Getting released from the hospital the next evening proved to be a much greater ordeal than Cloud had anticipated, considering Barret lacked a car and the hospital wasn't willing to offer chauffeuring to him after the earlier incident with the nurse. He wasn't sure why it was such a big deal - they were right in a hospital anyway, so all they would've had to do was move him to another room to put his teeth back in, but apparently he had been asked not to come back, which was fine by him. Never again.

Barret assured him he'd arranged an escort, and it took several reassurances to the doctor that Cloud could handle the walk home despite having woken up from a coma the day prior for him to finally get clearance to leave. They were nice enough to give him a pair of disposable sunglasses for the time he'd be outside, at least.

When he walked through the door to the Seventh Heaven, he was met with two familiar faces. The first was Marlene, asleep on the couch, who came with Barret during his weeks. The second, to his surprise, was Yuffie.

"Where's Jessie?" asked Cloud, frowning in confusion.

"Hello to you, too," said Yuffie, rolling her eyes. Cloud opened his mouth to recover, but she shrugged it off. "You were out for three days, remember? It's Barret's turn. But she actually freaked out and left two days ago, and I've been covering until he could get out here."

"She...?"

"She'd got it into her head that it was her fault or something. She showed us your note. I told her it wasn't her fault you went and got yourself all maimed, but she's taking it pretty hard." Yuffie shrugged. "I dunno, maybe she thinks this is another Wedge thing."

Barret shot a severe look at Cloud, who turned his gaze to the ground.

"Well," said Barret almost calmly, which made the pit in his stomach worsen, "I'll have to remember to ask Jessie what happened while she was with you, huh?"

Yuffie looked between them uncomfortably. "...Are you two okay?"

"Yeah."

"Yup."

"Well... alright. Do I get a hello now?"

Cloud nodded and pulled her into a hug with his good arm, which Yuffie gingerly returned.

"I asked her to come out here," said Barret. "Kept an eye on Marlene for me while I was at Edge Medical." He turned to Yuffie. "We'll need to have a talk later, about you staying extra, at least until Tifa gets back."

Cloud's blood ran cold, and he spoke up. "Does Tifa -"

"Know you almost died? Yeah," said Yuffie, handing him his phone, which appeared badly scuffed but at least operable. "She offered to fly back early, but we told her Barret was already here. She'll wanna hear from you, though."

"Right... so I guess I'll take care of that lat -"

Yuffie narrowed her eyes. "Call her, Cloud." They watched him expectantly. Cloud took a deep breath, and dialed. She picked up on the first ring.

"Cloud! I'm so sorry, I would've come back but there's only one airship in and out, and - what happened?! You're okay, right?"

"I'm... fine." He wished Barret and Yuffie would stop staring at him. "I just got home now. Barret and Yuffie are with me."

"What happened? Did someone run you off the road? I don't -"

"I..."

He looked between Barret and Yuffie, who was covering for Jessie, who had left because of him.

"I'll... do you have time to talk tomorrow?"

"...Cloud, what's wrong?"

"Call me back tomorrow. Take care of what you need to. I... we need to talk about - about what I told you before I left."

There was a period of silence on the other end of the phone, before a very quiet "okay" came through, followed by a click.

He pocketed his phone with some difficulty through the bandages, and turned to Barret and Yuffie, the latter of which who was now glaring at him.

"...I promise I'll tell you tomorrow, okay? I just... I wanna get home. Sit down." That part wasn't really a lie, at least not entirely. Enhancements or no, his legs were about ready to give out from all the walking following everything his body had been through in the last three days.

"Whatever. But Barret and I decided that I'm gonna be staying with you 24/7."

"Fine. That's fine." He staggered over to the couch and slumped onto it, then gently shook Marlene. "Hey. Hey, little girl. What are you doing, sleeping in my spot?"

Marlene yawned and spent a moment rubbing the sleep from her eyes, then threw her arms around his neck, prompting another pained groan from him. "Cloud! You woke up!"

"Yeah. Had a real good nap."

"The doctor said you weren't gonna," said Marlene, sniffling a bit, and Cloud saw her eyes looked a bit red. "She said if you didn't wake up after one day then you might not wake up at all."

