Rust
A/N: The climactic fight scene of Advent Children is so much weirder once you've played the game. Combat strategy centers around materia! Going into a serious fight without backup constitutes a crisis situation! Yuffie brought materia, why is Cloud fighting the Big Bad alone, with a major handicap?! (Sephiroth doesn't use anything but his sword either. It's a goddamn exhibition match.)
I always give Nanaki the Black Materia at the Northern Crater. It would just feel weird giving it to Barrett when you have an official Guardian of the Planet right there. Not that it makes any actual difference, but hey. This fic brought to you by the number thirteen and the color red. ^^
Cloud went back out to the cliff where Zack had died, the day after Aerith's healing rain fell, after Sephiroth returned and Cloud defeated him, and the Remnants perished. He'd gone to sleep at Tifa's place for the first time in months, the night before, and slept without nightmares.
There were a lot of things to get done in the aftermath, and Cloud had spent the morning doing some of them—rounding up remaining Geostigma cases from all throughout Edge and conducting them into the ruins of Sector Six to visit the remains of a certain church, spending time with Denzel, fixing up the damage his high-speed chase the day before had done to Fenrir. Tomorrow he would start on the first of a planned series of delivery runs across the surface of the Planet, saddlebags loaded with bottled water, carrying the cure to all the sufferers of Jenova's corruption.
But right now, he had an errand here.
Maybe he lingered a little. But it had been a long time since he had spent any time alone with his memories that wasn't devoted to waiting to die and hating himself for all the ways he'd failed. And your memories made you who you were. He knew that better than anybody.
He wasn't sure if Zack was still listening, or even Aerith, after they'd bid him farewell in the church yesterday, but he hadn't had a chance to really thank them for all their help.
(His living friends had kept their distance from the fight, and he realized most of them weren't prepared for a fight against Sephiroth anymore but most of them hadn't been actively dying yesterday morning, either. It had been Tifa's idea, it turned out. He'd told her for future reference that while it was nice to be the only one in immediate danger, he would never not appreciate ranged support.
I wanted you to have a chance to prove you could do it yourself, she had said. Sometimes he wondered how Tifa could think it was more important to protect Cloud than the world, especially that kind of protection that might get him killed, but they had all been there, after all. If he had gone down, fighting alone and without magic as he had been, the Highwind could have swept in and disgorged a tiny army for Sephiroth to face. Realizing this had almost made Cloud feel silly for charging onward at all costs, the way he had. Almost.)
"I'm going to make sure," he said, at the end of an hour, as the sun began to drift toward the western end of the cliffs. "That you aren't forgotten. Both of you. Even when all of us are gone. I'm going to tell your story to everybody who will listen."
And maybe in other people's mouths it would become a tragic romance, or an addendum to the story of Cloud and his friends, the one that kept being told over their protestations and getting stranger in the telling. Who knew what people would do with an idea, once you gave it to them? But that wasn't something you could control, and that was fine. So long as they remembered.
Of them all, after all, Aerith was the only one who had really saved the world.
The light was low and golden when Cloud heard the shift of grit behind him, and turned smooth and ready, hand on the sword at his back—the Remnants were all probably dead, but he didn't care to be shot in the back again today.
The interloper was unmistakable, though, for anyone but a friend—nobody else in the world looked like Nanaki. "Cloud," he said, pausing with one forefoot in the air, in the middle of a step. Set it down.
Cloud let his hand fall. "Sorry," he said. He'd probably looked kind of threatening.
Nanaki shook his head, tail lashing. Was silent a long few seconds more, staring Cloud down. Spoke. "You died again."
That…was refreshingly direct, actually.
"I guess," Cloud agreed. He guessed he had. After struggling so long to come to terms with dying without being able to save anyone, it was odd to have had death come just when he'd started being ready to live, gather him up—and put him back again. He was working to feel grateful to have the opportunity to keep living in the world that was so full of things he loved, more than guilty that he got to come back, again as Nanaki pointed out, after so many other people hadn't. He was doing fairly well.
"You need to stop that."
Cloud smiled. "I'll try. Pretty sure it has to happen at least once more, though."
"No hurry, though," said Nanaki. Whose human grandfather was old enough that every day he kept living was a surprise.
