IV
"And they ride, they ride, the drama takes the lead; they ride, they ride, the beast of Heaven their guide…"
He was bleeding, and it was black.
Cloud swore softly to himself as he dragged himself back toward the chamber of Project Terminus. He'd known that using the power of his JENOVA cells would accelerate his mutant Geostigma; he'd just had no idea how much.
And the pain. He'd forgotten the pain.
But he walked, the wing a terrible weight dragging his left shoulder down, heavier than the First Tsurugi by far, even though such an emaciated, cruel appendage should weigh next to nothing. He walked, the wing dragging along the floor behind him, striking sparks from the metal and the pavement.
He walked into the room which breathed, and he saw a man.
Rufus Shin-Ra had not aged well. His hair had thinned and gone completely white. His beautiful features had hardened, then sagged.
But he stood straight in his white coat, the shotgun dangling almost casually from his left hand, as he stood regarding the machine.
"Please don't try to stop me, Rufus," Cloud said, straightening up and flaring out his wing despite the horrific pain which the motion sent shooting through his body. "I've killed enough old friends for one day."
Rufus glanced over his shoulder at him. "So you beat Valentine," he said. "I would have owed Reno a substantial amount of money, if you hadn't killed him." His voice had lost none of its sonorous depth or power over the years, nor did it seem he had lost any of his control. If Cloud hadn't known the man, he wouldn't even have known Rufus was upset.
"It wasn't easy," Cloud said. "Now step aside and let me finish my mission."
He saw the man's lips quirk. "I suppose I should at that. The last time we fought, you killed Dark Nation and I barely got away with my skin." His white coat fluttering in the sighing of the machine, Rufus turned to look at Cloud full-on. "But maybe you'd like to let me talk for a while first, and then you can go ahead and end the world as we know it."
"I've waited fifteen years," Cloud said.
"Isn't the usual corollary to that statement 'I can wait another few minutes?'"
"Not in this case. Move, Rufus."
With an exaggerated shrug, Rufus walked over to stand in a corner. "Have it your way. I'll just talk while you insert the Protomateria and the machine runs through its startup routine. I know for a fact that it will take seven minutes to prime."
Cloud paused as he reached into his coat for the Protomateria. "How…?"
"Let's go back to twenty years ago," Rufus said. "A certain wealthy individual, for philanthropic reasons, became interested in the idea of manned expeditions into the Lifestream. He contacted a Lifestream-studies expert, a man by the name of Victor Aleph, and asked him to design a machine to facilitate that kind of exploration."
"You're the one who commissioned the construction of this thing?" Cloud demanded, waving at Project Terminus. The machine seemed to quiver in response.
"Of course," Rufus said. "But I've never liked first-person narratives. Do you want to hear the rest or not?"
Narrowing his eyes, Cloud crossed the room to the core of the device and inserted the Protomateria. The sickly-green glow immediately brightened, then began to shade away from green into the violet spectrum. "Talk. Like you said, we have seven minutes."
The breathing of the machine began to accelerate.
"Dr. Aleph had pioneered many theories and made many discoveries about the Lifestream," Rufus said. "Thus, he was uniquely suited to take on a task of this nature. For four long years, he slaved away at the problem. The philanthropic individual kept tabs on his progress, and when Dr. Aleph finally produced this machine, which he chose to call Terminus Est, he was pleased at a good investment."
Cloud felt the bizarre constructions around him begin to hum at a frequency he could feel in his molars. The valves shuddered and produced forked tongues of blue-white flame.
"But Dr. Aleph told the individual that the machine could not be used without forever altering, perhaps destroying, the fabric of our reality." Rufus gestured at the machine, at Terminus Est. "You see, you and several others have been swept up in the physical aspect of the Lifestream and had your spirits interact with entities on the other side, but your bodies were always here, on the Planet. Dr. Aleph explained that this machine was capable of crossing the physical threshold between this place and the Lifestream – not the current of mako energy running through the Planet, but the actual Lifestream."
The hum increased in volume. Cloud realized it sounded less like a hum and more like a moan, or a toneless scream.
"And," Rufus continued, "Dr. Aleph explained that upon completion of this project, something became obvious to him. The threshold between this world and the other one, between the Planet and the Lifestream, exists as an absolute concept. It is not like a wall, where a section can be brought down and later restored. It either exists, or it does not."
"So breaking one part of the wall breaks the entire thing, forever," Cloud said. "Now I understand why everyone was so adamant I not use this thing, and why the Sons of Weiss wanted it so badly."
Rufus smirked. "What did Reeve tell you before he died, Cloud? That this machine would let you see your loved ones again at the cost of the rest of the world?"
"Something like that. He certainly didn't lay it out in clinical terms like you did." Cloud shrugged, though the pain was steadily getting worse. "But it doesn't really matter. I've come this far, and I'm not going to stop now. Like I told Vincent, without me, there wouldn't be a planet for this machine to change. I bought everyone a few extra decades when I stopped Sephiroth; now I'm – how would you put it? – cashing in on my investment."
"Clever, Cloud," Rufus said. "A very neat rationalization of what you're doing."
"So why are you here?" Cloud asked. "You don't seem particularly interested in stopping me. I mean, you didn't even try to shoot me in the back when I put the Protomateria in."
