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The lifestream worked like a tide, towing souls between its endless ebb and flow, the arching veins that ran beneath, through, and above the planet. Whether their energy was meant to heal the earth or crystallize into Materia and fonts of knowledge, it saw every spirit through to where they were needed most and Aerith was no exception.
As soon as the tide let her go, she felt the frost of the North Crater nip at her raw and immaterial skin. So this was where the planet demanded her. With him.
Aerith felt his presence no matter where she stood in the lifestream, the same way oceans felt the moon’s gravity— Or, more accurately, the same way two comets might orbit each other, inching closer and closer until they collided in bursts of flame and starlight. She hesitated when she felt his spirit prowling below, but the lifestream nudged her forward—closer—until she had no choice but to succumb to the call of gravity.
It did not urge her upward to the peaks of the mountains, the reflection of the northern continent that existed on the planet’s surface, but rather down. Deeper and deeper down, until the light and power of the lifestream were void and inaccessible, a distant and weakened pressure felt only in flashes of greenish-white light that grew thinner the further she went. It pulled her straight into Sephiroth’s locus and the unholy culmination of all Jenova’s fell energy. As deep as bone marrow and as dark as dried blood, she felt it sap her strength, but the lifestream stayed as wings at her back. Without it, Aerith knew Jenova would assimilate her with the numberless other spirits that had joined Sephiroth’s homecoming.
The bottom of the pit was a black void: pure nothingness. Flickers of green and blue surrounded her, the lifestream’s last attempts to cling to the dead earth above lured by her sacred connection to the planet. She stepped out of the water she’d trudged through and into something… different. Pulpy and thick like molasses. Oppressed by the fetor of blood and centuries of rot. Her boots became sodden only a few steps in. Aerith felt lucky to have them.
At the peak of the darkness, when the light of the path she took could no longer find her, Aerith froze. A chill poured down her spine and when it crested at her sternum, it felt like a familiar piercing. Masamune and its lucent silver blade erupted through the front of her torso.
When she had first fallen into the Lifestream and her life-ending wound numbly basted itself back together, Aerith was grateful. The pain waned, and she was at peace.
But now, as Aerith pulled herself off Sephiroth’s blade, the apathy of painlessness only left her feeling more dead than before.
“I thought you’d know better than to venture this deep.” Sephiroth’s voice carved through the darkness, keen as his weapon, reverberating through the hollow space between and around them. The air grew stale and suffocating with his presence. “You should have learned your lesson in the Forgotten City.”
“You can’t kill me in a way that matters now,” Aerith said. “I’ve come to make a plea.”
A plea. Yes, that was why the lifestream pushed her here. The planet ached and wheezed with desperation to cut this tumor from its muscle. Where the blood and immune system of the planet had failed, Aerith existed to take a more personal approach. She had summoned Holy, but that was not enough to ensure the earth’s protection. Not yet.
“A plea,” Sephiroth repeated, a cobra spitting venom. “Meteor already descends upon the planet. What reason do I have to listen to a plea?”
“I don’t have to stop Meteor. Only you, and only because you’re holding Holy back. If you’d only let it go, the planet could save itself.”
Sephiroth took one broad stride towards her. He towered over her by a head and a half and the liquid at her feet warped around her ankles, growing tighter and thicker with his closeness. Aerith felt stuck in place but would not have moved even if she was able to; Sephiroth had felled her once, but that was the only way he could. Now, his threats seemed like nothing but an unruly child’s attempt at getting his way. Maybe the lifestream had swallowed or diluted her mortal fears when she slipped into it, but Aerith liked to think she’d finally grown out of complacent safety in Shinra’s steel cage.
He hissed, “Go back to where you came from before you regret it.”
Stubbornly, Aerith shook her head. Chestnut hair waved loosely over her jacket and, though the lack of her ribbon, Materia, and braid reminded her too much of death and sinking into the planet’s warm embrace, she did not let her grief or nostalgia show. “How can you have changed so much?” she bit at him. “You weren’t always like this.”
That took him aback; ire flashed in his snakelike gaze before he pivoted toward the depths of Jenova’s sepulchral domain. Aerith was not going to miss her chance to reach him. She followed him forward, into the dark.
If only in part, Aerith knew the lifestream was to blame for the change in him: While particularly strong souls could hold themselves together, keep from being merged with the current of shared consciousness, it never came without a price. Even Aerith, while spared by the planet itself and not her own tenacity, had felt the weakest parts of herself succumb to the singularity at the moment of her death. Sephiroth refused the pull, cemented his will as one with Jenova’s, and lost most of himself in the process.
But some fraction of humanity had to still exist in him, she knew. A connection to his past or his mortality? Aerith would remind him.
