Hi friends! This is the first chapter of the sequel to "Reclamation." If you are a new reader of my fics, you are certainly welcome to start reading this story right away but you may want to go back and start with "Dreams Incarnate" or "Reduced to Specimens." This fic is the newest installment of a series I have on the site that Begins with DI. The order is "Dreams Incarnate," "Reduced to Specimens," "Reclamation", and now "Renditions of Consequence." Though DI comes first chronologically, I did write RtS first and you don't need to read DI to know what's going on in this story, however you may want to be familiar with RtS and Reclamation so you don't feel lost in some of the chapters to come for this story. I hope all of you, old readers and new, enjoy this fic. I will try to update as frequently as I can but if you know my track record you know there can be some pretty long waits between chapters. I appreciate your patience with me and be sure to let me know what you think of the first chapter!

-Jaydee

~One~

Hojo and I have come to an arrangement.

Genesis's words echoed in Cloud's head over and over.

An arrangement…have come to an arrangement.

Even knowing where it had led, he still had a hard time accepting it in some ways.

You're turning me over to him?!

It haunted him when he tried to sleep. Those final moments before his capture he'd pleaded.

Don't do this to me!

Another voice, not unlike his own had something to say about it.

You did this.

Was it truth? Out of his own mouth, it must have been. That was the hardest thing to know.

I did this…Who am I?

Who was he to find himself back in the place Zack had risked everything in the end to get him out of. Had almost given his life on the cliffs outside Midgar to save him from.

C4 C4 C4 C4…

The lights in his cell came on suddenly, making him aware of the pounding headache he still had from the day before. It was rivaled by the pain in his guts. Pain or no pain, the moment those lights came on, he sprang into action, throwing the thick linen blanket off the bed and himself as he stood up, one end of a knotted bedsheet in his hand. The other end he'd tied to the one metal leg of the bed the night before. He knew he only had seconds to carry out his plan, tying the other end of the sheet to the handle of the only door in the room. He made a tight knot, pulling the sheet as tight as he could between the door and the bed that was bolted to the cement floor of his cell.

He was still holding the end of the sheet when the door was unlocked and an attempt was made to open it. For a minute it looked like his plan was going to work as the door was stopped from being pulled open by the taught knotted sheet attached to the bed holding it shut. He hadn't considered the material of the sheets though, hadn't thought about the fact that there might be any give in them, or that they would have been designed specifically to tear when a certain weight was applied, perhaps to keep someone from hanging themselves or keep them from being utilized in the way he was trying to use them.

Watching the sheet split like paper, he retreated to the bathroom nook, dropping himself to the floor between the toilet and the wall next to it. He'd barely been there ten seconds before he was being dragged back out. Strong hands gripped his legs and pulled him on his stomach while he tried to catch hold of anything stable that he could with his hands. He managed to curl his fingers around the doorframe separating the bathroom nook from the rest of the cell but the force of the pull on his legs found two of his fingernails bending back under the pressure and his hold slipping immediately.

Tile turned to metal under him when he was finally dragged out of the cell and into the only other room he'd seen besides the lab. The room was small, not much bigger than his 8x8 cell, and lined top to bottom, floor and ceiling, with stainless steel. There were no windows, only a light in the ceiling above and a grate in the center of the floor. The floor, though it felt flat and even, dipped toward the grate on all sides. He had discovered this by watching the way his blood had traveled toward the grate, on the few times he'd shed more than droplets.

He didn't look up at the two clones standing over him. He buried his face behind his arms as he covered it, gripping his own hair on the top of his head before he felt the first of many blunt impacts to his body. He started counting in his head. One-one thousand. Two-one thousand. Three-one thousand…At the count of sixty it'd be over and he'd be returned to his cell just for him to wait for the process to repeat the next day. How long had it been? Eighteen days? Twenty? It was hard to know.

He'd had many expectations the first day he was back in Hojo's clutches. All of them centered on the types of torture he expected to endure. Mako, whippings, surgical procedures, starvation. None of his expectations had yet been met except one: that he would be tortured. It was the how that had been something of a shock.

