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year 5, quarter 3
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Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 21, 2022 22:00:33 GMT -6
Cloud watched something pass over Angeal's face but he wasn't good enough at reading people to figure out what. Jenova meant something, that much he was sure of, beyond whatever stories about human experimentation Angeal claimed to have heard. But it could have meant anything. The truth about Jenova existed on a decaying tape in an abandoned home at Icicle Inn and in the minds of the friends who'd been with him to watch it and two other people. Dead people, Cloud wanted to call them, but one of them was still alive and if the other one was too he wasn't sure he'd be able to handle it.
His posture went reflexively rigid when Angeal stepped up to him and started playing medic. The muscles in his jaw tensed up like he was trying to grind his own teeth down. His skin crawled. His hands balled into fists. He looked past the man and didn't move, taking a controlled breath in and out through his nose.
"They kept it in the reactor, but that thing wasn't a Cetra. It was the thing that killed the Cetra," he said through his teeth. He paused a beat, shook his head. "Nobody knew that then."
What was it that Aerith's mother called it in those videos? The Calamity from the Skies? Cloud still had no idea how Gast ever mistook the thing for a Cetra in the first place, but who was he to talk. He was a grunt, not a scientist.
"All Professor Gast's research notes, everything about the Jenova Project starting from when they dug the thing out of the crater, they kept it all in the Shinra Mansion's basement. After the reactor, Sephiroth left the rest of us and locked himself in the basement. He read everything, all of Gast's reports on the Ancients-- the Cetra-- and on the Project. And after that..."
After that came the fire, the blood, the screaming, that maniac's grin and empty eyes. That god damn laugh. Cloud screwed his eyes shut tight but the same movie played out like it was etched permanently in his mind. Sometimes he thought he could still smell it, the wood ash in the air, the toxic stench of burning plastics, charred meat...
Did Sephiroth have the decency to cut his mom down first, or were those her screams as she burned to death? It went back and forth in his mind but he couldn't stand to sit with it until he decided on an answer. It wouldn't really be an answer, anyway.
"I don't care what excuses you come up with for him," Cloud said bitterly as he opened his eyes. Bright with fury. His voice was tight, barely restrained if only for the sake of his injuries. "Nobody gets some bad news and decides to slaughter a village without being a psycho to begin with."
The blonde was tense under Angeal’s hands. It briefly crossed the Soldier’s mind how delicate the trust in this situation was, how the young man was only acting in such a way to keep himself alive. He had no idea that Angeal wouldn’t dare fight a man that could barely walk, that his honor was so strong he would never got against his own word. Briefly, Hewley wondered what the blonde was like outside of these life-or-death situations. He mentioned his friends earlier in the forced conversation, so was he less of an angry, wet cat outside of situations like these? Angeal would never know. He was likely on the blonde’s hit list for life.
However long of a second life he’d have in this world, anyway.
Angeal listened intently to the story as he finished peeling away the layers of older bandages. He set them neatly aside before grabbing gauze and gently applying pressure to the oozing wound. At least the edges of the wound were clean, and it didn’t appear that the blonde had pulled his stitches entirely out with his little bat stunt. They would just need to be re-threaded and tied off again. Nothing Hewley hadn’t done out in the field plenty of times for injuries basic potions wouldn’t cover.
The story of Jenova continued, and Angeal wished he could have been more surprised by the outcome. Instead, all that came was a deep and terrible sadness. He could almost picture it, Sephiroth completely alone, feverishly reading through report after report on Jenova, on the experiments that he turned out to be. It took Angeal days to find the strength to pick up the research notes on himself that Genesis had forced out of Hollander. He knew firsthand what it felt like. To find out your entire life was a lie, that you were toyed with, that at your very core you weren’t a human but a monster. Just the memory of it made Angeal nauseated.
No one could say how they would react to something like that until they experienced it for themselves. Genesis took out his anger on Banora, on his adoptive parents, and then on Shinra itself. Angeal flip flopped on taking it out on anyone that got too close and burying the pain to try and help others, but in the end, he was just as terrible as any monster.
Zack’s haunted expression, staring down at him as he died, hung heavy over Angeal constantly.
“I’m not here to make excuses for him,” Angeal sighed, lifting the gauze to check the oozing wound, “I’m here to hear your story. And the things you said earlier imply that this isn’t the end of what Sephiroth did to you … to everyone, I guess.”
With the wound under control, Angeal grabbed the antiseptic spray, “This’ll burn.”
