Cloud suffers from memory loss, but he wouldn't have known if not for the brunette with a bright (resentful) gaze.
He is a SOLDIER First Class (he was a lonely boy from the frigid mountains). He deserted ShinRa and works as a mercenary (he was rescued by a crooked grin and a pair of desperate eyes). He is self-assured, beyond confident in his skills as a swordsman (he was barely able to steady his shaking hands as he held the rifle). He didn't see any reason to doubt what he knew until Tifa saw him enter Seventh Heaven with hopeful recognition blossoming on her face and a plea pouring from her lips.
"Cloud!" she cries, a broken sort of longing reflected in her twitching arms as if she wanted to lunge for him and hold him close. (There's a darkness there, lurking, because she is a predator who has been roused by the scent of familiar blood and a past she wished to discard in favor of bitter vengeance.)
"Who are you?" he asks blandly, the fragmented image of a small girl falling as a wooden bridge collapses beneath her feet dancing before his eyes; it's gone as quickly as it came, and forgotten just as easily.
Tifa pursues him doggedly like the shadow at his feet cast by the fading light of the sun. Cloud feels weary and more than slightly bewildered as his mind wages war with itself, conjuring foreign afternoons of fervently (enviously) watching a girl while hazy figures crowd around her in obvious adoration. Cloud's memories are vague impressions of a diminutive and shy (determined) blond child struggling to finish the last lap, lagging behind his fellow cadets. At first, the memories are not terrible, simply cloying and tinged with a certain, throbbing emptiness (loneliness). A woman with straw-colored hair and eyes more green than blue scrutinizes him across a worn dinner table, her face creased with worry. Snow falls around him while he treads up a rocky path, conversing with a man who wears a lopsided smile and laughs often (but he, too, has a darkness mingling in the light of his pupils).
Aerith and her proud, gentle strength follows, and shortly after, ghosts begin to snap earnestly at his heels.
Fetid green suspends Cloud, its stench a promulgation of everything foul he had ever smelled. Scratchy tubes are shoved down his throat and up his nose, forcing him to breathe freezing oxygen at odds with the warm, pulsing viridian burning through his skin and into his very bones. Cool glass encloses him on all sides, and then a reedy face dressed in dangerously contemplative frowns and a prim, white lab coat leers at him on the other side.
Cloud jolts awake from nightmare after nightmare, his breath harsh and his hands clamped around his wrists in a pitiable attempt to find solace. He remembers straw-spun hair pooled around a charred face and a bleeding, crumbled body staining his clumsy hands crimson. The worn broadsword propped beside his bed taunts him as it gleams in the moonlight. (Not yours, the sword says. He embodies the dreams of a dead man. He is a broken doll.)
Everything is green.
Zack, at once his closest friend and the most distant stranger, smiles at him (that barren smile hiding the darkness prowling beneath his façade). A firm hand holds him place as Cloud stares numbly. Cloud shifts, tries to move his arms and legs, tries to find a way to lift this familiar-strange man and carry him to Aerith, a name he only barely knows. Aerith, Zack always would mention wistfully. Cloud doesn't know this dying man (yes, he knows him. Backwater country boys, lost and alone). Cloud doesn't understand the weakness in his muscles or the blank slate of his thoughts (experimented until he was ruined).
"Do you remember, Cloud?" Tifa asks, prodding his mind cautiously before her claws dig and tear open mental wounds. (I didn't need to remember! he wants to scream.)
Cloud sighs a breathy, terrified "yes" as his life washes away into noxious emerald.
He didn't know he suffered from memory loss until he was told. He didn't yearn for what once was until it was handed to him. Cloud wants to sink behind the skin of a crooked grin, but the miserable young woman refuses to allow it until he is able to share her scars. (Yet, he cannot hate her for it. And yet.)
Cloud implants the broadsword (it's his. It was never his to begin with) on the cliff where a grin and empty eyes died.
He suffers in his memories, not in the loss of them.
A/N: A character-study, as well as a curiosity in the phrase "suffering from memory loss". Is it truly suffering to no longer have memories, or to suffer in remembering?
This drabble is unedited as of right now, but I'll likely come back to it later and edit it briefly, perhaps make it longer and more detailed.
Published: 12.6.2016