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The darkness is warm. Comforting. Inviting.
He's in a stasis of bliss. Like as if all at once, he's feeling yet unfeeling; thinking yet thoughtless. He's never felt so alive yet so empty at the same time.
Is this a dream? He doesn't remember falling asleep. Well in hindsight, he doesn't remember much, really. Can’t feel much, either.
Not that it matters, the darkness beckons.
He's falling, but it's gentle. The darkness takes extra care to carry him down tenderly, straight into the heart of its black abyss. It's become something of a solace to him, this darkness. In fact, he must have been floating around this dark haze for quite a while because he's much too comfortable to be afraid.
How long has he been asleep for, anyway?
Far too long, if you ask me.
This time, it’s not the darkness, but a sound—a voice—that reaches him. It shatters his equilibrium.
What?
You heard me. It’s time for you to get up.
This voice—he’s definitely heard it before.
You need to move something. Can you get up?
He’s trapped in a daze as the voice spews out commands, but despite himself he decides to listen. Carefully, he tries to move, but his body fails him.
I can’t . . . feel anything.
You have to try. Can’t keep her waiting for much longer.
Her?
Never mind that. Just focus on yourself now. Try to move something. Anything.
I’m trying. It . . . hurts.
What hurts?
My heart.
All the more reason to try harder then.
The voice is right. Bit by bit, he tries again. This time, he feels his leg twitch.
That’s it. Take it slow.
Gradually, he feels the sensation of a breeze against his skin. He doesn’t understand it, but there’s an air of familiarity about all this.
Hey ... I remember you ...
It’s almost as if this has happened before.
... I never got your name.
It’s faint, but oddly enough, he thinks he can hear them smirk. In a suspense, the voice takes in a breath.
It’s—
“Cloud?”
It’s sudden. The comfort of the darkness morphs into a blanket of white and a chill runs up his spine at the sound of a new voice ringing against his ears. Her voice.
Who—?
It’s much too bright to open his eyes, but unlike being within the darkness, his senses are heightened. His prior numbness is replaced by a surge of energy; he could feel its essence flow through his body as smooth as the blood in his veins.
He hears it—her?—approach, footsteps so tentative he almost loses track of her presence.
He feels her looming over him. She’s curious, but also careful. Maybe doubtful even. He can’t understand why he assumes so, but the thought of that particular sight makes him shiver.
Then there was her smell: sweet, sultry, and tame and inviting. There’s a floral nip to it, he might add, with a tease of petrichor.
“Cloud?”
Ah, right. That was his name. He should say something, shouldn’t he?
Before he can open his mouth, a sharp pang shoots through his head, spinning the world around him. He tries to open his eyes again, but the stark white void enraptures his vision and burns him.
“Wha—” he tries to speak, but all other words fail him.
“Hey,” her voice calls out. It’s as sweet as the first time he heard it. She’s hesitant, almost uncertain. Afraid, is she? He hopes not.
He tries to compose himself, taking a breath to calm the storm in his heart. His lids flutter open slowly, but in the next moment he sucks in a breath. A contrast to the darkness he felt prior, bright and beautiful emeralds stare right back at him and he’s hypnotized by the sight. He can’t seem to tear his eyes away.
The woman with the emerald eyes gasps as if stricken.
“It really is you,” she breathes out in a whisper. “How are you . . . how is this—?”
She cuts herself off. He doesn’t understand what she means, but he doesn’t care. Her gaze doesn’t leave him and Cloud doesn’t dare to pull away. A part of him fears that if he does, she might just disappear forever again.
Again?
Cloud’s gaze only breaks when he can’t seem to see her anymore, the sight of tears he didn’t know he was forming blurring his vision. He catches them with a touch of his finger but the tears continue to slide against the metal and fabric of his gloved hand. He suddenly wishes that he didn’t have them on.
His eyes drift naturally back to the woman. She's turned away from him, narrowly missing how her hands moved to her face to quickly swipe away at her own eyes.