"That wing of yours would doubtless just block the slugs," Rufus said with a sigh. "Honestly, Cloud? I came here to tell you the precise ramifications of your actions. That's all. I didn't truly expect that knowing the hard details would cause you to magically reconsider, but I never like to see anyone make an uninformed decision."
"Thanks, but the details really don't matter to my decision." Cloud glanced up reflexively as Terminus Est shuddered, the blue-white flames pouring from its orifices growing. "My mutant Geostigma's terminal. The doctor told me that a few days ago. I'll never make it to the Lifestream myself when I die. I'll never see Tifa again – or Aerith, or Zack, or Mom. Going to them myself… or bringing them to me… whatever this is, it's the only way to make it work."
"I understand that," Rufus said. "But I don't think it's a good enough reason. So I don't think I'll be giving you the code."
Cloud felt his stomach lurch. "What?"
The floor shifted. There was a sudden blast of hot air behind him. Turning, Cloud saw the core of the machine extruding a panel. It was a simple interface, a touch-screen device with a numbered keypad and two buttons, one labeled CONFIRM and the other ABORT.
"I had Dr. Aleph program in a code to initiate the final breaching sequence," Rufus said. "So nobody could actually activate Terminus Est but me."
"You son of a bitch," Cloud growled. He took a step forward, then shuddered and nearly collapsed to one knee as his body screamed in protest. He slammed the First Tsurugi's point against the floor so he could lean on the sword, the pain making it almost impossible to stay upright.
"I lied before," Rufus said, sounding almost apologetic. "I did come here to tell you all the details of the project, but my purpose in telling you them was mostly to stall. I knew you would have to resort to desperate measures to beat Valentine, and the only such measures available to you were your JENOVA cells. I also knew you wouldn't survive long after using them, considering how it would advance the spread of your Geostigma." He gestured at his shotgun. "And I didn't bother to shoot you in the back because I didn't want to waste my ammunition."
"I'll kill you," Cloud hissed. "Tell me the damn code so I can go home to her, Rufus. Before these things eat me alive from the inside and I go to Hell."
"You know I can't do that. I'm here to save the world, Cloud, not destroy it." Rufus shrugged. "I'm sorry it has to be this way, but –"
He stopped talking abruptly as Cloud hurled himself forward and drove the sharp point of his wing through Rufus's eye socket, up into his brain.
"GIVE ME THE FUCKING CODE!" Cloud roared.
He raked metal fingers through Rufus's dying mind, the JENOVA cells lending him their powers even as his body consumed itself trying to fight them. He saw the code in his mind's eye, seven shining digits, and knew they were Reno's Shin-Ra ID number.
Cloud let Rufus fall limply off his wing. Of course, he thought. That isn't a number he'd forget.
His legs gave out from under him. He felt Terminus Est pulse around him, the flames rising ever higher, the machine screaming as it approached its own threshold. He dragged himself across the floor back to the core, leaving a trail of viscous black blood in his wake. With all his remaining strength, Cloud hauled himself upright, leaning against the console. He punched the code in with trembling fingers.
"Cloud…"
Even though he could feel his very life ebbing away, Cloud looked back at the dying man on the floor, his face covered in blood. Rufus stared up at Cloud with his one remaining eye, his shotgun leveled at his back.
"Would… you want them… to see you like this?" he hissed.
The shotgun spoke. Cloud felt the slugs tear into his body, spraying black all over the machine, black which clung wetly to the metal in some places and boiled away with the force of the flames in others. His eyes bled it, obscuring his vision.
"Tifa, I'm sorry," Cloud whispered.
He pressed a button. He couldn't see which one it was. He didn't know which one he wanted it to be.
He felt himself dissolving.
"It must not have worked," Elena said.
Tseng, standing across the room in the ruined remains of Project Terminus, turned to look at her. "What?"
"What's left of the Protomateria is in here," Elena replied. "The machine was clearly primed, and from the looks of this explosion and the fact that we're still here, talking, it just must not have worked."
With a scowl, Tseng hobbled across the room to stand next to her so he could look into the core himself. "You're telling me we went through all that hell to protect something that doesn't even do what it was supposed to do? That Aleph was a crazy hack and built a machine that didn't even work?"
"Either it didn't work," Elena said, "or it did something other than what it was supposed to do. I mean, does it feel like we're in the Lifestream right now?"
"I wouldn't know," Tseng told her. "I've never been." He crossed his arms. "But if Cloud activated the machine, he must have gotten the code from Rufus. And Rufus would never give that up willingly, right?"
"Not unless he wanted Cloud to win, I guess. Dammit, there are a lot of questions I doubt we'll ever get answered."
"Mm." Tseng stared into the blackened core of the machine.
The glassy remains of the Protomateria were inside. The sphere had been cracked clean in two directly down the middle, the halves oddly symmetrical.
"So what do we do now?" Elena asked.
Tseng looked up at her. "We do the only thing we can do after the apocalypse," he said. "We keep on living."
They left that place, then, returning to the elevator they'd taken down. Tseng smiled at Elena as the doors closed them in and the elevator began to rise. They would go back to their lives, the world would keep turning, and his wounds would heal.
They would always heal.
Fin
Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I enjoyed writing it. A small note: I'd just like to say that there is no one "right" interpretation of exactly what happened at the end. I don't know the final result of this conflict. So feel free to think whatever you want without worrying about Word of God! Until next time.