YAY! God, finally got this chapter out. Sheesh. Show me to make promises about a semi-regular updating schedule, right?

So yeah, sorry that took so long. RL got in the way, you know how it is.

I only hope this chapter wound up being worth the wait! :) Tell me what you think. I'm not 100 percent committed to this direction yet, so… you think you've got some constructive (or even destructive. Hey, I take what I can get!) criticism, please drop a review!

Don't own don't sue.

Enjoy! (I hope!)

The church was silent despite the two people within, a picturesque scene of tranquility here in the slums of Midgar. Light filtered in through shattered windows to bathe the white flowers somehow growing in this dump of a city. Careworn pews made of warm wood seemed to radiate with reflected light; everything glowed like something out of a dream. The flower girl was knelt in prayer at the edge of her beloved plants, her strange materia glistening and making it look almost like she had a halo. All in all it was probably the most beautiful sight one could hope to find in Midgar.

Reno absolutely hated it.

It was his week to watch the ancient-chick. It wasn't an assignment he ever particularly liked, but at least it usually posed some kind of amusement. The brown-haired girl made it a pastime to give the Turks the slip amidst the ins and outs of the Midgar Slums. Reno had to admit he enjoyed a good chase, so babysitting Aeris wasn't usually so bad. But this week it really, really sucked. He didn't know what caused it, but for whatever reason the ancient hadn't left her precious church except to eat and sleep for the last five days. All she did all day was kneel by the flowers and—well he didn't know. Maybe she was talking to the planet or something. He didn't really care. All he knew was that it was freaking boring.

Reno glared at the pew in front of him and kicked it for good measure. Gaea. He hated this place! It was so… pure. It was like a representation of everything he wasn't—everything he'd never been able to have. Call him bitter or jealous, he didn't care. The fact of the matter was; being in this damn church pissed him off. It always made him feel like he wasn't good enough to be there, like he didn't belong. And who could argue? What business did a man who'd sold his soul to Shinra and washed his hands in the blood of innocents have in a church? Besides that, there was the fact that he'd had nothing to do but stare at that silly ancient girl for the last five days, with no hope of anything interesting happening. Even if he hadn't hated the church before, he would have hated it now purely for boredom's sake.

To make it even worse, he knew about all the craziness going down at headquarters right now. A cadet had shown up suddenly mako-poisoned in the barracks, with SOLDIER and the Turks both none-the-wiser over what the hell happened. Lazard was still AWOL, Hojo uncharacteristically quiet, and a whole lot of power was up for grabs in the Shinra Hierarchy. Take all that and what do you get? Reno wasn't really sure what it all added up to but he was certain it was all somehow related. There was some weird shit going down in the Shinra building right now, and Reno was stuck here. Babysitting.

The redhead sighed, blew a few strands of hair out of his eyes, and resigned himself to the rest of the afternoon. At least there were only two days left until the end of the week. And then…

Perhaps it was time he go on a mission of his own.

Reeve was beginning to get just a little frustrated. His plans had started out well enough. Everything had practically mapped itself out for him and within an hour he had the perfect plan for undermining Hojo. All he needed to do was form his alliances, manipulate a few fools, keep up his naïve act, and everything would fall into place.

He'd started off by going to make some phone calls on his lunch hour. This was not unusual, as he often made calls during lunch break to some contractor or another. In order to avoid the noise of his fellow employees, most of these calls he made from the 65th floor, where there was a scale model of Midgar. A large number of his coworkers found the floor "creepy" but Reeve loved it. It was quiet, and served perfectly to remind him of the reason he came to work every day. There was little chance of anyone going there, especially during break, and he certainly didn't have to worry about any wayward scientists coming in and eavesdropping. He stepped into the large room with the to-scale model of Midgar and pulled out his phone, ready to begin his counter-plot.

