Title: Second Chances for Broken People
Wordcount: 560
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Notes: When you're broken, there's always a lot to put together. You just need the right person to help you find the pieces. A Clouffie in the works: this is basically my introductory chapter/outline, and someday I hope to put the rest of it together.
In this world she is sixteen going on twenty and has been forced to let go of the past that no longer exists in exchange for a past that never was. She has a new family here, a family who should family in all the ways that matter but blood. There is no Godo, no Wutai, no Sephiroth, no Avalanche, no duty, no Shinra, no Reeve. There is no Vincent.
Her Vincent.
They had been lovers when Gaia had ended, drawn together in the manner of desperate survivors: loving each other with the desperation of the nearly-dead. She had died in his arms, ribs crushed and drowning on her own blood as he cradled her and desperately fought with the unspoken need to ease her suffering (she had told him not to, that she would fight to stay alive and with him for as long as possible, and that she would hate him if he made her struggles worthless). She woke to healing green energy and an Aeris who was far too young to be the one she knew.
She woke to heartless, and a family she had never met: Aerith and Squall.
Despite herself, her confident statement that she wasn't so weak as to forget, she finds herself forgetting, slowly, until Cid showed up. She threw herself at the Cap'n with more than just a hint of desperation. She bawled, and clung to him, and muttered about tea and rockets and airships as he cradled her and cursed until Aerith slapped him upside the head. Then he talked of Shera and Denzel and Barret and Elena and Marlene, and she told him about Reeve, Reno, Red, Rude, Rufus, Shelke and Vincent. And neither of them asked of Cloud (Cloud who had been the first to warn them with a text from a PHS they had never again been able to connect to; Cloud who couldn't be anything but gone even if they knew that he must have survived, too).
And then they avoided each other, wounds too raw and hearts too broken to stay near such a constant reminder of everything.
And then she found Cloud. Cloud with Vincent's cloak; with Vincent's arm; with Vincent's cold-dead mannerisms. When she found him at the coliseum she threw herself at him, anger and desperation and—"Why didn't you find us? Where have you been? SPIKES…Where is he? Is he alive, ohgodohgodohgod, Spikes, AVALANCHE."
"It's only us, princess. You, me, and the Skipper…Tifa might be out there." His hand brushed her cheek. "I was with him at the end."
She broke.
It took a year for Cloud to put the pieces back together, and two years before her smiles regained that tinge of genuineness—but a year for Cloud let go of the cloak; the hand; the past. Two years for them both to move on. She was nineteen going on twenty-three when she donned the clothes she had abandoned for Reeve's dreams for Gaia.
She was nineteen going on twenty-three when her old crush came back full-force, because even with that fugly black apron thing, Cloud was a dish. He knew it, too, and held back (not at all) in teasing her about her tendency to get rosy-cheeked around him. She was nineteen going on twenty-three when she allowed herself her the new start.
There's nobody to stop them this time.