“You were good once,” Aerith said, and her words made the fragments of the lifestream around her shift.
What little of the tide hadn’t retreated from Jenova’s rapid encroachment flooded the silence between them. Immediately, Aerith knew it as her memories— No, their memories. Their shared, absorbed cognizance. Sephiroth must have felt it too, as he stiffly turned to face Aerith again, the enmity in his gaze fiery enough to singe.
A door formed from their unwilling recollection. It was built of polished mythril and marked by striped yellow and black warning labels that belonged to the Shinra building’s sixty-fifth floor. The laboratory.
Sephiroth’s expression curdled.
Aerith raced ahead through the honey-dense puddle. When she reached the door, it slid apart for her.
The hallway past it was ripped at the seams. Paper-thin, the lifestream did not have the ability or strength to form the whole illusion, only the important parts. Metal beams built a shadowed corner beneath the staircase—small, but a hiding spot any child under ten could easily slink into.
There, Aerith saw herself again. The false visage of her younger self as both she and Sephiroth remembered her crouched in the corner, no older than six but barely taller than a four-year-old. The stress wore her body down, stunted her growth. Sometimes, Aerith wondered if she’d be taller now, had she only grown up elsewhere.
“Do you remember this?” Aerith asked. She turned back to the door and it faded, revealing Sephiroth standing on the other side.
“I don’t remember much of this place. There’s nothing I want to remember.”
“But this was a good memory—meeting you.”
Another apparition wilted into view: Sephiroth, many years younger, before the SOLDIER enhancements and heroic reputation sanded youthful innocence to sharp and stubborn swordpoint. His silver hair was short, cut like daggers around his neck. Though he’d been Shinra’s esteemed first SOLDIER already, to most he still looked like a child rummaging through his father’s things to play dress-up.
Not to Aerith, however. In the sea of black military uniforms, gray metal, and white lab coats, she’d always struggled to differentiate between friend and foe. Her mother wore muted but brilliant crimson, Aerith had her thick yellow cotton dress, and everyone else seemed sterile and faceless, only come to harvest the blood and humanity from her mother and keep them both imprisoned. Through the haze of tears, she’d only seen the person entering the stairwell as another of her captors.
When Sephiroth noticed Aerith curled up in the shadow of the corner, he raced forward—flickering through his current self, standing frozen in thinly-veiled reproach—and knelt a step before her.
“Are you okay?” he asked. The younger Sephiroth’s voice echoed throughout the hollow, coming not just from his lips, but everywhere around them. It pounded in the base of Aerith’s skull; the world shook with it.
The younger Aerith sniffled, trying to bite back her tears. She looked up at Sephiroth and couldn’t hold them back any longer.
“I thought you were terrifying,” Aerith said. Sephiroth turned from the memory toward her, his frown piercing. “I thought you were going to drag me back to Professor Hojo and tell him I ran away. My mother and I would have been in so much trouble.”
“I’m Sephiroth,” the memory said. “What’s your name?”
Back then, Aerith had rarely been capable of speaking or willing to speak with others. The kinder lab assistants compelled Hojo to rethink the testing she witnessed and was subject to, believing it stalled her natural development. They were promptly replaced with more callous researchers. Hojo had chided her for learning stubbornness from her “idiot of a father” and insinuated she refused to speak only to hinder his research. To spare her mother his wrath, Aerith found other ways to communicate: whispering answers to her mother, drawing pictures, using hand signs.
For Sephiroth, she pulled the sleeve of her dress back to show him her wristband. All test subjects wore them; they had identification numbers, dates of birth or acquisition, the name of the scientist responsible for them, and, on the rare occasions that subjects actually possessed them, their names.
Aerith Faremis, the name she left behind. Time had long since made her forget her ID number, but she committed the name to memory even when she never knew her father. She wore that band from the day she was brought to the Shinra building to the day her mother cut it off her wrist and told her they were running away.
“Aerith… It’s nice to meet you, Aerith,” the vision of Sephiroth said. He pulled up his glove to show her his wristband. Sephiroth seemed to have forgotten his entirely; even though Aerith was only a couple of feet away, she could only make out blotted black ink on the paper. “Look—I have one like that too.”
Suddenly, Sephiroth moved from where he’d been frozen in place watching their younger selves. The pool at his feet splashed upwards as he drew Masamune and bitterly cleaved through the vision in front of them. The hallway and their childhoods rippled out in the darkness, into wisps of light fleeing his rage, and then there was only the two of them again.
“The past is pointless to dwell on,” Sephiroth snapped. Aerith nearly recoiled. “None of this means anything now.”
