-04-

At first, he thought that they were probably just due to all this Deepground nonsense – stressful situations causing him to relapse – but even after Vincent returned Omega to the Planet, his thoughts continued to focus on Zack.

The night directly following the destruction of Deepground, he was visited a second time by the nightmare, and he found no discernible reason for it.

The second nightmare was startlingly similar to the first. Cloud hung inside the same green tube, with the same foggy Mako running through his body. Exhaling a lungful of the nauseating liquid, Cloud glanced around the room, once again taking in the table, the equipment, the books, and the other detention chamber. In this dream, Cloud reached for the glass tube to scratch something to Zack and heard a baby's wail from far off in the distance. The cry cut through his ears and went straight to his core, and Cloud coughed a little as he scraped something into the glass. "Let's get out of here."

He knew what should've happened next, but it wasn't what happened. Zack simply gazed at Cloud through the green- and blue-tinted glass chambers, gazed at him with an unsettling degree of interest. Cloud felt the walls of his stomach contract with the sensation, and he nearly wretched into the Mako.

There was no sound as Zack suddenly broke eye contact and tore a deep gash into his left wrist with two rigid fingers, throwing up a cloud of inky red and black humor that stained the Mako current and slowly drifted upward. Cloud fell back against the other end of his tube and looked on in disgusted horror as Zack peeled away the skin and the muscles from his own arm. Then, with his fingers coated in his rust-red ichor, Zack traced something into the clear walls of his chamber. The blood didn't wash off the glass like it did from his wound, and Cloud could only stare as Zack's face contorted into some demonic and horrible... thing that sneered in great pleasure at his horrified expression.

YOU ARE MY LEGACY

Then Zack reared back and crashed his head through the glass tube, snapping it into billions of sharp fragments, and Cloud suddenly found himself staring at a sharpened projectile as it slammed into and through his chamber and into his-

After that, more dreams came, and more "memories" came with them. Each time he woke up, he thought he had found another piece, another cherished memory of Zack that had been lost to and by himself. Each time he woke up, he was sadly disappointed when he realized that they were not memories at all, but simply dreams. The dreams of an overactive imagination, perhaps.

After a period of weeks went by and he became accustomed to these spontaneous bouts of wishful thinking, he was visited for a third time by the stallion of horror.

Cloud looked around the room, finding that nothing had changed since he last saw it. On the operating table, dampened from a lifetime of living underneath the earth, sat an evergreen-tinged blue hardbound book. There were no trimmings on it, nothing to differentiate it from any of the myriad books lying about. Turning his attention to the life-supporting cylinder next to his, Cloud faintly discerned Zack's nude form hanging suspended in the Mako – his hair flowed upward with the circulation of the green energy, looking almost like anemone waving about in the sea.

Cloud knocked gently, trying not to disturb the atrophied organs inside him, and when he could just barely see Zack nodding, he scratched as hard as he could. "Let's get out of here," he wrote into the glass, wincing against the pain as he stared at the Mako swirling around his fingertip and sewing the skin and nail back onto it.

Looking expectantly at his friend, he waited for some sign of confirmation. Nothing of the sort happened, though.

Instead, Zack brought his hand up to his face as if he were examining his own body. Then, in a long, drawn-out motion, he slashed into his own chest, gouging into the muscle and carving out pound after pound of pulsing, living flesh. Cloud looked on, flabbergasted and thoroughly frightened for his own life, as Zack continued to slice himself mercilessly, clouding the upper half of the Mako tank with his blood.

Soon, though, the foggy redness receded upward and only a small trickle of blood came from Zack's deep gashes. As Cloud stared out from his ineffable green prison, he saw the words contrasting sharply against the Mako.

YOU ARE MY LEGACY

Zack howled, his voice lashing out in demonic laughter, and Cloud cringed away from it. It came from every direction, though, a hateful, malicious, and soul-seeking cackle that bounded everywhere in Cloud's limpid chamber, reflecting and refracting off the walls until his ears were filled with dozens of the sounds, as if an armada of demons stood just outside the glass, and suddenly, the glass completely shatt-

He woke up after that third dream in such a cold chill that even Tifa was jarred awake, worried.