Hello! This fic is not part of my 'expanded universe' fan-canon and doesn't require your knowledge of any of my other works, although (true to form) it will cross reference other works (as a treat to readers). So why not canon? While I don't find any of the subject matter in this fic morally reprehensible (quite the opposite) it is just at odds with how I view the characters. Also, it also assumes that the Compilation exists (*gasp!*) which is far harder for me to write seriously. This fic is a response to a challenge made by the lovely Sai at the Genesis Awards. Challenge heartily accepted! What is fanfiction for, if not exploration?

Grangalan Dolls

Chapter 1

When Cloud sees Meteor, he sees a tiny grangalan doll. Everyone else sees it for what it isn't – the problem. But as the red glow brightens the bridge of the Highwind, Cloud knows what they don't. Meteor is big, sure. But it's not the big doll.

There's a secluded alcove on the airship's bridge – near where the navigation officers tinker at standing dials and widgets. It's quiet there, facing a column of curving windows. Cloud stands there sometimes when Cid is barking loud orders. If he looks down out of this glass fishbowl he can see the Planet gliding beneath them. Tifa sometimes finds him. She asks him how he's adjusting, as if he wakes up every day a different person. It's no different this morning.

"How are we doing, Cloud?"

"We are doing."

She hums through a smile. "And how's that going?"

"It's going." His own absurdity gets to him. They both smile. He forgets sometimes that it's okay to do that. Maybe he needs her daily reminders after all.

Tifa saddles up beside him. "Wow. It's like a whole new sunrise now."

"Sailors take warning."

"Hmm?"

"Oh, it's this old adage. I learned it when I was a kid. Red sky at night, sailors' delight. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. The colour of the sky used to determine the likeliness of a storm."

"Now the sky's red all the time."

"Yeah. If the oceans weren't polluted, we'd have the most confused sailors ever."

They smile again. It makes Cloud's face feel good.

"Say," Tifa cocks an eyebrow. "Nibelheim wasn't a fishing village. How did you learn that rhyme?"

"I... I guess I didn't. That was Zack. Zack learned it as a kid. There was a fishing village a few kilometres south of Gongaga. I... he went there with his parents in the summers, caught fastitocalons. When he was ten, he was stung by a crown lance. His parents never took him back. It was called Vissen's Haven."

"Wow," Tifa says. "You really are his living legacy."

"I guess I am."

Cloud still has Zack's memories. He's regained his own, of course, but they're living parallel with the illusionary world that Jenova constructed for him. The memories that don't fit in his reality he has to put into Zack's past. It doesn't occur to him to do so until moments like this, when it's brought to his attention that something isn't right. Cloud supposes that it will be like that for the rest of his life.

It works out okay most of the time. It doesn't really conflict. He can compartmentalize – adapt to the different scenarios that play out in his recollections.

It only becomes a problem when he remembers the same moment as both people.

His true memory is always stronger – it's been that way since he emerged from the Lifestream – but recalling their time together is always a little off. Like watching a 3D film without the glasses. Not just visually, either. Emotionally. The way Zack sees colour, the way he perceives the same smells differently.

Sees. Percieves. Cloud thinks about him like he's still around. Memories take place in the past, but occur in the now. It hurts his brain. He wasn't that good of a puzzler to begin with.

"You still here, Cloud?" Tifa asks.

He's gazing down out of the windows at the Corel desert, a barren sandy badlands.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm still here."

He thinks, 'So is he.'

Corel hadn't always been a desert.

It was their second to last mission before Nibelheim, five years before Meteor. The wizards at Shinra still hadn't developed a drug for motion sickness. Cloud cowered in the corner of the truck as it rolled under the overpass and out of Costa del Sol.

Zack laughed. "We haven't been on wheels two minutes and your skeleton's falling out."

The truck's bed was spacious. Crates were stacked near the front, at the cab. Cloud was sitting on one. He had thrown his mask and helmet off and his head was buried in his hands. His semi-automatic machine gun leaned against another crate, barrel towards the army-green cloth canopy draped over their mobile headquarters.

Zack could stand perfectly still in the bed of the truck, despite the jostling and jerking movements over boulders and mu-holes. The wide blade of his buster sword crossed behind his back, and the handle extended up past his right shoulder in a neat diagonal above the iron pauldron.

Cloud burped his words. "Organs, sir. Not skeleton... Feels like... my organs... are falling out."

"Right. I wouldn't know. I've never had motion sickness."

Zack ruffled Cloud's yellow hair with his hand. Cloud pulled his head up with great effort and mustered a smile that made his face hurt.

Zack almost laughed. "Hang in there, buddy. I'm gonna go get briefed, and I'll give you the reader's digest version when I get back."

"Why... did you say... digest?"

Zack walked to the back of the truck's spacious bed – where the canopy ended and the blue day beamed in. Sephiroth was silhouetted against the rolling green hills.

(Cloud recalls this moment as both himself and Zack. As both sick and healthy. As both afraid of and in love with Sephiroth. Cautiously he focuses on Zack's memories, to see as much as he can.)

Sephiroth was lit up by the morning sun. The white of his pauldrons and hair glinted and stung Zack's eyes, so his turned his gaze out of the truck. They looked out at the lea. The beach and Costa del Sol disappeared behind a green bluff. Any last pretence of a dirt road had given way to calm, wild terrain.

"I heard the kid call you 'sir'," Sephiroth goaded.

"Nothing wrong with being professional," Zack grinned. "Sir."

"Very cute."

"Ain't I just?" Zack pulled a yellow hair off of his glove and let it fly into the wind. "All right, it's briefing time. Who, what, where, when, and why?"

"I should hope the 'who' is obvious."

"That's us, right?"

Sephiroth just gave him that look. The look that would make Cloud hide behind a crate. The look that would make Zack's arm-hairs stand on end.

"We're heading to an East Corel hamlet called Trommel's Moor." Sephiroth explained. "There has been reports of Shinra infrastructure failing."

"I didn't know we had development in Pommel's Moor."

"Trommel's Moor. And we don't. Officially. But Corel has been our toughest nut to crack in terms of mako deals. The President believes that by helping out the smaller towns—"

"We'll have some sway in the election next year. So we're bribing the regional leaders with infrastructure, clean water, toilet paper, yadda, yadda, yadda."

"Clear deduction as usual. Good work, Zack."

Zack positively beamed at that. "So we've got all the bases covered except the 'why.'"

"Because we were ordered to."

"I figured you'd say something like that. Not that I don't like a paycheque, but isn't this more of a job for, I-dunno, architects?"

"The village leader, a man named Josiah Saen, seems to be under the impression that military action might be necessary."

"Man, those must be some big termites."

"Something like that."

"What do you mean? Do you know something I don't?"

Sephiroth smiled. "I always do."

The truck rolled through the hills towards the east. Cloud looked ahead, through the cab windshield. They were cresting a hill, and below them was an enormous expanse of forest, the largest on the Planet. The forest of Corel.