#cloudaerith

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When Cloud had agreed to the whole gardening thing, it’s because he had expected it to be much easier, but, the longer Aerith goes on, the more he realizes he had been wrong. He has no idea what he’s doing, or how to do it. The last time he felt this out-of-depth, the answer had simply been to swing his sword at the problem. He knows he can’t do that this time. That gardening is something more delicate, despite Aerith’s insistence that the flowers are tougher than they look.

“Look, it’s easy. You just dig up these ones over here, and replace them with the new bulbs!” Aerith explains with that beaming smile that always leaves his heart fluttering. It’s all he can do to nod along and try to commit her every word to memory.

She bounces around from one patch of flowers to the next, explaining her various plans for the day before setting him loose on the section that he’s supposed to be helping her with. With no real idea of what he’s doing, he starts digging up the old flowers with a concentrated frown on his face. They don’t look dead, but he’s not the expert, and, honestly, there’s nothing in Aerith’s garden that looks as if it needs replacing. All he can do is trust that she knows what she’s talking about and hope he doesn’t mess it all up.

He’s midway through digging when she calls from somewhere off to his side.

“Oh, you’re working on those?”

And his heart all but stops at the mere implication of her words. He looks to the flowers he’s already pulled with wide eyes and frantically starts grabbing them up to replace them, except he doesn’t know how, and he’s already cut through their roots.

“Cloud?” Her voice is suddenly much closer, nearly in his ear, and he tries to swallow the bile rising through his stomach as he tries to make something of the mess he’s made, but it’s hopeless. The whole patch looks worse than if he’d simply finished pulling it all out.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t-”

“Oh,” Aerith says, somewhere between surprised and-- amused? She reaches with her arms around him and carefully takes one of the bulbs from him. She holds it closer for a moment of inspection. “Honestly, Cloud, you’re being silly. These will be just fine.”

“But I-”

“I told you,” Aerith chastises lightly, “They’re tougher than they look. Here. Let’s replant these, and I’ll show you how to do the fertilizer, then we can work on the ones that actually need digging up.”

Cloud’s quiet for a long moment. Long enough that Aerith nudges him gently with a bump of her palm against the back of one of his hands. “Yeah- okay.” He’s not sure what else to say, but Aerith doesn’t seem upset.

Together, they work to replant the section that he’s torn up. It doesn’t take as long as he expects, and she insists that it’s fine. That the roots will retake, and that they’ve suffered worse. It doesn’t stop the guilt from eating at his stomach, but he’s grateful when she practically holds his hand through the whole ordeal. She only unhooks her arms from around him when they’re nearly finished, and she pumps both fists into the air.

“You see? Easy!”

“If you say so.”

“I do, now come on,” Aerith wraps her hands around Cloud’s bicep and pulls on him until he gets up and follows her to the next patch. “Now these can come up any way you like, so you can make a real mess out of them.”

She’s teasing him, he realizes about a second too late to come up with anything snarky in reply, so he simply nods and crouches on his knees in front of the section before him. She settles next to him and helps him clear enough of an area to start planting the new flowers.

“Just like that,” she says with a hint of triumph to her voice as he finishes patting the dirt around one of the little sprouts. “You’re doing great, let’s do one more, and then you can finish pulling up this bed and replanting it.”