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he fell from the sky like an angel with broken wings, then, in his post-fall daze, asked if she’s the angel.
one date! he said with a smile, holding his finger up cheekily.
she didn’t fall in love instantaneously, but it was a near thing.
----
the thing is, aerith gainsborough is lonely.
in came zack fair, sunshine and smiles and practically wagging the tail she’s sure he had in another life, and she couldn’t help but fall hard. he made jokes about it, later; his three-hundred meter fall for her versus her long, never-ending fall for him. gaia, but she misses him so bad.
it was bad every time he got called away from her church for a mission. every time, every time it hurt worse than the last, and every time she wondered if this wouldn’t be the last time she saw him, if this time he wouldn’t make it back home.
the longest he had ever been gone was a month.
had being the key word, here.
it’s been three months, at this point. the turks are on edge around her. kunsel hasn’t come to see her in a while, and she knows-- knows --he isn’t dead, because the planet would tell her if he was, but it’s a near thing. she can’t help but worry. where is he? why hasn’t he called? why won’t he pick up?
she’s called him more than a dozen times on her mom’s phone by now, and not once has it even gone to voicemail. it feels like after that mission where the first thing he did upon seeing her was collapse on the floor crying, except he’s not here crying this time; it’s just her.
yo, princess, reno calls after her late one afternoon, as she’s walking back to her mother’s house. i, uh, wanted to, to say sorry about--
he’s not dead, she snaps back with the force of a hurricane. i don’t care what your cover story is, but even if he’s never coming back, he isn’t fucking dead!
and just like a hurricane, the strength of her own anger, of her own conviction, leaves her unmoored--she’s broken off from the shore, adrift and suddenly very, very, very lost. everything hurts.
she can’t help but crumple to the ground, mud getting all over her sandals and in-between her toes as her feet slip. her face is so so wet from all her tears, and her breaths are little more than hiccups, shaking and shaking and falling apart. reno’s arms hoist her up. it isn’t fair. it isn’t fair, and he isn’t good at comforting her with his words, holding her close. lifting her up out of the dirt, tch’ing and rolling his eyes when she cries all over his suit shoulder. the mud feels awful between her toes. she swears off the sandals, vows to get a pair of boots or something. it doesn’t matter. it isn’t fair, it isn’t fair, all she wants is her mom and zack and zack’s gone and he’s never coming back--
aerith doesn’t know how or when she got into her bed, but she’s here now, curled around the pillow. it’s a pale imitation of the one she wants, and reno’s downstairs talking to her mom maybe, or maybe he’s already long gone, and she’s been an adult under midgar law for two years sure but it doesn’t fucking feel like it. it doesn’t feel like much at all, only the damp pillowcase and the tear tracks down the side of her face and her sore eyes, probably all red and ugly from crying.
(his smile, reaching out a hand for her and pulling her along. i painted the wagon! he cries jubilantly, when they get into the church: and there it is, messy and bright and wonderful in a way she didn’t really expect of him but should have known to anyways, and it’s a mess and it isn’t really a good wagon but who gives a flying rat’s ass when he made it for her, her sunshine boy...)
her breath hitches and she can only sob harder. her mom’s hand rubs soothing circles into her back and she can only sob harder. her hair gets gently pulled out of the way, detangled and combed and loosely braided, and she can only sob harder. she can only sob harder.
----
six months is kind of a long time, when you think about it, but on the scale of the planet it’s really nothing at all. she’s endured longer than six months, right? right.
the wagon broke down.
she called kunsel about it, told them that she wanted zack to come fix it. it was a stupid request. they offered to come down in his stead. she said no. why did she say that? why didn’t she just accept kunsel’s offer? why does it matter? it’s a flower wagon, nothing terribly special except for the circumstances of its creation. it isn’t even good.
she starts writing him letters, though. the first one is short, too short--it’s more of a postcard, really, written on the back of some scrap paper she found in her mom’s study and sealed into a tiny little envelope. she leaves it in the church’s old mailbox, knowing damn well that the spotty mail service of the slums doesn’t come over here and that the turks use that mailbox as a dead-drop anyways. she pretends not to notice tseng slipping the envelope into his pocket when he comes to check on her the next day, just like he pretends not to notice the blotchiness of her cheeks from how she’s been crying, again.
(she should be over it by now. she should be used to the fact that everyone around her acts like he’s already dead, like they already know he won’t come back, not ever.)
(she isn’t.)
she lays down next to her flowers and pretends imagines what zack’s response will be.
dear aerith...
i’ve missed you so much. sorry i’ve been gone so long, hah! i’d tell you about it, but then i think tseng would kill me for real, and i...
(the thought trails off. it’s not a very convincing fantasy. she isn’t even sure what his handwriting really looks like. the couple of hand-scrawled notes she has from him are locked tight up in a box in the attic, because she couldn’t stand to look at them two weeks after he’d left when tseng came to the house and asked to see her. when tseng didn’t say anything, but just smiled at her in that weird sad way like he does every time he comes by to ask if she’s manifested her powers as an ancient yet and they both lie about the truth, like he does every time her mom gets that look on her face like she wants to know what shinra will do to aerith. she couldn’t stand to look at the few remnants of zack she’d had then, except for the pink ribbon she always always keeps in her hair. it hurt too much.)
(it still hurts too much.)
