Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters nor places and I’m not making any money outta this so don’t sue me.

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII.

Rating: PG-13.

Genre: General/Angst.

Summary:  How an immortal might feel, seeing their loved ones dying one after another. Just a random ‘what if’, inspired by some incredibly cool OverClocked ReMixes. One-shot.

Author’s Note: Like I said, dark, heavy, angsty one-shot inspired by a couple of stunning remixes at OverClocked ReMixes. This isn't exactly my usual style but I'm rather happy with it.

And don’t forget:

Italics – flashback

Normal – This moment, first person view

--------------------

Envying your Death

by Goldenfur, June 27, 2004

Wind has picked up, tossing heaps of autumn colored leaves around, creating a perfect gloomy atmosphere for the event passing on in the quiet town. Everyone looks so sad and serious although they barely knew her. Well, may she rest in peace, then. Ironic… I knew her the best, yet I’m the outsider here, just lurking in shadows while those hypocrites escort her on her last journey. Among those people I hardly recognize I can see one person with those burning, knowing eyes and face of stone – the only person alive who knows me deeper than just the surface. Nah, scratch that. He isn’t alive – no more than I am, for sure.

…Damn, it’s cold. Almost makes me think of that day… so long ago…

Windy.

That was the word that crossed the pilot’s mind as he stood by the railing on his beloved ship’s deck. It was windy and… freezing. Yeah, that was the word. Idly he wondered if it always was like this – feelings matched the weather, or vice versa. Like when you felt all desolate, it was raining and all gray… And now that it was time to face death eye-to-eye, it would freeze you completely inside, even more than the wind did outside? A rustle of fabric startled him from his thoughts and he glanced over his shoulder at the silhouette of his quiet teammate. It really wasn’t all that hard to know it was Vincent – the guy was easy to recognize.

“Reflecting?” the low, monotonous voice drifted to Cid as the gunman walked up to the railing too, watching the landscape passing by.

“Kinda.”

A half-smirk crossed Vincent’s face, if only for a moment. “I think everyone is. After all, there may not be a tomorrow if we fail.”

“…I wish,” Cid muttered almost inaudibly.

“Wish what?”

“Nah, nothing.”

Vincent turned and leant his back on the railing, the strong wind clawing at his hair and cape. “…It is a good opportunity to try and end it all.”

“What the &$£# are you talkin’ about?” Cid eyed him vaguely annoyed.

“Cid, I know about you.”

“Huh?”

Vincent sighed. “Immortality is just a curse, isn’t it?”

“…” Cid watched the night sky, dotted with stars and lighted by the Meteor. “Yeah, it is.”

“I wonder…” Vincent started quietly. “Maybe this will be the day of redemption… salvation of the soul.”

“The only one asking for salvation’s gonna be that son of a bitch Sephiroth,” Cid growled, then scratched his neck and muttered, “’Sides, I have no soul to be redeemed anymore.”

“Neither do I, but there’s always hope that the Planet would accept the spirit and grant us sleep and ignorance.”

“There’s nothing wrong in wishin’ so. Hey Vincent…”

“Yes?”

A dark, humorless grin grazed Cid’s face. “Don’t mind, but I just thought… How old are you anyways?”

“Depends on how old Sephiroth is,” Vincent shrugged. “I was… twenty-six by the time he was born. I think Hojo stopped my body’s aging process a year or so later, after all the other experiments he did.”

“Nasty.”

“That’s what life is.”
Cid laughed bitterly. “You call this life?”

“Some equivalent of it, then.” Vincent shrugged slightly. “Now, may I inquire about your age like you did about mine?”

“Hmh. I dunno, around ninety I’d say.”

Vincent nodded to himself. “That’s what I thought. Have you led two or three ‘lives’?”

“Two. It’s hell getting outta a casket that’s six feet under,” Cid chuckled mirthlessly. “Didn’t think I’d end up sayin’ this, but you were lucky you didn’t get buried.”

