as the first leaf that fell

A/N: This is the second of my two fills for the 2019 ffvii fanworks exchange; technically it's a continuation of the first chapter of my AU series 'not one before another' but should stand alone.

The scenario is that Ifalna befriended young Sephiroth and brought him in on the escape attempt, so they made it out of Midgar alive. And then split the party.

A frog crouched on a lily-pad at the edge of a shady pool, waiting patiently for one of the buzzing gnats skimming above the water to come within reach of its tongue. No great hungry Kimara bugs or Frogs or anything large enough to be a threat to the frog on the lily had appeared since dawn, and the water was dark and clear.

An abrupt crashing through the bracken shattered the peace of the morning, ferns and dry branches smashed aside by the passage of some large, hurried animal, and the frog went still, hoping to be taken for a smooth wet stone.

The creature broke out of the tall grasses edging the pond, and proved to be a human child.

She seemed between four and six years old, in stained pink running pants and a pale blue top that might have started life as the upper half of a set of scrubs, but had since been awkwardly hemmed and had a decorative white ribbon sewn around the collar. The sole of her right shoe was visibly on the brink of parting company with the upper, and the foot that showed through the gap was sockless and dirt-stained.

She flung herself down beside the little pond, putting herself nose to nose with the petrified frog.

After several seconds of not being eaten, it decided the benefits of motion outweighed the risks, and flung itself into the drink with a loud 'plop!'

The child laughed, scrambled to her feet, and took off running around the edge of the pond, squelching, toward the large stone that rose at one end.

"Roth, come see this!"

Through the cane-brake there followed, in rough brownish clothes somewhat better kept than hers, a boy or young man. He was at one of those ambiguous stages of development, where he might be thirteen with strong features and tall for his age, or twenty with delicate ones and undersized, though his proportions argued for youth and height, as did a certain quality of care to the way he moved through space—as though not yet quite comfortable with the way he occupied it.

He had green eyes a different shade from the girl's, and hair a similar brown. His was cut much shorter, cropped close at the back of the neck, and the longest part of it was the bangs, which were as fluffy as hers, parted naturally in the middle, and fell to his jaw. "Rith, slow down," he hissed.

She spun to walk backward, which did mean slowing down, but her smile was impish and she said, "What for?"

"Because we don't know this place yet, and I can't watch every direction for danger and keep up with you at the same time if you keep dashing ahead like this."

"Could so."

The boy had caught up to his sister now and stepped in close, so that his head was partially above hers. "Not without being suspicious," he whispered fiercely, with great intimation of hidden meaning.

Rith heaved a martyred sigh, and scrambled up onto the large rock, making her taller than the worrywart. "Fine. I'll be more of a slowpoke. Now come look at the pretty lilies they've got here!"

"I climbed to the top of Uncle's house and put a pumpkin on his chimney!" bragged the small, wild-haired child who was, to Sephiroth's despair, still better groomed than his own charge. It was his parents having an actual house and more than one complete set of clothing to dress him in, he supposed. "Bet you can't!"

"Could so!" Aerith stretched her arms as wide as they would go. "I can climb anything! I climbed a tree so big around Roth's arms didn't go halfway, and there weren't even any branches. Kettle houses are easy. There's edges."

"Prove it, then!"

"Nuh-uh." Aerith kicked a pebble. "You're fam'ly, you can put squashes on people's houses without getting in trouble. I gotta be good, or Roth'll get worried and your mom won't give me pie anymore."

"…okay," Zack fair admitted after a visible struggle. "You have to climb something though, or admit I'm the best!"

Sephiroth ran a hand through his hair as the children argued about what Aerith had to climb, and worried about dye. He'd used almost the last of the original supply touching up his roots yesterday. Gongaga was a hotbed of gossip; even if he could find more brown dye here he'd wind up cemented in local memory as the boy whose hair wasn't really brown.

He supposed he could start shaving his head. Blacking his eyebrows didn't need the same level of product quality as recoloring his hair. He could use campfire soot, in a pinch. But a bald teenager would stand out, which was what he wanted to avoid, and matching with Aerith smoothed over so many awkward questions.

Maybe if he bought black dye and recolored both their hair, in the next town they reached? That might help break their trail.

