(Acheron)

Your hand in mine. My voice in your ear. Together we fall.

We leave Cloud with his head bowed over the flowers in the Church. The sky is beginning to lighten at last as we travel, twilight blue fading to white over the Nibel mountains, dawn stretching pale fingers across the earth's brow, the sea lapping contentedly at Wutai's shores.

The other side of the world, in a place hidden from prying eyes, one of his former companions raises his head the way animals do when we pass by, remembering all of a sudden a man who might have been his son (Brilliant, a choice between a scalpel-wielding maniac and a vampire. Poor Seph'd be doomed either way.

He says nothing, but the sudden intensity of his glare tells me I should change the subject).

He tilts his head to the side, listening intently. If Vincent had fur like the dogs that prick their ears when we go by, there's no doubt in any of us he'd be bristling and snarling.

Vincent is lost inside a maze inside a labyrinth in his mind. He wavers from thought to thought, stumbles through tangled snarls of blood and loss and grief and nightmare. He flees the thought of us to a memory of Lucretia, a gentle comfort that the smell of stale mako and old blood soon begins to creep into, and the feel of her hands and the smell of her hair and the smile on her face crumble and are replaced with glass walls and the feel of wings that are and are not his tearing through his skin and unfolding like a curse.

We depart, Vincent remaining to ponder his sins, the beast named Chaos stirring fitfully inside of him at our passing, and follow the call to the girl logic says should be dead. (—Even the best make mistakes. Right, Seph?

—I can't believe you're joking about such a thing, Aerith protests.

—We're dead, sweetheart, there's no need to be tactful anymore.)

Tifa jerks awake with a gasp, her eyes blank and unseeing, for one blinding moment overcome with fear. Even when it recedes she is still uneasy, searching her mind cautiously for a possible reason. Rolling over she reaches for the clock and frowns at it, tracing the number the hands carve out with one tired finger. Back here the sky is still dark.

(flesh peeling apart, a red flower blooming – don't fall asleep, you might not wake again,)

There is something wrong with the stillness of this morning. It's anticipatory, and she curls back into the blankets, trying to find a reason for the pain in her chest and the dryness of her mouth.

There's an empty space part of her knows should be filled, and she's not entirely surprised at the idea that occurs that the place is Cloud's. That's not what's wrong, though, because the empty space is an old ache, one she nurses and tries to occupy with the abandoned and disaffected children that find their way to her.

She doesn't have a calendar. Not here in her bedroom, where she should be safe from having to think about the future. She does that too much outside of it, and that's why she comes here. Lives are supposed to be made here in this safe place, but not hers. She needs this place to be where she can be free of her reason, her sense and all the bindings that stop her screaming her anger and frustration at Cloud every time he comes back, slips back into her life as if he never left, never tore her open and left her bleeding. She hates calendars, thinks they're there to mark out the days, the months and the years she's lost to waiting, to searching, to whatever reason. She doesn't like the idea that her life can be fitted into the tiny little boxes alongside minuscule print that declares the holidays she never observes.

She doesn't have a calendar, but part of her knows already. She doesn't want to get up this early and have to face the date, so she turns away, buries her face in the pillow, inhaling her own exhaled breath, the sound reverberating in her ears. Sparks and motes of tinted light dance behind her closed lids, whorls and mists and chequered patterns, explosions of colour that fade and reshape into another in the infinity between seconds. She can almost be peaceful trying to define them.

Her bed is warm and comfortable and there are days when she just wants to stay there forever and never think about getting up again. She could just linger her life away; it would be so easy.

Without her consent, the idea of 'a year' enters. A year means many things to Tifa. It's a stretch of time she's never going to have again; it makes the anniversary of so many things a little more real, the scars a little deeper. A year implies another birthday missed and gone, another period of mourning being added on to the old. She used to care about the number of years since her father died, her hometown destroyed, until she realised that it made the years seem longer and emptier than they should have been.

This is the day of the almost-Meteor strike, the anniversary of the end of the world, the day a deluded, godhood-seeking psychopath surrendered to the shameful weakness that is death.

(—Death has no shame, Sephiroth whispers, stung. He's never let himself be resigned to his death but that doesn't mean he isn't capable of understanding it. Sometimes.

