“Without a thought I will see everything eternal,
forget that once we were just dust from heaven’s fire.
As we were forged we shall return, perhaps some day.
I will remember us and wonder who we were.”
— VNV Nation, Further

Phase IV. Further

Bodyguard… he’d promised to be her bodyguard. Even if he didn‘t realize the severity of her need at the time, it was still a promise made and a duty to serve. Not that he needed a title to motivate himself to protect her, he would come to feel that over time on his own. Even so, he had failed utterly and now he can barely protect himself.

Some suffering is necessary to life.

Yeah, sure, Cloud thinks in the one of the rare lucid moments available to him now. Try explaining that to her…

---

Cloud can’t count the days he’s been in her church now, unable to add to the tally on the floor. He‘s lost track of his own internal count and he’s in far too much pain to move to check. He’s barely able to turn his head and watch the progress of the stain darkening his arm, spreading down through his fingers and now creeping its way over his shoulder. The bulk of it forms a weight that presses down against his heart. Sitting up or trying to stand is nearly impossible now: the pain is too much, the weight too great… Each time he tries Cloud’s head spins and aches, threatening to split down the middle and expose the throbbing wound inside… The wound called memory.

He didn’t want to fall on the flowers but he can’t bring himself to crawl away from them. He doesn‘t have the strength for it anymore, but it’s not only that. The shadows of the broken columns bring no promise of comfort to him; the splintered pews and shattered windows all pale next to the simple beauty of the flowerbed. Besides, he wouldn’t want to move if her could. As more and more days pass, he can feel her near him. Below him, beside him—sometimes even inside, a familiar warmth brushing through the fragments of pain and scattering them, giving him temporary reprieve from the agony unfurling inside him. He is afraid of moving away from the flowers, afraid that it would mean moving away from her, from the warmth, her scent. She’s all around him now in the air he breathes though he’s noticed how his breath is more shallow now, quicker and escaping in rasps. The more he tries to take her in the less he’s able to hold on.

He can’t be frightened, he won’t be frightened. He will be brave for them both no matter how grave the situation even if he can no longer feel the left side of his body, never mind bring it to move. He will be brave even if his fingers haven’t moved from their flexed position for days, even if he sometimes feels the ground beneath him sinking and shifting, as if accommodating his weight or, he thinks in a panic blind with pain and a strange delight, opening to accept him, biding its time before it opens up wide enough to swallow him whole. He will fall like a pebble into some deep and unknown well in the world. He will fall, hitting no bottom but coming to an end, the end, the end of him and all that is his.

The only thing Cloud fears is what that means for her.

---

… The flowers are talking to him again. Cloud strains his ears to listen, struggling to focus as much as he can on their words, her words, a comforting song that calls him back from the edge of his jumbled, harried thoughts.

Who’ll be left to remember us? Will they even care about this place once we’re gone?

He has no answer for her. It’s something he often wonders, too. Is memory enough to leave a lasting mark on a place? Can the living feel the imprints of the dead like currents in the air or a change in the wind? Cloud likes to think so, and he continues thinking so, hoping against reason that she can hear him and find comfort in these thoughts.

---

Cloud hasn’t been able to move his head for what must be well over a week now but he can still look, he can still move his eyes and even if they’re starting to haze over in a veneer of fog he can still use them to see. So what if the darkness spreads faster and faster, swallowing up his vision until he sees nothing but a small pinprick of light? At least he can still see. And at the very least he can still smell her.

Memories are just memories, yes… but whole lives exist in those memories, lives and people, places, sounds, sights, smells, sensations… an entire world exists in a memory. In the incomprehensible space of recollection a whole universe is created. Memories you share with someone else, memories you have of someone else, they all create a world that is entirely yours, made just for the both of you. You are the gods of your own creation, the makers and rulers of your own domain. Nothing can take that away from either of you—nothing can stop it from happening. It’s already happened.

You must really want that date, huh? You’re so dedicated, Cloud.

How he’s missed her teasing him. He can almost feel the familiar prod of her finger at his side, tickling him in the instant it takes for her to lightly jab, his skin burning with pleasure from her touch, from the warmth she left behind… the warmth still inside that Cloud refuses to let fade. Cloud shifts as much as he’s able, which isn’t a great deal, and wills himself to speak, trying to remember the mechanics of it.

