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Her name is Eva and she’s been coming to Seventh Heaven for weeks now. She has short hair, freckles, and by her second drink her cheeks are always red. No one else sees anything weird about her. At first, Cloud wasn’t even sure if other people saw her at all. He asked more than enough times about her, enough to make him sound creepy and paranoid. Insane.
Tifa would stare with furrowed brows, and her voice would go soft and reassuring. Yuffie would scoff. Barret would buy him another drink, slap him on the back with a big hand.
He thinks they don’t remember Aerith the way he does. It's been years since they’ve seen her, but he still dreams about her. He remembers her face, her bright green eyes. He had never met anyone else with eyes as green as hers. Until Eva.
*
Her name is Rivka, and she’s a nurse. She comes once to see Denzel when he’s trapped in bed with the flu. She has a long, dark braid, and green eyes. They look mischievous. Cloud won’t stay in the same room as her. Later, Tifa scolds him for being so rude.
Her name is Thalia. She’s curvy, accentuated by the apron she wears. It brings out the green in her eyes. She works at a grocery store Cloud no longer goes to. He’ll drive around to the far side of Edge instead.
Her name is Gardenia, which Cloud thinks is too obvious, and actually downright stupid. Are they even trying anymore? She’s a kid Marlene plays with at the park. She loves to tie pink ribbons in Marlene’s hair.
Their neighbor has a new cat named Blythe. It showed up out of nowhere. It’s an unremarkable brown tabby, but its eyes are an intelligent green. It whips its tail and watches Cloud from perches around the block. He hates it. He hates what he’s thinking, and he hates that he’s thinking it at all. There are ghosts around the city, and they’re trying to drive him mad.
*
Eva is at the bar again tonight, her fourth night in a row. Her eyes catch the light and seem to glow. She sees him from the corner of her eye. Is she smiling? Are her eyes smiling?
This is a record for her. Cloud’s been keeping track. She's showing up more often.
He’s convinced it means something. Some days he’s sure no one else remembers Sephiroth coming back, or even Kadaj. Using Aerith's face to reform himself would be sick. It sounds just like Sephiroth. And no one else will listen.
He dreams about Eva that night. He watches her stretch tall, her skin ripping open to birth black wings. Aerith hunches over at his feet, bloody black wings reaching out to the sky. She’s bleeding from her stomach. She pulls him down by his shirt and looks at him with Sephiroth’s eyes and screams, screams, screams. Pain, terror, delight, all shine in her green eyes.
Cloud jerks up at 4 am drenched in sweat. It wakes Tifa. He tries to explain the dream, or what happened, or what could happen. What's wrong about Eva and the way she looks at him. The other girls and women around the city. He knows he’s not making sense. He knows he sounds like a lunatic. Tifa tells him so without saying it out loud. Her expression, her soft voice, the tiredness in her eyes all say, “You’re crazy. You’re crazy again and now I have to deal with you.” He knows it, he knows.
Aren’t you over this yet? Can’t you just be normal?
Until Tifa falls back to sleep, Cloud lays stiffly next to her, even as she shifts and pulls the blankets off him. He leaves the bedroom silently and walks downstairs and then outside. It’s fall, and the air is turning cold. He exhales and watches the fog of his breath dissipate. A moth beats against the dim street light above him. From a bench across the street, he sees the long wisps of someone else breathing. The street is dark and empty when he looks both ways. No one has their lights on yet. His untied boots thump as he crosses.
Eva turns around.
Cloud's fusion sword is locked up inside Fenrir, in the garage. Eva's eyes are bright green. They catch what little light there is. He can feel every silent moment tick by. In his sleep clothes, he might as well be naked.
“Cloud,” she says. It’s not Aerith's voice. He hardly remembers her voice, truthfully, but he knows this isn’t it. Too soft. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”
“Why are you here?” Cloud’s voice comes out too loud. It echoes down the empty streets. Icy. He grits his teeth.
She has the nerve to look stunned. Hurt, maybe. He’d be lying to himself if ignored how hard it was to see that look on Aerith's face. In the dim light, he can see her red nose. She drank too much. Or is it just a ploy?
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Yeah, right.”
“I don’t have anywhere else to be.”
“At your own house,” Cloud says, frowns, “instead of ours.”
“Do you live here? Above the bar?'' Eva scoots forward on the bench to better face him. The change of subject is painfully obvious. She looks nothing like a girl who’s just been asked to leave. When Cloud doesn’t answer, she fixes him with a too-real looking pout. It makes Cloud shiver. “Why don’t you like me?”
“You look like someone I used to know.”
“Aerith?”
A whirlwind of fall leaves blows down the street in a dry clatter.
He wants to leave.
“Relax,” she laughs. The sound stills in the air. “I just heard you say her name when you met me.”
Cloud doesn’t relax. “You should go.” He starts to stand.
“What was she like?” Eva's green eyes trap him. “What was Aerith like?”
He could cry. He could scream. He could beat Jenova out of her, but no, he couldn’t. “She,” he says, and finds that he can’t finish. “Don’t say her name.”
“Cloud.” She won’t let him leave. She stands up and it’s the longest moment in his life since Aerith was stabbed in front of him. “Tell me about her.”
“I don’t know!” Cloud pants, suddenly short of breath. “I barely knew anything about her! She never talked about herself, or her past, or anything. I…” It all wants to leave his chest, where it’s built up for years. “I know she had a hard life, but she never talked about it, or let it drag her down. She never stopped dreaming about the future. This world only took from her and she still gave up her life for it.”
He looks around, ragged. Eyes watch him from the shadows. They catch the light and gleam. Humans don’t have eyeshine.
He can’t breathe. His chest and lungs ache like the fall cold is inside him. He's frozen, terrified, angry, disgusted. This thing with Aerith's face walking forward to touch him. Her cold, small, soft hand cradles his cheek. Aerith's hand. He wanted to give her a better life. He wanted to live simply together in a way so they never thought about the bad things in their lives again. He would come home and they’d make dinner together and their home would smell like fresh bread like it did when he was a kid.
He loved her.
His heart is pounding.
Eva changes.
It’s like a flash. Her hair erupts behind her, long where it was just short. She’s older, somehow. Something in her eyes has changed. Cloud thought Eva looked like Aerith before, but he was wrong. Now that she’s standing in front of him, he can see all the subtle things that make Aerith herself, all the things he had forgotten about since she died.
Aerith is holding Cloud's face. Aerith.
They’re alone.
“Cloud,” she says, and her voice is right this time. Hearing it feels like an anachronism. Hearing it makes the world under him shift. He's insane. This can’t be real. He's insane, he has to be. But if it gives Aerith back to him, maybe that’s okay.