sing hallelujah

I really love seeing Aerith in new outfits.  She wears pink for Zack, but it’s not the only thing she can pull off with flair!

“By who?”

The answer’s obvious.  ‘You’.  It’s not so obvious why she even has to ask until that lilt in her voice registers.  A thought wells up in his heart, the hope of acceptance still, and he starts to turn his head even as he thinks that much forgiveness couldn’t be possible.

All he sees is the trees of the forest, their ethereal light wrapped by darkness.  After being held seconds too long, a shaky breath passes his lips.  ‘Knew it couldn’t be true.’

‘But isn’t that how she was?’

His eyes are stinging—must be the wind—and he shakes his head with a slow blink before focusing again on the road ahead of him.  He’s got a job to do.  He’s got to focus.  While there’s still time for him to act…

All he can hope is that when his time runs out (getting shorter and shorter each day) and they really meet again, she still has that smile in her voice.

Tifa slices through the apple deftly, checking that each piece is small enough to be eaten without any biting or chewing. It’ll be a sad, sad thing if Cloud chokes to death after surviving everything else life has thrown at him. The thought brings a tremulous smile to her lips before she forces a more confident one to face him with. “Ready for lunch, Cloud?”

“…Aa…”

She pretends it’s an answer. “Sorry it’s apples again. But you like those, right?”

He stretches his head and it flops down without any coordination. ‘Better than nothing,’ she imagines he’s saying. He probably would put on a brave face if he could.

No. If he could, he’d refuse to let Tifa even see him like this, she’s sure. He’s always hated looking weak—but now…

(Source: fanfiction.net)

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He’s twenty-one and a psychotic child.  His hands are as empty as the pit they stand in (the same thing missing from both, temple of black materia), and the only way he knows to fill their void is by curling shaking fingers into fists.

Not your fault, she says.  Not your fault but he just gave Sephiroth his goddamn victory, handed over the materia like it was nothing, how is that not his fault?  She should be angry with him—she should scream at him—he screams at himself—there aren’t words for this hate boiling in him, just vocal cords shredding themselves—

She’s twenty-two and always has this aura of childlike innocence, purity, fragility.  She takes the punches on shielding arms that threaten to break, backs away but doesn’t stop him, and that just makes him angrier because she has always been merciful until now, when he needs mercy most.  He doesn’t want to hurt her, doesn’t want—

But he’s cracking like eggshell and suffering for it, and he has to hurt something, and something needs to hurt him shatter him back so the pain’ll be over—and she won’t retaliate, even when the hits crash down on her like hail in a storm—even though he’s crying out for righteous vengeance—

As it turns out (as it always turns out), the ending socks him from behind, hard.  Not hard enough.

Underneath the mako haze, he recognized the city in the distance.  It took him the long crawl of a half-hour to finally place in the fog of memory, but he’d lived there two years.  The sun crawled with the time and reflected sharply off the plate, nearly blinding him, and he remembered—the glint of infantry helmets, the sheen of their rifles that killed—and his breath hitched in his throat as sweat dripped off his forehead.  Midgar was Shinra.  Shinra was evil, Shinra was death, don’t go to Midgar, run run run.

…He was too tired.  Too tired to even think of heading to Kalm instead.  Why had Zack brought them both here?

Legacy.  Dreams, honor.  Hero.  …Heroes…saved people.  Was he supposed to save someone?

You let Zack die, didn’t move a muscle, can’t save anyone and he stumbled to a halt at the accusatory thoughts, stomach and throat convulsing. 

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“Your ribbon—”  Still in her hair, pink and soft and careworn, at odds with the shimmering dress that is too red, too dark, too new for it.

“Oh, this old thing?” she says, fingering it.

“Yeah,” and then, “Not gonna take it off?”  She makes no move to, and she said ‘old’, so he guesses: “Sentimental value?”

“It doesn’t mean much,” she tells him, “It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

But after Mideel, after his memories have been scattered and gathered up again, he won’t ever remember she said so, because he never saw a day she didn’t wear it.

Zack hates arguing with either Cloud or Aerith, because it just doesn’t work.  They’re both bullheaded people, even if it’s in different ways.

Cloud gets mad fast, furious, yells and shouts and storms off if it’s bad enough—or if he’s ashamed (which is often), quiets down and battens the hatches.  It’s nearly as predictable as clockwork, and irritating because Zack can forecast Cloud’s storminess better than the actual weather, but he still has to wait it out.  “You wouldn’t get it,” his friend mumbled through a split lip once.  “Everyone’s always liked you.”  And it’s true—Zack’s never been on the outside looking in—except when it comes to Cloud himself, who’s poor at separating who’s trying to help him from who’s already hurt him.

