Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

"I am an aging, angry woman laying mightily about me with my handbag, fighting hoodlums off. However I don’t, nor does anybody else, consider myself heroic for doing so. It’s just one of those damned things you have to do in order to be able to go on gathering wild oats and telling stories."

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Dried mushrooms, dried chillies, Wutai ginger, and the last of the fresh garlic from the garden. Only the best seasoning she had for Marlene, who'd stopped crying after two days and laughed again on the morning that followed. She spent her afternoon in the garden, smiling in the filtered sunshine and bending over to introduce herself to the flowers even now as evening closed in. Elmyra stretched her back and stirred the thin broth, leaned in and breathed deep the spices that had been such a rare treat in her village on the plains, learning to cook for the first time, and that brought flavour to the smog of the slums. In the fragrant steam she closed her eyes, loosening the knot that had gathered in her stomach since the night the sky over Sector Seven crumbled.

The knock at the door put it back.

Elmyra frowned and turned down the heat. Through the window, Marlene ran with skipping steps over to the newcomer with a spray of asters the colour of the sky outside the city bundled in her fist. She'd wept and wept for her father but never complained once, even today when the dinner was so late. Elmyra took off her apron and dried her hands, running for the door. Whoever it was, they'd better not delay putting food on the table any longer.

A man in a dark blue suit stood on her doorstep, toying with the cuffs of his sleeves. “Elmyra Gainsborough?”

“Yes.” She put herself square in the middle of the doorway and folded her arms, breathed out through her nose, out and in again over the hammering of her heart. “Who wants to know?”

She didn't need to ask, of course. They trotted him out on camera to be mild-mannered and handsome every time some new scandal concerning a sector's living conditions emerged or another stretch of the grasslands she grew up in dried out and turned to dust, breezing his way through a prepared speech about deficits and balances with the glass and empty space of the company's headquarters shining in the background.

There was no reason for him to be there that meant anything other than trouble.

“Hi.” Marlene stood behind him, and for all her shy glances downward she held up her flowers proudly, already drooping on their broken stems. “These are for you, if you'd like them.”

Tuesti gasped and placed a hand over his chest – a hand that trembled slightly as he took hold of the offered gift. He slipped them into his breast pocket and manufactured a gleaming white smile. “Well, thank you, miss, I feel most especially welcome now.”

Elmyra stepped to the side. “You did a great job, Marlene. Now, could you be a sweetie and go wash your hands before dinner?”

“Okay, Aunt Elmyra!” The girl left her muddy sandals by the door and thundered up the stairs, taking the scent of the garden with her.

Elmyra arched an eyebrow and turned back to their uninvited guest. “You were saying?”

He held out a hand. “I'm Reeve Tuesti. I'm the Head of Shinra's Urban Development department, and if you don't mind, I've been sent to come and ask you a few questions.”

She could've slammed the door in his face. She could've planted her foot in his crotch, then his stomach, grabbed Marlene and dashed into a labyrinth of side streets and back alleys in which this man and his expensive tailoring wouldn't last five minutes. They could've left Midgar and found Marlene's father, gone wherever he went that took him so far from Shinra's grasp.

She shook the hand firmly – his skin was calloused and dry at the knuckles, but still softer than hers had ever been. “Sure. Come right on in.”

Elmyra closed the door behind his hesitant footsteps. “Make yourself at home.” She pulled out a chair from the table and paced back to the oven, permitting herself a sneer while her back was turned. “Head of Urban Development, wow, I never would've expected the privilege. It's not often we see the likes of you gracing us all the way down here.”

In the corner of her eye, he winced – a slight twitch, but enough to tell she'd hit a nerve. Good. He could play the bleeding heart on TV all he wanted, but she wasn't buying. If what Aerith's friends had told her was true, where was he the night they dropped the plate?

He stayed standing, resting one hand on the top of the chair, drumming his fingers in a faint discordant rhythm. “You have a lovely home, Mrs. Gainsborough. I didn't know any plant life could grow like this down here, and my team's been trying for years.”

She rolled her eyes unseen. “It's kind of you to say, but this is all my eldest daughter's handiwork,” she said, as if he didn't know. She stirred the pot with her back to him. “If you don't mind, we're both very hungry, and I'd like to get our dinner on the table before it boils down to nothing. Can we make this quick?”

“What you're making smells great,” he said.

She bit her lip and turned around, the warmth of the stove at her back. He was shorter than he looked on screen, and fixated on something on the flagstone floor. “But sure. I don't see the use in beating about the bush, either, Mrs. Gainsborough. I know Marlene came under your care only recently.”

She kept her mouth a straight line and met his eye, for the brief moment his gaze wasn't directed anywhere else. “Children come by misfortunate an awful lot down here. It's the least I can do to put a roof over her head and food in front of her,” she said, and she rolled her tongue around the words, savouring them like the last sour candy in the bag, “since there's no official channel to go through.”

His frown deepened. “And for that I apologise, on behalf of the company as a whole,” he said, right on cue. Then his shoulders fell. “I'm afraid I've been asked to escort Marlene back to Shinra headquarters with me when I leave here.”

She jutted out her chin and kept her face still. No sense pretending. “So she's a hostage.”

“Excuse me?”

“A four-year-old child.” She narrowed her eyes. “Tell me different.”

He sighed, pacing around to the far side of the table. “I don't like this any more than you do, Mrs. Gainsborough. But I can only assume you know what kind of man her father is, the people he's involved with and what they've been doing – they need to be brought to heel, before any more innocent lives are lost. Wouldn't you agree?”

Don't act like what I think counts for so much as half a gil in this. She'd failed. She'd sworn to keep his daughter safe while Barret Wallace went off to do what she couldn't and help Aerith escape. She'd failed Aerith, whose last wish before she was taken was to sleep under strange stars safe in the knowledge that Marlene was out of harm's way.

Both of her beautiful girls - they should be out there in the flowers and the sunlight, slurping their soup in spite of her chiding and reading in front of the fire. Not locked away in a glass and concrete cage, specimens, bargaining chips, statistics.

She pursed her lips. “And if I refuse?”

“Well, I can't force you to comply.” He glanced toward the stairs, playing with his cuffs again. “But I can't say what the Turks are capable of, and I don't want that any more than you do.”

All three Turks had sat around her table before, complimenting her tea and her baking, and the ground cinnamon a luxury she always kept stocked in the pantry for guests. Would they? A child? But if it was true about Sector Seven, how many children had they pushed a button and buried without a thought? The soup bubbled and began to boil, spattering on the tiling behind the stovetop. She turned off the heat and dabbed at it with a damp cloth.

“I promise no harm will come to Marlene,” said Tuesti in little more than a whisper. “Not if she's with me.”

Elmyra threw the rag in the sink and squared her shoulders, facing him. “Look me in the eye and tell me that again.”

He sighed, swallowed, but looked up as requested. “You're a good person trying to do right. I can see that. I'm happy to leave this house and you'll never hear from me again. But you have to be aware that there's no shortage of people within the company who'll see you as an Avalanche co-conspirator and sympathiser, and they might not be so lenient about it.”

She nodded slowly. I used the last of my mushrooms, you prick. And the tiny packet of Wutai ginger, a parting gift from a woman with whom she'd had a brief but intense fling that she'd saved a whole three years for something, for someone special. Damn it all.

“Then take me, too. At least let her have one friendly face in that tower.”

He shook his head. “Fine.” Marlene's flowers wilting in his pocket, he retrieved his car keys from a pocket and moved to the door. “Grab some things. I'll be waiting by the bridge.”

She could've pulled him by the slicked hair that brushed the back of his collar. She could've thrown the scalding soup in his face and pressed his hand onto the hot stove until it scorched. She could've run with Marlene and slashed his tyres on the way, run and run while security forces were still trying to make sense of the wreckage of a neighbourhood she called home.

“Marlene!” A rumble of tiny footsteps answered, and a smiling face appeared around the top of the stairs, chewing at the ear of Aerith's ageing stuffed rabbit. “I need you to pack up your suitcase again, honey. We're going on an adventure with Mr. Tuesti for a little while, okay? So take everything you brought here, and Bunny can come too, if you like.”

Elmyra followed, counting the steps. One, two, three, and the creak of the wood on the fourth. It had always been there, ever since she first moved in with Soren. Would she ever see the place again? The bedroom window ushered in a floral-scented breeze as she threw clothes at an old leather suitcase that hadn't seen a journey in almost half her lifetime. She could've jammed the window all the way open and leapt out, catching Marlene and carrying her if she needed to, all the way to safety through streets too serpentine and small to allow a car to follow. She could've found Barret Wallace – or they could've run even further. That man, blustering into her home with rehearsed speeches of his own and a gun where a father's guiding hand should be, leaving Marlene alone again to fight on... what kind of life would she have with him?

They descended together, Marlene's little pink suitcase bumping against hers. “We'll have something nice for dinner when we get there, I promise, but I need you to be patient and brave for just a little longer, okay?” She squeezed Marlene's hand. At least the abandoned soup wouldn't last long enough to rot down below the plate, and someone less fortunate might have a good meal that evening and remember the ginger in their low moments. “You're doing so well.”

The car was parked a short way past the bridge, a sleek but small black number showing a little wear and tear in its paintwork. He slipped into the driver's seat himself. Elmyra threw their luggage onto the back seat and climbed in behind him, helping Marlene with her belt. The engine growled to life and she craned over her shoulder for one last look as they ambled away. A light rain began to fall, drumming against the roof and throwing the receding slums into a soft, half-remembered blur.

Elmyra slumped against the window. Through the front-facing view cleared by the wipers, three thin and graying people of indeterminate age – one could never tell in the slums, where everyone stooped and shambled under the same weight – shuffled across the road. Tuesti gave them a blast of the horn from inside a car whose price could've had them eating better than they ever had for years. She placed her hands flat on her knees, and did not kick the back of his seat.

“I remember you now,” Marlene chirped, swinging her legs as they hit the freeway heading up to the top of the plate. “You were talking on the TV and my daddy said you let the whole city go to shit!”

“Marlene!” Elmyra leaned against the window with the back of her hand covering her mouth, though the smirk made its way unbidden to her eyes. “You can't say things like that!”

“Yes, well,” Tuesti muttered barely loud enough to hear, tapping his fingers on the wheel. “Your daddy has never had to worry about balancing a budget that safeguards millions of people, or deal with constant funding cuts and extra workloads because sending people into space is apparently more important. Your daddy does whatever he wants and leaves the rest of us to deal with the consequences.” They shuddered to a stop at a red light like exploding stars shining through the drops on the windscreen, and he threw himself back against his seat, waving his hands. “Oh, come on!”

Elmyra settled back into the window, letting the bumps in the road vibrate through her. It didn't matter how hard they tried to tout him as the nice one in times of crisis, or how much of his own money he made a big show of donating to charities that kept the bigger portion for themselves – turn off the camera and he was the same as the rest of them, never deigning to set foot under the steel save to impose his own will upon those who scraped a life out of them. For all his impatience, they moved slowly, like the slums were doing their damnedest to drag them back. The car had no complicated locks. All she had to do was wait for him to unleash a string of expletives at someone else on the road, slip off her seatbelt and Marlene's, open the door and roll away to safety, to jump on the back of a wagon, anything -

Marlene's hand slid into hers, shaking a little. The girl looked up at her with wide eyes and a slight pout. She's not worried for herself. The kid gave the same big eyes and nervous smile to her, to him, to thugs and dealers and soldiers they passed in the street on the way to pick up groceries. She's worried for me. Elmyra plastered on the biggest smile she could and entwined those little sausage fingers in hers. If that was the only comfort she had to give, she ought at least to give it.

***

“Can I spin on this chair?” Marlene dropped her suitcase by the door and ran to the computer desk in the corner, turning around with a grin.

“Knock yourself out.” Tuesti slouched pale and dark-eyed in a rumpled suit with pomaded hair straying into his eyes. Red sparks flared behind Elmyra's eyes every time he spoke. She sat on the bed and pressed fingers to her aching temples. No use. The blood still pounded in her head with every sound. Marlene pushed herself off from the desk and slid across the floor, giggling.

She gasped when she entered the tall building's foyer and saw her own reflection on the gleaming marble floor, stamping her feet and pointing so all and everyone passing by could see, too. She babbled all the way up sixty floors in the elevator and ran right up to the tree in the centre of the food court, moving on, taking the spiral stairs two at a time, waving to every straight-faced suit they passed, sticking her arms out and whirling in wobbly circles like she'd never seen so much free space in her life.

Elmyra had looked up first, as they approached. The tower reared its great head like a beast in hunt, declaring its dominance over all it surveyed and swallowing her on her slow march through the wide glass maw at its front. No place for humanity here, or for hope. After years in the slums with barely space to breathe between have-nots in their ramshackle buildings, this tower was indulgent with its emptiness. Every chrome and marble surface glowed and shone with room enough to bask in the crisp, piped-in air that filtered all the filth from outside.

“This was her room,” Elmyra said.

Not so much as a window to let in the outside world, only the metal door. Two soft beds, crisp crimson sheets, small bathroom and kitchenette, a shelf of well-thumbed books in the corner, a beautiful swirling mural of flowers borne on the wind bathed in the warm reddish glow of electric lamps built into the walls. Cosy in their own way, but a prison was still a prison. If this metal box had housed Aerith in her earliest days, no wonder she yearned to head out who knew where looking for adventure.

Tuesti ignored her and held out a clutch of keycards. “These are for you. We're on Floor 65 now. This is Hojo's domain and I... well, I can't really recommend looking around too much. Gods know I don't. But you can get to the elevator along the corridor and my office is on the 63^rd floor, so please don't hesitate to drop in if you need anything. I arranged with the food court to give you both as much as you want, whenever you want, and this one lets you into the gym.”

She took the cards and set them down on the table without a glance, and nodded slowly. “The gym.”

Marlene span and span in the centre of the room, a wicked gleam in her eye. “Does that mean I can have cake with every meal? Can I have cake before bed?”

Tuesti laughed, but never lifted his gaze from the ground. “I think your aunt might have something to say about it, but far be it from me to stop you.” He raised a soft touch to the flowers in his pocket.

Elmyra took off her boots and placed them together a little way under the bed. “And I suppose I'm meant to infer that we're not to leave the building at all?”

He ran his fingers through his hair and straightened his cuffs. “It shouldn't be for too long, Mrs. Gainsborough. The best of the best are out searching for the suspects, and I have complete faith they'll be apprehended in no time.”

She swung her legs onto the bed. He was right, almost certainly – three freedom fighters and her daughter stood no chance against the combined forces of Shinra and the world they held in their iron palm. The rumoured pockets of resistance in Fort Condor to the south and the canyon over the sea were barely a hope, either. Would they allow Marlene to reunite with her father again before they broadcast his death to the whole planet? Would the rest of the world know Marlene Wallace existed at all?

Aerith was useful. Aerith would be fine. Away from home a while, but unharmed and still breathing, still laughing, still growing her flowers.

Tuesti cleared his throat in the silence and adjusted his tie. “Yes, well. I have lots to be working on after everything that's happened recently, so I'll leave the two of you to get settled in,” he stammered, like he'd seen them into a hotel suite for the night. “You know where to find me, so please don't be shy if you need anything.”

“I think you've helped quite enough for one day.” Her voice didn't so much as quaver. “You can go. I wouldn't want to keep you from your work.”

“Right, right.” He nodded and left, sealing the door with a hiss and a click behind him.

She lay down and faced the corner, the coloured lines of the painted wall behind her eyes. What was Aerith looking at now? Scrub and sand and mako desert, most likely. Was she afraid of the wide blue sky after so many years under one roof or another? Or did it look like hope and smell like freedom, possibility and adventure blowing in on a coastal wind?

The air carried something like that the day she and Soren crossed the empty prairie road on their way to Midgar, married a mere three months and starting a new life in the shining pinnacle of progress that rose higher into the sky day by day. He drove in weaving side to side patterns, dancing the beat-up truck to the tune of the rock song on the radio, while she stuck her head out of the open window and sang with the sea breeze in her long hair. They grew up in the same sandstone and thatch village on the grasslands, back when the plains were rain-fed and full of life. He came into the bakery for his daily coffee and bagel after his morning run and, he admitted on the third date, to see her smile and bid him a good day. Not that she'd have known it, as he never acted anything less than a gracious customer and perfect gentleman while she was on the clock. That crooked smile, the way it made crinkles around his eyes, and the most elegant long-fingered hands that loved her long hair so much. They were never made to hold a rifle, crouched in a foxhole, but an order was an order.

Her heart and her eyes grew heavy, so she closed them for the day and gave herself to sleep.

***

Days? Weeks? Time moved in its own untraceable way in a cell. Another morning waking up to cold metal walls with Marlene's arms around her neck. Another painted-on smile as they read together, another race to the elevator and back she pretended to lose. Another black coffee, another chamomile tea. The cafeteria's spread of delights changed every day, even if the rich and fresh ingredients lost some of their savour in captivity – though not for Marlene. She squealed in awe at croissants with perfectly flaky pastry, colourful fruit salads and thick slices of toast with real, rich butter.