With the wound properly treated, Hewley began figuring out the best path to restitching the skin together. He was no trained healer, but he could manage it well enough. He set the pickups and scissors among the collection of measured gauze, giving the young man a break from his capable, albeit rudimentary care.
“So, Sephiroth found out the truth of his life, lost it, burned down Nibelheim and killed everyone there. What happened from there? I’m assuming Shinra managed to cover it up. That was what they did best with rogue Soldiers.”
How long can you swallow the pain? Before it comes round again, And a shadow in the valley will lead you to them, So don't follow.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 7, 2023 0:30:41 GMT -6
Cloud didn't flinch at the antiseptic burn. Recounting Nibelheim dredged up worse pain, older pain, that made the present feel like nothing. How many times was he going to have to do this over again? Was the world ever going to let him leave it in the past? Not as long as Sephiroth was alive, a cast shadow over everything. A revenant. A cockroach.
He was a long time silent, staring past Angeal at nothing hovering in the middle distance. Then at the sword propped up in the corner of the room. The sword whose weight and balance he knew like it was a limb. The one he'd run through Sephiroth, nearly cut him in half with. Picked up again with a bloodslick handle on a muddy cliffside overlooking Midgar.
There were details he didn't need to recount. Zangan. Tifa's father. But there was one important one staring him in the face.
"He didn't get everyone," Cloud muttered. "When Shinra showed up they found two survivors in the reactor. Me an' the First Class they'd sent along with Sephiroth. Zack. I guess you knew him, since you're carryin' his sword around."
The bitterness still lingered in his voice, but mostly he'd gone flat. Distant. Looking at Nibelheim in the pages of a book like it was someone else's story, trying to trick himself into not recalling the heat of the flames.
"After he burned the town down, Sephiroth went up to the reactor for Jenova. Tifa followed him, he cut her down. Zack went after him, and they fought, and he cut Zack down too. Then I was the last one there, and while he was too busy talking to that thing in the tank and calling it mother, I picked up that sword--" he inclined his head a degree, staring at the rivets on the guard, "--and stabbed him in the back."
If he thought about it, he could feel the sword in his hands again, and that little bit of resistance before he threw his bodyweight behind the blade and drove the tip all the way through until it cracked the tank glass. He should have twisted the blade until it cracked Sephiroth in two. Stabbed him again. Cut his head off. Stupid mistake.
"Wasn't enough. I tried to finish it and he ran me through and... I don't know how I did it, but I threw him off the walkway, down into the open mako pit. Him and Jenova's head. Wasn't any trace of him left when Shinra got there. Just... Just burned bodies, and me and Zack."
He took a long deep breath. When he opened one of his fists there was a tremor in his hand. He curled his fingers again and felt his nails against the inside of the tank glass.
"Yeah, they covered the whole thing up. Rebuilt the town brick for brick and put a bunch of Shinra employees in it to act like nothin' ever happened. They said Sephiroth died on a mission and for all anyone knew he actually was dead. And me an' Zack... It was Hojo that got us. We ended up in a couple mako tanks in the basement of the Shinra mansion. I don't remember much. Mako poisoned for most of it. Zack busted us out after a while, four or five years, dragged me along with him even though I was just dead weight."
He would've made it if it wasn't for me.
Something cracked in his voice, just a little, and he cleared his throat.
"Shinra gunned him down outside Midgar. Not long after that, Sephiroth came back from the dead."
"When Shinra showed up they found two survivors in the reactor. Me an' the First Class they'd sent along with Sephiroth. Zack. I guess you knew him, since you're carryin' his sword around."
Angeal froze, a lump forming in his throat, impossible to swallow past. Slowly, he turned his head to look at the Buster Sword as Cloud continued his awful tale. Zack had been there that day … of course he had. Shinra threw him at every ugly thing they possibly could, didn’t they? At him, at Genesis. Zack had probably gotten somewhat close to Sephiroth during that time, but it would never have been close enough. Zack would never have been able to talk Sephiroth down from the ledge, no matter how hard he tried to.
But, Zack wasn’t the one to stop Sephiroth that day. Apparently it had been Cloud, and briefly, Hewley wondered if Cloud had even a quarter of the strength then that he did now. What a hell that must have been – everyone you knew slaughtered, your home set aflame, the world’s hero the cause. He filed away one piece of information for later; Sephiroth calling Jenova mother. The most he’d ever heard about Sephiroth’s mother was that she’d passed away in childbirth. Leave it up to Shinra to feed him a lie like that. Or, was it a lie? Was that thing really his mother, somehow? Or was he infused with its cells, as an unwilling infant experiment?
