Parallel Threes

00--Prologue: Manifest Fear

By Miyamashi

Miya's Note: Sorry to everyone who's been waiting for this. I was originally gonna put up both the prologue AND first chapter, but I got such terrible writer's block on this fic, mostly from stress that's caused me not to want to work on it, and because of distractions by other fandoms, that I got completely stuck on Ch. 1, and decided to finally post the Prologue at least, so you guys could get SOMETHING, even though it will throw off the numbering of the chapters when I start posting others.

Well, here it is: the beginning to the long-awaited sequel to Business As Usual. If you have no clue what the aforementioned BAU is, you're in the wrong place, and you need to do some backtracking. First, check out White Flag, which is BAU's prologue, and then read Business As Usual itself. If you don't, you will be exceedingly confused during some very important parts of this story (even as early as…say THIS part), since it's a direct sequel, and makes a huge amount of references to its predecessor, including storyline points, mythology, and certain (generally fairly minor) characters who are my own creation that appeared in BAU.

If you can manage to sit through BAU before this, or if you already have, congratulations and welcome! I hope you enjoy. I'm really excited, and I hope you are, too. Though this story has elements of BAU, it is different on a lot of levels. The format will seem very familiar: The Prologue (Included here, instead of as a separate story, like it was with White Flag and BAU, to avoid having to refer everyone to the Prologue in nearly every chapter like I did before.), an Interlude and the Epilogue, along with the short intros to each chapter will be in first person, while the rest of the story will be in third. Bizarre, yes, I know, but it worked before, and it will hopefully work here.

If you need to brush up on it, be sure that you remember the Cetran mythological story that I wrote in BAU's chapter 22. That plays a HUGE part here. :D

Oh, and if anyone's been watching my art for a while, too, you may recognize some of the parts in here from being the passages I had written for a couple of my older pictures (albeit one is a very loose paraphrase). It was nice to finally get to work them into an actual fic, because I really still like them.

So, without further adieu, here it is: Parallel Threes.

Much love, guys.

Drown me in my sorrows, wash me in my sins.

Cleanse me in my troubles; this nightmare that I'm in.

All the world is dying, and I can hear its screams.

Take this sacrifice of mine: My life, my heart, my dreams.

I was at the bottom, looking up.

I didn't know how, or why, but there I was, and it was at this moment--at the bottom, looking up--that I found myself asking the question, "What is it, exactly, that defines fear?"

It had to be this, I reasoned. I had never been one to fear, but this feeling of being at the bottom of everything I'd ever known, looking up at it being suddenly destroyed, was something more frightening than I could ever have imagined.

I could feel my left hand shaking violently behind me while the right seemed somehow painfully unresponsive, and the cold metal that surrounded the wrist I could feel was cutting into it. As I shook, I could imagine the blood the shackle created as it dug into my skin dripping down my fingers to the ground.

For the first time in my existence, the fear caused me to look away. I looked down at myself, and suddenly grew dizzy at the sight. As I'd been concentrating on my hands, I had managed to overlook the blood that was flowing out of my chest. Had I been able to bend my head down farther, I think I could have seen straight through it. I didn't know how. I couldn't, for the life of me, remember why.

In the fear, I couldn't even think straight enough to realize that none of this was possible.

Had I been able to think, I would have realized that I shouldn't have been at the bottom, looking up. I should, instead, have been there, in the midst of the destruction that was playing out in front of me. I shouldn't have been chained to the earth. I shouldn't have been able to keep conscious with a wound like that in my chest. Hell, I shouldn't have even been alive.

Not sure what to be more afraid of: The fact that my city, Midgar, was being destroyed in front of my very eyes by the Meteor that Sephiroth had called and that I had tried, in vain, to fight, or the fact that my own state of existence at that moment was a physical impossibility, I chose that moment to look around instead of up.

The people who wandered, seemingly aimlessly, around the gates of Midgar were sullen and sad. None of them were chained to the earth as I was, but each of them seemed to be caught in their own kind of traps. On occasion, one of them would look straight at me, and I could see the hatred in his or her eyes. I thought, then, it was because I had failed them. I though it was because I couldn't save the city.

In a moment of clear-headedness very much unlike the chaos in my mind just moments before, I suddenly noticed that something, however, was very wrong. These people shouldn't have had the time to be blaming anyone for their misfortune. The city was in flames. Had things been right, they would have been screaming, they would have been crying, and they would have been, like me, looking up.

But I was the only one there, at the bottom, who seemed to notice that anything was going on above me at all.

I caught eyes with a woman who was wandering in that strange crowd. We locked eyes, and her face changed.

I recognized this woman, briefly, in the moment where her forehead split with a bullet's mark and her head jerked back as she clutched the wound. She was in a SOLDIER uniform, except for her helmet, and I recognized a shadow of that thing called fear from within the fiery glow of the pure abhorrence in her eyes.

Other than the bullet hole that had managed--as bizarrely as my chest wound had me--to not kill her when it had appeared, she was a rather beautiful woman. I hadn't noticed it when I had shot her in my father's office more than eight years before.

"You're starting to understand now, aren't you?" came a calm, feminine voice from somewhere behind me.

"I'm…not sure," I answered, trying not to let fear etch my voice as I broke the gaze with the SOLDIER.

I suddenly looked down, and found it very fascinating how my own blood was soaking into the dirt around my knees.

I could hear the voice shift around me as the woman who owned it paced. "I know you," she said, remarkably pleasantly for the situation that surrounded her, "even though I don't think we quite got along the last time we met."

