Stars Align - Final Fantasy 9 oneshot
Technically, it's the same old story, from the very beginning of time, written down in every novel that she has basically devoured as a child: Girl meets boy and they fall in love. Essentially, that is exactly what happened, to put it simple, cliched and as what everyone already knows and expects.
She can't pinpoint the moment she has lost her heart to him – by the time she had realized that it happened, it was already too late to stop it. It happened slowly, without a moment of sudden realization that all the heroes in her novels had experienced. She doesn't know whether it was his laughter when Steiner had slipped in the Ice cavern and fallen face first into the snow, or whether it had been the pain and compassion on his face when they had watched Lindblum fall, doesn't know whether the twinkle of mischief in his eyes had touched her heart or if it had been his peaceful face when he had curled up next to their campfire after a long day of wandering. Maybe it had been the fact that she hadn't been but a pretty songbird before he had stepped into her life and opened her golden cage with such ease that she couldn't do anything but fall for him. Whatever it was, Garnet knows one thing – she's fallen in love with him, from the bottom of her heart and with all her body and mind and soul and when she had thought him lost forever, it was as if a part of her had died.
But against all odds, he has returned to her. Safe and sound and so incredibly beautiful like the sun itself, golden hair and blue eyes and this smile that always manages to catch her breath. Like the sun after a long period of rain, he has returned to her and like the two moons in the sky, she will always orbit him because without his light, she cannot glow, cannot laugh, not be who she really is.
It's not like she can't live without him. She can, has proven so in the time he was gone, swallowed by darkness and the hatred that had lived inside the Iifa Tree. She has lived and ruled, had been the queen she promised to be, so long ago, at her mother's grave. The people had looked up to her and loved her while she worked relentlessly to rebuild Alexandria and Lindblum and Burmecia. But something had been missing and everybody who knows her had known that too.
She had seen it in Eiko's hanging shoulders and Freya's absent looks, in the hard lines of Steiner's mouth and Amarant's even grumpier brooding, in Quina's sad sighs and Vivi's forlorn silence. The sun they all had orbited like planets hadn't been missing from only her life, they all had been just pieces of dark rock without him, gone out and without the one thing that had brought them all together in an adventure so epic that she is sure the historians will still write about it in centuries. And when he had thrown off the cloak and revealed his fave, the sun had risen into seven lives again, she knows.
Just like she knows that she will never let go of the sun again. Through sickness and war and death, come hell or high water, she will always stay by her sun and reflect his light and lead his way in the dark of the night like she has once done for him in Garland's Pandaemonium. Sun and moon and the planets around them, their own little system which the stars have taken mercy on, aligned by the will of someone's great design, so that all of them may glow and illuminate the sky of their shared horizon.
She can feel everybody's eyes on her, waiting and touched, and then there's him looking at her with this special smile that is hers alone, his eyes filled with so much warmth and love that her heart skips a beat and then starts beating wildly like the canary that finally leaves its cage behind. And her lips curve into a smile so wide she's afraid her face might burst as she speaks the words everybody is waiting for.
“I do.”
