A/N: I think I'm going to make two consecutive chapters of the story in Cloud's POV, unless I can think of a Warrior of Light quote that would be fitting for the next chapter, which will also concern goings-on at the Order's Sanctuary. Because like I said in the note at the end of Zidane's chapter, even if Ultimecia is a liar, there are other ways of making Cosmos's warriors go mad with worry on account of poor badly-wounded Terra.

Another A/N: I should like to largely credit my fellow writer and YBWD-reviewer dantesdarkqueen with a good deal of artistic liberty as pertains to Final Fantasy VII universe plot-workings and how they might tie in with the events of my story. Just take a look at some of her FF7 fics for details.

I won't sleep well tonight. (victory; Cloud vs. weaker opponent)

"Just listen to me, Luneth. No matter what it takes, we'll find wherever it is that Sephiroth took Terra. We'll rescue Terra, and if she's injured, we'll heal her. And then I'll destroy Sephiroth for ever even looking at you, or her—and nothing, not even Chaos himself, is going to stop me!"

I'm surprised Luneth didn't call me a liar right away. It wouldn't be the first time I had failed when it mattered the most.

But that wasn't what you told a child. Especially if the child was no older than ten and came to you with multiple injuries, claiming that your enemy, of all the discord-god's soldiers, had wounded him and kidnapped a girl who'd just been rendered helpless by a sleep spell. You didn't tell that child of the certainty, the absolute certainty that your enemy intended to brutalize the girl he'd kidnapped in the worst way possible.

Finding one of Terra's fingerless red gloves a short distance from the edge of a world-shard Luneth had called the "World of Darkness" only served to confirm my worst fear where Terra was concerned. "Stay here," I'd bidden Luneth as we came within sight of a great pile of rubble.

The rest, as they say, was a blur—a red haze of consummate rage. Fury that ended only when I had then heard Luneth scream to me for help and looked up to see that two Chaos-serving warriors, Garland and the Cloud of Darkness, had double-teamed the boy. Rising to the aid of my young charge, I drew my sword to deal with Garland while Luneth fought the Cloud of Darkness (and even gained his crystal), but then I learned the hard way that we had been tricked. The battle had been a diversion, one intended to give some manikin-contingent the cover they'd needed to drag Sephiroth back to Chaos's stronghold.

Much good it would do them! At least I'd made sure that if that bastard ever did manage to wake up from the bloody pulp I'd tried to beat him to, he would be begging Chaos to put an end to his pain.

I was distracted from these vengeful thoughts, however, when Luneth tapped me on the arm to get my attention, and when I answered his "Take a look at this, Cloud," I saw that he had collected what appeared to be a score of arrows and no fewer than three hand-axes. I took one of the arrows from him and discovered it to be perfectly real, rather than a phantom arrow shot by one of the yellow Firion-shaped manikins. "These are Firion's, aren't they?"

"Yes, as a matter of fact, they are," I replied, rather taken aback.

"You didn't find Terra anywhere in that big rock-pile, did you?" Luneth continued to ask. "Do you think Firion managed to rescue Terra and get her back to the Sanctuary?"

"I hope so, Luneth," was the only thing I could say as I let my hand linger on Luneth's shoulder in a way I hoped was comforting to him, "I really hope so." For if not…what greater horrors had befallen Terra?

My thoughts continued to torment me as Luneth and I made our way from the World of Darkness all the way to the Order's Sanctuary. Then, at long last, we arrived. No sooner had we come in view of Cosmos's altar, however, than my heart sank yet again at what I saw.

Terra lay on Cosmos's altar in a semi-conscious-at-best state, barely moving, her pretty green hair in wild disarray. Most of her body was blanketed in what appeared to be Firion's cape, but I was fairly certain that she was naked underneath the too-thin cover, and even from my distance I could see blotchy red skin that indicated burning. I noted with no small relief that Firion was beside the altar as Luneth had predicted, as was Hikari, both of them attending to Terra.

Luneth and I both started running toward the altar to meet Firion and Hikari, but they shouted at us to stay away.

"Stop!"

"Cloud, keep Luneth away!"

Luneth looked hurt by this order. "I don't understand," he told me, confused. "Why don't they want me to see her? It's not like I didn't know she'd be hurt…"

After a brief interchange with Hikari, Firion rose from his position of kneeling beside the altar and strode the distance necessary to meet Luneth and me. "I'm sorry, but I'm not sure you'd be able to handle seeing Terra in the state she's in right now," he began, apologizing to Luneth first.