Zack rarely argues with Aerith, because they agree on most things and tend to skirt the ones they don’t.  But when the conversation does heat up, Aerith takes arguments like any other kind of talk—like she’s dancing, matching her steps to her partner’s, unafraid.  She’s slow to anger, but for such a gentle girl, she’s got a knack for picking out weak spots and hitting hard, and she doesn’t care so much if you’re friend or foe as if you’re right or wrong.  The hardest part of fighting with her is that two minutes after you give in, she gets you laughing again, which makes it tempting to forget how stubborn she is until the next argument.  He’s not sure he’s ever gotten her to change her mind after their voices have been raised.

With her the bumps are hard to predict, and a surprise when they’re hit.  He mentioned Hojo once and how he’s kind of creepy but apparently knows what he’s doing, and Aerith came very close to a snarl, which from her was like seeing a caterpillar spin itself a cocoon and emerge a goddamn bat.  And he doesn’t remember what she said when he asked what was wrong, but he does remember the tone in her airy voice that sounded suspiciously like Cloud’s “You wouldn’t get it”.  He won’t get it unless she tells him, but he’s always known she’s different and he’s tempted to think she’s right, he wouldn’t get it.

Still frustrating.  Sometimes he thinks he needs to introduce them just to see them argue and figure out who out-stubborns the other—but then he’d be doomed if they ever teamed up against him.

“Just wait. I have a cute friend I want to bring,” she told the guard with a giggle, curling a ringlet of brown hair round her finger flirtatiously.

If the smirk on the man’s face was any indication, Corneo’s mansion would be easy to sneak into, just so long as Cloud actually agreed to her plan. When she skipped back to him, the mercenary was staring, lips slightly parted in shock before he managed to splutter: “Aerith! I can’t…”

For all his cool attitude, Cloud sure got flustered easily. His cheeks were even reddening. She hadn’t lied to the guard about having a cute friend to bring—though ‘beautiful’ fit, too.

(Source: fanfiction.net)

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pianoxlullaby:

I wonder if people really do understand the point of it? I do feel a huge sense of Clerith hints are played out, completely. Here’s my take on it:

I agreed with your conclusion about the theme at the end, but along the way… the points about Tifa seem to completely miss an understanding of not just her, but how Cloud reacts to her and the movie’s chronology.

Let’s start with where Final Fantasy VII ended off.

Yes.  At the moment after VII ended off, when Cloud tells Tifa with a smile that he thinks he’ll be successful now where he failed before because he has her, and she tells him he’s always had her and he smiles again as he clarifies that what he means “is a little different”—this after they’ve had that moment under the Highwind that the others tease about, no matter what version played.  And from a writer/reader’s perspective, after Advent Children has already made a huge deal about Cloud’s smile; it’s not something that’s given lightly.  Cloud, by his own admission, relies at least partly on Tifa’s support.

Then Cloud smiles again after Tifa corrects him about Denzel.  He’s glad that she says the kid wasn’t led to just him, but to both of them, their house.  He’s never fit in easily before and he’s nervous about fitting in now, treating it seriously when Marlene wants to include him in her view of the family.  That nervousness extends to Tifa as well, since she’s also a member of the family he wants to be part of, probably the most important member for him to be accepted by.  Was Tifa scolding him?  A bit.  But saying that’s a knock against Cloud/Tifa as a functional relationship while promoting Cloud/Aerith is ignoring how Aerith would scold him when he was rude/pessimistic/just off in the game.  Cloud has his own lectures to AVALANCHE members on occasion in the game himself.  Scolding, arguing, isn’t on its own a bad thing for a relationship.  It shows that there is caring about what the other person does, and Tifa should care: he’s going to the church alone, a place associated with Aerith, when he was noticeably depressed after doing a delivery for her.  It’s the coping method he knows best.  Not the healthiest one.

“Which is it? A memory or us?” To refer to a cherished individual as a mere memory is just wretched in my honest opinion. Why is he not allowed to continue to love his lost mage and still be a part of their family? That’s almost like marrying a widow (if you indeed believe Cloud and Aerith had a romantic relationship) and then telling him to completely forget about his first wife, whom he would STILL be with had they not died. It’s just terrible.

