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A year passes. Midgar forgets itself.
It isn’t a ruin, hasn’t suffered the blessing of the elements and time alike wearing it down to its bones. It stands, in places. The Shinra building groans in the wind, sloughing beams and walls and whole wings with a thundering crash the people have started framing their days around.
The plates won’t remain suspended forever, not without the thrum of endless maintenance. The mako reactors intrude upon the horizon, great, gutted beasts that are grateful to have been put out of their misery. Sparks rise from them, now and again. People watch the sky for the familiar turquoise burn of the planet’s cry, but their eyes focus and only stars remain.
Midgar is a city, a thing moulded by human hands, only animate when orders are beaten into it. It is no forest or river, no winding canyon. It cannot shape its own path, nurture itself, slowly changing as it sees fit.
All that remains is to pick it apart.
But there is beauty in it, too. Migratory birds return to forgotten roosts. Without the endless churn of the reactors, the ground remembers itself. It drinks down every drop of rain and lets the wind rush over it. Grass grows, flowers bloom. Ivy bursts from the ground, wrapping around concrete, steel, the jagged frames of shattered windows; anything and everything it can reach.
And Aerith feels it all.
The swirl of life beneath her feet, held back for decades, almost violent in its return. The voices of those who have returned to the planet reach her with a rataplan, no longer fearing all the reactors will take from them.
She spends her days as she always has: keeping busy, helping those in need, and tending to her flowers. The wall of Midgar has fallen. The new city spreads out onto the open plains, more than corrugated iron rusting against misshapen blocks of concrete, bathed in the gloam of artificial suns. It doesn’t compare to the streets that once sprawled across the topside, architecture grand and imposing, and likely never will.
It took months for the dust to settle. Longer for the topsiders to accepted that there was no more Shinra, no more mako, no stark divide between themselves and those who’d lurked beneath the plate. Luckily, there are those like Barret who remember a world without mako, and the shapes of towns and villages that never depended on its brilliant, hollowing power. A man named Reeve, who has studied infrastructure from Midgar to Wutai, joins Avalanche’s restoration efforts, helping create something with order and integrity.
The Seventh Heaven, no longer just a bar, stands on the precipice of the slums and the new city. It is a community hub, spread over three floors, offering advice for those braving the new world, homes for those in need, and jobs for any who want to help. Hot food is served throughout the day, and the dozen apartments built along the back ever have people coming and going.
Aerith spends as much of her time as she can there with Tifa, surrounded by familiar faces, never lacking chores to attend to. Tifa stands behind the bar, wiping it down after a long day, never so content as she is when everything has found its rightful place.
“Question: when do you sleep?” Aerith asks, perched on a stool, chin rested against her palm. “If you’re not here, shaking cocktails and listening to half the world’s woes, you’re out breaking up fights and putting roofs over people’s heads.”
Tifa comes close to rolling her eyes. She’s always been far too modest.
“What about you?” Tifa challenges. “You’re bringing a whole city back to life.”
“That’s not me. That’s the planet! I can’t take credit for what she’s doing,” Aerith protests. “Besides, it’s just in my blood. Anything that happens around me just kind of… happens.”
Tifa holds her gaze until they both break out into smiles.
Stretching her arms over her head, Aerith says, “I guess we’re both pretty great, huh?”
Tifa answers with a grin and a drink, always on the house.
“Have you seen Cloud lately?” Tifa asks.
Concern laces her voice, tempered by time. The last year has been hard on each and every soul in Midgar, homes ripped away from them, power dried to nothing, but Cloud has stumbled across his own struggles. They pull him to and fro, tugging him between the solitude of abandoned slums and the blossoming community built upon the scorched earth.
“Oh, not this week. You know how he is,” Aerith says, never sounding quite so dismissive as she wants to. “Always out, scavenging through the ruins, thinking he has to build a city with his own two hands.”
“Yeah,” Tifa murmurs. “Yeah, you’re right. He’ll be back when he’s back, huh?”
“That’s our Cloud,” Aerith says, holding up her empty glass.
Tifa lights the lanterns and candles spread throughout the bar. A gruelling day of construction sees people pouring in as soon as the sky begins to darken. Aerith hops to her feet, hands on the bar so she can swing forward and kiss Tifa’s cheek.
She promises to return soon. Tifa tells her to get some sleep, Aerith returns the sentiment, and weaves her way out of the bar, waving at familiar faces as she goes.
