5A/N: Blah. Miss Aerith's stories are so frickin' depressing.
I'm like a sponge, kinda. I feel like by reading stories I tend to… absorb some of their more interesting characteristics. Like the -(insertcomment) that aforementioned depressing author likes to use.
I'm sorry for copying you, but it does feel right.
Pieces
Cloud sees her everywhere, now.
Aeris.
Pieces of her, really, tiny flawed parcels that remind him of what the full package used to be, what they had, what she was.
It's strange because she always was so alive, and now she's not, and it's all wrong, horribly wrong and unnatural. And Cloud should know, because he's unnatural himself, and when a freak knows that something is missing – that something's changed – you know it's something big.
It's getting so bad he has to push himself to continue, and it's harder and harder for him to resist just giving up and stopping, to stop fighting and stop eating and stop drinking because Cloud's not fighting and eating and drinking with her anymore, he's not living with her, because she's gone forever and it's just the way the dice fell – he feels a familiar burn across his eyes, a hard little knot of despair in his chest – and he can't do a damn thing about it.
And when he walks in a town or along fields or anywhere he's afraid he'll find something he thought was gone (a slip of a flowergirl) and nowadays he's so desperate for whatever he can get that he actually allows himself to hope, to wonder if it might be real, before reality sinks in like so much dead weight and so many sharp edges.
All it takes is a voice, a smell, a touch, a face, to bring her back, larger than life; the way she used to laugh, the colour of her hair, the colour of her dress. That's all that's needed, really-
the faintest breath of hope, because he's willing to delude himself, he's done it before and he'll do it again and again and again if it'll help anything
Aeris.
Her name is like a blade in his mind, and when the Masamune went through her it hurt more than any wound he'd ever got, ever.
When he cried that day, as the lump in his throat ached and his heart ached and he felt faint and dizzy, he knew that he'd lost something that day (a piece of himself) and it wouldn't come back, ever ever ever. It was something a Restore couldn't fix, something no potion could heal.
And when he found something new after that day it was the town we got to a month after Aeris died, it was something Aeris would've laughed at, it was I wish Aeris was here, a thousand times over in his mind and everything he did, it was with her ghost at his side.
'Isn't it pretty, Cloud?' she gasps in wonder, running out into the snow at Icicle Inn.
'Oh, Cloud!' she says excitedly, hands gripping the rails of the Highwind firmly as mile after mile of green and blue rushed by below.
'Isn't it amazing?' she marvels, deep under the sea with whales and sharks circling around curiously.
"Yes," he says to no one in particular, his heart so full and empty it could burst, "Yes, it is."
"And someday…" she says, cocking her head to the side. "When it's all over, I'll come back." And she smiles at him, one last longing look that's supposed to tide him over till she returns; and it won't, and he wants to scream her name as loud as he can, but nothing comes out and he knows she won't turn back anyway even though he can see suspicious sparkles of moisture in the air as she runs away.
"You'd better," he says fiercely into the night, that last night at the crater, feeling his vision blur and knowing it had nothing to do with the frigid wind howling and brushing his whole being, his whole self. "You'd better."
But she never does.