Author's note:
Last half, involving some swearing and general silliness. Enjoy!
Everyone turned in shock upon hearing the words spoken, and gasped redundantly at the appearance of none other than the self-proclaimed greatest pilot in the world.
"So... Vince got all of ya as well."
"How did you know, Cid?" Aeris queried urgently, ignoring her manners and planned greetings.
"The bastard told me all about it. I... saw everyone there, too..." Cid seemed plain disturbed by the memory of it, but Aeris pressed on.
"C'mon in Cid." The several bullet holes in Cid's jacket began to pull themselves together as he sat down in a cushy armchair.
"Kadaj, if you don't mind, could you get Cid some tea?"
"Loz, go make tea."
"What? Why me?"
"I wanna see what happens!"
Loz slouched off, grumbling, and the rest of the group leant in eagerly to hear Cid's story.
"Well... shit, any cigarettes round this place?" Cid drummed his gloved fingers anxiously on his knees, stressed.
"I'm afraid not, Cid. But technically you shouldn't need one any more, all your past addictions should be cleansed from your syst-"
"I don't fucking care, I need a goddamn smoke!"
Aeris sighed, looking around hopelessly. "Well, I guess I could..." She began the delicate thought process that had woven the street, flowers and house around them, and in moments Cid held a packet of cigarettes and his own lighter from home.
"Nice touch, that," he grinned at Aeris. "Thanks." He took one long, soothing drag, before continuing.
"Well, I was at home, workin' on the new Highwind model. S'not as sleek as the Sierra, mind, but I wanted to make somethin' like the old one... anyway.
"Vince comes in, an' I say hey like I always do, an' the damn guy shoves me in the nearest plane in my yard and tells me to fly to that damn waterfall-cave. I'm like, what the fuck, but he's got that shotgun o' his pointin' at my skull, so I just fly 'im there like he asks.
"We didn't talk much on the way, but when we get there he's actin' real nervous. He keeps pacing up an' down, mutterin' all this crap about that Lucrecia woman. Then we go inside, an' I just about piss myself, 'cause there's all you guys, lyin' around the floor with blood everywhere an' that woman propped up in the back.
"He starts talkin' then, an' he tells me he needs all of us 'cause we're the strongest and that we'll live on an' all this crap. Hell, even you were there, Aeris... your body, I mean."
Cid swallowed hard, took a gulp of tea and another drag.
"So he tells me this, then gives me this real hard look and raises his gun up. Next thing I know, I'm out here with all you fine folks."
There was silence following Cid's tale, before Aeris spoke up.
"That explains why you didn't come in screaming, like everyone else."
Cid couldn't muster a smirk; he just gulped down more tea.
Everyone fell into silence once more, quietly adjusting clothes or dusting off imaginary flecks of dirt.
"Well," said Tifa finally, "I think we're all feeling pretty crap. Maybe we should get some sleep."
There was a collective sigh of relief and agreement, and Aeris disappeared upstairs to fabricate spare rooms and beds.
No one wasted any time in hurrying upstairs when she was done, glad to get away from the awkward reunion. Aeris had imagined there would be tension between the recently deceased, and so had made sure there was a room for every person to sleep alone.
Then she continued along the extended hallway, sighing deeply, and stopped at Zack and Sephiroth's room to say goodnight.
"Night, babe," Zack said, pressing a kiss to her cheek.
"The Promised Land," said Sephiroth absently. "Must return to Mother." He plunged the Masamune once more into Aeris' stomach by way of farewell. "Black Materia. Cloud... puppet."
"Shut up, Seph," Zack said merrily, punching the silver-haired man on one leather-clad shoulder and giving Aeris a wave.
There was a click as the door locked, then Aeris went and flopped down onto her own bed, unable to stop worrying about Cloud.
Where was he? Maybe he had stayed home in Edge... None of this made sense.
Why would Vincent have started in Midgar, then gone all the way to Wutai, then returned afterwards to Rocket Town?
It was a bizarre route, but then again, Vincent was acting rather bizarrely himself.
Aeris tried to remember the anatomy of the world she had seen so briefly and so long ago.
He was last at the waterfall cave, which was in the Nibel Area. So as long as Cloud was somewhere in Midgar, he would be safe for a while longer.
Maybe it would take Vincent a long time to get back to Midgar from the West Continent. It depended on how he was travelling, of course, and exactly how time differed between the realm of the living and the Lifestream.
Yuffie HAD arrived later than everyone else, apart from Cid on the neighbouring West Continent.
But only minutes later.
Reno rolled out of bed and made to leave his room, intent on finding Rude to pester. He had just stuck his head out the door when he saw his partner already outside, stretching idly and ogling the Lockheart girl.
In fact, Reno noted as he looked up and down the hallway, everyone had emerged from their rooms and were now stretching bemusedly or asking the time.
Only Zack and Aeris strode by undisturbed by the night that lasted only minutes.