"Well, most doctors are full of sh - nonsense," he corrected at Barret's indignant grunt. "I've shook off worse than that, remember?"

"Papa took me in to see you when you were asleep," she continued as Barret picked her up. "Can you show me your arm cuts?"

"Marlene!" objected Barret. Cloud gave a rusty laugh.

"I wanna see 'em and Dr. Laughton didn't let me!"

"...I haven't seen 'em yet either, actually. If I have a look at them first and it's not too bad, I'll let you see, okay?"

"You're not gonna like what's under there, Cloud," Barret warned. Cloud shrugged.

"I've had worse," he said, which was undeniably true. "We're gonna have to change the bandages soon anyway."

"Sooooo, you're gonna at least tell us something, right?" said Yuffie. Cloud sighed.

"I must've - passed out," he muttered. Barret would probably never let him live it down if he claimed to have "fainted" in front of him.

Yuffie's scowl deepened. "You needed to wait until tomorrow to tell us that?"

"Just... give me a little time, okay?" Yuffie "hmphed" and sat down on the other side of Cloud. "So... how's Wutai?"

"Y'know. Better. Dad's still pushing the whole succession thing. 'Course, he's dropped it lately. You know, after you almost died."

"I didn't almost die," he said sharply as the smile on Marlene's face faded a bit.

"Well, Dad thinks you did. If he calls you gotta act real sick, or he'll tell me to come back home."

"Did you speak to the Planet again?" asked Marlene, poking a particular spot on his ribs. Cloud winced, and he and Barret exchanged another uncomfortable glance. They'd never really gotten around to explaining much of the events from four years ago to her. They'd have to eventually.

"No. The Planet doesn't really speak to people anymore. We all forgot how to listen. I just had a really good nap, is all."

"Shouldn't you be sleeping now?"

"In a little, yeah. Shouldn't you?"

"Papa said I could stay up for when you came home," she said quickly, "and now that you are, can you arm wrestle me?"

"No arm wrestling tonight, baby girl," cut in Barret. "Cloud's home, so you gotta get to bed. Say good night."

"I'm not tired, though!"

"It's ten thirty, so you'd best get tired as fast as you can."

"But Cloud just got here!"

"Cloud wants you to go to bed so you'll be awake tomorrow," said Cloud, trying not to smile. "If your pa says it's okay, you can teach me another recipe, alright?"

"Fine..." mumbled Marlene, and gave him a quick peck on the cheek before trudging upstairs with her stuffed tonberry to Tifa's empty room. Cloud watched her go, hoping she'd grow out of the phase soon enough. The toy was eerily lifelike, and Cloud and Yuffie had mutually agreed to stuff it into a drawer whenever she was out of the house without it so they wouldn't have to look at it.

"I'm gonna head up to bed, too," said Cloud, and carefully got back to his feet. Yuffie followed suit.

"Get some rest," she said to Barret. "You look awful. I'll keep an eye on him."

Barret shuffled into the back room again without a word to the contrary, so he really must have been exhausted. Yuffie began helping Cloud up the stairs to his own room. "Besides, I gotta help you with all that gauze, and I've been using your bed while you were gone."

It was another few minutes before they finally had all the medical supplies laid out on the bed, and another still before Cloud managed to wrestle himself out of his clothes and into his boxers. Yuffie's hands were probably a bit better suited to carefully untangling surgical gauze from a wound, and soon enough the entire mess was laid bare.

His chest was covered in ugly purplish-green splotchy bruises, which Yuffie gingerly placed a hand on and began healing. He'd technically mastered that spell himself, but White magic had never been his strong suit, whereas Yuffie had some innate skill with it. Cloud breathed a sigh of relief after a moment, signalling to Yuffie to move onto another area. If this was how it looked now, he could only imagine what it had been like before the healers at the emergency room had gotten to him. Hopefully, between Yuffie and his own "unique biology", they'd be gone by tomorrow night. Then they took a look at his arm.

When he'd seen the x-ray, he'd imagined that the bone had simply been very badly broken in two, but looking at it now explained why he couldn't seem to move it at all. His arm seemed to have been pinched off from below the elbow, tearing it almost entirely off save for a bit of skin at the top of his shoulder, the only bit that didn't have stitches and what must have been holding it on. It had been sewn back on, with the stitches already having been smothered more or less in his own regenerated flesh. Perhaps he'd go back to the hospital in one week instead, just to get it over with. There must have been a lot of screws in there. He'd had worse. He'd be fine.

