He is skulking around outside Tifa's bar, and when she spots him, she calls him a word in her (their) native language that has something to do with the color blue and what it means to be a traitor. It's almost interchangeable, she tells him, mentions that she's wearing blue panties, but is still true to her roots at least, because she not wearing a blue suit.
That blue suit.
The word she calls him was coined only a few months after the war. Standing only a few feet away from him, in the shadow of Tifa's bar, she imagines pulling those blue lapels back like flowers petals, and putting her hand flat against his heart.
She does that. He actually allows her to do that.
The beat is steady.
You actually have something in there, you know. she says, only partly kidding.
He has the dark eyes of a Wutain man, all the world carried in the smooth neutral skin of his face. Stoic, either like a Turk, or like the ancestors of his that are undoubtedly turning in their graves.
When she says that, he tells her that anyone who is properly deceased wouldn't be doing anything in their grave, and if they were, the subject of his own loyalty would be the last of their worries.
I could have you killed for talking to me like that. She says playfully, but with all the vindictiveness of a spoiled child, vitriol lurking soft behind wide shining eyes.
The look in his eye is still, and it makes her falter, feel dumb for threatening a man who made his living giving and escaping death.
Don't you think you ought to pay attention to more important things?
Like? She asked, eyes falling down to the gun strapped behind his right hip. When she reaches out towards it, he grabs her hand in his, holding her fingers together.
Like your country, he says, voice unaccented, altogether forgettable. Your country.
What do you care? She says, trying to jerk her hand back. But his grip is steel.
You live and breathe, princess. Then he brings her hand into his jacket, passed his hip to the cold steel of the his gun. He looks at her, and her fingers are wiggling, she is biting her lip, and looking into his eyes.
Be still. He says, and it's something divine the way she actually does. Something about somber men with long black hair and guns, something about the calm of a Wutain man. Something. Wrap your fingers around it. He says and when she does, the barrel is cold and solid.
You'll realize that a beating heart does you no good. He says, You can follow it until your kingdom follows you, most likely to disaster. The gun becomes warm under her hand. But you'll find that the clearest moments, are when the beating stops."