Someone to Come Back To
February 2024
Every breath hurt. Cracked ribs, probably. Maybe broken. Aeris had done what she could, but materia couldn't heal everything. Wedge walked slowly, his arm slung across her shoulders for support. Marlene clung to his other side, her small hand wound around three of his fingers.
As far as they'd come, the sound of gunfire should have faded by now, but it echoed on in his head. His friends up on the pillar, fighting for their lives and for the lives of everyone in Sector 7. And here he was running away.
"We're almost there," said Aeris.
Wedge glanced up, briefly. He hadn't lived in Midgar all his life like Biggs and Jessie, and he didn't know this part of Sector 5. Their path had taken them nearer the main support, where the distance between sectors was shorter, and they'd passed through a sort of main square a little while ago. Now, they walked along a corridor between rock on one side and corrugated metal on the other. The terrain in Sector 5 wasn't as level as Sector 7, like the land was more determined to remind you of its presence.
Maybe that was why there were more weeds, too, he reflected idly as his head dropped to focus on the ground beneath his feet. It was years since he'd seen so much as a dandelion.
Breathe in, and out. One foot in front of the other.
Marlene exclaimed wordlessly. Wedge tensed, winced, and looked up.
That was a lot more than weeds.
"Am I seeing things?" he wondered.
"No," Aeris laughed. "It's--"
She cut herself off at the sound of footfalls behind them, tensing up with recognition.
"I think you've come far enough," said a voice.
Slowly, they turned.
He was a tall man, Wutain, wearing the kind of suit Wedge had been lucky enough never to see in person before now. Biggs had pointed them out to him in televised press conferences, standing behind the President. Publicly, they served as executive bodyguards. Behind the scenes, they did a lot worse.
Marlene's grip tightened around his fingers.
"Hello, Tseng," Aeris said pleasantly. "I don't know what you're talking about, since I'm almost home."
"Don't play the fool, Aeris. Not this time."
Aeris glanced aside at Wedge, at Marlene. Wedge pulled his arm from her shoulders and tried to draw himself up. He wasn't going to run away now.
"Look," he said, "just let them go. They've got nothing to do with it."
Tseng fixed him with a cool look. "Is that so?"
"This is all about wiping out AVALANCHE, right?"
"Wedge--"
"She didn't know," Wedge continued. "I got hurt, and she was just trying to help."
Tseng shifted his gaze back to Aeris, and it was only then that it occurred to Wedge to wonder how they knew each other. The Turks probably kept tabs on a lot of people, but why Aeris? It was starting to feel like Tseng had followed her here, and that didn't make any sense.
"It's a serious crime, isn't it?" said Tseng. "Aiding a terrorist."
"Don't you dare," said Aeris.
Tseng glanced at Marlene, who ducked behind Wedge's legs with a whimper.
"You understand your options," said Tseng.
Aeris drew in a sharp breath. Wedge didn't get it. Wasn't he after AVALANCHE? Shouldn't that have been the situation here? Shouldn't it have been the obvious play, for him to give himself up so Aeris and Marlene would be okay? They were nothing to Shinra.
He opened his mouth in hopes that some of that sentiment would come out, but Aeris turned to him.
"Wedge," she said, her voice soft. "I know what you think you're doing, and I..." She hesitated, and then her smile returned with a forced cheer. "It's really sweet of you," she said. Her eyes said, They'll kill you. "But I'll be okay."
"I don't..." Wedge faltered. "I'm the one who's..."
"Just look after my flowers for me, okay? And tell Mom I'm okay." She stepped away from him, towards Tseng. "Shall we?" As if the Turk had issued an invitation she wanted to accept.
"W-wait!"
Wedge stumbled forward, but his effort at haste sharpened the pain in his chest. Marlene didn't move, her clinging hand anchoring him in place. She started to cry.
Aeris and Tseng disappeared around the bend, and Wedge wanted to cry, too. It was AVALANCHE's job to protect the Planet. He hadn't even been able to protect Aeris.
He turned to Marlene. "Hey. Hey, you heard her. She'll be okay."
Marlene sniffled valiantly against her tears, and he managed to get her walking again. They approached the house in the middle of the garden, and Wedge knocked. He was painfully aware that they were strangers to the woman who answered, and there was a lump in his throat as he explained. When he told her that the Turks had taken her daughter, she didn't look surprised.
