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In the blackening haze of her fading life, he is the last thing she sees.
Face bled of colour, his horrified gaze pierces her deeper than the blade ever could. It’s only for a moment, the briefest of terrible moments that she sees it in his haunted eyes: the fragile thread of their connection severing, her love for him collapsing in on itself. Aching, aching, for all that had ever gone unsaid, for what could never be.
And then, it’s over.
Death lances through her as a sudden, icy shock, spreading from her heart to her throat like cracks through glass. Her breath falters, the world tilting from her grasp, her body slipping away from her mind before she even has the chance to hold onto it. All too soon, the Lifestream is cradling her unbound form, its weightlessness both familiar and frightful. For interlaced in its flows are the deep, wrathful cries of the Planet, alive with whispers and memories and pain. So, so much pain. The immensity of it rips a guttural scream from somewhere deep within her - but the sound that comes out is all mangled and agonised and not like her at all. It’s a desperate whisper, a prayer, a plea.
It’s the effluence of his grief, spilling between the cracks of her being.
Aerith!
Aerith, wake up!
Aerith…
This can’t be happening. Please, Aerith.
Aerith? Please. Please. Don’t do this.
With each shudder of her name, she feels her grasp on herself grow weaker, feels the weight of the Planet grow stronger. She scrambles to rediscover some sort of centre, some pause - a gravity for for her feelings as they spin wildly off their axis. I’m right here, she tries - but her words are swallowed up by the flow of the Lifestream, carried away by the sheer nothingness of her being.
Aerith is gone.
Gone. She’s gone.
Aerith will no longer cry, laugh or get angry.
His sobs come out in gurgling, churning swathes that force her down into the depths.
I’m sorry, she whispers voicelessly as she succumbs to the void. I’m so sorry.
She finds she has little energy to fight against the riptide of his anguish, of the Planet's anguish. For a fleeting moment, she clings to herself, to her shape, to the memories of warmth, of laughter, of touch. But the Lifestream does not abide by such things. It’s like she’s fallen into a frozen lake with no way out from under a thick sheet of ice. Her fingers become nothing but light and memory. Her voice is torn away. Her heartbeat, once steady, becomes a mere echo in the endless hum of the Planet. There is no pain to the loss, not really - only the aching sense of dissolution, of something precious slipping from her clutches.
She wants to hold onto something, anything. She wants to keep some fragment of herself. But the Planet’s cries are relentless, and she is so, so tired.
As she sinks deeper, time wends out of shape. It folds, bends, twists. The steady, linear thread she once knew fractures into fragments, unspooling into uneven pieces. Moments bleed together in a way they never should - past and present and future unravelling in all directions, all at once. At first, it’s subtle; the feeling of minutes stretching too long, the slow-motion weight of her own descent. But then it splinters altogether, flickering in and out of focus.
She sees them leaving the altar before she has even finished falling. She sees herself in a hundred fragmented reflections. Folding. Bending. Twisting. She’s standing in the church with a forlorn smile, watching the flowers grow in soil now tainted by grief. Her cold fingers are dipping just below the surface of the lake. She is there, and she is not. Alive, and yet fading. Present, but already forgotten. Slowly at first, and then with a harrowing sharpness as her friends leave the altar, and then the lake, and then the city. Without her, without her.
There is Yuffie, kneeling in the snow - her hands trembling, curling into fists, then suddenly she is gone, vanished into another moment, another place. Nanaki is howling somewhere, but the sound is distant and illusory, an empty echo swallowed whole by the Planet. She tastes the hot sting of Tifa’s tears soaking into the soil - each sob dousing her in anguish, in anger, before softly receding into the river of time. Under a blood-red sky, Barret clutches at something or someone unseen, and then he is walking away, the solemn tread of his footsteps pulling and pushing at the roots of her.
In the cold darkness of her empty existence, only Cloud remains.
