Title: How To Dance Real Slow
Author: daemoninwhite
Summary: He cannot remember the last time that he rose to greet the sun without thinking: 'today will be the day I die'.
Disclaimer: I own the rights to none of the mentioned nor the implied texts. I do, however, own this, and if you see it posted anywhere and the author does not use the handle daemoninwhite, please tell me.
Warnings: Friendships that could be interpreted differently between Cid and Vincent, Cloud and Zack, Cloud and Aeris and Cloud and Tifa.
A/N: When will my FFVII muse leave me alone…? It's an AU (IU to the original game, but ignores FFVII:AC) which will (hopefully~) become more obvious as the story progresses.
By his count, today is his three hundred and sixty one thousand, nine hundred and ninety second attempt at suicide. Like the three hundred and sixty one thousand, nine hundred and ninety times before hand, it doesn't work. Like the three hundred and sixty one thousand, nine hundred and ninety one times before, he curses Hojo, loudly and at length. He knows the pattern of curses by rote now, they fall and rise like a chant, like a litany, like a creed; the words that he screams through a throat blocked with tears have lost all meaning. Like Zack, Sephiroth, Aeris, ShinRa, Tifa, Marlene, Denzel, Vincent; these words were once integral to his soul, he knows this, but he knows it like how he knows that his eyes are blue – it's more of a memory of knowing this basic fact, rather than the actual emotion behind the words. He cannot remember the last time that he rose to greet the sun without thinking: 'today will be the day I die'. What scares him is that 'to die' and 'death' have become two totally separate things – he has been dying for a long time now, but still the Planet forces his immortality; every time he thinks that he has finally touched the last scrap of the Lifestream that still remains, he is violently rejected. Sometimes he even thinks that he can see arms reaching out desperately for him, failing once again to catch hold of any part of his tattered spirit.
He still remembers each time his spirit ripped a little more (sometimes he hysterically thinks that it must resemble Vincent's beloved cape now, only he cannot remember who Vincent was or what his cape looked like and it is driving him crazy!).
The first time was when he realised that all his struggles had been for nothing, no worth, useless; even though ShinRa had been stopped, there was no way to repair the damage that they had done to both their planet and their Lifestream. People had gotten used to the opulent, over-comfortable lifestyle that ShinRa had provided for them, and while some were content to live in relative peace and quite, some (a very loud and forceful some) had complained. Alternative energy sources were, naturally, already being developed, but it was to no avail. It seemed like the very Gods were against them regaining any trace of their former lifestyle; the new Ecology Support Committee rejected every possible alternative energy resource, claiming those that had the potential to support all those on the continent were as dangerous to the continual health of the Planet as Mako, and green lighting too few of those they approved. Within months, a fossil fuel black market was created; and all too soon, it was where most people got their power. The Planet was dying, and everyone looked its death in the face and shrugged.
The second time was when people stopped frequenting the Seventh Heaven. People could charge whatever they liked for coal and oil as reservoirs dried up; supply and demand had never been in more damning, nor more obvious, effect. Nothing was, and perhaps couldn't, grow any more; everything within ShinRa's shadow was blackened to Nature's touch, and ShinRa's arm was long. With basic necessities costing more and more, there was less money to spend elsewhere. Tifa had smiled, had said that they had seen through worse, times were a little tough, that was all, but even then, he could see how fragile her smile was becoming. He relives it so many times, and regrets hopelessly that he hadn't done more, hadn't taken her into his arms and reassured her that everything would be okay. Yet again, Cloud is firmly entrenched in the past, looking forward by looking back.
The third time was when Marlene died. Supplies of food had finally dwindled into nothing; people had been reduced to hunting down the mutated creatures that roamed the countryside for food. There were even rumours of people going missing, and of whole skeletons being found, picked clean and covered not in monster teeth marks, but in human. Tifa had been giving more and more of her share of the food to the kids, but it wasn't enough. And then Marlene got sick, and there was nothing that they could do. Cloud could occasionally call on the Lifestream, it had a special resonance with him, the last of it's Children, but Curing took part of the body's natural reserve; they didn't dare try. It took two weeks and three days of high fever before Marlene finally gave up. What Cloud was still ashamed of was the fact that his grief at that moment had only been partly caused by Marlene's death, it was almost overshadows by the selfish panic when he saw the haunted despair in Tifa's and Denzel's eyes. He knew that they would soon follow her, and he never wanted to be alone again.
He cannot count the moments after that, they fall too close together and even now the pain of those moments makes the memories blurry. It makes him hurt to remember, and he wakes up from dreams of those time with wet cheeks and a hoarse, hurting throat. The physical hurts soon vanish; he has to swallow frequently or the Mako that rises to the surface will drown him – he's tried it before. And as the planet's blood erases any trace of his physical hurts he has a flash of (ungratefully) wishing that it would erase his emotional ones too. But it can't, and he is forced to relive his sins every night.
The Lifestream flickers as each soul rejoins it; Cloud can't decide if it's welcoming the return of its babies, or almost at full capacity, or if humanity are killing it just like they killed what was supposed to be its eternal partner.
Denzel had gone next; the trace amounts of Mako in Tifa's system allowed her to live long enough to burn both of her children before it, and she, gave up. Wutai had fallen into the sea; destroyed as one of the tectonic plates of the earth slid completely under the other. It happened too quickly for anyone to get out, Wutai's disdain for technology damning them once again. Rocket Town had been buried under an avalanche that resulted from the shift in the earth's core; Vincent turned up a month or so later, his one possession the tattered remnants of Cid's jacket. He didn't talk for a long time after that.
Sometimes Cloud would just sit with him on the roof of Seventh Heaven and watch as the world slowly died around them. It was a death foretold in the story of the Seven Deadly Sins; the greed, pride, lust, gluttony, envy, vengeance, and sloth of one man had sparked the blaze, but the materials had been there for eons.
Vincent left as well, chased back to sleep under the twin burdens of guilt and his demons.
It took him nine years to finally break. In the end, he had begged Cloud to kill him, and, as the final act of mercy that the Planet would ever see, Cloud did. The truth was, Cloud only did it because he fully expected Vincent to be rejected by the Lifestream as he had been.
The Lifestream flickers out of existence when Vincent does, and Cloud screams in anguish as it dawns on him what he has done. There will be no flower-filled field for him; he has damned himself for the final time. He doesn't know it yet, but that's also the last time he will see true night, the sun will not rise properly the next day.
On the twenty fifth night that Vincent stayed dead, Cloud first attempted suicide. It didn't work.
Now, all he has left is his ritual. Its rigid structure is one of the cornerstones of his sanity; he dreads the day that he will wake up and simply stare at the ash-filled sky until the false-night falls again.
It's almost funny. When it does come, he forgets why he ever dreaded it.
A/N 1: Lol, on the first draft, it was 'Like Tifa, Marlene, Demyx….' I was like, wtf, crossover? How did he get in there?
A/N 2: Because I find the evolution of writing fascinating, here's what happened with this:
1. First five-ten minutes of writing, am confident that it's Zack's experiences in limbo. It comes from random wonderings about just where the Jenova tainted part of Zack went when he died and the Lifestream cleansed him. I then watched Advent Children, and was screwed (Sephiroth or Kadaj, can't remember which one, states that Geostigma is the result of Jenova poisoning the L/S, I had a faint idea that the Planet might cleanse the souls that met it, but obvs not).
2. Then mutates into emo-Cloud at the end of the world (firmly ignoring, of course, the 498 year flash forward that AC does).
A/N 3: I don't know what this is … far angstier than my usual stuff, (where is the lols? There are no lols!) and just generally kinda a little skew if.