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-Chapter Seven-
Out of the Frying Pan
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Leon was sitting on the steps overlooking the Third District courtyard, as he did every morning, with his first cup of coffee, ruminating. He was attempting to rationalize the disturbing incident which had disrupted his sleep and planning a strategy for distancing himself from the source of the problem when it sat down beside him.
"Mind if I join you?" Cloud's voice was still husky with sleep.
Leon looked over at the blond, all tousled and drowsy, and every clever and sensible idea he had come up with promptly vanished from his mind. "Not at all," he replied.
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When the two men finally came inside, empty coffee cups in hand, Aerith was sitting at the kitchen table with her own empty cup. She looked up from the paper and practically huffed. "Well, it's about time. I was beginning to think you were going to sit out there all day."
Whoa, somebody was in a pissy mood.
Must be that time of month, Cloud thought, remembering Tifa's touchy days.
Women, Leon thought, which was a little unfair, seeing as how he could out-pissy any woman any day of the month.
Aerith must have realized how she sounded from the surprised looks on their faces and attempted to sweeten her tone, as well as her temper. "Can I get you some breakfast?" she asked. "There's bacon or sausage and eggs, or I could fix pancakes, or..."
"Just some toast would be fine," Cloud replied.
"I'm gonna make some oatmeal for myself; you want some?" Leon was already bustling about the kitchen, opening cabinets and grabbing utensils.
"Sure, that sounds good. I haven't had oatmeal in ages."
"That's all Leon ever eats for breakfast. How boring." Aerith turned to Cloud and made a sour face behind Leon's back. "You"ll be sorry," she warned. "He doesn't even put any sugar in it."
"I put sugar in it," Leon declared in defense of his culinary skill, "just not a whole cupful like you do. And you know perfectly well that I'm boring, so why do you bother?"
"You do have a point there," she begrudged him and turned back to Cloud, still trying to win him over to her way of thinking. "You'll see – it tastes like cardboard. Don't say I didn't warn you."
"Well, I can always add more sugar," he offered with a conciliatory smile.
"Leon doesn't like anything sweet," she continued, only partially appeased. "Maybe if you ate more sugar, you'd be sweeter, Leon."
Leon pierced Aerith with a deadly glare, and for a moment, Cloud thought he was seriously angry, but then the glare softened into a smirk, and he swaggered, "If I were any sweeter, Aerith, you wouldn't be able to stand it."
Game, Set and Match, with Leon, as usual, the winner. Aerith had no comeback for that; it was true. His sour disposition was the only thing that kept her from melting on the spot.
Before Aerith could continue down her grumpy path, Leon decided that it might be better to simply change the subject. "I was hoping you'd take Cloud shopping this morning."
Aerith perked up a bit at the prospect of spending the morning with Cloud. "So, you and Merlin decided to open Second District, then?"
Leon scowled, clearly displeased. "Mayor's orders," he grumbled. "We're aiming to open at ten if everything goes according to plan – which it won't if we don't get going," he added, glancing at the kitchen clock. Aerith was right; he had wasted far too much time this morning sitting outside with Cloud. "Please tell me Yuffie isn't still sleeping."
"Right here, Master Slave Driver, Sir!" the ninja in question said with a mock salute, bounding into the kitchen and popping a bagel into the toaster. "Reporting for duty, Sir, and right on time as always, I might add. Oh where, oh where would you be without me?" she sang. "Oh where, oh where would you be?"
Leon rolled his eyes and suggested, "Heaven?" He set his empty bowl in the sink and then turned back to Aerith. "So will you take him?"
"All right," she said, looking to Cloud for agreement.
"Get whatever he needs and have them put it on my account," Leon said. He motioned to Yuffie, who grabbed her bagel and followed him out the door, leaving Cloud alone in the kitchen with Aerith.
Wisely, he didn't mention that he had liked Leon's oatmeal just fine.
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Second District had been closed for nearly a week due to the Heartless, but the influx had finally begun to die down. Yielding to pressure from the merchants, the mayor had insisted they be allowed to return to their shops, and despite admonishments from both Leon and Merlin, the 'Temporarily Closed' sign that had been hung on the door leading from First was replaced with a new one announcing the abbreviated business hours.
