A/N: Hey guys! Sorry it's been so long! (Don't worry, I hate me too.) Life happened and stuff and I got the REMAKE (no remake spoilers but omgomgomgomgomgwtfwtfwtfwtfwtf) and that swallowed a solid two weeks of my life up then some other stuff and more stuff and UGH. You know how it goes.

In light of the remake and as a general note anyway, I have characterised Cloud based on the theoretical personality he might have if he hadn't been experimented on, so mixed his pre-Nibelheim tragedy persona (at only 14 years old) with his post-lifestream persona in the original game (not Advent Children—no mopeyness for me). So yeah. Smiley face.

SO. WHOOPS. It's been ages. Lotsa shit happened. To everyone. BUT WE'RE HERE NOW. As always I hope you're having a fantastic week and moreover, I hope you are and continue to stay safe.

6th May '20

Chapter 27: All I Know

Aster pulled at the hem of her shorts to dry her palms. They didn't cover the mottled bruising on her knees or the fine scar that formed where the halberd had slashed through her holster and fatigues the week before. It was still pink. She brushed her finger across it, raised like braille. It would have been difficult to lie that one away. Now she didn't have to.

Shorts were a far cry from the neck-to-knee Bandersnatch pelt cloaks that the girls of Icicle Inn were particularly fond of that year. When she had asked her mom, one of the town's skilled seamstresses, to make her one, her dad had whirled around that it would be much too short and her legs would catch the death of the icy wind. A breath blew through her nose at the memory, once mundane, now fond. She wondered what he'd say if he knew how short these shorts were, despite the fact it was twenty degrees celsius warmer in Midgar than the Knowlespole.

The thought distracted her long enough to knock on a door in one of the SOLDIER buildings, way up on the First floors, without stopping to address the fluttering in her stomach.

"Door's open!"

The latch clicked as she pushed the handle and the room spread before her and invited her in much less frantically than last time. This time, without fear and adrenaline and panic, Zack's apartment embraced her. When she closed the door behind her, it slammed in the faces of those emotions. She knew intimately well they could not reach her here. Walls of salt repelled her demons.

The apartment was distinctly masculine, all glass, leather, and shades of charcoal with a dark wood floor. It felt like a hotel room but lived in for years. Long-term temporary. The smell of his soap drifted from beyond the ajar bathroom door, base notes of wood and something fresh, and through that door she could see a fogged up mirror collecting tears.

The door opened fully, and Zack emerged, pulling a heather-grey shirt down over his chest. If only he had appeared a moment sooner.

"Could've been untimely if it wasn't me, huh?" she said with a grin, pretending her cheeks weren't turning pink.

"Nah, I knew it was you. Exactly on time—military girl, you know."

He said it with a smile but his words sounded staccato against the now prominent silence. Aster bit hard on the inside of her cheek with the same stiff smile and a nod.

She hugged her arms and said, "I've been looking forward to this all day."

Then the smile on Zack's face reached his eyes.

"Only all day?" he asked, confident or arrogant, as he hooked his fingers around her elbows and stepped in to kiss her.

She sucked in a deep breath through her nose—her first mistake, since it made her mind hazy. Her second mistake was failing to exhale until he pulled away, because lightheadedness prevailed.

Her words came out breathlessly and all rolled into one. "Okay—I meant all week."

"Better." He grinned. "Gotta stop at Teef's real quick before we go."

"Sure," Aster said with a shrug. "She there? She's usually at the bar on Saturdays."

Zack grabbed a hoodie off the back of his couch and a key from his pocket. "Yeah, I already asked."

If Aster wasn't at the bar—not that she technically worked there, she was more along the volunteer line than employee—and Tifa wasn't, either, who the heck was?

Sure enough, Tifa was in her showroom home, the only room truly lived in being her kitchen, when steam rose and licked the tiles with sweat, and dampened the herbs and spices peppered the counter. On chopping boards, chunks of raw meat piled high atop of one another, seemingly enough to feed fifty people, and on others, fully cooked. A bunch of containers were stacked beside them. Okay, she was either doing some serious batch-cooking or Cloud is a hell of a big eater.