Elmyra made herself small on her trips to and from the food court, hunched shoulders and downcast eyes, though she still caught the notice of the coiffed and suited employees. What must they think of her, in her beat-up loafers and faded long skirts? Marlene tagged along sometimes to take up most of the attention, hiding behind Elmyra's legs until it was time to introduce herself to a new face with a formal handshake she'd picked up watching other diners. Once, they passed Reno and Rude coming down an escalator, bruised and bandaged. Their eyes met and Rude nodded, while Reno threw her a little wave that from anyone else would seem almost shy. He hobbled a little as he walked off into a gleaming corridor for further instruction. Take off the suits, and they'd look like any other cheerful bruiser kids from down in the slums.

She tapped the railing of the escalator on her way down, tuneless and scattered. The emptiness, that was the worst of it. Empty long corridors and empty identical office rooms and empty eyes on the people who worked there, looking past her on their way to push more pencils – a pristine glass cage for nothing. Home was loud and closed in and not always so sweetly fragranced, but life happened in the slums. People made memories with each other and danced on broken rooftops, and even the forgotten souls drinking in the gutter could always find someone to pick up a digestive aid and some spare change.

Tuesti cornered her in line for dinner late one evening with the same kicked puppy look on his face. “Mrs. Gainsborough, would you follow me back to my office a moment, please? There's something I'd like to show you.”

She narrowed her eyes and pushed her tray towards him – a green tea and smoked salmon sandwich for herself, fresh apple juice and an overflowing plate of four-cheese pizza and salad for Marlene. “I need to take this back to our room first.”

He nodded, leaving with only a black coffee in a paper cup for himself. She rolled her eyes. The offer was friendly enough, but it wouldn't do to learn the hard way what would happen if she objected.

She found his office after leaving the tray with Marlene, her tea and food in hand. The door was open and emanating an ice-blue light from a computer monitor. When she knocked, he waved her in and slipped out to bring her a second chair. They sat in silence side by side in front of the flat screen, a grainy, sepia-toned image drifting in and out of focus. She squinted and leaned closer. A roaring bonfire, three silhouetted figures facing towards it, away from the hidden camera. Tuesti gave no explanation, but clicked a few keys and turned the stream to the right.

She gasped and pressed caressing fingers to the screen, drawing them away and touching her open lips. Aerith! Unhurt, but untidy, and hugging her knees with her face half-hidden behind them.

“What's she saying?” she whispered.

“Oh, I almost forgot, I'm sorry.” He handed her a headset identical to his, holding back while she put it on.

“About the Cetra...” said Aerith, voice crackling as she stared off into the distance at something beyond Elmyra's view. “About the Promised Land.”

She was quiet and breathy as she spoke, as soft and easily stirred as feathers, spice powder, dead petals on winter ground. The same voice from the morning Soren died in a distant land, and when Tseng came to talk to her for the first time. Elmyra should be there beside her. She should be holding her close, loving her. The knife in her chest dug a little deeper as Aerith's shuddering breath hitched.

“I'm... alone. I'm all alone now.”

Instead it was the boy from SOLDIER sitting beside her. He put a hand on her shoulder and left it there without a word. She didn't move, so he rose and stood talking to the wiry woman with wine-coloured eyes instead, beyond the range of the microphone.

Tuesti cleared his throat. “Aerith is a remarkable woman, Mrs. Gainsborough. And I don't say so because she's the last of the Cetra. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone so brave and so kind, and after everything she's been through, too. She shouldn't be there with them, mixed up in all of this, and we all know it. We're just trying to bring her home safe.”

Elmyra closed her eyes and bit her tongue. I'm so glad. I'm so glad you think she's kind while you exploit her trust and spy on her. I'm so glad you think she's brave while she runs in fear of what your company will do to her if she stops. Keep my girl's name out of your mouth, you snivelling little yuppie, or I'll -

Far away, Barret leapt to his feet. The camera moved from his ankles to stare up into his face, so impossibly far away on the screen. “Avalanche!” he cried into the stillness of the night, waving his gun arm in the air, rousing and righteous while his daughter was imprisoned behind enemy lines.

“I know keeping Marlene here is extreme. Don't think for a minute that it was an easy decision to come to. But look at this man. We can't just let these people run roughshod over the whole world.”

She bit her tongue harder, holding back a bark of laughter. You really don't understand where you are or what you do at all, do you?

But he wasn't wrong. Was he? He hadn't had Barret Wallace sat at his kitchen table, leaning in with his dark glasses off to let the warmth in his eyes flow free and imploring you to do what you could to protect the planet. Who wouldn't want to be loved the way he loved the ground they walked on? There was a man, still, a loving father living in fear of powers beyond his control. She sighed. Was it really too late to negotiate? He didn't, they didn't, deserve to die. Marlene didn't deserve to lose her whole world all over again, but against Shinra's show of might, one little girl meant nothing. A pawn long past its usefulness. Another number. Collateral damage in a pink frock with a worn-out bunny toy in its arms.

Elmyra took off her headset and placed it on the desk. “So you're spying, too.”

Tuesti kept his eyes on the screen. “So far we've been... somewhat less successful than anticipated at bringing them in.”

She frowned. “How did you manage to win their trust? It must have occurred to them Shinra would try this.”

“You would think so. They're more accepting than I could've hoped.”

“Have you sent an operative in person?”

“Not exactly.” He offered nothing more.

On screen, the little party headed off one by one to houses built into the cliff face around the fire. Tuesti opened a drawer by his leg and thumbed through it, ignoring her. Elmyra rose in silence and headed out, the fire on the screen still burning bright.

***

She returned two nights later after Marlene had drifted off to sleep. A small collection of wrappers from the vending machine down the hall lay adrift on the desktop and little else besides. He rested his head on one hand and stared at the screen, still as if frozen as the camera panned over the remains of a blown-out reactor somewhere in the dense jungles of the south. Gongaga. It had been all over the news at the time, the faulty valves that vomited the core of the planet up and over the outskirts of the town, and had everyone under the plate looking up in terror at the engines of ruin over their heads for weeks. But then life went on as normal. Not much to be done about it, from down on the ground.

The party left the blast site and paid a visit to a shopkeeper with deep wrinkles and a bushy white beard. “Nobody's been the same since the reactor blew and took half the town with it. It's like folks all just gave up hope,” he said, red and swollen hands shaking as he sorted coins in the register.

Aerith touched his arm, soft but firm. Tuesti turned his chair and stumbled to his feet, making his way to the cupboard at the back of the room. On screen, the group stepped into one of the tiny cylindrical houses, barely big enough to contain them all. A man with a burn scar covering half his face helped a stiff-kneed lady into a battered armchair, both of them groaning and wincing as they went. “Our boy, Zack, went missing about five years ago,” she croaked.

Elmyra gasped in unison with her daughter. The first love who was going to come home and meet her mother, always next time. Would Aerith's tears alone at night have been less bitter if she'd known why? Oh, my girl, I know. I know. If only she could will herself through the screen and hold her, deaden even a little of the same pain that pierced her heart when she learned beyond question that Soren was never coming home again.

Tuesti placed a tumbler of dark whiskey on the desk and flopped into his seat. He downed it in one long swallow as the sun set over the charred, tentacular ruins of the reactor.

She entered without knocking after three nights, Marlene in bed and Tuesti still awake. The video link was off. Instead the monitor displayed a photo of a pale, dark-haired man with the most striking scarlet eyes, almost the same colour as the K.I.A. stamp beside him on the document. Tuesti turned quick as a bullet as she entered and closed the window.

“I wasn't expecting you, I'm sorry.” He cleared his throat. “They have a new recruit and I ran a quick background check, but I can get the feed up in a second.” He swept the desk clear of paper cups and wrappers and patted the chair beside him. “I usually switch to automatic when they're fighting. I don't like to watch.”

Automatic. “You're on some sort of machine, then?”

“... I am,” he said, dazed, like he'd forgotten.

She sat down in the second chair that hadn't moved since last time. “Are they finished fighting yet?”

“I don't know. Let's take a look.”

He pressed a few keys and the speakers roared to life with ear-splitting distortion. Elmyra winced and shifted back in her seat as he plugged in the two headsets. On screen, the camera panned around the perimeter of a cave and focused on Barret holding down the opposite side, the sparks from his weapon-arm the only light in that space, spotlighting the raw and ragged yell he gave as he unloaded into an amorphous dark shape in front of him. Stay in bed, Marlene, don't wake up to this.

Another shot rang out, only one, louder and clearer and coming from the other side of the cave. A long and ragged figure ran into view, gaunt and swift as the wind, firing a large pistol with a dark cloak billowing behind him. The new recruit, then. He launched himself backwards into the air and narrowly evaded a stream of bright light in his direction – fire! Fire illuminating a wedge-shaped snout, a ridged spine and a pair of leathery clawed wings... They were fighting a dragon. Cloud swung for the creature's leg, dived and rolled out of the way of its wings, and threw a potion to Aerith standing proud with her stave on his way past.

“I can't watch,” she said, but she didn't move.

“You know, Vincent!” Aerith trilled, standing on one leg as a plume of blue sparks flew from the tip of her staff toward the dragon's heart. The cloaked man darted in front of her and she took off after him, skipping, not so much as glancing at their quarry but holding her weapon close to her chest. “When this is over, how about we take you for a spa day? That's a whole thirty years of filth we need to wash off.”

“A spa day sounds very welcome,” said Tifa, dashing in and delivering an uppercut straight to the dragon's jaw, the force of her one fist enough to make the beast throw back its head and bellow.

“You know nothing of what you speak,” said the newcomer, in a low and cracking voice like rolling thunder. “I bear a burden heavier than you could imagine.”

“Yeah, well, so does Tifa's bra!” Yuffie of Wutai ran onto the screen, scrambling up the dragon's back and embedding the strange circular blade she carried into its shoulder. “You're not special!”

“I need a goddamn spa day after weeks of listenin' to y'all carry on like this!” Barret boomed over the din of clashing metal.

Tuesti coughed, burying his face in his elbow, but his laughter showed in the creases at the corners of his eyes. He hadn't touched the notepaper he usually made reports on all evening, scowling all the while.

The image lurched to the side. In the midst of their laughter, the camera spun, round and round in a blur of floor and ceiling and quick-moving figures weaving back and forth. The robot righted itself just in time to show the dragon's tail catching Aerith by the stomach and bending her in half, flinging her to the ground.

Bile rose in Elmyra's throat and a hand moved to cover her quaking lips. Aerith scrambled to her feet, staff in hand as the dragon's gaping, jagged jaws advanced. Bulbs of rotten saliva the size of her head dripped from its giant teeth, but she only stood straighter. She twirled, her skirts fanning in a circle around her, and sent an ice spell straight for the eye of her foe. The dragon roared again and disappeared in a cloud of pale dust. There was clapping, cheering, and everyone swarming Aerith to pat her on the back as she dusted her skirts like she'd done nothing more than trip on the sidewalk. The little girl whose hand she'd held as they walked to the schoolhouse, who needed a nightlight because the gap under the closet door was too dark. They made their way out of the cave hooting and chanting her name, and only then did Elmyra leave for the night.

She was back the next, something like routine, putting Marlene to bed and eating her own dinner in front of the computer. Tuesti smiled over the rim of his coffee cup and nodded as she entered. She took up the headset herself and winced at the barrage of expletives that greeted her.

“What in the world did I miss that inspired this?”

“Meet Cid Highwind,” said Tuesti, his voice flat. “The greatest pilot in the Shinra air force and prime candidate for first abusive asshole in space.”

Elmyra raised her eyebrows. Captain Highwind was presently berating a mousy-haired, bespectacled woman for some unknown slight, but could anything could justify the way he loomed over her, the red-faced vitriol he poured himself into? If Soren had ever spoken to her that way and with such language, he'd have been cast out into the gutter before he finished so much as a first sentence.

“I know it can't have been easy for him to feel like his dream was stolen from him,” said Tuesti, looking off into the corner of the room and aiming the words at no-one in particular, “but the space programme was an absurd drain on funds and resources to begin with. Its only purpose was to give us something else to lord over Wutai. It's time and money that should've been spent on the people below the plate.”

Elmyra nodded slowly. “Finally. Something we agree on.” Quiet descended as the captain stormed out of the room with a final slam of the door.

“What an unpleasant fellow,” said Vincent, pale as a ghost in the daylight.

“Finally. Something we all agree on,” said Tuesti, holding her gaze. The camera he controlled moved from side to side, as if feeling some of the same awkwardness as its living, breathing teammates. Its gaze passed over a tall mirror next to the poor brow-beaten woman bent over the tea kettle, and Elmyra blinked again and again. Why, in the names of all the gods, had a stuffed cat riding a giant moogle suddenly appeared in the room?

Unless...

“Is that... Are you... We've been watching them over that?”

Tuesti reddened and laughed, rubbing his forehead. “Mrs. Gainsborough, meet Cait Sith. I built him myself.”

The man beside her had kidnapped a child for leverage against her father, had built the machines draining the planet of its life force, had stood back during who knew how many atrocities committed against the denizens of the city's underworld – but she laughed, she laughed like she hadn't in weeks, sharp cackles spilling out of her like soda bubbles. “On company time?”

“Ah, no. Just something I threw together for fun. I made the prototype years ago, back in my hometown. My best friend lived in the house across the street and we used to send him back and forth with messages all night after lights out.”

I didn't ask for its backstory. But he smiled fondly as he recounted the memory, ten years younger for a moment.

He kept it up when the haulage truck barreled into Palmer, propelling him through the air at a speed astonishing for an object that size. Tuesti attempted to disguise his laughter as a coughing fit, covering his face with his elbow and sipping water, but she was laughing too. She laughed and laughed as the Tiny Bronco's engine rumbled to life and through the robot's eyes they took to the air, nothing but clouds and cerulean skies ahead. Her stomach turned and looped, her knuckles white on the edge of her seat as they swooped in and picked up the captain. Tuesti mashed a few keys and treated them to a final view of the young President's furious face as Rocket Town receded further and further beneath them.

Even when shots from the ground jolted the view on the screen, Elmyra laughed and laughed at their escape until the plane's carcass touched down in the wide open blue of the Southern Ocean. There was Aerith, dusting her skirt and welcoming the gruff pilot to the group, a sea breeze lifting the loose hair that framed her happy face. Their amphibious new craft came to rest on the shores of Wutai as dusk fell. The land held Soren's remains somewhere, unmarked and beyond memory. News of the day had painted pictures of jagged mountains and impassible valleys and sudden, capricious snowstorms, populated by a proud people no less fierce than the rocks they called home. As the group made camp under a single tree in a field of soft grass, the ground looked much like anywhere else.

He hit the commands to have his cat follow Aerith and Yuffie to the banks of the marsh, where without a word they both pulled cattails out from the ground and smiled to discover they were both stripping them for down to light the fire. They carried whole fronds back with them, and after the sun went down, they drew swirling patterns in the air together with their torches while Tifa meditated on a rock by the stream and Barret gave a deep, booming laugh to all who'd listen. Something in her unwound, watching them. Anything the group could need on their journey, the planet would provide, like in the Cetra teachings Aerith remembered to her from time to time. Her daughter knew what she was doing. She'd be fine. Elmyra never should've doubted her at all.

***

Pitch darkness, or the red glare of the lamp embedded in the wall shining directly into her eyes; the cell offered no middle ground, and Marlene cried in the dark. Elmyra lay awake on her back in the harsh light, eyes dry and heavy. The knock, when it came, was timid and barely there. She stretched her arms over her head, spine crackling, and tiptoed to the door. Tuesti waited in a crumpled shirt, shuffling his feet and toying with the sleeves the way he did when he first turned up on her doorstep.

“She's sleeping,” said Elmyra, one hand still on the door and ready to close it.

“Wish I could say the same,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “These timezone shifts are killing me.”

He smiled without looking her in the eye. She folded her arms and cocked her head to the side, standing square in the doorway between him and the girl. “It's late. Is it really anything that can't wait until tomorrow?”

“Not really, it's pretty urgent, it's... I need Marlene to come with me, please.”

She could've slammed the door and barricaded it with their furniture. She could've knocked him to the ground and made for the exit, just to know she tried. She could've slapped his face. It wouldn't have won their freedom, but he would've known. He would've known what that hangdog look and constant stream of apologies was worth. She could've.

Marlene shuffled along the corridor, yawning and rubbing her eyes. Straight from bed, she wore her favourite pyjamas, the purple set with the happy swimming ducks embroidered on the chest. She leaned against Elmyra's leg in the elevator, the green glow of the city sprawling out beneath them, homes and families so far away. Tuesti collapsed against the door, sighing. Elmyra gave him nothing.

They stepped into the office together and Marlene swung herself up into his chair immediately, her sleep-weighted eyes widening at the colourful patterns on the computer screen. Tuesti retreated to the back and poured himself a glass from his near-empty bottle, placing it on top of a filing cabinet.

“Marlene,” he said, tense and halting, “how'd you like to talk to your daddy for a little while tonight?”

A smile lit up her face. “He's here?”

“No, but if I give you this,” he said, helping her to put on the headset, “you can talk into the microphone here.”

Marlene frowned. “I can hear Tifa! She sounds real mad, though.”

“Right. Okay.” He typed a few lines of code, pressed execute, and turned back to Marlene. “Alright. They can hear you now, too.”

