"Why did you save me?"
Jessie asked into the white void surrounding her. There was nothing but her there. Nothing at all.
And then someone appeared in front of her, along with that familiar scent of flowers. Her savior.
"Why must one need a reason to save someone else?" The mysterious stranger spoke playfully, "After all, you didn't need a reason to go out of your way to save this beautiful planet, yet you did it anyway, despite the odds stacked against you. That's admirable, you know?"
"But…I didn't even do anything!" Jessie argued, "All I did is make a big mess one after another. I couldn't do one thing right even if my life depended on it, and that's exactly what happened when I…when I…"
Jessie couldn't force herself to finish her line. The painful memories were just too much. She had to see it time and time again every time she closed her eyes at night, still remembering the agonizing pains she had to go through all the way to her final moments. It was her own damn fault, too.
Her own fault…just like everything else that happened.
"I shouldn't be alive. Why me and not anybody else?" Jessie asked in a resigned voice, "Why not you, Aerith?"
Aerith's smile faded a little, and Jessie worried if she said something wrong again, "The harsh truth is that we can't really pick and choose who we could save, Jessie. Believe me, there are many other people who deserve to live a long life, but no matter what we do or how hard we try, they never get to have one. For what it's worth, I'm happy that I could at least save you."
"Well, I wish it had been you…" Jessie admitted, "If there's anyone who deserves a second chance, it should have been you."
"This is already my second chance," Aerith replied, another smile widened on her face, "And I believe I've made a better use of it than my first time around. Now, it's your turn, Jessie."
"First time around? I don't understand."
"You and your friends were never meant to survive that night, Jessie." Aerith explained, "Me, Cloud, Tifa, and our friends…we kinda have something to do with changing that. I don't really understand it myself even now, but what I do understand is we've saved a lot of lives that we weren't able to save before. For that, I am extremely happy."
Jessie remained silent. This was all too much for her to process. Second lives, defying fates, they're all something beyond her understanding. All those things she never bothered to care about because she never really believed in them.
"You know…you really remind me of myself in a way." Aerith added, then she giggled, "My mom would've liked you, Jessie. Speaking of, I believe you and her have something to talk about. Better not keep her waiting! She can be pretty mean when she's upset, you know?"
Aerith's ghostly form began to fade away into the white.
"Wait! Aerith! Don't go!" Jessie called out, "I…"
'Thank you for saving my life' was what Jessie wanted to say, but the words somehow struck in her throat. Was she really thankful for her life? If not, then wouldn't it mean Aerith saved her for nothing? She was afraid. Afraid of disappointing her savior. Afraid of wasting the precious gift she had given her. Afraid of screwing up once again.
Even something as easy as just saying a simple 'thank you', she somehow found a way to screw it up.
How could she ever hope to repay Aerith's kindness?
"Don't worry, I understand." Aerith nodded with another kind, understanding smile as she faded away completely, "Say hi to my mom for me, okay?"
Jessie awakened to the blinding lights of a spotless white room. For a moment, she thought she was still dreaming that she was in the white void. With each passing day, the line between dreams and reality became pretty blurry for her. Is this even the present? Or did she just take another long nap and awaken some months into the future again? She wouldn't be surprised if this was actually a test chamber inside the Shinra Tower and that they were putting her under all along in order to turn her into some…thing…
Before Jessie could question her sanity any further, the single door in the room creaked open, and in walked a familiar face: Elmyra Gainsborough. The middle-aged lady who once lived in that fancy handcrafted home in Midgar's Sector 5 slums and often seen in her plain housemaid clothing, was now wearing a smart semi-business, semi-scientist attire that made her look about five years younger. Despite that, she didn't seem too pleased to be here.
"Ah, so much for my lovely afternoon break…" Elmyra sighed as she sat down on a chair opposite of Jessie, separated by a decent-sized table. Classic 'interrogation room' setup, as Jessie noticed. Elmyra placed the items she carried on the table: a tablet similar to the one Cissnei used in her right hand, a cup of coffee on her left.
"I have to say, miss. You certainly have an interesting definition of making a good first impression for potential employers," Elmyra began, "That being said, you did impress Rude a bit with your punches, so there's that. He's not one to be impressed easily, either."
"Great. Impressing some Shinra thugs is the last thing I wanted to do. I'd rather break his face," Jessie snarled, "How could you stand having people like them around!? They're Shinra people!"