Yuffie began healing away the bruising around his shoulder as well, but she was staring at another scar on the other side of his chest - the one Marlene had poked at earlier, running horizontally just below his ribcage.

Cloud looked up at her. "What?"

"Nothing. Just... they asked a lot of questions about it. They asked a lot of questions in general, but especially about that one. Apparently it's been infected for, like... years."

Cloud shrugged. "I didn't notice."

"Oh. Well, in case you did, it's not anymore."

"Did you say anything?"

"I told 'em about the doctor in Mideel, and he didn't say anything about it. Just mentioned the mako poisoning."

He sighed and relaxed into the wall. It would have to do.

"Did you break any arms this time?" asked Yuffie as she carefully helped him into a clean work shirt and sweatpants that wouldn't be ruined too much if a bit of blood spotted on them. "Besides your own, I mean."

"...No," said Cloud slowly, conveniently hiding his face in the shirt while he spent some extra time adjusting it. Not for lack of trying, certainly.

"Ugh. Just don't get yourself arrested, alright? Prison's gotta be worse than a hospital."

"Speak for yourself," he grunted, shifting against the wall to try and keep himself upright.

There was a pause as she appeared to carefully put together her next sentence. "...I always pictured that old manor as... y'know. Kind of a jail cell."

"There were a few rooms like that in it, yeah," said Cloud brusquely. He continued when she opened her mouth again. "I'm gonna get some sleep. You should too."

"...Sure." Yuffie scooted herself off the bed and eased herself into the sleeping bag and six blankets she'd brought with her for the occasion. Cloud closed his eyes, still propped up against the wall with a pillow, and spent a while listening to her breathing.

The window was still open, and the stars were out, and his room was comfortably warm...

It was cold in the storage room.

Cloud didn't understand why he was here. There didn't seem to be much of a pattern to the Professor's behaviour. He knew that if he did anything bad there were any manner of consequences he'd wind up subjected to. He also knew that if he was good, they would say how well he was doing, and tell him how great he would be.

The problem was knowing what were the good things to do, and what were the bad ones. Telling them about Mother was usually good. Even things that he didn't think were good, like how Her voice hurt sometimes, or how he felt parts of him were missing, and he wanted them back now, seemed to earn approval. Escaping was always bad, he had learned. Giving the wrong answers to questions, or not knowing the right ones, was bad. Speaking without being spoken to first was usually bad. His teeth and tongue had grown back a month ago, and he knew better by now. Injuring guards was good, but only if he injured them in certain ways, and otherwise it was bad.

He didn't know what he'd done this time that was bad. He had told them about Mother, like he was supposed to. They had nodded, and taken notes, but instead of leading him back to his cell, or leaving him in the tank overnight, they had cuffed his hands and led him into storage.

"Sit facing the wall," they'd instructed. "Don't move from this spot." Cloud sat facing the wall like they wanted. He thought maybe it was another test.

Instead they had brought the Box in after him. Cloud swallowed. He hadn't seen the Box in months, after his fourth escape attempt. It was a steel cube, no bigger than a dog carrier, just barely big enough to fit a boy in his late teens that was a bit on the small side inside of it, with a few air holes in the top. It was if he had done something bad but it wasn't conducive to the project to start additional testing.

"Get in."

Cloud carefully backed himself into the cramped space. No hesitation, because that was bad.

Then they turned out the lights and closed the door and locked him inside.

He didn't know what he'd done. Were they mad? The Professor didn't look mad, but alone time in the dark for a few days was usually because he'd done something bad and they just didn't have time to punish him properly. He thought he'd been doing good.

Maybe this was good? Maybe the Box was supposed to help him. If he wasn't so stupid, he could understand the rules better, and do what they wanted.

"This is good," he told himself aloud. "This is a good thing." Mother seemed to think so too, because there was nowhere to move away from Her in the small cramped space. It was so much louder, in the absence of any other sound or stimuli, and there were so many of them.

