I LOVE CLOUD, I LOVE CLOUD, LA LA LA
Seriously, how is Cloud so damn amazing? Will I ever love another fictional character as much as I do Cloud Strife? I think not.
This was the FFVII fic I started as my NaNo project last year, got about 5000 words in, and then failed miserably on (like all my fics). I was reading it back the other day and there is something in here I'd like to salvage, unlike most of the terrible snippets of fic floating around on my computer. This is my "What would Fusion by like if I'd started it now, instead of however-many-years ago?" fic, although it's very different from that story in many respects.
Title: NaNo 2009 Snippet
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (Advent Children compliant. Ignores all other Compilation titles.)
Rating: R for this, maybe?
Summary: Post-Advent Children. Cloud's world is torn apart once more when he starts to suffer bizarre and increasingly-vivid hallucinations, threatening to strip him of everything he's worked so hard to regain - his family, his sanity, and his life.
Recently, Cloud dreamt of the cold. It was so, so cold - a cold so deep and penetrating that it made his entire body hurt, like he was being stabbed with needles underneath his skin. It reminded him of the piercing winters up in the mountains of Nibelheim, where a man could easily get lost and perish if they weren’t careful.
He would wake up with his body aching, a vague echo of the pain in his dreams. It would pass, but it would leave him feeling unsettled and uneasy.
Sometimes he dreamt that someone was with him in the cold, and he could hear Zack saying, “We’re friends, right?” He could feel the rough movement of a truck beneath him, and Zack’s voice, over and over again, “We’re friends, right?” He would wake up disorientated, the feel of the truck and the cold still so close he was still almost there, even while he was awake.
He felt like he was dying in those dreams. He couldn’t really remember their flight from Nibelheim, if he was being honest with himself, and he wondered if that was how he’d felt at the time. The absolute cold, the certainty that he was going to slip from existence, no matter what Zack said or did for him.
He didn’t want to dream about Zack. But, he supposed, at least he wasn’t dreaming about Sephiroth. Not yet, anyway. He had no doubt that would come. If there was anything Cloud had learned about himself the past few years, it was that he was, after all, a glutton for punishment.
<><><><><>
The market was crowded and it only took one glance at the mass of bodies to remind Cloud just how much he hated places like this. He tightened his grip on Marlene’s hand, as if just by being in their proximity she might get sucked away out of sight. He must have gripped too hard - after a moment he felt her hand wiggling, tugging away, as she gasped “Cloud!” in that horrible reproving tone only children could manage. He let go, startled, and when he looked down, she was rubbing at her fingers. He wanted to apologise for hurting her but somehow the words got stuck in his throat.
Denzel, on the other side of Marlene, was bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, gazing out across the marketplace. “It’s right at the back,” he said, lifting a hand to gesture over the heads of the other market-goers. Then he was off, heading into the crowd before Cloud could stop him.
“Denzel!” Cloud called, but the boy had already disappeared. Something like fear wedged in Cloud’s throat - the markets were no place for a child to be left alone, too dangerous, too easy for something to happen and not realise. He grabbed Marlene and swept her up into his arms, ignoring her surprised protest, and started in the direction Denzel had gone.
It was impossible to spot Denzel in amongst all the much taller adults, even with the way some people stepped aside like a parting sea when they caught sight of his distinctive figure. Cloud was never in the mood for the misguided awe people seemed to regard him with, least of all when he had an errant child on the loose, and he held Marlene tight against his chest like her warmth could shield him from the unwelcome gazes.
He headed through the throngs of people in the direction Denzel had pointed before, hoping that the boy hadn’t spotted something else of interest on the way and veered off somewhere else. But as Cloud and Marlene approached the back of the market square, he spotted the familiar head of red-brown hair emerging from the thinning crowd and heading towards a stall at the very back that looked like it was selling junk.
“Denzel!” Cloud said sharply as he and Marlene broke through towards the stalls. Denzel turned at the sound of Cloud’s voice, face such a perfect picture of confusion at the older man’s tone that Cloud had no doubt Denzel didn’t realise he’d done anything wrong at all. “Don’t run off alone like that,” he said. “It’s not safe here.”
“I didn’t go that far!” Denzel protested, and then switched off from the potential argument completely by turning to the stall and saying, “Look at all this stuff! Isn’t it cool? I think it’s all from before Meteor!” He picked up what looked like a twisted piece of dark metal from the table and began inspecting it, enraptured.
“Let me down,” Marlene said, and between the two of them Cloud’s intention to argue his point some more was completely derailed. He set Marlene down but kept a firm grip on her hand, and looked at the stall Denzel was so excited about.
It WAS all old stuff. Cloud was surprised and a little disturbed as he took it all in properly. It was mostly old Shinra things, salvaged from Midgar - all things that belonged to the old age: an old rifle, damaged enough that it was probably unusable now but not enough to hide the Shinra logo on the side; an old grunt helmet; an assortment of various elevator keycards that looked like they would have sold for a fortune on the black market if the Shinra building still existed.
“Look at these!” Denzel said, shoving something into Cloud’s free hand. They looked like large, bulky sunglasses. Cloud turned them slowly in his fingers, running the pad of his thumb along a deep scratch.
Someone reached over and plucked them from his grip. They were wearing gloves similar to his. “Aaah, haven’t seen these in a while. VR training goggles. You remember these, don’t you?”
Cloud looked over and found Zack smiling back at him.
<><><><><><>
Cold. It was so damn cold. Cloud could feel his whole body shaking with it, his muscles seized up and aching fiercely. And beneath that, a slightly different kind of cold - the sharp-edged kind that signified a serious injury of some kind.
It was like a switch flipped, and as soon as he realised he was hurt, pain flooded his body. He gasped, or wanted to, as the shock hit him - oh god, his side, he had to be bleeding out, it hurt so much -
“Easy, easy!” someone said in a panicked voice. “Oh god, calm down - stop moving, please!”
He couldn’t stay still, how was he supposed to just lie there when he hurt so badly, and he didn’t even know where he was, or what was happening?
“Stay still, you’re just going to make it worse!” the panicked voice went on, high and strangled with fear. “Oh god, oh god, where’s Commander Fair?!”
“Use some materia on him, for god’s sake!” another voice shrieked.
“I have!” cried the first voice. “I used up all my MP and it wasn’t enough! He’s still bleeding! WHERE’S COMMANDER FAIR?!”
For a second, the shock as the name registered was enough to cut through the haze of confusion and agony, but then it was gone again. His muscles all seized up at once, back arching, and then he was shaking, shuddering, jerking, and his consciousness fizzled out in a bright burst of white light.
