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She watches him fall.
Her name tumbles from his lips in a desperate cry. He reaches out his hand, grasping at the ever-growing space between them. It gnaws at the steel bars around her heart, and oh… how she yearns, how she hurts. If only she were someone who could love greedily. If he and her were people of flesh and blood and nothing more, with all the time in the world. Here, she had only had minutes. Even with the knowledge that he would find them, she had let herself linger. She had wanted to make it last, no matter the consequences.
Indulge now, she had told herself. With the knowledge that you’ll starve later.
Aerith knows it was carelessly selfish, and so as Cloud fades into the void, the reassuring smile she hopes he will remember her by falls from her face.
And that’s it. The end of what could have been. The end of her selfish dream, and maybe the only good thing in her life. And with it, the burn of another’s stare like daggers in her back. The foreboding tread of footsteps growing ever nearer.
“Sephiroth,” she murmurs in acknowledgment. “I’m afraid you’re too late.”
“Is that so?” he hums. She knows him well enough by now to recognise the twinge of annoyance concealed beneath his arrogance.
She holds her head high as she turns to face him, even though her fingers are trembling around the ribbon still clutched in her palm.
“I admit your little trick was clever. But though my conscious mind was stripped of those precious memories, your whispers cannot touch me here. I imagine that by now you have realised as much.”
The setting sun catches his visage, warming his features and making his hair shimmer like the most precious of metals. His lips curl into a slight, lopsided smile, though his eyes belie his true feelings. Snake-like pupils flicker with dark malice, with anger.
“And what of your precious Cloud? You would toy with his mind so callously?” his eyes glint dangerously. “Time and again you prove that you are no better than me.”
“Maybe I’m not,” she holds his gaze firmly, choosing not to rise to his accusation. Her grip tightens around her ribbon, nails pressing it deeper into her closed fist. She’s resisting every urge to remind him that unlike her heart, his is a terrible, mangled thing. “However, he’s stronger than you think.”
“That remains to be seen,” he chuckles. “Regardless, I must thank you. You gave me a rather vital clue during this game of hide-and-seek, little Cetra.”
He comes to a halt, near enough now that she can make out the little flecks of emerald green lining his irises. He reaches out a gloved hand to briefly toy with the floral pin on her jacket, and her breath catches in her throat.
“I now know his greatest weakness,” his voice goes low.
“You know nothing, Sephiroth,” she mutters.
He looks so mortal, so human, up close like this. A human capable of feeling. What she finds in his gaze now is something far too coherent, far too simple. He’s fatigued - like her. Not defeated, but worn down, just scraping by. She finds herself thinking, and not for the first time: who can blame us? Each and every day they move one piece an imperceptible distance across this infinitely expanding board. Today, she was one step ahead… But tomorrow? Neither of them could say.
For now, there is nothing more to be done. There’s an odd kind of comfort in the thought. That although somewhere else other parts of her remain locked in this never-ending nightmare, the river of time thrusting her ever forward - here, in this liminal space she occupies in the wake of her victory - and his defeat - everything slows and stutters to a halt.
She doesn’t like that it’s happening with him though. Especially here. In her most special, cherished place.
So, she closes her eyes, bending the Lifestream so the world around her shifts and contorts into something new. She fully intends leave him behind as she slips through the portal of light she creates - but at the last moment her hand seems to move of its own accord to grip at his wrist and pull him with her.
She doesn’t really know why she does it. She never seems to know why, with him.
Maybe she doesn’t want her memories of the church to be defiled by his profligate presence any longer. Maybe she wants to delay the inevitable, when she’s left alone again to suffocate in her own solitude and fester in her anger. Maybe she wants to unpick more of his myriad complexities to give herself a leg up in their next bout. Or maybe it’s something deeper. Something she’ll never understand, no matter how hard she tries.
Indulge now, she reasons with herself again. Starve later.
When she opens her eyes again, they’re on the flower hill overlooking Midgar. She’s been here once before in waking - though, unlike in that world, the flowers here have withered on barren soil.
