Author's Notes: For the interested, here is what I listened to approximately 239587234 times while writing this: "Who We Want To Be" by Tom Day. It's on YouTube. Please feel free to set it to loop the way I did while writing and editing.

Written for the CloTi Fall Festival 2020 – combo prompt:
Day 5 main – Reunion and Starlight
Day 4 alternate – by poet Pablo Neruda

Word Count: 5070

Crossposted on AO3.

"We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon." – Franklin D. Roosevelt

"Cloud."

It took a while for Cloud to look up at Sephiroth. It was likely that less than an hour before, the presence of his mother's and Aerith's murderer would have sent him into a frenzy of panic to protect Tifa . . . but that didn't matter anymore. And if Sephiroth killed him, well, that was fine. He had no intention of fighting.

Sephiroth looked down at him, took in Tifa's limp body in his lap. "Your last gift to her?"

To her and himself, really, because he couldn't stand to watch her suffer. But Cloud felt nothing about the attempt to bait him; he lowered his gaze to a spot behind the other man and just waited.

Masamune appeared in Sephiroth's hand. The former hero raised his blade between them, then pivoted, adding enough power to his swing to gouge a small trench wide enough for a body in front of Cloud's feet. Cloud looked at it. Looked at Sephiroth.

"Such ego, Cloud," Sephiroth purred, green eyes narrowing. "You think you're the only adversary to earn my respect, however grudging?"

Cloud's brows drew together for a bit, but then it made sense.

"She wielded my own weapon against me, tried to kill me despite seeing what I'd done and knowing what more I could do, survived my strength in a way you definitely wouldn't have without Hojo's interference, and faced me with resolution even as fear lurked in her eyes and her heart choked her." Sephiroth smirked. "Why, I'd even say I have more respect for her than I ever have for you, because she lacked all the special power granted to you but still had the courage to face me over again."

After a moment, Cloud nodded. It did make sense. It made sense, and he had no argument.

Carefully, he gathered her in his arms and got to his feet, only to kneel by the makeshift grave. He pressed a slow kiss to her forehead, then eased her down. He arranged her gently, and drew his own weapon as he stood. Sephiroth casually swept Masamune's length behind him and watched Cloud use First Ken as a makeshift shovel to loosen the edges of the trench and let the dead gray earth fall over her. Cloud didn't hurry, but Sephiroth didn't leave. When Cloud was finally done and there was only an odd depression in the ground where Tifa lay, he lifted his gaze to his enemy.

"Walk with me," Sephiroth said, and paid Tifa one last respect, circling the dip rather than crossing over it to continue on to wherever he was going.

Cloud almost didn't follow. He was ready to stay right where he was, grieving, until something permanent happened to him. But Tifa had learned to move on, and Cloud supposed it was the last lesson he could learn—in whatever capacity the current state of the planet would allow—to honor her memory. So he took one last look at the depression, about where her head was, and then turned away to follow Sephiroth to nowhere.

Sephiroth, his body entombed in crystallized mako, had been freed as the mako had been chipped away by Omega's gathering of the Lifestream. His soul—spirit, mind, whatever—had been considered poison and expelled into the convenient vessel, and that was how he'd found himself alive again. Cloud could tell he was still insane, but it was quieter; without the Lifestream, he was trapped on the remains of the planet with no means of controlling it, so there was no longer anything to really fight about. He was a well of information, however.

"We will die, eventually."

"Good," Cloud said, and meant it. With Tifa's death, he had given up any interest in living.

Sephiroth passed the time telling stories. Of his few friends—of Angeal, Genesis, Zack. He was even able to fill in a little of Cloud's memories regarding certain things, though by that point Cloud no longer cared. When he wasn't telling stories, Sephiroth talked about the Lifestream and how Zack had given him a piece of his mind every time Cloud had defeated him.

