Disclaimer: I make no claim whatsoever to the characters or world of Final Fantasy VIII, which is the property of Squaresoft/Square Enix.


Chapter I

Centra, The Forgotten Shore

"So you've come here looking for a man... who threw you off a cliff."

"Yes."

"And not for revenge?"

"No. Not in the least."

The tavern-keeper shook his head and topped up Kiros' palm wine. "You may look like us, my northern friend, but you're a strange one. Seems those Galbadian ways have dulled the Centran common sense you were born with. You'd better face the truth. Your friend's dead."

Kiros took a sip, mainly out of politeness, and the milky sweetness spread over his tongue like a lick of honey straight from the comb. "I don't think a fall off a cliff is enough to kill him," he said. "Not him."

"Then he must be a strange one, too." The tavern-keeper chuckled to himself, and stoppered the gourd.

The blades of the ceiling fan overhead swept slowly round, moving the humid air in a vague semblance of breeze that made little difference to Kiros' discomfort. He wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. Hours spent poring over old maps in Deling Central Library had led him to this ramshackle tavern, in a forgotten little village on the far northern coast of Centra, the closest populated settlement to the excavation site where he, Laguna and Ward had been chased out to the cliff's edge by wave after wave of masked Esthari soldiers. Where their ways had parted.

It was months in the past now, but to be standing here, back on Centran soil, made it feel like no time had passed at all. The memories were always on the fringes of his thoughts, pushing inwards. Sometimes he shut them down; sometime he let them in, hoping to find clues, some small detail missed before.

Salt water rushes into his lungs, and he' s dead, this is it, he must be—

But he's not. Arms are pulling roughly at him, hauling him upwards, but his sodden uniform is weighing him down. Now hurried fingers are fumbling at his shoulders; he feels them clicking the release switch on his shoulder-plates, and the G-Army standard-issue fiberglass armor sinks away into the water, and he's light enough to be dragged onto the boat.

He can't stop coughing up seawater. He feels like his lungs will come out too. Then it stops, and he can open his eyes. A soaked-through man-mountain lies sprawled on the deck to his left. Ward's unconscious form. The water pooled around him is red with blood. Let him be alive, please Hyne, let him...

An unfamiliar voice is giving orders, somewhere over his head. "The clifftop's swarming with Esthari troops. Get us out of here."

"Wait." Kiros forces out an alien-sounding voice, hoarse and thick with the exertion of expelling the water. "Wait, there's one more, our Commander. Laguna Loi—"

"We saw him fall. Crashed against the cliffs. There's no way he survived. There's no time."

"No, you have to wait." He grabs the captain's ankle. The man shakes him off.

"There's no time."

"...Wait..."

That was where the memory ended. They didn't wait. They didn't wait for Laguna, and Kiros had drifted into unconsciousness. The next time he had opened his eyes was in the post-surgery recovery room at the military hospital in Deling City. With Laguna gone, lost, half the world away.

And now he was back where it had all started. A land where he was a disoriented stranger, and yet inherently tied to the place by blood. The land his grandparents had left on a huge ship, crowded to overflowing, while thick smoke and ash billowed from the gaping crater in the fractured landmass. The high cliffs that Laguna had hurled him from edged onto that crater. It was now a tranquil caldera, filled with ocean water, all traces of the sprawling city that had been home to hundreds of thousands of Centrans obliterated.

Despite the stifling heat that brought moisture beading to the surface of his skin, Kiros shivered.

"All the reports I could access in Galbadia indicated that the Estharis are gone. Is that true?"

"They're gone all right." The tavern-keeper's expression soured. "Shouldn't have been there anyway."

"I assume they weren't welcome." As far as Kiros had discerned, there was no official relationship between Esthar and Centra. Moreover, the fact that the scattered Centran communities had no unified government made it easy for Esthar to walk in, take what they wanted, and leave.

The halogen light above flickered, casting a shadow across the tavern-keeper's face. "The thing that was buried there... they had no business digging it up."

Kiros leaned forward. "Then you know what it was?"

Those strange, dreamlike crystal passages had played on his mind every day for months. Only the more pressing matter of Laguna's absence kept him from dwelling on it. He was sure, though, that as soon as Laguna was found, they would set about finding out what Esthar was up to. They were already in too deep to walk away. That both he and Ward had now left the army was immaterial; the chain of events had made this personal.

The tavern-keeper wiped the palm wine gourd with a cloth, keeping his eyes shielded from Kiros' curiosity. "We knew not to go near it. We've known that a long time. Esthar's folly will hurt them. Maybe hurt all of us."