His grief does not move with the flow of time. It anchors around her like chains. She hears the restless thrumming of his heart as he lies awake beneath the stars, tossing and turning and pressing his ear to the earth. His breath shudders in a broken rhythm, raking over her like splintered wood. It’s so raw, so real, even as everything else slants and shifts.
Do you hear me? Her thoughts reach out to embrace him, to touch the blades of grass entwined between his fingers. Do you feel me?
Child of light, you must let go, the Planet roils in scolding, warning her that his fate now lies beyond her touch, beyond the gentle fluttering of a heart that no longer beats - but she ignores the voice, fighting against the edges of her soul. Her essence winds its way through the roots and stems, through the threads of time. She cannot grasp him, cannot speak the words that press at the edges of her being, but she can feel it - how his presence is the tether that holds her together even as she contorts out of shape. His fingers twitch against her touch, his breathing slowing to the steady rhythm of sleep.
I’m here, she coos into his dreams again. I’m right here, Cloud.
The Planet whispers back fragments of his memories and of futures yet to come: the quiet moments, the laughter, the unspoken promises. The trials he’ll face, the truths he’ll discover. They’re faint, faraway, each a dapple of sunlight breaking through a canopy of leaves. She listens quietly, holding each piece close.
He had noticed her more than she ever knew. The way her hair caught the light. The way she hummed as she tended to her flowers, or braided her hair. The inward tilt of her gait as she bounded ahead of him. There’s a quiet fondness to it all, a softness she hadn’t realised she’d drawn from him. She feels the gentle tug of a smile on his lips, the way his heart would squeeze in his chest when her teasing broke through the walls he’d built around himself. She hears her own laughter, warm and lilting, wrapping around him like a healing balm. She feels how much he had wanted, had hoped, to be the source of that joy.
She hovers in that space between their memories and dreams, following the quiet tremor of his heartbeat to those tiny, stolen moments where his yearning had mirrored hers. She sees it in how her fingers had so often hovered near his, a pinky curling ever-so-slightly to brush against his palm. She sees it in how her own gaze would soften when she looked at him. She sees it in how he had waited for her as much as she had for him, lingering on the precipice of something more, trusting in some hidden promise locked behind his broken psyche, and her fractured heart.
Now is not the time. Familiar, fleeting thoughts sigh through her, and she’s not sure if they’re his, or hers. Maybe once this is all over.
Light refracts through the cracks, new visions coming with an unbidden clarity, heightened by her own memories. Beneath a cascade of shimmering sparks, liquid looseness permeated down his limbs, or her limbs, or both. She senses his dazed awareness of how warm she felt beside him. The way the fireworks reflected in her eyes like bottled starlight. That small flicker of desire that bloomed in his chest as she rested her head on his shoulder. How his breath quickened when their fingers entwined, each crackling burst of light concealing the desperate urge he’d had to pull her closer, to press his mouth to the soft skin of her neck and drink her in. In that moment, he burned, he ached. The wind sang, the stars beckoned. His eyes fluttered shut, as if to press the memory there like a flower between the pages of a book.
She lets his feelings engulf her, allowing herself to dream with him - to drink deep of what could have been.
She dreams of those futures that never came to pass, moments stolen by fate. She sees him waiting for her on an unfamiliar, twilit street, his face painted in shades of gold and cherry-blossom pink. In the soft glow, his countenance is easy, with a slant smile and kind eyes as he shyly holds out his hand for her. Oh, she thinks. There you are. She sees herself, carefree and heedless as they stroll through bright, dusty streets, shining with perspiration and laughing at something he says. They’re happy and older, blissfully free of the horrors of a world that had once been so frightening and dark.
And then - a different sky, a different night. One of those perfect, cloudless evenings where the heavens are a tapestry of scattered stars, woven into constellations that she can trace with the tips of her fingers. He finds her there, laying amongst wildflowers that sway like dancers in the breeze. When he settles beside her, she tilts her head to study him. He looks fragile, made of nothing but the finest glass. She lifts a hand, trails her fingers along the slope of his jaw, and he turns towards her, breath catching just once before he closes his eyes and leans into her embrace. Here he pulls her into his arms not in farewell but in passion, like kindling exploding into an inferno, the type that could render a forest to ash.