Cloud shivered. He hadn't lost clothes privileges, but he had been taken straight here from an exam, and hadn't had a chance to retrieve his shirt. He hoped it would be in his cell when he was let out.

"This is good," he whispered to himself again, blinking back tears. "This is good. This is good. This is good..."

There was another voice. One he wasn't used to, that didn't seem like Mother's, or the howling he sometimes heard that She didn't seem to like, because it used words.

"Who goes there?"

Cloud froze. It sounded like a man's voice. Sephiroth? No, he was dead. It was too deep to be Hojo's. A lab assistant? Perhaps, though he hadn't heard the door open.

"Series 3. I'm here because I need to be here. It's good to be here. Being here will help me be better."

The new voice seemed confused. "No name?"

Not a lab assistant, then. Series 3 was the only designation he was supposed to have and reply to, as far as he knew, and he didn't have a proper number yet. Cloud realised it was another fake voice, the ones he heard after mako treatments, or when he was alone in his cell for too long while they fixed the equipment.

There was no harm in talking to it, then. It wouldn't say anything that had right or wrong answers.

"It's good for me to be here. Isn't it?"

"That depends on why you are here," said the new fake voice, suddenly sounding heavy. "I suppose... yes, it could be good for you to be here."

It sounded almost familiar. Which, perhaps it was. He knew the fake voices were just ones he made up. Sometimes they sounded like the villagers, or that one girl in the blue dress, or Ma.

"That's why I'm here, then. I think..." He shifted uneasily, trying to get into a position he wouldn't regret being in by tomorrow when his arm fell asleep. "I don't know. They don't tell me, and I can't ask."

"Who are 'they'?" the new fake voice asked. It was very deep, and quiet and scratchy like Cloud's was now, as though he didn't use it often. Cloud felt he had heard it before, but not anywhere that made sense. From a dream, maybe.

"The doctors," he said. He tried his best to speak up, because he was badly muffled now, with his cheek pressed against the metal. "They're making me better, so I won't be weak. Then I'll be useful to Shinra. I don't know how."

"Shinra..." the voice said quietly. "My sins have come back to haunt me, even away from my dreams."

And Cloud knew who the voice was then, and smiled.

"Hello, Pale Man."

Cloud remembered the Pale Man then, a memory he dragged out of the green haze so many of them had fallen into over the last seven, or eight, or maybe nine months, or days, or lifetimes. He remembered when he was very young, and he had made believe about a man living in the floor of the old mansion. He was tall, and pale, and had glowing red eyes, and would chase away monsters when Cloud was asleep. Eventually, Ma told him he had grown too old for imaginary friends, and he had to stop exploring, and visiting the Pale Man, and telling everyone at school about how he would come up from under their beds and eat them if they didn't share their toys with him.

He had missed the Pale Man for a long while after that. It was nice to have company, even if it wasn't real. Maybe here in the dark, he'd brought himself back some company on his own.

The silence in the room resumed, and Cloud cursed himself for becoming distracted and making the new voice, the Pale Man, disappear. Then it spoke again.

"...What did you call me?" There was a hint of growing horror in the voice now.

"It's me. It's... Cloud." His name felt strange and foreign on his lips, and a thrill of fear went through him even though there was no one present to hear him say it anyway. "I miss visiting you. I'm going to pretend I'm visiting you now, though." He could almost see the Pale Man now, red eyes peering at him through the air holes through all the other equally fake eyes peering at him through the air holes. Cloud stared back to try and make it all more real, the glow emitting from his own eyes the only light in the room.

"This cannot..." He didn't sound happy. Cloud thought as hard as he could about the Pale Man sounding happy to see him, even though he never really had sounded happy about anything, so maybe it would happen.

"We're here together," he said to the eyes. "Like how I used to visit. I didn't bring any magic rocks for you. Ma says I'm too old to believe in that stuff. Just Mother here now." His voice cracked, and he swallowed thickly, trying to keep the emotion out of it.

He'd missed the Pale Man a lot more than he'd thought.

"No." Not a response. Denial. Fury. Shock. Disgust. "No."

"That doesn't make sense." Nothing made sense anymore. He didn't know why he expected a hallucination to as well.

"No." The eyes vanished into the sea of the rest of them, and then there was a loud slamming of wood on wood. Silence followed.

