cosmopolitanwarrior on Tumblr gave me a fanfic prompt: Something about Nanaki and outliving his friends? If you want to do sad/hurt i mean.. :)

I told them they were an evil genius and got right to work.

EDIT: Jan 2014, I've been (correctly) informed by ~turtles on AO3 that I mispelled 'Barret' through this piece. Also, Red Dog Krim on reminded me that Seventh Heaven was crushed under the Plate long before Meteor, so I've changed the setting of the final scene to the park outside Sector Seven. Thanks!

All of My Friends are Dead

When they were old enough, Nanaki took his cubs to Midgar.

The towering city had become a rust-red skeleton, strangled by the forest. Memories of black metal and neon lights had been buried under the carpet of green. He wasn't sad to see it gone, but picking through Meteor's wreckage made something ache in his belly. Even his youngest had gone quiet, watching the small streaks of sunlight break through the cracked plate and the foliage.

It had been an evil place, but it was dead. Somehow, dead things always demanded respect, even if you never would've given it to them when they were alive.

'You look sad, Dad,' his eldest said, trailing a few paces behind him.

'Midgar is a sad place,' Nanaki replied.

He took them to the old Shinra building by the safest path he knew. The cubs had heard the story, or at least enough of it.

This was where the number had been branded into his fur. At first it had been an insult, but with Avalanche he'd worn the nickname like a badge of pride.

No one called him Red XIII anymore.

Cid had died first. They'd given him a bigger funeral than he would have liked, and Nanaki knew he'd have had something to say about all the damn flowers, but everyone else seemed to know as well.

'That's what you get for leaving us, you mean bastard,' Yuffie had said, laying the most ostentatious wreath on his coffin before it was driven into the furnace. Some way through the ceremony, Nanaki heard Tifa murmur, 'Why was this such a surprise? We knew what he was like…'

She trailed off and Cloud hugged her shoulders in one arm. She was right: they knew Cid. He drank and smoked and got into fights in bars where nails in a board were considered a gentleman's weapon. He'd been a walking example of habits that could get you killed.

And yet, he hadn't died. In fact, he'd continued to not die so well and for so long that when he did pass away, it was like having your rope snap when you were climbing a mountain.

They shot his ashes into space. A few years later, Shera's went up to join them.

The others lived to see Marlene and Denzel grown up. There was a stretch of time that went on for decades, where Nanaki grew up and his friends grew old. Reeve died and Barret died, and Marlene joined the new Shinra in Urban Development to research renewable fuels. Nanaki didn't know whether that would have made Barret proud or not.

Sixty years after Meteor fell, there was less left of Avalanche than even the crumbling walls and shattered windows of Shinra HQ. An aging Yuffie ruled over Wutai until she had three heart-attacks on the dojo training mats.

'You'd think she'd have learned after the last one,' Cloud said. It was hard to tell if he was joking or angry. His hair was white. He was an old man now.

One day, years later, Tifa called Nanaki's PHS to tell him that Cloud had snuck away in the night. He found him in Nibelheim. Cloud had set his old rust-bucket of a motorbike against the wall of his reconstructed house and dragged an armchair outside to sit in. He'd turned it to face north, and stared up at Mount Nibel without turning as Nanaki padded up and sat beside him.

'I can't die,' Cloud said. 'Sephiroth might come back.'

'He won't.'

Cloud didn't answer, and it occurred to Nanaki that he hadn't meant the Sephiroth they'd fought in the Northern Cave, but an old friend. A war hero. A man Nanaki had never known.

Looking up, Cloud's fingers twitched for a moment, as if meaning to reach up for something. For a moment, Nanaki thought Nibelheim smelled of flowers.

Cloud's chin dipped against his chest and he sighed.

Tifa cried for hours when Nanaki told her. Cloud passed the Buster Sword on to her, and then when Tifa died it went on to Nanaki, because Vincent didn't want it. The famous blade hung on the wall of the observatory in Cosmo Canyon now. Nanaki did his best to keep it from rusting.

After Tifa passed away, Vincent disappeared. Nanaki looked out for him, sent messages across the Planet for him, but he never showed his face again. If he was hiding in his coffin at Shinra Mansion or in Lucrecia's cave, no one could find him. Nanaki couldn't help but resent him a little. It would have been nice to have one friend who didn't die.

Then again, he thought, maybe that was why Vincent left. Maybe he was just as sick as staying young while his friends faded away, and Nanaki wasn't sure which of the two of them would live longer, in the end.

'There's a reason I've brought you here,' Nanaki said to his cubs, taking a rest outside the splintered wooden beams that used to be the park outside Sector Seven. A huge, broken moogle's face grinned blankly up into the darkness. It had split in half and the paint was faded until it was barely any brighter than the wood behind it.

Nanaki said, 'Tell me what happened to this place.'

'Meteor hit it,' said the elder cub.

'And then?'

The cubs were quiet. The younger scuffed his paws in the dirt.

'The Planet took it back,' Nanaki said. 'The most important thing you will ever learn is that everything dies, and then the Planet takes it back.'