"We found these," Luneth said to Firion, almost shyly, as he held up a bundle he'd made of the liegeman's arrows and hand-axes from the scene, tied together with Terra's glove. "You were the one who rescued Terra, weren't you?"

"Thank you, Luneth," Firion replied as he accepted the bundle. "Yes, I did find Terra and bring her here for Cosmos to heal her."

I fixed Firion with my gravest stare. "Tell me everything that happened. From the top."

"Very well, from the top," Firion repeated. "I hadn't been in the World of Darkness for very long when I first saw a brilliant flash of light, as if from a very powerful magic blast, and subsequently heard a great deal of harsh laughter. I knew not what had happened, only that somebody on Chaos's side was responsible for some trouble. I rounded a corner, and I saw the insane clown Kefka gloating over a huge pile of rubble…"

"Kefka?" Luneth questioned. "Isn't he Terra's enemy on Chaos's side?"

Again I put a hand on Luneth's shoulder. "He is," I answered.

"Yes, and anyway, I engaged Kefka in battle right away. I don't know how long we fought, but at one point he managed to hit me, and once I'd gotten back on my feet I saw that he got a-hold of my wild rose, the symbol of my dream of freedom. Just before he vanished like a coward, though, he said, 'Keep fightin' and y' might get your pretty posy back—but you're far too late to save the Red Rose of Mobliz!'"

Luneth gasped in fear and shrank back toward me. "By the moniker, 'Red Rose of Mobliz,' he meant Terra," I translated.

"Yes," answered Firion heavily. "Naturally, the moment I'd realized that, I tore my way through the rubble-pile in search of Terra. As expected, I found her at the very center. What I didn't expect, however," he went on—I could tell that he was choosing his words carefully in Luneth's hearing—"was to see Sephiroth in the exact same state as Terra, generally speaking. Now let me ask you something, Cloud—when Luneth ran to you for help because Sephiroth had kidnapped Terra, you immediately feared the worst on Terra's account, didn't you?"

"You bet your ass I did," I replied at once, not caring that Luneth overheard my curse. "You try having Sephiroth as your enemy and not be thinking worst-case scenario."

"I knew you'd say that," Firion demurred. "The fact that Kefka had attacked Terra and Sephiroth both in the same blast, however, as well as some other signs—the absence of certain injuries on Terra's body, for example—told me that there was trickery, rather than force, involved."

Kefka attacking with an overpowered magic blast because Sephiroth had seduced, rather than raped, Terra? Somehow I didn't think it fit Sephiroth's traditional mode of operation, but I guess it made sense where Kefka was concerned. Being Terra's enemy, Kefka would want the absolute worst for the poor girl, wouldn't he?

"When I arrived here in the Sanctuary with the unconscious Terra in my arms, Cosmos appeared to Hikari and me, and her testament confirmed my suspicion of trickery," Firion continued. "She stated that Sephiroth had obtained a potion from the Chaos-serving sorceress Ultimecia, a potion that had the effect of…making Terra fire when she should have been ice…and it was under this evil influence that Terra was helpless to even try and resist Sephiroth's power."

The effect of making Terra fire when she should have been ice…a lust-inducing potion, in other words, the kind that would kick in when Terra woke up from the sleep-spell she'd suffered in battle. From there, Cosmos only knew what Sephiroth had had to say in order to talk Terra into giving in to temptation. The fact of Terra's fire magic being stronger than her ice magic made her an easy target for any Chaos-serving seducer willing to get into cahoots with a voyeuristic sorceress—damn it! And damn Chaos for having a witch among his soldiers!

"Is there any sign that she's even a little better than when you found her?" Luneth asked Firion, craning his neck to look at Terra past the rebel. Some part of me silently blessed the boy for being able to yank me out of my angry thoughts.

Firion glanced back to the altar where Hikari had just carefully arranged the cape to cover most of Terra's body but reveal her shoulders, resting her burned arms atop the cape, over her belly, and decided that it was apparently safe to let Luneth and me approach the altar. "He's trying to get her comfortable," the liegeman answered heavily as we walked. "She's regained a semblance of consciousness, but she's in too much pain to do more than twitch and whimper; I can tell by the tension in her face and the squeezed-shut eyes. Do either of you have any healing implements?"

Luneth shook his head no. "I do," I affirmed, retrieving my Cure materia. None of my materia seemed to be quite as effective in this world as at home, but it was better than nothing. Removing my gloves and stuffing them into the pocket that the materia had been in, I knelt beside the altar and slowly brought a hand to Terra's forehead, focusing my energy into a Cure spell.