"He didn't want to go," Sephiroth added. "Unlike me, he allowed himself to be separated from Mother, so Omega was willing to take him along. SOLDIER was his entire life while he was a teenager; he had many friends—brothers—and since they all carried Mother's cells they had to stay. He was especially adamant that he didn't want to leave you—said it made no sense that his living legacy would be left in the past."

It was nice to hear.

"And the flower girl, Miss Gainsborough. She asked me to apologize to you for her. Her power as a Cetra may have seemed quite great, but the reality was that her mixed heritage meant it was limited, and what happened was something she simply could not prevent."

Cloud shrugged one shoulder and shook his head. He actually hadn't thought much about Aerith, figuring she'd either done the best she could to help or she'd rejoined the Lifestream and had no clear awareness of what was going on, and he'd been fine with both possibilities. She deserved the chance to rest.

Sephiroth's expression might have qualified as amusement. "You make such a warm travel companion. Do you have anything at all to say?"

No.

Cloud stopped in his tracks.

Yes. Yes, he did.

"Tifa," he said, staring at the ground. Sephiroth's boots stopped as well, a few steps ahead, and turned to him a little. "She hid from Chaos so Omega wouldn't take her. But her soul—spirit, whatever—had nowhere to go when she died." Cloud brought his gaze up to his enemy. "Is she . . . really gone? Forever?"

Sephiroth turned the rest of the way to face him, then looked upward. Cloud let his gaze follow. Above was the night sky, spangled with stars; it was also increasingly the day sky as the planet's core cooled, the magnetic field weakened, and the blue of the atmosphere was slowly blown away by solar wind.

"Stardust," Sephiroth said. "All life in the universe, wherever it is—whatever planet or moon it might find itself on—is made of material that originated far beyond the world on which it exists. Nothing is wasted. She was stardust before she came to this planet, was stardust while she lived on its surface, and is stardust in death."

Cloud felt a stirring of hope. "Then . . .?"

"Energy such as hers, yours, mine . . . Well, energy can be neither created nor destroyed, correct? That applies to all forms. In a normal life cycle, then, death allows that energy to be released to the universe. But energy is naturally attracted to itself, so the larger lifeforms such as planets will accrue it over time and strengthen it by allowing the energy to be repurposed, born, reproduce, and die. When planets die without things like Omega, their energy is also released to the universe and eventually taken in by other planets, moons, suns.

"So Miss Lockhart's energy did, and yours and mine both will, leave the remains of this world and travel the cosmos. In time, it will be caught in the influence of larger energies and pulled in. She is dead, yes, but not gone. Not forever. That means nothing as far as the likelihood of you ever encountering even a thread of her energy again, however, let alone being aware of it."

Cloud stared up at the stars, breath catching in his lungs, eyes blindly searching the speckled darkness as they filled with tears. Maybe Sephiroth was lying, even though there was no reason to bother any longer, but Cloud was happy to let himself be manipulated for once.

As long as Tifa was okay, that was all that mattered.

Sleep was something Cloud hadn't realized was habit more than need, though it made sense given that he'd learned about his similarly reduced need for food and water after giving up his rations so Tifa had enough to eat. He did still sleep from time to time, but he could go without for a long while.

The first time he slept in Sephiroth's presence, several weeks after Tifa's death, he'd half expected to be killed. Instead, when he woke Sephiroth was gone. Cloud waited for a few days, seeing as there was literally nothing else of significance left to do, but when the man didn't return Cloud decided he'd chosen to part ways and continue on whatever journey of his own he felt was worth taking. So Cloud gathered First Ken and its siblings, placed them in their loops in his harness, and set out on his own.

While Chaos was on its rampage, slaughtering every untainted thing it could find, Cloud had halfheartedly contemplated killing Tifa to spare her the trauma of death at its hands. She'd never contracted any form of Jenova and had made peace with all the horrors of her life, so she definitely would have joined the Lifestream and been collected by Omega; she wouldn't have been aware of it, but she'd have traveled the cosmos and been given a new home on a new world somewhere. Eventually, she'd have been reborn into a new life.