Elmyra clenched her fists. She needed to step out of the room, now, before she did something to doom them both. But Marlene was so small in that high-backed chair, barely big enough to see the monitor. She clutched the top of it, knuckles white and trembling.

“Daddy?” she said, swinging her legs and beaming. Her smile quavered with the shouting from the other end of the line leaking through the headphones. “Daddy?”

Tuesti took off her headset. He didn't so much as look at her as he typed, hissed and tapped delete, tried again. His hands shook, and his knees. Good. Let him quake. Let him never know another peaceful night after this. Marlene broke into sobs, calling and calling for her father on the other side of the world.

Elmyra fell to her knees and slipped her off the chair, pressing the weeping child to her shoulder. “I want my daddy! You promised!” Marlene screamed at the top of her tiny lungs, stomping her foot. On the screen were Aerith, Cloud, Tifa, and the heavy boots of Barret coming closer. Two robotic moogle hands raised themselves at his advance.

“Look at me,” she hissed over Marlene's wailing. “Did you get what you asked for?” she said, straining to keep her voice even. “Can I take her back to bed now?”

Marlene buried herself in the folds of Elmyra's dress. “Why doesn't daddy want to talk to me?”

Elmyra moved back and brushed away her tears, but kept her eyes on the man responsible. “It's not that he doesn't want to talk to you, Marlene, he's just very busy and Mr. Tuesti needed the headset back before your daddy could get there. We can try again soon, okay?”

She stood on quaking legs and took Marlene by the shoulders, leading her towards the door. Tuesti downed his whiskey in one gulp and bent over his desk, braced on tensed arms.

“I had to,” he breathed, his voice ragged. “If we let them go on as they are -”

She slammed the door on her way out.

“I'm sorry I stamped and shouted, Aunt Elmyra,” Marlene sniffled on the way back to their room. “I didn't mean to be rude.”

Elmyra squeezed her hand. “It's alright, sweetheart.” One of us has to. One of us has to. Marlene howled when she climbed into bed, when Elmyra got in beside her and stroked her hair, pressing light kisses to her hot forehead. As she grew still and passed out, the red light bore on. It was the fiery tinge of gunfire, of the on light for a microphone that carried a little girl's frightened tears across the sea.

She didn't go alone to the office again.

***

He sought her instead, a few dinners later.

She was pushing Marlene across the room on the desk chair when the muffled knock came again. She sighed, patted the girl's head, took the keycard and flung open the door, making no move to disguise exactly how pleased she was to see him. She met with the back of his head, looking over his shoulder at another man waiting in the far end of the corridor.

“Are you alright, Director Tuesti? You looked all shaken up.”

“I'm fine, Jason, I'm just a little tired. You can head back down.” The other man disappeared and he turned back to her, face paler than ever and streaked with tears.

“Mrs. Gainsborough,” he stammered, breathless and desperate.

She froze.

Cold wind hit her in the chest and knocked all the air out of her. “You should leave.” It was a day like any other, and they were playing. There was no place for him in their room. The world tilted and she lost her balance, scrabbling for the door frame, she reached for the metal casing but it slipped away from her trembling hand again and again. “We're busy. I don't want to talk to you.”

He sniffed and spoke in a small, fractured voice. “Something happened. Just now. I have to -”

Elmyra gripped her heaving stomach and shook her head. “We're busy!”

“You... you should sit down -”

“Not today. Not now.” She gripped the door frame, found it at last, and only her head could move, shaking and shaking. “I don't want to hear it from you!”

“Aunt Elmyra?”

Marlene's voice came swimming up from behind a barrier to another world. A hand tugged at her skirt, but her eyes refused to open. No. No.

The world shook, the floor eager to come up to meet her. All she could do was stay on her feet. There was no room for anything else. Not Aerith's smile, the glimmer in her forest-coloured eyes when she talked to the plants in the sun, nothing left at all.

“They... I, I have to, I think you should take a seat, there's -”

“Oh, spare me.” A rasping snarl like scraping ice came out of her throat from somewhere uncharted.

“Mrs. Gainsborough, I-I'm so sorry, but. They landed on the northern continent -”

She hissed and glared into his eyes. “Spare me your apologies. And spare me 'Mrs. Gainsborough'. My Soren died on the other side of the world from me because of your precious inventions, because of your selfish war.”

He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

She barked a bitter laugh through curling lips. “You. Here you come again, making a big song and dance out of acting like a friend. You think you're better than anyone else in this awful building because you drive your own car and work a few late shifts?” She sneered. “At least they have the guts not to pretend to be anything other than the grasping parasites they are.” She drew back, struggling for breath. “You want to talk so badly, do tell me what you were doing the night the plate fell.”

He winced and looked away. Something dark inside her laughed harder, low and quiet.

“Oh, I bet you put away some of your expensive whiskey that night. Did you even try to stop it, or did you just leave them to it? Did you even care?”

His shoulders shook as he sobbed, his eyes shining again. “I tried to -”

She scoffed. She trembled the way she did when the Turks turned up for tea, sitting and smiling at the kitchen table while they stalked Aerith's steps and planned to take her away from the beautiful life she built for herself, in a place built to crush the will out of her. The flowers in the slums would die with no-one to tend them, brown and wilting, just another offering for the refuse piles.

“All of you,” she snarled, the fire of a gun in place of an arm and the mako-clouded eyes of the SOLDIER boys glimmering in her own. “All of you, you're all the same, ploughing through our lives, flaunting whatever you have that lifted you up like it couldn't -” Her knees trembled, and she gasped for air.

Tuesti had a hand on the door frame, too, crying and shaking his head. “I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Elmyra clenched her fists, her useless hands made for holding brooms that had never protected anyone. She grabbed him by the tie and pulled him down to meet her eyes.

“You're all the same,” she snarled. “In here, out there, playing hero around the world. All of you. You have your talents and gifts that the world was good enough to put into your hands and you don't think, you don't imagine for a second what it's like to be trampled with the rest of us!”

She pushed him away, pointed fingers jamming into his chest. He stumbled back with a hand reaching out to touch her shoulder. She jerked away and fell back, tumbling to the floor. Was Aerith so alone when she fell? What was she doing in the north? She was never meant to be in the cold, she belonged to the softness of sunshine after rain when all the earth smelled new and rich. Who was left, now, to tend the flowers?

Aerith...

Elmyra threw back her head and howled.

Marlene was there, a ghost's touch of her hand, and the man above her was saying something, his voice hoarse and cracking like the static of the headphones they listened in on. None of it made sense. It didn't matter, anyway. Their words were only air. Cold wind stealing through an empty tower, a monument to nothing and rust.

Chapter Text

How it happened, if she'd lingered in pain, where the others were – the words danced just out of reach, coming out of the other world Marlene reached for Elmyra from. The real could end at the foot of her bed. Nothing was left for her beyond it, so she stayed, no light but the red lamp, wrung out and emptied.

Tuesti came for Marlene, sometimes. Food from the other world drifted in and out with them, the sounds and smells of a former life. He left a folder full of yellowing papers by the table in front of her eyes. She didn't move. Words, more words, meaningless shapes of air that flew past her head. Meteor. They said it again and again. A spell the like of which the world had never seen, hurtling through the cosmos to end all life on their planet in a final blaze of destruction. So be it. Let it finish what the shriveled souls in this building had started, now there was no-one left to grow the flowers.

Marlene lay on the bed beside her and pressed against her back, throwing a pale rounded arm over her waist. “It's okay, Aunt Elmyra. I'll keep you safe. If the Meteor comes here, you can hide under my bed with me and Mr. Reeve.” Marlene paused, then scrambled up onto her knees and kissed her cheek. “I love you.”

The blossom-soft touch of her lips broke through from the other world, and a single violent sob shuddered through her. Then another and another, until she slept and woke with a sharp pain in her head. Pain was fine. Pain was something to work with. She stood, threw back some water, and made for the shower. How long had she lain there while Marlene felt the weight of the world on her shoulders in a blanket hideout? The hot water soothed her throbbing forehead, the worst of the pain gone with the grime she collected in her inertia down the drain.

“Did you look at your folder yet?” said Marlene, through a mouthful of granola and cherries ripe to bursting.

“Oh.” Elmyra sipped her coffee, letting its warmth seep through to her toes. “No, not yet.”

“You should. Mr. Reeve got some photos just for you. He let me press some of the buttons on the printer, so I helped.”

She opened the package with Marlene leaning against her side, spreading its contents across both their laps; pages of small typed text she set aside in favour of photographs. Marlene picked one from the pile and waved it in front of her face. “I printed this one! It's our room!”

“You did a great job, honey.” They took hold of the paper together, one after another. Flowers growing through cracks in thick ice, a dark-haired woman in a rainbow-spattered painting smock, a moustached man in a lab coat, and a small green-eyed face that took her breath away all over again. “Oh, my,” Elmyra whispered. “It's Aerith. She must be about your age in this one.” She sat on the very same bed with her knees pressed together and her hands folded, back straight – so unlike the way she slouched and draped herself over furniture now. Now. Its echo stabbed Elmyra through the chest, but Marlene continued rifling through the pictures, Aerith watering a basil plant growing under a sun lamp and reading with a tiny frown. She'd made a whole world out of this dark little room.

She hadn't done it alone. Ifalna, her name was, the woman of colourful skirts and otherworldly beauty she'd found taking her last breath under the steam of a departing train, all those years ago. Even sallow and sweating and desperate she'd looked like a storybook princess, like a famous actress giving the most iconic performance of her lifetime. It was she who'd painted the mural, flicking long elegant swirls along the wall with a thin brush while Aerith slept. In another photo, she smiled to herself as a spray of green sparks rose from her wrist and rushed in spirals around a tall white orchid in her care.

An older photo fell out of the stack, black and white and showing Ifalna in a cosy clapboard room, standing next to the man in the scientist's garb. A fire in the hearth at the back leant them a gentle glow. Gast Faremis – Aerith's father, touching his hand to Ifalna's over her rounded belly as they looked into each other's eyes like nothing else in the world remained. Elmyra bit her lip and pressed a hand to her own stomach, still as disappointingly flat as it had remained every time Soren left for the front again. They'd spend every week of his furlough barely leaving the bed, andevery morning for a month she peered into the mirror to spot the slightest change in her body, but he never did leave that piece of himself behind.

Each day with Aerith made her world shine, and no less brightly because she hadn't carried her daughter herself. Her eyes welled again, silent and still this time. Did she know? Did she know she made me smile like they did in this photo, every day?

There were newer photos, too. Blurred, poorly framed, sometimes capturing only a small piece of her and often overexposed, taken from the safety of dim alleys while Aerith wandered in the sun. Snaps of Elmyra and Aerith walking together, laughing together, at the kitchen window chopping vegetables together. One showed her with a tall, muscular, dark-haired boy, whirling around hand in hand on the church rooftop and laughing, laughing until they cried. Zack. Aerith's tears after he vanished were all she'd learned of him. To see him bring her this joy after all she'd been through... This is what I tried to take from her.

The photos were all signed with Tseng's neat hand or Reno's illegible dead spider scrawl or Rude's single initial. She balled a fist and sneered. They knew. They watched and they knew Aerith was loved, and how she loved in return, and on they went doing the dirty work for twisted men who'd reduce her to nothing more than a resource and a curiosity.

Marlene rested her head against Elmyra's arm and closed the folder. “She went back to the planet, didn't she?”

Elmyra sighed and kissed the top of the girl's head. “Yeah. She did.”

“I'm sorry.” Marlene hiccuped, and touched her stomach where it grumbled. “I'm still hungry, Aunt Elmyra. Mr. Reeve got me the cereal but I'm s'posed to have some vegetables and fruit every day, and he said not to go on my own.”

Elmyra tucked the photos back into the folder and stood. She'd made a promise, twice now, to take care of a little girl and she was failing this one, too. She wiped her eyes, squared her shoulders, and headed out on a mission for salad and coffee with her head held high.

The reddish light in the corridor, just like the lamp in their room, stopped her in her tracks. She hurried along to the wide window and stumbled back at the sight of it. It festered like an abscess in the sky, a black void ringed with red, glowing with palpable malice. Small and far away, but drawing all eyes toward it.

“Shiva, spare us,” she whispered. They'd told her, somewhere in the background of her time in the other world of dust and dark. But how could it be true? How could this doom be coming to a world that housed her memories of Aerith, of Soren, of sunlight falling through a broken steel sky onto flowers?

If there's anyone out there listening I'm sorry I didn't mean any of it I still care I'm so sorry I never meant it I don't want it all to disappear -

She swallowed the lump in her throat, kept her head up, brought dinner and a juice to Marlene and set off out again. To stretch her legs. To clear her head. Because she'd seen nothing but the same four walls for days and even one more syrupy promise that everything would be okay, sweetie, would've made her head implode. No plan in mind. The office door was closed, but the blue light of the monitor seeped through at the edges. She knocked twice and entered.

The room was marinated in the smell of whiskey. He was slumped on the desk on his elbows and startled like he'd been asleep, but he threw her a smile over his shoulder. “Hey.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up straighter. “It's good to see you up and about.”

She waited in the doorway. “Are you busy?”

“Not really, no, come on in.”

He'd kept the second chair beside him and the second headset plugged in. She stepped forward, leaned against the tallest filing cabinet and nodded to the drained glass and half-empty bottle by his hand. “Feel like pouring me one of those?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, taking a second tumbler from a drawer to his right. “Least I can do.” He let the pungent liquid fall into it, like their last encounter in the metal doorway had never happened.

Elmyra perched on the edge of the desk and picked up the glass he pushed towards her. “So. Give it to me straight.” She raised the drink and downed it in one gulp, coughing at the burn in her throat. “How long have we got before it hits?”

“You've seen it, then.”

“It's hard to miss. So? How screwed are we?”

His shoulders slumped and he turned to the monitor. “We can only speculate. Judging by its size and how it's increased for the last few days, we could have weeks, but as of now there's no way to test if it's picking up velocity as it goes – we don't know. We just don't know.”

“And is there any way out of this? Oh, yes, please,” she said when he pointed to her empty glass. After weeks without her glass of wine at dinner, the first was doing its job already, spreading a tingle all down her limbs as she sat.

He poured slowly, hand shaking. Behind the computer sat a heavy leather-bound book on the construction of warships, the blue blossoms of the asters Marlene had picked for him a lifetime ago poking out of the top, dried and pressed to keep.

“We're rounding up Huge Materia. They crystallise in the mako reactors, far more powerful than the regular orbs you find occurring naturally.” He pushed the glass to her and slumped back, cradling his own. “If we hit it with those, then maybe.”

“Hell of a maybe.” She took a sip, then put it down for a while. “Say, when was the last time you went home and slept? Why not put the cat on autopilot for a while?”

“They want me here monitoring the situation at all hours, and besides -”

A shrill, cracking screech burst from the computer speakers and she hissed, slipped a little way off the desk. Cait Sith's camera shorted out for a moment and when the visual returned, her jaw dropped.

“What in the ever-loving blue fuck is that?” she whispered, hoarse.

“Weapon,” said Tuesti. He stared as the beast in the sky came closer, the sheer force of its imminent presence rustling the tall palms the cat craned upward to see.

“One of yours?” she said.

“Oh, no.” He finished what was left in his glass and readied himself at the keyboard. “This is an ancient creature. The planet itself created them. They rise up out of the lifestream in times of crisis, destroying anything they see as a threat to the future of the world.”

The Weapon landed in the open square of the small forest town, the ground shaking and knocking Cait Sith backward. The robot sprang back to his feet, Cid and Tifa and Nanaki already charging in and taking their best swipes at Weapon's sprawling feet. Yuffie somersaulted into view with her usual flair undimmed, jumping onto the mighty tail and aiming her blade at the areas around its joints - the same places precise gunshots caught it, Vincent finding shadows to hide in even there.

She frowned and squinted at the display. “Where's Cloud?”

“In their hospital. Mako poisoning.” He pressed a few keys and the beast loomed closer, jerking up and down with the cat's bouncing footsteps. “I'll explain everything later, if you like, I just need a minute...”

“Yes, of course.” She took another sip of her drink, faint stars swelling into being before her eyes. Weapon roared, the red glow from its open maw shading the battlefield as Yuffie's blade struck near its eye with a clang. In the centre of the fray was Barret Wallace, walking in slow sideways circles and raining bullet after bullet upon the howling beast. Even he was small and fragile next to this primordial guardian, but he moved without so much as a tremor, the volley of shots constant save for when he paused and waved the others out of the way – and he never took his eyes off his companions, not even in the face of oblivion.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so bad for his daughter to see him like this, if she woke.

She emptied her glass and blinked a few times. “I wish there was something I could do to help them.”

Me too,” said Tuesti, reaching for the bottle again.

“But you are helping.” On screen, Cait Sith threw out fire spell after fire spell, though the Weapon didn't so much as turn in its direction.

Tuesti shook his head. “I couldn't smooth out the combat system properly before they wanted him in the field. His attacks do more harm than good, half the time.” He sighed, head in his hands. “I didn't design him to fight. I just wanted to send messages across the street after lights out.”