----
i need materia, she tells kunsel four months later, when they call her on her mom’s house line.
what for?
i have to practise. i gotta get good at it, if i’m gonna go... she doesn’t complete the sentence, suddenly aware of the turks who are listening in.
that’s a bad idea, aerith, kunsel says, but i’ll see what i can do. saturday?
she gulps. the last time she’d seen kunsel in person was before zack left, and she’s not sure she’s ready for it--then again, she’s been putting this off for ten months now. ten months is a long time. zack’s still not dead, though, so she can endure. she has to, until he comes back.
kunsel hums affirmatively, hanging up a moment later without a goodbye. they don’t say goodbye to each other. they don’t even say see you later, because aerith said goodbye to him when he left, and said see you later to him the last time she called him, on the last day of september last year, and those turned out to be lies of a kind and aerith detests lying so she doesn’t say that anymore. maybe that’s stupid. grief is stupid.
saturday is here before she knows it. with it is kunsel, zack’s other best friend, and with kunsel are several orbs of green materia. (the last time she handled a green materia was when zack was with her in the church, right before he got summoned back to the tower, letting her practise casting barrier. he was going to get her her own for her birthday. he was supposed to give her one for her birthday, after he’d come back. it wasn’t supposed to be a long mission. it wasn’t supposed to be--)
hey, aerith, kunsel says, gentle voice breaking her out of her spiralling thoughts. i brought my collection of natural materia. i thought you might take to it better.
thanks, she replies with a genuine, if watery, smile. she can already hear the materia singing, hidden in her friend’s bag.
ice, fire, barrier, cure, thunder, and... cleansing? she guesses based on sensation alone, walking with kunsel out from the train station to the church. she wiggles her fingers at rude, half-tucked away in the shadows of a nearby alleyway, and keeps moving without waiting for him to return the gesture with his own stiff nod. she knows he’ll do it anyway, doesn’t even have to look to see it.
good job, kunsel remarks. you’re even more sensitive than i thought.
she can’t help the giggle she makes at that, high-pitched and maybe the realest moment of happiness she’s had since he left. it’s just--of course she’s sensitive to materia, she’s an ancient. the... the fucking last one! she doesn’t say it aloud, of course. you never know who’s listening.
but she gets the feeling she doesn’t have to, not with kunsel. they always know so much. they know more than they should. she doesn’t mind. she can’t see the mako-glow in their eyes through the helmet they have on, because of course they’re down here in their soldier uniform, helmet and all, but she doesn’t need to in order to know that that glow is brighter than it should be. she doesn’t need to see anything to know. her hand slips into theirs, and she skips the rest of the way to the church.
----
dear zack,
i spent the day practising materia with kunsel today! i got really good at the support spells, but i wanna get better with the offensive ones too. also, i finally broke my boots in last week, which is really good, cus it was starting to hurt a lot every time i had to go everywhere, haha...
kunsel thinks i should sell flowers above plate. they said i’d make more gil that way, and then maybe i could start my own collection of materia! wouldn’t that be really cool? except, well, i’m probably just going to use it to buy real postcards for you. my mom always frowns at me when i talk about wanting materia...
i miss you. come home soon?
love, your flower girl
----
(she spends the entire last week of september, 0003, crying in bed. cissnei comes by once or twice, but aerith can’t muster up the energy to talk to her. it doesn’t matter. zack isn’t here.)
----
the afternoon he left, they’d been about to take the newly-painted wagon out for a test drive. she was still getting used to even selling her flowers, still finding good spots to do so, and he was... he was really bad at it, but it was so cute that she just wanted to tackle him to the ground and kiss him stupid.
sometimes she thinks about finding someone new. she misses her rambunctious puppy of a boyfriend so much, and she’s been told enough times that he’s not coming back to believe it by now... it isn’t cheating, either, even if he never responds to her letters. she’s only sent four so far, and she kind of highly doubts they’re getting to him--but maybe tseng knows where he is and is taking them to him? ...maybe. it’s tseng. she won’t find out from him, but even reno is surprisingly tight-lipped on the subject.
anyways. she and zack always agreed they had an open relationship. she lies on the floor of the church, tracing nonsense shapes in the beam of sunlight filtering down onto the patch of flowers, through the hole he made when he fell. goofy puppy boy. she misses him fiercely.
sometimes, when she’s not hurting so bad, she stares at the infantry who patrol around the train station, or the off-duty ones visiting wall market. she’s looking for a head full of golden hair and eyes like ice water--at least, that’s how zack would describe the little trooper he had a giant crush on, the one he met on the mission he lost his mentor. he never did tell her what happened that day. not where it was, nor who all he was with, nor how his mentor died, but he mutters--used to mutter--in his sleep sometimes and she maybe wheedled half of it out of cissnei one day. only half, though, cus cissnei insisted she wasn’t there, and aerith didn’t feel like not believing her.
his name is cloud strife, if aerith remembers correctly, and she never sees him no matter how hard she looks. why does she go looking, anyway? she could just... ask, if she really wanted; kunsel or cissnei or maybe even tseng might tell her something if she forced the issue.
she doesn’t, though.
the afternoon he left, it had been kind of drafty in that under-plate-autumn way, but it wasn’t cold enough to bother with a scarf. it’s that cold now, in december, but it’s never that cold under the plate. something about the ventilation system of the plate itself, or so she’s heard. aerith doesn’t honestly know. the scarf is wrapped loosely around her upper body, getting dirt and maybe splinters all tangled in it as she lays on the floor of her church. she’ll pick them out when she gets home. it doesn’t matter, even if her mom scolds her about tracking more dirt into the house, as if she doesn’t do the same every time she goes to pull vegetables out of the garden.