Tifa was red in the face and her apron was splashed with soup but she still managed a smile as she handed Zack a set of keys with a chrome chocobo keyring, and though she returned instantly to her bubbling pots and pans and Zack seemed eager to leave, Aster hesitated. There was something about the way she scraped one of the heaps of diced chicken into the hissing oil, and how her knuckles paled in her grip of the wooden spoon. Urgent, like a competition, a race, not cooking for the love of it like she usually would.

"Tifa?" Aster said, leaning over to get a better view of her friend's face that stared so intensely into the pan. "You look kinda anxious. You okay?"

Tifa had turned twenty around three weeks ago, yet somehow the catering ordeal surrounding her had aged her by ten years. She blinked a few times and the lines disappeared from her face.

"Yeah. Guess I'm a little stressed."

"Is it work?"

Tifa set the wooden spoon down and watched the oil like a tea leaf reader. "I suppose. I've got a lot on my plate at the moment."

"Shinra?"

"Sort of," she said, and picked the spoon up again. She turned the meat over absently. "How do I put it? I've got a lot of deadlines coming up, I suppose. There's a lot going on."

Aster set her hand on Tifa's shoulder. Clammy. She wondered when she'd last left the kitchen. "Let me know if I can help."

Tifa looked at her for a moment with round, red eyes. They creased at the corners when she smiled and nodded. "I will. Go enjoy your date, okay?"

"Thanks," Aster said. She stopped herself halfway through the kitchen door, hand against the frame. "Oh, what were the keys for?"

Tifa scoffed loudly. "As if I'm going to spoil it!"

The building elevator pulled Zack and Aster down to the basement parking lot of the complex, though not without obligatory elevator jokes and subsequent eye-rolling from both parties.

"I reckon Cloud and Tifa are dating," Aster said with her lips pulled into a thoughtful rosebud pinch.

Zack practically choked on the notion. "Yeah, right. Cloud and Tifa aren't dating."

The doors slid open to the cool concrete spill. Aster shrugged and led him out. "They spend a lot of time together, you know."

"Nah," Zack said, looping the set of keys with a chocobo on them around his finger. "Cloud can't talk to women like that. He's the worst. Couldn't ask a pretty clerk to lick a postage stamp. I've seen him try."

Aster scrunched up her nose.

"Really? Are you just holding him to your standard?" she asked, then almost bumped into him when he abruptly stopped beside the door of a small, pristine pale blue pickup truck that definitely wasn't his motorbike. The carry bed was covered over with a black, waterproof cap. She looked at him. "Is this…?"

Zack dangled the chocobo between her eyes. "Teef's."

She slipped the keyring off his finger. "Can I drive?"

He might have protested if it weren't for the grin she shone at him—and the fact she was already sat in the driver's seat. He leaned an elbow against the frame.

"You don't know where we're going."

She beamed at him. "I trust your directions."

The roof gave a tinny thump as he slapped it lightly. He was smiling at her as he made his way around the front go the truck to the passenger side; the headlamps flicked on and set ablaze the mako in his eyes.

And when she drove, her face lit up, too. Yes, the late evening sun streamed through the windscreen at an angle even the visor wouldn't block and her face glowed orange and eyes squinted because of it, but also, her whole body came alive. There was energy in how she held herself.

"Didn't realise you were such a gearhead," he said, draping his hand out of the window.

"Neither did I until recently."

Her knuckles, dusted with green and yellow bruises and the occasional cut, were pale against the wheel at ten and two, religiously. There could have been an image of her in a textbook for correct driving posture.

"Rex would call this a 'ute'," she said, bringing Zack back inside the truck. "Short for 'utility vehicle' or something. 'Ute'. Weird, huh? It's a totally pickup."

"Rex?"

