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year 5, quarter 3
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Post by Cloud Strife on Jul 1, 2020 14:35:24 GMT -6
When the bulk of the blood and the dirt was gone Cloud tossed the cloth aside on the battered old nightstand and he looked her over again. Nothing else to be done without a couple of potion bottles, if the old guy - Saltzman, she said - was willing to give them up, and if the remedy was any indication then he probably was. Something sounded funny about Tifa calling somebody else the owner of a bar named Seventh Heaven but Cloud couldn't spare the focus to think about it. He looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the stairs and he looked back at Tifa and he nodded his head and stood up. He moved like he had to force it. As though pushing against some magnetism that rooted him to her side.
"Okay," he said. "I'll be right back."
Away and down the stairs. Boots making deep heavy thuds on each step. He found the old man and explained what he needed with barely restrained urgency. He heard some distant snide comment from the guy at the bar that Saltzman had called Benny and Cloud shot a glare in the direction of him but otherwise let it drift. As soon as he had the potions in hand, two bottles, he thanked Saltzman hurriedly and then made for the stairs again, ascending two at a time, shame warming the back of his neck. It was stupid, being so unprepared. No potions, no restore materia, not even a damn bandage. Stupid.
He turned the bottles over in his hands and scanned the labels. Like everything in this place they fell into some kind of uncanny valley. Recognizable but wrong in some small way. He could only hope this world's potions worked just as well as its remedies.
Back in the room he returned to Tifa's side, sitting on the edge of the bed, and he opened the cap and offered her the first potion bottle and set the second on the nightstand. He helped her sit up enough to drink it and waited until she was done before he started to speak.
"Hey, Tifa, I... uh..." he scratched the back of his head. Half a dozen different thoughts struggled to get out at once and got stuck in the exit. "...I'm... glad I found you again. I was lookin' for you for a while."
A point somewhere in the middle distance suddenly seemed very interesting and Cloud stared at the nothing of it. He rested his forearms on his knees and tugged at one of his gloves. He said quietly, "I missed you." Paused a beat. "A lot."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 28, 2020 13:19:16 GMT -6
In the morning Cloud passed by a slum scrapyard with a broken down motorcycle sat out front on flat skins of rubber that once were tires. Caked in a thick patina of dust and grime from forks to tail like some forgotten relic only just hauled from the depths of the earth. A handpainted sign in thick black grease on cardboard hanging from its handlebars advertised ten thousand gil or best offer. Cloud had gil in his pockets, now, but none of it to spare. Maybe he could rub two coins together until a third spawned between them and call that his best offer. It was the twelfth time he'd passed by the yard after finding Tifa and getting his bearings and settling into life in the city of Sonora and every single time he stopped and he stared long and hard at the sad old machine. In his mind the sound of the engine turning over. The crunch of the tires over gravel as he eased it forward. His hands in the mechanical innards of the bike bringing the dead back to life, smears of black from his fingertips to his elbows. Then he shook his head and he walked on past and he kept dreaming.
He could afford to keep dreaming now. And to think about practical things. About picking up jobs and helping Tifa with the rent while he hunted down leads on his friends. While he lived, for the first time in what felt like eternity, without a blade dangling over his neck on fraying rope. The worries he once held in his heart since the moment he woke up in this world evaporated like water in the desert. He was whole now, and Tifa was with him, and he'd find the others, and the world wasn't ending. An almost terrifying expanse of possibility lay before him.
Cloud had since shed the weathered old SOLDIER uniform. It wasn't him anymore. Never had been, really, but it still lay in the apartment in a neat folded pile underneath its battered boots. He thought maybe he ought to burn it but something held him back and he didn't know what. He kept the armor and the gloves and he wore a dark blue shirt and loose black pants and a new pair of boots and he looked, if not a new man, then a recently renovated one. Appearances mattered when you didn't have a reputation yet, though the story of the battle with the robot house that heralded his arrival in the city spread far enough to bring in some work.
So he worked.
After he left the scrapyard and the sad old motorcycle behind he headed out into the bustling heart of the city where people stared at the sword on his back and he put on his best stoic tough guy expression and acted like he had important places to be. He worked a job where he watched men load and unload trucks and glared at anyone who wasn't supposed to be there. When the thieves finally showed up Cloud welcomed the violent distraction even if it was over in a few seconds. He got paid less than what he thought he should have but it was more than nothing so it would have to do.