"Maybe." Kiros agreed. He accepted a further top-up of his glass, and took out the folded map from his shirt pocket, spreading it flat on the bar.

The tavern-keeper peered down at the mess of colored lines Kiros had drawn from the Centran crater outwards, flowing west to Poccarahi Island, northwest to the Humphrey Archipelago, and snaking north as far as Shenand Hill on the southern shore of the Galbadian continent.

"These arrows?" he asked, frowning.

"The ocean currents. They're what I could work out from Galbadian sea charts. But it might all be wrong."

The man stared at Kiros. "You can't be suggesting anyone could drift unconscious that far and still be alive."

Kiros took a long, sickly-sweet sip of palm wine. "I think there might have been another boat."

With his eyes half-closed, he looked down into the glass, trying to picture the clifftop, the reddish-brown rock smooth and cool under his broken body, the gray-blue of the waves far below. The pain of his shattered bones had been so overwhelming that the memory was poorly-formed, but the more he revisited it, the more real it became.

"A boat! We're gettin' on!" Laguna's voice is strong, strong enough for Kiros to focus on. He croaks out a wry admonishment, a last appeal to his commander to sound like a damn soldier for once.

"A... vessel... They'd... normally... call... it..."

He's drowsy with the pain, but forces his eyes open to look down over the edge, far far down, to the waves crashing at the rocky shore below. Laguna's right, there are two G-Army speedboats. No, three; a third is nestling at the foot of the cliff.

Think, Kiros, think. Picture it. He tapped the glass with his fingers, and sank deeper into the memory.

Laguna's hands are at his chest now, and he's being dragged right to the edge. Rock scrapes against his dislocated leg, and he'd scream if he had the strength. He's too groggy to even try to work out what Laguna's doing. He takes one more look—

Focus, Kiros, focus.

There is another boat. He hasn't imagined it. It's almost out of sight, past the curve of the crag that shelters the military vessels. This one isn't military. It's a small, unmarked boat, with a single grayish sail swaying gently on the waves. It's real, it's there, and it's close enough to see Laguna as he falls.

Close enough to rescue him.

Kiros let the tavern swim back into his vision, and stared into his wine glass. How much of that was wishful thinking? How much was a genuine memory?

It was a scrap, barely more than nothing, but it was the only thing he had. The alternative was to abandon all hope, and that—well, that was unthinkable.

"If there was another boat... A small one... Who else sails those waters?"

The tavern-keeper shrugged. "Not our fisherfolk. We keep to our own shore. The islanders might come that far, though."

"Which island? You mean Poccarahi?"

"Mm. Or there might be fishing boats from the North. Poaching. Shouldn't be there, but they come."

Kiros blinked. "From Galbadia?"

"We get fisherfolk from Shenand down this way. Traders, poachers. Sometimes Winhill, too. Not often, but sometimes."

Kiros took out the pen clipped to the top of his shirt pocket, and wrote at the bottom of the map. Poccarahi Island. Shenand. Winhill.

"Thank you. You've given me a place to start. You have my gratitude." He paid for the drink, slipping in as much extra gil as he thought manners would allow, and the man took it with a thoughtful look.

"Some advice, friend. Get yourself some Centran clothes if you want people here to talk to you."

Kiros glanced down at his faded G-Army shirt and dark blue cotton pants. His old training uniform was all he'd had on him when he left Galbadia. He'd signed up as a cadet at fifteen. He no longer owned anything personal: no clothes, no memorabilia. No home.

The man was watching him. "Your family up in the north. They still around?"

"Not any more."

"Great Hyne bless their journey." The tavern-keeper drew his hands together in an old Centran gesture, one Kiros had seen his grandfather make upon hearing of an old friend's passing. "Which tribe were they from?"

"I can't say I ever knew."

Centra had been a painful topic at home, rarely ever broached. Only his maternal grandmother had spoken freely about their homeland, as her mind started to unravel with old age, and it was often so garbled that Kiros had found little to understand. Worse, he'd been uninterested. A restless young teen, eager to get away from the confines of his life, away from his family, and out into the world. If he'd known they'd all be gone within ten years, one death after another, maybe he might have—

The man interrupted his thoughts, and the spiral into familiar guilt was cut short. "Well, what's your blood-name?"

"Seagill."

"Then you're ocean-folk. West coast, or over in Poccarahi. Find yourself something there."

Kiros shifted on his stool, suddenly uncomfortable. "I don't know if I..."

