jinketsu
People wait their entire lives through to get out of Midgar, and here you are thinking of it like home. Home sweet highways. Home sweet fumes and ash raining down from higher, grinding plates and richer people, and that long-lasting cancer that is Shinra (what they were in the past still haunts them today, even while trying to rebuild, crawl back on top, be civil—Cloud still wants nothing to do with them). The only truly clean spot you could find down here now, in the slums, and aptly named, is the house where Aeris grew up. It's the yellow flowers (that he still doesn't know the names of, and still won't ask), the almost clean smelling water, the lighter, kinder looking soil. There's no shade of black here.
Except maybe for him.
Why he comes back here has less to do with guilt everyday. The house might be empty now, but it looks the same as it ever did, unlike any other building in this city. He never goes any closer than this (because he's just that kind of person, because it wouldn't feel right). Beyond the run-down buses people live in, the sheds for homes, the electric hum from living in the bowels of a perpetually dying creature. But Midgar grows stronger, grows cleaner. You can find pockets of fresh blown air if the wind's up now, you can find grass and weeds growing in the cracks of stone now; there's a blue sky out there.
To show the changing times he's hidden his swords, his materia, his hero's life away in Tifa's bar, under loose floor boards and tracks of footprints. To show he's still wary, still a fighter, he keeps a sword with him anyway, locked away in his motorbike (habits are habits). Because things can only change so much. Because no matter how far he's come from that little boy in Nibelheim, the failed SOLDIER, the impromptu leader, the self doubt, the puppet, it's only been buried, not wiped clean. No Lifestream rain for that illness.
Quiet, sleeping memories are the best anyone can do.