Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Cloud felt like shit.

He felt like shit that had been artistically molded into the shape of a person, stomped on, scooped up, re-extruded, set on fire, and then used as sculpting material again.

He had also been spending too much time around Barrett and Cid, to have come up with that one. People who thought soldiers had foul mouths had never hung out with miners and pilots.

“Ugh,” he allowed himself. Loud, he complained silently. There were people and engines and a yappy snuffling dog and—the rattle of trains.

Another point on the ‘recently around Barrett’ odds; the train lines in Corel were getting really sophisticated these days. Maybe he’d gotten run over by one. Why couldn’t he remember?

The first cold prickle of fear shot through his chest, as he realized that even as he became more and more awake he could not supply a single memory to explain why run over by a train seemed like a reasonable possibility based on his condition.

Except it didn’t; if that had happened he’d either have gaping wounds and crush injuries, or someone would have used a Restore, and he knew what half-Cured after devastating injury felt like. This wasn’t that, it was a different ache, it—

His heart stopped. This pain was familiar, too. Worse the further in you went until you got to bones that screamed at existence. Muscles shot through with shaky weakness. A throat too dry and a tongue too clumsy to make words. Mako poisoning.

Mako poisoning, and amnesia.

“Poor kid,” muttered someone, and the dog he’d heard a moment ago thrust its wet nose interrogatively into his wrist, sending spikes of nausea-inducing pain up through the marrow of his arm, which didn’t respond right away when he tried to push the creature back.

Just when he was going to have to choose between hyperventilating in place and trying to leap to his feet with limbs that didn’t want to acknowledge him, a familiar voice asked, “Are you okay?”

His eyes flew open, his heart falling to a steadier rhythm at the presence of someone he could rely on.

She was bending over him, and she looked worried. And not even mad at him, which might mean whatever had happened wasn’t his fault, but more likely meant he’d scared her too badly to hold a grudge until she was sure he was on the mend.

“Tifa.”

She smiled. It didn’t look right. “It is you, Cloud. This is a surprise! Are you feeling alright?”

“No,” he said, because trying to lie to Tifa when it was completely obvious he was lying was a habit he resorted to only when he needed her to leave him alone and didn’t know how to ask. And right now she was hiding something from him, which was alarming. “What happened?”

Wasn’t her hair supposed to be different? There hadn’t been enough time for her to grow it out to its pre-Meteor length again, had there?

…had there?

Oh, Gaia. He hated losing his memories like he hated nothing else.

“Let me help,” said Tifa, and she got him properly sitting up instead of propped awkwardly against whatever flat hard thing he’d collapsed into. This involved moving to one side of him so she could lift his shoulders, which gave him a view of something other than her face that he didn’t have to work for.

Cloud stared.

He knew this place. The Sector Seven train station, at the edge of the train graveyard. It had fallen months before the rest of Midgar, when the Turks dropped the plate.

This was where his first uncompromised memory took place. The first thing after his first mako poisoning broke that had set into his brain and not gotten jarred loose, and had never needed to be pieced back together, or given up on entirely.

His fingers reported that he was grasping something smooth, and he looked down to find the Buster Sword, not restored as he had made sure to do before moving it into the Church but rather not yet rusted, lying beside him on dirty concrete.

Beyond Tifa, a small wire-haired terrier sat down in the street and panted happily. There were cracks in the concrete.

This was the memory. And—not, because he’d…still been blurring in and out at the time, the first time. Had stood up without knowing it, clutching his head, not lain here dazed.

“Cloud?” Tifa asked, and he looked back at her, as she finished settling him and backed off a little.

He could see all the things he’d missed noticing the first time, when his disintegrating psyche had first begun clinging to Tifa as an anchor against Reunion, just as hard as to the scraps of Zack. Could see her uncertainty, her hope, the fear of an unexpectedly familiar face over a terribly familiar uniform. The yearning for him to be real, and sane. One more Nibelheim survivor to make her less alone, something she might be able to have for her own besides her business and her grudge.

They’d lived next door from infancy, but it was only as adults they’d really gotten to know each other. Enough that now he could read through her brave face so well it was barely even guessing.

He looked away from Tifa, and there were the junked trains and the stack of metal beams grown dull with waiting to be used, the glowing lamppost with its old-style inefficient Shinra bulb, and over on the platform the red hat of that one conductor who’d stayed at his post, even though he’d heard the plate was going to fall even before Cloud tried to warn him, because he’d worked here so long he couldn’t bear to leave it—

This wasn’t the first moment of his life he’d lived over again. That first return to Nibelheim had recurred several times over, Sephiroth’s version and Tifa’s, and his own-melted-together-with-Zack’s, digging toward truth. He’d relived this moment once before, as he was swallowed by the exploding Northern Crater, after Sephiroth convinced him he’d never been anything but a puppet.

If this was a memory, someone had found a way to make it more real than mental invasion via Jenova cells or the Lifestream itself had ever managed. And with a freedom of action he’d never found trapped in a memory before.

If this wasn’t a memory—

“Cloud?” Tifa asked, and he shook himself free. She would tolerate a ridiculously high level of suspicious behavior without saying anything, or giving up on him. He knew that, because she had. But he didn’t want to give her more reason to be suspicious than he could avoid. It distressed her so much, having to suspect him. And it would be inconvenient, too, if she did.

He glanced down at his hands again. The left one moved when he told it to. He pulled it into his lap. “Nibelheim,” he said. Practiced closing the fingers of his right hand. It was getting rapidly easier. That was right, he’d been recovered enough to cross the plains to get here at all, this had just been—a relapse. (A relapse that might have ended with him rocking endlessly in a black cloak, if Tifa hadn’t found him.) “What happened there?”

Tifa hadn’t known he’d been there when their home was destroyed, his face hidden behind his helmet and his scarf and his shame. She’d seen him only at the very end, as she passed out from blood loss and Sephiroth’s careless blow, and she’d thought for the longest time that she’d only imagined it.

The look on her face was stricken. “You went back?” she asked. Shot a look from one side, to another. “It’s…not a good thing to talk about out here. Come to my place?”

He nodded. He’d tried to walk away from her, the first time. He remembered that. His most recent not-memories of her then had been of trying to avoid her, in case she recognized him and found out he’d failed, and the feeling had lingered if not the facts; he’d been angry at everything and unable to care about anything, and he’d been being pulled ceaselessly toward Zack’s goal of Aerith and Jenova’s goal of Reunion, without being aware of either. She’d had to badger and plead and offer him paying work.

This time, there was nothing you could have paid him to get him to walk away without having been shown to the Seventh Heaven.

Tifa offered him a hand up, and he took it. Felt fairly steady on his feet, and placed the Buster Sword on his back in a motion smooth with reflex.

“So…you got into SOLDIER?” she asked as they walked, taking a little sidelong look at his eyes.

Cloud shook his head. “I don’t work for Shinra. I wouldn’t if they begged me.” Rufus had come as close to begging as he was probably capable of, during the incident the children had taken to calling the Last Reunion.

(Cloud had hoped so hard that they were right, known they couldn’t be sure. They’d been pulled deeper into Jenova’s grasp than he’d ever wanted anyone to be again, but they hadn’t known any more than he did, not really, and Sephiroth’s final threat had hung in some moments on his wristbones like a leaden weight.)

Not that the Shinra would have any reason to beg him as he was now—probably the weakest SOLDIER on Gaia, fresh from his mako addiction stupor—but he could build himself back up.

“Oh.” Tifa relaxed.

Cloud wasn’t sure whether it was impressive or embarrassing that he hadn’t noticed she was hiding things from him the first time. She wasn’t precisely subtle, if only because she kept almost changing her mind about hiding them. He guessed he’d just…assumed all the little strangenesses were part of her crush. It wasn’t like he’d had any experience being crushed on.

Tifa led him through the junk heaps into the inhabited part of the sector, then around through the twisting streets to the spindling-tall Weapons Shop (built, as seemed to be customary for that sort of establishment in lower Midgar, of corrugated scrap metal) across the road from a comfortable-looking bar. They turned right.

“This is mine,” she said, and led him inside the empty bar.

The original Seventh Heaven.

It was…Cloud was swamped by a wave of homesickness for the version in Edge; a larger, newer space with a longer, smoother bar and windows to let in the sunlight, and four neat little bedrooms upstairs, one for Tifa and one for Cloud and one for the kids to share, and one for any friends that came visiting. He hadn’t always slept there, even when he was in town, even after Geostigma was over. But he’d known it was there to come back to. Come home to.

This—this wasn’t a home. Except maybe to Tifa.

Still, there was some nostalgia at seeing it again, the raw wood tables, the battered fridge, the green bar stools, the ridiculous nonfunctional pinball machine that sank into the floor to reach the Secret Base underground. He’d never remembered to ask Tifa who’d built that. Maybe he could find a good moment later today.

He pictured the looks on everyone’s faces if he wandered over to the pinball game later and fiddled with it until the secret lever just happened to get pulled, and the floor sank out from underneath his feet. That would be almost funny enough to make up for the fit Barret would throw. Maybe actually funny enough. He’d have to wait and see.

“Make yourself at home,” said Tifa. “Want a drink?”

Cloud’s tongue was still trying to stick to the roof of his mouth. “You have safe water?”

Tifa nodded. “Tap off the water mains for up-Plate,” she said. “It’s clean.” She turned the appropriate valve, and water gushed into a glass, which she handed off to him—dry on the outside, and too recently filled to feel cold against skin. Their fingers didn’t quite brush.

Cloud drank it all down in a few seconds, and Tifa wordlessly held out her hand to take the glass back and fill it again. Cloud sat down at the bar to sip this one. It was good, he felt better already, the water leaching through his body and helping the blood run more easily.

He missed the sunlight-clean taste of Aerith’s springwater.

He was probably imagining the feeling of Poison-slick tendrils curling through his body, making his cells hum. He knew Jenova’s intrusions into the human genome opened the way to great power—it had been his dream once, after all—but as important as his strength was to him, he would much rather be trapped within his human limitations and free of her contamination. Of Sephiroth.

But Sephiroth would be back soon, his old nightmare. And anything it took to be ready….

While he sat and drank his water, Tifa dug into the fridge and into one of the kitchen drawers and came out with sacks of potatoes, carrots, and onions.

Root vegetables were the most common kind in Midgar; they shipped well. They had to, considering the distance the Midgar Wastes stretched to after over thirty years of drain from eight constantly churning reactors. Most of the farmers around Kalm and points east made their living supplying the appetites of the floating city, and the potatoes, onions, and grain came in from as far away as the Western continent.

Cloud had somewhat involuntarily learned a lot about the world economy over the past few years. Reeve liked to talk about his work, Barrett and Tifa liked to complain about their businesses and were both surprisingly canny about the factors that influenced them even though Tifa (with her share of the fortune their group had almost accidentally made, in the course of training to save the world) didn’t need to turn a profit off the bar, and because of her generosity often didn’t. A lot of the clients for his delivery business were also independent businesspeople who liked to complain. Even Yuffie sometimes had coherent economic observations, now that her father was seriously trying to get her to shape up into a capable heir for the only surviving actual country on the Planet.

But that was in the future.

“I don’t open for another four hours,” Tifa explained, “but I need to get the stew started. Help me cut up these vegetables?”

Cloud nodded. He hefted his sword as if to ask ‘with this?’ and Tifa hid a giggle behind one hand. She set him up with a reasonably-sized knife and a cutting board, and the vegetables—the best that could be said of Cloud’s generalized cookery skills was that the ingredients were rarely less edible after his intervention than before, but he was excellent at cutting things—and then they both set to work.

And this time she told him the story of the destruction of their hometown. Her version was much more accurate, but less complete without the important pieces of information only Zack had been there to learn. She only knew that after their roundabout trek out to the reactor and back, Sephiroth had vanished into the old Mansion for days, only to abruptly emerge like a high-level Summon and lay waste to everything so quickly that anyone who’d been inside their homes when he struck had burned alive without having a chance to make it even as far as the door.

She’d chased him up to the reactor. He’d struck her down. The other SOLDIER had turned up after her, and she was pretty sure he’d lost, too.

When she woke up, there were voices, and all she could think of to do was crawl into the corner under a monster tank and hide until everyone went away. Master Zangan had caught up with her halfway down the mountain, slightly delirious and not holding up to the cold nearly as well as usual, after so much blood loss. He told her the town was destroyed, patched her up, and carried her to a doctor able to close her wounds, where he left her.

Once recovered, she’d come to Midgar, as so many without homes did.

She’d gotten a job in a bar from a guy who liked that she was cute and tough enough he got a bouncer and a waitress in one. He’d gotten knifed in an alley almost three years ago, and she’d taken the place over.

Cloud already knew most of this, especially the Midgar parts. She had his attention anyway. Somehow, he had never realized just how close Tifa had come to being research material in the Jenova Project. She was stronger than him, and not inoculated like Zack. She would have died.

If she was lucky.

Ridiculously, he almost panicked during that part of the story, and forced the knife through carrot flesh so hard that it sank an inch into the wooden cutting board. Luckily Tifa wasn’t looking, and he pried it out and set it down.

“Nobody made it out but me,” Tifa said. “I ran into one of the guys our age who left to find a job here a couple of years ago, but that’s it, and now he’s disappeared too. I don’t think there were any other survivors, Cloud. I’m sorry.”

She seemed really apologetic, and it took Cloud a minute to realize that she thought he’d been hoping to reunite with his mother.

It would have been nice, if he had to time travel, to go back far enough to save her, and Zack. And the rest of the town, he guessed. But he wasn’t mourning her all over again now. “It’s okay,” he said to the bisected carrot. Picked up the knife and started slicing again around the gouge. “I wasn’t really expecting to find her alive.”

“Cloud…” Whatever Tifa was saying, she didn’t finish saying it yet. The stew pot was beginning to steam, and she dropped in dried stock cubes and dried meat cut small, to start boiling into broth. Tifa didn’t know it, but this wasn’t his first time helping with this recipe. “Are you going to stay here, Cloud?” she asked, as she turned away from the pot.

“In Midgar? I can’t.”

