Disclaimer: Lopsidedly not mine.
A/N: Originally written for the ficlet collection A Riotous Symphony. The idea is that you put your playlist on random/shuffle and then write a ficlet related to or inspired by each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish; you start when the song starts, and stop when it's over. I went beyond the remit with this one, though, and ended up extending it into a fic of its own.
What I've Become
© Scribbler, July/October 2010.
Sweat dripped into Cloud's eyes, turning his vision hot and grainy. He arched his neck, trying to head-butt the man behind him, but the hold on his unbroken arm didn't surrender. His sword lay on the ground a few feet away. He was ambidextrous, so he could switch it to his left hand, but that didn't mean a thing if he couldn't get the hand free long enough to grab it. His right arm was broken in at least three places. It hung slack at his side, a useless hunk of meat, weighing him down in what was turning out to be his very last fight.
"Yield, Cloud." Sephiroth's voice was honey mixed with iron filings. It dripped into Cloud's ear while also scraping across his skin. It made him want to submit and smash things at the same time. Sephiroth always had that effect: he loved pretending they were best friends while trying to split Cloud's skull or gouge out his innards with his katana. "Yield to me."
He wanted to spit in Sephiroth's face, but couldn't from this angle. "Never!"
"I've already won. You've chased me for a hundred years, across continents and between worlds. You've tried to stop me, but never actually succeeded. Every time, the darkness in your heart makes you lose to me. It won't let you defeat me.
Cloud arched his back. It did no good. "Murderer!"
"All that," Sephiroth continued as if Cloud hadn't spoken, "and it has come down to this place, this time, this battle, and finally, this moment. This is the end, Cloud. You've lost. I have beaten you for the last time. Admit it. Yield to me and preserve what's left of your honour."
"Honour?" Cloud laughed. "Honour?" It was too funny. What the hell did honour have to do with it?
He had spent a hundred years trying to maintain some sense of honour in his pursuit of this madman. It had ended when he finally realised that to beat Sephiroth, he had to think like him. Thinking like Sephiroth was an exercise in cruelty by proxy. He took brutality to a whole other level; one which reflected his superhuman strength and capabilities. Regular murder just wasn't good enough for him. Trying to predict his movements had sent Cloud the very limits of reason. His sanity was at least tattered and coming away from the edges of his mind like a worn out drum-skin. A hundred years of chasing and nearly catching him had done its work, and this final push had either finished it off, or brought him pretty damn close. It was difficult to tell where sanity ended and madness began when your own point of reference was a confirmed sociopath. Honour had no place anywhere in that morass. It never had. It had just taken Cloud a long time to accept that.
Where had honour been for either of them when they fell into the Pit and the Darkness turned them into … whatever they were now. Not men anymore. Monsters. Demons. Nightmares. Cloud thought of them as horrible parodies of men, frozen in time. He hadn't aged since the day he and a posse of other townspeople, having seen the Wanted posters, chased the escaped criminal General Sephiroth into a cave in the mountains. Cloud had gone on ahead and cornered Sephiroth, but their tussle had collapsed the floor over a crater of magic left to rot and ferment in secret since mankind was in its infancy. Honour had stuck its head in the ground like an ostrich as they changed into creatures of shadow and fear, and Sephiroth recuperated first, burst into the world and razed the mountain to rubble behind him. He had also laid waste to the town nestled on the side of the mountain before Cloud recovered enough to stop him. Everyone there was killed, including Cloud's friends and family. Still, somehow he had retained his sense of honour and taken it upon himself to deal with Sephiroth so nobody else would have to.
They were both too strong for normal people to fight. That had become increasingly clear as Sephiroth went on a killing spree to equal no other. It had crossed worlds and times, and Cloud had seen the aftermath as he stuck to his promise to punish the murderer who had levelled Nibelheim. It seemed fitting that after a century of cat and mouse, they had finally ended up back where it all started, in the ashes of a town nobody had wanted to rebuild and everybody had eventually forgotten about. Somewhere under their feet were his mother's charred bones. He wondered what she would say if she could see him now. Then he decided he didn't want to know.
"If you yield, I'll make your death quick," Sephiroth promised.
"Go to hell," Cloud snarled.
"You could join me instead. I'm still willing to forgive you."
"Forgive me?"
"Accept the Darkness, Cloud. Yield to it, if you can't yield to me."
Cloud tried once more to head-butt him. It was a good enough reply.
"Then accept the consequences of yet another bad decision." Sephiroth's voice pulled away from Cloud's ear. "You're good at those."
Cloud was about to reply, but sudden agonising pain stabbed through his shoulder. It wasn't like a blade plunging in, but a yanking, pulling, tearing agony. He bit down on a scream. His shoulder-blade and back became an inferno as Sephiroth hauled with his inhuman strength. Cloud heard the wet crunch and splatter before he registered the fresh agony as tendons and ligaments tore loose from their moorings and Sephiroth ripped out his right wing.
"You chose this!" he shouted over the scream Cloud couldn't keep in any longer. "You refused to yield! Face your punishment like a man!"
