The sun beat down on Cloud as he trudged across the endless desert. He knew he had to get to a certain place for some reason, but he couldn't recall any specifics no matter how he racked his brains. On top of that, there was something strange in the back of his mind, some half-remembered tidbit about a cocktail and a fire that kept bugging him.

"Try to remember. You have to let go of something. You have to forgive yourself for something. It'll be difficult, but you can do it."

"I have to… let go…"

Cloud turned his head toward the voice that had spoken to him. Tifa stood there, looking concerned. "Cloud, are you all right?"

"I don't feel well," Cloud replied. "Not anything you can do about it, though. Thanks for asking." He kept walking, and Tifa followed him, which made him think she was somehow important in this whole endeavor – whatever it was – but he still couldn't quite put a finger on it.

Then he ascended a dune and a small town was lying before him, and he suddenly remembered everything.

He spun around and looked at Tifa, drank in every detail of her. She looked alive, as real now as she had ever been. "This is impossible," Cloud said. "Some kind of hallucination. That cocktail they shot me up with… it must have been so full of drugs…"

"Hallucinogens change the way your mind works for a brief period of time," Tifa said. "Some people think they open your perceptions up to things that once were, are, or are going to be, and let you detect things that are all but gone. Put that together with mako, which – separated from the Lifestream or not – contains the knowledge, experiences, and even souls of the Planet's inhabitants…" She shrugged. "Can you really say I'm just a hallucination? Is there no way that I might have some substance?" She stepped toward Cloud. "Or are you just telling yourself that because you're afraid to hope?"

Cloud felt himself backing away from her, a lump forming in his throat. "Tifa… please. Don't do this. Don't make me lose you again. The drugs are going to wear off, and you'll be gone, and I'm not sure if I can take it a second time."

"Sure you can," Tifa said brightly. "Just go back to my house and break something else in it. I'm sure that'll make you feel better."

"Is that supposed to convince me you're real? I know I did that, so you could have just pulled that out of my head to mess with me."

"But how does it help me if I make you think I'm real when I'm not? I'm just trying to convince you of what's true, Cloud." Tifa took an especially long stride forward, reached out, and took Cloud by the arm. He froze at the familiarity of her touch, the calluses on her palms brushing against the skin of his arm. "Please don't waste this opportunity. I'm not sure how long you'll be here, and I want to take this one last chance we've been given and use it to talk." She drew close to him and ran a hand down his cheek.

"Okay," Cloud whispered. "Let's say you're real. I'd like nothing more than to believe that, but I'm afraid to. Tell me something I don't know that only you would."

"That's simple," Tifa said. She brought her mouth next to his ear and whispered something there, something that for some reason he didn't hear so much as register and file away for later. He put the strange effect down to the drugs, but that thought left his mind too when she lightly brushed her lips across his cheek. "Does that answer your question?"

"I'm not sure," Cloud said. "All I know is that once this ends – once the drugs run their course – I'll know for sure, one way or the other." He looked at her and said, "But for right now, I'll go along with you being real. Or even if you are, you're going to help me somehow, and that's good if not just as good."

"Fair enough," Tifa said.

"So. What do we do now?"

"We go down there," Tifa replied, pointing at the small town below them. "This is where your guilt springs from. This is where you'll have to go in order to root it out."

Cloud looked at the town and swallowed, dread rising up in him despite the fact that he didn't know where it was or why he was feeling this way. All he knew was that things had resolved themselves in his mind once he'd seen it. "All right," he said.

Acquiescing seemed to be enough, because as soon as the words left his mouth the two of them were there. The streets were full of people, ordinary people going about their lives, perhaps not blissfully or even happily, but going about them nonetheless. Cloud looked around, taking in the sights – the buildings were all short, squat, and made of simple concrete; the streets were dirt and sand, and there was a large water tower in the center of town that he assumed supplied the populace with the water they needed to survive.

"It was such a nice little town," Tifa said.

"Was?" Cloud asked. "What happened to it?"

Tifa pointed at the horizon. "That."

A group of vehicles was suddenly visible in the far distance, speeding toward the town, kicking up a huge cloud of dust behind them. Squinting, Cloud could barely make out that they didn't have any kind of insignia or crest, and they moved in a loose, uneven formation that suggested disorganization.

"Raiders," Cloud said. "Must be." His hand automatically went to his back where the First Tsurugi should have been, but he wasn't wearing it. "What are we going to do?"

"You can't do anything," Tifa replied. "You're on another continent, sleeping in a pod. I'm the only one who can defend the town."

A chill ran down Cloud's spine and his blood turned to ice. "This is where you died."