<><><><><>
Cloud’s eyes snapped open, his body curling in on itself instinctively. His side, he was injured, badly, what - ?
“Cloud, easy, ssshh,” said a voice, one he knew, and Cloud found himself looking up into Tifa’s worried eyes. He froze for a moment, and then reality slid into place. He wasn’t cold - he was warm, wrapped in blankets, and though his body ached a little it was nothing like the pain he’d been expecting. He wasn’t injured.
He slowly sank back down onto the bed, guided by Tifa’s hands on his shoulders. A quick glance around the room told him he was in his own bed, in the room he occupied in Tifa’s house. Through the window, he could see the sun shining. No hint of cold except for the slight chill that he associated with the last vestiges of his dreams fading away in the daylight. No sign of anyone else in the room except Tifa, and certainly no-one with those panicked voices he’d heard.
“Are you okay?” Tifa asked, startling Cloud from his reverie.
He stared at her where she sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, uncomprehending, before ducking his head in a nod. “I’m fine. What happened?”
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Tifa said. Cloud suddenly saw how pale she was, how drawn her expression was. “You just collapsed in the middle of the market.”
The market! “The kids!” Cloud exclaimed, snapping upright again. The movement made his head spin, so much so that for a moment Cloud thought he might throw up.
Tifa’s hands were cool on his arms. “Cloud?” she asked, and her voice was as drawn as her face had been.
“The kids,” Cloud insisted. “Are they okay?”
“They’re fine.” Something of Cloud’s relief must have shown, because Tifa’s lips pulled into a fond, slightly sad smile. “They’re both about out of their heads with worry, but they’re fine. They’d love to see you if you’re up to it.”
“In a minute.” He needed to take stock first, ground himself a little before he let Denzel and Marlene see him. “What did they say about what happened?”
“Denzel said he handed you some old Shinra goggles, and after a moment you just collapsed,” Tifa replied. Cloud watched her wring her hands in her lap rather than look her in the eye. “Denzel called me. Some of the market people looked after you until we got there. You were out cold, and you kept shivering. We brought you back here, and called out a doctor - he said it was probably exhaustion.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He hadn’t meant to scare anyone.
“Just...try not to do it again, okay?” She was smiling - tiredly, but it was still a smile - when he looked up at her face. He nodded, and she reached over to squeeze his hand. “I’ll go get the kids, and then you need to get some rest.”
Cloud watched her leave the room silently, and when she’d turned out of sight his gaze dropped down to his hands, curled in the blankets in his lap. His fingers ached faintly, like he’d been gripping something very tightly for too long. He flexed his hands a few times to try and ease the sensation, watching the muscles shift beneath his skin with interest.
Exhaustion, the doctor had said. Cloud shuddered - he’d rest as much as any doctor wanted him to if it meant he didn’t hallucinate Zack standing beside him. For the moment he’d been there, he’d seemed real enough that Cloud could reach out and touch him. More substantial than the times he’d felt, or even imagined he’d seen, Zack’s presence since his death.
Cloud couldn’t help the soft huff of laughter at the thought. Reality, now there was something that he’d proven time and again meant little, if anything, to him.
The door flinging open prevented him from going too far down that potentially dangerous train of thought. “Cloud!” Marlene’s voice squealed, and she was somehow already clambering up onto the bed and throwing herself into his arms. “Don’t do that again!” she cried sternly, fingers digging painfully into the hair at the base of his skull. She began to shake against him, a fine tremble that went throughout her whole body, and as Cloud wrapped one arm tight around her he realised she was trying very hard to hide the fact that she was crying.
She would always be Barrett’s daughter, but she was loved by all of AVALANCHE and Cloud was no exception to that. “Sorry,” he whispered into her hair, not knowing what else to say. Over the top of her head, he met Denzel’s wary gaze. The boy was standing just inside the doorway, watching him, intent but uncertain. Cloud recognised the reticence there as something he himself suffered from, a consequence of losing too many people he’d held dear.
He nodded to the boy, and after a moment Denzel nodded back and started across the room towards them. He chose to sit in the chair next to the bed rather than on it, but Cloud didn’t begrudge him the distance. The tight set of Denzel’s jaw told him exactly how much the boy was upset by the situation.
He desperately wanted to promise them that this would never happen again, but he didn’t honestly know, and he didn’t want to lie to them - not to Marlene, who he loved, and certainly not to Denzel, who might as well be his own now. He’d never been good at lying knowingly.
<><><><><>
Denzel warmed back up to him after he appeared to ascertain to his satisfaction that Cloud was healthy enough. “Do you know what happened?” was the only thing he asked, and when Cloud said, “The doctor said it was exhaustion,” his mouth tightened unhappily, but he didn’t mention it again.
After dinner, Cloud pulled him aside and said, “You want to go for a ride on Fenrir?” He knew right away that Denzel saw straight through him, but the lure of the bike was too much, and the cautious way in which the kid’s eyes lit up helped to ease the horrible knot in Cloud’s stomach. It was more than worth braving Tifa’s disapproving gaze.
He took them on a leisurely circle of the city as night fell, and then sped outside into the surrounding wastelands, revving up to the kind of speed that made Denzel laugh breathlessly with delight, his grip white-knuckled around Cloud’s middle. When the last of the day’s heat slipped away and the chill became too much to handle on the motorbike, they wound their way back into the city.
Cloud took them past a construction site not far from 7th Heaven, cranes looming silently over them in the dark. He rolled the bike slowly to a stop, aware of Denzel’s curious gaze on his back. “See that building?” he said, nodding to the low, squat black shape beneath the heavy machinery. “It’s going to be a school. A proper one.”
“A school?” Denzel echoed. “Like, with other kids?”
“Lots of them,” Cloud said. “You wanna go?”
“Can Marlene come?” Denzel asked, excitement creeping into his voice.
“That’s the plan.”
“When does it open? How many other kids will there be?”
“I’ll ask Reeve when I next see him.”
“Can you take me to school on Fenrir every day?”
Cloud’s mouth twitched upwards, and he began to ease the bike away again. “Not every day.”
“But some days, right? Right?” Denzel demanded, voice growing louder as the engine began to drown him out. “RIGHT?!”
“Maybe,” Cloud said, but it was lost to the wind. When they got back to the house, he watched Denzel sprint off into the house calling for Marlene, and the excitement on the boy’s face made him smile, the knot of his stomach loosening fully for the first time since he’d stepped into that cursed marketplace.
