Squall has fallen asleep, lulled by the steady rocking of the train, and Rinoa looks at him and thinks, finally.

He would stay awake for days if he thought she needed it, even though it bothers her, the way he never takes care of himself. She wants to tell him to let her be, to go, do something without her sometimes, but he only ever shrugs when she does, and asks her what would he do without her around anyway?

She doesn't want to admit that she is too afraid, too selfish, to be without him any longer than she has to be. The endless days and longer nights when he is gone because of Garden are all she can handle, no matter how many ways she tries to find to fill her time.

The quiet is her enemy.

Edea (Matron, although Rinoa will never feel comfortable calling her that) says it's part of their gift. Their curse. They share themselves with a power so much bigger than a mortal body, a power that will find something to do, if she does not find it for herself. And Rinoa has more of a battle than most.

So she clings to Squall when he is home, and ignores the whispers in the hallways of her weakness, her dependency, that prey on everything she hated about herself before they met.

Squall breathes deeply in his sleep and she turns to look at him, and feels like she is seeing him for the first time.

In her mind he is still young and boyish, with the smooth skin and stern jaw of the teenager who caught her eye on a dance floor so many years ago. She remembers mornings spent breathing kisses into his ear, running her hands through his thick hair while they lay tangled together, each still in awe of the other's presence in their lives. She had him memorized, then. She knew and kissed every scar, could tell without looking which eye had flecks of grey, and traced constellations in the freckles scattered across his back and shoulders.

Now he has a small white line on his jaw hidden under the stubble of beard, one she only vaguely remembers noticing before. She knows when he came home with the cut, but has spent too much of her time looking for distractions in her work or answers in the stars to realize just how clear a mark it left. There are lines across his forehead that never quite fade, even now while he is sleeping. He looks perpetually worried, and she is not the only cause of that.

And he is still gorgeous. If she was drawn to his mystery, to his loneliness, when he watched her that night in the Garden ballroom, she is not ashamed to say she was equally drawn to his looks. Looks she stopped staring at, and eventually stopped thinking about, the more comfortable they grew around each other. As he stopped being Squall Leonhart, and just became meanie, or babe, and eventually husband. As she lost seeing him as separate from her.

There is so much about him she has not taken the time to properly appreciate, she thinks, not for a long time. She brushes a few strands of hair over skin that has lost much of its softness with years as SeeD's Commander, and she falls in love with him all over again. More, she thinks, than she has even before, in these moments where he is realized as a legend in their own time; smart, strong, filled with his own demons and torments that he has pushed past and overcome and managed to save the world. And he vulnerable beside her, laid bare in the place he feels the safest.

She wonders when she stopped choosing him, when his role in her life became so constant that she started to take him for granted.

He never stopped choosing her. Not that she could tell, at least.

Outside, the world moves steadily behind them, and she lets her head rest against his shoulder, and reaches for his hand. She'll stay awake for him, now. She threads her fingers through his and soaks in his presence, and lets herself relax.