She remembered everything about him, even now as an old woman with graying braids and a broken heart full of love for someone who died years before his time.
She remembers the soft pull of jet black hair and his mako enhanced eyes that starkly contrasted with his skin. She remembers nights when he'd bury his face in her shoulder (it was those night even she felt the guilt suffocated him) and all she could do was to hold him as he (a SOLIDER… first class) cried like a child.
She remembered that last night when he took her up to the upper city (even then this meeting had felt different) and they had lain on the highest skyscraper with a balcony.
"Look," he'd had said softly, pointing at the night sky and the only light that littered the velvet night; the stars.
Her eyes shot back to him quizzically, wanting to understand yet….
He laughed (a rare sound these days...) his blue eyes creasing in his merriment.
"When you've finished counting all the stars in the sky," he said, voice dropping to a whisper in her ear, "that's when I'll come home to you."
And she remembered saying to him, in a voice full of childish fright "but Zack.. I'm never able to see the stars from the lower levels..."
He had wrapped his arms around her and placed a gentle kiss on her lips and she'd let the matter drift from her mind, sinking into the warmth (taking his always there presence for granted).
Zack had left the next day, left to fight in a war that was as personal to him as war could get and left her with a kiss, and an empty promise formed by the lips she's never feel again.
Eventually, after the months had passed and after he didn't answer her letters (not even the one about the baby she….they had lost), when she hadn't heard from him in what felt like an eternity, she started counting.
Every day, every night she would count the stars, the lights anything that would remind her of that night as long as she still had that hope.
And then Cloud came to her (the night has been starless… a sign) and he had been carrying Zack's sword and tried to explain but he had broken down, falling to his knee's begging her to understand.
She forgave him (it was in her nature) but still… She kept counting.
She remembers it all, even as an old woman laying a patch of wilting flowers and her only visitor a boy (a man) filled with grief and pain.
And sometimes, she wishes she could forget get (what was a life without me? Her love, her only…?)