.

He hadn’t remembered why, yet, but Zack was laughing. 

Head thrown back, the blazing sun beaming down on his face, laughter erupted from him like a glittering fountain—overflowing, resplendent, and capable of wish-granting. 

He was always laughing, Cloud remembered. Like second nature, to have a smile in his voice. Basking in it was like finding a patch of sunlight cast through the window—an obvious yet secret warmth.

Apparently I’m not good at watching my back, he’d told Cloud, once. You, you’ve probably got a better sense of awareness, yeah? Teach me! 

Teach you? Cloud hadn’t asked, because the question was too absurd to respond to. Still, he glowed with unearned pride at the idea he was Zack’s confidant.

Isn’t your hair getting long enough to cover it, he’d said instead, and here he still couldn’t understand the why—it wasn’t particularly funny, but Zack had laughed like that anyways, full-bodied and open, like Cloud had delighted him beyond belief. 

Hopelessly and involuntarily, he’d ducked his head and smiled, thinking it would go unnoticed, but Zack broke out of his laughter at just the right moment to look at Cloud and say, You’ve got a great smile. 

He didn't know what it was Zack had liked in the shape of it, because when he's tried to find it in the mirror the expression had looked flat and unappealing. Maybe it was just the irreplicable way Zack looked at him—incredibly real and too good to be true all at once. 

You, too, Cloud hadn’t said, the fact too damn obvious to waste words on, but now he wishes different—wishes he’d told him how his eyes crinkled when he smiled and how he was charmingly incapable of standing still and how he was like a compass point away from home and how he was so easy to love that it was almost frightening, and that Cloud had nevertheless loved him in his cowardice, and that he was part of the reason he could no longer say something like, I wish they’d killed me instead of you because every time he remembered Zack’s face he found he couldn’t remember it in heartbreak, and he knew now that it would break him to hear it. 

You can’t be real, he’d said. Who even says that kind of thing? I don’t believe you.

Zack had just grinned. Come on, don’t you trust me? 

When he’d hefted the Buster Sword from Zack’s corpse, the metal had been cold and unforgiving, the burden impossible to carry. But the body had remained warm. He couldn’t remember him any other way. 

The fires of Nibelheim had scarred his memories with heat, the all-consuming hatred and guilt seared into his skin. After, when sunlight would warm his skin, he’d flash to that deep sense of loss and linger in it, the cruelty of the moment pinpointed on his flesh. But he remembers, now, what it was like, to stay by the sun and be rewarded with his smile, his laughter, his belief.