So I watch AC too much. Sue me. :P I came up with this when I was watching the ever amazing "Calling" for the ump-teen-billionth time. Aerith's last line was sort of lingering in the back of my mind (hence the title, and the emphasis on the expression "Everything's all right" throughout the story) and this sort of popped into my head. I've had writer's block for a while, so I couldn't help but stick to an idea that felt like it would work for me, as I was already in the process of writing a (phaild) Tifa-angsting-about-marrying-Cloud-and-ditching-the-wedding fic. The inverse (a Cloud-angsting-about-marrying-Tifa-and-ditching-the-wedding fic) worked even better than the original concept, and, of course, I think you guys will appreciate it more since it's from the perspective of Mr. Dubious Strife himself, and generally just focuses on how bloody much he loves Aerith. :giggle:
Anyway, despite this being hurriedly written in one night, it's pretty much my ideal vision of Cloud and Aerith's happy ending- the implied and understood, but never obnoxiously declared proclamations of love, the peaceful, secluded atmosphere, the lack of concern about death and what it means to them... it's all gravy, baby. :lol: Here we go!
ALL RIGHT
By Luna-Nayru
“And here comes the groom!”
He could not help but stumble uneasily as the arms of all life’s warmth wrapped tightly about his torso, while the perfectly rounded peak of a chin that coiled skyward into the familiar smile of his dearest friend flopped ecstatically onto his shoulder. For here she was, alive as she had ever been. Here she was, knowing the exact blind spot at his back from which she could attack him with a spirited embrace and still catch him by surprise each time she repeated it. Here she was, grinning like a teenaged girl as her cheek pressed fervently against his own, only intensifying the overwhelming heat of a vermillion blush that had rushed to his features with the warmth of her smiling face. Here she was, so exhilarating, so proud, so beautiful, so true. So easy to love in every way.
She planted a firm kiss on his cheek, meeting his eyes as he unconsciously turned to face her. “I’m so proud of you,” chirped the voice that sent shivers down his spine each moment it dared to toll, and a faint whisper brushed its way into her words, as if the steadfast grip she applied to each edge of his unceremoniously unbuttoned jacket required every ounce of energy she possessed. For he was not certain she knew that her fingertips were digging into the immaculate ashen shirt fastened at the collar by an idly loose black tie, with the tender force of a gardener pushing seeds into the earth.
“Th… thanks.” He managed to mumble, massaging his collarbone with a clawing contracture of his fingertips, and could not help but inwardly muse that his appreciation for his accomplishment on this day was fairly limited under the circumstances.
“Well, come on, sit down, talk to me!” He drew in a sharp breath as her arms unwound from their comfortable fold about his chest, feeling as if the light breeze that hung with such grace in the spring air had suddenly struck him with the force of the harshest winter’s gale, and felt her fingers gently entangle with his own. She tugged at his hand abruptly, dragging him vivaciously away from the aging Fenrir motorcycle he had skidded to a halt at the side of the usual field where they met, away from the long-deserted highway that led him from Edge to their sanctuary, away from May sixteenth, away from three o’clock, away from the prospect of being preyed upon by hounding wedding planners, away from the future… away from his reality, to a place where he could simply speak, listen, and live.
She pulled him into the sea of yellow that encircled their ankles, seeming to glide over the waves of daisies in her manner of settling herself comfortably among the blossoms, the vibrant pink dress that enfolded her billowing about the thin crooks of her knees as she floated to a kneeling position. Ever the warm and endearing hostess, she gave the patch of flowers before her a cordial pat, gesturing for him to mimic her procedures, although he posed the introverted question of whether his unceremonious flop into a cross-legged hunch could ever compare to the magnificence of her own methods.
“You’ve got to tell me all about the big day,” she beamed as she plucked a small patch of flowers from their entailment among the masses and began to weave them absently between her fingertips. “I mean, look at you, all dressed up and ready to go! You must be so happy.”
Happy. He stifled the urge to grimace at the word, and found himself reminiscing at all the times he would wonder if her endeavors to make him squirm were intentional. “I’m all right,” he mumbled. Pure poetry. He could not even begin to count the number of times he had posed this curt reply to her prods.
“All right?!” He was not even goaded to blink as she grazed his forearm with a pretentious slap, donning an indignant expression of mock-offense that was so dreadfully typical of her, he was forced to stifle the fervent urge to smirk. “Cloud Strife, you’re terrible! What would Tifa think of you?”