The new city spreads towards the far horizon. Aerith turns towards the slums. She’ll have to leave her house behind one day, the logical part of her knows that. Yet she’s starting to believe that if the plate ever came crashing down, oak trees would sprout from the ground, a whole forest there to protect her, keeping the steel sky precious inches above her home.
The slums have been cleared out. Everything that could be repurposed is out in the open, drinking down sunlight and clear air. Only those who can’t bear to leave their homes remain. Aerith hops over rubble, taking the worn path past the old Leaf House and through her garden.
She’ll have to leave, one day, but the crash of the waterfall and the sway of the flowers make the first moment she stares at her home eternal.
Inside, the lights are low. The plate above, stripped of its suns, casts the garden into a gloom the flowers are sworn to battle against.
Even in the dark, it’s impossible to miss Cloud sitting outside the front door. Aerith clasps her hands behind her back, taking slow, wide strides towards him. She bites back a grin, not wanting to scare him off.
“You’re not still scared of my mom, are you?” Aerith asks.
Grunting, Cloud gets to his feet.
“Just waiting for you,” he says.
He waves an arm towards the front door, shoulders heavy, eyes sparking with mako and a light of his own.
“Such a gentleman,” Aerith says, letting him hold the door open.
“Aerith, honey. Perfect timing. I’m just about ready to serve up—” Elmyra begins, pausing as she glances over her shoulder. “Oh. Cloud, hello. How are you?”
She greets him as warmly as she ever does. She’s getting better, but even Aerith’s endless insistence that Cloud isn’t going to disappear forever doesn’t reassure her. Vanishing once is bad enough, in a mother’s book.
“Well. Thank you,” Cloud says, trying his best. “Let me—”
He steps into the kitchen, knowing the drawers and cabinets by heart. He lays the table for three, having long since learnt that Elmyra always makes extra, then sits quietly between Aerith and her mother.
Aerith is bursting with questions for him, all the same as ever. Where has he been, all this time? How has he been? Is his head still bothering him? The nightmares, too? Pursing her lips, Aerith turns her attention to her mother. She tells her all about the day’s progress, and how much Marlene liked the scarf she knit for her.
Cloud eats slowly. He places a hand on the tabletop, close to Aerith. He answers all of Elmyra’s questions, sincere and detached, but never asks any of his own. With dinner done, he washes the dishes. Aerith talks and talks, not giving her mother the chance to make any comments about Cloud while the water runs and dishes chime together.
Elmyra retires with a book to the corner of the living room. Aerith takes Cloud’s hand, leading him up to the balcony atop the house.
He sits close to her on the bench, eyes on the sky that borders the far end of the plate. Every time he returns from wherever it is he goes, Aerith fears that they’ll have to start all over again; everything between them will begin anew, over and over, never progressing beyond their last parting.
“Dinner was good,” Cloud eventually says. “Your mom is a great cook.”
“You say that every time,” Aerith teases.
“It’s great every time,” he counters.
Laughing softly, Aerith says, “She doesn’t hate you, you know. She’s just looking out for me! She spent a decade and a half keeping me safe from Shinra, and you’re just the latest thing for her to worry about.”
“She’s just being your mom. I get it.”
“Then you’ll stop being scared of her?”
Cloud stretches his neck from side to side.
“… No promises.”
Aerith smiles. Something softens in Cloud. He wraps an arm around her and pulls her closer, fingertips idly running through her hair.
Resting her head on his shoulder, Aerith says, “Where were you this time?”
“Out in sector two. A few families refused to leave their homes, but a chunk of plate came crashing down. Took us days to get ‘em out, even with Barret there,” Cloud explains. “After that… dunno. Lost track of time.”
“Mister Mercenary, Saviour of the Slums. What will you do with your time once everyone’s out and the city’s all built up?”
Cloud leans back enough to raise his brow.
“What?” Aerith asks, narrowing her gaze.
“Like you’re going anywhere easily.”
Cloud nods towards the garden, wild within its constraints. Each scrap of land cradles something that promises to bloom all year round.
“Oh? So I’m sooo stubborn that I’ll dig my heels in even after the plate’s fallen and you’ll spend the rest of your days trying to drag me out into the real world?” Aerith asks.
“Yep. Sounds right.”
Cloud wraps both arms around her waist. Aerith leans close, feeling his breath warm on her face.
“And what if I do get out of here? What if I build a new house next to Tifa’s and let the planet take this all back? What will you do then, hmm?”
Cloud shrugs.
“Learn to garden, I guess.”
“Ah! Of course Mister Everything has a green thumb,” Aerith says.
“What? Even you won’t get all your flowers back overnight.”
