Aerith Gainsborogh was eighteen years old and had been homeschooled by her mother Elmyra her entire life. As a result, she had Aerith reading by four, playing the violin by seven, and maintaining their entire herb garden alone by the time she was ten. Aerith had been a dream to raise, but a nightmare to keep against the tirade of the Mayor's people constantly beating down the door with seizure orders. Elmyra almost never had to scold the girl…

…until recently!

Zack met Aerith at the church in Sector 5 to find a growing crowd of people already there. Aerith volunteered with the YMCA on Sundays, where the community set up a soup kitchen out front with produce from her gardening operation. Inside the church was a coat drive, while students from the Community College came to peer-counsel the neighborhood's troubled youth. Aerith sold flowers for $5 gil a bundle to benefit the needy. They were gone in an hour.

Zack had lived in the Shinra Barracks above the Plate since he came to Midgar, so the outpour of the city's downtrodden and displaced denizens shook him up. He'd never seen so many homeless people in his life, scraggled and unkempt with as many holes in their skin as there were in their clothes.

What bothered him most was the classic mark of red rings around their bloodshot irises, the telltale symptom of Dancer addiction. Aerith taught him not to judge them, reminding him that there were very few people in the world who were as strong as he was. She was the only one who could scold him while still making him feel good about himself.

The volunteers that helped her were hardy folk, working people who did what they could to survive. Most, if not all, had never seen the sun. Zack implored them, asking them why they never went above the Plate, and they replied that there was nothing up there for them. But wasn't it preferable to this, why would they choose to live down there like that?

One woman put her hand on Zack's shoulder.

"Kid, living's better than dying."

Zack's heart went out to them, and he found himself filled with a renewed vigor to help them. After all, he was a civil servant, a servant of these people too. So when a box-truck pulled up laden with heavy donation packages, Zack jumped right up and got to handing them down two at a time. Boxes as big as him, no sweat, he was SOLDIER! He had that truck unloaded in fifteen minutes flat with admiring glances being showered upon him, scoring brownie points with Aerith like three-throws.

He did some improvised community outreach work, letting the little kids line up in the church and take turns punching the SOLDIER's hand. Some wayward apprehension loomed in the back of his mind however as he kept his knees bent wary of his crotch.

When the citizenry was amply fed and all the volunteers packed up and went home, Zack and Aerith got to do what they'd wanted to do…be all over each other. They sat in the pew by the flower bed kissing like the world was going to end, exploring each other's taste in rapturous enflowering waves, their arms caressing each other like sweeping cattails. He felt like some sort of sacrilegious bad boy making out with this hot young filly in church on Sunday.

Oh what would his parents think?

The thought filled him with evil pride as he deepened his passionate intensity lovingly toward the girl in his arms. She really liked his biceps, her tiny hands running up their firm length to his shoulders, sliding under the sleeves of his uniform shirt. Man, he was loving this!

"I'll take 'yes' for one hundred gil," he said in between kisses. Her eyes shifted back and forth, a kitten's curiosity twinkling on the tip of her nose.

"What's the question?"

"Are you my girlfriend?"

The spark that lit up her face was exhilarating as fireworks, the sheen of roman candles in the deep well of her eyes. Zack pulled his girl into his lap and kissed her longing and fiery until the lights went out.

Their two-week anniversary went by like a song on the radio, and they hit the one-month mark coasting on candy-kisses and walks in the park. Zack bought her a little plant he'd picked up at the Whole Foods near the boardwalk for the occasion.

"Checkitout! It's one of those fly-catcher thingies, I saw it and thought of you. I named it Spikey."

She put her hands on her hips shaking her head. "Zack, it's a Venus Fly Trap, and it's not an animal, it's a plant."

"But look at it! It's got teeth!"

"It doesn't belong to the kingdom Animalia and it doesn't have a backbone."

"But it eats meat, just like me!"

Oh she could hug him for the rest of her life.

