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Standing in an unending field of yellow flowers, he sees her. She’s facing away from him, hands folded behind her back, dress ruffling in the slight breeze.
For the second time in the span of a few days, Cloud is aware that he’s dreaming. He knows that he’s actually sleeping at an inn in Kalm, and he knows she’s in the room right next to his. And he knows, too, that if he saw what he was seeing now while he was awake, tears would flood his eyes and he would double over in pain for some reason he can’t hope to understand—but his dreaming mind goes easy on him, and the sight only makes his heart flutter.
“Aerith…” he says. Speaking her name makes his voice uncharacteristically warm, even to his own ears.
She turns at the call, a light smile playing on her lips. It almost takes his breath away.
“Am I dreaming?” he asks, even though he’s sure he is.
She shrugs lightheartedly. “Not that I have a problem with everyone else, but… I like being alone with you.” Her smile widens. “This is the one place where it can be just us.”
Cloud thinks, I like being alone with you, too, but he doesn’t let himself say it. Indirect as it may have been, telling her that he wanted a say in loving her had just about taken up his lifetime quota of admitting his feelings.
He’s been wanting to ask her if she really had been there in that dream, but he had no idea how to bring it up when they were awake and around the rest of their group. Asking in another dream won’t really help solve the mystery, but he can’t stop himself from doing so anyway. “Is it just us, though? I mean… It’s not just me. You’re really here. Really you.”
Aerith hums. “Does that change things?”
Out of all possible responses, he’s surprised she went with that one, because the answer is so obvious. “It changes everything.”
“How?”
Again, the answer is so obvious he feels he shouldn’t have to say it. “Because… If you’re not really you, then nothing that happens now will matter in the morning.”
“Won’t matter to me, no,” she corrects him. “But it still matters to you, because if it wasn’t really me, then you could say or do whatever you wanted, right?”
He hesitates, because she is technically right, but when she puts it like that it sounds like she’s trying to back him into a corner and get him to admit to something that’ll probably embarrass him. Even figuring that’s where this is going, though, he eventually agrees with a short nod.
A playfully devilish grin lights up her face, and he knows he’s fallen for her trap before she even speaks. “So, what would you do that you’re too nervous to do with the real me?”
Cloud rolls his eyes and looks away, trying to act unbothered and hoping like hell she can’t see the blood he feels rushing to his cheeks. “Wasn’t thinking about it like that. Will you just answer me?”
She walks closer to him and leans forward, making it harder not to look at her. “You know, my answer right now doesn’t really mean anything. If I am the real me, I could say I’m not, and if I’m not, your brain could dream up me saying that I am. You’ll have to ask me when you wake up in the morning to find out for sure, won’t you?”
“I guess.” He glances back at her, and her grin has turned self-satisfied. “But you could still answer me anyway.”
“It is me, you silly goose,” Aerith laughs out. “Come on. The last thing you told me the other night was that you were coming for me, and what was the first thing I said when you found me?”
“‘You came for me,’” he quietly repeats. The quote feels the same way as this dream did at first—there’s a distant awareness that it should pain him, but it doesn’t.
“Right. Because I was really there. And I’m really here now, too.” Her playful grin returns. “Which brings us back to my question. If this was just a dream you could do whatever you wanted in, what would you do?”
Cloud gapes as his mind swirls with possibilities. All the scenarios he envisions have an undercurrent of wrongness, though—not because he doesn’t want them to happen, but because he wants her, the real her, to be here with him. He wants everything to be real.
And his heart clenches as he remembers what she’d said before. ‘Even if you think you have, it’s not real.’
“…I would make myself wake up,” he finally answers.
“Really?” she says, disbelieving. “If you were given the chance to freely control your dream, you’d seriously rather wake up?”
He shrugs. “It’s like I said before. If it was just me controlling it, nothing in the dream would matter, anyway.”
Aerith is quiet for a moment, eyes scanning his face as if looking for a sign that he’s joking, and then she breaks out into giggles. He doesn’t get what she could have found humorous in his answer.