Now, money in hand, he made for a shop to buy a few sundries itemized in a list in his head. From the outside he looked into the shop and that was when he saw her reflection in the window. Unmistakable, even in a crowd, like all the world was dull and monochrome except for her. Cloud whirled around to stare across the street and froze in his tracks and watched with wide disbelieving eyes and a catch in his throat.
You're seeing things again.
He looked away. Scrubbed a hand down his face and inhaled a long deep breath. He couldn't count the number of times he thought he saw a flash of fluttering pink fabric out of the corner of his eye or heard bright, distant laughter like an echo across time, always drifting out of reach like smoke in the wind. No trace but a hollow memory. When he looked at where she'd been standing she was still there and he didn't know what to do. It didn't make sense. She was gone. He remembered it in detail so excruciating it might have been branded into his brain. The way the light went out of her eyes. Lifeless body in his arms. This didn't make sense.
Before he realized it his feet carried him across the street with a desperate urgency. Tires squealed and a driver yelled something profane out the window that Cloud didn't hear. He pushed his way through the hurried pedestrian traffic until he reached her, until he stood before her slackjawed and wide-eyed.
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 11, 2020 22:44:42 GMT -6
Cloud had hoped Caius would have responded that he was an expert on the city, knew every nook and cranny like the back of his hand, that maybe he was a local returning home after wrangling a pet dragon somewhere. But beggars couldn't be choosers. A few visits amounted to a fountain of knowledge for all Cloud knew of the city. He wasn't sure what to make of 'a knack for meeting people' and if he had a coin to flip, heads would have been a strange kind of luck and tails would have made Caius a bounty hunter.
He stood there leaning on the bar and bounced his heel on the brass rail and kept a steady look on his face that in better circumstances was the cool impassive look of a mercenary who could handle anything but presently was the cool impassive look of a mercenary who was too tired to kick up a fuss about anything. He glanced at Caius and then he glanced at his whiskey and picked up the glass and let the alcohol swirl around lazily while he answered. It was hard to play it cool when he was asking after Tifa to every stranger who gave him the time of day, but he did it anyway. Call it an old habit. He could feel silly about it after he found her.
"Lookin' for a woman named Tifa," he said. He gave a just-the-facts description of her; brown hair, about this tall, a fighter, but the tone of his voice when he spoke about her betrayed him as it always did. He broke up his talking with a sip of whiskey, and he pictured her standing behind the bar with a bright smile on her face and he pictured her lobbing a drunk like a grenade clean out of the building. A small lopsided grin tugged at the corner of his mouth and cracked the glass of his cool impassive look just a little bit.
"Or a guy named Barret. He's got a gun for an arm." Cloud took another drink of whiskey and that emptied the glass. He set the glass back on the square of cardboard in the damp little ring it made and he thought it was a shame it was empty and at the same time had no inclination to order another. He folded his forearms on the edge of the bar.
He hoped if Caius met either one it wasn't half as interesting as their meeting.
"Interesting pet you got, by the way," he said offhandedly. "Didn't know you could ride 'em. They've always just tried to eat me."
Post by Cloud Strife on Jun 9, 2020 22:41:52 GMT -6
He raised his head and regarded Ignis only after he finished telling his tale. Quite the group of friends. There wasn't much else to say about all of that. Cloud huffed a toneless sound that passed for a chuckle and rubbed the back of his head. He didn't expect Ignis to remember all of them nor find them in his travels but he appreciated the sentiment all the same.
They were quite the group. An incongruous assortment of people thrown together by crisis like the odds and ends in a junk drawer. It never hit him like that until he rattled them off one after the other. An improbable list. Outside the hut the sky had turned a deep blue-purple and grew darker and a dim thought seeped into his head like the deepening night and he wondered even if he found them what would happen to them now. His friends that, bar Tifa, he'd known for a grand total of a few weeks. His friends bound together by a quest to save a planet they were no longer on. Cloud never heard a story that told the tale of what happened to the heroes after they went through hell and walked out the other side. After they beat the bad guy and saved the world the credits rolled and the audience was left to assume that everyone lived happily ever after and nothing changed between them.
