Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters of Final Fantasy VII, nor of anything else.
A/N: Hola! Como estas? Wow, I'm a great Spanish speaker, don't ya think? Just messin'. Anyway, welcome to chapter two of my infamous-3-reviews-story: Wicked Savior. Great to have you, hope you enjoy! I've really been working out the plot on this one, but I've had to mess up a few things on the original game plot, but hardly anything noticeable, so don't go off in a fury just yet. My apologies for the lack of dialogue in this chapter, but I had to get it out of the way, and in one big, huge wad of boring seemed the best way to do it than boring spilled all over the place. Heh heh, okay, now to the real stuff: I'd like to thank me, myself, and my three wonderful reviewers! Keep up the great work, I says- I says. Aight, now to the real, real stuff…
Chapter 2: The Dream
Heat filled her senses until all she was aware of was the intense throbbing and dank air. She struggled to inhale, but fresh air mingled freely with moisture, causing her to gape like a fish to simply catch her breath. The air held a pungent mildew reek and stung her eyes to the point watering. Her emerald irises darted wildly, but a thick, touchable haze hung just before her vision. Her hands reached out feebly to push the green clouds away, but they shrouded around her swipes and engulfed her arms. She gasped sharply in frustration, but was rewarded by a fit of coughing.
The coughs lasted a good five minutes, wracking her lungs until they felt as though they would burst. Her chest heaved and liquid caught in her throat. Doubling over slightly, she clenched the base of her neck and abdomen. Her breathing paused, allowing fear to cloud her senses before a large wad of blood swelled and burst from the back of her throat. She spit it to the ground, letting the rest foam at the corners of her mouth. Her body clenched, spasmed, then expanded as she took in a deep breath of the foggy air.
Oxygen came in with gagging breaths and it took six good tries before Aeris finally felt stable enough to stand straight. As she did so, her ribs and stomach screamed in blistering pain. Hissing, the girl removed her hand that was still grasping that section. Her palm revealed a handful of dark, sticky blood that continued to seep down onto her clothes at a quickening pace. Panic erupted from her and she let loose a scream that echoed on invisible barriers.
The wound was deep, far too deep to survive and it was then that Aeris noted the same warm flow running down her back. Tears began to match the steady stream of blood, creeping over her pale cheeks as she stumbled about dumbly. But the heat of the clouds surrounded her; held her in suffocating embrace. She struggled, but the Planet called her to a stop. The voices came from outside her form, speaking from the haze and far spaces in between. They called her true name in a language Aeris did not understand, yet found oddly familiar. The language of the Cetra.
Hands penetrated the clouds, thousands of them. They all touched, soothed, and gripped Aeris until she was no longer mobile. Each shifted in a dancing light, flickering in and out of existence. They all seemed to be caressing the girl's flushed skin, yet only the heavy air against her sweaty body was detectable. Soon that was beyond notice as well. Nothing seemed to be touching her as Aeris's whole body became numb.
It was a numbness rarely felt, but instinctually recognized. The humidity became cool, then cold on the girl's dying breaths. Two hands covered her eyes, two of the only things she could now feel. They were hard and calloused, but held the aura of the Planet's power as they gently slid Aeris's eyelids closed. Everything became still and the silence was heavy, if not frightening.
Darkness engulfed her, but she could still hear. She heard everything. She heard music of a thousand cultures, voices of a thousand people, sounds of a thousand functions, and then nothing at all. Had her muscles been able to move, Aeris would have coiled into a ball of fear, but instead she lay lifeless, floating into the stomach of a desolate eternity. The girl had felt this only once before, when she lost her true mother, Ifalna. The pain was so familiar. It was inevitably followed by a daze of shock as reality slips away into oblivion. When Aeris's foster mother, Elmyra, first took the young child into her arms, it was only too clear the trauma she would have to live with. Eventually, Aeris had lost the rigid stillness and silence in her demeanor, and, much to Elmyra's surprise became an altogether optimistic person.
In later years, Aeris had explained before how her mother had never left her in the first place, and how many people, including her mother, would always talk to her. This only gave her the attention and ridicule of the neighborhood children, so the voices stayed inside and Aeris learned to never speak of them to any but her foster mother.
