Their encounter, however formal and forgettable as it should have been, dominated her thoughts.
She twirled a tulip between her fingers. "I wasn't too uncultured for him, was I?"
"Hey, don't knock yourself like that!" Zack chided, wagging his finger admonishingly before folding his arms across his chest again. He hadn't quite caught the sarcasm. "But either way, I dunno. I asked him what he thought, but he kinda dodged the question."
Aerith swung her legs against the wooden fence as he leaned against the flower cart. The perfumed scent of tulips smothered the metallic tang that hung heavy in the air this deep in the slums.
"I guess it doesn't really matter, does it? Meeting someone like him is a once-in-a-lifetime thing down here."
If he ever detected the caustic edge of her words, he never indicated as much. Zack always assumed good faith, after all.
"You never know," he said pleasantly, arranging the flowers in color order. Pink petunias first, purple pansies last. It was the closest to a real rainbow she thought she'd ever see.
She dared not voice as much to Zack, but there was something eerily familiar about Sephiroth, something that she couldn't quite place from pictures and description alone. There was a subtlety to his mannerisms that brushed against a muddled memory, stirring it from a lengthy slumber.
"What's he like?" Her sandal dangled precariously from her foot before falling to the ground. "You know what I'm saying, right? What he's really like."
Zack's gaze lingered on a pink hydrangea blossom, his face inscrutable. He was as unprepared to answer the question as she was to ask it, it seemed. She rubbed her thumb along the tulip's stem. It was too late to rescind.
"Good question." He paused. "I don't know."
The admission draped itself over the silence between them like a dense curtain. Maybe it was the knowledge that something beyond simple curiosity spurred her question. Maybe it was the realization that he knew nothing about his superior beyond the superficial layer of consummate professionalism, unaware of what substrates lay beneath.
The sharp sound of his ringtone cut their quietude short. He quickly turned away and flipped open the phone in a fluid movement. This had become a pattern.
"Ugh, you're kidding. Totally forgot. Got a lot on the mind lately. I'll be there in ten." He hung the phone up with a crisp snap and flashed a toothy grin. "Time flies when you're having fun."
"If you're having fun, then I'm not giving you enough work to do."
"Yikes. Better not push my luck." He waited a beat. "See you tomorrow?"
She nodded. "Tomorrow."
He ran off, boots pounding against the dirt, until the sound of his footsteps faded to a distant scratch of rubber against grit. She remained in her spot on the fence and traced her fingertip along the veins in the tulip's petals. Her finger slipped and the nail pierced through the pale and fragile flesh.
Aerith had wanted to mourn, but perhaps this was a better fate. The alternative was someone purchasing it for a single gil, marveling at the novelty, and ultimately casting it aside — left to choke in tainted waters on the side of the street.
An image slipped in and out of focus. Silver hair, pointing toward a door. Silver hair, the color of steel. Maybe it was a dream that fused itself to the fabric of her memory.
She held the tulip up. The petals stood tall and proud with the exception of the one she injured. That petal wilted and limped, torn and tattered.
She pursed her lips.
The rest of them would soon follow.
"You have to know that it's not your fault — no matter the outcome."
She thinks that this is what it's like to have a grandfather; to bathe in the cold glow of austere and obstinate optimism. He pushes a dish of sliced prickly pear across the table and she obliges, popping piece after piece into her mouth, ravenous.
"Good, good! Eat up. You'll need the insulation where you're going."
She grins wryly and the smile tugs at one corner, lopsided. "I don't think I'm going to get fat off of cactus fruit."
Bugenhagen takes a sip of nopal tea; tendrils of steam, minty and fresh, swirl around her. "You seem to be in better spirits."
Prickly pear juice gathers in the spaces between her fingers. Aerith examines it, tilting her hand so that the reflection shifts in the late morning light filtering through the window. Is she in better spirits? She's as lost as ever. No specific path unfolds before her. She can make out the beginnings of every route, but their destinations hide behind a veil of shadows.
The juice spills forth from the crevices, coursing down her knuckles before splattering onto the wooden table. No choice but to traipse through the darkness, then.
He proffers a handkerchief and she accepts, dabbing off the moisture.
"You've…" Aerith smiles and searches for the right words. "You've been kind. Thank you."