The hotel and the rest of the district past the main business section down to the Gizmo Shop had been roped off, and Merlin had cast as much protection as he could manage on the stores themselves. Leon and Yuffie went in an hour beforehand to clear the area of Heartless, and then the district was officially reopened for business. Cloud and Aerith were among the morning's first customers.
Cloud didn't need much – just a few articles of clothing and some personal toiletries – and quickly finished making his purchases. Reluctant to return to the house, he suggested they sit for a spell on one of the benches in the courtyard where Leon and Yuffie were still patrolling. Following his gaze, it hadn't taken Aerith long to figure out why; it wasn't Yuffie he was watching.
Aerith also watched the strong, silent man she had to come to know a little and love a lot over the past year. Then she looked at the man beside her. They were so much alike, Leon and Cloud, both so outwardly strong, and so insecure inside. They accepted all the responsibility that was thrown at them, even though it wasn't wanted, and they took all the blame for every failure upon themselves, even though it wasn't given, but they couldn't handle happiness. They didn't trust it, didn't know what to do with it, and neither man believed he deserved it.
Aerith adored them both.
There were differences between them too, of course, but they were almost inconsequential compared to the things they had in common. The same current flowed through them both, and it had carried them both to this same lonely place, these two heroes who had saved their worlds but couldn't save themselves. And while it might be true for ordinary people that opposites attract, these two men were too emotionally damaged; without a common ground to work from, there would be no meeting in the middle for either.
For the two of them together, it would be all or nothing; they would either heal each other, or kill each other.
It was wrong to begrudge them this chance, and she knew it; her jealousy was unfair. If she couldn't have them for herself, she couldn't think of anyone she would rather they have than each other. They really were perfect for each other; she could see that once she removed herself from the picture.
"He's very interesting, isn't he?" she commented casually.
"What?" Cloud pretended not to have understood her, but the color on his cheeks gave him away.
"Leon," she stated quietly. "He's a very interesting man..."
۵۵۵۵۵
Leon fascinated Aerith.
His brain was like a computer, sifting through data at an incredible rate. And there was a lot of data in there to sort through.
Leon knew more than anyone Aerith had ever met, with the possible exception of Merlin. He could talk intelligently about almost any subject you cared to throw at him – from philosophy and literature to politics or religion, even quantum theory and time compression. If you could get him to talk – that was the catch. Getting even a small portion of that knowledge back out of Leon was another matter altogether.
If you didn't know Leon, you might mistake him for the type who cultivates that silent, brooding look to hide the fact that there's nothing really going on behind those beautiful eyes. But that wasn't the case with Leon, no siree. Leon was the real deal, the genuine article, the Real McCoy. There was plenty going on behind those stormy greys.
And it wasn't all just intellectual knowledge either. Behind that handsome face was a lot of practical, day-to-day, hands-on stuff too.
Leon could find potable water on Cactuar Island or his way across the ocean, navigating by the stars. He could get your broken down truck up and running or set your broken bone. He knew how to build a small house or a bomb capable of taking one down. He could solve your computer problem, repair your dishwasher, and prepare a palatable dinner from the latest monster kill – his latest monster kill – because yes, Leon was very good at that, too.
Just don't ask him to fix your love life.
Ask Leon a personal question, anything involving emotions, and the machine malfunctioned; you could practically see the breakdown. His brain would spin furiously for a few seconds, searching through all that stored data, and then slam to a halt. 'No data matches input criteria.'
He could crack the most complex code in minutes, but he couldn't tell you how he felt about his father if you gave him a lifetime.
People often made the mistake of thinking that Leon was cold and uncaring. They thought that his inability to articulate his feelings meant he didn't have any, but Aerith knew that nothing was further from the truth. The man cared deeply – too deeply for his own good, she often thought. Beneath that calm, cool exterior, he was brimming with passion. She knew it, for she had seen it.
Leon had gotten drunk one evening – a thing of disbelief in itself, for Leon didn't drink. He would no more voluntarily relinquish his self-control than Aerith would intentionally cut off her arm. He thrived on self-control. Discipline and order were the things which had made up his world from a very early age.
There was no place in that well-ordered world for messy things like feelings, things that couldn't be understood or explained. He couldn't even name them; how could he possibly categorize them and catalog them and properly file them away? He didn't know where they belonged, so he just shoved them all aside, and they collected like forgotten junk in the bottom of his mind; like a closet full of clutter in an otherwise orderly house.
