a/n; Posting a day early because why not?
I should warn you all that I do ship Cloud/Aerith, so that'll be mentioned sometimes. Not overwhelmingly so, but occasionally. It pops up here.
02. flowers.
"Hey! I've got a surprise for y'all when I come back!"
"What can you find out there that will surprise us?" Leon responded flatly, and Cid just scowled. The engineer had left the Bastion about two weeks ago to gather some restoration supplies, and was taking his sweet time returning. "Seriously, the universe has thrown everything possible at us. It's getting pretty damn hard to surprise us. When are you getting back?"
"Well, aren't you just a freakin' ray of sunshine?" Cid grumbled. "Don't get your boxers in a bunch, Leonhart. There's a handy warp hole next to Traverse Town. I'll be there in a few hours." He ended the transmission, and Leon sat in his makeshift office in silence for a while, staring out the window. He could hear the roar of the falls from here, but he liked the constant sound. (Yuffie and Aerith had picked bedrooms farther up in the castle simply to escape the noise, claiming that they couldn't sleep with it.) The window overlooked the barren landscape of the world, where the remnants of the town sat in eerie silence.
But on the window sat a pot, and in that pot, a seed had been planted. Aerith had been insistent on brightening the place up, and she did it in her own way - planting flowers. Since they had deemed most of the world unsafe as of right now (no one ever went out alone), Aerith was restricted to pots inside the castle. Soon, every window had a flowerbed, and every table had a pot, all of them filled with the unique blue earth and given a few seeds. No one was complaining.
That day, Leon noticed that a little leaf had finally sprouted from the soil. And that day, it turned out that Cid's 'surprise' was an old friend who had all but disappeared when Hollow Bastion succumbed to the Heartless.
They had worried about Cloud at first, and when Leon had begun his tour around the worlds to fight the Heartless, he had looked for him. He had looked for everyone in every world he visited. After a while, they all just gave up - Cloud was lost. They figured that if he wanted to be found, he would make himself known, and clearly he hadn't. While everyone else moved on to other concerns, Aerith never really gave up hope. She always said that he'd come back when he was ready.
And clearly, he had.
Yuffie was all but ready to pounce on Cloud, to reprimand him and ask him what had kept him away from home so long. But Aerith approached him first, and Leon held Yuffie back. This was their moment, after so long apart.
Not only did Aerith's flowers brighten the place up, but all of her hope for Cloud and this world in general did, too.
a/n; and I mean, hey, who doesn't like feedback? ;)