Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

By the grace of the scorching sun and the violent rays sewn into it, Edge had never been given such bliss in a day—at least, ignorantly in the form of road-melting heat.

The occasion conjures up overwhelming business for Seventh Heaven. Sweat trickles down Tifa’s temple as she works three drinks in her arms flawlessly, swerving past running children and their parents chasing them down with shouts of steamed irritation. She’s beginning to regret making the bar menu family friendly at Marlene’s request; she never could say no to the girl. The ceiling fan is on its last legs, not doing any better than the small toy Denzel holds up to his face on a step of the stairs. Tifa meets the boy’s eye once she sets cold lemonade and beer down, giving him a wince of sympathy that makes him pout. It’s not far off from Cloud’s own, one that constantly tells Tifa, I’m having a bad time and not even a Gold Chocobo could fix it.

She sees too much of him in Denzel.

The thought makes Tifa smile to herself and turn her head to the door, held wide open with a chair for any breeze that might pass through. It’s a hopeless thing to expect, she knows. But if she said that to Cloud, who—still as a rock at the entrance—looks about ready to fall over, he might just do so.

Tifa relishes in the way Cloud’s entire figure is less… tense. Body leaning against the doorframe, slightly grown out hair tied up with a band from Tifa’s room, all in the name of peace. He’s not posed and ready for a fight, even as unfamiliar faces nod and wave when they enter the bar. Cloud’s ornery is welded into him like hot plastic, yet he seems trimmed down in a way that makes it painless to be. It’s painless to nudge Tifa’s side with his hip when they walk past each other, to ruffle Denzel’s hair every morning at breakfast, and to kiss Marlene’s knuckles like a noble before she’s home with Barret.

It stirs something horrific within Tifa’s gut, a quiet notion of not knowing. (It’s curling and coy. She’d rather feel anything but.) It successfully terrifies her; what she and Cloud went through to get him back is no secret, making Tifa grow accustomed to always being in the know.

Absentminded questions come in the form of asking each other how they’re feeling (are you still here?), or if they like the Nibel treewood of the outdoor tables (do you remember home?), and whether or not the heat is really getting to them (you’re still you, aren’t you?).

What’s the price to pay, in being unknowing, if it lets the most important person in Tifa’s life stand on his feet without needing her air to breathe? She wants to accept it in a flight of speed, faster than her fist and harder than her pulse.

It doesn’t happen.

The heat of the day lessens, almost as much as the customers when they begin to pay their tabs after sunset. It’s quieter in the bar, with Marlene loaning all of the usual cheer yet staying with her father for the time being. A toll of it seems to hit Denzel first. He nearly sulks without the presence of the girl that’s a sister to his tightly wound heart, excusing himself to bed once the last drinking man leaves and Cloud closes up for the day.

Cloud starts following after the boy—their boy—to bid his goodnight, when Tifa is hit with the fallen pit of her stomach again. She quickly moves away from the sink, wiping wet suds over her pants without a care, just in time to gently grab Cloud’s elbow before he makes it up the stairs.

At first, Tifa feels the need to cover it up. She wants to ask him to help her put away new shot glasses that won’t be unboxed until next week, or maybe ask if he’s got an empty delivery slot tomorrow morning. Tifa can’t meet his gaze until Cloud makes a worried noise in the back of his throat, and she looks at him. Cloud’s open, softly patient face staring back at her makes Tifa accept that she never needs to cover anything up for him. Not ever.

“Can we talk… after Denzel’s settled?” Tifa asks, plain and simple. She searches Cloud’s face, looking for any spasms of uncomfort or nervousness, eyes slowing down when all she finds is confusion.

Cloud’s eyebrows are knitted together. “Everything okay?”

(And of course he would ask, because he’s Cloud. Tifa never expected anything different, the question helping her relax. Tifa smooths her hand down Cloud’s arm and lets it fall to his side, beaded bracelets from the kids sliding down to his wrist from the movement, hanging a little loose. They’re as colorful as the hands that made them: one a signature of Cloud’s name in bold, and the other an assortment of rainbow beads and stars. 

Upon being given the latter, Cloud had asked why, like they were speaking of mythological origins and not a piece of handmade jewelry. Marlene had told him, so ardent and big for someone her size, that it’s because “you’re a star, Cloud!” The memory makes Tifa’s eyes sting.

They deserve this life, don’t they?)

“Everything’s fine!” Tifa sees the pinch between Cloud’s brow fall and can’t help but smile. “I just… I wanted to ask you about something. It can wait until morning, if you’re tired—”

“Tifa.” Cloud offers a hand to her, knocking his head towards Denzel’s room up the stairs. “I’ve got time. Tuck him in with me?” His voice tilts amusedly when he says those last words, like they’re children sharing secrets that no one else will have the pleasure of hearing. The two of them both know that if Denzel had heard this, the boy would protest in all kinds of glares and scoffs and huffs of breath.

Being tucked in was for kids, and he certainly is not a kid.

Denzel allows it to happen, however, with Cloud pushing away brown hair from his eyes and Tifa wishing him sweet dreams in the form of a forehead kiss. A son of such affection can’t seem to resist it, even in rebellion, and it’s something that rings in Cloud’s head infinitely. He feels a little older than he is as he fusses with Denzel’s window, muttering about how he doesn’t want the boy to fall ill in this weather. The exact path of time when Cloud stopped being a child and began raising one of his own, is something he doesn’t know. What he knows now though, is the sound of Denzel’s breathing starting to even out when Tifa flicks his light off, and the small glance they share into the darkness of the hallway.

Cloud walks a little closer to Tifa, bumping shoulders. “…It’s good to see him falling asleep so easily now. I worry about how many hours he gets.”

“I know you do,” Tifa says quietly. She reaches out to pick a loose thread on Cloud’s shirt, his sigh of faux exasperation only making her smile reach her eyes. “Worrying is your second nature these days.”

“Isn’t it yours, too?”

It’s a rhetorical noise, a question of answers that she already knows. Tifa hears it from deep in Cloud’s throat, because he knows more than she does. Even as Cloud holds open his bedroom door for Tifa to step in, dimly lit with a lamp on his desk built up by scattered papers, the urge to let him know that she worries (every second every minute every hour every day) doesn’t falter. Even as they get comfortable on the made bed, shoes slipping off and knees coming up to chests, Tifa’s clenched teeth dig into her gums with a scold of silence.

Cloud’s voice pulls her from herself. “Tifa, you’re sure everything’s fine? If something’s going on, you can tell me.”

(Tifa holds back any means of crying at how badly she wants to tell him the same thing. She wants to be plain and simple with him again. She is going to be plain and simple.)

“Did something happen recently? Something that… that maybe, you were too scared to tell me?” Tifa’s neck trembles with the force of wanting to get the question over with. She wraps her arms around her knees, cradling her elbows as though she’s hugging herself. It’s comforting in the absence of another body snug in her own.

She waits, despite her legs shaking from the need to run. But Cloud—Cloud doesn’t move away from her. He doesn’t hide. He stays planted firmly next to her on his now unmade bed, pulling out his cover from its tight creases and handling the lower half in his lap. Tifa jolts slightly at his cold hands on her warm shoulders, although leans into the touch after Cloud murmurs a small “it’s okay.” His eyes flicker to every wrinkle and mole on her face, every faint scar or crease from laughter, each little piece of the past that still holds her in their clutches. Like he’s looking for her feelings before Tifa even gets the chance to feel them. Cloud is more plain and simple than Tifa could ever wish to be.

“I think I’m losing it, Tifa.” He says.

And suddenly she’s afraid. For him.

Cloud is looking Tifa straight in the eyes during the casualty. There’s heartbreaking acceptance written all over his features and, sparingly, a hint of defeat when he looks away from her. She’s confused more than ever now, but not any less concerned when Cloud’s hand skims over the pink ribbon on her arm. She bites down on the pit of her organs, on her heart. “You—?” Tifa unravels her limbs from her own security and stands up from the bed. “Cloud, what are you talking about?”

Cloud swears under his breath, dragging a hand through his hair roughly. “I’m seeing them.” He says that and doesn’t explain, as if the lives hunting for his life on a broken platter haven’t made their way into his blood and his memories and his head.

“Who are you seeing? Is it—is it him!? ” Tifa’s sounds downright frantic and guilt weaves its way into Cloud’s chest. 

A lingering side of Cloud knows that his healing with Aerith, and his tears with Zack, had been undeniably real. The man Tifa speaks of has plagued his nightmares for the last year, nowhere to be seen in the light of day or in the faces of his family. Sephiroth is no longer a part of Cloud. Sephiroth can no longer tear apart his visage and reach into the caverns of his existence, crushing everything in sight like a bloody, wilted carnation. Sephiroth is no more when it comes to battling with death before he gets a chance to live. Sephiroth is gone. But Zack and Aerith… Cloud can’t say the same for. He hopes he never has to.

“Cloud, please!” Tifa pleads. “Talk to me.” She looks halfway near the verge of tears, reaching out to wrap his hands into hers.

This wasn’t what he wanted to happen. This isn’t what Cloud had meant to do. 

So, he tells her.

He tells her of being in a time that doesn’t belong to them, that isn’t their own, where Aerith lives defiantly until she’s stopped. Cloud wonders if Aerith is destined to die in every time and world that exists, because she had been destiny’s enemy long before it came for her, and feels his blood run cold with the thought. He tells Tifa of the church flowers that sing to him and love him and didn’t want him to leave—he didn’t want to leave. He speaks of the Planet being warm and gentle, cradling him in the crook of her arm and being careful with his head like Cloud was her newborn baby, soft spot and all. Zack’s name blows from his lips in cold fog, feeling himself shake the more he goes on. Cloud tells Tifa of the love that suffocates him because the only person it is reserved for is dead. As dead as the dried fern on his windowsill. What is he meant to do with a love that has no host?  

“…and—and what, I’m supposed to just believe myself? Believe that it really… that I saw them again?” Cloud feels himself slipping bit by bit, but he wants to make sure he’s still here. Wants to make sure that he’s still himself. “I was—Fuck, Tifa, there’s something telling me that they’re not in the Lifestream anymore. And I don’t know what to do with that.” Cloud looks down at his feet hanging off the bed. He feels Tifa’s thumb circling over the back of his hand, a calming gesture that he couldn’t receive in mere words.

They’re both silent for a few seconds, until—

“I believe you.” 

Cloud gapes. “But, Tifa—!”

“No. Listen to me, okay?” Tifa squeezes his hands tighter. “The Lifestream has never once let you stay, has it? It always spits you back out. Maybe because it wasn’t your time or the Planet didn’t think it was right. For whatever damn reason. And I’m grateful for it, I really am, but that shouldn’t happen to anyone. It’s never been real. Except for when it comes to you, Cloud.” Cloud looks back up at her, slow in regard. His mouth is dry; eyes burning, he’s reminded of a feeling that makes him bitter. Sadness, desperation, grief, and pitter patters alike. Yet he lets Tifa talk, and keeps listening to her every word like she’s the wisest he’s ever known. “So, if you met Aerith… if you saw Zack, then there’s a chance that was real, too. Gaia knows you’ve had to see so much more.” The way Tifa says Aerith’s name has Cloud trembling. Her words are firm, cutting through him like a soft butter knife. One for toast. She repeats, “I believe you, Cloud. I think I always will.”

That’s enough for him to believe it himself.

Tifa spends the rest of the night next to him. She whispers reassurances, even though his door is closed and they don’t have to whisper. It’s still better than not hearing her voice at all. Tifa gets clothes from her room and convinces Cloud to change out of his jeans. They curl under Cloud’s blanket when Tifa tires herself out from the quiet mumbles, reaching for him as soon as their heads hit the pillows. Cloud complies easily and lets Tifa fold him in her embrace, his head on her chest and his arms circled around her torso. She kisses his forehead, right underneath the line of his hair and with all the love she puts into Denzel’s goodnight kisses.

Cloud makes a tired sound in the back of his throat, one that Tifa shushes with a hand in his hair.

“Let me help you figure this out.” She begs, tension leaking from her body. “Let’s figure it out together.”

All it takes is a slight nod of Cloud’s head on her collarbone for Tifa’s eyes to close. He’s glad he can lay here with a member of his family, his best friend through life and death, without having to worry about her fading away during the night. He’d say Tifa’s his friend in sickness and in health as well, because when has she ever not been there for him? Most days, Cloud thinks their water tower promise had been switched in role since the night they made it.

Cloud allows himself to slip into the dark, the guiding pull of the breathing Planet serenading him with lullabies, and sleep.

—

When Cloud comes to, the right side of his bed is empty. His hands scatter around the wrinkled sheets in search for Tifa, but only finds the imprint she’s left. Still warm, he notices. He rubs sleep from his eyes and throws his legs over the bed, groaning when multiple bones pop into place. (He’s getting too old for this). Simply sitting for a moment, Cloud’s ears catch on Tifa’s voice in the kitchen downstairs. Something he’s learned over the past few years of living with her, is that Tifa has a habit of talking to herself, muttering this and that. It’s usually harmless in the form of setting mental timers for the oven and counting through the ticks of their clock. But there’s a different tone to her conversation this morning, as if there’s actually another person she’s been talking to this time.

Once Cloud hears the house phone click back onto the wall and Tifa exhales shakily, he decides to start the day. He doesn’t bother changing into something more suitable, as the bar hasn’t opened yet. His focus through bleary eyes is on following the smell of brewed coffee outside the room. Cloud trudges down the stairs quietly so as to not wake Denzel. The boy’s a lighter sleeper than he is, so Cloud wouldn’t want to be a disruption. 

“Morning,” He mutters once he reaches the kitchen, nodding his thanks to Tifa when she passes him an already filled mug from her spot at the table. Cloud can’t resist the urge to sigh in relief when the steam hits his throat. “You get a call?”

Tifa’s toast looks long forgotten and cold on her plate. “Good morning. And yeah, I… I did. There’s a voicemail, too.” She says, resigned. 

Cloud knows that voice. The voice that Tifa can’t control when she thinks not bringing their problems up would be beneficial. He pulls a chair out to sit across from her at the table, cradling the mug of caffeine in one hand like it’s the best gift on Gaia. “Is someone we know in trouble?”

They’ve had their fair share of house calls from the gang, their family, after one of the members finds themselves in a hellbent situation. If Yuffie’s in the area, she spam calls Cloud like no tomorrow while he’s out on deliveries, in hopes of him being able to bail her out when being caught stealing something as big as a truck. (For all the teasing between them, Cloud’s not surprised that he’s always her first call—it makes something in him feel incredibly sated.) Even Nanaki is an avid contender to the Strife-Lockhart protective services business, often having to ask familiar faces from Cosmo Canyon to dial Tifa’s number when he needs advice on dealing with children. Cloud is elated, and albeit a bit worried, that the gang still feels fine coming to them for help outside of defeating Gods and destroying reactors.

“I’m not sure, he—he wasn’t really clear.” Tifa replies. She looks stressed first thing in the morning, having her fingers soothe an apparent pain in her temple.

“Who?”

“Reeve.” Cloud suddenly understands her current state much better now. Reeve has been busy rebuilding the Planet’s infrastructure with the WRO for a while now, so it wasn’t uncommon for him to let them in on new knowledge from time to time. But an unsolicited and unclear call from Reeve, or even from the WRO, is enough to know that something could be very wrong.

“Wanna fill me in, or should I…?” Cloud trails off, gesturing to the phone on the wall.

Tifa nods. “I think you might want to hear what he left.”

Cloud tries not to let his concern physically sway him when he stands up. He reaches for the phone with steady hands and presses on the files of saved voicemails, holding it up to his ear as it begins pending. He and Tifa share a glance that doesn’t exactly help with the quick anxiousness that stabs his body.

The voicemail starts.

“Hello, Cloud. Tifa. I’m leaving this to let you both know of a recent… development, in the church of the Sector 5 slums.” Cloud’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion. “I know you two are very familiar with it. There’s been certain reports of—ah, ‘green and blue light’ flashing all over the church from people in the slums. Sound familiar? Even the children are frightened by it, and I considered sending in one of my groups, though this feels far more up your alley, Cloud.” The said man feels his knees buckle and has to support his upper body by leaning on the wall. “I’m very sorry to burden you with this, but I’d be grateful if you could check it out and confirm that it’s nothing too dire. Between all of us, it seems like Cloud is the only person that knows the church better than anyone. Thank you for your time. I’ll be looking forward to hearing back from the two of you soon.” A sound confirming the end of the message pierces through the air.

“Shit...” Cloud hangs his head, harshly placing the phone back in its slot with a clang and a repeated, hissed swear. “Shit.”

Tifa speaks up hesitantly, combing a hand through the ends of her hair: a nervous action. “You don’t think it has anything to do with what you told me last night, do you? Because if it does, I can—”

“There’s no way I’m letting you check it on your own just for my sake, Tifa.” Cloud says, sounding tired. He knows Tifa can protect herself, of course, in more ways than he could ever do for himself. Something about Reeve’s message doesn’t make him feel fearful, it makes him feel quietly akin to ansty. Restlessly wired enough that a Sleep spell couldn’t falter his stride, and agonizingly impatient, because it never ends for him, does it? It’s a bitter thought that Cloud can’t control, chuckling to himself humorlessly. “I’m going alone.”

“Cloud,” Tifa’s frowning, and Cloud can hear it in her voice without having to look at her face. “You know you don’t have to do this alone anymore! I’m… I’m here, remember?”

(The words echo in his head like familiar belief, but Cloud has to stop and remind himself that Zack isn’t here anymore.)

Cloud takes a deep breath to compose himself. He moves to sit in the chair he pulled up to the table again, right in front of Tifa and her sunken expression. Smoothing a hand across the table, his fingers find Tifa’s clenched fist, curling his own hand around hers. Cloud keeps it there as he explains, “I know you are, and I know I’m not alone, but this? This might be—”

“—something you have to do on your own.” Tifa finishes for him. She places her unclenched hand over his. “I know.”

The corner of Cloud’s mouth turns up in a half smile. “Always do.”