<><><><><>
That night, Cloud didn’t dream of the cold. He dreamt that he was hot instead, but the delicious kind of heat from not being alone in your bed. There was a furnace at his back, stretched out along the entire length of his body, wrapping him up in warmth. When Cloud stretched, arching his back, the heat moved with him, stroked a broad hand absent-mindedly up from his stomach to his sternum.
It didn’t occur to him that there was anything strange about the whole thing, not even when the sensation remained with him as he slowly pulled out of sleep into the waking world. It was gone by the time he opened his eyes to the early morning light, but the transition from dozing to wakefulness had taken long enough that he’d already forgotten about it.
<><><><><>
Reeve’s headquarters in the city were located in a strangely normal-looking building, so much so that Cloud used to walk past it without realising he’d done so. That day, however, there was a Turk hanging around outside the entrance, and Cloud couldn’t have missed Reno even if he tried (a tempting option, a lot of the time). The Turks still set his teeth on edge, the redhead especially, even though they were no match for any of AVALANCHE’s old members these days.
Reno was smoking, and he took the cigarette from his lips as he watched Cloud approach. “Howdy.”
“What are you doing here?” Cloud said shortly.
“We’re on business,” Reno answered easily enough, taking a quick drag. He watched Cloud with that quick, cunning gaze that made Cloud’s hands itch for a weapon. “Legitimate business, even.”
“What kind of business?”
“You’ll have to speak to my boss about that,” Reno replied. Which meant Rufus was probably in the building somewhere. As if this day couldn’t get any better.
“Whatever.” Cloud strode past the Turk into the building, a sour feeling in his stomach. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a smirk spread across Reno’s agile features, and he barely resisted the urge to punch it off the man’s face.
The inside of the building was as disarming as the outside. A receptionist had been set up inside, but her desk was of the cheap fold-up kind rather than the imposingly solid creations Shinra had favoured in its time. A mountain of files sat in neat piles beside her, and propped up against one of them was an old whiteboard with a map of the building drawn on in marker.
The only thing that might tell you someone important worked here was the two security guards just inside the entrance. They snapped to attention as soon as they saw him, tall and broad in suits similar to Reno’s. “Sir,” one of them began, eyes flicking to the sword on his back.
“I’m here to see Reeve,” Cloud said instead, purposefully ignoring them. He wasn’t going anywhere with Turks in the vicinity without a weapon, whether they really WERE here on legitimate business or not. “I’ve got an appointment.”
“All visitors are requested to leave weapons and materia with us,” the other guard said, but the glance he shot his companion said he really didn’t want to have to enforce it. They both towered over Cloud but all three of them knew who would win in a fight.
“Then you can tell Reeve he can come talk to me outside,” Cloud told them, turning to stride out of the building. He’d got two steps when Reeve’s deep voice called, “That won’t be necessary. Let him through.”
When Cloud turned round, Reeve was coming down a flight of stairs to the left, Rufus Shinra at his side. Cloud’s jaw tightened - what the hell did Reeve think he was playing at?
Rufus nodded to him in acknowledgement across the room. He looked a lot healthier than the last time Cloud had seen him, though that had been some time ago. Cloud offered a tight, reluctant nod in return, walking past the security guards to meet them. “Rufus.”
“Cloud,” Rufus said graciously.
Reeve glanced between the two of them briefly, one eyebrow raised. “I trust what we’ve discussed won’t be a problem for you, Rufus,” he said.
“None at all, I assure you,” Rufus replied smoothly. “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Good luck,” Reeve said, coming to a stop next to Cloud. From there they both watched Rufus leave, obtaining a gun from one of the guards on his way out, which the blond slipped under his white jacket out of sight. Cloud frowned after him.
After a moment, Reeve said, “I know what you’re thinking, but I have my reasons.”
“They’d better be damn good ones,” Cloud told him, liking the entire situation less and less the more he saw.
“I’ll explain upstairs.” Reeve nodded his head towards the stairs he and the ex-President had come down. “Shall we?”
Cloud followed the older man away from the entrance, up the stairs towards the mid-sized room Reeve used as an office nowadays. The other man seemed to be doing well, Cloud mused, well-groomed, smartly dressed and as controlled as ever, but it was still difficult to imagine that the new world was basically being reconstructed by this man, in this rundown little building with a receptionist who sat at a fold-up desk. Cloud supposed he’d become so used to Shinra that it was difficult to imagine the world working any other way.
Reeve’s office was as unpretentious as the rest of the place, though he had a more imposing desk than the woman downstairs, shelves full of files, and a computer. Out of the large window, Edge stretched out before them, and beyond that, the ruins of central Midgar, the remains of the old Shinra tower thrusting up into the sky - though there wasn’t so much of it left now, not after the mess with Kadaj.
“Did you know I chose this room specifically because of this view?” Reeve asked, apparently having followed the blond’s gaze outside. “It’s a pretty effective reminder of what not to become.”
Cloud snorted, turning away from the window to stare at the dark-haired man in disbelief. “And how does doing business with Rufus Shinra and the Turks fit in with that?”
Reeve sank into his chair behind the desk, crossing his legs and folding his hands neatly in his lap. “It’s not an ideal situation, I’ll give you that. But Rufus is far too clever and ambitious to be left to his own devices - I’d rather have him doing jobs for me where I can keep an eye on him. And the Turks are fairly useful for the more dangerous jobs I have that need doing. Would you like to know what I’ve asked them to do?”
Cloud crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the wall beside the window. “Enlighten me.”
“I’ve asked them to head into Midgar and retrieve what they can from the old Shinra labs.”
“What for?”
“I want all their research on Jenova.” Reeve leant forward, resting his elbows on the dark wood of his desk and steepling his hands. The sound of that name sent a jolt of unease through Cloud. “We were completely helpless against Geostigma. Hundreds of people died, and I couldn’t help any of them. I don’t want to be caught that unaware ever again.”
Cloud raised an eyebrow. “If there are no other Jenova cells being kept, then that might well have been the last we saw of her.”
Reeve nodded. “That’s one of the things I’m hoping we might be able to confirm by checking all the research. I’ve sent a team out to Nibelheim to collect everything there, too. I want to make sure she’s gone, once and for all.”
It would set Cloud’s mind at rest, knowing that Jenova was finally dead, though he still didn’t like the thought of Rufus being involved. But Reeve was stretched thin, he knew that well enough. The fact that it had taken this long to organise a retrieval of Shinra’s old data was testament to that. Reeve had been focussing all his efforts on rebuilding the infrastructure they’d lost when Midgar had been destroyed, but a lot of stuff had had to be put aside in order to do that.
“Are you going to be building labs?” Cloud asked.