He frowns slightly, willing his limbs to stand. Surprisingly, he does so effortlessly, like his body is weightless and grounded simultaneously. Despite it all, there's a terrible heaviness in his chest. It's an achingly, familiar feeling.
Something isn’t right.
The woman watches him, standing unmoving in her place as the fringes of her pastel dress and bold red jacket flow gently against the streams of viridescence. Taking a minute to take in his surroundings, he feels the very essence of the bright white void pulsing around him—almost as if alive. A sea of pearls and jades encompass them like a river and Cloud feels lost in its current.
“What . . . is this place?” he finally manages. His voice is hoarse and much more timid than he’d wanted it to be. He follows how her hand tightens at his words. The colours of the stream blow across her skin; she looks ethereal.
The pain in his chest remains. “And who—?”
Who are you?
Cloud chokes, his breath catching in his throat as she glances over to him. The look of uncertainty doesn’t suit her.
At least that’s what he thinks sees. It only appears for a second before the woman blinks it away and allows herself to smile with a kind expression.
She takes a moment to herself before humming in slight amusement.
“This place, you asked?” she begins with a dulcet cadence. She moves away swiftly, creating a distance between them that Cloud feels the desire to close.
She takes in a deep breath, contemplating her next words. “It . . . holds a kind of power,” is what she settles for, but even though he was the one who asked, he's too distracted by her voice—how clear it is, how familiar it is—to truly listen to what she’s saying.
She extends a hand to feel the flow of the effervescent current. “Do you feel it? All the moments, all the memories, all the life and death from the people of the planet—they’re all connected here. It’s kind of like the open sky.”
He locks his jaw, listening attentively.
She continues. “You could say that this place . . . breathes life into the Planet, so much as it takes life away.” Her voice falters next, the corners of her mouth tugged down grimly. “But I think . . . it’s for the best. After all, everyone dies eventually.”
There’s a sadness laced in her tone that shakes him something fierce. It's much too solemn that it unnerves him—this isn’t like her.
Her expression is unsettling and her words even more so. There's a quickness in his pulse now, accompanying the sudden crushing in his chest. He wants to reach out to her. He wants to tell her that’s not true, but for some reason he's frozen in place. He just can’t seem to get closer. She’s just too. Far. Away.
She always has been.
In the end, it doesn’t matter what he wants to do because the sound of her soft giggle fills his ears and decides for him. He stares blankly at her, awestruck by her cheerful expression but even more so by why the hell she’s even laughing.
“Well? Were you impressed? Did I sound cool there for a second?” The sound of her stifled laughter and the lilt in her tone takes him aback. She pivots on her heels to face him and bends at her hips, hands clasped behind her back in a playful innocence.
It must have been the proximity—yes, that was it—because he looks away abashedly, but not before sending a disapproving glare her way.
“Stop joking around, A—ah,” he stops himself, swallowing his words.
He was about to say her name, wasn’t he? What was her name?
If she had caught his strain, she doesn’t make note of it. “Ooh, a glare! Now that’s a face I haven’t seen in a while!” the woman teases excitedly. His initial feelings of irritation dissipate in an instant at the sight of her smile, but it doesn’t last very long. All too soon, her smile loses its vigour and Cloud watches as the emerald shine in her eyes dulls to a matte. “I . . . missed it.”
“I missed you.” The words escape him so instinctively, he surprises even himself. There’s an odd feeling in the pit of his stomach. He doesn’t know why, but he feels like he’s been waiting a lifetime to finally speak those words to her.
It seems to catch her off guard. She straightens herself, prior diffidence slipping from her cheerful façade.
“Liar,” she mutters aside, just enough for him to hear, but if it was intended to be heard or not, Cloud couldn’t tell. “You can’t miss someone you don’t remember, now, can you?”
Don’t remember?
Like lightning, her words strike him so fast he can’t seem to keep up with them. Nostalgia for something—no, someone—he can’t remember crashes against his memory. It’s too overwhelming. He feels like crying again.
There’s no way in hell he could ever forget her.
“It’s not a lie,” he tries, but his mouth is dry. He’s afraid—so afraid—that she might be right. “I—“
He lurches forward in pain, head pounding through his skull. All of a sudden, he can’t seem to breathe.
