Cid, as promised!
He has the sneaking feeling that they'll never understand him. They'll never look into the stars and see a place, a place that may be explored and loved as surely as they love their home towns. They'll never be interested in the feeling of flying cleanly through a cloud and getting wet from the condensation, feeling the ice crystals that form on one's eyelashes, opening their mouths and tasting air as clean as the day it was made. He wonders if they've ever paused to feel the never-ending sky; because they believe the lifestream is the key to what the world was, before Shinra. This, he knows, is not true. Somewhere around ten-thousand feet, the world is perfect, unscarred, infinitely beautiful, endless.
But he doesn't hate them for it-it's a very rare person, he has realized, that feels this way; a person that looks at flying birds and sighs with longing. Someone with a dream so strong that gravity itself is powerless to stop them-someone willing to risk their lives every day for the high that is flight. He handpicks his crew for this-he looks into their eyes and searches for this manic need, this lunatic gleam of desire. It's how he met her, coincidentally.
That woman in the lab-coat; so structured, meek, bookish. So…earth bound. He had dismissed her almost immediately. But then she had stood before him, eyes flashing in the first and last bit of open defiance he would see out of her, and there it was.
Open sky. He had seen the purest, most never-ending need of it since he had seen in himself as a child. And she had promised her life to his dream.
He knows now that the world is soon to be destroyed, and there is a very large threat looming in his precious, endless blue. As he flies his ship toward this very danger, all he can see ahead of him is her eyes-so f& saving the world. He'll save her-and that pure devotion-any day of the goddamned week.
Okay, next chapter-Aeris