Reeve nodded. “Yes, but nothing on the scale of Hojo’s old ones. And any research is going to be strictly monitored. I am not going to be the next Shinra.”
Cloud hoped, for all their sakes, that Reeve truly meant it. He wasn’t sure he had the strength left to deal with it again.
<><><><><>
He left Reeve’s office some time later, surprised to find that the sun was already low in the sky. Tifa would be wondering where he was - and sure enough, when Cloud pulled out of his phone, there were two missed calls from the bar. “You must be still in the meeting,” Tifa’s voice message began, as Cloud settled onto Fenrir and reached for the ignition. “We’ve gone ahead and had dinner, but I’ve left some for you to have when you get back. See you soon.”
Cloud snapped the phone shut and put it away before reaching for his goggles. He eased the bike out past some pedestrians, and was about to get going when he heard a man’s laugh that was so heart-stoppingly familiar that it sucked all the air out of his lungs. He snapped his head round, shoving his goggles back up, and stared at the group of people he’d just passed - but he knew none of them.
Hands shaking, Cloud watched them until they disappeared out of sight around a corner. None of them were Zack, no matter how similar the laugh had been, but it had sounded SO like him that it took a moment for Cloud to get himself back under control. And even then, his heart was still pounding uncomfortably in his chest when he revved up the bike and started home.
He went in the back door when he arrived at the house, still not feeling quite himself. Pressing a hand to his aching head, Cloud headed up the stairs and into his room. He crawled into bed, only bothering to kick his boots off, and was out before his head even hit the pillow.
<><><><><>
He found himself drifting in and out of consciousness for some indeterminate length of time. It felt like it could have been minutes, or forever. Initially, it seemed to be voices, and lingering pain throughout his body, that lifted him out of the dark - some that he knew and some that he didn’t. “...us all if he doesn’t pull through,” he caught one unfamiliar man saying. “You’d better hope...not dead in the morning, or we’re done for.”
Later - or not, he couldn’t quite remember - he heard Zack’s beloved voice. “Ssssh,” he kept saying, and Cloud could almost feel the man’s hand stroking comfortingly over his hair. “It’s alright. It’s all going to be fine.” Maybe he really WAS dying, if Zack was there. That wouldn’t be so bad, really, if the dark-haired man was with him.
That was another thing he’d proven over and over - as long as Zack was there to shore him up, he could deal with pretty much anything.
Zack’s hand abruptly stopped its soothing motions. “You’re here,” he said, and Cloud wondered dimly who he was talking to.
“I came as soon as I could,” replied a deep, smooth voice, but Cloud was pulled back into the darkness before he could really register the fact that he knew it just as well as, if not better than, he knew Zack’s.
The next time he woke, things were clearer: he no longer seemed to be swimming in quite the same dream-like state. He was cold along one side, but warm on the other - a moment later he registered the crackling of a fire nearby. Groggily, Cloud tried to shift his body over, instinctively trying to get up out of the vulnerable position he was lying in - where was his sword?
Moving proved somewhat ineffectual. After a moment of fear that had his heart in his throat, he realised he was wrapped up in something. Blankets, maybe? That, and the weakness in his limbs, meant that he managed little more than his head flopping to one side. From there, he managed to open his eyes. The firelight was too much, and he ended up screwing his eyes shut again, but not before he’d seen that someone was sitting beside him on the rock floor.
Zack? he wondered, more than a little hopeful. Zack meant safety. Cloud managed to slit his eyes open again to take another look, gaze falling upon long, black-clad legs stretched out nearby. The man was wearing black boots that went up past the knee, the edges of a black coat falling just in Cloud’s line of vision - and then, with a shock that felt like being struck by lightning in the chest, he saw Masamune.
No, he thought blankly for a moment before the panic set in, no, no no nono-
The legs shifted, and then there was a commotion off to the side. “Cloud?” Zack’s voice - ZACK’s voice - called from beyond the fire, heavy footsteps echoing around them. “Cloud, what’s wrong? Cloud!”
He was shaking, vision whiting out around the edges, his body out of his control - a seizure, why was he seizing, what was happening - and the last thing he saw before he lost it completely was two pairs of Mako eyes staring down at him, and a black gloved hand that wasn’t Zack’s reaching towards him.
Another indeterminate amount of time later, he woke with a curious sense of deja vu. The fire was still crackling, and he could feel warm hands stroking over his hair, his face. His body ached all over, and his mouth was so dry it felt like his tongue was made of sandpaper. He tried to lick his lips and discovered the skin was cracked and stung fiercely.
“Cloud?” Zack, again. The hands lifted from his face briefly, and something like a groan escaped Cloud’s throat. Then wetness touched his lips, dripped into his mouth infuriatingly slowly. He must have made a noise of protest, because Zack said, “Sorry, I know, I know, but you’ll probably be sick if I let you gulp it down so quickly, and then the General would have my hide.”
There was something so fundamentally wrong with his words - the entire situation, really - that Cloud’s brain seemed to refuse to take it in properly. He swallowed the water being given to him, his thirst driving out all other real thought, and basked in Zack’s inexplicable presence beside him. He didn’t want to THINK.
Eventually, though, the water was taken away. “That’s enough for now,” Zack told him. “Sorry, kid. Just doing what the medic told me to.” Fingers along his hairline again. Zack’s voice, and his touch, floating in the darkness behind Cloud’s closed eyelids, was both exhilarating and excrutiatingly painful. A horrible, wet feeling lodged in his chest, caught in his throat.
“You should sleep,” the voice above him went on, in a strangely soft voice. “Thought you were gonna go out on us a couple of times. Scared the shit out of us with that seizure, and the medic said that wasn’t even the first one you’ve had. We need you to get better, okay? Be the fighter I know you are.”
None of it was making much sense to Cloud, but he let Zack’s voice wash over him, uncomplaining. Something in him kept catching on Zack’s ‘we’ - there was something important there, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.
Then the other man said, “Seph’s gonna be pleased to hear you woke up a bit when he gets back...” and abruptly Cloud remembered black-clad legs, black-gloved hands reaching for him. It made his mind temporarily go blank and his whole body freeze, because Sephiroth had been THERE, and he was supposed to be DEAD-
“Hey, hey, sshhh.” Fingers combing through his hair, scratching against his scalp a little urgently, caught his attention again. “Just relax, relax, okay? Gods, Cloud, don’t seize again, I can’t watch another one. You listening, kid? Seph’ll be back soon, and he’ll kick both our asses if you give up on us...”
But Zack was dead, too. Two dead men. And then there was Cloud.