As I heard her stop in front of me, I let my stare wander up from its spot on the ground. I could see her boots, brown and saturated with water. I could see the bottoms of her legs, wet as her boots, the skin on them tinted slightly green in decay, parts of it attempting to peel away from the muscle and bone underneath. As my eyes continued to wander, drawn upward in a bout of pure morbid fascination, I realized that this woman--like me, like the SOLDIER I had shot--should not have been able to stand and to speak.

As I looked up high enough to see her face, she smiled, though it wasn't in the least bit comforting. The flesh of her face, like that of her legs and like the cloth on her clothes, was rotting away as if she had been long submerged in water.

I found myself involuntarily backing up, though I didn't get far for the chains that held me. Pain shot through every part of my body where pain hadn't been before, and the ache in my wrist lay forgotten as my chest finally felt the agony that it should have been feeling all along, and the sharp jolt in my right shoulder as it was jerked by the shackles told me that it had been dislocated.

The woman moved to calm me down, but I flailed harder and my pain grew as my new fear-upon-fear drew me farther from my senses. She knelt, and one hand, the bony tips of fingers where the decay had hit the hardest reached for my face.

"Calm down," she said, and her voice was steady and strong. "There's no reason to be afraid of any of this."

By then, I couldn't breathe, so I couldn't speak to reply.

"Calm down," she reassured again, and as she touched my cheek, I felt true fingers, not pointed bone. "It's coming, and it'll make everything alright. Soon, all of this: Meteor, and the anger, and the fear, will all be washed away."

I stopped struggling as the lack of breath from lungs that were no longer there began to steal my consciousness.

But, suddenly, as she had said, everything changed.

There was a song I remembered vaguely from sometime before, distant and chanting and sad. Just as I began to black out, I felt the woman catch me in a surprisingly soft, secure hold, and song was accompanied by light.

It wasn't the music or the glow that did it, but as I could feel myself slipping away, I was suddenly overcome by a wave of peace, and I thought, yes, I could die like this. I felt nothing, remembered nothing, and could almost believe that nothingness was what I was about to become, and I welcomed it, but just before the peace could take me, all-to-willingly, away, fire spread through my body.

It was neither pleasant nor painful, but I had felt this fire before. I recognized the song that had, in the space of only moments, moved from a distant echo to a hymn that took up the very space in my veins, until it reverberated through my entire being and I knew. The song had been in a dream where the Lifestream had cried, and the fire had accompanied me on a few distant nights where my only other friends had been Reno and a needle that had given me strength that I had lost.

I could breathe again, and see, and feel, and I looked up into the woman's face. Right before my eyes, a tendril of Mako, flowing like visible breeze through the air, brushed past her and stole away her decay.

"It's Holy," she whispered. "It's come to fight Meteor."

I thought back to the dream where I had heard Holy's and the Lifestream's song. There had been a small, Mako-green object there, which I now realized had been the white materia. The materia had been at the bottom of a lake, and it helped me to understand why she had looked the way she had.

From the corner of my vision, I could see that Holy was winning, and Meteor collapsed with a great flash and disappeared. The woman who was holding me up with a safe and motherly grasp was smiling down at me fondly, almost amusedly.

I knew her, but not personally. She had been a member of AVALANCHE.

"My name is Aeris," she stated as if reading my mind. "Aeris Gainsborough, to be more specific, although I don't know anybody else named Aeris. You just knew me as some flower girl from the slums." She laughed, somewhere in between a chuckle and a giggle.

I felt it would be pertinent to properly introduce myself as well, but again she spoke before I could react.

"Oh, and don't worry. I already know who you are. You're Rufus Shinra." At my astonishment, she laughed harder. "You act like I wouldn't know. I'm not the only one, it seems, too. You seem to be quite the celebrity. That shouldn't be surprising, though."

"Why are you helping me?" I asked, and my voice seemed to be having trouble readjusting to the act of speaking.

She smiled farther, and her head tilted a little to the side. "The chains, of course. You put yourself here, right in the middle of all of these people who you know hate you for the things you've done. Repentance, isn't it? If so, there's no reason for me not to be forgiving, is there?"

"What?"

"There is nothing here that you didn't create. No punishment worse than the ones we make for ourselves."

And then, as hard and unforgiving as the fear had appeared, so, too, did realization of what it all meant.

"Am I…?"

She nodded. "You're dead, of course."

Miya's Note: Well, there you have it. It's short, and I'm sorry about that, especially since it took so long to get to you guys. Along with getting Ch. 1 up, I'm also trying to finish the insanely long Ch. 3 of The Mannequin Garden, and am writing a really crazy Death Note one-shot called Twisted Religion, which has, so far, been both a wonderful writing experience AND the bane of my existence. (I absolute LOVE how it's coming out, when it's cooperating!) The latter is what has been eating my SOUL for the past couple of weeks. Once those are out of the way, I'll probably crank out another chapter to Do-It-Yourself, too. Gah, I work on too many things at once, and it's you guys who have to suffer through the delays it causes me. Sorry again! Much love, especially for those of you patient enough to stick with me through it all.

Oh, and sorry to any Aeris-haters. She's the secondary protagonist, so she's gonna be in here a LOT, but don't expect her to be written exactly how you may expect, because I see her character a lot differently than most people do. I also go with the name "Aeris", instead of "Aerith", not only because it's what I got used to when I played FF7, but because I simply prefer it. I also pronounce it like "Aries", not like "Heiress", but that's just me. Reno will come in later chapters (starting with the first third-person section of Ch.1) .