So I finally parsed Aeris. It's taken me a while to get her to sound right in my head, because of all the expectations and shear symbolism associated with her. I can tell you this, she's certainly not happy with the assumption of perfection. Doesn't make her a witch either. I find her very... human. You can blame Tijuana Pirate for me posting this here, as I was dared. And is it just me, or is it an unusually long and annoying process to post anything up here? Maybe I've been spoiled by the instantaneous nature of livejournal. Though I will say this is the best format for multi-chapter. Good thing I mostly write short stories.

Of course she frequented those seedy slum bars.

Reno was pretty good at seeing through bullshit. Only reason he was still alive, really. He liked to brag about how not much would get past him, and how Rude was always the one that pounded somebody, but he always had the right thing to say to make them talk. There was no shame to a little bragging, here and there.

But she'd thrown him slightly off guard.

It wasn't that she was really dressed like a slut or acted like one. There was no doubt in his mind that she sure as hell wasn't a virgin, though. The dress was an innocent kind of pink, but it was cut just so and the bottom buttons were undone...

He couldn't help but see a lot of himself in that. Had to wonder if her parents were kind of messed up too, or if she was just as bored with middle class bullshit. She was too clean to be poor and too nice to be rich.

Hadn't had a girl that he couldn't keep his eyes off of in a while. So he approached her.

"If you're going to feed me a line, it's a little early."

Well, she certainly shot down his first plan. "Aren't you a pill."

"Usually does good to scare off the riff raff." She looked up at his hair. "Dyed?"

"Natural. I have some weird family."

She wasn't drinking much, and he could see from that she was clever. Maybe a little guarded. People that didn't let themselves drink too much, particularly pretty girls by themselves, had a sense of survival to them.

"So were you wanting to have a conversation? I'm not really in the mood for much else, see." It was almost kind of sweet the way she said it.

"It wounds me that you would assume my intentions are impure. For all you know I could be some honest and sensitive bookworm, lost in the big city."

She laughed at him. Rather hard. Well she had a decent bullshit detector too.

"You wouldn't be carrying a nightstick if you were a bookworm."

"Nothing gets past you, does it?"

"Well, your name, but I don't think we'll see each other enough for me to learn it."

He leaned up against the bar counter. Well, she didn't leave much hope for a guy, did she? "It's Reno, just in case you feel like getting in contact with me."

She stirred her red drink with one of those little umbrellas. "Don't change out of your suit much, do you, Reno?"

Sixteen or seventeen. That's how old she had to be. Her face was still honest enough, but she spoke like she was older. Reno figured she fooled a lot of guys with that. He wasn't that much older than her, really.

"Oh this old thing? Saves on laundry time." There was no need to change out of his Turk suit after hours. Not like he wore it properly anyway. When Veld was around he used to get yelled at for it, but that crazy man went and disappeared on them. Tseng usually just leveled him with a glare and regurgitated a couple of lines from the Manual.

She looked around his shoulder when none other than Zack Fair, the boy who would be First Class walked in. She was one of his? Great.

The girl hopped off the stool then, gave him a quick little wave before giving Zack one of those classic movie woman clasping the big strong man around the neck kind of hugs. He didn't want to be one of those guys that envied Zack, like that MP kid with the anger management problem, but times like this he could understand that.

Some people just really had everything.

---

Fate, it seemed, had it out for him.

Maybe he'd been drunk or asleep all those years, but he didn't really make the connection between that little girl that Veld had made such a big deal out of them being nice to when Shinra made demands to have her captured and the girl he'd seen in the slum bar. She was wearing white and blue now, with only little bits of pink here and there. While the pink could be kind of lascivious, this was clearly meant to be worn around her mother.

God, did Tseng really have to take a sick day?

"Oh, so they sent you this time?" He couldn't help but notice the braid along her back swayed in time with her hips. Maybe she wasn't doing it on purpose.

"Tseng ate some bad sushi or something. Disappointed?"

"I think we both know this is just a formality." There was a long story behind that, but he'd never really wanted to know. Still, the girl herself was kind of interesting.

"And I know your name, tease. Aeris doesn't really suit you."

She looked surprised. "Why do you say that?"

"It's melodramatic sounding. You seem pretty straight-forward, if a bit of a liar."

"I never lied."

"But you never told the truth, either."

She ignored that, and went about poking around with her flowers. It seemed futile to him, spending so much time poking around a flowerbed in an almost toxic waste area of a city. That betrayed her age too, which he knew was sixteen. The file had said so. It also said that the sour-faced woman that lived in her house with her wasn't her real mother.

"So do you like your job, Reno?"

He was getting so bored with the normal boy meets girl shit. Tseng kept threatening to put a girl on the team to 'dilute the testosterone' as he put it. That wasn't really the problem, the problem was that girls tended to be boring and stupid. And Reno was still young enough to want one.

"Pays good and they let me play with explosives. Can't complain, really."

"Tseng seems pretty serious about it."

"Tseng's got a stick up his ass. No offense."

She giggled. "He's pretty intense sometimes. Used to be a lot nicer when he was younger, though. I kind of miss that."

Oh god no wonder Tseng always volunteered for this. Zack and Tseng? What was up with this girl?

"You never are lonely, are you?"

It was the look she gave him then that left a lasting impression.

"You're confusing what loneliness really is."

---

When all hell broke loose, of course they were there. But after hell, he and Rude were in another one of those seedy slum bars, hoping that they could drink the smell of charcoal out of their sinuses.

He felt her more than saw her. It was the pink dress again, though she didn't quite have the same glow as the first time he saw her.

"I heard what happened."

He found it odd that she spoke first.

"Sorry about your boyfriend."

She didn't look so young, really. Seventeen now. He had a memory for that kind of thing. Rude's fault. His best friend wasn't the kind of guy that remembered facts easily.

"He really is dead, isn't he."

"I'm not going to lie to you."

She had a rather self-deprecating smile sometimes. "I thought you said I was the liar."

Reno didn't really expect her to take the drink when he offered it. Tequila wasn't for the faint of heart, and she downed it rather quickly. But her boyfriend had just gotten his heroic ass killed and there was something different about Tseng, too. He figured that this was only the beginning of something crazy, and not just with this girl.

She started it, too.

For the first time he could remember, he had a girl slip out before he woke up. Never even had the chance to know what she looked like in the morning. Then again, he was only a temporary distraction. Not like he'd ever had someone he loved die.

Not like he understood those things.