Cloud stood on a lone battered cliff overlooking the chitinous industrial ruin of the great city of Midgar. In the ten years since Meteor's fall, nature had not taken back this barren spot. It was like a memorial to what had happen there, a monument to the peril that had echoed throughout existence itself. Cloud remembered feeling those forces, all working to save this planet and it's denizens from death.
Cloud thought much about death. He thought about all the busy people bustling about their lives looking for anything to distract them from facing the inevitable. He thought about the all the faiths and sciences seeking any and all information they could, searching desperately for whatever meaning they could find and apply to the tedium of life and the eventuality of death. He thought about what it must feel like to accept that death is coming, to see it realized. But the specter of the inevitable did not haunt him like it used to.
He found himself in the barren clove atop that cliff often. He reflected on lives lived and lives lost no longer out of mourning or pity, but out of respect. The same respect he felt nature giving that dead clove, a stake of remembrance to what it had fought for and sacrificed for the right to exist. It was reflective to the part of his head he had donated to the memories of his lost friends and comrades, a plaque he put in his mind of the fogged images of the dead, the ones who had sacrificed their right to exist.
But the milky silk ghost of melancholy haunted Cloud no more, and the hazy glazed images of the lost in his mind no longer reinforced the grand emptiness of death. Death was a shrill, sad beast but not a malevolent one. For what better to reinforce to joy of living then the knowledge of the ending, what better to sweeten the bust of the fruit of love and life upon the pallets of the living than the bitter taste of resolution and a great and powerful end. For the living hold the future in their hands, a future they will not posses but pass on to the next. Life is a fight for what you cannot have, but a fight worth the struggle and trouble it bears upon the heart, the mind and the soul.
Cloud knew death would one day seize him, and on that day he would lower his sword and accept the release. Not out of dread or surrender, but because of respect. The same respect nature gave that barren clove raised above the new life surrounding the corpse of Midgar, and the respect he had given the dead. Cloud smiled as rays of sun breached the overcast skies about the clove.
Because he did not accept death as an ending. Endings are meaningless and simple, and Cloud knew life was anything but meaningless and simple.