communi_kate | ficspam, part 2 (Reply)

Title: Bad Education
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating: PG-13
Warning: Swearing, part of my 'Satellites' post-game story arc
Summary: An intraGarden conflict with a difference forces one of its Instructors into desperate measures...

Bad Education

A Final Fantasy Eight fan fiction by xahra99

The war had begun as a series of small yet bloody conflicts. Gradually, it settled into a war of attrition, each side attempting to wear the other down by a series of repeated attacks. It was undeclared, brutal, and savage.

The fact that it was a matter of internal politics rather than actual bloodshed made no difference to any of the Garden faculties involved....

Like all decent feuds, the origins of the conflict had been lost in the mists of time. Sergeant-at Arms Yan Simony suspected that it had started out as healthy rivalry several years ago; a natural competition between the faculty members to produce the brightest and best students, the highest percentages on test scores. That had been only the beginning. Like the monsters in the Training Centre, it had mutated into something altogether more vicious; and like all wars, it had its skirmishes and battles and periods of multilateral disarmament.

Simony hated the contest. Though, if pressed, he would have admitted that it was the losing which really pissed him off.

He had been on a winning streak six months previously, one which had culminated with several of his students beating fellow Sergeant-at Arms Kana Sakatan's pupils to a pulp during a melee. Sergeant Sakatan had taken her failure with good grace. She was a tall thin woman with a smile like the glint of sunlight from a coffin-lid, and like Simony, she hated losing. She had given Simony enough time to lull him into a state of complacency; and after an interval of several weeks she had transferred Seifer Almasy to Simony's class.

That. Simony thought, was the problem.

If students were weapons, Almasy would have been banned by international treaty. He was was only fifteen, and already beginning to gain a certain notoriety among the instructors. Almasy had a sense of entitlement that would have put a prince to shame and and an attention span of a second except when confronted with sharp objects made out of metal. Simony had been assigned him for the remainder of the teaching year, which was six months long.

Too long, in Simony's opinion.

Still, he had begun the term in a relatively positive mood, determined to make the best out of a bad situation, but he had known that he was on a losing streak as soon as he laid eyes on Almasy's gunblade.

Simony had designed and built the weapon in the first place. He'd cleaned it, oiled it, and even installed its first limited upgrades. After four quiet months in the armoury, some nameless fool had assigned the weapon to Almasy, who'd promptly dyed it black, given it a stupid name and punched holes in the blade.

Simony spent their first lesson attempting to explain to Almasy that gunblades should not have holes in, and got for his pains a 'huh?' and a 'mmm.' The holes had not disappeared. Still, holes were better than that quiet kid in 3g, the one whose gunblade had acquired jewelry. Leonhart, that was his name. Sometimes Simony worried about Leonhart.

Not nearly as much as he worried about Almasy, though, because things just went downhill from there.

Simony wasn't sure just why he found the cadet so unappealing. After all, in his fifteen years as a weapons instructor he had seen it all; the stupid, the fat, the accident prone and the dangerously inept. Almasy was none of those things.He was just good. Terribly, terribly good.

The skill wouldn't have been a problem. The arrogance was.

After four months of complete and utter failure to teach Almasy anything, Simony had discovered that the best strategy was to leave him to work on his own. Instilling discipling in the kid wasn't (thankfully) his problem; teaching him swordfighting was, and Seifer seemed to have that pretty much worked out by himself. Their undeclared treaty functioned pretty well for six weeks, until Simony broke it.

It was a petty revenge that pushed him over the edge, and it happened like this:

Almasy had interrupted the sergeant during an evening training session. Simony enjoyed the quiet atmosphere of the gymnasium after all the students had left, and he would often lift his own sword down from its place on the wall and go through a few training kata without the distraction of pupils. He was halfway through a fendente-double cross combination when he heard the scrape of boots on the soft bamboo matting

He finished the combination before he turned around and saw Almasy leaning against the wall in a position of studied arrogance, his own sword slung over his shoulder. The sergeant had no idea what he was doing there, and cared less.

"Did you want something?"

The kid pointed with the tip of his gunblade. "That'd work better if you'd just lean the fuck forwards."

Simony bristled like an old Behemoth at the familiarity. "And you would work better if you'd just learn to keep your mouth shut."

He knew even as he said the words that they were a mistake. A more intelligent student could have used the sentence to draw him into an argument, but thankfully Almasy had never been the brightest blade in the rack. The kid just shrugged. He shrugged again when Simony assigned him a simple defence exercise by way of punishment, but to the sergeant's surprise he climbed onto the mats and got on with it.

The exercise, of course, was carried out perfectly and with the absolute minimum of enthusiasm.

Simony, irritated, assigned him another, harder, exercise, and met with the same result. By then he had pretty much abandoned his own attempt at training, and was watching Almasy with the eyes of a hawk and the heart of a cynic. He remembered training like that, as a student.

Never that good, though. Never that fast.

What made the situation so much worse was that he knew that he should have been rejoicing. Students as good as this came once every generation. Still, he found it hard to be enthusiastic. Good fighters didn't always make good soldiers, and Almasy's ability to fuck things up was already legendary within Balamb. Frankly, Simony doubted he would pass the SeeD test.

In some lights, it seemed like a terrible waste. In others, a narrow escape. It would be like harnessing a race chocobo to a plough; the plough would be useless within minutes; and you wouldn't be doing the chocobo any favours either...