Of course, gossip spread like wildfire in SOLDIER, and keen glances started being thrown Zack's way. His friends in particular would get quiet on lunch hour, and he'd find them all leaning in, leering at him with wry, expectant expressions. He told no one, and couldn't figure out how they knew—perhaps the couple-selfies plastered all over his Facebook wall had something to do with it.

Only one thing bothered him that he'd just barely started noticing—black suits, hovering around the church. Zack caught them posted up in precarious positions, on terraces of other buildings or in parked cars with tinted windows. Four of them—Reno, Rude, Cissnei, and Tseng—took shifts alternating surveillance.

He tried to pretend like he didn't know, keep a low profile, but he knew they knew. He assumed they were watching Aerith because of her involvement with Zack, he was involved in some pretty heavily classified stuff after all. It didn't make him too nervous, they were just Turks, might as well have sent rent-a-cops to keep tabs on him. Zack took sick pleasure in knowing that he got to make out with his girlfriend while they had to sit outside in the elements bored out of their minds watching him score.

Back in SOLDIER Wing, Shinra could keep tabs on him all they wanted, but all that ended for Zack as soon as he got to his bunk, where Shinra technically needed a search-warrant to intrude upon. Zack's tiny bunk that he got all to himself—perks of being a 1st—was homey enough for a guy his age, with Beastie Boys posters tacked to the walls and a sock draped over his Emerson stereo with a 5-slot CD changer.

Now he lay on his twin bed, which rested on plastic milk-crates in lieu of a box-spring, talking to Aerith on the phone while bouncing an oglop ball off the ceiling.

"So you don't think Jean Grey from X-men was the best girl superhero of all time?"

"I liked Poison Ivy."

"But she's not a superhero! She's a badguy!" Then Zack thought for a minute. "But she does have a cool costume…hey uh Halloween is coming up soon." He coughed, she giggled.

"What are you going to be Zack?"

"I'll be a gardener, you can go as my flower girl."

He could practically feel her rolling her eyes on the other line.

"OHH Zack, where do you get your material?"

"From the same golden cloth the angels cut your eyes from."

She squealed, burying her face in her pillow.

"You like that?" Zack laughed. "I can go on all night!"

"Nooo, my sides, they hurt!"

"C'mon, one more," he pestered, she obliged him. "Do you know what my shirt is made of?"

"What?"

"Boyfriend material."

She almost fell on her floor.

"Ahh, I can't Zack, I'm dying! That was almost enough to make me stop liking you."

"Oh yeah? Well I will stop liking you when an apple grows from a mango tree on the 30th of February."

Now she was on her floor, leaning against her bedframe hugging her pillow.

"I'm dead. I'm officially dead. You killed me Zack."

"Aerith, you brought me back to life."

And she squeaked like an oversized mouse. He was horrible! Zack just laid there on his back picturing her twirling her charging cord around her finger.

"So what are you doing right now?" he asked.

"Nothing really. Just lounging around in my pajamas."

"Pajamas! I see. Um, what, uh, color are they?"

"Zack Fair. Are you asking me what I'm wearing?"

"NO! No I would never do that!"

His other hand begged to differ.

"Oh. Well in case you were they're long fleece pants in pink plaid with a spaghetti strap tank top…at least it had straps a second ago."

His hand went to town…

"Can I come see you?" he blurted out.

"NOW?"

"Yeah."

"But it's late and you've got work in the morning."

"I know, I won't stay all night, I'll hang out with you for a bit and then come home. I just want to see your pretty face."

"You'll come all the way down here just to hang out for a bit?"

"Yeah!"

A long silence ensued on the other line, so tense and quiet it had him biting his nails. She mulled over him, somehow apprehensive, like a reason to not quite trust him existed.

"…Okay."

He shot up, throwing his boots on in record time.

"Where can I meet you?"

"Come to the house. My window is the first one on the left out back. How quietly can you climb?"

