Cloud went through the dinner service in a kind of stupor. When they closed the kitchen at 11, he was too disoriented by the events of the day to properly feel tired. He hadn't realised he'd been sweeping around the same table for the last fifteen minutes until Tifa tapped him on the shoulder and told him he could go to bed if he liked. He spent most of his time looking over his shoulder, catching things flitting from surfaces out of the corner of his eye. He had a nasty feeling there probably wasn't anything there, at least not now. He expected to see them everywhere and now they were everywhere. They wanted in. They wanted in, and they were patient and he would slip up eventually.
At 6:09 am, he was roused from his sleep by a noise. He rolled over and turned his back to the window, keeping his eyes firmly shut until he drifted back to sleep.
Contrary to what Barret thought, Tifa did not spend every moment of her day worrying about Cloud. That wasn't to say she didn't spend every moment of her day worrying. Most of it she could handle -there was a bar to run, bills to pay, and former Turks to throw off her property. Most of it was something she was used to by now, and was even easier than it had been before now that she was no longer checking for wiretaps and EM sweeps every four hours to hide the terrorist organisation cloistered away in her basement. Just a nice, legitimate business that she didn't have to launder money for or smuggle explosives into for a change. Other things, she couldn't fix - Nibelheim, or worse things besides. There was plenty of worry to go around.
One of her more recent worries was the rebuilding effort - she was being called in to help with aid - a quick supply run to what used to be the cities up north. The bar was important, but so was this. As of two years ago, she'd started specifically requesting any and all volunteer jobs that had room for another person on them be given to her. It was the least she could do, considering.
She didn't start worrying about Cloud until he retreated back into his room after filling his last appointment, closed business for any more, and did not emerge the next day. Tifa waited for a few hours or so, in case he had decided to sleep in (unlikely, but one could always hope), then went out back to check for his sword. As she had feared, he had removed it from his bike and likely had it on him constantly again.
She endured another half hour of prep work for when the bar opened at lunch, then knocked on his door. "It's me. Can I come in?"
"Close the door behind you," came the muffled response. Tifa quietly let herself in to avoid startling him, then shut the door and turned around.
She was no stranger to panic attacks - not her own, and certainly not Cloud's. But this time seemed different: normally, Cloud would switch off the artificial lights in the room but open a window and sit in front of it on a blanket, staring out of it. She'd sit next to him for a while if they were both up to it, and wait it out. There were probably better methods, but that's what he seemed to prefer the most.
Cloud was indeed sitting in front of the window staring intently at it, but there were papers taped over it, muting the early morning sun and leaving the room poorly lit. His sword lay on his lap, his fingers clenched tightly around the hilt. Tifa sat down next to him, on the side that didn't have the blade pointing towards her.
"...Bad day," he said after a moment of glancing between her and the window, by way of explanation. She nodded uneasily.
"...Do you want me to call -"
"No," he interrupted. "I think she's on her way anyway, right?" Tifa didn't answer. "You can go if you like. I'll be fine, I promise."
"Show me you've got your phone on you," Tifa said, crossing her arms. Cloud reached into his pocket and held it up for her to see without taking his eyes off the window.
"And you're going to use it?" she pressed. Cloud just looked at her wearily.
"Are you going to use it?" she repeated, this time sounding a bit irritated. When it came to Cloud, pride and shame seemed to be one and the same for him as far as she was concerned. "I'm going to call you at ten. Will you answer it?"
"Yes. Phone call at ten." He tore his eyes away from the window, properly this time, and focused them on her. She could see bags forming underneath them. "You had stuff to do, and we planned for it, right?"
They had. Cloud did not handle being alone well anymore, among other things, so they had worked out a system. But still...
"If you need to, call me," she relented. "Okay? Even if it's to ask me how to set the clock on the oven."
"I thought I wasn't allowed -"
"If you really need to set the clock on the oven, then call me."
"Alright."
She gave his hand a quick squeeze, and he squeezed back so hard she thought he might've broken a finger, but at least it was something.
"You know..." she began carefully, "if there's something bothering you -"
"There's not," Cloud said quickly. Tifa glanced between him and his sword looking unamused. They were both silent for a moment.
"...I've been seeing things," he finally admitted. Tifa kept her expression neutral, even though Cloud could probably smell the quick thrill of fear that went through her.
"What kinds of things?" she asked evenly. If they had learned anything from the last few times, it was that if Cloud was seeing something it was only because, at the risk of it being tautological, the rest of them simply couldn't. The fact that a lot of it was in his head didn't make it any less real. Yet, anyway. He was rather like an anxious, well-armed canary in a coal mine.
"Just... I dunno. Things."
"'Things'?"