—Death is simply the other face of Life, Aerith says, and I don't tell either of them what I think.)

She resents Cloud's absence now. It feels as if he's somehow managed to weasel his way out of carrying the burden, the heavy weight of remembrance. (—Yeah? And what would you know? C'mon, say it to our faces!)

She resents his absence as a symptom of a disease – Cloud Strife is not a man or even a SOLDIER (he's something else she doesn't want to think about). He's Atlas, carrying the sky (carrying us) on his shoulders.

Truth is, she understands that Cloud is always going to be part of something else, is never going to truly belong in this mediocre world she and everyone else lives in. He's part of the Other now, lost to Lifestream and memories.

She knows that. But oh god, does she hate it. It would hurt less, if only she didn't love him so much.

(—Nobody could keep him for long, Aerith says quietly, sympathetic. —He's ours, really. You know that, you've been there with him.

'There' is our place, the combination of Lifestream and memories, and if anyone belongs here, as close to living as death will allow, it's Cloud.

—He's here already, Sephiroth says from his place on the other side of the room. —He walks here everyday, he's just forgotten to leave his body behind.

Then he smiles, and it's like learning the meaning of the word 'sinister' all over again. —I'll have to remind him someday, he murmurs dreamily.)

Cloud isn't really cut out for normalcy. Not anymore. Tifa now, she and the rest can slip back into the comfort their former lives, but Cloud's lost too much, suffered too much, changed too much to ever be able to fit back inside his skin – a monster emerged from the chrysalis of a normal childhood, he sometimes thinks.

(—What monster, Aerith asks. —You're just like Sephiroth.

—Exactly, Sephiroth says coolly, anger and hurt freezing to form cold hate. —A monster.)

Now that she's hit upon the knowledge of the Anniversary, she finds it impossible to forget. She doesn't have the same memories Cloud has, vivid flashes that use all the senses to paint a picture so riotous it takes minutes for his heart to still in his chest and for his mind to clear enough to remind him that it has been a year since it ended. Tifa remembers things the way normal people do, flat pictures misted with time and never quite right. She remembers now, and wishes the gaps were a little larger, the holes in the remembrance a little deeper, because then perhaps she would be free.

(A thin, high scream as a man's mind was torn to pieces)

This is the day it all could have ended.

(Echoing and sometimes she jerks awake expecting to see Cloud on his knees, clutching his head, trying to tear through his temples, screaming. Screaming, and what can she do before this?)

Sometimes, she almost wishes it had.

down

This morning is one Cid futilely hoped he would never have to face, or if he did, that he could face it fortified with a heck of a lot of beer. Six a.m. is far too fucking early to have to think about it but he's awake and he needs to keep busy, needs something that will occupy both his hands and his thoughts. Maintenance seems as good a way as any.

It's not like he knew her. I mean, hell, he joined their now legendary group last of all. Barely had time to get attached. So he can look at the loss objectively, the way the others can't, not clouded by affection and nostalgia.

It doesn't help. That's the thing about Aerith, no matter how briefly she touches your life, the image of her stays there, lingers with the scent of flowers and the stubbornness of glitter. She was a sweet girl, and he remembers a gentle smile, and calm green eyes. A girl soft and feminine and oh-so out of place among the grim-faced men (Blond or no, Cloud can do a kick-ass SOLDIER impression.

Sephiroth gives a huff of laughter beside me, but being the inconsiderate bastard he is, refuses to elaborate on the private joke) and confident, athletic fighting women who turned up at his door.

Those are pretty goddamn weak memories. It's the end he remembers most, the graceless, awkward way she fell and that hideous gaping hole in her abdomen, the way Cloud's hands shook helplessly as they covered it, a reflexive combat instinct to place pressure on a wound that couldn't be helped.

He feels a little guilt that he can't care more, give more to her, but at least he's honest. It was sad, it was a tragedy, but all life ends some time, and it's not that bad a way to die, he supposes, not compared to some of the rumours he heard serving ShinRa back in the war. (Sephiroth draws himself up to his full height, all injured dignity and insulted pride.

Aerith and me, we wisely back away pronto, and say nothing about the fact that those rumours were true.)

