Her mother taught her since she was young that all life came from the Planet and all life returned to it. That all lived with the Planet, which had lived for millennia and would live many millennia to come. It was a pretty thought at age four and five and six, that her handful of years in gray isolation was just the blink of an eye in her existence, even if she couldn't remember anything but white lab coats and sterilized needles. It made things okay when they pricked her and took samples, because she wasn't just a specimen, too young to be useful. It made it okay when she was lonely, because she had always been part of something bigger that she just couldn't see. It was okay when she felt terror and pain during the scarier experiments, when they locked her into the thrumming machines and she didn't know if she'd come out-it was okay-it was okay-because she had that soothing thought.
Her seventh birthday passed with her humming nonsense songs to herself, doodling flowers she hadn't seen but heard in her mother's voice. She was alone that day, but it was fine. It wasn't as though her earlier birthdays had been celebrated either. She got a gift a few days later, though, when one careless technician left equipment within sight of her cell, within the reach of a little girl with a little cunning. One needle glittered in the flickering yellow lights. She knew the amber liquid inside it. She'd seen what it did to her mother, and had felt what it did to her. It made for dreamless sleep. Her mother got the full dosage; she got half because she was littler, and too much might put her in a sleep too deep to wake up from. The needle was full.
She did nothing with it at first, just pushed it under her pillow and rested her head on top of the thin padding, dreaming dreams that for once weren't gray (even if the colors were washed-out) where people surrounded her, talked to her, listened to her. She woke up and tromped through another monochrome morning with the lab assistants who talked over her and around her and never bothered to remember her proper name, just the code and numbers. "Hello," she chirped with a smile; the answer was silence. After lunch, she decided she was bored and toyed with her tiny amber needle. She played pretend lab assistant and found a vein with expertise born from observation, smiled at the thought of racing along the Planet, and stuck herself.
After that she waited; her thoughts turned inward, then sideways, curling along with her guts, and colors swirled into life, flowers of every hue blossoming like fireworks-there were people shouting around her, excitement, a celebration?-and then the pain came; at first she thought that it was okay, it was just the aftereffects of the sedative and would go away soon, and then in jolts and shocks she felt needles buried in her skin, binding plastic to her flesh, and now there was only one person shouting, the Professor was angry, and she kept trying to wake up to see what was happening but time and time again tumbled off reality and back into the technicolor delirium.
The first semi-coherent memory she had afterward was her mother nearly suffocating her in her weeping hold. "Oh God, Aerith," Ifalna sobbed, threading her fingers through the child's sweaty, knotted hair. She was crying, and Aerith felt twinges of panic stirring underneath the drugs and exhaustion. Mother very rarely cried, and when she did it was always, always something horrible.
"I saw the Promised Land," Aerith mumbled in a bid to comfort her, small, pale lips barely opening to let the words out.
"No. No, no..."
But the girl didn't have the chance to tell her mother that yes, she really did, because the darkness came again.
"You have to live to see the Promised Land," Ifalna told her later, wrapping an arm around her daughter's tiny frame and clutching her shoulder firmly. The researchers were allowing her to stay with her mother now; they had said to her face, thinking she couldn't understand, "emotionally unstable", and Aerith thought they were a little slow for not realizing she had just been bored—with this little lab and her tiny cell and this helpless body that wasn't really her—but she kept quiet. She'd stick herself with the needle again if it meant being able to see her mother all the time, but apparently once was enough. Mother was upset with what she'd done, and sometimes Aerith felt sick with sadness and guilt for it, especially since she hadn't thought before of how she might have left Mother alone, but other times she just wished she'd done it sooner.
The hand on her shoulder tightened, and Aerith realized Ifalna wanted her to pay close attention to the next words. "…One day you'll get out of Midgar," the woman said in a low voice, stroking back Aerith's hair with her free hand. "You'll speak the Planet…that's how you'll find your Promised Land."
"With you, right?" Aerith asked. "I don't know how to do it by myself."
"You'll learn," Ifalna promised. "I'll always be with you."
And she was, as a voice in the Planet's chorus, because she left behind the her that wasn't really her sooner than Aerith did. Looking at her mother's corpse through tears, the girl felt a strange detachment from the lifeless green eyes, the straggled mess of brown hair; this was not her mother, because her mother was now traveling the Planet
(And fifteen years later a man would thread trembling fingers through brown hair sticking to red blood seeping down her back and beg lifeless green eyes to open and scream because this dead flesh was not her, because Aerith was gone)
but it meant her mother was no longer hurting, so it was okay. And in the slums there were so many things to see and people to talk to—she could actually get them to talk to her, even if sometimes she had to be a little bit pushy and maybe once or twice got herself into more trouble than meeting new people warranted—and she would explore it as she waited to get big enough to travel the Planet, and then she would see everything, and one day she'd tell her mother all about it and they'd go to the Promised Land together. She was a butterfly fresh out of its cocoon, flitting between exciting possibilities as she realized that the view from tiny windows was not the scope of the world at all, not even close. Her body was growing slowly, but she felt as though a half-inch was a half-foot. The little girl of the monochrome lab belonged to a completely different life.
Then Tseng came, and as quickly as that, the wings were shredded.