Tifa lined up a row of onions behind her cutting board and started shucking off the crackling outer husks. “Even if I need your help?”

“…you can’t need it that much. You’re doing okay.”

He hadn’t decided yet, what he should do. Instinct was pulling him two ways—toward splitting off alone and trying to handle everything himself, quick targeted strikes at all the problems he would be able to see coming, without putting anybody else in danger, but also toward gathering all his friends together again where he could watch over them, and relying on them to watch his back while and they saved the world again. Both options seemed selfish and risky.

Tifa’s mouth pulled in an unhappy line, and she halved an onion firmly and turned to face him. Her eyes were a little bright, but that might just be onion. “Did you forget our promise?”

Cloud had forgotten. But he remembered, now. He’d had a Tifa to remind him. “That promise was for if I became famous,” he said. Tifa looked hurt. Cloud sighed. “I’d be a terrible hero anyway,” he said. “I know that now.”

It was weird, he was able to realize, looking at this day and his hazier childhood memories as both being the settled past. How they’d gone from a little boy desperately wanting the girl next door to like him—she’d been the only kid in town he actually thought worth his time, and not just because most of the rest of them had been hostile—to a young woman desperate to hang onto a brusque young man. There were probably less cataclysmic ways the same thing could have happened. It was still—strange.

“That doesn’t mean I can’t try to help,” he added. Because it wasn’t fair to make her think he didn’t care, just because he knew that wouldn’t make her give up on him. The Tifa he knew had been his best living friend. This was still Tifa. He didn’t have to start over from the beginning with her.

“Like when we were eight,” he said. She looked confused, like he’d known she would. “You went looking for your mother’s spirit over Mount Nibel,” he said. “I went after you in case you needed help, but we both fell. Your father was really mad at me. Isn’t that why you didn’t talk to me for years after that?”

Tifa was looking distraught, fists tight and her mouth just slightly open, and Cloud squirmed a little inside. He minded upsetting people more than he had when he was really twenty-one. At least, some people. He wasn’t a lonely angry kid anymore.

It was too bad, though; he’d been hoping he’d get to tease her about forgetting things.

“You’re the one who didn’t talk to me!” she protested.

And he knew she’d been telling herself they’d been close friends all along, because they’d had a promise binding them and she’d known he might still be alive which made him matter more in memory, so it probably hurt to say. To admit how rarely they’d actually spent any time together, as children. Especially after her mother died.

Cloud shrugged. He’d been told he had an extremely expressive shrug. He was pretty sure he’d stolen it from Zack. “Tifa’s friends didn’t like me, or your father. You weren’t mad?”

“Why would I be mad at you for not saving me from being stupid?” She shook her head. “I didn’t remember. I’m sorry. It was—I usually only talked to you when no one could see because…I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Cloud said. The apology actually hurt. The debts went so far in the other direction he couldn’t even begin to list them. “I’ve forgotten a lot, too. The mako,” he added, twitching fingers toward his eyes. It was a known side effect.

Absorbing memories from nearby friends and patching them into your own was only a side effect of a complete mental breakdown combined with lots of Jenova cells, though.

Tifa bit her lip. “You’re okay, though?” she asked. She hadn’t pried into why she’d found him collapsed in a train station moaning incoherently, but obviously was still concerned.

Cloud nodded. He was as okay as could be expected. Better than he’d been the first time. (Pain swept through his chest, and he wasn’t sure whether it was for Zack’s corpse lying on a bluff on the southern mountains right now but also four years ago, or for all the friends whose bonds had been fire-forged so deep he couldn’t doubt even Reeve anymore, all of them alive but freshly lost to him all the same.)

He looked up at Tifa. “Even though I’m not famous or a hero, I guess I still promise to rescue you. But, you know…sometimes I need rescuing too.”

It had been a silly promise. And Cloud wasn’t saying that because he’d failed in every particular, either. It was a silly exchange between children who just wanted to matter to somebody, and were too proud to say so openly.

Cloud still wasn’t much for talking most of the time, but he thought he was getting better at saying what he really meant.

“I promise not to forget about you, Tifa,” he said. Or leave you behind again, he thought. But he couldn’t say that yet.

She smiled. “And I guess I promise to rescue you, too,” she said. She was scraping half the chopped onions into a skillet with a little bit of oil, which might be why her eyes were wet. Cloud hastily finished the carrots and proffered them, and Tifa accepted the cutting board carefully, not losing any bits of vegetable.

“So,” she asked as she dumped these in as well and turned on the cooker. “Where have you been? Last I heard was seven years ago when you left to join SOLDIER. You avoided all the other Nibel expats in town, I heard.”

And even now, when he was years removed from all the events and had a much better idea of what was really important, the explanation of his own inadequacy he’d unknowingly gotten out of giving the first time…it burned. He had so many better things to be ashamed of now, and at this point was glad Shinra hadn’t accepted him, but that first great failure to live up to his dreams could still sting.

“I…didn’t become a SOLDIER,” Cloud said slowly, as the skillet began to hiss. Tifa reached for a wooden spoon without looking away from him.

The last time—he hadn’t lied to her. Neither of them had known the truth. He didn’t think he should lie now. He didn’t know if he could lie about it now, not convincingly. He wasn’t actually good at lying. “I was in the Shinra infantry. But my friend was a SOLDIER. He…the company needed to get rid of both of us for a cover-up, so they let us be used as experimental material. When my friend broke out, he took me with him, even though I had severe mako poisoning. I couldn’t even move for months.”

Zack had always been a real hero. Tifa should know.

“The army ran us down in the Junon Mountain cliffs, just south of Midgar,” he told the surface of the bar. “Zack hid me, and then he fought an entire battalion on his own.”

“He’s very strong, huh,” Tifa said, and Cloud nodded.

“He was,” he agreed, even though the strength he and his friends had gathered on their quest to save the Planet in the future had made the entirety of SOLDIER look weak. Zack had been so strong, and if he’d lived he would have just gotten stronger. Cloud had just done it in his place.

“Oh,” Tifa said, a wounded little sound that dropped in among the frying onions and carrots as she stirred. She must have known Zack had to be dead, from the way Cloud had been talking, but the confirmation still stung. Or maybe she hoped he might have only been recaptured, and had thought they could save him. Tifa was an optimist. Cloud had never understood that, but it was useful a lot of the time.

“He gave me his sword to carry,” he said, reaching up over his shoulder to grip the hilt. It wasn’t the best sword on the Planet, it wasn’t even all that powerful for its size. But it was the sword, and he didn’t think he could return it to marking Zack’s death any time soon. It didn’t belong in the Church yet.

Maybe he would give it to Aerith, once he could bring himself to let go of it. That had never been an option, before.

“And his dreams,” he whispered.

He had gotten so many people killed, the first time. Not just the ones he knew. The devastation from the awakening of Weapon. The death toll of Meteor.

Aerith.

He didn’t care if he never got to rebuild his friendships. They had been loyal to him when he failed and failed and failed, and even if they were never knit together by world-ending despair the way they had been once, he didn’t need them to be. They’d all suffered more than enough already. He’d be loyal to them whether they ever cared about him or not, and he would keep them safe.

He knew what Sephiroth and Shinra were planning. It wouldn’t happen the same way this time.

“And his uniform?” Tifa teased, and that was just like her, trying to break into his brooding. She didn’t do it with as much confidence as she would have in the future, but.

Cloud relaxed his hand, let go of the Buster Sword, plucked at the front of his black jumpsuit. He’d worn it all the way through their first adventure, excluding brief attempts at subterfuge, even though it had been a Shinra uniform and if he’d known nothing else then he’d still known they didn’t have or deserve his loyalty; worn it even after he’d found out that he’d never earned the right.

It might have been a spare of Zack’s; he’d gotten the Buster Sword back on his way out, after all, and maybe Hojo had stored all his things together. “I think he took this one off a guard,” he said. Felt his mouth quirk up a little. “He…was a lot taller than me.”

Exactly how tall Zack was, what sort of commanding officer he’d been, what his jokes had sounded like when he wasn’t fighting to keep his spirits up in the face of relentless pursuit and a traveling companion without even the strength to meet his eyes, let alone laugh along...Cloud would probably never remember. Just like his memories of his mother were a bare handful of scraps: briskly scouring dishes at the sink in their small house, stalking out of the inn after a spat with one of the town housewives, fondly scolding him about how he should find a girlfriend to look after him already, when he came home at sixteen with nothing but a Corporal’s rank to show for all his ambition.

What he knew of the man who’d saved him now was probably all he ever would know, even if Zack’s ghost was still watching over him. But he wanted Tifa to know what he knew, because she’d met Zack too, even if just the once.

Zack’s parents were in Gongaga, stubbornly believing he was just fine out there somewhere, too proud or too wild to call home. Cloud should probably let them go on thinking that. He had the first time. Shinra had taken enough from them, without Cloud taking away their dream.

He rolled his shoulders. The dual pauldrons felt strange, after he’d gotten so used to only wearing one. Why had Zack thought it made sense to strap armor onto a catatonic body, anyway? Hadn’t it just made him harder to haul?

“I’m sorry,” Tifa said. Turned the cooker down so the sizzle of onions subsided to the occasional pop and set her wooden spoon aside; looked like she wanted to reach out and pat his arm comfortingly, but didn’t quite go through with it. “I’m sorry you lost your friend. But I’m glad you survived.”

Cloud found a small smile, before he looked away again. “Thanks…Tifa.” He paused. “I’m glad you’re not dead, either.”

Tifa sniffed what sounded like offense, but when he glanced up she was smiling. “Thanks Cloud,” she said. “It’s been a long seven years for both of us, huh.”

He nodded, and they sat quietly for a moment, before Tifa turned up the heat again and went back to stirring the onions.

“Is there anything else I can do?” Cloud asked.

“Hmm.” Tifa gave the broth a stir. “I got all the glasses clean before I turned in last night, but…there’s a lightbulb I’ve been putting off changing?”

She showed him where the lightbulb was and then he got to stand on a table and carefully unscrew the lampshade, try not to dump dead bugs on his face, get rid of the bugs out in the street, since Tifa’s place didn’t have a bathroom, put the lampshade down on the bar, climb the table again, unscrew the dead bulb, and screw into place one of the terrible, inefficient halogen bulbs that had been the only kind Shinra produced, so they could sell more power per client.

(In the future, Barret’s coal-powered plants put out less power than Shinra’s mako plants had, and his big damming project was still in its early stages, and solar power was still a little chancy because big enough batteries to store it when the sun wasn’t out were costly to produce, but there was electricity again in most settlements, and the recovering technology sector was focused around energy-efficient and self-sustaining devices. Reeve had been flooding the market with designs for years.

He kept giving Cloud his newest phones. Cloud didn’t see why buggy prototypes were expected to make him more reliable as a contact.)

Then he had to get off the table again to retrieve the lampshade, and up again to screw it back into place. Still better than doing nothing.

Meanwhile the onions got soft and brown and delicious-smelling, and they and the carrots were stirred into hot broth. Cloud set about cleaning the cutting board he’d damaged, and the knife.

There were still a little more than three hours to opening time when the door swung open, and a tiny form burst in, followed more slowly by a larger one.

“Tifa!”

Chapter Text

Marlene was tiny.

Of all things that should not surprise him, but somehow it did. He’d gotten used to the intent little wren who’d looked after Denzel throughout the Geostigma, even after Cloud had given up and slunk away having convinced himself he could only make everything worse. That Marlene, age seven and a half, confidently ordered Vincent around and had learned not to flinch at sudden monsters. This Marlene was not yet five, and she pulled up short in distress when she caught sight of him behind the bar.

She had to be used to strangers in here, since it was an actual place of business, but he guessed the space behind the bar usually only had familiar people in it.

And he knew he was scary, at first, especially to kids who weren’t used to mako eyes, or armor. With most people, he could at least counterbalance his intimidation factor with the fact that he was below average height, but to children the important thing was that he was still taller than them.

Marlene hadn’t actually spoken to him until after Meteor.

Luckily, kids were actually really easy to get along with, once you knew how. If you cared enough to try.

He came out from behind the bar, got down on one knee and made his face soft. “Hey there,” he said. “I’m Tifa’s friend Cloud. What’s your name?”

She opened her mouth, closed it again, looked anxiously over her shoulder at her father, who’d crossed the room while Cloud ignored him. His human hand came down on her shoulder protectively. “This here is Marlene,” Barrett said. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Like he said, he’s my friend, Barrett.” Tifa huffed, sprinkling some kind of dried herb into the pot.

In the future, enough life had started to creep back into Edge that she grew her own herbs, basil and rosemary and he didn’t know what in little pots on the windowsills. Watering them was one of the kids’ chores, and Denzel had talked Cloud very carefully through the exact right amount of water to add so they had enough every day but didn’t get swamped. It was surprisingly specific considering plants in nature got by on whatever rain happened to fall.

“We grew up together,” Tifa continued, oblivious to Cloud’s abstraction into memory. “Cloud, this is Barrett Wallace. I guess he’s my friend too, but I mostly just keep him around because Marlene’s a sweetheart.”

Barrett grumbled under his breath. Cloud decided to focus on Marlene; it seemed a better bet than laughing at Barrett. “See?” he asked. “I’m Tifa’s friend. I was helping her with the stew.”

Marlene narrowed her eyes consideringly at him. Finally, she nodded. His presence was acceptable. Cloud smiled.

“Hey,” said Barrett. Cloud looked up at him, face fixed in a look of patient expectation. Barrett stumbled over his tongue. It was sort of sad to have Barrett looking at him like an enemy again, but it would never stop being funny to wind him up. Barrett never really changed; he just relaxed and cheered up a little eventually.

Cloud tipped his face back down, winked at Marlene, who smiled just a little before hiding her face in Barret’s hip, and got to his feet.

The door opened again, and—AVALANCHE tumbled in. The last AVALANCHE, but one. Biggs, Wedge, Jessie, jostling one another as Biggs made an incomprehensible joke and laughed at himself.