"We're. Not. Men!" Cloud shot back.
For a brief instant, Cloud saw his mother's face as he had last seen it. She had tired to dissuade him from following the other men. He remembered how she had ruffled his hair and kissed the top of his head even though he was twenty-one years old and a man already.
"You'll always be my little boy, no matter how old you get," she had said. "Don't take any unnecessary risks, Cloud. I don't know what I'd do if I ever lost you." She didn't need to add the rest of that thought. She had been overly protective of him because she had already lost her husband in a chance rockslide when Cloud was only a few weeks old. Growing up, it had been just the two of them, scrimping and saving, but too proud to accept help or their own limitations. Cloud's mother had instilled a powerful sense of responsibility in her son, and that had carried through after his dip in the Pit.
Cloud realised with a strange, detached sort of clarity that he was an orphan. That had never occurred to him before. Why had it now? Maybe his brain was just trying to distract him from the pain; or maybe this was what happened when you were about to die: your mind threw up all sorts of odd, disconnected things, like a sleeping mind processed the events of your day at night.
Wetness ran down his back. Sephiroth held the torn off wing aloft like some sort of trophy at a sporting event. It was his mistake and his downfall. With one hand occupied, only one was holding onto Cloud, and neither held his katana.
Cloud twisted, half blind with pain and rage, and threw what looked like a wild punch at Sephiroth's face. Except that it wasn't a punch. It also wasn't aimed at his face.
On the last world, he had gone to see a magician and traded a pint of his own special blood for a set of gauntlets forged from another pint mixed with an enchanted alloy called 'mako'. The gauntlets were supposed to be unbreakable, and though the magician had finished only one before Sephiroth killed him, Cloud had kept the first, planning to use it in his final battle.
At the last second, Cloud opened his fingers and drove the claws of his gauntlet deep into Sephiroth's throat. Sephiroth's eyes bulged. He stared at Cloud, the wing still gripped in his hand. He couldn't say anything. Blood bubbled from the sides of his mouth. He started to topple sideways, sliding off Cloud's fingers.
Cloud couldn't stay upright anymore, either. He hit the ground and lay, unable to move, waiting for death. He didn't care anymore. At least he had finally punished the man responsible for his mother's death, and the deaths of thousands more. Now maybe he could find some peace. He had earned that, at least.
Hadn't he?
He didn't hear the engine of the Gummi Ship. He may not have recognised it even if he had. Technology had changed in the century he had been away from this world. He also didn't hear the clomp of boots from those sent to investigate the disturbance in what should have empty wilderness. He did, however, wake up enough to register he was being loaded into a flying ambulance, and that someone was using healing magic to seal the wound in his back before he bled out.
"Whuh?" Figures swam into view. "Huh?"
Someone bent close to his face. "Are you awake?"
Cloud spied Sephiroth being loaded into another ambulance. He struggled to sit up, but couldn't. "Don't …" he tried to say, recognising the green glow of healing magic over him as well, but it was too late. The doors closed and his own ambulance lifted off the ground. He was too weak to even push past his rescuers to go after his enemy and make sure he stayed dead this time.
"What's with the wing?" asked someone out of his line of sight. "Is this guy human or what?"
"Shush! He can hear you!"
"Maybe not. There was an awful lot of blood out there."
"Hi there," said the person crouched beside him, ignoring the other voices. "Don't worry; we're taking you to our home, Radiant Garden. You'll be okay once we get you into the Infirmary there."
Cloud tried to speak. Only guttural noises came out.
"Hush now. Don't overexert yourself. Can someone hold onto him?"
Only muttering met the request.
"A full ship of cadets and not one volunteer? So much for bravery and honour."
Two sets of footsteps approached.
"Squall. Tifa." The warmth in the greeting was genuine. "I knew I could count on you. Keep him still while I finish cauterising the wound."
"Sure, Aerith."
"All right."
No. No! These people were fools. Well-meaning, but still fools, and their foolishness was going to get them killed. Cloud guessed a scene much like this one was going on in the other craft. Sephiroth would accept their help and then kill them. It wouldn't be the first time it had happened. He had racked up a mammoth death toll since Nibelheim, and each life Cloud had failed to save weighed heavily on his conscience. Sephiroth was his responsibility. He was … uh … he … was …
"Why'm I …?" His eyelids started to droop. This wasn't unconsciousness born of injuries. This was something drug-induced.
"Just a mild sedative to help you sleep while we move you."
"Well done, girly," said a gruff male voice from the controls. "You'll have your Healer Licence in no time."
"Thank you, Captain Highwind."
Cloud sank into oblivion, cursing these people for their unwanted compassion. He had thought he was free. He had thought it was finally over. Little did he know, where he and Sephiroth were concerned, it would never truly be over.
"What is that? Look, through the windshield. Are those … meteors?"
Cloud and Sephiroth had missed a hundred years on their home world, but the prodigal sons had returned just in time to face the Darkness's newest, deadliest creations yet.
Fin.
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