denotes art!Rinoa/Squall recs
Small Things by invocations
This really is such a lovely piece. I love the glimpses we get of Rinoa through Squall's eyes. It's domestic but at the same time carefree and the tone pulls you in so well that you can almost imagine you smell the sawdust on the air. Towards the end I sort of flailed quietly, because yes, everything that's said and all the little asides we get just ring so beautiful, true and perfect to this couple. Really, really fabulous. ♥ (Rinoa/Squall)
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Under the Willow Tree by siva630
This story is fabulous, period. I read it once and turned around and read it a few more times just because I enjoyed it so much. I don't read many stories with character death, because I tend to get too sad. Don't get me wrong, this is sad in all the right ways and the author compounds it by telling the story backwards—the future first and past second, so the reader already knows what's come and gone. Rinoa is so wonderful here. In fact, all the characters that feature here are well drawn and themselves, even Zell who only appears for a moment. The fact is that I see Rinoa the most likely to forgive Seifer—it's an interesting line to draw between Squall and Rinoa in the first place. Squall was tortured by Seifer, Rinoa was thrown to Adel by Seifer, but Rinoa is the one that excuses him. Squall has always to me been defined by his training, choices in battle and facing the consequences of those choices, while Rinoa has more room to step back and be forgiving of the choices. The author hits it on the head at the end, which I don't want to spoil. Rinoa doesn't know the things SeeD knows, or what they mean, truly—her existance is sheltered, which the author gives us in the second part of the story. This will always be a sticking point between the person who Rinoa is and the people she's fallen in with and the author conveys it marvelously.
There are so many other things, this story isn't just rich with beautiful characterization, but the thoughts and actions of the characters, how they respond and react to each other, their worldviews—it all rings so true for me. Added to that, the writing style is so good, absolutely everything serves a purpose for the author's goal. I've always, always loved the author's work, but I think this is the best piece of fanfic he has published yet. Amazing story and highly recommended. (Rinoa/Seifer, Rinoa/Squall)
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Devotion by DK
I get jealous of people that can communicate the real horror of the premise of this game. Yes, SeeD has a purpose, and this purpose is to train people to kill the sorceress that will one day return to try and achieve Time Compression. At the time this happens, the first war is just finishing. Many adults are dead. Who's left? The children, and the children become the ones who are pulled into these training schools, taught horrific things in order to be best prepared to kill the sorceress. Children that were never children, and this story really gets that across in the contrast between Squall and his precision-training and reactions, Rinoa's horror with the situation. There's other things I could say, but it would be ruining the end and maybe the whole story itself, and the end is just—it left me with burning eyes because I read this in one go, and I usually take breaks with anything over 5,000 words. Some stories can touch you so deeply, and this one does that so well, bam, right in the heart, because even as you're sick, reading the words, you feel empathy for these people that were cheated out of a childhood, that don't necessarily see anything wrong with it. This is one of the reasons Squall/Rinoa stories don't always work for me, because in the game we only see Rinoa pulling Squall out of his shell—we don't get to see her dealing with the fallout of her choices and decisions to choose him, his life, his friends. In the game she talks about feeling left behind and in this story, you really feel her thoughts on this after the fact, now that she knows. I think this is one of the must-reads of the entire fandom, and it deserves endless praise, because what DK did here had to be hard, because reading it was hard, but rewarding at the end. (Rinoa/Squall)
