Chapter Thirteen

'I told you: you can't go back and change time. You mourn but you live.'

'Cloud? Can you hear me Cloud?'

'What the fuck was he doin'?'

'I don't know. He must have tried to turn the machine on. Cloud? Cloud? Come on, wake up!'

Warmth and softness suddenly passed through Cloud's body. It was like being wrapped in soft fur blankets on an icy day. He heard a whooshing, tinkling noise, and realised that someone had used a cure materia on him.

He'd survived. He had no idea how, but he'd survived and someone had come to get him before Hojo and the Turks arrived. Sephiroth was dead, but if Cloud was okay then Zack and Tifa were probably okay as well.

In fact…

'Cloud?'

'Tifa?'

She sighed in relief as he opened his eyes and blinked up at her.

'How're you feeling?' she said. He didn't quite hear; he was too distracted by her face. Her cheekbones were more prominent, her puppy-fat gone. He shifted a little, and kept staring.

'You look older,' he said. Tifa frowned and, behind her, someone burst into loud guffaws of laughter.

'He's delirious,' Tifa sniffed. 'I do not look old.'

'Not old,' Cloud said, sitting up carefully. 'Older. You look grown up.'

He rubbed his head, covering his eyes with both hands, but he wasn't really hurting anymore. Thank the Planet for cure materia.

'Well,' Tifa said in a slow, baffled tone, 'I am grown up.'

He glanced out from under one hand and realised that she was right. This was not a fifteen-year-old girl. This was a young woman, in her early twenties at least. He looked up over her shoulder and saw not Zack, but Cid, laughing his lungs out.

'I'm back,' he said, and actually felt queasy at the very idea. 'I can't be back; I had more to do!'

'Cloud,' Tifa touched his shoulder. 'You were messing around with this old Shinra machine. You blew yourself up.'

'I combined materia,' he said. 'I went back in time.'

Cid, who had stopped by now, starting laughing all over again.

'I think you have a concussion,' Tifa said kindly. 'We need to get you home.'

'No, no, I'm not concussed, I'm telling you, I went back in time! I swear it—'

'What are we doing up here?' Tifa said. Her tone was stern: it wasn't that she didn't know. She wanted to test whether he knew. Cloud stopped, thought for a moment, and couldn't come up with an answer. It had been two years since he'd come up here with them; the last thing he'd been doing was fighting Sephiroth to the death. He had other things to worry about.

'That's what I thought,' Tifa said, to his glazed expression. 'What day is it?'

'The first of October,' Cloud said immediately. Tifa's eyes widened, and even Cid went quiet in recognition of the date of the Nibelheim Incident. Cloud shook his head. 'No, wait, that's where I was… it's the, um…'

'It's February, Cloud. It's the twenty-third of February.'

'Oh.'

'You're concussed. I'm going to give you another cure materia, and then we're going home. Okay?'

Cloud gave up.

'… Okay.'

The weather was grey and heavy, the sky full of storm clouds. They yielded no rain, but just sat, thick and opaque over the rooftops, and made the city feel dark and trapped. Denzel and Marlene had been playing in the street, but it was getting cold and Tifa had called them inside. Now Cloud had nothing to watch.

He shifted in his seat by the window and pulled the duvet closer around his shoulders. Tifa wouldn't let him out of bed without it. She'd barely let him out of bed at all.

The doctor hadn't been able to find anything wrong with Cloud, and no amount of potions or Cure Materia seemed to make any difference. Once, he remembered, when he and Tifa were children, a virus had spread around Nibelheim. Tifa had been ill for a week, coughing and sneezing and aching all over, but when Cloud had got it he hadn't felt sick at all. He had only felt tired: so tired that getting up out of bed to eat had warranted an hour's nap every day.

He wondered if he had the same virus now. It certainly felt the same, only this time he was getting the headaches as well, and the painkillers the doctor had left didn't seem to touch them. At least Tifa was a kinder nurse than the ones that had been employed by Shinra. In the last fortnight, he hadn't seen a single needle.

He had given up on trying to talk to anyone about being in the past. After a few hours of trying and being told that he was hurt and he needed to calm down, he'd realised that he had nothing to tell them. Nothing had changed. He knew that his history of mental health wasn't exactly flawless (or, as Cid put it, he was 'mad as a sack of badgers'), but of this he was absolutely certain: he had been given a second chance, and he had wasted it.

