Shattered glass spills across the ballroom floor and glitters in the light of the full moon like a field of dim, fading, dying stars. Overhead, the dome is cracked open to the night, the panes long gone after some war she has since forgotten. Her war, his war, doesn't matter. That isn't why she's come.
She remembers this place. Too many years ago to count, she danced with a handsome stranger she caught watching the stars through this dome, and she sees it now as it was then – gilded arches, reaching up into the heavens to offer an unfettered view of the night sky. They were doomed from the moment they laid eyes on one another, to live a life so fraught with suffering, if they knew then what she knew now, perhaps they would have walked away from each other and never looked back.
Her feet are bare as she shambles across the dance floor, her limbs tired and old, and her skirt tangles around infirm and aching legs. Something cuts into the sole of her foot, but she ignores the pain as she searches the room for memories she's forgotten along the way. There is nothing here for her, but she's compelled to look anyway, her heart a dark, masochistic thing that doesn't know when to leave well enough alone.
They tore each other apart in the years that followed. For love, for duty, for their childish determination to be different than the rest. They so blindly believed love would carry them through the trials, that they could fight the malignant power that ate little pieces of her soul a bite at a time, the way Guardian Forces ate memory. They were wrong. Love was never enough to save them.
She begged him to let her free him from that promise he made before he knew what it meant. It was unnatural and cruel to own another person that way. Her power fed on him, devoured his soul, enslaved him, and in the end, left him like a capsized ship with a broken spine on some far-away beach with no hope of a rescue.
And still, he stayed.
She resents it, even now, even when everything else is gone, she resents the way he lingers. He's still there, holding on, a pathetic shadow of what he was. She never should have tried to domesticate a lion, whether real or metaphorical. Wild animals belonged in the wild, after all. The life she offered was little more than a cage, and he did not thrive in captivity.
If she closes her eyes, she can hear the waltz and she can feel his arms around her. His confusion was so cute, so endearing, so innocent…
She acts out that long ago dance and forgets that she is no longer a girl with laughing eyes and a shapely figure. She forgets that her hair is streaked with silver and so tangled, the knots will never come free. She forgets that her legs shake under her weight and that her back is twisted and gnarled and she dances, dances, sways, twirls and laughs as bits of glass flay open her naked feet.
In her wake, she leaves smeared, bloody footprints and the scent of powder and lavender, and living things move and gleam and skitter along the floor – animals and insects flee from the unexpected motion, or perhaps because they sense what she could do to them.
"You're going to like me…"
"I loved you."
She turns to the shadows beyond the pillar where he once stood, the best looking boy in the room, and she forgets how her resentment aches like a festering wound in her gut. He's still beautiful to her, his blue eyes brightened by madness and his face heavily creased from age. His hair remains dark, but there's a hint of a beard on his jaw, one she knows will be flecked with a startling amount of white if she looks too close.
He shouldn't be here, but he's the reason she came. No matter how hard she fights it, no matter how many times she's pushed him away, he always finds her. He is the last remaining piece of her humanity, the only thing that's left of Rinoa, and she can't deny how much she misses herself.
"You were the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen," he says as he steps forward into a shaft of moonlight. "No one else would have dared… But you… you broke my guard with one look…"
He takes her hand and she remembers so many nights wrapped up in his arms, cradled against the warmth of his chest like something precious. So many nights, heated, passionate touches, kisses, long moments of desperate wanting, his lips stealing away her breathy cries, his hands in her hair, bodies joined in a different sort of dance… She remembers and she misses it, misses how his touch chased away the terror and the doubt.
Tears spill down her cheeks as he takes her face in his hands and kisses her the way he used to, back when he was still whole and strong and virile, back before she destroyed him.
"I always loved you. Don't ever doubt it."
It was never his love she doubted.
Now, sixty years on, his love is all that remains. He's long dead and there is nothing left but memories and madness and visions of what she can never have again.
He fades before her eyes and her hand flutters to her side like a bird with a broken wing. She is certain, once the life passes from her tired, withered body, he'll still be waiting, no matter how hard she tries to let him go.