He kisses her like she’s a floating ember he’s trying to catch and keep forever. She feels his hands touching her everywhere in disjointed flashes of feeling - her hair, her face, her shoulders, her back, her breasts, under the thin silk of her skirt, skimming up her thighs. He fumbles to unbutton her dress. She fumbles to shuck off his coat, and then his shirt. He lays her bare form against the grass, his pupils blown wide with a dark need that almost eclipses the faint glow of green that flickers around his irises. And when he fills her, her heart is so overladen with emotion she thinks she could burst. He hooks his hands under her ankles and brings her legs upwards, so that they cross at the small of his back. She tangles her fingers in his hair as he begins to move, relishing in the glimpses she gets of him unguarded - flaxen hair sticking to his forehead, head thrown back and lips parted, the tendons of his throat flexing, a pink tinge to his cheeks. She squeezes her eyes shut, gasping.
She no longer sees the stars above. Instead, she joins them. She becomes one of those stars. Gold, silver, red lights swirling together, pin pricks of white light shining through them. Through all of it, a streak of bright blue, effervescent and ever-lasting. Tears slide from her eyes as the world begins to blur. I love you, I love you, I love you, I-
The stars converge, and then vanish in an instant, replaced by another vision, another version of them. Decades have carried them beyond their trauma, beyond the burdens they never asked to carry. The scent of freshly watered flowers drifts through an open window. A lazy morning where he stirs awake to find her already stretching in the first light of dawn, turning to greet him with a sleepy smile. The sound of laughter fills her ears - not just her own, but his and the children's too, unrestrained and brimming with mirth. Laughter across a lifetime’s worth of memories, hanging on every wall of this home they'd built together.
He would have been happy. They would have been happy. It’s not just a dream... This was possible. It could have been real.
Fate does not wait for second chances, the Planet reminds her, its currents darkening her vision. There is only now.
She’s lingered too long, she knows - too long in his dreams, too long in her shattered hopes. The Lifestream pulses around her, insistent and restless. It tugs at her, a silent demand to let go, to move forward, to release what was never meant to be. But how can she? How can she, when the warmth of his touch still lingers, when the echo of his laughter still rings through the quiet spaces of her memories? How can she, when this version of them, the one unburdened by regret and grief, is right there, shimmering just beyond the veil of time? If she lets go, it will be as though it never existed at all. As though their chance, their love untangled from tragedy, was nothing more than an illusion. Yet the warmth fades. The softness ebbs away, replaced by something heavier, colder. A weight pressing against her very essence.
Time is swaying in another direction entirely, forcing her to peer into his future without her. No, that’s not quite right. It’s not the future: it’s the here and now.
She sees it vividly for the first time - that lost part of him etched into the fabric of the Lifestream itself, burning hot and bright and just beyond his grasp. The threads of fate twist and spread around his essence, and she reaches out to touch it, to cradle his soul against her own. She senses how the mako drowns him, how the angry vestiges of Sephiroth’s darkness engulf him in cold despair. His presence scrapes her open, and she recoils, a cry of anguish echoing out into the darkness. Whether its Cloud’s, or hers, or the Planet’s, she cannot possibly know.
The Lifestream churns with chaos all around them, its currents twisting and clashing as he begins to slip away. Pieces of him come undone, scattering outwards like stars against the vast blackness. Aerith tightens her hold, trying desperately to pull him back together, to gather up every shard of him she can reach. But there’s parts of him that she cannot possibly touch - parts of him that are shattering up amongst the living, far beyond her grasp. She can feel the Planet hum in gentle reprimand once again as she pushes too close, as she thrashes against Sephiroth’s wicked, unfathomable pull. She can’t, she knows she can’t, yet still she tries.
