Suspension of Disbelief
by Ky
Summary: Thoughts of an "ex-SOLDIER" in a broken world.
Genre: Drama/General
Rating: G
Warnings: None.
Disclaimer: I do not own Final Fantasy VII or any of its characters and incarnations. This fic is slightly AU from the events in Advent Children.
Notes: After observing the signs on the walls in Crisis Core, I've decided to pick up on an idea my sister had a while back. I'm using "Shinra" for the name and "Shin-Ra" for the company. I can see where that choice would get made when it came to making signage long, long ago. Shin-Ra with two capital letters does stand out a bit more. Just thought I'd justify my inconsistency.
...
Just two years earlier, Cloud would have believed that Rufus Shinra's appearing here before him was impossible.
The president of Shin-Ra Electric Power Company —or was he now the former president?— was confined to a wheelchair, and an entire half of his once-handsome face was covered by bandages. He looked aged beyond his twenty-odd years.
To the best of Cloud's knowledge, Rufus ought to be a corpse, crushed under the rubble of the Shin-Ra Headquarters. Cloud accepted this new turn of events without disbelief or outrage, just a raised eyebrow.
"Rufus Shinra. Boy am I surprised to see you."
It wasn't as if Cloud had come to expect the triumphs of humans in their struggle to put their lives back together in a disease-ridden, disaster-stricken world.
The reason was much simpler. Possible and impossible had simply ceased to matter. Cloud was well aware that his own life was built on nothing if not happenings that, two years ago, he believed simply could not occur. His own memory or another's, likely or unlikely, reality or illusion: drawing lines around it and putting it in a box couldn't make a life un-lost or a man re-killed or a history of false identity ignored.
In two years, Cloud had not come to a deeper sense of understanding and acceptance of the way the Planet turned. No, after two years, he had finally ceased to care. The dead were very much alive, reality was an illusion, and, as he thought about the bruise-like patches on his arm that would not heal, he know that he would fade away without knowledge of who it was that faded.