She would've been okay, for certain.

But he'd been unable to bring himself to do it. Not because he was too selfish to let her go, to do what was best for her, but because going against her wishes would have been hurting her—physically and emotionally—and he hadn't been able to figure out whether it was worse to hurt her to keep her safe, or let her have her way knowing she'd suffer for her choice later. She'd made it more than clear that she wanted to stay with him even though it would mean being left behind forever by Omega, and was so adamant she'd rarely ventured aboveground to avoid encountering Chaos, leaving the search for food and water to Cloud; he may have been attacked if spotted but not specifically sought out like she would've been had Chaos caught wind of her presence.

As he'd searched, Cloud had watched the planet die little by little, and in doing so also watched the closing of Tifa's window of opportunity. He had tried to bring it up a time or two, promising that he'd do the deed so she didn't have to be afraid of the more brutal, unfeeling method Chaos used. It was ridiculous that it was something they'd even needed to discuss, but though Cloud might have preferred to cling to Tifa, he hadn't been able to bear being so self-centered as to condemn her to obscurity alongside him. For her sake he'd be quick, he'd promised; she'd feel only an instant of pain, and then he'd hold her until he was positive she was dead.

"You won't be alone," he'd said during their last argument, absolutely certain of it. He'd never leave Tifa vulnerable to any people or creatures that wouldn't care whether she was alive and scared or not. It wouldn't have mattered that he was defending her death with his life—he'd do it without question.

Tifa's reply had been a simple, "But you would be."

He'd attempted to point out that even if everything were to go perfectly and she managed to live a normal life, he'd still outlive her and be alone anyway. But she'd been stubborn on the matter. However long he'd be alone after she was gone, it wouldn't be as long as it would have if she'd let Omega take her.

When Omega had finally left the planet, Tifa had held his hand as they watched the massive WEAPON rise from the surface and abandon not only lives too corrupted to take along but also people like her who may have been worthy of collection but had managed to stay hidden. "Bye," she'd said, voice quiet, and Cloud had never asked who she was saying it to or whether she was saying it to everyone—her parents, their friends, the kids.

It was a small mercy that Denzel had been an early casualty of Chaos, though not a target. Corel had been perhaps the first major settlement it had attacked, and the kids had happened to be there visiting Barret. Chaos had gone after Marlene, and Denzel had attempted to protect her. According to a survivor's story, Chaos had hesitated—possibly thrown by the appearance of "tainted" life energy in front of "pure" life energy—but ultimately killed both with one strike. Barret and all but a handful of Corelians had died as well.

Cloud had no idea what had happened to Denzel's energy, since it would have been undesirable to Omega given that he'd once been infected with geostigma, but hoped it'd still been able to tag along somehow. Surely the WEAPON couldn't have been that good at filtering out unwanted stuff in the Lifestream—that was presumably why Deepground had been so selective about their slaughter.

The weak summers and harsh winters of Nibelheim had meant knowing exactly what was edible and what wasn't, then collecting what was as soon as possible and canning it carefully for future consumption. It hadn't been hard at all to apply the same practices elsewhere; Cloud and Tifa had gotten by fine for a while with what they'd managed to stockpile. There was no way to actually know, but Cloud figured they'd done better than a lot of the people left behind—especially those in cities who'd always relied on store-bought supplies. He and Tifa had been able to keep their heads down, eat well, and avoid anyone desperate or greedy, who might have forced them to fight for what they'd put in the effort to gather.

Not that Cloud had ever entirely understood why they'd bothered when they'd both known everyone and everything would be dead soon enough. He supposed it was simply the instinctive animal desire to live, regardless of the inevitability of death, in which case the desire had always been there—it was just more vivid because of the futility of the situation.

Eventually, though, local resources had grown thin, and the circumstances had meant that what resources they had were really the best they could find. Travel would have been meaningless. A clock had ticked deafeningly in Cloud's mind, warning him Tifa's time was coming to an end. Without food she'd last maybe a month; without water, less than a week. Even so, they'd been able to squeeze two more years together out of the mess Omega had left behind.

