Set Against the Grain

Drabbles following the exploits of Zack and Cloud, via Final Fantasy VII/Crisis Core.

--10--

The price of freedom is steep.

Cloud's eyes clenched tightly as he heard the words echo loudly in his mind. Water surrounded him, soaking his clothes, chilling his body—he silently hoped it would numb the rest of him. But he was only waist-deep, and it wasn't cold enough to do anything but calm his shaking limbs. In his arms, he held the body tightly, afraid to let go, afraid to give up.

Freedom…

The pink dress she wore was now stained with the dark red of her blood, and the water around them was quickly clouding over. He wanted to apologize to her for not being there. He wanted to rip Sephiroth in half. He wanted to try everything to get her back. But he knew it was hopeless.

As he slowly let go of her quickly fading figure, he felt a part of himself die.

He hadn't known her long, but his heart ached with a strange emotion he couldn't name. Flashes of images he wasn't familiar with passed before his mind too quickly for him to distinguish—they were as pieces from a dream cascading all around him like a puzzle, but he was too bewildered to put them together.

Instead, he closed his eyes again and sighed.

If you want to be a hero, you need to have dreams.

He struggled for so long trying to find answers to these thoughts inside his head, but he was worse off than he started. He lost her. She wasn't going to come back.

This strange emotion inside him was not foreign, but achingly familiar. So familiar, his mind began to claw helplessly against an invisible barrier that he was slowly beginning to become aware of. He felt there was something he was missing. There was something telling him that Aerith's part of the puzzle was more important than any of them imagined. She was possibly the most important.

And now she was gone.