Cloud squirmed a bit, clearly uncomfortable. "They don't look like anything. It could probably just be floaters." He curled and uncurled his fingers from the hilt of his swords, the way she would do sometimes with her hands, a habit he had picked up (mimicked?) from her. Wanting to fight an enemy that wasn't there, in the vain hope that one could pound whatever the issue was into submission.
"...Sometimes, I'll look at a window or a mirror really quick, and I'll think I see something reflected in it," he said hesitantly. "But then there's nothing there. I've - I've thought about moving the furniture, so it looks less like people. If that's okay."
"As long as you don't block the doorways," she replied. He still had not let go of her hand.
"Is She -"
"I haven't felt a pull or anything," he quickly amended. "And if I do, I'll let you know."
Would you? she thought to herself, looking at the papers on the windows. Then again, would she tell Cloud if it had been her? She couldn't be sure that she would.
"Alright." She stood up. "I trust you. Just don't hurt yourself okay?"
"I'll be fine," he said, quickly turning his gaze back to the window. "Call at ten o'clock. See you in ten days."
"See you in ten days," she said, and left, closing the door behind her again.
Cloud stared at the door for a moment after she left, then turned his attention back to the window. There hadn't been anything unusual since that morning. No noises, no shadows, no heaviness in his limbs. Perhaps if he just kept watch, they wouldn't show up again. Perhaps if he didn't look at them they wouldn't be there. He didn't know which set of rules to follow, which only made him more anxious.
Perhaps he was just going stir crazy from being confined to one place for two days.
He let himself into Tifa's room again and closed the door to that. For good measure, he drew the curtains across the window anyway. Just in case.
He had realised a while ago it was always better to do this in Tifa's room. It made reaching the right state of mind more difficult, but her familiar scent made things easier to stop in case it didn't work out properly. He could probably go in deeper in his own room, with his own scent, but that made coming back a lot harder too.
Maybe I can just zone out through everything for the next ten days, he thought. He made a good effort for about ten minutes, but the fact that there was nothing going on downstairs actually distracted him from being able to focus on anything, let alone functions in his brain he still had a very poor handle on. He got back up and went downstairs.
It was quiet. The bar hadn't opened yet, and the rest of the staff wasn't there either. He sat down on the couch and began to listen for anyone coming. The lights hummed in the ceiling. A few ice cubes settled as the ones under them melted. Next door, someone's dog paced across a hardwood floor in anticipation.
He felt the panic start to set in about two minutes later, when the dog and its presumed owner left for a walk. The bar was absolutely empty, and would remain so for a while. There was nobody here. No one knows you're here. No one -
He felt himself reaching for his phone, then scolded himself for it. It would probably only be an hour. Toddlers could wait by themselves longer than that.
After another fifteen minutes, Cloud found himself resentfully conceding that said toddlers had better resolve than he did, and walked back upstairs to his room. Sleep. If he just slept through as much of this as possible, he wouldn't even know he was alone.
And besides the point, he was exhausted. Sleeping had been a privilege, as he'd been made aware of a long time ago. Cloud thought he'd be sick of sleeping by now, but the fact that it wasn't on anyone's schedule but his own anymore made it significantly more appealing.
He stole a pillow from Tifa's room anyway before going back to his own and buried his face in it. It was gonna be a long ten days.
Tifa leaned back into the window of the airship she was on as the icy wind stung her face. Rebuilding here had been one of the bigger challenges they'd faced. The remote location, coupled with the harsh weather, made it hard to get both people and supplies up this far, and people were one of the few commodities that were even lower than supplies. Most human life in the northernmost continent had been wiped out, and what few survivors there were had fled the area until the carnage had died down. They had considered leaving it uninhabited (after all, it wasn't as though there was suddenly a space issue), but she supposed Barret had been right: people wouldn't want to leave their homes, no matter how bad they got.
Its isolation had given it one advantage: there had only been two cases of geostigma in the entire area, and only a handful more of more mundane diseases. If anything like it ever popped up again, it would be good to have a haven to fall back to.
Tifa hoped it wouldn't. She knew she wouldn't be able to go through all that a second time, and she wasn't sure if she'd have let anyone else do it either.
Someone cleared their throat behind her. "Miss Lockhart?" It was one of the other volunteers, looking at her expectantly.
She closed the window and adjusted the collar of her coat. "We're landing soon?" she asked, and the man nodded.
"Good. It's a six hour hike to the settlement. The sooner we get going, the better." She hefted her bag over her shoulder and a first aid kit over the other.
Now that they were on the ground, the air didn't have the bite of windchill to it. It wasn't as bitterly cold as it could have been, considering it was summer, which made it the ideal time to set up as much as they could before the area was too closed off by the elements. It would also be more difficult to get birds willing to cooperate the colder it got.
