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Who: Aerith & Sephiroth
When: Early June
Where: Aefenglom
What: Berry Picking
Warnings: None yet! No one will die, which considering the characters, is a miracle.

[It's a distraction, truth be told. The coin will be useful: for more books, to help with the cost of things around the house. But she isn't doing it for that, not really, and gradually as the effect of the berries begins to take hold, she loses track of why she's doing it in the first place.

It's a distraction, she recalls, vaguely, from being unreasonably sad about someone not being here, when he wasn't supposed to be here in the first place. She shouldn't be upset about it, but she is, and so she's taken up an excessive amount of odd jobs in the meantime. This one isn't much different from flower-picking, and she moves to stand (unsteadily, slowly), having plucked what she can from this bush, when a shadow falls over her.

She squints up, forcing her vision to adjust, and does not look surprised at Sephiroth's presence. Not frightened. Merely pensive.]

Odd place for you to be.

[The words do not slur, but they are spoken with a strange, careful sort of slowness, like she's working out what she wants to say and hasn't finished thinking on it before she says it.] Have you come to help?

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Because it's a difficult conversation. [She sounds weary.] You may not act like it, but this has to be affecting you. I don't care how stoic you are.

[For now she allows him to remain standing, though this line of questioning makes her gaze cant away, and she wishes she had something to do with her hands in the wake of it. They settle in her lap instead.]

Yes. It happened during our journey together, and afterward too. He could hear you, I think — guiding him, telling him where to go to complete tasks for you.

[And now came the beginning of one of the worst parts of this story, she thinks.] When we started to travel outside of Midgar, people claimed to see you places, so at first I thought it was only that. But then we went to an old temple of the Cetra, where something you wanted was inside. It was called the Black Materia. It's a very old magic, a terrible one. It could summon something called Meteor, which would cause a wound in the Planet, one too great for humanity to survive it.

The Cetra there spoke to me, through the Planet, and told me how to retrieve the Black Materia. But when we did...

[Her hands tense.]

Cloud attacked me. [In a rush now, as if trying to explain herself, lest she be doubted:] I know it wasn't him. It wasn't his fault; he didn't know what he was doing.

[Her voice has dropped some. She had not ever discussed this with anyone. Not the others, not Zack while he was here, certainly not Cloud. Only said that she'd never blamed him, and that was true. But she had been afraid then, afraid of him for the first time, and that was true too. If the others had not intervened...]

The others had to pull him off of me. And then I understood.

[ You may not act like it, but this has to be affecting you.

A statement that has him straightening his back as though to contradict her, a bullheaded display to show that he’s as unyielding as before, that his stoicism is a proper shield that keeps his spine straight and repels the scrutiny of others. Of her insight, which is poignantly and so very correct.

Every statement seems to be a new revelation that he has no context for, beyond stringing together the story hurriedly in his own mind. Black Materia, Meteor— a connection to the almost-destruction of their Planet, no doubt. That hatred he saw in the fires of Nibelheim, having spread to a global scale. How can he house that kind of dread motivation? If what she says is true, is it not quietly sleeping in him now, waiting for the moment to be set free?

Maybe she was right to be scared.

When Sephiroth pulls himself back to reality, trailed along by her explanation, he’s realized that he’s pressing the heel of a palm against his head. Not as steady as he thought.]

I—

[His focus is stretched too thin, and perhaps after all this time, he cannot quite blame only the plants and their leaves.]

I haven’t done that to him. Not here.

[He shakes his head, silver swaying.]

It’s like you’re speaking about someone else. You don’t know what this is like— to accept that is the kind of monster I am. Do you understand? I can’t.

[For a time, Aerith doesn't respond. She studies him, quiet and somber, and takes in what he says, and what he doesn't say. He doesn't look well, despite his stubbornness, the clipped control in his tone, and she feels that worry again, eating at her.

She doesn't let it overtake her. Fear and worry had never been enough to stop her before, and she wouldn't let it stop her now. If they had a Bond... the idea of it, even knowing he was not the man he would become, it makes her balk. But it would be easier, if she had it now, to allow her emotions to fall as a cloak over his own, soothing them. It would make her more confident in what she was doing, the things she was saying.

It's the truth, is all she knows. She can only hope that's enough, for now.]

No, I don't know what that's like. But I do know what it feels like, to be angry. To feel like you're different, like you don't belong anywhere. To be alone. I know what those kinds of feelings do, if you let them fester.

You're not a monster, Sephiroth. [She sounds so sad.] You don't have to accept that. You've been given a chance to change it. No one's ever given you a chance before, that's all. What Cloud told you, what I'm telling you now... it's just one future. That doesn't mean it's the only one.

[It’s once more similar to what Cloud had told him, barely even couched in differing rhetoric. And it should provide more comfort than what it does, if not for Aerith being correct on all other accounts — the endless sense of being different, and being alone, and the rest of this ugliness that had long crystallized at his core, cannot be swept away with a handful of reassurances. He only knows how to keep it all locked inside, to let it sit and weigh and fester, as she said. The reason Sephiroth allows anything to slip through now is due to extenuating circumstances; both his affected mind and a subject too cumbersome to know how to truly process.

But as he looks at her, pale brow pinching above searching eyes, perhaps her words are just enough to win the smallest of acquiescences, dulling the hardest edges of his uncertainties.]

You’re so certain that the future isn’t already written. Even though you and Cloud have already lived it.

[Hasn’t it gained permanence through that alone? He wonders if the future is as malleable as they make it sound.

With that, a full accedence seems to overcome him, and Sephiroth takes that once-offered seat — the berry-drunkness has him sinking low to his knees, pressed into the blades of grass beneath him. His wings are so long that his flight feathers protest and splay across the ground.]

