Stars couldn't peek into Aerith's church, not out from the growing hole up in its rafters. Not with nothing but a black plate swallowed in night and height to be its sky.

Stars couldn't, not for any other reason than a plate and the air was sickly without their light. Without light the whole church felt like a sick space and Cloud felt sick for feeling sick.

He closed his eyes and smelt the flowers. It wasn't cool at night in the slums; it was hot, it fused clothes to skin with sweat. With his back pressed against a wooden floor and a flowerbed to his right, the hole above streamed no light down on him and the church didn't feel any different from the first day he fell into it.

Cloud expected it to feel different. He expected to spend one night like this and understand what was divine intervention or a religious experience or a spiritual awakening. Or even a very plain old awakening to bide him over.

Instead he felt nostalgia wash up like waves eroded beaches, passing through him and sweeping everything earthly out to sea. It occurred to Cloud that God lived burrowed inside nostalgia, not in places or planes or heavens or hells. That God lived in his garbagehead and swept the garbage out to sea, that God had no place in his heart because nothing happened there-- only in his head.

That people happened in his head and not his heart, even Aerith.

But people happened with that burning brand of heart-heat and lingering tug-tug-tug, just all up in his brain, where the heat sometimes scrambled things. It was better in the heart without neurotransmitters and receptors.

It was a drowned kick in his head, a haze of shaken up mako-thick brain cells that had him feeling a light touch over the length of his cheek and jaw. Cloud didn't open his eyes and brought a hand up to grasp the foreign one, the shape of it small and familiar when he closed his fingers around hers.

Cloud opened his eyes and there was wispy brown hair falling against his forehead, the outline of her face which was so thin and dim he could not read an expression into it.

The outline of her body up and over his, where her small weight spread sweat under his clothes into a thick coat, where his small stature tensed and his knees drew up and spread,

Where his hand fumbled for a heart-place on her chest to feel a bloodflow but lifted only to cut through plain humid slum air. It fell to his abdomen and twisted up in frustration, of always reaching out with something and pulling back with nothing. Cloud only dreamed her up in his head and his head was useless.

He stuffed people in with all those foreign chemicals and the tick-tock clock of his heart moved mechanical, steady by the hour. Everything else unsteady and without time like time never existed for five years, no day or night to judge by. Aerith sleeping at the bottom of her lake.

"You said," he said, a weighted slab of vowels and consonants that crushed back into his throat.

That you would be back.