"No," agreed Cloud, because he really was grateful to be living. "No hurry."
They didn't say anything more for a while—Nanaki was good like that; he conversed happily enough but was comfortable with silence once he ran out of things to say.
After the silence had had time to settle, Nanaki turned west toward the sinking sun, Cloud and the Buster Sword and the ruins of Midgar all falling to his right. "Sunset is my favorite time of day," the Guardian said, and sat down. His tail curled in around his ankles.
The sun kissed the western peaks and blushed red at its own daring, staining the stone under the two friends' feet almost as ruddy as the cliffs of Cosmo Canyon.
There was a place on the withered plains below where, if you stood looking east at sunrise, you could stare up the corridor of the long, ancient cliffs toward the grasslands and have warm golden light burst over you as the sun left the distant sea, even as the land to the north and south remained shrouded in the dim of false dawn. Cloud liked sunrise best of all hours, he thought, but sunset was beautiful, too.
In some ways it was better, because it lasted longer, a slow fade of color into color without erupting into the harsh brilliance of day. Especially in mountain country—the highlands on this continent would never be the same as the ones around Nibelheim, of course, but the abruptness of dawn and dusk in flatlands never ceased to surprise him.
"Are you okay now?" Nanaki asked him eventually, after they had stared at the sunset until only a narrow sliver of orange showed under a magnificent display of yellow, pink and purple ribbons.
Cloud's mouth bent up at one corner. "Yeah."
Nanaki's great head swung slowly away from the sky, to contemplate Cloud. "Are you really?"
"I said I was, didn't I?"
"Hm. But I have some reason not to accept it right away, when you say you're fine. You understand, right?"
Cloud's mouth twisted a little more wryly, and he shrugged. Thinking back to that day in the grotto at the heart of the Whirlwind Maze, inside the Northern Crater, and the trusting way Nanaki had looked up at him, concerned, eager to help, oblivious to the warning signs of his ongoing utter mental breakdown, or at least willing to believe in spite of them that he was fine, if he said it in a firm voice.
You know I would have just hurt you until you gave me the Black Materia, back then, if you hadn't trusted me with it, he could have said now. Meteor wasn't your fault, not even a little.
His disappearance and subsequent catatonia, and the urgency afterward of dealing with Weapon and the end of the world, had meant there had never been any real discussion amongst their group of that day in the North, when Cloud had allowed Sephiroth to break him, and given in, and helped his nemesis achieve the goal they'd been struggling to stop. No discussion, no comfort offered, and no apologies beyond the string of them Cloud hazily remembered laying out before he rose up toward Sephiroth's chrysalis with the Ancients' most terrible weapon in his hand, regrets extended as if they could ever be enough.
I'm sorry about that, he could have said again now, as the sun slipped below the curve of the Planet. Or even Sorry I keep worrying you.
"You're growing up a lot," he teased instead.
Nanaki flicked his tail. "I have lived for fifty years you know," he pointed out. "Grandfather is having a party, next month, to celebrate. It's a foolish fuss, but you're invited."
"Wouldn't miss it," said Cloud.
"I'll trust you to show up, then," Nanaki said, standing. The rust-red of his fur dwindled toward grey in the gloom, where the light of his own flame didn't fall.
Thanks, Cloud thought. It was more foolish than anything that his friends kept trusting him, but…he didn't always fail. And now that it hurt a little less, he really did appreciate it. "Say hello to Bugenhagen for me," he said.
"I will." Nanaki shook his coat out, a strange, full-body shiver, and then sprang into a run. He vanished quickly among the dusk-shrouded rocks, but the flickering gleam of the candle-flame end of his tail reappeared curving along a lower level of the cliffs after a while.
Cloud went back to the blade standing upright in stone, a grave marker for a forgotten hero. The stars were beginning to show themselves overhead.
Use brings about wear, tear, and rust, said a voice that might be a ghost in the Lifestream, or just a ghost in his head.
But rust came even more rapidly with disuse.
Cloud was pretty sure the deterioration was all just on the surface still; a few hours with his best polish and he should be able to get the blade shining as bright as it used to again. He wrapped his fingers around the red-bound hilt.
Live, said Zack.
"I promise," said Cloud. And pulled the sword free.