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-Chapter Two-
Secrets of the Cetra
۵۵۵۵۵
It was late afternoon of the following day, and Aerith was still stationed at her bedside post when Leon entered his room for a fresh change of clothing. He and Yuffie had spent most of the day fighting Heartless, and he was in sore need of a shower; he ached all the way down to his bones. He wondered if he was getting too old for this job.
No, he quickly dismissed the thought; even Yuffie was completely worn out. She hadn't made it past the living room couch. Leon rubbed at his scar and frowned.
In addition to an increase in quantity of the usual varieties, a new breed of Heartless had appeared, and they had proven exceptionally difficult to take down. Neither he nor Yuffie had been able to discover any weakness, so they had stopped by Merlin's on the way home to see if he knew anything, but he had never heard of them either. He promised to check all his sources and get back to them later.
Leon walked over to the bed and watched as Aerith tenderly treated Cloud's wounds. Everything except a couple of exceptionally deep bruises and the two sutured slashes had already healed completely, and even they looked much better. But there was no other outward change in Cloud's condition, and despite her forced optimism, it was obvious that Aerith was worried. She looked up at Leon and smiled sweetly anyway. "You did such a good job with these stitches, Leon. There should hardly even be a scar."
Leon gave no acknowledgment of the compliment, choosing to direct the conversation towards Cloud instead. "He heals fast."
Aerith took a deep breath and released it slowly, carefully composing her thoughts as she set the vial of potion back on the nightstand. Talking about Jenova was like opening a can of worms; she had to be careful not to let any of the slimy little things slither out. If she slipped up at all as she wove her way discreetly through the facts, Leon would likely catch it and would be sure to call her on it. She had already made her first mistake by mentioning Jenova to begin with. Funny, she always figured it would be Yuffie who let it slip, or possibly Cid ... but certainly not her.
She had been too distracted yesterday by her concern for Cloud, but as soon as the odious word had slipped from her mouth, she had known – from the slight furrowing of Leon's brow – that it would only be a matter of time until he asked her about it. Honestly, the man would go to great lengths to avoid discussing anything personal, but if it was facts he was after, he wouldn't let go till he had them.
Well, no use crying over spilt milk, Aerith supposed, or worms; what was done was done, and it was up to her to fix it before he asked Cid or, heaven forbid, Yuffie. She took another deep breath and tossed out the bait. "Yes, that's Jenova's regenerative ability. Unfortunately," she added with a sigh, "it won't give him the will to wake up."
Sure enough, Leon bit. He sat down on the edge of the bed, next to Cloud's feet. "What's Jenova?"
Leon had been given the abbreviated version of their struggle against Sephiroth, the same version that Avalanche had given everyone outside their inner circle back on Gaia, including an account of Cloud's past which was based, more or less, on the story which he himself had first told them in Kalm; it left out a lot of the details, not to mention the truth. And they didn't mention Jenova at all.
It was so much easier to simply leave Jenova out of the equation altogether, to point the finger at Sephiroth as the sole evil entity and leave it at that, because Jenova was the thread that unraveled all of Cloud's secrets. And they all guarded those secrets out of respect for their friend.
It wasn't difficult to do – to leave Jenova out of the tale. There weren't many people who had known about Jenova, and fewer still who had known the truth. Only Shin-Ra's top executives and the scientists involved in the Jenova Project had even been aware of Jenova's existence, and they had believed her to be an Ancient.
The Ancients had known the truth, of course, but they were all dead.
Professor Gast had learned the truth from Aerith's mother, Ifalna, the last living full-blooded Cetra, after leaving Shin-Ra, but they were both dead.
Hojo had discovered the truth from Gast's reports in Icicle Inn, but had he shared those reports with anyone else, or had he kept them to himself? Had President Shinra been told the truth, or was he still blindly seeking the Promised Land? Who would ever know? President Shinra was dead. Hojo was dead.
Rufus certainly hadn't known about the reports – not until the Weapons began to move in the Crater – and besides, Rufus was dead, killed by one of those Weapons.
There was Lucrecia, but Lucrecia was as good as dead, sealed away in her crystal cave.
And what about the other scientists and assistants who worked with Hojo after Jenova had been moved to Midgar? Had they known what they were dealing with when they helped Hojo carry out his heinous experiments? Maybe, maybe not, but it didn't matter anyway; they were all dead. Everyone on the 67th floor had been slaughtered.
Scarlet? Heidegger? Who cared. Dead.