When it had come down to the last of the water, they'd sat in silence at their table with the glass between them. It had been all that was left of the good water; Cloud had left it for Tifa and been drinking questionable water for well over a year, figuring he was most likely of them to survive any adverse effects. The ensuing discussion of what they'd do once she drank it was very short, because they had, really, already argued about it while Omega was still on the planet.

"Don't make me watch," Cloud had said. "Please, Tifa."

She hadn't answered for a while—instead, just stared at the glass of water. He'd always wondered if she'd regretted insisting on staying, or whether she'd been considering sending him away to try to spare him. He wouldn't have gone. Wouldn't have left her alone, even if it had meant having to watch.

Finally, she'd consumed the water. After she'd set the glass down, twisted it a little on the warped wood in an idle gesture, she'd met his gaze. Then she'd smiled.

"I love you, Cloud. Thank you so much. For everything."

She hadn't bothered to eat after that, even though it might have provided her with a tiny bit of water; she'd respected his plea to not drag things out. He'd let it go for three days. He shouldn't have, because he'd seen the first signs crop up by the end of the second day, but he'd wanted just a little more time with her. By the end of the third day, though, it had been clear she was beginning to struggle, even as she'd tried to hide it. That was why, that night, when she'd announced she was going to bed, he'd instead coaxed her outside. They'd sat together, him behind her—mainly so he could keep her warm, but also safe if some Jenova-tainted mako beast had happened upon them—and looked up at the stars together one more time.

"I suppose we really will have to rearrange the stars," she'd murmured, voice sleepy.

"What?" he'd asked, baffled.

"You didn't read it?" she'd replied. "I wrote you a note."

She'd been writing him love notes for years and leaving them somewhere, obvious or tucked away, where he could find them. Cloud had found it enchanting from the start, though he'd never been able to reciprocate well; he could write things far easier than he could speak them, but even so he'd never been skilled with openly romantic prose. He'd made sure to keep every one of them, but had been forced to abandon the earliest ones when Chaos had been doing its work.

"I'm sorry. I'll find it," he'd assured her. "You know I love them."

He'd held her until she fell asleep and for hours after that, trying to scrape together some last little bit of time with her, but he hadn't wanted to risk her waking up or he'd have felt compelled to let her go one more day to avoid traumatizing her right at the end. And he hadn't been able to let her have one more day, because she would've been in far too much pain as her organs began to shut down; he would've had to watch her struggle to live even as she died.

He hadn't bothered to hide his own pain then, for there was no one around to see it. He'd just admired her beauty for what had to have been the zillionth time in their lives, quietly declared his love for her, kissed her temple as he placed his hands where they needed to be, and then yanked her chin upward at the same time he pulled the top of her head down.

The muffled crunch of her cervical vertebrae yielding to him had echoed in the silence. He'd gagged.

He'd just held her body after that, not sure what to do and content to wait for some signal he hadn't much expected would come. If he'd died then and there, he would've been okay with it—would've been just fine with his body lying beside hers until the universe came to an end—but that was when he'd begun to dwell in earnest on what had happened to her energy, and the thought that it had simply dissipated into nothing and her entire existence was gone forever because of her stubbornness had plagued him.

Then Sephiroth had found them. And while Cloud had indeed joined him in a slow, meandering walk with no destination, the first order of business had been to find that final love note.

Sephiroth had been the one to spot it, tucked under a makeshift vase of wilted chrysanthemums next to the coffee tin in what had passed for a kitchen in the tiny bunker Cloud and Tifa had shared. Cloud had consumed coffee regularly, but it had still been an odd place to put a note, and he'd wondered for a moment if it had been a sign of how the dehydration had been affecting Tifa's brain. It hadn't really mattered, however, and he'd dismissed the question as he'd tucked the paper into his pocket to read another time.

