Notes: I wrote this years ago for Samhain-inspired ficlet event and only just dug it back up again. Someday I might find the sketch that went with it.
Follow The Light
Aeris stepped out under a blood red sky. The dried earth cracked and crumbled as she passed. The sun loomed large in the west, a gravid ball of red flame, hovering close without drawing nearer.
"So it ends this way after all."
"Everything ends this way, Cetra." Dark tendrils coagulated beside her. "It is the way of things."
"You never give up, do you?" Aeris turned to face her nemesis. Sephiroth affected a shrug, more akin to a ripple of his insubstantial form.
"You certainly never did." He drifted over the barren rock. Dark threads of his being plunged hungrily into the cracks, seeking any remnant of precious life to sustain them.
"There's nothing there," Aeris said. "It's all dried up and gone."
"Except for us."
Aeris looked away. "It's the way of things, like you said. Everything lives, then it dies."
"Even planets," Sephiroth answered needlessly. The paler strands of long co-opted lifestream floated around him, framing a translucent face.
"Even planets." Aeris sighed. She drifted aimlessly a while along the stretch of rock. This place had once been Gongaga, lush, rich with life. But as with all things, that life crept past its prime and faded, weakening while the sun grew large and rosy above. Sephiroth was content to watch the girl walk for a while.
"You miss it, don't you?" He would have sneered but long eons of reviving himself, chasing after eternity, had stripped that from him.
"Wouldn't you" Aeris turned back to him. The red sun's light shone right through her. "If you'd spent your entire existence helping life to thrive here, wouldn't you miss it when it faded?"
Sephiroth was silent. Aeris was hardly more than a shadow herself, the last remnant of pure life energy on a dying world. It must have been hard for her, these long ages standing guard in the lifestream, guiding spirits onward, waiting to thwart him at every turn. Cloud she had sent back so many times in so many forms to return Sephiroth's determined, battered soul to Gaia's core.
One by one, her friends' essence had all scattered to the currents, droplets lost in an ocean. They had been everywhere, in every leaf and bud and blade of grass, her legacy of life. Even Zack, strong as his sense of self had been, had joined the flow eventually, rising again and again, with Cloud more often than not. They had, after all, been only human.
Now it was down to the two of them, with barely enough Lifestream between them to be more than shades on a dead rock. The battle was at an end and victory was hardly absolute.
"I do miss it," Sephiroth said. Aeris blinked at him. "I miss life," he said. "I miss purpose. This… There's nothing here for us." Really, what was left for a guardian of life on a dying world? What was there for a would-be god with nothing to be god over?
Aeris turned away from him, facing into the sun. "It's not all gone, you know."
"I know." Sephiroth hovered behind her. "They're out there." Fragments of Gaia's life still grew, far away, where the first space colonies had been sent into the void. Out there, life existed, if not thrived, the drifting product of a search for a new world when it was understood that their own was fated to die. Sephiroth bent low and whispered in the woman's ear. "We can follow them."
"What?" Even after all these years, she still kept her eyes a brilliant green. Sephiroth almost smiled.
"This barren earth. We could follow them, go into the void. Find a new sun and forge a new world out of the ashes of this one. We could begin anew."
Aeris bristled at the temptation. "It's what you've been wanting all along."
"And now there's nothing to lose." Sephiroth smiled. "There should be strength enough left for it between the two of us, if we're careful." He saw the flash of realization and knew at last that he had won.
"In a moment." Aeris nodded, moving closer. His dark tendrils sought to mingle with hers. Later, Sephiroth assured them and dared to narrow the space. Silently, together, they watched the red sun go down.