Prologue

Would you do it with me

Heal the scars and change the stars

Would you do it for me

Turn loose the heaven within

[Nightwish - Ever Dream]

There was no sound but crunching snow and the sandy hissing of snow on an endless frozen tundra. The ice plain stretched in every cardinal direction with unending brightness that sent lasers of pain through his eyes. In all directions, the nothingness offended his very sense of direction, leaving him resigned to purposeless walking in circles. It was so featureless, his eyes actually strained to find some spot of color or hue other than pure, painful white. It was like staring at a painting that seemed unfinished, only to discover that no artwork is. He merely shut both eyes and kept moving forward - for what else had he to do but perservere?

Beyond the whistling wind, as he marched, his toes losing feeling to the frozen cold, his boots armored in ice and lances of cold, cold snow.

On his way to the Promised Land, he had found himself here. The one-winged angel couldn't fly here. His strength were ripped away like his body warmth in the rapidly brewing storm.

Without ceasing his march, he said softly, "I must find shelter, or I'll freeze to death out here. Wherever this is."

The cold. It calls to you, does it not, Sephiroth?

The same familiar grating voice. The sound of it filled the busy, demon infested cavern of his mind, reverberated. It was his own, taunting him.

"I don't know what you mean," he lied calmly, tightening his cold hands into white-knuckled fists. Leather wasn't very good at keeping anything very warm, much less the knotted muscles in his calves becoming sore with endless walking, or the tendons in his hands growing hard with cold.

Suddenly he stopped, felt the creeping dangerous threat of falling unconcious grasp skeletal fingers around his skull. His vision grew dark.

Do you remember when you died, and your cold body awoke to the touch of Black Materia?

Do you remember?

Why did that voice sound accusatory? A jabbed finger in his direction? You are a failure. His throat closed on a sour, acrid lump. He fell to one knee, but he refused to move. A noiseless movement caught his attention directly in front of him. The Planet had rejected him, expactorated his tattered corpse from Its core to walk here in this color-bleeding nowhere.

There shouldn't be anyone out here. Unless I'm seeing an illusion. I've gone snowblind; I shouldn't be able to see anything.

But there they were - vertical shadows that resolved into people-shadows, growing closer. Several dogs yapped and ka-yiked in the closing distance. He was still on one knee and not very sure he could stand again. He locked his elbow, leaning on his hand, buried elbow-deep in snow. A brisk wind blew him sideways. He let it.

So be it. Resigned. He let the numbness strip him of pain caused by cold, and it was gone.

----

All alone. Just laying out in the snow as if laying down for a quick nap, but judging from the blue on his chapped, shapely mouth, he was freezing to death. So she had pulled his body onto the dog sled and brought him back, calling it a day. It was no use trying to argue with the Planet. If it had called her to bring this man to her fireside, then it would be so.

The only reason she stayed cramped up against the far side of the cave, as far away as she could, was the familiarity of his face. After all, the last time she had ever seen his face was very briefly before the pain in her abdomen and the blood pouring from her wound had driven her to sleep that would last forever.

Or so she had presumed.

Just as she had woken up before, she was in this cool cave, warmth all around her, naked, with a fire burning nearby. The hooded faceless stranger who helped her was long gone. He never spoke once, and she wasn't not entirely certain he was a male. The light smoothness with which the creature had moved about the warm cave lent it an alien grace.

Finally it had left her alone with the supplies to make it on her own, including a pair of dogs that pulled her tiny sled nimbly across the snowfields. The figure's cloak fluttered whenever it came and went, bringing back food to return her strength. Eventually it returned with a stave. Worked with metal, figures etched into its entire length, she took it solemnly - having a good feeling it was a gift and the last of the very few she would recieve in her new life. Then he was gone.

She began to hear the comforting voice of her Planet once more - a child's timid voice, fearful of a beating, but telling her that someone was coming to see her, but he was too weak. She had to find him in the snow before he fell into death once again, and then she would have to go even farther to seek him.

This the Planet decreed. Find the man, and bring him back. There was no other indication.

In the warmth of her cave home, decorated with whatever she had found out in the wilderness to at least make it comfortable, the man lay bunched in rough wooly blankets made of mountainous ramskin and the skin of a bear she had found.

A silver waterfall of hair gathered itself near the bottom of the little raised cot, moisture standing out all over his forehead. She never saw his eyes reopen for hours. In between making him drink snow water and feeding him bits of chewed leaves dug up from the snowbare patches along the mountain, he continued to breathe laborously and never opened his eyes.

A day had gone by before she began to worry he might die anyway.