After waking in the lab, he was initially confined to the exam table he'd woke up on. Hojo and his assistants had examined him thoroughly, taken samples and notes before he was tagged. Though he still had an incomplete memory of what he and Zack had endured their first time in Hojo's custody, he knew they'd never undergone a procedure like the tagging. A black band had been wrapped around his right forearm, midway between his wrist and his elbow. It seemed almost like a thick zip-tie that was tightened until it was pressing into his skin. It seemed like plastic, though he couldn't be sure what it was. All he knew was that when the tie was locked in place and the loose end snapped off, the band became hot like fire. It had felt like his skin was melting and for all he knew it was the truth as since then the band had been bonded to his arm, practically flush with his flesh. The skin around it had blistered and took a few days to heal. It had itched like crazy and continued to irritate him to the point where he didn't realize he was scratching at it until he made himself bleed.

After he'd been tagged he was sedated. He woke up in what had been his only living space the rest of the time he'd been there. It was technically inside the lab, built into the one wall, a floor to ceiling pane of thick glass for separation. The other three walls were concrete as far as he could tell. So was the floor. The only door led not out into the lab, at least not directly, but into that metal room. There was an access door in the metal room but he'd never seen beyond the closed door to what may be beyond it. In his cell he'd been given a bed. It was narrow and low to the floor but it was a bed with actual bedding. He was given clothing. Pants, a t-shirt and a sweat shirt, but no shoes. There was a panel at the bottom of the door where a tray of food and sometimes juice or milk would be slid in. The trays were always connected to a locked chain so they could be retrieved without his compliance.

Attached to the cell was the bathroom nook, different from the ones he and Zack had spent their time in previously because in this one he had a shower. It was a small tiled area of the nook with a shower head but no actual knobs or dials that could be used to access the water. He learned quickly enough that the water would come on automatically twice a day for about five minutes. Once at 7 am and once at 4 pm. There was a toilet and a small sink. The toilet was all once piece. No lid. It reminded him of what a prison toilet must be like. Nothing could be pried off it to be used as a weapon. It flushed automatically. The sink was also automatic. No knobs or dials that could be pried off. There was no windowed area in the nook, which meant no one could look in at him directly from the lab but there were cameras in all areas of his cell, which meant he was never in complete privacy. It weirded him out at first until he came to the conclusion it was stupid to care whether someone wanted to watch him take a dump in his cell. In normal circumstances he'd probably care.

The first day he woke up in the cell he'd been able to see and hear what went on in the lab. He could see through the glass in front of him and hear through a speaker system wired to the cell. It hadn't lasted long. It was only a few hours before a thick black curtain had been drawn over the glass and the speaker feed cut off, leaving him feeling isolated. In the one wall, close to the ceiling was a digital clock face that told him the time. He suspected it was there for a reason and it wasn't meant to be an amenity to him. He learned of the role it would play after the first few days.

Every day after the first day in his captivity was the same. At 6 am the lights would come on in his cell and the door at the back would open. Two clones, exactly like those who'd come after him in Midgar that one day at the apartment, would enter and without a word, drag him from wherever he was into that adjoining metal room where one of them would beat him senseless for a straight sixty seconds or for however long it took until he was knocked unconscious. On two of those days it had taken barely thirty seconds before one of their hits had him blacking out. One minute seemed like nothing normally but it seemed like hours while under their fists. If he fought back it took longer.

The first five days he'd tried to fight back. It had made no difference. After those first five days, he tried only to defend himself and keep from getting seriously injured. If he was knocked out he woke back in his cell after however long, his injuries treated. If he was still conscious he was left alone in the room until being treated by the doctor before being brought back into his cell and given the option of clean clothing to change into. He was able to clean himself of any blood he still had on him when the shower came on at 7, or later if he missed the first one. He knew what Hojo had been trying to accomplish with the daily beatings. He knew it was meant to condition him, to subdue him and make him compliant and accepting of his situation. To be grateful for the time when he wasn't being beaten.

He could tell himself to fight the response Hojo wanted, but as the regimen continued to the end of the second week and into the third he found himself beginning to break down. He spent every minute of the day in pain from the beatings. He longed for any other human contact. Longed to see past the curtained soundproof glass wall in his cell out to the lab at what Hojo and his assistants were doing. He wanted someone to talk to him. Every night at 9, right before the lights went out in the cell, the same voice-presumably from one of the assistants-asked him the same three questions, the voice coming at him from one of the speakers. What is your name? The answer was C4. Who do you belong to? The answer was Shinra. And What is Shinra? The answer was home.