“Bodyguard… your bodyguard… right…?” he sputters, his tongue feeling like lead that he must pry off the roof of his mouth.

He wonders if she heard him. He wonders if she is even there to hear him, if she isn’t something he’s constructed for comfort in what he’s sure are his final days, the daze of approaching death. He decides he doesn’t care; any trace of Aerith is still Aerith, his own creation or not.

But who will protect the bodyguard? Aerith‘s voice sounds out after a long pause. The flowers closest to his head sway gently, moving in some unknown breeze. It’s as if they’re talking to her, using a voice Cloud cannot hear. Aerith pauses again. I see now…

Cloud wishes he has the strength or the voice to ask what she’s thinking, but he only listens.

… That is, if you’re sure? A warm, gentle pressure lays itself across Cloud’s forehead. He’s so sure it’s her, determined to believe she’s capable of touching even if she no longer has hand or body with which to wield. Memory can do anything. It’s their world, their rules.

“I am… of you… you… of me…” His voice barely works though he hasn’t tried it in many weeks besides a few stray comments here and there. The swelling of his throat, though no longer painful, has made talking almost impossible. His vocal chords were eroded raw, painful stubs that he imagines are near to snapping with the slightest strain. He has no use for them now. Not anymore.

That’s right, Aerith says, her fingers stroking his temples, smearing away the wrinkles of pain Cloud feels gouged into his skin. There’s no avoiding it.

---

The next thing he hears is a sigh, long and low, as if a massive beast with lungs to match is exhaling for miles around. In the sigh Cloud hears creaks—what sounds like wood splitting, shifting stone, and the churning hiss of dirt shifting, tumbling into a gorge. Aerith’s touch and presence is gone but her perfume is stronger than ever now, so pungent it’s replaced the air entirely. The flowers are shaking in their bed, almost violent in their undulations, the cause of which he cannot understand… His eyes are open, feebly he can feel them moving from side to side searching through the darkness, hoping to find a split in the shadows’ seam. He knows there’s none but hope springs eternal even when faced with reality.

Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing, she chastises him. Her voice is louder now, clearer. She’s come back.

Cloud imagines that if he could smile to her, he would. Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.

“I hope so,” she says. She says! Cloud can barely understand it, unable to make sense of how he should hear her so clearly. He should be miles away from her, from her church and her flowers. He’s falling, he’s been falling, the long sigh is still echoing, the earth still hissing and crumbling, the flowers probably still shaking, trembling to their roots—but falling to where? To her?

The further down he falls, Cloud feels the weight and the pain of Geostigma fading, growing smaller and smaller. Either he’s numbing himself to the pain or it’s really disappearing, Cloud can’t tell which. The weight on his heart, the jabbing ice cold stabs at his back that splinters its way through his spine, all of it fades and grows weaker. Even as he thinks about them he can’t properly remember their exact sensations as if their absence is enough to erase their existence entirely.

No, it’s not that. Absence is still a presence, it’s just the presence of nothing. Even if their entire form isn’t there, traces of them still remain. He just has something else to focus on now, something that distracts him from the pain, making it unimportant. A familiar warmth moves up his back, splitting into two forks to flow around the upper part of his chest. Cloud sighs as the small, mostly smooth but partly rough hands come to rest on the spot above his heart, falling into the groove he imagines he‘s dug into the skin. For the first time the weight is welcome and through the presence of her hands there exist her arms, and through her arms come her shoulders, torso, neck, legs, head. He can feel her against him, behind him, joining him in his descent but also cradling him, taking the fear out of his fall. Finally.

“Finally.”

Cloud thinks he hears her laugh or something close to it. A giggle lost in the crescent of a smile. “I was never really that far away from you,” she says. “It took a little while to understand, but you caught on.”

“It still felt further than heaven,” Cloud says.

Aerith squeezes her hands, holding them tighter to his heart. His pulse leaps into the cradle of her palms and she holds it, keeping it steady.

“Now I’m not,” she says, her voice right against his ear.

“No, you’re not.” And with a surge of strength—surely his last, greatest move, the move for which he’d been conserving all his energy and efforts in these past few weeks of pain, Cloud turns to face her.

And she’s there. Smiling. Warm. Real. There. Here, at last.

“Finally,” she echoes back to him, and this time it’s Cloud’s turn to laugh.