L'Cie that fulfill their focus become crystal, and gain eternal life, the legend says. At first, seeing Serah floating above, shining and twisting and becoming a translucent statue, Lightning thought it meant successful L'Cie would live forever, yes, trapped inside. It wasn't after the first ten years had passed that she started to notice it wasn't exactly like that. For them, at least – she did not know any other L'Cie beside her group of eight. Nobody could blame her, really, because Hope and Dajh growing up had masked the whole discovery.

The thing was, L'Cie fulfilling their focus did crystallize and immortalize them. But the crystal statue and the immortality were not bound together. As in, L'Cie does not need to be a statue to live forever.

She first noticed it when she was receiving some good ten stitches after being cut by the blade of one quite insane character that had entered the Weapon Research Division of the Guardian Corps official basement. The intruder himself had no chances of getting whatever he wanted, as she had knocked him on the ground in five seconds, but the group that apprehended the man after she was done with him was incompetent, and let him loose. She was a little surprised when he pulled the gunblade from the nearest soldier to attack her; hence the cut on her upper right arm.

She had merrily given him a concussion after that, of course, but by then there was a lot of blood and Hope, being one of the Weapon Research crew passing by and seeing her arm covered in red liquid, had pulled her towards the medical wing of the basement and demanded she stayed put until her wound was treated by a professional.

Some things never changed. His way of dramatizing things was one of them.

"This is just a minor wound. You have seen me in worst state." She said, looking at him from the place she sat on the stretcher. She would never admit it for anyone, but she was talking so she would not have to think about the doctor who was sewing her skin back in the place. She was resistant to pain, of course, but not a masochist, and that needle hurt like a bitch.

"Yes, I have. I was also able to mend you in seconds, back them. That is not the case anymore."

He was leaning on the table in front of her, arms crossed, staring right back at her glare. There was a time when her angry face made him wince. Right now, he dismissed it quickly, having grown used to it after almost a decade being one of the targets of that look. Or maybe he learned that from Snow, who knows. She knew she should not have let him near her – argh – brother-in-law.

"I wanted to interrogate him. This could wait."

"He was out cold after meeting the blunt edge of you gunblade, so, I think we have plenty of time before you are able to do that, Light."

She sighed.

"You did not need to drag me here like that." It had been embarrassing to be pulled by her hand, in front of her subordinates. But she had let him do it, because she did not like to make a scene, and because he was very stubborn and would make a scene. Also, her arm was bleeding and would be disadvantageous when she tried to make him free her other hand.

"You would not have come here at all if I hadn't."

"I would have come after the interrogation."

"You would bleed until you got home and Serah saw it and started to fret. I'm doing you a favor."

Then, the doctor snorted. Hope moved his head to watch him, and Lightning looked down, arching one eyebrow. She did not know that face; he was probably a new addition to the medical staff.

Sensing the silence and noticing the patient and the man with the researcher tag had stopped talking, the doctor looked up from the wound he was stitching and looked at their expressions. Seconds passed before he returned to his task, grinning apologetically. "I'm sorry. You two just make me remember my brother and his wife."

Hope blinked. Lightning frowned. "Excuse me?"

The doctor laughed a little, before piercing her skin again. "You and your boyfriend there argue just like them. The wholes are reversed, though: he is a soldier, and she is a doctor, so she is always mad at his disregard of injuries in general."

Hope turned his head to watch Lightning. She widened her eyes a little, clearly startled, before frowning again, making that irritated face that always made him want to smile. "He is not my boyfriend", she gritted, boring her eyes into Hope's green ones as if trying to make a point. His obvious amusement worsened her aggravation. "I am old enough to be his mother."

Stopping his stitching again, the doctor looked up. "Oh?"

"Unless you could have been a mother at seven, you really could not pass as my mom, Light. And if you were trying to, you did a shitty job when you taught me military psychological torture after that bullying-at-school episode."

The doctor looked obviously surprised at Lightning denying of his assumptions, and observed her face with intense scrutiny. The soldier felt uncomfortable, but didn't do anything about it. Whatever he saw did not convince him, though. "You must excuse me, but you do not look seven years older than him."

Lighting stayed quiet, and Hope chuckled. "That's a compliment, if I ever heard one."

"Shut up."

Finishing the last stitch, the doctor started bandaging her arm. "All done. Come back to take them off one week from now, and be careful not to hit the place or let it get infected. You can clean the blood here; I have to take a look at this intruder guy you caught", the man said, taking of his gloves and heading to the door of the white, sterile room. When the door closed behind him, Hope was already beside her, using a cloth wet with something that smelled like ether to clean of her bloodied wrist.

She took the cloth from him and started to do it herself, still a little irritated with the whole situation. He stayed where he was, looking at her face with enough intensity to make her feel exactly where his eyes were roaming.

"He is right."

She did not bother to look up, and kept trying to clean her fingers. Her glove had been taken of and was soaked. She would have to buy a new one.

"You don't look older than me at all."

At that, she lifted her head to throw a glare. Expecting to find his amused expression, Lightning was surprised to see Hope was really considering what he was saying. His platinum eyebrows were creased in deep contemplation.

"You said it yourself, seven years is not enough to make me look like your mom."

His expression did not change. "That's not what I mean. I have never noticed it because you were like this ever since that day we met inside the fal'Cie, but… Lightning, you did not change one bit."

Hoping down from the stretch, she threw the bloodied cloth in the nearest bin and started to attach her weapons to the place where they were before she stripped them to be treated. "What does that mean? People don't change all the time". Claire Farron had changed to Lightning once, and Lightning had changed to what she was now while pursuing her Focus but, since then, there wasn't any reason to go through another metamorphosis.

Hope sounded very serious, and that called for her attention. He could be a drama queen, sometimes, but he did not like to lose his time with bullshit, just like her.

"It means you have not aged, Light."

Lightning stopped checking her gunblade and turned to look at him.

"Look at Lebreau, and Yuj, and Gadot – they were near your age when the whole mess began, and now they are certainly looking… Well, older."

Lightning thought of her reply, but remained silent, running his words over her head. Usually, humans do not notice their aging, because it happens gradually, and they always have the time to adapt slowly to all the new things happening to their bodies. Gadot had retired from camp activity a while back, saying he did not have the same reflexes he had a decade ago; and she did remember the tantrum Lebreau had thrown last week after she found a single white her among her dark ones.

It was probably Hope's paranoia, or confusion, but. Could she really say she had aged at all in the last ten years? The face at the mirror everyday was the same since ever. She didn't find a wrinkle or line in her skin, or white hair like Lebreau. Her maintained stamina could be explained by her daily training, but her colleagues with the same age were not as active as she still was, nowadays.

All in all, she really did not feel any older. The last ten years had passed so quickly and full of changes for their people – Cocoon falling on Pulse and forcing its inhabitants to search shelter and safe ground in the wilderness – that her own changes went unnoticed. She only knew the time had passed at all because Hope, here, in front of her, was a head taller and used to be a head smaller, and his face had lost all the baby fat to turn into the classic, handsome features she had grown used to without even noticing.

Later that day, they were all at the bar (the new one Lebreau had been quick to create in their new environment), sitting together in the bunch of tables a separated from the other costumers, as it happened every month since the Ragnarök incident. They did that to never lose contact – now, at least. In the beginning, it happened so the group could discuss any signals of their lives being threatened by the government, since they had been the ones to trigger the whole change in the world.

Today, though, Hope had brought up the age subject. Sazh was quickly to laugh it off.

"What are you saying, kid? You sure don't look a little shrimp anymore, as you looked like back then."

Nobody really paid attention to what Hope said, and Lightning stayed quiet while the others made fun of him. But she did notice Sazh was supposed to be fifty that month, and she could not find anything that showed the pilot had aged at all. Serah, too. She was too used to the sight of her sister, and had not noticed she was still the eighteen-year-old girl she was before becoming a L'Cie, even after having two kids and putting up with Snow every day.

When the reunion was over, and Serah and Snow went back home to dismiss the nanny and watch their children, and Sazh nudged Dajh home, since the boy had a exam the next day and needed to sleep. Lightning waved at them and fell in pace with Hope, like she always did. He had been too young when those fomer-L'Cie-meetings had begun, and she always escorted him home at the end, since his father trusted her to protect his son.

It had become routine, like everything else – including her unchanging face in the mirror.

"You don't need to do this, anymore, you know. I can take care of myself."

She snorted and didn't tell him that old habits die hard. However, she did notice the need she had to protect him had turned into fierce friendship over the years. At first, she had shielded him; right now, they stood in equal ground. The time passed quickly, and she had not understood it until that moment.

"I don't even live with my father, anymore", he mumbled. Lightning chuckled.

"Don't you feel lonely?"

He sighed. Then looked at her, curiously. "Don't you?"

She felt the question enter deep in her mind.

After the "great hero marriage", Lightning moved out of her house, under the vehement protest of her sister and her husband. Nothing could demote her of that intent, though. That house was big, and meant for a family, which was what her sister was creating with Snow. Lightning did not deserve to stay with the house, since she was a loner, and would still be a loner for a long time.

Of course, that had not been her excuse: she had said living with Snow was beyond her patience capacity. Nobody could say otherwise.

Her home right now was a small apartment in a quiet area of the town, and it was all she needed. Anyway, she spent little time in it, working most of the waking hours and being dragged by her sister the rest of the time. Sometimes, though…

"Sometimes."

Hope sighed again. They neared his house – the one his father gave him when the boy said he wanted to ingress in the Guardian Corps, since the Security Regiment was now responsible for protecting the whole new world built in Gran Pulse. Lightning stopped, and waited for him to go inside. He kept walking.

"Where are you going?"

"I'll accompany you home, this time."

"You don't need to."

"It's not far from here."

She would keep the argument, but watching his back, large and belonging to a man, not a child, she decided to indulge him. They kept walking in companionable silence for minutes before Hope talked again, hiding his hands inside the pockets of his cloak.

"What will you do, Light? If you really are to be young forever."

She had been thinking that since looking at Sazh's afro, and noticing it didn't have any white hair. Hours passed, and she didn't have a clue.

"What can I do besides keep living?"

Always the realist. Hope laughed, and looked at her, tilting his head to the side. His green eyes glinted in the dim street light, and Lightning wondered if he had always been this tall. She had watched him grow, but had not felt the reality of that until now. Twenty-four years old, he was older than she had been back then, when they met. Not a kid anymore. Then again, he had not been exactly a kid back then, too. So serious. So mature. Learning very quickly how to hit vital points, how to avoid combat, how to clean the blood of his weapons, so they wouldn't rust.

"That's so like you."

"Your point?"

His eyes were veiled, now, and she wondered when he learned to hide from her like that.

"Young forever. Living forever. We'll only have each other, after some time."

Oh. That. Well, it's not like it would be a big trouble.

"It's fine, by me."

He chuckled again, knowingly, and turned to open the iron door that closed the entrance for the stairs that climbed up to her apartment. She followed, wondering if he intended to leave her at her door.

He did. She reached for her pocket, and pulled out the keys while he leaned in the wall beside the door. He watched her with the same intensity he always did.

"It's fine by me, too."

Looking up from the lock, Lightning only had time to blink. His face was too close, his green eyes were glinting in the dark, and he put a hand on her shoulder to pull her closer. And he kissed her.

It was more like a brush of lips than anything else but, as much as Lightning could have gone years without caring to have a real boyfriend or something, she was not a shy virgin and knew what counted as intimacy between two persons. That was a kiss, all right, but it was over before she could decide why and what to do about it.

Hope passed by her and waved with his back turned. "See you tomorrow, Light."

Things started to change quickly after that.

Firstly, Lightning was intrigued with the whole thing, and even forgot a little about the possible immortality issue. More importantly, Hope had obviously kissed her, and, the next day, joined her at the GC's cafeteria for breakfast as if nothing of the sort had happened. He came, sat beside her, gave her a coffee cup – black, with a little sugar – and started to talk about something, like he did every morning since starting to work there. When the time came, he stood up, caressed her neck with a quick brush of his hand, and went to work.

To say she was dumbfounded was an understatement. Lightning had no idea what to make of his actions and, because of that, had not decided how to take them. So, she just let him do the… Things. Buying her coffee, or waiting for her at the end of the day so they would walk home together, or buying her knew gloves, or guiding her with the hand pressed in the small of her back.

When she finally understood what he was doing, everything was already routine, just like her still face on the mirror, and the monthly reunions of their group of friends. She didn't know how to stop it, or why she should stop it.

One day, when he had walked her home and pressed her gently against her door to crush her lips with his, when she found herself kissing him back fiercely, Lightning decided to address the situation verbally. Amazed at her own reactions, surprised at wanting that thing so much it twisted her belly in a painful but pleasurable way, she pushed his shoulders back to look at his face. And maybe she had to look up to see his it, but she was strong enough to make their bodies distance themselves without much effort.

Hope sighed, resignated.

"What are you doing?"

Arching one eyebrow, he grinned. "You really need me to answer?"

She frowned, and remembered that if he was someone else – anyone else – she would have already beat the crap of him. Hell, she would not even had let him five inches from her.

But he was Hope. And he had kissed her. Why had he kissed her?

"Why?"

Not trying to force her hands always, he lifted his free arms that were holding her waist, and used his hands to cup her face. They were warm, and calloused from using tools and testing fireguns and blades, and she remembered those long fingers could also play the piano, as he had told her some lost day. She could not remember a time when those hands had been smaller, and holding the back of her uniform for reassurance in front of peril.

Right now, they were so big they caged her face effortlessly.

"When I was fourteen", he began, never blinking, staring at her cerulean eyes like they were the last thing he would see, "I had a crush on you. My father used to laugh at me because of it, and I knew it was useless to look at you in that way. Because I was just a kid, and I knew it."

He smiled his small smile, and it really fit his face.

"So I went through puberty with this problem, and tried to be mature about it, and dated some girls, and lived through this new life we got, and when I was finally aware of myself, I had followed your footsteps to enter GC and see you every day, and, hey, maybe that crush was not that silly, because I still lose my breath every time I see you."

She stared at him, digesting his worlds. Being truthful, she had never thought about him that way – making out in the corridor way, specifically – until he had dared to kiss her that night. After, in the lack of more important things to consider, amidst her unchanging routine, Hope was all she could think about. And his company, that had always been part of her days since a long time ago, was something she enjoyed.

She also enjoyed his big, grownup hands caressing her face, and the warm eyes that saw only her. Lightning really enjoyed it, and maybe, a while back, she would have given a thought about their age difference, to dismiss it as bullshit soon after (she was really pragmatic, like everybody said), but right now her age and his age did not matter anymore. After all, she had been L'Cie, her Focus had been completed, she had become a crystal statue, and now… Well, now she was stuck forever with her unchanging image in the mirror. Her age didn't really matter anymore.

Hope seemed a little nervous confronted with her silence, and she understood it was her turn now. She sighed deeply and moved her hands near his neck.

"So, what now?"

A little surprised, and a happy, Hope touched her forehead with his and caressed her cheeks with his thumbs, carefully.

"Now, we continue what we were doing. And then, one day you'll invite me to enter you house. And sometime after that, I'll ask you to live with me. And after that, Snow and Serah will bug us and pressure us and ask if we are going to get married someday. I'll be very irritated with that, but will reach the conclusion they have a point and ask you to marry me. And if you accept, maybe I'll also ask if you want to have children."

Lightning watched him, incredulous, and he laughed out loud. His body shook near hers.

"That, of course, will happen with time. Right now, I'm satisfied with the kissing, since it took me ages to get here."

And that he did. She complied. When they separated again, trying to breath, Lighting felt her keys pressing against her back, inside her pocket, and reached the conclusion that time was a relative thing. She apparently had the eternity to live, but did not need to wait forever for something that was right in front of her.

That thought, Lightning pulled Hope's hand, took her keys and jammed them into the lock, opening it to throw the startled man inside the apartment. Smirking, she closed the door with her feet, and started to push him to the bedroom. He gasped when she fell with him on the bed.

"That's impressive, but you didn't count me in your plans at all."

...

In the next monthly reunion of the L'Cie group and their allies, everybody had things to say about Hope's immortality theory. Sazh finally noticed all his pilot fellows were retiring. Serah commented how the other moms at school asked if she was the sister of her little kids. Lebreau was feeling betrayed by the prospect of getting old while Snow would never be hit by advanced age. Gadot and Yuj kept laughing at her. Snow said they were all exaggerating, and asked Lighting's opinion on the matter.

He was surprised speechless when he turned to his sister-in-law only to watch Hope with one arm over her shoulders, whispering something in her ear and making her smile.

...

END

Disclaimer: FFXIII. Not mine. Pff.

Notes: First Final Fantasy fic ever, because I'm so obcessed with HopuRai it makes me crazy.