The crimson cloak around her, concealing her, is a very real weight that she wishes would swallow her, make her disappear. She’s never been one to shy away from anything, facing everything head on with a zeal that seemed uncomparable. She doesn’t like how she’s overthinking things, or how she’s silently questioning everything as if she’s uncertain.
Until he says her name and Aerith stops.
Before this moment, they were once companions that found one another and were bound to a common goal. And maybe that had been a lifetime ago, but it still happened and as she stands here, in this petrified place that is both in a standstill or dead, locked by time, she feels vestiges of that certainty coming back to her as she steps towards him.
Towards Vincent, holding out an offering for her to stay.
Her lips are still tingling, and maybe there’s a slight flush to her paler than normal cheeks, but she doesn’t shy away as she comes back into his space, looking down at the brush he’s holding, the one she’d used to tame the mess of that midnight mass that was his hair, now pleated nicely and neatly in a braid.
Every step she took back to him, distance not being much between them, was sure and purposeful. It reminded her of when she first arrived at this place after she had come to the decision to leave everyone and make her own way here. The stones she had touched leading down to the hidden city speaking to her, telling her everything they had recorded with voices of people she would never meet were all so overwhelming, but it was her own resolve that kept her going.
A resolve that would not, could not, waver.
She stands here, in front of him, with that same feeling, except there seems to be something more now. The only way Aerith can describe it is like she’s being pulled.
That feeling doesn’t subside, even when she’s near him, but rather it evolves into something that can almost be akin to completeness.
There’s a lilt in her voice where she can’t help but reveal that playful side of her. Even after death, that has not changed or gone away. There is relief coursing through her as the tension she’d been carrying abates in knowing she’s not made things awkward.
“…can you braid my hair, too? I feel like I’ve got a lion’s mane.”
Resolve makes her sidestep him to sit where he’d been kneeling and plopping herself onto the ground, the cloak more than enough to conceal her as she sits facing the water’s edge. The lake is placid, even still, as her eyes take into the cool darkness of the now purified waters. Pure as it may be, it was still so cold.
There’s still that somewhat kiss they had that’s mulling through her brain. Aerith can’t decide if she wants to talk about it or leave it be, but she doesn’t want to pretend it never happened.
Secretly, she wants it to happen again. His lips against hers…it felt nice, just like how she leaned against his back and soaked up his warmth, but better. So much better.
The glittering facets of the Great Glacier. The vast, winking darkness beyond the trees, stars enshrouded in the galactic arms’ glow. The flashes of bioluminescence in deep water.
It can be lethal just the same.
But it does not need to be, not always lethal, not always cold, airless, lightless. Vincent understands that even if he has been distant from it. He watches as he is wont, observes as a matter of skill-becoming-instinct, nature or second nature from his life before, his half-life now.
They met in dire and dark circumstances. As potential enemies at first, but for the promise of confronting Hojo. The wretched thing that emerged from the coffin-prison in Nibelheim manor was barely human, a vengeful wraith haunting their shadows, hungry for retribution. He wished to avenge himself and shrouded it in atonement, because the notion of avenging Lucrecia was delusion.
He can see that now, here on the other side. Shelke shattered the compartmentalization of his trauma, of decades of torture. A lifetime relived, condensed into moments. It still haunts his eyes, just underneath the surface, and it is enough to embolden him to focus on the moment.
Together, Avalanche faced no less than the end of the world. A few scant weeks - months at the most - spent under duress, under crisis, were not enough to really learn, to really know.
Wanting. What a novel concept, even if the brush of affection was at once anomalous and accidental. Nevermind, nevermind.
Easing down onto the ground behind Aerith, Vincent settles genuflect, knees spreading for balance. He did not answer her prompt for a promise with anything more than a slow blink and a canted smirk, but he is gentle, precise, working through tangles with clawed and human fingertips, weight lifted up off of her scalp as not to pull.
It’s meditative. Rhythmic.
Aerith has quite a lot of hair. He takes his time with it, eventually smoothing to long strokes of the brush, gathering it up into the clasp of his right hand at the base of her neck.
There, then, a low hum exhaled, thoughtful, at this impasse.
“...pardon,” he murmurs, flowing forward, chest pressed to her back as he releases her hair. His chin hovers just over her shoulder as he winds his arms around, reaching out and down to one of the hems of his cloak. Within her sight, within proximity, he protracts his left thumb-claw, leveraging it like a knife against obdurate fabric.
The cloak is voluminous enough. A strip pared away won’t rob her of warmth or of coverage.
“If you would prefer pink...”
Well, he can always remove the ribbon she so kindly secured to his braid, but he is in no particular hurry to move, looking down with a vague flicker of humor.
Moonlight is simply a reflection of the sun, after all.
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