They let each other go so that Cloud has a chance to down his now cold coffee with a scrunched face of disgust. He puts their dishes away to wash them, and even though it’s only two cups and a plate, the repetitive movement of a washing routine is helpful. The clatter of the glass makes him wince. Due to Denzel being out of school for summer, the boy has been letting himself sleep in for a reasonable amount of time. Cloud is a bit happy about it, because it means that Denzel is getting much more sleep compared to when he first arrived in the household. While the two of them as adoptive father and son still have their moments of warily not feeling like they belong, it’s comforting to know that Denzel has marked his place in the littlest ways. Even if it’s in the form of littered clothing and muddy shoes by the door.

(Cloud leaves to gather any gear he might need, yet doubts the Cure materia that Tifa hands him will be necessary. 

He takes it anyway.)

The two back blades of the Fusion Sword being stuffed into the storage compartment in Fenrir is a comfort. Cloud has gotten inexplicably better at being apart from his weapons, especially in the church, of all places, but this time not knowing is enough to put him on edge. He questions, silently, if this is how Tifa often feels. The strange feeling running down his legs does not go unnoticed.

Cloud promises to give Tifa a call once he figures out whatever is going on, and then he’s off.

Passing through the same dirt roads and streets like he’s done so many times before is easy. Familiarity is easy. But what’s not easy, is being left alone with his own self in the dark-set picture of the world through his goggles. Cloud thinks back on what Reeve had said about him, about the church. Being seen as the only person that knows the church like the back of his hand makes him want to laugh until his stomach is sour, because in no world will that ever be true of him. He didn’t raise himself in that church, or take care of its flowers, or be bothered to fix the hole in the roof just for the source of sun that has hurt his eyes with how long he stares. How many times did it hurt her eyes?

The only person that knows the slums church better than anyone, and infinitely better than Cloud, is dead.

He tries not to let it get to him.

As Cloud parks Fenrir right beside the church steps, he feels the air in his lungs become constricted. Tighter. It feels uncannily like being dunked in the murky green hues of the Planet, lifestreams that he’s been touched by before. Similar to the very same streams that run underneath and inside the church. He pulls out his two swords and lodges one across his back, the other clenched in his hand, and takes a deep breath. Exhaling, he slowly opens the grand wooden doors of the church and prepares himself for whatever might come for him. Or rather, whatever won’t.

The caution makes Cloud’s steps small and light with his sword held up in front of him, a dangerous shield. That visceral feeling is much more persistent now that he’s inside its beating heart, where strange and even stranger things always overtake him. 

Cloud is deftly poking a fallen piece of debris with the toe of his boot when a gasp hits his ears, and he isn’t quick enough to logically react, not when it’s so easy to let his guard down here, causing him to make the mistake of aiming the sword in his hands towards source of the sound. A pained yelp is meshed with the impact. Cloud turns his head around like a swift wind to see his weapon pierced through the wood of a pew, not too far from the great lake of blessed rain water in the center of the church. There’s movement behind the tip of his sword: a near jittery body, soaking wet from head to toe and sitting in their own puddle. When did his vision get so blurry? He can’t make out anything else aside from pinks and reds from where he stands, which has Cloud bringing himself closer so the feeling in his body can stop pumping, and pumping—it hurts.

Cloud is wobbling and almost goes crashing before he leans on the pew where his sword is trapped, and he feels fucking sick once he understands what he’s done.

His target has a mop of brown hair, braid and bangs dripping wet yet miraculously, the soft pink bow in her hair remains unscathed. Her dress in its sopping state makes him choke on his own spit and he’s already wanting to close his eyes shut before he even finishes looking. A healing hand is held up in front of her face, now bleeding with a fresh impaled wound that makes Cloud nauseas. He did that. He did this. She seems to gather up the courage to put her hand down and open her eyes then to meet his gaze; the blinding brightness of evergreen is the finishing touch for Cloud. He can’t breathe. He can’t move. He can’t do anything but force the bile back down his throat.

A squeezed out word, a stuttering breath.

“…Aerith?”

Chapter Text

If Cloud listens hard enough, he thinks he can hear Gaia laughing in glee when he sinks to his knees. He hits the floorboards with a force that knocks the remaining breath out of him. Aerith’s eyes are wide and hurriedly flickering over his body, and his face. She’s got her injured hand tucked against her chest protectively. For a moment, Cloud assumes the worst—that she’s afraid of him, if she’s even able to register that he’s kneeling so close to her. He, for one, is struggling. Aerith’s teeth are chattering, the clicking of her teeth being only noise between them aside from heavy pants and the beginnings of a sniffle, and all Cloud wants to do is pull her close to warm her up. He barely catches Aerith’s lower lip quivering along with the tears welling up in her eyes, her mouth curving over a name that she’s carved sweetly so many times when she was alive, like she is now, and it’s—

“Cloud.”

It’s his.

Aerith flings her arms around Cloud’s neck and shoulders, clutching the back of his shirt like a lifeline and pulling him in closer with it. She lets out a guttural sob when Cloud returns the embrace just as tightly. He tucks his face into her soft hair like he’s always done, vulnerable and confused, but together with her all the same. Cloud doesn’t know what hits him, or what makes it happen, when pointless words come pouring out of him like a flood onto Aerith’s skin.

“Sorry, I’m sorry—Aerith, I’m sorry,” He cries, face wet and red. It quickly becomes his mantra, mumbling warbled, desperate apologies for something that has long been forgiven and forgotten. “You have to know that I—”

Even as Aerith murmurs “You don’t have to be, I know,” soft and broken, Cloud’s still babbling against her neck like a child. Perhaps he still feels that way, in this time, with how hard he’s clinging onto Aerith’s damp dress as if it’s his mother’s stained apron, and crying unabashedly in her hold. Perhaps she still feels the same, he concludes, light and airy. Smells of the same cloves. What surprises Cloud is how Aerith’s heart beats the same after not beating at all for years—iron-willed and strong. He swallows down the pained noises forcing their way up his throat.

Cloud feels Aerith pulling her hands away from the base of his neck where her hand had been sifting through, now smoothing it over his shoulders to coax him into loosening his arms. He goes startlingly easy, with how much he didn’t want to let her go.

She pulls back slightly, lifting her uninjured palm to cup his cheek. “You don’t have to be sorry, Cloud. For any—anything at all. I know you did all you could, and that’s enough.” Aerith’s thumb wipes away the wetness from under his eyes, smiling with all the care in her heart through her own tears. “It’ll always be enough.”

Cloud breathes heavily, taking a few deep, shaky  breaths to compose himself. There’s a certain amusement that comes with this: sobbing his lungs out every time he sees a dead friend again, no matter how real it might be. He can’t control the bordering hysterical giggle that bubbles up in his chest, clogged and breaking off into a quiet hiccup when Aerith looks at him in worry.

“I’m... ‘m fine.” Cloud says, rather unconvincingly. He’s vaguely aware of how his plain shirt is suddenly sticking to his skin and grimaces at the feeling.

“You don’t have to pretend, Cloud.” Aerith tells him firmly. 

All Cloud does is nod, but it seems to suffice.

“Guess I got us both wet, huh?” Aerith gently lets her hand fall from his cheek, wincing when it falls on top of her other. Cloud’s eyes widen in horror when he sees the fresh blood trailing down her wrist, past her bracer. He wants to wither away.

Cloud cradles her hand. He can feel himself shaking. “Gaia, I didn’t mean to hurt—What are…? How are you even—” How are you even in front of me, he wants to say. How are you in front of me when you should be living in the stream underneath me?

“…I wish I knew how, or why, so that I could tell you, Cloud.” Aerith sighs. “But the Planet… it was like she didn’t want me to know until I needed to. Whenever that may be.”

“How did you get here? How long have you been here?” Cloud can’t help but ask. He’s sure he has every reason to, considering Aerith is soaked from head-to-toe in what he suspects is her own rainfall.

“Woke up right where I started, in the water. I thought I was drowning,” Aerith laughs over that slightly, much to Cloud’s dismay. She wipes her eyes with the back of her free hand and tucks a coiled strand of hair behind her ear. “It was only a few minutes before you got here though, don’t worry! Always my hero, you.”

Cloud scoffs in disbelief. “I hurt you—”

“And now you’re helping me, right?

(Aerith often did have her special ways of getting him to shut his mouth. His self doubt and feigned reassurances were never lost on her, no matter how discreet he tried to be. Knowing what he knows now, Cloud understands a bit better as to why she tried to pull him out of his head as much as she could in the past, and didn’t once put any blame on him for whatever has happened. Although, just the mere memories of hurting her when he wasn’t in control of his bodily autonomy, compared to his own aborted hypervigilance hurting her this time, makes him want to fall back into guilt. Despite the already present amount of blood staining his hands, Aerith’s was a color that Cloud had never wanted to see on them.)

Cloud turns away from her. “…Right.” He begins to stand, pulling Aerith up with him although going at it slower when he sees Aerith wince and her legs shake. He sits her down on the next stable pew nearest to them, and she lets out a breath of content at no longer being on the floor.

“Then it’s okay. I promise.” Aerith smiles again, much more cheerfully than before amidst the dried tears on her cheekbones.

Cloud feels his own lips mirror hers. He tries to believe her, tries hard, and reminds himself that she never blamed him. Not once.

It helps.

He tells Aerith to stay put and that he’ll be right back, in which she cheekily replies that she has nowhere else to go. Being herself in coping humor—despite everything she’s been through—makes Cloud ache, because it’s as though Aerith hardly gives herself a second to soak in her despair and let it run a full course. He knows that avoiding it must be her way of standing tall and steady; the urge to keep her in a net of safety grows stronger with each moment that he’s here with his dear friend in the church.

Cloud can’t exactly fathom what’s happening. He’s sure he was knocked out by some immoral entity he’s never met the minute he stepped foot into the chapel, and thinks this so, even as he finds a familiar folded quilt amongst the rubble. He pinches his forearm in order to wake up if he’s dreaming. Cloud ignores the sting that streaks through his chest at the sight of the item and makes his way to Aerith again, with Tifa’s Restore materia in his hand and the patterned blanket under his arm. He notices that Aerith’s shivering has subsided into occasional tremors.

Cloud will always put his thanks into the hole in the roof, especially now that it’s brought sunlight and summer heat above their heads.

Aerith doesn’t say a word as he wraps the quilt over her body and casts Cure on her hand. It’s ironic, he thinks. No one in their ragtag family had ever been as good a healer as Aerith was. The thought brings back a memory of a time shortly after she was killed, in which Yuffie sobbed and cried and called out for Aerith after a nasty fight, because Vincent’s healing was supposedly not good enough. With Cid’s encouragement, Yuffie later reluctantly admitted that she had acted in grief, telling Vincent that he “didn’t totally suck” (an apology).

Cloud hadn't wanted to speak up to tell the gang that he understood the girl’s actions, in a way. It was never quite the same to be conventionally healed after Aerith’s death.

And now here he was, healing her.

Aerith’s bloodied hand is being wiped away by the end of Cloud’s shirt when she says, “Thank you, Cloud.”

“You don’t have to thank me.”

“But I do—I will,” There’s a defiant glint in her eye. “And you can’t stop me!”

(Cloud shakes his head, something heavy being pulled away from his body. He’s chuckling freely when he puts the back of Aerith’s hand up to his cheek without thinking further about it, reveling in how her skin has lost its chill. She was terrifyingly colder when he’d laid her body to rest in the Forgotten City lake. Cloud lets her warmth spread into his face before placing Aerith’s hand back in her lap, and finds himself missing it already.)

Cloud smirks in acknowledgment. “I won’t be taking you up on that challenge.” He pockets the materia and finally decides to do something about his sword. Aerith’s hands hold the leg of the pew right on the floor while Cloud dislodges the blade, pressing a quick, relieved peck to its hilt that earns him a giggle out of Aerith. He offers her an arm, saying, “Ready to go home?”

Aerith freezes. “Home?”

“Seventh Heaven, I mean.” Cloud feels slightly embarrassed. Home could mean a number of different things for Aerith.

“…Tifa?” She asks hopefully. Aerith’s demeanor turns into something shy, fiddling with the choker around her neck as she leans her weight against Cloud’s side. She’s still a bit weak in the knees, wobbly and gripping Cloud’s shirt so tightly that her knuckles turn white. Cloud catches the fleeting look of respite passing over Aerith’s face.

Cloud smiles, warm and reassuring, wrapping his arm around her shoulder to keep her up. “Yeah. Tifa will be there.” An earlier interaction strikes his thoughts like lightning, so fast that he swears to himself and receives a look of confusion from Aerith’s gaze. “Promised to call her as soon as I figured out what was going on, she’s gonna chew me out…”

“Sounds like our Tifa,” Aerith says, helping Cloud pull open a church door wider. “Does she do that often now?”

“What, ‘chew me out’?” At her hum of confirmation, Cloud snorts. “More often than I’d like, but I always deserve it. And I need it.”

He can feel Aerith’s eyes linger on him as they head for Fenrir. She compliments his bike and tells him how it seems to be well-taken care of—it means more to Cloud than she could possibly know. He hesitantly lets her stand on her own when she insists that she’s better now, and proceeds to unburrow herself from the quilt. Aerith folds it neatly against her chest, like it’s a priceless family heirloom and not dusty, sewn pieces of cloth found in a church attic most likely belonging to someone dead and gone.

He supposes that she must have seen how he reacted every time the quilt was in his line of sight. Cloud couldn’t exactly be normal about it. His calls to Tifa weren’t going through on his end, so Cloud hoped that his vague voicemail would be enough to save him. It isn’t until the engine is rumbling underneath Cloud’s thighs that Aerith speaks again, back-hugging him in her seat with her arms locking around his waist. The folded quilt is snug between their bodies. 

Her voice is sincere when she whispers, “I’m proud of you.”

For once, Cloud knew before she told him.

—

It’s a bit before noon by the time Cloud and Aerith arrive at the bar.

Cloud takes note of the lack of customers. People are usually flooding in as early as possible during this particular summer, but there's not one sweaty drunkard laid out before his eyes. He takes out his two blades from the bike’s storage compartment and accepts the straightforward offer of the folded quilt. Cloud doesn’t head for the door right away, or rather, he can’t. Aerith loops her arm through Cloud’s and tugs him close when they hop from Fenrir after being parked. He can practically feel the nerves radiating off of her. It comes as a surprise to him, for Aerith has never been seen to be nervous when it comes to Tifa. He recalls teasing words and shameless kisses during their travels, things that Tifa had always been the target of. Could something be wrong?

He asks, “You okay?”

Aerith’s eyebrows furrow. She’s deep in thought if her expressions are anything to go by. “Cloud… what if she doesn’t…?” She trails off, sounding unsure.

“Yeah?”

Aerith stares at the bar from the outside, gratefully, like she’s afraid to be trapped inside without a way out. Cloud can’t remember a time where she behaved quite like this in front of him: having to mentally prepare herself to face Tifa again, of all people, after being forcefully torn away from her. She takes a deep breath, asking quietly, “Do you think she could love me again, after being away for so long?”

The summer breeze washes Cloud’s bangs over his eyes.

Tifa didn’t stop thinking about Aerith to this day, even after her mourning calmed and was replaced by memories of Aerith’s graceful hands and playful grins. Cloud caught onto this not long  after Geostigma had been granted a cure; the ribbon around Tifa’s bicep loosened considerably, yet the brief, sad glances to the yellow lilies in a vase atop her bedroom shelf have not ceased. There’d been nights where Tifa spent hers curled up in Cloud’s covers while she silently cried, murmuring an angel’s name and shaking in her sleep. Tifa tried to be strong for the kids, for Barret’s instinctual paternal concern, and more so for Elmyra, whom they paid a visit to not long after Meteorfall to give their condolences. The woman gifted Tifa a flimsy photograph of Aerith on her daughter’s twenty-second birthday, folded and creased but never not beautiful. And when Tifa wept on Elmyra’s dining table, exclaiming apologies and tearfully asking through wet laughter if her love had really been so obvious, Cloud knew the answer.

“She never stopped.”

Aerith’s tension withers away slightly, shooting him a thankful beam and exhaling through her nose. “Well… I’m ready if you are,”

Cloud is indeed not ready to show up with Aerith alive and well at their doorstep, but still allows her to pull him along. The bell of the door dings when they pass through, and if Cloud is correct, Denzel might currently be eating breakfast while Tifa attends to any delivery request calls they receive.

His suspicions are confirmed once he sees Denzel jumping from a stool and excitedly shouting, “Cloud! You’re—” The boy stops in his tracks when he sees Aerith. His eyes flicker to the blood on Cloud’s shirt, to Aerith, and back to Cloud again, who stifles a short laugh. Denzel stands up straight and puts his hands behind his back, a gesture of anxiousness when he meets someone new. “…Who are you?” 

Aerith places a hand on Cloud’s shoulder when he opens his mouth to speak, effectively stopping him. She falls to a squat in order to reach Denzel’s height, but doesn’t come any closer until she knows that it’s alright with him.

She smiles reassuringly. “Hi, there. I’m—”

“The one... You’re the one that called us to the church, when I was sick. Cloud’s friend.” Aerith makes a small noise of surprise, and Denzel falters. “Uh, right?”

“You’re right,” She tells him, holding out her hands and patiently waiting to see if Denzel accepts them. Smaller fists lay in her palms, jittery, but she closes around them gently. “My name is Aerith! It’s good to meet you, Denzel.”

The boy’s eyes widened. “How’d you know my…?”

The scene unfolds in front of Cloud like a playwright. Aerith is pressing their entwined hands to her forehead, as though in prayer, eyes closed. Denzel appears to be almost tranced when his stare lessens, weakening into softness. He’s no longer tense with good posture; Denzel’s back slightly slumps, and Cloud can already hear Tifa’s voice reminding him to straighten up. He momentarily feels a pulse of familiar warmth treading through his blood, suppressing a huff once he grasps that Aerith’s connections with Gaia always follow her.

Aerith unfurls their hands and raises a finger to her lips, making a shhh sound to Denzel. He nods along in agreement without hesitation, and Cloud figures that it’s not his place to ask his son what Aerith had shown him. Whatever it was, however, succeeded in making him more comfortable with this stranger of a woman than Cloud had ever seen him be. Denzel has taken Aerith by the hand and led her to the kitchen, with Cloud following close behind after he puts his swords near the entrance alongside the quilt. He begins to fade out a bit—words dying in his throat, fingers tingling—due to feeling efficiently overwhelmed now that he’s home. Vision blurring around the edges, Cloud is able to make out the sound of Denzel’s voice politely asking Aerith if she’d like a blueberry muffin, or anything else their pantry provides.