They'd stayed five weeks over their three-month deadline, and it was time to face the truth: if Ifalna were going to make the rendezvous, she would be here by now.

"You'll see," Zack enthused, "the Midsummer festival is the best! There's cinnamon cake and spooky masks and the Ghost Parade!"

Sephiroth saw Aerith open her mouth to say something about ghosts, then swallow it back. Good girl. He was willing to trust the boy not to tell Shinra about them, or use Aerith's full name, not that he'd had much choice in either case, but permanently resisting the urge to gossip about a girl who could hear the voices of the dead would be harder.

He frowned at Zack. "You haven't forgotten, have you?" he asked. "We're leaving soon. Leaving Gongaga, I mean." They wouldn't be here at Midsummer. They shouldn't be here next week.

Both children grimaced, briefly, at the reminder. No, they'd both known. They'd just been ignoring it.

"Man, I wish I could," groaned Zack, leaning back into the embrace of his favorite climbing tree. "Leave Gongaga. It sucks being cooped up in a small town like this. I wanna get out and see the world already!"

"We could take you with us," offered Aerith, and Zack sat up, beaming, exclaimed,

"Really?" in a way that dispelled any doubt that he had been maneuvering for just such an invitation.

The little minx bounced up onto her toes, her smile conspiratorial. "Why not? Right, Roth?"

"No, Aerith," Sephiroth said. He hated telling her no, but he had gotten better at it since they left the labs. Sometimes no wasn't about control and taking away opportunity, sometimes it was keeping someone safe. "We cannot kidnap everyone you happen to like."

Naturally, she was frowning. "But he wants to go. And you like him, too!"

"Yes, Zack is very nice," Sephiroth temporized. He liked the boy for being Aerith's friend, if nothing else. He wasn't sure how to explain to her that not everyone was like them; that not everyone who felt boxed in needed rescue or escape.

What did he know? Maybe they were. Maybe under all Zack's laughter was hiding the truth that he went home every night to some horror. Maybe the weapon-seller uncle deserved much worse than a pumpkin on his chimney. He knew nothing. It didn't matter. "But we're leaving to avoid attention. Kidnapping a child is one of the stupidest things a pair of fugitives could possibly do."

"It's not kidnapping if I want to come! I'll have run away."

"Which you won't be able to explain until you are found, so the spike in pursuit and attention your disappearance would draw to us would be the same."

"I could leave a note!"

"You aren't literate."

"Your brother's mean," Zack told Aerith, who had clamped both hands over her mouth to hold in her giggles.

Preserve him from overconfident five-year-olds.

"Yes, alright, I'm a dastardly villain, but I refuse to be implicated in a kidnapping. I made Aerith's mother a promise," he told Zack. "To keep her safe. Taking you with us would put her in danger."

Zack sagged. "But…I just wanna come. It's not fair if you're leaving and I hafta stay here."

Sephiroth sighed. "Don't you have any friends here in Gongaga?" He should probably know the answer to that, but keeping a low profile meant avoiding unnecessary contact. Zack was just too persistent to avoid.

"Sure, lots. But they're all older than me, or babies, and nobody's as fun as Rith."

"That's cuz I'm the best!"

To keep Aerith smiling, it almost seemed worthwhile. The longer she stayed in the Tower the more solemn she had grown, as she began to understand that they were closed in a trap, and her mother did not have the power to protect her. Watching her brighten and spread under the sunlight beyond Midgar even in her mother's absence had been almost better than being free of Hojo himself.

But they were going to meet Ifalna again. She would make the second rendezvous, in Mideel. She must have evaded pursuit. And when they met again, Sephiroth was going to be able to say he'd done everything he could.

"Please can he come?" Aerith pouted. "It doesn't have to be for long! Just so he can have an adventure! I never had a friend before, come on."

Sephiroth supposed he didn't count. "No," he said, but he could already hear his voice had lost conviction.

"Please?"

"What were you thinking?" he hissed, almost before the door to their apartment was shut. It would be one thing if she'd been helping someone, putting herself a little bit in the way of danger out of generosity of spirit the way she did, occasionally; he always told her not to but he'd never felt angry about it. "Political graffiti? Really?"