"Correction: former Shinra people," Elmyra cut in, "And there are plenty of them working around here whether you like it or not. In times like this, everybody needs to work together. We can't turn away more pairs of hands if they're willing to help us rebuild the planet, even if they were part of the reason why the planet became such a mess in the first place."
"Even after everything they did?" Jessie asked disdainfully, "After all the atrocities they committed? All the families they ruined? All the lives they took? I'm just supposed to forget it all, is that it?"
"Of course not. Nobody should ever forget everything Shinra did to this planet and its people, and so should they," Elmyra explained, "Even though I don't exactly approve of it, that young man really did need some reminder that his actions did have consequences, a fact that I believe he fully appreciates by now."
"Does he? He doesn't even remember what he did!" Jessie argued.
"And when he does remember, the first thing out of his mouth is that he's sorry for it."
"Oh, please. His type always says anything to weasel their way out! Cowards like him always do."
"That 'coward' could have fought you back and won easily," Elmyra continued calmly, "Believe me, that young man has been through a lot of tougher beatings in his life. A few punches would've been just another Tuesday for him. He could've retaliated at any time, but he didn't. He just laid there and took the punches from you. Why do you think he did that?"
"Why should I care?!" Jessie spoke angrily, "He 'felt' sorry and let me use him as a punching bag, so it means all is forgiven, right!? Is it fair for everyone who lost their lives because of what he did?!"
"I know you. You're that young girl from Sector 7 who used to hang out with Biggs at the Leaf House orphanage, aren't you?" Elmyra asked with a curious frown, "That does explain a lot, actually."
"So you know…you of all people should know what these people did!" Jessie pointed out, "They're the reason we're in this mess in the first place!"
"Yes, I do know. I still remember what they did to my daughter." Elmyra raised her voice in a way that reminded Jessie of her own mother, "I also remember how she got caught up in your Avalanche business and forced to go on a long journey so far away from home and never to return to me again. I never even got to say goodbye to her. Do you think that it's fair for me as well?"
For once, Jessie had no answer for Elmyra. She lowered her face, unable to look her in the eyes. Though she didn't know the specifics, she learned from Tifa that by the time they rescued Aerith from the Shinra Tower, circumstances forced them to flee Midgar and left on a long journey without Aerith even having a chance to say goodbye to her mother. Had she never met any of them, would she still be forced to go on that path? The path that led to her life being taken away cruelly and mercilessly while Elmyra could do nothing but wept for her after the fact.
Would Aerith Gainsborough have lived if she had never met Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and the others? If the chain of events that Avalanche participated in didn't lead to Aerith ending up with them in the first place? Would it really be better off for everyone if they just do nothing and let fate sort itself out?
"Eventually, I realized that there's no point getting angry and vengeful over something you can't change," Elmyra added, clasping her hands together, "I could continue to blame everybody else in this blasted world for what happened to Aerith, or I could just accept it and move on with my life – making the best out of what I still have left and honor her memory through my actions."
"You made it sound so easy, just moving on…" Jessie mumbled, "I have to watch dozens of people gunned down the night they dropped Sector 7. My father was killed when they dropped the plate down, killing who knows how many other people, and I almost died. I can't just exactly turn it off and pretend all of that never happened."
"And I'm not asking you to," Elmyra cut in, her voice sounded more sympathetic this time, "Despite what you might think, I fully understand how you're feeling, Miss Rasberry. I've been through it before. I spent a long, long time before I can even begin to accept the fact that I'm never getting my beloved Aerith back. It's not easy. I won't sugarcoat it. It's going to be the most agonizing period of your life. That's the reality you must come to live with, and accepting that is the first step you need to take so you are able to move on."
"Well, at least you're honest." Jessie chuckled bitterly, "Maybe it would've been better if I had just died that night, then. What's the point of living if you feel like you're dying inside every day?"
"Because you still matter." Elmyra answered, "There are still people who care about you even if you don't care about yourself. People who need you and will feel devastated should anything happen to you."
Great, she's trying to guilt-trip me just like Biggs and Wedge did. Jessie thought. Why do people always use that justification to convince someone not to do something? Always think of someone else first. So she wasn't allowed to just live her own life anymore now? Now she has to live for someone else, too!
"I never asked for any of this!" Jessie snapped, slamming her fists on the table, "I never asked to be saved! I had my chance and I blew it, and that should be the end of me! I never asked to wake up in a world where everything I fought for didn't matter. I never asked for a second chance because I know I'd just fuck it up somehow, because that's the only thing I seem to be good at!"
Tears flew down Jessie's face again as she sobbed uncontrollably. She was just tired of it all. Tired of everything she had been through in both of her lives. Why couldn't just it all be over already?