They’d all liked him, the first time, Cloud remembered, and he’d been rude in return because he hadn’t wanted to be liked. Or hadn’t trusted it, maybe. They were all in their twenties but seemed so young, as he watched Jessie elbow Wedge, and he was hit by a surge of formless warm feelings toward them, the same kind he got around the children in the future, or watching the people of Edge pull themselves onto their feet after yet another Crisis, and give one another a hand up. Survivors, who still found the strength to care.

The three of them pulled up short and their laughter sank away without quite dying, when they noticed him standing there at the end of the bar. The man with the wild dark hair squinted at him. “Who’s this?”

The short, round man shrugged. “Must be a new guy!”

The woman with the ponytail cocked her head and approached. “Hello, New Guy.”

In most of his few memories of Jessie the ecoterrorist, Cloud was looking down at her. Not because she was shorter—they were the same height—but because she had mostly caught his attention when she’d fallen, or gotten stuck, and needed help. Or she’d been leaning over toward him, to point something out. Or bending into his space to rub soot smudges off his face without waiting for permission. Or climbing down a ladder at his feet, while giving him ludicrously unnecessary tips on ladder-climbing.

Or she’d been bleeding out on the stairs that led up to the top of the central Sector 7 plate support, murmuring that her death was probably what she deserved for everything she’d done, trusting him to save the people of Midgar from Shinra committing worse acts of terrorism than AVALANCHE had ever considered.

“He’s not a new guy!” Barret growled. “He’s just Tifa’s childhood barnacle or whatever.”

Cloud tipped his head to one side. “Do you guys work here or something?”

“Or something!” agreed Jessie, just as hard to provoke now as she had been in the today that was years ago. “I’m Jessie, these are Biggs and Wedge.” She pointed.

“…Cloud.”

“Nice to meetcha,” said Biggs.

“You’re Tifa’s friend?” asked Wedge.

Cloud nodded. “We have the same hometown.”

“I ran into Cloud at the train station,” said Tifa, setting the lid on the stewpot with a soft clatter as she turned from the stove to summon Marlene to her side with a gesture. “He’s not feeling his best just now, so don’t be too hard on him.”

Cloud slanted her a mild resentful look. He was fine. His bones only ached a little now. He guessed he’d asked for her protective side to come out, though, hadn’t he, telling her about Hojo and saying he needed rescuing too. It was only the truth. She didn’t have to act like it meant he was weak.

“Nice to meet you,” he shrugged at the terrorist kids. “Why are you three wearing red bandannas?” he asked Jessie. It was something he’d never have wondered about, let alone asked, the last time he saw her. “He isn’t,” he added, meaning Barrett.

The three AVALANCHE members traded looks. “We’ve been friends since we were kids, too,” Biggs shrugged at last. “It’s just our thing.”

“That’s enough!” Barrett exploded. “All of ya, stop changin’ the subject and let’s get some explanation of what some Shinra asshole is doing in Tifa’s bar!”

Barrett was the worst at subtlety. No wonder Shinra had tracked them down. Marlene was over by the fridge now, sliding magnets around, unconcerned by her father’s shouting habit, so even if Cloud hadn’t known Barrett well enough to be sure on his own, he would have known this wasn’t a very serious round of yelling.

He said, “I’m not from Shinra.”

“Sure you’re not! You’re one of their SOLDIERs, don’t try to lie!”

Cloud snorted. “I’m not SOLDIER.” The explanation for why he looked like one, uniform and glowing eyes and all, was so convoluted it would sound like a lie—maybe that was part of why it had been so easy for his mind to substitute parts of Zack’s life story for his own—so all he said was, “I don’t work for Shinra anymore.”

“‘Anymore,’” Barret scoffed. “But I betcher still in contact with yer army buddies, right?”

“No.” Cloud doubted he’d had any buddies. He’d never really had the knack. There was at least one person in Shinra’s army still who’d know his face—he’d recognized it in the Junon Reactor, right before they’d killed him—but Cloud would never know who he’d been or how they’d known each other.

He didn’t quite want to say he had no friends in Shinra—there was Reeve, even if he was a slippery snake who had no reason just now to value Cloud’s life in return—so instead he just said, “I haven’t voluntarily gone anywhere near a Shinra affiliate in years.”

Paused. He hadn’t, in this timeline, voluntarily done much of anything in almost five years, but they didn’t have to know that. It was sort of a lie by his own timeline, as he had after all gone to visit Rufus during Geostigma at Reno’s insistence and voluntarily spoke to Tseng sometimes, usually if they both happened to be visiting the Seventh Heaven. But that was a different Shinra, not powerful enough to taint by association in the same way.

“And,” Cloud added to cover alternate avenues of contact that didn’t require proximity, “I don’t have a phone.” Barrett had given him his original, he suddenly recalled, to keep in touch with the rest of the team as they split up to cover distance less traceably, after leaving Midgar.

“Look, Barrett,” Tifa interjected firmly, to a rhythm of ball glasses being laid out in a row. “This is my bar. You don’t actually get to throw people out of it without my say-so. Besides, he can help.” Cloud smiled at her, trying to show he was fine and didn’t mind, or not enough to need rescuing, but realized it might look the opposite way, like gratitude for the rescue. Oh well.

Barret folded his arms, the barrel of the gun that was his right hand pressing into his opposite bicep. “Oh yeah? But help who, us or Shinra?”

“I hate Shinra,” Cloud volunteered, to the sound to Tifa unstoppering a bottle. The first time, he had insisted I don’t care, nothing means anything to me and it had been true—he hadn’t cared, been able to care, hadn’t felt sufficiently connected to anything to care about it. Spending time around Tifa, having her call up a few of his memories and bolt them into place, had helped.

Aerith had helped, and the urgency of having a mission to save people instead of destroy things…

It could have just been amnesia and lingering mako addiction, but comparing it to how he felt now…he’d been mourning Zack, he realized. Unable to remember him consciously, but grieving, and hating everyone he saw for being alive when Zack was dead, and himself most of all.

But he had learned about forgiveness, and he had his memory again. Enough of it. This wasn’t like last time at all.

“Oh yeah?” Barrett sneered. “What did they do, refuse to promote ya? Kick you to the curb?”

“They stuck me in a lab and tortured me for four years,” Cloud said flatly. (SOLDIERs were never fired. The lucky ones retired. The least lucky disappeared. In between was death in Shinra’s service.) “They killed my mother and my best friend.” Technically his mother’s death had not been a Shinra Company action, but Sephiroth was their fault and had been in town on their business, set up to go crazy there by their Head of Science. And with that, “They destroyed my hometown.”

And they’d blamed Cloud and his friends for Shinra’s own crimes and for the imminent destruction of the Planet, and tried to execute them on live television for propaganda purposes when there were actual threats to people’s lives to deal with. They’d founded Deep Ground, on a basis of torturing soldiers until they would obey in all things without question. And even when they’d plainly failed in every possible way, they were endlessly, insufferably smug.

Well, that was really one specific Shinra he was thinking about.

He settled for reiterating, “I hate Shinra.”

“Four years, Cloud?” said Tifa, the brown glass bottle in her hand poised in the air over the last empty glass, and he realized that she didn’t know he’d been at Nibelheim, that he hadn’t given a date, that she’d imagined the cover-up and the lab and Zack’s rescue as well as Zack’s death had all been relatively recent things.

She hadn’t asked why they’d been coming back to Midgar, either. Maybe she just knew how good a place to hide from Shinra the underbelly of their own city could be. Maybe she guessed he was here for revenge.

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

She let a breath out, filled the last cup, and began passing the glasses out—rum, Cloud found, when he tried his.

The trio accepted their drinks and took up places around the table, leaving the side toward Cloud and Tifa at the bar companionably open. Cloud hopped up onto one of the bar stools, facing out into the room.

Barrett remained standing, drank the whole cup in two swallows, set it aside, folded his arms, and growled under his breath, but didn’t try to argue that these weren’t good reasons for hating Shinra, or that Cloud might be lying. Tifa must have already said something to the rest of AVALANCHE about Shinra destroying her hometown, like they had Barrett’s.

Cloud folded his own arms and leaned back against the bar, swirling the little glass of rum absently against one elbow. “You’re terrorists, right?”

General alarm that didn’t quite sharpen into outcry. Nobody spat rum on anybody else, though Biggs looked like he came close.

Marlene’s attention was drawn anyway, by the suppressed furor, and she turned away from the refrigerator to peer at whatever the grownups were getting up to. Tifa turned away once again to smile at her, and then leaned over to stir the stew, noisily scraping the bottom of the pot, to all appearances completely unconcerned by Cloud’s little bomb. Cloud was honestly impressed by her calm. Did she trust him that much already? She shouldn't.

“You’re not subtle,” Cloud told everyone besides Marlene and Tifa, who were behind him and not guilty anyway, because Tifa had been pretty sneaky all things considered. “It’s okay. Tifa’s right. I’d like to help.”

Barret snorted. “‘Help,’ huh. Do you have any useful access codes or anything?”

“No.” After four years as an experiment? Honestly. “Codes to what?”

Barrett shrugged. “Reactors. Consoles, maybe. Good to have an extra in and out of anywhere, especially if you’re goin’ in hot.”

“…I might be able to pass as a real SOLDIER to infiltrate,” Cloud said thoughtfully. Probably not, there weren’t many Firsts left even now. “Once. But I’m not sure I want to help with blowing up reactors.”

Granted, the one he’d actually helped blow up was a pleasant memory, and he’d have regretted never taking that decisive action against Shinra. But it had had a price in lives, and furthermore been Shinra’s excuse for the dropping of the plate. Which had killed a few thousand below-Plate and maybe ten thousand atop it, where the evacuation warnings hadn’t spread as quickly because people were used to depending on the news and other official things for their information rather than whispers, and had left twenty thousand more homeless.

Unexpected calamitous consequences were a theme in his life that he was hoping to cut down on with the benefit of hindsight.

Barrett wasn’t exactly impressed. “What kind of lukewarm volunteering is that? Didn’t ya say ya hated Shinra?”

“Of course I hate Shinra.” It was a different hate from theirs, he thought, a hatred tempered by time and having seen the behemoth fall and not rise again—he knew the company was mortal, and he knew how carefully its death had to be managed, to have less human cost than it had the last time. “But that doesn’t mean blowing up reactors is a good solution. People die, when that happens. It’s cruel and bad publicity. And Shinra will just build more.”

“Yeah? So it’s hopeless, is that what you’re saying?”

“Of course not.” Cloud shook his head. “Just annoying Shinra isn’t good enough. Definitely isn’t enough reason to kill people who don’t know better, and make needless orphans. We have to destroy it.”

“Really?” asked Biggs, and he was a pretty easygoing guy—all of Barrett’s original AVALANCHE crew had been, it was kind of weird for terrorists, though Cloud guessed with friends like he’d had he couldn’t talk about what was weird for a terrorist organization—but he was still capable of getting annoyed. “Shinra needs to be destroyed? This is news to us, we had no idea.”

“How do you suggest we do that,” said Jessie, and it wasn’t clear whether she was being sarcastic or not.

“I’m not sure,” Cloud said. Because what had destroyed Shinra last time was the obliteration of Midgar, the destabilization of the world economy, and a general public unwillingness to rely on mako power any longer. He didn’t want the first two to happen, at least not so intensely and abruptly, and he didn’t know how to provoke the third without the world almost ending.

There were ways, though. “But I do know a better project for us than blowing up reactors for right now.”

“Oh yeah?" Barret's annoyance was probably completely justified, but Cloud figured annoying him until he came around to acceptance had worked once, so he might as well rely on it a second time. "You nancy-ass little fuck come waltzing in here in a Shinra uniform, telling us how to fight?”

Cloud took a small sip of his drink. “I don’t have any other clothes.” He was seriously considering getting some, though. There had to be shops somewhere in the slums that sold men’s clothing. “And this is important, even if it won’t make the same kind of statement. The Emergency Plate Release Mechanism.”

“Plate…release?” repeated Jessie, blankly.

“Plate release?” demanded Biggs.

“That’s not good,” assessed Wedge.

“A Turk told me only Shinra executives can activate or cancel it, but I bet we can break it, if we have time.”

“What is it though, Cloud?” Tifa asked.

“Shinra has bombs attached to all the plate supports.”

Cloud had asked Reeve about it, long after the fact, during an afternoon at the WRO offices after Cloud had run a string of deliveries for what was increasingly becoming the new government. Reeve had been easier to pin down than he would have expected. The bombs had been there from the beginning—‘just in case,’ Rufus’ grandfather had said, when drawing up the plans to build a clean, bright floating city over the ugly urban sprawl that his glut of manufacturing jobs had created on the Midanyeard Plains.

It explained, a little, how Shinra had even thought of using such insane tactics just to crush and frame the tiny Sector Seven AVALANCHE cell. The contingency had already been there. Waiting.

(Didn’t excuse Reno and Rude and Tseng setting it off. Didn’t excuse the order. Nothing ever would. But explained, just a little.)

“So they can drop the Plate,” he added. “If they want. They’re waiting for you to give them an excuse. Next reactor you blow, they’re planning to drop the Sector Seven Plate and blame it on you.”

“That’s insane,” said Jessie flatly.

“Yeah, that can’t be for real,” chimed in Biggs.

“I didn’t say that,” said Jessie.

“That can’t be for real,” said Wedge.

“No,” said Barrett heavily. “No, this is exactly the kind of shit Shinra would pull.” His voice, the strain in his shoulders—Cloud could tell he wanted to scream and wildly fire his gun. But Marlene was here, so he was keeping a lid on it.

This part, honestly, was for Barret maybe more than any other individual person, because even though he and his daughter had been among those who survived the fall of Sector Seven, he was someone Cloud had learned to care about over years of friendship, even if it didn’t go both ways anymore, and Cloud knew his story and never wanted him to have to stand staring at the smoking ruins of another home.

(Tifa either, but Tifa never took things quite as hard or personally as Barrett. She’d never blamed herself for the fall of Nibelheim the way he did for Corel.)

“We’ll stop it,” Cloud said, because they had to. “Who here is good at bombs?”

“I’m okay,” volunteered Jessie. “Mostly I just build them according to instructions, though.”

Tifa asked, “Are you, Cloud?”