"I know you," she whispered fearfully on the morning of the second day, sleepless herself. She used a metal container the cloaked savior had given her to press some water against the man's lips. He shuddered; she recoiled, staring in fear. Where is this feeling coming from? Her body ached, right through her middle, with a hard unmoving persistence. "Please wake up and go away... I'm so scared of you and I don't know why."

Near that afternoon, he began stirring in a restless manner. She pulled at least the bearskin blanket away. He was too warm, she realized. The fire was kept built nice and high, and as soon as she had done so, he relaxed. He breathed more and more evenly, until his eyes gently fluttered open. Sweat cooled on his forehead. Both eyes illuminated his cheekbones with a sickly marine glow. Then the cat-slitted pupils swiveled and fixed on her as she cowered on the other side of the cave.

His mind began to resolve the past events into some sensical manner of chronological order. He saw a figure in the snow, heard the sounds of dogs barking. Now he could smell the dogs, who sat up and wagged their tails near the entrance of the brightness in the cave he slept in. He saw the woman, recognized her face from somewhere, even as fear contorted her features. Vertigo and nausea whipped through him, a sour froth gathering at the back of his throat.

"Hello?" she ventured softly. Her bravery availed her. No trace of fear in her voice. She scooted forward, clutching with white knuckles a long metal stave. "I found you outside. You were beat up pretty bad, but... you seem to be healing very quickly."

His body ached in a thousand different places. He tried to move his hand, discovered his entire arm was immobile. He shifted, and the sickening tilt to the room made him halt and swallow hard. "Where."

"This is my house," she said in a joking manner. "The mortgage is pretty cheap, but you're welcome to stay as long as you don't cause any trouble."

Her attempt at levity helped him find his center, even if seeing her face made the stone ball in his chest crackle and crunch in on itself. He levered himself up onto his elbow, shaking his hair loose. His entire scalp felt crackly and sticky with sweat and perhaps even blood. The decaying stink of it made his stomach turn. "Who are you?" he asked. "You brought me back here?"

"Yes, I did," she answered, sliding around the first question as though it were an enormous hole about to swallow her up. The truth was, she had a hard time remembering. The cloaked man had never told her. "Are you hungry? I've boiled some stew for my lunch but you can have some. I'll never eat it all."

One of the dogs barked for attention. She stood up, patted the animal, then reappeared from the glow at the front of the cave. "It's sunny out today. I don't expect a storm, but you should still stay inside until you're a bit stronger. Don't want you to fall down the mountain."

"Then..." His stomach gurgled with renewed hunger. In a few moments, a little bowl with a rough spoon was before him. With shaking effort, he managed to feed himself - giving her a deadpan stare that kept her on her side of the fire.

"Take your time," she offered gently. "It's hard to get over the snowfields. It's like a big eraser and nothing stays still." She brushed back chocolate brown hair with honeyed highlights, twisted it into a tight neat bun against the back of her head. He watched her do this without speaking, but the actions, the soft firelight on her hair, made his heart easy.

She's afraid of me. Whether he knew why didn't matter. It was true enough to the point that he kept his eyes away from her for a long time, like keeping a wild cat at ease. Fear was a reasonable reaction to his presence. Then again, having trouble remembering his own name gave him reasonable cause for concern as well. What if everyone was afraid of him and he would never know why?

And why did he still feel that strangling pain in his chest when he looked at her, even met her gaze for a brief moment? Strength trickled into his muscles like a weak rainfall, not like a deluge. He closed his eyes, warmth filling him from the inside and flowing out. Rest was the only thing left for him to do; the beautiful, sorrowful woman that feared him would have to wait.

-----------

In a few hours, he was fully awake once more, with more bodily functions demanding to be attended to. With a monumental effort, he managed to get up without waking the woman. He found his clothing in a state of repair. She had sewn with painstaking effort every tear in his trousers, every rip in his cloak, with what appeared to be fine strong fiber. Whether it was plant or animal, it didn't matter. It was fine work and it would withstand mild mistreatment. There was a bowl-shaped dip in the back of the cave, and bars of hand-made soap at its edge. He took some stones super-heated by fire and brought in buckets and buckets of snow from around the edge of the cave, and when it was high enough to climb in to his waist on his knees, he washed quietly. Dried, encrusted blood stubbornly resisted being removed, but after a good hard scrubbing and a soak, the flakes finally slipped away, turning the water a tinted brown. He sat by the fire to dry, revelling in the fresh prickly clean sensation sliding over the skin stretched down his spine, his back, his shoulders. When he was dry, slid the dizzyingly familiar leather. They even smelled clean.

She must have toiled for hours trying to make these clean. He gazed at the russet-haired woman while her chest rose and fell in even, deep motions. He kept bating his own breath until she took another breath - and another - as if he expected her to stop breathing.

She would look much more familiar, dead.

