middaeg | [ closed. ]

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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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.]

[ closed. ]

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