A/N: Who else almost threw up all over themselves in excitement when they watched the State of Play teaser trailer for FFVII:Remake *hand raise emoji* Just me…? How gorgeous does it look? I die. I've watched it about…two-hundred times.

Anyway, I'm back bois! Sorry, I really couldn't get last week's update out in the end because I was stressed outta my goddamn MIND over my finals and…well, let's just hope I passed? I have one more exam to go tomorrow then…I'll be a lady of leisure!

I spread myself way too thinly this year. Next (academic) year I need to be more careful and look after myself a bit better. If you're out there somewhere reading this and you have exams or deadlines or assignments in school or work or otherwise, make sure you take some time out for you, okay? It's not worth your health; it's never worth your health.

Hope you're having a fantastic week, and here comes Chapter 11!

15th May '19

Chapter 11: Death of the Perennials

Mixed blood and water pooled beneath Aster's fingernails as she scrubbed the floor with a cloth. She sighed and sat back on her heels; those on the Cadet Training floor at the time of the break-in who were not injured were required to aid in the cleanup operation.

The damage was mostly superficial. Shattered mirrors, broken doors, damage to the ceiling tiles. One of the training rooms had found itself stripped of a section of floorboards, and in the common area of the Cadet Training floor a support pillar had been blasted into pieces—thankfully it wasn't solely responsible for the structural integrity of the room. Carcasses that had yet to return to the planet were strewn throughout the debris, but as far as battlefields go, it wasn't so bad.

Still, Aster couldn't shake the feeling of death from her shoulders. Like a pressure over her neck that no amount of stretching could relieve, the lost lives of the scientists merely trying to better the planet weighed heavily on her mind.

An instructor knocked the empty door frame with his baton. "Doe, report to Tseng's office."

Her eyebrow quirked in interest. Maybe it had something to do with the break-in? She flung the rag into a bucket and stared at the stains on her hands, the blood of foe and friend.

"Now," the DI ordered.

Guess she'd have to wash her hands later. She clonked her helmet over her head and followed the guard out, numb to the feeling of eyes on her back. Across the room, two members of SOLDIER donning their infamous black uniforms conversed quietly with a third man in a long, red trench coat. She stopped in her tracks when one of them looked at her, Zack, and the DI slammed into her shoulder, muttering then shoving past her. Relief swelled in her chest; he was okay. She swallowed hard and snapped into a salute all too eagerly, then brushed past them into the elevator.

She crushed the button with her knuckle and expelled a shuddering sigh as the doors began to close, and tipped back her helmet so she could wipe her forehead free of sweat.

"Hey!"

Any relief was snatched from her gut when a hand waved between the gap in the doors, alerting the sensor and reopening them. She staggered back into the glass behind her, jerking to pull her helmet back over her face too late, but the eyes that watched her, though certainly of SOLDIER, did not belong to Zack. Neither was it Angeal. Her shoulders sank from their tensed hunch. One of these days her luck was going to run out.

The man let himself into the elevator and leaned across her to push the button to close the door again, his body blocking her view of the Training Floor. She eyed him cautiously, from his Mako eyes of SOLDIER excellency to his vividly auburn hair and the red leather trench coat that he wore over his First Class uniform. Somehow he pulled it off. Maybe it was his confidence.

She realised she was holding her breath, maybe so as to not choke on the aftershave from his neck.

"Excuse me," he finally said, pulling away from her personal space as the elevator began to move.

"No problem, sir," she said stiffly, unsure where to put her hands or her helmet or whether to salute or not.

"You are the Turk cadet, correct?"

When her throat croaked in lieu of an answer, voice caught by confusion and apprehension that a man she had never met knew who she was, he simply shrugged, apparently reading her body language aptly. "Apologies. Fair told me. I merely had a question for you."

She looked at him dumbly, then remembered herself and fixed her gaping jaw. "Yes, sir."

A ring of Mako green encircled his pupils, and the rest of his irises were a pale, but luminous blue. His gaze drifted from her and out over the Midgar skyline. "Do you not think that for a break-in the force applied was weak? No Crescent Unit. No anti-SOLDIER monsters. No troops."

Aster shifted in her boots. Weak? Not really. Maybe to a First Class SOLDIER, but to the dead in the labs? No, not at all. They were vicious, hungry for blood. "Sir, what are you saying?"