Knowing that, it was easier not to think. It was easier to imagine it was all a hallucination; something brought on by being smacked too hard in the head.

There was a knock on the door and Tifa came in bearing soup.

'How are you feeling?' she asked, passing him a bowl. 'How's your head?'

'Took some painkillers.' He shrugged, gesturing to the pack sitting next to him on the windowsill. 'Didn't make much difference.'

'I'll call the doctor again; maybe we can get something stronger,' Tifa suggested. Cloud nodded, although he honestly doubted it would make any difference how strong the painkillers were at this point. Tifa hovered where she was, watching him as he gingerly sipped at the soup. He glanced up but she didn't say anything. Usually by now she'd have run off to take care of the customers – or the children.

'Cloud,' Tifa said suddenly, 'what was that "time travel" stuff all about?'

He looked up, spoon still half-dipped in the bowl.

'W-what?'

She took a seat on the edge of his bed. The bar downstairs must have been quiet; she very rarely abandoned it in the middle of the day like this.

'When you first woke up, you spent the whole walk home trying to convince us you'd gone back in time, but then you haven't mentioned it since. I mean … it was just a concussion, right? You know that.'

'Oh.' He turned back to the window again. 'Yeah, a concussion. I guess.'

Tifa drew her knees up to her chest, balancing her heels on the edge of the mattress.

'You don't sound too sure.'

'Doesn't matter,' Cloud said. 'You're probably right. I was hurt.'

'And if I'm wrong?'

Cloud turned back to his soup, but for some reason he didn't feel like eating.

'Then that's even worse,' he said.

'Stranger things have happened to us, I suppose,' Tifa said, but she sounded more like she was entertaining a fantasy than considering Cloud's story seriously. 'We weren't in the room. You could have gone back in time, I guess, and then just … reappeared?'

Cloud put the soup down on the windowsill and pulled his duvet closer again. Despite his mako-pumped, stronger, more muscular body, he felt more fragile now than any time when he'd been stuck in the past.

'I was sent back to change something,' he said. 'To "change one life," she said.'

Tifa stretched out and then crossed her legs and leaned back on the bed, making herself comfortable for a long story. From her expression, he couldn't tell whether she was really interested or just humouring him.

'She?'

Cloud looked apologetic.

'Aerith.'

Tifa blinked slowly, like someone trying to prove to themselves that what they were seeing was really there.

'Aerith sent you back in time to change one life,' Tifa said. 'Hers?'

'No.' Cloud shook his head. 'Aerith didn't send me back. I think she just explained the rules, and I don't think it was her life I was meant to save. It might have been. If it was, I fucked up even worse than I thought.'

'Fucked up what?'

Cloud took a deep breath.

It took hours, but he managed to sum up two years of re-lived life to Tifa in a way that she could understand, despite all of his pausing and backtracking.

'Well,' she said eventually, 'I think I believe you.'

Cloud managed a very thin smile.

'Either that,' she added, 'or you had the most vivid, detailed hallucination ever.'

'Wouldn't be the first time,' Cloud muttered, but she either didn't hear or chose to ignore him.

'You think you failed?'

Cloud lifted his arms in a helpless gesture.

'Nothing's changed. I remember what life was like the last time, and everything is the same. Sephiroth, Zack and Aerith are dead. Nibelheim was destroyed. Sephiroth came back and nearly killed everyone all over again. I went crazy, you fixed me, and we beat Sephiroth and Shinra was destroyed. That all sounds familiar, right?'

'Pretty much.'

'So I must have failed.'

Tifa thought for a moment, and Cloud sat in miserable silence. He would almost have wanted to go back up to the Shinra Headquarters and try again, if it weren't for the fact that he was certain he would fail again. Or the fact that the materia accelerator had blown up. He still didn't know which life to change, but maybe if he concentrated on Aerith this time, instead of on Sephiroth…

'No,' Tifa said softly, 'I don't think you did.'

Sector Five hadn't escaped the damage from Jenova's meteor, but Aerith's church was somehow, miraculously, still standing. It was dusty inside, and poorly kept, but really it seemed in no worse a state of disrepair than it had the day Cloud had fallen through the ceiling. The flowers were even still growing in front of the pews. They had become tangled with weeds from lack of care.

