Fic requested by ImagineAsian. Hope you like it!

Italics = memories or the eponymous 'ghost echoes'.

Disclaimer: I don't own FFVII.

Aerith knew that it would come down to this.

"Don't be scared! Look! It's such a pretty shade of blue."

In a way, she had always known.

Words like 'pretty', 'heart' and 'roses' fell without the slightest restraint from his lips. He was different, she knew. Different from all the other men in her life. Sparse as they came, sometimes a bleak shadow an arm's length from her retreating back, men were best reduced to specters in her life. Flitting in, flitting out, flitting in, flitting out, fli –

"Aerith?"

She hadn't touched her breakfast.

The lemonade boiled in her belly from drinking too fast. Was this what a daiquiri would taste of?

"Here," He caught her ready-to-swat hand in his. A return present thanks to his pinching her nose at the bridge. Still. "Hold still and swallow. You did ask for it."

Bitter, scorching, cold acid and it spun her head round so much that…

"Woah there! I warned you about the first time. Hey, hey, it's okay!" Because she'd begun to cry. "Relax! I'm a First Class now, remember? It's gonna take a lot more than a bit of vomit to keep me away from you…"

Words like 'blood', 'piss' and 'puke' never rose from his throat after his first kill. He coddled her far too much for her liking and she had let him get away with it. The poor, dear, trembling, overgrown boy crumpling like a broken paper crane in her arms and a graying white feather pressed to his palm. He never took her out for another drink afterwards. She never pressed him more for another singeing kiss to the mouth, the way the alcohol stung just right without making her insides burn.

"Uh-uh, no more beer for you, Missy," he crooned, imitating the pudgy-faced barman at the tavern. "No siree, it's off to bed with ya!"

Contrary to popular belief, Aerith didn't care for flowers.

Not the slightest.

But here, caressed between grass and petals nipping at her exposed skin, she could understand why she needed them. Beneath tall green stalks and chilly winter sunlight, Aerith was humbled. The sky seemed not to mourn wholly, its tears only drops upon stark white petals. But the flowers didn't trouble her much with their mourning elegance, not even to surrender the rain to the cold ground.

Aerith was humbled.

"What is fear?"

"To be afraid."

"And to be afraid…?"

"To be human."

All children were supposed to be special. Her adoptive mother had told her. So had her birth mother. Zack hadn't believed in a single word they said.

"What makes you so special, Aerith?" He chuckled, lifting her chin up for her. "Two eyes, a pretty smile and a heart that beats in your chest. Which is more than what I can say for… certain people I know…"

She had always known that there would come a time when she would have to refer to him – and even the flowers, the most delicate of them that would persist in withering – in the past tense. Too long had the maiden lived in her bubble, free of the chains that bound others to fatalistic notions of eventual endings.

There was a tradition in Midgar, probably smuggled in from one of the backwater towns from the west, proclaiming love-drunk young lads to bestow their sweethearts with a red ribbon for the sake of their undying devotion. The redder the red, the deeper the love. The pink cotton wound round her finger with a lock of her hair numbed her slightly, if not completely curing the hangover. After that experiment-fraught night at the bar, Aerith had been plagued with the sobering actualization of her own humanity. Not just a 'very special little girl', but another foolish lass pining away for a blue-eyed ghost who lived on through the fearlessness of his demise.

"Miss? Miss?"

The boy appeared so suddenly before her that she almost cried out at the unexpected sight. He peered through a thick brown fringe, quite alarmed at her disheveled state. She stared through her own lighter strands, thinking him too heartbreakingly lovely for a place like this, with his cherubic eyes and rosy complexion.

"You dropped your hair-ribbon, Miss. It almost fell into the gutter down there."

"Thank you. What is your name, pray tell?"

"Denzel, Miss."

And he was soon on his way, leaving her to contemplate the shadows dancing out from within her grasp.

"I was thinking about what you said to me the other day, Aerith."

"And?"

"You're right. I can't give into myself like this. Thanks for helping me realize that."

"You're a soldier, Zack. That's what they do. Fight for justice, freedom, for those they love."

A faint smile skirted the corners of his lips. "You believe in this more than I do?"

"I believe in you. That's all that matters."

He kissed her then and there, unafraid of the watchful eyes of the flowers in bloom.

"Write to me soon, will you? I'll try and get back as soon as I can."

"But of course." she replied, ignoring the clouds blackening the skies.

She wrote him poems and prose, notes and anecdotes, illustrated with penciled hearts and doodles. When the hopes of a response began to dwindled, the letters lengthened as she tried to postpone reality's outstretched grasp. Flowers were plucked, flowers were sold, flowers were tended to, all in her attempts to preserve the only lives in Midgar that thrived alongside the choking smoke of despair.

When it was time for her to finally say goodbye, she had already remembered the promises.

All twenty-three of them.

"I'm sorry, so sorry." she wept as she buried the dead flowers, the petals crumpling to ash between her finger and thumb. An azure day was ahead, another one watched over by the sky she'd grown to love and hate in equally opposing measures. The survivors of this year's frost stood askance in the basket next to the neglected wagon gathering dust.

Aerith tugged once more at the ribbon.

It stayed.