The tavern-keeper turned away, and began to wash Kiros' empty glass over a cracked sink. "Every man has his roots, my friend," he said over his shoulder. "Find yours. They might tell you something."


Galbadia, National Military Medical Center

Kiros picked up the notebook next to the bed, left there by one of Ward's nurses. Ward's inelegant scrawl appeared in disjointed fragments, scattered across the top page: "Bedpan", underlined twice, "Thirsty" and something longer that Kiros could not make out, though he was reasonably sure that the second word was "Sandwich?".

"If this is going to be your primary form of communication from now on, you'll need to work on your penmanship," he observed.

Ward grabbed notebook from Kiros' hands and slid the pencil out of its holder at the ring-bound spine.

Screw you, he wrote, then tilted his head in thought and added a smiley face underneath.

"Eloquently expressed," Kiros said.

Ward made a silent laughing sound, a sort of wheeze. In the weeks since the second surgery on his throat, he had become able to breathe unaided, but his voice had not returned. The damage to his vocal cords was irreparable. Kiros stole a glance at the angry red scar on Ward's neck, an inverted V-shape, the stitches recently removed. It still didn't feel real. Ward, who'd always been so garrulous, sentenced to a lifetime of silence.

But it was a life, at least. He'd been lucky. They both had.

As for Laguna...

Ward was tapping the notepad. Start searching? When?

"As of today, I'm released from service. Officially a civilian. So, today, I suppose." Kiros looked past Ward to the small window behind the bed, and watched the endless Deling City drizzle trickling slowly down the glass panes. "Tell me, Ward. Am I walking straight into insanity? Am I crazy to believe he must have survived?"

Probably. Ward scribbled some more, and thrust the notebook back into Kiros' face.

But - Laguna doesn't follow rules. Like logic. Gravity. Etc.

"That's true. I suppose that's what keeps me certain that I have to do this. That, and..." Kiros trailed off, wondering what he'd intended to say.

Ward took the pencil again, and wrote, Love?

Kiros raised his eyebrows. "Well, of course. That goes without saying. We're brothers-in-arms, the three of us."

Ward shook his head, then added the word "in" in front, and tapped the question mark with his finger.

Kiros blinked down at the notepaper. "What a question. I wouldn't know how to answer." He mulled it over, trying to picture Laguna's face. Longing, yes. Almost physical pain, yes. Was that what this was? "I suppose it's possible. I've no frame of reference for such feelings."

Never?

"Not as far as I can tell. The... urges others seem to feel have never made themselves known to me." It felt odd to voice it after all this time; odd, but cathartic. "It doesn't exactly bother me," he said, noting Ward's concerned eyes. "It's simply how I am. I don't believe it's something that will ever change."

Ward gave a half-shrug, and scribbled, Just wondered.

"No doubt you did." Kiros' mouth began to twitch with amusement. "You never saw me lust after a woman, so your conclusion was that I must be lusting after Laguna?"

Ward scrunched up his face, and wrote, Handsome bastard.

"One might say so. Objectively speaking." Kiros started to laugh. "It's a great shame he isn't present for this conversation. Imagine the leg cramps it would induce."

Ward's wheezing sound joined his laughter, and Kiros stopped abruptly, subdued. This wasn't right, with one of the three missing. It was all wrong. He didn't want to laugh again until he was laughing with Laguna.

A pressure at his wrist told him that Ward was gripping his hand. He looked up at Ward's eyes, and knew that everything unsaid had already passed between them: Ward knew. Ward agreed. They were two, when they should be three.

"You think he's alive too, don't you?" he said.

Yes. Ward underlined the word three times, then put the pencil down.

"Then I had better get myself on a ship to Centra."


Poccarahi Island, Eastern Docks

He made his way along the pier, the laughs and shouts of fishermen rising up from the bobbing boats on both sides. Even before he set foot on land, it was clear to Kiros that his chances of finding anything in this place were remote. There were dozens of boats at the docks, and not a single one bore even a passing resemblance to the half-remembered vessel he held in his mind. The fishing boats of Poccarahi Island were distinctive for their curved, billowing sails of indigo-dyed cotton, and their double hulls joined together with parallel slats of timber.

Still, he had come this far; he owed it to Laguna to try. Kiros wove his way through a throng of islanders on the pier, keeping his gaze down. Unobtrusive. It seemed to work. They stepped aside for him as he walked.

He was ill at ease here, and unwilling to confront the reason why.