His eyes were back on hers again. There was something intense about them. "Did you see anything suspicious during the break-in or immediately before?"

She reeled back, confused. "Suspicious? No."

"I suppose that may have been the wrong word," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Unusual is more appropriate. What did you notice?"

"Each monster was native to the Wutai continent," she said. Her eyebrows drew together as she went on to recite her textbook. "Foulanders, Jayjujaymes and Bizarre Bugs are all indigenous to both the forested and the desert areas of the Western Continent. Although there was a mech that I didn't recognise."

The man before her smiled. "I knew you were the right one to ask. You've been studying, no?"

"If you want to put it florally." She looked at him blankly. "For every question I get wrong, I get a slap to the face, sir."

His smile fell. "I see."

The elevator bobbed to a plateau, and the door opened. It was Floor Forty-Two where she knew to meet someone to take her to the Turks Floor, wherever that was. She'd been countless times by now, yet they managed without fail to conceal its location. When they swiped their keycards into the elevators, the screen would go blank and hide the floor number. She nodded respectfully to the SOLDIER beside her before she stepped out, but to her surprise, he followed her out and grabbed her by the crook of her elbow.

"Just one more moment, if you wouldn't mind."

"Oh, uh, sure," she said, itching to check the watch hidden beneath the cuff of her glove but not wanting to get scolded for harbouring contraband. Tseng was waiting, and he wasn't particularly patient.

"You said you saw a mech? I know you're encouraged to observe."

She nodded. "It was human in shape, kinda leathery." She pointed to his trench coat and raised an eyebrow at him, forgetting, apparently, that this man was her superior. "Same colour, same texture. Nice, by the way."

He seemed to snort, but she couldn't be sure. She continued, "It had a metal mask and mechanical arms. Seems out of character, from what I've read, anyway. I thought Wutai leaned towards the biological end with their pet monsters."

"You're not wrong there. The monster you saw was one of our Roboguards. Angeal is reporting the defect; it likely became damaged by one of the fiends and malfunctioned. Was there anything else?" he asked, leaning towards her and clenching her elbow, still.

Her brow furrowed as she narrowed her eyes slightly. He was really pressing. Was it possible? Had he seen it, too? "I've…seen monsters give off a pale glow before, sometimes, when they die. Usually a greenish-blue like the Lifestream. Pretty standard," she said, placing her every word with care. "But there was this…dark stuff. Kinda like oil or, I don't know, ink or something. It seeped out like blood."

"How many?"

"Just two, I think."

He nodded slowly, his gloved hand covering his mouth and chin. When he didn't say anything, lost to thought, Aster frowned. "Did you see it too…?"

"I don't have any answers," he murmured to himself. "When the war of the beasts brings about the world's end, the goddess descends from the sky…"

She furrowed her brow. "Uh, something wrong, sir?"

"LOVELESS, prologue," he answered automatically, then fixed his posture and tone to something more authoritative. "Thank you. That is interesting, indeed. I would encourage you to share that information with Tseng."

She shrugged. Figures.

"It was lovely making your acquaintance—Doe, wasn't it?" He said offering his hand which she gladly shook. "Genesis Rhapsodos."

"Pleasure's mine, sir," she said, and she meant it, yet there was still perhaps a hint of uncertainty within her voice, though he likely didn't notice.

"If you ever need anything, seek me out in my quarters." He called for the elevator once again and the door swept open. "Ask the receptionist on the ground floor of the SOLDIER building. She'll send you up."

"Oh, shit—I mean—" When she smacked her hand against her mouth all too late, awaiting her reprimand, she could have sworn his mouth quirked upwards. Maybe he wasn't so much of a guardian of the rules as, say, Angeal was. "Thanks—thanks, sir."

With a nod and a farewell, he was gone.

And then it dawned on her. Slowly. That somehow he had left with all her answers, and only gave her questions in return.

Tseng wasn't having any of it. He wouldn't take a report and neither would he divulge into the nature of the break-in. Classified, he said, and Aster's muscles wound one cord tighter.

He stole her down into the slums once again, deep into the unfinished divide between Sector Five and Sector Six. Debris won down here. Construction was due to be finished sometime during the next few years, although it sure didn't look like it took priority.

Scorpion-like creatures with spiralling teeth crawled from beneath a toppled crane and fallen girders, spewing a sickly green fog that smelt vile and would certainly poison any in its path. Such so that she was happy when Tseng pulled her in the opposite direction.