Cloud shrugged. “Not really. I’m okay too, I guess.” Setting one had been one of the abilities he’d held onto during his amnesia; he didn’t know when he’d learned it. Maybe Zack was the one who had.

He’d even disarmed a few bombs over the years since, on weird occasions when there hadn’t been a bomb expert available and he’d volunteered on the basis that if it went off while he was working, he was the only person sturdy enough to have a chance of survival. There was a limit to how much any of AVALANCHE could justly complain about terrorism, but Cloud sometimes wanted to.

Barrett scowled. “Okay, anybody here know anybody good at taking bombs apart?”

Jessie shrugged. “I know a couple people, I guess? Some of the Weapons-shop guys.”

Biggs said, “I know a guy who knows a guy who’s trained in demolitions. He lives Plateside, but if I bring my friend along to see the bombs are really there and he vouches for it, I think the bomb guy will be in.”

“Is he Shinra?” Barret demanded.

Biggs shook his head, paused, shrugged. “He learned bomb work in the Wutai War, but he retired and now he owns a mechanic’s shop.”

“So we get that guy up inside the plate…” said Wedge.

“And if these bombs are really there, he can take them apart,” concluded Jessie.

Biggs rubbed the back of his neck. “The whole Plate, though…that’s a lot of bombs.”

“Maybe we can get him to train assistants,” said Tifa.

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,” cut in Barrett. “Maybe this is real and maybe not, first thing we gotta do is get up there and see if there’s anything to this weird rumor. You going to tell us how you heard about this, SOLDIER boy?”

“My name’s Cloud. And…I overheard the President talking about it to some of his executives.”

That had happened after the Plate fell, so it wasn’t really an honest answer to the question, but it wasn’t quite a lie, either. It had happened. And it was better than claiming to have heard via the Turks or Don Corneo, who very likely didn’t know themselves, yet. Cloud shrugged. “He’s gotten tired of Midgar, now that it’s almost finished and the mako has started to run low.”

Maybe partly because it had been his father’s idea originally, too—Rufus never had been as different from his old man as he’d liked to pretend. Just less subtle.

“…so we check this out,” Barrett repeated. “And if it’s not a fake, we take this thing down. I hate this stars-damn steel sky pizza, but I’m not gonna let Shinra smash anybody’s homes with it. You’d better be right there with us though, SOLDIER boy. I’ve got my eye on you.”

Cloud shrugged. His cup was empty; he set it aside. “Alright. And after that, there’s someone I want to rescue from the Science level. I also heard a rumor someone is going to assassinate President Shinra in the next few days.”

He didn’t know if dropping the Plate had somehow been the catalyst for Sephiroth’s attack, or if that had just coincidentally been the first time he’d gotten one of his clone-selves sufficiently overwritten and in position.

For that matter, Cloud didn’t know to what extent killing the President had been the goal of Sephiroth’s attack on the Shinra building, compared to making off with Jenova’s corpse. It wasn’t even a sure thing he had used a clone, and not just possessed Jenova’s body long enough to break it out of containment and kill Shinra, though the blood trail argued against that. He’d definitely been dragging something starting from the Jenova capsule.

Considering he’d let Cloud and his friends out of their cells during the same visit, it was possible Cloud himself had prompted the timing. Somehow. Sephiroth had known he was there, anyway. Unless he’d just unlocked all the cells out of some weird personal principle or impulse. Both ideas were sort of unsettling to think about.

He shook himself out of possibilities with a hard blink. “If they fail, maybe we should do it.”

He hopped to his feet, not bothering to give Barrett time to remember how to say words. “I’m going monster hunting. Tifa, want to come?”

She brightened. “Yes!”

“I’ll come too!” said Wedge excitedly. Cloud looked at him, blank. This had not occurred to him. He really didn’t want Wedge along. It would be awkward to have an extra person there when he found Aerith.

“You sit yourself back down!” Barrett ordered. “Nobody’s going anywhere with this Shinra-fresh punk!”

Looked like he still had a ways to go winning Barrett over.

“Stop trying to be a bully, Barrett,” said Jessie, in an easygoing way like she’d known him for ages instead of the eighteen months since this cell of AVALANCHE had formed. A year and a half could feel like ages.

“It’s fine,” said Cloud. She wasn’t wrong but Barret’s bluster had been working out in his favor. “Tifa and I need more time to catch up, anyway.”

“Right,” Jessie said. Waggled her eyebrows. “Stick with me, Wedge, let the childhood friends catch up.”

Tifa actually blushed. Cloud hadn’t seen her do that since their ill-fated overnight at the Golden Saucer, right before Reeve took Marlene hostage. “Shut up, Jessie,” she retorted, and grabbed Cloud’s hand. “Come on, Cloud, we’ll go rack up some experience while these losers mooch off my hospitality.”

“I’ll watch the bar!” said Marlene happily. The bar wasn’t actually open, which was just as well since four-year-olds were not qualified to draw beer let alone mix cocktails, but she bustled happily back and forth with the top of her head just barely showing, rearranging the glasses. They were thick enough she would probably have difficulty breaking them, especially dropped from her slight height.

“Okay,” Tifa told her fondly. She let go of Cloud’s hand once he stepped away from the bar, and he wasn’t sure whether he was glad or not. “Be careful. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

“Hrrrgh,” grumbled Barrett.

“Jessie, keep an eye on the stew?”

“Why do you always ask me, Wedge is the one who actually remembers to stir things.”

“Okay, Wedge then.”

“I won’t let the food burn!” the fat terrorist promised.

“Add a little more flour if the broth doesn’t start thickening up by half-past.”

Wedge actually saluted.

“General Tifa, Lady of Kitchens,” Cloud teased her as they slipped out the door together. Tifa eyed him sidelong, and he realized this Tifa wasn’t used to the way he teased, monotone and expressionless, but then she grinned.

“That’s me.” She caught his wrist. “Come on. There’s a pretty good weapons shop across the way, do you want to stop there first or go straight to the margins where we’ll get attacked?”

“I’m broke,” Cloud admitted, following. “So I can’t shop unless you want to lend me anything.”

He had a Lightning materia on him and the Buster Sword, and with a partner to cover him that should be plenty to handle anything the slums could throw at them—though he’d like to hit one of the materia shops for a Restore as soon as he could afford it; as long as you had somewhere to rest and recover your strength occasionally, those were the biggest gil-saver an adventurer could invest in. Life-saver, too.

Tifa gave a tut through her teeth. “I can do that—I’ll buy you some stuff free and clear, even, help you get on your feet. What do you need?”

Cloud rubbed the back of his neck. “I guess it would be good to have a couple of potions just in case we screw up?” he said. “But I’ll pay you back, don’t worry.”

“No, don’t be silly, those’ll be for both of us. You can’t get those at the Weapon Shop, though. Come on.” She gave another tug on his wrist in a new direction and then let it go, trusting him to follow her competently of his own accord, and set off toward the nearest shop that carried things like healing potions, which was apparently in this sector, and thus in the opposite direction from where he wanted to go.

Oh well. They had a few hours and they were going to be hunting monsters anyway, he could steer them toward the lower numbered sectors.

Tifa pointed out useful landmarks occasionally as they walked, and greeted the occasional acquaintance, but seemed content to go without conversation. She was good at quiet, for someone so outgoing.

Cloud walked at her side, absorbed in thought. Normally, he struck up at least one conversational exchange with anyone he met, if he wasn’t in a hurry. He rarely had much to say himself, but people liked to talk, and it was a good way to stay informed.

It was one of the reasons he had such a good reputation in Edge in the future, he was pretty sure, and people didn’t mind their children following him around; until he’d started drawing into himself and waiting for death during Geostigma he’d been a familiar face around town that lots of people felt they knew. Tifa said he was friendlier than he acted, and Cid said that didn’t even make sense. Yuffie said he was a Mime materia, which made even less sense, but that was Yuffie for you.

But he still remembered at least vaguely what most of these people would say, and the inside of his head was higher priority at the moment.

People had kept expecting Cloud to lead, in the future, and he had to admit he’d never been the worst choice out of their group—Cid was the only one who really had both experience and talent in a leadership role, and he was an asshole—but that didn’t make him good at plans. Marginally better than Barrett, maybe, or maybe just more comfortable freestyling, but that also didn’t mean good. He had to think everything over, now, until he was sure he wasn’t missing anything, because this was so important.

Possibilities swirled through his head, threatening to make him dizzy.

There were so many ways they could still fail. First of all, Cloud determined, they had to make sure he was never in a position to give the Black Materia to Sephiroth the way he had the first time. It didn’t help to keep Sephiroth from sacrificing a clone flunky to shrink the Temple, if Cloud turned out to be a flunky.

He thought he’d conquered the Reunion. He thought he knew who he was, and wouldn’t fracture again. But how much of that might turn out to be physical recovery that hadn’t happened anymore?

He couldn’t count himself out, the way he’d wanted to the first time, after he found out how vulnerable his mind was.

(It might or might not have helped if he’d stood firm then, stayed miserably put in Gongaga and not let Tifa and Barret convince him otherwise. Sephiroth had already known where Aerith was going, from spying on his dreams. And Sephiroth had been able to get into everyone’s heads, so close to the Crater, even if not as thoroughly as he’d gotten into Cloud’s.

And it was really pretty strange they’d managed to catch up to that Copy with the Black Materia even though Sephiroth could fly and they’d been three days behind.

It was possible, even likely, he’d never needed Cloud at all, and had only orchestrated his role as vengeance for killing him. So maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, if he hadn’t been there, except to him.)

He couldn’t sit the fight out. For sure, this time. But he could make sure he was never anywhere critical without at least one person strong enough to put him down hard if he started acting off. Preferably two.

They needed to get Vincent.

Not that he didn’t want to anyway, but right now Vincent would be stronger than all of them put together, and as long as they went to the false Nibelheim to collect him fairly soon, he’d be able to keep ahead of or at least pace with Cloud no matter how hard Cloud trained, and was more likely to be willing to shoot him in the face if it became necessary than Tifa was to punch him in the throat until it collapsed.

Aerith’s first-level Limit paralyzed Lost Number. As long as they had her in the assault team with a Restore materia of at least second level equipped, they could get the key to Vincent and survive even if they were weaker than they’d been last time they’d made it that far.

Or they could try just breaking the door down, but Cloud wanted his Odin summon back. It was going to be such a drag mastering it again. But worth it.

So, once they’d made their move and it was time to flee Midgar—west through Kalm still, pick up a Chocobo Lure, head south through the Mines like before, because Zolom aside that was the best route to build skill at the rate they’d need. Also they needed to help Fort Condor, and not just for the Phoenix summon and Huge materia.

Being in a hurry meant less time to train, but they had to train. He started sketching routes in his head. He knew basically how to fly planes now, he should be able to steal the Tiny Bronco from Cid once they got that far, but he’d like to pick up some kind of vehicle a little sooner than that. Maybe they should just steal that seaplane from the Costa del Sol harbor; the people who owned it had to stop being in physical contact with the thing at some point. Failing that, wild chocobos were better than nothing for speed. They’d have to hit the Gold Saucer at the first opportunity for Enemy Lure, that always helped. They’d gotten stronger awfully fast last time; he was pretty sure he could make it happen even faster now.

He was getting ahead of himself, though. First he had to decide who he was trying to kill, when he went in after Nanaki. Jenova was there, after all, in Hojo’s lab.

She’d brought him to his knees last time, and even if his mind was stronger now, he was pretty sure this body was just as much a patchwork wreck as it had always been, before Aerith’s rain had purified everyone. (Would the Geostigma come back?) He might not be able to destroy her, even if he got to her before Sephiroth.

He had…three or four days before Sephiroth was due, still. Two or three days before the Sector Seven Plate had fallen. So little time, but more warning than he was used to before a crisis.

(A crisis that he could do anything about, at least. Meteor, they’d had a schedule for.)

Tifa bought four potions and each of them carried two, and then Cloud steered them back toward the place where sector seven gave way to rubbish heaps. Tried not to stop and stare up at the plate support pillar as they passed it.

Fortunately, a Hell House jumped them a few steps later. That was exactly the kind of distraction he needed.

Chapter Text

It had been a long time since he’d watched Tifa really fight.

They’d been separated during the Deep Ground counter-strike, she’d been taken to the ground already when he reached the town square during the Remnant’s attack on Edge and when he’d reached the Church after the Remnant incursion there, and nothing else that had gone up against her in years had made her break a sweat.

So, not since Meteor, really.

It made her happy, he thought, as they left the splintered remains of the Hell House behind. She had a spring in her step; fighting made her happy. Almost the same way it did him.

She wanted to live a peaceful life, but she’d studied the Zangan before she’d had battles to fight. For love of the art or the desire to be strong.

When Cloud had just met Aerith, she’d joked that the Turks were after her to induct her into SOLDIER because she had what it took. They’d both known that they both knew that that wasn’t really the reason, but he’d let her have her secrets. Tifa, though…

He watched her drive her heel into a really idiotic mugger’s throat, ready to pitch in his support if it seemed necessary, but doubting it would be. This was only one guy. And Tifa…

Tifa was, basically, stronger than him. Her natural human strength had always almost kept up with his Jenova and mako infused SOLDIER-like power, right up to the point where he could just about match Sephiroth even on a bad day, and the way her limit breaks chained meant that when they were executed perfectly they outmatched everything but Yuffie’s. In a life where they had both survived Nibelheim without being experimented on, he would have needed to hide behind her.

(He would have refused to do so. Cloud knew his own useless pride all too well.)

If Tifa had been the one to apply to SOLDIER, he wondered if she would have gotten in. They didn’t usually accept girls, but she would have qualified. She was smart, strong, took direction well, and her mako tolerance was excellent.

She would have been terrifying.

…she would also have defected the first time they told her to kill somebody she didn’t want to kill, probably, but he didn’t think that would have shown up on her psych exam. Maybe it would have. He didn’t remember taking the exam, so it wasn’t like he knew what the questions were, let alone how they were scored.

Tifa was generally an accommodating person, who didn’t dig her heels in at every piece of high-handedness the way Cloud did, or pick fights with authority figures. She just did what she thought was right when the chips were down. (Sometimes she wasn’t sure, and other times her idea of what was right made no sense to him, but she did it.) It was completely possible Shinra would have thought she’d make a good, loyal SOLDIER.