She invited them in, strangers though they were, and they introduced themselves. Elmyra sat them down at her kitchen table and brought Marlene a glass of water and a cookie. Marlene was too smart to let that distract her from the situation, but it did calm her. She was in a safe place. Elmyra was a safe person.
Elmyra probably counted for more than Wedge, right now. Her daughter had just been taken by the Shinra, and Wedge was the one barely keeping it together. He wished he'd stayed at the pillar with his friends. All he could think was that he'd abandoned them, abandoned Aeris. He'd let everybody down.
The gunfire was too distant to hear, but the fall of the plate wasn't. The sound chilled him. The groans of metal echoed throughout the rest of the undercity, a reminder that the same threat loomed over all their heads. Any day, the whole world could just come crashing down.
Barret and the others... Wedge swallowed hard. He met Elmyra's gaze. Neither of them said anything to Marlene, except to pretend they weren't quite sure what all that noise had been about. They weren't, right? They couldn't know for sure how many lives had been lost, or which people had made it out.
Hours passed. Marlene fell asleep, and Elmyra put her to bed upstairs. The two of them sat at the kitchen table with the radio after that, listening to Shinra's skewed reporting that blamed AVALANCHE and counted only the casualties of the people who'd lived topside.
When Cloud appeared unannounced at the door, Wedge didn't think he'd been happier to see anyone. Barret muscled through after him, followed by Tifa-- and that was all. Wedge's desire to leap to his feet and hug them all evaporated when the slight shake of Tifa's head confirmed it.
Biggs and Jessie were gone.
Wedge listened dimly to the conversation. The others asked the questions he was too shell-shocked to voice, and Elmyra explained what the Shinra wanted with Aeris. The last of the Ancients. Wedge had let Shinra capture the last of the Ancients.
The others spent the night and left early in the morning. Wedge wanted desperately to go with them, but he knew he'd just slow them down. He couldn't help them rescue Aeris. Barret and Tifa and even Cloud told him to take care of himself. He knew they were all genuinely glad he was alive and they didn't blame him for what had happened.
It still felt awful to know they couldn't count on him.
He couldn't even be there for Marlene. Barret had said it, and he was right, that it was too dangerous for them to stay put. Elmyra was leverage against Aeris, and Marlene against Barret, and Shinra knew exactly where both of them were. Wedge's injuries wouldn't let him travel yet, but he encouraged Elmyra to take Marlene and leave without him. He gave them his brother's address outside of Kalm, figuring nobody would think to look for them there. If he had anything to offer, it was that Shinra didn't think much of him; maybe they didn't even know he had a brother.
Wedge stood in the doorway and waved them goodbye. Elmyra and Marlene disappeared down the path, leaving him alone in Elmyra's house.
The others didn't come back, but there was a big story on the news the next day about how the remaining members of AVALANCHE had murdered President Shinra and escaped into the night. He wondered what the real story was. Could they have killed the President? Barret had talked about it enough times. And Shinra wouldn't have admitted to their escape if it wasn't true, right? If they could take out AVALANCHE for good, they'd want to advertise it.
So he figured that part, at least, was real. They'd gotten away. They just couldn't come back for him.
Wedge spent the next week expecting Shinra to come for him instead. They didn't.
As he recovered, he ventured more and more out of the house into the surrounding garden. Unlike his friends, he'd grown up on a farm, and he knew something about plants, although the little vegetable plot next to the house was more familiar to him than the expansive flower beds.
Aeris had asked him to look after her flowers. It was the only thing anyone had really tasked him with, and there was no one else around to do it, so he figured that was what he would do. It was a slow effort, at first. His healing ribs made it too painful to carry a full watering can, so he made his trips a little at a time, carrying the half-full can out to the edge of the garden and back again.
The flowers seemed okay, for now. He wondered how she'd gotten them to grow in Midgar. Was it because she was an Ancient? What if they wouldn't accept him as a temporary stand-in?
He found a notebook in her bedroom detailing her gardening efforts. The tricks she'd discovered and the things that absolutely hadn't worked. He learned that the lilies did best because they were poisonous to the local hedgehog pie population, but you had to keep a close eye on the tomatoes. He knew about tomatoes, at least.