It was a simple surveillance training exercise in the town proper of Sector Five, setting her to follow civilians without being spotted. "The goal is to blend," Tseng said. "If the target spots you, it's game over. You're out of the running, and the team is a man down."

The component fell into place in Aster's mind. "So…when Rude went to kill the men that had chased after Cissnei—"

"Yes." Tseng nodded affirmatively. "She compromised the mission and her identity."

"But that doesn't make any sense!" she said, slapping her arms down by her sides. "The Turks are infamous. The suits even more than your faces. Surely only an idiot could be being watched by the Turks and not know about it!"

"And yet you were watched for years." He flicked his wrist dismissively, with a cold eye on hers. "The fact that our faces and clothing are famous is irrelevant. We are indisputably the best in the world. They do not see us until it is too late—they are already as good as dead."

Aster thought back to the day she caught Rude in the clearing, waiting with the SOLDIER members besides a truck back in Icicle Inn. I saw his face then, she wanted to say, and I didn't die! But then she remembered herself, remembered that if she wanted to leave, she'd have to give her life first, not to mention the life of her brother, too, and realised that in a roundabout kind of way, she was as good as dead after all.

It was as he said.

Around an hour later, Tseng called Aster over. She'd had a hard time—it wasn't easy disguising yourself while wearing a cadet uniform but still.

"Not a total wasted hour of my life," he said. "But can you tell me why were we really here?"

Her eyes were completely devoid of understanding, so he sighed as though it ought to have been obvious. "Who have I been surveilling?"

Crap. The message was clear: keep an eye on the target, but be aware of everything else, too. Goddamn it. Anybody could have been around throughout the entire exercise, and she wouldn't have noticed since she was too wrapped up in her target. She blew out her cheeks, frustrated with herself.

"Come with me," he said.

A path wound through the rubble of slum-life. Far off in the distance, a large wall sealed the slums and the upper plate. Beyond it, the Midgar Wastelands stretched, where grass couldn't grow and withered trees fingered at the sky in dry reminders of the life that once was. They said that nothing grew in Midgar because of the intensity of the Mako reactors on earth. There was truth in that statement, but not the whole truth.

Regardless, Aster's presumption of growth in Midgar was soon to be proven baseless. Tseng stopped beside the stone steps of a grand—going on decrepit—church, with doors thrice the height of Aster and immovable.

One door lay half open, as it likely had for years upon years. Aster imagined what a mighty bang it might make to slam it. She imagined the cacophonous echo, reverberating endlessly up into the lofty space of the hollow roof, rattling the pillars and shaking the foundations. She imagined the crackling of rockfall and dust settling. Maybe the door slamming had been what had caused half of the roof to have caved away in the first place.

They stared in from outside. Wooden pews were neatly in line…to a point. Parts of the ceiling support had fallen in on the seating, splitting a few benches in two. A paradox; the church was rundown and well-kept.

Beneath a large stone arch sat an altar draped in worn red cloth, and a garden grew in the wreckage of ripped up floorboards. Yellow and white lilies flourished above sparse greenery in a patch of sunlight. Serendipitous indeed, the church sat just beneath a bridge that connected the top plate sectors high above, and as a result saw the slightest sliver of sunlight. It was the most growth Midgar had birthed in years.

By the garden sat a girl. It looked like she owned it, judging by the way she cupped a flower in her hands, caressing it like she was willing it to live.

Aster had just been about to ask what Tseng's course of action was, and if they were watching her, what were they waiting for? But the girl herself broke the silence, with a voice gentle, but bright enough to ring through the chapel.

"You may come in."

Tseng pushed through the gap between the door and Aster's body. His voice was frosty. "I don't recall asking your permission."

Aster tentatively stepped in behind him, her footsteps, no matter how careful, making hollow-sounding thuds against the old floorboards. The girl looked up from her flower, the sun drenching her back.

She was beautiful. Her features were soft but mature, framed by bangs of a fawn brown. A long braid swept down her back, tied in a broad pink ribbon, but most notably, like many others Aster had come to meet since arriving in Midgar, she had extraordinary eyes.

Not in the way that SOLDIER glowed. Nor how Tifa's winey red spoke of comfort or Rex's hazel gleamed with mischief. Not how Zack's inspired wonder. These eyes were vivid green, the precise shade of the Lifestream. Aster could think of only one time she had witnessed the Lifestream in the flesh, and it was following a burst near the cliffs of Bone Village many years ago. But that colour, that bright green, that was the exact colour of this girl's eyes.