SOLDIER was a den of monsters, Zack had told him once, in the inn at Nibelheim. Cloud hadn’t understood then, had only known that the friend he admired looked like his heart was breaking, or had already broken and had to be pieced back together, which had left it fragile. But Zack had always been stronger than Cloud, and even with cracks in his heart he’d been more alive and hopeful than Cloud at his best.

Zack had never been a monster. Hojo had never been able to change who he was.

(One of the things Cloud always tried not to wonder was what Zack had thought of him when he cracked, broke on the table and begged Hojo not to give up on him, to give him a number and not throw him away. Before he stopped talking at all.

He’d obviously believed Cloud was still a person, or he wouldn’t have carried him so far. Wouldn’t have fought for him. So it didn’t matter, he told himself. And didn’t think about it.)

Hojo didn’t know anything. He couldn’t even tell which of his experiments was successful and which had failed, and he destroyed himself in the end.

Even the project that had produced Cloud had been pointless, by its own standards. Judging by that one ex-SOLDIER shopkeep in Junon, anyone with any Jenova cells at all could have been enough for Reunion.

Still could be. The SOLDIER corps was awfully small at this point, if Cloud recalled right, and there was practically nobody left in First Class. But they weren’t all gone, not yet. Even ignoring Deep Ground.

(Which he was going to have to do, at least until the impending Sephiroth Crisis was cleared up. Most of the people trapped there, it was much too late to save, anyway.)

Cloud wondered if the Shinra plan had been to fold all of what was left of SOLDIER into Deep Ground eventually, or if the President had planned to keep both enhanced forces as insurance against one another. He’d obviously been wary of SOLDIER, and its members’ ability to go rogue, but maybe he’d been smart enough not to completely trust the Deep Ground brainwashing to hold either.

Or maybe they’d been keeping the surviving SOLDIERs around as raw material, in case Hojo’s attempts at cloning Project S yielded useful results.

But then, for whatever reason, Hojo had let the clones go wandering across Gaia, or possibly scattered them and watched them be drawn to where Sephiroth wanted them. And Shinra’s assigned watchers in the false Nibelheim had reported on their vocalizations and otherwise pretended they weren’t there.

Cloud still woke up in a cold sweat some nights, remembering the black-cloaked figure upstairs in the replica of what used to be the Balehardt family home, the one that had barely come up to his waist, and its tiny voice keening Re-u-nion. (That was what Kadaj had tried to do to Denzel, and Cloud pitied the hollow, driven facsimile of a man-child, but he would kill him a hundred times over rather than let that happen.)

Denzel would be six years old right now. Maybe seven. He lived on the plate in Sector Five.

If Midgar was destroyed again, this time he might not be one of the lucky ones.

Even if Cloud had been the kind of person who didn’t care if strangers died, that would mean he had to save the city.

He stared up at the underside of the Plate, trusting Tifa to notice any monsters or other ground-level difficulties, and plotted their upcoming bomb-hunt.

It took longer than he expected to bump into Aerith. He was just about ready to go stake out the church even if it made him creepy, though not quite to go to her house and ask Mrs. Gainsborough for help, when she walked out of the Weapons Shop in Wall Market, basket over her elbow.

She was different, alive. He’d forgotten. It wasn’t so much that she was less beautiful as just…more human. Not that she’d ever stopped being human—he had a very confused picture of the Ancients, between the tall dark forms they’d seen painted in the temple, the squat, plump little ghosts they’d met, and the perfectly normal dimensions of the furniture left in the abandoned shell-city, but Aerith had always been at least as human as she was anything else. But when she’d reached out from within the Lifestream…

She was almost three years older than him, physically, and not quite four younger counting in years experienced, or the same age exactly if you cut out his time less than conscious in Hojo’s lab, and always so much wiser than he could hope for, but in this moment she looked so young.

“Hello!” she said, making a beeline toward the blond man staring at her. She never had been shy. “I bet you want some flowers.”

Cloud hesitated. There were a lot of kinds of flowers in the basket—some of the yellow ones from the church, but also all the varieties she grew around her house. “Yeah,” he said after a second. “How much?”

She laughed. “Five gil each, and six for the sunflowers. I charge twice as much up on the plate though, so be glad you caught me here!”

“Okay. Can I have a yellow one and a white one?” Cloud had hit Midgar broke, of course—Zack had had money, but he hadn’t given any of it to the catatonic he was hauling, and it hadn’t exactly occurred to Cloud to go through his dead friend’s pockets before dragging his sword away—but after four hours of monster hunting he had some pocket change built up. He passed over ten gil and Aerith passed him the two flowers.

“This is for you,” he told Tifa, giving her the yellow one. She seemed startled, but then she smiled. “And this is for you,” he told Aerith, and gave her the white one back. She reached out to take it automatically, but for once he had managed to be the one confusing her.

He couldn’t enjoy that as much as he would have liked to. “You’re…Aerith, right?”

“Uhm,” she said. She’d noticed his uniform and his eyes of course, and probably thought he was SOLDIER, just as he had, but only now was she nervous. He guessed she only expected Shinra to send Turks after her, and even then they were never trying very hard.

Tseng was a complicated person.

Cloud dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry. Zack tried really hard to come back to you.”

White flowers were for mourning. Aerith’s fingers tightened on the stem, but not so much that she crushed it. “You…were there?” she said, and Cloud looked down at his Shinra uniform and realized what she was thinking.

“He saved me,” he told her. The confession he’d never known to make, the first time. “If he’d been willing to leave me behind, he would probably have gotten away. We almost made it to Midgar together. He was thinking of you the whole time. I’m sorry.” He reached up to touch the hilt of the Buster Sword. Had she recognized it? She’d recognized Zack in him, the first time, but he didn’t know if she’d ever realized about the sword. It seemed like she should have. She’d never said anything.

She’d told him back then that Zack hadn’t been important to her, that it was nothing, but he was fairly sure that had been the kind of lie you tell to people you aren’t ready to show your heart to. After all, she’d run away from facing Zack’s parents, and the shadow of Zack had been what she liked about Cloud at first. What had drawn her attention.

“He told me to live for him,” he said. Wasn’t sure how to turn that into an apology or an excuse, justification for being alive when the man she’d hoped to see again was dead.

The same, Aerith had said, not long before she died. A different person, and yet the same.

The proof that Zack had existed.

Tifa’s hand landed on his shoulder. “It’s okay, Cloud.”

“Cloud,” Aerith repeated. Since of course he hadn’t introduced himself yet. Right. “It is okay, Cloud,” she said, and with a single firm twist tucked the white flower into the leather strap of his sword-harness where it ran down the front of his shoulder. “I’d…guessed that he wasn’t coming home.”

He remembered, belatedly, that Aerith had told her adopted mother the moment her husband died, far away in the Wutai War. That his spirit had tried to come back to her, but dissolved into the Lifestream before he could. She’d never even met Mr. Gainsborough.

Of course she’d known Zack was dead.

…had offering to pay for Cloud’s bodyguarding skills with a date that first time they met been an attempt to move on? After waiting for almost five years, when he’d been dead three days? But to someone who felt like almost the same person…Cloud was rapidly realizing all over again just how little he actually knew Aerith. He wondered if it bothered other people this much when he was mysterious. Not that he was nearly as good at it.

He let all his breath out. “Listen, Aerith,” he said. “There’s something…Midgar isn’t safe for you anymore.”

Her smile was impish, and he couldn’t see anything behind her eyes. “When was Midgar ever safe for anybody?”

“No, I mean. You know Tseng of the Turks doesn’t want to catch you. But he’s not going to be able to avoid it much longer.”

He wasn’t sure what to say next. I’m about to declare war on Shinra, so run away across the Planet with me? If the dead Shinra General manages to summon a meteor to destroy the world it will land on this city, and we need you to go to the lost city of your ancestors and use mystical abilities I’m pretty sure you don’t understand yet so you can raise Gaia’s defenses?

I want to meet you, she’d said that night at the Golden Saucer. He didn’t know how she had figured it out before anyone else, even Tifa, but she had wanted to meet the Cloud that wasn’t hiding inside Zack’s ghost.

She’d never had the chance, not except as a ghost herself, and while he had always felt like Aerith’s presence cared about and approved of him even when he didn’t deserve it, that was different from this Aerith, who’d never been drawn to the shadow of Zack on his shoulders or realized she could convince him to dress up as a girl if she insisted it was the only way, or had him fight for her or beside her, or watched him break.

Just a mixed-up kid she’d called him when he admitted he’d never had a date before, and it…wasn’t untrue. In some ways he’d still been sixteen, then, the years in between barely lived and then forgotten. He’d grown past that now, though, past his old limits. This was the self he’d built.

(He wanted her to like this him so much it hurt, deep in his chest where all the worst things happened, but that didn’t matter, couldn’t be allowed to matter, that was just what he wanted.)

One thing he remembered for sure was that Aerith tended to make an excuse and run out of the room when she felt pressed about anything private, especially her Cetra heritage. He wasn’t sure how far she would run if she started now, but he didn’t really want the kind of attention you got as a guy with a weapon chasing a girl through Wall Market. Mostly because it would probably get back to the Turks, but also because at least one person was bound to applaud his initiative and he hated that kind of attitude.

“Cloud,” said Tifa, as Wall Market bustled on around them, taking only cursory notice of the people talking to the flower-seller. “Is there something you want to ask her?”

“This is Tifa,” Cloud said to buy time. “She owns the Seventh Heaven over in Sector Seven. Tifa, Aerith Gainsborough. She grows flowers in Sector Five.”

Both women were appropriately impressed. “Grow them, really?” Tifa asked. “I always try to get herbs started, but there’s so little sunshine down here…”

“I just have a nice little plot of earth,” Aerith shrugged. Oops. Did she really not realize she was using Cetra abilities to grow flowers where nothing should grow, or was this another part of her disguise?

“Show us?” Tifa asked, and it seemed intrusive—it was—but it was also a way to move the conversation somewhere a little more private.

Aerith hesitated.

“The Church, right?” Cloud asked quietly. Let her think Zack had told him—Zack probably had told him, on the run, though maybe not in the labs because you never knew when the scientists were listening. The point was letting her know he already knew, so she wasn’t costing herself anything by taking him there.

She nodded. “So Cloud,” she said as she took the lead, down through Wall Market and out. “What do you do?”

Cloud rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. “A little bit of everything, I guess?” he asked. (Hearing the redoubling echoes of himself and Zack behind the words and trying not to.) Since he didn’t own a motorcycle, his most marketable skills right now were fighting—he wasn’t as good as he used to be by a long shot, but expertise made up for strength more than he would have thought—and chocobo racing. The latter field was a lot harder to break into. “Mostly I kill monsters.”

He didn’t think he really had to worry about jobs until they’d finished saving the planet again. Another bright side of the situation, to add to all the people who weren’t dead yet anymore.

(Eventually this was going to stop feeling like the past had equipped a Double Cut materia and attacked him.)

It was strange seeing the Church so intact again, even more than the rest of Midgar because the ruined version of the city was so different it could hardly be considered the same place. Open to the sky, a field of rubble and the upright stubs of beams and timbers. Midgar didn’t recall itself, the way the Church did.

Of course, the Church in the time he’d left was hardly itself anymore either; he was remembering it as it had been when he retreated there during Geostigma, not as the shell that stood around the holy spring. Here, too, it was as though it was considerably more than four years that had been unwound. The wooden pews stood in their lines, and only one side of the ceiling was missing, and none of the pillars had fallen. And instead of Aerith’s healing water rippling before the altar to forgotten gods, there were her flowers.

Tifa dropped onto one of the foremost benches as naturally as anything, as Aerith went ahead to kneel in her garden patch, digging her fingers into the soil. Cloud stood in the aisle at the end of Tifa’s pew, hands loose at his sides.

“They really are growing,” Tifa marveled.

“It’s the church,” Aerith shrugged. “I think it’s special.”

She was the only reason it had ever been special.

“Shinra thinks you can lead them to the Promised Land,” Cloud said.

Aerith went very still. The whole air of the Church seemed to have gone still with her.

“The mako in Midgar is almost exhausted. They want to find the Promised Land and build reactors there, and a new Midgar.”

“Do you think that will change?” Tifa asked, because Aerith was still not moving. “If the President is killed?” Like he’d predicted.

Cloud shook his head. “I don’t think it will change. Rufus will want to do something impressive to surpass his father.”

Aerith stood up. It was very rapid, but then she stopped moving and stood there amongst the flowers, brushing the dirt from her hands. “Why do they think I can find this place?” she asked.

“…the Ancients were supposed to know where it was.”

“…ah.” Aerith’s hands knotted together, then came apart, brushing over her skirt, businesslike but purposeless. “So did you come here to make sure I can’t?”

She said it so brightly that if he hadn’t known her, he wouldn’t have heard the darker question buried just inside the open one. The make sure I can’t that was written in blood. He ignored it. It wasn’t worth acknowledging. “No. I know you wouldn’t. Could you?”

“…I don’t know.”

Cloud thought she really wasn’t lying. But then, he had the advantage of having watched her blunder desperately toward understanding over their months roaming the Planet, through searching the Ancient Temple for clues. This wasn’t the sort of thing that could be mastered in a day.

Nothing worthwhile ever was.

“I don’t even know where I would start. What kind of place is a Promised Land?”

Cloud shrugged, thinking of a blasted waste in the far North. “Shinra thinks it’s a location on the Planet with infinite mako reserves, where they don’t have to worry about the devastation they’ve created in Midgar.” Typical, really. Shinra never believed in consequences, at least not for themselves. And of course they’d think supreme happiness was just limitless wealth.

“What do you think?” Aerith asked.

Cloud gave this question the careful consideration it deserved, from her. “I don’t think the Promised Land is a place,” he said. “Or…it’s not one place. It’s different for everyone. It’s where you are when you feel like you don’t want to go anywhere else.”

