In the morning Cloud passed by a slum scrapyard with a broken down motorcycle sat out front on flat skins of rubber that once were tires. Caked in a thick patina of dust and grime from forks to tail like some forgotten relic only just hauled from the depths of the earth. A handpainted sign in thick black grease on cardboard hanging from its handlebars advertised ten thousand gil or best offer. Cloud had gil in his pockets, now, but none of it to spare. Maybe he could rub two coins together until a third spawned between them and call that his best offer. It was the twelfth time he'd passed by the yard after finding Tifa and getting his bearings and settling into life in the city of Sonora and every single time he stopped and he stared long and hard at the sad old machine. In his mind the sound of the engine turning over. The crunch of the tires over gravel as he eased it forward. His hands in the mechanical innards of the bike bringing the dead back to life, smears of black from his fingertips to his elbows. Then he shook his head and he walked on past and he kept dreaming.

He could afford to keep dreaming now. And to think about practical things. About picking up jobs and helping Tifa with the rent while he hunted down leads on his friends. While he lived, for the first time in what felt like eternity, without a blade dangling over his neck on fraying rope. The worries he once held in his heart since the moment he woke up in this world evaporated like water in the desert. He was whole now, and Tifa was with him, and he'd find the others, and the world wasn't ending. An almost terrifying expanse of possibility lay before him.

Cloud had since shed the weathered old SOLDIER uniform. It wasn't him anymore. Never had been, really, but it still lay in the apartment in a neat folded pile underneath its battered boots. He thought maybe he ought to burn it but something held him back and he didn't know what. He kept the armor and the gloves and he wore a dark blue shirt and loose black pants and a new pair of boots and he looked, if not a new man, then a recently renovated one. Appearances mattered when you didn't have a reputation yet, though the story of the battle with the robot house that heralded his arrival in the city spread far enough to bring in some work.

So he worked.

After he left the scrapyard and the sad old motorcycle behind he headed out into the bustling heart of the city where people stared at the sword on his back and he put on his best stoic tough guy expression and acted like he had important places to be. He worked a job where he watched men load and unload trucks and glared at anyone who wasn't supposed to be there. When the thieves finally showed up Cloud welcomed the violent distraction even if it was over in a few seconds. He got paid less than what he thought he should have but it was more than nothing so it would have to do.

Now, money in hand, he made for a shop to buy a few sundries itemized in a list in his head. From the outside he looked into the shop and that was when he saw her reflection in the window. Unmistakable, even in a crowd, like all the world was dull and monochrome except for her. Cloud whirled around to stare across the street and froze in his tracks and watched with wide disbelieving eyes and a catch in his throat.

You're seeing things again.

He looked away. Scrubbed a hand down his face and inhaled a long deep breath. He couldn't count the number of times he thought he saw a flash of fluttering pink fabric out of the corner of his eye or heard bright, distant laughter like an echo across time, always drifting out of reach like smoke in the wind. No trace but a hollow memory. When he looked at where she'd been standing she was still there and he didn't know what to do. It didn't make sense. She was gone. He remembered it in detail so excruciating it might have been branded into his brain. The way the light went out of her eyes. Lifeless body in his arms. This didn't make sense.

Before he realized it his feet carried him across the street with a desperate urgency. Tires squealed and a driver yelled something profane out the window that Cloud didn't hear. He pushed his way through the hurried pedestrian traffic until he reached her, until he stood before her slackjawed and wide-eyed.

"Aerith...?"

He didn't know what else to say to a ghost.

-----
Aerith Gainsborough

He froze in place. His throat went dry when she smiled at him and spoke to him in words that weren't just an echo of the last conversation they'd ever had. Only when she threw her arms around him did he accept the reality of it and even then it was only just. Something stung in his eyes. He had to fight to wrangle himself into some measure of composure by the time she pulled back to look at him. He held it together with tape and string.

Cloud had changed but she was the same. The same face in his dreams, the same voice in his memory, the same ache in his heart. In his nightmares this scene would end with a great black shape looming up behind her but it was nowhere here. Just a stream of agitated Sonoran pedestrians flowing around them and muttering bitterly as they passed.

