Hello, readers. It's Mengde again, and I own neither FFVII nor The Sandman. If you don't know what The Sandman is but clicked anyway, the short version is that it's a brilliant comic series written by Neil Gaiman about seven people (though they're not really people), called the Endless. They are Destiny, Death, Dream, Desire, Despair, Delirium, and Destruction, and each has its own function, performing that function and watching over all possible universes for all time - perfect crossover material. Dream is the titular main character, and as such this piece features him. Please enjoy.

The world of Gaea sleeps.

Its people rest (though whether they do so individually or with others is their own preference). The veil of night hangs over the city of Edge, and the people there sleep because it is time to. On the other side of the world, in Wutai, the people there are not asleep yet, as the sun hangs brightly in the sky. They rest as well, when they feel they need to.

It is night in Edge, though, and the people there do not merely rest. They dream.

Dreams

A Final Fantasy VII Fan Fiction

Written By Mengde

Denzel dreams.

There is something that is chasing him (though he is not sure why), but he is not concerned. His nonchalance springs from the fact that whatever is chasing him cannot catch him, not when he is on his motorcycle. The bike is sleek and black and beautiful, a mix of hard lines and curves and glistening steel, and Denzel straddles it and rides it through the night, the wind whipping through his hair and the road lying before him endlessly.

He is alive, on top of the world, the roaring beast beneath him carrying him faster than the wind, and there is nowhere that he would rather be. The one thing he does not do is look in his rear-view mirror. The thing that is chasing him may not be able to catch him, but he still does not want to look at it. If he looks in the mirror, it will get faster, and want to catch him more, and he does not like that idea.

So Denzel ignores the thing that is chasing him, and he rides his bike down an endless road through a fantastic world that has nothing in it. He never looks in the mirror. If he looks at the road and not at the mirror, sometimes he can pretend the thing that is chasing him isn't actually there, like how he and Marlene sometimes pretend that they are grown-ups and Tifa's house is actually theirs (though, just like he and Marlene always know that they are actually children, Denzel always knows that the thing is chasing him).

Pretending, he thinks as the road whips by, is fun. It is better than the alternative.

Rude dreams.

He is in a restaurant, and he is waiting for somebody. He is not sure who it is, but he is waiting for them, and he knows that the meeting is important.

Occasionally, Rude will check his watch. The hands move slowly, very slowly. Time passes, and the person he is waiting for still does not appear. There is nobody else in the restaurant, which is filled with tables with white cloth and empty wineglasses that sing softly in the dim light.

Rude is uninterested in why there is nobody else in the restaurant. He has done many things in his time as a Turk (most of which he is proud, he tells himself), some of which have been more interesting than what he is doing now, some less so.

Chelsea (who is not actually there) asks him why he continues to wait for someone that obviously will never come. Rude tells her that she wouldn't understand, that this is something he has to do. She left him to go back to AVALANCHE and be their spy, and now she has no chance of understanding. He wonders if she is the person he is waiting for. How else would she know that the person he is waiting for is not going to come?

At least Vladimir and Estragon knew that they were waiting for Godot, Rude reflects, even if he never came. He wonders about that thought – he has never seen that play.

In the real world, next to Rude, Reno shifts in his sleep, twitching, and mutters something to himself. He is also dreaming, but Reno does not dream in ways that words can tell.

Cid dreams.

There is a cigarette in his mouth, and he makes no effort to light it. He relaxes his lips and lets the thing drift away. It slowly begins to spiral through the air, which seems significant.

Shera (who is dead) watches the cigarette go. She asks, silently, why he's letting it go. Cid replies, silently, that there's no point. His lungs don't work, his blood isn't flowing through his veins to carry the nicotine to his brain.

After all, he listened to the flight crew when they said to forget about her. He turned off the intercom when the temperature of the rocket had grown to the point where she was cooking inside her own skin. Now, because he did not hesitate and did not abort the launch, he is the first man in space. A legend.

He almost doesn't mind that oxygen tank number eight blew up as soon as they got into orbit, quickly taking all the others with it. He almost doesn't mind the memory of how he slowly suffocated to death, breathing in his own waste gases until he blacked out.

Shera, whose eyes melted in their sockets in the engine room, who is little more than a blackened, skeletal husk, silently sighs and says that she's glad he's given up smoking. She says it silently because, even if she still had vocal cords, there would be no air in the rocket for her words to travel through.

Cid also sighs and agrees with her. Silently.