Aerith feels him relax as he speaks, yielding to the present, to the possibilities ahead of him. His torrent of thoughts interspersed with mismatched memories fall quiet, and he kisses Aerith’s temple, her cheek, her mouth.
Aerith watches as shadows claim the garden, till Cloud’s eyes are the brightest thing under the steel sky. She’ll have to leave, one day. She’ll have to face the moon, the stars, and all the rest, but for now, she has Cloud and her garden.
There’s nowhere else she has to be.
She leads Cloud to her room. It takes him an age to unlace his boots. Aerith doesn’t want to be without him, but she understands who he is, what he needs. She knows that he disappears into the city and within himself so that he can gather rubble and memories alike, working towards the day he can bear to stand out in the sun.
They aren’t so different.
Aerith knows he’ll always return. She trusts him with everything she is, but that doesn’t stop her from clinging tightly to him in the night, holding him close as he rocks above her, mumbling that she missed him into his mouth. There’s an honesty in intimacy that they can’t often face in the light of day.
Aerith falls asleep against him, hair askew, strong arms around her. When she stirs, short hours after midnight, the bed is empty next to her. Cloud stands at the window, elbows on the sill, hands in his hair.
The silhouette has become a night time companion. Aerith rubs her face, ensuring she’s properly awae before approaching him.
She tiptoes across the floor and places a hand on his bear back. All his muscles tense, shoulder blades pulling together, and a soft gasp leaves his mouth as he returns to the room, to the woman next to him.
“Aerith. Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “Go back to sleep. It’s late.”
“Or early!” she says, taking one of his hands between her own. “And you know I won’t sleep without you there. The slums are still dangerous, and this is no place for a humble florist without her bodyguard.”
Cloud’s mouth quirks at the corner.
“Yeah,” he says, letting himself be led back to bed.
Aerith wraps the blankets around them. Cloud’s body remains taut, like he’s lying on coarse ground.
“Want to talk about it?” Aerith asks softly.
Shuffling onto his side, Cloud mutters, “Nah.”
Aerith lets him turn his back to her. She doesn’t reach for him, though her fingers twitch. She gives him the pretence of privacy, lets him stare into the darkness until he finds the words he needs.
“It’s just—everything. All these memories, my head. It’s…” He pauses, humming in frustration. “I hate that I lied to everyone. To myself. About who I was, what I was. I don’t know how to go back from that.”
“You didn’t lie to us,” Aerith says, hand hovering over his back. “You went through something terrible, Cloud. Your mind did everything it could to protect itself! You were confused, you were hurt, and it’s okay that you didn’t know what to do with that.”
Cloud nods into his pillow.
The unravelling of Shinra, of old, corrupt power systems, saw to the unravelling of Cloud. He had tied himself in knots to keep the bitter past out, but the people had been angry. They wanted their old lives back, the comforts mako energy had brought them, because surely Shinra had never been in the wrong. It was all Avalanche, spreading lies, inciting fear, begging Wutai to pick their weapons back up.
But when the war didn’t return to Midgar and more and more underground research facilities were uncovered, hundreds and thousands of human experiments suspended in tanks and left to rot, the people realised they couldn’t go on as they’d been.
Something had cracked open in Cloud. He’d looked into those tanks and seen his own reflection.
“I shouldn’t—shouldn’t let it get to me. Wasn’t all bad,” Cloud mumbles. “The mako infusions. Wouldn’t be anything without ‘em. Don’t remember most of it. Not yet. I spent all those years in a tank, unconscious for most of it. And you, you were awake, you were a kid, and you’re…”
Aerith props herself up on an elbow. They’ve had this conversation before, but that doesn’t make it any easier for Cloud; it doesn’t mean he can go without saying it all again.
“And I’m?” Aerith asks.
Cloud glances over his shoulder.
“You’re you. When I met you, you spent your days helping orphans. You’re so… strong. Nothing gets you down. Nothing stops you,” Cloud says, staring back at the wall. “You keep going, in spite of everything. In spite of Shinra. You don’t let it define you.”
Aerith rests her hand on Cloud’s back. He doesn’t flinch.
“That’s how you see me. And it’s sweet! Really, Cloud. But it’s only from the outside. I could say the same about you, mister. Always running off to dig people out of rubble, never turning anyone away, rarely taking a single gil for it,” Aerith says. “But the truth is… I’m terrified, Cloud. All the time. Everything’s one big distraction to me. I don’t want to think about all those years in Hojo’s lab, so I pretend I’ve always been here. I’m just a simple florist, doing her best to make the slums a little brighter! I’m no differeny from you, or any other human. I’m definitely not the last Cetra left wandering the planet.”