But they were narrowed. Set in a scowl.

"Are you here to kidnap me again?" Somehow the voice was familiar, and contrary to the actual content of her words, she sounded utterly calm. Almost at ease.

Aster's brows knitted together as she watched this…peculiar girl stand gracefully, her white and blue dress swinging around her knees as she did, then her heart sank. Kidnap her? 'Again'? Her eyes flicked between the girl and Tseng's profile—she didn't think she had it in her to help Tseng put another girl through the same thing she'd had happen to her not even two months ago. Why the hell was this girl so calm?!

"You weren't always this villainous," said the girl, taking a few measured steps towards the Turk and Turk-to-be. Then green met blue, and although Aster had never seen her before, that was when recognition struck. The voice from the cells. As quick as she looked, she had looked away, back to Tseng. "Oops, sorry! Were you trying to impose a picture of yourself as a villain to the girl there? Did I ruin your image?"

She took a few more steps forward, charged by the bravery of her words, and challenged Tseng once again. She wasn't scowling anymore. "When I was young, you were more concerned for my safety. You watched out for me, didn't you? You protected me."

Aster watched in fair amazement of the girl before her; she was either brave or stupid. Maybe both, but that was far too dangerous a combination, and if she was the latter there was no way she'd still be standing here taking controlled swings at Tseng of the Turks—and after getting herself out of one of his cells somehow, no less.

Something in Tseng's jaw hitched. He was positively rigid. "I was rather observing you."

"Hmpf." She pressed her hands to her hips and turned on her heel, braid swinging behind her. "I'm not going to come with you."

Tseng sighed and approached her. "I have told you before—"

She whirled around with a pointed finger. A silver bangle caught the light. "And I have made it clear. I will not work for Shinra."

"Aerith," he urged, with a frustrated edge to his voice. "It's not about Shinra—"

"It's always about Shinra," she said and returned to the small garden. Gently she reached to stroke the petal of a yearning lily. "You are the reason my flowers are dying and not growing back. Trees are falling and not being reborn. The planet is being poisoned."

"And we need your aid. It is with your power that—"

"Shinra only wants the Promised Land. And I will not bring you to it!"

Tseng's voice boomed through the empty church. "Aerith—!"

"I will never work for Shinra."

He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose and growled at the girls before him. "I am surrounded by stubborn fools." He turned, squeezing his fists in the most outward display of emotion Aster had ever seen from him. "Doe. Make your own way back."

Gone.

Aerith approached Aster somewhat cautiously. "Shinra is not welcome here."

"I, um, didn't know about—sorry," she stuttered, backing towards the door.

Aerith's head tilted to the side. "Wait, our paths have crossed once before, haven't they?"

"Uh, yeah, I think so. The cells, about...five or six weeks ago?" said Aster, then she snorted. "I don't meet many people in prison, honest."

The brunette smiled and it carried straight to her eyes. "Me neither. My name is Aerith Gainsborough. I'm a flower girl."

"Aster Doe," she replied, taking a few steps towards her and offering her hand. "I guess I'm a Turk cadet?"

"You almost don't sound sure," Aerith said with a small laugh, taking Aster's outstretched hand in both of hers warmly, and offering a completely different front to that she had given to Tseng. He sure didn't seem very popular. First Tifa, now this girl. Not a ladies man.

Aster couldn't find the words to phrase the question she wanted to ask eloquently. "Why were you in the cell?"

Aerith clasped her hands behind her back. "I guess they must think I have what it takes to be in SOLDIER!"

The Turk cadet frowned. Didn't sound like it from what Tseng was saying. And what was that about a poisoned planet? The Promised Land? But if she was lying, there was no point in pushing it. It wouldn't get her answers.

Aerith invited Aster to sit near the flowers and she did—for nearly half an hour. Something was intriguing about the girl, something in her smile hinted that she always knew something you didn't. She was talkative and inviting, and upon Aster's leave, she offered a flower to her to take along. The younger declined, saying she didn't want to take something if it wasn't going to grow back, as Aerith had stated to Tseng, even though she didn't understand the weight of her words.

Aerith's face fell at that. She nodded quickly, and said, "Right…yes, well… I'm going to work on that one."