They unloaded the chocobos from the airship as well, though most of the volunteers and staff would be walking. The supplies were the first priority, and they could carry a lot more if unencumbered by a rider. It didn't take long to get everything packed up, and then they headed out into the wilderness, with Tifa at the front.
Every now and then they found the strewn remains of a house. Bones, sometimes animal, sometimes human, picked clean by scavengers long ago. As they pressed further into the mountains, they found more intact remains, preserved by the cold and a lack of bacteria to take care of them over time, not unlike Midgar. The most they could do was incinerate the bodies using magic. It seemed disrespectful, but they couldn't afford to waste fuel that was meant for the settlement, and couldn't carry every body they found back with them with their limited personnel and time. It would have to do. It was better than leaving them in the ice.
Tifa clutched the little green materia tightly (fire had not been one of the spells she had chosen to master), restoring the warmth to her hands, then passed it to the woman behind her leading one of their birds. Nobody spoke much. Most of the people here either had once lived here, or knew someone that had. Tifa herself had seen much of the carnage firsthand - Sephiroth had been a force to contend with. It seemed as though they had been running from him as much as they had been pursuing him at times.
Sephiroth... when Cloud had first recounted some of "his" escapades in Soldier, he had mentioned his strength and skill and ability with almost as much reverence as he had contempt. She hadn't quite understood it until she saw it for herself, though. She had supposed he was simply a very powerful mage (which he had been), or unnaturally strong (which he had been). But it became quite clear that there was a lot more to Soldier than just performance enhancements.
She "knew" that, of course - she knew about Jenova, had heard the stories about the dodging of bullets and the surviving broken necks: it had been another thing entirely to see it; to know for certain that what they were fighting was utterly inhuman. To see things done that must have been magic, but couldn't possibly have been, because there was no magic to do the sort of things he did.
It was impossible. All of it was, by definition. Magic had rules. Things it could and couldn't do. It was one of the first things anyone learned about it in school - magic was the rules that let you use other rules to your advantage.
It shouldn't bother her as much as it did, with all the things they'd seen. She tried to think about something else, and looked around her environment. Snow. Rocks. Icicle. Snow. A burning chunk of someone's arm. Moss. More snow.
She quietly asked for the materia again when it had made it all the way down the line to anyone that didn't know enough magic to cast it themselves. It was going to be a long hike.
By the time they got to what could generously be called a "town", Tifa was in a lot better condition than the rest of her group - growing up in Nibelheim and climbing mountains for most of her life (and for some years, for a living) had acclimatised her to the conditions they had faced, and she was one of three people in any state to unpack anything as soon as they arrived without a rest first. A few representatives from the WRO spent several minutes panting before beginning to assemble the large receiver tower they had brought in pieces with them. The sooner they established connections, the easier it would be to coordinate future endeavours. This area was the last to be added to the grid, due to the remote location and the need to hike out on foot for the time being.
Tifa, meanwhile, began doling out the other supplies they had brought with them - mostly batteries and dried fruit. There were enough animals nearby for things like fur and meat, but power and fresh produce was harder to come by.
One of the men lingered nearby her table and seemed to be waiting until everyone else had left. She glanced at him occasionally, doing her best not to stare back. After another ten minutes when the crowd had thinned out, he spoke.
"Don't I know you from somewhere?" he said. Tifa actually looked at him properly then. He seemed too old to be coming onto her (though one never did know), and the question was phrased with a certain amount of sincerity.
"...I don't think so. Do you own the cabin on the outskirts?" she guessed. They'd spent three days in that cabin waiting for a storm to pass, but that had been years ago.
The man shook his head. "No, I live here. But I know I've seen you somewhere."
Tifa shrugged, keeping her tone as professional as possible. "Just one of those faces, maybe. It's a bartender thing, I guess."
That seemed to spark something in the man. "Yes, that's it! You were on the news two years ago. Something about a -"
The colour drained from Tifa's face. "I'm not sure what you mean."
"That girl in Edge, that's you isn't it? They said you were a hero. Gave some big speech over you and that nasty pandemic business, didn't they?" he continued cordially, oblivious to her discomfort.
"Oh. Yes, that. No, just a look-alike. Excuse me," she said, and retreated into the crowd to find something else to look busy doing, leaving the man standing there looking bemused.
Of course. Of course there had been fucking cameras there, and of course anyone with a working screen had seen it. She'd hoped no one would remember, but obviously someone did. Now she could hope he didn't say anything to anyone else.
Her thoughts inevitably drifted back to the stigma after that. It was still poorly-understood what it was - something auto-immune, she'd heard. She wasn't sure how true it was. The contagion seemed to spread regardless of how well they had quarantined it, and there were theories it had been spread directly through the Lifestream, which had become tainted as well - apparently its cells weren't the only part of it that had been infectious. That would be the sort of thing Sephiroth would do, because by all rights it made no sense and was just another perversion of the rules of how everything should work.
