I've been working on this for a while. Just a sort of introspective piece about Cloud's thoughts during the game, nothing special. Anyway, I hope you all enjoy it!
DISCLAIMER: If I owned Final Fantasy, I don't think I'd be struggling to pay rent.
When he first meets her, he is young and foolish; bruised and broken without knowing it at all. When he sees her, smiling, sun framing her face, cheeks in shadow, eyes looking right through him, he feels it for a moment, those leftover cracks.
He has no friends, not really, not then. There were people that tried to care, pushed toward his heart and in ways he did not acknowledge, he was grateful for such things. He liked to act as if he cared for no one, but he can't pretend to her, not even with his first words.
He remembers love, then, as her voice echoes in his ears and her smile brings out his own; he remembers family, and friends, like indistinct shapes and ideals- no longer forbidden or forgotten, but something to be sought. Still, he does not understand.
He promises to protect her, the resilient flower growing amid the muck and grime of avarice and cruelty. He knows, even then, that he could not live with himself if he failed.
He was such a fool.
Her strength is not measured in weapons or kills, (though she is no stranger to death; in fact, she knows it better than anyone) or the great power she does possess, but instead with her very heart.
The words sound childish if he says them aloud, even just to himself, but it is true. She joins him on his journey, and with him, finds friends. That she had been as friendless in her life as he was another wonder in and of itself, for who would not wish to be her friend? Still, as they all smile and fight together, he starts to realize that he'd shut himself away from the best of things, with more still to come, because of her.
One by one they push his pieces up, finding them in the most obscure of places, holding them out toward him, but still they are unfamiliar. It is her that starts to line them up, smooth hands not affected by the ragged edges, cradling each piece with care. She'd seen through him from the start, though she didn't fully understand all that was hidden; even he hadn't known, then.
With battle comes blood and promises of death; they chase a murderer, a puppet master with his own strings still attached. In the murderer he sees all that he might have become, if not for her. If he'd truly forgotten friendship, denounced love, and lost his scattered pieces for all time.
Still even with their- her –care, he crumbles more, looses himself in a seductive whispering voice and overpowering rage that is not his own. He hurts her, nearly kills her, but still the flower hardly wilts. The murderer gathers ultimate powers, and she runs after the murderer, alone.
He meets her in his dreams, standing in a shining wood, her darting between trees while his eyes struggle to follow her, even as she looks back and smiles, promising to return.
That is the first time she leaves him, and again (as he always seems to do) he does not move fast enough.
When he finds her, she seems to be waiting. She does not lift her head, and yet he feels as if she knows his every thought, his every weakness, and for a moment he cannot move; he needs her, and it takes her kneeling in the light, summoning powers to save them all, that makes him admit it to himself. He cannot wait to go to her, his feet cannot move fast enough, and yet the moment that he reaches her, there is something above, pulling the strings on his shoulders and back, lifting the heavy sword above her head, and he wants her blood with every fiber of his being, wants to bring the sword down and rip the petals off of that flower.
But it is not he that drops a sword. At the last moment it clatters away, clear voices of those he's come to love bringing him back to himself, if only for a moment.
A moment is all it takes.
She smiled at the end of everything
The murderer falls, and there is a bloody sword pointing toward him through her stomach, and she jerks, as if in surprise, and he does not move as she falls forward, her eyes closing for all of time as the blood pools and a scream leaves his mouth and the murderer smiles.
He looses himself all over again. Looses himself in his failure and sorrow, the coaxing voice ever in the back of his mind. Sometimes, he thinks he hears her, too.
Still, his friends carry on. They fight, drag, him along with them. They don't give up on him, and in some part of his fractured mind he thanks them, loves them, even as his memories overlap.
He was a first class soldier (no, he failed)
His name is Cloud (why does he remember Zack?)
Childhood friends (she was hardly there).
He falls. Forgets friendship, light, love. Forgets words and identity and what he was fighting for.
Who am I? Tell me, Aerith…
She was in his dreams, in faint murmurs and brief touches, ghosts, flitting in and out of his mind like a badly tuned radio, as if for the first time, she could not find him.
He is lost, broken, surrounded by people who love him but cannot reach him.
A puppet.
By the time the whispers start to fade, the world is almost as broken as he was. Lying in wait for its destruction. He knew now, because of his friends that he had almost pushed away, almost lost (just like her) that he was no soldier. No hero. He was a living lie.
But the world…with all of its people, and his friends, the world she had wanted to save, needs someone. He has to cut his strings and fight.
The second time he meets her, it is only for a moment. After all the fighting and the blood and fear and loss, he stands among the tendrils of the lifestream, and suddenly, she is not a whisper or a faltering presence; she is there.
She reaches for him with a delicate hand, ready to pull him with her and he cannot believe that after all this time she is here and suddenly he knows that everything, everything-
"-will be all right."
Before their fingers can touch, she is gone; no, he is gone, back with the living and his friends. The people who need him. The people he loves.
She had led him back, as always.
When it mattered most, she had found him, and now it was time for him to return the favor.
"The promised land…I think I can meet…her…there."