This assumes the “memory” is Aerith herself.  How could Tifa be treating Aerith as a “mere memory” when she in fact addresses Aerith herself in the movie, sensing her presence?  She’s known that Aerith was there all along.

The memory is not Aerith.  It’s the guilt Cloud feels for not saving her.  Tifa never tells Cloud to let her go—when she finds out he’s been going to the church, she tells him, not that he shouldn’t go, but that she wants to come too.  She’s concerned about that guilt consuming him if he’s alone, which is why she gets upset when he rejects her offer of company to drink by himself; she feels like she’s getting shut out and she’s already nearly lost Cloud so many times throughout their history.  She wants to keep Aerith with her, as evidenced by the ribbon.  When she says “Is it a memory or us?” she’s not telling him to forget about Aerith, she’s telling him that he’s being so consumed by guilty memories that he’s hurting his family in the present.  And it’s not an ultimatum: his actions have already proven that if he sticks to the guilt, he will lose his family—because he already had felt so guilty and useless that he left to avoid hurting them further (ironically and sadly, doing just that).

Throughout the movie, Tifa is very forceful on Cloud to get better, whereas Aerith merely encourages him to realize that life goes on, she is still by his side, and he isn’t at fault for anything that happened.

It’s important to note that Tifa and Aerith are speaking to Cloud at two different points: Tifa’s “forceful” speaking is while he’s inactive, when children have been kidnapped, while Aerith’s first appearance is when he’s on his way to check things out, taking a more active role.  Aerith doesn’t have to force Cloud on anything, action-wise.  Which brings me to the next point…

Soon, he builds up the courage to fight. You know why? Because of Aerith’s words of encouragement and even her slight teasing of his self-blame.

No.  Aerith’s first appearance is when he’s on the road to the remnant’s base: meaning, he’s already taken an active role in what’s going on.  The movie is not entirely chronological, as we later see a flashback to that scene when Tifa shouted at him while he was inactive.

If you put the scenes in chronological order, Cloud is inactive until Tifa shouts at him (and Reno tells him the base is his to go to), then becomes active by going out to find the children.  Aerith encourages him and makes him think about who is actually holding him accountable for “sins” (himself), but she is not the turning point in him deciding to do something.  If any single person is behind Cloud’s change, it’s Tifa.  Some of her outburst really is inappropriate (yes, he DOES have it that damn hard), but that’s always been part of her character when she’s pushed to a stressful breaking point, and she has two children kidnapped, and Cloud giving up on himself at a time when “giving up” means dying.  None of the VII characters have ever been perfect and it’s very understandable for her to be breaking down.

But Cloud’s turnaround doesn’t rely solely on one person.  Tifa makes Cloud realize that his preoccupation with guilt is hurting his family.  Aerith makes him realize that he is the one blaming himself, no one else.  Marlene reinforces the point that his family has been hurt by his preoccupation with guilt, and Vincent makes him realize that if he doesn’t try now, even though it means risking another failure, he will never feel free of that guilt.  They are all important in this.

Advent Children is a movie about forgiveness, moving on, life after death, and knowing that just because we have lost someone very dear, they continue to live on within our hearts. The ones we love will never die so long as we hold them close to our hearts. That is what Advent Children is about. IMHO, it’s telling us the Aerith and Cloud can NEVER be separated. She continues to live on in his heart, in his very soul. They share the same Promised Land, the same world.

I agree with all of this.  It’s just that none of it means Cloud and Tifa could not work things out between them or shouldn’t try.  (Or would give up on each other.  After all, even as Cloud keeps Aerith in his heart, Tifa is part of his Promised Land.)  They forgive each other for their mistakes and push each other to move on; Cloud does this for Tifa in Case of Tifa, telling her that she’s not one to be troubled by her thoughts and if she forgets that (becoming troubled by her own feelings of guilt), he’ll remind her.  Cloud and Tifa have a relationship that’s been rocky so far, but Advent Children isn’t about being perfect.  It’s pretty much about the opposite: being human, having failures, and persevering past those to triumph.

By the way, I prefer Cloud/Aerith.  I like shipping both pairings post-game.  It’s just that I think if she’d lived and they became the sole couple, they would have their own issues.  (Though at least he wouldn’t feel quite so guilty if she were alive…)

xionthepuppet:

full size ==> 

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/38691263/ifidieyoungwip.png

;n;

I know I’m on hiatus, but I’m still… arting. 

I just.

This was just supposed to be a silly sketch and then it turned into some really heavy feels.

for just sketching, this is so lovely.