Either they didn't teach that sort of thing in whatever school Sephiroth had gone to, or he knew and simply didn't care. She had watched him move through the air with nothing but force of will; pass through walls as though they weren't there at all; rend buildings to pieces without so much as lifting a hand; create spaces inside spaces that might not have been there at all. It was as though he simply ignored the world around him and what it should be and its rules, because no one had told him he couldn't.
It was completely alien. Which was fitting, all things considered, and for a while that was the easiest way to think about it. Weird alien stuff from a weird alien guy.
Then Cloud had done it too - understood the rules that weren't rules, and...
He wasn't human, they knew. Not biologically, anyway. It was easy enough to pretend he was most days, but sometimes he would move in a way he shouldn't, or something else would, or...
Or whatever had happened during Meteorfall. Tifa didn't understand it, and if Cloud himself did he wasn't telling.
"Miss Lockhart." Thank god, a distraction. Tifa turned around. Shera waved at her.
"Got a job for you," she continued. "Scouting."
Tifa approached her and lowered her voice. "Scouting? I thought we had this area mapped."
"We do. The important parts, anyway," she explained. "It's not where we're concerned with, it's what. There's a lot of small caves a bit further up north. Now that there's more raw Lifestream in the atmosphere than there was, we think some of the local wildlife might have started moving closer."
Well, that was another reason she'd been assigned to this job specifically, she supposed. Mountaineering was already a pretty valuable skill, but there weren't a lot of mountaineeers that could also handle "local wildlife". The great glaciers has small pockets of dragon populations sprinkled throughout the area, among other things.
"Don't be gone too long." Shera handed her a small bag. Tracking tags, in case she found a nesting female, the gods forbid. "If you're more than twelve hours we're sending a rescue party after you."
The minute Tifa was out of sight of the settlement she felt her shoulders unknot. This was something she could handle - a big cave with a bunch of monsters in it. It was almost like old times. Those few brief weeks had probably been the happiest in her life in a long time, even amid the near-death experiences and the recent sting of loss. The sense of accomplishment one got from puling themselves up a sheer cliff-face, the thrill of a fight alongside that growing family they had built with each other, the little discoveries of bits of ruins left over from the Ancients.
There seemed to be a lot of them in this area, she mused as she began to make her way across a particularly narrow crevasse by bracing her weight against the wall above it. Never anything too intact - bits of old armour, sometimes the remains of weapons, presumably from the ensuing fight against Jenova. She wondered how long they had lasted - if they'd been wiped out in a matter of days, or had slowly been worn away over a few decades or even centuries.
Tifa carefully slid down the side of the cliff she found at the end of it, kicking off the wall at the end to land lightly on her feet. Cloud or Yuffie would have probably just jumped straight off, but she was no slouch either (and also had a better sense of self-preservation than the both of them combined, in all honesty).
There was a huge structure in the distance - a natural ridge that seemed sunk into the ice as much as it jutted over the horizon. No one had gone there - there was little point given the arctic temperatures and the long hike over. It was just far enough out of her way to where she probably wouldn't be able to take a look, either. Perhaps someday, though...
There were rumours the lost capital of the Ancients was this far up north. Who knew, maybe she'd finally discover it and be famous for something that wasn't awful and upsetting.
Further around the edge of the cliff she'd come down from, she found an entrance to the cave system. A few gremlins were lurking around the entrace, she'd have to deal with those first, and that probably meant the cave was already teeming with them.
Never mind dragons, this would be what she'd have to deal with for the next few hours.
Tifa sighed, worked out the last few kinks in her neck, and adjusted her gloves. It was gonna be a long ten days.
Cloud had one of his bad days then.
It was something that would never quite go away, he had realised. He wasn't really sure why, and didn't care for the idea of seeing a doctor to find out. It could have been Jenova, or the tests, or leftover brain damage, or just something psychological, or a whole host of other things. Whatever caused it, it was another thing he just had to deal with, and another reason they had their system.
By the time he woke up, there wasn't a Cloud. All the pieces that made him up had fallen apart or crumbled away in a wash of deafening voices, not all of which were his, and not all of which were Jenova. Bits of noise that had been him once drifted away, each one of them not large enough or loud enough in their own right to properly be a person.
There was a noise. A real one, that existed. Something heard it, and realised it had perceived something else different from itself, and realised that it was itself. It clung to that idea, which was all it could really do: I.
There were more bits, then, after it realised that it wanted to be, and would continue being. I am. It was all he could do to latch onto the concept, because that was all he was - I am.
