XII. Only great sorrow or great joy can reveal your truth. If you would be revealed you must either dance naked in the sun, or carry your cross.

They sat side by side in the flowers, bare backs to the door. She didn't feel empty like she thought she might; instead she felt full, full to the brim with understanding and deep-seated warmth. The Planet's influence, perhaps, or the simple magic of human contact. She didn't look at him, or touch him, but nonetheless could feel his presence solidly there. What he was thinking, she could not guess, but she wanted him to know…

"It's not the ending that hurts," Aeris said. Her quiet voice echoed in the stillness of the church. "That, I've always expected. Beginning this...trying to change things...maybe that's what damned me. If you didn't know me, didn't know what I was…"

He didn't want to tell her that being born was what damned her, just as it had damned him. One last small kindness for the flower girl, the best he could do. A familiar numbness was settling into his bones; the emotions she had aroused in him—affection, confusion, acceptance, fear—were dulling in response to the fact that nothing had really changed.

I finally thought that I was in control now, he thought. A General for Shinra, stronger than any that have come before me. I should be untouchable. What strange force compels that she die and that I need be the one to kill her?

The questions he had had for her melted away in the face of her attempt and failure to move him; the details of his background, and hers, were unimportant. Like every other creature on the Planet, she simply wanted to survive. Like every predator, he wanted to kill, to crush, to consume. But each a monster, in our own way. That, he understood.

Sephiroth looked at her, disheveled, lips and pale skin bruised. She was staring at the crushed flowers, petals and leaves scattered about like their clothing, with a pleasingly blank look on her face. Tendrils of her hair snaked over her shoulders and down the valley between her breasts. Objectively judged, she was lovely. If even her love, given freely, was unable to have him choose a different life—to acknowledge that that choice was even possible—then he couldn't deviate from whatever shadowed path lay before him. He could feel its call.

So he left. Forever after the heavy scent of lilies brought Sephiroth back to this day—he razed an entire field of them just to forget her and instead carried the scent in his hair for weeks afterward. She had marked him more than she knew. But her turn to be marked by him would come in time.

Aeris watched him exit the church and slid a hand over her heart, pounding away. Love couldn't sway death, just as death could never erase the memory of love. She knew that, and hoped he knew that as well. If he questioned our fate, for even one moment, then perhaps this detour was still meaningful. I can move to the next life knowing that we were united once, and that he experienced love, even if he couldn't understand it. It was small consolation to a scared little girl, and she watered the flowers with her tears.

She'd done everything she could. She knew, just as well as he did, that it hadn't been enough, though she'd carry the memory of her gift to him for as long as she lived, until the day when he would repay her, in his way, the way he had chosen. And she'd accept his gift with all of the poise and strength she could muster and await his arrival in the Lifestream, so he could see once and for all that love was just as eternal as death was.