As a young boy in a quiet Deling suburb, he'd often daydreamed about how it would feel to be surrounded by faces that looked like his. Now at last he was, and all he felt was a heightened sense of otherness. Kiros finally understood, first-hand, the depth of the schism between those who had fled Centra and those who stayed behind to rebuild what they could, to scrape a living from the scarred and broken lands. A continent whose bedrock had been shattered by the Lunar Cry, its ancient capital city wiped from the surface of the earth. But not from memory. And that was the worst of it. Everywhere he walked, his feet stepped on soil and stone soaked in memories. Lost glories, stolen futures, countless lives cut short. He had to keep his mind trained on the task at hand—sifting through remote possibilities to find a trace of Laguna—or the weight of Centra's sorrow would swallow his resolve whole.

It was a burden he could not bear, and he felt ashamed to turn away from it.

The eyes of the islanders on him, the way their gazes slid slowly and curiously onto his face, his braided locks, and his gold earring, then away sharply when they recognized the G-Army insignia on his shirt, reminded Kiros of the tavern-keeper's advice. So he took what remained of his stash of gil to the tailor's shop on the seafront, and called out a greeting when he found the counter unattended.

While Kiros waited, he turned around to examine the pieces of ceremonial armor on display in the window. Not only a tailor's, then, but an armorer's too—or perhaps there was little distinction between the two in Centra.

A woman emerged from the back room, wearing a long tunic of brightly patterned cloth, and sea-green cockatrice feathers woven through her dreadlocked hair. She listened as Kiros talked, and when he placed a wad of gil notes on the counter she nodded, and returned to the back room before bringing out a bundle of smooth, dark red leather.

"Try this on," she told him, and showed him to a small curtained area at the side of the shop.

With the curtain closed, Kiros shed his G-Army clothes and unfurled the red bundle, holding it up to the light. It was not leather, he realized, running his fingers across the smooth scales. It was sewn from strips of ruby dragon-skin, tanned a deep crimson. He slipped into the pants and fastened them, and did the same with the top. Worn together, the two separate pieces visually merged into a tight-fitting bodysuit, its long seams running down his arms, legs and abdomen.

There was a full-length mirror in the center of the shop, so he pushed the curtain aside and walked to stand in front of the glass, self-conscious but curious to see his reflection. The tailor-woman was leaning against the counter, and Kiros slowly became unnerved by the way she watched him, calm and smiling.

There was something about her that he could not identify. Her dark brown eyes were like his own, and yet different. Her irises were illuminated by a light source unseen, a rich amber glow that seemed to move like thin clouds across a night sky.

Until today, Kiros could say with full certainty that he had never come face-to-face with a sorceress. But from today, and each day that followed... No, he would never be quite sure again.

She handed him a gleaming bronze breastplate and matching hip piece from the armor collection. "These are worn over the top," she explained, and showed him how to affix the armor and fasten the hidden leather ties. The bronze was impossibly light, hand-hammered so thin that Kiros wondered if it would buckle as soon as he moved. But no; it was strong. He looked back at his reflection.

He had walked in here an ex-Galbadian soldier, and now the man in the mirror was a Poccarahi Island warrior, plucked from some long-past century. Kiros turned, flexed and stretched. The dragon-hide was not stiff in the least, melding perfectly to his form, displaying the curves of his lean muscles.

It was the strangest feeling. He suppressed a small rush of euphoria, as if he were looking at himself for the first time. What right had he to feel like that? Surely he was little better than an imposter. A Galbadian tourist, playing dress-up with the garments of an ancient people.

"Am I permitted to wear this?" he asked the tailor-woman.

"Yes. I would not sell it to you if you were not."

She came close to him, and adjusted the breastplate. She looked up at him, examining his face, and her fingers brushed questioningly against his gold earring.

"Your father's?"

"Grandfather's." The earring was his only sentimental link to the family he had lost. Kiros had worn it for so long that he'd stopped thinking about it, never wondered if it held more significance than mere adornment.

"If you're the son of Seagills, then your forefathers served the old island kings. This armor is yours if you wish to wear it. Your money is enough."

Kiros looked back at the blank-faced warrior in the mirror, a man displaced from another life. "May I have your opinion?"

"Of course."

"Do I pass as an islander?"

He did not know why he asked, nor why he felt such an urgent need for her affirmation, to shed his otherness, to be seen as the same.

The amber light in her eyes shifted and glittered, and he could not shake the sense that she saw far more in him than he would willingly have shown. She moved one of his forelocks aside with gentle fingers, and traced a soft line along his cheekbone.

