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year 5, quarter 3
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Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 31, 2023 23:30:09 GMT -6
The voice cut through the feeble rumbling of the motorcycle engine like an air raid siren or a fire alarm. Cloud's shoulders reflexively tensed up, suddenly on alert. The dirt ground under his boots and he turned on his heel to face the oncoming storm. Yuffie ran towards him and whatever limitless well of energy she drew from had followed her all the way to another world. Or maybe she tapped it from the world around her. Caius - it took Cloud a second to put the name and the face together again - trailed behind her in a way that supported the second theory.
"Yuffie?" Cloud started, his vaguely annoyed resting expression replaced instead with genuine if restrained surprise. Running into somebody from their world wasn't a new experience anymore, but it hadn't gotten mundane yet. Eventually they'd find everyone. He was as sure of that as he could force himself to be. "When did you--"
But that was about all he could get out before she talked straight over him. The surprise in his expression dimmed until it was gone. Like a subconscious reflex, his eyes dipped to the materia slotted in the mystile around his wrist, in the base of his swords. She was still talking. Cloud reached over, turned the key in the ignition and killed the motorcycle's engine but he didn't think Yuffie would have noticed either way. She had a lot of talking to do. If Shinra had figured out how to harness her yapping for power generation, they wouldn't have ever needed mako.
If he didn't try to interject he'd never get a word in.
"Slow down," Cloud said, holding his palms up to emphasize the point. "Yes, I fought Sephiroth. The situation with him is... complicated," Cloud paused a beat, frowning. Sephiroth has friends still seemed like such an absurdity that Cloud couldn't totally accept it, even after he'd spoken with Angeal. "...So we're not going after him right away. Not until we figure out a plan."
He looked past Yuffie, to Caius, and nodded a little awkwardly. He cleared his throat and scratched at the back of his head.
"Didn't get a chance to say thanks for scraping me off the pavement," he muttered. The guilt around the collateral damage still stuck to his ribs. "So... Thanks. Yuna does good work."
He looked between Caius and Yuffie for a moment, and one part of him latched on to the idea of Yuffie with the Dragonblades, and the other part of him thought Caius hadn't done anything to earn that kind of punishment. He didn't comment on it, but he offered Caius what might have passed as a subtle look of sympathy.
Employment options aside, he asked Yuffie: "Have you found anyone else? Tifa and Aerith are here, but I haven't seen Barret or Nanaki or the others since I got to this world."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 18, 2023 22:11:42 GMT -6
"I'm all right," Cloud answered. He had a definition of all right unique to himself. It was still an improvement over the days when he might have answered Tifa with a cocky shrug, ill-fitting bravado, some lame attempt to sound cool like nothing ever bothered him. Those days didn't just feel like a lifetime ago; they were another life, another Cloud cobbled together from fractured memories and failed dreams and the insecurities of a kid ashamed that he was wasn't good enough. And the dangling puppet strings of Jenova cells...
He left that weight behind on another world to sink in the lifestream. Regardless of whatever doubt and anger Cloud still grappled with, he knew himself now. Failures and all. He didn't fear them anymore, because Tifa had seen them too - wandered through the maze of his mind and helped put him back together from nothing but shattered pieces. She hadn't left him behind then, and she was still here now even though he'd added new failures to his record. All he had to fear was losing this.
"Nothin' hurts. Just need to shake the rust off," he added, with a quick glance down at his arm. Free of bandages, the stark line of a new scar ran diagonally across the meat of his forearm. If Angeal's blow had gone any deeper it might've taken his arm off. Cloud flexed his fingers and watched the scar tissue dance over the muscle beneath. He felt no pain, but it didn't feel right either. There was a faint note of uncertainty in his voice.
He gave his arm a little shake and then leaned back until his head touched the wall behind the bench. Cloud wouldn't consider himself the most perceptive guy in the world, but when he looked at Tifa again he thought he saw something hiding in her expression. Tension or nerves, maybe. Something troubling just behind the eyes.
"What about you?" he asked, "Everything all right?"
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 18, 2023 22:10:57 GMT -6
It was past time to get gone. If he didn't leave Provo behind, he'd never get his head clear. He'd take another run at Sephiroth with all the same fire and fury he carried in his heart and screw it up. He couldn't let himself get pulled around by puppet strings of Jenova cells again. He'd plan it out, do it right, and finish this thing once and for all.
