Memory wasn't something he had much faith in. For Cloud, memory had always been a hit-or-miss kind of thing; at best a slapdash collection of fragments, at worst a cacophony of voices and images, each one screaming its version of truth, contradicting the last until his sanity fled into darkness, no longer searching for truth, only for silence. Some of the quote unquote "biggest" days of his life were nothing more than a haze of sound or light to him. Some weren't even that.

So it was completely out of character for him to remember that one day so well.

Really, it was mostly the water. God, he'd never seen water that blue, even on the shores of Costa Del Sol. Intense, blinding blue, not dark, but somehow serious. Solemn. Water that swallowed your eyes, focusing even the floor a hundred feet below with perfect clarity. When he was a child, the sky had been that same open clear blue, matching the shade his eyes had been before he joined Shinra. When he was little, he'd thought the sky would always be there, always waiting for him, arched over like a womb, soft and sheltering and pure.

Now, at 21, he had stood over water that same sky shade and consigned to it the body of the one person who'd brought that innocence back to him. The one person who'd brought color into Midgar, of all charcoal-dark and ashen places, and in so doing saved his life before she even knew his name. Even 100 feet underwater she hadn't lost that smile, the one she'd carried from the dirtiest trashpile in Midgar to the altar of Holy in the Forgotten City.

Maybe she wouldn't have smiled so damn much if she'd known when she died she would leave the entire Planted undefended and him in particular blindingly, cripplingly alone.

Cloud shied away from the selfish thought. She'd never been selfish, or not that he'd seen; the least he could do was return the favor.

He remembered carrying her out of the city. He remembered someone's impromptu suggestion:

"She should go in the pool."

She'd been so light, like a broken bird in his arms. Her hair, slowly unraveling from its braid, had brushed like burnished silk thread over his hands as he slid them out from under her, when all he could do was stare, stone-faced, as the water swallowed her up and took her away.

Nearly everyone else had been crying, or at least choked up, even Vincent's wooden face a little paler than usual- all Cloud remembered was a frigid shock, far off and yet somehow nestled deep inside his sense of self. After he'd released her, he'd waited for the grief to come, and the devastating loss and madness... But all there was was a slow, chilly ache from that same place in his core. He'd waited and waited to cry, or scream, or somehow let out the maelstrom lying barely beneath his skin...

Only now, after everything, was he beginning to thaw. Not melt, just thaw, slowly, until he was the same Cloud he had been before the Forgotten City. Sometimes he had this dream where he was back in the pool, floating there, staring down at her body. It was only in the dream that he could cry, and if that wasn't some kind of ironic, he didn't know what was. But when he cried, his tears dripped down off his face and into the water and glowed green, perfect Mako green, and stained the water all the way down to the bottom.

Yeah, maybe that was ironic. Or maybe it was just sad.