Disclaimer: FFVII belongs to Square Enix.

For the rest of their lives, they remembered the year that followed as the happiest and most carefree of their lives. They frolicked like children, tumbling together in the deep moss, and spent the days naked- learning one another's bodies.

He liked to take her standing against one of the room's crystal pillars. She liked to pin him to the floor and ride him hard and fast. He called her his angel, his little love. She called him Sexyroth, and- what was more amazing- he let her. He taught her how to swing Masamune and how to develop a better stance with her guard. She taught him how to braid.

They put on lazy, happy weight.

He learned that she often bit her thumbnail when the Planet spoke to her - a quirk born of habitual secrecy. She learned he had an oral fixation- had, in fact, sucked his thumb until he was fourteen, although he somehow hid the habit from his trainers- and she took eager advantage of his compulsion.

They were days brimming with laughter and play, of sleepy orgasms and waking with sticky thighs. Days of magic and healing and small, hard-won victories.

A silly joke that made him throw back his head and laugh until the cave walls rang.

A dinner he made out of army rations and a mako-ridden beast.

A ribbon of silver saved from the time he let her cut his hair.

A week that passed with no night terrors.

A month.

Little miracles.

Vincent and Nanaki found them after two weeks, stumbling on their hideaway more by happenstance than by design. Sephiroth was standing in the waterfall, showering, the water hissing off his shoulders and plastering his hair to his skull.

Aeris had her little jacket on, but nothing else, and when she saw them, she gave a little shriek and scrambled under Sephiroth's coat. The silver-haired man was between them in an instant, his hair flinging an arc of water behind him.

When he saw who it was, his stance eased, and he only stood blocking their view, looking vaguely pleased with himself.

Nanaki could not blush, but he swished his tail back and forth, and ducked his head as if he wanted to put his paws over his eyes. Even Vincent averted his blood-colored gaze, and cleared his throat before saying, "If you need us, we will be in Midgar."

Aeris poked her nose over the edge of Sephiroth's coat, and grinned.

There were other times, though, when Sephiroth came to her roughly. While he was never again as violent toward her as he was their first night, she could tell he was sometimes tempted to be. Afterward, he always seemed to need reassurance.

More irritatingly, as the months passed, he grew moody, often insulting, often inclined to castigate himself by pushing her away. Occasionally, exhausted by happiness, he picked stupid arguments. Then, if she responded with a nasty retort of her own, he would steal things from her and hide them in various unreachable parts of the cavern. He took useless things, for the most part- a tin plate she had used to heat her dinner in, the white bauble her mother had left her, a broken piece of shoelace, but once he took both her boots and her Guard, and another time he cut off all the buttons on her jacket, then had the audacity to defend his action with, "But you never button the jacket up, anyway."

In short, he was infuriating. Still, she understood his actions better than he did, and she knew he was not trying to punish her, only trying to assuage his abject terror: a starving child squirreling away provisions against coming privation. More than that, he found himself in a new environment, and, perversely, he had to test the limits.

All this was over and above the patient work that Aeris spent undoing the training in his head. He rediscovered all his misdirected rage against Shinra, and the Forbidden Forest began to avoid him, glowing woods forming a wide circle around him, because he vented so much of his wrath against the trees. Eventually, he even notched the end of Masamune.

But, night after night, he found himself in her arms: accepted and blessed. And as the knowledge of her love crept into certainty, he found he had something to hope for each day, and something to be grateful for. And when he had learned hope and gratitude, love was an easy lesson.

Day by day, he began to change.

Then, after about a year, she saw him flinch slightly, and when she asked what was wrong he said only, "Mother sends her greetings." And Aeris knew that he had learned to distinguish Jenova's voice from his own.

"Seph?" she asked.

"What is it, angel-mine?"

'Angel-mine' was new this week, an instant favorite of his because it could be either laudatory or possessive.

"Do you think we're ready to rejoin the world?"

He turned to her, his glowing eyes warm, his expression so soft that it made her flush crimson and look away, her mouth tightened by a furtive smile.

"I think I should like that, Aeris Gainsborough. If you will go as my wife."

And when he held out his hand to her, two thin, silver rings lay in his palm. The larger, masculine one was set with an emerald, no doubt pried from the glittering walls around them. The smaller one held the tiniest, most brilliant bit of materia she had ever seen. She knew what kind it was before she touched it. Revive. He was saying, silently, that she had brought him back to life.