<><><><><>
...And that's how far I got. D:
This was the FFVII fic I started as my NaNo project last year, got about 5000 words in, and then failed miserably on (like all my fics). I was reading it back the other day and there is something in here I'd like to salvage, unlike most of the terrible snippets of fic floating around on my computer. This is my "What would Fusion by like if I'd started it now, instead of however-many-years ago?" fic, although it's very different from that story in many respects.
Title: NaNo 2009 Snippet
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII (Advent Children compliant. Ignores all other Compilation titles.)
Rating: R for this, maybe?
Summary: Post-Advent Children. Cloud's world is torn apart once more when he starts to suffer bizarre and increasingly-vivid hallucinations, threatening to strip him of everything he's worked so hard to regain - his family, his sanity, and his life.
Recently, Cloud dreamt of the cold. It was so, so cold - a cold so deep and penetrating that it made his entire body hurt, like he was being stabbed with needles underneath his skin. It reminded him of the piercing winters up in the mountains of Nibelheim, where a man could easily get lost and perish if they weren’t careful.
He would wake up with his body aching, a vague echo of the pain in his dreams. It would pass, but it would leave him feeling unsettled and uneasy.
Sometimes he dreamt that someone was with him in the cold, and he could hear Zack saying, “We’re friends, right?” He could feel the rough movement of a truck beneath him, and Zack’s voice, over and over again, “We’re friends, right?” He would wake up disorientated, the feel of the truck and the cold still so close he was still almost there, even while he was awake.
He felt like he was dying in those dreams. He couldn’t really remember their flight from Nibelheim, if he was being honest with himself, and he wondered if that was how he’d felt at the time. The absolute cold, the certainty that he was going to slip from existence, no matter what Zack said or did for him.
He didn’t want to dream about Zack. But, he supposed, at least he wasn’t dreaming about Sephiroth. Not yet, anyway. He had no doubt that would come. If there was anything Cloud had learned about himself the past few years, it was that he was, after all, a glutton for punishment.
<><><><><>
The market was crowded and it only took one glance at the mass of bodies to remind Cloud just how much he hated places like this. He tightened his grip on Marlene’s hand, as if just by being in their proximity she might get sucked away out of sight. He must have gripped too hard - after a moment he felt her hand wiggling, tugging away, as she gasped “Cloud!” in that horrible reproving tone only children could manage. He let go, startled, and when he looked down, she was rubbing at her fingers. He wanted to apologise for hurting her but somehow the words got stuck in his throat.
Denzel, on the other side of Marlene, was bouncing slightly on the balls of his feet, gazing out across the marketplace. “It’s right at the back,” he said, lifting a hand to gesture over the heads of the other market-goers. Then he was off, heading into the crowd before Cloud could stop him.
“Denzel!” Cloud called, but the boy had already disappeared. Something like fear wedged in Cloud’s throat - the markets were no place for a child to be left alone, too dangerous, too easy for something to happen and not realise. He grabbed Marlene and swept her up into his arms, ignoring her surprised protest, and started in the direction Denzel had gone.
It was impossible to spot Denzel in amongst all the much taller adults, even with the way some people stepped aside like a parting sea when they caught sight of his distinctive figure. Cloud was never in the mood for the misguided awe people seemed to regard him with, least of all when he had an errant child on the loose, and he held Marlene tight against his chest like her warmth could shield him from the unwelcome gazes.
He headed through the throngs of people in the direction Denzel had pointed before, hoping that the boy hadn’t spotted something else of interest on the way and veered off somewhere else. But as Cloud and Marlene approached the back of the market square, he spotted the familiar head of red-brown hair emerging from the thinning crowd and heading towards a stall at the very back that looked like it was selling junk.
“Denzel!” Cloud said sharply as he and Marlene broke through towards the stalls. Denzel turned at the sound of Cloud’s voice, face such a perfect picture of confusion at the older man’s tone that Cloud had no doubt Denzel didn’t realise he’d done anything wrong at all. “Don’t run off alone like that,” he said. “It’s not safe here.”
“I didn’t go that far!” Denzel protested, and then switched off from the potential argument completely by turning to the stall and saying, “Look at all this stuff! Isn’t it cool? I think it’s all from before Meteor!” He picked up what looked like a twisted piece of dark metal from the table and began inspecting it, enraptured.
“Let me down,” Marlene said, and between the two of them Cloud’s intention to argue his point some more was completely derailed. He set Marlene down but kept a firm grip on her hand, and looked at the stall Denzel was so excited about.
It WAS all old stuff. Cloud was surprised and a little disturbed as he took it all in properly. It was mostly old Shinra things, salvaged from Midgar - all things that belonged to the old age: an old rifle, damaged enough that it was probably unusable now but not enough to hide the Shinra logo on the side; an old grunt helmet; an assortment of various elevator keycards that looked like they would have sold for a fortune on the black market if the Shinra building still existed.
“Look at these!” Denzel said, shoving something into Cloud’s free hand. They looked like large, bulky sunglasses. Cloud turned them slowly in his fingers, running the pad of his thumb along a deep scratch.
Someone reached over and plucked them from his grip. They were wearing gloves similar to his. “Aaah, haven’t seen these in a while. VR training goggles. You remember these, don’t you?”
Cloud looked over and found Zack smiling back at him.
<><><><><><>
Cold. It was so damn cold. Cloud could feel his whole body shaking with it, his muscles seized up and aching fiercely. And beneath that, a slightly different kind of cold - the sharp-edged kind that signified a serious injury of some kind.
It was like a switch flipped, and as soon as he realised he was hurt, pain flooded his body. He gasped, or wanted to, as the shock hit him - oh god, his side, he had to be bleeding out, it hurt so much -
“Easy, easy!” someone said in a panicked voice. “Oh god, calm down - stop moving, please!”
He couldn’t stay still, how was he supposed to just lie there when he hurt so badly, and he didn’t even know where he was, or what was happening?
“Stay still, you’re just going to make it worse!” the panicked voice went on, high and strangled with fear. “Oh god, oh god, where’s Commander Fair?!”
“Use some materia on him, for god’s sake!” another voice shrieked.
“I have!” cried the first voice. “I used up all my MP and it wasn’t enough! He’s still bleeding! WHERE’S COMMANDER FAIR?!”
For a second, the shock as the name registered was enough to cut through the haze of confusion and agony, but then it was gone again. His muscles all seized up at once, back arching, and then he was shaking, shuddering, jerking, and his consciousness fizzled out in a bright burst of white light.
<><><><><>
Cloud’s eyes snapped open, his body curling in on itself instinctively. His side, he was injured, badly, what - ?