He was already halfway to the elevator weaving around other SOLDIER's walking in the halls. They saw him bolting toward the entrance talking on his plumb phone, and they knew where he was going.

"Like a ninja!" he replied.

"There's a terrace for my morning-glories, please try not to squish them too much!"

"I'm like a surgeon Aerith, I'll see you soon!"

Then he hung up and barreled out the entrance to the Shinra HQ Building.

"You're mah boy Zack!" someone cheered after him as he ran.

The train took way too long. Zack ran up changing cars every stop just to keep himself from going stark raving mad. Sector 5 looked like a horror movie at night. The sick adrenaline rush propelled him through the Wall Market, down to the cul-de-sac Aerith lived on, where he saw her house in the flickering amber porchlight.

He whipped out his phone and called her.

"Zack?" she answered in a whisper.

"Hey, I'm here!" he whispered back. "Which side are you on?"

"The right side, come around the back."

He clicked on her and hurried around the house. A window out back slid up, and there she was. He saw her through the paint-flecked bars as she unlatched them, a glittering flower-nymph in a gilded tower of thorns. She smiled down at him like a shooting star, and he smiled up like her comet tail had pierced his heart.

"Come up!" she called, and her whisper was like a noose that throttled him with tension. He did as he was told, rushing to the wall to find the terrace laden with vines. He got a handhold putting a foot up.

"Careful!" she pleaded. "Don't step on the flowers!"

Oh the things a guy does for a girl he wants. He lifted his leg halfway to his head to get the first foothold, playing a game of wall-twister all the way up the side of the house. He grasped the edge of her windowsill like he'd reached the top of the Aggro Crag, and she pulled him through in a victory hug.

He toppled into her room with slightly more grace than a falling brick, but they giggled like criminals as she scooped him into her arms in the dark. Her scent invigorated him, a warm smell of down blankets and fabric softener, her hair wafted of herbal shampoo and tingling pheromones that made him cross-eyed and giddy. She fit against his body like molded temperfoam, contouring to his chest and midsection in a way that they hadn't tried holding each other before. He got way too excited, he had to slow himself down.

Her room was so much bigger than his, a full wood vanity—albeit a hand-me-down—and space for a dresser and reading desk. Her walls were a cool baby blue in the smooth dark, picture frames in the shape of hearts and frilled borders were hung in geometric arrangements. He noted burning incense—lavender and white sage—and the low tones of Savage Garden ballads humming on her Panasonic Portable Speakers.

Her mouth brushed against his in teasing nibbles, love bites against his lower lip. He loved kissing her, but tonight there was more on his mind.

His hands on her hips, holding her decisively close to his own, he scanned her white tank top with scheming eyes.

"I'm disappointed," he said, and she cocked her head.

"Why?"

"I thought you said it didn't have straps."

A mischievous glint in her eyes, she pinched thumb against forefinger, and flicked the strap off her shoulder.

He yanked her in, his mouth at her neck, kissing in agonizing sweeps that drove her head back skyward. He preened her chin back, kinking her neck, sucking her in as she gasped in elated sensation. A little girlish moan and he fell with her onto the bed, pulling her onto him straddled. They'd been going together long enough, it was time.

Illicit chemicals assaulted his senses, snapping everything into a serene linearity, all other noncritical information did not register. There was only one mission objective on his mind: his mouth, her breast.

But without warning, she pushed his hands away and crawled off him.

"Preview of things to come," she said as she snuggled up next to him, burrowing into his shoulder like a kitten, while Zack stared blinking up at the ceiling.

His mouth hung open in a vacant expression, a blank look on his numb face and a tire iron in his pants like ya gunna do somethin' about this, wise guy? He didn't know how long he lay there before he took a breath, standing straight up off the bed and ripping his shoulder out from under her.

"What's wrong?" she panicked. He snapped his sword onto his back and turned on her.

"If you're just keeping me around as a trophy I'm done with this! I don't play that game!"

"What game?!" she cried.

