Chapter 14
Sephiroth looked around, trying to reconstruct the story from the landscape. From the tracks and craters in the surrounding snow, it looked like he had been trying to escape from the air assault. He looked again at the one-sided char on the wagons, scanned the ground fifteen feet away. Yes, there was the main crater. A bomb had landed there, and when the wagons had tumbled up and over from the concussion, they had pinned him underneath. But Baral had still been alive, at least for a little while. Two neat bullet wounds on his forehead was how he ended. At least he didn't suffer long, Sephiroth thought. He sat back on his heels.
Ice crystals had formed on Barals' eyelashes. Sephiroth reached out and brushed them away with the fingertip of his sooty glove. He wasn't sure what to feel. It wasn't as if he had really known him. Baral had always kept much more to himself than he ever revealed, despite all his talking. He looked at Baral's body again. The wounds on his forehead looked unreal, like coins of red sealing wax. He looked as if he had had just laid down to rest and at any moment he would stand up, brush himself off, and go back to being his old self.
But surely they couldn't leave him like this, like any other carcass for the animals to strip and devour. He heard boots crunching on the snow behind him, Aerith's light quick step. Any moment now she would look down and see…He closed his eyes and waited. The footsteps stopped. He heard something, a small object, drop into the snow. Sephiroth turned around.
Aerith's eyes were large and round as she focused on the body beneath the wagon. The red and gilt tea glass she had been holding lay at her feet. Tendrils of her hair were poking out of her hood and were buffeted back and forth across her face as the wind picked up. She pressed her thick mittened hands to her mouth.
"It's him, isn't it?"
"Yes."
She knelt down in the snow.
"Oh Baral, what have you done?" she said tenderly. She took off her gloves and touched his icy palm, his fingers. She started to cry, but choked herself back.
"We should bury him," Sephiroth said after a few minutes. The wind kicked up from the east, blowing sheets of sparkling snow from the top of the dune. It rained down upon the camp, covering everything in a fine diamond powder.
"Yes." Aerith lifted up her goggles and wiped her face with the back of her sleeve. "Let's move these wagons."
With both of them pushing and the aid of a gravity spell, they were able to shift them just enough so they could get to the body. Baral's legs had been broken in numerous places, his pelvis crushed almost flat from the weight of the wagons. The snow beneath him was a deep crimson-black. At the sight, Aerith turned away, opening the flap of her parka. She breathed in and out slowly, trying not to retch.
"You should find a place to dig the grave." Sephiroth said. "I will find something to wrap him in."
Aerith got up and stumbled away. The wind threw snow in his face as he turned to watch her go.
Sephiroth searched the wreckage and returned with the singed half of a yak-hair blanket. He spread it out on the ground next to Barals' body. It was more than large enough. Carefully, he eased Baral onto the blanket. He looked so much smaller than he remembered.
Sephiroth looked into the still dead eyes. They had first met in one of the Crater's shallow caverns, he remembered. Baral had been poking around, somewhat haphazardly, for hours, making a horrible racket. Sephiroth had followed him, unseen. When he finally decided to show himself, Baral had leaned casually against the wall and grinned at him, then shrugged and pointed his gun at his head. Baral had fired a warning shot into the cavern ceiling, calling out merrily: "Here to share my treasure, are you, my friend? You might think again."
Sephiroth smirked at the memory, but it soon vanished. Here had been a man that had laughed, talked, thought, and now there was nothing, just a frozen husk. Sephiroth got up and retrieved the gold tea tumbler from the snow. He pressed it lightly into Barals' hand, although he didn't know why. He folded the blanket over the dead man's face and went to go find Aerith.
She had dug the grave at the edge of camp, a wide oblong hole a few feet deep. She shook her head at him as he approached.
"It's the best I can do. It gets too rocky if I go much deeper, it deflects the spells." She tossed her head in anguish, trying not to sob. "I tried."
"It will suffice."
