I Never Let Her Die! (Aerith x Male Gamer Reader)

Disk 01: Chapter 14: D.T.R.

Aerith hadn't gone far. I found her sitting on a large boulder in a vacant lot between two homes, less than ten lots away from where Zack's parents lived. She was facing away from me, but I'm pretty sure she knew I was there even before I sat down next to her. "You wanna talk about it?" I asked as I sat.

"Not really." She answered. "But, I suppose I should... I knew Zack back in Midgar, but I've not seen him in over five years."

"Ahh... So it was you instead of Tifa... The girlfriend he wrote home about, I mean."

Aerith chuckled. "Do I detect a hint of jealousy?" I wasn't sure of how to respond to that, so I just stayed quiet. After a moment she continued "I'm teasing. But as for Zack... I'm sure it was me he was telling them about, though I never really thought of us as boyfriend/girlfriend. Not quite, anyway. It was close. Probably would have been if he had come back from that last mission..."

Feeling like a heel for asking things I already knew the answer to, I said "Do you have any idea what happened to him?"

Shaking her head no, Aerith replied "Not a clue. He was leaving on a mission with Sephiroth and some infantrymen. Something about a town near a reactor being attacked by monsters. Zack said he thought he'd be back in two weeks. I never saw him again. I guess I should go apologize to the Fairs for running off like that. It's just that..."

"Take your time."

"Thanks... The thing is, all this time, I've thought that he must've found someone else. I knew there was some Turk girl with her eyes on him, for example... And, you have to understand that as close as I was to falling in love with him back then, that was when I was a teenager... If I met him today, well... Zack was a bit of a ladies' man, if you catch the meaning. Maybe it was denial, but I never thought he was dead. But if his own parents haven't heard from him in all this time either, well..."

"I'm sorry." I wanted to say more, but under the circumstances nothing else came to mind.

"Thank you." She leaned into my side, head on my shoulder. "I'll be okay. Actually, if you don't mind, I'm glad I've got you here alone. There's something else I'd like to talk about."

"Okay..." I replied cautiously.

"We've been through this before..." Aerith began. "And we'll be through it again if you don't talk today... Y/N... Who are you? Where are you from? What... What is the deal with how you just came falling out of the sky that day?"

"Aerith..." I started to say, but she cut me off again.

"I don't mean to pry. But there are parts of this I deserve answers to. I mean, I've let it go until now, but... That first day. When you opened your eyes and saw me bending down over you... You almost called me by name."

"Uh-oh." I thought.

"And then, when we were on the cargo ship, when you were trying to cheer me up after the fight with Jenova... You nearly called my birth mother by name when I hadn't told you her name yet. Then in the Gold Saucer... You were all tense when I asked Cait for a fortune, and when he gave it to me, you relaxed. You relaxed even though it sounded pretty bad to me. You knew there'd be Bull Motor things in the prison when you hadn't been awake to see them..."

I sighed and replied "You're too observant for your own good. Aerith, for whatever it's worth, I'm sorry for being this way."

"I don't want an apology. I want an explanation." We were both quiet for several minutes. When Aerith spoke again, she started on what seemed like an unrelated tangent. "You know, I can't normally hear Gaia's voice as well as a full Cetra would have been able to..."

"I've kind of wondered about that..." I replied, taking the bait. "What exactly is the difference anyway?"

"To a full-blooded Cetra, communicating with the planet was no different that carrying on a conversation like the one we're having right now. They could hear Gaia's voice in complete thoughts: words, phrases, sentences. It was crystal-clear communication. For me... Most of the time, all I hear is emotions and vague feelings, like incomplete pictures. Every once in a great while, I'll catch a single clear word, or maybe a three or four word phrase. Those are actually less useful to me than the feelings though, because they're parts of full sentences, so without the context I don't know what they mean."