a/n: once again, i can't thank you all enough for your incredibly kind words. you have no idea how much they mean to me and how much they motivate me. thank you for reading and enjoying! :)
"Aerith! Aerith! Calm down, please!"
She coughs and dry heaves and grabs frantically at the middle of her chest, feeling for a hot, wet depression, leaking and dripping onto her dress, dyeing it red —
"Damn it! Get a hold of yourself, kid!"
She can't forget that feeling, so deeply imprinted within her ribcage, and she wants it to be there, she wants the sticky heat of blood between her fingers, she wants it to end —
Gloved hands pin her wrists to the bed, forcing her to cease her wild thrashing. Panicked tears pool in the corners of Tifa's eyes as she holds Aerith down. Barret's wide chest heaves up and down; beads of sweat sluice down the sides of his head and neck, shining in the candlelight.
Aerith finally stays still as the rigid grip of panic relents and releases its hold on her. The tension escapes her muscles and her limbs go limp. The smell of pine and dust fills her senses once again, and as much as she's come to despise it, she can't deny that it's familiar — an emblem of stability.
Tifa lets go of Aerith's hands and Barret takes a generous step back. Aerith's eyes dart over to Cloud's slumbering form. Did none of that really wake him?
"Aerith?" Tifa says, wringing her hands.
She parts her lips to speak, but the words are lodged deep inside her throat, and she isn't sure she has the energy to expel them.
"Maybe we should leave 'er be," Barret suggests.
"...I'm awake."
It takes all the willpower she can gather to sit up in bed. She leans back against the headboard and closes her eyes. A dull throb emanates through her skull.
"You look like you've seen hell," Barret continues. "You that rattled by what happened?"
Aerith shakes her head. "No, just a nightmare."
Tifa and Barret exchange skeptical glances. She grimaces, acutely aware of the responsibility of defusing the tension landing squarely on her shoulders.
"I'll be okay, promise. I just need a second," she assures with a manufactured smile. "Could I be alone for a little bit? I'll come out there soon."
Apparently it's a sufficient request, as Tifa's features soften and she nods. Barret shakes his head but acquiesces nonetheless as he moves to exit the room, whispering back and forth with Tifa as they cross the threshold into the main room.
A deep and weary sigh escapes her lungs as she throws the sheets off of her, revealing a map of bruises on her legs once more. Her finger twitches; she needs to make sure of something else. She looks once, then twice, to assure that Cloud is still asleep and that no one is about to enter the room. She shrugs her jacket off and slides the straps of her dress down her shoulders, letting them hang loosely about her, before rolling it down to her midriff.
She peers down at her bare chest, and — nothing. She traces a finger along her sternum where a scar should surely stain her skin. It's smooth, unblemished. It's all intact.
Aerith slowly slides against the headboard and sinks back into bed, drawing her knees up to her chest — her pristine, unwounded chest.
She swallows down a whimper and waits.
"What's wrong, Aerith? You look as though you've seen a ghost."
Aerith can't even muster the artifice of amusement when Red repeats himself after she walks to join the others at the cemetery, just as she did before — no, he doesn't repeat himself. He simply says what he was meant to say all along.
She hops up onto the wooden fence, the very same that she sat upon yesterday. With an anxious smile, she repeats, "Do I? I feel like I've seen one."
"Understandable. We've all been under quite a lot of stress."
The scratch of footsteps. Cloud reappearing. The mechanical exchange between them. It doesn't deviate, fails to surprise. A question in Cloud's scowl, a question that she can't bring herself to answer. She doesn't even know if she possesses the answer anymore.
They reconvene as Barret once again prompts them for their next move.
"Sephiroth's got the Black Materia and we got no clue where he's heading next," he says, mirroring the words of yesterday.
It's not just the Black Materia; he stole the White Materia from her. Did that carry over to her current reality? Inexplicably, it never crossed her mind to check. She reaches back and feels for the bead nestled at the center of her ribbon. Her fingers graze a glassy surface and a sigh of relief bubbles in her chest, but it's short-lived when she recalls that she still cannot summon Holy. There's no guarantee that he would still be waiting at the City of the Ancients — perhaps he assumes that she's intelligent enough to have given up by now.
