Fanfiction: "Driver's Education"
Apr. 11th, 2020 02:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
deemoyzaTitle: "Driver's Education" (4,642 words) [AO3]
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating/Warnings: General Audiences / No Warnings Apply
Characters: Nida, Squall Leonhart, Zell Dincht
Summary: Nida is a trusted comrade, dependable assistant, and erstwhile hero who piloted Balamb Garden in combat and around the world. Yet, he harbors a small, but embarrassing, secret: he never learned to drive.
(Written for a fic prompt on Tumblr: "Driving or in/around a car.")
He'd been a hero, too, once.
When the dust from Time Compression had settled, when all the important trips had been taken and business resolved, when he guided Balamb Garden home and nestled it snugly in the crater it – and the Galbadian missiles – had left behind, people noticed. Xu and Quistis and Squall and Cid stood on the bridge with him and offered congratulations and thanks, and below, in what used to be Cid's office, a small crowd cheered and clapped. They offered smiles and backslaps and high-fives as he stepped off the elevator and walked out of the office, and he drifted off to sleep that night with their cheers still ringing in his ears.
But, for people like Nida, "hero" was a phase, not a title, and soon, the applause died away, the high-fives stopped coming, and he contented himself with settling into the next best role: mentor. He spent the following months teaching a group of SeeDs and eager young cadets the basics of maintaining and piloting a mobile Garden. The trainees looked up to him, at least while they were on the bridge together, and Nida finally felt as if he'd found his place in Garden, a purpose to his SeeD service.
Then Esthar swooped in and took that away, too.
As part of their payment to Garden for defeating Ultimecia, Esthar offered two of their older airships, still in very good condition. Their only stipulation was that Garden build a hangar suitable to house and maintain the airships, and Cid authorized construction of one before the ink had dried on his signature on Esthar's contract. Most of Garden assisted in building the hangar, including all but three of Nida's trainees, and once the first airship arrived, everyone seemed to forget that they'd ever traveled by any other means.
And so, Nida was cut adrift once more. Out of habit, he became something of an assistant to Xu, which usually meant conducting inventories of Garden's supply closets, posting reminders of Garden's regulations on every public bulletin board, reposting those reminders when they'd been ripped from the board and used as scrap paper or projectiles or paper airplanes, signing for deliveries, fetching coffee and paperwork for Xu, and, every once in a while, being loaned out to Squall or Cid for whatever small tasks they needed accomplished.
It was far from the life he'd imagined leading when he signed up to become a SeeD, but part of him knew that he should be thankful for the relative peace, as boring as it was. If he was going to be an errand boy for the rest of his life, though, he wished his errands would at least be more interesting: a little risk, a little excitement, a little something different, something to push the boundaries of what he knew, an opportunity to learn and grow.
As was often the case with these kinds of wishes, however, Nida failed to specify exactly what he wanted to learn, and who he wanted to learn it from.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VIII
Rating/Warnings: General Audiences / No Warnings Apply
Characters: Nida, Squall Leonhart, Zell Dincht
Summary: Nida is a trusted comrade, dependable assistant, and erstwhile hero who piloted Balamb Garden in combat and around the world. Yet, he harbors a small, but embarrassing, secret: he never learned to drive.
(Written for a fic prompt on Tumblr: "Driving or in/around a car.")
He'd been a hero, too, once.
When the dust from Time Compression had settled, when all the important trips had been taken and business resolved, when he guided Balamb Garden home and nestled it snugly in the crater it – and the Galbadian missiles – had left behind, people noticed. Xu and Quistis and Squall and Cid stood on the bridge with him and offered congratulations and thanks, and below, in what used to be Cid's office, a small crowd cheered and clapped. They offered smiles and backslaps and high-fives as he stepped off the elevator and walked out of the office, and he drifted off to sleep that night with their cheers still ringing in his ears.
But, for people like Nida, "hero" was a phase, not a title, and soon, the applause died away, the high-fives stopped coming, and he contented himself with settling into the next best role: mentor. He spent the following months teaching a group of SeeDs and eager young cadets the basics of maintaining and piloting a mobile Garden. The trainees looked up to him, at least while they were on the bridge together, and Nida finally felt as if he'd found his place in Garden, a purpose to his SeeD service.
Then Esthar swooped in and took that away, too.
As part of their payment to Garden for defeating Ultimecia, Esthar offered two of their older airships, still in very good condition. Their only stipulation was that Garden build a hangar suitable to house and maintain the airships, and Cid authorized construction of one before the ink had dried on his signature on Esthar's contract. Most of Garden assisted in building the hangar, including all but three of Nida's trainees, and once the first airship arrived, everyone seemed to forget that they'd ever traveled by any other means.
And so, Nida was cut adrift once more. Out of habit, he became something of an assistant to Xu, which usually meant conducting inventories of Garden's supply closets, posting reminders of Garden's regulations on every public bulletin board, reposting those reminders when they'd been ripped from the board and used as scrap paper or projectiles or paper airplanes, signing for deliveries, fetching coffee and paperwork for Xu, and, every once in a while, being loaned out to Squall or Cid for whatever small tasks they needed accomplished.
It was far from the life he'd imagined leading when he signed up to become a SeeD, but part of him knew that he should be thankful for the relative peace, as boring as it was. If he was going to be an errand boy for the rest of his life, though, he wished his errands would at least be more interesting: a little risk, a little excitement, a little something different, something to push the boundaries of what he knew, an opportunity to learn and grow.
As was often the case with these kinds of wishes, however, Nida failed to specify exactly what he wanted to learn, and who he wanted to learn it from.
