Gift for tamatamatan

[iki_teru]

Recipient: tamatamatan
Author: imadra_blue (Mod note I put dear imadra through hellfire trials for this fic exchange and she not only wrote an amazing piece but she also pinch-hit for us! Give her a big hand you guys!)
Title: "Not I or You, But We"
Series/Characters: Final Fantasy VII - Reno/Cloud
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sephiroth has returned and laid waste to his enemies.
In the wake of fresh destruction, Cloud and Reno are left alone in a
dying world to cope with the aftermath. Together, both may return to
life.
Warning(s): Post-Apocalyptic AU, Character Deaths (pre-story)
Word Count: 3727
Notes: tamatamatan, you said you liked gen, slash,
and horror, and I somehow put them all together and got this. I hope
it's not too far out where the buses don't run for you, and I hope you
have a Happy Holiday. ♥

*******

I will never be a memory…

Cloud heard Sephiroth's parting words echoing in his head, over and
over. He tried to block his ears, but Sephiroth's voice continued to
echo. He sat beside Tifa, staring at the black sludge that had once
been Aerith's church garden. He could not hear Aerith any longer,
only Sephiroth.

Sunlight still shone through the broken rafters. Denzel and Marlene
huddled in its rays, staring at him with red eyes and wet faces. They
needed comfort, but Cloud had none left to give him. They needed
Tifa, who would be able to take them in her arms and smooth away their
fears. He reached gently shook Tifa and tried to wake her, but she
did not move. She did not make a sound. She did not even breathe.

"Wake up, Tifa," Cloud whispered. "Please wake up. We have to get
moving. Edge is still burning."

But Tifa did not respond. The red, sticky liquid beneath that pooled
beneath her had turned dark. Cloud did not know what it was.
Blood, said a voice in his head that sounded remarkably like
Sephiroth, but Cloud would not believe him.

"Please wake up, Tifa. Why are you sleeping at a time like this?"

Marlene and Denzel approached. Denzel leaned forward to close Tifa's
open, glassy eyes. His thin body shivered as he stared down at her.

"Cloud," Marlene said, taking Cloud's hand. "Cloud, we have to go now."

Cloud continued to shake Tifa's body. "Why won't she wake up?"

"She's dead."

Dead. Cloud jerked away, horrified. The dark, sticky substance
stained his hands and clothes. Blood, the voice in his head
reminded him. Tifa's blood. He stared up at Marlene as his emotions
quickly eroded, disintegrating and leaving him with dust for a heart.

"Why does he always take the women?" Cloud whispered.

Marlene did not answer. She only took his hand and led him out of
Aerith's church. As they left, it collapsed onto itself, and its
wreckage turned black with corruption. Around them, Midgar died a
second time, eroding and rusting before their eyes. The plants that
once choked its ruins withered and died, and Cloud wondered if they
would ever return.

As they walked, Sephiroth's voice finally faded, leaving Cloud as
empty as an unsold coffin.

*******

With their golden blond hair, Rufus and Elena looked like brother and
sister under the flickering lights. They had no relation in life, but
in death, they were twins, one in white and the other in navy blue,
both stained with blood. Reno studied them with heavy-lidded eyes,
amazed at their similarities. He wondered if the fact that they had
left behind corpses to clean up made them special. There was nothing
left of Rude.

Reno pushed thoughts of his partner from his mind and lit his
cigarette with shaking hands. He stared around the wreckage. Two
lights still flickered in what remained of the Healen Lodge, like some
perverse joke. Knowing what he did of Sephiroth, Reno would not put
it past him.

Tseng stood between the corpses, looking as if he was torn on who he
should attend first. Duty won over sentimentality, and he lifted
Rufus into his arms. He stared over at Reno, his face ashen. "Carry
Elena, please." His voice sounded hoarse.

Reno nodded and picked her up. Already, her body felt stiff and cold.
Her expression remained frozen in fear, and Reno thought he could see
Sephiroth still reflected in her eyes. Reno cradled her and followed
Tseng out to the hills behind the wreckage.

