PSL; [FLOWER, STARDUST, STEEL EXPLOSION]

[supersoldier]

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[supersoldier]

[As soon as he releases her, Sephiroth feels strangely overburdened with awareness. The quiet removal of his touch is slow, purposefully retracted; the inhale of breath steady and voluntary, else it sounds like it hitches; even how he considers her atop the chocobo feels more clinical than it should, in the way a person overcompensates for something vacillating beneath the surface. Like Aerith’s nearness has upended his foundations in the palm of her hands, a gentle upheaval that makes his nerves radiate.

It’s odd; paradoxical. Almost-anxious but not unpleasant, he doesn’t know what to do with it. So it’s a swift blessing that the world soon turns into carpeted flowers and an impossible stretch of cornflower sky, a beautiful distraction coming alive at her request.

He’s never seen anything like it — even though he knows it isn’t real, that it’s all light pieced mathematically together to imitate reality, there is no SOLDIER training that would dictate the environment transition into a field of blossoms, sunlight, an oaken tree that would never grow in Midgar soil, and therefore it’s all shockingly strange and new. It steals what words still remained on his tongue, and his hand finds idle purchase on Aerith’s chocobo, fingers carding through yellow feathers.

The birds seem to like it well enough, warking with excitement. Sephiroth cranes his head up to squint against the artificial sunlight, watching white tufts of clouds stride overhead— a parody of a military march.]

You’ve picked something out of a storybook.

[It’s hardly a complaint, light as the observation is, as though saying it to himself. And maybe it’s telling, that a young boy raised in a steel structure would see untouched, unyielding nature as fantastical.]