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“Father?”
The small voice is an unwelcome interruption. At first, Nanaki ignores it.
It is the first year he deemed the cubs old enough to accompany him for his tour around the planet. His most critical criteria was that they were able to practice restraint when Nanaki was speaking to others, to wait their turn. The cubs have been surveying the shoreline while Nanaki spends time visiting and advising. Reminding.
When he glances at them, there is something about his children that causes him to pause. Their ears are flattened to their heads, bristling along their hackles. He does not sense fear. But something has activated them.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
Nanaki steps aside to give them his full attention. As soon as he does, they dance around him. He was correct. It is not fear. They are excited.
“Come see!” they say. “Come see what washed up on shore.”
The sand crunches beneath his paws. He moves slowly and deliberately, whereas his children are like bees, orbiting around him and running to a spot on the sand, then back to him. An object lies there, catching the light.
He barely has time to examine it before he is bombarded with questions.
“Is it materia?”
“It is, isn’t it? I told you. Father, tell him!”
There is a green, glowing orb. It is untouched by time, but around it, the metal is eroded. The children are correct. It is materia. A rarity in today’s world.
But it is not the materia that interests Nanaki. It is the metal. He looks at it, and sees a shape that it no longer resembles. Spikes. Four of them, one for each knuckle of a hand. Nanaki envisions the leather it once attached to, though there is no longer even a trace left of that. It would have disintegrated centuries prior.
More than that, he remembers the hand that wore it.
As Nanaki stands on the deck of the Highwind, he senses the disquiet of the woman as his side. She grips the railing, and looks below. The Lifestream has retreated. It leaves behind a landscape much altered.
The airship’s navigational equipment has gone awry.
“Psh.” Cid scoffed at his crew, striding toward the window with his usual swagger. “If you can’t navigate without all that fancy schmancy bullshit, then you’ve got no right to call yourself a pilot.”
When Cid realized that the landmarks he would typically use to navigate had shifted, he went quiet. It made them nervous, his crew who had been bracing themselves for a standard outburst, full of creative curses. It was best to leave him to it. The others made themselves scarce.
Nanaki presses close to Tifa’s legs, and her hand drops down to his head. A glove encases it, knuckles covered with steel spikes, heavy with equipped materia. It is dirty. There is dried blood on them, from sources unknown.
“It looks so different,” Tifa says.
“We’ll land in a changed world.”
Tifa’s brow furrows as she considers this.
“Changed, how, I wonder.”
“Hmm,” Nanaki muses. “For the better, I’d hope.”
No more Meteor. No more Shinra. No more Sephiroth. Presumably, no more battles.
They continue looking down as the Highwind travels over hillsides and roads, rendered apart by the Lifestream breaking to the surface. Tifa sighs. Nanaki knows that although she is looking down, Tifa is now looking inward, as she so often does.
“I don’t feel any different.”
“Do you want to change?” Nanaki asks her.
“Yes.” The response comes without hesitation. “If the planet has changed for the better, then I want to do better too.”
“You will. We will. You’ll see.”
Nanaki bumps Tifa’s hand with his head, and is gratified when it seems to break her from her troubled introspection. She looks down at him and smiles. Then she looks at her hands, inspecting the bloodied gloves.
She removes them.
They begin to fly over a vast sea of blue. Cid has navigated them to the ocean. It, at least, seems to be much as it was, though the waters churn restlessly, waves crashing into foam.
“To a changed world,” Tifa says.
She shoots her arm out over the railing, both gloves in hand, and then releases them. They plummet through the sky.
“To a better world,” Nanaki agrees softly.
He leans against her legs. Tifa’s hand lands on his head again. Bared of her gloves, her fingers are gentle as they stroke his mane. Together, they watch as the gloves hit water and disappear from sight. The moment feels profound.
“Oh my gawd. Oh my gawd. No. No. You didn’t!”
There is a thunk as a body collides with the railing next to them.
“The materia,” Yuffie wails. “You got the materia out first, right?”
The horror of what they have done seems to have temporarily cured her motion sickness. She leans so far over the railing, that Nanaki springs behind her, biting one of her socks and pulling her backward. Tifa places an arm around Yuffie’s shoulders, tucking her against her side. Yuffie shakes her head in disbelief.
“Maybe we don’t need materia like that anymore,” Tifa says.
“Maybe,” says Nanaki, “the world will be better.”
“Not without materia, it won’t be,” Yuffie grumbles.
“Father?”
His cubs are still, which tells Nanaki the extent of their concern. He has not moved for some time now, staring at what has washed up on the shore.
“We should put it with the others, right?”
His children have a peace that would make Tifa happy, and a passion for materia that would make Yuffie proud. It is a better world, except that Nanaki’s friends are not in it any longer.
“This one, we throw back.”
“Why?” Nanaki’s answer distresses them as much as his silence. “Is it dangerous?”
“It is a reminder.”
Carefully, he retrieves it from the sand, and heads away from the water. His cubs follow close behind. They will go to the cliffs, and return it to the ocean.