“Cloud, easy, ssshh,” said a voice, one he knew, and Cloud found himself looking up into Tifa’s worried eyes. He froze for a moment, and then reality slid into place. He wasn’t cold - he was warm, wrapped in blankets, and though his body ached a little it was nothing like the pain he’d been expecting. He wasn’t injured.
He slowly sank back down onto the bed, guided by Tifa’s hands on his shoulders. A quick glance around the room told him he was in his own bed, in the room he occupied in Tifa’s house. Through the window, he could see the sun shining. No hint of cold except for the slight chill that he associated with the last vestiges of his dreams fading away in the daylight. No sign of anyone else in the room except Tifa, and certainly no-one with those panicked voices he’d heard.
“Are you okay?” Tifa asked, startling Cloud from his reverie.
He stared at her where she sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, uncomprehending, before ducking his head in a nod. “I’m fine. What happened?”
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Tifa said. Cloud suddenly saw how pale she was, how drawn her expression was. “You just collapsed in the middle of the market.”
The market! “The kids!” Cloud exclaimed, snapping upright again. The movement made his head spin, so much so that for a moment Cloud thought he might throw up.
Tifa’s hands were cool on his arms. “Cloud?” she asked, and her voice was as drawn as her face had been.
“The kids,” Cloud insisted. “Are they okay?”
“They’re fine.” Something of Cloud’s relief must have shown, because Tifa’s lips pulled into a fond, slightly sad smile. “They’re both about out of their heads with worry, but they’re fine. They’d love to see you if you’re up to it.”
“In a minute.” He needed to take stock first, ground himself a little before he let Denzel and Marlene see him. “What did they say about what happened?”
“Denzel said he handed you some old Shinra goggles, and after a moment you just collapsed,” Tifa replied. Cloud watched her wring her hands in her lap rather than look her in the eye. “Denzel called me. Some of the market people looked after you until we got there. You were out cold, and you kept shivering. We brought you back here, and called out a doctor - he said it was probably exhaustion.”
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. He hadn’t meant to scare anyone.
“Just...try not to do it again, okay?” She was smiling - tiredly, but it was still a smile - when he looked up at her face. He nodded, and she reached over to squeeze his hand. “I’ll go get the kids, and then you need to get some rest.”
Cloud watched her leave the room silently, and when she’d turned out of sight his gaze dropped down to his hands, curled in the blankets in his lap. His fingers ached faintly, like he’d been gripping something very tightly for too long. He flexed his hands a few times to try and ease the sensation, watching the muscles shift beneath his skin with interest.
Exhaustion, the doctor had said. Cloud shuddered - he’d rest as much as any doctor wanted him to if it meant he didn’t hallucinate Zack standing beside him. For the moment he’d been there, he’d seemed real enough that Cloud could reach out and touch him. More substantial than the times he’d felt, or even imagined he’d seen, Zack’s presence since his death.
Cloud couldn’t help the soft huff of laughter at the thought. Reality, now there was something that he’d proven time and again meant little, if anything, to him.
The door flinging open prevented him from going too far down that potentially dangerous train of thought. “Cloud!” Marlene’s voice squealed, and she was somehow already clambering up onto the bed and throwing herself into his arms. “Don’t do that again!” she cried sternly, fingers digging painfully into the hair at the base of his skull. She began to shake against him, a fine tremble that went throughout her whole body, and as Cloud wrapped one arm tight around her he realised she was trying very hard to hide the fact that she was crying.
She would always be Barrett’s daughter, but she was loved by all of AVALANCHE and Cloud was no exception to that. “Sorry,” he whispered into her hair, not knowing what else to say. Over the top of her head, he met Denzel’s wary gaze. The boy was standing just inside the doorway, watching him, intent but uncertain. Cloud recognised the reticence there as something he himself suffered from, a consequence of losing too many people he’d held dear.
He nodded to the boy, and after a moment Denzel nodded back and started across the room towards them. He chose to sit in the chair next to the bed rather than on it, but Cloud didn’t begrudge him the distance. The tight set of Denzel’s jaw told him exactly how much the boy was upset by the situation.
He desperately wanted to promise them that this would never happen again, but he didn’t honestly know, and he didn’t want to lie to them - not to Marlene, who he loved, and certainly not to Denzel, who might as well be his own now. He’d never been good at lying knowingly.
<><><><><>
Denzel warmed back up to him after he appeared to ascertain to his satisfaction that Cloud was healthy enough. “Do you know what happened?” was the only thing he asked, and when Cloud said, “The doctor said it was exhaustion,” his mouth tightened unhappily, but he didn’t mention it again.
After dinner, Cloud pulled him aside and said, “You want to go for a ride on Fenrir?” He knew right away that Denzel saw straight through him, but the lure of the bike was too much, and the cautious way in which the kid’s eyes lit up helped to ease the horrible knot in Cloud’s stomach. It was more than worth braving Tifa’s disapproving gaze.
He took them on a leisurely circle of the city as night fell, and then sped outside into the surrounding wastelands, revving up to the kind of speed that made Denzel laugh breathlessly with delight, his grip white-knuckled around Cloud’s middle. When the last of the day’s heat slipped away and the chill became too much to handle on the motorbike, they wound their way back into the city.
Cloud took them past a construction site not far from 7th Heaven, cranes looming silently over them in the dark. He rolled the bike slowly to a stop, aware of Denzel’s curious gaze on his back. “See that building?” he said, nodding to the low, squat black shape beneath the heavy machinery. “It’s going to be a school. A proper one.”
“A school?” Denzel echoed. “Like, with other kids?”
“Lots of them,” Cloud said. “You wanna go?”
“Can Marlene come?” Denzel asked, excitement creeping into his voice.
“That’s the plan.”
“When does it open? How many other kids will there be?”
“I’ll ask Reeve when I next see him.”
“Can you take me to school on Fenrir every day?”
Cloud’s mouth twitched upwards, and he began to ease the bike away again. “Not every day.”
“But some days, right? Right?” Denzel demanded, voice growing louder as the engine began to drown him out. “RIGHT?!”
“Maybe,” Cloud said, but it was lost to the wind. When they got back to the house, he watched Denzel sprint off into the house calling for Marlene, and the excitement on the boy’s face made him smile, the knot of his stomach loosening fully for the first time since he’d stepped into that cursed marketplace.
<><><><><>
That night, Cloud didn’t dream of the cold. He dreamt that he was hot instead, but the delicious kind of heat from not being alone in your bed. There was a furnace at his back, stretched out along the entire length of his body, wrapping him up in warmth. When Cloud stretched, arching his back, the heat moved with him, stroked a broad hand absent-mindedly up from his stomach to his sternum.
