He felt his tongue try and say the words. Felt his throat pushing them towards his mouth and past his lips- but there was nothing more than a dying breath. his heart felt nothing.
Nothing but a sea of agony over the loss. Nothing but a world of regret for his lies. For his broken promises. For every moment he could think back, and say 'if I had just walked past', 'if I had just turned back', 'if I hadn't taken that turn'. It was guilt. It was honor. It was devotion...
It was never love.
Her voice danced around him, the flowers of snow and sun swaying with the soft breeze. "Don't look so sad..." came her words, "your eyes don't deserve this sadness. I didn't want to see you only to get a frown and lines of guilt! I needed to tell you."
Blue eyes came from his shoes to stare at the apparition, at the ghost within his mind. The beautiful girl with the pink dress and the eternal smile, her hands clasped behind her back, head tilted as she watched him. She was hollow. Transparent in front of him, leaving him to wonder if she was real at all.
"I cam to tell you. My heart," her body turned, the long braid and her bow bouncing as she swept herself around, "ached from never being able to say it, the same way it ached every time I denied that Zack was dead". Her giggle filled his ears, his heart pounding tears to his eyes.
He'd let her down. Why? Why did she still speak to him?
Feet walking around the growth at his feet, around the only patch of heaven Midgar had left, his hands reached for hers, locked behind her back still.
"I needed to tell you I loved you, Cloud". The sad words came like a wave of cold, washing over him and causing such heartache that even he could not fight his pain, the tracks of tears leaving streaks through his unwashed face. "I needed to let you know".
How he wanted to tell her. How he wanted to say it for her: He loved her, he'd always lover her. He could lover her more than any man she'd ever known, even Zack, who had always poured his heart and soul into all he did. He could do better.
But, as his fingers reached where skin should have been, where warmth and where home could have been found, the woman's body changed; the pink in her dress shifted to black and white, skirt and tank top, while her legs were longer, her body shapely, hair darker and loosely tied.
Say it Cloud...It isn't my heart you love. I've always known this...So say it now, here where no one will tell you you're wrong, where no one will reject you, and you can keep your heart from aching...
The transparent figure that had once been the flower girl now turned her head, the childhood shock Cloud remembered the new woman wearing now covering a face of different proportions, eyes of different shades.
"I..."
Cloud, you can't go on feeling guilty. You can't go on feeling alone...
Oceans of blue stared deeply into her pools of red: such deep, beautiful eyes. So full of romantic fantasies, worries, truths, responsibilities
Love. Love for him. Love he knew had warmed his heart, and was drawing it from the cold.
The giggles came again, but this time it was not the confident, bemused sort, with sugars in the douses, and the scent of lilies, but instead a shy, hiding, emotional sort that made him think of chocolates and roses.
Tell her...
His eyes watched the woman's mouth move as she spoke, her face turning pink with blush and embarrassment, but her smile growing ever so slowly. As the smile grew, the light in the room followed, until there was nothing but white, blurred, softened, hugging him like blankets and pillows in the middle of the night.
Like the glow spilling under the door.
Spilling in from an over-watching moon outside the curtains.
From the soft tans of her skin, and the pink in her face. Of her shoulders, her arms, her hands gripping his, from where he'd let her rest, her worries left to him, her tears soaking into his shirt, his ears open, but his mouth left shut.
Shut to words he wanted to say, and hadn't been able to. Hands left to fit hers, but not to hold, grip, squeeze for lack of words and pressing of emotions.
And now she stirred in her sleep, in the chill of Neo Midgar air, body looking small and alone beside him, but fitting the spaces he could not fill. The curve of her jaw, the slope of her nose, the corners of her lips...
Aeris had clutched his heart, teaching him what love could do to a person. How much someone could mean. She'd given him his first steps in a crash course.
This woman, this girl from years ago, when they had been young, and foolish, and so full of passion and dreams, had opened the locks. She'd stood back and watched him follow a girl he'd never learned to love. She'd felt she'd lost him. She'd watched him climb his mountain and fall down the other side, being there to pull him up and then give him his space.
She'd loved him.
Cloud found his hands running down her arm, careful not to press too hard against her. She was angelic in sleep, and he didn't want to wake her. She'd given him a world to build off from, and he'd turned it away countless times. He'd broken her heart. He'd disappeared. Came back. Broken her heart again, only to repeat all the offenses.
Never before had he thought of it that way. He'd always watched her. Silently thanked her. Cared for her. Hurt when she hurt, felt pain when she felt pain, but it had all been kept behind cold eyes. It all was kept behind a face that wasn't his own. For years it had been a friendship. A passionate, care filled friendship that knew no ends. A friendship he would have died for, if ever the need had been. If he could save her by taking his life, he would.
He'd never thought of it as love. He'd never guessed it. And now, with Aeris' whispers, an apparition from years before, before the North Crater, after her death, in the halls of her church...When he still wore the uniform of her fallen love, who died trying to save them both from a fate that swallowed the man...
When he thought he should lover her, and knew he couldn't...
When, now, her memory felt closer than ever, and that moment decided to visit his dreams...
Bare hands softly touched the woman's face, index finger rolling down her cheek, eyes in awe. How much she had given for him...
Tifa's deep eyes flickered open, sleep giving them the quality of true beauty, true angelic grace. Childhood hearts, spilling from behind such pure eyes...
"Cloud?" she whispered, her voice uncertain, merely a whisper next to his body, "What time is it? Why haven't you been sleeping?".
Her body stirred as if to move, but his hand carefully came to rest at her shoulder. With a confused look, she went to speak, only for his other hand to silence her, finger tips covering full lips.
A part of her looked frightened, another left to shock. He'd gotten himself this far, and now her expression threatened to scare him from what he had built himself up to do.
But as his fingers ran down her lips, tugging at the bottom slightly, and falling back to the bed, her whisper was lost to a sea of emotions, disguised at thoughts he could not decipher.
"..Cloud? Cloud, why do you look so lost?" instinctively her hand went to his cheek, like it often did with Denzel, and Marlene, when the children were upset. Eyes widening in surprise at herself for carrying out the action, she went to pull her hand back, but his stopped her.
Her body tight with the rising confusion and increased beating of her heart, as her mind battled with reality and the denial of, the breath came for words
His lips cut them off, trembling a little, the knot that had tied itself inside his chest tightening around a block of ice that claimed to be his heart, ridged with fear.
The brief moment where time stopped from his terror ended with an explosion of light and warmth that cast off his cold and his knots as the woman in his arms pressed back, the tears on her face touching Cloud's skin- or, were they his own?
And now, the words of the woman he had lost, and who had brought him to this point, made all the sense in the world:
He wasn't alone.