The amount of whiskey you drink at this desk could have had something to do with it, but she said nothing and took from her own. The battle raged on with everyone flagging and panting and tripping over one another. Cid growled and dived forward with his spear, and that did it. The creature reared and roared and took to the air, the movement of its wings knocking the party flat on the ground. Elmyra blinked and the skyline cleared. The people of the town began peering around their doors, while the group helped each other to their feet and handed out potions.

“We did it,” Tuesti whispered, wide-eyed and smiling.

Elmyra took hold of the refilled glass, but held off drinking any more. “It isn't just Meteor, is it?”

Tuesti slouched back in his seat, nursing his drink like its warmth would seep into his hands. “Meteor, mako, the passing of the last of the Cetra – what the hell haven't we done to piss off the planet?”

She traced the rim of her glass, gathering breath. “I felt like I could've raised monsters out of the earth, when you told me.”

“I'm sorry, Elmyra. And I wish I could've given you something better than that. It happened too fast -”

She raised a hand. “I don't... I don't want to know. Not just yet. But it wasn't your fault.” She sniffed, blinked, and still the tears pricked her eyes. A shadow that had settled unannounced in the background evaporated as she spoke, the words becoming true in the telling as Tifa reappeared on screen pushing Cloud in a wheelchair, his eyes blank in a way that made her shiver. “I don't blame any of you at all.”

Tuesti downed the rest of his drink and threw back his head with a sigh. “We knew. For years, we knew what mako consumption at this rate was doing to the planet, what it did to the human body. There were so many other options, gods know I tried. I showed them designs for wind turbines, hydroelectric dams, solar panelling, resources that won't ever dry up... they laughed in my face, all of them. And they had their reasons -”

Elmyra sighed, her face hot and tingling and all the walls falling down. “I'm sorry, I just... How in the world do you make it up to the executive floor and still find yourself licking this many goddamn boots?”

She put her glass back on the desk, almost an echo in the silent room.

He laughed bitterly. “They wanted their Promised Land, and to hell with everyone else. Easy to say when you can pay your way out of anything. I for one can't wait to see how our new young president intends to buy off Weapon.”

He leaned over for an amber glass bottle full of small white pills, hidden behind one of the speakers. He tipped one out onto his palm and kept the whiskey glass in the other. She shuddered and blinked a few times before she spoke. “You sure that's such a good idea?”

He shrugged and downed both, slumping back in his chair again. “The world might end in a few weeks and I didn't feel like going to the water cooler.”

She frowned. “Have you eaten anything today?”

“Oh.” He stared off in the direction of the open door. “Guess I didn't.”

Anyone else would've left him to intoxicate himself into oblivion in his luxury office. Anyone with a spine. “Well, I should go and take Marlene's plate back. I don't want to leave her alone too long.” She threw back the last drops in her glass and stood, off-balance only a moment and leaning on the desk until the walls were straight again. She brushed her skirt and aimed for the door. “But today, I looked through all the photos. It was very kind of you to dig those up.”

“It's nothing. I didn't sort through it all before Marlene ran off to show you so there's a lot of dry research papers in there you don't want, but anything you do is yours to keep.” He smiled and pulled the keyboard towards him.

“Thank you.” She moved slow and measured towards the door, then stopped without turning to face him. “Wait. I had one more question.”

The typing stopped. “Go ahead.”

“What was the alternative?”

The traffic outside and the office gossip died down, as if waiting on an answer, too.

“I'm sorry?”

She breathed out slowly. “If you didn't agree to pick up Marlene and myself and bring us here, what was the alternative?”

“Oh.” Behind her his chair creaked as he shifted. “The old president would've sent in the Turks.”

“And the new?” She'd seen him on TV a few times. A more beautiful man than Rufus Shinra you'd struggle to find, if only on first glance. There was nothing behind those cold eyes the colour of low-burning gas fire.

“I'm not making excuses,” he said. “Whatever he said, I still went ahead and did it.”

She lowered her voice. “Hostages we might be. But you've done a lot for us. So tell me.”

“He told me...” Tuesti paused, no doubt staring at the floor again, fiddling with his suit. “He told me to bring Marlene here and keep her or he'd drop the Sector Five plate, too. And he's not someone whose bluff you try to call if you have any sense.”

She nodded. “Right.” The world spun a little, and she righted herself on the door frame. “I don't really know what to say.”

“I didn't expect you to. But you asked.” He hit a few keys, accompanied by the dull thump of raising and lowering his glass again. “Goodnight, Elmyra.”

Goodnight, Reeve – it perched on the tip of her tongue, ready to fly, but a rumbling noise from the small town far away caught at her spine. She ran. She was leaning on the top of his chair, their faces close, and the jungle floor buckled and fissured.

“No!” they screamed together as the falling earth took Cloud and Tifa with it.

***

A function of sleep deprivation, perhaps, or a window into a world beyond these four walls and the tower that contained them. Better than pacing, worrying at her lip, conjuring terrible images of what happened to Cloud and Tifa after the earth took them. Elmyra shook herself and turned back to the screen. With Marlene asleep in her lap she kept scrolling, skimming a list of materia combinations long enough to blur before her. It required two hours and some choice vocabulary but she'd managed to boot up the computer in their room and read the data on the old disc in Reeve's folder – all that was left, after two previous nights spent poring over every dry research document that found its way in there.

“She was researching materia even before Gast came along,” she told Reeve a few days later, sitting in her spot on the edge of the desk. She walked in on Cloud and Tifa talking with the others in the boardroom of the stolen airship on their way to Rocket Town with the huge materia. She'd bought plates of chicken and rice from the food hall for both of them, and the sun shone a little brighter against Meteor's red light that day. “Ifalna, that is. Aerith's real mother.”

“Birth mother.” He attacked his food like he hadn't so much as seen a good meal in weeks, glancing over his shoulder at irregular intervals. On her way in she'd collided with the stately bulk of Heidegger leaving, Reeve pale and shaken in his seat. The taller man horse laughed right into her face and took her by the shoulders, pushing her to the side and moving on.

Elmyra finished her own food and put the plate aside. “She didn't use it for combat. She was looking into ways to regenerate soil and stimulate plant growth with magic.” From the corridor that blight in the sky kept swelling and storming, larger and darker by the day. “Aerith taught me a little, you know, about how some kinds of plants can help nourish each other. You saw our house and everything she grew. I don't have the Cetra's gifts, but after reading through all of that, I can't get it out of my head. What I could do if I had the time, if I had some materia.”

When Aerith first brought the glowing green orbs home she was twenty and heartbroken and throwing herself at any perceived threat that came by, marching home with bruised shins on the best days and being escorted to the neighbourhood medic for stitches and splints on the worst. She wore the damn armlet in the bath. Elmyra had shivered to even think of the stuff being under her roof, the destructive capabilities stored under its glass-like surface. No-one told her it could be used in a gentler way.

“There was talk of demolishing our neighbourhood and relocating us at one point – this was years ago, before you were in charge, don't look so worried,” she laughed, as the frown creased his forehead. “They were worried about a landslide because the soil of the valley was so dry. Aerith planted vines to stop the erosion, and we never had a problem again.”

Reeve typed a few commands to Cait Sith and turned back to her. “I never would've thought of that.” He rested a hand on his chin and glanced back at the open door. “Imagine if we'd listened to her instead of playing gods with Jenova cells.”

Ifalna's ideas were limited to a few paragraphs in a smaller font, about halfway through the reports. Elmyra had tucked the photos of Aerith into the middle compartment of her suitcase for safekeeping, and the picture of the happy couple with their bump, too. The moment deserved someone to take care of it, that frozen space of pure crystallised happiness.

“But it's been on my mind lately,” he said. “How the Cetra knew centuries ago they were part of an interconnected network of life and had a duty to the planet. The people of Cosmo Canyon carried the torch, a little. But it's not the way I was taught.”

She frowned, the burning sky and its black wound waiting in the window just outside their room. “How old were you when they had you designing reactors?”

He shook his head. “It doesn't make a difference.”

She arched an eyebrow at him.

“Seventeen.” He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. “Who'd turn down a big contract with Shinra at that age?” He sighed. “This tower was smaller then, but it was still the biggest building I'd ever been in. I couldn't stop staring at it, and I couldn't wait to get started building things that might make someone feel the same way. I grew this out as soon as I got here,” he said, stroking his beard, “and hit the gym. Thought it might help them take me more seriously. You can see for yourself how well that worked out.”

Elmyra's face fell as he stared into nothing. A skinny, quiet kid escorted into the most glamourous setting he'd ever seen and walking through the same doors day after day a little older, a little sadder, face a little more lined.

“You know the most absurd thing? It started out as a rough idea for a school science project. I could've just made a baking soda volcano like everybody else, but no, and now the planet's dying.”

She lifted a hand, hesitated, then touched his arm softly. “You can't put that on yourself, not all of it. It wouldn't be the first time they pounced on some poor kid's bleeding heart. Best way to groom a loyal company man.”

He scoffed. “At one time, sure. But no. I have... no affiliation with Shinra, now.” He huffed out a breath as he finished, collapsing back into his chair. “Oh, boy.” He twisted the seat slowly from side to side, staring at the ceiling. “And now I've said it out loud.”

“You had any thoughts about what you'll do if we make it out of...” she gestured vaguely, “all this?”

“Let's see how this rocket scheme goes first.” He glanced at the screen. “Looks like they're about to launch. Shall we go watch from the window?”

Most of the building had the same idea, heads hanging out of windows all the way down the tower to the crowds gathered on the sidewalks. With a knot in her stomach she raised her head to the sky. At some point, she'd placed her white-knuckled hand over Reeve's on the sill. Neither of them moved.

Shinra No. 26 was out of sight across the sea, but the impact made itself known – an explosion of fire in the side of the black spell's bulk, then darkness, then a flare of angry red light. A roar from the heavens that shook the very foundations of the building, lights dying and crowds shouting and in the sky all red, red, red.

Meteor roused its flames as if angered, and continued its course towards them. Her knees buckled and she fell into Reeve's shoulder; he caught her, trembling just the same and holding her to his chest.

***

“Aunt Elmyra?”

Tiny fingers clasped her shoulder and shook. She groaned, shielding her eyes from the lamplight and scrabbling for the clock. Quarter to four in the morning. “You have a bad dream, Marlene?”

The girl nestled against her chest. “The ground was all shaky. You didn't feel it?”

“It was a dream, honey,” Elmyra said, stroking her hair. “You sleep right here with me and if it happens again, I'll be -”

A tremor fell upon the room, ripples rising in the glass of water on the table and summoning cries from the floors below them.

“You see? Like that!”

Oh, what fresh hell? She sat up and fumbled on the floor for her shoes. Reeve's running footsteps came along the corridor before she had them laced.

“Elmyra!”

He flung open the door, stumbling in his haste with hair and suit all in disarray. Beside him stood, for undisclosed reason, a janitor's cart and uniform. “Get your things together, both of you – hurry!”

Marlene looked back and forth between them, but dragged her pink suitcase from under the bed and began folding her clothes.

“You don't need to make it neat, honey, just get them in there,” said Elmyra, walking to Reeve and whispering, “What's happening?”

“Weapon. Coming here, fast, and I'm sure Heidegger's worked out I'm not exactly on side anymore, there's no time to explain – the two of you need to get down to the ground floor, there's a driver waiting in my car to take you both to Kalm. Here, take these.” He threw the starched grey overalls and red cap into her arms. “Everyone's on alert, they won't be watching a janitor on the move, there's a keycard in the pocket, you'll be fine.” He raised his voice and turned to Marlene. “And it means you get to ride in the cart!”

Elmyra unfolded the overalls and stepped into them, straight over her pyjamas, holding Reeve's eye. “But what about you?”

“Everyone knows me, it'll attract too much attention if I try to leave with you, and besides... I think I should stay. I need to let the group know what's happening, and then I'm going to help with the evacuation. And I'm going to do something stupid. I'm going to do something so stupid.” He blinked a few times rapidly, and cleared his throat. “There's a room for you both at the Kalm inn, all paid in full, food and board. You should be safe if you lay low there.”

“Well, maybe I should stay, too. This was my home, and life wasn't always kind here, but -”

He took her gently by the shoulder. “You promised Barret. We both did.”

Elmyra sighed, and nodded. “Is there any chance of standing against it?”

“Rufus is here. We brought over the mako cannon that took out one of those things in Junon. And if Barret and the others can make it in time, well, you've seen how strong they are now. I'm sure there's no fight they can't win.” He took a deep breath. “I need to go, I need to tell them, but I had something else to give you first.”

He pulled a thumb drive from his pocket, black with a silver Shinra logo, a simple thing to be looked on so wistfully. “On here is every plan and every design I've ever drawn up for utilising renewable energy sources. I don't know what's about to happen to me, but if there's anything at all left of this world a week from now and I don't come to collect it from you, I want you to find someone who'd do it right and give it to them.”

Elmyra took the drive and held it in her palm – such a small weight for containing all that a man wanted his legacy to be. “I'm not sure I'm the best person to judge.”

“I trust you more than anyone else in this tall den of vipers. That's why I got you these, too.” And he handed over a silver armlet, inlaid with two glowing green stones.

Marlene hauled her packed suitcase off the bed and toddled over to them, gasping at the gift. “It's so pretty!”

“Yes, it is,” said Elmyra, staring. “Is this...?”

“Earth and restorative materia. Use them together and you can regenerate soil, like you told me.”

Blinking and dazed, she put it around her wrist. It hung loose on her slender arm, though the metal was pleasantly warm where the crystals sat. “I don't know how to thank you,” she murmured.

“You're not coming with us?” said Marlene, pouting at Reeve.

He shook his head. “I have a few jobs to do here first, Marlene, but I'll try to come and see you both soon.”

“Can you at least tell me where my daddy is?”

Reeve sniffed and dropped to one knee, eye level with the girl. “He's been all over the world, Marlene, with Tifa and their friends. They've been doing everything they can to keep you, and me, and Elmyra, and everyone else on this planet safe. And I know nothing less than that would ever keep him away from you.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Your dad is one of the kindest, bravest, and most loyal people I've ever been lucky enough to know. And you tell him I said that, if I don't get the chance to first.”

Elmyra squeezed her shoulder. “He's right, you know.”

“Is daddy fighting the monsters and the bad men?”

“He sure is,” said Elmyra.

Marlene's smile widened with the discovery and she made a fist, smacking it into her open palm again and again and stamping one sandalled foot. “He'll do this! And this! Until their bones go pop and their heads explode everywhere!”

Reeve's eyebrows shot up at her display of violence, one more for the pile of evidence marking him childless. He stood and dusted his knees. “Right. Okay. Good. I need to go. Good luck, both of you. I hope we get to meet again, somewhere better than this.”

“And you,” she said, and he headed for the door. Her feet moved of their own volition. “Reeve! Wait!”

He spun around and she caught him by the shoulder. She swallowed the lump in her throat and clenched the trembling hand that didn't hold him. “You're going to make it out of this. You have to, because you're going to find me, you're going to build everything on that drive and I'm going to do what Ifalna never had chance to. You hear me?”

His face crumpled in pain, only for a moment, then he nodded slowly. “Whatever's left to build on, if I have any say in it, I never want anyone to feel trampled again.”

They clasped their hands, pulling together and drawing apart. And then he was gone, setting off at a jog along the corridor. She hurried to the bed, wrapping the drive and the disk containing Ifalna's research in her thickest sweater and hiding them in her suitcase.

***

Reeve was right – her uniform was as good as a spell for invisibility amongst panicked suits rushing this way and that. Klaxons blared up and down the building, and swarms of screaming streamed onto the streets below, glaring in the red of the emergency lights. She steered the cart into a small alcove in what was once the food court, now a room full of overturned chairs from which the staff had fled, falling into each other and dropping papers and folders across the floor in a broken mosaic. She bent and mimed picking one up. “I need you to keep quiet in there, my love,” she whispered to Marlene, hiding in the long basket at the front of the cart.

“Is it so the monster won't hear us?” whispered Marlene.

“Yes, that's right. You're doing great so far.” They set off again, the elevator close and on the move, further down with the seconds. It had taken longer to get this far than she'd hoped, ducking into empty offices and navigating a few floors she had never walked before. The tremors came slowly still and the tower remained standing, but there wasn't much time.

The elevator chimed at last and opened for her – directly onto Scarlet and Heidegger talking at the back.

She kept her head down, covering her face with the brim of the cap and nestling herself in to the side of them. Shiva, Ifrit, Ramuh, if any of you are out there and listening to those of us who made such a mess of the planet, please, please just let me get this poor girl out of her prison safely. Heidegger had looked her right in the eye only a few days before, but he didn't so much as glance her way now. There was that much to be thankful for.

“I can't believe professionalism just flies out of the window as soon as we're faced with the unknown,” said Scarlet, her arms folded. “Now we have to share this elevator with everybody.”

Heidegger horse-laughed and raised a hand. “At least the director's terrorist friends will be the ones in the direct line of fire, and not us. I'd say it's working out as well as could be expected.”

Her heart clenched. Reeve. Had they arrested him, or...? She bit her lip and stared into the ground, clutching the handle of the cart. The elevator passed through floor thirty. Halfway there. Snatches of cries from the offices on the way drifted past her, snippets of eerily calm emergency broadcasts trying their best into the night.

