Gonna Need You to Back the Hades Off, Plot Bunnies.
He’d failed. He knew the wound was fatal by the flash of stem-green in her eyes and the fading that began. Her life flame was seeping into the air around them…despite all the warnings, from her hinting comments, from Sephiroth’s taunts, Aerith was dying, as though all the fate and Fate they’d challenged had been for less than nothing.
Cradling her, Cloud’s eyes scanned her somehow-smiling face as though trying to read every yet-unseen bit of her soul with the time they had. Words he didn’t consider consciously leaped to his numb lips.
“You…were right.”
She smiled. Gaia, what a smile, more peaceful now than ever before even though the world was ending. Her light voice came like the last trembling of a candle flame.
“Every moment…mattered.”