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It was in a gloomy January when he first saw her. Cloud had taken refuge from the storm in an abandoned cottage on the Midgar moors, and she followed in not long after, accompanied by her steed and her earnest companion, a man with long black hair, tied back to further accentuate the sharpness of his countenance.
Her face was cloaked with the shadow of her hood, but as she let it fall down, a sudden flash of lightning made her features appear with clarity. There was a toss of brown hair as she brushed her long braid over her shoulder, and there was something graceful in the swiftness of the action.
“We mustn’t stay too long, your mother expects you back home now,” the man said, and she nodded in acquiescence. She had paid not much heed to Cloud beforehand, but as she left there was a quick glance thrown over her shoulder, and the traces of a smile on her lips. The man regarded him with a silent interest, but it was difficult to tell what he could have been thinking of him with the blankness of his expression.
He hadn’t seen her again until March, when the Shinras hosted the spring ball. Cloud was generally indifferent towards the Shinra family, and indifferent towards social gatherings in general, but he attended anyway for the sake of being a companion to his friend, Zack.
From across the room was where he caught sight of her. Initially he didn’t recognise her; she was dressed in a magnificent pink garment and her hair was styled in an elaborate up-do, but then he saw her black-haired friend accompanying her, and in his heart he felt the desire to approach her and ask for a dance.
Cloud spoke of her to Zack, who told him that the girl was called Aerith, and that she was the daughter of a noble family.
He learned from him that Aerith's escort was called Tseng. As he watched him from across the room, a thought flitted through his mind that the two could very well be lovers. He wondered why that thought upset him so.
After some persistent begging, Cloud shared a dance with Zack to keep him sweet before he decided to step outside for some air in the courtyard. Some minutes later he heard the sound of footsteps on the cobblestones behind him, and he was startled by a sudden tap on his shoulder.
He turned. Aerith offered her hand and her name, and Cloud gave his as he took it. She remarked that he was a talented dancer, and then there was a sudden flash of recognition across her face.
"I remember you from the storm."
From behind her Cloud caught sight of a figure standing among the topiaries. From one glimpse of his countenance and neat long hair, he recognised it was Tseng.
"Don't mind him," Aerith said as she followed where Cloud's gaze was leading. "It's his job to keep an eye on me while I'm away from home."
"Does it not annoy you?"
"I'm used to it. He's only doing what my mother asks."
Tseng approached and placed a hand on her shoulder. Now that Cloud could see his face up close, in the light, he noticed how handsome he was, and he thought bitterly to himself, they suit each other.
"Miss Gainsborough, it's getting late."
"Five more minutes, Tseng."
"Very well." He gave an astute nod to Cloud before retreating.
They exchanged brief small talk before Aerith said that sadly she must leave, and before Cloud could ask for one quick dance, she had already turned and hurried up the steps of the courtyard into the ballroom. He followed a short time after, but when he returned indoors she had already been lost among the crowd of bodies.
Zack came to him, offered a glass of champagne and said, “You seem keen on her.”
“It was nothing. There could never be anything between us.”
“Yes, I think that escort of hers wouldn’t allow it. He seems pretty fond of her himself.”
Cloud drained the last of his drink, and despite Zack’s pleas for one last dance together, he insisted that he just wanted to go home. He didn’t dare let his inner despair be shown on his face, despair that he did not know why he was feeling. It was none of his business what the nature of Aerith and Tseng’s relationship was. He hardly knew her, anyway.
He walked home as night unfolded and the sounds of foxes and crows screeching echoed in the distance. The memory of Aerith, the way she looked in the majestic ballroom lights, and her mellow disposition continued to linger on his mind, until he realised that the prospect of seeing her again and any interaction more than meaningless small talk was only a childish fancy.
Three days later, when the weather was particularly fine, Cloud set out to clear his head after a long day and walked along the beach that bordered the eastern continent. It was a crisp evening, and the fresh sea air had made him feel the most invigorated he had ever felt in a long time.
As he stood there looking out into the vastness of the sea, there was the sound of a voice being carried away by the wind that Cloud did not initially recognise nor pay any attention to, until he heard the voice again, closer to him now, and he realised that it was calling out his name. He turned, and almost staggered when he saw Aerith standing there. She appeared vastly different than she did at the ball, with her hair in a messily tied low braid and wearing a shirt and slacks, her face in the orange sunset being reminiscent of that of an angel in a Renaissance painting.
“Fancy seeing you again, Cloud,” she said with a smile. “I do wish we could’ve spent more time together at the ball, but Tseng would have been greatly agitated if I didn’t come to meet him when I said I would.”
“I don’t suppose he’s waiting for you over there?”
She laughed. “He doesn’t know I’m here. You were right, it does get quite annoying at times.”
She gestured for Cloud to follow her down to the other end of the beach, where a little hut sat on the threshold between the sand and the grasslands. Inside was a singular, slightly cramped room decorated with two cushioned chairs, a small bookcase, and a framed painting of a landscape, most likely somewhere near Mideel, on the wall. With a hand gesture she invited Cloud to sit.
“This is yours?” he asked.
“Yes. I like to come here when I need to get away from home, but without Tseng always keeping an eye on me.”
"I think he's rather fond of you," Cloud said with a bitterness in his voice he couldn’t control, but Aerith didn’t seem to notice.
"He is." Then, she saw the pained expression on his face that he failed to conceal. "Oh! No, not like that. He sees me more as a younger sister than anything."
"I see. I’m sorry for prying.”
"And to me, he's only my escort, and a friend, nothing more," she added with finality.
In the solitude of Aerith’s beach hut they were free to converse about many things. She spoke little of her parents, except that her father died when she was too young to remember, and more of her disdain for her noble life; how it was hard to be truly in a state of quietude when there were constant eyes and expectations placed upon you.
“I didn’t really want to go to the spring ball, honestly. I’m not a fan of big parties like that, but Rufus Shinra is a childhood family friend of mine, and it would have been terribly impolite if I declined.”
“I don’t like them either. I only go to be a companion for my friend.”
“The man with black hair, and the scar on his cheek?”
“Yes, his name is Zack. We’ve been friends for many years. We’ve always accompanied each other to most places.”
"It must be nice to have someone like that in your life."
They talked until the hut was cloaked in darkness and the moon was a full bulb in the sky, and Aerith said, with a look of sombreness expressed on her countenance, that she must take leave now, lest her mother should notice she was gone.
They stood, and before they parted, Aerith planted a swift kiss on Cloud's cheek. He felt her slip something into the pocket of his waistcoat, and found, when they were separated, a small piece of folded up paper. On it was scribbled her address, and, 'Write me a letter from time to time.'
From that point on, at times they would meet again in Aerith’s beach hut, but more often than not their main communications were through almost daily letters. As spring began to cease, so did their meetings at the beach, but the letters continued coming and going, and as long as that was how it stayed, Cloud was okay.
He kept all of Aerith’s letters in a box, tied together with a ribbon, in his closet. On nights where sleep never came easy or some other ailment was distressing him, he would reread all of them, and her eloquent prose and words of affection acted as laudanum to him.
Cloud spoke of her often to Zack, who would ask him in an uncharacteristically pessimistic way, how he could possibly be happy with this relationship that would never be any more than what it was now: the exchanging of letters professing affections like childish first-time lovers, but nothing more than that. Marriage would never happen; with Aerith being of nobility and Cloud of a lower class, they would both be shunned. He assumed that Zack was jealous he didn’t have him all to himself anymore, but deep down he knew that he was right.
In June, the Shinra family hosted the summer solstice ball. Cloud attended with the hope that Aerith would be there, and his heart swelled as he wondered how she would look under the sun’s benevolent rays, what kind of garment she would wear, how her hair would be done.
He waited, but she never came. From within the throng of summer gowns and suits there was no sight of that shiny brown hair, or green eyes, and no sound of that musical laughter.
“I don’t think she will be coming,” Zack said to him with a pitying expression.
He offered Cloud a drink and his hand for a dance. Cloud refused, and went home.
The next morning Cloud found no letter waiting for him, nor the day after that. Zack reasoned that Aerith could be away from home or busy, but Cloud felt in his heart a sudden pang like some kind of presage or alert of something terrible, and wanted to find out what it was. He walked across the moors to her manor house, which he had seen when passing by to travel to Kalm before, but in these past months had never dared to visit.
Tseng was the one who answered the door when he knocked. For a moment his mask slipped and his face appeared for but a brief moment surprised, then concerned, then relieved all within a second. Tseng told him that Aerith has spoken about the letters they exchanged and their blossoming relationship. To Cloud’s surprise, he seemed not to be bothered by the controversy of it at all.
“I am grateful for how happy you make her,” he said.
Tseng told him that Aerith hadn’t attended the solstice ball because she was unwell, and had been for several months, except very recently the sickness had worsened. It was such a sudden attack of disease that now nobody knew what exactly more could be done for her, if there was anything more to be done.
He allowed Cloud upstairs to see her. The sight of her after all the time they had been apart was one both relieving in the knowledge that she wasn’t just a phantom of Cloud’s imagination, but also horrifying as the woman he saw now appeared only as a husk of the woman that he knew and believed that he might have loved.
She was sitting upright in bed, reading a book by the candlelight. Her hair was loose and fell about her shoulders like a mane, framing the ghostly pallor of her visage. The green eyes had lost their lustre, and even the smile she gave to Cloud as she perceived him in the doorway was weak, as if that small action caused pain.
He faltered, unsure of what to do or to say that could make it go away. Except there was nothing, because he was powerless.
Aerith called out to him weakly; even simply speaking appeared to take a great deal of energy.
“It’s only a fever. It will pass.”
Cloud sat beside her for a while, and the two seldom spoke, but when they did it only caused him anguish in his heart at the sound of how weak her voice had become. She reached out to take his hand, and as her fingers brushed against his skin, they just felt so cold like he was touching the hand of death. There was a murmuring of words under her breath, and Cloud thought he had heard her whisper that she loved him.
Tseng came quietly into the room, telling Cloud that he must leave now, but that he was welcome to come again tomorrow.
Tomorrow came, and Cloud walked back to the manor house at late morning. But when Tseng answered the door, his face appeared shockingly cadaverous, and deep in his heart Cloud could guess what he was about to say, but the words still hurt all the same.
He told him that Aerith had passed away late in the night. He placed into Cloud’s hands a small box, and explained that in it were letters she had written for him, but never sent. Then, he shut the door without a word, and Cloud was left standing in his own solitude as the clouds above his head moved away, and the planet continued spinning, and far off all over the world life continued to move on unwaveringly even though his mind was static and seemingly stuck in a loop of repeating the words Tseng had said to him.
It wasn't until he came home when a visceral wave of anguish came over him, and he collapsed into Zack's arms, weeping so uncontrollably but neither of them saying a word.
That night he placed the box of letters in the closet next to the other, and not once did Cloud desire to open it and to read the contents; it would only cause him more pain.
Two days later, in an attempt to ease his despair, Zack took him on a trip away from Midgar, and for six months the two travelled from Midgar to Kalm, to Junon then overseas to the Costa del sol and Gongaga. The boxes in the closet became forgotten, as did the words Cloud had read in those letters Aerith had sent him, and gathered dust.
It was January when they returned to Midgar, and as gloomy as the day of the storm when he first saw her. It would have been a year since then.
Cloud felt the urge to see her house on the moors again. When he knocked on the door, however, a stranger he did not recognise answered. He asked about Tseng, or Aerith’s mother, and the stranger replied that they, as well as the maids, had moved away last summer. Since then they were never seen again.
Cloud began to walk away, but as he cast one last look upon the house, he noticed from within what was Aerith’s window a translucent figure against the glass, and there was a vague gesture of the hand before it faded away into the darkness of the room behind it. Cloud thought that he must have been seeing things.
That night he took down the box of unread letters, and opened it for the first time. As he scanned through the papers, he noticed that as the dates came closer to her death, the writing became more disordered and the prose more frantic. There was a sudden heat against his cheek and a sting in his eyes as the tears fell and landed on the pages at the despair he felt about the fact that she was suffering for so long, and that he knew nothing of it until the very end.
In the letters, Aerith admitted that she had never been in love before, that she was forbidden to marry anybody that wasn’t of her mother's choosing, and that with Cloud she was taking a huge risk, but a risk that was worth taking.
Then she spoke of her illness, how as a young girl she was very frequently sick. When her illness first hit her earlier that year, and only gradually grew worse, she knew she may never recover, that she would be lucky to live to see winter that year.
In the final letter she expressed an endless gratitude for the letters Cloud had sent her, how she would read them every night and how he could never truly know the happiness he granted her in those few months leading to her death. She wrote that had circumstances been different, perhaps their relationship could have blossomed into something more, but it was only wishful thinking.
Finally, she apologised for not telling him about her sickness; she believed she had more time, but by May she was housebound and by June she was bed bound and she realised then that the prospect was just too painful, as selfish as it was.
In a burst of sudden visceral emotion, something like a combination of despair and anger and longing, Cloud cast the letters away, and they all fluttered down to the floor in a mess of crinkled, aged pages and faded ink.
He awoke that next morning to find that the letters had all been cleared off the floor and placed on his bedside table, tied together neatly with the ribbons.
He asked Zack if he had come into his room and picked the pages up himself, to which he said he didn’t, he hadn’t come upstairs at all last night.
It’s madness, he thought. He must have been going mad.
It was the first time he had seen the old hut in months. It was in a terribly sorry state, and inside, the walls had mould on them and the fabric of the chairs had been chewed on by rats and such. He traced his fingertips over the walls and the bookshelf, collecting dust on them as he envisioned how the hut might have looked if Aerith were still here and if the two had eloped there. It was a fleeting vision that had been exchanged once or twice in their letters, but could have never been reality.
He went back outside, and there was a sudden chill, as cold as an embrace from death, and it squeezed him tightly for a second, as if there really were arms around him that he couldn’t see. There was something cold pressed against Cloud’s cheek and his forehead, then a warm wetness on his skin that felt like tears, except he himself wasn’t crying.
He thought he heard the utterance of his name. Like a fool he called out into the ether, but no response came except for a cold caress against his cheek, and then the chill had gone and Cloud realised that the sun was out and that the air was surprisingly warm for an early January morning.
In the distance, he perceived a figure walking along the shallow end of the ocean in a long black coat. Their long hair billowed around and obscured their face, until they had come close enough for Cloud to see that it was Tseng.
He still appeared almost as a cadaver, with sunken cheeks and eyes and his lips pressed into a tight thin line.
They exchanged brief words, not out of interest or concern for the other’s wellbeing, but more out of a feeling of obligation. Cloud mentioned briefly his travels, and Tseng said that he had moved out of Midgar, to Nibelheim, but occasionally he liked to come back to show Aerith’s spirit, if it did indeed exist and lingered there, that he still remembered her.
The two parted for a final time with nothing more to say than flat goodbyes and wishing each other wells.
Cloud returned home to find resting on his bedside table a small bunch of violets. He picked them up, and the scent that they gave off was one that smelt familiar, and homely, and he then realised that it was the same scent as the perfume that Aerith used to wear, and he couldn’t help himself from weeping, until the flowers clutched to his chest were mottled with tears. With no explanation for how they ended up here, or who had done it, he had taken it as a sign from the God he previously cursed for being a degenerate for taking her away, that her spirit did in fact exist, and lingered about him, maybe even missing him.
That night, Cloud lay awake for several hours unable to sleep. In the distance there was the sound of crows screeching and tree branches scratching against the windows that kept him awake.
From the corner of the room, he perceived a swift movement, one that was only minute and from the edge of his eye, but it still caught his attention nonetheless. He raised his head, and in the dark dusty corners of his room, he saw a figure move out of the door, a figure that was translucent and held no real substance, but a glimpse of the incorporeal countenance made him realise that the figure was the same as the one he had seen in the window.