Another week passed before he even learned the church existed, overheard from some folks in town. Feeling like an idiot, he took his half-full watering can and got lost twice trying to follow their directions before he found it.
He'd never seen anything like it, even before Midgar. The fortress walls of Kalm were big, but they were designed to be imposing. Even on the inside, they didn't really make you feel welcome. The church was like an embrace.
It turned out a couple of kids had been taking care of the flowers there. They'd overwatered some patches, but the harm was minimal. Wedge thanked them, sat with them, asked them about Aeris. It seemed like everybody in Sector 5 knew of her, but nobody really knew her. She was the flower girl: sweet and bright when you happened across her, but like the secret of how she got her flowers to grow, a total mystery.
Wedge didn't expect her to come back in the way that she did. The summer had passed, and autumn had settled in, a shift the slums typically marked with nothing more than a dip in temperature, but Aeris's garden understood it more clearly. The tomatoes were over with, and the pumpkins grew ripe, oblivious to the goings-on overhead.
He'd heard about Meteor on the radio, and he'd finally seen footage of it on the big TV in the town square. Shinra said they were going to deal with it. Wedge had a hard time putting his faith in Shinra saving anyone, but he didn't know how you dealt with a meteor. Did you blow it out of the sky? That might be one thing Shinra could do right.
He'd rather Jessie have been around to do it, though.
Tifa and the others showed up just a few days after about the most harrowing broadcast Wedge had ever heard, and this time he did leap up to hug them. They seemed surprised to find him there, and not Elmyra.
That was when he saw Aeris.
Barret was carrying her in his arms, and her face was pale and drawn. Her hair was down, a long cascade of curls that should have been beautiful, if it didn't seem like a sign that she couldn't manage her usual braid.
It was Sephiroth, they explained. He'd nearly killed her, and she needed a place to recover.
Cloud wasn't with them. A lot of strangers were--and strangers was definitely the right word for them, because their number included a talking lion and an animatronic mascot and a man who looked like he'd crawled out of a vampire movie. Wedge got bits and pieces of the story of their past months, but none of them were eager to talk. Cloud's absence, Aeris's close call, and the looming Meteor all weighed on them.
Like before, they only stayed the one night. They settled Aeris into her bedroom, and through the night, Tifa held her hand and Nanaki slept at the foot of her bed. In the morning they left, saying they had to try to find Cloud. Wedge didn't stop them.
He took breakfast up to Aeris. "I'm not as good a cook as Tifa," he confessed, "but she taught me a few things."
Aeris thanked him, but she ate listlessly, without saying much. Wedge decided it was too soon to pry.
"You just shout for me if you need me," he said. "I'll stick close to the house today."
When Aeris did call for him, it was hours later. She was lying in the hall between the bathroom and her bedroom, her eyes red like she'd spent a while crying first. Wedge pretended not to notice. He helped her back to her bed, and he could feel in the tension of her body how much she hated it.
It was that Wutain teen who'd taken him aside to tell him that Aeris couldn't walk. Sephiroth's blade had hit her spine when it passed through, and maybe she'd never get that mobility back again. The doctor who'd seen her hadn't been optimistic. No one wanted to talk about it. Wedge got the sense that they blamed themselves.
Aeris accepted more of his help over the next few days, by small measures. It took him a little while to consider that the last time he'd seen her, she'd been taken off to a lab where she probably would've been poked and prodded like a thing. He couldn't imagine what it was like to escape that, only to wind up in a situation where you needed to be manhandled by a stranger. She'd expected to come home to her mother, and he wasn't that.
So he did his best to be courteous about it. He asked before helping her, every time, which was hard at first. Wedge had always been affectionate with his friends, and it didn't feel natural to ask before lending a hand. But he noticed it put Aeris more at ease.
"I was in Icicle Inn a while," she said, when he cautiously asked after the gaps in the story the others had told him. "They came to see me, and I told them I wanted to come home."
"Came to see you..." Wedge repeated. "You mean they left you there?"
Aeris glanced away. "They had to go after Sephiroth. And I couldn't go with them."
"...I guess I know how that goes."
