She was used to feeling like she was being watched. There was a man with serious brown eyes who wore a blue suit and stood with his arms crossed in the shadows near the fringes of the church. There was the steady chatter of the planet that sometimes made her want to bury her head in the flowers until she could hear her own thoughts, and the silent eyes of her ancestors that sometimes made her want hold those thoughts close to her chest and ask if she could have them for herself.

So when she saw the glimmer of armor through one of the dusty church windows, she was only shocked for the few bright orange seconds left in evening.

And when the sun settled behind him on its ways down, he became a dark shadow inside of it, looking through at her as she raised a hand to shade her eyes.

When she looked through at him, standing still and bright in her fertile patch, he imagined bending her back towards the flowers. He imagined her tending to them, never leaving them, until they lifted their yellow heads. He brought the image with him to bed where he often dreamt of things that were not as sweet, like boys gazing for hours at text, fetuses curled into themselves, and then at shreds of paper on the floor. And sometimes when he watched her, he imagined the flowers rising from the ground tall enough to wrap completely around her wrists and throat until she was unmoving, no longer breathing.

And in his mind, she looked even better like that. How many mothers die by their own children's hands, even if those hands are hours old?

She was always caught between asking him in and trying to forget that he was there. There was no point, she thought, for him to stand outside when she clearly knew he was there. But she was scared to actually invite him, the General of all the soldiers whose eyes burned bright even in newspaper monochrome. They were dangerous men, and he was a dangerous man, even though he looked kind of like an angel.

So the day she crept over to the window and stood there until she saw him coming, she was trembling all over and trying in vain to keep the tremble from her lips, where she was sure he would see it.

He saw her at the window a couple streets away, and he nearly turned on his heel and went the opposite direction. He never really came to see her, just her hands in the flowers and her head bent prettily over them. He came to see the way she fussed over them like they were her children. And what made him smile was just thinking about her mouth pursed just like that, and her hands poised just like that, on a corpse lying in the flowers.

He didn't hate her, and he didn't love her, but gaia he loved her for every nauseatingly sweet thing that she was, things he didn't have, and didn't bother to long for any more. And when she pressed her hand to the glass, mere inches that separated them(because he couldn't have turned away even if he wanted to) he felt the longing that was there despite him, and he was so taken with that sweetness, his heart jumped at the mere prospect of destroying it.

Could she hear it hammering in his chest, could she see the woman he had never known behind his eyes? He had the feeling she could, even as her heart was clamoring for him. The young thing had a great deal of understanding, and when she pushed open the doors and looked at him with those understanding green eyes, he only wanted to tear them out and crush them in his hands.

She never imagined he would take her up on her invitation, but the day he finally followed her into her church he never stood by the window again. He was a constant presence in her church, he was silent footsteps down the wooden aisle, a pair of green eyes that she could feel on the back of her neck like a mosquito bite scratched raw.

It was funny what proximity changed, and part of her wondered if she had made a mistake inviting him in. But then she would feel him watching her as she tended to her flowers, she would feel him in his silence and something about it was so sad she wanted to do more. She wanted him even closer.

She wanted to be his friend. She wanted him to be her friend. Flowers were no substitute no matter how busy they kept her hands. So the day she finally mustered up the courage to ask him if he wanted to help her in her flowerbed, she was full of hope and of her own admittedly selfish ambition to solve her loneliness with his own.

In that moment it seemed as if those ever present eyes of her ancestors began to press into her skin just as his did, and she was embarrassed in his silence, in the steady fire of his gaze that made her turn back to her flowers in embarrassment. It was foolish of her, she thought, to ask anything more of him.

He saw it clearly, that thing he both loved and hated. She wanted to help him, she thought that she could help him and he almost laughed outright. It was so typical, so sweet and so misplaced he just wanted to laugh, and get his hands on that precious bleeding heart. The more he sat and watched her up close, the more he realized that she was exactly who he'd thought she was when he'd first seen her nurturing her flowers to life. And the more he saw that she truly possessed these things, that it was real, the bitterer he became.

Things he could have had, things he would never have, it made him a little intoxicated to see it all before him in a pink dress. It made him want to do more than destroy her, he wanted to completely dismantle her and figure out how she was the way she was, if he could possibly take it away from her. But he still found himself keeping his distance, watching her like he had in the very beginning.

And then one day she didn't come. She was always in the church, tending to her flowers. Always. He waited in his usual pew on the third day she was absent well into the morning, and when she still didn't show up the madness he had managed to subdue for the eternal 72 hours finally unleashed itself and at five am, he rose up from the pew a furious shadow, and swept from the church with the intent of never coming back.

But deep in his dark apartment, her face swam before his eyes, even when he dared to close them and he was so livid he trembled with it, and was made even more so when he realized he couldn't seem to take his mind back from her grasp. How dare she not come, he thought, how dare she make him feel this way.

But at 9 am, after trying unsuccessfully to sleep, the question had changed. And as he made coffee for himself before he headed to the office, a ritual he usually enjoyed, he wondered instead—

Why hadn't she come?

For a week he managed not to go back there, thinking only of seeing an empty church full of abandoned flowers. Then one day, with maybe a few moments left in the evening he went back to the church.

She heard him come in, and before she could turn all the way around he had passed the pews, and he was walking through the flowerbed, crushing them underfoot. He was moving so fast she took two steps back and felt her back hit the wall.

But she wasn't really afraid because it had been months and she supposed that if he was going to hurt her he would have done it already, she was merely surprised to see him because it had been a week and he hadn't come and she thought that maybe he wasn't coming back and she thought—

She probably thought, he thought, that she had him completely under her thumb, that it was funny to play with him this way, but she didn't and it wasn't, and he was going to show her when he dismantled her like he had always planned to, he was going to see what she was made of and why she made him feel like he had when she hadn't come, and the anger tasted so much like panic that he knew he could only refute it when his hands were finally around her throat—

Her throat was so dry when he finally came to stand over her, and she could only breathe—

He couldn't breathe, but he was going to smile when the light left her eyes, her green—

Green, eyes of his that were even greener up close, and she said—

'I thought you weren't going to come back…'

And he said— 'I waited here.'

Which was not what he meant to say, but when she took his hand in one of the hands he'd watched tangle in the flowers, so warm and rightly attached to her body with its beating heart and smiling lips, she said—

'…I'm glad you're here now.' And it dawned on him that maybe, that was all he'd really wanted.

Author's Note: So, I'd been having a really depressing dry spell with writing, and I thought I would try and go back to some of my ideas that had either died in the process, or in the wonderful computer crash of early '09. XD This was originally a really long, shamefully pretentious Zack/Sephiroth that started getting deeply religious and incredibly trippy. But I really can't lie, if I hadn't lost it in the crash I probably would have posted that monster. More recently in mourning, I resurrected it, still bitter over having lost it (can you tell?) and it morphed into an AeriSeph that was beginning to turn out very much the same. So I started over, (quite bitterly again) and at the advice from my cousin to 'murder my darlings' I murdered the shit out of it and came out with this much shorter piece, which was originally going to have an ending completely on drugs.

Think Jack the ripper meets harry potter, meets… dr. seuss? But I think I've broken through, and I'm happy to share this with you, along with all this crap none of you wanted to know about. Thanks for reading, and sorry about the whole tangent, but I had to do it. I know all of us have been there at some point (many points?), and I just wanted to speak to it. I hope you enjoyed the story, and as always I'm open to whatever comments/criticism you have.