4. Cloud's Response

He has told me everything. I am more worn from what I've heard from him than from the battles I've fought in this godforsaken crater. I nearly left him there for dead because of my exhaustion, but as we were leaving I could still hear him laughing at me. I turned. I had to come back alone.

I find him somewhat frail without her, but he doesn't surrender. He's standing, facing me in the closed arena that the crater makes around us. Only the two of us in the darkness, and at first I can barely make out his form, but when my eyes adjust I find him shirtless, standing up straight, uninjured and holding his masume.

The sword he used to kill her.

"Why aren't you dead?" I ask, for lack of anything better to say. I'm ragged, bleeding from the side and still breathless from the battle with him.

He laughs, of course.

"That was Jenova you killed," he tells me. "And I thank you. Now I'm free."

We stand staring at each other for a moment. We're both holding our weapons but neither of us seems willing to make the first move. He's grinning, trying to seem amused, but I can see that he's feeling desperate and bare without his "mother's" power. He thought he was telling me everything before either my death or his, but neither happened. Now we're left standing here, everything out in the open, and there seems to be no reasonable course of action.

"I thought you were going to leave me here," he says.

"I came back to finish what I started," I tell him, and I mean it. He will not leave this crater. He will not negate her sacrifice. If I ever loved her, if I have any respect for what she did, I have to kill him. And I loved her more than I thought was possible, I have so much reverence for her sacrifice that I can't hate her for abandoning me. So I will end his life with delight: for Aeris, and also for myself, for what he took from me.

But my sword is motionless in my hand.

"Why did you tell me all of that before?" I ask, though I know the answer. It was part of his absolution: it was the reason Jenova died and he didn't. He bested her with his memories of me, with the human part of him that stayed alive quietly while under her control.

"I wanted you to know that all of this was your doing," he says, a lie. What he wanted was one final performance, a cross to climb upon.

I open my mouth to tell him. I open my mouth to tell him that I knew all along that I had ruined him, and that I have carried that guilt since I was sixteen. Maybe I even mean to tell him that I was waiting for him the day that Tifa crashed into my hotel room, sobbing about how much she had missed me. I had been beside myself with shock: as a kid I had been in love with her, but she had barely given me the time of day. Not until she learned I was joining SOLDIER was she interested in befriending me, and then it seemed ingenuine, and my crush had died. When she kissed me I felt nothing, and when I looked up to see him fleeing from the room I was horrified, because I knew what he would think.

But just as I can't move my sword to destroy him, I can't open my mouth to save him, either. He doesn't deserve it. He claims to have loved me – he doesn't know what love is. Love is what I had with Aeris. I was surprised to find myself falling in love with her, so sure after my experiences with him that I wasn't interested in women. With the two of them it wouldn't have mattered, though: Sephiroth could have been a woman and Aeris a man. I would still have fallen in love with both of them: they were something more than gender, something otherworldly – a terrible power that could be used for good or evil, as their contradictory lives would show.

Why me? I want to scream, staring at him as he watches me with mock amusement. Why did I have to go through the unbearable pain of loving them, and losing them both?

Because, though he stands less than ten feet away from me, I have lost him. I lost him that day in Nibelheim when I had been too frightened to tell him that I knew why he was upset, that I didn't want Tifa, that I had always wanted him. I never knew before today if I had actually kissed him that night we left Wutai, or if I had only dreamt it. I woke up in the morning with the memory of being in his arms, unsure whether I had invented or experienced it, but with no doubt that it was what I wanted.

I want to rage at him, I want to shout, to get down on my knees and sob: the truth is too terrible.

I LOVED YOU. I want to scream it, to broadcast it to the crumbling world through the amplifier of this crater, this wound on the planet where we find ourselves at the end of all things.

I try to invade his mind like he invaded mine when we climbed into the crater, try to put my voice in his head the way his had been in mine while we fought. I want to admit everything as he has, I want to tell him, but my loyalty to her keeps my mouth closed. No, he should suffer. He should die without knowing the truth.

The truth is that I did love him. I loved him even before I met him; I think I must have known. I felt the same way about Aeris when I met her. In many ways I was reliving all of the things I had gone through with him as I fell in love with Aeris, though she was a kinder, happier soul: one who wasn't afraid to tell me how she felt about me, wasn't afraid to show it.

He had been afraid. I was never certain how he felt about me, though I had my suspicions. Sometimes I thought he was cruel, feeding my obsession by touching my hand, squeezing my shoulder, by standing so close to me that I had to concentrate very hard on not crushing myself against his side. Often I felt like he was fond of me, but I never knew how or why. At night, alone in my tent, I would touch myself, thinking of him and feeling pathetic. All the time he had been doing the same thing, thinking of me, his wanting parallel to mine, and so close.

It was the most tragic, stupid waste that any two people had ever orchestrated. And because of his selfishness, because of his irrational tirade, it had cost innocent people their lives. He and I had done that, just by missing each other by a few seconds. If he had come to my room sooner that night it would have been Tifa who found me in another's arms and suffered heartbreak.