The Turks might have known – Tseng and Elena, Reno and Rude – but even if they did, they would never tell; they were Turks. Whatever secrets they knew would go with them to their graves – well, with the possible exception of Elena – once they too were dead.
If they weren't already, that is...
The SOLDIERs certainly hadn't known about Jenova. Zack hadn't known. They had all been lied to. Deceived. Betrayed. Who would willingly allow themselves to be injected with evil-alien cells? Zack had eventually figured it out, but not until later, much later, too late. And then he was dead.
Not even Sephiroth had known – not until that fateful day in Nibelheim, and even then, he still hadn't known the truth. The reports in the basement of the Shinra Mansion still claimed that Jenova was an Ancient; Hojo had never amended them. No, Sephiroth hadn't learned the real truth until he fell into the Lifestream... Or was pushed... Or jumped. Cloud's memories of that part were a bit hazy.
That just left the members of Avalanche, and after it was all over, after Sephiroth was defeated and Meteor destroyed, they had decided there simply wasn't anything left to be gained by the truth. The truth would only cause Cloud further shame, and the one thing they all agreed on was that Cloud had suffered enough. Even though he had freely admitted the truth once he learned it for himself, they knew it wasn't something he was proud of – losing his own identity and being manipulated by a madman – so they chose to remain silent and leave the truth buried in the Northern Cave.
And when people mistakenly assumed from the glow in his eyes that Cloud had been in SOLDIER, they just didn't bother to correct them. They were, after all, Cloud's secrets to tell.
Aerith knew more of those secrets than anyone else, but then she was ... Well, she was supposed to be, anyway. Aerith had her own secrets to tell, and it was time to tell Leon. She folded her hands neatly in her lap and reluctantly started her story.
"Jenova was an inert life form discovered by Shin-Ra's top scientist, Professor Gast," she stated as stiffly as a child reciting a particularly unpleasant school lesson. "Believing he had found the remains of an Ancient, he excavated the body, named it Jenova, and began the Jenova Project.
"The goal of the project was to foster Cetran abilities in people by injecting them with cells taken from the inert life form," she continued. "Gast hoped to restore the Cetra race, not realizing, at least not in the beginning, that President Shinra's only interest was in creating someone capable of leading them to the Cetra's fabled 'Promised Land' – a land believed to be rich in easily accessible Mako.
"The project was a failure," Aerith sighed, relaxing a little as she got into the telling of the tale, "in that none of the recipients ever demonstrated any Cetran abilities. But they did manifest two other characteristics which were also of interest to Shinra: strength and regeneration. Together with his two associates, Hojo and Lucrecia, Gast developed a procedure for enhancing Shin-Ra's soldiers with those characteristics, making them stronger and more resilient. That procedure consisted of injections of Jenova cells combined with infusions of Mako. Thus was Shin-Ra's elite SOLDIER force created."
"So the professor's theory wasn't entirely wrong," Leon summed up; "he just didn't get the expected results."
"Exactly." Aerith waited, knowing that Leon had most likely already arrived at the logical conclusion.
"So Jenova wasn't an Ancient."
"Right again. Jenova was a viral life form carried to our planet by a meteor. It was the Jenova virus that decimated my ancestors," she said sadly. "Thankfully, the few who survived were eventually able to seal it underground, where it remained for two thousand years."
"Until Professor Gast unearthed it," Leon added wryly.
"Yes, well..." Aerith shifted in her seat. "He became increasingly racked with guilt for performing such unethical experiments, but continued under pressure from President Shinra. Hojo and Lucrecia, however, suffered no such compunctions. They had no respect for the sanctity of human life." She sighed. "Not even that of their own child."
Leon arched a brow, urging her to elaborate, and Aerith complied. "They offered their unborn child to the project, injecting it with Jenova cells while it was still in Lucrecia's womb. The alien DNA melded with that of the fetus and grew right along with the child's own cells."
"And the result?"
"Sephiroth."
"Sephiroth," Leon echoed quietly. "And you think he's back."
"Yes." Aerith nodded.
"Sometime after Sephiroth's birth," she continued with her story, "Gast finally succumbed to his guilt and left Shin-Ra, moving to the area where he had discovered Jenova to continue his research independently. There he met my mother, and through her, finally learned the truth, but he was murdered by Hojo before he could attempt to rectify his mistake.
"Professor Gast was my father," she added quietly, then fell silent as if waiting for Leon's reaction, but she really should have known better.