The fire popped beneath his sword and his eyes followed the small burst of sparks as they sailed upward with the smoke and drifted apart and disappeared into the dark.
Stop trying to predict the future. You're never right anyway.
He took in a long slow breath to clear his mind. The savory smell of the meat filled the crumbling little hut and overpowered the woodsmoke of the cookfire. So strong he could taste it. Low, empty rumble in his stomach. Up until that point he'd done an admirable job ignoring his own hunger, as good a job as he'd done ignoring his pressing need for a solid night's sleep or, in the lifetime of maybe a month ago, ignoring his own impending mental breakdown. Cloud had a talent for that sort of thing, just a notch below his knack for swinging a sword around, but only one of those ever made him money.
He watched Ignis plating up the food like a dog at the dinner table. Reflection of the firelight in the shine of the oil on the surface of the meat. The perfect browning of it. If any meal had ever looked so good in his life he couldn't remember it. Starving gave a man a different perspective. He took the skewered meat and the bowl of vegetables as Ignis handed them over and fought the ravenous urge to devour it then and there. He owed Ignis some manners first.
"I should be the one thanking you," Cloud said. "You're doin' all the work."
Then he ripped a chunk of meat from the skewer with his teeth and chewed it thoughtfully and closed his eyes as if sight might detract some sensitivity from taste and smell. He savored it. It was all he could do to not tear through it all in an instant. From the first bite he felt energy returning to him. Clarity in his head. The gnawing ache in his stomach fading.
"Man, this is..." he paused, chewing another mouthful. He tried to grasp for something out of reach of his vocabulary and settled for a low satisfied noise and a quiet, honest voice. "...This is really good, Ignis."
Somewhere along the way he stopped pacing himself and the food disappeared. He wiped his mouth on the back of his arm and set the bare skewer in the empty bowl on the floor of the hut between himself and Ignis. The hut had gotten cozier and the trek ahead of him didn't seem so long anymore. A full stomach made reality bearable in a way few other things did.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 31, 2020 1:11:34 GMT -6
He watched closely the remedy working through her system and as color and life returned to her it seemed to him a light returned to the room with it. When she opened her eyes Cloud met her gaze. Found solace in the warmth of it, like a piece of home in a strange land. Cloud knew then that everything would be okay. The anxiety that he carried ever since waking in this world untwisted from his insides and disappeared. Relief moving through him like a wave. So this is what it was like. He'd forgotten how it felt.
"Hey," he replied.
In his eyes, somewhere beneath the mako, there was a softness. A gentleness. Something that he never managed to fully shed or bury even when he was his coldest, most mercenary self. Neither time nor tragedy had been able to break it. Once, he'd been ashamed of it, thought it a weakness. But he didn't think like that anymore. It carried him through the end of the world, carried him on a long empty road, brought him here. The real him.
As Tifa moved to sit up and flinched with the pain, Cloud frowned, reflexively placing his empty hand on her shoulder as she eased back down onto the bed. The poison may have left her but she was still caked in blood, bruises deepening in ugly blue-purple patches. It hurt to see her like that.
"It's okay. Take it easy and rest," he said in a reassuring tone. "I'll see if I can find something..."
He looked about the room. It was the first time he'd really done so, now that Tifa was out of the woods. Dull patchwork walls and particle board flooring. A dirty film on the outside of a barred window. Typical slum digs, done up as best as they could be. He wondered if the old guy had any potions to spare. Cloud hated himself for how ill prepared he was. What would he have done if there was no remedy on hand? He couldn't let this happen again.
He hadn't seen where the old man grabbed the remedy from and he didn't like his odds of finding a potion hiding somewhere but he still looked. He couldn't bring himself to venture very far from Tifa. He inspected the apartment's sink and found no potions but he found a washcloth and turned on the tap until the water ran cold and soaked the cloth and wrung it enough that it stopped dripping. He turned off the tap and returned to Tifa's side. He sat at an angle on the very edge of the bed. Cloud, for his part, looked every bit the road-weary traveler. His old SOLDIER uniform sporting new rips and tears. Exhaustion etched deep in his face. He could have slept for a week right then and there but he wouldn't let himself think about sleep until Tifa was taken care of.