More voices buffeted him and continued tearing at I am, making him waver, the I am faltering before strengthening itself again. Something touched him (real?) and pulled him, and his thoughts weren't yet strong enough to focus on it. They continued focusing on themselves, and suddenly I am was a self-evident, obvious thing.
Then he realised, as much as he could "realise" at that moment, that something was horribly, terribly wrong. That he was hurting very badly, or was about to. The fear sharpened his thoughts, and he became acutely aware of the something touching him. It was a hand, holding his and giving it a gentle squeeze.
That didn't make sense, he thought, and the thoughts came easier that time, which they had obviously been doing the whole time, and he was Cloud, and something was wrong... but that didn't make sense, because he was here. Maybe nothing was wrong after all.
Since he existed, then he must be able to move, which he did then. The hand was still there touching his, which was nice, and there was a noise too - the same one he had heard and recognised. Talking. It was someone, and they were talking, at him... to him? His thoughts briefly fogged over again, and he looked at the source in confusion.
It snapped into place then, more or less. He was Cloud, and nothing was wrong. There was warm air filtering in through the window, and someone was holding his hand and sitting next to him, and talking about...
"...up and left me there! What a dick! If you hadn't come and picked me up I'd probably have been there for hours or -" The voice stopped, as though it had noticed something.
Cloud steadied himself against the other voices and turned to look at where it was coming from. "Jessie?"
Jessie smiled. "Hey, there you are! 'Bout time."
Cloud nodded mutely. At some point she appeared to have led him downstairs and onto the couch in the living area in the back. He stared at the floor and continued lying against Jessie, waiting for the fog to clear. She was saying words, but his brain wouldn't quite parse them properly, and his thoughts wouldn't line up the way they were supposed to in order to make many of his own. It was nice to just be for a while, though.
She continued to talk. About him, maybe? And someone else. Three someones. And a fourth? No, that was her too. Only lost, because of another someone, that said something wrong. His head felt heavy and talking seemed too complicated. So were the directions, which Jessie wasn't supposed to get because he should have been here? No, someone else.
It must have been another hour or so before the fog cleared from his head enough to make requests from his mouth. "How long was I out?"
She paused, checking the clock. "'Bout three hours, give or take. I had to spend a while poking you to until you twitched to make sure you didn't fall down the stairs if I went to the trouble of getting you out of bed, and even after that you didn't really respond to anything," she explained.
He grimaced. Four hours was a marked improvement over the two days it had taken him three months ago. He wished he felt happier about it.
"But, hey," she continued, directing his attention to an end table she had pulled up in front of them, "I made us lunch." Chopped up fruit in a bowl and some cheese. Like himself, Jessie couldn't cook much either, but at least she wasn't barred from the kitchen.
She then scooted away from him and hauled a large box up onto the couch between them. "Found this just lying on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere," she said, and opened the box, displaying the remains of an old sweeper bot. Before Shinra had collapsed, taking most of the government down with it, they'd been used to prevent unauthorised travel in and out of the city, but now that Shinra's servers were no longer active they sat around waiting for orders that never came until they broke down on their own.
Cloud immediately cheered up. "Wait wait wait, lemme -" he blurted, before disappearing out the back door. A moment later he came back with an old broken down desktop computer he'd smuggled out of an old military base the week prior and set it on the floor. The screen was miraculously still intact. Jessie squealed in delight.
They didn't really have the sort of plugs either one would use, so Cloud was forced to jab his thumb into where the cord would have been and continuously run a lightning spell through it while Jessie carefully unloaded the magazine from the sweeper. The power surged and cut out intermittently, but it was better than nothing. Within a few minutes, they had switched off, Cloud dismantling the remains of the robot to look at what was left of the engine, and Jessie excitedly working her way through the state-of-the-art command prompt with one hand and keeping the power supply going with the other (lightning was really the only spell she had bothered mastering).
Jessie would handle the software. Cloud would deal with the hardware. They had a good arrangement.
So, it had been Jessie's turn this week. And Yuffie a week before that, and then Tifa, and then Barret. So next week it would be Barret again. Probably.
Their system was something Tifa had come up with after he slipped into his third vegetative state after Meteorfall and they realised this wasn't going to stop. Cloud needed more or less constant watching, for a variety of reasons. There was always the risk of him mentally shutting down and starving to death in his own bed, of course. But his anxiety had returned with a vengeance after his memory had been sorted out, and the blanks in it were filled in, to the point where it was unmanageable at times. The thought of isolation, for any reason at all, was unbearable. It was more than dislike - it was a full-blown phobia, and as much as he knew it was completely idiotic and juvenile and so, so stupid and pathetic to wind up sobbing, backed up into a corner to fight off a threat that wasn't there, it didn't take more than an hour or two before the first nagging sensations of terror began to set it. There were other problems, too - his brain not storing memories properly at times, things that triggered panic attacks that Cloud couldn't understand why, and the very real threat of the entity still sitting at the edge of his consciousness that he had to focus on browbeating into submission once every few hours.