"Hoo hoo! I've extended nothing more than basic courtesy," he says.
She inhales the last of the prickly pear and licks the tips of her fingers before wiping them on the handkerchief. She'd rather not rush — she'd rather not leave at all. There's no room for selfishness in her story, though.
"You ought to get going, is that right? Let me see you on your way, then."
He follows her outside into the sweltering heat of noontide. It's a dry and crisp heat, unlike the stale, saturated humidity that permeated the slums.
"Thanks for everything."
It feels like a hollow platitude for how much he set her heart at ease. A wide smile deepens the crevices mapping his age across his face.
"Be on your way," he says. "And don't let doubt be your pitfall."
That gives her pause. She swallows and looks at him.
The image of the midday sun shines and dances on the surface of his glasses. It drapes a cloak of warmth over her shoulders; it is glorious, ignorant of human whim and folly. She hesitates before turning away from him. Here, she leaves that warmth behind. Joy burns hot and swift in her life — it's never the slow smoldering that others know.
"Come back," he says, "any time at all."
She spends the remainder of her paltry gil on a coat and pair of boots before repeating the arduous trek to Icicle Inn. The sound of her heartbeat against her eardrums drowns out the whistle of the wind.
She stares at the snow beneath her as she traverses up the slopes toward the summit. If she looks up toward the sky, it will burst past the gates of her memory — the panic. The mortal reprieve that the Planet denies her, over and over and over again.
Aerith shakes her head and smacks her gloved hands against the sides of her face. She's been taking navel-gazing lessons from Cloud.
With one last push, she heaves herself over the precipice that separates Icicle Inn from the perilous inclines below. The familiar sight stings her as fiercely as the shards of ice riding on the wind, cutting her lip.
She spies the derelict building that she once thought to trespass, the one whose horrors spurred Barret to intercept her attempts. She shuffles her feet through the blanket of snow and makes her way to the staircase leading up to the splintered wooden door. Her throat tightens as she bounds up the steps two at a time.
Cloud and the others aren't here to shield her from whatever lurks behind this door. Terror brews somewhere deep within her and her muscles stiffen, but intrigue compels her to reach for the doorknob.
She swallows thickly. Here fingers tremble as they hover above the handle. The door resists at first, refusing to budge even as she shoves her weight against it. Years of decay have rendered the hinge stiff. With a frustrated sigh, she swings her foot against the wood.
The door finally acquiesces to her persistence and groan as it opens, allowing her to cross the threshold into the ostensibly abandoned cabin. The smell of must assaults her senses and stirs memories of dust and pine. She pinches her nose and scrapes her boots against the greyed mat in the foyer, powdering it in snow. She's still a guest despite the emptiness.
Even death is not so quiet as this place. Aerith releases her hold on her nostrils and grips her arms with either hand to tame the shudders racking her body. A small part of her whispers warnings of what could happen if she stays, but she's come way too far to heed them.
She glances around. This was presumably a residence, but the unusually high ceiling and melange of machines in what would have been the living room suggests otherwise. The cold has spared the floorboards the fate of rot. Aerith treads lightly as she inches closer to a truth her friends deemed unfathomable.
She approaches the center console, all too aware of the way her footsteps intrude on what is no doubt an old and complacent silence. After pushing some buttons experimentally, the machine boots up and the screen turns on, revealing a file directory.
"'The original Crisis…' 'what is Weapon…'" she mutters to herself, going down the list of titles. She raises her eyebrows upon reaching the last one. "Confidential?"
Unease urges her to leave once more. Her shivers have nothing to do with the cold. This place must be haunted by whoever lived here last. Still, she can't risk leaving any stones unturned. She clicks on the first file. The video player takes its time opening; these machines can't have held up well in the bitter chill.
The player eventually opens, displaying a man and woman standing right where she finds herself standing now. The woman's back faces the camera. The mustachioed man strides over to her and shouts, "Camera's ready!"
The woman turns slowly, her face becoming visible little by little, until Aerith realizes.
"Then, Ifalna, please tell us about the Cetra."
"Two thousand years ago, our ancestors, the Cetra, heard the cries of the Planet."
She had imagined all kinds of sordid finds after Barret prevented her ingress. Mummified corpses, garlands of guts and teeth and hair. Pools of blood, failed experiments. Now it seems so obvious. The longer she looks at them, the tighter her chest feels.