Leon was fairly certain that in the bewildering world of polite conversation, a response was required, or at least expected, and Aerith's silence seemed to confirm it. So he searched through the paltry supply of platitudes he had collected over his twenty five years of limited social interaction for something appropriate, but couldn't find anything that didn't sound stupid.
Even a simple sorry was far too vague and open to misinterpretation. Sorry for what? Sorry that that her father had been killed? Or sorry that the man responsible for unleashing a madman upon their planet had been her father?
No, words could not be trusted. They were treacherous and often led one astray. You could start out on the most innocent of paths only to end up somewhere you never intended to go, mired knee deep in muck. Numbers were so much better; clear and precise, each and every one of them. They never left you dangling in ambiguity.
And there were only ten of them, zero through nine, and with those ten little digits you could build any number you needed, each just as clear and precise as the last. They marched along in a straight, well-mannered line, one after the other, and you always knew exactly where you stood – which number was in front of you and which one was behind.
Words on the other hand never behaved. They were like unruly children who pushed and shoved, or ill-mannered adults who cut in line. Half the time, they couldn't even decide whether they wanted to be a noun or a verb or an adjective, so they solved the dilemma by being all of them.
And there were thousands and thousands of them, most of them with numerous different meanings, and each different meaning held several different shades of nuance that could change from region to region, even from one sub-culture to the next. Hell, even down to the family unit itself, words could have subtle differences in meaning. It was a wonder people were able to communicate at all.
A rose was a rose might be a rose, or it could be a carnation, depending on who you were speaking to, but one was one no matter where you went.
Aerith finally realized that not only was Leon not going to respond, but that she had lost him altogether, and that he was, in fact, no longer even part of the conversation. With a sigh and a gentle tap on the hand, she pulled him out of himself and back into the world of the socially competent.
"You honestly believe that Sephiroth's regenerative ability is powerful enough to resurrect him?" he asked.
It was Aerith's turn to hesitate then as she carefully weighed her response. She really didn't want to get into the whole issue of Reunion for the fear that it would lead Leon to too many questions – questions such as what effect it had on the Jenova cells in Cloud's body. It was one thing to leave false assumptions uncorrected, and another altogether to tell out and out lies. Aerith was uncomfortable with the first and flat-out refused to engage in the second. No, she would just have to hope that her answer sufficed without bringing up Reunion.
"Yes," she finally answered, "due to the fact that the genetic material from Jenova fused with Sephiroth's own cells. If SOLDIERs gained regenerative ability from a fixed dose of inert Jenova cells, can you imagine what an entire body composed of living cells would be capable of? That incredible regenerative power, along with a will strong enough to keep his self-awareness intact in the Lifestream, could give Sephiroth the ability to restore his body."
Again Leon raised a brow, this time conveying skepticism and a note of challenge. "So no matter how many times he's killed, he just keeps coming back?"
"Well ... theoretically, I suppose ... as long as Jenova cells exist ... I don't really know," she admitted. "Cloud's already killed him twice." With a look of utmost affection, Aerith gazed down at the sleeping man and softly stroked his cheek. "Let's see what he has to say when he wakes up."
A strange and uncomfortable feeling began to well up in Leon as he watched – one that he was unfamiliar with, though he thought he knew its name. But as to why Aerith's display of affection for the other man should make him feel jealous was beyond his comprehension. He had no romantic interest in Aerith.
He had known of her feelings for Cloud since her arrival into his life, indeed her very first words to him had been a desperate inquiry for her lost friend. 'Have you seen a man with spiky blond hair and blue eyes?' she had asked. And she had never stopped asking, of every new refugee that showed up, and imploring Sora to look for him in his travels to other worlds. Now, here he was, and suddenly Leon felt jealous? It just didn't make any sense.
It was probably because he himself was alone, Leon reasoned – because the three friends from Gaia had the good fortune of finding a fourth companion from their world, whereas Leon didn't have even one. But that didn't make much sense either; after all, Leon preferred to be alone.
He realized that Aerith was speaking again and gave her his attention, grateful for the distraction from his uncomfortable feelings and confusing thoughts.
"– something else I need to tell you ..." she was saying, the hands which had been folded so neatly in her lap now clasping one another tightly, "... before Cloud wakes up. He won't understand – when he sees me, he won't understand ..."
Leon tried hard to be patient, to give her time.