She looked back at him, meeting his gaze, and nodded slowly. "They left you behind, too, didn't they?"
"Well, I was never much good in a fight anyway," Wedge said, scratching his head. "I really wanted to, you know, to help save the Planet. But I guess I'm just not cut out for it."
"I wanted to..." Aeris trailed off. She let out a rueful laugh and continued, "I thought I could do it all by myself! I thought... if I finally stopped running from my duty, then I wouldn't have to put them through anything more."
"Your duty?"
"As the last of the Ancients. I'm the only one who can summon Holy." Her expression fell into a frown. "I... thought I had. But I don't feel it moving. Something should have shifted by now. Maybe the Planet isn't strong enough. Or maybe I'm not."
Wedge wanted to assure her that she was, but he didn't know anything about Holy. She was the one who would know about all that stuff, and he was just... him.
Instead, he got her permission to carry her outside, where he put her in her wheelbarrow and wheeled her through the garden, showing her how he'd been taking care of it. A light came into her eyes that hadn't been there since she'd come home, and he realized what he had to do.
Wheelchairs weren't easy to come by in the slums. It took a lot of asking before he tracked one down over in Wall Market, where the owner of the weapons shop ran a side business in salvage.
The wall loomed just behind the shop, Sector 7 on the other side, one big pile of salvage. He thought of Biggs and Jessie buried somewhere under all that rubble, and he didn't know if it was good or bad if people were picking through it. Everybody had to survive somehow, but if they came across bodies when they were scavenging, did they give them a proper burial?
The owner gave him a sympathetic look. He showed Wedge the wheelchair without elaborating on where he'd found it or who it might have belonged to. The frame was bent, but solid. The wheels had had to be replaced with ones from a bicycle, but the seat still had some wear in it.
The chair cost him 3000 gil and the last of his pumpkins. He rolled it proudly into the house, and Aeris's eyes lit up with interest for a moment before something else fell over her expression. The chair offered her a measure of freedom, but maybe-- maybe she'd been hoping there was more healing to come, and she wouldn't need one.
Still, she let him help her into it, and he held the door for her to wheel herself out onto the garden path. Over the next few days, she was undeniably more present, pushing herself so far as the town square to wrinkle her nose at the latest Shinra broadcast. When she complained to him that her arms were sore, she did it with a smile.
The house was still a problem. Wedge might've rearranged the furniture, bringing one of the mattresses downstairs, but the house's only bathroom was on the second floor.
He talked to the local handyman about the plumbing situation, but installing even the most rudimentary bathroom on the first floor would've cost way more than he had, even throwing in all the vegetables. He lamented over it to Aeris, but she just laughed and said, "I can pee in a bucket." He wasn't sure if she was serious, so he made sure to put a bucket outside the house, just in case.
Their days seemed almost normal, almost peaceful, until the day of the rocket failure. Wedge told himself that he'd always been counting on Barret and Tifa, not Shinra, to save the day, but the faces around them didn't know any other rescue to hope for. He and Aeris went back to the house in silence.
Wedge made dinner, and sat down at the table with Aeris. "It's gonna be okay," he said, not knowing what else to say.
Aeris picked at her food. "Wedge," she said seriously, "Back when you tried to give yourself up for me... You know what would've happened, right?"
"...yeah," Wedge confirmed. He wasn't sure why she brought it up now, but he'd had plenty of time to think over that moment. "I'd always told myself that I was willing to give my life for the Planet, so it only made sense to give it for you and Marlene! But, I guess, I didn't really think it all the way through, what it would mean to be... executed."
Aeris just looked at him expectantly, knowing there was more behind his hesitation.
"Just a few days before you came here, you know, they... I heard on the radio they tried to execute Barret and Tifa."
He'd sat glued to the radio for hours afterwards. He knew that if Weapon's interruption had given them the chance to escape, then Shinra would use it, too, as a cover so no one would remember that they'd never actually finished the executions. He'd waited for the attack to end, for Shinra to get the situation under control, and for the no news that was good news. He'd been so relieved when everyone had shown up at the house; he hadn't expected any more confirmation than silence.
"...I started thinking," he went on, "what if that's what they'd done with me? Put me on TV and told everybody, 'This is the guy responsible for Sector 7'... I'm kind of glad that didn't happen."