Barret kept insisting he see a doctor, but the thought of seeing another doctor was one of the only things that scared him more than being alone. Or maybe that was the reason why in the first place. Never again, he'd sworn, and he'd meant it, even if it killed him.
He loved the company, of course. It was everything he'd never even hoped to have in a million years. But he hated the reasons behind it. There was another fear, behind all the rest of them, that if they had the choice to they'd never come back.
That was probably the only reason Tifa even let him live with her for free. Because he was a danger to himself and everyone around him. It couldn't possibly be enjoyable, putting up with him the way she did. No small wonder no one else could before.
So, his family worked in shifts, making sure he got out of bed, or at least was awake and simply choosing not to. Making sure he remembered that he was supposed to be somewhere, and when he was supposed to be there. Making sure he didn't go outside without his sunglasses on. Making sure he wasn't alone.
Weeks with Jessie were actually a bit easier, in that regard. She was almost as much of a mess as he was. It was a bit ironic that they had someone as jumpy as her building their bombs at one point.
Yeah, but Jessie has her own place, he thought bitterly. You live off Tifa's charity. Jessie doesn't have nightmares about -
"You okay?" asked Jessie. "You've been kinda quiet. We don't have to do this now."
"...No, I'm fine," he said. "Do you think we could move this, though? Don't wanna get grease all over the rug."
It took them a few minutes to get everything, lunch included, packed up and moved upstairs, before they went back to taking their finds apart, metaphorically in Jessie's case, literally in Cloud's.
"Anything interesting on there?" he asked, wiping his hands off on his pants before reaching for a piece of cheese.
"Nothing we didn't already know," she replied, looking up from the lines of green text on the black screen and scooting the plate closer to him. "But this was last updated right before Sephiroth cacked the president, so it's before they patched that bug where it doesn't check for signatures of incoming communication requests while you're scanning for unauthorised communication requests. I've always wanted to poke around with that one a bit, just for its own sake." Cloud pushed the plate back towards her, and she took another slice of cheese for herself. "The keyboard's a little water damaged, too, and I keep getting bad sector errors. Did you leave this thing in the rain yesterday?"
"A little, yeah. Is that bad?"
"You can't leave computers outside, Cloud! They're meant for indoor use in labs and fancy military guy stuff. I waterproofed mine for Avalanche but that's not industry standard."
He shrugged. "Nothing's industry standard anymore, technically." He stuffed a handful of berries into his mouth and turned back to his dismantled robot. "The mako drive on this thing overheated and melted most of the moving parts together," he said, picking up the ungainly chunk of metal that used to be the engine and giving it a firm shake to demonstrate. "Not that it'd matter anymore. The lock on the maintenance panel was still working, actually. Must've been a backup battery in there. I don't have the code for it or anything so I just had to rub a magnet against it for a while." He gestured to the chunk of neodymium he kept in an old sock he'd been using.
Jessie sniffed. "Can you keep that away from the computer, then? And stop picking out all the blueberries like an infant-baby?"
Cloud opened his mouth to firmly refuse and tell Jessie exactly what hole she could put her pineapple chunks in before a noise in the kitchen took the words from his mouth. It seemed like movement.
"...Did you hear that?"
Jessie stared at him for a moment. "Uh... no. Sorry."
Normally he would have left it at that - there were plenty of noises he noticed that most people that weren't Nanaki didn't. Lately, however...
"Be right back." He got to his feet and quietly walked to the kitchen, pacing himself to make it sound as though he hadn't heard anything, the electricity he'd been using earlier now humming at his fingertips in deadlier amounts.
He stepped around the corner, looking around. The kitchen appeared empty.
No, not empty. Something else moved. Maybe a floater across his eye. Maybe not. Cloud took another couple steps forward, and the noise started up again.
He tensed up. They had followed him from the tower. They must have. They couldn't get inside, could they? He hadn't let them inside. He couldn't quite see them, but they were inside now.
"Jessie?" he called out in warning. That was all he got out. If she replied, he wouldn't have heard, as his thoughts were abruptly snuffed out again.
It was different this time - more inconsistent. A few moments later, he was suddenly treated to the shock of having a functioning mind and realising that he couldn't move all at once before it drowned him out again. Brief periods of awareness seemed to come in waves that he had no control over, no matter how much he struggled. He tried to leave, but his legs didn't seem to work, and half the time he couldn't seem to feel them at all. Every muscle was locked up, and in the brief flashes he was able to feel anything, he felt a sharp, stabbing pain in his chest. The shapes whirled around them, and he was struck with how much he hated looking at them. Everything felt far away, as though he was being pulled somewhere. Before it could, something else pulled him away, with sharper claws, and it seemed as though he were falling. Help was the last coherent thought he managed to have, as the claws loosened and he slipped under.
