Author's Note: Disclaimer found below.

This is the last actual chapter, but there's a side-story bonus chapter I hope to complete soon (which only marginally features the boys).

Thank you for the reviews, everyone!

Here With Me

"Got him?"

"Got him. You push, I'll pull."

"Say when."

"Now."

Kadaj pushed against Loz's shoulder as forcefully, but gently as he could. With his brother's arm over his shoulders, Yazoo pulled, gradually dragging Loz's weight onto himself.

Kadaj's knee slipped on the vinyl seat in the truck cab - it was slick with blood. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, braced his other foot, and kept pushing.

Yazoo stumbled as Loz finally slipped out of the seat, and managed to carry him a few feet away to the grass. Real grass that had grown by itself, uncultivated and patchy and uneven.

And it held no fascination for any of them.

"His back," Kadaj exclaimed, crawling out of the cab with the medical kit from the glove compartment in hand. "Yazoo, one of those goes all the way through..."

"That... explains... all the... blood, then," Yazoo grunted, kneeling as slowly as he could and letting Loz down onto the grass. He turned Loz onto his back as Kadaj approached. "Which is it?" He asked, trying to determine what were wounds and what were simply pooled blood on Loz's body. He held his hand out for the medical kit and snapped it open without looking at it.

Kadaj reached as though to touch Loz, but pulled his hand back, hesitant. "This one, I think."

Yazoo nodded, finally looking down as he sifted through the kit. He withdrew a small, squat bottle, which he handed to Kadaj. "Pour that on it..."

Kadaj broke the seal and did so, the bitter smell of Potion joining the reek of blood. The liquid glowed and fizzed a little where it contacted his brother, and the blood stopped welling up quite so quickly, but the wound didn't close.

An odd choking sound across from him caught his attention, and he looked up at Yazoo. His brother's head was bowed as he sifted through the medical kit, his movements increasing in pace until he finally flung the tin box away, spilling its contents, never raising his head. "Nothing useful," he muttered, in a strained tone of voice unlike anything Kadaj had ever heard from him before.

Neither spoke for a moment. "There's nothing else we can do, is there?" Kadaj finally murmured.

They were out, and the world was wide and empty and cold and wrong, and it suddenly struck him that finding Mother was going to be difficult.

They sat still for a little while. Yazoo kept his head down, his face hidden by his hair, his hands clenched tightly in the grass at his sides, silent but for his unsteady breath. Kadaj found that he didn't want to look at Yazoo, and tried to find something else to look at instead.

After a moment, he found that he couldn't look at Loz, either. There was too much contrast - the blood was too red and his skin was too pale, and he was far more still than he ever should be, and it was just... wrong.

He looked away, at the trees around them. There was so much space between them, and it didn't seem to end... And looking up was no good, either; beyond the sheltering tree branches, there was nothing but weirdly striated pink and blue, with a dull red glow off to one edge. It took him a little to realize that the pink streaks were clouds. The fading glow was the Meteor as this part of the Planet turned away from it for the day.

There was something else, too - a darker haze that was at an odd angle compared to the sweeping clouds. He focused on it, confused.

And then his eyes widened. "Yazoo!" He rose up to his knees, reaching across Loz to push at Yazoo's shoulder. "Yazoo, there's smoke!"

Yazoo gave a start, then raised his head and looked in the direction that Kadaj was pointing. His eyes were reddened and his face was wet; Kadaj tried not to notice.

There was no time to waste. Yazoo stood so swiftly that Kadaj startled, yanking his hand back. His older brother wasn't even looking - he was unbinding his left arm, flexing his fingers. The poison was gone, the bleeding stopped - but even if it started again, he'd need the mobility.

Kadaj watched his brother cast about the clearing for a moment, then walk quickly to one of the taller trees, ascending in a series of jumps. "What is it?" Kadaj called, settling back to sit next to Loz again.

Yazoo gripped the upper limbs of the tree tightly, unable to speak for a few moments. It wasn't the way the tree swayed in the breeze, nor his height from the ground - it was the way that the sky that arched over the forest didn't end. He closed his eyes, swallowed, and opened them again, becoming still as steel as the wind took his tears.