It isn’t until Cloud drags himself into his same chair from this morning that his enhanced ears catch the sound of shuffling upstairs. 

Tifa’s voice carries when she yells down the stairs, “Cloud? Is that you?” Her sneakers come down faster on the wood when she doesn’t hear a response.

In the corner of his eye, Cloud sees Aerith wrapping her arms around her stomach beside Denzel, akin to looking like she’s going to be sick. Or perhaps even an act of comfort, hugging herself now that Cloud can’t even seem to move a finger once the exhaustion from earlier adrenaline dawns on him. He’d hug her close to his heart again, if he could.

Time stops when Tifa spots their heads of hair in the kitchen.

Nobody speaks. Nobody blinks. Even Denzel seems to feel the tension in the air, slowly shutting the doors to the pantry and moving close to Aerith, the back of her dress now clenched in between his fingers. He’s not afraid of Tifa, doesn’t think he’d ever have a reason to be, but he doesn’t understand why her mouth has fallen agape and her closed fists are trembling at her sides. Tifa looks utterly befuddled. It’s then that Aerith decides to break through the glass, through the seconds of silence that lasted longer than her years of living. She can tell that Cloud isn’t in any state to be explaining at the moment—his jaw is tight, a vein visible on the skin of his neck. Aerith remembers that this happened more often than not when they were all together once, chatting comfortably whereas Cloud was silent, though not looking any less happy. 

A murmur, “Tifa?”

Tifa’s silent resolve shatters. She makes her way towards Aerith in slow steps, as though she doesn’t believe what she’s seeing. Her eyes never leave Aerith, not even to glance at Denzel or Cloud so close by. When Tifa has gotten close enough to be in arms reach of Aerith, she tentatively holds the latter’s face in her hands, searching for any cracks or crumbles.

“…I’m dreaming again, aren’t I?” Tifa asks, a sad sigh leaving her. She’s already accepted that this couldn’t possibly be real. “I don’t remember falling asleep.”

Aerith frowns and reaches up to grab Tifa’s wrists. She squeezes once, twice. “Oh, Tifa, I’m—” Tears are spilling out of her eyes when Aerith chokes on a short, pained cry, face blotched and wet for the second time that day. “You’re not dreaming, I promise! I’m real, I’m right—I’m right here, see?” She has to speak in between gasps of air yet still manages to kiss the palm of Tifa’s hand.

Tifa pulls away like she’s been burned. She’s taking in everything all at once, from Denzel’s worried stare behind Aerith to Cloud sitting at the table her hip bumped into. He stands from his spot to reach out for her, not stopping even when Tifa steps back, catching her before she goes tumbling to the floor. And there Aerith is again helping Cloud keep her upright, with her pink cheeks and chest heaving up and down as she cries raggedly and this isn’t a dream, is it?

Tifa’s pulling Aerith into her embrace before she can completely comprehend it all. She whimpers into Aerith’s skin when her hands don’t pass through her so easily, fearful that she hadn’t been there in the first place. That Aerith was a ghost singing a hymn of those who had never died. 

Tifa’s talking again, hurriedly and pleading. “I’ve always felt it, always thought you’d be back. I didn’t want to believe you were—that you were gone, I…!” She pulls away from Aerith to wipe her eyes roughly, clearing her throat and sniffling. There’s a contemplative look on Tifa’s face, creeping, before she leans in to press a soft kiss on the corner of Aerith’s mouth and flushes bright red. But she doesn’t shrink any smaller. “If this is real, then please stay. With me, us. Please.”

Aerith’s breath hitches in her throat. She blinks in surprise, lashes muddled with tears, although a wide smile finds its way to her lips in no time. “I’m not going anywhere, Tifa, ‘kay?”

Tifa laughs wetly. “Okay.”

Cloud feels the need to look away when he hears Denzel titter from behind them. He must be intruding on their moment together in some way, despite the fact that he can’t be anywhere else. Truthfully, Cloud wouldn’t want to be anywhere else if he was given a choice. His heart feels a little less incomplete, whole in pieces that have been sewn together once more. Seeing Tifa and Aerith happy together again makes him happy. Cloud is aware of the undistinguished reasons as to why Aerith may be here in front of them, alive and weeping. It isn’t a force that ruins his newfound relief. Things will have to be investigated if they want to thoroughly be sure that everything coinciding with the Planet is well. For now, though, they’re all content with the unanswered questions and suffocating confusion in the wake of reunion.

This time, the resonance of a reunion doesn’t hurt Cloud to think about.

—

The heat of the outdoors starts to cool just after Aerith has showered in the upstairs bathroom. She now sits at the dinner table wearing Tifa’s clothes, which include a t-shirt that she’s practically swimming in and leggings. Her hair is untangled and newly braided. Cloud had specifically asked Aerith what she’d like him to make for dinner through a handwritten note, in which she merely replied, “Surprise me!” That resulted in a vegetable stew born from Nibelheim, carefully crafted and chilled. He and Tifa had written the recipe up together from what little they remembered of it, for it wasn’t an uncommon meal to have during summers in the village. Cloud thinks that his mother’s stew would forever taste better than his own, but Tifa, Denzel, and Aerith were content with the food anyway.

All throughout dinner, Tifa can’t seem to take her eyes off of Aerith. Her gaze follow the woman’s every movement, a soft and gooey shine glossing over. Neither Cloud nor Denzel say anything about it behind their bowls; Aerith most definitely notices, yet doesn’t say much about it either. 

Cloud and Tifa start their nightly routine of tucking Denzel in shortly after, with Aerith coming along and hoping that the boy sleeps well from the doorway. Tifa gave Reeve a seemingly inconspicuous nighttime call about the church that would probably have him bursting through their lounge soon regardless. After locking the door of the bar and flicking off all the lights, the three of them huddle together in Tifa’s room. The couple convinces Cloud to join them on Tifa’s bed instead of hovering around the room aimlessly.

(Aerith comments on his hair fondly, saying, “It suits you really well,” and continues to gush about how pretty his jagged mullet is just to fluster him. He denies it in the form of an eye roll, of course, which simply earns him more compliments. Their playful antics gets a few chuckles out of Tifa, hidden behind her hands that are mushed against her face and concealing the sudden stinging of her eyes. 

She’s pinched the skin of her forearm at least three times, yet Tifa never wakes up.)

“Tifa, what’s wrong?” Aerith catches onto her sullenness rather quickly, but she’s always been good at that—seeing and feeling what most others don’t. Aerith’s hands have paused in carding through Cloud’s hair where they sit at the foot of bed. His head is on her lap and he turns it to look at Tifa snug against her pillows with a question in his brows, whilst his legs are draped over her thighs. It’s a comfortable position he didn’t have any complaints towards when the two nudged him into it.

Tifa sighs, plastering on a brief smile so as to not worry them further. “Nothing’s wrong, I guess I just can’t believe that you’re… actually here, y’know?” She’s wringing her hands when she speaks again, “I’m a little scared that you’re still not real, if I’m being honest.” Tifa finishes with a broken chuckle. 

It’s not difficult for Cloud to understand.

He understands false pretense and hope. Once, the qualms of living beautifully and peacefully were lost on Cloud, in a daze of the blood of the Planet. Such things are easier to breathe through when you have something inching close to your bosom, something alive, breathing. Someone. Cloud knows that it’d have been harder to breathe without Zack after the labs, he isn’t sure whether or not he’d be here if it weren’t for Zack, in any way. So, to see Tifa lost and hazy after losing Aerith, her adoring someone that was living and breathing, aches in words he’d never say to either of them. Cloud doesn’t blame Tifa for being wary of Aerith’s resurrection, when he’s wary about it himself.

“I don’t know what I’m doing here—yet.” Aerith says breathlessly. “Time passes differently in the Lifestream, and it’s not all the time that I was able to see… everything,” at Cloud and Tifa’s questioning glances, she goes on. “Not every conscious soul remains sentient or gains control of the currents, and me being one—well, once being one of those souls, it was easier to talk with you, Cloud. But, with each step I took while in the Lifestream, it was even more boundless.” There’s a lost, distant look in her eyes. “The Planet could hear me when I talked to her, still, like I could hear her, so I’d been relieved. And Zack was with me. I wasn’t completely alone with myself.”

Cloud gains the need to scream into the sheets underneath him. He wills it in himself to speak up after hours of staying silent under misguided weight, turning slightly on Aerith’s lap. “…is he…?” Cloud mutters, voice hoarse, but can’t finish. Doesn’t really want to, either.

When Aerith spares him a look of woe, his heart breaks.

“Cloud… I don’t feel him.” She exhales shakily from above him. “I can’t feel him anywhere.”

He swallows. Cloud wants to beg Aerith for more, ask her what she means by that, see if she can try. But he knows that he shouldn’t, and he won’t. She already carries enough responsibility which Cloud would do anything to help take off her shoulders. Tifa senses the clamor forming in his head at the exact moment it cracks open, suggesting that the three of them finally get some rest after such a lengthy day.

The trio doesn’t take turns cramming into the hallway bathroom to wash up; Aerith has put her hands to work on scrubbing face wash (that he’s never used) onto Cloud’s face while he braids Tifa’s hair, crowded into a small, strange position with each other that could take months to master. It makes Cloud smile to himself then, upon thinking about how it’s as if they’ve been doing this every night for months.

Cloud only makes his way towards his room afterwards to gather his blankets and pillows and extra cushion. His blood stained shirt from this morning is long thrown in the washer with his jeans, yet he changes into a ‘comfier’ set of clothing per Tifa’s insistence. They came to a silent agreement that Cloud would be staying throughout the night, a plan that made Aerith quietly laugh in delight and attempt to make room for him on the bed suited for two. He ends up on a makeshift bed taking up the floor despite Tifa’s concern for his back, ultimately far more comfortable than Cloud had expected a pile of sofa cushions and covers to be. Tifa and Aerith chatter in hushed voices on the bed, not too far above him, however he drowns them out the best he can so as to not unintentionally intrude. Affection swells and pulsates in his stomach, his chest, his throat, and he tosses and turns into the dark.

It isn’t until the couple has wished him goodnight that he feels Aerith reaching over the side of the bed to poke his shoulder. Cloud turns on his stomach again to face her. She’s on the outside of the bed, away from the wall, with her cheek squished against Tifa’s pillow and her arm swaying freely.

Aerith whispers, “I’m sorry.” The words carry an inexplicable sorrow.

“What for?”

“Zack.”

Cloud threads his fingers through hers. He doesn’t want her to be, or feel, sorry for something that she can’t do much about. “S’okay,” he assures her, letting his body fall slack. Taking one quick glance at the Fusion Sword leaning against the wall, he lets out a slow breath. “…I miss him.”

Must be selfish of him to say, at the very least, when Aerith spent eternal time with Zack that she may never get back. With all the danger and debris he’s caused, Cloud doesn’t think he should get a say in Gaia’s power. Here, he thinks: it isn’t fucking fair. The Planet gives and gives and gives, just to take and take and take everyone that’s ever had meaning in an existence not quite so easy. He allows himself the hot, tearing anger that builds up in his stomach, never leaving the misery sunken so far below it. And he holds on tight—a balloon tied to his wrist, Zack’s forced joy never leaving his face until he’s burning in a puddle of his own fire—and he lets go. Aerith squeezes his knuckles before he hears her sniffle, as she speaks,

(I do, too.)

and it isn’t fair.

Chapter Text

Aerith has been alive for two days when it happens.

True to their expectations, Reeve indeed had enough worry in his heart to show up to their front door the morning after Cloud brought Aerith to the bar. The man only knew her through his control of Cait Sith, the robotic cat clinging to his back and yelping in genuine surprise when he spots Aerith tending to Tifa’s potted plants, but he appreciated her as much as anyone in their family does. She greets him with a gentle squeeze of his calloused hands along with an equally gentle kiss to Cait’s fur. If Reeve’s shock evidently doesn’t last very long, he hides it well. Cloud takes note of the greying color sprouting from his facial hair and head roots, but Reeve’s face doesn’t seem any more fallen than natural. He’s simply older—just like the rest of them—and it’s… it makes Cloud happy.

Reeve nurses a mug of tea from Cloud while he sits at the kitchen table with Aerith. He’s not questioning her about how or why she’s here, instead only asking her how she’s faring with slightly wide eyes. It brings an easy smile to the woman’s face, and she indulges Cait Sith when the cat begins to get restless in Reeve’s hold, leaping over the table so he’s seated snug in her lap.

“…I can’t imagine what it’s like to suddenly be… be, again.” Reeve mused. “If you need anything at all, my team and I are here to assist you.” 

Cait plays with the strings of Aerith’s hoodie, courtesy of Tifa once more. “Aye! You’ve got us in your little corner, lass.”

The way she’s here now is surreal in notions that Aerith couldn’t express if she tried—and she has. She’s found herself becoming conscious of her own breathing pattern and the keratinized softness of her lunulas and the hand that Tifa is consistently placing on her right shoulder, warm fingers inching towards collarbones and knobbed skin. Nothing feels wrong in her flesh about being here, quite yet. Aerith awaits the agonizing moment for the feeling of wrongness to overtake and rip her from the breathing dirt of Gaia. For now, she pushes down words of distance.

“Thank you,” she muttered gratefully, “…and Shinra?”

Reeve places his shaking mug down on the wooden table with a trembling maneuver. Any outsider would think that he’s nervous, desperate to get away, or even fearful. But, it’s only Reeve; sworn empathy grazes his blood. “The company no longer has the power it once had. You’re safe.”

“Reno and Rude stop by from time to time for a drink with no trouble except for Reno’s singing, considering they’re not exactly official Turks anymore.” Tifa chimed in with a smirk. When she catches Aerith’s face forcing a smile, she turns earnest, leaning down towards her cheek. “We won’t let anything happen to you, okay?”

Aerith turns just enough to peck Tifa’s temple. “It feels silly to be scared, but I know you won’t!”

Reeve laughed heartily at Tifa’s flushed face while Cloud held back a chuckle of betrayal in her eyes. The man leaves with Cait Sith almost reluctantly, like he’s not so sure that whatever happened in the last hour is enough to guarantee its authenticity. His visit allows Cloud and Tifa to make calls to the rest of their family with Aerith’s nervous permission, their words of ‘emergency’ having no urgency, though still resulting in concerned shouts that has Cloud pulling the house phone away from his ear.

Whilst Tifa finishes her, albeit short, conversation with Vincent, Cloud takes a seat next to Aerith. He breathes in the swarm of scattered peonies and the scent of honeysuckle surrounding her, relaxing.

He can tell that she’s anxious; it wouldn’t take long for even a stranger to realize how clammed up Aerith has become in the past few minutes, shoulders pressed up to her ears like she’s preparing for an attack with her hands clenched around a staff she doesn’t bear. Cloud doesn’t know how to make it easier for her, what with their family coming to see her for the first time in over three years without the knowledge of it all.

(Tifa had thought it would be best to tell the gang outright, because none of them are too keen on surprises nowadays. However, she relented once Cloud admitted that he’d rather get an earful of Barret’s complaints for holding the information back, instead of Barret hearing that Aerith’s alive and then immediately yelling heatedly before hanging up, “is this some goddamn prank call?!”

Cloud would do the same, he thinks.)

“…Hey, Cloud?”

Cloud hums in response, tearing his gaze away from the Nibel wood splinters poking out of the table. He’d have to sand those down soon.

“My mom…” Aerith looks at him with red-rimmed eyes. “How is she?”

Cloud silently berates himself for not thinking of the woman sooner. Her daughter’s death broke Elmyra in noises and contorted grief that Cloud hadn’t ever seen on a human face before. At first, Cloud and Tifa had visited her often. Innocent check-ins without voicing their intentions which had them leaving with copious amounts of food in tupperware, because Elmyra was always so used to cooking for two. It wasn’t until her mourning turned into tearful anger that Cloud realized, painfully obvious, he and Tifa aren’t what she wanted. Putting the blame on himself, having it weigh him down like wearing chains in an ocean isn’t what she wanted and, despite his denial, Elmyra told him as such: it wasn’t his fault. She didn’t blame him.

Cloud only saw her face when she called for deliveries after that.

But now, lighter from lack of weight, he’s learned to make sure to dial her number first.

“She’s doing a lot better, last time I checked. Made a soil delivery to her a few weeks back and she tugged on my cheek like I was a little kid.” He laughs, small and quiet. “Told me I should eat more.”

Aerith manages a smile at his words. “Of course, she did.”

Leaning further towards her, Cloud doesn’t smile. It’s rather a thin, tight lipped expression focusing on the right corner of his mouth, quirked up, with his eye slightly creasing. An act of offered comfort that Aerith wouldn’t recognize if she was any less wiser. “We can call her, too, if you want.” He reassures her as if there’s nothing else to it.

“Tomorrow?” There’s a hopeful spark in Aerith’s voice amidst all her worry, all her troubles.

“Yeah. Tomorrow’ll be good.”

Cloud would give anything—he knows—to never stop Aerith’s lithe grin from gracing her face again.

The dust seems to settle soon after. Tifa made it known that Cid, as their honorary pilot, will quickly become a means of transportation once more with the Shera as the family makes their way to Edge. It’s nothing the man would be against when it comes to the gang (or anyone, for that matter), though the three of them relish in the fact that he’d feign annoyance even on a good day. Barret’s only a truck ride away with Marlene in tow, and with Nanaki by their side in the back trunk. Nanaki tends to drag out his visits every time he’s reunited with one of them, because while resiliently independent, he’s still considered a cub. A child. An easily attached child, at that. (Not that any of them mind; they can’t say differently for themselves when it comes to being attached either.) Yuffie spends most of her time in Wutai compared to anywhere else, slowly refurbishing her home and making it what it once was—something about her stemming so easily into the dirt of adulthood makes Cloud feel a sense of pride swell in his chest. According to Vincent’s vague and constant two-word updates, he’s already got the girl bouncing around his shoulders on the Shera well into the afternoon.

Much to no one’s surprise, Barret arrives first in the less humid evening.

Aerith is helping Denzel put bread in the oven when the bell of the bar door sounds. Cloud insisted that he could do it himself after kneading and letting the dough rise, but easily accepted that he couldn’t talk her out of wanting to help. It makes her feel seen, then, with the rouse of her friend not forgetting what he’s dealing with when it comes to her. She supposes that not everything has changed beyond her understanding, after all this time.