"Seeya!" and he headed for the window.

"Wait!"

She curled up crying, hugging her legs on the edge of her bed. Zack moved to leave, and stopped…

Her muffled sobs, shaking and painful, ringing of confusion and agony. She clutched her legs rocking back and forth, hugging someone who wasn't there. Her cries tore through him like a lancet, he hated hearing a girl cry.

He stayed at the window for a full sixty seconds before he got his air back, a slow-count back from ten to settle the chemical fog in his brain. His body still trembled for a drug that it needed like a Dancer addict still chasing that last hit.

He looked back at her trembling form, outlined in the darkness by a thin moonlamp glow. Her virgin sensitivities lay shattered like mirror pieces on the floor, and Zack knew he'd done that. A tug in the back of his mind let him know that he'd erred, a serious mark on his honor like a burned tally strike against him.

He went to her, and knelt down beside her bed, so close that he could lean his head on her plaid pants. Like a knight swearing fealty and honor, he held his heart in his hands.

"I'm sorry Aerith, I'm being a jerk. You probably got scared. I should have known better." He sighed with an aggravated slump, looking down at her painted toes clenching and unclenching off the side of the bed. "Look, I've been going through so much at work. Things are just a madhouse right now. I'm so stressed out I don't even know what's going on with me. But I care about you. I…I want to be with you."

He looked up to find her eyes, and with tentative shudders she came out from hiding against her knees. The tears ran their course gazing down into his pleading face, fading in their own time to sniffles.

"Is this the only reason you came down here tonight?"

"No! Of course not!" He sat up on her bed, but a wary look met him, marred with sneaking suspicion. "I swear!"

The door opened, and the silhouette of a giant woman in a nightcap and sleeping gown filled the entire doorway.

"BAAAAAH!"

"GYAAAHH!"

Zack leapt back toppling out of Aerith's second story window. He landed flat on his back with a hard thud that wretched the air clear out of him. Then he looked up to see a massive woman running around the house in bobbing nightclothes like a suit of armor, brandishing a rolling pin like a broadsword.

"Sugar Honey Iced Tea!" Zack pulled himself up by his ears and ran off hobbling and hopping as fast as his limping leg would let him. She chased him all the way down the cul-de-sac, waving that rolling pin like a flamberge and shouting in a foreign language that sounded anything but friendly.

He made it in one piece to the train station, never more grateful that the Shinra Express ran 24 hours. It was a long ride back, giving him a while to nurse his lower back and swollen ankle…and to think. After the fear of almost dying faded, his mind wandered back to Aerith.

Something deep and treacherous in his heart gave him the feeling that he'd committed a serious infraction, the welling sense of shame creeping up the sides of his spine made him feel naked under his clothes. This wasn't his high school prom afterparty (which had been a wild night of binge-drinking and boobs), he was a long way from dirt-bike runs in restricted zones out by the reactor. The young guy excuse only went so far for so long.

The flash of railyard overheads through the scratchiti-marred shatter-proof windows transported Zack to earlier times, and he thought of Angeal.

"HEY SOLDIERRRR!" the girls had called out to them on the boardwalk when they'd been on patrol, summer buns and swimsuit tops accenting skyflaring bunny ears.

"HEY GIRLS!" Zack had hollered back at them, jumping at the railing like a puppy. "I got some little SOLDIER's for you right here!" and he waved his hand like a lasso.

"Zack," Angeal stepped in, but Zack pulled at his leash.

"What's your library number? I'm checking you out!"

"ZACK!"

He shot around to Angeal, startled to find his stern mentor standing with arms crossed.

"Remember our talk about discretion."

Zack slumped, he remembered, but looked back over at the girls and forgot.

"But what's wrong with it? They're into it and I'm into them! C'mon Angeal, you're single, what gives?"

Angeal shot him a glaring growl, making Zack flinch pinning his ears back. He wouldn't understand why until nearly a year later under his mentor's wing. The man relaxed, preparing to bestow another one of his lectures onto his student.