“Oh, Cloud. Won’t even let yourself have fun in dreams.” She reaches her left hand up and rests it on his cheek, and he’s somehow struck with nostalgia for something that happened only two nights ago. “It’s okay to want things, you know. You don’t have to force yourself to be all detached.”
“You say that now,” he mutters. “Seemed like you wanted me detached two nights ago.”
All her usual levity and playfulness vanishes, giving way to a look of regret and shame. She averts her eyes. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t…”
Her hand falls from his face, and he unthinkingly shoots his hand out to grab her, just like last time. Except this time, it works. He startles at the solid feel of her arm in his gloved fingers, surprised they hadn’t met thin air again. His body freezes, though the urge to pull her closer is almost overwhelming.
As the silence around them grows heavy, a sentence desperate to be spoken fills every corner of his mind. It’s too candid, too much—and yet he can’t stop himself from saying it.
“You make it really hard not to fall in love with you.”
Aerith lets out a breath, squeezing her eyes shut and shaking her head back and forth. “You can’t.”
“Why?” The word sounds harsher than he means for it to. “Why won’t you let me decide how I feel? If you… If you don’t…” He gulps. “If you don’t feel the same way, then fine. But that doesn’t mean you get to say my feelings aren’t real.”
“Cloud. Please. You have to listen to me. I’m sorry if I’m hurting you, but I’m just…” She opens her glossy eyes and looks deeply into his. “I’m just trying to protect you.”
“From what?” he breathes out. He can’t think of any conceivable way that he could be protected by not loving her; it feels the exact opposite.
Her lips stay sealed and her brows draw together. Whatever her answer is, she doesn’t want to say it. When she finally does, it’s in a whisper.
“From fate.”
A gasp rips through Cloud’s throat as his head wracks with pain. Aerith praying, her materia falling, lowering her into water—each image that flashes through his mind suddenly makes sense. The devastation it fills him with is all-encompassing, suffocating. He feels like he’s drowning in the lake he sees her in, hundreds of feet underwater with no air left in his lungs, sinking down further with every second that passes and being crushed under its building pressure. His fingers are tingling, his mouth is dry, his eyes are burning—
“I’m here, Cloud. I’m still here. It’s okay.”
Her voice is like light in the dark, breaking through to him and calling him up from the depths. Cloud blinks rapidly as he comes back to his senses. He’s fallen to his knees without realizing, arms wrapped tightly around his midsection like they’re holding him from physically falling apart, chest rising and falling quickly as he struggles to get air past the lump in his throat. Aerith is kneeling in front of him with both hands cupping his face. Though she looks blurry through his watery eyes, he can clearly see that she’s cautious, concerned—but nothing’s more important to him in that moment than the fact that she’s alive.
“That’s it,” she says, her thumbs gently stroking his cheeks. “Calm down. Deep breaths, Cloud. Deep breaths.”
He listens, taking in a deep, shaky breath. It doesn’t help much. “You… You can’t—” Cloud sucks in another gasp, unable to get the next word out.
Aerith doesn’t say anything. Through the pity she feels for him, he sees something else in her face: acceptance. She’s accepted the future he’s seen as inevitable. She’s not fighting her fate.
It only makes him all the more determined to fight it for her.
“We defeated destiny,” he realizes aloud, voice thick and desperate. “That fate doesn’t have to exist.”
Hope lights up her face for a brief moment before she visibly pushes it down. “…But it could still happen,” she says, letting her hands drop into his lap.
“I won’t let it.” Unloosening his arms from around himself, he grabs both of her hands in his. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Aerith. You have to trust me. Please.”
“You never let it happen to begin with.” Her words are spoken so quietly he almost doesn’t hear them, so quietly he thinks she might not have meant to speak them at all. She’s still quiet, but less so when she goes on. “…I do trust you. It’s just…”
“…You spent so long believing it had to be that way,” he finishes for her.
She gives a slow nod. “…One of my first memories is having a vision of my death. It’s … hard to imagine it not happening, after all this time. I can’t really wrap my head around the idea of having a future.” Her gaze falls to their intertwined hands. “It scares me. Not knowing what’s going to happen anymore.”