Aeris raised an eyebrow. "Only 'kind of'?"
"Well, you got captured instead! That must have been awful!"
"It wasn't so bad. Cloud and the others came to rescue me almost right away."
"But you didn't know they'd be coming."
Aeris shrugged, looking off.
"So it must've been hard," Wedge insisted. "Even if it wasn't that long. I mean... you must've known what would happen, too. Once they had you."
"Yeah. I knew that."
Wedge was quiet for a moment. There was something in the way she said it--she'd known that. That consequence. He wondered what she'd expected when she'd gone to summon Holy. She must have known there were risks, but they hadn't carried the same certainty as turning herself over to Shinra. There'd been a chance, too, that she'd come out of it just fine.
"...do you wish you hadn't gone to that city on your own?" he asked finally.
Aeris hummed, tilting her head. "Sometimes I do," she admitted. "I guess I thought it would be like when I turned myself in. I'd be the Cetra, and I'd hate it, but everyone else would be safe, so it would be okay. But they're not safe, and it's not okay. ...maybe a lot of the time I wish I hadn't."
Wedge started to reach over to squeeze her hand, and then stopped, unsure. Aeris met his gaze, smiling wryly, and he risked it. She didn't seem to mind.
"...I hope it's not all bad," he ventured, "being here. And once Barret and Tifa take care of Meteor, you'll have lots of time ahead of you. You can do anything."
Aeris nodded thoughtfully and said, "Did anyone even ask you if you wanted to do this?"
Wedge was taken aback. "Why would they need to ask?"
"I just think... you should really have a choice instead of having things dumped on you as if you're the only person who can do them."
"Well, I would've said yes."
Aeris looked down at the table. "Maybe I'm just selfish," she said.
"No, you're not," Wedge insisted. "That's not it at all. In movies and stuff, they always make it out like saving people is awesome. But it can be really... hard. And it doesn't always work, and then... you feel like you were stupid to try at all." He faltered, because that sounded less encouraging than he meant it to be. "I don't know if I'm saying this very well."
"No, I think I know what you mean." Aeris drew in a long breath and then exhaled decisively. "Hey, why don't we go see a movie?"
"What, now?"
"Why not? I haven't seen one in months."
"I wonder if they're even running now..." Wedge said, imagining the little theatres of the slums left abandoned in the face of the end of the world, reels left on the projectors, screens blank save for the hand-sewn patches.
But Aeris shrugged. "If not, we'll figure out how to work them ourselves. We deserve that much before... Well, we deserve it!"
Wedge managed a smile, and he didn't argue. They could use a distraction, and there was nothing more they could do anyway. Saving the world wasn't up to them.
When Meteor came, it came straight for Midgar. Topsiders crowded into the slums, seeking shelter beneath the plate. All the reactors had gone dark, sending the city into a blackout, but the red light of Meteor bled through the gaps between the plates. For a few brief moments, that light went bright white, but only for a few moments.
Aeris abruptly insisted that they get to the church, and at the tone of her voice, Wedge didn't ask why. For the sake of speed, she let him push her through the streets, although sometimes he had to run ahead, shouldering people out of the way who wouldn't move at his shouts.
The church was situated directly beneath the gap between the Sector 4 and 5 plates, unprotected and exposed so that no one had sought shelter there. The red light burned through its stained glass windows and cast the interior in a grotesque kaleidoscope.
Aeris wheeled herself up to the flower bed before the altar and looked back at Wedge. "I know what I need to do," she said, "but I need you to anchor me."
"A-anchor you? How?"
She held out her hand, and Wedge came around in front of her to take it, trying not to trample the flowers. She gave his hand a squeeze.
"Just be here for me, like you have been this whole time. So I know you're here to come back to."
"Where... are you going?" Wedge wondered.
"This is the one place in Midgar... where I've been able to hear the Lifestream," Aeris explained. "Holy is here, but Meteor is so close, Holy can't repel it alone. It needs help, and... I'm going to ask for it."
"From the Lifestream?"
Aeris nodded. "I have to try."
Wedge knew from Barret, the Lifestream was the life blood of the Planet, and the source of all life on the Planet. The Ancients had once been its caretakers. Was the Planet's voice something you could get lost in?