"Yeah," she said, "You know. In my squad. Surrexit."

Zack met her eyes in the mirror. "You know much about him?"

Aster pinched her lips together then nodded.

"Yeah. He's my best friend in the barracks. He's from Rocket Town but he has a funny accent and weird speech expressions." She turned her head briefly to scan his profile, a memory of an encounter between them from months ago niggling in her mind. "Do you know him?"

"Not personally," he said.

Off the highway at a north-bound junction saw them funnelling through the busiest streets of Midgar's nightlife. All glitter and gold with store-fronts and restaurants piling three-storeys high on every street. Aster muttered something, and Zack turned from the wind to ask her to repeat herself.

Then he realised she was only concentrating. Her lips moved faintly but over the passing traffic and open windows and bustle of the people on the streets, he could hear passing phrases, but only because his hearing was augmented.

Commentary. It made sense, then, that she held herself in the vehicle like a model student, and how Tifa's truck was an automatic, but even still she touched the shifter as briefly as you might touch a hot plate without a glove. The way she breathed and her eyes bounced from mirror to road to mirror, and she spoke everything she saw almost silently. Vehicle registration numbers, models and manufacturers, street names and approximate speeds of cars around them. Like a machine. Zack shuddered to think what Tseng had been doing to her to instil such mechanic behaviour that she seemed both unaware of and unable to control. What the hell was he doing to her?

What the hell had he done to her?

"Close the window if you're cold."

"What?" he asked, lifting his jaw from his hand and feeling the red mark his palm had left there.

"You shivered," she said, laughing, light in the wind, hair blowing into the headrest. "Close the window!"

"Don't you ever get cold?" he asked, pointing to her bare legs with his eyes. She got the message.

"This is not cold. This is nowhere near cold, Jungle Boy. Besides," she said, shrugging, "I overheat easy."

Zack smirked. "Just give me five minutes alone with you."

The flush of her cheeks betrayed her loud laughter and rolling eyes. "Modesty doesn't suit you," she said.

"You're right. Two minutes."

As it turned out, the venture into the city streets was just a detour to pick up food. They returned to the truck and hit the western-bound highway until the city came apart like a jigsaw, the unfinished edge of Midgar, where tesseracts of reality were missing in chunks and the highway came to an abrupt end. In the distance, no doubt why Zack insisted on west specifically, the rocky landscape of Midgar crumbled into sand and seas that glowed golden in the late-day sun.

Aster leaned against the steering wheel and smiled against the light in her eyes and face. "Times like this make me think maybe it's not so bad."

"What's not so bad?"

She caught her falling smile and shrugged. If he was offering a road to talk about her feelings, she wasn't about to take it. "Everything, I guess."

He cocked his head toward the door. "Come on."

Aster watched the sun on the distant waves, sparkling with life and warmth. Inviting, unlike the northern seas. Calmer than last she saw them. Calmer than the half a day they spent stuck together on the ship. Although she had only been stuck for as long as she had wanted to leave, which equated for only as long as it took for the truth to come out.

Zack's door slamming home was the key in her ignition. She hopped out of the cab and it could've been her overactive imagination, but the air carried the taste of sea salt to her lips. In an instant it was gone, replaced by the metal and concrete and rigour and strength of the robust city of steel. Aster turned to her, the city, and she stood chest bared to the sun. The Shinra insignia branded across her breast and in the dying sun she stood proud, knowing that even in darkness she shone bright. Skyscrapers were lost beneath the grandiose of the Shinra building, yet added to the masterpiece that was her iconic skyline.

Any inch as far as the eye could reach was a magnum opus etched in gold and silver, and enough to take the breath away from even the most seasoned fine art spectators. In the shadow of the grandeur of the city, it was easy to believe she was as inconsequential as a grain of sand on a beach full. But actions always have consequences, and she was already responsible for more than she could bear to count.

Still, it was nice to pretend that she was just a girl and he was just a boy, and that neither of them had blood on their hands or knives at their necks.