"It should've been your daughter sitting here," Jessie spoke softly through her sobs, "Not me…"
Elmyra watched Jessie calmly, pitying the young girl for her miserable state. She had seen her fair shares of people feeling lost and useless after the Meteorfall. People who don't know their places in the world and are desperately looking for a purpose in their lives. People who felt guilt for surviving something while their close ones didn't. Jessie Rasberry was no different.
For a moment, she was reminded of that day at Sector 5 train station, when she was waiting for her husband to come back from a pointless war with Wutai. She was lost then, too. The ideal family life that she was supposed to have with him was taken away with her being unable to do anything about it except clinging on to a false hope. Then she met Ifalna and Aerith, and they were just as lost as she was as well. They had nowhere else to go, no shelter that would take them in, and no safety they could find in a den of lions. Perhaps that's just how people are in the world: a bunch of people who are lost, doing what they can to help each other find their own ways.
It was Aerith who helped Elmyra found hers, and now it was her turn to help Jessie as well.
"You know? Back when I learned about what happened to my dear Aerith…I didn't want to continue on living, either." Elmyra finally began, "Aerith was my second chance. Me and my late husband…we never had a child together before he passed away fighting in that stupid war, so when Aerith showed up in my life, I thought I could make things right this time. To be a mother that I never got a chance to be. And for the most part, I think I did a decent job at it."
Elmyra smiled with nostalgia as she reminisced the memories she spent together with her adoptive daughter, a smile that managed to stop Jessie from sobbing for a fleeting moment before it disappeared from Elmyra's face as she returned to reality.
"That is until Shinra came back into her life, and that Sephiroth…they took her away from me forever." Elmyra continued, her voice started trembling as well, "I completely lost all will to live. There's no point living on in a world without her. When rumors of a calamity from the skies threatening to end the world as we know it started circling around, I was initially even praying that it would actually happen. To put me out of my misery already. To erase this insignificant planet from its miserable existence. That way, maybe I could at least see her again."
Another pause as Elmyra shook her head lightly, as if chastising herself for that fatalist thought she once had, "By the time I actually get to see the Meteor itself, though, I changed my mind completely. This world, despite its shortcomings, despite all the horrible things that happened in it, is a place that I shared with the people I loved and cared for. A place that held all those cherished memories that I created with them. I didn't want it all to disappear like all of it means nothing. I didn't want the memories of Aerith and my husband to fade away like they never even existed."
Elmyra's tale prompted Jessie to think back to her childhood memories as well, as much as she could recall it. The day her mother first brought her to a local daycare and met Biggs and Wedge for the first time. That blissful vacation where her father spent his hard-earned money to bring her to the Gold Saucer, where she first aspired to become an actress after seeing a powerful stage performance there. The day she first showed her mechanical talent by fixing a homemade walkie-talkie all on her own and the proud smiles on her parents' faces when she showed it to them. All those nights spent drinking and messing around with everybody in Avalanche in the 7th Heaven bar in the hearty slums of Sector 7. Every single moment was still clear in her mind just like it happened yesterday. All those precious memories that she wouldn't trade for anything in the world and will fight to the bitter end to keep them alive.
She wanted to keep those memories alive, even if it means she has to face her fears again.
"How did you do it?" Jessie finally broke her silence, "How did you deal with…everything that's happened in the face of inevitable?"
"With lots of alcohol and a fool's hope, to be honest," Elmyra let out a small laugh, "What the hell was I gonna do in the face of something so incomprehensibly powerful? Sure enough, everybody was running on hope. There was no reason to believe that we would live to see another day by the time the cursed thing was right above Midgar, yet we persisted on anyway."
Elmyra paused and reached for her tablet before switching to her photo gallery. She scrolled on it for some time until she found the folder she needed, then she handed the tablet to Jessie. The folder simply read: "The Promised Day", and inside it was photos taken on the day of the Meteorfall.
"I've seen medics still hard at work, helping people out of the city even though they had nowhere else to go. I've seen corporate suits risking their entire careers to save as many people as they could. I've seen car drivers stopping to pick up strangers and let them travel together just so that nobody had to be alone," Elmyra continued on, just as Jessie scrolled to a photo of a familiar-looking muscular man with a metal arm, standing with his back turned as he stared up upon the star, and sitting atop his right shoulder was a familiar little brown-haired girl, "And I've seen a loving father doing everything in his power to protect his little girl, even if it means going to fight a battle that he may never come back from."