"Zack, you're very young, this is a part of honor I don't expect you to fully understand until later, but honor also means respecting yourself and your fellow man…"

Zack looked at Angeal, then back at the girls, then back at Angeal. Yeah, and?

"…Any fool can jump into bed with a stranger, animals have been doing it for millions of years. But to bare your soul to another, intertwine hopes and fears and dreams, to let them into your heart and make yourself vulnerable to the point where they can hurt you as much as you can hurt them…now that's being naked."

Zack stood there boiling brain cells.

"I still don't see the problem."

"Come with me Zack."

"Hey, where are we going?" But Angeal strode off, Zack trotting on his heels. "ANGEEEAAAALL! What are we doing?"

"Patrolling."

They boarded the bullet train bound for Midgar Central, and rode it to the end of the line. They got off at a railyard that was more like a graveyard, with marred monuments of movement leaders graffittied over in terraforming urban sprawl. The first person they saw tripped a red flag.

She was a tall gypsy rogue with sex-frazzled hair draped down over a revealing blue sari and the olive skin of a foreigner. An arrowhead tattoo made her part of the Triads, and a battle lance over her shoulder made her a criminal. Zack wasn't exactly the most up-to-code member on the Force, but it was still really annoying when people blatantly broke the law right in front of him.

"Yo!" he threw his hands up. She stopped with a hand on a hip. "You got a permit for that poker stick?"

"Tsh, you gunna arrest me?" What was her accent? Galbadian? Who knew. But Zack found Angeal's hand on his shoulder. His mentor waved the woman on and she continued into a world Zack's eyes would never forget.

A desolate wasteland of cramped squalor stacked on top of itself like a garbage heap unveiled to him. There were no houses here, people made dwellings out of whatever they could; tent cities, cardboard box windows, sheet-metal walls, linoleum roofs. Old women bathed naked children in puddles draining from the reactor pipes that ran to the world above. Someone lay passed out in the street—was that a body?

"What is this place?" Zack gasped.

"This is where people go who have no dreams."

Angeal told him this place was directly underneath the Shinra Building, the dirty little secret beneath Midgar's crown jewel. The Sector 0 Slums—an area formally known as South Watts.

Girls lined the dirt streets on every corner, cat-calling him, taunting him, soliciting him with such vigor and vulgarity that it made his boyish sensitivities curl up into a ball. One scantily-clad twenty-something started over to him, gold hair tucked behind her ears. Something about her caught his attention—that made her somehow different from the rest.

She had a tail.

"Hey there kid, looking to lose your virginity?"

Zack implored her wide-eyed, asking her why she did this? Terrible things could happen to her, death being the most merciful. A desperate need to understand spilled through his open mouth and pleading eyes. She check over her shoulder, quick-scanning her six, and looked him straight in the eye

"You see the girls on the boardwalk, those little blonde hussies in string-bikinis chatting up big shot corporate execs old enough to be their fathers? You think they do it for love? The only difference between me and them is I'm straight up, I've got what you want and you're gonna pay for it. But you Plate guys want to leave your mark on someone to prove you were alive. So go ahead, have your lie, make yourself believe that you're any better than the scum that come around down here looking for tail. It's thirty for a blowie mister, but if you don't want it then keep walking, we've gotta get back to work."

And Zack had stood stunned, like a drunken man punched in the stomach, like a lost dog roaming the streets. He fled back to the train station, running toward the lie, toward a world where everything was neat and orderly on the surface—the skin-deep illusion of orchestrated chaos. A little girl jumped out in his peripherals, ten years old in a pink sweater over a school uniform jumper with ribbon-pulled hair, soliciting him with the gusto of a grown woman.

"Hey SOLDIERRRR! I got something for you right here! Right here mister!" She slapped her hips at Zack as he ran. "C'mon mister. You know you want it. Hey mister!"

He cried all the way home.

[Received Muscle Belt]