Somewhere, where life won't disturb it, there is a tombstone, where the words, like every other tombstone, will be destroyed with the elements.

A rock like any other, smoothed and lacquered on the front, and of the material buildings in Icicle are masoned with.

The tombstone has more than one name, and is a marker of lives that deserved to be encased in stone.

ANGEAL HEWLEY

ZACKARY FAIR

All men pass, but some of them redefine what it is to be a man, and serve to remind what dreams can be cultivated into.

SEPHIROTH

Some men are above others, and not by their own choice. It's easy to judge, to place someone on a scale and point. But, for something as common as sin to be all that is left after death is a mockery of life.

YAZOO

LOZ

KADAJ

Cloud hesitated before carving these names in the rock, but did it anyway, across the bottom, side by side.

AERITH GAINSBOROUGH

Cloud carves this directly under Zack's name, as an afterthought.

If the 'brothers' found their way onto its surface, surely there was room for one more.

Cloud holds back from carving Genesis Rhapsodos, knowing the ginger raven is somewhere on the planet, but he shrugs, and carves the initials G.R. anyway, and after two more hours and half a bottle of whatever he was drinking, Cloud adds C.S. on the back of the stone, near the top.

Not out of pride or selfishness, but to remember the time when these people shaped his life.

The blond warrior takes the stone and places it in the Northern Crater, just sticks it in the ice and hightails his butt out, not willing to experience frostbite to reminisce.

Cloud falls asleep in front of a raging fire back in his room at the inn, swathed in enough blankets to constrict breathing. The alcohol does its work and Cloud feels momentarily soothed by the buzz helping him drift into sleep.

Love and memories can't revive the dead, but maybe, if allowed, they can guide the lives left behind.

I don't own anything. It's 1:40 in the morning. That last sentence made no sense, not even when I was writing it.

"NO, spell check. It's 'Angeal', not 'Angela'."