maybe kunsel is right. maybe she should start selling flowers above-plate, if the turks would let her. they don’t mind her staying in sector five for the most part, even with her occasional trips to wall market, but wouldn’t above-plate be... pushing it? she doesn’t even dare sell her flowers in sectors four or seven, doesn’t even dare go there.
well.
that’s not quite true, is it? she’s definitely been to sector seven, even spied the bar there and its new bartender, a girl maybe a couple of years younger than herself. she just doesn’t... go in. drinking’s not quite her idea of fun, not by herself--that’s just lonely! and aerith gainsborough is lonely enough as is, isn’t she? so why would she go to some bar two sectors over for that?
it isn’t like she’s going to go drinking with the turks. they’re... they’re not really her friends, no matter how much she kind of wishes they were, and they’re on the job besides.
(reno’s hand, reaching out for her when she tripped over a rock she hadn’t noticed. he wasn’t there a second ago, having seemingly melted out of the shadows. his baton hangs from his belt. his rat-tail looks a little longer, brushing the bottom of his shoulder blades, but maybe that’s just her imagination.
thanks, she smiles, brushing the dirt off her skirt.
it’s nothin’, yo.
he lets go of her hand as soon as she’s upright again, melting back into the shadows with too much stealth for someone with bright red hair. it’s uncanny, but that’s the turks for you.)
(she’s walking back from sector seven, climbing out of the secret tunnel in the playground, when she comes face to face with rude’s impassive countenance. their conversation is short, and terse, and brief. he makes it clear that she’s not to visit seventh heaven again. avalanche lives there. good for them, she tells him, and flounces off, pretending like the weight of his stare, sunglasses on even in the dead of night, doesn’t follow her all the way home.)
...friends. yeah, right. keepers, more like--if she tried to sell flowers above-plate, would they stop her? would they tell her to go home? would they have to take her in? maybe she should ask kunsel. kunsel always knows everything, and knows how to say it just like the turks would, too. she’d think they were one if she didn’t know better. but she does know better, and she knows that there’s something strange about zack’s other best friend, the one who hasn’t vanished off the face of the earth like he did. something stranger than their freaky knowledge of things only the turks are supposed to know.
the wagon is still broken.
she sighs, drops her arm to her forehead, and stops thinking about it for a little while.
----
the thing is, aerith gainsborough is alone.
in the absence of zack, no one comes into her church. kunsel hasn’t been able to swing by for several weeks now, and aerith’s twentieth birthday is spent largely alone, except for the dinner she always has with her mother.
it’s stifling.
the metal plate used to be a thing of comfort, but now it just feels oppressive, its artificial suns a pale imitation of the real thing. she’s never experienced the real thing, not truly. zack was supposed to take her one day, maybe to his hometown on the western continent--gongaga, she’s pretty sure, although he didn’t talk about it much. he always said his parents were the most supportive people he’d ever met, but she also knows he left home at thirteen, ran straight to midgar. they loved him even when he named himself zack, but he still ran away. it doesn’t quite add up, and now he’s gone, and she can’t even ask.
it’s been over a year since he left. at some point, shinra declared him and general sephiroth officially killed in action, like they did with commanders hewley and rhapsodos a few years back. hewley is... well, she knows angeal was zack’s mentor, and she knows angeal is dead. rhapsodos isn’t, probably, or at least if he is she doesn’t recognise him in the lifestream--that makes sense, though. she didn’t exactly ever meet him.
it’s funny, that shinra would announce that, when they were lying about angeal the first time. it’s funnier still when aerith knows zack isn’t dead. he’s not dead, no matter what reno implies, no matter how sad a smile tseng offers her. cissnei hasn’t been around as much. aerith thinks she’s been visiting gongaga, maybe looking out for zack’s parents. aerith doesn’t know. nobody ever tells her anything, except kunsel, and kunsel is... also absent. it’s probably punishment for bringing her that materia a while back--they left a postcard for her at the church wishing her happy birthday, but that was it. that was it.
still no sign of cloud, either. maybe he got transferred elsewhere? junon, probably, that’s... she’s pretty sure that’s where infantry often get stationed. he’s not dead, she doesn’t think. with how distinctive he was to zack, she’s sure she’d notice him amongst the ghosts who visit her church, passing through at the points where the lifestream is closest to the surface. passing through in her flowers. she hates when they’re trampled on--those are the voices of the dead, there, and it’s disrespectful to just... stamp on them. as if flowers aren’t rare enough already in this gaia-forsaken city.
she used to love it so much here, and she still does, in some ways, but now... it all feels so fake, so small, so cold. zack told her about snow and about sand and about fields full of flowers as far as the eye could see. she wants that. she wants to see that, wants zack to come back and make good on his promise and take her, show her the real sky and not just the smog-covered version of it above-plate. blue, blue, blue, radiant like his eyes, flecked with clouds. open and endless and so terrifying but she feels stuck on the edge of a knife, teetering back and forth, and she’s ready to fall.
the price of freedom sure is steep, isn’t it?