"Don't have any potions. Sorry," he said. "I'll check with the old guy. He's the one who had the remedy."
He reached out with the cloth in hand and hesitated. Then he began to gently clear the blood from her face and to let the cool of the wet cloth soothe the swelling and bruises. Slow and methodical and affording her every opportunity to stop him if she saw fit. All this with a look of focus on his face. He could have been defusing a bomb. There was so much he wanted to say to her that he did not know the words for. Telling her that he missed her or that he was worried just sounded trite in his head. Having something else to focus his mind on made it bearable. Really, all it meant was that nothing changed.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 28, 2020 20:49:06 GMT -6
The old man with his head on his arms made a low noise deep in his chest that might have been language but Cloud couldn't tell. It meant something to the bartender because after he set two whiskies in front of Cloud and Caius on square cardboard coasters he walked over to the old man and topped up his empty glass.
Things had gotten too hectic too quickly for introductions when the pair of swordsmen crossed paths outside the city and in his quiet exhaustion Cloud had forgotten this until Caius introduced himself. Cloud nodded, taking a second as though to link the name to the face more permanently in his mind.
"Cloud," he replied, picking up the glass in front of him. He raised it. "Cheers."
He drank. He didn't have the palate or the experience to know if the whiskey was good or not as far as whiskey was concerned, but he followed the burn all the way down into his stomach. A warm feeling hit him from his gut outward and he thought it hit a little harder than it should have. Empty stomach. He hadn't eaten since he met Ignis out on the road.
He set the glass back down on the coaster and thought it wasn't so bad that he wouldn't drink it again.
In the calm and quiet of the bar Cloud could have lapsed back into a tired silence. With the whiskey in his system he was tempted to. It was too much energy to think. Just lean on the bar and listen to the clink of glasses and that low murmur of indistinct conversation a few tables away. Listen to the muffled hum of the city outside. Follow the old man's lead.
But he was in Sonora for a reason and it wasn't to fight houses and drink whiskey.
He absently turned his glass in a slow rotation, thumb and forefinger twisting it clockwise. He asked: "You know this place very well? The city, I mean. I'm tryin' to track down some people."
Post by Cloud Strife on May 25, 2020 21:07:56 GMT -6
Cloud walked the Sonoran streets with an unhurried pace that at first glance seemed relaxed and at second glance was the slow gait of a man trying not to look as tired as he felt. Even before the fight he'd been exhausted from his travels. The adrenaline carried him through the battle, like it always did, and now in its absence Cloud was left feeling like someone replaced his bone marrow with lead and turned his muscles to jelly. He was quiet on the walk to the bar. The noise of the emergency response faded behind them and the sword on his back made quiet dull metal clicks as it swayed with every step. His boots scuffed against the pavement. The quiet between them could have been amiable, but the truth was Cloud needed a drink before he could muster the effort to be sociable.
He wasn't a drinker, but some part of him decided alcohol was a necessity right about now.
He followed Caius into the bar and his eyes gave the interior a customary once over. Taking in the warm wooden decor and the scattered regulars nursing beer of a brand he didn't recognize. An old man at the bar ordered a whiskey and slammed it back like water. Cloud was pretty confident that was a man concerned with the strength of the alcohol and not the quality. He could smell decades of liver damage from across the room.
The bartender eyed the pair as they entered, nodding stiffly. Cloud decided in that moment that he didn't much like the bartender or the bar for no reason other than the bartender wasn't Tifa and the bar wasn't Seventh Heaven. But mercenaries make due. He stepped up to the bar and put the card down on the surface and slid it towards the bartender. The bartender examined it, nodded.
"What'll it be?"
Cloud had to think about that one. He made a stalling noise. What did Tifa make him before? No, they probably didn't have that here. He shot a sideways glance at the old man, slumped over and resting his head on his forearms.
"...Whiskey," Cloud replied.
The bartender took Caius's order and went to fix the drinks. Cloud put his foot up on the brass rail and rested an elbow on the bar and scrubbed his hand down his face. He wanted a shower. He wanted a bed. He wanted to sleep for a year. More than everything else he wanted to find Tifa and the others and if anything else happened to stop that he wasn't sure he'd be able to handle it. Outwardly he was just tired. Inwardly that thread was getting awfully thin.
