brokenprism | Ellone : Imagination

Title: Imagination
Fandom: FFVIII
Claim: Ellone
Other characters/pairings: Raine
Table/Theme Name & Number: (VII) 7. Imagination
Rating: K+
Warnings: n/a
Summary: Ellone has a dream.

The first time it happened, she'd thought it was only her imagination. She'd been sitting in Miss Raine's kitchen, boosted up on the counter with a skinned knee while Miss Raine patched her up. (It had still been Miss Raine then: the face and the smile was still unfamiliar, and Raine was not yet her mother.) She'd been sniffling and trying to hold back some tears and she'd wanted her parents so badly.

Miss Raine scooped her up and held her, and the tears started to fall - but before she could start wailing something happened and -

she was watching something - someone -

Her mother. Ellone recognized her mother's face. She tried to open her mouth, tried to call out for her mother - her hair was longer then, swept into a messy bun which fell along her neck - and then

Her mother smiled up at - her father - and said, "Do you think it will be a boy or a girl?"

Her father's face, with the prickles of a beard Ellone remembered running stubby fingers along and scolding him for. Her father smiled back. "Which would you want more?"

"I don't know," her mother said, with a smile so dazzling it hurt the heart. "Which do you think it is?"

Her father smiled back, his loving smile, his smile for his Katri and his Elle only. "Which does it feel like?" he teased her back, and Ellone tried to reach out, wave her hands, get someone to see her -

and then she was back in Miss Raine's lap, crying into an unmoving shoulder.

Raine stirred. "Oh, Ellone, I must have fallen asleep," she said, groggily, her voice a half-murmur thick with sleep. "I was dreaming..."

And Ellone, young frightened Ellone, had assumed she'd dreamed too, dreamed a dream about the parents she'd never get back: and she reburied her face into Miss Raine's shoulder and wailed.

It wasn't until later, until after Laguna and after Odine and after everything else so frightening, that she'd understood exactly what it was she'd done.

For