Her mother recounts the tales she oft told Aerith as a child, delineating the arrival of the calamity from the skies, the way their people couldn't withstand the devastation, their ability to commune with the Planet. All things she already knows. She hangs on to every word.
She moves from one video to the next until she lands upon a pair of videos labeled Daughter's Record. She can't walk away now, but that's precisely what she wants to do: walk away and pretend she never saw any of this, incinerate it, inter it into the cemetery of her heart, right next to all the other pain she buried alive.
She squeezes her eyes shut, draws a breath, and presses play.
"I've already decided! If it's a girl, it'll be Aerith, and that's that."
"Ugh, you're so selfish. But Aerith is a good name."
Her finger wavers as she proceeds to the last one. It opens on her parents talking amongst themselves. The content of their conversation is nothing remarkable and her eyes wander over to her father. Her mother never spoke much of him and she never concocted even a placeholder image in her head. He still doesn't look anything like she expected. He was older than she might have expected. His brow was stern, but a twinkle in his eye telegraphed his kindness.
The sound of Shinra troops kicking down the door in the video rouses her from her observations and the sight of her father's fearful eyes brands itself into the recesses of her brain. And the person who emerges amidst them—
"Hojo…"
She doesn't hear what they're saying. Her blood flows hot and fast. A soldier points his gun at the camera and fires. Her mother's screams and her father's pleas tear through the air.
The video cuts off. A future snuffed out before it could ever blossom. The gunshot that sparked a powder keg of tragedies.
Enough. She jams her finger into the computer's power button and sinks to the floor, head in hands.
With a grim laugh, she suddenly feels what he must have felt. Knowledge that seeps into the sulci of one's brain, forever fusing with the person that once was. The shifting of some convictions and the dissolution of others. The plates of her heart collide and the magnitude of her despair engenders fissures even through the hardened scar tissue of her past.
She wishes they were here. Any of them. She wishes she had listened. They knew exactly what it would do to her. Barret's forlorn face appears in her mind's eye and she hears herself whimper. The fantasy of clinging to him, just as Marlene does, burrows into her heart.
It's still foolish. Nothing she witnessed ran counter to what she already knew. There's no sense being this upset over a truth with which she had long ago reconciled — thought she reconciled. At least she had the privilege of seeing it like this; Tifa didn't have that. Cloud didn't have that. Her losses occurred when memories were only beginning to coalesce in her fledgling mind — that, or they occurred out of sight, mere abstractions, mysteries to which she penned her own endings.
She waits for the comfort of the Planet's voice and she hears something, some kind of low static, and she listens and listens and listens, willing the words to come to her. The static grows until it's swallowing her whole.
It's not the Planet's voice at all.
The journey to the Northern Crater is miserable and her muscles strain under the weight of her heartbreak with every laborious step. She stumbles and lands on her back into a snowbank gathered at the foot of a cliff. She sinks into the thick quilt of frost and turns her gaze up to the sullen skies.
Aerith pulls off a glove and reaches up to brush her eyes gingerly with her fingertips. Tears soak through her skin — the fruit of her grief.
Tears are a luxury reserved for those who live far above the plates; for everyone else, from the sprawl of the slums to the ends of the earth, they're nothing but a liability. A world inured to suffering has no room for something so human, so weak. This is her impotent rebellion. Her parents would be proud. The thought sends a fresh, hot wave coursing down her cheeks before running off into the snow.
She rolls onto her side. Elmyra always taught her that family is as indestructible as spider's silk, that the bond ties you to one another with an invisible thread that can extend to the farthest corners of the Planet. But Elmyra was fallible and she was wrong. A family can be torn to shreds in the time it takes to inhale deeply enough to scream.
Voices pour into Aerith's ears and she understands none of them. She was never lonely — how could she be when the Planet and her people were always with her? It doesn't matter that her family was torn from her before she understood what family meant. It doesn't matter that the two people she cherished left her to wither in the slums. Her ancestors never left her side. They never will.
She wraps her arms around herself, pulling herself into the embrace she needs that no one is left to give her.
Aerith wipes her hands across her face and wrings out the last of her tears.
