AN: It's been a while -.-' I know. This is just a thought, an idea, maybe a series of char-centric fics. But all of it has to do with music…and what can be done with it. And since I NEVER turn off the radio, literally…heh….
I own jack, yo. I don't even have enough money to go to school on. You think there's room in that for the rights to Final Fantasy? Pffffft, one can dream.
This installment set to nothing in particular. I vaguely remember writing it to an older Greenday song.
Midgar had five radio stations. Cloud Strife, known music hound, knew them all by heart. He could tell you what songs they played, what DJs they had, and who the guests were going to be. His dorm mates joked at him when he popped in his ear buds to go to sleep, the little tape deck radio sharing his small pillow.
It hadn't always been like this. Cloud had grown up in Nibelheim, where the only radio station was the public service station, noting the location of the tracked wolf packs, the nesting dragons, and playing the same five classical songs. If they were lucky they got a weather report before it was too late, but Nibel weather was erratic at best.
Clouds refuge was his cassette tapes. He had an entire wall of the things scrounged from various places, bought by the caseload from thrift stores in Corel and Junon via mail, and each carefully stored on it's alphabetical rack by artist. He had a few vinyl's, but he'd never been able to find a record player.
When he had left, he only had a little space for cassettes. So he kissed his worn out favorites goodbye, and packed the ten tapes he knew he couldn't live without.
When he got to Midgar, the first thing he did was scroll through the FM and AM radio bandwidths. He had found five stations, each one something he had never heard before.
Classical and public radio was 88.7FM, and he listened only to their news broadcasts, more regular than in Nibelheim. Classic Rock was on 99.3, and Cloud listened to that a lot, usually when he was on the brutal morning terrain runs. Hip hop was on 100.4, and Cloud only listened to a few songs they played, usually the ones that got him pumped for practice. Country and Western was on 104.5, and Cloud avoided it like the plague. He didn't need to remember lonely nights in Nibelheim. And his favorite station was New Rock on 107.8. Cloud could sing half the songs along, and sometimes at the beseeching of his roomies, he did.
And when Cloud couldn't sleep, when he needed just to pick a direction and go, he slid out his tapes. Ten mix tapes that were his lifeline on nights when the screaming in his mind was just that much louder. If he left the dorm at three instead of five, nobody remarked on it.
And if he found himself running alongside a man who wouldn't know him in the daylight, well he never said. And if it wasn't the same man every night, well he didn't care.
And when he got lonely, he just turned the volume louder, and drowned in noise.