- Deep Down -


Everyone had told him it would get easier with time, but truthfully it never did. He just kept it quieter as the years ticked on. Sometimes he would mix something up and Tifa would correct him.

"I'm picking the kids up from school," he'd tell her as he was leaving in the afternoon.

"Kid," she would correct.

He'd make breakfast for everyone and set four places at the table instead of three. Tifa would quietly remove the fourth plate. It's okay to forget things, she'd tell him when he noticed. It's just part of the process.

How could he not be over it, he could somehow feel everyone thinking. Hadn't they all experienced trauma before, and hadn't he been able to move on from that? Surely, the death of his best friend, a man who'd saved his life, and the death of the beautiful flower girl, a woman who'd saved the planet, could have prepared him for this. After all, the kid wasn't even blood. But Zack's death was a blurry awful place in his scattered mind, and Aeris happened in the thick of a hurricane of pursuit and discovery. He still held onto them both, in soft dark moments, but he could let them go in the daylight because they'd meant something more. Their deaths had meant something more. For the greater good, he thought. But what good is a dead child?

He tried to lighten up. He tried to just trudge forward. But no matter how good his day was going, all it took was one little thing to bring Denzel back into his head. He'd see a kid on the street with the same backpack or hear the boy's favorite song playing on the radio in the supermarket. Tiny glimpses of him were everywhere.

Tifa felt his death, too, of course. Harder, perhaps, than Cloud. She barely got out of bed for weeks right after it happened, and Cloud found himself caring for her more than himself. He'd wash her hair and kiss her face. She seemed to rebound after a few years while Cloud only dragged. Eventually, their friends stopped coming over. The initial shock of loss spurred everyone into action, but once time passed, so too did the friendly visits and phone calls. Why couldn't he just get it together, he knew they wondered.

He felt trapped. But the days went on, and he spoke of it less. When Tifa caught an error he made, he simply smiled and moved on. It would never truly heal. Time didn't hold that much power.

Everything was going fine, just fine, he'd say. One day Yuffie came over to visit. She plopped down in a chair at the bar and held a fistful of marbles out to Cloud.

"My materia," she said, "is broken."

Cloud looked down at the colored orbs in her palm. They appeared perfectly normal.

"These were yours," she specified, "There's something wrong with them."

But when he reached out to take one from her, there was a tremendous hiss of static in his ears and a blinding white light exploded in his head. Through a fog, he grabbed her wrist to steady himself and that's when the world turned.

Suddenly, he was standing in a vast expanse of dark ruins with an awful chattering noise filling the air around him. Unintelligible. Alien. There were massive creatures, hideous half-formed monsters in the shadows. And Yuffie… she was standing directly in front of him, but she was much older. Her hair was a long dark braid held in place by a light blue bandana. She grabbed Cloud's arm and smiled at him through a frantic pained expression, and he could feel something excruciating flowing upwards from his arm like poison.

Then he awoke into the scene like a car crash. Instant reality hit. Yes, he was standing right there with her. This was real.

"Yuffie?" he shouted through the rain and wind.

"Cloud! Yes, it's me! Oh, Cloud!" Her smile only widened on her lips and in her eyes."Cloud!" She hugged him and he realized he was somehow holding his sword. He threw it down and hugged her back.

He got the distinct feeling that something awful was happening and that he was running out of time. Everything flooded back to him in pieces. The calamity. Leaving Edge. Tifa. Marlene. Then he saw Denzel. Standing behind Yuffie, holding a rifle, a guy stared over at Cloud in solid disbelief. He wasn't a boy, of course, but Cloud was absolutely positive it was him.

"Denzel…!" His arms fell from Yuffie. The rain tore between them.

But there was a third person present. Someone was approaching through the turmoil. Cloud turned to see who it was. And everything went dark.

Dark and painful. He faded away. The next thing he knew, he was lying on the floor of the bar with Tifa blinking above him.

With a start, Cloud sat up, glancing all around. The other place had been so real. He would've believed it were real forever if he hadn't woken up. Tifa looked into his eyes full of worry. He hadn't blacked out like that in a while. But this wasn't a dream or some vision. It was real, he told her. And Denzel was alive over there. Yuffie, too, but she was in terrible danger.

He knew it sounded crazy, but he had no other way to explain the feeling of the rain on his skin. The smell of the wet concrete crumbling around him. The breaths he'd taken on the other side. He needed her to understand that something more was going on here. Why wouldn't she just understand? He paced frantically, trying to remember every detail. He would write it all down, he told her, and they could figure it out together. They could somehow see what Denzel was trying to tell him. But even as he tried to recall it, the whole scene slipped away. The harder he focused on it, the more elusive it became.

"I can't have you fall apart again," Tifa told him, shaking her head sadly. "I can't go through it again. I need you here with me. I am barely hanging on, and I can't lose you, too."

"You have to believe me. Tifa, please."

But she didn't. She couldn't, she told him. Even though she desperately wanted to believe that somewhere things were different, that maybe they were all a happy family in some other plane, it just wasn't reality. She had to move on and moving on meant acceptance. If he couldn't do that, then she'd need to move on from him, too.

It hit Cloud hard. She was talking about leaving him. The thought sobered him up immediately.

"I'm sorry," he said to her, "I'm here. I'm not leaving you. I don't know what I was thinking."

Acceptance, he repeated to himself. Acceptance. He held her tightly in bed later that night and fell asleep with her hair in his face, letting her scent fill him.