Stop

Vincent peered cautiously around a corner. I grinned and swept past him, shuriken out and ready, the ferocious little cub at my side.

"Didja really explore all of these caves before, Auntie Yuffie?" she asked, bounding forward and cocking her head back to catch a response. Cloud laughed and moved past me to drop a hand to her mane. She purred.

"Yeah, Aeris. Your father came too; we all spent two years exploring these caves. This network runs for miles. Your mother used to live here; this is where your parents met."

Aeris' tail flicked. "And I betcha they fought lotsa battles together!" I smiled at the thought of how different she was than her namesake. Aeris had been a healer; Red's youngest daughter was a warrior through and through. She took after her father, mostly, though her mother Avani was a warrior as well.

"Yes," Cloud said quietly, "we all fought lots of battles together." He stared blankly off for a minute, and I was reminded of why we were here. Aeris was nearly twenty now. Her sister Kasumi was forty-eight, the same age as her father when we had first joined together, and acted very much like him. I think it was Vincent she idolized, though. We had shown this to Kasumi when she was twenty-six, but Aeris was maturing faster.

"Auntie Yuffie!" Aeris tended to idolize, well, me.

This was a great deal more irritating than I had expected, to Cloud and Vincent's endless amusement.

"We're almost there, Aeris..."

I slipped sideways through a nearly-hidden crack in the stone, grinning widely at Aeris' astonished gasp. The little cub was adorable, but she was very easily amused.

Then again, I'm pretty easily amused myself.

Vincent followed me, Aeris trotting by his side and swiveling her head about curiously, and Cloud filed in last. He sat down on one of the raised stone platforms against the wall of the room and Vincent and I sat down on either side of him.

We were in a vast circular room, the domed ceiling far above us. The entrance crack was all but invisible from inside the room. Lining the walls were memorials. Aeris prowled around the outside of the room, reading the inscriptions.

"Cait Sith. Cid Highwind. Aeris..." She paused. "Aeris Gainsborough... Barret Wallace." She glanced over where the three of us sat, silent, and read the inscriptions above Cloud and Vincent's platforms and on the monument behind me. "Vincent Valentine, Cloud Strife, Yuffie Kisaragi..." The cub trailed off as she moved to the center of the room and read the final inscription, scorched into the floor hundreds of years ago. "AVALANCHE. In death as in life, as one with the Planet." Aeris sank onto her haunches in the center of the room, her tail flicking daintily. The firetip threw eerie shadows onto the walls.

"Uncle Cloud, where are we?" she asked quietly, her bright voice unusually somber.

"This is AVALANCHE's tomb," Vincent said quietly. "Your father wanted us to show you this when he felt you were old enough, and to tell you a story."

Aeris swiveled her head to look at Vincent. "But Uncle Vincent, you tell me stories all the time."

"This one's different," said Cloud, speaking for the first time since entering the tomb. He stared blankly across the room, at Aeris' monument. "This isn't something we could tell a child, Aeris. You had to be older to hear this one."

"It's worse than the story about Sephiroth, and Meteor, and AVALANCHE?" the cub asked, wide-eyed and crouching.

"In a way. This was after all of that. This was..." Cloud paused a minute. "This is about the ninth member of AVALANCHE."

Aeris stared at him. "Daddy only talked about eight members. He's never mentioned anyone else."

"He never told you...about Tifa Lockheart."