The barracks awaited her, and her uncomfortable, creaky bed, too. Despite it being almost painfully uncomfortable, the cot was welcome to her. The rest of the squad were already sleeping, exhausted from the toll exacted upon them by the break-in.

Aster's head spun. Nothing seemed to make any sense; everyone—even strangers—seemed more clued up about her life than she did. Her purpose. Tseng's purpose. The current state of affairs. She had been so set, so determined to press on and not stop to think for fear of the walls crumbling down, that she had dug herself to a point where she didn't even know what the hell was going on anymore.

There were so many things that Tseng shouldn't know, things that should have been impossible for him to know, that somehow he did, and there were even more things that she should know, but didn't.

She raked her fingers into her hair with an iron grip. Her eyes stung, taunting her with the possibility of tears, so she squeezed them tightly shut. Exhaustion, fear, deprivation, horror, confusion. The weight crushed her shoulders.

A test and a task—but what did that even mean?

She whimpered, barely audible. "Oh, Gaia…"

The shuffling of sheets somewhere to her right alerted her to the wakeful state of her friend and ally. He leaned between the gaps of their beds and squeezed that burdened shoulder. "You okay?"

"Yeah."

"Wanna talk about it, liar?"

She couldn't help but snort. "…Not here. You down for a little escapade?"

"Always," Rex said confidently, yet when she headed for the door, he whispered into her ear, "What about the guards?"

She turned to him and raised an eyebrow. "They're not here. Haven't been since the end of Stage One." Her smirk tainted the sound of her voice. "You're big boys now, supposedly."

The door slipped open almost soundlessly, and she hoped for Rex's sake more than her own that the rest of the squad weren't aware they were leaving. She could get away with it. Rex was taking a risk.

Outside the room, they both spoke in whispers, paranoid they still might manage to disturb someone. Rex went to call an elevator.

"No, not the elevator!" Aster hissed, slapping his hand away from the button before he could press it. "That'll send a message to everyone in the compound that someone's breaking curfew, moron! We have to take the stairs."

Rex snorted and cradled his 'injured' hand. "Sheesh, you're such a Turk."

The basement to the rooftop was a lot of stairs, even for a pair who faced incredible physical challenges every day. Still, thirty flights were worth it for the view.

The lookout onto the city was incredible under the dark sky and the spit of Mako plumes from the nearby reactors. It wasn't the tallest building in Midgar, not even almost, as the SOLDIER and infantry accommodation buildings stood over them, and of course, in the centre of Midgar, the Shinra Building loomed over all.

Aster sat on the edge with her feet dangling over, and when she looked down, clinging to the railing not far above her head, she didn't feel much. No fear, just the numbness that only the ache of pure exhaustion can give. Rex sat next to her, seeming to share the same immunity to fear of heights, but likely not for the same reason. But, hey. Maybe.

The inside her lip was raw from her near-constant fussing over it. Finally, she sighed, if only to stop herself from drawing blood. "It's getting to me," she said vaguely.

Rex nodded as though they were words he'd always expected to hear. Something about it set Aster's face into a frown. "You could quit," he said.

It rose her at the hackles. She snapped, "Are you that defeatist?"

"Are you?" he retorted calmly, and instantly she sat back on her hands and frowned at the Shinra Logo affront of HQ in the distance. "Is it pride? No one would think of you as a failure if that's what you're worried about."

Her lips twitched in thought. "You're pretty blunt."

"No use not being," he said.

She chewed this for a moment and nodded. "Alright then. Even if I wanted to quit, I can't. 'The Turks leave the Turks in a body bag', so I've been told." Blunt, be blunt. "My options are to die on the field, or leave via suicide or execution."

She sucked in a cold breath that tensed her spine and blew it away with a shiver. The heavy words were given the full force of weight that comes with voicing.

"What? That's the deal?"

"According to Tseng."

When Rex rubbed his jaw, Aster noticed the shadow of stubble that he'd be required to shave away at the first sign of life tomorrow morning. She wondered how he kept it back home, where his every action was not dictated to him, where he was free to make a choice.

He shook his head. "No way, come on. There's no use thinking like that."

"I know." Some kind of frustrated growl tore from her aching throat, aching from the threat of a suspicious swell that would suggest the onset of tears. There was no way she'd give in to that temptation in front of Rex, though. "I know. You're right. I've just been working so hard forcing one foot in front of the other that I've got so far in and realised," she said, looking at him intensely, "I have no idea what's going on."

