A/N: So uh. It's been six years since my last update.

HERE'S A NEW CHAPTER, HOPEFULLY I HAVE GOTTEN BETTER AT WRITING, ENJOY CLOUD BEING DAD-ISH.

Self-Imposed Responsibility

(Cloud Is A Guilty Dad)

Tifa stood nervously biting her lip, her arms crossed over her chest. It had been thirty minutes since that call, and she couldn't help but worry about that boy. Hundreds of people had died from Geostigma since it had appeared the year before, and nobody had found a cure. There wouldn't be much they could do for the boy except keep him comfortable and treat his symptoms. Tifa had gotten out a bowl of water and some towels, and gotten the guest room ready to receive another occupant. When the little girl staying with them noticed Tifa bustling about, she'd offered to help.

"Who is Cloud bringing, Tifa?" Marlene asked, her eyes wide as she carried a few towels.

Tifa set down a large bowl of water on the nightstand. "A little boy he found in the Midgar ruins. There wasn't anyone around to help him, so we're taking care of him."

Marlene frowned, troubled. "Is he hurt?"

Tifa pursed her lips nervously. Marlene understood that people were sick, but she'd never been directly exposed to someone with the sickness. "He has Geostigma, Cloud says."

Marlene gasped, her little voice heartbroken. "That's really bad!"

Tifa nodded, sadly. "He's sick. So we need to help him get better, okay?"

Marlene was too young to truly understand the gravity of the situation, and Tifa was glad for that. The little girl nodded in determination and went to the guest room to help get it ready for their guest.

Tifa now stood waiting out in the bar for Cloud to arrive, tapping her foot absently. She was always waiting for the blond these days. He hardly spent any time with her, or Marlene. His delivery service had taken off quite nicely, and it took him as far as Junon sometimes, but even though he had little time to spare he liked to run off and just be by himself. He never picked up his phone, or called back. She didn't even know if he listened to her many, many messages she left him. Probably not, she thought to herself, with a taste of annoyance. Why wouldn't he just talk to her once in a while? Was there something bothering him that made him run off all the time? Why wouldn't he talk about it with her? She was annoyed, even though she knew she shouldn't be. Wasn't she being just a little clingy towards him?

"Urgh, why is he so complicated?" she said in frustration. "And I thought women were complicated..." Cloud had never voiced his feelings toward Tifa. Was she still just a friend to him? It seemed that way. He had never said it out loud, but Tifa could tell that Cloud had cared deeply for Aerith. Maybe he'd even loved her, she didn't know. He still loves her, even now that she's gone, she thought. He'll never get over her. It made her sad to think how he'd lost someone he loved so much, but it was even more saddening to know that he wouldn't go to her for comfort.

Cloud hadn't sounded too concerned on the phone, but Tifa wondered how he was handling this. Either he was completely fine, or he was hiding how helpless he really felt. Cloud wasn't a doctor, and he often freaked out when he couldn't do anything to help someone. She hoped he didn't run off when he needed her most.

That meat-head... she thought. He didn't feel right if he couldn't beat the problem over the head, or slice it in two.

She was pulled from her reverie by the front doors swinging open. She gasped, startled, but was glad to see Cloud walk in carrying a little boy. She rushed over to assess the situation.

"Is he alright?" she asked, worriedly.

Cloud shrugged. There wasn't much to say; the kid was unconscious in his arms, and Cloud was no doctor. "I dunno."

Tifa bit her lip. "We made up the guest room for him. Up here." She turned to the stairs and ascended.

Cloud raised an eyebrow. Why was she showing him where her guest room was, when he'd been living in her house for more than a year? It just seemed unnecessary. But he shrugged it off, knowing that if he voiced his opinion, it would probably start a stupid and pointless argument between them. He followed obediently, carefully supporting the sleeping child in his arms.

Marlene moved aside as the two adults passed. She stared at the boy in Cloud's arms, curious. "What's wrong with him?" she asked, when they entered the room being used to house their new guest.

Tifa didn't like keeping information from the little girl. However, given the boy's condition, letting Marlene know the details could cause more problems than were bearable at the moment. Besides, nobody really knew how to explain Geostigma. So, she had to improvise, and hope the girl was satisfied. "We don't know for sure, but we will soon enough." She smiled.

Marlene was silent. It looked as though she took the bait, but wasn't entirely assured.

Cloud set the boy down on the bed as gently as possible, so as not to wake him. While Tifa scurried around, moving things out of the way and getting ready to house another person for a while, Cloud watched the boy. He was still, his chest hardly rising and falling to show he was alive and breathing. The only way Cloud could tell that he was indeed still alive was his fever, and how warm he had felt in Cloud's arms only seconds before. It was a lot different than the first part of the trip home, when the kid couldn't stop shaking.