"Should've punched that scientist out," Cloud muttered. He looked up at Caius. "He's probably skipped town by now."
Post by Cloud Strife on May 22, 2020 9:37:39 GMT -6
His mako eyes swept over a slum dive that held just enough familiarity to feel alien, like everything in this damned city. Midgar but not. Tifa's bar but not. Two men, one at the bar and one behind. Empty tables and that faint spilled-beer aroma that never quite came out of the floorboards. Cloud stood there with his heart in his throat for a beat before one of the two men hurled accusations that hit him too close to the chest. His jaw tensed and he felt the heat at the back of his neck but the older man stepped in before Cloud could defend himself.
Doesn't matter. Ignore him. Focus on what you gotta do.
Cloud rushed to follow the old man upstairs with his boots thudding dully on the steps almost as loud as each beat of his heart in his ears. But he couldn't shake the heat of shame and anger. An old wound, like so many of them were, inflicted on Mt. Nibel all those years ago. Scar still a faint jagged line on his knee. It was the tone. The tone was the exact same. He heard it clear as day:
Cloud! Why'd you bring Tifa to a place like this! What the hell's the matter with you!? What if she dies!?
What if she dies?
What if
"It'll be okay, Tifa," he said, barely above a whisper. He didn't think she could hear him but he had to say it anyway.
He followed the old man's direction and carried Tifa into the room and laid her gently on the bed. Pale and shaking. Worst case scenarios at the fringes of his thinking grew like an encroaching darkness. He fought them back with a mantra: She'll be okay. All he had to do was stay focused.
When the old man came back into the room with the bottle of remedy, Cloud took it from him with the urgency and resolve of a combat medic. He'd done this before, in the field, spells bursting overhead. He placed a steadying hand on her shoulder, pressure enough to try and stop her shifting, and carefully administered the remedy. He set the bottle aside and held Tifa's hand and waited for it to take effect. He watched the rise and fall of her breathing for the assurance that each precious breath was followed by another. He hadn't even noticed that the old man left again.
He reached out and brushed aside a few strands of hair from her eyes. As the medicine took hold he said her name again like a soft call back to consciousness.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 19, 2020 19:12:05 GMT -6
Cloud was peripherally aware of his comrade laying into the machine on the opposite side but his vision tunneled until all that remained was the sparking husk of metal before him. This was the final push. No holding back. He shouted wordlessly and threw all his strength behind his strikes, great swings that cleaved the house into twisted pieces of sheared steel, the jagged edges pulsing with a red glow. All around stunk of hot metal and melting synthetics and burning oil.
Then it ignited.
He reacted unconsciously. Leaped backwards as though spring-loaded, flipped in the air and landed with bent knees and his sword driven a foot into the ground. The marginal buffer of space gave him that fraction of a second to duck behind it and brace for impact. He felt the shockwave in his chest, in his skull, rattling his teeth. The blast of heat. Shrapnel flying past his ear so close he heard the zip of it through the air until his hearing turned into a single high note over a low, indistinct murk.
Then nothing. Cool air on his skin once more. He lifted his head slowly, looking past his sword at the smoldering wreck. He used his grip on the blade to pull himself standing. In the absence of adrenaline his limbs felt like dead weight. His ears ached as his hearing came back, a gradual return like someone slowly turning the volume knob. His arms were streaked grey with ash and dirt clinging to rivulets of sweat. He was very tired.
"Man..." he exhaled tonelessly.
His mako eyes swept over the scene. The destruction. The burning wrecks and crumbling facades of buildings, shattered glass strewn across the street. If the scientist had been standing there Cloud would have hit him but the broken jaw wouldn't have just been for this. The ruin made him think of sector seven. But then he looked past the destruction and down the robot's path, where people emerged cautiously from the rubble, helped each other to their feet. He looked up ahead, to the clusters of buildings and apartments the robot never reached, where shocked faces looked down from balconies, craned their heads out of windows to glimpse the chaos. It wasn't sector seven at all.
They saved a lot of people here, hadn't they?