A breath collided with full force against the interior of his chest, only to commence a swelling feeling that vaguely resembled the stifling weight of submersion. As much as he struggled against the currents, he could not bear to surface his gaze from its imprisonment in the floral earth below them, could not bear to touch the hands of breath, to look into life’s bittersweet emerald eyes, to be at peace with himself, hinder his unmindful floundering, and take in the sweet air that he dreamt would allow him to float. To look at her and express every unbearably fraught feeling that he had tried so desperately to drown would be naught but criminal. For granting them life would only pose disillusionment before the cold reality of their present state.
“… Cloud?”
Yet as such lachrymose sentiments curtained his body in their expansive panes of frost, he could not resist his natural gravitation toward a solitary flicker of warmth, to the light at the end of the tunnel. If he were required to compare the alluring sonnet of a voice emitting from the one he loved so dearly to a single diamond in the rough of his life, he could think of naught but the reeling sense of a life flashing before one’s eyes as death impended to represent such an otherworldly sound. For hers was the resonance of memories- the pure, the bright, the passionate and the somber- as the world fell around them, to force even the most shadowed of passageways to one’s demise seem all the more…
All right.
“… Cloud.”
And as much as she tried…
“… Are you all right?”
… Never would she convince him that every memory they had shared would fade in this unwarranted manner. He would not let them sink, further and further, until the light of their lives had become indistinguishable. As all that was once celebrated as the fervor of existence would metamorphose into a blackened labyrinth, so would all that was once granted ardent trepidation intermingle with that which was dearly beloved, until love itself had become inconspicuous, for such was the fate of his future.
As Aerith herself had once told him, everything was, and always would be, all right. And if all complied, nothing would ever differentiate from such an excessively worn standard.
“Y… Yeah, but … I want more than that.”
His voice sounded labored and unfamiliar, like that of a man long since broken by decades of toil devoid of any genuine zeal, as an array of evident syllables seemed to bubble from his sodden lips. And he was jolted abruptly as he became aware of the linguistic sin he had spilled so shamelessly upon the antiseptic air between them, eyes darting as far as was humanly possible from any space his bemused observer could hope to occupy as he uncouthly swatted detached flower petals from his lap, hauling himself instantaneously to his feet.
“Sorry,” his tone crackled and flared unsettlingly, as if the very warmth of a single instant had singed his ability to speak with the mordant allure of its sparks, though even he was not fully aware of what his instincts provoked him to apologize for. “… I’m leaving. I have to leave. I’m going… I’m going to Kalm for a while.”
With a forcibly perturbed hash of the cap-toed flats encasing his feet into the depths of the flowerbed below him, the steps he decisively took in the wake of his shadowed future bore unmistakable resentment for the path they had been forced to choose. For as much as he dreaded the plummeting feeling of self-loathing destined to accompany a look of revolted disenchantment in her ordinarily amorous eyes, his desperation to see them, no matter what sickened emotion they would bear in response to his treason against reality, was so great, so true, that he longed with all of his heart to stay with her as he turned away.
But he deflated in a manner as raggedly instantaneous as the fall of a punctured balloon, all air fled his body with a threateningly unstable pair of knees to accompany the horrifically wonderful feeling of falling, of flying. For a gentle tug at the linen trouser leg of the tuxedo he loathed, a tender reminder that all was not confined to the false pledges of this dreaded day, was enough to stop him dead in his tracks.
“Cloud… right now… it’s after three o’clock, isn’t it?”
How long had it been since he had wept? It could not have been terribly long, if the miniscule amount of time it took him to recall the functions of his tear ducts at this moment were any indication. Had it been five years, six, seven, since he had lost her? Had any time passed since the two existences he now identified as their own had intermingled by some slew of fate, since her hand had slipped with such ease into his own, since he had felt her shoulder brush against his as they strode to anywhere that the road dared to take them? Did those six years, ten months, and nine days between two streams of tears even occur?
“Oh, no… you didn’t…”
A fury consumed him; an inexplicable, pulsing fury, incomparable to anything he had ever felt, insatiable by any means of earthly comfort he had ever experienced. His heart was throbbing uncontrollably, a freight train engine with its mammoth beats of screeching, rumbling iron, reeling spouts of hailing perspiration to his forehead. His shoulders heaved skyward as his body flexed involuntarily, eyelids clenching like great, tearful fists over their broken prey. And in a wild rage, he made his abrupt and ostentatious twist, facing her in an instant like a man possessed, before the tension that consumed him shattered with every visionary clock he could forge of that which was foreboded.
For here she was, crouched with the innocence of a young child stooping to admire the simple beauty of the earth, on her knees as she had been instants before all time stopped for him. And any suggestion that his was human flesh, any color, any life drained from his features.
Never again would he lose sight of her through the veil of all granted pasts, presents, or futures. She embodied them all, as he dreamt they would be. She was his time, his life, when the clock had broken and any logical perspective of her present state had vanished in its wake. She was, he discerned as his knees crumbled beneath the weight of revelation, his limp torso slumping to a kneel that paralleled her own, and finally to a broken crawl before her, more alive than ever he could require of the one he loved so dearly.