"A village." He fell silent as a gust of wind swayed the treetops, and he hung on and swayed with them. "Two hills over." He glanced at the brightening sky, then at the sun that warmed his back. "West."

Kadaj watched, wondering at the way that Yazoo turned to gold once he'd risen above the shadows of the valley. He'd no more than deciphered the effect of what must be the rising sun than his brother was descending again.

"I'll go," Yazoo said, drawing the remaining gunblade - Loz must've holstered it for him - and checking it. Two shots left, and nothing to reload with. He scowled and snapped it shut again.

The thought of effectively being alone made Kadaj shiver, but there was nothing else to be done, so far as he could tell. It was logical; Yazoo was more adept at dealing with humans. "Quickly," he muttered, unable to look at his brother.

Yazoo paused, then approached and bent, lifting Kadaj's chin with one hand - the other on his shoulder - and touched their foreheads together. "Keep him safe," he murmured.

They'd woken up. That was what was important. His brothers were free, and they were all right, and they were as safe as he could make them. It was okay to rest now, right?

It had better be. He couldn't keep his head up any more. Too tired. He wasn't even sure how far they'd come, or if he'd remembered to change direction at all. He couldn't even remember half of the driving - it had been dark, and there had been nothing to the world but the small bright patch in front of the truck, and the vague impression of vastness outside the cab that he couldn't think about.

Loz remembered smelling smoke - that would mean human habitation - and turning into the woods. The woods were better. The trees helped to hide how big the world was.

Mother was out here somewhere, and she needed them. They had to find her.

Only no matter how much he wanted to... to get up, to just open his eyes, anything... he couldn't. He wasn't really asleep, but he wasn't awake, either - and there was nothing he could do about it.

So he waited, still and resting, surrounded by comfortable darkness.

Eventually, it started to worry him, that there was so much nothing. It wouldn't be so bad if his brothers were there with him, but they weren't.

He began to hate it.

It wasn't right. He had to get up. He had to move. He had to know if his brothers were still all right.

He tried as hard as he could, willing himself to wake.

Nothing.

For a little while, he screamed in frustration, trying blindly to reach out, calling for his brothers with every bit of strength he had.

He was rewarded with a strange feeling - a soft tension that seemed... green, somehow, like the dreams they had together. But it faded away almost as quickly as he sensed it.

There was nothing but darkness to know that Loz cried.

Kadaj fidgeted, one arm around his knees as he sat next to Loz. With his other hand, he pulled grass from the ground, one blade at a time.

His back began to feel warm, and finally, he turned and looked behind him. Through the trees, there was a light so bright that he couldn't look at it directly for very long. When he turned away again, he had to blink; the world was dimmed but for a residual bright disc - an afterimage.

So that was the sun. Big deal.

He pulled at the grass some more, then tore up several handfulls, then stood quickly and paced back and forth for a bit. "You're a mess, Loz," he sighed, walking over to take some of the half-unrolled gauze from the spilled medical kit. "You should mind yourself better."

He took the bandages over to the stream and dunked them, wringing them out on the way back. "I can't always be around to clean you up, you know." Scowling, he knelt next to his brother again, and quietly set to cleaning the blood away.

Loz made no response, barely breathing.

The village was small but tidy, the packed-earth streets well-kept. There was even an inn - the largest building in the town. The smoke they'd seen had come from its tall chimney.

Yazoo lurked at the edge of the village, peering around a tree. For as early in the day as it was, there were a lot of people out and about already.

Skirting the area, he finally saw why - vehicles from the labs dotted the central square. So this was where they'd fled.

His hand tightened on the gunblade. So the people would be on alert; that wasn't such a problem. There'd be a better chance of finding Potions or something he could cast Cure with this way.

Curled in on himself and whimpering, Loz tried to remember what it had been like when he'd been alone before. Long ago, before he'd been introduced to Yazoo.

...It hadn't been so bad then. He hadn't known what being alone was before he'd met Yazoo.

He'd never felt so isolated in his life. Even when separated for punishment, it had never felt like this.

And then he caught it: a sense of... something. Stillness. Bright. He could smell flowers.

The scent was strong. He wrinkled his nose, sitting up and blinking.

He was sitting in a field of flowers that stretched as far as he could see, with nothing at all above - no sun, no sky, no ceiling.