Cloud wrenched his sword free from the ground as civilians and authorities swarmed the scene. He slipped it onto his back again and willed his feet one in front of the other, gently pushing through the gathering crowd. It took him a minute to register the noise. Clapping, cheering. Somebody slapped him on the back, on the arm. Somebody looked him in the eye and called him a hero. He found the notion bewildering and he mumbled a non-response until the shifting crowd swallowed the person up again. He shook his head and kept walking until he found his ally from the fight. By the time he did there was a card in his hand. He didn't know how it got there.
"Hey," he said, "You good?"
He spied the card in the man's hand and held up its match.
"I guess we got free drinks out of this."
Which was fine by Cloud, since he didn't have any money. He nodded his head down the road, where clusters of neon signs beckoned wanderers to come in out of the cold - and where there wasn't an uncomfortably large crowd of people milling around them.
Post by Cloud Strife on May 16, 2020 0:16:41 GMT -6
Cloud listened closely to Ignis, intermittently shuffling the vegetables around with the stick-spatula. The pitch of their sizzling changing with the movement. Still not on fire. Good sign. He thought Ignis sounded like a storyteller. Detail enough to breathe life into anything with words alone. The image rendered itself layer by layer in his head. There were words and phrases that stumbled him - The Six, Insomnia. The only insomnia Cloud knew came when he tried to sleep. But in spite of it he swore he could conjure in his mind's eye a replica of this Noctis walking the road outside the hut. Overkill or not.
"Well, now I'll know him if I see him," Cloud said.
Could he do the same? When he closed his eyes he saw Tifa standing in the scrubgrass on a cliffside looking back towards him. Gloved hands clasped loosely behind her. The wind played at her long brown hair, brushed it back from her face. The sun low in the sky casting a halo of light around her. When her ruby eyes fixed on him they caught the light so perfectly--
No, he didn't have the words, but that wasn't a new problem.
He opened his eyes and rubbed the back of his neck and hoped the ache in his chest might disappear but he knew that it wouldn't.
When the turnaround of the question came, Cloud thought a moment of how to answer it. How to sum up the lot of them, this ragtag crew of misfits bound together by chance, by circumstance, by a quest bigger than all of them. Every thread he tugged on, it seemed, led to something more complicated. He cleared his throat. It would take more talking than he'd like, but he supposed even by his standards he had an excess stored up from his weeks of solitude.
"Before I woke up here... We were fighting to save the planet. It's-- it's a long story. There's eight of us countin' me."
Should be nine, he thought, and that simple truth was a dagger between his ribs.
He didn't look at Ignis while he spoke but at least this time it didn't matter. It was easier to focus his thoughts if he could stare at nothing and not worry about eyes on him, studying him, judging.
"Barret... You'll hear him from five miles away. 'Cause he's either yelling at something or shooting at it. But, he's a good guy. He's got a little girl, Marlene. If she's not here with him there'll be hell to pay."
Cloud had only ever seen flashes of it. The rage and the anguish when Barret thought he'd lost her for good. He didn't want to think of the lengths the man would go to get her back if she was missing here, with no one around to rein him in. He set the idea aside and continued.
"Cid's a mechanic and a pilot. You could say he's... rough around the edges. Smokes like a chimney. Red XIII is... I don't really know how to describe-- He looks like some animal but he's not. He's wiser than most people I've met. Yuffie's probably rippin' somebody off right now. If it's not bolted down you gotta watch it around her, and even then..." Cloud shook his head. They'd made amends but he'd be lying if he said her stunt back in Wutai didn't still nag at some place in the back of his mind. He could forget it if it meant finding a familiar face in this new world.
"Cait Sith..." Cloud cleared his throat again, "...is a... cat... robot. It'll take too long to explain. Vincent's a sharpshooter. Keeps to himself mostly. Kind of on the theatrical side. And Tifa..."
The tone of his voice changed instantly. He might've been embarrassed by it if he noticed it happening at all but he couldn't help it. He watched the pulsing red coals beneath his sword and he thought about what he could say about Tifa. There was so much he didn't know how to say. If there was one constant about him it was the failure of words to capture what went through his mind.
"...Tifa's probably out there helping people who need it. She's... she's strong. She's always taking care of everybody else."