Red XIII dreams.

there is a cave he does not like it there

He wrinkles his nose at the foul stench of death. Theside of his mind that his intellect does not like bares its teeth and growls that he should not be here, that no matter what Grandfather has to say it can't be worth coming to this place, this place that stinks like dead two-legged things.

he does not like two-legged things

The Gi were savage and dangerous enemies. He remembers his mother fighting them tooth and claw at the entrance to the canyon, barely managing to hold them off, the terrible blades of the opponents sinking into her hide and cutting her.

her blood smells strong and feels hot as he presses his muzzle against her side

her side does not move any more like it used to

mother what happened mother

He looks up at the petrified form of his father, who is riddled with poison darts but remains vigilant, standing eternal watch against the Gi. He looks at Seto, whom he had thought a coward.

father please move

i'm sorry

Barrett dreams.

He feels like there is something wrong. He wants to tell Dyne that they should take a different route back to Corel. There is something terrible about to happen (or has already happened). He's not sure what it is, just that there is a mounting feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach.

They round a bend in the road and he is in Corel. The buildings are burning to the ground, filled with the corpses of his fellow townsmen. He hears, somehow, a voice coming from his home. The front door has been blown off, so he steps inside, sees his wife fixing dinner. Evening, honey, how did things go with you and Dyne?

Better than they're going here, he thinks. Everything seems so surreal, and he finds himself unable to care that his life is burning, unable to summon the tiniest shred of anything but apathy that his wife is dying and she doesn't even seem to notice. He misses her, knowing that even though she's standing right there she's far away, in a place that he'll visit someday, eventually.

He stops. What if he's visiting now? What if this is all that awaits him on the other side, burning towns and dead dreams? Is that why he can't care? Because he's dead and doesn't know it? It makes a terrifying amount of sense to him, so much that he bolts from his home and runs, kicking up great gouts of dust as his feet hit the dry earth.

He runs, and he runs, and then he comes to a stop and sees himself taking the bullet in his arm, sees himself drop Dyne to what seemed to be certain death.

Marlene comes up to him and grabs his hand and asks what's wrong, and he looks at her and remembers where he is, and he assures her that nothing's wrong at all. Everything in the world is perfectly fine.

Cloud dreams.

The mountains of Modeoheim are cold, but he's used to cold weather, and trekking through the snow is not that difficult a task. He forgets why he's here, or why he's wearing the uniform of a SOLDIER, but he assumes that it'll all come to him if he keeps walking for long enough.

So Cloud keeps walking, and eventually he comes to a rise. He gets to the top of it and looks out over the vast, lifeless plains between himself and the great city of Midgar. The mountains of Modeoheim are gone, the snow beneath his feet vanishing and becoming the cliff where it happened.

Cloud turns around and sees the sword, stuck in the dirt, and he feels fingers of iron clamp around his heart and squeeze. He clutches at his chest and tries not to remember the pain, the brightness of the light or the sound of the guns firing (though he recalls also the silence accompanying those sounds, the void where a scream should be).

The light and the pain and the report of rifles all fade to nothing, and the world collapses into a gentle soothing white, and Zack takes up his sword and slings it across his back where it always is. He steps forward and pulls Cloud into an embrace, and Cloud tilts his head up and feels the chapped, slightly weatherbeaten skin of Zack's lips.

There's no more need to live for the both of them, because both of them are alive and everything will be perfect and they'll make new lives for themselves and Cloud will never float alone in a tank again. He's sure of it.

Yuffie dreams.

She's walking through the corridors of the imperial palace. She wants to go to the bathroom, but she can't find it because the palace is so big. For a moment she tries to remember why the palace is so big or where it came from, because to the best of her knowledge there never was an imperial palace, but she shrugs off the uncertainty a moment later and keeps walking.

The carpet is soft and warm beneath her bare feet and the smell of incense haunts the halls. She makes turn after turn, trying to find the bathroom but never able to, until she makes a final turn and finds herself at a dead end with nothing but a window set into the wall.

Wutai stretches out beneath her, enormously vast and prosperous, glittering and humming with activity even in the dead hours of the morning, and for a moment she forgets that she needs to go to the bathroom and just stares at the splendor of the city and reflects on how proud she is that her father made this possible (and how she helped by stealing so much materia and bringing it to him).

The thought stirs a little ache, a stony knot of pain next to her heart, but she ignores it and starts retracing her steps, thinking that the bathroom has to be around here somewhere. After all, who would build a huge imperial palace without bathrooms? It would really be a stupid thing to do.

Vincent Valentine does not dream.

