A/N: The words from Aeris's dream are from "Sand and Foam," a Kahlil Gibran collection of words and wisdom. The end's in sight…

X. Vain is the waking and empty is the sleep / And thrice empty and vain is the dream.

She awoke early the next morning with black feathers in her hair and words dying on her lips.

Aeris tried to grasp the vanishing threads of her dream, but they slipped through her fingers, into the darkness of her unconscious. Odd—she hadn't been able to forget the past months' dreams even when she tried; they sprang up to haunt her in every shadow and shudder. This felt different, important somehow, not threatening but…advisory. A message from the Planet or her ancestors, perhaps. Was her mission not yet complete? The thought sent paroxysms of worry running through her.

The dreams of her death had become less frequent after her interaction with Sephiroth at the Shinra Building. They appeared occasionally, as did the visions; the feathers in her hair vanished when she reached up to touch them. But they were nowhere near as vivid as they once were, and this gave her hope that she had done it: she'd changed whatever future existed there for her and Sephiroth, one where he wasn't a murderer and she wasn't a victim. Her deviation from the path they'd been on had been successful; by now he must have found the files Shinra kept on her, realized that he wasn't alone in the world, that he could seek her out and she could try to…what? She could heal him. Or so she'd thought, before this dream had startled her.

Next to her, Zack yawned and stretched, breaking her thoughts. While she was tucked snugly under the covers, he had slept above them, just in case Elmyra became suspicious. She rested her head in the crook of her neck and shoulder and inhaled his warm, earthy scent, trying to stabilize herself. She counted out her breaths, feeling her pulse slow and her heart steady.

"You were talking in your sleep last night," Zack murmured, eyes still closed. Aeris's rigidity returned in full force. "Must have been a nightmare."

"What did I say?"

Zack rubbed her shoulder lightly, feeling the knot of tension there. "Somethin' really weird, about a house, a road, past and future...I couldn't make it all out. You sounded…sad."

It was as if a bell sounded in her head. Words tumbled into her consciousness in a mad rush, begging to be heard, to influence, to help. For what she didn't know.

My house says to me, "Do not leave me, for here dwells your past." And the road says to me, "Come and follow me, for I am your future." And I say to both my house and the road, "I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going…

And…what? What next? Stay or go?

Try as she might, Aeris could not remember the last line. The Planet was garbled; it couldn't help her here, try though it might.

A despair unlike any other, seemingly born from the depths of her heart, rose to choke her. She was failing him. And through that, she was letting herself die. Her step off their preordained path hadn't been enough, it seemed. Was she needed to die so badly that it would be her fate regardless of what she knew, or what she changed? Tears gathered in her eyes, spirit dropping.

Defeatism was becoming easier and easier to accept, like the way your nose became accustomed to a harsh scent after a few minutes. Death came to everyone. Did it matter who administered the blow? The shedding of her mortal coil would herald her ascendance to the Promised Land, where she would never have to suffer. Perhaps in the future she was facing, Sephiroth would be doing her a favor by killing her.

The Planet, disturbed by her black thoughts, keened wordlessly in her ears.

Aeris burrowed closer to Zack, thankful that he'd drifted back to sleep and so didn't have to see her cry.

In his luxury apartment atop the Plate, deep within the Shinra Building, Sephiroth jolted awake where he had been dozing at his desk, the photo of Aeris trapped beneath his cheek. He blinked and looked down at it, her smiling visage somewhat of a comfort to him despite what he'd just seen.

He never dreamt, and yet tonight, the oddest images filtered through his mind: a house, a road, the intertwined threads of past and future…and him, killing the Cetra time and time again in a million different ways. Euphoria and hopelessness warred within him as he recalled the scenes—the blood arcing from her in graceful sprays, his hands bruising the white column of her throat, her eyes dimming like stars going out.

Sephiroth shuddered. On the one hand, he recoiled from ever hurting someone potentially like him, and on the other he recognized that if anyone were ever to take her life, it would have to be him. His hand was the only one worthy to spill a drop of her blood. A human killing her would be…a waste, a tragedy.

Concerned at his own thoughts, Sephiroth forcibly blanked his mind. He did file away the strange words impressed on him in the dream, spoken in a huge and distant voice…another question among many for the Cetra.

He remembered how she had shown him images once before, those disjointed fragments of varying clarity. Perhaps again she was trying to tell him something without speaking. What she had to gain from showing him images of her death by his hands, he couldn't say.

Something cold and unsettling percolated up from his stomach, and Sephiroth stayed awake to watch the sun rise, though it roused nothing in him. He would find her today.