He went to the church, once, somehow managing to avoid Spike, although he could see as clear as anyone that someone inhabited the place (they whisper in the street that he's a ghost, a sentinel spirit given by the Planet to guard the holy place). He'd planted some delicate little flowering thing Shera got him, and he hoped that was the right thing to do. It seemed... appropriate, but what the fuck would he know? It's probably died anyway.

He'd never seen someone he liked skewered on a six-foot sword before.

A pretty girl in pink, he thinks, with all her life ahead of her. Twenty-two. Fuck, what sort of an age to die is that?

An' Spike even younger, barely an adult, face smooth and blank as a child (even if his eyes are older than the damn planet) and he's a goddamn 'hero', and he's so fucked-up. Maybe that's what being a hero means, he decides. Being strong enough to convince everyone else he can carry their burdens and not realise he's the equivalent of thin ice when it comes to himself. He's got people in the street in awe of him while he hides away in that church, breaking to pieces. Maybe that's heroism. Putting everyone (and damn, does he mean everyone) before yourself, and not in the manner of storybooks and fairy tales; really, truly, ignoring yourself for a stranger in the street,

(There are days when Cid wants to grab Vincent and Cloud, wants to bang their heads together and shake them until their teeth rattle and yell, "Stop! Just stop! Stop trying to take everyone's crap on your shoulders! Not all the fucked-up shit in this world is yours – let people take the responsibility for their own mistakes! …and stop sulking in the corners of my goddamn ship like fuckin' suicidal assassins!" But of course, he never does.)

He can convince himself that the world was never in danger, it was never a matter of killing a man fast enough to let the power of the Planet loose. He can convince himself of that, but he's goddamn glad the spiky-haired numbskull recovered, goddamn glad they were fast enough and he's gonna have to take this up with someone in the Promised Land one day, he thinks, staring at the love of his life, his precious airship.

Don't you know it could have all ended? You put the entire world on the slender shoulders of a fucked-up kid and placed him against the man who was his (god) hero, and (what kind of sick bastards are you?) did you really think he could handle that? You're so damn lucky Spike is who he is.

Cid's got self-awareness. He knows that if he had been in Spike's place he'd have broken. Hell, broken ain't the word. He'd have shattered, been blown to sharp untouchable shards.

He throws the cigarette butt on the ground, cursing as he crushes it beneath one boot, grinding it into the dust. You bastards, he thinks, you complete, utter bastards.

deeper

Lucrecia is a dead woman. Ah, but dead women often hold greater sway than the live ones, much to the late Scarlet's displeasure. A dead woman, a dead mother is one of the most powerful people in the world. Men will kill in memory of their dead mothers, will conquer and rule for the pride of their dead mothers. A mother's dying wish holds so much more power than any wishes they expressed when healthy and there and doing what mothers do. A mother's dying wish is greater than a king's.

Lucrecia is a dead woman. Yet her body still lives. It's a similar thing – but not quite – to what occurred recently, Sephiroth's body (or the image thereof) darting around from continent to continent, town to town and battle to battle, while the 'real' Sephiroth appeared here and there, never for very long, a grave, sombre apparition that scared most of us unfortunates of the Lifestream shitless.

She's still a dead mother though, and she has the longest shadow any mother could have. She's the mother of a monster-god.

(Sephiroth walks to her, lays ghostly hands on her face, examines her features with gentle palms, searching. Searching for what I don't know, and he will never tell us.)

She opens her eyes, and they're dead and empty, but for the brief moment he gently traces their shape with slender fingers they flicker and live. She whispers his name through cracked lips, soft like a prayer and weak as a breath of air, looks through him almost as if she can see him, while her arms automatically form a cradle to rock the baby that never was.

She doesn't know what this day is, only that there's a pang inside her, like one of the contractions that heralded her doomed child's birth so many years ago, and she misses him so much, wants him so much, the child she gave up to science like a sacrifice to an old god, it's a physical ache in her heart. (He leans forward and puts his arms around her, whispering in her ear. For a brief, powerful moment, she remembers.)

Her throat aches (she keeps screaming it raw, the pained, hideous wails of a mother keening the loss of a newborn - she didn't even want him) but she keeps murmuring his name, over and over, as if she could somehow bring him back, give herself a reason not to self-destruct.

"Kill me," she begs us, and Sephiroth steps away. We leave her to her grief, as raw and fresh as the day a baby slick with blood and afterbirth was stolen from her.