Is that a risk she's willing to take?
"Where do you think he's going, Cloud?" Tifa asks.
No, it's not.
"Beats me, to be honest," he admits, scratching his head.
It's perplexing, the way some things stay the same and the way other things change with each repetition. Barret and Tifa's words remain unaltered, yet Cloud's are different. It's as confusing as it is quotidian, she thinks as she picks stray splinters off of the wooden beams.
"So," Yuffie says, "we're stuck. Where do we go now?"
North. He's still heading north, a voice urges inside her.
She murmurs, "North."
Tifa averts her gaze from Cloud toward Aerith. "North?"
"That's where Sephiroth is going," she continues quietly.
The same thought skips across all of their minds, so much so that none of them dare to speak the obvious. Cid produces a matchbook from his pocket, swipes a match against the phosphorus, lights his cigarette, and takes a long, luxurious drag. Wisps of smoke wrap themselves around him. Red's glues his gaze to his paws. Yuffie tosses a piece of materia up into the air and snatches it back before it falls to the ground, repeating the process as she pointedly avoids looking at the rest of them.
"How do you know that?" Cloud finally asks. In his typical fashion, the question comes out more like an accusation.
She doesn't want to consider the cost of that information. She doesn't want to think of what she has paid and what she will continue to pay with each iteration.
"I had a dream, but I think it was more like a premonition. I saw him going up a snowy hill. There was a town at the top," Aerith says, trying to keep her composure anchored firmly to the ground beneath her feet as it threatens to escape her. "We don't have any better clues, do we?"
"Do we really got nothin' better than a dream to work off of?" Cid says.
"What, you have any better ideas?" Yuffie lobs a pebble in his direction, eliciting a string of colorful curses.
"Hol' on. Think about it for a sec. The Northern Crater's where the Planet's got a big old wound, don't it? Maybe Sephiroth's plan's got something to do with that," Cait Sith posits as he scratches his whiskers. "He did say something about the Planet's wounds back at that temple."
They prattle on and on and debate and deliberate and she begins to realize that none of it means anything to her anymore. She scowls and sinks her fingernails into the wood she's perched upon. What does it matter that Sephiroth is approaching the north? The south? The east, the west? She'll die no matter where she goes and regardless of whether she follows him or not, whether she tries to summon Holy or not, whether she attempts to do anything to tame their fate or not. She'll wake up in the same room smelling of pine and dust, having the same conversations with people who are morphing into strangers before her eyes.
No, they're not strangers. She's the stranger now.
"Even if we're wrong, we'll just have to cross that bridge when we get to it," Tifa says with a sigh.
"Then it's decided? We're gonna go up there?" Yuffie tucks her materia back into the clip on her shuriken.
Barret kicks the dirt. "We got no other choice."
The joviality of yesterday's expedition is gone, replaced by disquietude and distrust. That fact bothers Aerith, eats at her more than it should, but it makes sense. They're riding on nothing more than a suspicion — one that she proposed, no less. Anomie is beginning to erode her willpower; she never felt like an outsider among their party, only that she was exceptional. That's beginning to change.
They move to make their way out of Gongaga, and Cloud wastes no time in approaching her with such a stern countenance that it gives her pause.
"Something isn't right," he asserts. "Are you...upset about what happened?"
This again. She rubs the bridge of her nose.
"No. I just...feel like I've been through a lot. I'm sure you feel the same way, right?"
His contrite gaze burns holes in her conscience, forming an intricate constellation of guilt for all her white lies. "I'd be lying if I said no. But I'm the one who hurt you — it's my responsibility to make sure you're okay."
His words should set her heart at ease, but as has become customary, they backfire — unbeknownst to him.
Once more, they depart Gongaga for yet another pin on their map; once more, she plucks a piece of rosemary from the bush and slips it inside her pocket, resting against her heart with each paradoxical beat.
