Zack's not going to think about the morning now, not when Aeris is curled up next to him on the couch with her head resting on his chest. There's some movie playing -- an action flick starring a Costa del Sol musclehead whose biceps are as wide as Zack's chest. His love interest's a Wutaian babe prancing around in a skimpy red number slit all the way up the side. He thinks she fights with poison-tipped hairpins; Aeris commented that it was a remarkably stupid idea, since she'd be in real trouble if she accidentally jammed one of those in her scalp. The movie's not really important, though. He can follow the plot with his brain turned off, which is good, because he'd rather think about Aeris. It's quiet tonight, or it would be if not for the sound of explosions blaring from the television speakers. It's warm but not humid, so he and Aeris can hold each other close without feeling suffocated.
"When do you have to leave for Kalm?" she murmurs, her lips sticking to the slick surface of Zack's chest.
"We're shipping out at seven in the morning," he tells her. He wishes she hadn't asked. It's not her fault that she did or anything -- she wants to know where he's going to be and that's fine, but he's not in Kalm now, he's still here, under the plate with his girlfriend. And he doesn't want to think about being somewhere else, not really. "The tour of duty's only two months. I might get to go home even earlier if the leakage from the reactor isn't too bad." He twines his fingers in her soft hair and combs out the loose braid. A curled tendril tickles the spot right above his navel.
"ShinRa's getting the reactor fixed right away, aren't they?" Aeris asks. "And the mutations shouldn't be too hard to deal with -- and you're not the only First Class there, are you?"
"Nope," he says. He still feels a funny warmth flare up in his stomach when he remembers his new title. "Angeal's coming, too. And Sebastian, I think."
"You'll be fine," she says confidently. "And you'll call every day."
"Sure I will."
"And you'll write me at least twice a week."
"You got it," Zack promises.
"And you'll bring me back a whole box of Kalm sweetcakes." Aeris grins.
"You'll get fat."
Aeris laughs and slaps his arm lightly. "I'm not going to eat them all at once, silly."
"Okay, then. I'll bring you back two whole boxes, how's that?"
"And you'll get me a chocobo chick of my very own. One with really fluffy feathers." She fights to keep her lips from twitching.
Zack kisses her forehead. "Where would you keep it?"
"Oh, in the abandoned church," she says lightly. "I could feed him the greens that grow there."
"He'd get sick from the pollution."
"So I'd make him better."
"What would you call him, anyway?" Zack asks.
"Hmm." Aeris tilts her head to the side, considering. "What about Siegfried?"
"Siegfried?" He snickers. "What kind of a name is Siegfried?"
"I think it's sweet."
"No. No way." He shakes his head. "I'm not bringing a chocobo home to you if you're going to name him Siegfried."
"You're mean." She smiles up at him through a curtain of brown hair.
"Completely horrible," he agrees cheerfully. "The absolute worst."
They kiss in silence. The musclehead on the television set shouts something about avenging his father as a fireball roars across the screen.
"But you will be back," Aeris says quietly.
"Yeah." He rests his chin on top of her head and cups her cheek in his palm. Her skin's a little damp. He hopes it's just from the sweat. "I'll come back to you. I promise."
They make love slowly that night, like they have all the time in the world. Zack closes his eyes and takes in everything he can -- how warm her mouth is when it closes around his, how the breathy moans she makes deep in the back of her throat linger in the air afterwards, how soft her fingers are when they travel over him. He buries his face in her neck and inhales the faint lingering scent of flowers and spice that follows Aeris everywhere she goes. They fall asleep sitting on the couch like that, lulled into slumber by the static buzzing from the television once the movie's run its course. He listens to the hum of electricity and the gentle sound of Aeris breathing, her chest rising and falling against his, and wishes that the morning would never come as a distant siren cuts through the drowsiness of the air.
His PHS beeps at five. For a brief, wonderful moment, he considers hurling it against the wall, but if he did that, he'd have no way to call Aeris, and Angeal would still pound on his door at a quarter to six, asking him what the hell he thought SOLDIER was, a Chocobo Scout camp? He fumbles around in the darkness with sleep-slowed fingers and switches the damn thing off before it wakes Aeris up.