“You don’t have to be scared,” he says. He squeezes one of her hands, then lets it go and reaches to cup his hand around her face. “I’m here for you.”
Aerith’s glistening eyes meet his again, and the way they light up as her face brightens makes the nervous thundering of his heartbeat worth it. Voice hardly more than a whisper, she says, “Thank you.”
Overcome by a whim, Cloud suddenly leans forward and pulls Aerith into a tight embrace, and immediately, it feels like a weight has been lifted off him. He can feel her cheek raise in a smile against his ear. Her arms snake around his back in return, and she moves to bring them even closer, sitting sideways across his lap and angling her torso so it’s flush with his.
He nuzzles his head into her, breathing in her floral scent and basking in her warmth. His heart swells in his chest. He can’t remember a time that he’s ever felt so soft, but he doesn’t think he’d mind getting used to it.
And he can get used to it—because there’s nothing stopping them from shaping their own destiny, now.
There’s no force keeping them on the agonizing path he’s seen. There’s no need for her to protect him from the pain that would come with her death, because there doesn’t have to be a future where she dies.
“There’s no reason why I can’t fall in love with you anymore,” Cloud says, voice muffled by her jacket.
Aerith pulls back to look him in the eyes, and their faces are tantalizingly close. A demure smile spreads across her lips. “And I won’t try to stop you anymore.”
Cloud wonders if she can feel his heart take off like fireworks.
He feels like he needs to say something to keep his lips from doing something stupid, but he ends up combining the two and saying something stupid instead. “I never got to kiss you before.”
A wave of embarrassment surges over him as soon as he realizes what came out of his mouth. Sweat crops up on the back of his neck and the sides of his flaming face right away. She literally just came around to the idea of him having feelings for her. He doesn’t want her to feel like he’s rushing her into something she’s not fully ready for yet.
Aerith laughs. “Has anyone ever told you how cute you are when you blush?”
Her teasing makes his face hotter, and being close enough to feel her breath on his lips certainly isn’t helping things.
He swallows heavily and tries to apologize, to give an explanation or excuse, but only stutters out the word “I” before he just clamps his mouth shut instead. Saying anything will probably just end up with him digging himself into an even deeper hole, and he can’t even climb out of the one he’s already in.
She lets out a sigh. “I was … pretty upset, too, you know. That I never got to kiss you before.”
When she says before, Cloud intuits that she doesn’t just mean the dream or the days before this one. She means something else entirely—and when he thinks about it, so did he. But for the life of him, he can’t figure out what that something else is. A past life, an alternate course, a different future; it feels like all of these at once, and understanding feels just outside of his grasp.
He might’ve been able to consider this more if his brain wasn’t about to explode from the knowledge that she wanted to kiss him, too.
“But since things don’t have to be the same anymore…” As Aerith trails off, the corners of her lips raise, and his heart stops for a second.
Cloud slowly runs his hand down her cheek to gently grab her chin. He doesn’t realize his hand is shaking until he sees it, and it’s only then that he realizes he has no idea what to do. How slow or fast should he lean in? Which way should he tilt his head? When should he close his eyes? What is he even supposed to do with his lips once they’re together? When does he pull back? His breath is fine, right?
“…You’ve never kissed anyone, have you?” Aerith asks softly.
His whole body going hot, he drops his hand. He … doesn’t remember—so he’s pretty sure she’s right. He answers with a small shake of his head, more than a little humiliated to admit to being so inexperienced at his age. He tries to justify it by reminding himself that he was busy in the military while other teens were out having all their firsts, but he has the feeling he probably wouldn’t have had it yet even if that weren’t the case.
“That’s okay. No reason to be embarrassed about it,” she says. “You know, we can stay like we are, if you’re not ready for anything more, yet. I don’t want you to feel like you’re rushing into things.”
He almost snorts at that. “I was worried you weren’t ready. I don’t feel like I’m rushing,” he says, leaving out the I feel like I’ve known you forever that he thinks afterward. “I—I want to.”