Tifa nodded. "Yes. This is where it happened. I managed to fight off the raiders and force them into a retreat before I bled out. Nobody here could do anything for me, and I dropped dead right in the street." She looked at a distant dune and pointed at it. "They buried me out there. There isn't a proper graveyard here, so they normally cremate their dead, but they felt they had to give me a proper burial. They really couldn't repay me any other way."

Even as she was speaking, a different Tifa emerged from one of the buildings in the town. She was older, with weathered skin and wrinkles beginning to form around her eyes. She looked out at the horizon, reached into the ragged cloak she was wearing over her traveler's outfit, and pulled out her pair of black leather gloves.

"Is this how it's going to go down?" Cloud asked. "I have to just stand here and watch you fight them and then die?"

"Of course not," Tifa replied. "Not unless you want to. This is your dream, after all."

Cloud looked down at his feet, anger and humiliation welling up inside of him. "You know that doesn't matter."

Tifa nodded. "Of course. You did tell me once that you never have dreams you can control."

"So how does it being my dream matter at all, then?" Cloud demanded, looking back up at her. "I can't change the way things happened. I can't step in and fight the raiders and help you survive. I'm completely powerless, but you've brought me here and you're standing there like you're expecting me to do something!"

"You just did it," Tifa said.

The town was suddenly gone, and they were standing in Tifa's house, in her bedroom. Cloud looked around, confused. "What… oh."

"Exactly," Tifa said, moving to sit at the piano bench. "'I can't change the way things happened.' 'I'm completely powerless.' You just admitted these things yourself. I didn't take you back to that town you never knew. You did that. Why do you insist on blaming yourself if it wasn't your fault and you wouldn't have been able to help?"

"Because I'm the only one I can blame," Cloud replied. "What, am I supposed to take it out on Vincent and Yuffie? It's not like they stood by and let you die."

"And neither did you. Don't punish yourself for the same thing you wouldn't blame on your friends."

Cloud sat down on the piano bench with her and put his face in his hands. "I just don't understand," he said. "How am I supposed to forgive myself and let go of everything I care about? I care about you because I can't let you go. What Yuffie said made sense, but I can't do it!"

"What Yuffie said goes for mankind in general," Tifa said. "But it's not the truth for you; it's not your personal truth. You're not afraid of dying a lonely and forgotten death, Cloud, and you don't really want or need to die and be remembered as an important person or a master of something.

"What you're afraid of is simple. You think you won't be able to make amends for whatever mistakes you've made – or even haven't made. You're afraid that you're going to die, and you won't have been forgiven. You've been seeking forgiveness your entire life. When my mother died and we went up Mount Nibel, the adults blamed you when I got hurt. Even though it wasn't your fault, you took it to heart, and when you left you promised to come and save me when I was in trouble as a way of making up for what you felt you'd done. When Zack died, you took up his life and personality because you felt guilty about his death. After Aerith died, you wanted forgiveness even though that wasn't your fault either. Now that I'm dead, you're seeking forgiveness for that even though there was nothing you could have done about it.

"Cloud, you don't have to let go of everything that's important to you because you know you're going to lose it eventually. You can hold onto the important things and the important people, and know that someday it'll be gone, but you have to recognize that it won't be your fault when it happens."

"That's easy enough to say," Cloud said. "But what am I supposed to do when there's so much wrong with the world and I could have changed some of it or prevented it from happening if I had just been in the right place, if I had just done something differently? I'll always feel guilty as long as there's the slightest thing that I could have done differently."

"You're always seeking redemption for things that aren't your failing because you care too much and too deeply," Tifa said. "You have to let go of that. You have to realize that bad things happen to good people and there's nothing you can do about it. It will hurt, but you will move on and do more good because you're not stuck in an endless, vicious cycle of penitence." Tifa wrapped an arm around him. "I never blamed you, Cloud. I missed you every day, and I thought about you all the time, but I never once blamed you for not being there. Nobody ever did. What are you really blaming yourself for?"

Cloud moved his hands away from his face and looked at Tifa. The moonlight streamed in through the window and illuminated her in soft white, making her seem ethereal despite her warmth and the weight of her arm around his shoulders. "I…"

He swallowed and everything came bursting out of him, the floodgates opening and unleashing a river. "Every time I hurt you, whether I meant to – though I can't remember wanting to – or not. All the times I was picky, or stupid, or unreasonable. All the times I made you wait, or I pushed you away when you were only trying to help – like now, even. The fact that the last thing I said to you was about coffee, and I was so worried about being late I didn't even take the two seconds to tell you that I – that I luh…" Cloud felt his throat close and the tears begin to stream out of his eyes. This time he didn't try to keep control of himself as he had in front of Vincent.