“Cloud?” her voice calls out, but it’s faint. He can’t hear her clearly over the way his heart is screaming in agony. His eyes are firmly shut, too afraid to open them. His head is in one hand, his grip firm against his scalp while the other clutches at his chest, a wave of sorrow and fear and loss and regret tethered to his very being, haunting him.
Without so much as a warning, he feels a softness brush against his cheek. He refuses to open his eyes, but there’s an unmistakable gentleness that accompanies her every move. At her touch, the searing pain slowly starts dissolving from his body.
“I guess I took my teasing too far...”
A flash of light pierces his vision. Like a bursting floodgate, waves of memories finally overflow his consciousness.
Her teasing. Her voice. Her smell. Her eyes. The beauty that graced her every move, every step, always too out of reach. Her laugh, her smile, her attitude. The way she always caught him off-guard. The flowers, the materia, the determination, the sacrifice. The look in her eyes as she fell.
She smiled till the end.
“Aerith.” His voice is breathless, desperate, and shattered by her presence. He's enraptured by it all: the shock in her eyes, the pout on her lips, the way her hair cascades around her figure as she slightly tilts her head to her side.
She’s just as beautiful as the day he lost her. How could he forget her?
He catches the hand on his cheek before she can pry it away, but she doesn’t seem to move anyway. He can’t tell if this is a dream or not, but he wouldn’t be surprised if it was. He’s dreamed of this too many times already.
“Aerith,” he tries again. Her name has never been so foreign yet so familiar on his tongue. A name he longed to call out, to say, to speak, but never did so again because he knew she could never answer.
All because of him.
Even as he spoke her name, she doesn’t say a word. Her smile answers for him.
Gently, he pulls her to him slowly, their hands never daring to break apart. As they inch closer, he reaches his other hand to her back, hesitant yet longing for her touch. He’s slow, she’s steady.
He can hardly believe she’s here—really here—until her breath ghosts against his ear. His expression grows pained and can’t help but groan in desperation, finally pulling her fully into his embrace. His head immediately finds the crook of her neck and burrows against it, arms wrapped tightly around her fragile figure.
“This isn’t a dream?” he asks, voice muffled against her collarbone.
There’s a pause. “Do you dream of me often?”
His response is immediate. “Everyday.”
She quiets. For a moment he thinks she’s about to pull away, but he feels her grip around him tighten.
He doesn’t know how long they stay like this, but no amount of time could ever be long enough. The last time he held her in his arms like this was when he lowered her lifeless, frail body into the river’s current. He shivers at the thought of it, holding her closer.
“Cloud,” she says, his name like a melody coming from her lips. This time, she does try to pull away. He doesn’t budge.
“Hey,” she tries again. Even without seeing her face, he picks up on the wariness in her tone. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what—?”
Before he could finish his thought, a screeching shrill builds loudly in his ears, forcing him to flinch in pain. He staggers backward, grasping his ears to lessen the unruly sound piercing against his eardrums.
He tries to brace himself, but he feels the ground beneath his feet rumble and the air around him stir wildly. He watches as the once peaceful viridescent current violently rage, flashes of shadows flowing within it and pulsating as if distressed.
He looks around. Aerith is no longer by his side. He clutches at his ears and yells out for her. "Aerith!"
He narrows his eyes through the current. He can barely see her through the darkness, but her hands are intertwined together by her chest, head in a slight bow and eyes shut.
He's about to call for her again until Cloud's hearing drowns completely to a silence, the ringing suddenly gone. The shrieking in his ears disappeared in a flash, the current quieting with it. Whatever darkness that once surrounded them has morphed back into the familiar celestial green and Cloud can’t help but blink in bewilderment.
Thankfully, Aerith's alright. Peaceful, even, despite the prior chaos.
After a moment she opens her eyes, hands falling to her side. He eyes her as she takes a deep breath, watching as her gaze falls downcast. She shakes her head.
“Hey,” he starts, “what just happened?”
She turns towards him hastily, the movement so swift it catches him off guard.