"Tseng keeps telling me that he's been watching me for years. He knows everything about me, but why? I wasn't an interesting kid, Rex, I can assure you. I can't lie about anything because he knows everything, and he's threatened me and my family and—" she realised she was rising to the point of ranting, so she swallowed to slow herself down. "And I have no idea what he even wants from me. A task. What freaking task? It's classified. Of course—like everything else!"

Her voice reverberated off the hard concrete roof and faces of the nearing buildings. Rex didn't look particularly phased though. He was like one of those people with one level—maybe two, she guessed. This one, completely laid back, and probably another if he just snapped one day. It was hard to imagine.

"You can only go forward, but you don't even know where forward leads," he surmised.

"Exactly," she said, exhaling hard into the night. "I guess SOLDIER is similar there, though."

He shook his head. "SOLDIER is a choice."

"Is it?" she asked darkly. "Recruitment, they call it. Kidnapping. And have you ever heard of a SOLDIER member successfully retire?"

Rex leaned against his hands. "It's pretty difficult. If SOLDIER members quit, they get monitored by the Department of Investigative Affairs—the same branch that the Turks lead—and they effectively get followed for the rest of their lives."

"But not many SOLDIER members have ever retired," he continued. "SOLDIER is in its infancy in the grander scheme of things. Old man Shinra was the one who spearheaded the SOLDIER programme. The Great Sephiroth is rumoured to have been the first SOLDIER member—which makes little sense since he's like…thirty-ish, and SOLDIER as an institution is I don't know, twenty years old or something. So not many SOLDIERs have reached retirement age yet, even by military standards."

Aster scrunched up of her nose. "Which politics book did you swallow?"

"Uh—just…heard it on the news, I guess," he said, rubbing his hand around his wrist.

"You'd be great in a pub quiz."

"I'd kick your arse, mate."

"That's nothing to be proud of," she snorted. "I'm shit."

They smiled at each other weakly in the wake of their laughter, faces lit by moonlight and Mako shine, then stared back into the city with the heavy silence of a strained future sat on their chests.

Aster acknowledged the unspoken words first. "SOLDIER members just die on the field. They don't retire. And they can't exactly quit either 'cause…"

"The Turks'll follow 'em, for betrayin' the Company…"

Aster looked at Rex again, blue eyes imploring in hazel. One prospective Turk begging for the answers from one prospective SOLDIER member. Both too young to face the weight.

"So…is that it? That's how our fates will play out? Either I'm gonna die before I even get to twenty, or I'm gonna live long enough to end up stalking you for the rest of your life?"

Rex sighed and raised his eyebrows. "You're alright, but you can be so damn pessimistic." He pointed to the sky cryptically, grinning. "Our lives will have meaning eventually."

His smile was infectious. "Yeah, you're right. Again. I guess I just wish it didn't have to be quite this way. You know, I always wanted to join SOLDIER."

"What's SOLDIER gonna do," he said, flicking her in the forehead, "with an eighteen-year-old figure skater?"

"Okay, first of all, why the hell do people keep saying that? I'd kick some real ass," she whined, rubbing her forehead and retaliating with a controlled jab to the shoulder. "Second of all. Nineteen."

"Um. Since when?"

"Since last week, thank you very much."

He jumped to his feet in disbelief. "What? No way! Why didn't you tell me?"

She snorted and got up to meet him eye to—shoulder level, folding her arms. It's not like she had anything to celebrate, in truth. "And what would you have done with that information?"

"I dunno," he said, "got you something!"

"Like a headache?" She facepalmed exaggeratedly. "Oh, wait, no, you give me one of those every goddamn day."

"Y'know, sometimes I really can't remember why we're friends."

She laughed and jabbed him in the back. "Obviously my dashing good looks, charm and smashing wit—"

He spun around with a glint in his eye. "No way, that's why you're friends with me!"

"I already know why we're friends," she said, grinning. She wandered around the rooftop, speaking with a lofty, fake-wise voice that an old wizard might possess. She stretched her arms above her head and spread them to her sides. "You help light the dark."

She was being goofy, but Rex's smile dropped flat from his face.

"Don't look so worried! I'm gonna light your path, too." She threw her arms up in the air, up to where he'd lifted her spirits. "We'll get through it. Wherever we might end up."