Floor twenty-three - potted plants knocked over, a few workers shaking and hiding under desks. Rank, status, bank balance, it made no difference - Weapon reduced all of them to children hiding under blankets when the wind beat errant branches against their window. Floor nineteen, and an impact bigger than any other hit the ground and knocked them all sideways, lights blinking out as the cap flew from Elmyra's head. She scrabbled on the floor and rammed it back while they juddered to a halt. Her throat seized and forgot to breathe. Please no, not like this, just get us to the ground floor...

The motion resumed a second later. Her companions laughed to themselves, a soft kya ha ha and gya ha ha that betrayed their nervousness. Marlene hadn't so much as squeaked.

“I don't see the need to panic, anyway,” said Scarlet, tossing her hair. “We've held command over the elements for years now. We have firepower the likes of which the world has never seen, and certainly not in the time of the Cetra. We've endured worse than this.”

So she said, but her bare arms dashed with goose pimples nonetheless. The elevator chimed again and opened on the ground floor before they had time to recognise Elmyra, or before she reached the end of her tether and jammed the cart into their ankles. While they stayed in the compartment on the way to their secret bunker, no doubt, she charged out of the box and into a glass-fronted foyer bright in Meteor's red glow, moving closer and closer. But she could worry about that in Kalm.

Elmyra raced across the floor and left by revolving door into the first fresh air she'd breathed in weeks, with no time to enjoy it. She slowed as they went down the steps, stopped on flat ground, and lifted the lid of the compartment to help Marlene scramble out, catching her and holding her close.

“You did so well, honey! Now, let's go find the car.” She took Marlene's hand and both of their cases, turning this way and that. A mighty footfall landed again, this one sending the two of them stumbling forward and raising a collective cry from the citizens running for cover. There! On the corner to the right, the same sleek back car that pulled up by her bridge and brought her to this prison, now her best shot at leaving it in one piece.

She ran to the back door, flung it open, ushered Marlene inside, followed her – and only then glanced at the driver. “It's us,” she said, breathless. “Let's go!”

Marlene clipped her seatbelt in herself and smiled proudly. The driver, a young man with light hair in a rumpled grey suit, nodded and turned the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life as the city rocked with another footfall, this one jostling them to the side and knocking a heavy rain of slate tiles from a roof across the way. Their driver stepped on the pedal and turned hard right towards the freeway, a trail of screams fading behind them.

“It's nice to meet you, Elmyra - you too, Marlene,” he said, in a distinct eastern grasslands accent. “I'm Mattias. We still good to go to Kalm?”

Another footfall, another round of screams, a volley of windows shattering in a line on the street they raced along. “Anywhere but here,” she said, rubbing at the chill crawling up her arms.

They emerged onto the expressway into a stream of red and black and silver, horns blaring and engines revving and shrill voices blending into a single swell. Mattias hissed as he hit the brake and fell in line. Elmyra's stomach clenched. Ahead and behind the cars lay in wait, trapped there together and moving at a crawl.

“Selfish idiots,” their driver muttered. “Look at this guy in the sports car, and the one in the yellow up ahead. If everyone just stayed calm and drove forward, we'd all be outta here, but they're holdin' us all back weavin' in and out like that.”

They started, budged an inch, and stopped again with a jolt. Marlene whimpered to herself and Elmyra took her hand.

“Say,” said Mattias, his voice straining and his brow beaded with sweat in the front mirror, “I know we got bigger things to think about right now, but is it true? They really arrested Tuesti?”

Ga-doom – another step closer. The bridge beneath them swayed and Elmyra's stomach lurched. She cleared her throat and nodded. “Yes. I'm afraid I can't tell you more than that.”

Marlene sniffled and tugged on her sleeve. “But why? Why would anyone want to hurt Mr. Reeve? He was always nice to me.”

“He was nice to everyone, kiddo,” said Mattias, shaking his head. “Everyone wanted to work with him. A lotta people from research and defence transferred into our department just for the chance to not get spat on every day – I know, your boss ain't your friend and all that, but compared with the others... Damn, if he knew he was about to do somethin' to get on the wrong side of the company, why didn't he come with us?”

Ga-doom. The structure beneath them rumbled again, and seemed to shake the traffic loose. They advanced, inch by inch. Elmyra kept her hand on the suitcase that contained his life's work, his real life's work, if the planet had long enough to see it realised. “He stayed behind to warn his friends, to help evacuate the city.” Reeve, pale as paper but for the shadows under his eyes who wore no ring, who kept no photos or affects on his desk, just a bottle of strong whiskey. He'd stayed night after night straining his eyes in front of that screen for them, turned his precious cat companion into a weapon for them, and he stopped for nothing less than the very life of the planet. “And they arrested him for it.”

Ga-doom. The size of a being that could create such a noise! They crawled forward a few paces and shuddered to a halt. Elmyra blinked, swallowed, clenched her fists as they inched forward again and again, tremors punctuating the stillness until the sun was burning on the horizon. Red and dim as something dying, and little comfort against the heartbeat of annihilation. Ga-doom. She closed her eyes and leaned against the window, breathed in through the nose, out through the mouth, with Marlene's hand stroking hers. When she emerged, the slums below the bridge spread out into the distance, her home a mere co-ordinate from up on high.

Ga-doom. The car jolted upward, smacking her head against the ceiling, the noise was reverberating in her bones and in her blood – outside, a crack in the road's coating unfurled, ran its jagged fingers halfway across the bridge. Elmyra screamed soundlessly and all around them doors slammed and voices rose as people fled their cars, scrambling ahead between the packed vehicles, scarves and sleeves hanging from suitcases and streaming out behind them, flags of surrender.

“They're running, Aunt Elmyra, can't we go too? It's scary up here.”

“Look, it's loosening up ahead!” said Mattias. “Please stay here, it's only a minute 'til we're back on the ground.”

The pillars supporting the freeway snapped and sent the bridge plummeting to the ground a few heartbeats after they made it to the floor of the desert. Elmyra watched it fall with her mouth open and eyes as dry as the clouds of dust the car kicked up, just so someone was there to bear witness to the last moments of those people only trying to live. Those who survived veered off road, taking their chances on the unpaved desert and leaving the highway free to speed away on. Above them, what was left of the plate shook with the impact of the planet protector's footsteps, faster and faster every time.

They passed into a shallow red canyon in silence, most of the exodus dispersed. Marlene sniffed occasionally but sat still and Mattias fixed his eyes on the road. Elmyra kept quiet as the grey-gold dunes and jagged crimson rocks passed them by. What was the use of getting to know you questions in a world that might be nothing more than fragments in space by next week? She rested her head on the back of the seat, leaving her home further and further behind. Her garden, her pots and pans she kept so perfectly polished, Soren's sepia-toned photos, Aerith's drawings in their special folder under the stairs – all gone, soon, trampled under the feet of a vengeful guardian.

The car lurched to the side. Marlene screamed as the car tilted on two wheels. A pillar of falling stone plummeted past the window and fell to the ground, shattering. Marlene's side door wore a deep dent where they'd brushed against another stone outcropping, but no-one was hurt. Mattias righted himself and carried on, fast out of the canyon and back into the open, where the air was fragrant with the split bark of newly felled trees uprooted by the force of the Weapon's advance.

She made the mistake of turning around for one last look at Midgar fading into the horizon.

It rose up with the bellow of a moving mountain, narrow eyes and wide mouth lambent in vicious crimson. The city, the whole tall tower shook and shrank next to the silver terror that emerged from the sea – miles away now, but still towering above them, shaking the earth.

She turned away and swallowed the bile rising in her throat. Her daughter's companions would be storming the beach now, eight of them standing against a creature too unfathomably huge to even be seen by her naked eye, all while she ran away in a company car. They've endured so much already, it's made them strong. Nothing would stop Tifa socking it in the leg or Nanaki diving headfirst towards its toes – and most of all Barret Wallace, standing proud and loving to the last. She touched her armlet, running the tip of her ring finger over the crystals. She couldn't stand beside them, but she could hold a little girl's hand and maybe, just maybe, she could live long enough to heal the ground they stood on.

The first attack fell out of sight, though not for long. The car bounced with the force of the impact on the ground, the dry soil splitting and cracking and pluming up in grey whorls all across the desert. Marlene nestled into her side and they huddled together, eyes on the back of the front seats like there was nothing outside the metal box they fled in. Flashes of red and blue light made it inside, and so did the tremors, and the noise, the boom of the impact on the earth and the roar of a dying planet and the ungodly screech of metal on metal.

“Oh, boy,” Mattias breathed. “I can see it on the top of the tower. They're charging the cannon.”

Elmyra pressed Marlene into her side and turned. The lights of the city were dead, as if all the power was gathering into the white orb on top of the tower. The ball of light grew and grew as the creature's chest emitted a vibrant red. They lit the sky over the badlands like festival fireworks, meeting in the middle in a burst of blinding white. She screamed, the car jolting forward and the din ringing in her ears.

When she turned back, the skyline was empty. The dust settled and the dented car rattled on. If Weapon was gone, falling into the sea, couldn't they turn back? Couldn't she bring Marlene to her father and check they were alright, and that Reeve was safe? Perhaps her house and her belongings had survived, too... But she passed out at some point, opening her eyes as dusk came around over the high stone walls of Kalm. Stepping out into the grey-blue of late evening, she helped Marlene alight and took their suitcases, heading for the warm golden glow pouring from the town beyond the gate. A soft bed waited inside, a bath, hot soup or stew and no metal encasement to wall them in. No such luxuries for the Avalanche cluster out in the fields, or Reeve captive in that tower.

She stretched and held out a hand to Mattias. “I don't know how I could begin to thank you.”

He grasped her hand in his, still sweating, but shaking it firmly. “No trouble, ma'am. Director Tuesti said I could take the car to go back to my folks' place, out by the chocobo ranch. Figured I wanna be with them most of all, with that thing in the sky.” He glanced up at Meteor and shook his head. “And if it's all gonna end in a few days, guess I couldn't pass up the chance to do a last good deed.”

“Even so, I won't forget it. Good luck on your travels,” she said, stifling a yawn.

Mattias scratched the back of his neck and looked out over the plains. “'Preciate it. Same to the two of you, and hey, maybe someday we'll meet again in better times.”

She smiled. “I'd like that. Beers are on me, if we do.”

He saluted her with a grin and climbed back into the battered car. She held Marlene's shoulder as the red tail lights disappeared over the hills, black against the first of the stars. A last kindness he went out of his way to do in these fading days – how? How could a world of people like him just disappear into dust?

***

Elmyra opened her eyes, and still, the peace lily waited brown and dry and fading. She sighed. The materia crystals were warm on her arm, but no matter how she flicked her wrist, how she called aloud for help from the earth, how she conjured a revived and healthy plant in her mind and willed it to be, nothing changed. Reeve must have tried so hard to source them for her, at this of all times, and she couldn't send up so much as a spark.

Behind her, Marlene had spent the afternoon cross-legged on the floor with a colouring book, forgetting the world outside the thick black lines. The door to the bar downstairs opened with a whine and closed with a bang, startling them both. Elmyra turned back to the window and her shoulders fell. As if a housewife could heal the world with nothing more than two magic stones.

A succession of heavy, lumbering footsteps fell on the floor of the room below, then the scrape of a chair dragging sent chills up her spine. “You can see it right there out the goddamn window, shit-for-brains! If you knew even a half of what my friends have had to do for the last -”

“Daddy!”

Marlene sprang from the floor, pouting and pointing up at the door's lock. Elmyra stroked her hair and slid the bolt across, following her rapid footfalls down the creaking stairs. Emerging into the bar, sure enough, there was Barret, who'd cornered a thin man in a pale grey suit and stood still, looming over him. Half of the day's special chicken pot pie cooled on the table beneath them, the rest of the patrons edging away in their seats.

The lucky man craned his neck up to meet Barret's blazing eyes and stood his ground. “Meteor is a hoax! It's nothing but bread and circuses dreamed up by Shinra to distract from their miserable failure to bring a radical group to heel. If you believe that -”

He tailed off as Barret took another step forward, slow and deliberate, bearing down on the man's face and wiping the smug smile right off it. He jabbed a finger towards the window in time with his words. “It's. Right. There.”

She held Marlene back by the shoulders and bit her upturned lip. His good arm was bandaged, his clothes soot-smeared and full of holes, but he'd come back to them in one piece. He spoke for all of them as he looked down on this man, this ignorant man who'd ignore a fire eating at his own ankles if acknowledging it meant changing his mind. And an angry Barret would be no less intimidating even if he noticed the wicker picnic basket he came carrying.

Still, the suit jutted out his chin and arched his eyebrows. “They have technology in that city we couldn't even dream of, giant projectors, explosives, you name it.”

Two women in short lace dresses sat at the bar, watching the spectacle with small smiles. “I heard it was a conspiracy by the terrorists to bring more people over to their side,” whispered one, leaning close.

Her companion nodded. “One of the two. It's gotta be.”

“Oh, it's Shinra's doin', all right.” Barret paced to the centre of the bar and raised his good arm. “But you'll eat up anything they wanna say, so long as it keeps the lights on, am I right?”

Elmyra let Marlene go and she stepped onto the floor, breathless and bouncing her hands. “Daddy?”

Barret froze in the middle of drawing up his shoulders for the next round. Then he turned, two tear tracks glistening on his face and melting into a smile. He opened his arms and Marlene ran, leaping up and laughing as he caught her, spun her around, lifted her onto his shoulder and held her close. Elmyra blinked away a little rain around her own eyes as they beamed at each other. The frightened man returned to his seat and his dinner, silent now.

Elmyra leant against the back wall and Marlene wound her arms around Barret's neck, planting a kiss on his forehead. Laughing, he eased her back onto the floor and they walked hand in hand over to the doorway.

“Elmyra,” he said. “I don't even know where to start on how grateful I am.”

She shook her head and patted Marlene's hair. “It's nothing, truly. She's been a joy the whole time.”

“Oh, yeah? You've been a brave girl for your Aunt Elmyra?”

Marlene nodded and grinned. “She's been so cool. And I got to eat real fruit and go on a staircase that moves and ride in the janitor's cart!”

The frown only crossed his face for a moment, papered over with a beaming smile. “Sounds like a fun time.”

“It had its moments,” said Elmyra, and she nodded towards the man in the grey suit. “Even with certain truths that should be self-evident to consider.”

“I'll say.” He lowered his voice and threw a grimace back over his shoulder. “You believe that guy?”

“I'm glad you said it,” she said. “They'd never listen to me.”

“Oh, I dunno. I can see you chargin' someone with a wooden spoon or a rollin' pin and if I was them, I'd do what you said right away.”

She snorted. “I'll take that as a compliment.”

Marlene poked at the picnic basket. “What's in here?”

Barret held it aloft in the victory pose she'd watched so many times from the safety of Reeve's office. The room would be empty now, if it still stood at all. Please let him be on the lower level. Please let there have been some way he got out, some place they couldn't find him.

Barret lowered his arm. “Dinner! How about the three of us take a trip to the lake and watch the sun go down?”

Together they took the gravel path out of the north side of town, through the tangled trees guarding the water. Barret sang on the way, off-key but straight from the heart. “We're still awake and we're going to the lake, got memories to make and a basket full of cake”. He lifted Marlene on the final line and she kissed his cheek again, little legs kicking wildly. He'd liked to sing on the road with the party, too, lifting everyone's spirits, whether it was Yuffie and Tifa joining in with rhymes of their own or Cloud and Vincent affecting grimaces in the back. A sweet sound so easily drowned by gunfire and metal, but not in those quiet woods. A reddish tinge lay over all the eye could see, but out there, perhaps it was only the setting sun. Marlene pointed to the gold edges of the deep pink clouds and giggled.

“I didn't know the sky could be this many colours!”

Elmyra closed her eyes in solitary and silent prayer for the children who'd never have chance to see the glory of the colours when a clear day ended or began. As they trampled through the brush, she stooped and picked up a flat black stone. She blessed it with a smile and threw it out onto the water, pumping a fist as it hopped five times before sinking into the cold depths.

Marlene jumped and clapped, and Barret nodded. “Never could work out how you do that.”

Elmyra crouched and rummaged for another suitable candidate, slate grey and rough to the touch. “Here, I'll show you.” She pressed the stone into his hand, guiding his fingers gently. “Yeah, between your thumb and forefinger, like that. And then you want to throw it as straight as you can. It's easier if you crouch.”

She stepped back as he knelt, pelting the rock in a smooth line towards the surface of the lake. It bounced and splashed three times, then dropped out of sight.

Barret nodded slowly and smiled, looking out to the drifting rushes on the far shore. “Well,” he murmured. “How about that? Another one off the bucket list.”

Marlene tugged at her sleeve, brandishing a small pale red stone. “Is this one right?”

“That looks great, sweetie.” Elmyra bent her knees, eye level with Marlene, and arranged her hand into the right position. Marlene gave a little twirl as she threw, startling a heron from its vigil on the bank to their left.

“Wow!” Elmyra clapped and cheered. “A whole three jumps!” She sighed and shook her hair out from her ponytail, letting it stir in the wind. “I did this all the time when I was a girl. The lake near my village was full of swans back then, and if you've never seen one, they're the most elegant birds you can imagine. Now I doubt there's even water left in that hole.”