But for whatever reason, Leon had come home one night with a small bottle of whiskey, which he promptly sat down with at the kitchen table, and he didn't get up again until it was gone. Aerith had reaped the reward: a very rare glimpse inside a very private man.
She had been on the verge of tactfully pointing out that it was perhaps a bit hypocritical for the very man responsible for Traverse Town's prohibition to be getting drunk on a bottle of whiskey he had confiscated from a new arrival, but when, halfway through that bottle, he had actually opened his mouth and started to speak, Aerith thought better of it and decided to keep her own mouth shut.
As if sensing her disapproval of his intention to get drunk, Leon began waving the bottle about in the air, ranting about it being the best – the fucking best – Galbadian whiskey ever – Seifer's fucking favorite, and a damn good year at that. Even Irvine could not have procured finer!
Cid would have been proud. He had always secretly thought that Leon was barely better than Cloud when it came to the matter of manly speech.
There was more, which she hadn't fully understood, about someone named PuPu and a case of whiskey that had somehow been lifted from someplace called Deling, and then, evidently, this PuPu person had given this particular bottle – as a gift for helping him when his spaceship broke down – to the refugee from whom Leon had taken it.
After Leon finished explaining to Aerith exactly how he had come into the possession of such a fine bottle of whiskey, he proceeded to finish drinking it, and his mood took a rather maudlin turn, succumbing to nostalgia. It surprised her; she would never have expected Leon to be a sentimental drunk. But when he raised his glass in a silent toast, she knew it wasn't her he was seeing. Leon had come face to face with the ghosts from his past.
The alcohol loosened the lock on Leon's carefully guarded closet of emotional rubble as well as the lock on his tongue, and when Aerith attempted to take a cautious peek inside, it all came tumbling out, spilling onto the table in a jumbled up heap. She helped him put it all back, a little more neatly than before, and in the process, she had learned a little bit about him – just a little, not a lot – but even a little was a lot with Leon.
With words that were sometimes slurred and spoken softly, and with others left unsaid, he had painted a picture of his past; not in bright and vivid oils, but in muted watercolors that bled away, leaving behind only a faded impression of what had once been; of an old stone orphanage and a lighthouse by the sea.
She saw how the person he had cared for most, the only one he had ever truly considered family, had been taken away, and how the young boy had waited for her return. She saw how the only mother figure he had ever known had suddenly disappeared, and how the other children had been sent, one by one, to other homes until only he and Seifer remained. Then the two of them had been shipped off to a military school, and even the orphanage itself had disappeared from his life. The boy stopped waiting.
She saw how he learned to comfort himself with discipline and control, soothing himself to sleep at night with thoughts of self-reliance. No longer did he count on the kindness of caring words nor wait for the warmth of a loving touch. He didn't need them.
The one thing that young Squall Leonhart had learned by the time he was sent to Garden at the ripe old age of five was that it didn't pay to become too attached to people; they never stayed. He turned instead to things that could be held on to – things like knowledge. Cold hard facts and practical skills.
Not long after arriving in Traverse Town, Aerith had once asked him how he knew so much.
"Garden," he had answered.
"Garden?"
"Military school."
"That's a strange name for a military school."
"Graduates were called SeeDs. SeeDs were raised in Gardens." Leon shrugged.
Aerith looked confused. "But I thought that military things were taught in military schools. You know so many other things."
"Garden had a different approach."
"How so?" she wanted to know.
Leon was beginning to sound a little annoyed, but he answered her in spite of it. "They wanted to make sure we had the necessary skills to survive in any situation."
"Well, that's pretty admirable," Aerith said, impressed and a little surprised. Her only previous knowledge about the military was Shin-Ra, and they sure as heck didn't give a hoot about their soldiers. Well, except for the SOLDIER soldiers, but that was only because they had so much invested in them.
Leon rolled his eyes. "They wanted to make sure we accomplished our missions."
Aerith still didn't understand.
"So they got paid," he explained.
"Oh." She finally got it. So maybe Garden wasn't so different from Shin-Ra after all. "Still, you know an awful lot."
"I was there for a long time."
"I know plenty of people who went to school for a long time too," she said, "and they don't know half of what you do."
"No." He sighed, shaking his head. "I was there for a long time."