It’s only when Aerith hears the soft rumble of a loud voice ricochet off the walls of the bar that she realizes what’s happening.

Denzel hops off his stepping stool with an excited shout of, “Uncle Barret’s here!” He nearly wipes his stained hands on his shorts before thinking better of it, visibly wincing, and giving his thanks to Aerith when she passes him a hand towel. The boy skids to a stop in the doorway once he senses he isn’t being followed by footsteps. “Aren’t you coming?” Denzel asks, curious eyes piercing through her.

He’s got a certain touch, this strong son of the morning, Aerith thinks. She knows what he’s been through—lived through, rather—and what he’s seen. Yet it hasn’t killed the dawning light in his heart and hands, letting himself be loved by two of the people she herself loves most. 

“I think I’ll just finish up here first before I join you, m’kay?” Aerith wonders if it’s foolish to reassure Denzel when he seems to see right past her uneasy attempt at convincing him.

Denzel’s expression mirrors a certain kind of face that his adoptive mother has been known to use: a flint of worried frustration brushed between furrowed eyebrows, and a small sigh pushed behind loose teeth. Unlike Tifa and her heavy heart, Denzel doesn’t sigh. He holds out his small, warm hand while looking at her expectantly, his eyes crinkling into a beam. There’s no way out of this, Aerith guesses. Sated as her determination currently is, she feels much better when she takes Denzel’s hand and curls her fingers over it. He pulls her along with him into the seating area of the bar, where three figures sit close together and question Cloud like it’s the last thing they’ll ever do.

“—hell’s goin’ on, spiky? You’ve got me scared with that face o’ yours!”

There’s Tifa, “Barret, it’s—”

The clatter comes to a stop as Aerith steps into the room.

She hears Marlene’s fluttered gasp, sweet little Marlene whose laughter Aerith would give up the world for. The girl’s hand is laid over her father’s prosthetic arm, all shiny and proud with flexed fingers, that she feels tears prick at the corner of her eyes by just looking at it. Barret’s face is the epitome of shock. His mouth is agape and his once-in-an-eclipse-moon announcement of fear has turned into something worse, something that hurts him, hurts Aerith, and he blinks hard a few times to understand if what he sees is what’s really there. Nanaki is no better; he’s lifted out of his sitting position onto all four legs, with his ears drawn back like a cat. He lets a barely audible whine out of his control creep up his throat, and Aerith has to do something before it all becomes too much.

Barret—always there, always ready—beats her to it.

She’s barreled into burly arms and lifted a few inches off the ground with a gasp of surprise, but Barret is crying. Loudly. Big tears roll down under his chin as he sobs like a baby without their favorite blanket, still careful not to squeeze Aerith enough to hurt her despite his tight hold. In the past, Barret’s embrace often felt as though a hug is a thing that she’s never had in her life. He found a way to curl the physical touch deep into her Spirit, and it wasn’t a mere one time that she allowed herself to imagine that if her father hadn’t been taken away from her so soon, his arms would feel no different from Barret’s.

The man sets her down and pulls back to scan her face with haste. His eyes, nose, and cheeks are a mess altogether, one that Aerith couldn’t ever mind. His flesh hand reaches up to fix one of her rumpled bangs with a look of awe, then he seems to break all over again.

“It’s really—‘s really you?” He manages, eyes wide. “How?!”

Aerith sniffles, grinning wider than she has in a long time. “I don’t know much myself, I’m sorry—”

“Now, don’t you be sorry! Oh, hell, I…” Barret smiles warmly before pulling her back in. To Aerith, he’s forever been the most soft-hearted of them. “That’s a question for later, huh? You’re here, and that’s what matters. Thank Gaia…” He thanks the Planet a few more times in his own mumbled words. Among the cries of the dead, Aerith hears a jumbled, pleased noise at the gratitude. 

It’s the first sign of Gaia’s speech she’s heard since the Lifestream.

When Barret forces himself to pull away from her once more, Marlene’s body runs into Aerith’s legs and holds on like a vice. She looks up, giggling. “You came back!” She exclaims, happiness written across her small face and not a trace of sadness. At least, not where Aerith can see. The thought causes her to remember one of the many things that Barret had mentioned about Marlene while sharing tales on the road. My baby girl, she’s stronger than I could ever dream of being.

“I did, didn’t I?” Aerith crouches down to hug her, wrapping around Marlene’s tiny body filled with all the knowledge of the big and bad. She’s grown so much. Too much.

A wet snout noses at Aerith’s open palm after releasing Marlene, and she gladly pets her hand down Nanaki’s fur whilst he rumbles a purr and leans into her touch, pausing the excited bouncing of his paws. She pretends not to notice his obvious and open animalistic behavior that he declines, for her mind supplies the word family every time she sees this loving creature. Something akin to the younger brother none of them had been blessed with, she’d say.

Nanaki opens his one eye, previously closed out of raw content. “I’ve missed you,” his left ear flickers, “no one could ever quite get the spot behind my ears like you do.”

And it’s such a relieving, boyish thing for Nanaki to say. 

Aerith has to move her hand away from his fur to hide her now tear-stained face. Muttering apologies, it’s harder to hold her crouch when her body begins shaking. She hears quiet and careful words of reassurance behind her when she slumps fully onto the floor, along with firm hands rubbing down on her back while she weeps. The tears pour out of her like a fountain, Aerith can’t believe that she hasn’t already run out in the past day with how much it’s happened. But, nobody shushes her. Nobody tells her to softly stop crying or to uncover her face so the proof can be wiped away. Her family lets her heart bleed with all that she is and that she once was. 

They don’t leave her to do it on her own.

—

The rest of the gang piles in as the night moves on.

Cid greets them with spews of bewildered curses and fumbled words. He barely gets a chance to break out of his astonishment and place a big kiss to Aerith’s cheek before he’s tugged out of the way by Yuffie’s grip on his shirt, her face turning bright red as she tries to hold back her cries. Then it’s like she’s the sixteen year old girl she used to be, the age that maybe she never really grew out of, afraid of both nothing and everything. Yuffie doesn’t bother asking what in Leviathan is going on if it gives her the chance to feel Aerith’s hands smoothing over her hair a bit longer, even though Yuffie’s the taller one now, murmuring words of soothing assurance that she hasn’t heard since she was a royal child. She takes a hesitant hold of Aerith’s hand, and doesn't wish to let go for the rest of the night. Vincent observes Aerith carefully in his silent stride, looking her up and down and around without his face revealing nothing more than a raised curve of his cheekbones. She doesn’t know if it’s a Vincent thing, or an Ex-Turk thing. He huffed a brittle laugh when he placed his gauntlet on her head of hair, patting it just as softly.

He’s the one who takes it the easiest, which no one is exactly startled over. Aerith swears she hears Barret say, “just a normal day for his crazy ass,” under his breath.

When the timer of the oven rings and the rest of the food is brought to the bar’s biggest table, the family falls back into their places almost too effortlessly. Not one question of why or how comes up.

Aerith sits between Tifa and Yuffie, the latter still holding her hand during the meal and switching food with her free fingers from her plate to Nanaki’s. Cloud had to drag another table in order to offer more space and have a seat for himself beside Vincent, with Denzel at his other side. He tears through a bread roll as Cid recounts an exaggerated story of his earlier aspiring astronaut days—the one that he tells every time without fail. Cloud catches Tifa’s twinkling eye across the table, and he’s begun smiling so hard behind his piece of bread that his cheeks hurt.

He looks towards Aerith, who’s laughing freely after Cid made a crude gesture in Barret’s direction because he was interrupted. She does a slight double take once she sees Cloud staring, and he feels somewhat childishly embarrassed. Aerith stops laughing when his stare drifts off unsurely, the back of his neck warming, and instead smiles. With him.

(Cloud doesn’t think he’ll say it out loud at this moment, say the thrumming in his chest and turn the sound into words that could lose meaning as quickly as they’re said. He’s afraid to make it real, probably. He doesn’t know.

Cid tells the last part of his story, “…an’ then bam! I hit the bastard upside the head with my wrench, told ‘im to get the hell offa’ my circuit board, then I—”

“—then you kissed his wife!” An eruption of unison around the table finishes it off for him.

The man’s got a sappy look on his face, chuckling and shaking his head all the while, not even pretending to be pissed. Cid’s leaning back in his chair far too heavily for Cloud’s liking and when he blinks for a single second, suddenly the pilot’s knocked over onto the floor and yelling swears so profusely amongst the loud laughter that Marlene puts her hands over her ears. The feeling grows a little stronger than before, snug and tight in his inner chambers like it's always been there. Like it knows its place, and where it belongs.)

Right there, the wind of tenderness makes a pipe out of his heart.

The kids, including Nanaki, end up curled together in a booth well past Denzel and Marlene’s bedtimes, Vincent’s tattered cape covering them to make up for a blanket. It sends the adults into hushed voices and quieter footsteps as the clock strikes midnight. Since they didn’t plan for a proposed sleepover to happen, Tifa makes due with all the blankets they have upstairs and the three air mattresses she’d bought on a whim, but never unpacked. Everyone takes turns pumping air in, though Tifa and her stamina do most of the work.

Cloud gets a moment alone with Aerith in the kitchen while they help clean up. It’s a marvel to see her limbs so pliant underneath her ease prior to how many nerves had climbed up her bones in the morning. He doesn’t dare voice it in fear of having it all topple down, opting with, “What Marlene said to you earlier,” he starts, putting away a few plates into the sink and grabbing a cleaning rag. “It made me think of something.”

“What she… Oh! You mean when she first saw me?”

He hums in affirmation.

Aerith passes him the all purpose cleaner next to the faucet. “She said that I came back. What was it that you thought of?” She encourages.

It takes him a minute to build the words up in his throat, because he has to tell her. He must. Maybe it means something to her, to Gaia, or simply just so much to him. Aerith remains patient throughout his moment of silence, looking only at him and waiting for his speech to start again.

“You came to me. In a dream, I mean. Before you… left.” Cloud heaved a sigh, making his entire body ache. “It was after the Temple, when I—after I, um—”

“Cloud, it’s okay.” She shuffles closer, their elbows touching. “It was the Sleeping Forest, wasn’t it?”

He nods curtly. “It was the last time I spoke to you before it happened. I didn’t know it was a dream until later, and I was… well, figured the next time I saw you, you’d be covered in bruises. Made by me. But then you told me not to worry about it, that you’d handle him on your own. And you ran down that path, but I couldn’t follow you. It was like I got—like I was stuck, and sometimes I think that if I’d been able to move, I could’ve made it to you in time.” He chuckles bitterly. “It was what you said, though, before you left: ‘I’ll come back when it’s all over.’ I never forgot that. Even when I stopped believing in it.”

Dabbing cleaner onto the wet rag, Cloud doesn’t expect much of an answer until Aerith speaks again.

“Do you think it’s all over yet?”

There’s a muted sort of pain in her question. The kind of whimpering silence that has him cowering, running to pick up all the pieces of a universe that hasn’t been kind to Cloud’s and Aerith’s skin, or to their bond.

He looks back into the main room of the downstairs bar, where Cid is hauling in thin spare blankets from the Shera and dropping them deliberately on top of Yuffie where she's sprawled out on a mattress. Barret’s knocked out cold after stuffing a pillow behind Denzel and Marlene’s heads, snoring lightly into his own. Vincent seems fine sitting upright in the booth next to the kids, spare for Nanaki’s burning tail swishing close to his hair every now and then. Tifa has just finished moving all the tables closer to the walls for more room in the center, dusting off her hands and looking happy with her work. She looks at the two of them, sending a little wave with a sheen of affection.

And Aerith… She’s next to him now, as he wrings out the excess water in the rag and flinches back when droplets hit his face. She's back.

“Think so,” is all that Cloud needs to say. 

He ignores how empty it feels.

—

On the second day, Aerith sees Elmyra.

She and Tifa left for Kalm after a single phone call and tearful promises with their family to see each other again the following week. Tifa remembers how terrifyingly easy it’d been for them to go their separate ways after Meteorfall, proposed with the easy idea that if they found each other in this lifetime, they could find each other anywhere once more. Barret and Marlene decided to spend a little more time in Seventh Heaven while Nanaki was flown home in the Shera, granting aid to the bar with Tifa accompanying Aerith and acting as a humored babysitter for Denzel so Cloud could make a few close deliveries.

The couple moves up Elmyra’s pebbled walkway hand-in-hand, swaying their conjoined fingers slightly back and forth. There’s patches of flowers and ferns scattered, pots and ceramic bowls overflowing with soil and stems. Aerith is tempted to make her steps slower from bouldering guilt, yet feels her knees buckle with how much she’s quivering with sheer excitement.

Excitement to see her mother, lovely in all her sensibility, as a whole piece of a person and not a pile of waning, broken glass; guilt gnawing and chewing inside of her for being the cause of such pain.

Tifa rubs her thumb over the back of Aerith’s skin. It’s warm, and the rough texture of Tifa’s fingerprint brings Aerith back to herself. “Are you nervous?” She asks, peering to look at Aerith’s face.

If given the chance, Aerith could stay in place to hold Tifa’s hands in her own for eternity. Or, perhaps however long Gaia allows them to. The toughened skin and split scars on her knuckles serve as time-telling, like the aged rings of a cut tree trunk. They speak passages of where she’s been with these hands, how long she’s had to fight with these hands, all the loving pinnacles she’s grown with these hands. The webs between her fingers are slightly dried with used flesh underneath burning water, but the soft carefulness of Tifa’s touch forever lingers. 

Aerith smiles apprehensively. “Yeah, I’m—shit, yeah. I’m really nervous, Tifa.”

“Oh, Aerith,” Tifa puts a hand on Aerith’s waist to stop their steps. She’s facing her unearthly, loving woman now. “Do you trust me?”

“Always.”

“You…” Tifa quickly recovers from her shock, shaking her head and chuckling fondly. “Then trust that I'll be next to you the entire time. If anything goes wrong, I’ll be there. I’ve got you.”

And the thing is, Aerith doesn’t need to be told that it’s okay to be nervous, that it’s reasonable to be so unreasonably restless, because she knows. If anyone is familiar with this subtle unpleasantry, it’s her. Tifa’s promises are dissimilar to any and every reassurance Aerith has been given. They have their way of making it all feel… too real, genuine. She wants the words edged onto her soul like treasured ink from a pistol that doesn’t kill.

“Thank you, pretty girl.” 

It’s a small and innocent pleasure to see Tifa’s face streaked with color.

The two of them restart their tread to Elmyra’s door, making it through the unlocked opening without so much as a creak of wood. She always leaves off the lock latch when she expects their company, Tifa acknowledged. When they make it through the doorway, a chill wind of woody odor and jatamansi hits Aerith immediately. She feels her eyes moisten at the familiarity of the scents, so much like her home back in Midgar yet nothing similar to it at all. Elmyra’s kitchen has a small air of steam coming from a pot on the stove, warming the temperature.

“Elmyra! It’s Tifa! I’ve, um, brought something for you,” Tifa calls out when she doesn’t spot Elmyra. 

The woman comes turning the corner of the kitchen, looking down and wiping her hands hastily on her apron with a tired smile edged onto her face. “You can just set it on the table, dear, I—” 

Elmyra’s resting, wrinkled face twists into an unreadable expression, but her daughter can’t hold onto her restraint.

“Mama!” Aerith throws herself onto her mother, who’s already catching her without even a second thought. She cries into Elmyra’s clavicle, words of apologies and saudade falling past her lips. Aerith doesn’t think she can handle crying and clinging onto someone else any further, but her mother is shushing her between gasping breaths of bewilderment and worry, because when has the pain of her given child ever been lost on her? Elmyra seems to process it all then, whispering my baby, my baby, my baby into the space between Aerith’s parted bangs. 

Elmyra looks to Tifa for a semblance of understanding, muttering in a hitch, “…how did you…?”

It’s Aerith who answers. She pulls away from the space of her mother’s breastbone, still held in a hug. Tifa nods in subtle reassurance. “It was the—the Planet, Mama. She brought me here, but Cloud found me… and Tifa’s been taking good care of me.”

Elmyra sighs softly, as if to say, why didn’t you start with that first? Then she turns somewhat serious, switching on a reprimanding tone in her voice. “I’m never letting you go again, do you hear me?” Her voice cracks at the very end, like a broken twig being stepped on and calling all the wild things in her woods.

“Yes, Mom. I hear you.” Aerith giggles wetly. “Hey, Tifa?”

“Uh, yeah?”

“Get in here, silly!”

Tifa puts both hands up, waving and shaking them. “No, I—I wouldn’t want to intrude—” She’s broken off by Elmyra’s lighthearted tutting.

“Nonsense, Tifa. You’re one of mine, too, you know.” She pulls Aerith’s head back towards her gently, mouthing a thank you to Tifa and extending a hand for her to take.

Taking it might be one of the easiest things Tifa’s ever done.

—

It happens quickly; a flash of lightning.

This summer has been one of the wettest in all the years that Cloud has been away from Nibelheim. Summers in the village were dry, windy, and every chance of rain came with a chill wind and shivering sneezes. He gets home from his last delivery with a leftover cardboard box covering his head as he parks Fenrir in the garage, but only after seeing Barret and Marlene out does he trudge back inside. He vigorously wipes his muddy shoes on the doormat, because he knows Tifa would have his head if she came back home with Aerith to a messy bar. Greeting Denzel with a ruffle of the boy’s hair earns him an oatmeal cookie (courtesy of Marlene’s skills) in return, much to his amusement.

Cloud is in the middle of stripping out of his wet, clinging clothes in his room when there’s a harsh knock on the door downstairs. 

Call it another faulty alarm of hypervigilance, but Cloud quickly peels his cold shirt back on over his head and chooses to acknowledge the sudden rush of blood pounding in his ears instead of pushing it aside. He swiftly makes it to Denzel's room to peek into the doorway. “Stay here.” He says, quiet but firm. Cloud doesn’t dare leap soundlessly into the stairwell until his son nods.

He reaches behind his back to grab at a sword that isn’t there, in a harness that he took off only a few seconds ago, when he makes it to the door. Cloud inhales sharply before pulling it open from the knob hard enough to detach it from its hinges, praying to any deity that’s awake in order to channel strength into his fists that aren’t nearly as easy as his blades. It’ll just have to do, he thinks, when he’s greeted by a mess of brown skin covered in grime, dirt, and the sticky rain falling down on the roof like bullets.