The shipping towns on the western Corel coast were good places for staying out of sight; lodgings were cheap and people were forever coming and going. He'd been glad they'd stayed here long enough for her to make a whole group of friends, but what friends!

Unemployed youth, from the dying inland mining industry and the fishing fleets that were losing out to the great mako-powered trawlers so badly they rarely took on new hands anymore. Running up and down the dusty streets fomenting trouble while he was out at sea, ignorant.

Except that he wasn't blind, and Aerith's pretty, pretty flowers and vines, that curled around anti-Shinra messages and scrawled condemnations from the dead as if to disguise them as mere art, were signed Faremis.

She stood in the middle of their tiny kitchen, sunlight slanting in broken by the potted herbs on the windowsill, small before him even now that she was probably nearly done growing; entirely undaunted. She'd denied nothing.

Sephiroth scrubbed his right hand over his mouth, calluses from hauling rope and net feeling thicker than usual against his lips. "You can't do this. Practically shouting out your location to your enemies. As if you're taunting them."

Ifalna had told him, when he was ten, that Hojo claimed to have been watching Gast for a year before he came to kill him. They could be anywhere. The next-door neighbor with the purple cloak might be an undercover Turk.

Aerith stuck out her chin "Let 'em try to catch me."

"Your mother did not sacrifice herself to cover our escape for you to throw it away. This is not a game."

He'd seized her by the shoulders at some point as that fury bubbled out of him, without fully intending it, and he shook her, slightly, holding her eyes from such a brief distance it felt intimate as a stab wound, as though this would somehow reach her better than words alone. She stared back, all sea-deep defiance.

He'd thought she was a headstrong child. That had nothing on her as a teenager.

"I know it's not!" She wrenched herself away, and he let her go, to stomp out of the dappled light the few steps to the far wall, where her reflection shone back distorted from the copper pan on its hook. "I know how serious it is. But we've been running my entire life." She made a fist, and it was a good fist, the kind that would hurt other people more than her if she hit, because he'd always made sure to teach her that kind of thing and she'd never hesitated to learn. "For once, can't we stand our ground?" Tears stood out in her eyes, as she turned back to him. "Are you just a coward, Sephiroth?"

They almost never used his full name. Even less often than hers. It was too distinctive, it could leave a trail. It made his lungs lock with imaginary Ice, almost as badly as the accusation. The walls in their lodgings were thin. "I promised Ifalna," he began.

"I am not a little girl anymore!" It clearly took everything she had not to punch the wall, or stomp her foot, or storm away into the bedroom to hurl herself onto her narrow bed, since he was blocking the apartment door. "I want to fight! It's my decision, you can't make it for me."

She was sixteen; she was a grown woman by law and custom; she was a child. She wasn't his child, wasn't even really his sister, and yet.

"I just," he began, not knowing what he was going to say and almost grateful to be interrupted.

"Roth," Aerith said, putting fury to one side. "What if Mom is still alive? What if they've had her all this time? What if she's waiting for us? To come back for her?"

"She wouldn't be," he said without thinking, and watched Aerith's face twist. "Sunflower. Listen. The thing she wanted most in the world was to get you away from there. She made herself very clear. The last thing she would want is for us to go back to help her, even if she was there."

She might be. He knew she might be. Ever since she'd missed the meeting at Mideel by a year, he'd half hoped and half feared that she'd been dragged back by Hojo. Because the only other option was that she had died, and he didn't know if that was worse or better.

"But I'm not a child anymore," Aerith repeated. "It's not the same."

Doubt dragged at his chest. She was still so young, and so reckless, and perhaps he should have tried harder to teach her fear and not just caution. "What is it you want me to agree to?"

"I'm not asking." She turned her back again, sharp, composed. Seemed to search for meaning in the dent in the copper pan, that stretched the reflection of her left eye far larger than that of her tight, pursed mouth. "I've been in contact with Zack. Since you sent him home."

He knew that, of course. Who else would all those letters have been to? Obviously someone had had better luck than he ever had forcing literacy more advanced than the alphabet into that child's head. "Have you still not forgiven me for—"

"He went to Midgar," she interrupted, as if he hadn't spoken. "Two years ago. He's joined SOLDIER."

Sephiroth's vision went white.