It hadn't taken Aerith long after first meeting Leon to figure out that there were certain things he didn't like to talk about. Well, Leon didn't really like to talk about anything, but there were some things he really didn't like to talk about, and the rising irritation in his voice warned her that this was one of them. Still, Aerith wasn't one to to be so easily discouraged, and she paused for only a moment, considering just how far she could push him.
"How long?" she asked.
"Long," he growled back.
She was quiet then, but she gave Leon the most wounded look she could muster, and it must have worked because he relented. "I lived there," he stated quietly. "From an early age."
"You mean you stayed on campus during the school year?"
"No, I lived there. It was my home," he said, irritation escalating a notch to exasperation.
But that just didn't make any sense. Children didn't grow up in military academies; they didn't spend their entire lives there. Thinking that it must be a matter of simple miscommunication, she decided to try another tactic. "So where did you spend your holidays?"
Leon rubbed at his forehead with the palm of his hand, trying to forestall the oncoming headache. "Mostly in the library. Due to the limited holiday staff, the training center was closed."
It wasn't until later, though, until all the little pieces of the puzzle began to form a proper picture, that Aerith had truly begun to understand the nature of his childhood and how he had come to know so many things: He had finished all the regular classes, then completed all the advanced classes and the specialty classes, and still had time for independent study.
"Why do you think Seifer and I were the only gunblade specialists?" he had said in response to one of her questions. "The other students didn't bother with the gunblade because it took too long to master. Seifer and I had plenty of time – it was the only thing we had."
Aerith didn't believe that was entirely true, but she wasn't going to argue the point with Leon – the point that they'd also had each other. She had put together enough pieces pertaining to Seifer to suspect that his relationship with Squall had been far deeper and more complex than Leon would ever admit.
Exactly what it had been, whether love or hate, Aerith wasn't sure – probably both, she guessed – and as to whether or not it had ever been anything, well ... more ... even Aerith wasn't about to ask, no matter how much she wanted to know. But the one thing she was absolutely certain of was that they had needed each other. Throughout their years together, their rivalry had often been the only thing that kept them going, even if neither one of them could see it.
They played off of each other perfectly – one's yin to the other one's yang, black vs. white, good boy/bad boy – though their roles were never static, and the lines were often blurred. They knew exactly where to push and when to pull. They fed off each other and kept each other alive. More often than not, it was by trying to kill each other, but it worked.
Aerith knew there had been blood between them – Leon had the scar to prove it – but she also suspected that Leon wouldn't be the man he was today if it hadn't been for Seifer.
Even back when Aerith had first met Leon, she had been intrigued by the charismatic man and had turned to Merlin for information. Much to her dismay, he knew very little about Leon's past, and nothing very personal or juicy.
Men. They just never got the information you wanted.
Merlin had been able to tell her only that Leon had shown up in Traverse Town seven years before, evidently the sole survivor of his world, and that Merlin had immediately recognized the young man's talents and swiftly pressed him into service. Now he couldn't imagine having to get along without Leon.
At Aerith's repeated prodding, however, the old wizard had managed to remember a few minor details, such as Leon having been the commander of an elite mercenary force, and that he and a handful of his comrades had traveled to the future to defeat an evil sorceress and save their world from time compression. Unfortunately, it had all been for naught, for his world had fallen immediately afterwards to the Heartless.
Leon had been trapped in time compression when it happened and could only watch through a window in time as his world disappeared before his very eyes. No one could have done anything to stop it, but that didn't stop Leon from blaming himself. He should have been there with his companions, even if only to die alongside them. Everyone else had managed to make it back from the future; he was the only one who had gotten lost.
Some leader.
That the others might still be alive had they followed him had evidently never crossed Leon's mind, but Aerith couldn't very well point out that fact when she wasn't even supposed to know about it to begin with. She had learned that piece of information from Merlin.
Of course, Merlin had only given her the facts, not how Leon felt about those facts, nor, technically speaking, had Leon. It was Aerith who had discovered a rather devious way of getting the lowdown out of Leon, even if the method itself wasn't exactly on the up and up.
She had learned that sometimes when Leon was very focused on a task, such as cleaning his gunblade, she could ask him a question in a very calm voice and get a surprisingly candid answer instead of his usual 'Whatever'. She thought it must be something like hypnosis; with Leon's conscious mind in a self-induced trance, she could slip in through the back door, so to speak, and bypass his customary defenses without the interference of his ever-watchful mind.
