Title:Eden
Characters: Red XIII
Rating:PG
Word Count:742
Summary: Gameverse. Here a city died, and a garden blooms in its place. Post-game, one-shot.

edited 16/09: for clarity.

He runs, free like the wind. In the moments between when his paws slap the hard ground he flies, rising up into the glorious blue sky. The sun splashes its golden bounty upon him. For five hundred years he has soared up this path, trod his mark into the soil, and it is in his wake his children struggle, clumsy but strong. The air is sweet and full with the wet smell of the soil, recently soaked, the peeking green grass, and the panting of the cubs. It is full with life and he sucks in it in great, gasping gulps, because it is the best he has ever tasted in five hundred years and it will only keep getting better.

He feels a stab of guilt then, as he slows down, sees the end of the cliff beyond him. Below the green vista of the plains stretch to the horizon and disappear, and in its center listing to its side like a dropped discarded flower the city lies, dead and dulled between the clinging hands of green. The streets were once choked with humans, and once long ago when he had summoned the courage to wander its broken roads he could almost hear the stories, lost and echoing in the air, cut off before their ends by the fire from the sky. He could almost see the ghosts, walking around, bewildered, having lived too little, died too fast. Only it's been five hundred years and even his nose can't pick up the scents any longer. They're gone. They're all gone. And he is the only one left.

He bows his head, as he always does; in respect for the bones that had been crushed into the earth and sealed forever into their metal graves. Sometimes he thinks: if only we had been a little faster, killed him a second earlier...but these are the thoughts of a fool, and he shakes them away with practiced ease with the flick of a ear. Time lies thick and heavy about this place like hanging curtains, and only in this place he can truly believe that he is here, in the present; that he has made it, and that, yes, a lifetime ago he did all those things and was a hero—one of many heroes. He misses them, had stood over every one of their burials, until he dug the grave for the last of them and nudged the soil onto the polished coffin lid. First the memories were sharp, pricking things, drawing blood when he nudged too near; now he wears them next to his heart like trophies, with pride. He has grown old, and he has grown wiser.

He looks down again, sees how the grass had sprung up and wrapped itself around the blackened metal, the little yellow flowers that from afar gleam like distant stars within the curled-up shell. Perhaps he might be old enough to stand here and see at last the shining grass drag the past back where it belonged and lay it to rest. Definitely his children would be here that day, and then like him they would marvel at the intricacies of time, how five hundred years felt so short and so long at the same time. How it felt possible to reach through the veil of time, and touch the past again...

He who had once been known as Red XIII to his long-buried friends feels his eyes sting, and the scene before him vanishes into a smear of green. But he smiles, keeps on smiling, because there is only beauty waiting in his future, and he will go on running forever into the unknown in pursuit.

The cubs bound up the slope, kicking up clouds of dust. They call for him impatiently, wanting to run, feel the wind beneath their lifted feet. Once he thought that he had been the last of his kind and had been content to fade away with his human friends.

But now he has something to live for, something of his own to pass into the future, and with a great howling laugh aimed at the sky that had once spat death upon the earth he lowers his head and chases after his children. They squeal and scramble down the slope swiftly. But they are fast now where he stumbles, for they are young where he is old. He can't ever catch them now. But he is fine with that. He runs, the wind pulls at his ears, and he is content.

-end-

Author's Notes: Yeah, another one-shot. Seriously, this was what I had thought happened when I finished FFVII: that Meteor had flattened Midgar like a bug just before Holy managed to muster up enough strength to boot Meteor back into outer space. It was, like, the most ambiguous and frustrating ending ever. At that time, AC and the rest of the spin-offs hadn't popped up like bad pennies yet, so I was free to speculate. And since there's no way I'm letting spin-offs, canon or otherwise, crush my speculations, this theory just sort of bounced around my head for a few years until I got motivated enough to net it and make it real. Yeah. Just a little side story of How It Came To Be. Also, I'm now writing so many one-shots (next time, concerning the crazy, crazy insanity of Sephiroth just as he's about to chuck a giant glowing rock at his abusive dad) that I wonder if I shouldn't just stick it all into a collection or something.

(And, for those among my pathetically small readership who still check on Alone now and then, I'm working on it. Yes, really. This time.)

~T. Axile