{-Alfonse-}
He might've joined the Heroes in training if he wasn't exhausted from being up for the better half of the night. Instead, he'd gone back to sleep for a little while before properly starting his day.
"Is Sharena okay?" Anna prompted as she pulled out the reports for them to go over.
"Mother said it was probably just a cold," Alfonse sighed. "Cried for an hour, though."
"I don't blame her. The one year you were actually going to go with her and she got sick the night before."
"When you put it like that it makes me feel worse…"
"It's just the Day of Devotion. She'll probably be fine by the Spring Festival and you can go with her then."
They worked until someone burst through the doors.
"Aha! Why am I surprised to find you here? I even checked this place last and, here you are, working." Zacharias strolled inside with the kind of smirk that showed he came with a plan. He stopped right next to Alfonse and asked, "You got anything else planned for today?"
"We were doing something…"
Anna shrugged. "You worked for the day off, might as well take it. I can get Lucy to help if I need it."
That was the only kind of confirmation Zacharias needed, at least. He took Alfonse's hand and began leading him outside. "Come on, you're gonna like it! Promise!"
Somehow Alfonse was surprised that they went to the village. There was a part of him that wanted to point out that he'd decided not to go because Sharena couldn't go with him; she'd just be more upset to know that than she was to realize she couldn't go. Then again, it wasn't like he was completely against it… and Zacharias was always impossible to deny with a smile like that.
They just walked around town and talked. Zacharias got him flowers and bought a box of chocolates to share. He didn't question where the money for it had come from, assuming it was from Henriette when she first heard the three of them were going together.
In hindsight, it felt like a final goodbye; the last time they truly spent time together before the events leading up to Zacharias's disappearance. It was also the first time they truly spent time together alone, just for the sake of being together. They weren't in town for an important matter of any kind or had Sharena wandering in front of them. It was simply the two of them, laughing over past events and the good things leading up to this.
After walking through the entire town, they stopped by the town square again. They sat by the fountain and ate their chocolates, winding all their stories back to the beginning again.
"I honestly don't know where I would be if I hadn't met you," Zacharias admitted quietly. "Maybe I'd still be wandering, maybe I would've tried to go back home… Either way, I know I never would've been this happy. You showed me that what I thought I'd lost I could get back—and even better than it had been before."
It took Alfonse to decide to give a confession of his own. "You saved me. I never would have realized it on my own, much less confident enough to defy it. You helped me see what it was supposed to be like and got me out of it… or I suppose a better way to put it is you saw I was drowning and pulled me out of the water I was too scared to leave."
Zacharias leaned a bit closer. "I have one more surprise for you. But as you can see, I don't have anything with me and you watched me all day so I didn't buy anything without you knowing. Can you guess what it is?" Then he gave him a kiss. "Happy Day of Devotion, Alfonse."
((A/N: And thus begins Alfonse and Zacharias's week-long relationship, which probably would've lasted a lot longer if Zacharias didn't run away. Surprisingly no one found out, mostly due to the fact that Sharena wasn't there (nor particularly paying attention to any differences) and Henriette couldn't figure it out because she didn't see them together before then. Anna probably figured something out but kept it to herself; same with Lucy. Veronica, on the other hand, figured it out just by the way Bruno talks about it and occasionally mentions it.))