She took a deep breath and tried again, the words beginning to tumble out of her mouth. "I would have told you before – I wanted to tell you before, and I tried, but I was just so afraid ... I didn't want you to feel different about me – I –" She looked down at her hands as if they might hold the words she sought. When they didn't, she began to wring them.
"Aerith," Leon sighed, losing the battle with his patience. "Just tell me."
"I shouldn't be here," she confessed, hands returning once more to her lap in calm resignation. "Sephiroth killed me – while we were chasing him – he killed me."
Leon didn't even bother to think about making an attempt to come up with an appropriate response for that one.
"So you see," Aerith said, "I know that it's possible to come back from death. And I know that Sephiroth has returned also, because I was there, in the Lifestream, when he left it.
"So I used the power of the planet's life force to come back. I didn't mean to stay; I just wanted to warn Cloud and the others, and then I was going to go right back. But the world just disappeared, Cloud just disappeared – right in front of my eyes, and I never even got the chance ..." Aerith buried her head in her hands. "Now I don't know how to go back."
"Oh," Leon said, suddenly recalling a conversation shortly after Aerith's arrival in Traverse Town. They had been sitting at the kitchen table when, out of the blue ...
۵۵۵۵۵
"What do you think will happen when Sora closes the door to Kingdom Hearts?" Aerith asked.
"I don't know," Leon answered.
"I know you don't know," she persisted. "I want to know what you think."
"I don't think about it."
"Well, then think about it now," she insisted in an uncharacteristically irritated tone.
To which Leon had responded in his characteristically irritated tone, "Why don't you go ask Merlin? He knows a lot more about that sort of thing than I do."
"I already did."
"And he said?" Leon prompted.
"He didn't know," she muttered glumly.
Leon rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling a large headache looming. "Why don't you just tell me what's really bothering you," he said, knowing he was sure to regret it.
"Well, it's that report that King Mickey mentioned," she said. "You know, the one that says when the door is sealed, the walls separating the worlds will return?"
"That's just Ansem's theory, Aerith. No one knows for certain."
"Well, I don't like to think about never again seeing the friends that I've made from other worlds."
"Then don't think about it," Leon offered helpfully.
Aerith sighed. "Wouldn't you miss us at all?"
"Whether or not I would miss you isn't going to change the outcome," Leon stated, but it evidently wasn't the answer she wanted, for she turned on him with her very best set of puppy-dog eyes. It wasn't a fair tactic, knowing his weakness for puppies, but she and Yuffie regularly employed it on him anyway, and it never failed to work.
"Fine. I would miss you," he grumbled. "Does that really make you feel any better?"
"A little." She smiled at him gratefully, but whatever was eating her wasn't yet sated, because she was still twisting her napkin into a tight little knot. "So, what do you think happens to a planet's Lifestream when the planet disappears?" she blurted out.
"Lifestream?"
"The life force of the planet. You know, Spirit Energy. Mako. What did you call it on your world?"
"No, I don't know, and we didn't."
"Well, where does your spirit go when you die?"
"How would I know that?" he scoffed, becoming more and more apprehensive of getting trapped in a spiritual discussion with Aerith – definitely not where Leon wanted to go.
"You don't know?" she asked.
"You do?" he countered.
"Well of course," she exclaimed. "Every man, woman and child on our planet knows that! ... Knew that," she corrected herself. It still hadn't fully sunk in that every man, woman and child on the planet was probably gone.
"And they all agreed?"
"What's not to agree on? The Lifestream could be seen and touched, even used – why do you think we were fighting against Shin-Ra? Because they were depleting the planet's life force by converting it into electricity."
"Oh," Leon said. He hadn't realized when they told him that Shin-Ra was sucking the life out of the planet, they had meant it literally.
"Why, some people have even fallen into the Lifestream! And some people, like me, can hear it."
"And just what is it you hear?" Leon asked with a wary glance. He was beginning to have his suspicions about people like her.
"The Lifestream is full of the knowledge of those who passed on before us," Aerith explained. "It holds the wisdom of every life lesson ever learned, all the thoughts and feelings, the dreams and regrets; kind of like a giant melting pot of memories." She laughed. "All life is born from the Lifestream and returns to it upon death, enriching it with its own knowledge in turn.
"My ancestors, the Cetra, or Ancients as they were called, had the ability to communicate with that collective consciousness, even direct it to a certain extent, but I am only half Cetra; I can hear the voice of the planet, but it's often confusing, and I can't always understand what it's saying."