Cloud’s story only got worse from there. Hearing Hojo’s name filled Angeal simultaneously with dread and a burning hatred. In his attempts to stop Genesis’s crusade against Shinra, he’d kept his friend from killing Hojo, and what a mistake that had turned out to be. What had Zack suffered all those years, kept as Hojo’s experiment? He was already a Soldier, durable, pumped full of mako and Gaia only knew what else. And if Cloud was mako poisoned, that must have been when he gained his Soldier features. Another unwilling experiment, fresh from the worst nightmare of his life.
Zack and Cloud became defectors, and Angeal knew well what happened to those who ran from Shinra. The blood in his veins felt like ice as Cloud explained he didn’t remember much, just Zack dragging him along despite being comatose. Zack, who never left anyone behind. Zack, who tried to save everyone.
”Shinra gunned him down outside Midgar.”
Zack … He just wanted to be a hero.
Sephiroth coming back from the dead hardly made it through Angeal’s skull. Instead, Hewley focused on the Buster Sword again. It made sense now, why Cloud was so experienced using a broadsword, despite it being clunky for his size. That sword was probably handed to him on a deathbed. It had a habit of trading hands like that.
“Zack was my pupil,” the words left Angeal quietly, before he could catch them, Zack’s grinning face in his mind’s eye. His entire body felt heavy, and his heart ached harder than he could ever remember it doing so. He let silence sit in the room for a moment, before softly continuing, “I passed along the Buster Sword to him at the time of my death. I can only assume he … passed it on to you, next.”
When he left, how heavy would that sword be on his back? The spirit of three tragic stories soaked into its metal.
Angeal cleared his throat, doing what he did best, and burying the ache for the time being. He would mourn what happened to Zack after he left. He grabbed the suture set, turning his burning, glowing gaze back to Cloud, his tone more terse and strained, “Sit up straight so I can close this up. Sephiroth came back from the dead – what’s next?”
How long can you swallow the pain? Before it comes round again, And a shadow in the valley will lead you to them, So don't follow.
Post by Cloud Strife on Feb 19, 2023 1:51:46 GMT -6
So that was how it all fit together. Why he carried that sword, of all swords. Something seemed to change in the room, like the lighting shifted to expose an otherwise hidden detail. For the first time since the fight, Cloud found himself looking at Angeal like the latter had something human in him. For a moment, the same weight bore down on both of them.
Only for a moment, though.
Every time Angeal made to patch up a wound, he asked Cloud to tear open another one. Cloud set his jaw, and he was quiet a long while after Angeal prodded him to continue. He took a long, slow breath just shallow enough not to aggravate his ribs and he thought about everything in a swirling jumble of dead bodies and monsters and a hole in the world and his head coming apart at the seams.
There was too much he didn't want to say.
He sat up, reluctantly, staring at the opposite wall. When the suturing began it barely registered.
"Listen, the first thing you need to understand is this thing called the Reunion theory," Cloud started, "Or else none of this makes sense."
Truthfully, it was hard to make sense of even with an understanding of that fucking theory. Cloud tried to drill down into the facts, figure out how not to linger on the rooms full of mutilated bodies, Shinra's meddling, the fragmented identity that carried him all the way into the Lifestream. If he never heard the word reunion again it would be too soon. When he spoke the words came out like pulling teeth.
"Hojo had this theory that if you cut Jenova up into pieces, all the pieces would try to come together again. It doesn't matter how small the pieces are. Or if they're part of something else. Like maybe a person." He paused a beat, just enough for emphasis, but didn't think he had to elaborate on the kind of butchery Hojo got up to for kicks. "So he did all his experiments, and Shinra brought Jenova's body back to Midgar and he waited for the Reunion to start. But it didn't happen like Hojo thought it would. All his experiments... all his 'Sephiroth clones' like he called 'em, they didn't all start returning to Jenova in Midgar. Five years of nothing, then even Jenova itself started going somewhere else."
Even after he sorted through his memories and put his identity back together, Cloud still couldn't remember how he dragged himself to Midgar. Everything from Zack's execution to before Tifa found him at the train station was mud in his mind, and maybe it always would be. It didn't matter anyway. And for now, AVALANCHE and the reactor bombings and the plate dropping didn't matter either. His brow furrowed momentarily, and he jumped ahead a few days and fifty thousand dead. Give or take.