"Morning already?" she asks, voice slurring.
"Yeah." He kisses her eyelids, and she uncurls on the couch, her limbs spreading out like the petals of a flower. "This isn't goodbye. It's just...see you again."
"Mmm," Aeris agrees. "See you soon."
And he is really good about keeping his promises, Aeris finds. He can't always call her every day -- sometimes he doesn't get back to his bed until one in the morning and it's all he can do to fall on the covers before he has to drag himself awake at the crack of dawn -- but he calls when he can, and he always encourages her to talk about her day, even if selling flowers must be dreadfully boring compared to tackling mako-spawned abominations.
Actually, he tells her, that's not what he spends most of his time doing.
"It's long stretches of doing nothing, and then there are split seconds where everything happens all at once," he tells her. "Mostly I've been working on mastering my poker game. I'm really bad at doing the face. Dominick's won most of my next month's salary from me, and I think he owns a pair of my boots, too."
Still, he always has something to tell her, either over the PHS or in his letters.
Angeal's been riding me like crazy lately, he writes. (No, not the kind of riding you're thinking of. I know the way your mind works, and I only wish it was the fun kind.) He's teaching me how to use that monstrosity of his. I've told you about the Buster Sword, right? It's lighter than it has any right to be, but it's still at least as tall as I am. And he wants to teach me all these big swinging strokes with it, too. My arms are going to fall off any day now. Hopefully you'll still love me even if I'm a limbless freak.
Of course I will, she writes back. I'll look on the bright side -- if your arms really do fall off, I'll finally be able to beat you at Costa del Sol Ultimate Worldwide Tournament. I'd like to see you perform all those combos with no thumbs.
"You wound me," he tells her the night he gets her letter. "You really do."
"Like you'd have it any other way."
After Kalm, Zack has another few months before ShinRa ships him off again. He's going to the mines in Corel this time; apparently, insurgent activity is high there.
"It means I'm moving up in their ranks," he says when she asks. "They're giving me more missions because they know I can handle them. It's like a promotion, except without the pay raise."
"It's people this time," she says quietly. "Are you going to have to -- "
"Deal with them the way I did with the monsters?" he finishes. Aeris nods.
"I hope not," is all Zack says. She traces the smudgy circles under his eyes with her thumb, but they don't go away.
He doesn't at first. Corel is even more boring than Kalm was, he says. "At least in Kalm there were cute little places to eat or catch a movie or something. Here, everyone's too tired to do things like that. They walk around town and look at nothing at all. All day long. The mines kill them, I think. That, and -- man, this place gets even less light than Midgar does under the plate some days."
She imagines the mine workers, their faces streaked with grime, walking from mine to house again and again, over and over each day, and feels a sharp tug at her heart.
We found the insurgents today, his next letter says. Some of them were barely more than kids. And they were all so thin...I think their eyes were bigger than the rest of them. We sent most of them back to HQ, but Angeal said that the President had ordered the immediate execution of the leaders. So that's what we had to do.
"She wasn't much older than you, Aeris," Zack tells her over the phone. He sounds older now, old and tired. "Maybe by a year or something. And Angeal said I had to do it, if I'd been at Wutai I'd have been used to this kind of thing by now and I had to learn someday..."
"I'm sorry," she whispers. She can't tell who's crying, her or him. Maybe both of them. "I'm so sorry."
When he comes back from Corel, he collapses on the couch and she rocks him in her arms until he falls asleep, singing half-remembered lullabies to him that she associates with the place in her memories that was very cold and very warm all at once.
They only give him three weeks before they send him to Junon.
"You know, I've heard some of the guys complain that Costa del Sol's just a tourist trap -- especially Essai, he's from Junon originally -- but I'd take a tourist trap over this mess every day. The harbor smells like it's rotting. Sebastian offered me fifty gil to swim in there, and I reeked like a dead fish for days after. The cute little TROOPER -- you remember him?"