Lacking shovels, they used rocks to digs graves. Reno carved a third
grave into the ground, though Rude was only ash scattered across the
Healen Lodge's wreckage. As Tseng pushed dirt over Rufus and Elena,
Reno stared down at Rude's grave, wondering where he had misplaced his
grief. Sorrow was hard to conjure when he half-expected Rude to
appear at any moment from behind a broken wall. Rude would straighten
his tie and straighten his sunglasses, then apologize to Tseng for
being late. Reno stared at the wreckage, waiting, but Rude did not
appear. Instead, Tseng shoved dirt back into Rude's empty grave.

"What do we do now?" Reno asked, feeling something stick in his throat
and burn at his eyes.

Tseng studied him. His dark eyes seemed hollow points set in his
sallow face. "We don't do anything. There is no we anymore. I'm
going home. You do as you like." He stood and brushed dirt from his
suit and his hands. It was a losing battle.

"Home?" Reno thought of the ruins of Midgar, of the Sector 7 slums he
had buried under a section of plate five years ago. He thought of the
drunken old man who had spent half of his life sitting in front of the
television, drinking beer, and the other half chasing Reno around the
house with meaty hands. Reno could never go home again, but that
suited him just fine. He would rather let Sephiroth run him through
as he had the President and Elena than go back home. "Where's home?"

"Wutai." Tseng stared at the horizon, his gaze stretching into
infinity. "Good luck, Reno."

Reno watched Tseng walk away as sorrow slowly crept its way in and
gnawed at his insides. He sat by the shallow graves and thought of
the old, bald man with meaty hands that he had crushed in the Sector 7
slums, along with many other people--innocent people who had not
deserved to die like the old man had. As the sorrow finally pierced
his chest as fiercely as the Masamune had his dead employer's, Reno
wondered if this was his penance.

*******

"This world is falling apart." Barret stood with his arms crossed
with a dark expression on his dark face. Behind him, Marlene and
Denzel stared at the floor. "Sephiroth is fucking rotting the Planet
from the inside out. Don't you care?"

"He will never be a memory," Cloud said, his voice as hollow as he
felt. "There's no point in fighting him. He'll only come back
again."

Barret spit at Cloud's feet. "You fucking pussy. Aerith never gave
up. Tifa never gave up. But you're gonna give up?"

"They're dead." The words felt funny in Cloud's mouth and left a bad
aftertaste. A bug darted over the white walls of the Junon hotel.
The wallpaper had already yellowed and peeled, though Cloud had seen
them pasting it on only a week ago. Everything in the world seemed to
have such a short lifespan now.

"The only dead one around here is you." Barret shook his head and
turned on his heel. He passed Marlene and Denzel. "Let's go, kids.
I ain't gonna fucking give up like this asshole."

"Oh, Cloud." Marlene ran over and kissed Cloud on the cheek. "Please
come with us?"

"Please," Denzel urged, stepping forward. The hope in his eyes seemed
misplaced, a thing of the past. It belonged to a time when Cloud
could watch flowers grow in churches and expect a plate of fried
chicken and a beer when he returned home.

Cloud continued to watch the bug make its way across the wall. "I
can't. I can't stop him anymore. He'll just keep taking people from
me."

Marlene closed her eyes and hung her head. "Tifa wouldn't want you to
give up, Cloud."

"She wouldn't have wanted to die like she did, either."

Marlene took a deep breath. "If you change your mind, Cloud, please
call us. Please." She squeezed his hand and ran back to Denzel.

Denzel took Marlene's hand in his and stared at Cloud with wide eyes.
Some of his hope had died, as it should. He would not hurt as much if
he had no hope. "Good-bye, Cloud."

When the children walked out, Cloud went back to watch the bug crawl
across the wall, but it had fallen to the floor. It twitched once,
twice, then stopped moving altogether.

*******

After three days of walking and two without food, Reno arrived at the
Chocobo farm. To his surprise, he found a familiar figure out in the
chocobo pens. He fished his last cigarette from his pocket and
watched Cloud pet a sickly gold chocobo. It lay on the ground beside
him, making soft "wark" noises. Wind ruffled its feathers. Several
flew off, fluttering past Reno.