Cloud shuffles onto his other side. It’s easier for him when Aerith’s the one talking. In truth, it’s been building up within her for months. Things have been busier than ever, and the Leaf House has opened so many new branches. Between having the earth bloom beneath her feet and watching a city rise along the horizon, she’s barely had time to catch her breath.
“I never missed my mother. Not in the way normal people do. I knew she’d returned to the planet, and that she was happy. Part of a flow of the world, just like she’d always been,” Aerith continues. “But just before you rescued me, Hojo told me—he said he’d taken her body. Stolen it. He hadn’t let it return to the planet in its own way. He’d taken it apart. Her skin, teeth, bones, hair—everything, all of her, put into boxes.
And I now that’s not her. Not really. But she was my mother, and I can’t stop thinking about everything she went through. How I’d cry every time they took her from me, and how tired she was when she came back. She never stopped fighting for me. She clung to me whenever the scientists took me away. And for so long, I pretended it was just part of my life, something that just happened…”
Cloud pulls her close, arms around her. He doesn’t say anything, but Aerith hears the steady beat of his heart.
“Do you know why I’m so scared of the sky? Of the real one?” Aerith asks.
Cloud shakes his head.
“Because I spent all those years at the top of the Shinra building, staring out the window. That was the only time I used to see it, and I was only safe once my mother took me to the slums, and my mom found me.”
“That’s rough,” Cloud murmurs. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to bring that all up. I’ll get my head on straight soon enough.”
“No. No, I want to share this with you, Cloud. I want you to share with me, too. Hojo did awful things to both of us. Neither of us had it worse, we just… we didn’t deserve any of it. But we have each other now, right?”
Cloud kisses the top of her head. Aerith closes her eyes, focusing on his heartbeat.
“… Is that really the only reason you don’t like the sky?” Cloud asks.
Aerith laughs softly. He really does know her too well.
“It’s the planet. With the mako reactors offline and the ground around Midgar healing, everything’s so loud. It’s so much. The flowers, the plants, the moss—to everyone else, they’re bursting out of nowhere! But that isn’t it. It’s all part of the cycle, and I’m caught up in that. I can feel it. Hear it. It’s like it’s all growing from me, and maybe that’s selfish, but it can get too much for a girl, y’know? So! I want to ignore my place in the world, down here under the grey, gloomy sky, and keep tending to my flowers.”
“Right. Denial. I get that,” Cloud says.
Aerith jabs his side, grinning. She doesn’t have to tell him how difficult it’s been, how the voices of the planet have rushed to her, always needing something, forgetting the living need rest. Cloud might disappear without warning, but he always finds his way back exactly when Aerith needs him.
“You don’t want to deal with being a Cetra. I don’t want to deal with not being a SOLDIER,” Cloud says. “Great match, huh?”
“I’m turning you into a real softie, Cloud Strife.”
“Maybe. Just wait until I have to be a real hardass and drag you out of the slums,” Cloud says.
Aerith laughs. The tension’s left Cloud’s body and the air is clear between them. She wraps herself around him, lulled back to sleep now she knows the worst of it has passed for him.
With her eyes too heavy to blink open, Aerith murmurs, “Tell me about it. About what will happen when you sweep me off my feet and out into the big, wide world.”
Cloud takes his time answering. Aerith almost drifts off.
“I’ll build you a house, I guess,” he says.
“You’ll build me a house?”
“Sure. Got lots of practise, now.”
“And there’ll be a garden?” Aerith asks, halfway to dreaming.
“Uh huh.”
“And you’ll help me tend to the flowers.”
“That’s what I said.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Aerith says, already seeing it behind her eyelids.
A house a little more modest than this one, built around necessities. A garden bathed in sunlight that won’t feel so unbearable, then, flowers springing from the soft earth.
“Guess your mom will need one, too.”
“A house?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Why? ‘cause we’re too old to live with your mom forever,” Cloud says.
Aerith hums softly. There’s a gentle promise in it. Cloud won’t be forever disappearing, serving penance in the slums to numb all the pain he’s been dragged through. Through no subtlety of her own, Aerith lets him know that he doesn’t have to go through this alone, and that there’s nothing he could say to drive her away.
She only wishes she could give him as much as he’s given her. He always comes home, he always listens, and he always understands.
“So you are scared of my mom,” Aerith says, grinning.
“Guess I am,” Cloud says, huffing a laugh.