Aerith Gainsborogh was eighteen years old and had been homeschooled by her mother her entire life. The big woman had a warlike mindset that had seen too much to believe in honor, so she would not send her bright little girl to a neighborhood school if the skies opened up and rained fire and brimstone solely on her property. As a result, she had Aerith reading by four, playing the violin by seven, and maintaining their entire herb garden alone by the time she was ten.
Elmyra Gainsborogh came from a long line of hardworking immigrants, and taught Aerith the value of selfless service and good old fashioned elbow grease. The girl never complained about hanging the linens on the line, then running out to tear them all down when the soot-fog rolled in and she had to do them all over again.
Aerith had been a dream to raise, but a nightmare to keep against the tirade of the Mayor's people constantly beating down Elmyra's door with seizure orders. She had not been a fussy or precocious youth, and even her dreaded teenage years had gone by without a hitch. Elmyra almost never had to scold the girl…
…until recently!
Zack met Aerith at the church in Sector 5 to find a growing crowd of people already there. Aerith volunteered with the YMCA on Sundays, so she along with locals from the community set up a soup kitchen out front with produce from her gardening operation. Inside the church became an impromptu donation center, with volunteers organizing a coat-drive and community clothes-rack. Students from the Community College came down to provide peer-counseling for the neighborhood's troubled youth, talking in the pews with very young children and some all the way up to Zack's age. A separate table was set up where Aerith wrapped flower bouquets in wax-paper bundles, selling them for $5 gil apiece to benefit the needy, they were all gone in an hour.
Zack had lived in the Shinra Barracks above the Plate ever since he came to Midgar, so the outpour of the city's downtrodden and displaced denizens shook him up quite a bit. He'd never seen so many homeless people in his life, scraggled and unkempt with as many holes in their skin as there were in their clothes.
What bothered him most was the classic mark of red rings around their bloodshot irises, the telltale sign of Dancer. Aerith taught him not to judge them, reminding him that there were very few people in the world who were as strong as he was. She was the only one who could scold him while still making him feel good about himself.
The volunteers that helped her were hardy folk, working people who had lived in the Slums their whole lives and did what they could to survive. Most, if not all, had never seen the sun. Zack implored them, asking them why they never went above the Plate, and they replied that there was nothing up there for them. But wasn't it preferable to this, why would they choose to live down there like that?
One woman who worked in a factory put her hand on Zack's shoulder looking him straight in the eye.
"Kid, living's better than dying."
Zack's heart went out to them, and he found himself filled with a renewed vigor to help them. After all, he was a civil servant, a servant of these people too. So when a box-truck pulled up laden with heavy donation packages, Zack jumped right up and got to handing them down two at a time. Boxes as big as him, no sweat, he was SOLDIER! He had that truck unloaded in fifteen minutes flat with admiring glances being showered upon him, scoring brownie points with Aerith like three-throws.
He did some improvised community outreach work, letting the little kids line up in the church and take turns punching the SOLDIER's hand. Some wayward apprehension loomed in the back of his mind however as he kept his knees bent wary of his crotch.
When the citizenry was amply fed and all the volunteers packed up and went home, Zack and Aerith got to do what they'd wanted to do…be all over each other. They sat in the pew by the flower bed kissing like the world was going to end, exploring each other's taste in rapturous enflowering waves, their arms caressing each other like sweeping cattails. He felt like some sort of sacrilegious bad boy making out with this hot young filly in church on Sunday.
Oh what would his parents think?
The thought filled him with evil pride as he deepened his passionate intensity lovingly toward the girl in his arms. She really liked his biceps, her tiny hands running up their firm length to his shoulders, sliding under the sleeves of his uniform shirt. Man, he was loving this!
"I'll take 'yes' for one hundred gil," he said in between kisses. Her eyes shifted back and forth, a kitten's curiosity twinkling on the tip of her nose.
"What's the question?"
"Are you my girlfriend?"
The spark that lit up her face was exhilarating as fireworks, the sheen of roman candles in the deep well of her eyes. Zack pulled his girl into his lap and kissed her longing and fiery until the lights went out.
Their two-week anniversary went by like a song on the radio, and they hit the one-month mark coasting on candy-kisses and walks in the park. Zack bought her a little plant he'd picked up at the Whole Foods near the boardwalk for the occasion.
"Checkitout! It's one of those fly-catcher thingies, I saw it and thought of you. I named it Spikey."
She put her hands on her hips shaking her head. "Zack, it's a Venus Fly Trap, and it's not an animal, it's a plant."
"But look at it! It's got teeth!"
"It doesn't belong to the kingdom Animalia and it doesn't have a backbone."
"But it eats meat, just like me!"
Oh she could hug him for the rest of her life.
Of course, gossip spread like wildfire in SOLDIER, and keen glances started being thrown Zack's way. His friends in particular would get quiet on lunch hour, and he'd find them all leaning in, leering at him with wry, expectant expressions. He told no one, and couldn't figure out how they knew—perhaps the couple-selfies plastered all over his Facebook wall had something to do with it.
Only one thing bothered him that he'd just barely started noticing—black suits, hovering around the church. Zack caught them posted up in precarious positions, on terraces of other buildings or in parked cars with tinted windows. Four of them—Reno, Rude, Cissnei, and Tseng—took shifts alternating surveillance.
He tried to pretend like he didn't know, keep a low profile, but he knew they knew. He assumed they were watching Aerith because of her involvement with Zack, he was involved in some pretty heavily classified stuff after all. It didn't make him too nervous, they were just Turks, might as well have sent rent-a-cops to keep tabs on him. Zack took sick pleasure in knowing that he got to make out with his girlfriend while they had to sit outside in the elements bored out of their minds watching him score.
[Received Muscle Belt]
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