He figured, even from his earliest days in the cell, that the key to ending his daily beatings from the clones was to give the answers that were expected but every day he remained silent while he contemplated why his answering the questions was so important. He didn't want to give in but the punishment he was being given daily was really getting to him. He spent every night unable to sleep, dreading the clock turning 6 in the morning. By the time the door to the back room opened, he was trembling in the anxiety he wished he didn't feel. He managed to hold back from crying and begging, which is what he really wanted to do when one of the clones began driving his fists into him. He felt close to insane with loneliness in the hours while he was left in his cell. The only sounds were made by him and the air vent near the ceiling and there was nothing to look at that he hadn't looked at a hundred million times by the twenty-first day of his confinement.

He had held out for close to a month, but all he wanted was to submit. He knew he was stronger than that. He believed he was. He and Zack had fought endlessly when they'd been held together. Albeit it was easier to do when there was someone to fight with, but he couldn't do it now. He wasn't sleeping. He couldn't keep food down. He was desperate. He made the decision on the twenty-first night that he would finally give the answers to the questions he would be asked before lights out. All day he thought about it, willing time to pass faster so he'd have the chance to end the torture he'd been going through for weeks. Needing for something to change to end the monotony of his life at that time. Even a different torture would be preferred. When the time came though, when he was asked by that voice from the ceiling what his name was, something happened. He felt something snap inside him. It wasn't fair. What was happening wasn't fair. Why did it matter if he answered the three goddamn questions at all? He was a human being and he didn't deserve this. Instead of giving the answers he had planned, he found himself screaming up at the one camera "MY NAME IS CLOUD! IT'S CLOUD IT'S CLOUD IT'S CLOUD!"

Over and over again he screamed his name while he began to pick up anything and everything that wasn't bolted down and throwing it against the walls. He even managed to rip the metal sink in the nook from the wall. He would have ripped down the cameras if they hadn't been too high for him to reach. By then he knew he'd caused whoever was watching him to take notice because he heard the sound of the door to the metal room being unlocked. The clones had been sent to him to subdue him. The moment the door opened he threw the sink towards the first clone where it hit him but didn't stop him from entering the room. He advanced on Cloud fast, crossing the short distance between them and taking hold of Cloud's torso. For a moment Cloud went mostly limp, expecting to be brought back into the metal room for another beating. He reverted to his defence mechanism that told him not to fight so it would be over faster but as he was pulled into the metal room, it was clear to him something was different. There were two additional clones present and instead of being dropped to the floor in the room where he would be punched and kicked, he was lead instead through that other mysterious door into a metal hall, the clone's surrounding him.

He wanted to take it all in. The difference in his surroundings, but he was moved too quickly. Barely three steps through the hall and through yet another door he saw where it was they were taking him. The room seemed empty at first. It was concrete, like his cell. Lit with the same irritating fluorescence he never seemed to get used to but there were what looked like doors in the floor. It made no sense to him until one of them was pulled open, showing him that the doors were attached to boxes built into the floor. His chest tightened as he looked upon the one open box. That's when he remembered that terrifying experience he'd had of being locked into a box by Hojo once before.

"No. No. No," he began saying, repeating it over and over a little louder each time until he was being forced inside of the box and he began to scream that same word while tears were building up in his eyes fast and terror gripped his insides. "NO! PLEASE!" he screamed out as loud as he could when the lid was flipped shut on him, trapping him inside. He raised his hands in the tight space to try and push the lid open but it was too late, he could already hear the sounds of the locks clicking shut. He was sobbing then with the word 'please' still erupting from him over and over until the lights went out in the room and the door to the room shut, leaving him alone. His screams died down fast but he continued to cry. But even that was short lived as his anxiety took over and claustrophobia set in. He strained against the constriction around him and pushed from every direction, heaving in desperate breaths, the hyperventilation making his head spin. He couldn't take it. His heart beat so hard, pain ripped through his chest. He imagined that's what a heart attack must feel like. Then he heard a voice.

"Can you hear me?" it asked. "You need to calm down," it said. "Lie still a minute."

"Who's there?" Cloud called out in return, his voice still cracked in emotion. He could tell by the way the voice was muffled that it was spoken from behind the lid of another box. He wasn't alone.

The voice shushed him gently. "Take slow breaths," the voice advised.

Cloud complied. And as the panic attack died down he began to feel his tears overtaking him again, running down the sides of his already wet face.

"What's your name," the voice asked after minute. Cloud could tell now that it was a male voice. Deep. He sounded older than Cloud was.

"Cloud," he said painfully as he tried to hold back from bursting into sobs again.

"I recognize your voice," the man told him. "I've heard it before, while in slumber."

"Who are you?" Cloud asked once more.

There was a brief pause before the man answered. "My name's Vincent."