Wedge carefully knelt among the flowers and took Aeris's other hand. "I'll be right here," he promised. "No matter what happens."
Aeris smiled at him, her grip firm on his hands, and then she closed her eyes.
Overhead, the plate groaned beneath Meteor's onslaught, echoing the sounds that had preceded Sector 7's fall. Shinra's feat of engineering wouldn't hold up forever. Distant crashes announced the first pieces to buckle as maintenance catwalks along the underside shook loose and high winds swept fragments of topside buildings down through the gaps. Wedge glanced up at the hole in the roof above them; if something hit the church now, it wouldn't be the first time.
Meteor brought with it a sweltering heat that was out of place on the edge of winter, but Wedge slowly became aware of a warmth in the ground beneath him, too. Amid the red light, a counterpoint green glow drifted up from beneath the floorboards. It spun into threads of light, and then thicker strands, something fragile weaving itself stronger.
The ropes of green light stretched up through the ceiling, and Wedge lifted his head to follow them as they joined the struggling glow of Holy far overhead. They didn't come just from the church, but from all over, and their glow grew so bright that Wedge was forced to look away.
His eyes squeezed shut against the light, Wedge realized first that the the groaning of the plate had abated. He heard instead a few distant exclamations from the people sheltering at the nearby train station. They didn't sound afraid.
The warmth washed back over him, and with it the light dimmed behind his eyes. Cool air settled back into the church, and he opened his eyes.
The church had fallen dark. Wedge had never liked the dark, and he could barely make out Aeris in front of him. The grip of her hands had gone slack. He squeezed them, hopefully.
"Aeris? Aeris, I'm here." What was an anchor meant to do except hold on? On missions with AVALANCHE, they'd always left him to guard the escape route, and until now he'd always thought it was because they knew he couldn't handle anything more important.
"You said you were going to come back," he went on, "and... I need you to come back, okay? I don't want you trading yourself in to save me again. You don't have to be anything but Aeris anymore."
Aeris inhaled audibly. He made out the shine of her eyes in the dim.
"...hey," she said.
"Hey," he replied.
"Are we still here?"
Wedge glanced up. Through the hole in the roof, he could see nothing but the overcast night sky. "I think so."
"Good, good. Come here."
She tugged on his hands, and he obligingly sat up nearer to her. She let go, and her fingers found the sides of his face instead. Her thumb brushed his lip, and her lips followed. If he thought the calm would give him a moment to process things, he was wrong. His mind went blank, and heat rushed to his cheeks.
"W-what was that for?" he stammered.
"I felt like it," Aeris answered lightly. His eyes had adjusted enough to see her tilt her head curiously. "No good?"
"No, I..." He wondered if she could see he was blushing, or just feel the heat radiating off of him. "I've never actually kissed anyone before," he confessed.
"Oh!" Aeris's hands went to her mouth. "Oh my gods. Wedge! You should've told me that before, I would've kissed you weeks ago."
"Huh?"
"Just to be sure, you know. But I guess the world's not going to end after all, so it's okay!"
Wedge laughed incredulously, not sure what else to do. "Y-yeah, I guess so."
Aeris reached for his hands again and gave them a gentle squeeze. "Do you think it's really true? I won't have to be anything but me?"
"Why not?" he said. "I mean... You shouldn't have to do that more than once." It could be somebody else's turn to save the world next time, right?
Hopefully there wouldn't be a next time like this.
"Do you think you'll be okay to be just Wedge with me?" she asked.
"I... thought I had been?" he said, confused again.
"But will you be okay with it?" she stressed, and he realized what she meant.
She was just Aeris, no longer the only person who could save the world. And he'd be just Wedge, not beating himself up for being unable to save anyone. But, maybe he'd saved her just now, by leading her back.
If he'd saved just her, this time, then that was enough for him.
"Yeah," he decided. "Let's do it. Just Aeris, and just Wedge."
She smiled, her eyes sparkling. Part of him wanted to ask if the kiss was a one-time thing, just to celebrate the world not ending. He decided figuring it out could wait. There were no expectations in the moment, and he didn't want to be the first one to change that.
They'd both just be here.