Cloud had no idea where Vincent was, but he couldn't have cared less. The gunman had appeared briefly soon after Omega had gone, and his last words to Cloud and Tifa had been, "I'll be with Lucrecia." But Cloud was uncertain if the mako crystals were still present to entomb her or if they'd been dissolved and she'd been set free like Sephiroth. If so, and if she and Vincent had agreed to stay together, they might have traveled anywhere. Or they might have just remained in or near the cave.

There wasn't anywhere to go anymore, after all. With the Lifestream gone, it had quickly become clear just how much the planet's life energy had contributed to everything humanity had taken for granted, from the food and water to weather and even gravity. As the atmosphere weakened and disappeared, so too did things like wind and rain, making it impossible to grow crops or find anything to drink; the sun grew increasingly uncomfortable during the day without anything to rebuff its full strength, and the nights were ever colder without anything to contain and reflect the leftover warmth from the sun. Sometimes a hop, skip, and jump carried a person a lot higher and farther than it should have.

The sky was full of stars, but the earth was gray and barren.

It was virtually impossible to keep track of the passage of time, and with Tifa gone Cloud didn't bother to try. He simply walked and waited—waited to see the truth of Sephiroth's promise that he would die too. When he happened to find a shovel he kept it with him, easing the effort of the burial of the bodies of those he came across—geostigmites like himself, SOLDIER poisoned with Jenova's cells like himself, some dead of natural causes while others had met more violent ends. It was more something to do than the pressure of any religious belief.

Then the day came when he looked at his hands and arms and realized they didn't look as strong as they had before. Each subsequent week revealed increased malnourishment and atrophy. It wasn't the sort of degradation known to SOLDIER, though—not technically. It was just that as sensitive to mako as he was, his body processed it with an unusual thoroughness and efficiency. Perhaps that was why he was so sensitive to mako. He didn't have an explanation, and wasn't inclined to search for one. But he knew it was a factor in his ability to take Sephiroth down over and over—while inarguably powerful and deadly, Sephiroth's body consistently lacked the ability to get more power out of less mako the way Cloud's always could, meaning Cloud had been able to keep up with him in battle with less effort. The "skill" had backfired with the death of the planet, however, dragging out Cloud's suffering far longer than the rest of the planet's forsaken populace; there was every likelihood that, by the time his body started to fail, he was the only person left alive on the entire planet.

That was why the discovery that the mako in him was at last slowing to a trickle, then a drip, caused Cloud to cry for the first time in years, decades, centuries. He dropped to his knees and wept heaving sobs of relief at the silent, starry sky above.

Finally, it was over.

It was rather funny, how he suddenly went from being eager to die to being eager to live so he could watch himself waste away. When he got tired, he slept, hoping he'd wake up so he could study the new wrinkles in his skin as the mako gave up its hold on the telomeres it had gummed together for so long and at last let them unravel.

It wouldn't be much longer.

He never saw Vincent again, or Lucrecia. He did come across Sephiroth, whom he'd found in what was left of Nibelheim, perhaps expecting he'd show up eventually. And he had, possibly guided by an instinctive urge to die somewhere familiar. Cloud considered kicking Sephiroth's body, just one time, but decided that the satisfaction of brutalizing a corpse wasn't worth it. Still, he had never left the deceased untended. He didn't have the strength to dig a grave, so he dragged Sephiroth into the remains of Nibelheim's inn, to a corner of the main room where there was a bit of intact roof, and covered the body with the decorative knit throws dry-rotting on the couches.

It would have to do.

He might have gone back to where he'd buried Tifa so he could die beside her, but two things stopped him. The first was that as he deteriorated his cognitive function failed; he wasn't entirely sure from one moment to the next that he even knew where he'd buried her or whether he could navigate there. He hadn't marked the grave, after all, meaning he could walk right past it and never know. Even if that hadn't been an issue, the second problem was that he wasn't certain he had the strength necessary to make it that far anymore.