But Tifa is not a maniac – she would not have burnt down the town and murdered everyone in her path in response.

Sephiroth is insane. I understand that it is not his fault – like everyone else I blame Shinra, Jenova, Hojo – I even blame myself, for being a fool, for having been too dense to see that even the great general had fears, that he would not simply sweep me off my feet when he wanted to.

None of that changes the fact that he is responsible for what he has done. I've been through some terrible shit – he's put me through much of it personally – but I haven't snapped, I haven't given up. Even when he killed Aeris and every breath I took was jagged pain, I did not desert my friends. I did not desecrate her memory by letting myself quietly die, which was all I wished for after she was gone.

After suffering a far worse loss than he has, I can never forgive him for reacting the way he did to the pain I have caused him.

But still my sword is motionless.

"Have you got anything to say to me?" he asks, smirking. "After everything I've said to you, surely you must want to tell me something."

I bite my tongue. I'm on the verge of admitting everything. Admitting that even after he burned down the town, hurt all those people, seemed to have killed Tifa – even then I hesitated before letting him fall into the mako vat. Even after I had done it – for Tifa, my mother, everyone – I regretted it. He's right when he says that there was remorse on my face when I watched him fall. I wanted to take it back.

But he can't know that. He can't. His punishment won't be his death, which I will deal to him soon enough. His punishment will be dying without knowing that I wept over him, longed for him, wondered if he hadn't been worth more to me than everyone who died in Nibelheim that day. After all, they had ostracized me as a child, teased me for not having a father. And my mother – she meant well, but she had never understood me. Not like he had.

"Bring Aeris back to me," is all I can say, choking a little on the words. " Please, there has got to be some way." I nearly crumble to the ground, my sword shaking in my hands.

"I no longer have any powers beyond yours," he says, raising his hands as if to demonstrate. "And even with Jenova inside me I could not have done that."

"PLEASE!" I scream, falling to my knees now, letting my sword drop to the stone floor of the cave. "Please – you took her – there's got to be some way." I collapse into sobs, my neck exposed, my defenses down. If he wanted to kill me, he could. I'm the only person who can kill him; we both know that. If he kills me now than he's won the world for himself. Even Jenova is gone: all is his if he just gets rid of me, his only threat. But he doesn't have it in him to kill me and never has, never will.

I am not afraid of death, even so. If I died I would be with her. It's not the first time the thought has crossed my mind. Death has been the most attractive prospect for me for some time now. This attitude has allowed me to be the kind of warrior that he was when he was at his strongest: fearless.

Almost. I don't claim to know anything after the afterlife, about the Lifestream. I'm afraid that if I die dishonorably then I won't be placed on the same plateau that she ascended to in death. I'm afraid that, as he believes, I'll end up with him for eternity, roasting in the fiery pit of his love.

Or afraid that it's all bullshit and our souls die with our bodies.

"Get up," he snarls, disgust in his voice. I look up at him with my eyes overflowing. She was the only good thing in my life, and he took her from me. I try to use this to motivate me, try to stand, try to take up my sword. I don't move. He kneels before me.

"You think you know pain?" he growls, his face close to mine. "You think you know heartache? She loved you. She loved you in return. What you had was bliss. You should thank me for ending it when your love was as strong as it ever would have been."

"Bastard!" I scream, catapulting up off the cavern floor and knocking into him, pushing him over. I rear back to punch him in the face, but he easily catches my hand, stopping me.

"Real pain comes when love is unreturned," he says, holding my fist as I struggle, glaring at me. "Real pain is being given a taste of love, of acceptance, and then having it thrown in your face."

"You asshole!" I scream down at him, unable to hold it in anymore. "I did love you! It killed me – it killed me that you thought –"

I can't finish. I don't want to tell him how much it hurt to be unable to explain about Tifa, too afraid that he really was furious about everything that had been done to the Cetra, and done to him by Shinra. I didn't want to sound like a fool in case I was wrong, in case he really didn't care about me, and for my own self preservation I let him wither away.

He throws me off of him, furious. I skitter across the cave's floor and my hand finds my sword. I stand, holding it. He's behind me. I have my back turned to him, but I can hear him breathing.

"Liar," he says. His voice is uneven, but still harsh, still wicked.

"But I loved her more," I say, not looking at him. It's the truth. Aeris was my salvation. Her pure and selfless love saved me from the hell of loving him.

I feel his sword moving through the air behind me, and I turn just in time to catch the blow against mine. He's fuming, his hands are shaking as he presses against my blade with his own. I can see in his eyes – outwardly furious but internally vulnerable – that he doesn't have strength to fight me. I wonder if telling him that I did love him was more cruel than keeping it from him. Finding out that you've built your life around something that isn't true can be harder than living with the lie.

I should know.