Cloud, she pleads. You’re stronger than you think. You’re so much more than what he’s made you.
As the darkness surges in response, she feels it. The faint presence of another, cutting through the shadows. It’s not a light like her own, but something more grounded: an unyielding, pure kindness born of years of love and resilience. Healing, gentle hands wrap around them both from the other side of the veil.
Tifa.
A silent sob of relief wracks through Aerith as she feels her presence weave its way between them, picking the pieces she couldn’t reach - those tethered to their childhood, to their misunderstandings, to their reunion, and the ripples of truth that it had concealed. She loosens her hold as Tifa gently guides him to himself: to the Cloud she had always wanted to find.
To the Cloud she loves.
To the Cloud she’ll now never know.
Child of light, your duty lies elsewhere, the Planet whispers coaxingly.
Aerith watches as Tifa’s presence steadies him, her voice a beacon of light cutting through his darkness. Aerith doesn’t hear her words - those belong only to Cloud - but she feels their weight, the way they pull him back from the brink. Slowly, the pieces of him begin to knit together, his essence growing brighter and stronger as the shadows retreat.
I wanted to be there, her words are tinged with guilt, for she knows that she must let go. She knows it, deep in her soul.
This was never about me. It was always about you.
The storm within the Lifestream quiets as Aerith finally lets herself recede. She whispers one last prayer into the currents, letting it drift towards Tifa, towards Cloud, towards all the love she ever carried for both of them.
I’ll be waiting for you.
The world is quiet.
Cloud lies still, the weight of his years passing over him. The roughness of a well-worn sword hilt is long gone from his hands. The restless ache of battle has dulled, replaced by something softer - the steady rhythm of days spent in quiet company, of hands tending soil instead of wounds, of kind voices that became his reason to keep moving, even when the ghosts of his past threatened to pull him under.
He has known peace, though it came to him slowly, like sunlight creeping over the horizon after a long winter's night. He has laughed and loved, even when he thought he wouldn’t again. But through it all, there was always a space left untouched. A quiet, unspoken truth tucked into the corners of his heart. A presence that never truly faded.
His eyes drift closed, and for the first time in a long time, he dreams of her.
It begins as a whisper, threading through the dark, familiar and calling with gentleness and patience. The world is slipping away in slow, dissolving ripples. All at once, the Lifestream is cradling him.
Oh, this is death, he thinks. Though it’s not in the way he once feared it. There is no agony, no struggle. Just the sensation of being carried forward, towards something. He leans into it, sinking and then diving deeper, drawn by instinct, by yearning, by a need greater than either.
He finds her in the emerald glow of the Lifestream, waiting for him like she always had been - like she never stopped waiting. The last time he saw her, she had been still, lifeless, the wound in her chest a cruel and final thing. But here, there is no scar, no shadow of death lingering over her. She is whole - with the same bright eyes, the same soft smile, the same warmth that has always undone him.
For a moment, he can only look at her, afraid to move, afraid to break the spell. But then she tilts her head, lips curling with something familiarly teasing but impossibly tender.
“Took you long enough,” she says.
His breath hitches - does he still need to breathe here? He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.
She is here. She is real.
“I...” his voice fails him, cracking on the weight of everything he has carried since the day she left him. All the words he held inside, all the things he never said, all the years spent aching for something he could never have back - words do not seem enough.
But Aerith understands - she always has.
She steps forward, reaching for him, and Cloud doesn’t hesitate. He meets her halfway, closing the distance to wrap himself around her.
“I’m here,” she whispers, the words a vow of eternity. “You’re home now.”
The moment she presses herself to the place where his heart had always carried a candle for her, something inside him unravels. The pain, the grief, the waiting, the wanting - it all slips away, carried off into the endless flow of the Lifestream.
And as their souls entwine, he knows he’s found it at last:
Their promised land.