Bullets in his chest, holes in his chest, blood in his chest—

Zack is panting heavily while he leans against the doorframe in the light of the busy Edge street. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s attracting bad attention to the bar on the curb like this, bloody in what Cloud hopes isn’t his own, but can’t really care about the bad attention either. The man—Gaia, is this real?—opens his mouth to speak, probably something affectionately inane or what he thinks is funny, but so unbelievably Zack, and then he’s tumbling down forwards without a word.

Cloud acts fast, he loops his arms underneath Zack’s to hold him steady, lifting him up slightly and dragging the toes of his combat boots across the wooden floor. He cringes at the soggy closeness yet feels his throat close around a lump of emotion. Able to find his footing, Cloud manages to dump Zack onto one of the outdoor folding chairs that Cid left behind.

A wave of hysteria passes through Cloud’s body.

He hears his knuckles popping as he squeezes his hand into a fist, reaching up to grab a bunch of his hair with the other. The urge to pace around and drill holes into the floor greets him, but he stays planted in front of Zack’s seemingly lifeless body, if only it wasn’t for his chest rapidly heaving up, down, up, down.

Cloud chuckles behind clenched teeth. He reaches down tremblingly to smooth his palm over Zack’s cheek, skin hot, murmuring an apology when his best friend’s brows furrow in his unconsciousness.

But he’s—right there.

Chapter Text

Her heart hammers in her throat as the Planet breathes through a sigh.

The feeling washes through Aerith like a perpetual chill; goosebumps line her flesh now, and she stands abruptly from Elmyra’s table with a groan of the chair being pushed against the floor. She remembers then, how Ifalna would call the current texture on her frail arms ‘chocobo skin’, just to get a giggle out of her daughter in the cold cage of a laboratory. There’s no way to laugh over something so precious and futile when all on the Planet is suddenly so incorrigibly right, that it feels wrong. She can’t decipher what the noise is for, as death and a soul being taken to the Lifestream feels nothing like this—she would be heaving up cries onto the floorboards if that were the case.

Aerith’s never felt anything quite like this.

She must look worryingly deranged based on the concern etched into Tifa and Elmyra’s faces. Her hands have gone to grip the edges of the table for stability, yanking a bit of the plaid tablecloth with her and moving the plate of biscuits a few inches along.

“What is it, sweetheart?” Elmyra asks carefully, a small vial of panic stuck in her voice.

Aerith gulps. “I felt… something.” She swallows again to clear the bile threatening to crawl out.

Tifa goes to stand next to her, much slower and calmer compared to how Aerith had gotten up. She puts a tentative hand between the other woman’s shoulder blade, “What was it that you felt?”

“I—I don’t know!”

Tifa nods, patient. “It’s okay, you don’t have to know right now. I’m sure it’s not easy to figure it out so quickly, huh?” Her face is open and apologetic, but Aerith can tell that she’s holding back on asking her questions. “How do you feel?”

“Relieved, almost. But it’s bittersweet.” Aerith grimaces. “Sickeningly.”

Much like the aftertaste of a green apple, sour and sweet in places that she couldn’t name by heart. Quieting her thoughts for a few seconds, Aerith uselessly attempts to pull the Planet’s voice back and have her sigh once more, solely in order to have it be understood, have it make a speck of a sense. It’s a fail amidst all the chatter and babbling of so many other souls and their Spirits, but for a mere moment, it wasn’t difficult to believe that she’d be correctly solving a problem as if she was a bullied child doing mathematics in the slums again.

She solves nothing.

All three of them jolt and jump slightly when Tifa’s PHS rings, muffled from her back pocket. Her expression is puzzled when she flips it open, only to immediately shrivel up in confusion even more at the name on the screen. “…It’s Cloud.” Tifa puts the device up to her ear after a click and doesn’t blink when Aerith shuffles closer to innocently eavesdrop.

The only thing heard from the other end of the line is shallow breaths.

“Cloud?” No response. “How’s everything with you and Denzel? I hope you two aren’t getting up to any trouble.” Tifa jokes, but nobody laughs. 

Silence.

Aerith feels like she’s going to puke up her mother’s cooking on the sweetly welded floor. There’s a scuffle of movement and a few quiet sounds from Cloud’s end, suddenly. She pieces a few things together in the few milliseconds of quiet that the phone provides: something is  wrong-right with the Planet, ergo, something must be wrong-right with Cloud. The peculiar bond between a ball in the solar system of natural, sentient gases and her Cloud—who, then again, cannot even hear or understand Gaia—is like a flower blooming only on one side. They’re given a semblance of an explanation when Denzel’s little, cracking voice replies.

“Tifa! Cloud, he… he’s having one of his bad days, and—and there’s this guy that’s getting mud on Cid’s folding chair!”

(Cloud… one of his bad days… It’s strikingly familiar enough that Tifa feels her perturbation cool down and be replaced by a stony flicker of vapor.)

“Guy?” Tifa questions. She glances at Aerith in the corner of her eye as if to ask, do you know who he’s talking about? She forces herself to stay calm for the boy’s sake when Aerith shakes her head and keeps the desperation out of her tone. “Honey, can you tell me what Cloud is doing?”

“Don’t worry, he’s okay.” There’s a collective sigh of relief reverberating around the room. “He’s not saying anything but he’s, um, helping this guy. Who doesn’t look so good, by the way… At first I thought they were fighting ‘cause, well, Cloud has a habit of attracting that, right? But he told me to stay in my room, and after half an hour of mostly silence, I got curious.” He pauses. “You’re not mad that I didn’t listen, are you?”

And here, he sounds like the child he’s meant to be.

“I could never be mad at you, Denzel. Maybe disappointed, but no. You’re not in any trouble, sweetie.” Tifa reassures her son. “If anything, I’m glad that you called—Aerith and I will be there soon, so hold tight.” When the call ends and she turns to Aerith, the other woman is holding Elmyra’s hands before her sight, fitting perfectly together like puzzle pieces despite the identical tear tracks on their cheeks. They’re haphazard prints in the dirt road of their faces, all mellowed out and smiling like it’s the last thing they’ll ever get from each other. Tifa remembers how Aerith once described Ifalna as “looking just like me, only lovelier,” during one of the few times her mother was spoken of. She went on to say that Elmyra looks nothing like her, but is still only lovelier, just like Ifalna.

Being torn away from a mother twice must make the loveliness ignite fear.

Tifa is staring for too long, she knows, quickly turning her back on the pair to give them their space. It’s harder; she never thought she’d have a child of her own. She catches Aerith’s wet, choked voice saying, “I’ll be here for as long as I can be, Mama.” 

There’s further promises of seeing each other again: tomorrow, or the next day, or the next after that, and for the rest of time (…for forever, is what Aerith wishes to say. She wishes to lay a promise on her mother’s heart and let it be true. But she does not know how long forever can mean for her. She doubts she ever will…). Elmyra is moving to cup Tifa’s face after reluctantly pulling away from her daughter, patting Tifa’s left cheek twice, so gently, and pulling her in for another swelling hug. She’s being thanked in tiny whispers to her ear before she can stop it, nodding in response to Elmyra’s words in the hopes of comforting her.

The couple leaves with their arms over their heads in the light rain, and this time, when Aerith looks back at one of her mothers, she understands that this won’t be the last time she’ll look back.

The truck ride to Edge starts after Tifa removes one hand on the wheel to place it on Aerith’s knee in the passenger seat.

—

Cloud can’t feel his fingers.

He can’t feel anything physical, really. The placid numbness has settled into his skin with an ease that makes him want to rip it off from his bones. Yet, he works nimble and steadfast on cleaning the rain and sweat and droplets of blood mixed with mud away from Zack’s face. As far as Cloud has been able to tell, very little of the blood is Zack’s, with the way there’s no trace of open wounds that haven’t already healed aside from a nasty road rash on his elbow. Cloud does his best to resist shaking Zack awake like a ragdoll and instead focuses on his inability to be awake at all in this moment. Denzel is beside him on a bar stool, slouched like usual with a Restore materia being taken care of in his hands. His son has grown quickly—Cloud wants to cry over how the baby fat of Denzel’s cheeks will be slimmed down when he traces his knuckles on the boy’s face. It’s an emotional succor to know that in just a few more years, Denzel will be the tallest person in the house.

He can’t verbally thank Denzel for taking over the phone call when he couldn’t, so Cloud settles for running his numbed fingers through brown hair and adjusting messy bangs. He hopes it’ll be enough for now. 

After Cloud holds out a hand for the materia, Denzel decides to speak. The green orb is imprinted with his warmth when it’s handed over. “Have you told me about him before? It’s like you… know him.”

(Cloud pauses his movements, because he already feels the answer without having to grip it from the confines of his veins, where neither blood nor oxygen sticks. Knowing Zack is an understatement. He has told Denzel of each piece of family that he’s ever known, dead or not. Or, well, previously dead or not.

And children remember everything they’ve been told, he’s learned. He wonders if his mind could supply him that kind of talent and curse again.)

Cloud is nodding in response after taking the question in. He turns his focus to the materia for a minute, getting a pulse of—of utter feeling back into his limbs through the energy of a Cure spell being cast. They watch it wash over Zack’s body as if he’s being doused by something other than water for once. The man makes a displeased sound in his sleep, and when Cloud tuts between his teeth before rubbing a thumb over Zack’s scar, Denzel is close to mesmerized.

This guy sure is special.

Denzel’s unable to ask the man’s name when there’s a sudden clap of thunder outside that makes both him and the bar flinch. It seems to have done far worse to the slumped man on the folding chair, because he’s opening his wild, enhanced eyes with a sudden determination and jumping up from his position with a stupor much akin to Cloud’s on one of his bad days. A bad day like this one, in which Denzel can no longer tell if it’ll turn for the better or worse.

The boy steps down from his stool when Cloud moves to stand in front of him like a shield. His adoptive father’s exterior appears calm and collected, but Denzel knows better. He knows infinitely better when Cloud puts his hands up slowly, like a weapon is being pointed at his head, and starts muttering with a clear, firm voice. “Zack. Can you hear me? No one is here to hurt you.” The firmness doesn’t stay for long towards the end, wobbling as though he’s holding something back.

This… is Zack?

Zack staggers on his feet with a loss of balance that’s almost humorous because of his size, but Denzel holds back his chuckle when Cloud grips the other man’s shoulders tight, keeping him from falling. An awareness shines in the light of Zack’s eyes then, flecks of mako piercing through the dimness of the room as they skirt over Cloud in front of him. Their breathing mingles with the sounds falling on the roof like nails when Zack opens his mouth, murmuring in disbelief, “…That you, sunshine?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s me, it’s Cloud,” he gasps shortly. “I’m gonna, gonna sit you down again, I—” 

Muscled arms are engulfing Cloud’s entire body before he can finish stumbling through his poor attempt at words, and the wracking sobs are coming back as quickly as the lightning strikes crackling in the sky. Cloud is squeezing back with the strength he’s been bewitched with, and grants it a loving kiss if such a thing allows him to be this close to Zack once more; Zack, who is crooning in his ear and placing tender pecks of his lips wherever they can reach on Cloud’s skin. His fingers lay sated in everlasting and ebony spikes, and Zack is saying something to him, something lovely, but how can he stop to hear it above the noise of his racing heart? He can feel the leather of gloves run up his back to cup his neck there and, restraining against the urge to fall limp in Zack’s hold, Cloud is unwillingly tugging himself slightly out of it to make sure he’s not having a hallucination.

He must look silly, perhaps, tugging on Zack’s cheek like he’s often wanted to do and pushing up on his top lip to see the reflective glint on a fanged tooth. It’s sharp, and it’s beautiful, and it’s real. That sharpness ends up being all that Cloud needs.

Zack’s face crumbles upon his treatment. “Cloud, oh , you—” He lets his forehead fall onto Cloud’s shoulder, an awkward position due to their difference in height, but it doesn’t seem to sway either of them. “Please tell me this is happening, please. That this is real. Think I might lose it otherwise,” he tries to chuckle, but it comes out choked and cracked. He’s mouthing his pleads into Cloud’s skin, eyebrows gradually getting more furrowed with a gloominess threatening to loom over his head.

What have they done to you?

Cloud is unsure of who the blame falls on these days. Sometimes he blames his mother for sending him off with a Nibel prayer instead of screaming at him, begging him to be smart—smarter than she had been. Other times it turns back on Sephiroth, or Hojo, or even the president, and these days overflow with an anger that leaves him broken on the garage floor until Tifa or the kids find him like that. For Zack, he blames the rest of the world that stood by and watched them be eaten alive by a hungry den.

The leering, rabid animals have always been kinder to them than man.

Cloud feels insane. He’s reminded of the fact that Zack is drenched and covered in Gaia knows what. He pulls back gently after coaxing Zack’s head away and holds his arms out, revealing wet and stained clothes with spots of mud and possible monster gore. “As real as your mess can get.”

He regrets it as soon as it leaves his mouth, his cheeks burning with wet tears. “Sorry, that was— stupid , I didn’t mean—”

“Don’t apologize, sunshine, that’s all I needed.” Zack crans his neck down to kiss the space between Cloud’s brows. “You’re all I need.”

There’s a clearing of a throat a little away from the two of them, small in volume but big in force. Zack’s eyes widen at the sight of a child whose head of wavy, brown hair only reaches up to his hip. He’s staring at the pair with subdue in the set of deep blue, hands clenched by his side and a desperate uncertainty being aimed in Cloud’s direction. But Cloud isn’t confused about this child in his house, merely reaching out with heavily trembling hands to beckon the boy forward. Zack catches the flint of silver on the child’s chest, a ring hanging off of a chain that looks like—looks so much like—

“Cloud, you’re shaking.” 

He feels Zack’s calloused hand take one of his wrists, and Denzel’s encasing his fingers over Cloud’s other palm. The feeling of their skin against him somewhat settles him, and he takes the slow breaths that Barret has been teaching him since they met.

(A tactic for Marlene when she had tantrums and a tearful range of emotions that didn’t fit within her body at such a young age. Counting down the seconds from ten had always helped her, but Barret gave Cloud the leverage to count from twenty. Or thirty.)

Zack noses his neck, murmuring. “I’ve got you, remember?”

Cloud nods in response, wrapping his hand fully around Denzel’s and squeezing once. He can feel the two people on each side of him eyeing each other curiously (moreso skeptically, in Denzel’s uneasy case), and wills it in himself not to laugh. Even through his comfort, the uncomfortable feeling of his and Zack’s still wet clothes has him sniffling, saying, “Don’t wanna move, but I need to change. And you should shower.”

“You wound me, buddy… It’d be nice to have some help washing my hair, y’know.” Zack must be joking, an indescribably fond smile on his face, but Cloud takes his words seriously. Then Zack turns rather somber. “I have so much to tell you.”

“We have time.” Cloud promises. He turns his attention on Denzel, who’s looking rather bored from the entire interaction. Cloud crouches down to be at height level with his son, inching forward slightly and muttering, “Everything’s okay. I can bring down some of my books, if you want?”

Denzel nods hesitantly, reminding Zack so much of his best friend as a cadet. The boy’s glance flickers to him occasionally, as if analyzing him. Zack offers up his most amiable smile and hopes he passes whatever test the child is constructing.

He doesn’t ask about the boy now, or even thinks of questioning why he seems to be at the dawn of Cloud’s day, but Zack keeps the moment filtered away in his head for later.

In the bathroom beside Cloud’s bedroom that he only managed to get a peak of, Zack is laid out naked and bare. Both in a literal sense, as his wet, dirty uniform is strewn about the towel rack, and the metaphorical sense that he never quite understood around anyone else but Cloud. It was almost a freeing figure of speech to be removed from the standard First Class SOLDIER turtleneck by Cloud’s careful assistance, he had sucked in his bottom lip to keep the phantom pained sounds hidden behind his two front teeth. Now he’s put down in a tub of clear water that turns brown as soon as he’s set in, and it’s nauseating to see. He pulls his knees up to his chest in efforts to shrink himself down to the size he was at thirteen. Zack gladly allows Cloud to lather a soft cloth in baby soap that was previously far in the back of the sink’s cupboard, and he has to close his eyes to stop himself from crying at the feeling of the suds cleaning over the healed holes in his back. A few of them match the ones on his chest. Scars, Cloud had whispered, voice void of judgement. So achingly gentle with a thing like him.

Cloud untangles his hair like Zack’s father once did for him when his mother was sick: analytically tugging out knots and putting light pressure on his head so that it doesn’t hurt him. Behind him on a small seat, Cloud hums a song of words that Zack can’t understand (“…it’s Old Nibel. I’ll teach you,”) yet the unenlightenment makes him feel better. There are stutters in his chest when Cloud cleans underneath his nails with a different, more brittle brush, pressing a chaste kiss to the inside of Zack’s forearm when he’s finished. 

Sleep pulls at him again, but he’d rather stay awake forever than wake back up in the guile Lifestream.

Zack is being wrapped in a towel as long and wide as a wool blanket after Cloud reaches over him to drain the water, brown skin newly dry and soft with lotion that smells of peaches, much like the child downstairs. He wonders if the baby soap was some time graced upon the boy by Cloud’s ministrations, too. 

They’re guided into Cloud’s room this time. Zack is sitting down on the empty mattress, and Cloud looks sheepish when he realizes that all of his blankets have been in Tifa’s room for the past few days, but Zack completely doesn’t mind. He hands Zack his most comfortable clothes while the latter observes his room—the beginnings of nervousness crawl up Cloud’s legs, until he acknowledges that this is just Zack. 

His Zack.

The man finishes pulling a v-neck over his head and lamely reaches out for Cloud. He mumbles a half-hearted, “C’mere,” which makes Cloud effectively compliant. Zack’s face is squished into his stomach when he speaks again, “…Thank you.”

“For?”

“Takin’ care of me,” he looks up at Cloud then, his chin on a covered abdomen. If only Gaia allowed him to feel this curved and cozy all the time he spent alive. “Not really used to that.”

(And here, Cloud would tear it all down if it meant that Zack could feel peace for a single time in his soiled life. Even more now that he is no longer dead and buried on a battlefield. He loves the Planet more than he loves the stone and electric life that inhabits her, he thinks, so what he breaks alone would matter to the simple tyrants.