It didn’t occur to him that there was anything strange about the whole thing, not even when the sensation remained with him as he slowly pulled out of sleep into the waking world. It was gone by the time he opened his eyes to the early morning light, but the transition from dozing to wakefulness had taken long enough that he’d already forgotten about it.
<><><><><>
Reeve’s headquarters in the city were located in a strangely normal-looking building, so much so that Cloud used to walk past it without realising he’d done so. That day, however, there was a Turk hanging around outside the entrance, and Cloud couldn’t have missed Reno even if he tried (a tempting option, a lot of the time). The Turks still set his teeth on edge, the redhead especially, even though they were no match for any of AVALANCHE’s old members these days.
Reno was smoking, and he took the cigarette from his lips as he watched Cloud approach. “Howdy.”
“What are you doing here?” Cloud said shortly.
“We’re on business,” Reno answered easily enough, taking a quick drag. He watched Cloud with that quick, cunning gaze that made Cloud’s hands itch for a weapon. “Legitimate business, even.”
“What kind of business?”
“You’ll have to speak to my boss about that,” Reno replied. Which meant Rufus was probably in the building somewhere. As if this day couldn’t get any better.
“Whatever.” Cloud strode past the Turk into the building, a sour feeling in his stomach. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a smirk spread across Reno’s agile features, and he barely resisted the urge to punch it off the man’s face.
The inside of the building was as disarming as the outside. A receptionist had been set up inside, but her desk was of the cheap fold-up kind rather than the imposingly solid creations Shinra had favoured in its time. A mountain of files sat in neat piles beside her, and propped up against one of them was an old whiteboard with a map of the building drawn on in marker.
The only thing that might tell you someone important worked here was the two security guards just inside the entrance. They snapped to attention as soon as they saw him, tall and broad in suits similar to Reno’s. “Sir,” one of them began, eyes flicking to the sword on his back.
“I’m here to see Reeve,” Cloud said instead, purposefully ignoring them. He wasn’t going anywhere with Turks in the vicinity without a weapon, whether they really WERE here on legitimate business or not. “I’ve got an appointment.”
“All visitors are requested to leave weapons and materia with us,” the other guard said, but the glance he shot his companion said he really didn’t want to have to enforce it. They both towered over Cloud but all three of them knew who would win in a fight.
“Then you can tell Reeve he can come talk to me outside,” Cloud told them, turning to stride out of the building. He’d got two steps when Reeve’s deep voice called, “That won’t be necessary. Let him through.”
When Cloud turned round, Reeve was coming down a flight of stairs to the left, Rufus Shinra at his side. Cloud’s jaw tightened - what the hell did Reeve think he was playing at?
Rufus nodded to him in acknowledgement across the room. He looked a lot healthier than the last time Cloud had seen him, though that had been some time ago. Cloud offered a tight, reluctant nod in return, walking past the security guards to meet them. “Rufus.”
“Cloud,” Rufus said graciously.
Reeve glanced between the two of them briefly, one eyebrow raised. “I trust what we’ve discussed won’t be a problem for you, Rufus,” he said.
“None at all, I assure you,” Rufus replied smoothly. “We’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Good luck,” Reeve said, coming to a stop next to Cloud. From there they both watched Rufus leave, obtaining a gun from one of the guards on his way out, which the blond slipped under his white jacket out of sight. Cloud frowned after him.
After a moment, Reeve said, “I know what you’re thinking, but I have my reasons.”
“They’d better be damn good ones,” Cloud told him, liking the entire situation less and less the more he saw.
“I’ll explain upstairs.” Reeve nodded his head towards the stairs he and the ex-President had come down. “Shall we?”
Cloud followed the older man away from the entrance, up the stairs towards the mid-sized room Reeve used as an office nowadays. The other man seemed to be doing well, Cloud mused, well-groomed, smartly dressed and as controlled as ever, but it was still difficult to imagine that the new world was basically being reconstructed by this man, in this rundown little building with a receptionist who sat at a fold-up desk. Cloud supposed he’d become so used to Shinra that it was difficult to imagine the world working any other way.
Reeve’s office was as unpretentious as the rest of the place, though he had a more imposing desk than the woman downstairs, shelves full of files, and a computer. Out of the large window, Edge stretched out before them, and beyond that, the ruins of central Midgar, the remains of the old Shinra tower thrusting up into the sky - though there wasn’t so much of it left now, not after the mess with Kadaj.
“Did you know I chose this room specifically because of this view?” Reeve asked, apparently having followed the blond’s gaze outside. “It’s a pretty effective reminder of what not to become.”
Cloud snorted, turning away from the window to stare at the dark-haired man in disbelief. “And how does doing business with Rufus Shinra and the Turks fit in with that?”
Reeve sank into his chair behind the desk, crossing his legs and folding his hands neatly in his lap. “It’s not an ideal situation, I’ll give you that. But Rufus is far too clever and ambitious to be left to his own devices - I’d rather have him doing jobs for me where I can keep an eye on him. And the Turks are fairly useful for the more dangerous jobs I have that need doing. Would you like to know what I’ve asked them to do?”
Cloud crossed his arms over his chest, leaning back against the wall beside the window. “Enlighten me.”
“I’ve asked them to head into Midgar and retrieve what they can from the old Shinra labs.”
“What for?”
“I want all their research on Jenova.” Reeve leant forward, resting his elbows on the dark wood of his desk and steepling his hands. The sound of that name sent a jolt of unease through Cloud. “We were completely helpless against Geostigma. Hundreds of people died, and I couldn’t help any of them. I don’t want to be caught that unaware ever again.”
Cloud raised an eyebrow. “If there are no other Jenova cells being kept, then that might well have been the last we saw of her.”
Reeve nodded. “That’s one of the things I’m hoping we might be able to confirm by checking all the research. I’ve sent a team out to Nibelheim to collect everything there, too. I want to make sure she’s gone, once and for all.”
It would set Cloud’s mind at rest, knowing that Jenova was finally dead, though he still didn’t like the thought of Rufus being involved. But Reeve was stretched thin, he knew that well enough. The fact that it had taken this long to organise a retrieval of Shinra’s old data was testament to that. Reeve had been focussing all his efforts on rebuilding the infrastructure they’d lost when Midgar had been destroyed, but a lot of stuff had had to be put aside in order to do that.
“Are you going to be building labs?” Cloud asked.
