They watched the stars, once.
This she remembers most of all: how they would lie in the clearing in the woods, with its own small patch of sky that at night turned to black satin, pricked with a silver needle and bleeding light. (It was their secret place, he would murmur against her lips and idly tug his fingers through her hair, and she would smile so he could feel it and try to pull him closer.)
And then she remembers meteor showers, and how they fell asleep in the clearing and returned with rumpled clothes to find everyone in a panicked frenzy. (But then the war came knocking, the sky obscured by smoke and fire and hate. Their forest is razed.)
Now she sits alone by her open window, wrapped in bedsheets and shivering in the night air, cigarette down to the filter clenched in trembling fingers that are not caused by the cold.
(Because in the end, this is all they are: broken promises and bittersweet memories and golden embers burning to ash.)
