Disclaimer: I don't own Dissidia. Otherwise... some people would have more Amano beads on their costumes (long story).

It's awkward to write a Cloud that jokes around a little bit. Please tell me how it sounds? And I don't know if anyone's read the translations of the character-specific battle quotes, but some of them are pretty... entertaining and/or awkward for everyone involved. But reading them gives a really good impression of inter-character dynamics between EVERYONE since some of that can be difficult to piece together with so many characters in so little screen time. They also reveal a lot of the characterization changes that happened from the canon series to Dissidia. Some characters are substantially different from their FF-game selves due to their new circles of interactions, I think (like Kuja and his 'I'm not a kid!' Hisoka Kurosaki complex).

Rant=over. Please enjoy and review!!

Chapter Eight: Not/Something

Who was I?

A good listener. Which was new to me, but it was a change I liked.

"What do you do when you add up the numbers and figure out you're not real?"

Tidus had said it to the empty air. Was he going crazy? There was no one else here in the room, and it's not like he was trying to talk to me.

Crawl into a psychological hole and die, would have been my response. From personal experience. But instead I asked, "What happened to you?"

He blinked. I'd spoken to him, and now the world was going to end. Forget this mess with the crystals and Cosmos and Chaos, the apocalypse was imminent.

I really shouldn't joke about things like that. "I mean," I clarified, "most of us aren't exactly here because random acts of kindness just weren't doing it for us."

Tidus laughed, and then he said, "Jecht is my old man."

What?

"With Kuja hanging around, I got to thinking. Thinking a lot. I know you call me 'that stupid jock' behind my back," he added.

I felt the need to make some sort of excuse for myself. "I—"

But he just continued. "I like to think of my not-life in two parts. Zanarkand, my happy little paradise, and after Zanarkand. In the first part of my life that didn't really happen, I was a star blitzball player. Zanarkand Abes. But I could never be as good as my old man. I… I wish I'd never found out. That I was dead, the whole time. After Zanarkand."

"What do you mean?"

Tidus sighed. "I'm like a runaway summon. My people died because someone needed our spirits to fight Sin. I came back centuries later, and I didn't know I wasn't real. And I helped this girl, this summoner, try to save the world. My old man had tried to do the same thing before me. I didn't know that."

"But you saved the world all the same," I told him.

"Yeah. Hey, Squall's back. Doesn't look too happy," Tidus said, nodding in the direction of the front-facing window. "I don't know. I gave up on talking to him a while ago. Some people are hopeless."

I sighed. "I'll talk to him."

"Braver than I am," Tidus called after me as I shut the door behind me.

"It's really pathetic for me to go on hating him, isn't it?" Squall said to me as he sank onto the doorstep, hunched over himself and gunblade laying forgotten at his side. It wasn't hard to figure out who he was talking about.

"Why do you hate him?" I asked, careful to be nonchalant.

"Because he's a narcissistic creeper—" Squall said, but then sighed. He looked at me, and then down at the pavement.

"This is stupid. I hate him because he didn't use me. To bait Zidane. Because he knew I was alone and rubbed it in my face that maybe Zidane wouldn't bother to rescue me. One look at me, and he saw through my game like it was nothing."

"Looking at you is kind of like looking in the mirror for him," we both heard Zidane's voice say. He was hanging halfway out the first floor window on the other side. How long had he been there?

"So don't feel bad. You messed with him as much as he messed with you," Zidane told Squall. "You messed with me, too, if you want to know the truth. I didn't get you—the fact that I didn't have a real family made me feel alone all my life, until I met my friends back on my world. And here, there's a whole bunch of people waiting to help you, and you didn't take the opportunity. I didn't get it."

"The only family you've got is him, isn't that right?" Squall replied.

Zidane shook his head. "You guys are all my family. Doesn't matter where you came from, or that your blood's not the same as mine. Heck, I'd consider that a bonus."

And then we saw it. Squall smiled.

I spoke. "I'm sorry for keeping you guys out. I should have learned from my world. We don't have the power to go it alone. Chaos needs that power because they're lonely, but we don't have to."

When was the last time I smiled? A while back, maybe. Had I smiled? I didn't know. Must not have, then.

"Some things you have to do by yourself, though," Zidane said, suddenly serious. "Just don't make it a habit," he added, and then laughed. One of his fake laughs. Which meant there was something on his mind.

I wondered if maybe I was the only one who knew exactly what it was.