"There any food around here, Cloud?" he asked after a long time
without acknowledgment.

Cloud shrugged. "I had some bread that Choco Billy gave me this
morning. It was fresh-baked, but tasted stale. Soon, everything we
eat will be rotten. Eventually, we'll die of food-poisoning."

"Wow, you're a real ray of sunshine in the dark, aren't you? I feel
so fucking cheered that I think I'm gonna go slit my wrists and sit in
a tub of water." Reno took a drag from his cigarette. Somehow, in
this dying world, Cloud still looked vibrant. Despite his tone and
his blank expression, his mako eyes still shone like gems.

"Only Choco Billy is left here, along with the woman who drove me here
from Junon." Cloud stroked the chocobo's head. "She's probably going
to die soon. She hasn't left her bed in days."

"Wow. And I thought you were fucked up before." Reno bent down and
pulled Cloud up. Cloud's hands felt oddly warm, especially in the
chilly air. "Why are you here, Cloud?"

"Because I can't die. I don't deserve to." Cloud stared down at the
chocobo, his expression as lost as a child in the Gongaga jungle.

Reno also studied the chocobo. It was molting and wheezing, but it
was not yet dead. "I haven't eaten anything in two days, so let's go
see this Choco Billy of yours for some more bread. I don't give a
shit how stale it tastes. And then we're gonna see if this birdie can
still run."

Cloud blinked and finally looked up at Reno. "We?"

*******

"Did you call your friends again?" Reno asked. He peeked outside the
window. Rain still drenched North Corel, not that he needed to see it
to believe it, as hard as it drummed on the roof. The radio reports
said the squall stretched throughout the entire desert and would cause
flooding.

"Yes," Cloud said. He stretched across his bed and stared up at the
cracked ceiling. The bright side to their stay in North Corel was
that it had already been ruins, so they could not tell the difference.
The people here already knew devastation intimately, and they were
prepared for anything--even floods in the desert. Their food kept
longer and plants still grew. Somehow, this shanty-town was one of
the last places of bounty in the world.

"And?" Reno prompted. Getting Cloud to speak was no easy feat in the
best of circumstances and even less so now.

"My calls still won't go through."

"Maybe they're dead, too." Reno went to fish a cigarette from his
pocket, but he was out. He sighed. Cigarettes were hard to come by
lately. Everyone needed their vices at the moment.

"Probably." Cloud's voice caught, and he turned over. Reno made
himself busy with cleaning up the empty bottles of booze he had left
littering their room while Cloud shook on the bed. It amazed him that
it took Cloud so long to finally break. He had broken almost
immediately after Tseng left him alone with the dead, and now he
existed in a wonderfully numb condition--which was likely aided by his
rampant alcohol consumption. He would have to give up that vice soon,
as well, for he was running low on his stock of liquor.

Reno found a half-full bottle of gin. He thrust it at Cloud and shook
the bottle. "Here. Drink this. It'll make you feel better. Then
you can be as fucking fantastically zen as I am."

Cloud looked up and grabbed Reno's wrist. He felt warm, and Reno's
numbness seemed to wear off at the touch. He ached for the
familiarity of the Turks, an ache for the only family he had been
willing to call family. But they were dead and gone now. Like all
those people he had killed in Sector 7.

"I should have gone with them," Cloud whispered, knocking the gin from
Reno's hand. It clanked and rolled off the bed. "Now everyone's
dead. Why do I always let the people I love die?"

"I wish I could tell you." Reno meant that sincerely, perhaps out of
pity, perhaps out of sympathy, perhaps because the stars aligned just
so. He pushed Cloud flat on the bed and then climbed over him. Cloud
stared up at him with wide blue eyes. They shown in the dim light,
and his body felt warm, alive, an anomaly of health in a gangrenous
world. Reno did not understand it, but he did not have to understand
it to enjoy the warmth of Cloud's body, or the responding warmth in
his own.