Our battle is anticlimactic: he doesn't last long. He's blown apart by what I've said: I know he feels the real weight of my words, though my speech was stunted, and that he realizes that I'm telling the truth. The truth, which is that I loved him, and that I still want her back, that I don't want him, the one I've been left with.

My sword goes through his stomach like a hand sliding neatly into a pocket: the same way his masume cut through her. The perfect stroke, the blood pooling only after a few seconds of the steel hibernating in the skin. He looks down at his mortal wound and then up at me. He looks stunned, relieved, delivered. I pull the sword out and feel what I think is splattered blood on my face.

Then I realize I'm crying. I'm weeping, sobs racking through me the way they did when I held Aeris's lifeless body. He crumbles to the ground, and I throw my sword aside, drop to my knees and lean over him, crying against his cheeks, which are dry.

"Oh, you loved me," he says, as if he's just heard me say it, or just let himself realize it. His voice is strained, his eyes stare blindly up into the darkness of the crater.

"Sephiroth," I cry, putting one arm around his shoulders and reaching down with the other to try, fruitlessly, to slow the blood that is pouring from his wound.

What have I done? Again remorse races through my body – again I don't want to kill him, but again I already have.

"Shhhh," he says, shutting his eyes against my forehead, his eyelashes brushing my skin. "The promised land," he whispers.

And then he is gone.

I'm left crying over his body – just a body, after all, not the form that a god had taken, not the alien lifeform's host. Just the body of a man I loved. A man who was more than a man, but still human. So flawed. So perfect. I lay my cheek on his chest and cover the last warmth from his skin with tears.

He is gone from the world. I feel the planet mourn with me the way it did when I lost her.

They were incredible, and wasted.

Is there anything more cruel? Is there anything more cruel than being the lesser being, the one who fumbled and cost the world both of them: is there anything more cruel than having drawn the love of two of the brightest spots of light, and having snuffed them out for it?

I hear the Highwind descending above, the others coming to retrieve me. I stand over Sephiroth, covered in his blood, my sobs giving way to the hollowness that follows, to the empty place I know well, thanks to him, thanks to her, thanks to me for getting in the way of their destiny and costing them their lives.

I say nothing when I board the Highwind, after climbing a ladder dropped to me. The others say nothing as well. We fly away from the crater, leaving him there in the planet's wound.

Midgar appears in the distance. My friends gasp and murmur with fear as Meteor presses against the city. They cry when the light of Holy fades against the burning red hate that Sephiroth brought to the planet for me, because of me, to spite me and hurt me and to show me what disappointing him cost.

I watch Holy disintegrate against his power and I'm surprised – tears are again slipping from my eyes. I realize I'm watching his hate battle her love, and that she's losing. My flower girl. She was so strong, but not strong enough to know that hate was the key to prevailing over him – by hurting him I had given him the power to overcome her.

"Look!" Tifa says, drawing me out of my trance. I lift my eyes again, wipe them dry, and see something – green threads of light. They are shooting around the ship, rising from the earth below – one flies right past my ear.

And then I know. It's her. I hear her voice in my head as the green lights intertwine, as they form a net that catches Meteor, that defeats it, that holds the planet in it's merciful embrace. I hear her voice:

"Lifestream."

Everyone on the ship's deck is looking at me now, and I realize I've said it aloud. Lifestream. Aeris.

There are tears of joy, expressions of disbelief. Cid finds an old bottle of champagne below deck and my friends pass it around, dirty and tired but overjoyed, drinking and crying.

Tifa sees me standing alone and walks to me, puts her hand on my arm.

"Cloud, it's over," she says, crying, kissing my cheek. I look down at her and try to smile.

It's over. They're gone. And what have they saved – Sephiroth with his subtle resistance against Jenova and Aeris with her sacrifice? I look around the ship. I see people who are kind and true, but no light shines from their mortal forms. No brilliance, no extraordinary grace. Nothing like what I saw when I looked at him, when I held her. Just watching them walk across a room had felt like a privilege. What will the world be without them?

I have to go below deck. I use the excuse that I'm injured and need rest. Both are true, but I can't sleep when I put my head to the pillow on my cot.

I want to be happy, relived like the others. I feel cursed for having known them – Sephiroth and Aeris, they took the ability for me to be happy with them when they left me.

And yet I would give none of it back. None of it. Even if I had not lost Sephiroth, I would not have found her.

I roll over on the cot, this thought having given me hope. When I lost him I thought my life was over. For five years I wandered in a daze, lost until she came.

I never anticipated her existence. I never thought I would love again. And certainly I am as sure now as I was then: it couldn't happen.

Which means, of course, that it could.

I drift to sleep, and in my dreams they are waiting. They sit on a block of cracked pavement that floats through the sky – no Promised Land, just the two of them on this unceremonious altar, he standing with his arms crossed, she sitting with her legs over the edge, looking down onto the world that floats by below.

"What do you miss most?" he asks her in the dream.

After a pause, she answers:

"Him."

He nods. And they float away, through my mind, the Lifestream, through the history of my heart: not lost, but waiting.