They stayed a while, releasing volleys of stones on the water until Barret pointed out an imaginary duck's nest, and Marlene insisted to disturb them would be very rude. She ran off into the brush with no idea that she'd never have chance to stand by a clear blue lake full of swans. The sun was a line of distant fire and the sky a rich purple in the corners where their traveling doom didn't reach. The trees, dark against the sunset, stretched up into the heavens with black hands grown over centuries, her whole lifetime a mere turn of the tide to them. Marlene ran ahead, gleefully stamping down dead twigs and tall grass in her red rubber boots. She slipped in the dewy greenery and laughed, real mud and real grass stains adorning her for perhaps the first time in her life. Barret swung the basket to and fro as they walked.

“Couldn't help noticing that piece of armour you got on you,” he said. “Could swear you didn't have it when we left.”

She lifted her wrist and turned the bangle. “It was... a parting gift. But I can't seem to get it to do anything. I was supposed to use it for healing, to help things grow, but maybe I just don't have what it takes.”

“Huh. Never had a problem with it myself.” He swung the basket in a full circle over his head. “I just pictured what I wanted it to do, and I did it.”

She lifted her skirt as she stepped over a puddle. “Perhaps it's a failure of my imagination, then.”

They stopped to eat on a rose-patterned blanket spread over the roots of an old and groaning oak, the whispers of its crown a hushed serenade. A few leaves drifted down with the wind and landed in her hair. Will we see another winter snow, another spring where the flowers come home? She plucked a loose leaf and traced its veins with a fingertip, so orange and so perfect. Then she cast it back into the wind to fly free, and helped herself to robust red wine with five different cheeses.

As the moon rose Marlene tired, until she lay down under a thick wool blanket at the foot of the tree. While she slept they strode back to the water's edge. A breeze from the eastern sea danced among the rushes and the fireflies had come out with the stars, their golden glow doubled in fractal patterns all across the dark waving glass of the lake.

“Five strawberry scones, one after another,” said Elmyra, smiling at the grey bundle under the oak. “No wonder she put herself to sleep.”

“Better hope she gets good rest. Don't think I can handle one more story about how cool Mr. Reeve is.”

Elmyra's breath hitched. “Do you know where he is, or what happened to him?”

“Lucky bastard's fine. Got himself out of the Shinra tower in the middle of it, now he's hidin' out with some of the folks left in the slums.”

She let go of her breath, a wordless whisper of thanks. “I couldn't blame you for resenting him. But he was good to us, and I dread to think of the alternatives.” She touched the crystals on her arm, and if their only use was giving her small warmth, it was better than nothing.

Barret sighed as a breeze stirred the leaves, brushing deeper ripples across the black water. “I wouldn't wanna be in his shoes no more than he would mine. He proved himself enough times out there. It just... might take me a while, is all.” He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. “Man. I'm sure glad I took this chance to see the stars, the real stars, just one more time.”

Elmyra swallowed the lump in her throat. “Only once more? So there's nothing to be done?”

“We'll find out tomorrow, I guess.”

“You're leaving again?”

“In the morning.”

“But why?” She sniffed, her voice cracking. She folded her arms and steeled herself. “Why not stay here and spend the time we have with her?”

“I want to. Gods know I want to.” Barret gripped his augmented arm with his human hand, looking up to the hole in the sky. “But it ain't over yet. Sephiroth's waitin' on us and if there's a chance, the slightest chance that blowin' him to pieces can put this world back on track, then I gotta.” His voice broke in turn then, his wide shoulders shuddering. “I gotta take it.”

Elmyra's head span and she pushed an errant strand of hair from her eyeline. “I don't understand any of this. A soldier we all thought died years ago... what does he have to do with helping the planet?”

“You mean nobody's told you?”

She shook her head. “Told me what?”

Silence fell save for the sound of the leaves. Were they crying, too? Were they up there taking this last chance to profess their devotion to the roots that tangled with their own, to reminisce on brighter days, to wish against all odds to stay on their branches before the cruel wind cast them to the ground?

“It was Aerith. She was praying for us.”

Elmyra gasped and raised a hand to her lips. “That materia she had, ever since I found her, the useless one... She was so frustrated by it, all those years.”

“She went to the old capital city of her people and tried to summon a spell that could counteract Meteor. That's... that's when it happened.”

There was hope because of Aerith. The wind whipped up and pulled down all the walls; she sobbed into the night, all she could do to keep standing.

“He cut her down 'cause she was the only one who could get in his way. And now... we know she's waitin' on us, too. She's still in the lifestream, still prayin', and that silver bastard's the last thing keepin' her stuck.” Barret sniffed and blinked, laughing lightly. “Man. She was somethin' else, your girl. However long I get to live after this night, I'm always gonna be glad I had chance to know her, for a little while.”

Tears flowed freely down Elmyra's face, the fireflies mere dying embers in her eyes. She wiped them away to see it all clearly. “This was hers,” she whispered. “The trees and the water and the soil and everything that lives here. It was her inheritance, and her whole life I kept her under all that concrete and metal.”

Barret gripped her shoulder, his touch as warm as the orbs at her wrist. “You wanted to keep her safe. You told us how you found her. Anyone woulda done the same.”

“Maybe I shouldn't. Maybe I should have trusted her and trusted the power she had. Instead of telling her she was just a normal girl, that she didn't have a duty, maybe then...”

“Sounds like a guaranteed recipe for Rufus Shinra,” Barret said. “It wasn't your fault,” he added, quiet and fumbling, like he knew the words were too little and too late.

She gave a small, clucking sob and something in her chest unwound itself. “And it wasn't yours, either. I don't blame you, any of you. I was watching most nights, with Reeve. I know you all don't really know me, but I feel like I know you, and I'm proud to have been there, even in a small way.”

They returned to Marlene on the blanket, arranging themselves cross-legged and watching over her. As they sat she stirred, murmuring and crawling onto their laps before sleep took her again. Barret smoothed her hair away from her placid face. “I meant what I said. I can't even begin to thank you for everything you did. Goin' with her into that horrible tall tower, making your escape with a goddamn Weapon tailin' you... you're incredible.”

She shook her head and stroked Marlene's hand, gripping her lightly in turn even in her sleep. “It was no trouble to me. Truth be told, I think she looked after me just as much. When I heard about Aerith, if she hadn't been there needing me, loving me, then I don't know how I would've even left my bed.”

Barret laughed as soft as the breeze as Marlene giggled in her sleep. “Yeah. She'll do that to you.” He fell still and silent for a moment. “Marlene was adopted, too. She was my best friend's daughter, one of the few they pulled outta the town when it burned. She was about the size of your forearm then, she don't remember a thing, but I always did wanna tell her when she got older. I don't think a good thing ever grew out of omittin' the truth.”

Elmyra leaned forward and pulled two blankets out of the basket. “It would only confuse her, now.” She wrapped the warm wool around her shoulders and offered another to Barret.

“Thanks. And you're right.” He covered himself, suddenly smaller when swaddled in grey. “But damn it, there's so much I still wanted to do. So many things I never got around to.” He leaned back against the tree trunk, eyes on the canopy. “I lost my wife, too, when Corel went up. Myrna. I don't even have a picture of her now.” He allowed himself a small chuckle. “I think about it hard enough and I can still feel the blisters I got this one day, size of biscuits they were, walkin' over to the other side of the mountain. She loved the blue flowers that grew in the foothills, shaped like bells, I never did remember the name. But she wanted 'em, and nothin' ever grew on Mount Corel, not in our time. She carried 'em down the aisle and I never saw a thing so perfect 'til I first set eyes on Marlene.”

The trees and the grass and the water rustled, as if urging him to go on. His voice, when it returned, was small and hollow. “Then the Shinra came. And I never stopped long enough to put the flowers on her grave.” His broad chest heaved with a heavy sob. “Damn it. I ain't proud of what I've done, but what choice did they leave us? What else was I meant to do?”

Elmyra was weeping too, for every choice stolen from them all. “I wouldn't know. I never tried to do anything.” She leaned in and her arms were around him, breathing in the sting of gunpowder. It clung to Soren, too, when he came home. Barret's living hand, this huge hand stained with the blood of all those who perished in the reactor bombings, pushed ever so gently into her hair and tipped her head onto his shoulder. Warmth radiated from him, his body he'd nurtured into such a size not for vanity, but to protect a world that provided for them all in turn.

She'd married a soldier, after all. Did I forget what soldiers do? Under the crisp uniforms and the righteous marching songs, the same darkness was called upon in battle. Was killing so much less of a sin if you signed the right forms first? She wilted against him, dropping her arms and resting them on the cold metal where a gentle hand deserved to be.

They slept under the stars, sharing warmth out of sight of the hole in the sky. When she woke to a grey morning, he was gone, only two glasses stained the colour of mulberries to prove he was there at all.

***

The noise swelled throughout the day, a background hum waking her in the morning and growing to a droning roar as the rock and fire out of space came bearing down upon them, dwarfing what remained of the pinnacle of civilization in the distance. If she'd been alone, Elmyra would've lain down and slept and never known when it happened – but she wasn't. Marlene sat on the floor, flinching at the sound and staring out of the window.

“Aunt Elmyra,” she said, sniffling. “It's scaring me a bit.”

Elmyra slipped off the bed and took her in her arms, smoothing her hair. “It's alright, sweetie. I'll be right here with you, and in his heart, your daddy is too. Can't you feel it from here, how much he loves you?”

“He's going to stop it, right?”

Elmyra nodded and blinked away tears. “Of course he is, he'll take care of it.” The words were reedy and hollow as Marlene threw herself up and down miming Barret kicking Meteor and stomping on the ashes. Overhead and oblivious to her show of might the red roiling loomed ever closer, blocking out the stars, eating up more and more of the night sky right before her eyes.

She'd stopped trying with the armlet and the lily in their window. Its dry and sagging leaves stirred in the wind their doom brought with it. Perhaps the plants knew it was useless, too. Those who loudly peddled their conspiracies had been oddly quiet all day, frightened faces peering from windows the only movement as the whole world held its breath, as the eyes of the gods closed on such a small and selfish species.

They waited in the window together. Elmyra blinked, and blinked again – would it be this time that she opened her eyes onto the shockwave that would bring death upon them? Sweat pricked her brow and the dead leaves of the plant crumbled – the temperature was rising as the spell descended. The very air was choking her. Marlene pressed closer, toying with her skirt.

“How will we know when daddy stops it landing?”

“I'm not sure. I think we'd see light, light and – look!”

Across the plains, the horizon was changing. A pale blue, soft at the edges and soothing to the eye sore from reddening heavens, pulsed into being above the ruined city. Elmyra bit her lip, her stomach clenching – Holy? She squinted as the blue light formed a curved shield around the city, rising to meet the surging scarlet menace above.

The final prayer of the planet and its last protector.

“Here it comes,” she whispered, holding Marlene up to the sill. She scrambled up and sat hugging her knees, eyes huge and reflecting the light, the gentle colour of asters.

Red and blue met in the night sky with a hiss, audible all the way across the desert. Inside the blue shell the buildings trembled and buckled, their great shield pulsing with the strain of keeping them intact. It had to work. Aerith gave her life for it to work. A father parted from his perfect daughter for it to work.

Was it the screams of the people trapped inside, or the ringing of her own ears?

Why hadn't Meteor disappeared, crumbled, turned away yet?

The blue shell cracked, and in flooded the fire.

Okay. Okay.

It wasn't enough. Aerith was gone and it wasn't enough.

The last bones of the dark tower crumbled, falling away and taking pieces of the plate with them. Thousands, millions, countless faces with hopes and memories and favourite songs and foods they hated gone in the time it took to steady herself against the sill. Was there anybody left to count? Would anyone anywhere know they'd been here at all?

So there she stood, at the end. No use in crying, really, and she had nothing left to cry for in a world without Aerith. Perhaps they'd earned it, this place the powerful bled dry to line their pockets, where the powerless turned on one another for the mere false promise of a few more scraps from high tables. Midgar, the breeding ground for so much pain and desperation, toppled to dust... Her head fell. Perhaps it was better this way.

No.

Elmyra lifted her gaze from the floor and met Meteor's red stare head on, narrowing her eyes. If all of it was to disappear from space and time and knowledge forever, then she would cherish it, all of it. She made a fist, like she could hold them all in it and keep them there. A frightened driver who couldn't turn down one last good deed. Flowers growing in the slums. A man who at the end of it all wanted only to hold his daughter and lay flowers on his dead love's grave. She would stoke the fire of rage for everything Marlene would never have a chance to experience and she would blossom with gratitude for everything her own life gave to her. Aerith, Soren, skipping stones and sunsets over the plains and new spring buds and her friends in Avalanche who let her see the whole world with them. She stared into the eye of the fire and smirked.

Come on, then. Take it all from me. Just you try.

Marlene wrapped her arms around her neck and fell into her arms. “We can't hide from it, can we, Aunt Elmyra?”

She kissed her temple. “It's going to be okay, honey. I'm here with you. Let's just wait here and watch. Where else are you going to see fireworks like this, huh?”

Her smile stayed, grew and brightened, for every soul still breathing had united in this moment, this most joyous lament her heart and all hearts beat into the night. And together they stood as red eclipsed blue in the sky, its light painting fire on the walls around them, sending sparks out into the universe like a final call for aid.

She breathed in. She breathed out. Again, another, one more.

But something changed.

It fell like a peal of bells, like cooling rain, like the scent of moss and bark on a dewy morning. She opened her eyes to a crystalline sound and ribbons of green light swimming overhead, swarming toward the pulsing blister burning up the skyline. The fires dimmed, its roaring silenced. One by one, doors across the town swung open, people running out and pointing and yelping with joy.

“The flower girl!” Marlene gasped, tugging her sleeve.

Elmyra nodded, eyes brimming with tears. They fell down her face as she laughed, as Meteor died and the last embers scattered into the sky, leaving only the healing green to light up the darkness. It was as good as seeing Aerith's face one last time, the very essence of her around and among them. And not just Aerith, no. Here too came the prayers of Soren, of Ifalna, of Gast Faremis and Myrna Wallace, of every poor soul under the Sector Seven plate and every fresh-faced soldier cut down in battle across the sea. She closed her eyes again, unclenched her fist below the armlet and spread out her fingers. Yes. It flowed through her easily now, love and horror, from the place she kept her dreams and fears and out through her fingertips.

Marlene cried out again. Elmyra opened her eyes and emerald sparks flew from the stones at her wrist into the dying plant, unfurling dry leaves and restoring them to vibrant green. The tiny lights whirled around the stem and left, their work done, rising to join the others dancing in the night.

Chapter Text

“Meteor was a lie! Shinra had us all believing the world was about to end so we wouldn't riot now the power's out!”

Elmyra stood a few feet from the crowd gathered around the loud man in the square and rolled her eyes. The sun was low in the sky, the clear wide open blue sky, and they were on their way back to their candlelit room with sandwiches and cake. An apocalypse averted party for just the two of them - in five days of rushing to the window every time a car pulled up beyond the walls there'd been no contact from anyone. No news came through even on battery-powered radios, no word at all on who lived and who was in charge or what the plan could be. But no-one had turfed them out of the inn, either.

Elmyra held the swing door for Marlene who toddled in clutching a brace of pine cones from their daily amble in the woods. A man in a sky blue jacket sat at the bar, cigarette smoke trailing in lazy circles around his head. “Only basic green or black, alright then, one green tea, please, my man.”

Her heart leapt into her throat. “Cid? Cid Highwind?”

He turned and nodded to her. “Mrs. Gainsborough? And this must be Marlene!”

She could've taken his craggy face between both palms and kissed it, then, hurrying over to the bar. “This is Cid, Marlene, he's a friend of your daddy!” She held out a hand. He clasped it with calloused fingers, waving off the bartender. “Are the others with you?”

He shook his head. “But they're all waitin' for you in Junon, right as rain. You ladies flown on an airship before?”

She laughed, blinking away tears. “I most certainly have not. But I can think of someone who'll love it.”

They packed up their cases and left the little walled town and its disinterest in reality behind them. Right enough, Marlene squealed and jumped when she saw the Highwind waiting by the roadside, engines firing up to take them to the reunion.

“We get to ride on there, really? Where are we going?”

“We can go anywhere you wanna go, possum,” said Cid, throwing her a wink. “But how's about we go see your old man and Tifa first?”

Marlene shrieked and giggled, whirling in circles all the way up the ramp and not letting up until takeoff. She clung to Elmyra's skirt, stood by the railing with the ground receding fast below them, then ran off to inspect the interiors and hunt for rumoured cookies. Elmyra stayed in the open, the wind in her hair and the shouts of the crew at her back. Had the sky always been so blue?

Cid shambled up and joined her, shielding the cigarette he struggled to light with the collar of his jacket. “So you were watchin' us from the Shinra tower?”

She nodded as the smoking ruin of her confinement receded from the view of the deck. “It helped me feel like I was doing something, I suppose.” She stepped forward and jabbed him in the chest. “And I hope the first thing you did once Meteor disappeared was go home and make that poor woman her own pot of tea.”

“He did.” A soft voice came up behind them and there was Shera, snug in a fur-lined grey jacket over her sunny yellow clothes. “Same night Barret went to you guys, I think.”

