General Note: I'm only going to reformat my fics so much when this site is the one at fault. So If the formatting is weird (like, say, there aren't any scene breaks where there should be), please check out my profile for more info. Thank you.
Obligatory (but ultimately pointless) CYA: I don't own it.
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Let's Dance
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'Cause you know comes a time
When love will unwind.
Somebody suffers—what's new?
Still, you…
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The first time he saw her wear them, she was barely sixteen.
It was warm that day, in the spring, and even the dank slums under the plate couldn't completely suffocate the brightness in the air. It was fitting for her, and she wore the atmosphere as comfortably as the calf-length, white summer dress. A red ribbon ran below her bust-line—and he realized she actually had a bust-line to speak of, these days—and tied in the back. And she wore red shoes to match. Flirty, sassy things with a heel her surrogate mother would deem too high and likely too thin.
With one hand curled around the SOLDIER's forearm, and the other holding a basket—covered, and larger than the one she usually carried her flowers in—she smiled at him fondly. They treaded a thin line of Cetra and Turk, enemies and friends, and on some days the relationship listed more to one side than the other. Today they were friends, and she radiated the sort of happiness that couldn't be repressed. He wondered if maybe her smile had some connection to the beautiful weather.
"We're going on a picnic," Zack Fair said, in that almost overly-enthusiastic way only Zack Fair could pull off.
A rather humorless, ironic smile tugged slightly at his lips. "Where?" he pointedly asked.
She giggled and spun around. "Anywhere!" And she had struck him then, genuinely happy for once, despite her circumstances, caught perfectly between girlhood and womanhood, braid swishing in the air, skirt twirling, dress shoes clicking. Intoxicated with being a normal teenage girl.
The SOLDIER grinned at her, knowing himself to be lucky, knowing a good thing when he had it, and for a moment, the leader of the Turks had seen himself in that smile.
He had been maybe eighteen. His hair had been too short to pull back, and had always fallen in his eyes. He had asked her to the autumn festival, and she had said yes. Warm brown eyes glittering, and she had worn red, and red shoes as well. Round-toed pumps. Cute and classy. He had kissed her that evening, and the night was special, like their relationship might have been.
He would have called her "the one that got away," but the fact of the matter was, it had been he who had gone away. Accepted the job offer from Shin-Ra, because as much as he had liked her, he was sick of his home town, sick of studying for subjects he cared nothing about, sick of the monotony his young life had become. He told her he would write, and she had smiled, half sadly and half to humor him, as if she knew he wouldn't, and he never did. He wished he could have blamed it on disorganization and losing her address, but it would have been a complete lie, and anyone who knew the slightest about him would have known it. The truth was, he knew exactly where her address was, written on a piece of white paper that had turned ivory with months that had turned into years. The truth was, he had moved to Midgar, and everything had changed.
Midgar seemed to have a way of doing that to people, no matter where they lived in relation to the plate.
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-o-
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The second time he saw her wear them, he noticed the shoes before he noticed the girl who wore them.
He hadn't really come to the slums in search of her. He had come because the slum bars were rowdier, darker, more dangerous than those on top of the plate. And he wasn't much one for drinking these days, not even under the present circumstances, but he needed distractions of some sort.
They flashed into his almost downcast vision, and it was the color that gripped him. Red, and instead of being a distraction, it just served to remind him—of blood, too much blood from a man he had grown to call a friend—and then he recognized the style, with a heel too high and likely too thin. Paired with a black dress that made her legs too visible, they had aged from sassy into reckless. Painful, even.
She approached with a shot in one hand, and a glass of bourbon for him in the other, telling him that she had noticed him before he had noticed her. She held out the drink to him and her mouth stretched and turned up at the corners in greeting, but it wasn't quite a smile.
"It's on me."
"Aeris…"
Saying her name was a mistake, he realized too late. It sounded mature, and she looked mature, and there was something wrong about knowing she was attractive, and something very wrong with being unable to ignore that he was attracted to her. Everything was wrong here. He didn't belong in the slums, Zack Fair didn't deserve to be dead, and perhaps most of all the color black didn't suit her. The fact that it was the color of mourning was just coincidence—and she had every right to be in mourning, with one charismatic, First Class SOLDIER boyfriend dead. But the fact of the matter was that the cut of the neckline was a little too low, and the slit in the skirt a little too high, and it would be obvious to anyone that mourning was not exactly first and foremost in her mind. At least not in the traditional sense.
He didn't take the drink, but his mouth took a disapproving tilt downward. "Do you think he'd want you to be like this?"
He wondered if her smile had always been so broken. "It doesn't really matter what he wants, now, does it?"
He blinked at her at that. "You used to be less cynical."
"You used to be nicer," she pointed out, and it stung him a little because it was true.