The journey to the north is far less time-consuming on the Tiny Bronco than it was via caravan-hopping. She sidles up next to Red while the other members of their party seize the opportunity to rest their eyes as Cid helms the plane.
His coarse fur brushes against her skin, whetting her hunger for the touch of another. Elmyra's hugs, Zack ruffling her hair and peppering her face with kisses, even a stranger's adoring caresses — the memories of which taunt and torment her now — it may have seemed like nothing to any of them, but it was everything to her. When was the last time someone held her, well and truly?
Red's amber eyes glimmer, reflecting the late afternoon sunlight bouncing off the water, when he looks at her in his periphery. "You should rest. You had a fitful sleep."
She shakes her head and laughs despite herself. "I did, but I guess I'd rather be awake with a friend than asleep right now."
"There's something weighing you down, isn't there?"
"What makes you think that?"
"Your shoulders are slumped. I've noticed that humans do that when something troubles them."
Aerith's mouth quirks up in a crooked, amused smile. "Then I guess you'd notice other things too. You've seen how humans hug each other, right?"
Cautiously, he replies, "Yes, I have."
"Has anyone ever held you like that?"
Red tilts his head from one side to the other, sifting through his recollections for something that may apply, before the place where human eyebrows would be shoots up in recognition.
"Grandpa held me, once. It was after my mother died — I must have been fifteen years old. He did what all humans seem inclined to do when their loved one mourns, even though physical affection isn't common among my kind." Red closes his eyes, bathing in the warm glow of the memory. "But in that moment, I understood. It was like his arms were shielding me from the pain."
That's an apt description. She felt safe, invincible, in her birth mother and even Elmyra's arms.
There were other times she felt that way. The thought twists a stake into her heart.
"Humans need touch. But that's hard to get when you're alone...when people don't really know you. And I don't know if it's because I'm scared of other people or if they're scared of me," she admits, turning to face the water and resting her chin on her hand.
Red reads between her lines and moves to relax on his side, folding his legs beneath him. "You may pet me if you wish."
She chuckles and scratches behind his ear. "You're a good friend, you know that?"
"Be careful. Grandpa might say that you're giving me a big head." Any traces of tension in his muscles vanish beneath her touch as he yields to her ministrations. "You are the last of your kind. I am joined only by a few. You are a good friend too, but you are lonely...as am I."
Nanaki. That was his birth name, wasn't it? Perhaps she should start to think of him as he truly is. She strokes Nanaki's fur with one hand and lets the other dangle off the edge of the ship, her fingertips skimming across the surface of the water, as they sail past isle after isle, land after land, before the lumbering, snow-kissed mountains begin to peek over the horizon.
"W-We didn't think th-this through, didn't we?"
"Shoulda...shoulda stopped and got…some kinda coat...or somethin'..."
She shakes her head. She had tried to say something shortly after they had disembarked, but they were too eager to reach the north yet far too complacent with the western continent's fair weather. Now, they face the slope leading up to the village at the top.
Cloud clenches his teeth and spits his words out hastily. "Nothing we can do now. We just have to move on ahead."
"G-Good idea," Tifa says. Poor thing — she and Yuffie have the worst of it.
They begin their trek up the slope. This snowy, familiar slope. Today it storms where yesterday it was clear. It was clear and quiet as her blood seeped into the snow and cascaded down the hill. She can see it behind her eyes with nauseating clarity.
The world around her tilts on its axis — it tilts and spins so swiftly that she might be hurled off the face of the planet any moment now. Her breaths grow steadily more shallow, labored, and she clamors to grip Cloud's shoulder, his arm, anything to remind her that she's here right now.
"Let's hurry," she urges loudly as the wind threatens to whisk her words away.
Cloud hesitates and makes no effort to conceal his concern, but he continues trudging upward, allowing her to hold onto him without comment.
After what feels like a thousand trials, the top of the slope seems within their reach. Lights begin to come into view, focusing as though through a camera lens; the dark umber silhouettes of log cabins peer through the misty grey of the hail and fog.
"O-Oh, thank gods," Yuffie groans, nearly tumbling into the snow.