Who would care what such creatures say?)

“Looks like you better get used to it then.” 

The pair joins Denzel downstairs in the kitchen, where he’s reading a book on hematology at the dinner table and making notes whenever he figures fit. Most of them are doodles of what he thinks white blood cells and platelets look like drawn on a sticky note, slapped onto front and back pages alike. He looks up to smile at Cloud, who returns it easily, faltering slightly when it lands on Zack.

Progress.

“You two want some lunch?” Cloud asks while he ties up his hair and washes his hands. He feels Zack’s eyes burn through him at the action, making him huff out a short laugh.

“Can I help?” Denzel’s already rolling up the sleeves of his jacket and washing his hands before he gets an answer.

“‘Course you can.”

Zack doesn’t want to be in the way, as he’s unfamiliar with the kitchen, interest piqued by the obvious fact that half of it is meant for the purpose of a bar. He sits with his hands holding his jaw and his elbows perched atop the wooden table, appearing newly sanded down. Watching Cloud work like there’s no one else around is entertaining, like spreading mayonnaise on toasted bread is a sacred craft. The feeling hitches in Zack’s stomach, stopping as soon as it enters his throat and starts rattling, a caged cardinal.

I love you. Please let me stay. I love you. Please keep me here, please keep the blood out of my lungs, please. I love you. 

The bar door bursting open prevents any chance of letting it be known for now.

“Cloud? Where are you?!” And he knows that voice, knows it better than the back of his hand with how much it has cradled him through life and death. Zack knows the way it tilts under pressure and darkens when anger strikes a cord, and especially knows at present that worry wipes it clean like the blade that ran its owner through.

He could find Aerith’s voice through a sea of dying songbirds.

There’s another woman that enters the kitchen hurriedly, blanking and turning pale as a sheet when she sees Zack. He recognizes her face and her ready stance without her having to lift her fists, and she’s calling that name yet not turning away her gaze to see Cloud putting down his butter knife. Maybe she’s cursing him and his entire family, because a shiver runs down Zack’s spine.

“Aerith, he’s in here…!” She shouts, moving from the entrance of the doorway like she knows what’s about to happen.

Zack stands from his chair when Aerith runs into the room. Her bow is stitched perfectly into her braid, wearing a sundress that swishes around her legs and matches the color of her eyes. She looks as she had in the endless white of the Lifestream, held together by the glue that keeps the air pumping through her. Aerith slams into him with the strength of an enhanced SOLDIER, something that doesn’t come as a shock for Zack—she’s never been very good at surprises.

“I thought I lost you! I couldn’t feel you anywhere, I couldn’t—” Aerith warbles, arms thrown over Zack’s broad shoulders and gripping the collar of his shirt from behind. There’s relief in her voice. Relief and an emotion only he could understand.

Zack pulls back. “Me? You—you disappeared, and I asked everyone, everyone I could, asked them where the hell Gaia took you.” He says incredulously. Searching for any sign that Aerith may still be dead, whereas none of them could ever know it. And then the incredulousness is tampering down like an open fire without fuel, laughter bubbling up uncontrollably in his chest. His shoulders shake with the force, because it’s not funny, it shouldn’t be, but it doesn’t matter. 

Aerith is here with him. 

She’s also giggling with him, too, his constant wake-up call since he fell through the roof of her church.

“There’s nothing to worry about anymore, angel.” Zack kisses her cheek, hugging her a bit tighter than before. “Cloud’s been taking good care of me.”

Aerith begrudgingly untangles herself from Zack’s arms, apologetically patting his cheek when he pouts. She looks over at Cloud, who’s leaning against the kitchen counter with his arms crossed, watching the scene unfold. Like it’s a regular afternoon with his family. “Hm, I’m sure he has. Soon you’ll be spoiled rotten.”

Cloud does not deny this.

It hits Zack, given the reminder of Cloud’s being, that the woman speaking underneath her breath to the young boy is Tifa Lockhart. Straight out of Nibelheim and the village that his former friend and comrade torched to the ground. He winces.

“Zack?” Tifa calls out. She’s staring at him with those blood-red eyes, velvet consuming his consciousness and corroding it with guilt. “Denzel tells me that you got mud on our friend’s chair.” He can’t tell if there’s humor in her voice, or deserved hatred.

“I… did. I’m sorry, really, I’ll get that cleaned up—”

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. Do you like mustard on your sandwiches?”

Their exchange runs deeper under the surface.

—

Dinner isn’t very loud.

The adults are soaking each other in like wet sponges while Denzel is eerily accepting of the situation. His parents’ partners, who were once dead, are now alive again. It’s simple. 

Cloud doesn’t eat much of the leftovers from the night prior, tossing his pieces of meat onto Zack’s plate and chewing on the cauliflower left in the residue of beef. The two are undeniably attached to the hip, practically sitting in each other’s laps and chairs on one side of the table. Tifa and Aerith trade murmurs between themselves, with Zack occasionally butting in if being quiet claims to be too difficult. He has Cloud leaning against his side and listening in on the rest of them talk, now having a silent conversation with Denzel after the boy yawned.

It takes them all to bed after the table is cleared, courtesy of Zack and his irreplaceable eagerness.

Cloud feels strange sleeping in his room after three days of being holed up in Tifa’s. Her room could also be considered Aerith’s as well at this point, unless someone decides to be innovative and use the available guest room at the very end of the hallway. That someone doesn’t conclude to be Zack tonight, whose drowsiness trails after Cloud and into his best friend’s bed. The sheets and blankets have returned to the mattress, and Cloud joins Zack after he and Tifa said their goodnights to Denzel… after Aerith enforced his new skincare routine… and after Tifa braided his hair. Many afters.

“Your hair looks real nice,” is the first thing Zack says after Cloud is under the blankets, exhaustion evident in his voice. “Pretty.”

“…You think so?”

“Know so, sunshine. ‘S perfect for you.”

Cloud smiles in the dark. “It was like this before I left home. Ma cried when she had to cut it. Did I ever tell you that?”

Zack hums in the negative, lifting his head up from his curled arms to tuck his face into Cloud’s neck. He thinks he fits quite nicely. “I’ve a question,” he mumbles.

“Yeah?”

“Who’s the kid? Denzel.” Cloud can feel every lash of Zack’s eyes flutter against his nape. “Reminds me a lot of you.” His sentences become small, slurred.

Cloud hears himself crack open like a walnut, if he’s honest. He knows that he could never replace Denzel’s father—Abel was his name, Denzel told him—or ever fit the missing corner that the boy lost a few years ago. Cloud feels indirectly, wholeheartedly responsible for the man and his wife’s death, yet doesn’t think he’ll ever voice this. However, even as the past plague of the Planet threatened to take Denzel away from him, Cloud swore to himself that he’d be what the child needed for as long as necessary. He’s a father, if that is what a son wills him to be.

“He’s my son.”

“Thought so.” Zack’s lips twist above Cloud’s collarbone, pressing a light kiss to that spot. “You look at ‘im like… like dads look at their newborns, yeah. When they try not to cry.”

There’s a sliver of silence as Cloud registers the other’s words. So much he wants to say, but will any of this last?

“Zack. I’ve got a question for you, too.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Are you…” Cloud turns his head to side. He thinks he might faint. “Are you gonna leave me?” And it’s stupid, it’s stupid, it’s—

Zack has his strong pair of hands on Cloud’s chest, his frowning face looking down at him. The droop of his tired eyes screams puppy. But that is not who Zack is anymore. That is not who he has been for a long time. His hands are covered in the grease of human engines, his fingerprints leaving red splotches in his wake wherever he touches, nails torn up from hacking and slashing on human bones like they’re tree stumps. Pattern and all. Zack is a daunting wolf with clean teeth from tearing away the cartilage of his kills; he buries them under tar roads with tombstones, and even the worst of graves deserve to have marked names. These hands rest atop Cloud’s beating heart. The thumb on the left hand is tracing the line of a rib bone through Cloud’s shirt, and his heart isn’t beating faster because of fear.

Zack is the one thing he’s not ever been afraid of.

His face is inching closer, closer, nearly threateningly so, to Cloud and the man’s mouth. Zack sighs into the open slot of lips, making contact down only barely, finally whispering, “She’ll have to tear me apart if she wants to take me away from you again.”

Distance is closed.

Through the tying of heartstrings and the binding of pretense, Zack is softly, speaking through their interwoven touch, passing along the carved crystal wish from earlier and praying to the Planet that he defied only seconds ago. I love you. I love you. I love you.

He knows that Cloud catches it, clutching it tightly in his fist when his best friend’s cheekbones grow wet.

(Zack has never lied to him.)

Chapter Text

Tifa has been well-versed in the ways of the world since birth. Death is no stranger on her doorstep, yet that doesn’t mean it becomes any easier to greet its taunting face through the keyhole. She was graced with the light of the moon on a hollow night, her mother used to say, and Thea Lockhart was a woman born of all the cosmos in the sky. Her daughter was inclined to believe it, with heartbeats imprinted into Thea’s voice and will. But her daughter, being born of the moon, pulled the tides of her little, aching heart, and let herself be consumed with the anger and grief broiling in the Planet’s core since the Calamity first struck her down. The death of a cosmo is not unimaginable, but it strikes the moon and its craters harder than thought possible.

Tifa is well-versed in the way the world treats its children, yes. Here, doing laundry beside a once dead SOLDIER with tidal waves of his own well into the hours of morning, she understands that unwanted knowledge better than ever.

She’d woken up when looking out of the closest window still gave her a pitch-black view, untangling herself out of Aerith’s arms a bit regretfully, she missed the warmth almost immediately underneath her bare feet. Even with Aerith by her side, some nights do not bring easy sleep. As she’d clumsily made her way downstairs and trailed into the doorway of the kitchen, the sturdy figure with his face stuffed into the refrigerator pulled out of the cold with terrifying speed—Tifa didn’t even see Zack move. The scene in front of her didn’t exactly surprise her, either. As being an ex-SOLDIER checks out, Zack’s body requires an ungodly amount of food, exceedingly more than Cloud’s does. He had a sheepish little expression on his face, various tupperware containers wrapped with foil on the tops in his arms. Zack had spoken low in his usual rumble and said, “’S it okay if I eat this?”

“Um, sure. Which one?”

“…All of them?”

Tifa felt a bit terrible, honestly. Had they not been making enough food? Was it that Zack felt he couldn’t eat the amount he wanted? Needed?

She heated the containers of leftover meats, rice, and vegetables up for Zack while he sat at the table, watching her every move with his chin seated atop his folded arms. He sat in the opposite direction in his chair, so his arms were hanging over the back and his feet were planted with the last two chair legs. He looks tired, but restless.

(Tifa had asked Aerith about his staring problem before. She hadn’t known what else to call it.

Aerith had slightly laughed, squeezing water out of her wet hair with a towel. “I know what you’re talking about, Tifa, don’t worry. Can I tell you the truth? It scared me to the core when I first got to know Zack, too. I always thought he was going to… to eat me. Suddenly turn on me and hurt me. I think I got so paranoid at one point that I avoided him for a few days. But, that was back when my judgement was clouded because of my past.”

“Did you ever ask him about it?” Tifa asked, eyebrows creasing.

“You know it!” Aerith winked. “He said that it really just made him feel better, being able to see me and watch me. That way, he knew I was safe. That I was alive.” Aerith had noticeably faltered, saying, “He was losing a lot of his people around that time. The more I understood it, the less scared I was. Seeing that he still has his—what’d ya call it?—staring problem, makes me feel protected. He wants to protect us, Tifa.”)

Tifa let him watch.

Zack had somewhat eaten in silence, occasionally yawning behind a huge hand. He offered a forkful of cooked broccoli to Tifa that Cloud had made the night prior by holding it up as if he was trying to feed her. She remembered what Aerith had said then, about Zack’s protection and care. She bit the food off from the fork.

When he was finished, Tifa gestured him over to the room cramped in between the garage door and end of the kitchen. Figures that doing laundry could calm a man with knives for hands.

“Why is it that both you and Aerith came back soaked to the bone?” Tifa asks, adjusting the basket on her hip as if it were a child.

Zack chuckles. He’s put an unreasonable amount of distance between the two of them, so far from Tifa that where he stands at the dryer, she stands at the washer. “I don’t think Gaia wanted it to be too easy for us,” he lightly sighs, throwing another clean pair of pants over his shoulder. He moves onto the next pile of newly washed and dried clothes, briefly beaming when he finds a bright yellow shirt with a cartoon chocobo in the middle—a gift to Cloud from one of his family members (Marlene, Zack thinks her name was) that he wears proudly. “She enjoys it, I think, throwing us into shit we wouldn’t expect. Like we’re her favorite contestants on a reality show.”

The next day after Zack had arrived, he immediately made it clear that he wanted to be a helpful hand around the house and bar, something about “earning his keep”. It disturbed Tifa a bit, to know that he felt like he had to earn his stay in a home that was already filled with crumbled minds and sunken hearts.

(Plenty of room for more.)

Aerith and Tifa had done anything they could to convince him that he didn’t need to take up doing every little thing, but Cloud had been the one to stop them. Tifa supposes that being what they went through—together—Cloud would understand the pain of man that is Zack best. So, she listened to his requests of letting Zack run free in his desperation, because freedom is so profoundly new, in order to let him see for himself that they wouldn’t be throwing him out any time soon. Or ever.

A few days have passed now, stretching well into a week, and it’s laundry day. A day not for the faint of heart, Tifa is coming to learn.

She hums in response to Zack’s words, slightly distracted by the clothes. Tifa pulls out a familar piece of clothing from the basket then, letting out a small, wavering “oh” at its condition. 

“What is it?” Zack nearly lets the multiple pairs of pants slip off his body with how fast he turns to her, only for his eyes to catch the article of misery hanging from her hands. His breath catches in his throat; he feels slightly sick.

The sleeveless turtleneck is decorated with torn bullet holes and unstrung strings of wool. Irony paints a pretty picture in between the arm holes of the SOLDIER uniform—who else except Shinra Inc. could ruin part of its military issued items so perfectly? In subtle subconsciousness, one of Zack’s hands drifts to his chest. He can’t lie to himself and say that he’s imagining the many matching scars along his sternum, once open holes sewn over by Gaia’s love and care.

Tifa notices his reaction, filing it away for when she finds the cargo pants that go along with the shirt. “We can get rid of it, if you want. I know that made Cloud feel better.”

“…What’d he do with his?”

“Incinerated it.”

Zack laughs shortly in disbelief, expecting her to be joking around. When Tifa’s quirked lip stays intact, he raises his brows. “You serious?”

“It wasn’t too long after Meteor, actually. We were staying at a friend’s while the bar was being rebuilt. He told me he was going outside for some air after he… after he had a ‘moment’, but I didn’t think to question what he was carrying.” Tifa huffs out a breath as she recalls the story. She remembers being worried enough to chew on her hair. “Next thing I knew, I smelt smoke through an open window and,” and thought he was burning the world to the ground, “I raced out with a ladle as my weapon, only to see Cloud standing over his burning clothes.”

There hadn’t been any feeling in Cloud’s eyes as the flames licked the air and were reflected in his pupils. A small matchbox was gripped in his clenched hand, because he didn’t trust himself with materia for weeks. Tifa had heard the sticks crack in half from where she stood.

Zack thinks on the story for a minute, finally settling on, “Has he always been like that?” He smiles again, longer than before, a ripple of fondness lining his mouth.

“Like what?” Tifa questions, ready to be defensive on Cloud’s behalf. However, she knows that if the way Cloud never strays too far from Zack’s side is anything to go by, his question is innocent.

“Headstrong.”

Tifa matches Zack’s smile.

“For as long as I can remember.”

Being in the same room with a resurrected man that’s on true name basis with the Planet must be something sacred, Tifa thinks. But she’s often been one to indulge in sacrilege, accidentally or otherwise.

The living man that speaks of Gaia like she’s his friend is simply… Zack.

Zack, whose dishes from Gongaga have become Denzel’s new favorite in a matter of days, because his secret recipe is apparently love and not extra chili powder. Zack, who happily allows Aerith to apply drugstore makeup to his face whenever she’s bored, and kisses her candied cheeks when she’s done. Zack, the Zack that comes out of the garage every day covered in oil and grease, yet comes back holding Cloud’s hand like they were meant to live on that way for the rest of their lives.

Zack, who is just a man.

That might be why it’s so hard for Tifa to be alone with him before she starts thinking about all he’s been through.

“I’ll think about what to do with the uniform. Thanks,” Zack says after a while. The two of them have drifted closer. His pile is almost done, the clothes folded neatly into different sections of who they belong to. Most go into the same stack, because they’ve all been sharing clothes between each other as of late. “For…” He loses his words and sighs, hanging his head.

Tifa gets it.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” she teases, punching him in the arm without a second thought.

Zack wobbles to the side out of sheer surprise at the impact, gawking at Tifa with wide eyes and a slightly gaping mouth. She thinks she might have overstepped, but then his eyes are quickly crinkling in the corners, and his fanged teeth are jutting out from behind his top lip when he starts to laugh. Zack’s laughter is full of crystal shards dug up from the ground and lying dormant in his chest, his stomach. The sound is so infectious that Tifa begins to laugh, too, her shards twinkling. They try to stay quiet, their laughter bouncing off the walls of the tiny room, but it only further is a cause for their noise.

And suddenly, they’re just two withered people doing laundry together. The sweater falling out of Tifa’s hold is ripped at the tight collar, unsalvageable. 

(Leaving it be is for the best.)

Zack braces himself against the dryer with heavy arms, shoulders shaking as he comes down. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, Tifa thinks. She’s hasn’t seen him laugh like this until now. He giggles a bit hysterically before taking a needed breath, “Tifa! You’ve got one hell of a punch!” He grins, turning to her with a look in his eyes not so different from an excited child’s. “Do it again.”

“We can spare after we finish here if you really want me to.” Tifa says. She faintly hears Zack whispering a “fuck yes!” to himself, which strangely sobers her up. “Hey, Zack?”

“Yeah?”

“You’re welcome.”

Zack’s face remains lit up, rivaling the imperceptible light of the small bulb above their heads. It’s the only source of light in the tight room. He bumps his hip against Tifa’s to the beat of the clothes tumbling in the washer, and the warmth of his side spreads through her like a washed up shore—she is the moon pulling his waves higher than a breakwater could reach, and he is moving with her in tandem to the sound of the sea.