He couldn't bear the thought of dying somewhere he could no longer identify or take comfort in, something he'd seen had happened to many others, so he stayed in Shin-Ra's Nibelheim to finish waiting. It was the closest he could get to both his mother and Tifa, and that would have to do. He wandered the town square in silence, amusing himself by studying the buildings and trying to remember who had lived there and what they'd been like. When that was done he passed the Shinra mansion, which had completely collapsed in on itself at some point, and walked as far up the mountain as he could.

Big surprise—the bridge had fallen. Again.

So he returned to town, never harassed by any of the creatures that used to live on and in the mountain, and went back to circling the town square of his memories. It was all there was left to do.

He spent the next few days in the replica of his house, thinking of his mother and actually feeling a bit glad that she'd died when she had, because it meant she'd joined the Lifestream as untainted spirit energy, and maybe at least a little of that had gone with Omega. She'd always liked Tifa, and surely would've been happy to know they'd been together, but she also would have worried about Cloud being alone on a dead world. Better that she was gone and spared that stress; gone from the world she'd been born on to be reborn on a brand-new one. Cloud had never been worried for himself, and wouldn't have wanted her to worry for him.

In a moment of particular idleness one day, he thought to go next door to the replica of Tifa's house. It was a shambles like every other building on the planet, but he managed to get up to her room without falling through the floor. He spent the remainder of that day and all of the next in the bed that was hers but wasn't, alternately thinking of her and staring out the window at the decaying world without a single thought to occupy his mind. From time to time he took a labored breath as the atmosphere continued to thin, and listened to the silence scream in his ears.

When he tired of that, he made his way back down to the town square and came to a stop in the middle of the cobblestones Shin-Ra had decided to lay down despite the original square being almost entirely dirt. It was as he was standing there that his brain flickered to life for an instant and he realized he'd never read the last love note Tifa had written for him. He'd been carrying it around with him all that time but never once thought to read it. With nothing else he'd rather do, he fished it from the pocket he'd put it in and found it a touch crumpled and its edges fuzzy from its time rubbing against the fabric of his pants, but otherwise none the worse for wear.

More than once he read in silence the words she'd written there, imagining her speaking them to him in her gentle voice and showing him the affectionate, reassuring smile that had never failed to set him at ease. When he'd memorized the words, he folded the paper once and looked up at the starry night sky to answer her.

"I guess . . . it's time to find out."

Not too much later, on an empty day like every other before it, Cloud made his way to the well in the center of town. He'd discovered its framework was in pretty good shape for being exposed to the elements, though the pipes had long since rusted through and fallen, pouring the well's contents onto the square. But it was still strong enough for him to climb and he had just enough strength to do so, so he did, then lay beside the reservoir where Tifa—wearing a pretty turquoise dress—had once sat and made him promise to save her. Just once. He gazed up at the stars overhead, imagining he could see stardust glittering between them.

After a while, he fished out the love note, read it one more time, then folded it firmly but carefully around the strap of clothing that crossed over his heart so no stray breeze, weak though they were those days, would snatch it away. He linked his fingers over his abdomen, closed his eyes, and saw her face and the stars they'd looked up at as children reflected in her eyes. He held tight to that image as his body convulsed and his diaphragm made a few faint, desperate attempts to draw air into his lungs. His heart slowed, the space between the beats growing just a little each time, and then his chest felt heavy. His body went numb soon after. A feeble flash of fear was replaced with a wave of exhausted relief and peace.

He hoped she was right, because life wasn't worth living if he couldn't have her beside him.

Sometimes I think we will always come back to each other. Not by chance, but by choice. There is no magnetic pull, no right time, or right place. The stars are not aligned for us, so we will reach our hands up to the night sky and rearrange them ourselves.

Love you! xx

Answers To Questions You Didn't Even Know You Wanted To Ask:

Tifa's final love note is Pablo Neruda's work, with adjusted punctuation and one added word ("will") for the sake of flow.

—

If you find this fic to be somewhat fine, please take the time to drop me a line!

~RN (LS)