"You know, the mountains and skies over Icicle Inn are so beautiful, and I've seen pictures and postcards of places like Mideel and Costa del Sol with their amazing tropical blue waters and white sand, and places like Kalm and the Chocobo fields where grass stretches for miles and its fresh and its lovely. I'd never thought that something this man-made and industrial could be just as…"

"Intense?" Zack offered as he wrestled with the tonneau cover over the bed of the truck.

It was the right word. Aster considered the first time she had been cleared to hike towards the Great Glacier with the local guides. The view from the top. The snow and the cliffs and the trees that looked like hedgerows in the distance far below, the faint curvature of the horizon and the reflection of the snow, and of course it was beautiful. But that isn't always the first thing that comes to mind. Overwhelming. Incredible. Intense. And she felt the same right about now.

Zack smiled the way a good-natured local might inwardly roll their eyes at a blatant tourist. "I felt the same, way back when. Thought you might wanna stay a while."

Finally the soft cover gave over the truck bed and Zack rolled it into a ball and tucked it near the wheel. The hard, likely aluminium or tin base of the bed had been covered by some kind of comforter or duvet. There were pillows and blankets and she simply watched in dumbed off bemusement as Zack vaulted in, the muscles of his shoulders lifting his body as if he weighed nothing.

"You thought of all this?" she asked before wedging her foot against a wheel as a step up.

He scratched the back of his head. "Teef helped me get the stuff together. Like the truck."

"It's incredible. Perfect."

"I wanted to spend more time with you," he said. His lips pinched in thought over the city. "Proper time. Not between customers in the bar, or at my apartment for thirty minutes before you have to go or I get called out, or in passing in hallways."

"Without time constraints."

"Proper time," he said, smiling, taking her hand and leading her in. "Out of the city, out of work, out of Shinra. Before—"

He cut himself off abruptly. Aster was glad, because she didn't want to go where it ended. She nodded her silent understanding and he mirrored her, then continued.

"I feel like there're things I know about you that I shouldn't have found out for years, and things that I should already know that I don't."

She hesitated, trying to gauge from his expression what he meant. Whether he meant he felt like he couldn't trust her or that early lies had shaken the foundation of the relationship they were still trying to build beyond repair. But his brows weren't drawn in serious thought, his face was open, and so simply she asked.

"What do you mean?"

He didn't pick up on the apprehension that rattled her voice. He grabbed a pillow and put it behind his back so he could comfortably sit back against the cab and watch the view, and passed her one too.

"I already know stuff like how you react to danger, to pain, to what should be immobilising fear—although you're handling that bit way too well. That's stuff you wouldn't normally find out about a person for a long time, right? Then there's other stuff, like the little stuff that you know about all your friends that I have no idea about with you. Like if you have pets at home or what you always wanted to be when you grow up."

She smiled and pulled the blanket up to their waists. "No pets. Wanted to skate. Wanted to be so good that I'd be remembered for years. Good enough to coach the best after retiring. But the pipe dream? The unattainable dream?" she said, as though becoming better than the best at ice skating wasn't a big enough unattainable goal on its own, "I wanted to be like you."

"Me?"

"Yeah," she said, flicking her thumbnails together. "I always saw myself as a military girl, as you said. Didn't think the dream would come to be, but here I am, I guess. It's not quite what I had in mind."

For a moment, he frowned. "Yeah, but, the Turks aren't really military at all. Not in the same way. They're part of intelligence. Different branch of Public Safety entirely." He shook his head. "That's what I don't get. Why are you being trained in the infantry in the first place? Look at Elena, Turk candidate. Trained by the Academy. Nothing to do with the infantry. It doesn't make sense. I just don't get it."

"I take it that's what you challenged Tseng with the other day when he punched you in the nose," she said with a straight face but a smirk in her voice. "How is that, by the way?"

