The field's still here, a little bare seeming, once you move past the half-sprawling new countryside town. Instead of a few lone shacks around a tiny square market area, it's already looking like a mini city. Several decades sometimes leave that effect, and yet he walks further into the field.
A little white dress, long enough to stop at her ankles, a brilliant smile, as warm as the Summer sun. Gorgeous green eyes, sparking with so much life that they could have put the trees to shame. And a hint of childhood insecurity.
"Do you want to look around?" And yet her green eyes said that she would not be the reason he'd stay here in this field and pretend that maybe they are different people.
"Sure." And her eyes light up, and her smile grows. And she's all of twelve years old, but in that moment, she is somehow more precious than any of his friends back home. She isn't like the people in the houses next to his; she doesn't speak with that perfect lisp.
Instead her words carry a hidden tune, a note that grew from around here. And somehow it's so, so different than playing with Atri in the city had been, especially when her fingers slip into his hand, and she tugs him along with her. And it's so, so easy to forget that she's from here, and he's from the city.
And it's like blinking and then it's gone, it's that easy. Of course he remembers the first time that when he came back, she wasn't waiting like a friend waits, but waiting almost like a woman does. She'd been fifteen, nearly sixteen, and when he'd stepped into the field, he saw her again.
Long red hair braided back, and a brilliant smile so wide at seeing him that his heart did a little dance in his chest that he could never replicate the rhythm to, and then, when she'd offered her hand, Zen had seen a woman rather than the little girl he'd been friends with for about three years now.
"What's the city like?" It isn't the first time where she's asked Zen to explain the way things were out there, but this is the first time where her voice sounds both wistfully sad and determined, and he's unsure what to say.
"Most of the houses are smaller. Mine isn't, but it's bigger." Zen looks uncomfortable; he knows that these houses out here have been made by the hands of the people living in the village, and he knows that someone had been hired from elsewhere to build his house, even if that was way before his time.
"Ah." Shirayuki looks out towards the woods, "Are the people nice there?"
"I don't know most of them." It's hard for people to not like you for your money, and Zen knew that first hand, and knew that money could also be a curse, a way for others to justify hating you.
"Oh." Shirayuki swallowed, but then she stood up. Already, looking ready to do anything else.
"What's with the questions?" Zen finally spoke up.
"I'm hopeful, that maybe it would be okay to live closer to you. And see you more often." Summertime just isn't enough, but she didn't say that then, no matter how easy it seems to fit it into the memory.
"Would you really move?" Zen isn't sure why that almost causes a panic in his chest.
"I think so." And of course, he hadn't known that when she would move there, it would be with him. That she'd call a house far too large for two people, home. A house that is so unlike the home she grew up in.
His house is big, large, and cold, especially now. But when Shirayuki had married him and moved in, it had felt warm, like an always lit fireplace.
The field that once was so warm feels cold, as he kneels down roughly where he first met her, a few stray flowers in hand, that he isn't sure whether he should plant or just lay flat on the ground.
"What are you doing?" And a little girl is peeking up at him past a tree.
"Visiting an old friend." Is all that he can choke out, despite the fact that friend is an understatement that the ring on his finger seems to highlight.
"I hope she hears you." And then that little girl's racing off, leaving an old man to thoughts and memories that the passage of time has never slowed down.