Title: Understanding
Author: Traxits
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: General audiences
Content Notes: None.
Word Count: 465 words.
Summary: The Planet had never understood that her mother was dead. It just didn't differentiate between lifeforms that way, and sometimes, it got frustrated with her, with her inability to stop thinking about such things. It didn't understand her tears, her need for connection to living people over those who were dead.
Author's Note(s): Original prompt from Fic_Promptly on Dreamwidth: Final Fantasy 7, Aeris, trusting the Planet is sometimes easier said than done
[[ … One-Shot … ]]
The Planet had never understood that her mother was dead. It just didn't differentiate between lifeforms that way, and sometimes, it got frustrated with her, with her inability to stop thinking about such things. It didn't understand her tears, her need for connection to living people over those who were dead.
It had given her those she loved most, hadn't it? Kept their individuality from blending into the seething mass of the Lifestream, kept them solid and steady and there to advise her. It knew that much, knew that Aeris wasn't skilled enough to understand it without them there to translate. There had been no one to teach her to understand the Planet, after all, no mentor to explain what it was she heard. And now, whether she was awake or asleep, she heard the Planet, heard the constant whisper of those long dead.
And all the Planet cared about was fixing its wound, healing itself and taking care of those living there. It cared about her too, but not quite in the same way. After all, the Cetra might be gone with Aeris, but the souls of those left on the Planet had bits and pieces, threads of Cetra through them. It was enough. It had to be.
So when the Planet told her where to go, where to summon Holy, she went. And so help her, but trusting the Planet was one of the hardest things she'd ever done. It didn't like Cloud, thought he felt too much like something else that made it cry in pure, instinctive terror, and while Aeris wasn't sure she understood that, she knew she had to believe. She was the last Cetra, and her mother had left her Holy, left her a materia so useless she kept it in her hair to keep people from asking about it.
Her hands still trembled when she left, and she didn't let herself look too closely at the horizon on her ship to Bone Village. With no Tifa and no Cloud and no Barret, she might well fall right into the water, and where would she be then?
No, instead she turned inward, and she practiced her connection to the Planet, tried to think of what she would say when she got there. A prayer for the souls of this planet, and the Planet kept reminding her of her mother, of Elmyra's husband, of Gast. People so long dead that Aeris could barely remember them. No one for her to save.
It was up to her to remember the people of Midgar, those few who had bought her flowers, Marlene, Emyra, Barret, Tifa, Cloud, Nanaki, Yuffie, Cid, Vincent...
The Planet never understood the difference between those alive and those dead. But it understood the need to protect. It understood love.