My concentration suddenly broke, however, as Terra jerked her head to the other side with a sharp cry. I let her convulsion ebb to minor twitching and her whining drop back down to whimpers before I tried again—but I couldn't touch her without causing her more pain, even in places that hadn't been burned. Face, hands, shoulders, it didn't matter; I couldn't cast a Cure spell if she couldn't relax under my touch. "You can't touch her without hurting her?" came Luneth's dismayed question.

No, it seemed that I couldn't. "Is she this sensitive to everyone's touches now that she's semi-conscious, or just mine?" I asked.

"Side effect of the witch's potion, maybe?" Firion offered as a wild guess.

"You have an aura of overpowering anger about you, Cloud," Hikari began as he produced the wide folded sash that Terra normally wore as a belt, dipping it into a bucket of cool water before placing the article over Terra's face so that it covered her eyes and forehead. I noted with some relief that the wounded girl seemed to relax under the treatment. "I believe that some part of Terra's magical nature makes her extremely sensitive to that anger, especially in her wounded condition."

"I'm not angry with her!" I protested—much louder than I had intended. Forcing myself to calm down, especially with the startled looks on Firion's and Luneth's faces, I emphasized: "If I'm angry, it's not with Terra. I already know that anything she did was because Sephiroth made her do it. And even if I did hold it against her for falling for his trickery, I see that Kefka already punished her." The understatement of the year, I thought bitterly.

But it didn't make sense for my anger to be the only thing making Terra hypersensitive. The heightened sensitivity to touch, light, and other stimuli…the overpowering weakness…oh, gods, not again!

It was something I had been through twice in my own world—it had never occurred to me that I would be the onlooker, rather than the sufferer.

"What is it?" asked Hikari, and only then did I realize that I was thinking aloud. "Cloud? Is there something you know that could have a bearing on Terra's condition?"

"Stay here with Firion," I bade Luneth, "He'll tell you what you can do to help Terra." As soon as I had assurance of Luneth's obedience, I led Hikari some distance away from Cosmos's altar, to where we sat down beside a spire with a crescent moon atop it, and there, out of Luneth's earshot, I began explaining to Hikari about my home-world's Lifestream and how Shinra Electric Power Company harnesses it for many uses. I explained about mako and Shinra's use of it, in particular to biologically enhance the men who became SOLDIER operatives, because I had been subject to such enhancement, as had Sephiroth (although my enemy had obviously been subject to much more than the usual SOLDIER enhancements). "It has to be used extremely carefully, because misuse can result in what's known as mako poisoning, which manifests itself physically by making the subject extremely weak and hypersensitive to light, sound, and being touched."

I didn't expect Hikari to fully understand, but he did seem to understand well enough. He then phrased his next question quite directly as he followed my dire suspicions: "And you suppose that mako could find its way into semen, if a soldier from your world had enough of it in his system?"

At the question, I couldn't help but palm my forehead in both hands. How in the hell could everything in the universe have aligned against Terra the way it had? A normal, human woman could, in all likelihood, have sex with a SOLDIER and not feel any out-of-the-ordinary harmful effects. But if Terra's physiology of being half-Esper really did make her that sensitive…if even the tiny amount of mako in Sephiroth's semen had been enough to cause mako poisoning…

And would Terra even be in this horrible condition at all if Kefka hadn't blasted her and Sephiroth both with that powerful magic blast of which Firion had spoken? Would she instead be sobbing and groveling at Cosmos's altar after her confrontation with the insane clown, begging the harmony-goddess to forgive her sin, as opposed to lying atop the altar fighting for her life?

"Listen, Cloud," Hikari spoke up, distracting me from my dreadful predictions. "Zidane Tribal passed through the Sanctuary several hours ago, and I recruited him for a mission that should give us the help we need to help Terra. I sent him to sneak into Ultimecia's castle for a book of potion recipes, in which should be the potion whose influence Terra was under at the time that Sephiroth seduced her. We're hoping that it'll have an antidote, as well as that there'll be a preventative to keep any lasting harm from occurring. In the meantime, come back to the altar. You and Luneth both need some rest."

I did as Hikari asked, sitting down at the corner of the altar by Terra's feet. Luneth soon joined me, looking ready to cry at any moment, much the same emotional state as he'd been in when he first came to me with the dreadful news of Terra's capture. I reached for him and soon had him wrapped up in my arms—whether I wanted to comfort him or needed his presence to comfort me, I didn't know; I supposed it was a combination of both. I held Luneth as he wept, and as he cried himself to sleep in my arms.

Cosmos help us all, I prayed. Cosmos help us all.