"Oh." Aeris noticed the confusion apparent on every face she passed. "You might have worked out by now that time passes irregularly in the Lifestream," she supplied with a smile. "Everything lasts as long as you need it to, and since none of us really need sleep any more, night only lasted for as long as everyone needed to relax."
There was some awkward shuffling as everyone realised there wasn't much of an excuse to get away from each other any more.
"Anyway," said Aeris, ignoring the long sword that had suddenly embedded itself in her midsection as Sephiroth arrived, "let's all go downstairs and have some breakfast."
She was already halfway down the aforementioned stairs and called for Kadaj, who hadn't had any need to sleep.
"Now, let's think." Everyone was seated in the living room, sipping idly at coffee or, in Yuffie and Cid's case, tea. No one had felt much like breakfast apart from Kadaj, Loz and Yazoo, who were in the kitchen making some concoction involving last night's pasta, a bowl of sugar and a carton of milk.
"Vincent can't be at Midgar yet, logically- but by my reckoning, he will be on his way to the Eastern Continent by now. There's a terminal in the Sector Five church where I might be able to head him off, if..."
Aeris trailed off as there was a quiet noise from above
... shadum shadum shadum...
- rising gradually in volume
shaDUM SHADUM SHADUM
before ceasing completely
shap.
"Hey, didn't that sound like footsteps to you?" Reeve asked no one in particular, before Aeris shushed him.
"Please forgive me just forgive me I let you die all of you oh please please forgive me forgive him-" came an almost incoherent string of words, which everyone in the room instantly recognised as the quiet, unassuming voice of none other than Cloud Strife.
"That is meaningless here." Everyone recognised that voice too- Vincent's low, empty and as of late almost unearthly tones.
Everyone remained silent, hoping for another snatch of conversation, but just as suddenly as it had come, all noise disappeared.
"Oi Vincent!" Cid stood up suddenly, eyes trained on the ceiling. "You bastard! Where the fuck are you?"
Of course, there was no reply.
"I think Cloud was praying," Aeris said, voice barely above a whisper. "And we could hear him... so he must be at the church already..."
"And so is Vincent," Zack added, grinding one fist into the other.
"So we're too late," murmured Tifa, tears already shining in her eyes.
"No we're not!" Aeris snapped. "It just means we'll have to act fast. I'll go down now and maybe I can stop him..."
No one seemed convinced, but Aeris marched out of the house nonetheless.
"She must- she must return to me." Vincent's voice cracked as it echoed down once more from the ceiling. "That's why I accepted this power when it was given to me. That's why I need your life force, and the life force of the others."
"You bastard!" Cid was now joined by a few other voices, unable to hold in their rage.
"Shut UP!" Tifa hissed, her tears gone. "We might hear something important!"
"Lucrecia."
Cid made a sharp huffing noise. "Like we didn't know that WOMAN had somethin' to do with it."
Aeris stood at the end of the street, at the border between the Lifestream and the living realm. The world beyond was hidden behind a waving wall of glowing green, woven together into a barrier. Hundreds of thousands of shimmering souls passed through from the other side, but none went back out.
No one ever had, apart from the Ancients and Sephiroth, and with this in mind Aeris took a solid step forward.
It was oddly like being taken apart and having every space filled with cool, soft green. She was vaguely conscious of voices calling behind her, but her being was flooded with the Lifestream in its purest form.
"Aeris!" Her arm was seized, warmth flooding the limb, and she was pulled back.
She turned to look at Zack, whose almost violet eyes were wide with fear. "Watch it, babe! You can't go back there like that!"
Aeris' eyes were blank for a second, before she snapped back to reality. "I don't have time to go through the proper procedures. It's faster this way," she told him curtly, and began to advance into the wall again.
"No no no, you're not going that way. You dunno what'll happen."
"Yes I do!"
"No, you- hang on, how do you know?"
"I've done it before!"
"Really?" Zack seemed surprised- the only time he'd made it out with Aeris was when Cloud had died, and that time they'd been led out the proper exit by an old Ancient who opened the way for them.
He mentioned this to her, and she shook her head impatiently
"I was seeing Cloud long before then," she said, turning away.
"You were seeing Cloud? Behind my back? How could you!" Zack seemed genuinely hurt.
"Oh, be quiet for once, Zack." And with that, the flower girl re-entered the wall.
There was the flood of consciousness, before she picked up on the one familiar terminal within the Sector Five church. She tuned into the two entities there until the noises became clear.
Gunshots. The sound of bullets rattling off metal. Then the shapes finally came into focus, and Aeris gasped as she saw Vincent, bloodied and deadly, with his gun pointed squarely at Cloud, who was trapped under the rubble of a destroyed pew.
"Holy shit!" came a voice from beside her, and though the sound warped and distorted itself on the way to her, Aeris recognised it as Zack's.
He'd followed her in- Aeris tore her eyes from Cloud to look around her- they'd all followed her in.
Her attention returned to the church as she heard Cloud's footsteps once more.
His face was bloody- his chest dripped, his hair was caked with it- and he now held Vincent's long weapon in favour of his own sword.