A normal child, possessing abnormal voices in their head, would generally need some sort of medication or special observation, especially with how influential and invoking the 'people' in Aeris's head seemed to be. They spoke to her every day, every moment. They told stories, told her what to do in situations, told her the ancient lore of the Planet. But this is to be expected of the last Cetra child. All voices, all hope of the Ancients' descent lay within one meek, kind-hearted girl. Some may refer to it as a curse, but Aeris refers to it as a blessing, to have all those of the Planet talking to you at once, guiding life as if swinging at a piñata without the blindfold. This didn't necessarily make life much better, it simply made getting to the hard part easier. Now the candy has dropped, but you're all alone in the struggle to get the biggest handful.
Naturally, Elmyra knew of Aeris's descent and thought nothing but the best for her gifted child. It never occurred odd to her that the girl who was so in love with the ground beneath her feet was the only one in all of the Slums to grow such vibrant, healthy flowers. The phenomenon was only natural of the Ancients and Elmyra gathered it as a sign of hope and better days to come for the Planet.
Aeris had felt the same, perceiving her destiny as saving the dying world and restoring peace to her distressed ancestors. When Cloud and his group of rebels from AVALANCHE came along, unknowingly offering her the opportunity to stop the destructive Shinra, she dove in head-long, never pausing to analyze the consequences leading to her own demise. All that seemed to matter was the Planet, the Ancients, and stopping the annihilation of the beloved lifestream. But generally if the term 'look before you leap' is disregarded, it ends up with the leaper in some sort of an unfavorable predicament. Aeris had plunged herself into several situations that rested far above her head. Thankfully, Cloud had seemed to have taken an infatuated liking to the flower girl, and found in necessary to protect and shield her at all costs. The journey had hardly taken itself anywhere but to a relentless search for the notorious maniac, Sephiroth, before Aeris found herself in a situation Cloud could not protect her from.
Yet Aeris's optimistic attitude prevailed once more, as she trekked alone through the Sleeping Forest and into the maw of the City of the Ancients, where her life, almost predictably, was stolen away by the very soul that AVALANCHE was searching for. The kill was swift, but the actually dying lasted an eternity. During her life, Aeris could not fulfill the fate she promised to herself and the Cetra before her, so she vowed again to come back; to see the end of the world crisis. The Planet was not so forgiving, nor willing to give up quite so easily. The waters Cloud let her lifeless form drift to the bottom of were pure and prayed upon from centuries back before the dawn of time itself. Elements of the raw lifestream sewed together through the wound and into Aeris's blood, supporting her corpse and chaining her soul to it. She awoke anew, neither dead nor alive, but rather a walking, talking memory made of lifestream matter. Her functions were not handicap, yet she was not gifted with any abilities she had not known in her life. It was a temporary, soul-wracking job, but Aeris resolved herself to do it: dead or alive… or somewhere in between.
The Planet still followed the girl's trail as it always had, assuring her in the actions she took and what she must do. Dreams were not an uncommon form for the Planet to reach her, but since her death it had become obvious that the visions were ominous. She was constantly reminded of her death, almost every night brought back to the moment of her revival, to another moment beyond time's grasp. They stole her body and mind of much-needed energy, leaving her drained when she awoke gasping and crying.
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Beyond the void, beyond the eternal silence, penetrated just a single sound: one voice that called to Aeris from what sounded like across the universe. She would never know how accurate that was.
It was the voice all too familiar to the girl, the voice of her mother, Ifalna. Long-lost tears welled in Aeris's eyes, falling over the rim of her eyelids and down to her chin. She was mildly surprised that she could feel again and be aware of herself. It hardly seemed to matter now that her mother was here, somewhere beside her whispering into her ear with a warm, soft air. There were faint traces of Ifalna's honeydew breath in the air and Aeris inhaled it as deeply as she could. The tears stopped to listen to her mother's faint words:
'Expurgate. Expurgate the Cetra. Expurgate. Expurgate the Cetra…'
The voice continued softly, drowning itself out every time the message was repeated. Aeris would scream back, refusing to listen or acknowledge what her mother told her. Instead she thrashed about wildly, hitting her limbs against walls that had seemingly formed around her. The barriers closed in as she struggled, until the girl could hardly move and was silent. Outside the dark room she was trapped within, her mother's voice was barely audible. The message was repeated over and over, until it spoke onto itself so many times that the words were no longer coherent.