Tifa moved around him to start nursing the boy, grabbing a towel and dunking it in the water, then wringing it out to gently use on the boy's forehead. "Thank you for bringing him here, Cloud. He looks miserable."

Cloud frowned. "Do you think you should be touching him like that?"

Tifa glanced back at him, glaring. "You were touching him all over, and you weren't at all afraid, right? Someone has to take care of him."

Cloud continued to frown as Tifa did her best to wipe away the grime from the boy's face and arms, and make him more comfortable. It was true, he hadn't been worried about himself. But they said the disease was contagious, and he couldn't live with himself if Tifa fell ill. "Just… be careful." He turned to leave and saw Marlene peeking around the door pane into the room. "Let me know if you need anything," Cloud called back, without looking. He slipped past Marlene and ruffled her hair, to which she scowled, upset that he'd messed up her hair.

Cloud walked across the hall to his room, closing the door behind him and stripping off his harness. Why had he taken the boy home with him? It wasn't as if he'd helped any other children suffering from the disease before. There wasn't anything he could do. But when he found a kid all by himself in the ruins of Midgar, of all places, taking the kid home was suddenly the right thing to do. He knew that Tifa wouldn't have accepted any different, and he probably couldn't bring himself to leave the kid behind, either.

At least the children in Edge were surrounded by people, sometimes friends and family. This kid had been wandering around in Sector 5 all by himself. Cloud couldn't help but think there was a reason for that, and it made his insides churn with discomfort.

He'd been alone like that, when he was a kid. He was the weird kid with no dad and terrible social skills who was always creeping on Tifa, and other boys figured those were perfect reasons to start fights. Cloud had thought so too, he supposed; he started a lot of the fights himself. At least from what he could remember, of course.

He didn't even remember the experiments he'd gone through. He was unconscious the whole time, and after Zack had pulled them out it was all a blur. He remembered walking sometimes, but he never knew where he was. After Tifa helped pull him out of the Lifestream-after that debacle at the Northern Crater-those memories never returned, so he figured he wasn't even conscious for most of that year Zack dragged him around. The rest was only beginning to come back to him, even after a year.

He knew who he was, and he remembered the incident at Nibelheim. He remembered Zack broke them out and pulled him to safety, and a few moments during that time. He remembered that Zack was his best friend, and the only person he really cared about besides Tifa. Then everything he did after waking up at the train station in Sector 7 he remembered perfectly. So everything that he was conscious for after they broke out of Nibelheim was intact.

But everything before that was still pretty much shattered. He remembered a few moments while he was in the army, but everything else was a blur. He remembered growing up with his loving mother, being angry at other boys and sad that Tifa's father hated him, then seeing Sephiroth in the paper and deciding to join SOLDIER… but it all seemed like it belonged to someone else. He had no emotional connection to anything that wasn't Tifa, or his mother. Even his feelings about his mother were dulled, and he had trouble remembering her face.

He was still pretty screwed up. Tifa had helped him piece together the important events that put together his identity when he'd had that mental breakdown, but everything else was still coming back. One of the biggest blows to his psyche was that he couldn't remember most of the days he'd spent with his best friend. He felt the happiness he'd felt from the few memories he recalled, and the overwhelming longing and the loss from his death, but most of the memories were missing. He hadn't even remembered the day he met Zack until recently.

All he knew was that the day Zack died, he was so heartbroken that his mind couldn't handle it, and it shattered. He was only barely coping with it now. Aerith's meaningless death hadn't helped at all, either.

He'd let the two people he loved more than anything die right in front of him. He told himself to get over it, that he wasn't helping anyone moping around like this, but it wasn't something his head could control. No matter how strong he was physically, he would always fear losing those he loved.

Luckily, he'd destroyed every trace of Sephiroth there was, and Shinra had been literally leveled to the ground by Meteor. His two biggest opponents were gone, so maybe he could start to be useful for once. Maybe that's why he took the kid home with him, to show that he could save just one person. There was that, and the self-imposed similarity between himself and the boy, and the weird coincidence that he'd found him at the church in Sector 5.

He knew Aerith was gone. He'd felt her leave this world, in his own arms. But sometimes, he could still hear her when he visited the church. Maybe she was talking to him, or maybe he was crazy, but it helped him cope with the fact that he'd let her be brutally murdered and done nothing to stop it. He liked to think she was still there with him, guiding him, because he had no idea how to guide himself.

Maybe she'd guided the boy to the church because she knew Cloud could help him. Maybe it was all crazy bullshit Cloud came up with himself so he wouldn't feel so lost. Either way, he hoped he could at least do something for the boy.

He pushed all the weird, crazy thoughts away to make way for thoughts about how to socialize correctly. Tifa was calling him, and he was still terrible at dealing with children.