----
seventeen months, or a year and five months. seven letters dropped in the mailbox at the church. twenty-three more calls to a line that won’t pick up. a hundred and some odd scratches on her boots, fully broken in and looking as though she’d had them her whole life, rather than having been bought new from above-plate somewhere and dropped on her mom’s porch by the turks. forty-five times she’s woken up screaming zack’s name, plagued by visions of him dying alone on a cliffside somewhere, bleeding out in the rain. forty-four times her mother’s run up to soothe her. dozens of crumpled sheets of paper. two pencils run to stubs. thousands of little moments where her heart collapses in on itself again, and again, and again. more tears than she could ever count. three words, half a sentence, caught when she was barely awake, reno carrying her home again.
in the lab...
it hurts. all of it hurts, death by a million paper cuts, and aerith is dying, dying, dying. in the lab? when she wakes in her own bed the next morning, she figures she dreamt it all. reno isn’t her shadow today. she doesn’t go to the church. rude shadows her instead, keeping just out of sight as she helps around the orphanage, making tomato and cheese sandwiches in the kitchen for all the kids. it hurts. the tomatos are donations from her own mother’s garden, and the cheese is from someone in sector four who’s been trying to raise goats. she hasn’t been. she wants to go. she can’t, not when the turks are always following her. the rotation of them used to be bigger. there used to be more faces, but something happened recently, maybe a little while after zack left, and now it’s just rude and reno and sometimes cissnei when she’s not in gongaga. tseng’s in charge now, or something like it, so he doesn’t come down to watch aerith himself anymore. she still wiggles her fingers in a facsimile of a wave every time she spots them, her hidden keepers. they don’t come to her door, always stopping just at the start of the little wooden path to her mother’s house, unless they’re taking her home or need to talk to her mom. they don’t come in the church either. they leave her these sanctums, and for that, aerith is grateful. it’s a small mercy. the tomato juice gets everywhere, splashing translucent red across her apron and fingers. it hurts. the knife slips and almost cuts her, but she catches it before it can, before rude has even finished moving from his spot on the other side of the window. he would have come with a cure or something, she knows. it’s probably really weird to anyone who isn’t her, but this has been her life since she left the labs with her first mother, the one who gave birth to her. that was so long ago, so so long ago.
in the lab...
tens of dozens of needles, wrapped in sterile packaging, on the white shelf. white wall. white ceiling. white tile floor. white lights, shining down. she was so little, it’s a wonder she can recall any of it at all. just aerith, not aerith gainsborough back then, and her mother, ifalna, sick and getting sicker every day. there was nothing little aerith could do, nothing that professor would do. her mother wasted away in front of her. aerith doesn’t even remember how they got out. it hurts. sometimes the professor would sneer when he thought she wasn’t looking and talk about some other subject of his, a boy, older, stronger, different, better. half-human. she never met him. the professor kept them separate, so separate, and she never knew why. she knows who he was now, and he died, and now he’s something else, sick and black and far-off in the lifestream when she goes walking in her sleep, dreaming of endless fields of yellow lilies. she wonders what happened to him, why he turned out the way he did, why he smells of death in her mind’s eye now. why she’s so afraid of him.
she washes her hands, heads home. crashes out on the couch downstairs while her mom makes dinner. it’s spaghetti and meatballs, so she says, which sounds great. aerith’s not here enough to care. she’s elsewhere, walking that field of lilies, looking for something she doesn’t know how to name, walking that field of lilies, looking for something dark and rumbling on the horizon, walking that field of lilies, looking for the boy in the labs, walking that field of lilies, looking for the boy in the labs, walking that field of lilies...
----
two years alone is nothing.
the turks don’t bring him up anymore, and for that, aerith is grateful.
i’m going to sell flowers in sector eight, she announces to her mother one morning, clutching her basket tight in her hands.
in the slums? her mom asks absently, rinsing off a plate in the sink.
no, aerith says, steeling herself. above plate.
elmyra lays the plate down gently, turns the water off, and twists her head to look at aerith directly.
oh, honey, she frowns, time making the creases on her forehead thicker than aerith remembers as a little girl.
aerith’s mother says little more, though, so aerith just... takes the basket, steps out of the house, picks enough flowers to fill it brimming, walks down the wooden path to the rest of sector five, nearly runs face-first into reno.
ack! she cries, teetering on one foot, about to fall.
tseng says it’s cool, yo, is all he offers, stepping out of her way after he catches her gently with a single hand. the other holds his baton, twirling it slowly behind his back.
what, you heard that from all the way out here? she scoffs, knowing full well that there’s listening bugs hidden across the house.
he gives her a single, long smirk, then gestures with his free hand.
after you, princess.
she rolls her eyes, but moves as directed anyways; she’s not about to pass up the opportunity to go above-plate now that tseng himself has signed off on it.
the train is scary, but reno steps onto it right next to her, having glued himself to her side the whole walk to the station. he even stands protectively in front of her when she sits down, something like a guard dog--she’s never put too much thought into it, but he can’t be too much older than she is, can he? maybe a couple years or something. he looks so young. they’re all so damn young, aren’t they? she’s been alive for just barely two decades now, and zack wasn’t even that when he left. how old was his trooper friend? how old was ifalna, when she died? not even tseng is that old, or so she figures; he always did look very mature for his age, but that first night with elmyra there was something so young about him. she could see it in his eyes, even if she didn’t know that’s what she was seeing back then, all of eight years old and hiding behind elmyra’s skirt. she knows it now, though. sees the same look in her eyes every morning in the bathroom mirror, and again at night when she brushes her teeth before she goes to bed. she’s so young. she’s too young for all of this, far too young.
