those who fight further

While Advent Children (and its expansion Complete) serve as the sequel to FFVII, the more direct follow-up is the novella On the Way to a Smile, written by Kazushige Nojima, the writer of the original game. It's comprised of short stories about the characters and what they did after Meteorfall, and ties FFVII in nicely with AC.

An English version of a few of the stories was released with the collector's edition of Advent Children back in 2006; I own a copy of it and base my information off of it. Those stories were later compiled into a single volume along with new stories, which was eventually released in English in 2018 by Yen Press.

Cid doesn't have a story to himself, but he appears in a couple of others: Barret's, Nanaki's, and Yuffie's. Immediately following the game's ending, the group head to the Forgotten City to pay their respects to Aerith and let her know the battle is over. When they part, Cid's intentions are to return to Shera, and when Yuffie protests that they shouldn't leaving so abruptly, he says "It just means we know we can always meet again." I've always really liked that line, especially in the context of FFVII, because in the face of so much loss and suffering it really is important for them to hold onto the bonds they'd formed through their struggle.

The interesting (and frustrating) thing about On the Way to a Smile is that Cid is clearly dealing with some serious issues, but we don't get a story from his perspective. Instead, we only see him through the eyes of other characters as they face their own troubles. Chronologically, Barret's story comes first, as he'd left Marlene in Tifa's care and gone out in the world to try and figure out how to settle his past. He ends up in Rocket Town, and discovers that Cid had started work on a new airship immediately after returning home. The problem is finding a new energy source. Mako is out, for obvious reasons, but there's a new option: oil.

(Purely as an aside: I hate this. Oil? Seriously? You're telling me the FFVII setting, which is explicitly about the world being destroyed by cheap energy, would turn to fossil fuels? Come on, man.)

However, Shera's contracted the disease spreading across the planet: geostigma. Entirely contrary to how he'd treated her in the game, Cid is gentle with her, in his own way, and tells her not to push herself. Their relationship is on the mend, but with no known cure for geostigma, Cid doesn't know what to do with himself. Like I talked about in the overview, he can move mountains when he's got the motivation, but against geostigma, he's left powerless.

Still, it's not Cid's way to be overly pessimisstic. As he says to Nanaki when he completes his new airship and takes it for a test flight, "If it falls then that’ll be that. Don’t hate me for it ya hear." Likewise, when they come across Yuffie and she asks if there's a materia that cures geostigma, he gives her a reassuring answer.

"You think there is, don’t you?" said Cid as he looked Yuffie in the eyes.

"Of course!"

Cid gave her the thumb’s up as he heard Yuffie answer him back in a loud voice.

"Then there is!" he nodded.

Yuffie began to think as she watched Cid return to his airship. How troublesome. That’s why the old man’s weird. He knows there’s no proof that any exists. But it was the words I was hoping for.

Cid ends up naming his new airship the Shera, and appears in Advent Children for the big battle sequence against Bahamut SIN, where we get to see him jump like a proper dragoon. Past that, though, he doesn't get a whole lot of action in the film, although he now has to pilot his own ship. Maybe he had to fire the pilot from the game. Times are tough after all. AC is ultimately Cloud's story; Cid's just there for support and transportation.

In Dirge of Cerberus, Cid has a more pronounced role, and more than a handful of lines, but little in the way of character development. For the most part, he's just there to help Vincent to get from point A to point B. DoC does reveal that he and Shera ended up getting married at some point, but other than that, there's not much on Cid himself aside from the part where he invites Vincent to come by for a beer. However, it is important to note that he's taken on a job with the WRO, Reeve's new peacekeeping-cum-military organization. This decision seems to follow directly along the lines of something he said to Barret in On the Way to a Smile:

Truth is, airships are useful. ‘Specially when the world’s in the middle a’ tryin’ to pick itself up. If someday they tell me they don’t need mine anymore, I guess I can just find me a spot with a nice view to set her down, and turn her into my house.

So long as somebody needs him, Cid'll be there to help. That's the kind of person he is. It doesn't much matter to him what, so long as it's for the right reasons.

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