That was why when it was written or talked about, it had all the characteristics that made a nice place to live—rich, and beautiful, without too much danger. If you wanted different things in life, then your Promised Land would be different. (Sephiroth’s Promised Land had been the crater where Jenova first landed, because it was a site of power he could use to devour the Planet from within, and thick with the contagious poison he’d become.)

Trust Shinra to hear about a dream and see an opportunity. They probably would squeeze still-living souls for mako extraction, if they figured out a method. It wasn’t like they ever worried about losing customers.

Tifa was giving him a look that said something like, When did you get religious opinions? but Cloud didn’t mind. The answer was even weirder than the fact that he had them, after all. He smiled, a little, and unfolded his arms. The Buster Sword shifted on his back.

“…that’s very interesting,” Aerith said. “What made you decide that?”

Cloud shrugged, awkwardly. “It’s…just an idea.” Based on things Aerith herself had said, of course, like one day I’ll leave Midgar and find my Promised Land. Like it was a personal quest, that you had to find the one that was yours. She’d said outright she didn’t know anything, but she was still his best source.

All I know is... Aerith had said in Shinra’s cells, last time. The Cetra were born from the Planet, speak with the Planet, and unlock the Planet. And…then... The Cetra will return to the Promised Land.

She could only hear the Planet here, in the Church, so far, he remembered abruptly—she’d said so, and it wasn’t the sort of thing she would have lied about. And she also said the Planet was noisy with ghosts, which he’d certainly experienced in the City of the Ancients, when he tried to reach out at the gleaming points where the Lifestream fused with the solid world, and had fallen down with his skull rattling every time.

Part of that had probably been Jenova. He hadn’t tried since. He probably should.

Carefully. Once he had some people in place to keep an eye on him.

“A very different idea from Shinra’s,” Aerith said, as though she was teasing.

“Well. There’s a lot of reasons I don’t work for Shinra anymore.”

Her face fell, slightly, and he remembered again how fresh Zack’s death was for her, even if she hadn’t seen him in years, and had to crush the impulse to apologize again. It was done. Aerith knew the story. She would hold it against Cloud or not as she saw fit.

“So,” Aerith forged on, “your activities aren’t Shinra-approved.”

“No,” agreed Tifa. Almost nobody’s were, down here, at least not officially. Even though half their employees even outside the manufacturing sector, in management positions even, couldn’t afford to live on-Plate and they’d built the train to accommodate that, technically even living in the slums was…not illegal, but extralegal, at least. They weren’t officially in Midgar, down here. Except when it came to jurisdiction.

On the other hand, unofficially Don Corneo was Shinra approved. So who was to say.

Cloud supposed he could see the why of that relationship. Corneo shared their philosophy, and he was too small a fish to ever rival them, and knew it. What was there for Shinra to mind? Why shouldn’t they encourage him?

“I’ll help,” Aerith declared—frankly, with a little nod, as if it was already fact. She’d never been the type to offer things.

“No,” said Cloud anyway. As if it had been an offer, that you could refuse. “Sorry, but…the more time we’re around you, the more likely we are to attract the Turks’ attention, and we can’t afford that just yet.”

Aerith grinned, not visibly stung by rejection but a little mocking. “Oh? You have plans, Mysterious Stranger?”

“So many.” It came out sounding exhausted by his own plotting, but he sort of was.

Aerith laughed at him, out loud.

It really was too soon to explain all their plans to her, even the ones Tifa already knew all about, but that was hard to remember. Honesty was easy around Aerith. Which—was a little odd, actually, considering she was the most secretive person he knew that wasn’t a Turk. More secretive than some of them. (She’d…actually have been better than Elena at most parts of a Turk’s job. Not following orders, of course, let alone hurting whoever Shinra wanted hurt, but the rest of it.)

Cloud shook his head hard to get the image of Aerith in a black suit out of his brain. Definitely made more sense than recruiting her to SOLDIER, anyway.

She giggled. “You look like a dog that got water in its ears,” she told him.

“I do, huh?” Cloud found himself smiling.

“Yes. But you’re not really the puppy type, are you Mister Mystery?” There was a sadness in the way she said this, even though she was smiling, that Cloud didn’t entirely understand. Aerith had once mentioned liking dogs. But he’d never seen her go out of her way to play with or greet one.

“People usually compare me to a chocobo,” he said, and for once his deadpan was meant to make her laugh. Tifa laughed, too, a gulping sound of surprise.

Even after the bit about General Tifa, she hadn’t known he knew how to be funny.

It was a work in progress.

“If you need to worry about surveillance, you should head out from here,” Aerith urged them, instead of pushing. “They check up on me a lot.” Tifa stood up, so apparently they were going to listen.

“We’ll be in touch,” Cloud promised. Because even though finding her and passing on word of Zack’s death had discharged that obligation, properly this time, he couldn’t leave it at that. He had a responsibility to keep her alive and save the Planet and bring Shinra down, somehow.

But one thing at a time. For now, he had a responsibility to save Sector Seven. They had two days to make sure Shinra couldn’t destroy it at the drop of a plate.

“…you know a lot of things, huh Cloud,” Tifa said quietly, after they’d walked all the way back to Sector Six together in silence.

“…I guess so,” said Cloud.

“Were you…looking for us, Cloud? Like you were looking for her?”

So she’d figured that part out. “No,” he said. Bit down on his tongue to steady his thoughts. “I…was forgetting. Everything. Until you found me. You said my name.”

“…what did they do to you?”

It was…soft. Afraid. Angry, but not in the way he felt like it should be, somehow.

He raised his head (not sure when it had dropped exactly, and his chest tight at the fact of that uncertainty even though it was probably just ordinary emotional distraction, not a Jenova-induced fugue) and turned to look at her. He’d stopped walking, and so had she, synced easily to his movements with a martial artist’s physical intuition. “They…” His throat closed. He shook his head. “Not…now.”

He still didn’t know how to talk about it. Wasn’t going to be able to talk about it while the past was still slashing him with its doubled edge. But Tifa cast a paranoid eye around the Wall Market crowd, and that was an important concern as well.

Part of him wanted to have given a different, more reassuring answer, something that cleared him of scheming to take advantage of AVALANCHE without betraying the weaknesses in his mind. Something that would make Tifa trust him and respect him.

But that was the child who’d wanted to be SOLDIER more than he wanted to breathe, talking.

He did need Tifa’s support for his plan, to save everyone, but…he knew her. She’d backed him on the basis of their promise, and their bond as survivors of Nibelheim, when he was having regular seizures and inserting himself into the story of the worst day of her life where she knew perfectly well he hadn’t been.

She wasn’t going to march in and denounce him to Barret just because he’d shown weakness.

Cloud didn’t trust the relationship they had now, built on such fragile threads, enough to ask her to believe his mad story of time travel, aliens, and magical deflection shields to save the Planet from space rocks. But he trusted her to give him second chances. More of them than he deserved.

Tifa started walking again without saying anything, and Cloud followed her. After a while she murmured, thoughtfully, “Cetra, huh…”

“Mm.”

“Aren’t the Ancients just a fairy tale?”

Cloud shrugged. “I don’t know which stories are true. But they did live. They left ruins behind.” He squinted. “Scientists study them. I’m not sure why. To learn about materia, maybe? They have something to do with materia.”

Tifa grinned. “I see you’re quite the expert.”

“I know the parts I need to.”

Chapter Text

They didn’t sleep that night until nearly dawn, between the planning session for how to go look for the bombs without being seen, the actual trip to do so, and the frenetic, rage-fueled planning session afterward, at the Heaven.

Wedge had stayed behind from the bomb-viewing to put Marlene to bed and keep an eye on her, this time, freeing Tifa up to come along, but was filled in by his friends at once once they got back. Biggs and Jessie talked over one another and Barret, which Cloud hadn’t seen them do before, in the first version of this week.

Usually when they weren’t relaxed, they were focused; all the chaos set aside for the sake of the work.

But Cloud had never really been party to the planning, that first time.

The bomb-removal brainstorm team ultimately consisted of the five official AVALANCHE members, Cloud, Biggs’ acquaintance with the demolitions contact, and a free-runner friend of Jessie’s who’d been asked along on the viewing expedition for her Plate-climbing expertise, but seemed halfway to fully enrolled as a terrorist by the end of the evening.

Cloud mostly kept his mouth shut, when he didn’t have anything useful to share. Things were moving in the direction they needed to be, and Barrett had things under control. He could only muck it up by sticking his oar in.

By the end of the next day, the demolitions contact had been brought in, gone through a surprisingly brief emotional adjustment period to the existence of Plate Release as a thing his former bosses were prepared to do, analyzed the charges built into the Plate understructure as best he could, successfully dismantled two, and started training those proposed assistants.

Four in the evening, a day later, found Cloud and Barret alone in the Heaven, which seemed like the best time to talk to him—Barret was always calmer without an audience, especially back in these days when he was under so much more internal stress.

He cared a lot what people thought, especially after his own people had forced the blame for their destruction on him, so being watched made him less patient.

“I was thinking,” Cloud said. He’d sat down next to Barret at the table in front of the bar, with a cup of Tifa’s clean water to sip at. She didn’t charge for water by the cup, even to people who weren’t personal friends; customers paid to have a cup at all, and then booze refills in the same glass were a gil cheaper, and water refills free. It was one of the things that made her place so popular.

“Yeah?” Barrett asked. His tone was almost cautious interest; less on-edge now that Cloud’s dire warnings had been borne out, and proven more than just a bizarre sting operation, but still not warm. Cloud wasn’t his friend yet.

“All these bombs we’re dismantling…we could re-use a lot of the parts,” Cloud said. “Really mess up one of the reactors for good.”

Squint of suspicion immediately reactivated. “Oh yeah? I thought you didn’t want us doing a thing like that.”

“The news is getting out about the Plate Release Mechanism. The more people hear and believe it, the worse Shinra will look.”

“Yeah? So?” He didn’t mean that didn’t matter, but he also didn’t feel Cloud had answered the question. Barret always liked to be thorough.

“So maybe what we should do is…once this project is done. We make an announcement so everyone knows we’re going to destroy a reactor because of the damage to the Planet and because Shinra can’t be…trusted with power.”

“Announcements, now?” Barret snorted. “AVALANCHE writing letters to the editor now?”

Cloud shrugged. He didn’t think any of the mainstream papers in Midgar would print it. There were the underground ones, though. Maybe they could call in to all the radio shows that took callers. Were there TV shows that did that too? Cloud had never really watched any TV. “I would think you’d like that,” he said. “You like people to know why you’re doing things, right?”

Barrett squinted at him even more suspiciously. Because it was true, but it shouldn’t have been obvious from what Cloud had seen of him so far.

“It’ll help with the cause, too,” Cloud pushed. “Part of how Shinra keeps everyone under their thumb is information control.”

Reeve had been on the wrong side of a fight about that, a while after Meteor—hadn’t seen why having only one news station was a problem, if they were the ones controlling it, through the WRO. Tifa, Barret, and Yuffie had all had points to make about that, along with several leading Edge citizens, including former members of the Shinra-controlled media and a man who used to run one of the underground newspapers.

“And…” Cloud added, almost to himself, “we can’t take them down unless we have most of the people on our side.” Not just agreeing with them—more than half of all people already thought Shinra was bad. Most of them couldn't think of any alternative, though, as things were. They needed the public’s active support.

He hadn’t understood what good that was, how far it could go, until he watched Edge rise out of Midgar’s rubble.

Barret was silent for an unusually long time. “You really think we can do that,” he said at last. His voice was almost hushed. “You think we can bring down…all that.”

Cloud looked up, startled. It had never occurred to him that Barret thought they couldn’t.

But of course he had. Of course he’d never been fighting with any expectation that he’d win, not back then. Not now. Not really.

Cloud was desperately glad he’d never realized that, back in the day. Barret’s belief had been like a fire, the kind safely girdled in a ring of stone, something all of them could count on and fall back to when nothing else in the world was reliable or even completely real.

Barret had believed that there was no option other than the fight; that the option of living peacefully as best he could contrive and letting Marlene grow up in the world Shinra defined, a world where a peaceful community could be gunned down on a flimsy political pretext for no reason at all but Shinra’s convenience, without giving everything he could in the opposition, was no option at all.

But he’d never been a madman. Barret was an idealist, but he was a realist too. He knew his forces were five civilians with scrounged scraps of equipment, against the last remaining great power of the world. He never really thought they could win.

“Not alone,” Cloud said. Because him and Barret and Tifa was a good party but it wasn’t enough even for the core assault force they were going to need. And because for this to work out in the long term without Sephiroth conveniently crushing Midgar and killing a hundred thousand people, they needed those people’s help. All the people. They needed Midgar to save itself. “But…yeah.”

He’d seen the giant fall. He’d seen greater giants felled, even, though this one was more complicated than Jenova or the Weapons or even Omega, because of all the children clutched in its fists. He knew it could be done.

And he knew how far they could come.

For once, he remembered to smile on the outside, where other people could see.

He assumed Barret looking slightly like he’d been hit with a brick was a good outcome.

Cloud got up, went behind the bar, and retrieved a bottle of Corelian brandy to pour Barret a double. He’d pay Tifa back later. He re-corked the bottle and pushed the glass into Barret’s hand, where he took a fortifying swallow, and then proceeded to sip at it carefully, until the front door opened and Wedge and Biggs came in, followed by Jessie.

“What’s up, boss?” Wedge asked, as they joined him at the table.

Barret finished the glass firmly enough Cloud went to put the bottle away; he wasn’t going to ask for another. “Right,” he said. “Cloud here wants go back to blowing reactors, but with more publicity.”

“I think we can control the publicity better,” Cloud corrected, coming back around the bar and taking the stool at the end, since the seats at the table were all claimed. “Stop Shinra from using it to make people depend on them more. They’ll already have a bit more trouble blaming it on us, if they drop part of the Plate now.”

Dropping Sector Seven would be hard by now, with a good proportion of the bombs dismantled, but the Release Mechanism covered the whole city. They could still do the same thing somewhere else. “We can build on that.”

“If we tell ‘em we’re coming, though, they’ll just beef up the security.”

“I can take them,” said Cloud, reaching up out of habit to touch the end of the Buster Sword’s hilt.