"Jessie?" Cloud's voice echoed down the hall, a note of alarm in his voice. Jessie looked up from her computer.
"Yeah?"
No response.
"Do they need me on tables already? Isn't it a little early for that?"
Silence.
"Cloud, Tifa called! She's pregnant and Red's the father!"
Nothing. Jessie snatched up an electric drill from Cloud's tool kit and ran into the kitchen.
Cloud was standing there, quite alone, staring at a spot under the sink. She lowered the drill in confusion. "What, what is it?" She looked under the sink. It was empty, and she turned back to Cloud. "What are you... looking..."
His jaw was set, but his eyes were unfocused. His face was ashen and his lips had acquired a blue tint. He had stopped breathing.
"Cloud?!" She slapped him then, uncertain of what else to do. It always worked in the movies, didn't it?
Cloud didn't start breathing again, but that was enough to unbalance him and cause him to topple to the floor with a dull thud. She rolled him over, her panic growing, and fumbled for her cell phone as his eyes rolled back and he passed out.
Before she could finish dialing, he started breathing again.
Cloud stood on the edge of the crater's lip, staring over it, hefting the Buster Sword in his hand. His foot shifted, and a pebble dislodged and skipped down the walls of the cliff. The wind howled, drowning out the staccato tapping after a few moments, and the cold bit right into him through his jacket. Barret came up behind him.
"You ain't done it yet?" he said, clearly wanting to be on his way.
Cloud shook his head. "It's dumb. I know it's dumb. It's just -"
"'Course it's dumb. Of all the stupid-ass things you've done, you standin' here for ten minutes and not moving is the dumbest." Cloud said nothing. "What are you gonna do with that thing, anyway? That's what he wanted. Jackass is dead. You gonna keep doing what he wants? Who'd it be for?"
Cloud didn't turn around. "...I dreamt about it for years. It was everything I wanted. It feels like... if I did, it'd all be for nothing. Wouldn't it?"
Barret snorted. "You could do ten times as good as anything they wanted you for. Wasn't that the whole point? This was your own damn idea."
"I guess so." He shifted on the balls of his feet.
"You guess?"
"...No. I'm right. That's why this was a good idea. I thought of it." Barret rolled his eyes, but Cloud thought he saw him smile a bit.
Cloud took about ten steps back, judged the weight, then took a running start and hurled the Buster Sword off Gaea's Cliff with a yell.
They watched it clatter off the rocks, making a racket all the way down, before it bounced out of even Cloud's sight. For a split second, Cloud had the urge to jump down after it and retrieve it. He'd have to fix that. Maybe make his own sword. One that was even better than that one.
"Let's get back to the ship. Marlene's probably getting bored," he said, turning back to Barret, but Barret wasn't there.
There was nothing here with him. He could hear wind, louder than ever, but the air was still around him. Things were lurking behind the wind. They reached for him, gesturing for him to come closer, and he reached back, but the living room floor was in the way.
Cloud snapped awake to see Jessie peering over him, looking shaken, rocking herself nervously. A couple of the new wait staff watched from the doorway.
"...Are you okay?" she asked hesitantly.
"Yeah. Fine," he grunted. The room spun around him, and he shut his eyes to avoid being sick all over her leg. "Must've tripped."
"You... you weren't breathing." Well, so much for that lie.
"I choked when I tripped," he supplied.
"That's not funny, Cloud."
"It's what happened."
"...Well, I'm covering your shift. We already decided," she said slowly. "Go lie down somewhere."
Cloud sat straight up. "You can't do that."
Jessie looked away and took a deep breath. "It was Jensen's idea. I had to have her help me carry you."
Jensen scowled and retreated back out to the dining room. Jessie did not look at Cloud's face. "You stopped breathing. If it were anyone else I'd say you should probably see a..." she stopped short at his glare. "I said if it were anyone else!"
"I'm not gonna lie down, because I feel fine," said Cloud, feeling even worse as he stood up. "I'm gonna be sitting in the dining room, and if you guys need me then I'll be right there ready to say I told you so." He began to head back through the doorway.
"Glasses," Jessie interjected sharply, offering them to him.
"...Right," he said, quietly sliding them on. The last thing they needed was to cause a panic. He paused on his way out again.
"...Please don't tell Tifa," he added quietly.
Jessie crossed her arms and glared at him.
"Fine," she huffed, and got up herself to grab an apron. "Moron," she added under her breath, obviously not caring that Cloud could hear her anyway.