"...Pale Man?"

The Pale Man had disappeared. It was just as well, he supposed. Mother wanted to speak now, and he obligingly let Her wash over him in the dark, feeding Her more of himself he knew he'd never even realise he missed.

A pair of eyes opened a few hours later, but the thing staring out of them wasn't Cloud. The quiet gasp of pain he uttered was enough to wake Yuffie, who looked up at him from the floor.

"Do you need another heal?" she asked, then frowned when he got out of bed, scanning the room, his eyes landing on the window.

"Cloud?" she asked again, a bit more nervously this time. She then frantically began untangling herself from her blankets as Cloud climbed up on the window sill.

"What the hell are you - !?" Cloud, who did not hear what she said before, would not have heard the rest of what she would have said anyway, as he had already jumped.

He landed lightly in a crouch, grunting in pain again, then straightened up and began to walk down the street. Behind him, Barret had already pushed open the front door and was yelling something else he didn't hear. He continued looking at the space around him, and began to move faster. In another few moments, he had broken into a sprint, leaving them both behind.

He took a running leap and latched onto the side of a building, hauling himself up with his good arm. He sped across the roof and jumped to another, and another, and another, ignoring the pain in his chest entirely. The landings were clumsy, and he stumbled on the last one and tripped forward onto his knees.

He sat there for a few minutes, then straightened up and turned his gaze towards the sky, which he spent several more minutes inspecting. He didn't even notice when Yuffie had scrambled up onto the roof after him, having finally caught up, or Barret barging in through the rooftop access door, panting from all the stairs he had just sprinted up.

He did not turn acknowledge either of them at first, even when they called his name, and kept his gaze on the stars, and suddenly neither one of them wanted to touch this strange man that had snuck out in the middle of the night and had fixed his gaze on the sky with an almost hungry look on his face.

Then there was a cool metal hand on his shoulder again, and Barret was towering over him shouting his name, and he suddenly gasped as it hit him all at once where he was, and what he had been doing, and that it had happened again, and that there was no pattern.

Barret looked angry. Or perhaps concerned. It was difficult to tell. Yuffie was still hanging back, still hesitant to actually approach him.

The pain from his recent physical activity began mixing with the nausea and disorientation, and he roughly shoved Barret away from him as he heaved bile onto the bleached concrete of the roof, and knelt there, shivering.

"Cloud, you -"

"I don't know."

"Dammit, Cloud, this isn't the fucking time for your -"

"I don't know!" His throat tightened as the emotion crept into his voice against his will. "I don't know, alright?! I don't know!"

The door to the roof opened again as someone, probably one of the tenants, joined them on the roof. "What's going on here? It's three in the morning!"

"Nothing," said Yuffie, as another two faces peered out from the doorway. "Just a discussion. It won't happen again, and we're leaving now."

The man eyed the puddle of vomit with a look of disgust, and then Cloud himself, sans sunglasses, with an even greater look of disgust, then turned and went back downstairs through the small crowd of tenants behind him, perhaps to fetch a custodian that would also want to know what was going on. Barret spoke up, his fist still clenched. "Let's get outta here."

It took another half hour to walk him at a normal pace back to Seventh Heaven. Marlene, thankfully, was still asleep. They had him sit back down on his bed. Cloud hadn't said a word since the rooftop.

Yuffie brought him a cup of tea and set it down in front of him on his bedside table, and sat down across from him in his work chair, with Barret sitting next to him, probably to keep him on the bed. Cloud didn't really feel like moving anyway.

"...Was it Jenova?" came the inevitable question from Barret after another few minutes of silence. Cloud shook his head.

"How do you know?"

Cloud said nothing.

"Can you hear Her now?" asked Yuffie.

He nodded. It was a stupid question; he could always hear Her.

"What does She want?"

Cloud said nothing at first, then looked up from the cup of tea he'd been staring at and addressed Yuffie.

"Can you hand me my phone?" he said.

Yuffie looked at him appraisingly for a few moments and exchanged a glance with Barret, who looked about ready to drop, then grabbed him his phone off the desk.

Cloud very slowly dialed Tifa's number and waited. The first call went to voicemail, and he cursed himself for forgetting the eight hour time difference. She was probably working. He dialed again, and this time she picked up.