Significantly more than a pot of tea would be required to make Elmyra smile the way Shera did at this man who'd vented his spleen onto her for years. She leant with her back against the railings and touched her hand to Cid's. Elmyra shivered. As Shera looked out over the crazy quilt their elevation made of the world, free and happy for a moment, she nodded to herself. We're going to be friends. I'm going to make you my friend and I'm going to look out for you.

Beneath them lay the snow-capped Mythril Mountains, the vast marshes and the weaving shadow of the Zolom. Had all of their lives looked so small from the top of the tall glass tower? It was how the world had taught her to see herself, every time the Turks came knocking or the planet dried out and died a little more. They dried us all out, too, made us wear each other down to dust. Who am I to blame anyone for lashing out when all I did was take it in?

But she'd keep an eye on Shera nonetheless. The mountains levelled into rounded foothills, a tapestry of forest stretching to the far horizon. “Why Junon?” she asked.

Cid laughed, shaking his head as he stubbed out his cigarette on the metal railing. “It's a long story. I'll let everyone explain when we get there.”

“Is there anything left of Shinra? Who's in charge now?”

“Everyone,” said Shera with a brightness in her eyes.

They touched down at nightfall in a city she'd seen on picture postcards and news reports, resplendent with red banners flying among all of Shinra's military might. Junon's heights stood broken and battered by fighting as they drew nearer, a cloud of smoke rising over the heights. They landed on the intact airstrip and Marlene vanished down the ramp in a blur of pink and white, launching herself into Barret's arms as everyone assembled clapped and cheered. Cloud, Yuffie, Nanaki, Tifa nursing a cut to her temple and Vincent lurking in the shadows by the control tower and the blonde girl from the Turks, hugging herself and staring at the floor, everyone was there and real and alive – and Reeve, nothing on him worse than a black eye. He waved shyly as she strode over, not moving. She rolled her eyes and threw her arms around him, his shoulders tense for a moment before he leaned in and held her close.

“I'm so glad you're alright,” she whispered, brushing a smear of gunpowder from his collar.

Barret crouched in the centre of their circle, introducing Marlene to the motley crew he'd gathered one by one. His daughter stroked the scarred part of his arm where flesh joined with metal – the wounds of a love that burned brighter than power, skin that grew back whorled and roughened but healed all the same. Her breath hitched as she drew apart from Reeve. She'd fallen asleep on those shoulders, cried in his arms and heard his deepest confessions in turn, breathed in the smoke that clung to him. A blush rose to her cheeks, the strip dark enough to keep it mercifully hidden.

Cloud came over, smiling and so much smaller with his sword left to the side. “We're all so grateful to you for taking such good care of Marlene,” he said, and then nodded to Reeve. “This one, too. Anyone tell you yet that he leaked a bunch of Shinra documents and let the world know everything they got up to?”

Reeve shook his head. “It was the least I could do, and about all I could do from there.”

Tifa, limping slightly, came up behind him and tapped his shoulder. “And none of this would've happened if you hadn't. People needed to know the truth if they were ever going to come together and build something better.”

Tears filled Barret's eyes as he detailed how survivors all across the world, thankful for the planet that provided for them to the last as much as they were furious at decades of misrule from the shadows, had converged on the coast and taken down the last vestiges of Shinra's power where they hid in the command tower. Nanaki was no less solemn as he laid out to her the principles of a society that let people govern themselves – after all, they could hardly do worse than what had come before. He nodded his head to the bonfire down below where the banners proclaiming a new era under Rufus charred into ash. More animated was Yuffie, ducking and diving as she praised the warriors of Wutai she'd led into the fray and recounted the tale of Vincent storming the city's command centre as a one-man army and rescuing Reeve from imprisonment and execution. Vincent himself nodded vaguely in her direction, which by his standards came as the warmest hug in the world.

“There's a party on the streets,” said Tifa, peering over the edge. Coloured lights and the distant sounds of clinking glasses and merriment followed the fire up to their level. “I've done so much talking today already. What do you say we all go down and enjoy a few drinks instead?”

Her suggestion was met with more cheers and she led the way, Cloud rushing to her side and putting a steady arm around her waist. Elmyra smiled – anyone could've seen those red strings from the moment they walked through the door. The others filed away one by one down the steps, all save Vincent and Reeve. She threw them a questioning eyebrow over her shoulder.

“You go ahead,” said Reeve. “I'll come find you later, I promise. I just need a moment.”

***

The three days of revelry that followed didn't bode so well for the planet's population and their ability to organise themselves. Elmyra woke on that first glorious morning in Free Junon sprawled across one of the outdoor tables with a pounding in her head, close to Shera curled up on top of a trimmed hedge and Reeve passed out on his back at the foot of a dolphin statue, one shoeless foot in the pool of its fountain. But with the city's reserves of drink depleted and the immediate, all-consuming relief of the aborted apocalypse out of their systems, the work began.

Elmyra's first task, planned in a small room at the inn overlooking the ocean, was designing rooftop gardens for the upper city's tall buildings. The residents jumped in to help her arrange planting, all of them, from grubby-handed children flinging dirt at each other to white-haired ladies with walking sticks who sniffed the seeds and spoke of younger, greener days. Together they laid out the plants - “You can't put the mint and the anise in with the vegetables, they drain the soil around them!” - and nurtured them to a late autumn bloom, protected them during the winter's winds, and nursed them back to glory when spring arrived.

Elmyra had moved into one of the apartments below the gardens by then, her rooms all white and draped in ferns and herbs. On her first night she'd had a knock on the door from Kel, the stocky, muscular woman from the distribution centre who lived along the hall. She complimented the smell of the soup Elmyra was cooking up, fresh mushrooms and garlic, and received a bowl to take back to her apartment for her troubles. The next night, she was back with a box of sour fruit curry for Elmyra in turn. A week later and the whole building vowed to gather in the garden to share meals, each household taking turns to cook – after three weeks they could wave at the residents of the neighbouring heights doing the very same thing.

Reeve, still driving the dented black car that had saved Elmyra and Marlene and Mattias from thousands of tonnes of falling steel, had assembled a team of the best architects and engineers and biologists from around the world – a team she was to be part of, somehow. She'd seen Mattias around a couple of times, living a few streets over, tanned and happy, though she was yet to make good on the promise of beer. Work was underway on converting the one-time Shinra command centre into their base of operations, and in between that and equipping the city with solar panels Reeve found time to show her some of the designs on the drive she'd smuggled out of Midgar. They took her breath away.

“Not what you had in mind?” he said. “I looked to the architecture of the Cetra for ideas.”

She'd expected the austere, industrious metal and concrete that dominated Midgar under that eerie mold-coloured light. What awaited her were colourful stained glass windows wrought with swirling patterns, graceful wind turbines with vines crawling up their bases, vertical farms overflowing with life, trees and greenery planted in between buildings, trams and barges to take people wherever they wanted to go in sustainable serenity.

“Your old department logo was a heart and you made cartoon cat robots for fun,” she said, her heart overflowing. “I'm only surprised you made them this tasteful.”

Working on the rooftops, looking out over the city, more and more of his improvements bloomed by the day, it seemed. Nine months passed in a blur of soft pastels and ocean breezes and the scent of mingling flowers. “I could enjoy it if people stopped popping out Meteor babies for five seconds and made my job easier,” Kel muttered, one evening out on the roof.

Elmyra laughed to herself the next morning as she walked the shoreline stretch, the strip by the sand and the little winding alleys she knew so well from her daily strolls around the city, to see her finished place of work for the first time. She laughed a lot then, wandering the streets in new clothes she'd made for herself in soft, sleek fabrics, floral prints and pale shades to set off the light tan she'd acquired for the first time since moving under the plate. And everyone she met smiled more too, from the shopkeepers on the higher ground getting accustomed to running businesses cooperatively to the old town at the bottom of the cliff, scraping together something of their old way of life now the fish had come home to clear waters.

From the outside, the building was the same ugly slab of concrete with a few colours in the windows and the Shinra banners taken down. She'd worn her most elegant clothes – a white dress printed with green and lilac flowers, straw hat, white gloves, and nude patent shoes with a small heel. She'd never worked with fabric so soft, even on her wedding day. By the time she reached the entrance, a small crowd had gathered outside the doors of the Aerith Gainsborough Centre for Regenerative Technology.

He hadn't told her that part.

His eyes found her in the crowd and he nodded as he opened the door. Anyone was welcome to come in and have a look and make use of their resources – why hide designs you wanted the whole world to have? And what a place to share. All assembled flooded in and a collective gasp went up into the vaulted ceiling – it was the most beautiful building she'd ever set foot in. Pink and blue glass around the entrance cast kaleidoscope patterns across the grey marble floor to welcome them. A stretch of flagstones framed a sprawling koi pond in the centre of the room, a little island in its centre replete with a small garden and swing chairs and a fancy coffee machine. Two spiral staircases at the far end led up to the offices and laboratories on the upper floors, all festooned with ferns and hibiscus, windowed with coloured glass that caught the waving lights from the water below.

“I can't believe I get to spend every day here!” she said to Reeve, linking her arm with his. “I can't believe it's a place that really exists. You did wonderfully!”

He laughed and ran his free hand through his hair, slicked back and finally trimmed of the overhang that set in during their confinement in the Shinra building. Unlike that prison and its selfish use of open space, everything here was covered in plants, in colours, in art made by the people of the city with all the free time they had at their disposal. “I can't quite believe it either,” he said. He clasped her by both hands, beaming, and he'd never looked so alive. “From today, I can build things that last! I can make everything easily repairable! I never have to factor in planned obsolescence ever, ever again!”

She laughed too, the two of them whirling in a circle with her skirts fluttering around her knees and embracing tightly, there in the centre of their joined effort.

“So I know this was all planned out for air filtration and energy absorption and all that good stuff,” said Priya, an architect from Rocket Town who grew up in the shadow of Shinra No. 26 and its burnout. She wore denim cutoffs to work and looked no older than Tifa, but word on the street said she caused a stir designing homes on stilts for areas prone to flooding. She appeared beside them, giving the place a once-over with a nonchalant nod. “But I'm looking at all these little nooks and crannies and all I can think is how awesome a game of hide and seek is gonna be in here.”

A few others overheard and murmured approval, swelling to a chant of “Hide and seek! Hide and seek!” Reeve sighed and pinched his forehead, but never stopped smiling. “Alright. We decide by consensus now and majority rule clearly says hide and seek. So, one day. We get one day for messing around and making a mess but then we get down to business – come on, the whole world's going to look like this by the time we're done!”

“Then you better start counting!” Priya tapped him on the arm and ran towards the stairs. The others scattered amongst the ferns, and Elmyra rolled her eyes as Reeve faced the wall and began the countdown. She took off her shoes and padded across the floor to the pond, nestling herself into the space under one of the seats and pulling a potted palm in front of her. If you can't beat them...

***

Marlene was the first to wear the pink ribbon.

She saw them on a market stall during one one her many visits to Junon – with her father, or staying with Elmyra while he went off to one corner of the globe or another, overseeing construction and sharing Reeve's ideas and creations where they were needed. And the need was plenty, what with more and more communities vowing to provide for one another and declaring their independence in the wake of the Free Junon Autonomous Stretch and its success – all despite the best efforts of smaller power companies crawling out of the shadows, seeking to fill Shinra's shoes. Let them, so long as they left the free world alone.

None of that concerned Marlene as she took the ribbon and looked at Elmyra with big, pleading eyes. Currency would be foreign to her, now. The village where she lived with her father in the forest at the base of the mountain, about an hour outside the city, was run as an experiment in a money-free social structure. Against all doubts she and everyone entertained, Nanaki was right. Nobody wanted to let their people down, or feel they weren't contributing. Elmyra visited often, the house built for Barret in the shape of a turret, with the top tower bedroom of course belonging to Marlene. Always, without fail, fresh flowers waited in the window and at the base of the steps towards it.

When Elmyra walked among the beautiful homes built around the trees, new ones springing up like grass shoots each time she visited, the place was lit by coloured lanterns and smiles. Everywhere were people giving their neighbours food they'd grown and art they'd made and providing services simply for the joy of doing them, for making everyone happy, with sweet cedarwood in the air and wildflowers underfoot. Even Elena smiled the two times Elmyra saw her hauling logs over her shoulders, chatting with the person who carried the other end without the crisp bite of ice that marked her words as they came over the screen. If the Cetra were there to see it, they'd shrug, say all they were doing was passing on the gifts the planet was gracious enough to provide.

Elmyra bought two of the pink silk ribbons. From that day, she never saw Marlene without the bow in her hair, and she wrapped her own above the part of her forearm covered by her armlet. Reeve turned up to the office a few days later with his in place of a wristwatch. On her next jaunt into the forest village Cloud and Tifa, waving to her from the top of the community centre they were constructing together, proudly displayed theirs on their left upper arms. Even Vincent she caught leaving Reeve's office with a strip of pink silk on the forearm not obscured by his golden armour.

Barret wore his around the wrist of his new prosthesis, a piece of intricately wrought metal painted black with a fully functioning hand – the fruit of the newfound ability he shared with Reeve to have conversation that didn't rapidly degenerate into passive-aggressive barbs about innocent bystanders countered with “Take the boot outta your mouth before you speak to me again”. The gun arm had been laid to rest in a chest in his hallway she'd caught him patting fondly a few times. Smart, really. Everything they built was a beautiful dream if someone somewhere wasn't willing to maybe sleep a little less at night to defend it. But he'd closed the distance. If they walked the village trails together, without fail they were met with a chorus of “Hi Barret” and “Hey Barret” and “Wanna grab a drink some time next week, Barret?” from people she'd never met, and he greeted them all in turn with a warm smile or playful salute.

“I dunno where I shoulda drawn the line in tearing things down,” he said, one balmy evening in a kitchen still warm from the stew they'd cooked, fireflies cavorting close to the ground below them. “All I know is I wanna spend the rest of my life buildin' 'em instead. That's enough from me, though,” he said, stacking their dishes for washing. “How 'bout you? Where's your work takin' you lately?”

“Not too far from home this time. I've been experimenting with different materia,” she told him, draining her wine glass. “The Cetra lived near volcanoes that were still active back in their time, and the eruptions made the soil richer in minerals and nutrients than anywhere else. And since I don't think it's the best idea ever to work directly in the way of pyroclastic flows, I figured I could try to recreate the right conditions with spells.”

Barret nodded. “I read a little about that back in the day. Before that, I never woulda thought of mountains as good growin' places. Corel never was.” He took another sip from his own glass and turned to the window overlooking the foot of their little garden, Marlene's beloved pumpkin patch and beds of yellow flowers. “Been wantin' to ask you about that, actually.”

She placed the empty glass by the sink and nodded. “Go ahead.”

He picked up a book from the table, open on a spray of small midnight blue flowers. “I know you're busy and all, but if you got a minute, I was wonderin' if you could maybe figure out how to get these damn things to grow in the soil down here. I got the seeds, but it just ain't happenin'. Not anywhere but the foothills of Mount Corel, it seems like.”

He handed her the little paper packet and her eyes widened. “I'll see what I can do,” she said, and brushed his arm gently.

“I appreciate that a lot.” He shivered but a little at her touch, looking down at her hand and then shaking his head, laughing. “Damn,” he whispered. “After everything you lost... You're somethin' else, you really are.”

She drew back and her face reddened – wine would do that to her.

***

A year had gone by since Meteorfall and left a photo album in her mind, small moments that attained significance only with hindsight. She, who'd never left the plains around Midgar, flew all across the world to aid with soil erosion in Mideel and irrigate vegetable plantations around Fort Condor and begin the arduous reforestation of Nibelheim with a little kick in the pants from her spells. She traveled to what remained of Midgar, a scar on the planet where human excesses had reached their peak, where Nanaki was helping the last bastions of Shinra learn the error of their ways cleaning up the poisoned land around it. Two winter weeks even had her cross the mountains of Wutai to offer new energy technology as reparations so long after the war.

But as no person was an island, nowhere could exist without everywhere else. Junon needed imports, too, minerals and metals and ore deposits found to the east and south. Thus a meeting was scheduled with representatives of the Eastern Seawall Power Company, based out of Costa del Sol and offering materials in exchange for ideas, crossing the sea with their suits and briefcases as Elmyra paced the length of the boardroom table, hugging herself.

“I think you're forgetting I've never done anything like this before. I really hope I won't say anything out of turn.”

“I think your work speaks for itself, Elmyra.” Reeve arranged water and fresh fruit in the centre of the table and leaned on the back of a chair, playing with the cuffs of his suit sleeves. The rest of the team walked around in jeans and slogan shirts and sweatpants most days, and seemed to give up trying completely the first morning Marcus turned up in pyjamas. But Reeve kept his pressed and tailored blue suits, his red ties, a rare holdover from the time before.

“You don't think someone with a little more experience might be better for talking them around? Two years ago, I was just a housewife, I was a housewife with no husband -”

“Elmyra, listen to me.” Reeve took her by both shoulders and stared into her eyes. “You are not going to sell yourself short. You are not going to let anyone do that to you.”

She blinked and nodded. “Okay.”