Cloud sat in the corner of the dining room, picking angrily at the placemat. He'd lost another two hours this time, judging by the clock. If he'd been unconscious for that long just from lack of air he probably would be in the hospital, even for someone enhanced. Whatever it was had taken longer than just a few minutes to actually let him wake up.
There had to be a pattern. It was usually at 6:09, but today it hadn't been. It had started at the tower, but they watched him at home, and were clearly already inside. This time he had suffocated. Last time he had walked up a few flights of stairs and stood still for over five hours. This time he hadn't been able to move at all, but he'd still been aware, if barely.
Was it Jenova? This morning he'd had to put himself together again. No, it couldn't be that. Yesterday he had been fine, and had only started having problems afterward. It was Jenova's sort of thing to use him, but not to get its host killed. If that had been an attempt on his life, anyway. It would have been much easier to have him throw himself out a window at the tower.
He had been alone at the tower. But Jessie had been in the other room. Did they know that? Would they have cared about her if they did?
There's no pattern, he thought glumly. There's no pattern and there's no "they" and you're going crazy and all that stuff Hojo put in your brain finally melted a hole in it. He didn't even have solid evidence any of it was real. It could just as easily be a relapse, entirely on his part, or worse.
Cloud suddenly couldn't stand another second indoors under the fluorescents. He made a quick stop to his room, retrieving his sword and the portable radio, then slipped out the back door. Maybe he would lie down somewhere. Because he wanted to.
There was a spot he liked in the ruins. He'd discovered it on accident four years ago, after he put a hole in the roof. He'd thought about fixing it, but that would have worked against the whole reason he liked being there in the first place. Years later, Tifa had coincidentally rediscovered it on her own.
Cloud parked Fenrir just outside the old abandoned church and stepped inside. Between the holes in the roof (besides the one he'd made when he crashed through it) and the stained glass windows, broken or otherwise, the building was filled with sunlight. Some of the broken pews still had cushions on the seat. While the isolation wasn't ideal, sometimes it was just nice to take a nap somewhere and wake up with the sky in full view and the sun in his face.
Cloud switched on the radio again and retuned it to one of the three stations available at this point, which was playing a song he vaguely remembered liking during his time in the military. He couldn't recall any lyrics. He lay down on one of the pews and wondered if he used to know them.
In all likelihood, it was probably just a regular old-fashioned crack-up. The kind he'd never been able to handle before, but especially couldn't now. He'd told himself, and had believed for a while, that it had ended when he had gotten out of the lab; the crying, the pleading, and eventually the resigned submission when he realised no one in the world would help, the shame at the things he'd done and said for the sake of his own self-preservation, and then later for reasons he didn't even understand himself. There was no one left that could hurt him, not really. It should have been over then.
It wasn't over. It would probably never be over. Every last one of them were dead, and there still wasn't a single part of his life that they hadn't dug their fingers into and taken for themselves. He could do whatever he wanted, and pretend to be a mechanic, and have a family that was willing to pretend along with them, but no matter what he was still, in some way, exactly what they had made him.
"It's not fair," he said to the radio, which indifferently continued hitting on an undisclosed third party by comparing her eyes to blue jewels. Cloud felt as though he were being mocked, and tuned the radio back to jazz before tossing it over to the patch of dirt that had broken his landing four years ago, next to the pool of deceptively harmless-looking water. It landed speaker-down but continued playing. It didn't take him long after that to doze off in the warm sun filtering in through the windows.
He slept for longer than he had wanted to, and was woken up by the sound of his phone ringing. Tifa. He'd forgotten entirely.
He missed the first call while fumbling through his pockets for the right one, but when he called back she picked up on the first ring.
"Hi. Sorry. Dropped my phone," he said. He wasn't entirely sure why he lied about misplacing what pocket he put it in. Maybe it sounded less stupid that way? The first lie of probably several in this call.
"Well, you called back on your own," came Tifa's voice from the receiver. "How is everything?"
"I spaced out earlier today," he said hesitantly. "I'm fine now, but Jessie's covering for me at the bar."
"How long were you this time?"
"About four hours."
"That's good!" She sounded genuinely happy about it. Cloud felt his chest clench painfully, and kept his gaze on the floor, as though she were there in front of him. "And you were worried it was getting worse."
"Yeah... guess so," he replied, trying to match her tone.
"They've got reception set up here, finally. Don't feel bad about calling, we've got the juice to support it now. They think they'll have a generator here in the next six months, as long as nothing goes horribly wrong all at once." A pause on the line. "Is Jessie there with you? Your end is pretty quiet."
"I stepped out for a bit. It's really nice out tonight." It was. The sun had just set, and the first few stars were beginning to appear. It was a bit colder, but not unpleasantly so.
"Send me some warm weather if you get the chance, alright?" she joked. "I'll see you soon."
"Mm. See you soon." He flipped his phone closed.
It wasn't fair.