it isn’t fair, and it doesn’t matter that it isn’t fair, because there’s nothing she can do about it. zack’s gone. zack left, one september day, and he didn’t come back, and the turks don’t think he will. and wherever he went, shinra won’t--or can’t--bring him back, and something from a while ago clicks in her head suddenly and she realises--
he’s in the labs, isn’t he? she asks reno grimly, not looking at him even as he steps out from the train behind her. she’s never been to the sector eight station before. there’s a big sign, full neon, that reads loveless avenue. it’s completely different from below-plate, and she almost feels out of place before she remembers that she’s out for these upper-plate assholes’ gil and nothing more so what the fuck does it matter if she looks weird? zack wouldn’t have cared. zack would say she’s cute no matter what, probably even cuter with the dirt and that mousey look and the way she stands out with her basket of real flowers.
reno doesn’t answer, so she takes that to be a yes, and wonders what her zack, her sweet puppy zack, ever did to warrant being stuck in the labs for two years straight. not for the first time she considers asking kunsel what even happened on the mission he left for, two years ago now.
not for the first time she dismisses the notion out of hand. kunsel probably can’t tell her anyways.
she gets more customers than she anticipated, and ends up walking back home that night with her pockets stuffed full of gil. it’s more gil than she’s ever held on her person at once--she’d be worried about pickpockets, if not for reno standing protectively over her in the train again. she isn’t worried about pickpockets in sector five. everyone there knows her, loves her for helping out at the orphanage and for her flowers and her generally kind demeanor. none of the kids in sector five would pick her pocket, not when they could just ask her for the gil instead.
which they do, which makes reno scoff from the corner he’s hidden himself in, which makes aerith smile wider and hand out even more of her gil. she gets home with maybe a fourth of what she made above-plate, all the happier for it.
that night, she dreams of zack amongst the lilies, smiling at her, and she wakes with tears still streaming down her cheeks.
----
every day wears on her greater than the day before. kunsel calls and brings her a fire and a cure, both natural, both un-mastered. she doesn’t turn them away, but she doesn’t have anywhere to equip them, so kunsel decides they’re going to teach her a bit of self-defense.
but i have the turks? she asks, frowning.
you might not, one day, kunsel says vaguely by way of answer, promising to come back another time with something to put the materia in and a plan to teach her some moves, or something. she’s honestly not sure.
she practises her casting in the church. she purposefully hits her hips into the pews, just to let it bruise, and then channels her mana into the cure materia to see if she can’t target it to the bruise specifically. it takes a few tries, but she starts to get the hang of it. rude lets her do that for a couple of hours before he steps in--not crossing the threshold of the church, no, but standing ominously in the doorway, arms crossed, eyes darker than usual beneath their shades. he doesn’t say anything. he doesn’t have to.
aerith sighs and drops the materia back into her pockets. kunsel calls the next day, asking how she feels with the materia. she tells them it’s kind of fun but really draining to cast them, to which kunsel replies with a kind of squawking noise and then says, you’re supposed to use a bracer or something, it’s really impressive that you can cast with your bare hand--although she knows all of that was just for show, to act surprised for the turks listening in.
talking to kunsel gives her bad ideas, though. she writes zack another letter. that’s forty so far, if she remembers correctly; every one, she’s left in the mailbox, and every one, a turk has come to pick them up. she knows zack isn’t getting them, by now. she just hopes the turks aren’t reading them either.
her writing schedule isn’t very consistent. some months, it’s zero; others, it’s a dozen. she’s written him five just this week. they’re short, nonsense sometimes; her tears stain a few of them and probably make them unreadable. there’s even more she’s written that she hasn’t sent yet, and maybe she’ll never send those; maybe she’ll hold them for herself a while longer. gaia, if only zack could read them! maybe she shouldn’t be sending them at all. maybe sending them means he won’t get them, when he comes back. he has to come back sometime. if she could get out of the labs, so can he--aerith will just wait patiently until he returns, right? she can hold on. she can always hold on.
this one is longer than the average. her forty-first letter to him. it’s going to go in a thick envelope, and get wrapped with twine, and set in the mailbox, and maybe she’ll stuff glitter in it so that if the turks open it they get glittered-on. zack would think it’s really funny. he wouldn’t mind getting glittered-on in the name of preventing mail fraud.
dear zack...
----
dear zack,
i hope you’re enduring, wherever you are. i think you’re trapped somewhere, or you’d have come back by now. you’re so sweet like that. i love you so much, did you know? i think of you all the time. i hope you think of me.
sometimes, when i’m selling flowers above plate, i look for him. your little blond trooper. cloud strife, right? with golden-blond spikes and ice-blue eyes, the one you never shut up about and have a big-ole crush on. i haven’t seen him. not that i ever saw him, heh... you promised i’d get to meet him when you came back. you gonna keep that promise? you better, mister, or i’ll be very cross!
