PSL; [FLOWER, STARDUST, STEEL EXPLOSION]

[supersoldier]

Comments

[cetral]

[ she's in the garden again.

and she doesn't, after all, call him very often with the express purpose of pulling him away from whatever he's doing, right now, immediately. he's a man of appointments, military engagements, missions and stuffy airs. she's just the flower girl. some lab rat, captive princess (or so reno cheekily calls her to her face one day, to his sheer and utter buffonery -- which she'd responded to by tugging on his ponytail hard enough to make him shriek a little in passing, right in front of tseng and the young heir of the shinra empire whose easy name she can't be bothered to remember) whose only freedoms lie in this greenhouse, and the most recent addition of the infirmary.

if asked, maybe she'd say that she likes it. it's different, anyway, from being locked up in a room all day, dreading the next visitor she might get that tells her any sort of bad news from the list of worst case scenarios that she's keeping track of in her head. maybe in the next board meeting, they'll give hojo the okay to drown her in mako; maybe they'll take a scalpel to her skin, and cut up pieces of her to examine under a microscope.

just like her mother -- whose pictures are blown up in technicolor in hojo's office, plastered like x-rays or trophies across the walls on both sides, which she expects he'd done only to get a rise out of her, to take out his sad frustration over the fact that he can't dissect her on an open table in the only way he can.

the infirmary is a good distraction. they watch her and her uncanny knack with materia, stitching up infantryman and soldiers alike when the nurses are overwhelmed by the workload. more often than not, she watches out for him, not sure if she's relieved or disappointed when he never seems to show.

but she's in the garden, and they're surrounded by her lilies now, and at least he's here, looking as sturdy as ever. ]

You seem happy.

[ it lilts a little subdued, even if the smile on her face is warm.

maybe she's still tired, feeding all of her energy into the soldier that wound up in the infirmary earlier in the afternoon, his red hair cropped chin length, and his on-off blink of cat eyes in the dimmed light, a gash in his shoulder that she feels she should somehow inexplicably recognize even if all she'd ever seen was - ]

I think?

[ she's still not that great at being not obvious -- because she's scanning him from head to toe in a way that could only mean she's checking for injuries -- even if, somehow, she's definitely avoiding his eyes. ]

Did you win a fight recently?