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Within Midgar, now a wasteland of lost dreams and remnants of a previous glory, Cloud lay in bed staring at the flickering shadows across the ceiling, waiting. From the darkness on some nights she would come, a translucent figure merging with the dull light of the moon, clad in flowing white linen with her hair loose around her shoulders. Sometimes she would speak to him, silent words not actually passing her lips, but rather a projection of images into his mind, visions of the past, visions of what could have been, and what had been taken away. Visions of the lifestream, meandering spirits and fragments of conversation amongst those who had returned to the planet.
Her kiss came like a glacial winter breeze, a barely tangible thing just grazing his lips. Sometimes in a frenzy Cloud would reach up and try to grasp for her calloused hands, an arm, the soft curve of her jaw. It was an embarrassingly fatuitous habit. In his hands he could only hold the cold mist between his fingertips; when she departed it would dissipate against the frail window panes followed by a rattle, while somewhere in the distance outside a wild animal would shriek incessantly. And then Aerith was gone, returning once again the next morning in the form of canary flowers blooming in the small patch of garden, opening up their faces towards the sun, the one truly alive thing to be found in the remnants of Midgar, or in the form of a blackbird perched upon the gate singing its melodious tune against the breaking dawn. Cloud liked to suppose it was her, anyway, returning momentarily from the lifestream as a reminder: I haven’t forgotten you, I hope you’ll never forget me.
And although they never spoke of it, he imagined the others had felt her too, that they had recognised her in the flowers, the crooning birds, the animals passing through the gardens, in the droplets of sporadic rain when they decided to come. But the one thing that was Cloud’s alone were the nights in which her spirit had revealed itself to him from the dark, her spectral presence a reminder of the love that wasn’t entirely lost, and the pain that there could never be spoken words, or laughter, or touch again, that this shared existence only to be had within the shadows was all this could ever be.