ENTITLED: Like in Movies
FANDOM: Final Fantasy VII (Crisis Core)
LENGTH: 1,000 words
SETTING: Vague Crisis Core timeline
DISCLAIMER: I don't own the franchise, or the initiative!
NOTES: Requested by LuFFy McCormick. Also, when I saw that reboot announcement, I screamed.
SUMMARY: It's funny how many times a girl can be asked if she's sad, and still smile when answering. — ZackAerith
Aerith closes her eyes. "I'm not sad," she says, and her words echo slightly off the white-white walls, bouncing around. Even the room doesn't accept it.
Tseng just looks at her. Maybe she should be an aggressive girl, the kind who knew how to throw just the right kind of tantrum and could get out of things by making enough noise. Maybe she should say something about being a child, under-aged, except that nobody was a child anymore. Aerith looks over his shoulder instead and says softly, "I'm really busy. Can I go?"
After a minute, he steps aside. Aerith feels his body through the distance that separates their feet, like shockwaves of life rolling through the ground. The sky is inverting, about to crush her. Today is a bad day.
Zack had known about her bad days. He had known secret ways of getting her through them. It was hard to be afraid when a pretty boy's pretty hands were on your ribs, tickling you until your face swelled with laughter, until you were doubled over and clutching onto—
"We should do it just like in the movies."
"Do it," Aerith repeats. Her cheek turns against his shoulder. A bubble of glee tears up her throat. "Do it, 'do it.' You have nice arms, but I'm a good girl."
"Hey," he leers, with an extra-sized grin. "The things you say! The assumptions you make!"
Sprawled out on her side, with his arm around her and her face turned so that her forehead pressed into the soft pillow of his cheek, Aerith grins. The grass shifts around them, smelling crisp and alive, the kind of smell she hadn't found anywhere else. Maybe in the wilds. Maybe in the next season's stock of perfume, au naturale, the world had the chemicals and anything could happen.
"I meant our lives," Zack says. "We should do things perfect. A house with trees."
"Are you taking me into space? I hear the real estate is cheaper."
"Don't be such a smart ass." His arm just twitches a little and suddenly, she's sprawled out across his chest, hands splayed to catch herself against his muscles. She forgets, sometimes, how powerful he is. She imagines he has the lungs of a shark, the liver of a bear.
"A house with trees," Aerith repeats. "Six dates and the man wants a house with trees."
"Don't get too comfortable, lady. We could be roommates."
She leans down to rest her face against his skin. She could breath him forever. She could be the normal sort of girl who stand to live without being strangled, without the shadow of the plate. "Sounds too good to believe. If there isn't a little misery sprinkled across the top, who's going to trust you?"
The next time he comes to check on her, Tseng proves once again that he can be a considerate man, and he buys a flower off her. He takes it from her hand and puts it deep inside his pocket. Aerith feels for that moment. She feels for the darkness, the oppression, the fear and the necessary defeat. Maybe she and Tseng were kind of the same.
Except she doesn't want to be this way, she doesn't want to—
"You'll kill it," she says. His hand strays apologetically towards his pocket.
"It's already dead."
"Oh."
Sometimes, she forgets.
People are always losing one another. She knows. Aerith hadn't liked school or reading or sitting still much, until one of the older girls showed her a book on romances. Those words had made sense, had come to her easier, and within a month she was the best student in the class, repeating the stories of heartbreak and separation to her friends and her enemies, fingers tracing the illustrations, rubbing them into her.
"Let's be so boring. So boring nobody wants to hang around us. We'll never fight, never break up, nobody will give a damn about us anymore. They'll leave us alone, and then I'll have you all to myself." Zack rubs his nose against her neck, like a puppy. "What do you think?"
She touches his hair. It's always softer than she expects it to be, soft like a baby's, or a finicky girl's, for all that it spikes up in cheerful greeting. She says, "Well, it's worth a shot. But what if by being boring, we'll stop being interested in each other?"
"Impossible. I'll always come back to you."
In his arms, she can look up, look down. The world is compressed into manageable spaces, not so hungry. He anchors her against the planet's current, the pull towards the drain. Someday, she knows, they'll all be washed away and drowned.
She supposes that she loves him, anyway.
"Are you alright?"
"I'm not sad," Aerith says, which wasn't the necessary answer to his question. Should she put herself against this other man, cement herself in the dark and the city and his patience? She looks at Tseng looking at her, and wonders what it is he needs. She wonders what Zack had ever needed, what she had given him. She wonders how she can be so certain that he's still alive, so certain that he would come back to her as he'd promised, so certain that something awful has happened—
Her throat closes up. The water is rising. The pull is relentless, unceasing, as she lives closer and closer to her drowning.
She smiles at Tseng. "We should have lunch or something, you know. Sometime. Friends have lunch." She pauses, and adds, "I'm always hungry, anyway."
"Are you alright?" Tseng asks again.
"What about when it ends?" she fixes her question, "What about when we end?"
"Stop trying to break up with me," Zack yawns.
Aerith realizes she's holding on to him again, her fingers pale and locked up around the hard flesh of his forearm. "But what about when I tragically die giving birth to our child? What about when you jump on a grenade to save the rest of your squad? What about when the reactor explodes and the plate collapses and we're turned into pancakes?"
Zack gives her that look which means she's being ridiculous, and maybe needs to calm down, but he's also not certain if it's a test or not. Nine times out of ten, they match each other perfectly, their respectively glee zinging back and forth until it rises through them like bubbles, like hot triumph. But sometimes Aerith remembers that she isn't just a girl, that there's a mixed-in part of her churning things up, feeling things wrong.
"Then we'll just have to change." Zack said finally.
She's picking flowers, killing things so she can live, their green-yellow blood leaking through torn stalks and staining her fingers, when she feels him go flying past her. Her anchor's been torn free, and now rolls through the current, heading straight towards the drain, the plummet, the drop. She thinks, first, that she'd been right. When he died, she'd known.
There is never going to be a house with trees. There is no perfect, there is no boring. So Aerith, she closes her eyes, and she waits to change.
"I'm not sad," she says.