"Well, there was no Lifestream on my planet. And there's nothing like that here," Leon pointed out.
"I know." She sighed. "But I thought it was just Traverse Town, because none of the normal rules apply here. Still, surely, all planets must have a Lifestream, even if it isn't apparent. Perhaps it was only obvious on Gaia because of the Cetra," she mused.
"Even now, I sometimes hear ..." She seemed to change her mind mid-sentence and shook her head. "It's just too hard to tell; the worlds are so far away." She fell into a pensive silence, but just as Leon was about to get up and leave, she suddenly perked up again. "What about magic?" she asked, deciding to approach the subject from a different direction. "You used magic on your world, right? Where did it come from?"
"Well ... we drew it from other people or creatures, mostly," Leon answered, "but there were also places it could be drawn directly from the earth."
"You drew it?"
"Through the junction of a Guardian Force," he explained. "Anyone could learn to use para-magic – like I can still cast fireballs, and you can use healing magic – but without the aid of a Guardian Force, it was hardly worth the effort. It took extensive training, and even then, it couldn't compete with the strength of regular weapons. And you know how draining it is. But by junctioning with a Guardian Force, we were able to use powerful magic without depleting our own energy."
"A Guardian Force?"
"A Guardian Force, or GF, was an entity from another plane, and it was possible to form a bond with them in your mind. All GFs had the inherent ability to draw, store and use magic, and by bonding with them, you not only gained access to those abilities, but also the ability to call on them to aid you in battle, as well as the capacity to bolster your own strengths and resistances."
"Beings that you summon from another plane?" Aerith exclaimed. "Like Ifrit or Shiva?"
"You know Ifrit and Shiva?"
"Yes, but we called them Summons, and they didn't live in our brains."
Leon resisted the urge to roll his eyes at the thought of Bahamut or Eden actually residing in his brain and explained that it was more like a mental link. "The connection feels like a tingle in your forehead," he attempted to clarify, "like a buzz, or a low grade electrical shock. Especially Quetzacotl; he downright sizzled. It's difficult to describe if you've never experienced it," he added with a shrug. Still, to Aerith's delight – and disbelief, amazed to be having an actual two-way conversation with Leon – he continued to try.
"They all had their own individual sensations. It could be pretty distracting at first, but you got used to it after a while. Ifrit felt like a blast of hot air, like stepping from an air-conditioned office into a hot summer day, whereas Shiva... Shiva felt like an ice-cream headache." He chuckled softly.
Well, it wasn't exactly a chuckle, it was more like a one-sided smirk accompanied by a small expulsion of air and a soft snort, but it was about the closest thing to an expression of humor that Leon seemed to possess. A faraway look of affection deepened his slate-colored eyes to a smoky blue. Shiva. She had always been such a struggle to keep.
He had a greater natural affinity with Quetzacotl, but Zell had adored the great Thunderbird – even had a stylized lightning bolt tattooed on his face in homage to his beloved Quetzy – and in spite of Squall's reputation, he didn't have the heart to take the GF from the blond. Besides, Squall preferred Shiva – needed her numbing chill, her cool detachment. He had loved her since the first time he junctioned her at the age of eleven. Shiva's feelings for him, however, had not been the same, not in the beginning, at least.
Cerberus had liked him from the start, and Diablos had taken to him like white on rice (and he really didn't want to think too hard on the implications of that), but Shiva hadn't wanted anything to do with him. Perhaps she had sensed the fire that flowed through his veins, the passion he had always struggled to suppress. Bahamut had sensed it, there in the Deep Sea Research Center, and so had Ifrit, coming to him so quickly in the Fire Cavern that day. But Squall hadn't wanted Ifrit's fire, didn't like it, and neither did Shiva, so he had given Ifrit to Seifer as soon as they reached Dollet.
He stayed away from fire magic altogether and stocked as many ice spells as he could carry. He summoned the glacial goddess constantly and learned how to bury his own emotions behind a wall of ice as solid as Shiva's Diamond Dust. It had taken months and months of unremitting determination – and a lot of luv-luv-gs – but eventually, he had won her over. After that, they had become inseparable, and she refused to junction with anyone else.
Shiva's Lover, people began to call him – or Shiva's Bitch, by Seifer. And Ice Princess, just to piss him off – just to prove that he could; that no matter how hard Squall tried to quell the fire within him, Seifer could always make it burn.
