Challenge from The Stained Narrator, as usual. Please excuse any inaccuracies since this was just for fun.
Midgar had once been the most sprawling, wealthy, crowded city in the entire world. It gave off a green glow at night, illuminating every tall, sky-scraping building on the upper plates with the sickly sheen from the mako reactors. You couldn't have seen the sky at night for all the light pollution.
Midgar was mostly the ShinRa's base of operations, with people pushing and shoving to get near the most successful company in the world. In the bustle, some people got shoved so hard they ended up underground. Only in the slums did people begin to realise that really, Midgar wasn't so great, and later they'd start to realise that really, ShinRa wasn't so great either.
By that time, it was usually too late for them, anyway. Luckily, even when he lived in Corel, Barret had thought Midgar was the ugliest smudge of a city he'd ever set eyes on, and he already knew what useless bastards the ShinRa were.
All the same, it was Midgar's slums AVALANCHE had been formed in. Sector Seven was where it had all come together. Tifa's bar had given Marlene a home- even if it wasn't the ideal one- and given Barret a decent view of what he was up against.
Barret had once thought that seeing the fallen plate that crushed Sector Seven was the worst and most horrifying scene that was ever laid before him. The entire sector looked mangled, like some horrible, twisted piece of machinery. What made it all worse was knowing that inside that mess of metal were half of AVALANCHE, and a good deal of other innocents as well.
What was the use in saving the world if you couldn't save your friends? That's what Barret had thought briefly, as bullets sprayed out from his right arm and rattled tunelessly into the shadows of the fallen plate.
After a time, Barret had fallen into a kind of melancholy that could not be shaken. But eventually he reminded himself what Jessie, Biggs and Wedge had wanted, whether their own lives had to be snuffed out for it to happen or not. So he remembered that every day, thought of their hopes and dreams every day, thought of Marlene and the future he would make for her every day. Life became easier with a goal in sight.
When it was all over, Barret had been shaken. Somehow, however, seeing all of Midgar destroyed by the Lifestream and Meteor combined hadn't been even nearly as traumatic as seeing the Sector Seven plate collapse. But it still scared him.
He wondered idly at how fragile the world had seemed when he was in the Seventh Heaven's basement, looking out at Midgar and its constant dark cloud, and then how suddenly the world had destroyed Midgar- destroyed the most sprawling, wealthy and crowded city- without even a second thought.
When he returned with Reeve and some of the WRO, he took a few hours to himself to explore Midgar's ruins. The entire city looked as Sector Seven had once looked then. He wondered at that.