Loz lay down again, curling on his side with his hands over his head this time. He shut his eyes tightly and could do little but tremble. This was worse than the nothing - this was something, and he didn't know how he'd gotten here, or how to leave, and his brothers weren't here, and he didn't like it at all. And the smell wouldn't go away.

"Poor thing."

His eyes snapped open, but otherwise, Loz did not move.

"You're kidding, right?"

The first voice had been a woman's; the second a man's. He listened intently.

"Not at all, and you know it."

The man's voice sighed. "You're going to insist on watching all of them, aren't you?"

"Every single one," the woman responded. "He's gathering them all together, and they're going because they're pieces of him, but..."

"But they have their own selves too," the man finished. "I know..."

"P-please," Loz managed to whisper - but he couldn't find any further words. He couldn't think of a time when he'd been so... weak. Afraid.

The voices fell silent, but he lay among the bright flowers for what felt like a long time.

The sun climbed higher, and Kadaj set to pacing again. He'd tried everything he could think of - cleaning Loz, talking to him, even slapping him once, but there was no response. His breath was shallow and seemed to be becoming moreso.

Fists clenched in frustration, Kadaj fell next to his brother, and there was an unfamiliar edge to his voice. "Loz? Come on. We need you."

Nothing.

"Loz, get up."

Nothing.

"LOZ!"

He stood again, stomping in aimless circles, waving his fists as though looking for something to strike. This was wrong, and it needed to be fixed now, and where the hell was Yazoo?

There was a splash, and Kadaj realized that he'd wandered into the pool of water, and he didn't care. He waded in, kicking and beating at the waist-deep water, and finally screaming.

"MOTHER! I WANT HIM BACK!" His eyes were stinging, and his face felt hot, and it didn't matter. "MAKE HIM COME BACK! MOTHER! PLEASE!"

He staggered out and fell, pounding at the ground. "Please," he begged, his voice hoarse.

There was no answer.

When Yazoo stumbled into the clearing again, Kadaj was lying next to Loz, wide awake and hugging himself tightly. He focused on Yazoo, sitting up at once.

Kadaj opened his mouth and found that he couldn't even ask. Yazoo was limping, his lip was split and bleeding, and his gunblade was gone.

But as he approached, his gaze never strayed from Loz. He reached out, falling to his knees with a pained grunt, his hand bursting into green flame as he lay it on his brother's chest.

And then yanked it away again, mouth opening slightly, eyes wider than they should be for as neutral as he usually kept his face.

Kneeling opposite Yazoo, Kadaj's hopeful expression fell away. It felt like everything was falling, somehow; he sat back a little, realizing distantly that he was shaking.

Yazoo was breathing quickly, unzipping and reaching into his coat. He pulled out a small metal case, battered and still so slick with blood that it nearly slipped from his hands. He fumbled with it for a moment - he was shaking worse than Kadaj was.

Kadaj reached out and snatched the case from him, recognizing it - a SOLDIER-issue Phoenix Down case. He was able to pry it open, one lonely, broken feather drifting out to land on Loz.

Both held their breath.

Kadaj cried out in triumph when it started - golden licks of fire spread from the feather and slowly covered Loz's body. A Phoenix Down was only good so long as some warmth remained in a corpse; it needed those embers of life to fan back into flame.

Yazoo reached across Loz and lay a hand on his younger brother's shoulder, and they waited. It took long enough that Yazoo remembered to heal himself, and he cast a Cure on Kadaj as well.

Loz's breathing evened, then deepened. The wounds burned shut.

When Loz opened his eyes, Yazoo and Kadaj were both hovering over him, smiling.

And he smiled back, because the world hadn't changed at all.

Current Music: Here With Me by Dido

Disclaimer: Final Fantasy VII, its story, and characters are the property, copyright and trademark of Square Electronic Arts L.L.C., and no ownership or claim on said property, copyright or trademark is made or implied by their use in the work(s) of fan fiction presented here. This fan fiction constitutes a personal comment on the aforesaid properties pursuant to doctrines of fair use and fair comment. This fan fiction is non-commercial, not for sale or profit, and may not be sold or reproduced for commercial purposes.