Tifa doesn’t happen to hear anything, but she knows that something has caught Zack’s attention when his face falls to an eerily blank expression and he drops the dress in his hands, swiftly turning to the doorway of the laundry room. His arm twitches at his side, for a moment. Tifa can guess what he was planning to reach for.

In the doorway stands Denzel in his normal quietude. It looks as though he just woke up, with a droopy face and sluggish movement, despite it being nowhere close to his bedtime. The boy’s eyes spare a glance in Zack’s direction, Tifa can feel the man’s stature relax next to her considerably. “Maybe you should start wearing a bell around your neck, kid.”

Tifa playfully elbows him in the stomach before shifting her attention onto her now frowning son. “Good morning, honey. Are Cloud and Aerith awake?”

“G’morning,” Denzel rubs the sleep out of his eyes, nodding at Zack hesitantly. “You, too. And yeah, I think they were up before me, ‘cause they were making breakfast when I came down.”

“Good to know. Let’s go see what they’ve put together, hm?”

Zack shuffles behind Tifa, picking up the fallen dress off the floor and shaking it out. “Do you, uh, want me to finish here? I don’t mind.” He tries to force on the weighted comfort of his usual snare, sounding like he’d rather be anywhere but in this air-tight room with a pull chain light and his own agonized self for company. He wants to sit next to Cloud at the kitchen table, squeezing hands and keeping his voice quiet—Cloud is easily overstimulated in the mornings. He wants to curl his leg around Aerith’s underneath the kitchen table and have her call him scandalous, teasing him with a kick to the shin. But he also wants Tifa to know that he could be worth all the trouble, that there’s more poison in his body than there is fight, and that being dead helps you acknowledge how easy it is to lose these things.

Zack doesn’t seem to want to understand that Tifa already does.

Tifa sighs through her nose. The breath washes over her. “The clothes can wait, Zack. Don’t worry about it.”

She somehow manages to tug him away from the laundry room, downstairs into the kitchen and inevitably pushes him into Cloud’s space. The two sit at the table with Cloud’s head snug on Zack’s shoulder, eyelids occasionally fluttering with tiredness. He eats at a robotically slow pace yet turns an embarrassed, flush color when Zack offers to feed him. The ring of the house phone interrupts the banter around the room, with Cloud desperate to get away and grumbling, I’ll get it!

“Strife Delivery Service,” he weakly starts, never following along with the business motto Marlene came up with for them. 

“That you, Spiky?”

Cloud’s face morphs into a soft smile, pulling the phone away from his ear and putting it against his chest. “It’s Barret,” he mutters to the others, then the phone is back up to his ear. “Yeah, it’s me. What’re you calling for?”

“What?! Can’t I just call my folks for the hell of it?”

“‘Course you can. I just wanna make sure everything’s okay.”

“Hmph. Softie.” Cloud chuckles. Barret goes on, “So, I was wonderin’ if I could bring Marlene over to spend the night today. I’ve got a meeting with the WRO about a project near Kalm, and I’ll be out late. Is that alright with y’all?”

“You know you don’t have to ask. But before you leave her here, you should know that there’s been another… addition added to the house.” He glances towards Zack, who tilts his side to the side.

“And here I was, tryna to be polite! Now what d’ya mean ‘addition’? Finally get that dog you wanted?”

Cloud opens his mouth once, twice, unable to decide what to say to that. It’s an innocent question, and Barret wouldn’t understand any unspoken context behind Cloud’s laughter at all, but it still raises a sound out of his chest that he almost feels bad for. It’s worth the rolling of his abdomen to see the confused smile on Zack’s beautiful face. (Has that faint dimple on the skin of his cheekbone always been underneath his left eye?) “You—you could say that, yeah.”

—

Barret isn’t exactly surprised, per se. More like at a loss for sensible words.

He walks through the ringing door to see part of his family sitting at the bar’s main serving counter. Marlene is humming happily to herself in front of him, walking ahead in quiet glee until she stops in her tracks right before she makes it to Cloud’s stool. The figure next to Cloud is prominently noticeable, with ebony spikes falling down his back and defying any rules of what gravity claims to be. This mystery man has his fingers laced between Cloud’s, talking animatedly to Tifa behind the counter in a voice that was once louder than it currently is, but there’s a small, threatening flex in the muscles of his neck when Barret steps on the creaking floorboard that wasn't nailed in right from the beginning. The man turns his head, exposing the glowing hue of green radiating from his wary eyes. And Barret knows a spooked soldier when he sees one. 

After all, he’s had some experience.

“Zack, it’s okay.” Tifa promises, glancing at Barret with a slightly pleading look. “You remember us telling you about our friend named Barret? And his daughter?”

Barret does a half-hearted waving gesture with his flesh hand, hoping it’s enough to reassure the man.

Zack nods slowly, throwing up a friendly two-fingered salute in return. “Good to finally meet ya. You’re Marlene, right?” He looks as though he wants to say something to Barret, but visibly decides against it. The man stands, still holding Cloud’s hand, and Barret doesn’t have to look slightly down at him like he does anyone else. He offers up a soft smile in the girl’s direction, who looks up at her father for approval before nodding her head. “Cloud’s told me a lot about you.”

“All good things, I hope!” Marlene goes up to Cloud and wags a playfully stern finger in his face, uncaring of Zack’s presence and only measured by how utterly comfortable Cloud looks next to him. Cloud catches her hand with his free one, so small compared to his, and squeezes it. Their conjoined hands sway side to side in the air for a moment, before Marlene giggles and pulls away. “All good things,” he tells her.

Barret stares at them for as long as the scene holds itself together. He’ll probably never admit—at least not out loud, in the presence of other people—that Cloud is as gentle as a flowing basin of water; some of that gently weaving river has flown into himself. 

The Planet needs Cloud more than she will ever know, Barret thinks.

“Excuse me, sir. Who are you?” Barret hears his little girl ask, breaking him out of his self inflicted trance. Marlene is staring up at the man with a wide crane of her neck, sounding polite yet still determined to receive an answer. It’s so much different compared to when she met Cloud, once reluctant. She’s braver now. She shouldn’t have to be. 

This man seems to think so, too. Barret should’ve guessed that dominoes would begin to fall after Aerith was returned from the Planet. Zack meets Barret’s eyes with a beaming crinkle forming around them, bending his knees to reach Marlene in a crouch. “I’m a friend of Cloud and Aerith, but just Zack is fine, yeah? ‘Sir’ makes me feel… pretty old.” 

“Oh, you’re a real geezer, alright.” Cloud mutters, making Tifa hide a laugh through her teeth behind the counter.

Zack stands up again and puts his weight against the counter, leaning back. “And Cloud still loves me anyway, wrinkles and all! Ain’t that right, sunshine?” There’s a soft emphasis on the countryside twang in his voice, one that sparks out of his lips and forms a bubble of the word beloved around Cloud’s head, like spinning cartoon birds. His fingers curl tighter over Zack’s knuckles. Zack is beautiful like this, shining with the grace of playfulness and the caress of hymnal affection. He’s an everlasting beauty.

It seems to click into place for Marlene. 

She smiles knowingly. “You haven’t always been here, have you?” Her natural wisdom is so much like Aerith’s that it nearly hurts to see. The bow in the girl’s hair, her twisted locks, the embers surrounding her heart; the littler bits of love that have been soaked into Marlene’s spirit since she was born would find a way to keep her blood pumping if there was ever a time that she didn’t have oxygen.

Barret can’t contain his booming laugh at the look on Zack’s face. The latter quickly recovers from his stunned silence, sighing through his nose. “Not always, no.”

(Cloud looks at him with an intensity that says but you’re here now. Isn’t that what matters?)

—

Over dinner, it’s as if Barret is giving Zack the shovel talk. 

He asks questions that wouldn’t fit themselves into the life of a previous First Class SOLDIER, let alone the life of a previous dead man. There’s a chorus of slight groans every time Barret opens his mouth: “What would you do if you saw a bag of gil on the sidewalk? Your opinions on capitalism? Do you play tennis? I ain’t trustin’ a man that plays tennis! Tell me your preferred chocobo breed to travel on. Scientific name, too.” Zack answers the best he can, almost like he’s trying to win Barret’s approval no matter how serious Barret is or not. Which is one hundred percent serious, Cloud knows. It’s endearing to see his partner stumble on the species name for blue chocobos whilst Aerith is unhelpfully and dramatically mouthing behind her hand, breaking into a fit of giggles when Zack’s answer is nowhere near her words. He must still carry his good-natured charm, his amiable barrier, because Barret’s face warms when he catches the sight of Zack placing a few of his roasted vegetables onto Cloud’s empty plate and refilling Marlene’s glass of cranberry juice.

It isn't his charm that Barret approves of.

He claims that the next question is his last, gulping down his glass of ice-cold water and raggedly exhaling to clear the chill in his body. “You thinkin’ about going back to your hometown?”

A fork clumsily clatters onto a plate. It’s the only sound surrounding the now silent table.

All eyes are on Zack, save for Denzel’s. The boy was taught to treat others how he’d want to be treated; the last thing he wants is for forlorn eyes to lay upon him. Zack can feel Cloud’s stuttering stare zoning onto the side of his face. He clears his throat, wipes his mouth. “Haven’t really thought about it. Not many people in my village were too keen on me running away from home to join SOLDIER. Something tells me that my folks are fine, y’know? My pops has a heart of hope as big as a behemoth, and my ma…” He trails off. “Nevermind. Point is, I—I owe them. The least they deserve is to know that their son is alive after all these years. Alive now, I mean.”

“You don’t have to go back. You know that, don’tcha?” There’s something akin to pity in Barret’s voice. If Zack catches onto it, he isn’t bothered. Or maybe he just doesn’t care.

Zack barely contains his growl. “What do you mean I don’t have to? Are you saying it—that it’s better to send ‘em an empty coffin instead? I should write a letter, too, sure, ‘cause that’s more than anything Shinra ever fucking—!”

“I’m saying,” Barret interjects, cocking his head toward the kids in warning. “That you don’t have to if you don’t wanna. A letter could go a long way. And don’t you pull that ‘you wouldn’t get it’ bull-crap on me, do you have any idea who you’re talkin’ to? The most hated man of North Corel, soldier boy!”

“Barret…” Aerith frowns whilst Cloud and Tifa sit up a bit straighter.

Zack glances between the four of them. “I’m missing something here.”

“To make a long story short, I backed a plan to build a reactor in my hometown. Things didn’t go as planned, jus’ like whatever else Shinra had in store back then. It was my fault. The last time I was there was about three years ago with these knuckleheads, and it was… hell. Angry eyes trailin’ after me, after my friends. Felt like I was prey that got hunted down for sport. Had to take care of a familiar face, but he ended up doin’ the job for me. Crazy, huh?” Barret chuckles bitterly, accepting the loving hand that Marlene places on his prosthetic arm. “But now, I realize that it was Shinra’s fault as much as it might’ve been mine. And I don’t owe nobody nothin’. I’ll never be rid of the guilt, I think, but that’s enough of a reminder that physically being there couldn’t give me. That town ain’t home no more.”

Zack takes it in slowly, running a hand through his hair. He’s about to give Barret a response when Cloud speaks up next to him.

“Nibelheim.”

“What?”

“You remember what happened, and what I told you about how we’d defeated him. Tifa and I went back for the first time after so long, but it was straight out of a horror movie.” Cloud muses. “Everything was the exact same, it was too uncanny. Only difference is that every time one of us asked what happened, to anyone, they’d get this look on their faces. Like we were rats under their kitchen sink that didn’t get caught in the mousetrap. I’m not going back if I can help it.” He takes a long sip of his drink.

Tifa nods. “Neither am I. It stopped being home a long time ago. If Gongaga doesn’t sound like home after all these years, then it just isn’t, Zack. Your parents seem to be the only thing you’d go back for—and that’s okay.”

It’s too much. Aerith’s looking at him like she wants to take him away from this table and plant him into the dirt, softly pat the soil of his skin, sing to him until he’s fully grown again. Cloud takes a hold of his wrist, palm warm with early sun, and Tifa passes her words through her touch on Cloud’s forearm like a tin can telephone. The way Barret turns his eyes at him with the face of his pops, unfamiliar yet so aching makes something burst within him. And it’s too much. It’s so much.

“Okay, yeah, I —…Yeah.” Zack turns away. The blur and itch in his eyes makes it hard to keep them strained on the nearby wall, but the sudden wetness of his cheeks makes it even harder. He gulps back the noises in his throat despite not knowing what he’s so afraid of.

The sun has set by the time Barret heads out to Kalm, leaving Marlene sleeping safely and soundly in her bed without any fears.

It’s something that Zack has yet to reach in comparison on this quiet night.

Cloud’s warm body lay comfortably against his, a head of flaxen hair sitting underneath Zack’s collarbone. They breathe in unison, chests rising and dropping at the same time. Neither of the two are near the brink of sleep or quite even tired enough to wish that they were there, but rooted words sit long enough in Zack’s cavern of lungs that it threatens to suffocate him before Cloud could grant him a good night wish.

“Would you go with me?” Zack speaks into the dark room. And it feels like one of the most difficult things he’s done in his life.

Zack can hear the frown in Cloud’s voice. “What d’you mean?”

“To… to Gongaga. Would you go with me, if I ever wanted to take some time?” He says, softly adding, “It would just be a visit. See how everything is and come right ba—”

“I’d go anywhere with you.”

Zack’s heart trills a soundless noise inside of him, but he feels it as much as he condemns it. Scares him, a little, to know just how much of Cloud’s spirit energy is tied with his, like a bright red balloon attached to a lost child’s wrist. He’d ask the ever merciless Gaia why that is so; does Cloud know what it means to care for a dead man walking? But she hasn’t been feeling too generous in the area of communication these days. Zack will never hear from her like Cloud and Aerith do, anyway. They must hear countless keys of gospel playing in their ears while all he receives from the mother of all life is a barely registered ringing. Maybe it’s the last of his frequencies dying. It stings, almost. Rubbing alcohol seeps into his newly given wounds from the bullets piling up in the acid of his stomach, there’s no leather belt for him to bite on or tear apart with his pained teeth, sharp enough to pierce a mule, long enough to kill the shepherd and his beating organ—

“—ack. Zack?” Here he goes, worrying Cloud when he already has enough to worry about.

Zack shifts in his spot to wrap his arms around Cloud’s body wordlessly, gripping him tight and breathing a bit too fast. The strength in which Cloud does the same eases him, a heavy pressure so helpful to his enhancements while straying far from the area of annoyance. But it also eases Zack into fit of tears, gasping for things he can’t reach here: he misses his father, his mother, and doesn’t forget why he never sent them any letters. He misses the infinite light of the Lifestream, because then, he didn’t have to figure anything out on his own. He didn’t have to file through the scattered cabinets built by his agony. He didn’t need to do a single thing except play the role of the dead.

(Zack doesn’t miss being dead. Not really. It felt like he had been without a voice—opening his mouth and screaming out for Aerith, the only sound being the disarray of such an eternal stillness. He doesn’t think being alive again is a punishment, no.

He’s just terrified that it’ll become one.)

Cloud hugs him more securely, as though hearing his thoughts. Such an action brings Zack out of his head, and the hiccuping of aborted breath that he releases makes it all too real.

Learning how to live again won’t be so hard.

Chapter Text

The air in Gongaga is warm.

Cloud’s palms sweat and stick closely to the arms that are crossed against his chest, lulling his rapid heart into an unbeat rest so that no one else can hear it. Even in early autumn, the trees sway with a humidity that pools together for the swarm of insects and distant touch-mes. There’s a faint memory of being here when he was something—someone—else, Aerith and Tifa by his falling grace, keeping him out of loop as safely as they could. Cloud doesn’t remember the boot tracks that go to and fro throughout Gongaga’s jungle or the pattern in which the hut-homes and stores are placed, but Zack, despite not being there for half of his overrun life, remembers it all as if he still breathes here. His combat boots follow swiftly into each print, perfectly fitting and dragging along copper dirt with heavy footsteps.

Zack stands tall beside Cloud in the town’s small graveyard, towering over the mossy stones, but his hands and legs shake with each carved name he reads. He told Cloud before that there are no bodies underneath the fertilized, weed-ridden soil, if he remembers well. It doesn’t seem to matter, for they both take care in stepping around and hopping over each bed of loss.

Cloud tries his best to understand.

He doesn’t remember anything like this in Nibelheim. Pieces of once-life in his town were marked inside the houses and backyards of whoever had lost someone in the form of items: photographs, ashless urns, logs making Xs on the ground, old hats still strung up by the door. There were no burial sites. What Cloud does remember of death in Nibelheim is scarce, and hidden, covered by the stickiness of burning skin and screams.

A faint pain bubbles in his chest, and onward a few feet in front of him, there’s a small stone engraved in mourning for a fallen mother around the year he was born.

Maybe it’s the difference in ritual between Gongaga and Nibelheim that begins to build the knot in Cloud’s throat. Here, there are gleaming rocks of slate foiled by the blacksmiths, all their soundless guilt poured into the push of the cast-iron presses shining with the name of a neighbor’s child. There, Nibel wood and oak etch themselves into the life of another, soaking with the tears of a grandmother’s grief. Maybe the understanding of death, too, is different in Gongaga compared to the home of mist—Cloud opens his mouth to ask such a thing of Zack, but closes it back up when Zack kneels onto the dirt. Cloud watches as he slowly lays the side of his face to the ground, like he’s straining an ear to hear something deep within the underground.

The only sound between the two of them is Zack’s nails digging into the dirt.

He stands again with a sigh, rubbing his hands together to clear off the soil and cursing the feeling of it beneath his nails. Zack meets Cloud’s questioning gaze with a softened look on his face, stepping closer to his partner’s side once more.

“There used to be a ton of strays around here when I was younger. Cats an’ dogs, I mean. We always did our best to help them, some townsfolk even going as far as taking them in, but most of them were sick.” Zack lets his eyes wander to the distance of the village that he has yet to fully enter. “As a kid I thought it was ‘cause they were fed table food, didn’t get the nutrients they needed. Now I’m thinking it was something to do with the reactor.”

Cloud frowns. “You mean…?”