Together they carried Baral's body to the edge of camp and carefully slid it into the hole. After they had finished they stood at the edge of the grave, not speaking.
"We should say something," said Aerith.
"What does one say?" Sephiroth said, shifting uncomfortably.
Aerith looked at him, it was difficult to read her expression, but her voice was innocent. "Oh. You really wouldn't know, would you?"
Sephiroth was silent.
"I will do it," Aerith said. She opened her parka and threw back her hood. The wind took her hair and lashed it, flinging it out behind her, bronze-red, the only color in the vast monochromatic landscape.
"Baral," she said, her voice almost entirely lost in the wind, "child of the Planet, trader, merchant, be at peace. May the Lifestream envelop you and guide you on your path."
Aerith lifted her arms and the surrounding snow swept together and gathered in the air; a swirling white column thirty feet high. Her whole body shook with the effort of suspending it. She bowed forward, and brought her arms down before her. The snow dropped into the grave in a sparkling shower. Baral was gone without a trace.
The moment the snow had finished falling, Sephiroth turned and began walking away.
Aerith caught up to him.
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"Back to the sled. There's nothing else left for us here. Let's move on."
They walked back to the sled in silence. When they arrived Aerith stowed the few items she had salvaged and then sat on her pack, looking up at the sky.
"Do you still want to do this?" she asked. "We have no dogs, we have only a fraction of the supplies we need to survive the crossing."
"We've come this far," Sephiroth said. His eyes were on the far horizon now, in the direction the sun had risen. "We need to at least try to make the attempt. To our ruin if it is to be so. Isn't that what you said?"
He threw the harness over his shoulders and buckled it across his chest.
Aerith got up from her pack. "Yes, you're right."
"Then, let's go."
They pulled the sled until nightfall, only stopping to rest once. The landscape was smooth and unchanging, a great flat plain of white upon white, and more than once Sephiroth wondered if they were making any progress at all. But eventually night fell, the light slowly fading into blackness, and they were forced to stop.
"Did we make it to the first waypoint?" Aerith asked, sitting in the snow beside the sled, so she could be out of the wind. Sephiroth paced back and forth beside her, wiping the frost off the screen of the nav-sat unit. He got their coordinates from the device and consulted the map.
"No. We're half as far as we need to be. We're completely out in the open. There's nothing for thirty miles. We should have made it to this ridge." He indicated on the map.
Aerith took another handful of dried apples and chewed, saying nothing for a while. "Should we try to get there?"
"Travelling in the dark is dangerous. We should avoid it if we can."
"Let's camp here," she said, "No sense exhausting ourselves the first day."
It was an overcast night, and the blackness was complete. They assembled their shelter in the pale green light of the nav-sat's screen, the wind battering them every step of the way. Sephiroth drove the last stake down into the ice and threw himself inside. Aerith was already in her bedroll, with her coat laid over her. Her eyes were closed, but she opened them as soon as he entered. They glittered weirdly in the harsh glow of the nav-sat screen. The wind rippled the roof of the tent and the poles flexed precariously with the force. Sephiroth turned away from her, sat on his bedroll and pulled off his boots. He closed the nav-sat to conserve power, leaving them in complete darkness. Sephiroth laid down and listened to the screaming wind, trying not to move in the tight space. He could feel the cold leaching in through the tent seams. Aerith shifted behind him, the edge of her bedroll moving against his back. He heard her gasp quietly, and then she held her breath. The edge of her bedroll continued to quiver. Sephiroth sat up and turned toward her.
"Are you crying?"
She sniffed quietly.
"No. Yes. I was just thinking of Baral."
Sephiroth was silent. He had no words of comfort to offer her.
She sniffed and continued. "When Cetrans die, it is always so beautiful, the energy in our bodies dissolves into a cloud of light, leaving nothing. Humans are so…different. I can never get used to it."
Sephiroth lay on his back and shifted away from her, until his shoulder touched the cold tent wall. Her proximity was unnerving, too intimate. He could smell the sweetness of the apples on her breath as she breathed in and out.