Tifa took him in her arms and held him with infinite patience as his body was wracked with great, heaving sobs. He buried his face in her chest and clung to her as she stroked his hair and said everything there was to say without actually speaking.

"It's okay," Tifa finally said after he had exhausted himself. "I forgive you." She cupped his head in her hands and brought his gaze up to meet hers, wiping the tears off of his face as she did so. "And I knew that you loved me. I always knew."

She pulled his face to hers and kissed him, slowly and tenderly, and Cloud lost himself in the feel of her lips. When he opened his eyes again, he was sitting in front of a fire, and the tears that she had wiped away were still on his cheeks.

Vincent closed the door to his room behind him after having returned from a midnight trip to the kitchen for a glass of water. His darkvision picked up that Cloud was sitting up on his cot, looking at him, and he raised an eyebrow. "You shouldn't be up, Cloud. The procedure doesn't seem to have caused any damage to your body, but you still need to be resting to regain your strength. It… it takes a lot out of you."

"I know," Cloud said. His voice sounded calm – truly calm, not flat and emotionless like it had been ever since Vincent had woken him from the pod. "It was a purifying experience. I can see why not everyone goes through it, though."

"Mm. Many people don't want to face the worst parts of their own natures, even if doing so means that they might be able to better themselves." Vincent took a sip of water and sat down on his bed. "At any rate, you should be able to use kànderén now. We don't exactly keep Lost around to let you test it on, but…"

"No," Cloud said. "I can tell I learned it." He looked Vincent in the eye, even in the darkness of the room, and went on, "It goes both ways. I can tell who still has their humanity, which means I can probably tell when it's being replaced with Lost madness.

"But I can also tell when somebody else also has the technique, when they've gone through what I have and faced the worst parts of themselves. I can tell you've done it."

"I see." Vincent took another sip of water. "That makes sense, of course. In being able to use kànderén, we are in some ways as strange as the Lost themselves."

"Mm." Cloud rubbed at his temples for a moment and then said, "Vincent, tell me something."

"Yes?"

"Do you remember the piece of music you heard me playing the other night, when you found me in Tifa's house?"

Vincent thought about it for a moment. "Yes."

"I heard it in a dream. Tifa was playing it. That used to be one of her favorite songs, but I didn't know the name of it. I always just thought it was familiar because she would sometimes play it for hours. Do you know what it's called? Just say yes or no."

It took a moment, but Vincent remembered the name of the piece. "Yes."

Cloud got up from his cot and handed Vincent a piece of paper folded in half. "Here. Look at this and tell me if I got it right."

Vincent unfolded the paper and squinted at it. He stared at the writing there for a while until his darkvision kicked in. He looked at the scrawl on the paper for a long moment, thinking about what it meant.

"It's right," he finally said. He handed the paper back to Cloud. "I take it that's the answer to an important question."

"Yes," Cloud replied. He moved back to his cot, lay down on it, and closed his eyes, still holding the paper between his fingers. "Yes, it is."

Cloud was still asleep when the door to Vincent's room burst open. Yuffie stood in the doorway. "Outbreak!"

Both he and Vincent were instantly awake and sitting up. "Damn," Vincent sighed. "Where?"

"New Corel," Yuffie replied. "The town's apparently trying to seal off an entire block because it's full of Losts – dozens of them. It's the biggest outbreak since the Fall."

Vincent looked over at Cloud, who was already getting out of bed and pulling his shirt on. "How do we get there?" he asked.

"You'll have to take an attack transport," Yuffie replied. "Red's still doing a flyby of the North Crater, so it's up to you two. Vincent's qualified on a transport – he can pilot."

"All right," Vincent said, swirling his cloak around him and checking Cerberus before holstering it. "You said dozens of Losts, though? I'm going to need a bigger gun."

Cloud raised an eyebrow as he slung the First Tsurugi's harness across his back and put the sword into it. "A bigger gun than Cerberus. Does the Protectorate keep RPGs lying around?"

Vincent gave him a small smile. "You'll see."

"The flight crews are already prepping your ride," Yuffie said. "Good thing the town got word out so fast."

"How'd the message come?"

"By radio." Yuffie looked at Cloud and explained, "Radio doesn't usually work very well over distances of more than a couple miles because there's a lot of EM interference since the Fall – we don't know why. I guess this was just their lucky day."

"Let's make sure it stays that way," Cloud said, getting his boots on. "I'm ready. Vincent?"

"I'll meet you at the hangar," Vincent said. He brushed by Yuffie. "I have to go and get my other gun."