She didn't use this tactic very often, and she was careful to never abuse it by asking anything overly embarrassing or personal, suspecting that even Leon's subconscious mind would object to revealing anything it considered too private, which didn't leave much. She also tried to limit her queries to those that could be answered with a simple yes or no, but occasionally he surprised her by volunteering additional information.
Perhaps all those inner dialogues with himself had a useful purpose after all... Perhaps he sometimes failed to distinguish between conversations taking place in his head and those actually spoken out loud to another person.
Sometimes, after one of their little sessions, Leon would look up with a troubled expression on his face as if plagued by the nagging suspicion that something had happened, but it was like walking into a room for something and not being able to remember what, or realizing that you've just read four pages of a book and can't recall a single word. Aerith would just smile sweetly, and she hadn't been caught at it yet. She had come uncomfortably close once, though, fishing for information on her most mysterious piece of the puzzle.
It was one of those pieces she had picked up on the evening he got drunk, and of all the pieces she possessed, it was the one which intrigued her the most; an important piece for certain, but unfortunately blank, with no markings whatsoever to indicate where it belonged. She knew only that it belonged to him.
He had been sitting at the table silently for quite some time just staring at the almost empty bottle in his hand, when he suddenly brought it to his lips, whispered a name to its mouth and then downed the last little bit of whiskey from the bottom.
Rinoa.
One little word, weighted with significance. It fell from his mouth like a stone.
Stillborn in the pregnant silence, it sank like a pebble in a vat of pudding, the silence curling around its edges like a shroud as it slowly disappeared, bit by little bit, until it had finally vanished completely, leaving not even a trace of itself behind, not even a hole.
Reverently setting the empty bottle down on the table with the quiet respect due the dead, Leon pushed himself up on rubbery legs and stumbled off to bed, leaving Aerith alone in the kitchen with the thick-as-butter silence and the not-so-empty bottle. It stared at her from its final resting place on the table, taunting and smug, as if it knew something she didn't. As if it held Leon's deepest secret within its little glass walls.
Instinct told her that it would be chancy at best, but the following day, Aerith gathered her courage and asked him about Rinoa. His answer was curt, even by Leon's standards, and cut off all consideration of ever bringing it up again. "Nobody," he snapped, giving Aerith no information whatsoever other than the certainty that Rinoa was definitely not nobody.
She carried the little piece around with her everywhere after that, worrying it until it was fretted and worn, and the more she tried to put it aside, the more it tormented her. It rankled and frustrated, festering under her skin like a splinter until she simply couldn't stand it anymore, so against her better judgment, she decided to give her secret method a try.
"Do you miss Rinoa?" she had asked him one day when he was thoroughly absorbed in his own little world; a simple question easily answered with a simple yes or no, but she had known it was a mistake as soon as the word left her lips. It whispered around the room like a ghost, and Leon had immediately looked up, eyes darting around the room as if attempting to follow an echo. Aerith added it to her list of things to ask the Lifestream once she had returned to its all-knowing depths and never tried asking Leon again.
But she had succeeded over the past year in gathering quite a few other pieces to the puzzle that was Leon, some of which weren't actual pieces at all, but more like subtle shadings for pieces she already had and served only to add a little color to the overall picture. The picture would likely never be complete, but it didn't really matter when she had the real thing to look at right there in front of her.
Yes, Aerith would have to say, Leon was a very handy person to have around. If you could only choose one thing to take with you on a dangerous journey, you would definitely want it to be Leon. He was so resourceful and so smart, so steady and strong. Responsibility sat so easily upon his capable shoulders. No wonder everyone turned to Leon for every little thing.
And it was all wrapped up in one incredibly gorgeous package. He was so handsome and so sexy. So mysterious.
And so utterly untouchable.
No wonder everyone fell so in love with Leon.
۵۵۵۵۵
Yes, Leon was a very interesting man indeed, and if anyone deserved him, it was the man sitting beside her.
With newfound resolve, Aerith turned her steady gaze on Cloud. "You're not the first person to ever crush on Leon, you know." Cloud returned the gaze, but admitted nothing. Of course, he didn't deny it either, she noted.