"My mother died at a train station in Midgar," she volunteered suddenly, "The escape from ShinRa Tower was too much. She was already very weak, from what the scientists had done to her."
"I am sorry." Sephiroth didn't know what else to say. There could be hundreds, thousands even, who might have had the same story of torment, escape and eventual death. It was or would be essentially his own story too, he realized, and the thought grieved him, but there was nothing to be done for it.
"When were you in the Tower?" he asked.
"We were in and out, over a couple of years."
"What years?"
"Why?"
"I was there, too."
"What were you doing there?"
"It was my home." He thought of the small square room that he slept in, with its gray rubber tiles, the white ceramic sink and the mirror above it, the single bed with the surgical blue sheets, the workrooms where he trained, the library, everything unchanged year after year after year.
"You lived there?" Aerith turned over to face him. Sephiroth was glad of the darkness.
"Yes. Most of the time, until I entered Soldier."
"How did you stand it?"
He had no idea how to answer the question. He had never considered it, but had only bore each suffering as it came. There had never been anything else; it was all he had known. That was the true answer.
"Where did they keep you?" he asked, instead of answering her.
"Lower-central I think. It was hard to tell. There were no windows. I never saw the sun. Where were you?"
"In the tower, two floors below the executive levels."
"So, almost at the top."
"Yes."
They were silent for a while. The wind buffeted the roof of the tent unceasingly. Sephiroth shivered and drew his bedroll closer around him. It was surreal, talking with Aerith about the labs. It was strange to think that she, of all people, had known them, too. But she had lived her life almost completely outside their walls, and had known so many other things that he had never experienced. She was a completely different creature.
"Could you see the sky, where you were?" Aerith asked.
He thought back. It had been a reward, just like a visit to the vivarium to look at the animals. Jani would take him to the maintenance space on top of the elevator core, where the huge counterweights for the cars hung like churchbells and let him look out of a small square window at the smoggy city below. The sky above the smog layer had been clear, impossibly blue, he remembered, the sun so bright it hurt to look at. And then, just once, in the middle of the night, he had stolen Hojo's keycard and snuck up to the heliport at the top of the tower. He had crept up to safety cable at the edge of the building, leaning out over the void so that the wind rattled in his lungs. It was incredible; so much space, so much air, the city glittering below him like a carpet of gems. But there was no way he could communicate all of this, what these experiences had meant to him.
"Sometimes," was what he said.
"Jani was the one who took care of you, wasn't it?"
Hearing her name shocked him. "How do you know that?"
"When you were recovering from the Lifestream, you said that name a lot. She must have been very important to you."
"She was."
Sephiroth turned over onto his side, away from her. He put his hands over his ears, laced his fingers into his smooth hair. His mind was racing; what else had he said while he had been recovering, what other things did she know? He didn't want to say anything more. Talking just proved how different he was, how he had nothing good to share. Already he had shared too much. He felt the wind bow the tent, pressing stiff frozen fabric against his face.
"Sephiroth?" Aerith asked, wondering if he had heard her.
"I don't want to talk about her. Please don't ask again."
The inflection in his voice wasn't anger, Aerith realized with a start, but was trying very hard to be. There was pain in his words, seeping out like a slow spreading bruise.
"I'm sorry," she said, still wondering at the desperate intensity behind his words, at what else he was hiding. Clearly Jani had meant a lot to him once, and maybe more than she ever guessed. Maybe he had even loved her. It was something, if only a vestige, of humanity, that she had never perceived in him before. As if he was only a man, something that could feel.
Sephiroth waited anxiously.
"Good Night," he said at last. He felt Aerith sit up and lean closer to him, as if she wanted to say something, but eventually he felt her lie down and turn away. Her breathing settled into an easy rhythm; she was asleep. Sephiroth stared into the darkness, wide awake. Jani. Hearing her name spoken aloud filled him with pain, and it shocked him, by how much it still hurt, even after all this time. That night, when it was all taken from him…