Kiros fought to stay still. He was wholly unused to intimate touching of any kind, and his first instinct was to flinch away. But something in her tenderness stirred memories of his mother, and he found himself allowing her fingers to move down to his jaw, tilting his head from side to side, searching him, seeing him.

"Hmm. Close, but no." She withdrew her hand. "You've a northern heart. A mind forged in forests and cold rain. Islanders can always tell. Your face is one of ours, but there's no islander underneath it."

She let out a chuckle at his crestfallen expression. "No, I'm not insulting you, Seagill-son. You have something that belongs only to you. Be proud of it."

He did not know what to say to that, and stayed silent as he gathered his belongings from the curtained-off corner of the shop. When he made to leave, the tailor-woman laid a hand on his arm and whispered, "One more thing. Don't pity us."

That made Kiros stop in his tracks. He turned to her, unable to refute the accusation.

"It's not hard to see it in your eyes," she said. "Pity. We don't need it. We love our land, and we're proud to be the ones left to steward it. You won't understand Centra if you don't understand that."

He wondered how obvious it had been, his dismay and unease at every dilapidated building, every crack and fissure running like spiderwebs across the dirt roads. The mass graves and ghost towns he'd passed through on the mainland. What if the people he saw had taken his expression to be one of contempt? Did they see a pampered northern emigre, sneering in disgust at the state of his motherland?

"...Forgive me," Kiros said, and she laughed with a rich warmth that melted the tight knot in his stomach.

"There's nothing that needs forgiving. Only ears that need to listen, and a mind that needs to learn. If you can wear the clothes of an islander, you can learn how we think. And you'll be welcomed here, Seagill-son. Stay, and talk to us a while more."

She slipped her arm behind his waist and led him out to the tea parlor next door, where his appearance was met with a murmuring of appreciation among the seated elderly patrons. Kiros was given a cup of long-steeped hibiscus tea, a deeper red even than his new warrior's garb.

The two men at the nearest table were hunched over a board game, moving small, smooth discs of obsidian along the grooves carved into a wooden tray inlaid with a set of gold symbols.

"Kingstones?" Kiros said, a long-buried memory surfacing like a bubble of air from the back of his mind.

"Know how to play?" the older man asked, his eyes still fixed on the board. The tailor-woman pulled out a chair at the table for Kiros, and he sank into it unthinkingly.

"My grandfather taught me."

He hadn't even realized that it was a Centran game. But of course it was. Of course. Kiros' grandfather had never spoken about Centra, yet it had been there all along: in his face, his gestures, his fingers as they placed the kingstone pieces in ever more complex patterns.

He stayed at the tea parlor until dusk, talking little, listening intently, and though the shadow of his otherness still hung over him, he let it be. Younger locals, fisherfolk and farmers, came in as the day went on, and Kiros answered their curious questions, probing gently in return as his ease in the islanders' company slowly grew.

He found exactly what he expected: nothing at all. No northern soldier washed up on Poccarahi's beaches. No fishing boat harboring a Galbadian fugitive. No trace, no suggestion here whatsoever of Laguna Loire.

A dead end like this meant that he should have moved on immediately. But somehow, he could not. He was kept in place by a visceral need to flood his senses with the sights, sounds and smells of the island until he was satiated. So Kiros whiled away several days in Poccarahi, until something calmed in him, and he felt no conflict in dressing as his ancestors had, and walking on his forefathers' land, all the while knowing that his heart and mind were Galbadian. That there was room enough under his skin for the coexistence of both, and that neither defined him or who he was.

What defined him now was the hope burning through him, the hope he clung to, even as time trickled away and his rational mind knew that he had not found a single clue to lead him to Laguna.

On his last day, waiting at the docks with enough gil for passage on a trader's ship, he took out his crumpled map, and drew a neat line through Poccarahi Island.

Kiros stared at the words that followed. Shenand. Winhill.

It was time to leave Centran shores, and take his search north.


A/N: This fic is posted as part of the 2021 Successor Challenge, with "hope" as the prompt word. Part II to follow soon(ish).

Various headcanon liberties may be being taken here... in my defense, the game is incredibly vague about how Laguna ended up in Winhill after falling off a cliff in a whole different continent. I reasoned that Kiros wouldn't need to search for him for months on end if they were rescued together, hence the appearance of the unidentified fishing boat in Kiros' memories in this story. But if an explanation was in the game (or the Ultimania, maybe?) and I totally missed it, then ehhh... apologies!