This one... Okay, this one was actually an idea I had a little while ago, but then I got a prompt that I realised would work way too well for it. So, the idea got paired with the prompt, and I kinda love it. Sort of.

Disclaimer though: I'm aware that this won't be that realistic. I can guarantee that I did no research for this fic, just because it was a request and I honestly couldn't be bothered doing research on the airforce/military etc. If it had been a longer fic, then yeah, sure.

Anyway, I missed writing angst for these two. Have some angst.

Prompt: 'promise' for bixlu - cosymotto/CoSmO333

A Promise to Keep

"Just come back to me, okay?" Lucy whispered to her husband as the taxi driver outside impatiently pressed on the horn. "You need to come back to me - to us."

Bickslow smiled warmly down at her, his forehead coming to rest against Lucy's and his hand drifting down to cover her own on the just barely concealed bump. "It just three months. I'll be back home before you know it," he said.

"You promise?"

"I promise," Bickslow whispered. And softly, he pressed his lips to his wife's one last time for the next few months, and then turned to pick up his luggage and finally leave. He only hoped his deployment would go by quickly for a change.

After two months, Lucy opened the door to find her husband's superior officers waiting for her, hats under their arms and with grave looks on their faces. And she'd known, right from the moment she'd seen their uniforms and all the ribbons that adorned them, that her worst nightmare had happened: that his plane had gone down and with him in it.

They'd told her that they didn't really know what had happened; contact had suddenly been lost with him, and then reports of the wreckage of his Lightning II washing up on the shoreline of Pergrande Kingdom had started coming in. Lucy had had no choice but to accept the worst. She'd known the risks when she'd married him.

She'd just always hoped for the best.

The day of her husband's funeral service had been beautiful, considering all things - the sun had been shining, birds chirping, and there hadn't been a single gloomy cloud in the sky. And Lucy had hated it, almost as much as she'd hated how she'd had to bury her husband without his actual body - they'd never found it, though. Everyone had just assumed he'd been lost at the bottom of The Cloud Sea, where they expected his plane to have gone down.

She'd been to her fair share of air force funerals, but that one… That one had been the most difficult for her, mostly because she was literally a walking reminder of the fact that she was going to have to raise his daughter by herself - and she knew how much Bickslow would've loved to hear that they were having a little girl.

The doorbell rang and Lucy could only groan up to the ceiling as she dropped the load of washing she'd been carrying on one hip to turn and rush down the stairs, still carrying the crying three-week-old infant in her other arm, and greet whoever it was at the door.

She wasn't that surprised to see the neatly-pressed-uniform-wearing officers standing outside and waiting patiently for her - they'd come to visit her every week or so just to help out with menial tasks and remind her of the support she'd always have available. But Lucy didn't even get a chance to say good afternoon to them before they each stepped aside and left a clear view of the path down her front lawn, and to the all too familiar man slowly making his way towards the front steps with the help of the cane in his right hand.

She was sure her heart stopped beating when he lifted his head to look up at her, and when his lips curled up into that same grin that had made her fall in love with him in the first place all those years earlier, Lucy couldn't stop the tears from beginning to fall down her cheeks. And quickly, she handed her crying daughter over to one of the officers just so she could run out and down the stairs, and feel her husband's arms around her once again.

"I promised you I'd be back, didn't I?"