The way it should've been finished, the way it was finished, before they all got pulled here.
Cloud had said his goodbyes and his thanks to Yuna and offered his help if she ever needed it, for what good that was. Odds were she wouldn't, but she'd done so much for him it didn't feel right leaving without offering something. He'd retrieved his motorcycle and now stood on the road just outside the clinic, staring at it skeptically. It was, in the loosest sense of the word, running, but he still felt like he needed to check all the seals again. Or maybe figure out what gods these people prayed to around here and hope one of them would do him a solid at least until he crossed into Sonora.
His sword was assembled into a single blade and presently he was attempting to affix a temporary sheath to the side of the gas tank to make it easier to travel with - he couldn't take a passenger with that thing on his back. There was a mess of ratchet straps around the tank and winding through the forks that he trusted even less than the bike itself. After ten minutes of contemplation from every angle, Cloud undid the whole mess and dropped the straps on the ground beside the front wheel.
"Shit..." he exhaled between his teeth. Back to the drawing board.
Staring at his distorted reflection in the chrome curve of the front forks, he didn't even notice the pair of people approaching him until they were moving smears of color in the metal before his eyes.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 9, 2023 22:48:45 GMT -6
Cloud sat on the bench in the courtyard of Yuna's clinic, where he'd been laid up for far too long and where he avoided Provo's authorities with a muddled sense of guilt that he hadn't sorted out yet. He'd taken to testing himself every morning by inhaling the deepest breath he could before his chest started burning. It didn't hurt anymore. It hadn't for days now, but he still kept up the habit, half expecting the spears of fire in his ribs to come stabbing at him again. Just that subconscious pessimism, lurking. He needed to work on that, but it was hard to spend his spare mental energy on anything but thinking up new ways to kill Sephiroth.
He'd come up with a long list of strategies, but nobody would mistake Cloud for a tactician. In the end it was more a creative exercise than a tactical one. With that Angeal asshole having Sephiroth's back, everything had gotten more complicated. And when he thought back to Tifa and Aerith finding him here... It wasn't right to do that to them again, whatever he thought his fighting chances were. He needed to let it lie for a while, but he couldn't. Whenever he had a quiet moment to himself, a minute to think, the only thought in his head was all the ways Sephiroth needed to die.
Vengeance and the Reunion theory had gotten tangled up in his mind once before. Was it the same thing again? And if it was... Well, wasn't that all the more reason for Sephiroth to die?
He scrubbed his hand down his face.
I gotta get out of Provo...
Physically, Cloud was back in one piece, even if he could use a few rounds of practice to shake the rust off his sword skills. Mentally, well, the less said the better. It was about high time for him to get out of Yuna's hair and get some distance between himself and Provo before he did something stupid and violent again. He scratched his chest under his shirt, feeling the rough edge of the new scar next to the old. As if he needed another reminder. Never forget the bad parts, Cloud. Worse things happen when you do that.
A black and white cat came down the quiet street outside of the courtyard. Its claws skittered on the stone. It ran with a kind of indecisive sense of urgency, like it had been half-startled by something. Or someone, judging by the footsteps that followed. The cat slowed and stopped and watched behind it and Cloud watched too as Tifa appeared in the opening to the courtyard. Cloud smiled the kind of small smile that he couldn't help. To someone who didn't know better, it made him look untroubled.
"Hey," he said, shifting over a few inches to make space on the bench. He scratched the back of his head. "I was thinkin', maybe it's about time to get outta here."
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."
Post by Cloud Strife on Dec 14, 2022 23:32:41 GMT -6
Cloud watched the guy from a position somewhere between confusion and suspicion. But he recognized the hand to the temple and the shake of the head. Could have been him, not that long ago - followed up by a crippling lightning bolt through his skull, the kind that dropped him to his knees. This guy didn't seem to have it quite so bad. Maybe he didn't need the pieces of his brain taped back together. Maybe he just needed to drink more water.
As the guy approached - still staring way too intently - Cloud found the sympathy of that recognition evaporating. He didn't quite take a step away but the reflex to do so was there, in the tension of his muscles, buzzing with it like a racing chocobo at the starting gate. He held his ground, tilted his chin up a fraction of a degree like it made him taller. The combination of that grin and the too-familiar 'friend' set Cloud's teeth on edge. A handful of faces grinned the same grin at Cloud and it almost always preceded a fight. He could feel it in his knuckles.