Tears streamed down his face as he surfaced, pushing himself higher above the waves of reality as the moisture cleansed and dispersed from his skin, plunging his arms heavenward as he embraced the sweet breath of life. How could he not have seen it, he wondered as his arms tangled beneath her own and wrapped around the small frame of her midsection, that time, heaven, the sky, the flowers, the very water of life and all it encased… how could he not have seen that everything was here, as they were, together?
Whether she was a mere manifestation of his most cherished memories, whether she had miraculously passed into purgatory, or whether she was dazzlingly, utterly alive, and the rapid throbbing of the delicate heart that pulsed against him as he clung to her was fueled by the very same blood that ran through the veins of the living- it did not seem to matter now. Not when those pallid, fragile fingers of hers, those fingers that had always fit like a glove between his own, were so vigorously clutching his collar. Not when her chin had come to rest at the peak of his cranium, not when he could feel her silently breathing the air that encompassed their embrace. Not now, not ever would it matter. Not now, not ever would they let go.
He was not aware of how much time bypassed them, floating so naturally to the wind like the flower petals ensnared in the undertow of its currents. And, true to his perpetually timeless image of her, words glided from her lips at a faint whisper comparable to the fleeting wind itself. “I thought… you and me… and Tifa, and Zack, and everyone… I thought everything was…”
His diluted expression slowly emerged from its prior burial in the gentility of true emotion, desperately attempting to reclaim his typical visage of indifference from her as their eyes slowly approached one another. “… You thought everything was all right.” he finished, with a blatantly aggrieved tone of resolution in his voice.
As his own gaze dissolved into the emerald orbs now brimming with tears, his grip upon her unconsciously tightened. For the sight of that charismatically practical head of hers bobbing a wordless, absent nod in reply, was well enough to break him completely.
“Well, you’re right. It is.”
The tone that emitted from his throat was so unrecognizably cognizant, so driven by the callously unadulterated spirit of indignation that it seemed, for a brief instant, that every dubious murmur that had emitted from his lips during youth had accumulated into the deeply rooted tone of an adult he exhibited at this moment. It was as if he had relished in the very core of his love’s strong and exuberant, yet still remarkably wizened soul simply by embracing her instants prior, for the force that fueled his words was one that triumphed over any word, any phrase, any emotion he had voiced in twenty-seven years of cowering beneath the prospect of its altercations. The beguiling air, the light of a radiant day that encased them pulsed rivetingly to his wrists, snaked its way to his fingertips as the muscles that controlled them sprang to life at the stimulus, while he, to an astonishingly restricted level of incredulity in respect to both parties, found now more than ever that the strength of his heart and mind had fully flourished into a true and unbreakable bond with his body. His palms, which once would have crumbled with such broken assertion, perspired and trembled at the prospect of meeting her own with such veracity that they would dare not have touched her- now, they had glided forth from his sides with a gentle ease, and rested reassuringly upon the shoulders of her frailly trembling frame.
“But I don’t want to be, Aerith. I want to be happy.”
He asserted the words he wished to convey to her with remarkably guileless composure. But they had both detected the lingering traces of apprehension in his voice as he breathed the name he had dared not speak for six trying years, had dared not breathe even in the face of her long-passed spirit before him. For no longer was he afraid to accept the presence of his desire to clutch her shoulders between his hands, to inhale deeply, retain and relish in the sweet impact of oxygen against the limitless space of his body, and exhale knowing that the beautiful sound of her name on his lips would give each breath a renewed significance to his world. No longer was he afraid to smile inwardly at some muse that neither had sensed before, and share his deepest joys with her through the simple act of meeting her gaze, knowing that anything that could possibly grant him happiness would immediately cause her to smile in return.
For as his lips curled into the most comfortable of human smiles, and his eyes slipped with such ease into the path of her bewildered stare, she could not help but beam at the sight of his newly discovered, yet eternally present ability to be at peace with that which he desired above all else. In the instant that a waterlogged pair of emerald green orbs had collided, spinning and twirling into the embrace of a contented cerulean gaze, she could see, at last, that it did not matter what the world conceived of his alleged expressions of indifference to that which was forced upon him. For it was here, now, that he was allowed to exceed it. It was here, now, that he was finally capable of meeting her.
And as he pulled her lips to his own with the gentlest of embraces, an arm linked unbreakably around her shoulders, his tremulous chin moistened by the soft, untainted touch of her tears- the feeling of true happiness left him breathless.
And such a feeling, he mused, was all right now.