Aeris began to cry again, her mother's reassuring voice now twisted into millions of the same words piled on top of one another. The sound was demented and disgusted Aeris to where she clapped her palms to her ears to break the morbid noise. Her body slumped despondently to what was once the floor. Instead she fell into nothingness, wrapped once again within the heat of the haze. Everything on her body refused to move, but she fell without struggle or panic, for the voice fell away upward and everything that had just passed slipped Aeris's mind.
It was a slow, lazy fall and as she descended, her torso and limbs stretched out and pushed forward, glad for the cooling wind that ran past her heated flesh. Her hair, tied up into a high, loose braid, unknotted itself from its bonds and released into the air above her. She wriggled slightly in her clothes, vexed by their slight, yet noticeable containment from the fresh air. Her eyes fluttered shut as each tied bow, each hurried knot, came loose and fell away from her. The pink dress, now unbound, came up over her head and torso, but never escaped her grasp as it fluttered above her in the continuous fall. She swam downward through the air, her body clad in nothing but her own soft flesh.
The air seemed to lift and the haze drifted away as Aeris felt herself submitting to the situation. Her whole being released tension and vibrations caressed her freely without the burden of clothes. The dress continued to wave above her, casting odd, translucent shadows that shielded a new light coming from a high angle. The light filtered through the warm color of the material, casting brilliant hues of crimson, fuchsia, and copper onto the atmosphere. They penetrated the clouding green and pulled in a clear view of the bottomless domed hall Aeris was falling within.
She felt as though the fall would never end, and she hoped it would be so. Fresh air, like the hands of a million lovers, drove her into a rhythmic ecstasy that matched the pulsating voices that began to chime from below. They came in low, husky whispers and told her secrets only the trees and rocks knew. They told her of all history, of all that had ever occurred. They told her to look up, to look into the winking eyes buried in the night sky. Only they saw what was to come, they could see the all sides of the world, all sides of the Planet.
The endless hallway shifted and Aeris's dress of which she clasped so dearly to, ebbed away from her clenched fingers like water. She looked up as the dress stayed twisting and winding in one spot as the Cetra fell forever on. She let out a quiet cry of distress and frustration, attempting to push herself up and to grasp the cloth. It inched away, swallowed by a dark, gaping mouth that ate the hallway into pitch black. The dress was no longer visible, but Aeris continued to watch the spot she had last seen the pink.
Just barely, in the farthest distance in time and space, she detected the cloth. It came forth, twisting in a new shade of deep blue. There were holes in it, thousands and thousands of holes. From each tear, each crossing of thread, came an extraordinary light. The material stretched and bent in all directions, engulfing the hall and passing Aeris to the pit below her and beyond her vision. Colors spilt and stained the dress, becoming living matter as the cloth rippled.
The lights of blues and yellows and oranges and greens covered Aeris. They fluttered over her naked form, casting prisms like the tropical waters of white-sand seas. And then it stilled, the millions tears and rips placed with perfect precision. Nebulas surrounded the Cetra. Galaxies swirled in and out, suns touched between her splayed fingers, planets orbited like tops on an endless spin.
The Cetra looked around her. The falling had seemed to stop, but it was hard to tell whether she was floating or the whole universe was just following her. Everything in her being and soul resonated with the harmony of the untouched purity that kept every motion moving, every life living, every death dying. Delicate fingertips reached just below her bosom to pluck a sun from its solar system. The planets that had been surrounding it unmindfully kept their trek of eternity, never minding that their whole balance of gravity had just been stolen away from them.
Aeris took the sun, no larger than the size of a marble, and lifted it before her eyes. Its light was incredible and it was hard for the girl to keep her focus on the burning orb.
'Gaze into the eye. Hold it until you can see fate's path written before you.'
And hold it she did. Aeris stared into the tiny star, determined to depict what it was trying to show her. She held it until her own eyes reflected the sun in their cores, the white light captured within her irises. Her eyes glowed momentarily, then dulled to a filmy cloud. She looked harder, but could see nothing. There was so much nothing: no dark, no light, no objects, no disruptions. But suddenly there was…
The floor.
The floor barely touched Aeris's toes before she was shocked into the world of consciousness. She flew from her fur pallet, sweat just beginning to break on her forehead. She had never touched the floor before.
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Thanks for reading and bearing with me! (Is that the right 'bear?') Anywho, I'd be eternally grateful for your review- go ahead, bash this story to bits, but please, leave your comments!