He pinched his lips together. To begin with, it could be misconstrued as regret. With a second look it was clear he was containing a grin. "Worth it. Not every day you get to punch a Turk and get away with it."

"Be careful though, won't you?" she said, knowing firsthand the kind of injury Tseng was capable of inflicting whilst experiencing next to no—if any—remorse in the process. "Don't do anything too irrational?"

"Aster, he hit me first."

"What?" she shrieked, slamming her palm into his arm in disbelief. "Are you freaking serious? He made it sound like—"

Zack started to laugh. "Yeah, I think I woulda been arrested if I hit him without prompt."

"That," Aster said, and finding no suitable alternative seethed, "bastard."

"Beautifully put," he said, smirking as he rifled through the bag of takeout they'd grabbed in the city. He gave her the rice she'd asked for and passed her a pair of chopsticks in a paper sleeve. She looked at them blankly and Zack watched her with a sneaking suspicion that she didn't know how to use them. That suspicion became fact when she tried to use them without pulling them apart. He raised an eyebrow and snapped them for her. "I could've got you a spoon, you know."

"Well, there's another thing you didn't know about me. Never had Wutaian food."

He snorted and arranged the chopsticks in her fingers. "This is going to be a whole world of frustration for you. Think pincers."

"Pincers. I got this," she said, definitely without having got it, and routing through her carton grabbing aimlessly with a pathetically weak grip and getting food into her mouth only by balancing it on the chopsticks and sucking it off before it fell. "So. What about you? Pets? Lifelong dreams?"

He pointed at her with noodles spun around his chopsticks so artfully it made her both jealous and plainly inferior. "No pets. The dream was SOLDIER."

The smile on her lips spread to her cheeks. "What's it like? Fulfilling your dream?"

"Addictive," he said and his eyes caught fire. "Surreal. Complete one goal and move onto the next. 'Cause of that though, there's no like, endgame fulfilment. I'm not done, never done. The goal was SOLDIER, then Second. Then First."

"What's next?"

"Wanna be this way by that age. Have this by then. Beat this time by that much. I wanna help Angeal instil SOLDIER honour into every damn cadet I see. But the big one's gotta be freedom. Yeah, I wanna do good, I wanna be free."

She frowned. "Free from what?"

"Authority, obviously," he said, then pushed a ribbon of noodles into her mouth without much warning. "Wanna try?"

She nodded and hid her mouth behind her fingers. "They're good."

"Right? I only got 'em so I could tell my friends I went on a date and shared noods."

Aster laughed—almost choked—and shook her head. "Can I be there when you tell Cloud?"

The sun set and the moon rose. In patches of sky barren of clouds and smog, stars peeped out of hiding. The city of Midgar went from gold to orange to blue and back to gold, this time of twinkling lights that gave it a glimmer against the black night.

Empty food cartons laid strewn at the end of their makeshift bed and the waves behind them caught the light of the moon. It was exquisite, warm beneath the blanket, pillows under heads, sunk into the quilts beneath them. Aster could feel Zack's pulse between her fingers as his entwined hers and nothing else mattered.

"How old were you, Zack? When you were in my place?"

"In the infantry?" he asked and his eyebrows crunched in thought. "I left Gongaga for Midgar when I was fourteen, made SOLDIER on my first attempt and I was First by seventeen."

Aster rolled up onto her elbow with a fallen jaw. "What?"

He slid his eyes from the sky to hers. "That's the look everyone gives me."

She blinked once or twice and rearranged her features to resemble something less shocked, if that was what he wanted, but he shook his head.

"It's alright. It's not like I'm not used to it by now."

"That's incredible," she said, though he might not have heard her. "You're incredible."

"I'm the youngest First Class member of SOLDIER the world has ever seen," he said and looked back towards the stars. Aster watched for their reflection in his eyes but they weren't bright enough, too choked by smog. "Even now at twenty-two, there's no one younger than me in First. When I was eighteen, I was commanding over Seconds almost twice my age."