And if we return to Gaia and nothing changes?

I'm not certain of anything. Not anymore. [she admits.] If nothing changes, then...

[She watches him settle, the feathers strange and too-dark against the grass.] Then nothing changes.

[She allows this to hang in the air for a moment, and then speaks up again.] But what if something does? That's a future even I haven't seen yet. None of us were supposed to meet this way, and we did. I can't believe that was all for nothing.

[How strange, to be having this conversation with her murderer. She supposes it's been a long time coming, and hating him for that seems so ultimately pointless. For Cloud and Tifa, and all the others, but for her... what she feels is hard to define. She doesn't feel pity, either, but seeing him like this, she can't help but feel something. That intrinsic human connection — the recognizing of your pain in someone else, if only in bits and pieces. Human's a funny term to use. But that was what they were, wasn't it? No matter how much Hojo tried to prove otherwise.]

How do you feel? What will you do, if you go back and remember this?

[The world feels a little steadier this much closer to the ground, even though the green things all around him seem to shudder beneath his weight — fitting, likely, for the alien strands of DNA woven into his own, though Sephiroth is spared that cruel thought thanks to his hazy cognizance.

He cannot say that she is right, nor wrong. Has the flow of time stalled so much during their time here that it cannot continue as normal, should they return? Or is destiny set, unwavering, and this only a temporary departure from what is guaranteed to happen? No one knows — and he can spin that as a comfort, or hang himself up on the what-ifs until they suffocate him. But in the end, none of them can say for certain.

But if things did change— if there was a chance—]

I was already planning on leaving SOLDIER. That won’t change. But Shinra should be held accountable for all it’s done.

[His eyes lift to hers, inscrutably cold but oddly assailed, all the same.]

Will you tell me what happened after Nibelheim? I was supposed to have died.

[But quite obviously, he didn’t.]

[Shinra should be held accountable, he says, and she feels a flutter of relief at it. Just Shinra. Not the Planet, not everyone on it. It's a response that is logical, despite the confusion and grief he must be feeling. It was a good sign. She's still cautious though, ruminating over what to say and how to say it.]

The official story was that you'd died while on the mission. The truth is that Cloud confronted you in Nibelheim's mako reactor. I'm not sure how he managed it, but he overpowered you, and you were thrown into the Lifestream.

Usually, when someone returns to the Planet, they become a part of its life cycle. Their individual consciousness... it disappears. But you managed to retain your consciousness, and traveled through the Lifestream until your... Reunion. What was left of your body was encased at the farthest reaches of the Planet, the Northern Crater, where Jenova once fell from the sky. When you had the Black Materia, you summoned Meteor. And if Meteor were to fall, it would create a wound in the Planet so great that Lifestream would gather there, and your body would absorb it. But the Planet, and everything on it...

[She trails off to look up at him, her expression pained.]

I told you it was a terrible story.

[She doesn’t need to explain the rest. There is only one outcome that would fit that description, a terrible magic called Meteor to come crashing down on the Planet. A wound large enough for the world’s lifeblood to churn at the surface of it, a place where a man lost to madness would undoubtedly view as a source of endless power.

He had been lost in the Lifestream, she says. So it was a death, in a way, because he cannot imagine a mortal body surviving that transition — to hear that he still would possess even a fragment of his cognizance would be a surprise were this not, indeed, a terrible story to hear.]

At the Gold Saucer—

[That too-bright memory, neon and lurid and noisy.]

—when you said you were on a mission to save the world, you had meant it literally.

[Dawning realizations, becoming more vivid through the heavy haze.]

Yeah. [Listlessly, she plucks at the blades of grass beneath her, a motion without any thought given behind it.] We were trying to figure out where you were going. To cut you off at the pass, and to stop Shinra too. That was the idea. Sometimes we did. Sometimes, [She thinks not of the aftermath of her death, that immediate fallout, the grief inlaid there. Instead she thinks of Mideel, of WEAPON. Cloud shattered all to pieces.] we didn't.

[She reaches up to her ribbon, and carefully undoes the knot there. From it, something comes loose, and she catches it in her palms to show to him.

It's Materia, pearlescent white and shimmering, like no other Materia in the world.] It wasn't all hopeless, though. There's always a way out. That's what my mother taught me.

This is White Materia. Here and now, it's good for absolutely nothing. I keep it all the same.

[Maybe it’s detrimental to wonder at what lies in-between the words of that phrase— the sometimes we didn’t. If there’s more ugliness to unearth as Aerith smooths them over; an endless spool of violence that his future-self left for them to trail after, what the shape of it might be. The story behind it. Still so many details he doesn’t know.

It’s a kindness, then, that she reaches up to undo the ribbon in her hair, allowing something white to slip loose, something else to fix his attention on. It glistens brightly as she shows it to him in gently cupped hands, as though proffering something uniquely precious.

It’s materia unlike any he’s seen before; it lives up to its name, but it’s more than just that — different, in an incalculable way, than his own assortment of materia he keeps from home. But according to her, just as useless.

Here, at least. The distinction is obvious.]

But if it did work?

[Black Materia. White Materia. The parallels are being drawn up in his mind, long before the question properly leaves his tongue.]

If it worked...

[She turns the orb over in her hands, watching as its surface catches sunlight, creating a pale prism of color. It's warm, though whatever magic it did have is well and truly locked away.

Black and white. Light and dark. She's sure he's already drawn his own conclusions, though she answers him anyway.] It would cast a spell called Holy. A shield over the Planet, the counterpart to Meteor. Cleansing light.

[But not without great sacrifice.]

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