What the hell game is he playing?
For a brief moment, Cloud's mind grabbed for the familiar paranoia - some stooge of Sephiroth's, grinning that grin on purpose. New puppet come to taunt the old. Explained the headache. The staring.
A voice that wasn't Cloud's, a voice that was more sensible and reassuring, piped up from the back of his mind.
Calm down.
He should probably listen to that one more often. Cloud crossed his arms, pushed the paranoia back down into the soles of his boots, and settled for a healthy suspicion. Maybe the guy was just a fucking weirdo come to take advantage of the situation. Charity with a catch? No, Cloud clocked a definite salesman vibe as Alex introduced himself and his guild. Neither name rang a single solitary bell in Cloud's mind.
Glancing briefly at the steepled fingers, he shook his head.
"Never heard of you," he said flatly. There were probably more elegant ways to state that fact, but Cloud had never been a wordsmith for a single second of his life.
Behind him, the mechanic made an impatient noise, the kind of sound that communicated whole sentences like 'get your trash bike out of my shop already' punctuated with colorful expletives. Cloud's eyes narrowed, but he didn't give the greasy old wrench-turner a second look.
"Rising Stones doesn't sound like a guild of mechanics. So what kind of help are you talkin' about?"
He really hoped it wasn't outright charity. Cloud didn't feel like having a stupid fight with his own sense of pride.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 29, 2022 11:57:57 GMT -6
Cloud looked from the craggy grease-smeared face of the mechanic to the dead motorcycle that stood between them on its rusty kickstand. He scratched at the back of his head, Mako-eyes tracing the run of a feed line as it curved into the guts of the bike's engine. Somewhere in there was a leaking seal that he couldn't see at a glance. Parts corroded by the Sonoran winter road salt that needed replacing. All of it amounted to a price tag that, parts and labor all in, Cloud couldn't afford. He crossed his arms loosely over his chest, furrowed his brows as his available options disappeared one by one.
"Shit," he said tonelessly, and mostly to himself.
The bike itself was sold to Cloud as having 'good bones', which Cloud learned was the kind of thing people said when they really meant 'you're going to have to spend twice as much gil just to make the thing run without the fuel tank falling off'. He'd worked himself ragged pulling odd jobs in Sonora to buy the bike in the first place, but the impulsive trek all the way down to Provo had been too much for it, and the time he spent laid up waiting for the hole in his chest to heal shut had been too much for his wallet.
It would be cheaper to leave it for the scrapyard and find another way back, but Cloud was nothing if not a sucker for the sunk cost fallacy. Besides, it had potential. He could see it beyond the wear and tear. Just a few new parts and a tune up and a coat of paint.
Yeah. Keep tellin' yourself that.
"Well?" the mechanic asked, snorting a mucus drip up one nostril and down into his throat, loudly spitting it out onto an oil stain on the cracked stone floor. There was an audible splat, even above the ambient noise of the busy market around them.
Cloud made a face, then shook his head.
"I can't afford that."
"Too bad," the mechanic said, shrugging. "Road's that way, kid." He turned around. The dismissiveness of it brought a tightness into Cloud's shoulders, made the back of his neck get hot.
Asshole.
"Hey--" Cloud interjected, taking a step forward. The mechanic glanced back over his shoulder with a sour look on his face that suggested he was already over the conversation. Cloud's eyes narrowed, and the set of his jaw and the bite in his tone matched levels with the mechanic's frustration. "Just sell me the part then, and I'll fix it myself."
Cloud told himself he'd spent enough time in proximity to Cid that he could probably figure it out on his own. Probably.
"You want to fix it yourself now, huh? Yeah, okay, sure. It's 4,000 gil."
Cloud stared the mechanic down, letting a tense moment of silence stretch between them. His expression was fixed and inscrutable. Inwardly, he knew he did not have to check his pockets and count his gil. He took in a long breath and exhaled it with a sigh and a shake of his head.
"...Shit."
He turned away from the mechanic then, not leaving, but taking a moment to assess what he was left with. Nothing. His hands dropped, fists resting at his hips, and when staring at the ground in front of his feet yielded no new ideas he raised his head and saw someone standing a couple dozen feet away, staring. Like the guy was trying to bore a hole through Cloud's skull with his eyes. Cloud squinted. He didn't recognize anything about the guy. Not face, or weapons, or clothing. There was no strange tug at the back of his mind.