One of her hands leaves his back and squeezes between them to cup his face again. “Then…”
Whether by her reassuring voice or the comforting feel of her skin on his, his nerves all but disappear. Cloud tilts his head and leans in, eyes falling shut, and then Aerith’s lips are on his.
Everything feels right. Like he’s finally found something he’s been searching for his entire life. Like he’s finally whole. It’s a type of bliss he’s never felt before. All of his worries feel lightyears away, replaced by hope for the future he’ll do anything to spend with her. Hands roaming her back, he pulls her impossibly closer, wishing they could stay like this forever.
Though he doesn’t want to, Cloud is eventually the one to pull back. He rests his forehead against hers and takes in deep lungfuls of air through his mouth. Feeling his lips tingling still, he draws his bottom lip in and runs his tongue over it.
“Not to ruin the moment,” Aerith says lightly, “but you know you can breathe through your nose while you’re kissing, right?”
He breathes out a laugh. “Nothing could ruin this,” he says, voice husky. “I’ll just have to remember that for next time.”
Aerith giggles. “There better be plenty of next times.”
“There will be.”
With a pleasured sigh, Aerith pulls back a little more, and they blink their eyes open. “Well, we’ve got a long journey ahead of us, and we’re not getting good sleep like this," she says. "I should go…”
It takes a few seconds for her words to sink in. He forgot he was dreaming. He forgot where he was entirely. He looks around them to the scenery he hasn’t noticed since the second he laid his eyes on her—the broad sky, the vast, open field they’re in, the flowers they’re currently crushing. That last one makes him glad he’s dreaming; he doesn’t want to hurt any flowers.
She says what’s on his mind. “You forgot you were even dreaming, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” he admits. Frowning, he looks back at her. “…I don’t wanna let you go.”
Aerith runs her finger over his bottom lip. “Your pouty face is pretty tempting… But we really do need some normal sleep. If I’m here keeping your mind occupied all night, you’ll be a grump in the morning.”
He thinks about telling her that he’s not used to getting good sleep anyway, so it probably wouldn’t bother him, but then he comes up with a solution where they can get some normal sleep like she wants and still be together like he wants. “You could come sleep with me in my room.”
She laughs, and he feels his face heat up again as he realizes that, yes, he did just tell her without a second thought to sneak over into his room in the middle of the night so she can sleep with him.
“I-I didn’t mean it li—”
“I know what you meant," she says through the remainder of her laughter. "It sounds good to me—if you’re okay with everyone seeing us come out of the same room in the morning.”
“I don’t care,” he says. He’s willing to put up with some ribbing if it means getting to spend more time with her.
“Okay, then.” She grins, and suddenly the sensation of her weight on his lap starts to dissipate though she hasn’t moved. “I’ll be over in a minute.”
Green light swirls around her as it did before, and bit by bit, she disappears. He’s only alone in the flower field for a few short moments before that fades away, too.
Cloud opens his eyes to the darkness of his room at the inn. He doesn’t physically feel any different from how he felt just seconds ago when he was sleeping, but he still can’t help but feel doubtful over whether everything that happened was real or not. To his waking mind, it all seems too good to be true. His stomach is in knots as he sits up.
But then he hears a knock on his door, and he almost trips over the sheets as he shoots out of bed to rush over to it. He yanks open the door, and Aerith is there. Relief washes over him.
She’s only wearing her pink dress and a matching pair of socks, and her hair is completely down, falling in long waves past her hips. Seeing her like this, all comfortable and ready to lay down with him, makes his heart skip a beat.
“Heya,” she whispers, smiling. “May I?”
He moves out of the way and gestures for her to come in. His heart is struggling to get back to a normal rhythm as he shuts the door behind her and they walk over to the bed. It’s kind of small for two people, he realizes—but that just gives them all the more reason to stay close together throughout the night.
Aerith gets into bed first, then stretches her arms out for him, still giving him that smile that takes his breath away. Cloud smiles back as he settles in next to her. She snuggles up to him, resting her head against his chest, and he wraps his arms around her.
As Cloud drifts off to sleep with Aerith in his embrace, he feels in his soul that everything is going to be all right.