He knew he could, too. He had better equipment and had come a lot further in his recovery, now, than he had by this same time, last go. Everyone Shinra had left that could take him, one on one, was locked up in Deep Ground right now.

(Having a civil war, if he’d understood the chain of events right as the WRO assembled it in the aftermath, putting what Vincent had learned together with the surviving computer records. Maybe that was the real reason the President had decided to squash Midgar under the Plate and escape to the Promised Land. Useless pig.)

“Besides, if we don’t tell them where we’re hitting…”

“…they’ll reinforce everywhere, so everywhere will be weak,” realized Barrett, as Cloud had known he would. He’d learned that lesson from Barrett to begin with. “Seems like security’s understrength lately anyway.”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah. My friend…Zack,” he added; it was strangely hard saying his name but it deserved to be said. “He killed about two thirds of the Midgar Home Guard garrison a few days ago.”

“He did what?” Barret and Biggs exclaimed this in a ragged chorus, and Cloud shrugged awkwardly.

“Shinra really, really didn’t want to let him make it to Midgar. They won, I guess, but…he made them pay a price.” He shrugged again. “So that’s why security’s weak. We should capitalize, before they can push out the new wave of recruits or free up part of the garrison of Junon to transfer up here.”

“One guy?” asked Wedge. “By himself?”

Cloud shrugged. “He was a real hero, I…guess.”

“You don’t know?” asked Biggs, and, “wait how do you know? That he…” Biggs waved a hand, apparently unwilling to say ‘killed half the army.’

“I was there.”

“You helped?” Wedge’s eyes were wide with something like awe. Cloud winced away from it.

“No. No, I was useless.”

Barrett’s wide eyes went narrow. “You telling me you just let yer pal die?”

“I didn’t ask him to!” Cloud felt his calm shredding, more than he would have expected. He didn’t like how much he’d had to talk about Zack since he woke up here. He didn’t like Barrett thinking he was the kind of person who let Zack die for him. Even though it was true. It wasn’t on purpose. “I was still sick. From…the lab. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t walk. He…”

He gave up on words. They were Barrett’s thing, and Reeve’s, and even Tifa’s, not his. He missed Vincent suddenly.

He missed Zack. He wasn’t used to missing Zack. Zack had been dead for over a month before Cloud remembered he’d ever existed.

His eyes were burning. Not with tears. But like they wanted to fill with tears, like he was a small child who hadn’t even watched Tifa nearly die when he’d come trying to protect her, yet. Who still thought he should be able to save everybody.

He wondered if all SOLDIERs’ tear ducts got damaged by immersion in mako, or if that was his particular weakness, or the length of time he’d spent in the stuff. Maybe it was just part of having mako eyes.

“I caught up in time to…watch him die.”

Cloud opened his eyes again to see Barrett watching him solemnly. It was a more familiar expression than the edged glower, after years of friendship, so for a split second he didn’t register the change. “Ah, hell,” Barrett said with a sigh, and sounded old, suddenly. They weren’t that far apart in age, really, anymore, but Barrett didn’t know that. “Kid…”

Barret walked over to the bar with deliberation, and took the stool to Cloud’s left. He sat facing the bar, his back to the room, and folded his hand over the place on his gun where a wrist would be. Cloud would have to turn over one hundred and eighty degrees to get a good look at Barret’s face, so he didn’t try.

Not softly enough for a secret, but quietly enough that the words were clearly meant for Cloud and not the other three, Barret said, “I watched ‘em kill my best friend, too.”

Oh.

Oh.

The truth caught at the back of Cloud’s throat: Dyne is alive. But he had no way to justify knowing it—knowing who the lost friend was, even, let alone knowing how he was. He’d burn up this new trust, trying to insist on something there was no way he could know or prove, and if Barrett did believe him the best that could come of it was false hope.

Because Dyne was so much more broken than Barret had ever been; Dyne didn’t see himself as fit to live, to hold Marlene, to be forgiven. Only to kill and to die.

Cloud clenched his eyes shut and let his chin drop, his hands close. Reached up to Buster Sword for reassurance, after a second. “They’re never going to stop,” he said. “Shinra. They’ll keep killing friends and destroying towns until the Planet burns out or somebody stops them.”

“And that’s us,” piped up Wedge, the words followed by the sound of his standing from his stool.

“Yeah,” affirmed Jessie, and she got to her feet too.

“We’ve got this,” said Biggs, with a ferocity Cloud didn’t remember him showing, the first time.

But then. They’d all been pretending not to feel as much of anything, especially pain, as they really did, back then.

“Yeah,” said Cloud, and lifted his head.

Barret finished Cloud’s abandoned water and braced his gun-hand against the top of the bar. “Let’s go.”

Spreading the word about the bomb-removal project meant it got to the Turks eventually, of course, but by then sectors Seven and Five were cleared and Six was most of the way there, and dropping any other part of the Plate wouldn’t actually do Shinra much good, especially not now.

It wasn’t like they were prepared to crush their own revenue-producing factories, the way they were to kill the public.

Shinra got into the propaganda game instead, insisting that AVALANCHE terrorists were behind the bomb threat, and Shinra was as always the people’s protector.

But Cloud had got the first stroke in, and too many people had seen the explosives, sleek mass-produced things nestled into the architecture of the city as though they belonged there. Part of the design. The Shinra line wasn’t accepted as easily as usual.

Plenty of people believed them, of course, especially on the Plate—the old AVALANCHE the Turks had broken had been much more professional than Barrett’s cell, so the people familiar with its achievements considered nothing too impressive for terrorists to accomplish.

And also, when choosing whether to believe the story that meant you were mostly safe unless the bad guys got really lucky, or the story that meant you owed your livelihood and moment-to-moment security to an institution that would with perfect equanimity blow you up, most people preferred the first one.

Cloud went repeatedly to check on the man in the pipe. He was always there, shivering, rocking, moaning.

Tifa came up behind him the third time he visited, peered around him at the wreck of a human being. “Are you…going to help?” she asked.

It wasn’t exactly a reprimand, or even a demand. Tifa had lived in Midgar’s slums for years, and while she helped where she could, she knew very well that you couldn’t help everyone. Could save even fewer.

The man in the pipe rocked back and forth. The numeral 2 on his hand flashed in and out of sight. “No,” Cloud said. “There’s no helping him.”

Maybe he should kill him. It would be kind. But he was Cloud’s barometer of Jenova activity. And anyway, it would be too much like killing himself.

Then it was the third day. Cloud didn’t think the Midgar-saving operation needed his oversight anymore; it wasn’t like he had any real experience organizing large groups of people.

Aerith, on the other hand, had been getting a lot done, adding her networking to Tifa’s and Barret’s and everyone’s existing webs of contacts, and her personal charisma to outreach efforts, ever since the Turks had made it clear they knew, so there was no more reason to keep her away from the scrum.

He’d asked her if she really wanted to put herself in such a visible position, and she’d flicked her ponytail off her shoulder and said that she had always been visible. Now she was just becoming impossible to ignore. “Besides,” she said, “we’re leaving soon, right? Since you told me Tseng wouldn’t have been able to ignore me much longer anyway.”

Cloud must have made a stupid-looking face, because she laughed at him again. “What else could you have been getting at? Yes, if you were waiting for me to agree. I think it’s high time. Even if it’s scary.” She shrugged. “And if someone does come after me, you’ll protect me, right Cloud?”

He stared at her. Answers rose to his tongue, words begging her not to rely on him, except that it was precisely when she’d stopped leaning on the rest of them and gone off alone that they’d lost her. Except they’d caught up anyway and been unable to help. Except the message she’d left him through a dream had been what gave her plan away to Sephiroth so if she’d only made the break even sharper….

This Aerith didn’t know any of that, but she knew he’d failed Zack, and was relying on him anyway. “I’ll try,” he said. “I’ll always try.”

Her eyebrows bent a little, and Cloud realized maybe he had been too intense again. He did that, he knew. Occasionally. Not quite as often as he sounded like he didn’t care as much as people wanted him to, but not exactly rarely all the same. It was worse now, when he had bonds to people who did not feel them in return.

“Zack…” he said, and maybe it was abusing his friend’s memory all over again to use him as an excuse but it wasn’t a lie. It might finally kill Cloud with shame if, after being given yet another chance to live up to his promise, this time with full knowledge, he still failed. “I’m alive in his place,” Cloud said. The proof that Zack had existed. “I have to protect the things he wanted to protect.”

I promised.

Please let me keep my word.

Aerith’s face softened, and sorrow showed for a second before she dismissed it again from everywhere but the very backs of her eyes.

He would fight for her for her own sake too, of course, and for his, as well as for the sake of the Planet, but it wasn’t time to let her know that. Hopefully he’d get a chance.

He would always love Aerith. Not the way Zack had, anymore, but…in his own way. Always.

Even when the Planet had been full of Cetra, he didn’t think there had been anyone like her.

“Okay,” Aerith said. Grinned. “Thanks, Mr. Chocobo.”

“You…” Cloud faltered. “The Planet, the Promised Land...I know it’s just you.” She was the only one who could do it, the very last Ancient among them. Whatever it was she did, this time, summoned Holy or something else, it would be something no one else could have done. She was unique. “But you don’t...have to do it alone. Okay?”

Please, he wanted to say, don’t try to do it alone. He’d been there to watch her die, once, and it hadn’t made any difference, but he’d learned for himself that leaving the party behind would never help. Trying to pin Aerith down like that, trying to bind her, wouldn’t help either, though, so he didn’t say it.

Sure enough the smile she gave this time was a little more strained, and she brushed at her bangs as she turned away from him. “Mm,” she hummed, noncommittal.

Of course, she didn’t entirely trust him. That was good, really. She shouldn’t. He hadn’t earned it.

“Whatever you decide to do,” Cloud repeated. “I promise.”

It was the day the Plate had been supposed to fall, and the only thing Cloud could be sure of was that it wouldn’t.

And that he had somewhere to be.

“Stay together,” Cloud implored them all, before setting out. “Protect each other. Don’t let Shinra…”

“We won’t,” swore Jessie.

“Watch Marlene,” he said, because she’d been made a hostage more than once. “Watch Aerith, she’s a target. Just…”

“We have this, Cloud,” said Biggs, blowing air upward to get a rogue strand of hair out of his eyes. “Go do your secret mission and come back safe, you hear?”

“…yeah.”

“We’ll be fine,” promised Tifa, and smiled.

Cloud knew his way up through the Shinra building, and he was a better thief than he’d used to be back in the day, too. And one person was easier to hide than three. He made it all the way to Hojo’s personal domain without setting off any alarms.

Getting out that way might be harder, but getting in unnoticed had been what was important.

The Jenova capsule was where he remembered it. He walked past without looking. It had to be dealt with, of course, but just in case he lost that fight he needed to set Nanaki free first.

The Guardian was curled in the giant reinforced-glass cylinder, one paw over his face, tail wrapped protectively around his haunches. It was a toss-up whether he looked more miserable or angry. The number 13 tattooed on his shoulder, with whatever method Hojo had used to permanently change the color that new fur grew, made Cloud’s stomach twist even though he’d never seen the Guardian without it.

He tapped on the glass.

Nanaki twitched, very slightly, and then his crest bristled just as slightly and he dragged his tail up over his face another inch and made a point of ignoring the sound.

Did Hojo’s assistants go around tapping on glass to get the specimens’ attention? Cloud didn’t remember being tapped at, but then he didn’t remember much. “Hey,” he whispered. Hopefully he didn’t need to be so loud, to be heard through the glass, that people working on other parts of the floor would hear him. “Hey, Nanaki.”

His friend’s head jerked up at the sound of his real name, and as soon as Red was looking at him, Cloud offered a smile. “My name’s Cloud Strife, I’m here to rescue you.”

“…what?” Nanaki sounded as young as he was, caught off guard, then cleared his throat and got to his feet, tail lashing once out of an instinct to gauge the space behind him, and continued more gravely: “Are you a mercenary Grandfather hired?”

What a good theory. He wondered what made him look so much more like a mercenary than a friend. Probably Nanaki just assumed if he were a friend they’d have met already. “Not exactly,” said Cloud. “Is there a button to open that thing on this level?”

As it turned out, the only controls really were the set one floor up, and Cloud had to use the elevator because there weren’t any stairs. Hojo’s interior design sensibilities were appalling.

Nobody came to investigate the noise. After a bit of trial and error, Cloud found the button to open the cylinder, and headed down again to find Nanaki waiting for him. “How are we leaving?” he asked.

“Elevator, hopefully. But I have another errand first.”

“Oh?”

“Yes.” Cloud drew and let go a huffing breath. He didn’t have Nanaki’s trust yet, which would actually help in some ways—he’d had it at the Northern Crater and as a result Nanaki had given him the Black Materia when that had been the last thing in the world he should have done. But he wasn’t sure how well Nanaki would listen to him, when they didn’t share a bond of trust. “I have to go look at another specimen—it’s long dead. If I try to do anything after looking, without explaining it to you first, stop me, okay?”

It wasn’t a foolproof defense, but it would take Jenova a lot more than a few seconds of eye contact to break him down psychologically. Had taken a lot more than that, even the first time, when he hadn’t known anything. And neither Jenova nor Sephiroth had ever shown any ability to put words in people’s mouths with anything less than a full bodily possession.

Ideas in their heads, yes…but he’d never been fit to explain himself when he’d been grabbed at by force, before. So it should be fine.

He walked over to the sealed capsule, and turned to face it. Nothing. He could see a little of Jenova’s headless silhouette through the viewport. He stepped a little closer. And again. Squinted through the inset window. Felt a spike of pain through his head, finally, that he suspected might have reached all the way to his eyes and lit them up, but nothing bad enough to force him to do more than squint to bear it.

Not as good as no reaction at all. But promising, all the same.

“I’m going to break this door open,” he announced. “When I do, I want you to cast your strongest fire spell on the thing inside, and keep casting.”

Nanaki gave him a look—maybe wondering how Cloud knew he had Fire materia equipped—but only said, “Is it a monster, then?”

“Worse,” said Cloud grimly. “It’s the Calamity from the sky. It killed the Ancients. And now Shinra’s giving it another chance at the world.”

