Disclaimer: Not mine.
Nanaki: Concrete Dust
Nanaki could not see the sky from the glass cage Hojo was keeping him in.
He was high up, he knew. He could barely hear anything from ground level. Just the occasional screech from a vehicle and other, similar sounds. One night there was a huge thud. Hojo had just turned to the window and said that the plate must have been dropped.
It occurred to Nanaki that all the sounds he could hear from below were those of destruction.
He couldn't smell much either, above the scents from Hojo's other experiments. The first scent he got from Midgar was when Aerith had been put in his cage. As he pretended to savage her, he smelled fresh earth, perspiration, concrete dust and faintly, flower petals.
Maybe there were flowers out there, in the lower reaches of the city. He wouldn't have expected there to be many growing things in Midgar. Judging by first impressions could be dangerous.
But then, he had nothing to base his impressions on except the scent on the people who came in. And there weren't many of them.
The three who came to rescue Aerith were a sensory revelation. The woman with long dark hair smelled of alcohol and floral perfume and the leather of her gloves. The men smelled of metal. Red noted the faded bloodstains on the smaller man's clothes. Not entirely unexpected from a swordsman- blood tended to spray. Nanaki had learned that from just his short stay in Hojo's labs.
They all smelled of concrete dust too.
And when they were all detained by the men in blue suits, Nanaki realised that those men also smelled of concrete dust. One of them was wearing cologne, too. He was no expert, but Nanaki thought it had probably been fairly expensive.
The President's office was as sterile as Hojo's labs, spacious and empty. There was no sound but the hum of machinery, no texture beneath his paws but smooth black marble, no smell but a faint trace of coolant and the meal that had been delivered here two hours ago. The walls, however, had large windows, and that provided Nanaki with his first real sight of Midgar.
It was so high, higher than he had expected. About seventy floors above the "ground", but the grounds itself was raised in the air. Surreptitious glances around the room showed that the view was much the same on all sides. Glowing lights showed the outlines of streets. From here, it was beautiful.
There were two flaws in the view. One, a smoking wreck of a building where he thought one of the power plants should have been. Two, a gaping hole in the lights, where the "ground" seemed to have fallen away.
He remembered what Hojo had said. "The plate must have fallen."
How many people must have been killed by that? People on top of the plate as well as below it. People near the edge of the impact, killed by debris. What must the damage to property be? How many homeless?
Nanaki's first sight of the sky in weeks was obscured by a haze of dust. It must have come from the plate's fall. That was the origin of the concrete dust on everyone's clothes- they had all been on Midgar's streets.
It was not a nice smell, Nanaki thought. It was gritty and dead and clung to every fold of clothing. It was not overpowering, just persistent. Even after he and his companions had a chance to bathe and do their laundry in Kalm, he could still smell the slightest traces, though they faded as they drew further away from Midgar.
Nanaki thought he would always associate the smell of that concrete dust with death, and with Midgar.
More than a hundred years later, he re-evaluated that second association. He decided to associate Midgar with the smell of flowers instead.