Union
. o .
She read. Even on the road, even through Yuffie's snoring and Tifa's erratic hours. Even before leaving the City, back when the tiny library next door traded books like secrets or stashes of gin. Aeris knew stories, and how they worked. She knew that thieves had hearts, sometimes; that even the mightiest adversary had a chink in their armour, somewhere; that knowing these things could be dangerous.
The library closed soon after the men in blue turned their attention to her sector, its contents seized by civic order. When books started re-appearing in the church she helped to tend, on a bench near the market square, and on the corner of her doorstep, she was grateful, but worried: knowledge was dangerous, but so was attention. She returned the books to their owners as best she could. Histories, romances, atlases, and Materia manuals passed through her hands, often smuggled in a basket under the flowers she sold. The library regrew as the men became bolder. She learned their names, or parts of them, but whatever they intended for her was caught in a stalemate. Some would – some did, later, compare her circumstances at that time to a gilded cage – but having known one without the courtesies, Aeris slipped a paper with thank you scribbled on it between the pages of a Junonian poetry book after it appeared in her garden one morning. It didn't take much effort to read the longing between the lines of sparse, lovely verse, but she'd seen star-crossed before. Lived it. Had, once, seen an old letter she'd sent her lover in a Turk's coat pocket. The dark-haired man had offered her a teacup to match his that day, but she'd refused and hurried past the cafe (reflex; never eat or drink anything they offer, or you will never leave, whispered a voice in her head that could have been her mother, or something much older.)
It could be, she thought, his reading my letters inspired the gift. They were good poems – she had read her share of bad to know – and he was not a bad man, in some ways, but Tseng was a Company man, and she was a curiosity. A scion, a Last, a science experiment. A princess in a walled city that seemed increasingly short on doors. So she left the book where she had found it: no flower pressed between its pages to speak a wordless language, no key word circled or coded promises in the glyphs of his homeland. His feet were firmly on the ground and she had a weakness for men who fell from the sky.
(She tried not to think too hard about that last part, even as she found that it was becoming a pattern.)
Once in the world outside the City for the first time since infancy, she marveled at the beauty found in the towns and countryside they explored. Hers was an odd group: haunted, abrasive, and driven – more than most teams of heroes she'd read of, and she wondered at her place in the pantheon. After all, the story as she suspected they would tell it really began when Cloud had fallen from her rafters. Was he the catalyst for her journey, or was she the reason for his?
As their journey continued, she started to sleepwalk. By daylight, the idea of following voices from her dreams – unknown, familiar, and impossibly old – seemed foolish. Dangerous. Yet it was harder to resist their pull as she traveled further from Midgar. She wondered if the city walls also kept out whispers, and started wishing for a spindle promising one hundred years of dreamless sleep. On a sunny afternoon, she brought the idea up around Tifa, but changed the topic after seeing how the other woman's hands froze. Vincent took the idea more in stride, after she climbed the sandy bluff of Cosmo Canyon to join his watch.
"Perhaps," he rumbled after she rambled out her story. "But can you say your sleep would be peaceful? You have been on the wrong side of Shinra as well, Aeris. It's entirely possible your voices would grow stronger."
"And if they do?" she asked. She'd spoken with the Cosmo elders, and knew their minds. A pattern was emerging around her friends, and with it, a cold certainty about her part in it.
He laughed – she supposed he was laughing. "Come to terms with them," he suggested softly. "I, personally, do not recommend giving them something to do."
"I'll try to remember that," she replied. "I'm just not sure how much choice I'll have," she added, sketching patterns in the earth with her toes. Vincent's gaze was steady, and she could see the wry humour in his eyes as she looked up.
"I find it helps to remind them that you were there first," he said. "Sometimes, it is enough."
And, for a time, it was.
As soon as they neared the Temple of the Ancients, however, her waking instincts told her to run. To get as far away as possible, and, ideally, not sleep very much while doing so. She felt at once afraid and at home: the song of the Planet was more vital here, but it was like a homecoming with no-one to welcome her, her blood's people gone (if not her heart's people, who watched her with eyes worshipful, worried, and measuring from across the campfire that night.) The Temple held a catch and a choice: with Meteor plummeting down, she could not keep both this new family and the world they'd traveled together. It didn't mean she had to like the choice the Cosmo elders had hinted at and which she'd been dreaming of, but she also hadn't traveled across the world in hopes of saving it only to turn back now.
That night and through the morning, she traveled northward, feet and voices carrying her, half-waking, from the Temple and to the coast. A stray Materia paid her passage onto a fishing vessel that was about to leave for Bone Village as she arrived in the harbour. She smiled bravely at the seadog captain, spinning a story about a dangerous man that was mostly true until the captain gestured her on board with a wave. She kept to her own at sea, hoping that her friends would sleep late enough for her to outpace the Highwind. The whispers cleared away as she landed on the Icicle continent and traded another near-mastered Materia for a chocobo with downy black feathers that she patted absently as she camped at the edge of an eerily luminescent forest. Words she'd read and words she'd never heard before braided through her half-conscious chanting, as her birth mother's Materia glowed softly, lighting her way as she started to walk through the tangling trees.
She felt, more than saw, the others join her in the chamber, but her words never slowed, even as Cloud raised his sword and struggled against his own monsters. She let out a breath as he stood them down and cast his sword away, entreating her to wake up to join them to watch out –
The words finished, the incantation complete, she looked across the water, hoping her eyes could say I'm sorry and take care and I loved you a little, you know, like in the historical melodramas Cid swore weren't his –
– and it would have to, she thought, as she heard the rush of air and the whistle of steel descending –
Or maybe not. For all his genius, Sephiroth had miscalculated. Even he couldn't kill a story like hers. Theirs. Her friends would keep it alive, keep their story moving forwards. Would fight, each in their way. As she felt herself smile, the green glow that enveloped her faded slightly, and she could see Ifalna standing just at arm's reach, holding out a hand to her daughter.
Aeris stepped forward and took her mother's hand, jolting at the warmth she found when she'd expected wisps of smoke. Maybe, she thought, I was wrong too. Perhaps I've still got a new chapter to write.
. o .
finis
. o .
Sabe's Scribbles: ...and one day, I will write a Cid who doesn't love trashy historical fiction (but I suspect it's not anytime soon. Perhaps it's because all the aviators I know are incredible romantics.) The idea of a genre-savvy Aeris was interesting to write for; in its revision, this story was influenced by reading Helen Oyeyemi's Mr. Fox, but initially and directly inspired by the word "reunion" from an old LJ 30_prompts prompt table. Thoughts are always welcomed!
Disclaimer: Aeris, her friends, foes, and the world(s) she lives in all belong to Square.