This was more than he’d told anyone else, but he thought it was safe. Nanaki would understand that much without further explanations, and be patient about waiting for any he did need.

And in case Cloud was overwhelmed by Reunion, there was someone standing by with fire.

Fire didn’t keep the dead from entering the Lifestream, of course, but it destroyed the individual cells of a body without offering the direct route into the Planet’s energy that plunging into the heart of a mako reactor had. This wasn’t a perfect solution—they would still need to destroy Sephiroth’s real body, and each of the clones, and Aerith would have to find some way to clean the rest of the contamination already in the Lifestream away, hopefully before Geostigma arose again.

Maybe there was a spiritual energy equivalent of water filters?

But less of Jenova’s body in existence meant fewer vectors of infection and control, less ability to become powerful monsters, meant things like the Remnants were less likely.

Might also give Sephiroth the advantage in whatever mental balance was being struck within the amalgamated selves of Nightmare and Calamity, and while that had its disadvantages in that Sephiroth seemed to be the better half at detailed planning, perhaps because he had been alive more recently, it had the advantage that he tended to be fixated on Cloud, and to talk endlessly, and Cloud had learned more or less to predict him. He was definitely the preferable opponent.

Cloud took the sword off his back. “Don’t stop,” he cautioned Nanaki. “No matter what happens. Keep burning it until it’s gone.”

Nanaki’s tail lashed, but he agreed, and Cloud had no more reason to hesitate.

He raised Zack’s sword. “Ready,” he said, and Nanaki nodded.

Cloud cut the capsule open.

His headache returned. His vision flickered at the edges.

Nanaki cast.

The feedback took Cloud to his knees, this time, but at least he was aware enough to know it. The roar of Nanaki’s magic filled the lab. He bit down on his tongue and endured.

His elbows were on the floor too, by the time the static in his head stopped, but he hadn’t let go of his sword. He sat up on his heels. The space where Jenova had been was a blackened hole.

“Did it try to fight back?” he asked. His voice came out rusty.

The look Nanaki gave him was complicated—a little incredulous at the idea, considering it had been a very old decapitated corpse, a little annoyed Cloud hadn’t mentioned that possibility ahead of time, maybe a little worried about him. “No.”

Cloud hauled himself to his feet. Prodded the ashes near the front of the pod with his boot. They crumbled. “Good.” That was the best he could do, right now. “Time to get out of here.”

He could have waited around for Sephiroth. But why bother? It wasn’t like Cloud wanted to stop him from killing President Shinra. Rufus was easier to deal with, Cloud had his measure.

And with Jenova burned, Sephiroth might not even come.

They had to fight what must have been half of what was left of SOLDIER on their way out. No Turks, though, which turned out to be because when they got to the Heaven, it was under siege. A detachment of infantry had shot the place up and sent most of the neighborhood running screaming. Biggs was down with a gunshot wound; Jessie and Wedge were trapped in Reno’s yellow Pyramid attack, that he’d thrown last time to buy time to drop the Plate.

Reno, Rude, and Tseng were fighting Aerith, Tifa, and Barret across the middle of the wrecked bar, when Cloud fought his way inside across a street of slaughtered infantry, Nanaki very generously plunging right back into combat at his shoulder despite both of them being fairly worn out from the Shinra Building.

Cloud called down Thunder on all three of the Turks almost as soon as he had the door open, completely uninterested in the combat etiquette of letting these kinds of confrontations play out. It was only first-level, his spell, and none of the three Turks was battered enough yet to go down from it.

Cloud snarled and flung himself across the room edge-first.

Once it was five on three, the fight where the Turks had had a slight edge despite not wanting to seriously harm Aerith (or in Rude’s case wanting to seriously harm Tifa, for that matter) was definitively stacked the other way.

It was, however, taking too long. There might be Shinra reinforcements on the way. Cloud took an open moment while his friends were all taking their swings at the secret police to swallow his only Ether, having felt his mana reserves sputter down to nothing.

Then he hit the Turks with Thunda-All and knocked them all off their feet, smoking and in Reno’s case twitching wildly. It was always especially satisfying to electrocute Reno.

“Fuck, fuck,” said Reno, the first to recover. None of Cloud’s friends had proven quite battle-hardened enough, yet, to kill defenseless enemies without an immediate, urgent need. Cloud was, but he did know these men, which stayed his hand just enough.

“We’re going, okay?” Reno groaned. “We’re gone, let’s go.” He was getting to his feet, hauling Rude up with him. “We won’t give this bar any more trouble,” he vowed, like a common mob enforcer who’d taken a thrashing, because really what else was he? What was the Shinra but one vast, suit-wearing gang?

Tifa glanced at Cloud, to see what he thought. Which, given his general expertise in matters Shinra in this lifetime, only made sense. He kept his face blank. “Nanaki?” he asked. These were the same people who’d dragged him away from his home and family into hell only a few days ago; he and Tifa were the ones with the most immediate right to pursue a grudge.

Also, Nanaki was the one between them and the door.

The guardian lion, fifty years young, tilted his head and lashed his burning tail. “I,” he said, after a deliberate pause, looking Reno in the eye, and ignoring the jolts of surprise from all Cloud’s other friends at hearing him talk, “will show you more mercy than you showed me, Shinra. Once.” And he stepped aside.

Between the three of them, the Turks managed to shamble out of the Heaven in bad order, Reno swearing loudly when he found the mess Cloud had made in the street.

If Wedge and Jessie were out of the Pyramid they might make the Turks fight some more to get away, but Cloud abruptly had no interest in that. “Marlene,” he gasped, raking his eyes over the ruined room. “Where’s Marlene?” He swayed, thinking it was the horror of having possibly lost her—to kidnapping again (where was Elena? had she gotten away with Marlene?) or to something more permanent.

Tifa braced him with both hands on his shoulders. “Easy, Cloud. Marlene’s in the basement, she’s just down in the basement with Aerith’s mother, she’s fine, they’re fine. You’re the one who looks like ground meat.”

“Let me,” said Aerith, but she landed a single anemic Cure on him, just enough to get him steady and stem any active bleeding, and also shut down the shock response that had been keeping him from noticing how beaten-up he was. “Shit,” she said, lowering her staff. “I’m out.”

“Biggs,” said Cloud, and dashed out into the street.

The Turks were gone, along with enough of the dead Shinra that either a lot of the men who’d been down had survived to carry their comrades’ bodies away, or else the neighborhood had been even more entrepreneurially forward about corpse theft than usual. Wedge and Jessie were huddled together over Biggs, in the way comprised of just enough frantic energy to suggest he was still breathing.

Cloud made it there to find that was barely- still, and cursed that he hadn’t gotten his Restore to a higher level yet. Spamming Cure wasn’t the ideal technique in a time-sensitive situation. But at least he could , unlike all those years-days ago when it had been Zack lying like this and Cloud had had nothing . “ Move,” he snapped at Jessie, and dropped to his knees.

There were a couple of bullets in Biggs, but the important one was lodged in his chest, deep enough and at a dangerous enough place it would be hard for his body to functionally heal around it.

Cloud ripped his glove off—it was filthy by now—and plunged his thumb and first two fingers into the bullet hole, groping and digging for the hard point of the bullet.

He found it, plucked it free, and immediately, before his fingers were even clear, as the blood began to gush harder from the artery he’d pulled it out of, slammed down the first Cure. Then he did it again, again again, until Biggs lay there scuffed and bloodied but whole, and Cloud’s whole body was shivering with mana rush.

“Anyone else?” he twisted his head up to ask Tifa, who had come to stand behind him while he was working.

Wordlessly, she led him to an unlucky neighbor who’d conversely been lucky enough to take the stray bullet somewhere not immediately fatal.

Then there were more, and Cloud’s hands reflexively swapped materia around so it was Restore now that was paired with All, and his magic would go further. Barret, Tifa, and Aerith had been battered pretty hard in the fight, though they were all tougher than the average person already, and Cloud spent a few castings on them next, once Tifa had no immediate triage cases for him.

Someone’s grandma who’d been hit in the hip was maneuvered out into the street with unnecessary shouting—bringing her out was also unnecessary, Cloud could have gone to her—and he swayed a little when he stood up too fast.

Biggs caught him by one elbow, and Nanaki bumped a steadying shoulder against his hip. “Hey,” Biggs said, not sounding at all like someone who’d had a bullet lodged an inch from his heart a quarter of an hour ago. “Look after yourself more, Cloud!”

There was always a tiny jolt, being called by his name. Usually an almost imperceptible, pleasant one because usually it was friends, but a nasty slimy one when it was someone like Rufus, and a deep, horrible one whenever it was Sephiroth. He didn’t know if it was because a tiny part of him had never stopped thinking he was actually Zack and being shocked by the reminder he wasn’t, or if he just didn’t on some level expect to be recognized and remembered, or what. It wasn’t something he usually took notice of, since it was always there.

He noticed it hit, this time. Because Biggs was a dead man. Biggs shouldn’t be saying his name like that. You’re dead, Cloud wanted to say. You died this morning, trying to stop Shinra’s terrorism. You died just now in the street. You died four years ago. You’re dead.

He shrugged Biggs off, politely, and went to take care of the grandma.

“Anyone else?” he asked again.

“Just one idiot,” said Aerith. At some point Elmyra and Marlene had come up from the basement, and were flanking her. Not the best party composition. He couldn’t be sure about Elmyra’s abilities, but Marlene was fragile and had no strong attacks. Even if one of the other two equipped Cover it wouldn’t be good.

“Hm?” Cloud asked absently, glancing around for the wounded idiot, and then an acid-green spasm hit him behind the eyes. His head snapped around.

Toward the next Sector, toward he knew exactly what spot, toward that pipe where one of the Copies had made it all the way to Midgar searching for Reunion.

Sephiroth was close.

Cloud’s hand flew to his forehead with a hiss as pain split his skull. No. No, he wasn’t. No—

He felt the jolt as his knees hit the ground, but wasn’t conscious to feel the street hit him in the face.

=

By the time he woke, almost everything was packed and ready for AVALANCHE to evacuate, and news of the President’s assassination had leaked. “Catman here says that wasn’t you,” Barret said skeptically while Cloud chugged water. Someone had scrounged up the mana to Restore him while he was out, but blood loss left you so thirsty, even after healing.

“It wasn’t,” Cloud said, refilling his cup from the water tap, which had mercifully survived the fight in the Heaven. “I told you I’d do it if nobody else did.”

Sephiroth was gone again; he couldn’t sense him. He didn’t volunteer his knowledge of the actual perpetrator, because how would he know? “I must have been back here by the time it happened.”

“Hm,” said Barret, with some justification.

“Anyway, it’s useful, they’ve forgotten all about us for now,” said Aerith. “Let’s go, Cloud. Up.”

She offered him a hand, which was nice of her. Tugged him off-balance as he got onto his feet, caught his weight with both hands on his chest, and peered deep into his left eye with a keen, fierce attentiveness he wasn’t used to seeing her devote to people. But then this was clearly about Cloud’s eyeball, not Cloud exactly.

“Your mana capacity is awfully high for a swordsman, Mr. Chocobo,” she said.

Aerith didn’t ask, are you a SOLDIER or not, really? or where did you learn to cast that relentlessly? or what’s going on? or what do you know, and how? Because she was only direct about unimportant things.

They had to make sure she saw her parents’ home videos, this time. Cloud wasn’t sure how to warn her about her father’s murder while still giving her space. They wouldn’t get to Icicle soon. He’d have some time to brainstorm.

Cloud got himself off of Aerith’s strategically offered support and onto his own feet. “I like to think I’m well-balanced,” he said, tonelessly. Aerith, Tifa, Wedge, and Nanaki all laughed. The pun had been an accident. Cloud did not say so.

“You’ve met?” he said instead, glancing at the human faces and tilting his head toward Nanaki.

“He says you got him out of the Shinra labs,” said Jessie.

“Mm. This is Nanaki. He’s from Cosmo Canyon. I think we’re heading there eventually, want to travel together?”

“I would welcome the company,” said Nanaki gravely. His tail lashed, betraying more tension than he was letting show.

“Great,” said Cloud, chugging more water.

And that seemed to be that. Everyone bustled around getting last-minute things together and leaving instructions for how to keep up the Plate-Release deconstruction around the city and so forth. Elmyra was particularly bustling and subjected everybody to a maternal once-over about having packed everything they’d need for the trip.

They reached the southern gate in a crowd nearly twice the size Cloud remembered, and found it unguarded. They stepped outside of Midgar. The Midgar Wastes stretched away toward the purple line of the mountains. Which met the sky, arcing pale and endless and empty overhead.

“We’ll need a leader for our journey,” Barrett announced. It was the same thing he’d said the first time, but the bluster struck a slightly different note when he had Marlene’s arm wrapped around the back of his head. “Of course, that can only be me.”

Nanaki shook his head. “I nominate Cloud,” he stated, in his serious way.

Aerith laughed, hands folded behind her. “Hmm, I can see it!”

Mrs. Gainsborough shook her head a little, amused, though Cloud didn’t know if it was at the idea of his being in charge, or Aerith’s enthusiasm.

“What do you think, Cloud?” asked Tifa.

“Yeah, Cloud could work!” said Wedge.

Cloud shook his head, too. He’d been leader before. This time he was a lot closer to knowing what he was doing, and he was planning to make a lot of suggestions based on the knowledge he had, but he didn’t want that responsibility again. For one thing, the leader couldn’t slip off and leave the group for secret personal missions. Everyone needed them to be present at all times.

Which made the answer obvious, if it hadn’t been already. “I nominate Aerith,” he said.

If Tifa was startled, Aerith was positively taken aback. “Me? But—”

“You’ll have all of us to advise you,” Cloud said. “But this is your quest, isn’t it?”

Aerith’s mouth smoothed out of its startled ‘o’ and her eyes looked far away. “I…guess it is, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” said Cloud. “You’re the hero.”

And he smiled. Because for all he’d lost—for all that fragile, wonderful home Tifa had put together and always included him in, for everything he would never stop mourning—he couldn’t be sorry about this. “We’re going to help you save the world.”