“I guess,” Vincent said and shook his head. “Truly, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you, Highwind.”

“Well yeah, ‘s your own fault. Damn vampy.”

“Look who’s talking,” Vincent raised an eyebrow. “At least I’m more of a werewo-- weredemon than an actual vampire.”

“Hey, who roused the fairy tales all of a sudden?” There was a small, sarcastic smile on Cid’s face as he took a drag on his ever-present cigarette. Vincent rubbed his metallic arm with his real fingers thoughtfully.

“If I weren’t a part of this, I’d say this isn’t happening.”

Yeah. “It’s not happening, it’s not true, it’s not possible. There is no such thing as evil spirits. There is no such thing as magic. Vampires don’t exist – werewolves and demons neither. There is nothing that can stop aging.” Yet… I’m still here. We’re still here, and for all I know, there is no way out of this cycle of life and death that has been badly wronged in our cases. So differently, yet with alike cruelty. There will never be solace for us, now. Back then… On that day… Everyone was either scared of what would happen, or like us… I can’t speak for him, but I was looking forward to it. I believe he did too. And we were there, in that final fight… We could’ve tried finding our redemption back then, go with the bastard Sephiroth.

But we didn’t.

Neither of us could stand to calmly go and lose that fight just for our own, personal benefit. If we had, there’d be no Planet anymore. No more pain and suffering, no more twisted creatures caught in the world’s cycle, no more tears… no more happiness, no more love, no more – nothing. There are things that make life worth living and yeah… We owed it to those who could still experience it.

The thing is, I want out. It’s been so long… The promise’s been broken too.

Vincent stared at the sky for a few, silent minutes. “It’s so wrong… I have committed countless sins, but I’ve started to wonder if there’s a way to atone at all…”

“There ain’t,” Cid replied sitting on the railing. “Not that I know, anyway.”

“Come to think of it…” Vincent said quietly. “What’s made you immortal in the first place?”

Cid stared at the deck for a while. “It’s kinda stupid, really… I’ve never been the ‘sweet little neighbor’s boy’ or what the hell you’d wanna call it. But I’ve always been quite obsessed with the $£%&in’ stars. So I swore I’d reach for the stars before I’d die… Little did I know the old hag next door possessed some kinda evil powers.”

Vincent waited patiently as a bitter shadow crossed the pilot’s face. “She never liked us kids but I pissed her off majorly for some reason. So one day when I was dreaming about the stars, she came up to me with this scary grin on her face and said: ‘It is dangerous and foolish to reach for the element that is not yours, son of earth. You have been given the body of a earth-traveler but a soul of a bird, poor creature. Such shall your fate be, then: you may not rest until the day you have conquered the skies and stars. May your death be a gruesome one; a human, slaughtered the way a loathsome vampire would, by his very own weapon.’”

Vincent just stared as Cid held out the Venus Gospel.

“Ever since… I have been trying to reach the skies. It didn’t really mean much what the bitch had said… until I got caught in situations where everyone else involved died and I should’ve too.” Cid sighed barely audibly. “I can’t die the normal way, only if someone decides to impale me on my own spear. It took me this long to reach the stars… Maybe I could rest after this mission, too.”

“…Someone tell me this isn’t true,” Vincent groaned quietly. “We… We’re…just so…Not real…”

“We’re like a &%$£in’ freakshow outta a horror story, aren’t we?” Cid smirked. “You ain’t the only one with a pretty %&$£ed up life, Vincent. How did you know ‘bout me anyways?”

“I was a Turk,” Vincent reminded him. “We… were rather well-known for kidnapping people back in my days too… but basically, you could have the Turks do any job if you paid enough. I was once assigned on a job associated with certain members of the Highwind family. I knew there was something awfully familiar about you when I saw you after Cloud had found me in Nibelheim, in that mansion… I had Cait Sith hack into the Shinra systems and see your files after we found out he was a spy.”

“You what!?” Cid stared at Vincent.