He knew, logically, that the seven-year-old he had shipped back to his grieving parents dosed up on Dream Powder in the hands of a vacationing Gongagan neighbor, leaving Mideel at the same time as him and Aerith but on a different ship, would have grown into a young man of fifteen by now. Sixteen, almost. Logically. But that didn't stop his mind from throwing up an image of that same wild dark hair that had bobbed around him just above waist height for almost two years, locked into the sterile prison of his and Aerith's childhoods.

He had been a SOLDIER once. He had some idea of what it meant.

Shinra was still at war.

His voice ripped out of him, indifferent suddenly to thin plaster walls. "He did what?"

Aerith was just as indifferent to his reaction. "He's been looking around for me. I think Mom…maybe…really…." She struggled with her words, then brought her head up, all snapping confrontation. "I think she might be there! Zack says there are a lot of specimens Hojo keeps secret in the parts of the lab he hasn't had an excuse to look at! So I'm going!" She nodded. "I'm going. We're going to fight. Me and Zack, and everyone else we can find. Rescue whoever it is, hope it's Mom. It's past time to do something besides running."

"Aerith, you…" He shook his head slightly. "You don't have any…revolutionary contacts yet? You're looking for them?"

"I…have some names of people to talk to." How many he wondered from her delinquent friends, and how many from the dead, who might know more? She squinted. "Why?"

She had a weapon, of course—they traveled too much for it to be safe not to, but it wasn't a good one. He'd let her practice with the four Materia he'd hoarded gil to purchase over the years, and she had potential, but she wasn't ready for the front lines. He'd made sure to keep her from being fit for any kind of front lines. She only had one Limit Break. "You're so young," he said. "You're not ready."

"I don't care. I'm fed up with waiting, and running. How am I ever supposed to get strong if I never start?"

There was a flaw in that logic, but he couldn't find it. All his thoughts had gone slippery, he realized, and far away. He remembered sharply, suddenly, the moment outside their cell door when he'd first spoken to Ifalna, and she had told him Professor Gast had been murdered. Remembered the nasty jealousy in his chest that had snarled it was glad the people Gast had abandoned him for had to deal with Hojo, too.

"How are you planning to get to Midgar?" he asked distantly.

Aerith's look was suspicious. "Why?"

He wasn't really her brother. He knew that, even as the thought of her as his sister had grown over the years into fixed habit. He knew.

But after eleven years…did that really matter?

"I'm coming with you, of course."

"But you…" Aerith shook her head, trouble in her eyes and on her brow. "No. I wasn't trying to drag you into this."

He sighed. At least she hadn't gotten any angrier. "If you don't want me involved, then say so." Not that it would stop him from following along.

She shook her head harder. Her bangs and pony-tail both flew. "That's not it." She took a step toward him, gentle for the first time this evening. "Roth, you…you're so scared of going back. I didn't understand when I was little, but you're. So scared. As long as I've known you you've been…dyeing your hair, and hiding behind it. Wearing the ugliest clothes, doing the grossest jobs, keeping your head so low, and we've always been running. And.

"Look, without me you'll stand out less. You won't have to run so hard, or hide so well. You'll blend in with all the other men your age, without a girl my age along. He'll never find you."

She smiled a little, tremulously. Reached up to brush the curtain of his bangs aside, met his eyes less like a knife than a caress. "So you'll be okay. That's all I want from you, okay? Just take care of yourself."

"Aerith." Sephiroth felt strangely distant, suddenly. "You…think it was me I was scared for all this time?"

Because he was afraid, of course, he was. There was nothing like realizing by degrees how intolerable something had been, to make you unwilling to go back to tolerating it. But if he had been alone…

If he'd been alone, he would have run a lot less, these one-and-ten years. And killed a lot more.

But he'd had a child with him. He couldn't justify putting Aerith in danger.

The most important thing in the world had been keeping her safe.

His mission had been keeping her alive and free.

He folded his hand around the back of hers, frozen where it held aside his hair. Warm knuckles and the nails of her curled fingers bumped against his cheek. "If I can't stop you," he told her, the path ahead suddenly the simplest thing in the world, "then I have to follow you."

There was confusion written on her, and uncertainty, like this of all things she had never planned for. But there was nothing of no.