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She was late.
A light snow had begun to fall in the deep of the woods. The light was still strange here, untethered from the laws of the sun. It caught the snowflakes and lit them up like shards of crystal as they drifted gently downwards. Over time they gathered, shimmering white, around Sephiroth’s black boots.
And still, she was late, so he set out in search of her.
The snow kept falling while he walked through the forest, slow and purposeful, leaving crisp footfalls in his wake. The prints seemed strange in their immediacy. A betrayal of time here, the way it stood still and stretched into eons. The sleeping forest. An anomaly, like him. He knew beyond knowing that he had walked there before, and so had his mother, leaving her own delicate footprints in the snow. In five million years more, when every tree and scampering creature had turned to dust, he’d walk here again through the ash.
All sense of time and its passage had left him, when he found her.
Aeris lay curled amidst the saplings at the forest’s entrance. Snow blanketed her hair and her slight body, claiming her for the earth and its elements. Her eyes were closed, downy flakes gathering thick on her lashes. Sephiroth knelt beside her and narrowed his eyes at the shallow movement of her chest. Still breathing, barely. When he swept his eyes over her again, spotting mottled skin and odd angles, he understood what had happened. Cloud had done the work he had left him too well, and not well enough.
Slowly, Sephiroth rose. A black figure in the biting cold, hovering over the girl like Hades himself, come to claim her.
By rights, she should be with the Planet already. He meant for her to be. One stroke was all it would take. Her blood would spread like red ivy through the snow, like the curls of her hair that had fallen loose around her too-still body.
He watched the chill wind pluck strands of her hair across her pale face, and wondered.
She was lighter than he had expected. Smaller. In greater pain, too. Aeris groaned and twisted as he carried her in his arms, her head shifting against his shoulder, but she did not wake. They would not have to travel far, only to shelter, and the deep forest had plenty to offer. Up ahead, an ancient tree had fallen across the high ground, leaving the earth black and dry in its shadow. It would do.
Under the aegis of the old trunk, Sephiroth sat with his back to the rock and laid Aeris across his lap. At some point on her journey she had done what she could to mend herself, but it seemed that, for once, her strength had failed her. Her head lolled backwards across his knee, pathetic, nearly lifeless. When he slid his hand beneath it, lifted it, her blue lips parted as she struggled for breath. Cold and frailty were distant memories to his body as it was now, but he recalled them sharply, staring down at her.
Fire, first. Materia rolled from his hand onto the ground in front of them, where he called it to life. It sprung obediently into a flickering flame, no larger than a campfire, warm and bright. Measured. Trivial for his talents, but for a moment, he eyed the fire as it danced, doubting the evidence of his own restraint.
Healing, he had no instruments for. He found what he needed at Aeris' wrist, shining green in her bangle. With a body he could make and unmake at will, and a mind to unmake the world itself, there was no use in healing magic. No use in what he was doing. He lowered her head gently against his knee, balanced her thin wrist in the cradle of his palm, and did it anyway.
The magic worked slowly. Another stretch of boundless time passed before enough of it had coursed through her to wake her. Aeris' head jolted upward with a sudden, violent gasp for breath, like breaching the surface of a still lake. Her eyes snapped open and searched wildly for some sign of what had happened to her.
Sephiroth closed his fingers around her wrist before she could snatch it away. He kept casting.
Colour returned to Aeris' face, her lips pink again as she took in the air like she had never tasted it before. She rolled her head towards the fire and took that in, too, took in the glowing green at her own wrist, and settled against him again with the understanding of what was happening to her. It kept her from struggling when her eyes finally fell on him, widening in confusion, narrowing in indignity.
"You…" she breathed, disbelieving, staring up at him. He felt her shift and then settle again, still deciding if she wanted to struggle. Her mouth twisted, looking for words, biting them back, all the while staring. It took her time to find the question she would ask, the only one that mattered. "Why?"
Why.
Lying next to her in the snow had been a pink ribbon, pinned under a pale materia that Sephiroth recognized at once. Precious, dangerous things. He picked them up along with her and carried them here, and now they lay at his side, just out of her sight. The tips of his fingers grazed the white materia as if he were running them along the edge of a knife.
He meant to kill her. If he did it now, he would end her interference before it ever began. When her companions saw the proof of what he’d done, they would all follow him into the depths and catalyze the rest just the same. A red sky, a black end. Turning the blade under his fingers. Sephiroth lifted his head to look at the wood and let his eyes follow the movement in the boughs of the trees. Little creatures, all destined for dust.
"You’re meant to die," he said slowly, lowering his eyes to meet hers. "Not suffer." Not waste away, ignoble, in the cold. Not her.
She stared up at him and thought. When her eyes slipped closed, he knew she had accepted his answer for what it was. He let the fingers around her wrist loosen and Aeris turned her palm to face his, swept her thumb across his artery. Slowly, her fingers curled around his wrist, too.
"It’s finished," Sephiroth said, his voice soft and certain. "You're too weak, this time. It would be better for you to turn back now. Your end will be gentler."
Aeris said nothing. Her eyes remained closed, her face calm, focused. She had joined him in the cast and called the magic into herself, willing herself onward.
"Will you?" Sephiroth prompted.
Aeris’ eyes snapped open again. Her voice rang clear. "No."
The wood was still. Sleeping, like time had shifted again and collapsed in around the two of them. It was the answer he had expected from her. The one she gave in every moment and every epoch.
"Why?” he asked anyway, with a flicker of frustration. “You know the truth of it. Nothing, really, dies. Nothing ends."
She fixed her eyes on him again, her quiet voice just as clear. "This life still matters."
"None of them do," he scoffed.
"Then why help me?"
The question struck him silent. He had no better answer. A faint smile tugged at Aeris’ lips, amusement dancing in the green of her eyes. Vibrant. Alive. For now, at least, while the forest slept.
He took the ribbon in hand first. Her eyes followed his hands as he wove it carefully into the curls of her hair, spilling out over the earth, still undone but as near to its rightful place as he could put it. The white materia, he pressed into her hand, the one that wasn’t joined with his. Aeris smiled again, curling her fingers around it and holding it against her heart. The blade back in the hands of its master. But what did any of it matter, in the end?
Sephiroth tipped his head back against the rock and closed his eyes.
"Rest, then,” he murmured. “You'll need the strength."
Once more she relaxed against him, bringing their hands to rest against her stomach. They rose and fell together with her breath. He listened to the sound of it, the snow still falling in the wood around them as the day darkened. When Aeris moved to leave, he would let her go, and they would both make ready for what was left. For now, the fleeting moment held.
For now, while the forest slept.