“The Highwind family has died out completely,” the gunslinger answered, unfazed. “There hasn’t been any babies born in the family within closest fifty years. The latest one alive, Kain Highwind, dragoon extraordinaire, has died over a decade ago. Which means that your identity was rather obviously fake. Besides, like you stated before, you had scarcely got any wounds in explosions, fires and battles where many others had died. Either you had a very powerful guardian spirit, or you were an immortal.”

Cid barely let out a few swearing words. “You’re too logical, you know that?”

“You left too many clues. It’s not very wise using almost the same name you originally had gone by.”

“Maybe not, but I didn’t have anything to lose,” Cid shrugged. “I really couldn’t have cared less if anyone had found out.”

The two fell silent, Vincent watching the ground below, Cid the stars – and Meteor – overhead.

“…I hope this day will end our suffering,” Vincent said, not making eye contact.

“Yeah… I damn well hope so too.”

Hoping doesn’t get you anywhere. We succeeded in saving the world and condemned ourselves to a fate of  being the famous, respectable heroes – for the first decade or so. Now, hardly anyone remembers us, or if they do, it’s almost without an exception Cloud Strife, the spikey-haired guy who dealt the last blow to Sephiroth.

Don’t get me wrong. I may sound bitter, but it’s not because I’d like to be the one people remember or anything.

It’s about Aeris.

She’s the one who died in order to give the Planet the chance to survive – she’s the one who called upon Holy. She’s the one people should remember. If not instead of Cloud, then at least both of them.

Ironic, isn’t it…? Everyone else is gone now, except for me, Vincent and Nanaki. Of course, I was the first one to ‘die’, to disappear because I couldn’t be assed with trying to dig myself a way outta the grave again and no one expected me to live long anyways, with my chain-smoking habit and all. The Mako poisoning finally got to Cloud only a few years later and Tifa kinda lost her heart with him. Barret, Tifa, Reeve, even that brat Yuffie, they’re all gone now. Hell, Marlene too... and to think, she was barely thirty. This planet is really poisoned beyond belief. Everyone’s dying early – well, everyone that’s lived near reactors. Which basically covers three fourths of the population. There’s more spirit energy in that Lifestream than ever before, I’d say. I wonder if all those people I knew have been born here as new people and then died again? Death… Everywhere I look, there’s always death involved somehow. That’s the worst part of being an immortal, but I promised myself I wouldn’t play at life no longer. Vincent can go on with his own true identity as long as he wishes and there’s at least someone who remembers him by that name. If I want to live a “life” again, I must wait until Nanaki dies. He remembers, and Vincent knows. They’re the only people on the earth up to this day that still remember me.

And her.

But… Now she’s gone. She, too, is now there, lying in that wooden casket those people carry on towards the cemetery.

She never let go of me, despite of how rude I appeared. Despite that I left her only a few years after the Meteor incident, too tired to play at life for anyone. She never, ever let go of me. Not once during those five decades I knew her, even watching her from far away.

It’s sad really. She was a normal human, which I’m not, and she had a life she wasted in unrequited love much the same way Vincent did. Except she was luckier, she doesn’t have to deal with demons in her head for the rest of eternity as a result.

I wonder if Vincent feels jealous for that? It’s hard to tell as he walks with those unknown-to-me people on her last journey to pay his last respects to her. I will do that too, later, when there are no others.

I don’t know about Vincent, but I know that I am jealous. She could die while I must eternally search for someone that takes me for a vampire and finally frees my soul of the shackles of this miserable life – except that won’t work either. I reached the stars and tried then taking my own life; I asked Vincent for such a favor too when I failed but he had no more power to free me than I did. All those long years spent on trying to reach the outer space and only now I see I was fooled. Stars can never be conquered the way that old hag said I should. And that means that even if my body perished, my soul would still be attached to this world. I’m never gonna be free.

And that is why I envy you, Shera.

Please do me one last favor: rest in peace… for me.

--- The End ---