Stop-All
Eventually, the others started dying.
We knew it was going to happen, but somehow it always seemed so far removed. They were going to die someday. Not now.
Not now.
But this was Cid's funeral, and he was the last.
I stood before the grave, long after the family had gone home, Cloud and Vincent on either side of me, and let one last cigarette drop onto the grave.
"Rest in peace, old man," I said quietly.
I turned and walked away. Vincent left in another direction, Cloud in yet another. Red XIII was somewhere far away; I hadn't seen him in years. We were the very last of AVALANCHE.
I didn't realize it, but we would not even see each other for a long time.
I don't know where Cloud and Vinnie went during those years. I've never asked and they've never offered. They don't know where I went. I slipped easily into one of my alternate forms, and I suspect Vincent did the same. Cloud...probably went to the City of the Ancients.
I became a wolf. I stayed a wolf for years that I never could quite add up. I lived near Bone Village for a while and became one family's protector. The daughter there saw me as a pet and savior at once and no doubt never really believed I'd leave one day, but her mother knew better. Ellen Highwind knew I was a creature of the wild and would never stay. She'd never know I had been her grandfather's companion, but she was grateful for the time I spent with her family.
I spent some time with Red as well, though my firecat form was male and he never knew it was me. I didn't really care to deceive him, but it seemed too much effort to explain. He mentioned seeing Chaos in the mountains around Nibel, so I left and made my way there. It was on that way that I found my last limit break, Tiamat. A dragon.
I don't know how much time passed before I found myself at the entrance to Lucrecia's Cave again. I paused at the entrance, one paw poised in the air, and moved slowly inside. It had been years, but the cave was clean. Years, but the air was not stale.
"Hi."
Years, but Reno was still waiting for us.
I became human for the first time in years. Swayed and fell as I was unaccustomed to walking on two legs. Reno caught me, alarmed, and laid me on the bed. I smiled up at him tiredly. "Hi yourself."
We had told him, eventually. I guess Tseng had asked him to finish a mission before fetching the Underwater materia Vincent still keeps on him. He'd gone to Mideel, which had been all but wiped out years before then while the Lifestream overflowed its banks, to retrieve some rare materia. It had rained the whole time, but he didn't think anything of it.
It rains mako in Mideel.
So Reno was still around. Still thirty or so. He'd moved in with us semi-permanently when Rude and Elena and Tseng all hit middle age, though he tended to disappear for long periods of time. But he stayed with us.
Now the two of us were the first back, and we sat back and listened to the rain. waiting for Cloud and Vincent to return home.
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AN: I'm moving across the country tomorrow, so updates might be a bit screwed up for a while. Hopefully I'll have the internet back fairly quickly; otherwise I'll be updating as much as I can before jumping in the moving truck and as soon as possible after I get settled in my new apartment, so probably it will be 2 weeks at the longest between updates.
-GuardianSaiyoko