“Why…?” Sephiroth stiffens in her grip. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think him bewildered.
She promptly lets go of his wrist. “I don’t know.”
She watches as he brings his other hand to adjust his gauntlet there, thumb pausing to touch where her hand had been. It’s such a small gesture that it could be accidental. He’s looking at her strangely, in a way he hasn’t before. Eyes widening as if he’s seeing something she can’t. Unable to withstand the intensity of it, she turns away.
Silence hangs between them, and it's oddly charged. Wrought with sharp, brittle edges. She finds herself twirling her ribbon between her fingers again.
“Why do you resist your fate, Aerith?”
She’s taken aback, for a moment. Partly by the question, but mostly because he rarely calls her by her name - and certainly never with such melancholy… or perhaps wistfulness? She lets the sound of it roll over her, feeling... suspended. Floaty, stark and scraped open, like some secret deep within her has been exposed.
She dares to look at him again, only to find that he, too, has turned his back to her. When she eyes his silhouette against the gentle pink hues of the evening sky, she’s transfixed by how his shoulders slowly relax, rising and then falling as he takes a deep breath. How his arms hang slackly at his sides, his fingers flexing delicately against his palms. It’s almost like he’s dropped the weight of being himself… no, not dropped. It’s been lifted from him, just barely, the spectral shadow of it still hanging somewhere above them, ready to crash down at a moment’s notice.
She realises she’s staring, and she sucks in a small breath. He’d asked her a question.
“I don’t resist it.”
When she moves to stand beside him, she does it slowly, carefully. Not getting too close, lest she burn. When she’s near enough, she steals a glance at his face. His gaze is distant, perhaps contemplative - and then he looks at her, and it’s sharp, focused. Like he’s peering into her soul. Like she’s the only thing that exists in the world. It’s a little unnerving, how he’s capable of being miles away one second, and profoundly present the next.
“Then, you deny that you seek to change destiny?”
She shakes her head. “I merely deny that destiny exists in the way that you seem to believe. It’s not… immutable. The things our planet encompasses are not meant to last forever. You are the one who resists this fact of nature, Sephiroth.”
“The trivialities of life and death do not apply to me. I will endure,” his arm brushes against hers - or is it her arm that brushes against his?
“Then so will I - at least until you can endure no longer.”
“Good, Aerith. Very good.”
He doesn’t pull away from her touch. Instead, his fingers appear on her waist like they’d been there all along. She can feel his shallow breaths tickle against the slope of her neck, and it sends a shiver down her spine. Her fists uncurl unprompted, sending her ribbon fluttering to the ground.
In her head, she knows that something about this is so very wrong. Everything about him is so wrong. And yet… it stops feeling wrong when it’s just the two of them like this, with nothing between them but empty air and words left unsaid.
A beat of silence. Then his breathing stops. Like it’s taking all of his concentration to flex his grip and bring her slowly around to face him. Like it’s taking every muscle in his body to be gentle with her.
She likes it, in a way. That she’s the object of his restraint.
Cloud was gentle by nature. Zack had learned to be gentle. But Sephiroth? His gentleness feels stilted, controlled, pulled so taut that he might snap at any moment. She finds that she’s not afraid of the way he clutches at the back of her neck, at her waist. His hands are warm, impossibly warm. Warm and undeniably mortal, his touch couched in something familiar, something comfortable. Like an echo of some distant memory she can barely recall. A memory of lifetimes and lifetimes ago, nestled somewhere between life and death and rebirth and death again, so deep that she’s almost unable to grasp it. To meet his eyes now is to drink in calm: sea-green in the low light of twilight, and still like deep waters. Drawing her to him, like the ocean rising inexorably to the moon, swells pulled up and up and up to the peak of high tide.
How many years has it been? The odd thought flashes through her mind, its origin unknown. Her heart batters against its cage. Haven’t we changed?
Had they? Maybe not enough. Maybe never enough.