“Looks like we don’t have a lot of time left here. I’m sorry, but I need you to listen to me.” Her words are rushed, determination in her tone. His face contorts in confusion both at her words and her sudden seriousness, but she presses on, placing a hand over her heart.
“I can feel it. The flow of time—it’s changing. Something big is about to happen to us. No, to the world,” she says hurriedly. “I think . . . it’s about to be remade.”
“Remade?”
She nods. “It’s almost as if something, or maybe someone, is altering fate.”
Her gaze wavers for a second and she glances around the white void bounding them together. The atmosphere around her is suddenly echoed with mystery.
“This planet, our lives, your story—they’re about to start all over again,” she says. She looks back at him with curiosity. “Maybe that’s why you’re here with me.”
She tilts her head in thought. A cute sight.
“I . . . I don’t understand,” he admits sheepishly, avoiding her stare.
“Well, that makes two of us.”
He gives her an uneasy smile. “So what’ll happen now?”
It was Aerith’s turn to grimace. “I have a guess . . . but there’s something more important. Something I need you to do for me.”
He gives her a questioning look.
“Even if this is all just for nothing,” she says, albeit with a bit of hesitancy. “I need to promise me something.”
His heartbeat grows faster, a wary inkling of what she’s about to say brewing in the back of his head. He clocks how her eyes briefly flash to apprehension before turning into steel.
“I need you to promise me that what happens in this new reality, you need to let me—”
“Don’t,” he tells her sharply. He looks away, barring Aerith from speaking before he can get his word out. “If what you’re about to say is what I think it is, just don’t.”
He won’t let it happen. Not again. Not ever.
“Cloud—”
“Please,” he says, knuckles turning white as he clenches them at his side. It’s like a dam of emotion is breaking inside him at the sight of her and Cloud can’t help but open his heart and confess his sins entirely. “It was my fault. All of it. If only I had been stronger. O-Or faster. And Sephiroth, he wouldn’t have—y-you wouldn’t have—”
“Cloud.” Her voice is firm. Unwavering. It's unlike anything he’s ever heard from her since they’ve met. Her eyes search for his, the emerald shine within them.
“I let you die,” he finally says, a sob caught in the back of his throat.
“But you came for me, didn’t you?” Gently, she takes his hand, placing her own atop his and intertwining their fingers without a moment's thought. With their palms pressed together, he can feel the warmth of her skin through the tautness of his glove. “That’s all that mattered.”
The words she left unspoken echo in his ears.
I never blamed you.
Oh, how he held onto those words. Back then, even though part of him accepted them, time and time again, he’d forget. Acceptance was difficult for Cloud, he and Aerith both knew. But they also knew that time and time again, he’d always find his way back.
He shakes his head, taking in a breath.
“We can find another way, can’t we? We'll change it. We'll change fate.” He searches her expression for approval.
Her smile is solemn. “That’s not something you can decide on your own.”
He sucks in a breath. So there is a way.
“Doesn’t matter to me.”
“Cloud, the Planet—“
“Screw the planet! I . . .”
The last two words die on his lips at the sight of her. Her gaze is despondent, an air of sorrow and disappointment gracing her expression.
He sighs. This isn’t the time.
“You’re being selfish, Cloud,” she whispers faintly to him.
“So are you,” he whispers back, but his words are empty. They both know it’s not the truth. In fact, it’s far from it. It’s possible, Cloud thinks, that she may have been the most selfless person to have ever lived on the Planet.
She allows him to be petty, though, just this once.
“We’ll find another way,” he repeats after a moment. This time, a truth. Or at least, what he hopes will be the truth. Still, he remains aware of Aerith’s concern.
“Please,” he tries again.
Aerith is silent for a moment. She breathes out a sigh.
“Okay. We’ll find another way,” she says, warmly. Perhaps maybe too warmly. He’s not so sure if Aerith’s words were meant to reassure herself, or him.
As his hands try to reach out for hers, he feels something shift in the air. It's then, he realizes belatedly, the same chaos they felt just moments ago was about to befall this world once more.