Cloud gently took Reno's hair in his hand. He suddenly yanked hard
and mashed their faces together in the most graceless kiss Reno had
ever shared. But Cloud's warmth spread across his body, sparking
fires across his nerves. Reno kissed back and slid his hands down
Cloud's body. Cloud returned the gesture, his touch leaving Reno
breathless.

Reno wondered if it was ironic that the best sex he ever had was right
there, right then, in a world three-quarters dead with the former
puppet of the man responsible for destroying it. Either that, or
poetic justice.

*******

Rain continued to drum on the roof, and Cloud could not recall how
many weeks it had rained now or how many weeks they had spent in North
Corel, killing the rainborn monsters in exchange for food. If Cloud
believed in a god, he would think it a divine desire to wash the world
clean of the human impurities that crawled over it like maggots. Reno
curled around Cloud, his hair spilling across Cloud's chest. It
tickled a little, but Cloud was too comfortable to brush it off.

"I like the way you taste," Reno whispered.

"The way I taste?" Cloud asked with a yawn. "That sounds dirty."

Reno chuckled, a brief, dark sound. He slid upwards and ran his
tongue over Cloud's cheek, then worked his way down his throat and
stopped at his collarbone. "Everything about you. You taste fresh.
Clean. Like a piece of freshly-picked fruit, washed in pure water."
His tone sounded idle, but his gaze fixed intently on Cloud's face.

Cloud stared back and ran his fingers over Reno's neck. The rest of
his body was hard angles and sharp edges, but the skin on his neck was
as smooth and soft as a baby's. "Aerith used to be like that."

"But she's gone. You're still here." Reno kissed the corner of
Cloud's mouth. He smelled of cigarettes and gin, but Cloud somehow
associated that with comfort now. Cloud kissed back, desire drawing
him from a somnolent mood to one that craved hungry fingers and lazy
kisses.

When Reno did not respond to his urgent touch, Cloud paused and looked
up to study Reno's face. That same intent gaze remained. Cloud
considered their conversation and realized what Reno wanted. "I like
you, too, Reno."

Reno smirked and pushed Cloud back on the bed to reward him.

*******

Cloud stood on the porch, listening to his phone ring as he tried to
reach Barret. Rain dripped down the sides and leaked through the
holes. Soon, the building would rust and collapse. The pieces would
wash away into the desert, and eventually North Corel would be lost,
like everywhere else. How it managed to survives months of deluge,
Cloud did not know. He dialed Cid's number, and as it rang, he
glanced down the street.

In a shack much like the one he and Reno stayed in, a few children
peeked out at the sludge-filled streets. A woman, presumably their
mother, trudged towards them, carrying already over-ripened fruits and
vegetables in her arms. If they ate quickly, it would still be good
enough to eat. The rain had plastered the woman's hair against her
face, but her jaw was set and her shoulders straight. The mud sucked
at her feet, but her forward march never faltered. In her, Cloud saw
Aerith. He saw Tifa. He saw Yuffie. He saw Marlene. He even saw
his own mother.

When Cid's number failed to connect, Cloud tried Yuffie's, then
Vincent's. As usual, the phone rang and rang until the automated
female voice coolly informed him that his call could not be completed
at this time. Cloud sighed and closed his phone. The woman down the
street yanked her feet from the mud and stepped onto her porch. She
handed the food to her children. One told her something, and she
laughed in response. She laughed. How long had it been since
Cloud heard anyone laugh?

Cloud walked back inside his shack, still clutching his phone. Reno
still lay on the bed, sleeping. The sheets were twisted around his
slender form, revealing pale skin that begged to be touched. Why had
Reno dragged him along, and why had Cloud acquiesced? He studied
Reno, unable to answer why he kept company with a former Turk, even
one as beautiful as Reno. The shock of Reno's red hair looked like
fresh blood in the gloom. The rest of Reno seemed as dull as the rest
of the decaying world, but his hair was a spot of vitality where none
else could be found. Perhaps that was why.

Cloud sat beside Reno and ran his fingers through the silky tresses.
Reno stirred at the touch and raised his head. He blinked at Cloud.
"Again?" he asked. "I know vorpal rabbits with more restrained sex
drives than you."