Shiva had her own endearment for him as well – Little Lion, she had whispered to him in the quiet of the night – and he had made the mistake of believing that she had come to truly care for him in return. But when his world fell, she had left him, and it had hurt almost as much as losing his world. Maybe more, for she had taken her gift of ice along with her. Now, without the aid of his Guardian Forces, the only magic he was still able to control was fire – a mocking testament to his true inner nature.
In the end truth will out, so they say.
Well, so much for two-way conversations with Leon, Aerith sighed, realizing that she had lost him. "On Gaia," she said, hoping to lure him back from wherever he had gone, "we linked to Summons and magic through the use of Materia, which was a crystallized, condensed form of Mako. It contained the knowledge of the Ancients and was a direct link to the Lifestream, allowing the user to harness the power of the planet."
"So, you're saying that we're talking about two different methods of channeling the life force of the planet?"
"Exactly. And those places you mentioned where magic could be drawn directly from the earth? They sound a lot like Mako fountains. Mako fountains were places where the Lifestream erupted from the planet's surface," Aerith explained. "They were one of the few places that natural Materia could be found."
The moments ticked by, and Aerith was beginning to suspect that she had lost Leon to his own thoughts yet again, when he looked at her and asked, "You said that memories are absorbed by the Lifestream?"
"Yes, prolonged exposure to Mako erases memories from the mind until, eventually, even the person's very self-awareness is lost. Only the very strong willed can withstand it for long."
"Sustained use of Guardian Forces resulted in memory loss," Leon stated. "The longer you were junctioned, the stronger the link became and the more extensive the loss. We assumed that it had something to do with the neural connections necessary for memory recall being overwritten in order to maintain the link with the Guardian. But maybe it had something to do with the energy being channeled through the mind as magic."
"Well, that would make sense," Aerith agreed. "If your GFs served as the means to channel the life force, like Materia did for us, it stands to reason that the connection could erase memories. Luckily for us, Materia didn't channel the energy through our brains.
"So..." She circled back to her original question. "Now that we've established its existence, what do you think happens to that life force when a planet disappears?"
Leon shook his head. "I'm sorry, Aerith, but I just don't know. You're the one who can hear the voices of the planets. What do they tell you?"
Aerith stared out the small kitchen window, contemplating the star-filled Traverse Town sky for a long moment before finally turning back to Leon. "The only thing I hear anymore," she said with a sorrowful smile, "is cries."
۵۵۵۵۵
... "So that's what's been bothering you," Leon said, returning to their present conversation, his tone surprisingly gentle. "You've been worried all this time about returning to the Lifestream."
"Yes," Aerith admitted, "and I feel so guilty. I've misused my powers as a Cetra, using Spirit Energy that wasn't meant for me. I need to go back, but I don't know how, and even if I did, I'm afraid. I don't want to end up in the wrong Lifestream.
"You see, I think that all the Lifestreams are connected, separated by barriers which break apart when the planet dies, just like the barriers between the worlds have broken down due to the Heartless. But if the Lifestreams of all the planets that have disappeared are all mixed up together now, what will happen when the worlds return?"
"If the worlds return," Leon corrected. "But does it really matter, if it's all the same Lifestream?"
"It matters to me," she said. "I want to return to Gaia's Lifestream, because the memories of my ancestors are there, and the spirits of people I love. I wouldn't want to get stuck in, say, Traverse Town's Lifestream."
"I can't blame you there," Leon said dryly. "You'd have to hang out with the mayor for the rest of eternity."
Aerith laughed in spite of herself; nobody could stand the mayor.
"But it seems to me," he continued in a more serious tone, "that if the worlds do return, then their Lifestreams would return along with them. Everything would go back to where it belongs, in which case, so would you. And if things don't go back to the way they were, there won't be anything you can do about it anyway. So why don't you just stop worrying and enjoy the extra time you've been given."
Aerith smiled at Leon gratefully, feeling lighter than she had for many months. In spite of his reluctance to get involved in other people's problems, Leon always seemed to have a way of making things better.
With a stiff roll of his shoulders, Leon stood up and walked to the dresser to gather his clothes and go take his shower. "And for whatever it's worth," he offered, pausing in the doorway, "I don't feel any different about you."
Though that wasn't entirely true, he thought, crossing the hall to the bathroom; his admiration and respect for the young woman had grown immensely. Leon hadn't even been able to make it back from time compression to save his own companions. Aerith had made it all the way back from death to save hers.