...i can’t stay mad at you for long, though, you’re just too cute. all big and fluffy and hyperactive like a real puppy.
what happened to you, zack? you wouldn’t tell me where you were stationed the few times we got to call that week. you wouldn’t even tell me who you were with--was the general there? they announced you and him killed in action a couple of years ago, but i never really believed it. i don’t think kunsel does either, and i know the turks don’t. they don’t say as much to me, though. most of them anyways.
you know, i haven’t seen cissnei in a while! i think she’s watching over your parents--in gongaga, right? i think i’d like to go someday. will you take me, when you get back? you promised to show me the real sky one day. you promised, remember?
it’s not nice to break your promises!
love, your flower girl
----
wow, you’re getting good with that staff, kunsel laughs, deflecting another blow with their sword.
it’s a simple piece of metal with a slot at either end for materia. she’s put the fire on one side and the cure on the other, and she’s been practising drills with it all morning, enough to work up a serious sweat.
gaia, i’m so weak, she wails when kunsel calls it quits maybe five minutes later.
you’re stronger than you know, they say, smiling under their helmet. your stamina could use work, sure, but you’ll get better the more you practise.
hmph.
kunsel laughs at her exaggerated pouting, although it isn’t a cruel laugh whatsoever. it’s more of with her than at her, and a moment later the infection spreads to her too and she’s cackling, a deep belly laugh that has her doubled over on the church floor. the staff clatters when she drops it, but she doesn’t care.
she’s laughing way too much for the situation, honestly. too boisterous and loud for just a silly comment made by her missing boyfriend’s best friend, but she’s laughing for other reasons too, albeit not ones she can name. she tries to imagine what zack would say if he could see her now, playing at being a fighter with some staff kunsel brought, sparring against a soldier second-class like she had any real strength, and bursts out laughing again at the thought of his little puppy tongue all stuck out at her. gods, it’s just too funny. two and three-fourths years since he left and she’s really doing this. she’s really learning how to fight, because she’s... because she wants... oh, it’s just too funny, and she collapses against the ground, a giant smile plastered on her face even if she’s not sure the emotion she’s truly feeling is glee or not.
kunsel shakes their head with a fond huff of amusement and reaches out their hand to help her up.
wanna grab lunch? my treat, they offer, and she nods. lunch sounds great.
they go back at it afterwards, and kunsel has her practise casting from the staff while they dodge. it’s so much easier to cast from the staff: the mana flows easily from her hands through the metal to the materia, and her first cast creates a huge ball of flame, way bigger than she meant it to be.
oops! she calls, laughing again, as kunsel hastily dives to the side to avoid the damn thing.
maybe we practise control next! they holler back, hiding behind a pew on the other side of the church.
she casts again, this time focused on keeping the flame small. it requires the same amount of energy as twitching her fingers, she finds, to send just a little bit of flame pulsing out towards her opponent, and laughs in utter delight when it finds its target easily. kunsel blocks it with their blade and offers her a thumbs-up, still from the other side of the church.
the afternoon passes like that, relaxed and almost happy for the first time in years, and aerith goes home with a real smile on her face.
----
the third anniversary of him leaving comes and goes without real comment. she doesn’t bother dwelling on it, not when she has training to complete.
aerith even manages to bother tseng’s new apprentice into sparring with her once or twice, although elena’s skill level is clearly far above her own despite only being sixteen. sixteen’s an adult in midgar, though, so far be it from aerith to make fun of her or anything like that. elena looks an awful lot like one of the turks aerith remembers from her childhood, before she met zack, but if there’s any kind of familial relation there, elena’s better-trained than to let it slip.
these days, aerith alternates her days between practice in the church and selling flowers above-plate. above-plate makes her a lot more gil, which is gil she can put into the community: buying lunch at mandy’s counter, giving to the kids and ms. folia, buying that natural ice materia that malakai brings in one day off him for full price. (above-plate folks pay a lot for her flowers.) when she’s training, she’s usually trying out moves kunsel’s been telling her about over the phone line. they don’t get to come down to train her one on one very often--apparently there’s been a lot more monsters on the outskirts than before, and all soldiers have been considerably busier for it. not that there’s terribly many more of those left.
apparently, the program’s still running, though. kunsel was just telling her about some new hot-shot who just made third, some blond guy who’s obsessed with bikes or something. not cloud. it’s not cloud. kunsel doesn’t talk about cloud over the phone.
they have other ways of talking, though. lately aerith’s figured out she can sort of... pulse her mind out, like she’s walking through the lily field but fully awake and grounded in corporeality, and if she thinks really hard about kunsel when she does it, she can appear to them at work.
that’s when they really talk.
kunsel has been looking into zack and cloud’s disappearance for themself, apparently. cloud was supposedly assigned to some backwater place called nibelheim alongside zack and sephiroth, and something really bad happened there because the town burned down, sephiroth died, and zack and cloud disappeared. aerith mentioned the slip reno made months ago about the labs, and kunsel dove deeper into trying to find out what happened to zack and cloud.
they haven’t found anything useful, though. not even concrete proof of them being alive still, despite aerith’s insistence that she would know if zack were dead (and she would, she would know). aerith’s gut feelings aren’t exactly admissible in court, as kunsel put it last they talked that way.
she hasn’t told kunsel about her plan, not even through the lifestream. they’d probably try to talk her out of it or something, or the turks would find out, or whatever else could happen. it’s just not a risk she deems worth taking, is all.
sector five is really benefiting from her increase in income, though. the water is cleaner. her plants spread out from elmyra’s house to the orphanage. the kids are happier, and the supply of real meat is more consistent. she starts bringing a second basket when she goes above-plate, because she always sells out of the first one. it isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s improved, markedly so.
and for once, aerith feels less lonely.