He watched as Almasy spun to a halt. He was panting, but not nearly as much as he should have been. A tiny treacherous part of Simony's mind wondered if punching holes in a gunblade could actually lower the weight of the blade without disrupting its balance, and then discarded the idea. If it worked, somebody would have done it before, right. Right?

"Again." he said.

Almasy rolled his eyes and started over.

The usual story, Simony thought drearily. A swordfighting genius, and a complete and utter idiot.

He watched as the kid completed a cross parry and volarica faster than Simony could have done, even before the first pains of osteoarthritis in his joints had driven him from the field to the Garden.

"Am I done?"

Later, Simony would ascribe his next words to a complex mix of envy, sheer jealousy and a weapons-smith's natural desire to test any new material to breaking point. Or maybe the kid just pissed him off. Who knew?

"You think you're good. What about the Training Centre?"

He'd seen cadets of a similiar age turn white at the thought of being allowed inside the Training Centre. Almasy just shrugged.

He'd been in there before, Simony guessed. Most kids of his age had, once. Once was enough to train them not to do it again, at least until they'd acquired some upgrades and a few hundred hours more training. He would have felt like he was throwing any other fifteen year-old to the wolves; but as far as Almasy was concerned, the wolves could have him.

They didn't.

They walked downstairs in hostile silence. Simony could have sworn that the Almasy kid was smiling. He closed the door behind him, walked up to the training gallery, and let a Grat in.

Five seconds later, it was mincemeat, so he sent in two Grats. They lasted ten seconds. Three Grats took half a minute. Geezards and Bite bugs didn't even last that long.

Four Grats took slightly longer.

Almasy finished the first off with a sword inside twenty seconds, cut the second neatly in half with a spinning double-slash, and smashed the third over the head with a box. Simony knew that the Manual of Swordsmanship had a lot to say about hitting people over the head during a duel. It said that you couldn't. It was debatable whether the rules applied to monsters.

He sighed, finger lingering on the abort button. He didn't press it.

Beneath him Almasy dodged a Blind spell and homed in on the fourth and last Grat, swinging his gunblade. The kid used his right hand, then his left, then both for an overhead slash. Needless to say, the technique certainly wasn't in any of Simony's books. The stricter side of him flinched at the move, and the rest wondered if it wasn't more effective. Certainly, any opponent of equal experience sticking strictly to the Four Dynamic Defences and Three Approved Attacks as started in Simony's Manual would have had as much chance against Almasy as a new-hatched Chocobo chick walking into a mincing machine.

But there was no disclipline there. No substance. No finesse.

The fourth Grat shrieked and expired. Simony looked at the kid and felt incredibly old. He let in a further pair of Grats and a Bite Bug, and Almasy waded into them

The only crumb of vicious satisfaction, he thought, watching, was that soon gunblades would no doubt become as outmoded as rapiers before them, and Almasy would find himself as useful as thumbs on a Bite Bug, having no other useful skills.

Half an hour later Almasy had hacked his way through most of Simony's monster allowance for the week, and Simony was beginning to develop a certain sense of sympathy with the monsters. He finally called it a day after the kid had taken five minutes to exterminate a particularly tricky Anacondaur/Grat combo which had taken Simony fully twenty minutes the previous week. He had the nerve to sit down on the growing pile of freshly-killed monsters, smirk up at Simony and ask "Got any more?"

Simony's hand hovered over the T-Rexaur release for a full five seconds before he remembered himself and refrained. He shook his head.

Almasy wandered off to torture small furry animals, mainline drain cleaner or do whatever the hell he did when he wasn't fighting and Simony spent a good half an hour hacking his way through a T-Rexaur to prove to himself that he still had it.

That had been their last lesson.

For the remaining two weeks of the term, Simony assigned the kid self-study and basically ignored him. The situation returned to its previous state of multilateral disarmament was regained. It really didn't matter whether Almasy actually carried out the exercises or not, because Simony had long since figured out what most of Almasy's teachers discovered as a matter of course. Fail him, and Simony would be stuck with the kid for another six months, and by Hyne, he wasn't having that. You scraped him though, passed him on like an unexploded grenade, and thanked Hyne he hadn't blown up in your custody.

Still, Simony wasted forty sheets' worth of narrow-lined A4 before he came up with a report style that satisfied him. It was mannered and discreet, glacier-polite, containing no single sentence anybody could disagree with while simultaneously suggesting that Almasy was as toxic as a ton of nuclear waste. Nobody in the Garden faculty would have trouble reading between the lines to the general theme, which was 'Oh, Hyne, get this boy out of my class before he kills me'

Normally Simony would have said 'before I kill him' but with Almasy that wouldn't be an option, not without a small, tactically guided nuclear missile, and that was too much trouble and expense for anyone.

He mailed the report, passed the kid, and spent the next three years studiously ignoring any mention of the name Almasy. The Garden's inter-departmental rivalry continued for about the same amount of time before fading out at approximately the same time as the news came that Almasy had been executed for treason somewhere in Galbadia. Simony considered throwing an inpromptu party at the news, but refrained. It was just as well, because later it turned out that the kid had survived after all. The faculty war ended shortly after, lost in the confusion of realer and more bloody battles.

Simony didn't miss it.

Notes: Having teachers in the family, I always figured that Seifer must have had problems with authority waay before Quistis came on the scene. The title is from a song about transvestites by the band Tilly And The Wall, and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter whatsoever save for those two words.

May be read as part of my Satellites trilogy, but works pretty good on its own.

Enjoy.