He was too busy trying to figure out how much she actually knew and how much was simply Cetran intuition; whether she had learned certain facts from Zack in the Lifestream, or if she was merely guessing. As he was turning these possibilities over in his mind and weighing the probability of each, a sudden commotion focused his attention on a much more immediate danger. A bunch of Heartless had spawned in and were attacking the citizens.
Cloud's battle-sharpened senses quickly sized up the situation, instinctively zeroing in on the most urgent peril: an elderly woman near the entrance was being attacked by a group of Red Nocturnes. Leon had also spotted the woman and was frantically trying to reach her in time, but he had his hands full in front of the fountain with four of the fierce Blue Flames. Yuffie was already engaged on the stairs, firing off her shuriken in rapid succession as she yelled at the customers to get back inside the safety of the stores.
In a desperate attempt to rescue the woman, Leon turned his back on the Blue Flames and started to scale the wall, knowing that by the time he made it around the stairs, it would be too late, for the Heartless already had her down. But before he was even half way up, a flash of red went flying past with wing unfurled and sword already swinging.
"I've got it," Cloud called out as he catapulted over the rail, freeing Leon to return his attention to the Heartless behind him, but the break in Leon's attack had already given them the advantage, and even as he was turning back to face them, he felt the burning sting of razor-sharp claws slice deeply across the back of his thigh as they pulled him down into their deadly grasp.
Aerith watched in horror as Leon went down, screaming for Cloud as she cast a curaga in Leon's direction, but just as the spell was leaving her hand, a Blue Flame materialized between her and her intended target. It intercepted the spell meant for Leon and promptly fell dead.
Having swiftly dispensed with the Heartless attacking the elderly woman, Cloud was helping her to her feet when he heard Aerith's cry for help. He quickly escorted the woman to safety through the heavy door to First District and then leapt back over the rail to help his friends below. By the time he landed, Aerith was just finishing off the last Blue Flame with another curaga.
Leon was sitting on the ground with his long legs sprawled out in front of him. "Well, I'll be damned," he declared, accepting the hand that Cloud held out to him.
Yuffie jumped down from the wall only moments later to join them and just stood there with arms akimbo and mouth agape. "What the... ?"
"Undead." Leon stated, shaking his head. "The damn things are undead."
"Undead Heartless? Isn't that kind of like ... redundant or something?" Yuffie asked.
"I have no idea," Leon said, "but at least we've finally found the way to take them out. Thanks to Aerith," he added, causing the flower girl to blush a pretty-enough pink to put her dress to shame. Even though her discovery had been purely by accident, praise from Leon was as hard to come by as sunshine in Traverse Town.
And speaking of crushes, Cloud gloated, eying Aerith with a knowing smirk, at least I don't turn into some silly little schoolgirl over one little compliment.
Catching the smirk, as well as its meaning, Aerith looked around for something with which to busy herself and found Leon's leg, but Leon stopped her before she could cast another cure, insisting that she had already healed it more than sufficiently.
"Well all right," she conceded, "but at least go home and take it easy for the rest of the afternoon. That was a pretty nasty injury."
"Can't." He shook his head. "As soon as we get the district closed, I need to talk to Merlin."
"I'll go with you," Cloud offered, tearing his eyes away from the very sexy thigh on display through the gaping hole in Leon's pants.
"All right." Leon agreed. "And afterwards, we can go to the waterway."
"Oh for heaven's sake!" Aerith threw up her hands. "Well, at least come home and eat something first. What if you run into a bunch of Heartless in your weakened state?"
"Aerith, really, I'm fine," he insisted, "but if it'll make you feel better, we'll stop by the house and have some lunch first. Besides," he added, nodding his head towards the man beside him, "I'll have Cloud along to watch my back."
Oh my goodness. Aerith could barely believe her ears. Two compliments in less than two minutes! Whatever in the world had come over Leon?
It was merely a rhetorical question, of course, for she already knew the answer and looked over at what – or rather who – had come over Leon. He was practically beaming, his already-glowing eyes now shining more brightly than if that truant Traverse Town sun had suddenly burst into the sky and started showering him with its heavenly light.
Feeling the warmth on his face, Cloud looked up, but no sun had miraculously appeared in the Traverse Town sky to chase away the endless night; it was only the warmth of Aerith's eyes, bubbling over with affection and mirth. Knowing that the jig was up, he returned her wide, adoring smile with a sheepish grin and a goofy shrug.
Silly little schoolgirl indeed.
