steel-blue marionette

A/N: This may be more the sketch of a fic than the actual thing, but I've seen AUs done more sparsely and enjoyed them. And do not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Da?

They said Sephiroth had been lost because he didn't have a partner—that engineering a SOLDIER to Drift alone had been a flawed plan because your partner helped you stay sane.

And maybe that was part of it, but Cloud knew it was the least of it. He'd seen Sephiroth standing before the kaiju with his jaeger's chest wide open, his arms spread, the look on his face like a man coming home…

…and then he didn't remember anything, but he knew enough. He knew what had happened. He knew what they'd done, to make their perfect pilot.

He knew.

Aerith was so happy to be able to fight again. She'd spent four years with her jaeger and her partner both missing, grounded as the invasion ground on, and the Buster Blade coming back was amazing enough without a compatible copilot coming with it. She was so happy, and she tried to hide from him how much she still missed her old partner. How much Cloud reminded her of him.

Mostly hid it, but it was hard to hide anything completely in the Drift, unless you could stop thinking about it entirely. Cloud didn't pry, but he knew. It was alright. He didn't need to be first, to be best. Just good enough.

(Tifa was disappointed, he knew, but Aerith had the prior claim to the jaeger, and the two of them synced so well it was as if they'd been made for it. It felt natural even the first time. Like they'd done this before.)

They didn't need Shinra's alarm systems, or fancy docks. AVALANCHE had its own hangars, and Aerith always knew when a kaiju was coming.

They couldn't save the world like this, but they could keep it going just a little longer. They could buy time. That was all the jaegers were for, buying time. Temporary heroes.

But never disposable, and when Jessie and Biggs and the others were crushed and burned by Shinra, by executives who would rather SOLDIER got the credit for a kill than keep their allies alive to keep the world turning—Cloud realized there was a limit to how much you could hate the monsters. They were like a force of nature, after all. There was nothing like humans, for hating. Or for hate.

The tall silver form of the Masamune, the jaeger only Sephiroth could ever have piloted because inside of it there was only one pilot's rig, had been seen again. Stalking along the horizon. Breaking into the Junon fortress like a kaiju itself, only to grab President Shinra in one long-fingered hand and cast him down on the stones so that his head broke open.

There was a spiteful satisfaction in that—hah, you made a monster and for once the consequences came to you instead of the people you were meant to be protecting. But SOLDIER was weakened and disorganized now, and Rufus Shinra had different ideas about what jaegers were for. The coast wasn't all equally valuable, after all. People would take their safety for granted if you always stopped the monsters out at sea. They were more useful scared.

And AVALANCHE only had one jaeger left.

And now the Masamune's long, impossibly sharp blade had razored through the left half of Buster Blade's chest, as if the armor panels didn't exist, and—and Aerith was gone. Cloud would have expected to be swallowed in the screaming pain, to be dragged down with her to the brink of death or past it, but. There was only serenity. Focused, certain purpose. Aerith's mind lancing out and a single keen instant of agony—

And then he opened his eyes on the grease-reeking cockpit, newly invaded by sea-water and blood-stench and the brilliant slab of metal that had punched through the wall to the left of him, and cut out the Buster Blade's heart.

Instinctively he tried to stagger back, and—the jaeger moved. Both sides of it.

The first thing he felt on the heels of shock was rage. Now he could move? When minutes before, when Aerith had needed him, he'd been frozen solid under Sephiroth's gaze, holding her paralyzed as well, now that she was dead and it should be impossible, he could move?

It should be impossible.

He was the only one alive in this jaeger, and—

Sephiroth smiled. It was insanity, having the heart of a jaeger carved open like that, exposing the most fragile working part (the pilot) to the danger of the outside. But it let him let Cloud see him smile. "Cloud," he said. (Why, why did he recognize him, why did he care, what happened after Sephiroth joined the monsters at Nibelheim? What did any of that matter when Aerith—) "You are…"

Masamune's sword swung up. Inexorably, desperately, hypnotically, the Buster Blade's did the same.

Metal screamed against metal, and this was nothing and everything like fighting a kaiju, and even when Barret and Tifa came charging up in the cobbled-together rattletrap Dragon Laser to back him up, the monster was still a monster beyond telling.

Cloud wasn't sure they won. But the Masamune vanished under the waves, leaking kaiju blue, leaving him with a final terrifying two words, and Aerith's cold limbs hanging in the rig beside him.

A puppet.

Cloud looked up at Tifa.

Who was asking him to stand, to face the sea, the sea that rose and fell and washed at mind and steel, the sea that had swallowed Aerith. Who was telling him he had a responsibility to his jaeger and its sword. "I don't want to go out at all," he said. And it was so foreign, not wanting to fight. Not feeling like everything would be easier out in the water, with danger all around just asking to be cut apart. The absence of that feeling burned hollow.

Maybe that feeling had never really been his after all, though. "But I can't go out alone."

For any other pilot, that would be like saying water is wet. Unnecessary. Not an argument, a request, a plea.

But Cloud wasn't any other pilot.

He could take his jaeger out alone. It would move. The other rig still and empty as a corpse beside him, it would move. He could do it.

And he could not.

He never wanted to endanger another copilot by being what he was. With his inability to raise the sword against their enemies when it was needed most. But still less could they risk unleashing a second rogue jaeger on the world.

"I couldn't keep any of my promises," Cloud said. "I…can't make any new promises yet. Will you promise me something? Tifa?"

She sank onto one knee beside him. It put their faces almost level, hers tipped up just a hair. "Of course."

"Promise to stop me." Her eyes widened, her lips shaped round around a no. Cloud ached to grab at her hand, to reach out with something, anything. He couldn't. "That's something Sephiroth never had. I may not be as good as him, but being alone made him…an easy target. So…."

Tifa wrapped both her hands around his left, the one without a burn healing in the palm. "I'll save you," she promised. "I'll always save you."