Jessie couldn't help but smile upon seeing the photo. Even though the scenes of Barret Wallace being the coolest dad ever to his adoptive daughter Marlene was a common sight in the 7th Heaven, it still warmed her heart every time she sees it happen, and there was something significant in the fact that even the end of the world could not change the love that he has for her. Elmyra smiled as well as she continued once more:
"Sometimes, we just have to take things on blind faith. Just hope for the best that things will turn out alright. The important thing is don't let despair have a hold over you, even when it feels like the entire universe itself is out to get you. Do the right thing even when it seems doomed to fail, just because you can. Don't let anything change who you are until the very end."
"I…don't know if I have the strength to do that." Jessie admitted, "I'm scared. So scared that I'll mess up again. I messed up a lot of things in my life already. Hell, just look at what I did here today, for starters. I don't know if it'd be any different this time around. I just…I just thought that out of everybody who deserves a second chance, it should've been someone else who would know what they're doing better than me. Someone who would've changed the world for the better and not potentially making it worse. I don't know if I am that person."
"Nobody knows, really." Elmyra took a sip from her cup of coffee, "And let's face it, nobody really knows what they're doing, either. Just a few months ago, I was just a housemaid whose biggest concern was paying my rent on time, and now I'm in charge of a project that could seriously affect the world's environment even though I barely know how to use a wrench. Nobody ordered me to do this, but I accepted the job anyway because it's what I wanted to do. Because it's the right thing to do."
"And you're not scared at all?"
"Hell yes, I'm scared. I'm always scared that I'd fail again, just like how I've failed to protect my daughter," Elmyra admitted, followed by a small sigh, "But like I said, I can't let it change who I am. If Aerith was brave enough to face the unknown and journeyed halfway across the world to do what must be done, then how can I call myself her mother if I gave in to my own fears and never tried to be even half as strong as she was?"
"Even still, you did all this just to prove a point?" Jessie asked, "I mean, Aerith would've been already proud of you no matter who you are or what you do."
"I guess we're both not so different, then," Elmyra noted with a smile, "Isn't that the same reason why you joined Avalanche in the first place? To prove that you can change the world for the better?"
Touché, auntie. Jessie could not come up with any retort. Elmyra had a point. Though she did join Avalanche partly to get some payback for what Shinra did to her father, mostly it was because she genuinely wanted to make a difference to the world by doing what she can to protect it from anybody who threatens it, and though she didn't have a single meaningful success, it didn't stop her from trying again and again anyway, just because she can.
Perhaps that was also why Elmyra did what she did, why Aerith did what she did.
A beeping noise sounded from Elmyra's tablet, followed by a message notification. Jessie handed the tablet back to Elmyra, who frowned upon taking a look at it, "Huh, looks like the new shipment of solar cells from Junon had just arrived, but there's a slight hiccup with one of them. Guess I have to see to it now."
Elmyra reached into her handbag before pulling out a pamphlet and handing it to Jessie. Inside was a long list of job openings with brief descriptions for each position, some pictures, as well as numbers for the related departments.
"Take a look and see if there's anything that interests you. I believe your friend mentioned that you're quite a talented mechanic yourself, so I imagine some of the open positions would be quite appealing for you," Elmyra said, "I can't promise that you'll get it, but regarding what happened today, I'll do what I can to make sure that it doesn't affect the job interview process. These things happen and I totally get why you'd do it, so don't beat yourself up over it and focus on the present. Just try not to make a habit out of it."
"I…thank you for the offer, ma'am…"
To say surprised would be an understatement for Jessie. She thought she had totally flunked any chance of getting a job with the WRO with the stunt she pulled earlier, but there she was, gaining favor with someone in high places within it. Granted, she was still unsure whether or not she would actually want to work there or not, given that she already had beefs with some of its members, but it's always better to have more options available than fewer.
"Why did you do so much for me?" Jessie asked, "I'm just a nobody."
"We all used to be nobodies, kiddo," Elmyra chuckled after taking another sip from her coffee, "It's your choice whether or not to remain one."
And with that parting word, Elmyra left the room, leaving Jessie to ponder her options in silence.
A/N: A lot of elements in this chapter, including Elmyra's characterization, are heavily inspired by the story 'You Grow The Flowers Yourself' by frozenfountain, an Elmyra-centric character study story that really gets into her mind as we followed her experince through the events of the game and beyond. I highly recommended it for any Final Fantasy VII fan!
And thank you frozenfountain for your inspirational and emotional story! :)