Aerith frowned. He could deny its meaning, mock the memory’s worthlessness, and insist it was a cruel trick with nil effect on him, but she saw the truth in his momentary tempest. It made him feel something. She hoped that meant there existed a part of him that could still be reached.
Her hands folded in prayer, Aerith pleaded for the fleeing lifestream to stay. A flurry of echoes swam around her at her beckoning, rebuilding what Sephiroth cut down.
The memory whole again, she watched as the apparition of Sephiroth lifted her younger self’s frail figure into his arms. That Aerith leaned against him, pressed her cheek against his scuffed and dirtied shoulder armor, and rubbed her tears away with the back of her hand.
“It wasn’t just that you were a test subject like me,” Aerith said. Sephiroth looked back to her, his eyes full of hatred, but made no move to correct things again. He silently acknowledged the futility of his outburst, thankfully. “You were the first person at the company that was ever genuinely nice to me. You didn’t snap at me when I couldn’t talk. You didn’t yell at me for running off alone. You didn’t drag me back to Hojo’s lab.”
“I didn’t know you. There was nothing else to it.” Sephiroth’s gaze trailed and reviled the past as they walked circles around him, through the vision’s ever-shifting incomplete hallways, trying to find Aerith’s mother—or anyone that would keep her safe. “Do you think this can change anything that’s happened? A memory won’t bring you back to life.”
“And it doesn’t have to.” It was Aerith’s turn to press forward—to demand, to be intimidating. Sephiroth’s glare burnt like a heat lamp, like the stale and oppressive air of the sixty-fifth floor laboratory or the Turks’ interrogation room, but Aerith refused to writhe beneath it. “But it could change things going forward. Part of you must still feel it, deep down. Your humanity.”
“Neither of us are human.”
“But we aren’t monsters either. It existed in you once. It must be able to again.”
Newly developed of the lifestream’s power, a door rose from nothingness to her right. Together, they turned to watch it. Two faceless and incorporeal Shinra scientists entered through it, their darkly nonexistent gazes set on their younger selves.
“There she is. The Ancient,” one said, in a voice so gruff and intimidating that Aerith knew pure fear was all either of them remembered of the man. “Put her down, Sephiroth. We’ll return her to her cell.”
“Wait— I only just found her. Can’t I walk her back?”
Despite the scientifically-enhanced muscle and his status as Shinra’s most beloved pet project, Sephiroth roughly had Aerith wrestled out of his arms and was pushed aside by the haunting and rangy men. The memory of Aerith’s screams and sobs as they pulled her through the doorway reverberated completely through the cavernous domain until Aerith felt her ears might bleed; even Sephiroth visibly reeled at the noise.
Sephiroth tried to follow them, yelling for her. Reaching out to save her.
But then the doors closed and the memory faded from view. Only the dead Aerith and Sephiroth were left in the darkness. Waiting.
This time, after a long moment of silence, Sephiroth spoke first: “I am not that naive boy anymore. This does not end the way you want it to.”
“It already didn’t.”
As cruel as they’d been when Aerith first trespassed upon his territory, Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed on her. In his dark, lidded gaze she saw him still feel nothing of their past or her pain. No guilt, no regret. Only a pure, senseless drive forward. To godhood.
The planet’s current tugged at her, raced like cold water over her face and down through her loose hair, compelling her to leave this sunken place before Jenova’s lure overcame and drowned her. Still, Aerith held on for as long as she could. The memory had only just ended. There still stood a chance that he could be reached.
“It could have been either of us,” she said. “That place could have changed us both—ruined us both. I escaped the hatred. I know that you can too.”
“But I won’t. Not all of us got to run away, Aerith.”
“I—”
“If you really thought this would change my mind,” he snarled, interrupting her, “then you haven’t changed at all from the stupid, helpless girl you used to be.” Reflexively, his hand ached for the hilt of his sword. The lifestream called Aerith back into its light with more urgency; she was pushing her luck. “You’re pathetic. You’re wrong.”
“If there’s anything I can try to stop you, I will do it,” Aerith said, but she couldn’t hear herself over the lifestream’s wind rushing past her ears. “I won’t let you win.”
As orbiting comets neared each other, inching closer to impending death, so too did they part. One final time, Aerith felt the pull of the planet and knew she could no longer wait to surrender to the tide. She’d failed to reach him but knew she would try again—and again and again and again—both here in the lifestream and by aiding her friends in the fight above, until Holy was able to complete its mission and spare the planet his destruction.
As the lifestream guided her back to safety it felt like she was six again, dragged away by scientists through the doors to the laboratory.
But this time Sephiroth did not reach out to save her. Malice in his eyes, he only watched her go.