He was sorely disappointed. There were three main points most integral to the plan: Sephiroth, Tseng, and Heidegger. He'd tried contacting the pseudo-director of SOLDIER first, but after being directed to several different numbers he somehow found himself back on the phone with the first SOLDIER secretary he'd talked to.

"Sorry," she'd said, though she didn't really sound it. He could just picture her upturned nose and perfectly manicured nails. "There's a bit of a situation right now. The General can't afford to waste his time on his fanclub." Honestly! Where did Shinra get these self-righteous people? He made a mental note to look at the employee time-tables later and figure out who the hell he'd been insulted by before writing her up.

"Hmm. That's fine. Can you tell him the Director of Urban Development called then?" He bit out, taking a small amount of satisfaction in the awkward silence following. Ha. Well at least she knew she'd screwed up.

"Y—yes of course! I'll tell him you called director." Reeve had grumbled a little over the delay in phase one as he closed his phone, but no matter. He had other plans to put in motion, and so his call to Sephiroth would just have to be put off.

Next he'd tried the Turks. Observation had proven Tseng to be a reasonable sort of man, and he was sure he could convince the Turk of the merits of his plot. If not, he had a few things up his sleeve for just in case. But he didn't get the chance. His call was received by another, much kinder, secretary. The poor woman sounded more than a little frazzled, and told him Tseng and the other Turks had been running in and out all day. Reeve frowned. If SOLDIER and the Turks were both so busy with something, then it was probably important.

So after being put off twice, he was more than a little irritated. Heidegger was still an important piece, but without knowing he had the support of the other two it wouldn't be an intelligent move to include the head of Public Safety yet. That might backfire and allow Hojo to manipulate his own plan against him. He was going to have to wait another day, but who knew what progress Hojo might make in his own plan by then?

Reeve looked at his watch and groaned. His little impromptu game of phone tag had taken longer than he'd thought. Lunch hour had ended half an hour ago. Most of the wait had occurred waiting for someone to pick up in the SOLDIER department, and he'd been so anxious to begin he hadn't been watching the clock properly… Ah well. He would just have to stop in the break room for a quick snack instead of his usual lunch.

He waited by the elevators for about five minutes before he realized they weren't going to work. The director resisted the childish urge to kick the damn things. Instead he turned on his heel and marched toward the stairs. Four flights of stairs later and he was staring at the obviously tampered with key-card receptor and wondering what the hell happened. He remained where he was, glaring at the broken technology, before deciding it must have been some kind of maintenance thing and moving through the now unlocked door.

In retrospect, this seemed like a very dumb thing to do. But he had already been faced with annoying secretaries, a malfunctioning elevator, four flights of stairs, the current stagnation of his plan, and a lack of lunch. Right now, he didn't really care if there was a psycho capable of hotwiring the key-card locks on the loose. He was going to have something go right, damn it!Even if it was only a bag of chips and a soda.

However, he noticed the SOLDIER operatives in the halls as he walked to the break room, and his mind began to tick. Was this what SOLDIER and the Turks were so busy with? He put on his naïve pawn expression as he passed the SOLDIER second outside the break room door and wondered what could possibly have happened. Had there been an assassination attempt on the president? This floor was connected to the President's floor, after all. It was probably the easiest point of entry for an assassin to take. But he would surely have heard of such a thing by now, right? The director frowned and turned to his favorite machine, only to stop dead.

Reeve had seen a lot of things in his life. Growing up in the city of Midgar meant that you saw some strange people. Rebels, Shinra forces, Wutai refugees…he'd seen it all. Working in the same building has Hojo necessitated the occasional shock. Sometimes if you were unlucky enough, specimens would be brought in via the main elevators. And Hojo liked to work with some weird shit. He liked to think he was pretty well versed in the world, and that there wasn't much that could surprise him.

But the freaky glowing eyes atop the vending machine, the person curled up there, and the voice speaking his name might have done the trick.