"I hate you," she whispers, coughing up blood. "I hate you I hate you I hate you!"

It's hard to tell just who exactly she's talking to.

and down

He kneels beside the pool, looking deep. The mako that sharpens his eyes and ears takes a moment to remind him it enhances his every sense, even those that have been latent in human beings since they began to leave hunting and gathering behind.

His eyes (—they glow, jeeze, what kind of freak are you?

—Shut up Zack!

—I'm joking! Holy frickin' Meteor! Do you see my eyes being completely normal?)

His eyes are sharp enough to rival a hawk, and every ten seconds or so his head will jerk up minutely, just enough to verify that the movement of leaves a hundred yards away is nothing to concern himself with. It takes less than a second, all a matter of synapses and electrical impulses, so fast he doesn't even realise he saw anything in the first place. His ears can discern the stirring of animals deep in the earth beneath him, if he wants them to, (he doesn't. They do it anyway.) the worms chomping through dirt (that's all everyone is, you know – worm bait). His nose detects an assortment of sweet scents he recognises but cannot, having never been taught the names, identify.

(—lavender, moth bane, bee balm, dragon's tongue, briar-rose, and woodruff, Aerith tells us matter-of-factly. We take a moment to laugh.

Cloud's flower is the Black Archangel. The neat, hooded flowers are a deep, carnivorous red – among the pointed leaves they gleam like flecks of blood on green knives. They are hard to kill, and by some morbid quirk of Aerith's usually compassionate nature they grow best where he has shed blood or self. They have no meaning except what he gives them.)

A sense he cannot title, and understands is no longer possessed by any other human in the world, tells him the only life near him is not hunter, or at least, not of man, and that he is in no immediate danger.

Cloud realised, in a drugged, subconscious way as I half-dragged, half-carried his poisoned ass to Midgar that if he didn't learn to deal with the sensory overload he'd spend the rest of his life like all the other recipients of mako poisoning – drooling, unable to form a single coherent word… worthless. So his brain adapted, began to filter the information at a subliminal level. It's a matter of fine control – is this really important, is this information needed? There are some things that you train yourself to always be aware of (when I became First Class I taught myself how to pinpoint an ice cream truck's location to a street within three bars of jingly music. …What?) but as to the rest, he just tries to shut it down.

(Ah, the glories of mako, that necessitates learning the difference in smell between menstrual and arterial blood.

Have I told you that story?

It was a while after the war – not long, but long enough that people had gotten used to the fact that Sephiroth was in Midgar, not slaughtering people in another country halfway 'round the world. There was this rebel group – not a big thing, nothing serious like AVALANCHE, just a group of idiots who should've known better, getting drunk together, saying rude things about The Man; just graduated to acts of minor terrorism – y'know, breaking windows, scrawling graffiti in particularly prominent places, malfunctioning bombs at the train stations, like that would do anything…

Well, the Prez is hardly going to stand for that, not so soon after the war, not now he has the perfect dog to set on their trail with orders to destroy if necessary. We chased those poor bastards all over Sector Four until they darted into a brothel. I don't know what they were thinking – maybe that the Great Sephiroth was too high-and-mighty to follow them into a whorehouse, maybe that we would be too embarrassed to chase them through there, but evidently they were wrong.

So there we are, the women and their customers all lined up, the troopers turning the rooms upside down looking for these men, and Sephiroth keeps casting around like a bloodhound that's caught a scent it knows has nothing to do with what it should be tracking, but can't ignore. Sephiroth's taught himself to respond automatically to the smell of blood, and the more he tries to ignore it, the stronger the smell seems to get and at last he snaps, "Who's bleeding?"

Of course, one of the girls goes crimson, and the madam doesn't look much better – she looks ready to brain him with a frying pan.

"You can smell… smell that?" Another one of them squeaks, and Sephiroth – getting annoyed, because smelling blood is triggering responses inappropriate to a non-combat situation – gives a pointed look to the area which should never be indicated in company if you're any sort of a gentleman and says "What do you think?"

At this point, Mama-san really did try and brain him with a frying pan, and Sephiroth's response, naturally, was to break her arm in three places and that's how we managed to get SOLDIER banned as clientele from every brothel in Midgar, and also how we ended up trying to explain – to Heidegger, no less – that the city-wide scandal about SOLDIER brutality and Company interference in matters beneath their concern was all the result of Sephiroth being able to smell that this girl was on her period.