"Hello?"

"...Hi, Tifa."

"Is... is everything okay? I thought you were asleep."

He remained silent.

"Cloud? Are you still there?"

"Please come home."

The anticipated alarm immediately filled her voice again. "Cloud, what's wrong?"

He drew a deep, shuddering breath. If he cried again in front of his family, that would be it.

"...Please come home," he tried again. "Okay?"

"Cloud, what's going -"

He hung up as whatever composure he'd managed to scrape together in the last half hour shattered again. He clutched the phone tightly as tears overtook him again, and he buried his face in his knees so his family wouldn't see that on top of having a high-maintenance deadbeat they had to drag back into the house at 3 am, they also had an unstable high-maintenance deadbeat they had to drag back into the house at 3 am that couldn't keep it together for more than an hour. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

They'd only be able to put up with so much, he knew. Surely there was something he was supposed to be doing at this point to hold up his end of the bargain, but he couldn't imagine what it would be. No one else cried for no reason, or needed to be helped out of bed, or kept company. He couldn't provide parenting advice to Barret. No one, Cloud included, trusted him enough to babysit. Jessie had managed to work through the deaths of Biggs and Wedge on her own. Yuffie mostly screamed her issues at her father and then complained about it to them. Even Tifa was fine on her own for more than an hour.

So he just remained dead weight and sobbed into his knees with Barret pulling him into a hug and Yuffie now sitting on his other side, which just made him cry harder, everything pent up over the last three weeks spilling out for both of them to see - for both of them to deal with.

He managed to stop a while later with much prompting from Yuffie to drink his tea before it went cold, and found that Barret had at some point fallen asleep sitting on his bed from exhaustion. Cloud leaned against him, and Yuffie against Cloud, the three of them too tired to move. When they'd been on the road they'd had occasions where there wasn't much room to be picky about personal space, and after a while they'd stopped thinking about the piles the eight of them would wind up in. After everyone had settled down, of course, they'd gone back to using real beds, but Cloud had found himself missing them ever since.

He lay there sandwiched between his family, welcoming back the familiar feeling it provided. He didn't really know what to call it. It was warm, but that wasn't an emotion, just a physical state he enjoyed. He supposed it made him happy, but it felt strangely painful, too. All he could think about was how he'd have to go back to feeling the minute they left.

Jenova was so much louder now. He began his "meditation", allowing Her to flood himself, listening to Her music. He pushed in deeper than he had in years, tempering Her voices with the steady sound of Barret's breathing, of Yuffie's quiet snores, weaving them all together as they wove into him. He eventually drifted off to sleep like that, Mother twisting and burrowing into his mind, his family around him, both of them reminding him that he belonged here.

Cloud woke up before Yuffie and Barret, but didn't really feel like moving. Partially because it was comfortable, and partially because waking them would hasten the arrival of the interrogation he knew was coming. He'd said tomorrow, and he had meant it, and everyone had probably been too tired to protest it, especially after chasing him halfway across town. So of course, it would be most practical to discuss it in the morning.

This morning. Now.

When they did wake up an hour later, the first thing they did was decide that this definitely counted as a serious matter and began calling every other member of the family in, which was something Cloud had dreaded happening since this had begun. Now he had an entire audience to upset.

The second thing they had done was herd him into the back room and sit there staring at him. Reeve had been the closest geographically and had arrived before everyone else, and had joined Barret in looking stern, or maybe angry.

"I heard you had something you wanted to tell us, Cloud," said Reeve evenly.

"...I've been hallucinating again, for about three weeks," began Cloud. He was met with silence. He was supposed to continue. "They're... shapes. If I try to look at them they go fuzzy."

"Is it -"

"It's not Jenova," he interjected, cutting off Reeve. "And it's not the Planet, either. At least, I don't think so."

"So, when you crashed your bike, it was because you got... spooked?" asked Yuffie, trying not to sound dubious. Cloud shook his head and paused. This would be the hardest part.

"It, um... it was because I couldn't move. I'll start seeing things, and then I'll... I'll do things," he faltered. "It happened again last night. That was the fourth time. I don't know what causes it, or how to make it stop."