"Never been anyone like you before or since. Probably never will be," she said. "A prodigy."

"So they say," he said with a shrug. "But I can do better. More, push further."

"They'll have to make you a new class."

"Yeah," he said with a grin. "SOLDIER Ultimate Fair Class, Zack, on the freaking job!"

When she started to laugh, he sobered. "You don't just get to First and stop. You keep getting better, doing better. All the time."

"You really are a good example to everyone in Shinra. An ideal to strive towards. To be like you," Aster said trailing her finger across his hairline. "Although, you're a slightly different ideal to me."

His tongue peeped over his straight white teeth in his characteristically mischievous grin. "Ideal boyfriend?"

Aster felt her face blow hot but light was low and who the hell cares if he saw anyway? She nodded once but with force and a determined scowl that might have been better placed whilst saluting a commander on the battlefield. "Yeah. Yeah!"

He tucked his free arm behind his head. The glint in his eye morphed from mischief to pride. "I already called you my girlfriend. It was an accident, but it totally still counts."

"Ah," she said through a laugh, and flopped back into the pillows, "I knew that was an accident."

"But I didn't take it back," he said. "I was okay with it."

Aster hummed in contentment. "So was I."

"That's that then," he said as if pleased with himself, lifting their joined hands into the light of the moon. Her bracelet slipped down her wrist. The breakages of her bracelet and her wrist itself had been so numerous, she couldn't count. Zack was apparently thinking about it, too. He turned the white bead with the black letter A once and back. "I've never seen you not wear that."

Aster pinched her lips into a bud. She looked at Zack, the relaxed, warm ocean wave of colour and Mako intensity on hers, then back at her bracelet. "It's a pretty weird story."

"Don't worry about it," he said, and she believed he meant it.

"Alright. Hang on, then. And—listen, I don't want any pity. Please."

That was when his eyebrows began to draw together, because her mood had shifted. She was still smiling, but her face seemed to disconnect from her voice.

"When I was less than two years old, I was found curled in my dead mother's arms about fifty to a hundred miles outside of Icicle Inn."

Zack couldn't stop his eyes from widening.

"No one knows what happened," she said, voice as vacant as a local reporter commenting on a petty crime committed in a shopping mall. "It's an enigma, really. How my mother—and that's assuming she was my mother—got there. Why. How I survived when she died. They thought it could've been a murder, since she died so cleanly and wasn't mauled by monsters, then decided it could have been suicide, but why was I alive? Why was I even there? There weren't any discernible traces in the snow. No evidence. No leads. She was never identified and by proxy, neither was I. A general identification call was made from the Public Safety services stationed in the Knowlespole out to Midgar, but Shinra didn't know who she was, either. Figured she must have been some kind of traveller from Modeoheim or Bone Village, or one of the settlements further north that even seasoned hikers from Icicle Inn wouldn't dare try to reach."

Aster got up onto her knees and turned to face the seas. If the truck was facing west, and the mountains facing Midgar were in the south… She turned her head due north. Icicle Inn was up that way somewhere. She leaned against the cool roof with her chin resting on her knuckles. Zack shifted to meet her, circling their shoulders with the blanket, arm wrapped around her. He kept it there.

"Anyway. The bracelet was on my wrist. Except only the white beads. I added all the colourful ones as I grew up and it didn't fit anymore." She moved each white bead around in turn. "My first name, my date of birth."

"I've questioned both of those facts over the years. Am I even nineteen? Is my birthday truly the twenty-first of March every year? Or do I celebrate then when actually I was born in January? Or June? There aren't any official records to go by, so how can I be sure?"

She turned her head to Zack with a smile on her face where he expected none. "I've learned that ultimately none of that matters. Doesn't change who I am. The fact that no one knows who my mother was, and that there's even less hope for finding my father doesn't change a thing about me."

Zack traced his fingers up and down her shoulder. "What happened when they took you back to town?"