That story always got a good laugh from the newbies when I used it to explain about the type of enhancements mako would give them.

(But I didn't tell them about the girls, how they reacted to his even look with either defiance or shame, or how when he turned away one of them demanded, "Who th' fuck does 'e think 'e is," her voice tight with rage and tears, "lookin' at us like that? Like 'e ain't a man, like all the rest of 'em?" How she spat the word 'man' like a curse.

I didn't tell them that he vomited after we'd left, I didn't tell them about how he was convinced he could still smell the place on his skin, or how he said he could smell everything in there, he couldn't block it out; that to him the place had stunk of sex and stale perfume and old sweat, that it had smelt like despair.

I didn't tell them that.)

I think they laughed mostly that we all knew Sephiroth was a far apart from us as any of us were to a trooper, as a god is to a man. We knew we'd never understand what it was to be able to hear the continuous buzz of radio frequencies, or to smell the slightest amount of blood in a sea of people, or to be able to see so clearly in the dark it might as well be day, and be so blinded by even weak sunlight that our pupils had to become catlike slits.

They never understood what I told them, and to be honest, neither did I. Cloud understands now.)

In combat situations, he's just plain unnatural – all his sense sharpen, the brief flare of mako and Jenova cells making his eyes flash even brighter than usual, and he's vicious and fast, ready for anything, and he revels in it – it's better than any high. Most of the time (that's outside of battles) he feels normal (or at least, the way he was before), despite knowing there's enough mako in his veins for a transfusion to give a SOLDIER mako poisoning.

He still shies away from human habitation though (like an animal), and around Tifa he can't trust his own senses – sometimes he'll be able to hear her heart beating, when he's the other side of the room, or he'll look at her and he can see the way her brow creases minutely in pain or exhaustion, he'll smell blood from a tiny scratch on her finger that's already closed, he'll taste her apprehension on his tongue when outwardly she's as calm and serene as a statue. He'll know she's standing in the doorway behind him, watching him while he tries to drink (doesn't work; his body automatically breaks down the toxins and it just makes him irritable and light-headed – without the buzz) and he hates it. He doesn't want the reminders that he's an abomination, that Hojo tore him to pieces and rebuilt him into something (better) inhuman, something (great. The Great-) alien. He's afraid of what he might do to her, because he's not human anymore.

Perfer et obdura;

He dives.

dolor hic tibi proderit olim.

A flash of memory. Lungs expanding, filling up the narrow confines between his ribs, demanding more than the stale air they hold inside them, his heart beating rapidly against his ribcage, forced to speed up to try (and fail) to cope with the demand of a dying body, the fight against instinct to open his mouth and suck in great lungfuls of precious air to appease the burning in his chest, the curious weightlessness the deeper he sinks. It's just a memory; he's been down there two minutes, maybe three, and there's no sensation, no fight at all beside that of the one he's battling now, the automatic urge to swim up and gather air he no longer needs so desperately. He's a second Sephiroth, a genetically modified freak – human rules are redundant.

(—That's not true! Aerith yells at him, but it's hopeless because it is, even Sephiroth can stand to admit it.)

He opens his eyes, and watches as the light sparkling on the surface recedes from him. He wonders if this is what Aerith would have seen as he lowered her into her underwater grave.

(—No, Aerith protests.

Yes. What's the point in lying when you're dead? No one but other restless dead can hear you anyway, and they've all come to same conclusion.)

He hits the bottom, silt stirred by his fall billowing around him, fishes darting away in a flash of perfectly synchronised silver scales, and the light from the surface so far above him dances over his skin in beautiful, spidery patterns. He lets us go. He's still waiting for the air in his lungs to run out.

l'appel du vide - the urge to jump from high places, into a canyon, etc. Literally, "the call of the void."

A/N: There may or may not be a flower called 'Black Archangel'. Regardless, the description here is an amalgam of several members of the red nettle family. More specifically, the Yellow Archangel (Lamiastrum Galeobdolon) and the Red Dead Nettle (Lamium Purpureum) and thus, totally inaccurate. Basically, Cloud, you're a prickly weed.