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Those Who Loved Us Today[07.05.01] » by Wallwalker Disclaimers:
*****
Aeris kneeled on the crystal dias, praying. She could sense the presence of another - of many others, all watching her intently. But that would make little difference; if she could not speak to Holy, her journey - her sacrifice, would have been for nothing. She wanted to look up, to speak to them, but she couldn't interrupt her prayers. Cloud stared at her, overcome by surprise, curiosity and horror - the latter for what he had almost done to the kneeling girl, and the others for what he was witnessing. He hadn't expected to find her like that, deep in some kind of spiritual communion... She felt the acceptance of her prayer, felt the sudden weakness coursing through her body. Smiling sadly, she'd looked up at her friend, forgiving him for what he'd almost done to her - it wasn't his fault, she knew. They were dealing with a power greater than any that the Planet had ever prepared to deal with. As she started to try to speak, to try to explain what little she could to him, she felt another presence - this one darker than the others, and with a deadly purpose. Cloud watched his former hero swoop down from above, his sword ready to pierce the Ancient's heart - and his entire world shattered. The onlooker watched sadly as the broken hero knelt down and embraced the fallen girl, eyes filling with unfamiliar tears. The presence watched from a great distance, greater than any living being could comprehend - beyond time and space itself. For a moment, it also wished that things could have been different somehow. And you would give anything Time had passed, as it must always do. The Meteor had been destroyed; the world was slowly regaining what vitality remained, returning to some semblance of a normal routine. And the heroes that had saved it went largely unsung, except for a few legends that would inevitably grown twisted and corrupted over time. Tifa walked into the villa, ready to relax a bit more from her already exhausting "vacation" - Marlene was too energetic for her own good, she thought to herself. "Cloud? You in here?" He answered her with a scream, and the clang of falling metal. All traces of the fatigue left her as she realized exactly what the sound meant. She ran around the corner, into the kitchen... "Cloud! What -" "Get away from me!" She realized with a sinking feeling that he was drunk again - liable to do almost anything. "Cloud, look at me. Don't - " "I said get away!" He brandished a knife - a kitchen knife with a blade as long as her forearm. There was a single smear of blood on the tip. "I've gotta do this! I've gotta go find her!" With a sudden thrill of horror she saw a long scratch - not very deep, but deep enough to draw blood - against his wrist. "There was nothing we could do, Cloud!" Tifa was almost screaming, she was so afraid. She'd fought so hard to keep him from fragmenting into nothing when he'd been lost in the Lifestream, and now she was losing him again. She couldn't let that happen. She just couldn't. "She knew that! She knew we couldn't help her! And you know that she wouldn't want you treating yourself like this because of her!" "I know," he managed through the choking near-sobs. He was almost pathetically vulnerable at moments like this. "But I want to go back. I want to help her. She didn't deserve to die that way. No one does, dammit!" The presence felt sympathy for him. She wanted to go down there - to comfort him, to tell him that Tifa was right. Few would know that better than it - she - did. No one leaves you Aeris had been watching over them, ever since she had died - floating in the Lifestream, reviewing the life of her Planet and the lives of her old friends. Tifa had been even more right than she could have known. Cloud's pain had stemmed from his near-obsession with what had seemed like a callous murder - an innocent, gentle girl stabbed to death by a monster. He had been desperate to return to the past, to somehow prevent her from dying that way. But he had been very, very wrong. The sword through her heart hadn't killed her; she had already been doomed from the instant she'd begun her prayer, and she'd known that she was marked for that death all of her life. It hadn't always been easy to accept.
- she was kneeling on a crystalline dias, all alone, her friends gone, eyes closed, hands locked in prayer - "No!" Little Aeris tossed her favorite toy - a little stuffed bear that someone had given her when she was very young, she didn't even remember who anymore - across her room. More tears streamed down her face as the ragged old toy struck the wall with a dull thud. Fear throbbed in her chest as the vision flashed through her head - - suffocating, dying, not able to even move as her body froze and trapped her there, her mind speaking to a power that she could barely even comprehend - "I'm not gonna die! I'm not gonna!" she wailed, curling up into a tight ball on her bed. "And you can't make me!" She was sobbing too loudly to hear Elmyria racing up the steps, and didn't even look up when she felt her hand on her back, rubbing it soothingly. "Aeris? Is something wrong, baby?" "Mommy," she whispered, "why'd you haveta go?" The little girl was too terrified to realize how much her words would hurt her foster mother. "Why can't you make it go away? Why? Why?" "Aeris..."