"Just a little more." Vincent sighs and wraps his hand around her thin bicep before nearly dragging her to the top, the rest of them following suit soon after.
A modest, lacquered wooden sign greets them: Wᴇʟᴄᴏᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ Iᴄɪᴄʟᴇ Iɴɴ.
Their first order of business is to fork over a painful amount of gil in the endeavor of purchasing appropriate outerwear ("A-About time," Yuffie grumbles); when they're aptly clothed, they reconvene near the welcome sign.
"We should take the time to ask around and explore," Cloud says to them. "If anyone here has seen a man in a black cape, we'll know we're in the right place."
"Prob'ly better to split up and meet back at that inn," suggests Cid, scratching his stubble.
They informally split into three groups — Barret, Tifa, and Cloud in one; Nanaki, Aerith, and Yuffie in another; and Cid, Cait Sith, and Vincent in the last. Aerith's group takes the north side of the town, where each villager proves to be a dead end. All but one, a small boy who confesses to seeing a man with "really, really, really long hair" passing around their town, traversing the stout peaks that border the hamlet.
"Welp, we got what we needed. I'm heading back 'cuz I need some soup or somethin'," Yuffie declares as she stretches lazily.
"Will you come with us, Aerith?" Nanaki asks.
"I think I'll go catch up with Cloud's group. Go get something warm to eat." Aerith ruffles his fur and he rewards her with an appreciative pur.
The two of them run off, leaving her to her own devices. She makes her way toward the west side of town, no more comforted knowing that Sephiroth is nearby than she felt when she was uncertain.
Cloud and the others are nowhere to be seen when she arrives. Have they already returned to the inn? It's possible. She frowns and moves to march toward the inn when she hears the telltale creak of a door. She freezes in her tracks, just out of their sight, though she can still see them clearly from her vantage point behind the facade of an unlit house.
Cloud leaves first, followed by Tifa. They descend the steps wordlessly. Adjacent to one another, they appear as twin ghosts, pale and petrified. Tifa leans toward Cloud and the wind swallows fragments of her statement, rendering them unintelligible to Aerith's ears.
"We can move on...we...let her see that."
Cloud paces around silently. Tifa places her hand over her mouth. Their unique brands of grief encumber them, weighing them down like yokes fastened to their necks.
The question of what they're agonizing over stokes the flames of her curiosity. Is the "her" that Tifa mentioned Aerith? Yuffie? Someone else? What could be so dreadful, so calamitous, that they need to conceal its existence from one of them after everything they've experienced?
Cloud says something that she can't quite catch and Tifa reluctantly turns on her heel. He follows her and they walk through the snow toward the inn — side-by-side close enough that their arms brush against each other, she notes with a pang of longing.
Once she's satisfied that no one is around to spy on her, Aerith traipses across the frosty, frozen earth toward the house, making every effort to stifle the sound of her footsteps. She walks up the steps and stands before the door as she wills her frantic heart to slow its beat. The passage of time and temperamental weather has plunged the house's stony façade into a pitiable state of disrepair. Cracks cut through the stones like tributaries of ice. Electric energy tingles in her mittened fingers — a shaky sigh escapes her chapped lips. Has she seen this place before? No, she couldn't have. She didn't make it this far last time and she's never traveled this far up north before that.
Her trembling hand hovers over the weathered door knob. If she could just turn it, step inside, see for herself —
"Aerith."
She turns to see Barret standing right behind her, brows knit in uncharacteristic melancholy, looking for all the world like the bearer of bad news.
"C'mon. We're leaving," he says tersely. An ineffable grief — similar to that of Cloud and Tifa — colors his scowl.
"I was just going to see what was in here first. I'll be quick, promise," she insists. A swelling sense of urgency washes over her; a desperate need to exhume the secrets behind this door consumes her.
Barret lifts his hand and places it on her shoulder with surprising tenderness.
"Some things are just better left alone, kid. Take it from me."
She tenses. "Why are Tifa and Cloud allowed to know and not me?"
Barret withdraws his hand and weighs the question, churning it in his mind, before responding.
"If you go in there, we might not be able to bring you back to us."