When she stepped back and told him she'd last been in the Forgotten City, he looked away and crossed his arms over his chest and tried to disguise it as a nothing reaction but did a poor job of it. Too many thoughts and memories ran through his head too quickly. She didn't remember what happened to her. How was he supposed to tell her-- should he even tell her? But above all, one thought rang out clearly in the mess of his head:

Keep it together.

Cloud cleared his throat and renewed his composure and looked back at her.

"Aerith... There's... Ah..." he stammered, rubbing the back of his neck. "We should find somewhere to sit down and talk. A lot... a lot happened."

Too much of which he still didn't understand. He wished someone smarter than him was here to explain it in his stead.

He remembered passing by some dingy urban park on his way over from the slums to this side of town. Graffiti covered benches and rusting swings bordered by a concrete half wall. It wasn't far. Most of all it was quiet. It beat trying to talk in the street while a crowd of pedestrians shoved past them. He nodded in the direction of it, for Aerith to follow him as he started to walk.

"This city's called Sonora," he explained. "Tifa's here, too. I'm still lookin' for everyone else."

He found himself staring at her as they walked, only glancing away when he needed to get his bearings. In a world that stole people from their own maybe it shouldn't have been so difficult to grasp that its reach wasn't limited to the living. Yet the wound her death left on him was so deep that Cloud hadn't even considered the possibility. He didn't know what to think now. A part of him remained on edge, waiting for the catch, the other shoe to drop. The rest of him just wanted to take it for what it was. She was here again. What did it matter why or how?

-----
Aerith Gainsborough

She had so many questions and Cloud couldn't blame her. His stammered non-explanation did little other than spark worry and more questions. He wished he had answers for all of them but all he could tell her was what he knew and none of what he knew answered the bigger question that encompassed everything else: why?

It would have been too easy if she could have communed with this planet and drawn out the answers for herself. He was no planetologist but some naive part of him assumed that there must be some kind of a lifestream here. It was how planets worked, right? Just like how people had blood and a heart to pump it through their veins. That Aerith couldn't sense it only added another layer of unease to everything about this place. Like trying to walk the deck of a ship careening with the waves. As soon as you found your footing, the world shifted in a different direction.

His eyes followed her hand as she linked herself arm in arm with him. A strange sense of deja vu. The tension in him began to uncoil by degrees. They walked.

"I'm not trying to hide things from you," he said, "I just don't know if I can explain it all in a way that'll make sense. It doesn't even make sense to me. But... I'll try."

Past a weapons store with black iron bars bolted over the windows and the last letter of its name buzzing and flickering in neon. Down at the end of the block lay the park, its entrance marked by an arched metal sign in flaking green paint mounted on posts bolted into the concrete half-wall. It was empty. It had the sad look of disuse about it. Old flyers peeling from the lamppost and tattered and flapping in the breeze. Garbage scattered like fallen leaves around a trash bin. Patches of rust corroding the chains on the swings. Where there wasn't rust there was graffiti, layers of it in indecipherable cursive weathered and re-painted and weathered again.

With Aerith on his arm he walked over to a solitary wooden bench painted dull blue and flecked by illegible tags in white and silver spraypaint. He sat at one end and shrugged one shoulder to hike up the end of the sword on his back until it hung at a comfortable angle. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees and looked like he had to think long and hard about too many different things. He cracked his knuckles for something to do with his hands and he looked at Aerith and took a breath and started talking.

"You're right that we're not on our planet anymore. I dunno know how we got here, or why... But we're not the only ones. When I was on the road I met somebody else who woke up here. He talked about places that I never heard of. Places that aren't on this world either. Whatever grabbed us, it's grabbin' all kinds of people from all kinds of places."

That was the easy part. It was the recap on the cargo ship, or in the hotel at Gold Saucer. It was gathering the facts all together and speaking them out loud, as much for his benefit as it was for everybody else's. That was all he had straight about this place. It was worth about as much as the lint in his pocket.

"He said he woke up missing memories. Even Tifa doesn't remember everything. Maybe I'm missing something, too. I don't know. But I remember the Forgotten City... And what happened after."