"He jumped out the window in the middle of the night," explained Barret to Reeve, "and we chased his ass across sixteen blocks and found him standing on a roof."

Reeve looked concerned again, and again Cloud cut him off. "I wasn't gonna jump," he said. "I was looking at the sky. If it wanted me to jump it could have thrown me out of Shinra Tower, when it happened there."

"You didn't think about it?" asked Barret. Cloud shook his head.

"I didn't think about anything," he said, and everyone visibly relaxed a bit. "I don't... I didn't mean to crash the bike, either. I just... I couldn't do anything."

"...Would you have jumped?" asked Yuffie after a moment.

"No," said Cloud decisively. "I haven't - I haven't thought like that in years. I wouldn't ..."

"Well, that's good to know, but it doesn't leave us with a lot of leads, besides the obvious." Cloud leaned away as Reeve turned and leaned in to inspect his eyes, which were a bit more green than they usually were. The pupils were slitted, but then, they always were.

"It's not Jenova," said Cloud, a hint of irritation creeping into his voice now. "Jenova responds to it, and it makes Her louder, but it's not Her."

"That you talking, or is that what that thing wants you to say?" said Barret pointedly.

Now Cloud was the one made uncomfortable, and he looked away. "I haven't... there hasn't been any pull to Reunion. It's not Jenova."

"We can't ignore this, Cloud," said Reeve slowly. "Not your family, or the WRO. This is -"

"I want to visit the tower," he interrupted again. There was a moment of uncomfortable silence.

"Cloud -"

"I don't care how we do it, Reeve. If you say no, I'll do it anyway. I'm visiting the damn tower."

No one had been enthused about the idea, but eventually they agreed that Barret would come with him as far as the edge of the ruins, and Yuffie would see him in further, just in case. It really had been a while since anyone had been out there.

It was probably a good thing Yuffie was there with him - she chattered constantly, always stopping to point out an interesting bit of rubble or a potential shortcut, or to complain about her father. Cloud appreciated the conversation, as usual, and that was more or less how she usually was, but he did notice her endgame as well - it would be a lot more obvious if something were to happen if he suddenly stopped responding.

The climb to the sixty-eighth floor was much slower this time due to his injured arm, and several times Cloud had to stop on the way up to look around. He found what he was looking for eventually, in the remains of a decorative garden in what was once a lobby.

The sixty-eighth floor wasn't so much of a floor as it was a collection of rubble on top of the sixty-seventh floor, as a result of the more recent fight Cloud had had two years ago. In spite of that, there was a small bit of unbroken floor behind one of the larger rubble piles, and on that spot stood a knee-high pile of rocks.

Yuffie stood back out of respect. Cloud wouldn't have minded if she wanted to pay respects too, but he supposed it would have been awkward. After all, she had never known him.

Cloud approached the pile of rocks and sat down in front of it.

"...Sorry I couldn't make it out earlier," he told it. "Things have been really busy." He took a deep breath. The sixty-ninth and seventieth floors were strewn about the rest of the ruins, and the floor simply opened up to the sky above, which was still choked with grey, but less so than it had been before. The sun even managed to occasionally peek through.

"Tifa finally got more people to work at the bar," he continued. "It lets her go out of town a lot more often. I miss her, but she likes to help." He clenched and unclenched his hands nervously. "I got into a car crash. I'm okay, but it hurt a lot. I got to punch a nurse. Knocked out two of his teeth." He smiled a bit. "I... I want to think you'd have been proud of that."

He reached into his pocket and took a deep breath. "...I, er... I brought you another magic rock." He withdrew the object he'd retrieved from the garden - a round, smooth stone. He set it carefully on the pile.

"Make a wish," said Cloud. "Maybe it'll come true."

He sat like that for a few more minutes. He wondered what had happened to the "magic rocks" he'd brought him in that basement. He'd thrown them out after Cloud had left, most likely. He always was hard to read.

Eventually he stood up, his legs still unsteady, but feeling calmer than he had this morning. He signalled to Yuffie that he was ready to leave with a nod, and she climbed down from the rubble pile she'd been sitting on.

"I've gotta go. I'll try to come back sooner next time." He took another long look at the pile of rocks in preparation for the long climb back down.

"See you, Vincent."