Reeve nodded. “Yes, but nothing on the scale of Hojo’s old ones. And any research is going to be strictly monitored. I am not going to be the next Shinra.”
Cloud hoped, for all their sakes, that Reeve truly meant it. He wasn’t sure he had the strength left to deal with it again.
<><><><><>
He left Reeve’s office some time later, surprised to find that the sun was already low in the sky. Tifa would be wondering where he was - and sure enough, when Cloud pulled out of his phone, there were two missed calls from the bar. “You must be still in the meeting,” Tifa’s voice message began, as Cloud settled onto Fenrir and reached for the ignition. “We’ve gone ahead and had dinner, but I’ve left some for you to have when you get back. See you soon.”
Cloud snapped the phone shut and put it away before reaching for his goggles. He eased the bike out past some pedestrians, and was about to get going when he heard a man’s laugh that was so heart-stoppingly familiar that it sucked all the air out of his lungs. He snapped his head round, shoving his goggles back up, and stared at the group of people he’d just passed - but he knew none of them.
Hands shaking, Cloud watched them until they disappeared out of sight around a corner. None of them were Zack, no matter how similar the laugh had been, but it had sounded SO like him that it took a moment for Cloud to get himself back under control. And even then, his heart was still pounding uncomfortably in his chest when he revved up the bike and started home.
He went in the back door when he arrived at the house, still not feeling quite himself. Pressing a hand to his aching head, Cloud headed up the stairs and into his room. He crawled into bed, only bothering to kick his boots off, and was out before his head even hit the pillow.
<><><><><>
He found himself drifting in and out of consciousness for some indeterminate length of time. It felt like it could have been minutes, or forever. Initially, it seemed to be voices, and lingering pain throughout his body, that lifted him out of the dark - some that he knew and some that he didn’t. “...us all if he doesn’t pull through,” he caught one unfamiliar man saying. “You’d better hope...not dead in the morning, or we’re done for.”
Later - or not, he couldn’t quite remember - he heard Zack’s beloved voice. “Ssssh,” he kept saying, and Cloud could almost feel the man’s hand stroking comfortingly over his hair. “It’s alright. It’s all going to be fine.” Maybe he really WAS dying, if Zack was there. That wouldn’t be so bad, really, if the dark-haired man was with him.
That was another thing he’d proven over and over - as long as Zack was there to shore him up, he could deal with pretty much anything.
Zack’s hand abruptly stopped its soothing motions. “You’re here,” he said, and Cloud wondered dimly who he was talking to.
“I came as soon as I could,” replied a deep, smooth voice, but Cloud was pulled back into the darkness before he could really register the fact that he knew it just as well as, if not better than, he knew Zack’s.
The next time he woke, things were clearer: he no longer seemed to be swimming in quite the same dream-like state. He was cold along one side, but warm on the other - a moment later he registered the crackling of a fire nearby. Groggily, Cloud tried to shift his body over, instinctively trying to get up out of the vulnerable position he was lying in - where was his sword?
Moving proved somewhat ineffectual. After a moment of fear that had his heart in his throat, he realised he was wrapped up in something. Blankets, maybe? That, and the weakness in his limbs, meant that he managed little more than his head flopping to one side. From there, he managed to open his eyes. The firelight was too much, and he ended up screwing his eyes shut again, but not before he’d seen that someone was sitting beside him on the rock floor.
Zack? he wondered, more than a little hopeful. Zack meant safety. Cloud managed to slit his eyes open again to take another look, gaze falling upon long, black-clad legs stretched out nearby. The man was wearing black boots that went up past the knee, the edges of a black coat falling just in Cloud’s line of vision - and then, with a shock that felt like being struck by lightning in the chest, he saw Masamune.
No, he thought blankly for a moment before the panic set in, no, no no nono-
The legs shifted, and then there was a commotion off to the side. “Cloud?” Zack’s voice - ZACK’s voice - called from beyond the fire, heavy footsteps echoing around them. “Cloud, what’s wrong? Cloud!”
He was shaking, vision whiting out around the edges, his body out of his control - a seizure, why was he seizing, what was happening - and the last thing he saw before he lost it completely was two pairs of Mako eyes staring down at him, and a black gloved hand that wasn’t Zack’s reaching towards him.
Another indeterminate amount of time later, he woke with a curious sense of deja vu. The fire was still crackling, and he could feel warm hands stroking over his hair, his face. His body ached all over, and his mouth was so dry it felt like his tongue was made of sandpaper. He tried to lick his lips and discovered the skin was cracked and stung fiercely.
“Cloud?” Zack, again. The hands lifted from his face briefly, and something like a groan escaped Cloud’s throat. Then wetness touched his lips, dripped into his mouth infuriatingly slowly. He must have made a noise of protest, because Zack said, “Sorry, I know, I know, but you’ll probably be sick if I let you gulp it down so quickly, and then the General would have my hide.”
There was something so fundamentally wrong with his words - the entire situation, really - that Cloud’s brain seemed to refuse to take it in properly. He swallowed the water being given to him, his thirst driving out all other real thought, and basked in Zack’s inexplicable presence beside him. He didn’t want to THINK.
Eventually, though, the water was taken away. “That’s enough for now,” Zack told him. “Sorry, kid. Just doing what the medic told me to.” Fingers along his hairline again. Zack’s voice, and his touch, floating in the darkness behind Cloud’s closed eyelids, was both exhilarating and excrutiatingly painful. A horrible, wet feeling lodged in his chest, caught in his throat.
“You should sleep,” the voice above him went on, in a strangely soft voice. “Thought you were gonna go out on us a couple of times. Scared the shit out of us with that seizure, and the medic said that wasn’t even the first one you’ve had. We need you to get better, okay? Be the fighter I know you are.”
None of it was making much sense to Cloud, but he let Zack’s voice wash over him, uncomplaining. Something in him kept catching on Zack’s ‘we’ - there was something important there, but he couldn’t quite remember what it was.
Then the other man said, “Seph’s gonna be pleased to hear you woke up a bit when he gets back...” and abruptly Cloud remembered black-clad legs, black-gloved hands reaching for him. It made his mind temporarily go blank and his whole body freeze, because Sephiroth had been THERE, and he was supposed to be DEAD-
“Hey, hey, sshhh.” Fingers combing through his hair, scratching against his scalp a little urgently, caught his attention again. “Just relax, relax, okay? Gods, Cloud, don’t seize again, I can’t watch another one. You listening, kid? Seph’ll be back soon, and he’ll kick both our asses if you give up on us...”
But Zack was dead, too. Two dead men. And then there was Cloud.
<><><><><>
...And that's how far I got. D: