Work Text:
"Do you remember the promise you made me?"
Hope stops at the sudden question, puts down his pen, smiles at his research paper. “Which one?” he asks innocently (but they both know full well what she’s talking about), as he looks up at her.
Vanille pouts (though she isn’t really angry at him). “You know the one. Back on Gran Pulse.”
"Ah, so it’s the promise I never made, then?" (She knows he’s just teasing her, but she crosses her arms anyway.) “What about it?”
She sits herself down in the seat in front of him, folds her hands neatly in her lap. “I was thinking,” she says quietly, and Hope has to strain to listen to her words. “We – we’ve all known each other for so long, but we’ve never really had much time to be ourselves, don’t you think? We were always fighting, trying our best to survive – but now we’re in another world, Hope, and our fighting days are a lifetime away. We’re no longer Pulse l’Cie, enemies of Cocoon – you’re not a Director and I’m not a legend; we’re just Hope and Vanille now, and – “
"Vanille," Hope says gently, cutting across her. (She doesn’t mind the interruption; she was fast losing track of her words.) He reaches across to grasp her hands in his, and she enjoys the feeling of his fingers stroking hers. “What is it?”
Vanille tilts her head to catch Hope’s gaze.
"I want to see the world, Hope," Vanille says breathlessly, and her eyes are shining emerald (and it’s in moments like these that Hope remembers why he fell in love with her in the first place. She’s radiant, like a star glowing brightly in the midst of a sky painted black, and he still can’t quite believe that she’s his). “We fought so hard for this, and I – I want to see Europe, I want to see Asia, Hope, let’s travel together. We can get Fang and Lightning and the rest, we can all see this new world we helped to create – “
"Hey, slow down," Hope laughs, and leans across the table to kiss her (he can tell a lot of things, through that kiss. He knows that she’s wearing strawberry lipgloss, that’s she’s smiling against his lips because she’s just that excited, and that he never wants to kiss another pair of lips again). “We’ve barely settled down here. Let’s try and establish our normal lives here before we go running off into the great unknown.”
But he knows, as well as she does, that there will never be normal for them, because they’ve all been through too much together. (She also knows, without any words being said, that his heart is already set on her idea, but she wants to hear the words from his mouth, so she waits.)
Hope can think of a thousand reasons why they shouldn’t go: work, commitments, routine; and each reason sounds flimsier than the last, because Vanille is really the only reason he needs to do anything.
And at long last, finally, he says, “When shall we begin?”
(They don’t know what’s out there, but they’ll be facing it together, and that’s all they really need.)