A/N: I like this one, even if it doesn't make the most sense in the world. To me, it gives me the sense that Cloud needed Aeris in those moments before he went to go find Sephiroth and fight him. So most likely he went back to her usual haunts and thought about her until he felt ready to leave. I also feel like it gives me the feeling that Aeris was the one who really gave the strength Cloud needed to get the job done in the end. So yeah. Hope you enjoy.
Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VII Characters and Places belong to Square Enix.
To see her was about as necessary as breathing in oxygen to live.
He couldn't help but go back to the places that she had once haunted in her life. To walk down the same slum streets as she did, to caress the same flower petals she cared and loved. To walk down the same holy pews that she did, day after day, thinking to her self and living in her own little slice of heaven while living in purgatory…It was almost a relief to do it all.
It made him believe that he could one day be forgiven for the things he did.
He crouched by the flowers, touching the yellow and white petals with careful fingers; pads calloused from fighting, hands riddled with little white scars and a larger scar from the one time he grabbed onto a blade and dragged himself deeper onto it. The petals were smooth as silk under his rough skin, much like her cheek had been when he had stroked it the one time he'd dare to, sitting in a carriage watching fireworks in an amusement park long since closed. He missed the soft sigh of her hair, the gentle kiss of her lashes when she blinked open her eyes, having fallen asleep on his shoulder with her nose buried in his neck. He missed the earthy smell she carried with her, the air that made her seemingly float as she walked, yet caused her to be so completely grounded.
He missed Aeris Gainsborough.
He sat on the hard, rotting wood of the church, the only structure in all of the slums that seemed to call out to people, to urge them to enter its sanctuary and feel at home, peaceful and loved. The church was the only place where someone could feel like they mattered in a hellhole like the Sector Five slums.
The silence around him grew, and he tilted his head back as he breathed in deeply, almost imaging soft hands at his neck, smoothing out his hair and whispering soft, non-verbal reassurances that everything would be fine. He would defeat her murderer. He would save the world. Everything would be at peace again, and no one would have to die needlessly anymore for a power-hungry company and its mad scientists.
No one would have to die to protect him anymore.
He opened his eyes, watching as a transparent image of a young girl with long brown hair in pink smiled and waved for him to follow her to the entrance of the church, knowing that it was time for him to leave.
Reaching up, he took the faded hand of Aeris, pulling himself up with a strength only she managed to give him.
He needed to go save the world.