"For Tifa."
Aeris looked away as a hail of shots assaulted her ears.
"For Barret. For Yuffie, for Reeve, for Cid..."
She heard his voice harden as he fired the last of Cerberus' bullets.
"For Vincent." Then the gunshots stopped.
Cloud left the church, leaving Vincent's corpse behind him.
There was nothing, no sound but the gasp of relief that escaped Aeris' own chest.
Then the pile that was Vincent stirred.
Aeris felt sick.
She had seen many things, in both her life and death, that she had never wished to see. But seeing Cloud walk away from the friend he had thought was dead, and then seeing that friend move after being practically destroyed, was too much.
She swayed on her feet. Zack and Reno, on either side of her, reached out to catch her, but the Lifestream pulled at their hands, drowning their movements. Aeris fell away from the wall and collapsed in a dead faint behind it.
When she awoke, she was in bed. Not her usual bed, but somehow the bed she had slept in when she was alive, the bed her adopted mother had given her.
She looked around. The surroundings were almost identical to her old room, except for the shimmering, blurry quality of all things in the Lifestream.
Everyone around her had seated themselves on plain wooden chairs, Zack standing beside her, Sephiroth absent, and Kadaj wetting cloths on the floor.
"Here's another one- oh, she's awake."
Aeris became suddenly aware of the warm, damp rag on her forehead, and took it off as she sat up.
It had been a pleasant surprise, having woken up to her beloved old room. She wondered how everyone had managed it- fabrication of the Lifestream was difficult, and it was only second nature to Aeris because of her Cetra blood.
She realised that Zack must have been behind it, him being the only one who had been in her house enough times to memorise it.
"Why aren't you outside looking for Cloud?" she asked curiously. Zack rubbed the back of his head anxiously.
"Well, uh, to be honest, I figured that if Spike dies, we know where he'll end up, obviously... but we didn't know what would have happened to you... so you were more important."
"So where's Cloud?" Aeris was panicking. "How long has it been?"
"Take it easy, babe. He's not here yet, but we figure it's morning in real life. Tifa stayed outside to keep watch."
Figures, thought Aeris, and she swung her legs out of the bed. "I'm going down there to check up on them. Don't worry about me. If it's already been an actual night in the living realm, then I've had more than enough rest."
Then she left the house, Zack, the group, and Sephiroth emerging after her.
In the wall of the Lifestream, Aeris stood with the rest of the deceased. They saw Cloud lying against a gravestone near the road to Gongaga- "Maybe he was finally gonna go tell my parents where I ended up, eh?" Zack joked- and watched him get to his feet.
He walked through the graveyard, footsteps wet with dew and rain. He walked to where Vincent- almost skeletal now in the sun- and the long-dead Lucrecia were slumped together, closer and freer than they'd ever been in life.
"Aw, man, Vince... what a way to go," came Cid's voice, hoarse with the wave of emotions that was silencing everyone else.
Cloud stood before the altar, the church behind washed clean of all its previous horrors, and there was a collective sigh as everyone watched the hero glow in the morning light.
"Cloud!" Tifa called suddenly. "I'm here, Cloud, I love you-"
This got everyone started, shouting their own messages from beyond the grave.
"Hey Chocobo-butt!" Reno giggled like a little kid.
"Yo Spikey-ass! C'mon, get yo ass up here!" Barret hollered, laughing heartily and waving his arms in the air.
"Hi Cloud!" Reeve managed to shout out weakly.
Everyone began to shout, just a ridiculous torrent of laughter and even the odd catcall, thought there was no sign that the blonde could even hear them.
"C'mon Spike! S'nice and warm up here!"
"We've got pasta!"
"We've got crack!"
Aeris couldn't contain a smile, but waited patiently until Cloud was ready to join them.
Sephiroth tried to poke the Masamune into the living realm.
"Cloud, grab the other end of this and pull me out!"
"Don't do it Cloud, it's a trap!" Reno jumped up and down, laughing hysterically.
"Lookin' good Spike!" Zack shouted over Reno's giggling.
"You're so hot!" Reno shrieked, not to be outdone.
"Make love to me Cloud!" Zack hollered, receiving a slap around the head from Aeris.
"For heaven's sake, you two, knock it off! What a thing to hear when you die!"
Then Aeris felt the rumble beneath her feet, and much to the others' curiosity, leant further than they could, past the swirling clouds of life, extending one hand.
"Cloud," she murmured, sounding more like a mother waking a tiny child than anything else.
He looked up at the hole in the roof, seeing no one but reaching back up anyway.
"Cloud, I love you." She suppressed a giggle as she heard Tifa fume behind her.
His hand met hers, and his eyes were wide as the young woman finally came into view.
"Cloud, I love you," Aeris repeated. "Come back to me."
And finally Cloud was through, hand in hand with Aeris as the deceased AVALANCHE and ShinRa staff, the great General Sephiroth and his clones, and finally the freed Vincent followed them back through the street.