His sincerity isn't lost on her. She purses her lips and steps away from the door.
"I'll find out eventually," she proclaims, straightening her back. "But you're right. Maybe now's not the time."
An uneasy silence suspends itself between them as they head back in the direction of the inn, and the ghost of what lurks behind that weathered door wraps around her neck — an ethereal noose — as they shuffle through the snow.
After debriefing at the inn, she and the rest of their party resume their journey. They sail down the slopes on the other end of Icicle Inn toward the valley at the bottom. As it turned out, the village was at the apex of the snowcaps; mountainous caverns await them at their descent.
"If we can make it past these caves, we'll be close to the Northern Crater," Vincent says as they all look up at the towering wall before them, lined with shelves and laden with cliffs. "Be ready to climb."
"Tell me I'm not the only one ready for this shit to be over." Cid rubs his face, grey and dull with exhaustion, with a gloved hand.
"I don't think anyone here's enough of a freak to be enjoying any of this," Yuffie retorts.
They weave their way through the maze of caves, climbing out of one only to find themselves in another. The air grows thinner and Aerith can tell that they're close to the surface. In one particularly claustrophobic cave, a beam of light pierces the otherwise thick veil of darkness. She hurries over and grips the cracks in the wall to scale upwards and squeeze through the narrow opening.
"Guys, I think I — "
She turns around, expecting to see them behind her, only to find a cluster of indigo clouds and an orange sky staring back at her. Blinking slowly, she continues to look around, waiting for them to emerge from the opening in the ceiling of the caverns. After a few moments, there's still no sign of them. She knits her brows together. Did they not hear her climbing the wall? At any rate, she should probably go back in there and search for them.
"Lost, are you?"
That voice. That damned voice that freezes her blood and warps time itself. She squeezes her eyes shut and stands there statuesque. She should have anticipated this. The sparse air at this high altitude muffles the sound of his footsteps as he approaches her.
"Did you find me alone on purpose?"
"As convenient as this is, no."
"You already have what you want," she spits. "Just leave me be."
Sephiroth plants his hand on her shoulder and forces her to face him. "You're wrong. I only have part of what I want."
The implications behind that statement tie her stomach into knots and, to her own chagrin, she can't help but cower, shrinking before him.
"I'm tired of this. Aren't you?" she asks, staving away the desperation threatening to leak into her voice.
He releases his hold on her and stabs Masamune into the earth, folding his arms. "...It is vexing, I admit. But I will continue to do what I must, both to break this cycle and to proceed as planned."
"And what if we'll never break free unless you give up?"
"Impossible. Unlike you, I can sense why this is happening," he says blithely. "I didn't expect a Cetra to be so clueless."
"You said you'd kill me however many times it takes." She straightens her back, standing at her full height, hoping eyes are as serrated as his and cut just as deep.
"However many times it takes," he iterates, lifting Masamune from the ground and tightening his grip on the hilt.
Something lingers behind his words. A lack of conviction, a shadow of a doubt. It can't just be her imagination.
"Go on, then. Maybe this will be the time that does it." Angry tears hang heavy on her eyelashes, clouding her vision.
He peers at Masamune, weighing his options, before looking back at her.
"No."
She laughs humorlessly. "No? You're telling me you came all this way just to talk?"
He doesn't answer, instead taking a step toward her and extending a hand toward her face. Her breath hitches in her throat and she instinctively brings her hands up to shield herself. He may have just implied that he has no intention to kill her, but it would not surprise her if he reneged on such a thing moments later. That's simply whom he's become.
She squeezes her eyes shut and waits for her fate. Again. Another piece of her heart chipped away, another ounce of willpower drained.
But what she had been waiting for never arrives and all she feels is a hand cupping her cheek instead of the frigid taste of steel impaling her gut. She tentatively opens her eyes and looks into his. His enigmatic smile, softer than his typical smirk, stirs sleeping memories with her. He tilts his head and regards her with an acidic mix of affection and arrogance.
"What could you tell me that I don't already know, Aerith?"