He does not dream because he hardly ever sleeps any more. Spending so many years in a coffin atoning for his sins has thoroughly exhausted him of resting, as ironic as that is, so he only sleeps two or three hours a week, which is plenty of rest for his modified mind.

The rest of the time he spends awake, almost painfully so. So it is that on this one night, he catches a glimpse of the figure on the rooftop.

He is wandering aimlessly through the streets of Edge when he sees it: a rail-thin figure, silhouetted against the sky, that is looking straight at him. He feels the figure's gaze pierce him like the infinite cold of space, but there is no malevolence, only curiosity and power. Vincent gathers himself and scales the building in one quick sweep of his cape, landing on the roof next to the figure.

"Who are you?" he asks.

Up close, Vincent can see more. The rail-thin figure is dressed in a flowing black cape of infinity, all billows and tangles of inky midnight that fold in on themselves and expand and end and somehow keep going. He cannot see any arms, though he is sure that the figure has them, but he can see a face. A shock of black hair stands up from a head with skin paler than the moon. Aristocratic features wear an expression of what might be the slightest hint of bemusement, and from the eye sockets twin stars gaze at Vincent.

"Dream."

Vincent does not question this. "You know me?"

"Of course I know you, Vincent Valentine," Dream replies. His voice is like liquid silk being drawn across the edge of a knife, forever. "You spent many years in my realm, fleeing from the waking world."

"I was repenting," Vincent says. "For my sins."

"I suppose that is one way to look at it." Dream gestures at the sleeping city, a bone-white hand extending from the bottomless depths of his cloak. "Everything must dream. I have not seen you in a span of several years, Vincent Valentine. You no longer come to the Dreaming. You rest, but very little, and when you do, you do not dream." He returns his gaze to Vincent, the stars in his head gleaming. "You must dream again."

"I only have nightmares," Vincent replies. "I've had nothing but nightmares since I woke up like this. I thought they were part of my punishment, that I was supposed to subsume myself in them and let them scourge me. It didn't change anything, and I'm tired of them. I've moved on." He meets Dream's gaze, no small feat for anybody. "I'm tired of dreaming the dreams you've given me."

"They are not tired of you," Dream replies, what might be the ghost of a smile flickering across his otherwise-inscrutable features. "Your nightmares are your own, Vincent Valentine. I did not make them for you. The dreams I have made for you are not meant to torment you or punish you. They merely are. If you are willing, you may have them."

"Regardless," Vincent says, "I don't need to dream in any event. It's not something that my mind requires any longer. I know because if I still needed to dream I would have gone insane by now."

"Everybody needs to." Dream spreads his arms and images appear within his cloak of midnight. The road flashes by beneath Denzel's motorcycle and whatever is chasing him doggedly pursues. Rude waits patiently for Godot and Reno dreams the kind of dreams only he can have. Cid is glad that he gave up cigarettes before they killed him. Red XIII wars with himself, intellect against beast, adulthood against childhood. Barrett remembers what is important. Cloud relaxes, secure in Zack's arms. Yuffie still hasn't found where the bathroom is.

"Everybody must dream, Vincent Valentine. Even you."

"Dreams are pointless," Vincent says. "What good are they? They torment you, either directly with things that frighten or disturb you, or they do it indirectly, by throwing you bones, tantalizing visions of what could be, and then taking them away the second you wake up. I don't want to dream. I grew tired of it a long time ago."

Dream lets his arms fall to his sides and the images fade. "Dreams are not any good, Vincent Valentine. Dreams are what they are and no more – dreams. If they are anything, it is what you make of them. However, if you wish to deny yourself that, it is your choice." He turns and begins to fade into the night. "It is a shame. You have some truly wonderful dreams. If only you would allow yourself to see them."

Then he is gone, and Vincent is alone.

The next morning, the dreamers wake. Denzel rolls out of bed, trying to shake the feeling that something is chasing him and not particularly knowing why. Rude feels peculiarly satisfied, knowing that he waited for something but not knowing what, and Reno feels something ineffable. Cid sucks down his morning cigarette and, impulsively, tells Shera that he loves her, at which she blushes. Red XIII cracks his good eye open at the first sign of light and feels very adult and mature, perhaps a bit on purpose. Barrett, on the verge of finalizing plans for another oil dig, decides on what feels like a random impulse that he needs to take a vacation to see Marlene. Cloud wakes up next to Tifa, and plants a tender kiss on her lips, and is happy, but somehow feels that he wishes she was someone else. Yuffie gets up and goes to the bathroom.

Vincent watches the sunrise and tells himself that he does not feel as though he is missing anything at all.