His composure started to crack and he looked away, straight ahead at nothing. He clenched his fists and the leather of his gloves creaked with the tension. The memory still so raw he might as well have been there again, standing in that ethereal light, that heavy silence, watching, frozen...

Keep it together...

How the hell am I supposed to do that?

"Sephiroth was after you, so we followed you to the Forgotten City. Found you praying. Tryin' to summon Holy," he said. His voice was quiet and even and measured and balanced on the edge of a blade and if he so much as breathed wrong it was all going to shatter like a mirror against his fist. "Sephiroth... Took control of me, again, like he did at the Temple... I tried to fight it. He almost made me--" Cloud swallowed back a hard lump in his throat and shook his head. "I snapped out of it, but he was there... I couldn't... I couldn't stop him. He killed you, Aerith."

He screwed his eyes shut tight like that might stop the scene from playing in his mind again and again and again as it had so many times before. It didn't and he opened his eyes and blinked away the burn welling up in them and found the guts to fix them on Aerith once more even with her death on his mind. To imprint this picture in his head. The life in her eyes. Did this absolve him of the sin of his failure? Could he bury the horror of it?

"He killed you but now you're here and I don't... I don't understand what's happening."

-----
Aerith Gainsborough

Cloud's eyes searched her face but he didn't know what for. Behind the shine of Mako he tried dumbly to fit the pieces of everything together. To make sense of the impossible. Then a thought hit him like a tight, cold fist square to the gut. She was so certain that the nightmare burned into Cloud's skull hadn't happened to her at all before she appeared here that Cloud questioned what he remembered. Everything from the moment he woke up after the Temple of the Ancients. What if he hadn't woken up? What if everything he remembered was just another twisted illusion cobbled together in a broken mind? Memories lied. He knew that better than most. What if--

Just stop thinking about it.

If she doesn't remember it how can I know it really happened? Nibelheim--

--Wasn't made up. You were there, you just remembered it wrong.

...

You were never at the Forgotten City before. Or the Northern Crater. Or Mideel. All of that was new. You couldn't just make that up, right?

...

Ask the others when you find them. Ask Tifa. Stop thinking about it until then.

He inhaled a slow breath and felt as though he was standing on the edge of a cliff and the saner voice in his head told him to take a little step backwards. He had his feet under him but he was peering over the edge into the bottomless dark and it was a long way down. He knew the fall well. The climb out was a tough one. But he had help. Still had help, if he needed it. When the world started fraying at the edges all he had to do was remember that.

He stopped thinking too much about the wrong things. His existential crisis didn't matter right now. All that mattered was that Aerith was sitting beside him on a battered park bench in a neglected park in Sonora, that she was alive and whole and telling him she forgave him for a failure he thought he'd carry with him for the rest of his life. He needed a minute to let it sink in. To feel the weight lift off his shoulders like she'd just grabbed it and thrown it aside. That simple.

And as the dead weight of guilt left him the anguish in his face faded away and all the questions that still hung in the air, all the truths he still needed to tell moved aside. When she asked him to smile he reflexively shook his head in a weak denial. He didn't smile on cue. Except at the same time her asking him to brought up that small, involuntary curve of his mouth and all the anxious tension he carried in him came out in a quiet chuckle and he looked away, almost embarrassed by it.

He sat up a little straighter. A chill Sonoran breeze blew through the park, rustled his hair, wafted in the smell of industry and exhaust. Midgar felt near and distant all at once.

"Aerith... Hey... Thanks." he said. His voice was warm and quiet, the waver of uncertainty gone. "Whatever's going on with this place... I'm glad you're here."

Silently, he made a vow, etched it into his bones. He wouldn't lose any more friends. Not here, not ever. It didn't matter what it cost him to make that true. He didn't understand this place, this world, why any of them were here, but if he had to make something out of it then he'd make it a second chance.

But she wasn't the only friend he'd lost. And he still owed her the truth about that. About himself.

"...There's still more I have to tell you," he added, rubbing the back of his head. "Stuff that... Well, I never told you the truth about me. About SOLDIER. 'Cause I didn't even know what the truth was. I was pretty messed up when we met. It's... a long story."

-----
Aerith Gainsborough