She scales the cliffs with abandon. Ice crystals, keen as knives, buffet her face. Scrapes mar her face and hands by the time she's reached the upper corridor. Blood feels a lot like tears when it's flowing down her cheeks.
He — no, his clone — stands before the passage into the chamber where his body rests. He waited for her. He turns slowly. She thinks she sees amusement, but she blinks and it's gone.
"Are you asking for death? Is this whittling your willpower?"
"You'd like that, but I'm here for a different reason."
She tears the White Materia from her ribbon and grips it in her fist.
"Nothing you've done has worked," she says sharply. "You can't end this alone. Neither can I."
His expression remains impassive. It's reminiscent of a version of him long obsolete. The iciness in his eyes wasn't always sharp enough to kill.
"I felt your pain." He looks to the ground. "You understand now."
Her nails scrape against her palms. "I'll never understand."
"You don't change, do you? Always forcing yourself to feel what you believe is right."
"That's not it," she says. "There are more important things than my own pain."
"How selfless of you."
"Or I know how to prioritize. Holding onto a grudge is bad for your health, you know."
The slightest suggestion of irritation flickers in his irises.
"You don't hate them? They took your family — your freedom. They condemned you to a life of poverty and oppression. You're no nobler for thinking yourself a martyr."
Through the incendiary veil of his hostility, the dense miasma of his madness, she sees the silhouette of the person he once was. The thought shakes her confidence.
"I don't hate them. I resent them, but you already knew that." She narrows her eyes and scowls. "But you…you let your hate destroy you. I won't let that happen to me."
A searing silence settles over them, pregnant with portent, and the muscles of her stomach tense up.
"Why did you come here?"
"To make a deal."
The White Materia sparkles in the light shining from above. It's as cold as the frost that surrounds them, a cold that sinks deep beneath the cloth of her mittens and into her soul. Her reflection on his blade taunts her. Purple circles peek through the thin skin underneath her eyes.
"What deal could exist between us? There is no compromise or middle ground."
"You're right," she concedes. "But middle ground might be the only choice we have."
We, we, we. The word sticks thickly to her tongue like slime, sludge, gluing her mouth shut. There is no 'we' — not anymore. That there ever was a 'we' is a notion that she must tamp down deep into the fathoms of her psyche.
"A deal," he repeats. "I have no incentive to accept that."
Rage bubbles in her breast. She pelts the White Materia at him, at it, at whatever stands before her. He raises his hand and catches it in one fluid motion.
"You want an incentive? There it is," she spits.
He rolls the orb from the tips of his fingers down to his cupped palm. His lips twist into a sinister and satisfied smile. The pleasure of her surrender no doubt surges through him. She grimaces and her blood curdles with disgust.
"This, by itself, is of no use to me."
Her teeth ache from the pressure with which she clenches them.
"Why, then," he continues, "would you give this willingly?"
"I'm not telling you what you want to hear."
"I'd expect nothing different from you. However, I have no obligation to return this. I have no need to cooperate with you, either."
"And then where would you be? Back at the beginning with nothing to show for it. If that's what you want, be my guest! We'll keeping doing this forever!"
Her words twist until they're gnarled and fanged, her voice cracking with her own kind of delirium as she teeters on the edge of this folie à deux. She thought that he might delight in it, savor it the way he savors all others' agony, especially his own. The expression before her is more perturbed than triumphant. If she didn't know any better, she might have the audacity to think that her desperation moved him somehow.
Gravel crunches beneath her boots as she closes the space between them. She stops a mere few inches away from him, close enough that she can see the azure rings around his pupils, close enough that he can smell the rosemary.
"Second thoughts? Why don't I help you?"
She curls her fingers around his wrist and lifts. He does not resist and his blade ascends until it's level with her hip. It presses against the fabric of her coat.
"Go ahead."
She coaxes it closer.
"Do it."
He considers it.
"Well? I'm waiting."
He withdraws and sheathes his blade. The muscles in his face are tense, his glower severe. He turns away from her and she must resist ascribing any significance to it.
"This is your choice," he says. The question lurks in the spaces between the words.
It occurs to her that the choice might be final, its consequences indelible. She can't pretend to understand the Planet's designs. It may not afford another chance.
She squares her shoulders.
"It is."
He examines the materia with intrigue and something else she's only seen once before: wistfulness.
"Then we will live, Aerith."