“I mean it. You were never 'just' a housewife, you were a person with next to nothing who never lost sight of right and wrong while everyone who had everything lost their minds. And we need you more than ever now, as much as we need scientists and builders. If I have to be around these kinds of people again, there's no-one I'd rather have standing by my side than you. You got that?”

She nodded again, and the deal was done within a couple of hours. Costa del Sol would receive a shipment of solar panels the next year, while Junon would be given the resources to make them and to fully outfit their allies in Nibelheim, too. Once the rest of the building left for home they took a complimentary bottle of sparkling white wine from the coastal vineyards into Reeve's office. They clinked glasses and held one another's eye, like they had on the night chugging whiskey at the end of the world. The chilly glare of the computer took up only a small corner at the back, the rest of the open room housing long work benches and little glass lanterns and potted plants and the plush couch they sat on, half the bottle gone already.

“I saw Marlene this morning, in the park with all her new friends,” he said, staring into his half-empty glass. “She looked so excited to see me and it made me sick with myself. Some day I'm going to have to tell her the truth about how we met.”

Elmyra shook her head. “She thinks she had a fun vacation with her cool babysitters. Let's have her keep that, for a while. She'll work it out in time.” She smirked, raising her glass. “Probably when she's old enough to beat the snot out of you.”

“It's no more than I deserve. But I am grateful that I get to be a part of her life. Especially now. I think the chance to have one of my own is long gone.”

She sighed and chuckled, a bitter sound with her head leaning back against the wall. “Well, that makes two of us. You I was always a little surprised by,” she said, an eye on his desk. “I would've thought you'd have no end of offers, good-looking executive living the life.”

He looked at her with a raised eyebrow. “I didn't leave myself enough time for a cat, Elmyra.” He laughed to himself, a red rising to his cheeks. “There was an article in some magazine years ago. I was Midgar's most eligible bachelor, for a while at least. My mom framed it and put it on the wall.” His shoulders slumped as he sank back into the couch, cradling his wine. “I gave her that much to be proud of, I guess.”

He drained the glass and shared the last of the bottle between them. A wind from the sea wound through the open window and drove a chill into the room between them, silent but for the city's winding down and the song of the fountain in the courtyard.

“I love him,” Reeve said, shaking his head as the slightest tremor came into his voice. “I love him and if I told him, he'd probably apologise. He'd think it made me stupid.”

Elmyra didn't ask, and she didn't need to. Whatever mysterious hidden wonder it was that had him so hung up on a person who showed up two or three times a year and said next to nothing, Reeve left handwritten letters for no permanent address at Cloud and Tifa's centre every few weeks, and hid himself away in his office for an hour some time later when a reply arrived, always emerging a little lighter in his step for the rest of the day. Hell of a rope to cling to, from where she stood.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to go and turn our happy day maudlin. So how about you?” said Reeve, curled into the corner of the couch and half-asleep. “Nobody's caught your eye since everything settled down?”

***

She didn't answer, but the question carried on the wind as she made her way through the village in the forest a few days later. The new shuttle tram brought her there, and just a little way into the woods children not yet grown to her waist came up with greetings and offers to show her where to pick mushrooms, where the best apples grew, all for nothing more than a smile and the promise of gratitude. They scampered off to their hideout on the edge of the fields and left her winding her way towards the turret house, with its tribute to Myrna Wallace blossoming in shades of lapis at the far end of the pumpkin patch.

Marlene usually waited in the window for her and ran downstairs calling her name. More often than not as time wore on, there'd be other faces in the ruddy windows clouded by fragrant steam, friends from the village who joined them for dinner and drinks. That night six of them stood in the kitchen helping Barret with chopping and stirring, keeping Marlene out from underfoot and reminiscing. The girl stayed with them most of the evening, quiet, but nodding and laughing along rather than hiding behind Barret. They spoke of Midgar, and the last chance prior the village's creation they'd had to use fresh ingredients. Fellow travelers from a world outside the slums, before the desert - they could've passed each other on the streets of Midgar and never known, too tired and too beaten down to see a person lay under the old clothes and sour faces.

“Where I grew up, people cared as far as they could gossip,” said Elmyra after Marlene had been put to bed and the other guests had gone home. She stood beside Barret drying the dishes he washed, bumping elbows as they went. “They were there for each other when it counted, but day to day, people were so ugly to each other.”

“We pulled together in Corel, when I was young at least. We had the mine to give us all a sense of purpose, some pride. I see the same in people now.” He pulled the plug and left a final baking sheet in to soak, ushering Elmyra through to the living room with the last bottle of wine. “I get so excited thinkin' what Marlene's future's gonna look like, growin' up here.”

Elmyra sipped her wine, just like the night before Meteorfall. Barret had warm, kind eyes, the sort you could get lost in now he rarely hid them behind his sunglasses, framed instead by the coils of black hair he'd started growing out some months before. Sometimes in the dead of night, when the city was too quiet and the void in her chest where her love for Aerith used to live grew too wide and too deep, she drifted off to slumber remembering how it felt to rest her head on those broad shoulders. Just a night of desperation under a bleeding sky, but it helped.

He sat on the sofa beside her, reclining and stretching his legs out in front of him - faded jeans over bare feet and a short-sleeved shirt of blue and pink floral print, one of many he'd sported during her visits, all in different colours. When they came, if they came, some profiteer's private army arriving on the doorstep would flee from the wrath of a man with no shoes and the loudest shirts in the village. She smirked to herself.

“It can be hard being one person doing the work of two,” she said. “As a parent, that is. With no-one to corroborate, you always think you've gone wrong somehow.”

“I've been thinkin' on that, too,” said Barret, pouring wine for both of them steady and sure with his new hand. “Bein' a parent seems like one hell of a lot of work for two people, too, when you step back and look at it. I lthink about how Marlene is with Tifa, Cloud, Cid, you especially, so many of the other folks we've been gettin' to know, and can't help feelin' like they're as much her parents as anyone.”

Elmyra raised her glass. “To things that take a village?”

Barret knocked his glass against hers and they drank, their eyes meeting over the tops of the glasses. She turned to the window, to the full moon rising with a pearly halo over the treetops. “The fireflies might be out tonight.”

“Right time of year for it.” He placed his glass on the table and leaned forward, a glazed look in his eyes. “I think about that night a lot,” he said at length.

Elmyra's mouth dried, and as she fumbled for words, a shrill cry bled through from upstairs. They both leapt off the couch and raced to Marlene's room, where she sat up in the middle of her bed with tears in her eyes and Aerith's rabbit clutched to her chest. Barret knelt beside the bed and placed a hand on her shoulders, the metal one wiping the tears from her eyes.

“Was it a bad dream, honey?” said Elmyra, stepping out of the darkness and sitting beside her.

Marlene nodded. “I thought the Meteor was coming here. I thought it was going to fall on the house.”

“Come here, girl,” said Barret, sitting beside her and pulling her onto his knee. “There's no Meteor now, and even if there was, we stopped it once before, am I right? Nothin's gonna hurt you here, I promise. It's just you, and me, and Bunny, and Aunt Elmyra.”

Elmyra rubbed her back and whispered in her ear. “Tell you what. Next time you want to come through to the city and see me, how about we all go on the jet skis again? Wouldn't that be fun?”

Marlene sniffled. “You think I might get to see the dolphins this time?”

“If that's what you're hoping for, you'd better make it soon, because they'll go south for the winter before long.”

She drifted off to sleep again soon enough, after a few minutes of Barret rocking her on his knees like a dolphin leaping through the waves. Their knees touched and Elmyra's face grew warm in the dark, though they'd been closer than this that night on the Kalm lake, when he enveloped her in the warmth and strength of his body and cast the shadows out for a moment to let her sleep. Her small presence did the same for him too, perhaps, if the world was fair.

Had anyone caught her eye since her life became this? Of course, she'd noticed – Kel's strong arms and warm smile, Shera's delicately pretty face when she came across the sea to help with turbine construction, the man at the fabric stall with the dimple and the long legs. Even a few late nights in the office with Reeve, when everyone else had gone home, and the strange bond they'd forged in their shared captivity and this new path they took together made her wonder. It had been so long since Soren's passing. There'd been dates here and there, a few dinners with neighbours from the slums that sometimes ended in a kiss, the odd tryst when Aerith was out late. “You're still gorgeous, mom,” she'd said, standing them both in front of the mirror the first evening they spent sipping bright floral wine in front of the TV together. “You just need to put yourself back out there!” But nothing that lasted. Nothing that stuck. Nothing that felt like driving through the prairies with the wind in her face and a rowdy song on the radio, that made her forget her hands had grown red and creased like paper, her hair too coarse to lift in the sea breeze.

***

Another year passed, and still smiles on every face. A pale winter of mighty ocean waves and bare branches reaching for what remained of the sun; sunny green spring and new buds awakening; a summer shimmering in rose gold and lilac, and again, red autumn and the scent of damp and healthy earth. Another four seasons and something like routine. Awakening, hours in the lab or the office, evening walk by the sea, dinner on the roof, sleep, and a visit to the village at least once a week. Did it all seem like a wonderful dream to the other happy people, too?

“Icicle Inn,” said Reeve as she entered the office, handing over a thumb drive. “They've approved the plans for the wind farm in the mountains and the dam over the hot springs. Looks like work starts in a couple of months.”

“Well, that's wonderful.” The snowy northern town had been in touch back in the soft-coloured spring with thoughts to declaring itself autonomous – and now this, so soon after the victory in North Corel! “I can't believe what we're doing caught on so quickly. Are you going away, then?”

He shook his head. “I have some new recruits coming up from Mideel to work on getting the worldwide video network up and running. Hopefully once that's operational we won't need to centralise everything here and drag people away from their homes, their families. I put Barret in charge of the construction in the north.”

“Oh.” Elmyra's stomach twinged. Visits with Marlene would continue, but it took her unawares, the idea of going months without looking into those kind dark eyes. She shook herself and held up the drive. “So what am I doing with this?”

“It's everything we have on the soil makeup and the traditional ecology of the Icicle Inn area. Their food stocks and growing conditions are still suffering after everything that happened in the Crater, and they asked if we could take care of that, too. I thought if you feel like taking another trip, you could head up there with Barret, it's a beautiful part of the world.”

“I've never seen the snow,” she said, moving to the sun-flooded window to hide her soft smile. “I'll get right on it.”

“Thing is,” said Reeve, rubbing the back of his neck, “we'd be using the laboratory that once belonged to Gast Faremis as a base of operations. Are you comfortable with that?”

The clapboard house, the beaming couple, and just a little way over the mountains, the place where it happened. She bit her lip, and nodded. “I don't see why not. The facilities are there, and the work needs doing.” She turned to leave for her own office down the hall.

“Oh, Elmyra!”

“Hmm?”

Reeve frowned still as he looked to her. “I don't want to push. I know it's going to be hard for you, but if you could take a look at those designs for the statue soon, it'd be a big help. If you still think it's a good idea?”

“I will once I get home. I'll let you know tomorrow. I think it's a lovely plan.” She coughed. “Excuse me.” And she held her head high and walked briskly to her own domain, heels clipping on the floor and not so much as a twitch on her face to give anything away. She sat at the computer and read, printed, made notes, made coffee, drew up an itinerary and gave no more thought to statues of people who were no longer there to walk among them.

He arrived as the early autumn sun was shimmering over the sea, coming with a gentle knock on the wall at the far end of the room.

“I like what you did with the ceiling,” he said, pointing up at the wooden frames that held blooms of gold and purple. “The colours look gorgeous together.”

“Thank you.” She patted the seat beside her. “I did them like this over my bed, too. It's my favourite colour scheme.”

“Damn. The oxygen in your place must be crisp as hell.” He sat down and rubbed the back of his neck, the bounce of his hair fading into a soft golden glow as the evening sun caught in its tips. “I'm not sure why I said that.”

“It's only the truth,” she said, and turned the monitor around.

“The ecology of the place is absolutely fascinating,” she told him over green tea laced with lemon as they talked over the plans for their trip north. “I've been reading up on it. Dating back to the days of the Cetra, they've had elaborate processes for extracting maple sap – it can be syrup, it can be sugar, it keeps forever and gets them through the coldest parts of the winter. The water in the sap freezes as a layer on the top and – I'm sorry, this is probably boring for you.”

“Now, don't go gettin' all sappy on me.” A chuckle rose in his chest at her eyeroll. He sat with his head resting on one hand, leaning towards her. “For real, though, not a bit. Never a dull moment for me when someone's tellin' you what they're passionate about. Sure looks like you're not strugglin' with spells these days.”

“No, not in a long time.” She turned her wrist, adorned with orbs of green and purple. “The planet told me what to do, the night Meteor came down. I was going wrong trying to command it. What I do now is I ask a question of the earth, and I guess if I'm a suitable conduit, sometimes it gives me the answer I want.” She sighed, and turned to the window where a flock of gulls took flight into a reddening sky. “It all seems like so very long ago, now.”

“And that reminds me -” And he dived into the pocket of the loose brown jacket he wore, tailored and pressed over a soft green wool sweater. “Here we go.” He held up a small ball of crumpled tissue paper and set about unfurling it, fingers moving with all the delicacy of the glass treasure they unveiled. “A buddy of mine in the village started makin' these, and I thought it might be the right kinda thing to get for you, since you grow the flowers yourself.”

She took it, brushing his hand, the little blown-glass swan. Folded wings, an elegant head, and hues of green and lilac running through it and glimmering in the light. “It's beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

And then she smiled wider, a little crooked this time. She wrapped the swan back in its tissue cocoon, placed it in her purse, took his hand, and marched him quick-step back to her apartment to demonstrate exactly how crisp the oxygen in her bedroom was.

***

“I really wanna stay like this,” he whispered as he stroked her bare arm and planted a soft kiss on her temple where she lay on his chest. “But Marlene's waitin' on me, and for all I know Cloud and Tifa got plans for tonight.”

She leaned on an elbow to let him up and glanced at the clock. A whole four hours since they burst through the door, spent half-dozing between kisses and touches. She combed her fingers through her mussed hair and arched her spine, lingering on the way his back muscles rippled as he pulled on his sweater. With a groan she rose out of bed into the cool air and slipped into a deep green robe, soft and whispering against her skin. She helped him with the last of his jacket buttons, touching their noses and placing a quick and gentle kiss on his lips before they walked to the door.

“I'll see you next week at the big reunion, I guess,” he said, leaning on the door frame. “I got some jobs to do before then in the village. Damn. Feels like a whole other lifetime since we last got everyone in the same place.”

“I know what you mean. It'll be lovely to see them all again.”

“And if it's okay with you, I think I wanna tell Marlene first. About us, I mean. Uh...” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That is, if you wanted this to be more than a one-time thing.”

She wrapped her hand around as much of his arm as she could and stood on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, her other hand lingering there on the steady rhythm of his breathing. “That's something I'd like very much, and you're right, Marlene should be the first to know.”

He clasped her hands in both of his, the metal and the skin, and kissed them. “I'll see you around, then. You take care of yourself.” Throwing her a last wink over his shoulder he left, footfalls fading as he moved down the stairs and into the deepening twilight.

Elmyra closed the door and fell back against the wall, her legs still shaking. She laughed to herself, and laughed some more. The scent of their sweat stayed on the air, blending with the flowers and ferns into something magical. She helped herself to a glass of crisp white wine from the fridge and stood by her table, on which rested the little swan next to a lilypad of coasters. She opened a wide bay window, paced back and forth from the bedroom where the shades of their shared movements still played in the darkness, laughed to herself and toyed with the belt of her robe until she took up the two pieces of paper that sat on the coffee table.

The statue in the courtyard overlooking the waves was to be one alone. No-one still living wanted to hold themselves above the other people on the planet who'd endured the weeks of waiting for Meteor, too. The first showed Aerith standing with her head bowed, eyes closed, and hands clasped in prayer, to be positioned so the setting sun would make a halo around the serene perfection of her face. A stone angel, the image of beauty and peace and devotion standing guard over the city for as long as it took the stone walls to weather into dust.

“This is beautiful,” she said aloud to no-one, and sighed. “But it wasn't really you.”

In the second Aerith stood with her knees bent and far apart, stave held diagonally across her body with her shoulders up and ready for anything that dared to cross her sights. Her chin was up, proud and defiant, her lovely mouth frozen forever in a war cry to rally the earth and the elements and the people blessed to live among them to her cause. A shiver ran down Elmyra's spine as she stroked a finger over the fine details, the flutter of her skirt and the arc of her hair as she spun, poised and primed to defend all she loved. This, this was the one that would preside over the city's centre, casting a long shadow on all who walked there.

Elmyra pressed the drawing to her chest as tears began to flow. “My brave girl,” she whispered to the night. “I hope you're just as proud of me, now, if you're somewhere you can see.”

She opened the sliding door to the balcony and stood a while, glass in hand, as inky black eclipsed violet in the sky and the city burst into golden lights below, dusting its radiance upon the incoming tide in glittering streaks. A city she'd played a part in rebuilding, after they'd prised the steel sky from the world and let the sun come in again.

Without a plate, without Meteor, without the harsh halogen lamps that coloured the streets of the world before, the sky grew darker when night fell. And sometimes, if she squinted, if she looked in the right direction, the jade-green threads that rose up and saved them could still be seen on their dancing journey through the heavens – pale, faint, and never to be broken.