"The first sign we saw of Sephiroth was at the Shinra HQ. The tank they were keeping Jenova in was busted open and everyone from that floor up had been killed. President Shinra was at his desk with Sephiroth's sword in his back. I remembered all the stuff he said in Nibelheim, about how he was going to rule the planet. I knew if he was back, even if he started by killing off Shinra, he wasn't gonna stop with them. So that's when I told my friends we had to find him and stop him ourselves."
He was starting to hate the sound of his own voice. The hoarseness worsened until he stopped to clear his throat.
"We didn't know where he was going or what exactly his plan was, but we kept following his trail. Sometimes it was dead bodies. Sometimes people would tell us they saw a guy in a black coat going off somewhere. Sometimes we'd see Hojo's experiments. We knew who they were because they all had numbered tattoos, these black robes. Their minds were gone. They kept mumbling about Sephiroth, that they had to follow him." Cloud paused, shook his head, muttered between his teeth: "And sometimes... I just had a gut feeling like I knew where we had to go."
The same gut feeling that brought him here, to Provo. It hadn't been any different, really. All it took was some passerby talking about a guy in a black coat with a long sword and those alien neurons flared up and reoriented his internal compass.
"We caught up to him a couple times. He'd say something cryptic, 'The time is now' or talk about 'Reunion', and a couple of times he'd sic Jenova on us. I thought it was to stall us, but..." Cloud abandoned the thought with a vague gesture. "It was when we got to the Temple of the Ancients that we figured out what Sephiroth was really after. The Black Materia. Meteor. Ultimate destructive magic."
He could still feel that perfect sphere in his hand. Could see in his mind's eye the way it seemed to suck in all the light. The apocalypse in the palm of his hand. The palm of his hand opening up, and handing that apocalypse right over to Sephiroth... And that stupid smirk, those monster's eyes, the laugh clawing at the inside of his skull.
The scowl on Cloud's face deepened.
"When Sephiroth was in the Lifestream, he didn't die... not really. He absorbed everything... the knowledge of the Cetra and everyone else. The truth about Jenova. And when he came back he had a plan to use the Black Materia to summon Meteor. He wanted to injure the planet so badly that it would funnel all the energy of the Lifestream to that wound to try to heal itself. He was gonna sit at the center of it and absorb that energy and become a god. That's what he told us." Cloud made a point now to pull his gaze away from the nothing he'd been watching on the opposite wall and fix Angeal with a stare. Where he'd been distant and restrained recounting everything prior, now the rage threatened to ignite every syllable. "My friend Aerith was the last of the Cetra. She knew what to do to stop Meteor. To stop him. He knew it, too, and he killed her in front of all of us."
Even though Aerith was alive here, claiming she'd never died at all, dredging up the memory didn't hurt any less. It was as clear in his mind as the moment it happened. He had to take a second to cool down. To find his place again in the story. To skip past the crippling doubt that Sephiroth used to break him into pieces. He watched the wall again.
"Everything led to the Northern Crater. That's where Sephiroth - the real Sephiroth - had been this whole time. That's why the Reunion happened there instead of where Jenova was in Midgar. He was controlling it all himself. All of Hojo's experiments, Jenova itself, Sephiroth was using them to bring him the Black Materia. And it worked. And he summoned Meteor, and that woke up the Weapons, and all of a sudden everyone on the planet was staring down the end of the world hanging in the sky while these giant monsters were going around attacking Junon and Midgar and Mideel."
He was probably going too quickly now, jumping around at the most complicated part of the story, but Cloud was tired of talking. About this, about anything. He was tired of being in the same room as Angeal, he was tired of being hurt, he was tired of being tired, and most of all he was tired of the prospect of doing all of this again when none of it got through Angeal's thick skull and he insisted that Sephiroth was just a good little SOLDIER who definitely wouldn't try to end the world again.
"In the end, before she died, Aerith managed to activate Holy. The White Materia that could stand against Meteor. But Sephiroth's will was stopping it. The only chance we had to save the planet was to go down into the Crater and fight him. Either we died fighting or we'd die watching Meteor crash into the planet, so we fought. And we killed him. After everything-- we killed him. ...But I never got to see what happened next, because I woke up in this world and the murdering psychopathic asshole is alive and he's got a friend."
Cloud hadn't even noticed one of his hands clenched in a tight fist, trembling like he was ready to slug Angeal in the jaw. With effort he relaxed his hand, loosened his fingers, and did a poor job of mustering enough rage to fill the large hollow space he felt in his chest.