"My mom and dad adopted me. A middle-aged couple without children of their own." She shrugged. "I love them. They're my parents—do you know what I hate?" she said, and finally her face turned as hard as it possibly should have been all along. Stone in anger. "Sometimes people expect distance between my parents and I just because I don't have their blood. Now I—I've made some stupid mistakes and I've hurt my parents pretty bad before—but they are my parents. I wouldn't love them any more or any less if they were my parents by biology, you know? This is all I know. I love them and they love me."

Aster didn't realise that the stone in her face had spread through her blood to every muscle until her voice dropped to a more sensible decibel and a breath shuddered over her teeth. Zack remained silent.

"I learnt that. I wish I could tell them," she added quietly. She unclenched her fists, fingertips pressed against the roof of the truck as if poised to play the piano. The next page of the sonata, the sweeping, gentle end after a powerful crescendo. "When I was four, we adopted my little brother and sister, Danny and Marina. They're related by blood, but we know about as much about their blood parents as we do mine. Mom calls us her patchwork family, but we work. There really is a lot of love in my household."

She rapped her knuckles against the truck. The memories really did no good—though she didn't want to call them that. Memories suggested the past. Her family wasn't past, it was present. It could be future. But what it definitely was, was a gaping wound full of rotting gauze and linen that bled and bled when the plug was removed. That was enough, for now. It was time to fill the wound with new bandages and stop the bleed for another day.

She looked at Zack again. "It's not some kind of trauma—my past. So, please don't treat it like it is. It didn't make me stronger and it didn't leave me in a mess, either. It's just a fact of my life from before my earliest memories."

"The trauma isn't in your past," he said.

"You mean it's here? Being here?" she asked. "I just don't know. I'm so conflicted. I ask myself all the time: do I hate being here, or is it what I always wanted? That dream of mine to be here, or was it always a nightmare?" She shrugged off those heavy questions and let them go in the breeze as if it were easy, yet it became apparent that her emotions were packed as tight as gunpowder. "It's probably a bit of both. But besides. It brought me to you. That wasn't particularly traumatic."

She glanced at Zack sidelong. "Cliché?"

"Not if it's true," he said.

She touched her lips to his. She meant to be brief, but his body was so warm and suddenly the air became so cold as it licked at her neck and made her shiver. Zack's arms wrapped around her shoulders, pulling her into a firm embrace, the blanket tight around them. She couldn't not smile. It was simply impossible.

They slipped back into the cargo bed, stealing tiny kisses between laughter and smiles. The sound of the wind blew over them but their blankets were impenetrable. Nothing else had to matter inside the confines of the cargo bed.

With Zack's head against a pillow as she fit her mouth to his it was easy for her to imagine they were somewhere else. His hand found the subtle curve between her waist and hip, and his fingers skimmed against her skin beneath her tank top. She pressed her hand to his side to stop her fingers trembling and wanted desperately to run it under his shirt, but couldn't quite summon the bravery and clutched the hem in a fist, pulling it towards her. But no matter how she pressed herself into him, or how much she pulled his body into hers, or how far into his mouth she let her tongue, it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough.

Between her lips, Zack murmured, "Can't we just stay here all night…?"

Her thigh between his and her fingers against his neck she breathed deeply, too deeply to retain a clear head. "Yeah…" she said, then swallowed it back with a faint laugh. "Wait, no, I have to be back or Tseng'll murder me."

It was intended to be light, but fell like a stone.

"Well," he said into the thick atmosphere, pretending it wasn't as clogged as it was, and running his hand up her spine. "I don't want to move. You'll have to force me."

"I'm in no fit state of mind to do that," she said in a much lower register than usual, like it was being dragged up from deep in her throat. Her heart pounded in her chest, against his.

Their lips met again, but this time with a certain degree of finality. Zack raked his fingers through the full length of her hair and sat them up slowly, supporting her back.

She pulled away with her fingertips brushing his jaw, breathless, but not worrying about it either. He was too, after all.