He looks around frantically. There is an uneasiness to the winds that blew over them, now choosing to whip against their faces and sting across their arms. Once he hears the beginning of familiar shrieks echo in the base of his eardrums, he turns to Aerith quickly. “What’s going on?”
She looks at him somberly, gripping their hands together tightly. “I think . . . our time is up.”
“What do you mean—?”
A shiver runs up his spine when he spots it. In the distance, an onslaught of grey and black ghostly figures scatter sporadically towards them, ruining the purity of the Lifestream. As the tufts grow closer, the orchestra of screams accompanies it and forces their hands apart as they clasp their ears.
“I can’t stop them this time,” she yells out above the noise. They stand back to back, cornered by the hooded figures. “This is it.”
The flying ghosts rush towards them, surrounding them in a flurry.
“So what’ll happen to us?” Cloud asks, now more concerned than before. The ghostly entities draw closer, swaying above their heads. He tries to swat them away, but it’s all for naught.
“You’ll forget. Same as everyone else in the new world.”
“What?” Bewilderment and anger overcome his emotions as he turns to seize her arm. When their eyes meet, it’s mixed with pain and regret.
It’s only then, under the gaze of Aerith’s apologetic eyes, that he realizes that she’s right—he will forget.
In fact, he did so once already.
He remembers how easy it was to forget his name. How easy it was to forget her. The thought of losing it all again makes his heart shatter.
“E-Even this?” he stutters.
“Especially this.”
“So . . . why?” Why tell me any of this?
As soon as those thoughts seep into his mind and those words leave his lips, he’s suddenly left breathless at his realization. As dense as he is, even this is obvious enough.
She wanted to tell him. She wants him to remember.
She spots the recognition in his eyes, smiling sadly. “Maybe I am selfish after all.”
He tries to find his voice again. There’s no time to quarrel about the inevitable. Time is running out. Their time together is running out.
One of the ghostly entities manages to pass through his chest and he staggers, a shock coursing through his veins. It’s a feeling of loss, like something was ripped violently away from his body. The feeling envelops him whole. Even breathing feels like too much of a burden.
No, he thinks. Not yet.
Another barrage of ghosts rushes towards them, forcing them apart and he yells for her. He catches her arm in his grasp.
“Aerith!” he yells. She’s slipping away. The winds blow faster, his grip faltering. Still they fight, holding on to each other by the tips of their fingers.
“Cloud!”
He tries to step forward, but the winds are much too strong now and it pushes him back.
“I won’t forget!” he promises. His hands are shaking. I can’t forget.
She smiles. It’s genuine this time, and it’s beautiful.
He needs to tell her. He needs to tell her before it’s too late.
It becomes all too much, all at once. Cloud watches as Aerith’s hand slips from his grasp, a gasp escaping his lips as he dives forward to take her back, but it’s not enough. The hooded ghosts claim Aerith as theirs and they swallow her into the fury of their grey tempest.
He reels back, falling to one knee as he tries to keep himself steady, but by then it’s too late. The ghosts encircle him in his own storm, capturing his body for themselves. There are too many of them. He tries to stand, but they move too quickly. They travel through his body unbidden and each time they do, he feels them sap something of his away; his strength, his spirit, his memory.
Ultimately, his knees give out and Cloud falls to the ground gracelessly, face-up towards what he thinks should be the sky. His vision is a blurred mess of torturous darkness and each breath is bringing him closer to the end.
“Aerith,” he calls out, but it’s weak. His consciousness is fading. He repeats her name like a mantra, wiling his mind to remember.
In the distance, he hears it.
Thank you for suffering so much for me.
It’s only a matter of time now, but maybe, he thinks, it’s not all that bad. He can still hear her after all.
To Cloud, that was enough.
He’d been trying to hold on, trying to fight it, but he couldn’t any longer. Finally, Cloud takes in a breath and uses the last of his strength.
“I’m coming for you.”
Fatigue overcomes his body once and for all, and the world around him fades away, taking his memory with it.
It’s a bit frustrating . . . but I’m happy.