She'd only been a child - too young to understand the urgency in those visions, too young to see them as anything but nightmares. The poor little girl that she'd been hadn't cared about the Planet, hadn't cared about anything but saving herself. Years of being prodded, scarred, and chased by the Shinra had already started to wear on her, even at that tender age. All she'd wanted was to be a normal little girl - to be able to run and play with friends, to live a normal life without hearing strange voices speaking to her, to be able to go to bed and sleep at night without dreaming of her own death. Death had been a scary thing then, before she'd realized exactly what it meant. It had been the end of everything that made her her. She'd be gone, everyone would cry over her, and she wouldn't be able to comfort them; she'd be lost in the darkness, forever and ever and ever. Years had passed before she'd started to wonder if it was truly so horrible as that - before she'd learned to truly listen as the Planet spoke to her. After a while, she'd just managed to accept that as her fate, to realize that it would be best not to let it destroy what life she'd been given - to try to be happy and make others happy for as long as she could. She'd tried as hard as a child could try to live without regrets, to love life until the visions came true, without forcing herself to try to understand them. Wisdom had come to her after death, accompanied by comprehension. She had learned that, instead of the eternal darkness she had feared, the Lifestream was a place of light, a place where souls gathered and flowed throughout eternity. It was powerful, and truly beautiful. The knowledge of her ancestors had taught her many things about the crisis that her world had almost fallen prey to, as well as the necessity of her own actions. . Holy was one of the greatest powers that the Ancients had ever created, equal to the destructive power of Meteor; using it at the wrong moment could well have meant the end of all life on the Planet. Like Meteor, it required a sacrifice - not out of some uncivilized blood rite, but out of necessity, to keep it out of the hands of those who were unwilling or unable to accept such a consequence. It was simply a normal, necessary failsafe for a dangerous weapon. Aeris had been fated to be the sacrifice, to kneel on that altar and speak to Holy - and lose her life in the process, as her body froze and died. Her mind would have died as well, but much more slowly - and with the full knowledge that her friends would have followed her, would have found her in that state and known the truth about her sacrifice. The way that she had died was probably the better way - a quick, painless death at her enemy's hand, sparing her friends the knowledge that her life had already been forfeit. They would not have understood the truth, not without the visions that she'd lived with all of her life. But the failsafe had failed. The Ancients who'd created them hadn't counted on the arrival of the Calamity and the near-annihilation of their entire race, or the defection of their people who had grown sick of searching for their Promised Land that had preceded it. Nor had they expected the Black Materia to fall into the hands of one whose cells had been so radically mutated by the Calamity that he would not die when the magic took hold. Sephiroth had only been twisted into something other than strictly human; Aeris had seen him, had watched as Cloud and his friends had destroyed the monster.
She had seen so many things. Time didn't really exist for her anymore. If she'd ever wished to, she could've gone back to speak to herself as a child, to help ease her passage from rage to acceptance. That kind of meddling, though, might've irrevocably changed their history, and that was something that she wanted to avoid. But she had been guiding the spirits of her ancestors as they intercepted the Meteor, had watched the planet nearly fall apart before they had managed to destroy the weapon. She had been to the distant past, watched her ancestors land on the planet, carving an existence out of nearly nothing and becoming, in many cases, too prosperous to ever wish to leave at a Planet's whim. Her friends' ancestors had chosen to leave the others, to pursue a more sedentary existence and to sacrifice most of their powers to do so. The entire universe was spread out before her. All of the Cetra had shared this destiny - that of offering themselves to the Lifestream that had created them and blessed them with the power to hear its voices. They were its eyes and ears, the sapient mind that controlled it in times of need - the ones who created new lives, new planets. Someday, when they'd accomplished their task, they'd be allowed to create their own world, to rest for an eon or so before returning to their task. Such was the pact that the universe had made with them, their Promised Land that they would someday find. But there was still much to do - the Lifestream was still reeling from the shock of fighting Meteor. It would take some time to recover, and until it did recover, it would need her guidance. She was suddenly aware of two other spirits watching the scene before her, watching their own past. The Cetra blood may have been weak, but there was still enough in them to allow them to remain distinct from the rush of souls that joined the Lifestream every day. They both radiated an outpouring of love and friendship, one that the Ancient gladly returned to them. After all, she would have given them as much in life....
"I don't think that she was lying, Cloud." "But... but she said that..." "She told us that someday, when everything was all right again, we'd all be together." At that point in the flow of the Planet's time, they had been much, much older. Cloud's golden hair had faded and thinned to almost nothing, and Tifa's flowing black locks were gone, replaced by a cap of short silver hair. After years of searching for answers and finding little more than pain, the two had finally managed to find that they could create a kind of peace through acceptance. She took his hand, noticed the tremors that even his weak grip created. Age had taken its toll on them. "Maybe she was right," she continued slowly, her voice cracking. "Maybe she... knew something about what was going to happen. Maybe she's waiting for us there." Cloud was silent for a moment, absorbing the thought. "I'm scared, Tifa," he finally whispered. "They told me in the army that I might die in any battle. I knew that we were probably gonna die when we went up against Sephiroth. But... that was different." She nodded her understanding. "Yeah. That was what we had to do." "And now we're just fading away. When we were fighting... we didn't have time to think about it. But now we have time, too much time." He looked up at her with cloudy blue eyes; age had robbed him of much of his sight. "I don't want to die, Tif." "I know." She wrapped her arms around him, pulling his head against her shoulder. "I don't either. But we've got to try to believe in her, Cloud. We can't just give up hope; we've got to at least try...."
Again, Tifa's intuition had given her a truer insight than she could have ever known. She and Cloud had always been with Aeris, even before they had been born. They had also transcended time. The three were all together again, even after fate had denied them a life together as mortals. All of them were there. All of Aeris' old friends, the ones who had fought with her against the Meteor, were there with her, and many of the others as well - Ifalna and Gast, Zack, and even Tseng were all there. And even Sephiroth - the true Sephiroth, not the twisted caricature that had been created by the fusion of human and Jenova cells - was with them, somewhere in the fluxing stream of souls. There was no punishment in the Lifestream, only rebirth and re-creation; what most called evil was merely another aspect of life, one that could not be excluded without creating an imbalance among the others. She had been telling the truth. She'd known that when their time on the planet ended, they would return to the Lifestream, and they would find that they had always been with the ones that they had grown to love there. The three could not linger there, watching memories of what they had once been. They were the Planet's guidance, the ones that insured that life would continue. They were needed elsewhere. But even as the three separated, they remained secure in the knowledge that they would always be within a thought of each other, that they would always remain a part of each other. It was enough.
End
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