He clutched at the side of his head. A dull throb began in his temple. His eyes closed as he dressed, mechanically going through the phantom familarity of dressing, his skin encapsulated in the clothing of another man, so it felt. These were not his clothes. They belonged to a murderer.

Sephiroth breathed, more at ease once he was clothed. He had no idea whether to say he was modest, or simply practical. Was it practical to be modest? His eyes caught the glow of a small basket, which held some herbs tied with bits of string similar to the string which had sewn his clothing. With snow, he found a dented metal pot and boiled some water. By the time it was boiling, Aerith stirred and rolled over, rubbing her eyes, her arm curved behind her head. When she saw him by the fire, she gasped.

"Be careful! You'll burn yourself!"

"I may be a man," the white-haired man retorted gently, "but I know my way around a kitchen fire. What's that?" He aimed his thumb back toward some other containers. "Is there anything I can cook over there?"

"There's some salted meat... but nothing very big." She slid her arms down and tried to hide herself under the blankets, clearly enjoying the warmth of rest.

"Is there enough to make more of that stew?"

"I don't know... wouldn't hurt to look..."

He discovered that there were indeed more rations, but not enough to make a totally filling stew. He made what he could, boiling together herbs and ingredients that the strange young woman had managed to scrape off the frozen mountainside. She sat up, bunching the bear fur blanket around herself.

As he handed her a bowl, she sighed, "I think we had better move into town at last."

The spoon fell back into his bowl. He sat cross-legged, since seating arrangements were otherwise lacking. "Town?"

"Yes. There's a town, near the bottom of the mountains. I was told that there's an enormous crater in the mountain, and crossing it takes days - but it's not in our way, so..."

"So why don't you live in the town?"

"I... I just haven't moved there yet. And the dogs can't carry everything there."

"All you really need is money. With money, you don't need to take all this with you. We can get more things when we're there." Suddenly, he was smiling at her, and it felt good to be smiling.

"But I don't have any money." Aerith shuddered a little. "I don't like the idea of money."

"I don't either." He had nothing to add after that, and ate meditatively, before he said, "We can travel there as far as we can with the dogs, then let them go. We'll sell whatever we find along the way. Right?" His eyes lifted, cat-slitted pupils shrinking. "The money will help us do... whatever it is we're meant to do." Whenever he tried to put forth a solid plan to do something, he had no idea where to begin. He had only dim recollections and horrifying memories that startled him back to the here-and-now with chills other than cold.

Aerith went very still. Her shoulders froze, her breath caught. The sunlight glowed from outside, and the dogs cavorted together on the top crust of snow, yapping and happy, never straying from Aerith's cave as if something deeper than loyalty made them stay. Sephiroth fed them his leftovers and played with their velvety soft little ears.

"Will you come with us?" he asked softly. "Lechku and Nechku... are those your names?" He fingered the dark collars around their necks with names stitched clumsily into them. Their fur was thick and rough, but by their ears it was soft. When he took a second look around the plains outside the entrance of a cave, he finally noticed a dark splotch and a rising darkness that he assumed was a range of ice-capped mountains. Was that the town the girl was talking about?

Suddenly there was a steadily increasing sensation at his temples. He rubbed his forehead, before he pulled himself together, and turned to face the young woman who both entranced and made him ache with stolen memories. "I suppose we should get packing what we'd like to bring."

"Are you sure you're all right to travel? I mean, you were pretty sick." She was standing near him, but clearly out of arm's reach. She peered at him, her eyes possessed a strange glow for a moment. "No, you seem fine."

So they silently picked together what they wanted to bring, put it on the sled. Sephiroth jogged alongside the sled as it went along at a quick clip, while Aerith rode on the side. Sometimes Sephiroth would hop on, but the dogs would tire quicker that way. They were much larger than ordinary dogs, which made the silver-haired man postulate that they might be tamed wild dogs from these rugged cold landscapes.

As the distance between the town shrank and the sun swirled above them, the pair spoke very little. But the bond of a strange fate was already there.

"Do you think the Planet brought us together?"

Sephiroth nearly stopped altogether, but his arms and legs moved instinctively, and with fluid ease. He was moderately tall. His lungs burned from the chill air, but he was warm, the sun and fast pace warming him. His coat was bunched up now and tied down on the sled. If he sweat too much, it would freeze and cause immense discomfort.

"I don't know." He kept his eyes on the town, before he began to slow to a trot. The dogs, panting, slowed down, and Aerith peered at the tall silver-haired man, windblown locks swaying to and fro. She still felt a trace of fear. The pain of familiarity, the ache of nostalgia. Something about him struck an ancient, silent chord that vibrated without resonating enough to tell her what it really was. It prickled at her chest and between her shoulderblades.

And they had an entire town in which to figure out what that chime of meaning came from and what it would portend.