Two shades of green lay side by side in his outstretched hand, each the color of the other's eyes.

Through sudden tears she managed, "I wondered what you did with that bit you knocked out of your sword."

His smile widened. "Wonder no more."

That night, Aeris dreamed.

In the middle of a vast, empty expanse, a little house stood, surrounded by lush blossoms. Two shadows approached- one long, and one short- stretching across the desert sand. The taller shadow belonged to Sephiroth, his hair twitching around him like a live thing, the shorter one to the little silver-headed girl waddling after him.

Aeris knew, with the certainty of dreams, that this girl would grow thin and straight and sharp as the sword she carried, for she was heir not to a vast corporation, nor a monarchy, but only to Masamune- and all that that entailed. Hers would be a terrible beauty that men would go to war over- or follow into battle.

But all of that lay far ahead. For now, she was the precocious girl with large emerald eyes, never far from her father's boots, tottering after his shortened strides with all the eagerness and enthusiasm of innocence. Often, he would carry her, not as other men carried their children, but perching her on his pauldroned shoulder, balancing her with one arm while she gripped a forelock for balance.

Aeris saw herself, then, inside the house, spoon-feeding a baby with glowing cat's eyes and her mother's chin. He seemed intent on levitating and spitting out as much of the mush she was feeding him as possible, and Aeris was keeping at him with the tired persistence of a woman who did not want to be woken up tonight. Pattering footsteps on the front stoop alerted her to her daughter's entrance, and a moment later a shrill voice rang out: "Mamma! Mamma! You should have been there, Mamma! This monster was HUGE! It was the biggest monster ever, Mamma! The villagers said it was a demon!"

Aeris sighed. He spoiled his children hopelessly. She alone knew how much he wanted-needed-his children to be happy. The little wretches leveraged that as much as possible, and Aeris could not always stop them from shamelessly using his love, nor could she be the mother she wanted to be. Since their first pregnancy, marked by the headstone in the back yard, she had never been truly strong. Conceiving, always difficult for the Cetra, had been triply complicated because of the Jenova cells still tainting Sephiroth's flesh, and the pregnancies were difficult, dangerous and painful, full of lurid visions of darkness and flame. He had worn the floorboards smooth with his pacing, hating himself for the pain that his love brought.

His silhouette filled the doorway and she looked up.

He was covered in mud and shadow creeper silt, and a bluish goop that she did not dare to name. "Agh!" she squawked. "Sephiroth Gainsborough! Leave that filthy thing outside, or you'll be washing it yourself!"

He grinned as he complied and went to wash up in the sink, obviously in high spirits after butchering the bane of some village or hillside.

Their daughter was still darting around, eyes aglow with hero worship. "Pappa killed it, Mamma! Like this!" She demonstrated a series of unsettlingly accurate sword movements. "Tifa and I helped!"

Aeris arched an eyebrow. Sephiroth was the only man on Gaia who could not only slaughter any mako-made monster single-handed, but who could invite his three-year-old to- help. 'Tifa,' Aeris knew, was not Tifa Lockheart, but 'Tifareth,' the pet rat.

The three of them had undoubtedly been a very funny sight, and she shook her head and chuckled, actually a little sorry that she'd missed it. White arms snaked around her middle, clamping her tight to a broad, pale chest. "Laugh while you can, pretty flower girl." She heard his grin as he whispered into her hair. "I'll hear you beg tonight."

He pulled away abruptly, leaving the familiar heat coiling in the pit of her belly, and a flush in her cheeks.

"Didn't you hear me, Mamma? Pappa killed a monster that was bigger than our whole house! Than infinity of our whole houses!" Her daughter gushed louder, seeking to correct her mother's inattention with volume. "Daddy's the greatest warrior ever, isn't he Mamma! There's not a demon in the world who can beat him! Aren't I right Mamma? Aren't I right?" She replayed the afternoon's battle with her imaginary sword once again.

Aeris watched her Sephiroth ruffle his son's hair, glowing eyes twinkling. He was older now. Common gray mingled with the strange moonlight silver, particularly at the temples. But his finest and most beautiful features, the crowning glory of all her years of patience and love, were the laugh lines crinkling the corners of his eyes. The wrinkles of a man who knew how to smile.

"You're perfectly right, sweetie," Aeris answered. "Not a demon in the world."

Not even his own.

(finis)