Cloud tried to figure out a reason for Reeve to be here, but his sluggish mind was drawing up a blank. Reeve was one of his close friends, to be sure, but the man wasn't exactly the center of his psyche. Usually these dreams focused on Aeris, Zack or—well it focused on the people and events that had led to his current suicidal, screwed up state. Reeve wasn't one of those. He tried to come up with some kind of quality Reeve could represent—some kind of something that could explain his purpose here. But his thought process was on the fritz; Cloud was mentally and physically exhausted. He could hardly keep his eyes open, let alone ponder the reasoning of his innermost self.

The fact that he was so tired was strange in itself. This dream was just too realistic. So far, every natural law of physics and chemistry had still applied in this place, which was completely unlike any dream he'd had before. Logic wasn't a key figure in his hallucinations, planet induced ones or no. In fact, the lifestream delusions were usually the strangest ones. Voices continually echoed, surroundings pervaded by wispy green. Gravity never seemed to matter much in those dreams. A few times, there had even been other versions of himself scattered throughout the green landscape, suffering as he did. Not so this time. If it hadn't been for Zack and the Shinra Building, he wouldn't have thought this was a dream at all. That scared him. Because what if—what if—

"Who are you?" The question caught him completely off guard, and Cloud felt his breath stop. Reeve was looking at him like something foreign, something that didn't belong here, and he didn't know how to deal with that.

"I—" Cloud tried to think of something, anything to say but his mind was drawing a blank. Was this the test Gaea so wanted him to go through? Was he supposed to answer that question? He shook with exhaustion, no closer to the answer now than he had been at any time before. He didn't know who the hell he was. He'd like to think he never would, because something told him the truth wouldn't be pretty. The commissioner of the WRO didn't seem to share his sentiment. Cloud watched his friend's face darken, brow creasing with suspicion. The blond felt something ache to see a close friend look at him that way.

"Reeve?" He cursed himself for sounding so weak, but truth be told, it was all he could do to hold back the tears right now. He'd been tortured with visions of the ones he loved, knew he could never see them again. Now the dear ones he could see were being taken away. And all Cloud wanted to do was to fade from existence. Was death really so much to ask?

"Just because you know my name doesn't make you any less a threat." Absorbed in his thoughts, it took Cloud a while to realize his friend was talking. The world was coming to him delayed and through a haze. Reeve's words weren't quite registering, and why was Reeve looking at him so hatefully? It hurt. "Unless you can give me one good reason not to within the next five seconds, there's a SOLDIER right outside this door who I'm sure would love to know where you are."

Cloud didn't know quite what to do with himself. He felt like laughing and crying all at once. Laughing because Reeve had just asked him to prove he wasn't a threat, and how the hell was he supposed to do that? Hojo and Gaea and the whole damn world had made sure he was a threat. He had become the strongest man in existence—had to because to do otherwise would mean certain death and the end of the planet. He was a man trained for nothing else but to kill. So when is anyone like that ever not a threat? All the same, he was just so frustrated with this—this—whatever it was. It was only a damn dream, and he was stuck here, and he'd been running from ghosts and memories for what felt like forever. If Reeve called for help and Zack was the one to come through the door… Cloud knew he would break down.

"One," Reeve counted off below his breath. "Two." Cloud looked hazily into the hostile eyes of his once-friend and knew the man was serious. "Three." His mind raced for something, anything that could make Reeve stop. This wasn't just a dream any longer; this was a matter of life and death. "Four." He watched Reeve take one more breath, saw the decision already made, muscles tensing—

"Cait Sith's megaphone is in one of the lockers on the 64th floor." The sentence left him in a rush, was hardly audible and didn't make much sense at all. Why the hell had he said that? Still, he'd managed to keep Reeve from shouting for help. The commissioner was staring at him once more, eyes wide.