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."
Post by Cloud Strife on Feb 22, 2022 2:16:17 GMT -6
They said they understood. They even said it in understanding tones and followed it with their gentle admonishments for the way he decided to run headfirst into death and he knew he'd screwed up, he'd had days to think of nothing but that. So all he could think, when he heard "I understand", was No you don't.
How could they? Tifa knew the heat of the flames in Nibelheim and the empty eyes of the dead, and Aerith knew the story, and they'd both seen the trail of bodies Sephiroth left behind and knew the billions Sephiroth planned to kill if they didn't stop him. But neither of them knew what it was like for Cloud to have that thing in his head he couldn't understand or control, a presence that wormed its way deep inside his brain until he couldn't be sure what part was him and what was it and if he even existed at all.
Cloud could tell himself and everyone else all he liked just how much this was about stopping Sephiroth from hurting his friends, from doing to this world what he'd tried to do to theirs. But there would always be more to it. It would always run deeper than that.
He inhaled a long slow breath that rattled against Aerith's hand on his back. He registered Tifa's hand on his own and his fingers curled around it. The voice in his head told him in no uncertain terms to pull himself together. So he lifted his head and he answered their questions. He wrestled his voice into a monotone, but where he aimed for calm he only sounded tired.
"He said 'Do I know you', with that... stupid grin on his face. That was it. We just fought." Cloud offered a vague shrug. It was effort to lift his shoulders.
"I don't know how long it was. We were fighting and a SOLDIER showed up out of nowhere. To help him." Cloud couldn't keep the quaver of anger out of his voice no matter how hard he tried to stay level. "Carrying Zack's sword. He must've helped Sephiroth get away after..." Cloud trailed off, shook his head. "He found me here the other day. Said his name was Angeal."
Cloud found he still had an overwhelming desire to hit the guy in the face with a bat.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jan 15, 2022 23:23:50 GMT -6
Cloud turned his head at the sound of Tifa's voice, the sharp edge of worry in her tone cutting through the fog of exhaustion blanketing his mind. He reacted instinctively, trying to sit up, prop himself up on an elbow. To show her that he was okay, like he'd only been having a nap, and he could do things like sit up under his own power without ripping a lung apart.
You still haven't figured out the definition of 'okay'.
I'm fine.
Or the definition of 'fine'.
"Tifa..." he said. Her name was a hoarse rasp escaping his mouth like a leaking valve. He couldn't even muster a feeble insistence about how fine he was before a sudden strained grunt turned the valve, cut off his breath. The pain flared white hot in his chest from the nuclear core of the stab wound, radiating out through the rest of him. His arms trembled and gave way and he fell back against the pillow with a dull thump and a rustling of fabric.
He looked ashamed of himself even before Aerith entered the room.
If he'd learned anything from this it was how easy it was to throw himself on the point of a sword in a fit of heroic rage when he thought he wouldn't be around to face the aftermath. It wasn't the same as standing on the precipice at the heart of the planet, looking down into the possibility of his own death, taking the step anyway. The anger of his id was like being strapped to a rocket.
Now the aftermath was standing beside his hospital bed and there was no more heroic anger or murderous rage in him, no defiance, no unspent fuel for the fire, just hollowness and exhaustion. Failure like a bitter taste in his mouth, like ash and sweat on his skin.
He could hardly bring himself to look at Aerith as she scolded him. He didn't move or protest when she laid a hand on him and the wave of magic washed over him and the bright burning pain in his chest dimmed to a manageable ache. He took a deep breath and tried to sit up again, slowly, one arm bracing his midsection. He managed that much.
"I had to know..." Cloud said in a low voice. He looked from Aerith to Tifa only briefly and then stared at the folds of the sheet over his legs. "I had to know if it was really him. And it was. And I had to stop him."
A thousand what-ifs still swirled in his mind. A hurricane of worst case scenarios. He clenched his fist until the knuckles went white and pressed it into the mattress beneath him.
"I couldn't let him walk away. After everything..." He gritted his teeth, jaw muscles tight as steel cables, shook his head. "I couldn't let him walk away."