Her arms tremble and her words coagulate into a lump in her throat. A glimpse of the man she knew before stands in front of her — a ghost superimposed onto a monster.
Sephiroth capitalizes on her relaxed defenses and tears the White Materia from her ribbon, eliciting a pained cry. She withdraws from his touch and stumbles backward. The burn of his gloved fingers lingers on her cheek.
"This is not mercy. I will kill you again if that is what I must do," he intones, tucking the materia into a clip around his waist.
He partially turns away from her, his profile still visible. Something changes in his expression — he furrows his brows, mildly perplexed, possibly annoyed. His eyes trace the string of footsteps in the snow.
"That scent…"
Aerith knits her brows together, still dwelling on his flagrant manipulation. She doesn't smell anything around them.
Then, at once, the realization hits her with the force of a hurricane and her eyes widen. The rosemary. Slowly, deliberately, she reaches into her jacket pocket and extracts the sprig, twirling it between her fingers.
"You remember it, right?" Her acrid words are foreign to her own ears. That's not the voice of Aerith Gainsborough — it's someone else, someone who closely resembles her enough to replace her.
His expression is a mosaic of myriad emotions, all of them similarly inscrutable. Confusion? Irritation? A hint of longing? His eyes dart around, betraying his internal battle.
"Yes. But what I said before still stands. It doesn't matter now, and it never will again, sweet Aerith."
The sarcastic term of endearment rings harshly in her ears, unforgiving. When he turns on his heel and descends down the incline, marching toward the horizon, she does not chase after him. His silhouette shrinks with each step, merging with the blood red sun, until he disappears completely. Lips slightly parted (flushed pink, she imagines), she stares at the spot where he once stood and rubs her cheek raw to rid herself of his touch.
"Aerith."
Cloud's voice rouses her from her reverie. She turns to see him, joined by the others, standing at the foot of the cliff just above the cave.
"That was Sephiroth, wasn't it?" Nanaki asks.
"Why were you talking to each other like that?" Tifa's eyes narrow in ostensible distrust.
They're putting her on trial. Aerith hadn't realized that she was shivering until this very moment. Her fraught breaths come out as quick, visible puffs in the thin winter air. She turns to face the horizon once more, eyes fixed on the spot where he once stood.
"You all saw that?" she asks listlessly, continuing to twirl the rosemary sprig between her fingers.
"We saw enough." Cloud's sharp voice and gelid gaze slice right through her soul.
Barret turns his head, eyes narrowing and widening in tandem — vacillating between indignation and puzzlement. "First you knew where he was goin', now you're talkin' to him like you're old pals. What's going on here?"
She doesn't have the energy to take offense at their assumptions. She curses her own selfishness, curses it for creating this venomous coil of resentment deep in the pit of her stomach. It's not their fault. She chose to refrain from telling them anything, and now she is reaping her rewards for that choice. Yet, this nascent sense of rage threatens to set her convictions ablaze. How dare they accuse her of consorting with him? They don't understand — they can't understand — everything that it took to get here, what emotions rule her —
"We're wasting time," Vincent interjects.
"Yeah, that's right! The longer we stand around, the further ahead that clown gets!" Yuffie ceases her melodramatic teeth chattering ands stands up straight, nearly swallowed by her comically large coat. She sweeps a judgmental glance across the group. "Besides, you guys are really tryin' to say she's shacking up with that guy? Doesn't it make more sense that he was just being a creep?"
Nanaki nods and looks to Cloud and Tifa. "We know now that Sephiroth is a good manipulator. I can't imagine Aerith would willingly allow him to take her materia."
Not just any materia, she thinks to herself as an image of her mother's smiling face surfaces in her mind's eye.
"Can we, uh, save the drama for later? Now's not the time, folks!" Cait Sith says pointedly.
Amidst murmured assent, the others begin to march forward, following Sephiroth's trail of footsteps. The snow morphs into cement, gluing her feet to the ground.
He spared his sword. She's still alive. Why can't she allow herself to feel happier about that?
She steals one more glance at the rosemary spray before tucking it back into her jacket pocket — right against her still-beating heart.