“Reactors kill. Worse than monsters do, at least to me. One of the puppies from a stray litter had gotten too close, miles off from here. He wasn’t found ‘til the next day, and just like that the little guy was gone.” Zack’s voice is hollowed out with grim, yet Cloud takes note of the homely twang in his voice, now that he’s back. He turns to Cloud, saying, “I think all that dies finally goes when they’re found. Held for the last time. Then they seep into the ground, wash away in the air even if there ain’t any wind that day.”

(Cloud doesn’t always know what to do when Zack talks like this. Like he’s about to die again and wants his last words to be ones of solidified truth. It happens more often than not.

He doesn’t think of mentioning the wasteland of the reactor, or all that decays in its path.)

“I know I said there’s no bodies here, but we’re still standing over people. I just wanted to make sure none of them were my parents.”

Cloud’s hand finds Zack’s wrist. Squeezes. Then he’s nodding in tandem to Zack’s novel steps, following him wordlessly into a place that neither of them could ever think of calling home.

They pass by the weapon shop Cloud recalls purchasing a few items from the last time he had been here, now stuck in some old metal-diver’s inventory. He and Zack rode all the way from Edge to Gongaga on alternating backs of blue chocobos, green chocobos, trucks, and their rental motorbike: compartments full with the pieces of the Fusion Sword, just in case. Cloud sets himself a small reminder that he’ll have to get something meaningfully molded for Zack soon, perhaps another broadsword to soothe the desire of weight in his hands.

In these thoughts he finds himself going down a narrow path of Zack’s parents. Cloud had asked him to speak more of the two when the trip was first planned, as the only things he’d heard were bits and pieces from when he was ‘sick’ and his small encounter with them a few years ago. Zack’s mother holds a heavy dialect in her gritty voice, louder than Zack’s father’s but no less lovely. Zack talks of his mother as if she’s unreachable, mourning her despite being far from dead. His father is a soft man— too soft for this kind of world, Zack once revered—and is missing two fingers on his left hand because of a wrought firecracker in his youth. They’re both in their fifties, according to Zack’s handheld math, and Cloud can’t help but feel a protruding burst of admiration for the people that raised the being who is brushing arms with him.

He gets it, he thinks. The feeling of holding a child in your palm and pouring all that you have into them.

(Denzel crosses his gentle mind.

The boy sent Zack and Cloud away with little to no questions of whether they’d be back, rather a when. It seems that, for all he’s worth, Cloud’s actions no longer hurt his family’s hearts. Perhaps they’re sure Zack will bring him back, but Cloud thinks they simply know he’ll always return now.)

Cloud’s shoulder bumps into Zack’s as the latter makes a heavy stop. In front of them stands layers of brick and dirt, layers of age-old love and folds of who you once were. He hears Zack inhale through a shaky breath, the rattle of a snake’s tail. The rapidity of his pulse.

“I can knock,” Cloud offers. It’s just a small rasp of his knuckles against splintered wood, but he knows it’s much more than that to Zack.

Zack sharply bites down on his lip with one of his wise canines, dragging another breath through his mouth and letting go of his skin. He quickly looks over to Cloud with both affection and wild panic bleeding into his glassy, glowing eyes. “Could you please?”

Cloud is already raising his fist before Zack can finish.

“Sorry.” He murmurs, finding Cloud’s fallen forearm between their tangled shadows on the red dirt of the village. Zack’s fingers curl over the muscle there, leaving pressure in their wake.

“Don’t be.”

All too soon does a voice surround the inside of the home, accompanied by strong steps made only by the oldest leather boots. According to the lore on Zack’s parents—as the man in question likes to call it—they’re something akin to sentimental hoarders. This fact is telling in the various wooden bird feeders hanging outside the house, made only by the careful hands of Zack’s father, and original windchimes lined with rust built from nails and pipes Zack used to scavenge for in the dirt. His mother has worn the same pair of boots for two decades, because they were the only gift Zack was able to give her years before he left. Zack’s grip around Cloud’s arm tightens near painful as the door creakily swings open, revealing a woman he’d easily mistake for Zack even with his enhanced eyesight.

She looks once at Zack, at Cloud, then back to Zack again. And promptly slams the door shut.

Zack is speaking through the boards of wood at the door before Cloud can do anything, hands uselessly splayed. “Ma? Guys, it’s me! It’s Zack, I’m home!” Nothing. “Can you please open the door?” He yells, voice cracking like a teenage boy; he was once small enough to fit through the back window of the house. “Please,” he adds, desperate and sounding close to tears. His fists wobble against the door.

There’s a small pint of silence.

A shuffling can be heard from the inside, and finally: “How do I know you’se really my boy an’ not some Shinra fake?”

Something in Zack’s insides bursts. He starts pleading, practically gnawing a hole into the door with his words. “Mama, please. Before I left we had that—that big fight, where I knocked over your favorite cacti while I was foolin’ around and broke the pot, and we said a few things we didn’t really mean to each other, and—”

“Like what?”

Zack hesitates. “Like,” he glances at Cloud for only a moment. “Like how I ain’t made for the city life. You said I was too ‘heavy to handle’, and no one in SOLDIER would wanna deal with me like you have to. And I thought, shit. I’d better get outta her hair as soon as possible. But I’d been so hurt that I said— I said—”

Zack falls through the doorway when it’s pulled open once more, but he’s saved by the arms and hands of his mother grasping at every piece of him she can reach. She cries silently into his shoulder after swatting a hand at it, which is enough to get a wet chuckle out of him. The ruckus seems to have attracted more attention then planned, and Cloud finds himself meeting the gaze of a man around his height with thin, circle framed glasses falling slightly off his nose, and when he grins his relation to Zack is made obvious. The three of them are huddling close together like cold chocobos, granting each other the warmth they so crave.

Cloud looks away.

—

Zack’s parents treat Cloud like he’s a friend.

His partner had pulled him contentedly close with a smile so lovesick that it could kill and introduced him as “the one who saved my life,” much to Cloud’s sighing dismay, but it did the job of lessening his parents’ questioning looks and faces of don’t I know you? Zack’s childhood home is noticeably smaller than Cloud’s own, but no less cozy, and Zack’s parents steer them to a circular table near the stovetop where there’s more room to sit and talk. Xena (“Call me Xena, sweet thing. Or Ma, if tha’s easier.”) is still in apparent awe at her beaming son, who animatedly tells Zion (“I’m no knight, Cloud Strife. No sirs for me.”) of what it was like to use a sword for the first time. Under the light of the bulb strung over them, Cloud gets a good look at the two. Xena’s brown skin is covered in freckles and beauty marks, much like Zack’s own, and her dark hair streaked with gray curls into slight spikes over her shoulders, half tied up. She’s got crinkling crow’s feet around her indigo-like eyes, and Cloud wonders if Zack had her eyes, too, before Gaia’s blood was pumped into him. 

Zion is a bit smaller than Xena, both in height and stature, and he speaks through his eyebrows more than his speech. Zack informed Cloud that Zion was from the Canyons; his family has lived there since before the place was given a name. The small bump at the bridge of the man’s nose and his widow’s peak makes Cloud’s chest arch on a sob every time he looks, for Zack’s parents painted him perfectly in the stroke of their own beauty.

“So where’re you from, sweetheart? Up north in the glaciers?” Xena asks, standing next to Zack while Cloud and Zion have the table.

“No, I’m, uh—Nibelheim.”

Xena’s face brightens. “Oh, you hear, Zi? He’s backwater jus’ like me! Would’ve never guessed, with tha’ complexion of yours.” She doesn’t seem to notice the new flush on Cloud’s face, nor does she pay any mind to Zack’s laughter. “Must get real nippy over there though, huh? But like my pa used to say, us country folk gotta stick together no-how. How’d you boys get to be so close anyway? You haven’t taken an eye off each other since you got here.”

Zack hides his smile by running a hand through his hair. “It’s a… long story, Ma. And I’m sorry, but I won’t tell it unless Cloud says it’s fine. The last thing I want is to make him uncomfortable while we’re here.”

Cloud looks down at the mug of Zion’s homemade apple cider that was offered to him. “I’d rather not be there when you tell it, if that’s okay.” 

Xena practically falls apart at the seams. Her look of heartbreak is so abrupt that it has Cloud fearing he’s said something that upset her, then she’s hurriedly shaking her head and sending him a beam of softness. “Of course it’s okay, baby, you don’t gotta do anything you don’t wanna do. We want you to feel at home here. My apologies if I leaped like a touch-me over a boundary,” she says. “Now, what are you two hungry for?”

Conversation flows easily between the Fairs. Even Zion appears to be talkative over their meal now that his family is the way it once was. Cloud couldn’t say he understands if he was asked, because he doesn’t. He can’t exactly recall if he ever did see his own mother after leaving home for Midgar, and if he had, Cloud knows they’d have overwhelmingly been silent together. Zack has been gone for half his life, yet here he sits patting his father’s back during a full-blown laugh at something thoughtful his mother said about Cloud’s low ponytail, all in good fun. He sits like he never truly left the round table—eyes wide with mirth, sinking his shoulders deep into his chair as if he’s trying to leave an imprint of himself in its patterns. It isn’t hard to see he’s beautifully happy, and beautifully Zack, no matter the fact that he’s just in a zip-up hoodie which hugs his skin and a pair of torn straight jeans (courtesy of Tifa).

Cloud gently blows on his spoonful of lentils, wading away in the waters of his own forgotten memories. He thinks of calling Tifa before it’s too late at night, since Denzel started school again not too long ago, and Cloud has found himself missing Aerith on this trip. He’d like to talk to her about nothing special in particular as they always do. Maybe he’ll mention the plant life he’s seen growing around here and ask if she—

“Cloud?”

Zack’s hand is on his knee, concern bleeding through his fingers.

Cloud waves Zack, Zion, and Xena’s worry away, telling them he simply got lost in his head. Which is the truth. But the worry follows after him up until Zack and Cloud make attempts at figuring out their sleeping arrangements. Zack’s bedroom is reached through a hole in the ceiling, much like an upstairs basement. They climb up a fairly stable rope ladder whilst Zack tells Cloud about how many times he made the mistake of jumping down and breaking a bone instead of climbing as a kid. Zack’s childhood room isn’t what Cloud was expecting, for the only decor covering the space is a carpet and a drawer. However there are small, shiny trinkets at the very top of the drawer, Cloud feels like a child itching to grab at them.

Zack’s old bed is big enough for the two of them if they curl up. He tells Cloud about the many growth spurts he used to have, so severe to the point that his parents decided to give him a bigger bed than their own. And something about this tells Cloud of how much Zack was loved in this home, with the sun draped over his shoulders as a shawl.

Love lives here.

Cloud is holding a slightly dusty pillow to his chest and stuttering between the lines of sleep when Zack is finished readying himself, but he doesn’t crawl into the confines that once held him. 

“Pops said he & Ma wanted to talk with me, and I figure answering their questions is the least I can do.” Zack mutters quietly, careful around the silence that has drafted over Cloud. He reaches to pull the quilt Cloud had brought along with them higher up the man’s shoulder, then he’s gasping up a choked noise when he sees the soft patches sewn together—as heavy and weighted as it was the day Zack had found it amidst the many boxes in Aerith’s church.

His heart lurches; a nimble wave passes onto shore.

“Cloud, can you be honest with me?”

Cloud hums, albeit confusedly.

Zack stands in front of the side of the bed near Cloud’s curled form. His fingers stay touching—practically caressing—a patch of the quilt on Cloud’s bicep before speaking. “Do you feel… welcome, here? With my parents? They were treating you right when I wasn’t around? I mean, dunno why they wouldn’t be nice, but I know they can be a lot sometimes, an’…” He can’t help but trail off.

Cloud opens two bleary eyes and rubs the exhaustion away. He’s sitting up and peering up at Zack a little blindly, a little desperate to tell him that no, Xena and Zion are perfect and yes, it’s just him. The cascade of thoughts don’t register as soon as Cloud would have liked, in the minuscule moment, because he’s spilling his ailments onto the carpet of Zack’s childhood bedroom floor before he can stop it.

“They’re nice. They’re perfect. Their home… ‘s perfect,” he swallows. “Makes me miss the bar. My mom.”

(Cloud had occasionally wondered what homesickness was meant to feel like, as an infantryman. He’d been glad to be away from home, where no one stuck to his side like glue or gave him a day to breathe. Not once did he miss Nibelheim, or the rusted truck at its gates, or the taste of the earth waving through an air of mist in his mouth. But nearly every day he had missed his mother and the smell of her hair, her voice singing on weekend mornings, the way she’d tap her foot on the loose floorboard while she put together Nibel wolf pelts just to earn some money, for Cloud. He hasn’t been this far from Aerith since she was given back to him, and the thought alone has Cloud sick with the worry that he may have developed some sort of twisted dependency that probably isn’t too good for him.

And there Zack goes again, staring at him with an impenetrable wall of effort to understand.)

“Let’s call Tifa.”

Cloud sighs. “Thought your parents wanted to talk to you. Don’t blow them off for me.”

“Who said anything ‘bout blowing my folks off, sunshine? They’re down stirring their coffees as we speak! What’s an hour more to thirteen years, really.” Zack pointedly ignores Cloud’s frown and grins to himself, already stepping away to go unzip the side pocket of their duffel bag, pulling out Cloud’s PHS with a small aha!

It gets a simple smile out of Cloud, one that he’s quick to hide with his palm so that Zack can’t feel any satisfaction and stops acting like a rather endearing fool. Cloud wants to think that maybe this is his way of stalling; he might not want to unload everything with his parents after only being with them for a few hours again, and this is an easy way out. Then Zack is coming to sit on the bed next to Cloud as if to prove those thoughts wrong, legs crossed underneath him with the phone on speaker in his hand, but there’s this ‘shallow end of the pool’ kind of look in his eyes that Cloud hasn’t seen for a long time. Not since he was… sick.

This is Zack’s way of saying I’ll take care of you. His subtle, fond way, where he doesn’t want his subject of care to know.

Zack promises beforehand that he’ll make his way down again when they’re all done catching up. So when Tifa answers, Aerith by her loving side, Cloud lets familiarity creep in on him. He lets it wrangle itself around his wrists and ankles, swirling in his stomach like an effervescent warmth, and wills his soul to come out and see.

—

The week passes slowly.

Zack and Cloud spent most mornings in Gongaga taking walks through the village. Gongaga is considerably quieter and brighter than Edge, with its blinding heat and faint blows of wind. The air smells clean enough to where Cloud forgets the wasteland that lies so far from him, yet so close to the town and its haunted people. Zion will join them outside with his walking stick every now and then, mentioning little things of his home in Cosmo Canyon atop the red dirt and asking Cloud if he’s ever been, or if he knows someone else that was born to the Valley of the Fallen Star. He thinks of Nanaki and Bugenhagen, of his family once circling the eternal flame, knowing that next time he’ll tell Zion all the stories he wants to hear. When they’re not with Zion they’re paired with Xena, and she’ll say the most brightest, boisterous things whilst weeding outside that manage to catch full-belly laughs from Cloud’s mouth until his throat aches.

He can feel Zack’s eyes shining on him on their last night in Gongaga. Xena pulls out her old portable cassette player and fiddles with a funk tape as much as it can take, perching it on the sill of the only window in the home. When the first electric rhythm strikes, she’s got Cloud by the arms twisting and turning in her space, clumsily trying to find the pattern in her leathered steps. The fact that she’s a bit taller than him seems to pronounce his struggle.

And Cloud looks—he looks silly, the tension in his limbs making him stiff, the look on his face when he turns his head back over his shoulder to pierce through Zack and Zion’s resounding chuckles (even their humor takes the same shape), but a beam curls into the corner of his mouth when Xena’s face crumbles into laughter as she buries her face in Cloud’s shoulder.

Zack and Cloud sleep with their hearts and stomachs full that night, listening to the far-off croaking of touch-mes deep into Gongaga’s jungle and letting the sounds lull their bodies to rest.

The morning of their leave comes all too early.

There’s a sense of acceptance surrounding their circle of food and affection, and the Fairs talk to each other as much as they would any day whilst Cloud listens intently; it’s not often he has much to say around Xena and Zion, for just a simple expression contorting on his face could tell them everything they needed to know. He thinks that must be what he’s grown to… to love, about them. How easily they can fathom his winces or creased brows. They’ve become something he wants to keep even after such a short time, although he’s not so sure if the feeling is mutual in the slightest. Cloud supposes that Xena and Zion were merely born to love all the difficult things that were given to them: Zack’s ambition, the village’s water well, their home, thunderstorms, Cloud. He hopes that birthright is enough.

When it’s the promised time Denzel expects for them to leave, the four pile outside the brick home’s door.

Xena approaches Cloud first, a glaze over her sad eyes. She slowly puts both hands up to hold the sides of Cloud’s face, and he releases the breath he’d been holding. “I’ve grown mighty fond of you, sweet thing.” Her hands are warm, skin rough with calluses yet tender in the caress of her thumbs underneath his dark circles. “You’ll come an’ see me again, ain’t that right?”

“That’s right.” Cloud promises.

Zion sends him off silently. He smooths his three-fingered hand over Cloud’s hair like he’s petting a needy cat, and maybe they don’t love him just because they feel they have to.

Xena’s face turns hard when she turns to her son.

“Now you watch over Cloud, boy! ‘Cause he—because he loves you about jus’ as much as we do, an’ you know we don’t love you nothin’ small—” Xena’s voice breaks. She starts sobbing in the open, using the collar of her open flannel to wipe at her eyes and nose. Zack takes no time in pulling her close to his hold and squeezing her like he did on his first day here again, like he’s doing his best to make sure she doesn’t turn into ashes or end up carving her own name in the town’s graveyard. Zack gestures his father over to join them, somehow nearly pulling them close enough that they could fall into his chest and stay there forever. Cloud knows it’s what he’d want, if such a thing were possible. They pull apart after a few seconds, regretfully but no less happily to have had it in the first place.

“I made a promise to Cloud’s son that we’d be leaving around this time, and I don’t wanna break it.”

Zack’s words are laced with another promise for his parents. An absence of a goodbye. The rented bike’s rumble echoes past the outskirts of the village, and both Zack and Cloud agree that Fenrir’s roar is much more pleasant than this. Zack’s arms wrap themselves around Cloud’s middle from the back, a sigh tearing through his lungs and seeping into Cloud’s spine.

Dust trails after them as they ride, alongside the path of the morning sun.