His apparent lacking memories makes this complicated. The words stuck like splinters in his mind, and all he heard was Caius making the same argument Tifa made - the one he couldn't bring himself to understand - even if Caius wasn't saying the same thing in so many words.

It always came back to those god damn missing memories. Sure, get hit with mystical amnesia and all your sins are forgiven. All the people you killed, all the lives you destroyed, absolved because you forgot. Cloud gritted his teeth but he didn't say anything. Eliminate the threat of Sephiroth was vague enough that Cloud could hope Caius meant eliminate Sephiroth but he didn't have the energy in him in that moment to debate it if that wasn't true.

The fact that Yuffie was the only person who backed him on this without blinking might have given him pause in any other situation, but he took what support he could get. For all her immaturity, she understood what Sephiroth was. What he did. He took, he killed, he destroyed. It was all he ever did, all he was made for, long before he found his alien 'mother' floating in a tank in a backwater mako reactor. Nibelheim didn't make Sephiroth, it just took the mask off.

But that wasn't this conversation, and Cloud let the simmering anger die before it could come to a boil. The whole point was to get his ass out of Provo and leave the Sephiroth issue on ice at least for a little while, before he did something reckless again. The collateral damage still ate at him. He imagined Sephiroth never gave it a second thought - they were all worthless creatures to him, weren't they? But Cloud wasn't about to stomach another person hurt because of him, or a healer run ragged because of him, or a friend dead because of him.

"It's only complicated because he's hanging around in cities now instead of a crater at the ass-end of the world," Cloud muttered, "Yuffie's right about him. But I don't want anyone else getting caught in the crossfire. So we'll play it safe."

He stopped pacing like a caged dog and relaxed his shoulders and looked between Yuffie and Caius. In his observation of their back-and-forth he got the impression that maybe Caius didn't fully understand what he was signing up for by recruiting Yuffie into his Dragonblades thing. Or by letting her recruit herself. Whatever. Maybe Caius' pawning her off on Cloud again was a chance to get off the hook, but he seemed sincere about wanting her to head back to Torensten when all was said and done.

Good luck, man, Cloud thought.

"Okay, Yuffie, let's go," he said in a voice that did not betray any level of overt enthusiasm. He picked up the fallen tangle of ratchet straps and stuffed them into one of the saddlebags on his motorcycle.

"I'll see what I can do to help Yuna out," Cloud told Caius. He didn't exactly know an abundance of healers unless you'd call anyone lugging around a Restore materia a healer. But he'd figure something out. "I owe her one."

More than one, really, but it was better to start small.

-----
Caius Dragelion Yuffie Kisaragi

Figuring out how to deal with Yuffie again was like trying to wake up a sleeping limb. She barrelled through every conversation at a hundred miles an hour, and it had been long enough since they'd last spoken to each other that Cloud couldn't remember how he ever managed to filter out all the stuff he could ignore. Maybe he'd just been ignoring most of it. Maybe that was the trick.

But when Aerith came up, Yuffie's entire demeanor changed, and even Cloud wasn't enough of an asshole to brush right past that. His expression shifted, somewhere in the middle on a gradient from awkward to sympathetic. He rubbed the back of his head.

"Yeah, she's here, she's good," Cloud said. Bringing up Aerith out of the blue like that was a dumb move, but he hadn't even been thinking... "Listen, hey, we'll go find her soon and you can hear everything from her." It was about all he could think to say to shelve the topic for some future discussion where Yuffie's shouting hadn't brought the eyes of the neighborhood peering out from their windows.

Of course, he'd much rather have continued on that track than deal with Caius' line of questioning. Not about his recklessness or the collateral damage - he had that coming. But it ended up being Tell me about Sephiroth, again. It felt like that was all he was ever talking about these days. If he'd have killed Sephiroth in the town square it would've been worth it just so he never had to think back to Nibelheim again. Never had to recount the flames. Never had to remember the depths of the northern crater. None of that would matter anymore if Sephiroth would just stay dead, if his stupid corpse would stay buried in the stupid ground and just rot already.

His posture stiffened, and he shot a quick glance from Yuffie back to Caius.

"Well, she's not wrong," Cloud started, neither sounding nor looking enthusiastic.

Maybe the more he recounted Nibelheim the more he'd get numb to it. No, that wouldn't happen, and he wasn't sure he wanted it to either.

"Sephiroth used to work for this company called Shinra, as a SOLDIER. They had their own army and... basically ruled the world. Their scientists created him using cells from this alien called Jenova, so he was stronger and faster and more powerful than any human could be. But they never told him how he was made."

Cloud felt a kind of itch in his blood. Absently, he scratched at the inside of his forearm.

"He got sent on a mission to my hometown. I was there too, just a grunt, along with another SOLDIER named Zack. Turned out there was a whole library with research notes from the scientists who discovered Jenova and created him. And what was left of Jenova was stored in the reactor. So he found out how he was made, went insane, and burned the town down."

He paused, just for a beat, checking Caius's reaction. The cynic in him was bracing for another stupid defense of Sephiroth, because that seemed to be his luck. But Cloud pressed on in the story, the bitterness evident in his voice.

"He killed everyone. Killed my mom. Killed Tifa's dad, almost killed her... Me an' Zack went after him at the reactor. In the end, he fell into the lifestream and after that everyone thought he was dead. But he wasn't. He came back five years later, more powerful than he was before, with a new plan. He was gonna use somethin' called the Black Materia to summon Meteor, what the Ancients called 'Ultimate Destructive Magic'. Meteor would crash into the planet and create a wound so deep that all the planet's energy would travel there to try to heal it. And he'd be waiting there at the center of it to absorb it all and make himself a god."

Cloud paced a few steps, crossed his arms over his chest. The fight part of his fight or flight instinct started kicking in just telling the story. He felt the electricity running from his chest down his arms and into his fingertips. He clenched his jaw and scanned the street just for something to do while he tamped everything back down in his head.

"That's the short version, anyway."

-----
Caius Dragelion Yuffie Kisaragi

If it had been anyone else saying those things, the anger might have flared again, that white-hot fury running up his spine and down into his knuckles. So that was it, then, just forget about it? Cloud got to carry the weight of it all, and Sephiroth got to walk around like nothing ever happened because it was a different version of him? No. He refused to accept that. It all sounded like contrived bullshit to absolve Sephiroth of his sins. The kind of thing Cloud expected to hear from Angeal. Not Tifa.

But it was Tifa of all people telling him this, and he didn't get angry. He couldn't. He sat there as each word twisted a knife in him just a little bit more. The steely resolve wavered and there was a shred of disbelief in his eyes, but mostly he watched Tifa with a wounded expression that the gentle hand on his arm didn't ease.

"How do you know it's not just..." he waved his hand vaguely, "...whatever magic amnesia hits some people when they come here, and he's not just going to remember everything and pick up where he left off? Or that he's not just lying? Playing mind games is what he does. Tifa, he tried to convince you I wasn't even a real person."

There was an edge of desperation in his voice, a shadow of what he sounded like in the depths of the crater when everything broke. Where the new scar stretched around to the inside of his forearm is where his number would have been if Hojo ever bothered to give him one. He'd felt that pull again on his journey to Provo. The gut feeling as the Jenova cells polluting his body reoriented his internal compass. If that could still happen, here on Zephon, then what was stopping any of the rest of it? That voice scratching at his skull. His conscious mind separated from his body, watching, helpless. How was he ever supposed to live with the specter of that hanging over his head?

-----
Tifa Lockhart

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.

-----
Angeal Hewley