----
it still hurts so bad she can’t breathe, some days.
those days she fetches another letter from the stack in her dresser and bandies it over to the church, working through the ache in her lungs and walking slower than usual. she’s got to build up her stamina, after all. it’s the only way.
she considered selling in wall market, but rude shook his head in a definitive no when she brought that idea up.
it’s somewhere around sixty-five letters now, three years and four months into zack’s absence. she still has another twenty or so in the drawer. she doesn’t write them as much anymore; doesn’t feel the need to except on the nights she’s crying herself to sleep, and even then she rarely actually picks up the pencil to put it to paper.
she misses him. of course she does. but it’s getting to the point where she’s spent more time without him than with him, which is a horrible thought but also very true.
it was the 5th of april, 0001, the day she first met him.
it was the 19th of september, 0002, the day he left.
it’s the 16th of january, 0006, today.
a year and a half with him, three years and four months without. gods, what is her life? everything hurts so bad when she thinks about it today--there’s this suffocating, crushing weight, pressing down into her chest and staying there. she can’t hardly breathe, but she pushes past it and walks, slowly, to the church to drop off the sixty-sixth letter. he isn’t dead. she knows that. he isn’t dead. he isn’t dead, but he’s been gone so long, and every day that slips by is another day he hasn’t come home. it hurts.
reno catches her at the church, taking the letter from her before she can even put it in the mailbox.
yo, princess, he says, slipping the envelope into the inside of his permanently-open blazer. what’s up?
she doesn’t answer, too worn-out to truly do so. she turns and heads farther into the church instead, aiming for the stairs in the back. she wants to go sit on the roof and stare at the real night sky, the little sliver visible from up there, over the sector six wall.
she isn’t expecting reno to follow, but he does. it’s odd.
she climbs the stairs slowly, heading for the ladder to the attic, the one that leads straight out into the rafters and from there to the roof. sure, zack punched a hole in the roof when he fell through, but it was hardly the first hole this church’s old roof has seen.
reno lingers behind her like a second shadow, strangely quiet as she ascends. it’s slow work but she has to build her stamina, even when her chest is heaving and grief crushes her lungs. so she pulls herself up, rung by rung, steps very carefully across the rafters, makes her way slowly, tortuously slowly, to the roof. reno stays behind her every step of the way, keeping his distance as he does it.
it occurs to her after she gets up there that the last time she came up this way, maybe a month after zack had left, tseng had caught her thinking she was going to jump.
she isn’t interested in jumping today. she just wanted to see the stars, even though it’s only five p.m., because it’s january and the sun set half an hour ago.
aerith, reno calls softly. don’t do it.
do what? she asks him, voice deadened. she wants him to say it. wants him to tell her not to jump.
kill yourself, he answers simply, and comes to sit next to her.
she laughs--a dry, hollow sound--and stares out at the real night sky, the one zack was supposed to show her some day.
why would i? he isn’t dead.
reno just sighs.
she turns sharply to look him in the eye, daring him to tell her she’s wrong.
he isn’t, she repeats, trying for sharpness of her tongue. she isn’t sure how well she succeeds at that, considering her audience is a highly-trained operative who conceals all real reactions, even if said operative is reno.
reno steadfastly looks out at the sliver of sky.
no, he’s not, he agrees after a long moment. his right hand reaches into his coat pocket and fishes around for a cigarette.
he’s in hojo’s labs, i know, aerith sighs, turning back to look at the sky while reno lights up next to her.
sometimes, i just... i was in there when i was little, and i know those halls of the tower. he’s in there, right? well, maybe if i...
don’t, reno cuts her off. don’t say that.
her fingers curl hard into the shingles below her.
if it meant seeing him again, i’d do it, aerith proclaims. if i could see zack again, i’d go back to hojo’s lab right now.
there’s a sudden tightness around her wrist, and when she turns to look, reno has a strange gleam in his eye, his whole body turned to face her fully.
no the fuck you would not, he enunciates clearly, every word firm. you ain’t goin’ back to hojo’s ever if we can’t fuckin’ help it.
fuck, reno, aerith thinks. you’re deadly serious, aren’t you?
and besides, reno continues, oblivious to her internal monologue, zack ain’t in the tower. he’s somewhere else.
(her heart stops)
he’s... not?
nope, reno spits, the saliva landing somewhere far below. we ain’t even... fuck, aerith, i can’t tell you that.
(her shoulders fall)
oh.
yeah, it’s some real shit, i’ll tell you that, yo.
(he isn’t even in the tower)
c’mon, reno stresses. let’s get you home, princess, before the boss-man comes ringin’ me for lettin’ ya up this fuckin’ thing. c’mon.
(for the first time since zack left, aerith’s heart breaks. she lets reno lead her home without any real fuss.)
----
a month and three days after the night on the church roof, the first time, aerith tried to run away.
gaia only knew where she was going. she sure as hell didn’t, but she made it almost all the way to the sector six gate--the one that leads outside of midgar--before the turks realised that her flight was actually, well, a flight. tseng himself grabbed her then, wrapping his arms around her flailing arms and holding her tight to his chest.
let me go, let me go! she screamed, writhing and kicking out so hard her sandals flew off. let me go after him! he’s supposed to come back! dammit, tseng, let me go!
but tseng had held firm, all through her screaming, all the way until her voice went hoarse, all the way until the crowd dispersed, all the way until she stopped kicking. cissnei brought the sandal back over and slid it back onto aerith’s bare foot.
you have two options, miss gainsborough, he’d said, voice velvety like it always is. either you walk home with us yourself, or i sedate you. the choice is yours.
she’d been too cried out to protest at that point, and so home she went, escorted by no less than four turks, including the protege of their old leader (although she didn’t learn that for another couple of months).
she didn’t try to run away again like that for a long, long time.
but... the december after the fourth anniversary of zack’s leaving, kunsel calls her. it’s a late night. very late, and she answers the phone before elmyra even wakes up to its ringing.
call me, is all kunsel says, which is kind of an odd thing to say, but aerith understands all the same.
she reaches her mind out, touches it to kunsel’s. kunsel tells her that someone who looks like zack was spotted in nibelheim a week ago, and that maybe zack is finally coming home.
so.
a year and two weeks after the night on the church roof, the second time, aerith tries to run away.
gaia only knows where she’s going. she sure as hell doesn’t, and she makes it all the way through the crack in the sector five outer wall when she runs right into none other than tseng, again.
miss gainsborough, go home, is all he says.
no. she shakes her head emphatically. i’m going to meet zack.
zack fair is dead, tseng counters, the lie sliding off his tongue as smooth as butter.
you know that’s not true, dammit, aerith hisses. let me go.
miss gainsborough, we can’t do that.
why not? i know you guys saw him, and i know he’s not dead!
tseng’s eyes flash a strange look, very very briefly.
was that your ancient lineage at work, miss gainsborough? he inquires, a strange note in his voice.
uh, aerith flubs, no, nope, not at all! i just... just, let me go to zack, dammit!
aerith. tseng’s tone carries a dangerous edge to it now, but aerith refuses to bow her head.
go home.
no! she screams, defiant, and that’s when the syringe sinks into her neck.
----
dear zack,
how are you? i wish i knew where you were. i miss you so much it’s already been four years. this is the 89th letter that i’ve sent you, but i don’t even know where to send them anymore. do you remember the weird dog thing in the church
i think it’s angeal i
i hope this gets to you, tseng has taken the rest of them so i’m tucking this one into
her head hurts, and her hand hurts too. she crumples up the letter and tries again.
she’s looking at the strange dog-thing with wings and the marble face on its neck, the one that appeared in her church days ago. it looks like angeal. she doesn’t remember it being here the whole time, but there’s a lot of space in this church, so maybe it was.
it’s july.
she’s tired.
kunsel doesn’t know if zack’s going to get here or not. kunsel said--not over the phone--that they think zack is headed to midgar, which is a stupid idea because the military is hunting him. him and cloud. selfishly, aerith hopes they make it. selfish, selfish, selfish.
the other eighty-eight letters all went out, all gathered up by the turks. it hurts. it’s nearing on five years now, but aerith is running out of paper--she only has about half a page left, so she better make this count.
you gotta get this to zack, remember? she says to the angeal-dog-thing, angeal-copy or whatever, and gives it a light scratch along its ears.
she tries again.
dear zack,
how are you? i wish i knew where you were. it’s already been four years now. this is the 89th letter that i’ve sent to you, but i don’t even know where to send them anymore. i really hope that this final letter that i am writing gets to you. by the way, the flowers are selling very well. they make everyone so happy--thanks to you, zack!
love, your flower girl
...yeah, that should be good. she looks it over one more time: final letter? it is, isn’t it? because he’ll be home soon, and then she won’t have to write him any more letters. and then she’ll meet cloud, and then it’ll be okay, and everyone will be happy. right?
she folds the small paper in half and tucks it into the angeal-copy’s collar.
go on, take this to zack, okay?
she doesn’t know if it truly understands her or not, but it flaps its uneven wings anyways and takes off through the hole in the roof, the very same one zack made when he fell through it, all those years ago now.
----
(september 28, 0007.)
(she knows.)
(before kunsel calls, before tseng shows up at her door, she knows.)
(she knows.)
----
dear zack,
you haven’t answered the phone in a week, and so i thought i’d write you this letter!
i hope the mission is going well. i miss you. when do you think you’ll be home? did you forget to charge your phs again? silly boy, you’re so forgetful--but it’s okay! i love you anyway. come home soon.
love, your flower girl
----
dear zack,
kunsel offered to fix up the wagon, but i wanted to wait until you got back to do that. it’s your wagon, so you should fix it, right?
selling flowers is fun, though! everyone really loves having real flowers around. i miss you.
love, your flower girl
----
dear zack,
it’s been two years since you left. i miss you. come home soon?
love, your flower girl
----
dear zack,
i miss you so much i can’t breathe
where are you? are you well? do you miss me? i miss you. the turks keep taking every letter no matter where i address it to i think this is the thirty-third letter i’ve written you, but it might not be the thirty-third letter you get from me! i kind of just wrote a bunch, and stuck them in a drawer because i couldn’t stand to think of sending them and you never getting them have been sending them at random, haha! i’m not even numbering them or anything, but it’s been a lot of letters.
i miss you so much. i hope you’re having fun. everyone says you’re dead, but i know better you’re probably just goofing off somewhere, aren’t you? silly puppy. you forgot you’re supposed to come home!
come home soon, please? i’ll even talk mom into letting you stay the night. we can make lasagna.
love, your flower girl
----
dear zack