There was a pause, and in that time their relationship shifted from something close to friends to something far away from it.
She downed the shot, and gestured to the bourbon. "If you don't want this, I'm going to find someone who does."
His hand caught her arm as she began walking away, and he said her name again, but he wasn't sure if it was in concern or something else.
"Tseng." And he hated the way her voice was a gun that shot him in the ear, with a bullet that traveled down to settle in his chest. "I'm seventeen."
He looked at her, which was maybe a mistake because those green eyes of hers both supported and belied the statement she had just made. But the action gave gravity to his own point. "I'm thirty-one."
They were searching each other for something, and spoke in losses never to be found again. Her lover, his friend, her childhood, his youth. Normal lives, both their hearts—for vastly different reasons.
"We won't find it in each other," he eventually said.
"Maybe I'm tired of searching and want a distraction."
The harsh headlights of a passing car flitted through the bar, and his own reflection flickered in her eyes with it. The smoky darkness took hold again, and he finally took the glass from her hand. He drank it too quickly, and by the time they left, all he was regretting was his empty wallet.
They half-stumbled through the alleys of the upper plate, toward his flat, and she kissed him then. Put to use the extra height those red shoes gave her, and pushed him against the bricks, one hand on his tie, and one of his hands ended up buried in her hair. Her lips met his in something he didn't let himself think about, because he could tell it was desperate and dark, and she was moonlight and smoke and flowers and the deceiving warm glow of streetlamps. She was everything fleeting and intangible, tasting like honeyed vodka, and she was practically a highly alcoholic drink herself at that moment.
"When did you grow up?" he quietly asked, blinking down at her not entirely soberly, and she smiled, half sadly and half as if to humor him.
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The last time he saw them, in the hazy, hungover sun of the morning, they practically glittered with fire. They were the only sign that was left of her. She had gone without any other trace, disappeared again. She had grown to be very good at that. Maybe it had been he who had somehow taught her that in the first place.
He worried about her feet, if she was maybe wearing something else, if she would get cuts or have to step through broken glass on her way back home.
He worried that maybe he had found that lost something in her last night.
Almost like he was disrupting evidence at the scene of a crime, he hesitantly reached out from where he sat on the edge of his bed and took hold of one shoe. Slightly scuffed, average size, maybe a little smaller than average, and red, red, red. Shoes, lips, flowers, hearts, blood, death, all red, red, red.
He couldn't give them back. What would he say? What would she say? He thought about pawning them, giving them away, but found he couldn't part with them. Not like that.
Thirty-one, leader of the Turks, and holding onto a pair of women's dress shoes out of—what, exactly? Sentimentality? Regret? What-ifs? It had been a long, long time since he had felt it, and he had forgotten the proper name for it.
Whatever it was, it was ridiculous. He felt silly. Too young for his years. Too old to be indulging in romantic keepsakes and naïve nostalgia. Particularly with a woman—girl—almost fifteen years younger.
And what would his colleagues say if they knew he was holding onto them? Reno? Even Rufus? He ran a hand over his face, not even wanting to think about possible reactions. They wouldn't even have to know who they had belonged to—and sure as hell wouldn't know. For his sake and safety as much as hers.
He ran his thumb gently over the heel, the satin that covered it, and wondered just where they belonged in his life. They didn't; that was the problem. A man who was a stickler for files and reports and organization, and just where would he ever put these?
They ended up in a lockbox, stashed in the back corner of a shelf in his closet, right next to his small arsenal of job-issued firearms—because dangerous things belonged together.
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A/N: Wow. Tseng. He's not my usual cup of tea. Aeris even less so. I've always found her to be one of the trickiest buggers to get down, so I'm not sure where she came from. I guess I'm a little unsure about characterization. (But then again, my idea of Aeris in general tends to deviate from the norm a bit, I guess. Despite appearances, she lived in the slums, and managed to avoid Shin-Ra countless times. The girl probably had street-smarts like whoa, and I kind of doubt she was as innocent and as angelic as a lot of people make her out to be. But, eh, that's just me. -Shrugs-)
I forget how this story came to mind. Maybe I was thinking of the color red for Valentine's Day, or maybe I was thinking of David Bowie (as I will do from time to time). At any rate, the line "Put on your red shoes and dance the blues" wandered into my head, and maybe because it was Valentine's Day, maybe because I happened to be logged into my account, this little story took hold. So it was partly inspired by David Bowie's "Let's Dance," and inspired a little bit more by Telepopmusik's "Love Can Damage Your Health"—a sorrowful but rather sinister-sounding song, from which the lines at the beginning are taken. (As you might have guessed, I don't own those either.)
So happy belated pseudo-anti-Valentine's Day! (Because you weren't honestly expecting the fanfic equivalent to a box of chocolates and a teddy bear, were you?)