'I'm going to check the perimeter for monsters,' Tifa said. Although there hadn't actually been any monster attacks in Edge since they'd shut the malfunctioning reactor down, they liked to keep their eyes open. Which going down into the old, broken city to look for anything. 'Stay here.'

'Yes, I'll sit here and wait the monsters to come after me,' Cloud muttered, dropping onto one of the pews. It had been another week before he'd had the energy to get out of the house, and that was only at Tifa's insistence. Within a few days she had gone from concernedly keeping Cloud in bed to practically bullying him out the door.

'You do that,' Tifa said firmly, and he winced because he hadn't actually expected her to hear him.

Despite this determination to get him up and out, Cloud could feel Tifa's eyes burning on him whenever she thought he wasn't looking, and she'd had him sit out on half of the battles they'd encountered under the excuse of wanting to 'practise alone'. Cloud just wished she'd make up her mind as to whether she thought he was sick or not.

He stayed in his seat for several minutes, and then started glancing between his watch and the door. Tifa was taking an awfully long time walking around the church. He wondered if she was hurt, but he couldn't hear any shouting and he was sure she wouldn't have gone so far he couldn't hear her. She was more sensible than that. Well, she was now, anyway. Having the shit kicked out of you at fifteen years old in a one-on-one with Sephiroth with no one around to help was probably enough to make anyone re-evaluate their combat tactics.

After ten minutes, he got bored of waiting and went over to the flowers to pick out some of the weeds. Aerith would have had a fit if she'd known her flowers had been left uncared for like this. The memory of Sephiroth plucking dandelions out from around Aerith's white and yellow flowers made him chuckle, but then the laugh wedged in his throat like a rubber ball and made it hard to breathe.

Tifa still hadn't returned by the time Cloud had evicted the weeds – they had stubbornly taken one of two of Aerith's flowers with them as collateral damage – and he started to wander aimlessly around the church. How had Aerith spent so much time in here, all alone? It was maddening.

He leaned against the doorframe and peered outside. No sign of Tifa. He wondered what in the world she was doing. Maybe she'd found another orphan to take home with them, he thought, not entirely sarcastically. There were a lot of orphans these days.

'Thank you for doing that, Cloud.'

He spun around. Aerith smiled at him from the edge of the flowerbed.

'I know the church is a long way from home now,' she said. 'Will you take some of the flowers home, and plant them there? Then you can look after them better.'

'Aerith?' he said. She giggled, making her chestnut hair bounce around her face.

'It's me,' she said. Cloud took a step towards her, but she hurried back and put her hands up.

'No, don't come closer.'

She bent down and touched one of the flowers. Her fingers passed right through the petals without connecting to them. Cloud realised that she had actually walked backwards into her flowerbed without disturbing them. One poked up through her leather boot.

'You can't touch me.' She looked up. 'See?'

Cloud didn't come any closer. He went down on his knees instead. He wasn't sure his legs were going to hold him anyway.

'I thought…'

'You thought you'd saved me,' Aerith said, every word a sound of sympathy. 'Oh Cloud, I'm so sorry, but it wasn't my life you changed. You barely even knew me.'

'I didn't change anything.'

'Cloud…'

'Send me back.'

Aerith hesitated, and Cloud jumped back up on his feet and took a few steps closer to her, ignoring the way she drew back.

'Send me back! I'll do it again; I'll do it better!' He swallowed. 'Please.'

'Even if I could send you back again, it wouldn't make any difference,' Aerith said. 'You couldn't do any better than you already did.'

'But—'

'You weren't even aware that you were doing it. You were so busy concentrating on the big things – the things you couldn't control – you didn't stop to notice all of the little things you were doing along the way.'

Cloud realised his mouth was open, and he closed it.

'You were changing one life,' Aerith said softly. 'Just a tiny bit, every day.'

'But you still died,' Cloud said. 'Zack still died. I failed.'

'If saving our lives was all that mattered then yes: you did fail.'

Cloud squeezed his eyes shut. Hearing it from Aerith was somehow worse than hearing it in his own head. Thinking that he'd failed was like a hand squeezing his heart. Having Aerith tell him so was like having his heart speared on a pike.

