Chapter Text
Preamble
This is a story of friends and companions, found family, who all loved each other very, very much. Their lives and stories relived countless times for our amusement, recorded in the threads of the lifestream—every time just slightly differently.
In the longest threads, Sephiroth is banished to the obscurity of Cloud’s memory; prisoner in these lifetimes to his last shared cells housed in the sole remaining host. The puppet’s severed strings now bind him. With the planet saved, the members of the party live out happy and fulfilling lives. Cloud, Vincent, and those semi-immortal due to Shinra’s enhancements out-survive their companions and the eventual extinction of humanity.
But all memories return to the lifestream one day.
When Cloud perishes, Sephiroth’s consciousness in the lifestream is free to remember these tortured and fruitless failures. Driven to further depths of madness, he is bent on the only revenge left to him. To unremember countless futures already written, he must destroy the planet, the lifestream, end this cycle and all traces of himself and the essence of everyone else forever.
Sephiroth relentlessly hunts for new paths to live off of existing lifestream memories, seeking oblivion. Soon, his meddling rouses the fading but all-present consciousness of Aerith, and she follows memory path after memory path remembering—reliving—seeking a means to stop him.
The only apparent way to end Sephiroth is to end the cycle. The only way to end the cycle is the inevitable death of the planet, and destruction of the lifestream itself. Or can she find an alternative?
Gifted an alien memory from Jenova, Sephiroth is always ten steps ahead. Until one lifetime, Red’s grandfather gifts Aerith a strange materia.
Prologue
Time is fluid; and we, the living, fixed stones in its flow.
— anonymous
Invisible vaporous tendrils snaked around Aerith's slender wrists, whispering their presence against her skin. She could see the faint green sparks rising like lightning flies in the periphery of her vision.
…we will remember...after this memory fades...after this cycle is done...
Gunfire and the answering alien howls of the remnant echoed off the walls in the vast crystalline chamber beneath the Forgotten City. This time Cloud had overcome Sephiroth’s control and thrown himself in her place.
He was still conscious, but the sucking wound in his chest gurgled and sputtered threateningly. Gazing at her in shock, his life spilled like a fountain over the dimly lit dais, emitting its own faint glow as it shed to the still water below.
There was no harm to say the things she shouldn’t now, even as their companions exited battle and climbed the precarious stone steps. This memory had run its course. She would depart with him.
"I love you, you know. I have loved you more ways and times than you can imagine."
Fleeting confusion brightened his eyes, followed quickly by the defensive look he dawned in every instance when he couldn't garner a sufficiently cool response in a beat.
It changed nothing. Aerith smiled sadly and brushed stray spikes of hair from his eyes.
"Thank you. I’m sorry… and I'll love you as many more times as it takes."
Conflicted, he tried to say something, blood foaming delicately at the corners of his lips, the fading glow of his eyes perceptibly dimming, when a thread caught just so on her arm—
The small hairs of her nape rose and she smelled ozone. She was still with Cloud on the dais, but she was also with Tifa four lifetimes adjacent, days in the past in Nibelheim under the stars, breeze blowing gently off the mountains and through their hair as their legs dangled from the water tower.
A humble row of Tudor style cottages lined the cobble street below, and Aerith was turning to look at a window into a room that had been Tifa’s as a child. The double focus made her head hurt.
Tifa lowered her hand to her lap after gesturing to the window and said, "A scientist from the mansion visited my papa in that house once. He said if you could build a spyglass that could look fast enough, you could see the past—"
Aerith laughed politely, but her stomach rolled. She knew what came next.
"—And if it could look slow enough, you could see … paths.” Tifa turned to regard Aerith with uncertain amusement, “He said it kind of funny. Like a joke with no punchline."
"Mmmm. Shinra scientists for you."
Memory threads crossing. Such ill timing.
The sweet smell of standing water mingled with sharp copper and mako in Aerith's nose. Cloud's reply to her confession was lost beneath the clamor of Tifa tearing onto the dais and throwing herself bodily to the ground beside him, careless of his pooling blood soaking her stockings and boots. She flung herself across him hysterical, powerful hands pressing at his visible wound to stem the flow of blood and force cure after cure into his chest until her depleted mana ran dry.
Demure gentleness cast aside, Tifa wailed in desperation, "Don't just sit there! Aerith! Do something! Do anything!" Barret arrived at the top of the steps and took in the scene, shuffling helplessly.
...this isn't how we end...I promise...I promise...
"Tifa..." Cloud whispered reverently, and died.
...I promise...I pr...
Tifa made the sound. The one that haunted Aerith through all waking memories. The unforgettable wail of a soul tortured; the last of everything that mattered torn away.
As her anguished voice failed in another lifetime, Tifa tossed her hair and gazed up into the teeming ocean of stars above their heads, "I wish there were paths to different pasts."
Aerith hung her heads to hide her tears—
—and pulled back at the thread and remembered.