In an instant he knew that it was her, that she had come back, and he savoured the burn the tears left in his eyes as they spilled, because they weren’t tears of pain, and it was the first taste of something like happiness he felt for the first time in months.
Every night onwards, Aerith’s ghost would return. Cloud would speak to her, and she would respond not with words, but with actions such as a cold tender embrace, or the leaving of objects on his table such as a flower or a creased page with words scribbled on that Cloud could not read, but knew that they were words of affections because of the pages always ending with a line that he managed to decipher as saying, “Loving you always.” Sometimes the letters would be stained with something like… tears.
By day he would feel, in his heart, nothingness, until night came and he felt well and truly alive again when Aerith would come to him.
Of course, Zack knew. Every night he would hear Cloud talking, but after pressing his ear to the door, he realised that there was nobody there but him alone. It was on a night in May when he walked into Cloud’s room and found him sitting there by the candlelight, talking to the shadows in the corner, but with no one there.
He expressed concerns for his wellbeing, but Cloud insisted that he was fine, because Aerith was here and she had come back to him.
Zack asked what he meant, because Aerith had died a year ago, and upon hearing that word, ‘death’, Cloud cried out to him that it wasn’t true, because she was right here, but the way he then began to cry so viscerally made it clear that he was trying to convince himself more than anyone else that it wasn’t true. Because he knew that Aerith was long dead, and the woman who he was conversing with every night was not actually a woman at all, but the phantom of his memory of her that was only insubstantial.
Zack would come to him and would try to wrap his arms around him, and Cloud would push him away, because even though he really, really wanted to feel the embrace of a living human again, he ached for it even, he felt as though in doing so, he was betraying her.
Then, in one last desperate attempt to salvage him, Zack said, “Let’s move away from Midgar. I cannot bear to see what her death is doing to you, Cloud. Please, let’s go away.”
And Cloud would always insist, “No,” because she needs me and if I have to live without her again I fear I might lose myself please Zack do not make me live without her…
And by the time August came around, Zack had gone, somewhere over in the western continent. Back to Gongaga, perhaps.
It was then on a night a few days after Zack had left, when Cloud asked Aerith to never, never leave him like his friend had. As long as she was here, he would be happy, even if he could only ‘see’ her at night and if their romance could only have any kind of substance within the shadows. For a moment there came no response, before Cloud felt a brief chill across his cheek, but then for the rest of that night, nothing.
On the following nights after, trinkets left on Cloud’s table would slowly begin to cease, and he noticed that the nights were generally warmer because of her frequent absences. He would call out to her in the shadows, and beg for anything to show him that she was still there with him, but one night, when he called to her, he looked about the room and saw that there was no translucent presence, no movements, no flowers or letters on his table, and he went to sleep in the stifling heat longing for nothing more than her ice-cold embrace of death.
But she was gone, and perhaps forever this time.
The next morning Cloud walked to the beach and looked out to sea and across the infinite horizon. He had all the letters she had written to him in his hands, all the promises and declarations of love that he had held dear to him. Except now, they meant nothing to him, and he cast them all away suddenly into the sea. Part of him wanted to run and take back the ones that could still be salvaged from the water, but most of him felt nothing.
It was then when it seemed to him that everybody had moved on. The manor house was now lived in by strangers, while Tseng had moved overseas to the west continent to make a new future for himself. Aerith’s mother, and her maids, God knows where, but presumably they had done the same. Then there was Zack, Cloud’s only and closest friend who had moved on too, and he felt an absolute fool for driving him away, and his heart ached for him to come back.
Aerith’s hut on the beach had now ceased to exist from harsh weather and the natural decay that came with the passage of time. The only proof of it ever having existed in the first place were a few stray planks of wood scattered about the beach, or in the ocean. And now, the spirit of Aerith had moved on too, leaving Cloud with nothing but the letters he had foolishly thrown away, with the memory of her phantom that lingered all about him, vivid, ever present and stifling, and he felt nothing, nothing at all.