"Who are you?!" Cloud had known him long enough to see the calculating mind beneath Reeve's flabbergasted façade. He felt rather stupid. How on earth would bringing up something he shouldn't have known about prove him harmless? If anything, it only made him more dangerous, especially in Reeve's eyes. The man was nearly a Turk, and they always were smart enough to know that the real danger lay in information. "I don't know where the hell you heard about my prototype, I can assure you—"

"Prototype?" He interrupted before he could stop himself. Screw it. Who cared anymore. He was exhausted. Everything hurt, and he was just a few seconds short of passing out. It was understandable that the brain to mouth filter was not working at the moment.

"Yes. Prototype. I will ask you one more time; who are you?" The hero tried to pick himself up and get a better view of the commissioner. Gaea, this just wasn't making sense!

"Cait's a prototype." He mumbled to himself, attempting to get some kind of grasp on the dream he was in. "Reeve, why am I here?" He watched the dream-friend carefully as he waited for an answer, knew how much he must look like a lunatic, but did it really matter? Still, as he studied the dark-haired man before him, he began to realize that something was off. As WRO commissioner, Reeve had always seemed strained, stretched beyond his limits somehow. Worry lines and crow's feet had worked their way onto his face as the years passed, there to match the dark bags constantly lining his eyes. But this dream… Reeve didn't look like he ever had, not since Cloud had known him.

"Oh-kay." Reeve drew the word out, looking at him with some kind of combination of fear, confusion and worry. His hand moved slowly to reach into his pocket and pull out a cell phone. Cloud hated the way his former friend was treating him like some kind of feral animal, ready to spring. He just wanted to know what was going on and then he wanted to sleep. Preferably forever. "I'm going to call the General, and—" Cloud moaned, curling in on himself. Gaea, he should have known. The tears threatened to make their escape as his tired, aching body decided to give in. Sephiroth was here. Of course. What else could Gaea want with him?

"Oh! Director!" A voice Cloud knew all too well bounded in to the room. Cloud heard the accompanying, clomping gait and knew exactly who it was. "Have you a seen a—oh." Zack must have seen him, or Reeve must have pointed out the curled up ball of yellow hair and shaking limbs above the drink machine, but that wasn't what was bothering him at the moment. What was confusing was that Zack knew Reeve, which he supposed was possible although he'd never really connected those two parts of his life, and that he'd called the commissioner director.

Cloud 's mind sluggishly stumbled through the facts he'd been given. He was in the Shinra Building. Zack and S—the General were still alive. Reeve was director, didn't know who he was and Cait Sith was still a prototype. All of these things were in relative chronological agreement. Reeve looked young, younger than Cloud had ever seen him. Was it possible to contrive younger versions of people you knew in dreams? Because other than the whole "looking younger" thing, this Reeve acted exactly as the real one would have. The laws of physics and chemistry and reality appeared to be in order; the fact that his body was throbbing with pain and close to collapse was proof enough of that. If it weren't for the fact that this was impossible, he might have thought it was real.

Cloud choked.

"Hey, Spike." His best friend—dead! His mind tried to remind him, but that rational part of himself was quickly fading behind the throb of unending pain and confusion—was speaking softly somewhere near his ear. He didn't remember Zack finding something to stand on, but knew the SOLDIER must have. Cloud uncurled from his defensive position, inch by agonizing inch until he could see the near-violet eyes looking fretfully back at him. Now that he was looking for it, Zack seemed younger too. SOLDIERs didn't age, couldn't, but after Hojo had gotten a hold of them both, Zack had been different. Stronger and more fragile all at once, tired, far quieter, and more serious. This one's gaze was nowhere near naïve, but that horror, the complete and total brokenness and acceptance of death, wasn't there.

"Is this real?" Cloud let the question escape; focusing all of himself on the answer and deciding whatever Zack said next would determine his reality. He was just so tired. He'd tried to kill himself a short while ago, or at least he thought he had, so what should he care whether this was real or not? Maybe the answer was to simply enjoy seeing his friends like this: young and unharmed by destruction. So if Zack said it was real—

"Yeah, Cloud. I promise." Then that was good enough. Cloud smiled, or tired to. A tiny, watery, satisfied grin, and then the world went black.