“Tomorrow, you’ll pray for Holy,” he says quietly now. He’s giving her this look that’s suspended somewhere between wary and tender. It’s familiar, though Aerith isn’t sure where she recognises it from.
“Tomorrow, you’ll try to stop me,” she replies. You’ll pierce your sword through my heart, she does not say. You’ll pierce your sword through my heart to shatter his into a million pieces.
“And I’ll succeed,” he cants her head back, lightly presses his thumb to the pulse point of her throat.
He’s underestimating her. That’s good. She can work with that.
Instead of responding with words, she closes her eyes - base instincts telling her she doesn’t want the conversation, only what comes next. Base instincts remembering what her mind cannot.
Indulge now.
Starve later.
All thoughts trickle out when he presses a slow kiss to her lips. His grip tightens, fingers splaying out along the small of her back, pulling her closer. The last, whispering fragments of hesitation flutter away, and she kisses him back, body softening against his, arms flowing around him as if pulled by a current back to well-known shores. She’s kissing him back, and yet the guilt she expects does not come. Instead she feels her borders changing, somehow - shaped and reshaped by scattered, formless memories, anchoring her to him. Memories, memories that come quick and fast now.
Memories of meetings beneath cold laboratory lights. Memories of soft, sweet words. Of laughter, a special secret that no one else knew of. Of moonstone eyes alight with mirth. A brief brush of fingers. An innocent kiss on the cheek, sweet and blissfully ignorant of the horrors of the world. Memories of escape. Of the rain, soaking through her. Her heart fluttering in fear, and then like flower petals on the wind when he’d held her, reassured her.
She twitches when he breaks contact for a breath, then yields once more when he returns with the firm pressure of tongue and teeth. She stifles a small noise, a thrill of starry want sparkling from the place where his hand buries into her hair all the way down her spine. Oh, how achingly acquainted she is with the way he runs his tongue along her her lower lip, the way his fingers massage gently into her scalp.
Does he feel it too? Are his senses are overcome with the taste of her, the taste of all they once shared?
Memories of the weak blue light of dawn, when she would blink awake to catch him rustling about their camp, all careful and delicate as he checked their equipment, or packed away this thing or that. Memories of the way he looked whenever he realised she was watching - that ghost of a smile that would crinkle at the corners of haunted eyes, that slight tilt of his head beckoning her from the warm cocoon of her sleeping bag. He’d ask if she was okay in a hushed whisper, and she’d nod in spite of the chilly air prickling her skin and the clattering of her teeth.
A reddish flash of light filters through her closed eyes, pulling her from her reverie. Above them, the rift in the sky has started to flare and flicker turbulently, straining against the sheer weight of the Lifestream. It won’t be long now, until the load is too heavy to bear. Until candescent destruction tears through the heavens, through the ground, through their souls. Until her memories of him are buried once more in the deepest of unreachable depths.
It’s the last thing she wants, so she pushes onto the tips of her toes, pressing deeper into him, greedy and insistent. He comes up to cup her cheek, and she feels the faintest pressure of fingers against her jaw, as if he’s trying to mollify her, to steady her.
But Aerith doesn’t want steady. She’s afraid that slowing down will mean stopping, and she really, really doesn’t want to stop. Stopping means forgetting.
Yet even as she kisses and clings to him frantically, she can feel her mind fragmenting once more, the roar of the falling sky ringing in her ears. She’s forgetting if she ever told him she loved him. She’s forgetting if they ever grew old together. She’s forgetting her grief, the remnants of a love that had nowhere left to go.
The inches between them crack open, tearing him from her grasp. Her hands grip at empty air, the knotted cage around her heart bending and twisting out of shape. Had he betrayed her? Had they been enemies, just as they are now? Had he sought her destruction?
He calls out her name at the precipice, wild and desperate.
She doesn’t get a chance to offer him a reassuring smile before time turns to dust and the world shatters beneath her.
Eyes welling with anguish, he watches her fall.