'But,' Aerith said, 'that's not all that mattered.'

Cloud opened his eyes, but remained tense. She couldn't touch him, but for some reason he felt as though he was about to be slapped.

'Zack and I died young, but we had good lives. Bad things happened to us now and again, but we loved living. We had enough good in our lives that we didn't feel cheated when they ended.

'You went back in time to change one life, not to save it. And change one life you did: one life that dearly needed changing. It was different this time.' Aerith smiled. 'He had Zack, and me… and he had you.'

Cloud baulked.

'Se-Sephiroth?'

Suddenly his vision of the church around seemed to become clearer. It took him a moment to realise that, actually, he was seeing the church as it had been before Meteor. There was no dust on the floor or the pews, and the flowerbed was perfectly kept. It only looked clearer because all of the dirt had been driven away.

'You didn't even know him before, and because you didn't you couldn't see exactly how much of his life you changed in those two short years,' Aerith said. She stepped aside, and Cloud instinctively leaped back from Sephiroth.

The SOLDIER didn't look up. He was focused on the flowerbeds, busily tugging up some tiny weeds that Cloud could barely see. Cloud took a wary step forward and waved his arm, but Sephiroth continued at his work, oblivious to Cloud's presence. The longer he looked, the more Cloud felt that he could see through the cleanliness and even through Sephiroth, to the church as it would be in the future. This was only a vision. Aerith was showing him the past, but she hadn't taken him back.

Aerith turned to Sephiroth and her pink dress melted away into a white blouse and a blue skirt: whatever clothes she had been wearing that day.

'—I swear, those two cause me more trouble than the other departments have altogether,' Sephiroth was saying.

'I don't know,' Aerith said to him, and it seemed that she could no longer see Cloud, because her back was turned to him completely and all of her attention was on the apparition before her. 'The Turks have to put up with Reno. Zack's told me stories.'

Sephiroth snorted.

'Have you noticed that Zack is almost always in those stories, usually dragging Cloud along with him? I get two troublemakers for the Turks' one.'

'Well, why don't you leave?' Aerith teased. 'Run away in the night. I won't tell them.'

Sephiroth smiled, which to Cloud was a sight so rare he wanted to take a photograph, but Aerith seemed unsurprised by the expression.

'They're worth the trouble,' he said.

He faded away, and Aerith's pink dress came back into place, along with all of the dust and debris around the church. She looked back to Cloud.

'But—' Cloud stuttered, '—I didn't matter! He already knew Zack anyway. I didn't change anything that Zack didn't—'

'Zack barely knew Sephiroth before you came along,' Aerith said. 'They called each other "war buddies", but that didn't mean much. They fought together, and then went their separate ways: Zack to me, and to his other friends in Midgar; Sephiroth to an empty training room.

'He still died,' she said. 'We all did, and there was nothing you could do to change that, because our deaths all had an impact on more than one person. But this time, you gave someone – just one person – a few good things, a few things worth being alive to see, before the bad things happened. You changed one life. And that's what mattered.'

Cloud's shoulder's sagged, but not out of despair or disappointment. The tension had left his body, like a heavy weight he hadn't even realised he was carrying. No wonder he had felt so tired.

'Thank you,' he said. Aerith chuckled, and said,

'I always could make you see sense,' before she disappeared.

Tifa came back half an hour later, with no cuts or bruises to suggest she'd run into trouble. She looked a little tired, but that was probably because she'd spent the last hour and a half walking around and around Sector Five in circles.

'Did the monsters come?' she said. Cloud, who was carefully levering a few of Aerith's flowers out of the flowerbed from their roots, looked up from his work and smiled.

'Nope,' he said. He pointed to his selection of flowers. 'We need to plant some of these at home.'

'The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice-versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things and make them unimportant. And we definitely added to his pile of good things.'

[AN: This is not quite the end! Not yet. I still have one more little chapter to post.

EDIT: Another note I forgot to mention: Aerith's ghost appearing in the church was not something I just whipped out of my arse for exposition's sake. There's a point in FFVII after Aerith's death where, if you visit the church and stand in the right place, her 'ghost' will appear, tending the flowers. Her appearance here was an intentional reference to that - just Google 'Aerith's Ghost glitch' to read about how to do it.]