"In a little bit." Cloud stared down at the phone still clutched in
one hand. His other hand had its fingers buried in Reno's hair. "I
still can't get through."

Reno did not respond, but he moved closer to Cloud. He had once said
that he found Cloud warm, though Cloud did not know why that was. He
did not mind having Reno curled around him. It felt comforting, as
comforting as Aerith's flowers and Tifa's fried chicken.

"I don't know how to find them."

"We can always try. At least they wanted you to find them." Reno
turned his face and stared at the headboard. Cloud wondered if he
thought of Tseng, the last of Reno's Turks family, who had abandoned
him when Sephiroth destroyed Shin-Ra. The loss had left Reno as much
an orphan as Cloud. "That counts for something."

"We?" Cloud asked.

*******

Though Bugenhagen had died, Cloud stepped into Cosmo Canyon
observatory with a itching feeling that something could be found
here--something that would point him the right direction. The air
felt cold, and generator hummed a little too loudly. He glanced
around the large room, wondering what answers it could provide him, if
any. Reno lurked by the doorway, his gaze darting around nervously,
as if he expected Sephiroth to appear from behind a spinning
holographic orb.

Cloud fond nothing in the room but stale memories. He shook his head
and turned to leave, wondering why he thought there would be something
here.

"They're not dead, you know."

The familiar echo of Aerith's voice brought Cloud to his knees. He
choked, his eyes stinging, his chest burning. He suddenly smelled
her, the scent of freshly picked flowers, hanging in the air.

"They just need you to save them, Cloud."

Cloud gasped. "I--I thought that--"

"I was dead? Oh, Cloud. I already died. I've only been waiting,
just like everyone else."

"Waiting?" Cloud asked the spinning images of planets and stars. Reno
moved into the room, his expression concerned, but he said nothing.

"Waiting for you to wake up."

"Wake up?" Cloud stood again. His own planet shone before him, blue
and green in a vast sea of nothingness. "Sephiroth came back. He
came back and took Tifa. I couldn't stop him. It was just like
before, with you." His voice caught, and he paused to catch his
breath and let the pain in his chest pass. "He said he will never be
a memory--he can't be defeated."

"Sephiroth isn't a memory, Cloud. He's a nightmare, and you need to
wake up. Tifa's with me now. Don't worry about her. Worry about
what you have right now. About all our friends who need you to save
them. About the entire world that needs you to save it."

"Hey," Reno said. He put a hand on Cloud's shoulder. "Are you okay?
Who are you talking to?"

Cloud studied Reno. He realized there was real concern on Reno's
face. Humanity glittered in his eyes as it never had before. His
hair appeared bright and alluring under the observatory lights.
Cloud's hand twitched, and, as if guided by Aerith's own hands, Cloud
touched Reno's throat and felt his pulse throbbing beneath his
fingertips. It felt strong.

"You see, Cloud?" Aerith's voice echoed throughout the observatory,
but Reno did not react. He only watched Cloud, deaf to the voice of a
dead woman. "You bring people to life. Even when you're not trying.
Imagine what you can do when you actually try to save people."

Cloud nodded and stroked Reno's cheek. He ignored the quizzical
expression and turned back to the glowing representation of their
planet. "You're right. You're always right, Aerith. Show me. Show
me where to find Sephiroth."

A space deep in the crust of the Planet spiraled into a black miasma.
Veins of darkness spread throughout the Planet, choking the
Lifestream, slowly eating away at the world and, with it, the people
who dwelled on it. In the center of the darkness, Cloud knew he would
find Sephiroth. He absently stroked at the hilt of First Tsurugi,
knowing that he would have to face him again, and that as long as
Sephiroth returned, it was his duty to face him every time.

"Let me guess," Reno said with a groan. "We're going there, aren't
we? Where the darkness is coming from?"

"We?" Cloud glanced behind him.

Reno met his gaze and nodded. "We."

Cloud smiled. "So we are. My friends are waiting for us to save them."

End.