########

Tifa had called him to watch the boy while she went and bought some supplies. He had offered to go, but she'd given him this look that screamed, 'Would you really know what to look for, Cloud?' He'd relented, albeit defensively. He could read a list, at least! He didn't always know what they meant, but he could find things on a shelf.

He sighed. The kid hadn't moved, and Marlene was restless. They'd asked her to stay out of the room for now, and the two adults were busy and she had nobody to play with. Occasionally she pouted from the doorframe, wanting to see the new boy who had entered their household.

Cloud was stuck between two children with no experience on how to handle them. Marlene was an easy child, luckily, and she didn't press. Usually. If she decided to cry, he would have no idea what to do. And this new boy hadn't even moved, so that was easy to deal with. He sat and read a book while he waited, not even absorbing any of the material.

He didn't keep an eye on the clock, but when the room started to get darker he looked up from the page he'd been staring at for far too long. The sun was setting outside, and Tifa still hadn't returned. Cloud scoffed. Maybe she hadn't known where to find something any better than he would have. That was suggesting he would take as long. Damn. He'd implicated himself.

It was then he noticed a small whimper. Normal people usually didn't recognize small sounds like that right away, but his SOLDIER-enhanced hearing made it easy to tell that the whimper was coming from his right, and that he'd heard the boy make that exact sound earlier when he'd found him on the ground by his bike. He sat forward and turned to look at the child, a little concerned because Tifa wasn't there to help him oh Gaia. "Hey," he said quietly. "You awake?"

The boy opened his eyes. That answered his question. Cloud tried to be as comforting as he knew how, and tried not to think about how he'd scared Marlene the first time he'd met her. "You're safe here. You need anything? Water?"

The boy whimpered again, shifting in pain beneath the covers. "It hurts," he said in a small voice.

Cloud's heart panged at that. Children weren't supposed to be in pain. "I know… Sorry. Hopefully Tifa will be back with painkillers soon." He tried to think of something to get the boy's mind off his pain. "What's your name?" he asked.

The boy didn't answer right away, wincing from the pain in his forehead. "Denzel…"

Cloud nodded. "Denzel. I'm Cloud. I found you at the church in the Midgar ruins."

Denzel frowned, confused. "Church…?"

"You don't remember?" Cloud asked. Denzel shook his head, and Cloud sighed. "That place is dangerous. Do you remember why you were there?"

Denzel didn't answer, still frowning, but not as focused on how much his forehead hurt. Cloud decided to keep talking, in case he noticed again. "Are you one of the orphans?"

Denzel's frown turned downward, sadly, and he nodded. Cloud went on and asked, "Why were you all by yourself? Don't you have any friends?"

Denzel shook his head again, growing less sad and more vacant. Cloud didn't want to think about what had happened to this kid when most of the orphans in the city already had it rough. "Do you have anywhere to go?" he asked. Another shake of the head was his reply.

Cloud was running out of things to say. "That's rough…" he replied, lamely. This is why he should never be around kids.

"Am I gonna die?"

Cloud's gaze shot up. Denzel was looking right at him, his eyes still pained and sad. Shit. He couldn't lie and say the kid was going to be fine. That would be cruel.

Denzel went on. "Will I die like everyone else? Like Ruvie, and Gaskin, and everyone else who got sick. I'm gonna puke black stuff and die." His eyes started to tear up and his lower lip trembled.

Cloud had to say something. He hoped it would help. "No. We're gonna fight it."

Denzel looked confused again, and Cloud went on. "I won't lie, it's gonna suck. It will hurt, and it will feel like nothing is helping. But you aren't gonna die, okay? As long as you keep fighting, you'll live. We're gonna help you. You're safe here."

Denzel sniffed. "But, there's no cure."

"There's no cure that anyone has found. We're gonna keep fighting until we find one, okay?" He put a hand that he hoped was comforting on Denzel's shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

Denzel stared, sniffed, and nodded. Cloud relaxed a little, glad that he'd taken the bait. Except that it wasn't really bait. Everything Cloud had said was true. He was going to find a cure for Geostigma to cure Denzel.

It seemed unfair that Cloud suddenly cared when he came into direct contact with an afflicted child, and he hadn't done anything about it before, but this kid had literally collapsed into his life. Maybe this was the world's way of telling him to get his ass up and do something, already. So he hadn't helped before. He was helping now, and that's what mattered.

Cloud asked Denzel mundane things until Tifa came back. Denzel was nine years old, he'd lived on the Sector 7 plate (which Cloud secretly regretted), and he liked typical boy things like motorcycles and airplanes. Cloud tried to think of something nice to get Denzel the next time he went out.

A/N: Hope you enjoyed this short chapter I crapped out in three days. This fic is still going, just like every other one I haven't finished! I love reviews, please review I love you all and your kind words. Hopefully it won't take another 6 years to write chapter 3 holy crap (it probably won't).