(a/n: I hope you guys get it - and kh doesn't belong to me, mkay.)

sixty seconds to a hour

It's three-quarters the heat and one-half her own lunacy and five-eighths head pain, and she never learned enough about fractions in the first place, always too busy using whole numbers, one, two, twenty-nine pieces of materia and that was the extent of her mathematical skill. Cid flicks cigarette ash in her general direction, Aerith gives a small smile, and Leon tells her that she's delirious because there is no heat, as there is no sun, so she makes a very rude gesture at him and giggles before falling backwards in her chair, all tangled limbs and no grace, but she lays there anyways and laughs until they are but little blurbles of sound, and she hiccups while they watch her and the look on Leon's face reminds her of a moogle somehow and that sets her off for another ten minutes.

There's nothing really funny about any of them, but she laughs anyways, and tears stream down her face and she is so very young compared to the rest of them; they say that Aerith was young when the heartless came, but she was younger, so that makes it her duty to be as annoying as possible, which most of the time leads to her locked in a room by herself because they are about two minutes away from blowing her head off with whatever handy, except most of the time there is nothing handy, so she sits on the bed and keeps laughing, chuckling, giggling, whatever you want to call it, and then cries herself to sleep because the one thing she hates more than heartless (and the color purple, and her dad, and Wutai, and peanut butter) is being by herself.

She's twitching while she sleeps, and dreams and dreams about nothing and everything and black and green and sunrises and the color red, and it just figures that she can't ever stay still, even when asleep, but there's a lot of things about her that she doesn't know about herself, and she never concentrates, just bounces around and babbles randomly because talking is definitely her most favorite thing to do.

"-was thinking once, why the fuck do things looks so funny, I'm reading something and then it looks like a bunch of squiggles – does that make me dyslexic? Dis-LEXIC, DI-s-LEX-ick, oh wow that's a weird word right there, but raspberry's even worse, if you say the 'p' then it sounds like you have a lisp you know? I made fun of a girl with a lisp once at school, and when she yelled and cried at me she spit everywhere – "

…and then she's back to counting things, one, two, sixteen heartless and she's by herself and totally screwed, but she hurls her weapon anyways, and it's one-fifth accuracy and six-sevenths luck, but it hardly matters anyways, cause they're dead and it's all 'oh freaking yeah, who's the best?'.

Of course, later she has to take a couple potions (two or three or possibly five and she's about as drugged up as anybody ever wants to get), which tend to make her head spin, so Leon practically shoves her into the bed to make her sleep before climbing in himself, and she mumbles something like 'twenty-nine white hairs' at him and he snorts a little bit and has something like a half-smile on his face, and she thinks to herself, that makes a total of seven and a half, and that's a number she never counts wrong.