"Yeah." She nods.
"Well, he wouldn't go within ten feet of me. I had to holler at him until I finally just spent two hours soaking in the shower."
I miss the way the church smells, he confesses in his letter. We'll have to go there when I get back, so I can remember what flowers smell like. In this heat, there's a horrible stench rolling off the whole of Junon -- rotting trees and burning mako. I think the fumes are making me crazy. If they ship me off to the nuthouse, promise you'll visit?
I will, she writes back. And I'll bring some of my pies along on visitation days. But even if you are crazy, you can't fling them against the walls. You have to promise to eat them.
That's one promise I can't wait to keep, his next letter says. Now, how do I get ShinRa to declare me insane?
He's not as bone-tired after his tour in Junon, which Aeris takes as a good sign. Corel was an aberration, just like the monsters crawling out of the reactors are. Zack tells her there's talk of him getting stationed permanently in Midgar as a trainer for the SOLDIER candidates. "I think I could do that," he says. "I mean, I'd have to work on my shouting a lot, but I'd like that job. Do you know I've never called anyone a maggot yet?"
"I'm sure you'll get to," she says, and kisses his cheek.
"Love you," he murmurs.
But he has to go to Nibelheim first. Nibelheim starts out cheerfully enough.
"I'm not sure how much I'll get reception in these mountains," he says. "So we'll just have to stick to writing for a while, okay?"
"That's fine," she says. "As long as you keep writing."
"I've been good about it so far, haven't I?" Zack asks.
"You have," Aeris agrees.
Chocobohead (he does have a proper name, but once you meet this kid, you'll see why I call him that) is taking to the cold the best of any of us. He grew up in Nibelheim, so that makes sense, but watching him scamper up the rocky trails like a goat is adorable. When she reads the letter, she can almost hear the warm sound of Zack's laugh at that part. I did manage to get Sephiroth to join me at the fire tonight, though. It was just the three of us -- him, me, and Chocobohead -- but it was nice. Warm, too, for a change. I tried to teach them The Ballad of Six-Fingered Shanks, but they wouldn't go for it. Oh, well. That's what tomorrow night's for, right?
Just be gentle with them, she warns him in her letter. Not everyone's as enthusiastic as you are.
Hey, give me a little credit here, he protests.How many other SOLDIERs can claim to be drinking buddies with the Silver General?
He has a point.
Anyway, it looks like the reactor's going to be fixed up pretty soon. The techs we have with us say it's a simple enough problem in the core. So with any luck, I'll be back home in about a week. I'll even bring Sephiroth and Chocobohead over for dinner, how's that? Once they've tasted your cooking, I don't think I'll be able to get them to leave. I miss you, but I'm trying not to get too depressed about it. So I'll think about the four of us eating dinner together and laughing, like we've all known each other for ages. I love you.
And then the letters stop, just like that. Aeris checks the mail every day, but there are no envelopes bearing his cheerful scrawl. Maybe they're getting lost in the mail, she thinks. Maybe ShinRa's censoring employee communications now because Zack's in the middle of a delicate operation and he's not allowed to talk to the outside world.
After a month, she buys every newspaper she can and scours them all for information about Zack, about SOLDIER, about ShinRa, about anything at all. The closest thing she finds is a small article tucked away in the back of the paper announcing General Sephiroth's unfortunate death in an unspecified combat situation. That's all there is. It seems like the world's determined to forget Zack.
She tries to do the same, but it's hard. It's so, so hard.
Once the pain from Sephiroth's sword in her back fades, she sees Zack again.
"You never wrote," she says. "You never called."
"I'm sorry." His voice has the same distant, echoing quality that hers has taken on. "I meant to. But I couldn't."
"I know," Aeris says softly. The contact of their hands brushing together is less a physical thing than a reaching-out of their souls, a need to feel each other there once more. "I thought you were dead."
"I did die. But not when the letters stopped coming. After that. Years after, I think. They locked me away, me and Cloud, and they -- "
"Shh." She steps into his ghostly arms. "It's all right. It's going to be all right now."