Disclaimer: All recognizable characters and settings are property of Square Enix. No profit is being sought from the writing of this fanfiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.
Warnings: Violence, language, character death (although I don't see how that should be a surprise, given my track record. And canon). Speaking of canon, another warning- major liberties taken with canon.
Holy shit. It's been nearly a year. I suck.
Part 13 - Battle hymn of the vanquished
Cloud's shoulder blades were trying to crawl up into his ears under Heidegger's stare. People probably thought Soldiers were bad, with that creepy green glow that made everything look like a cut-rate paranormal investigations show, but nothing beat this, glittering black shards of glass just lying in wait in the dark.
"Modeoheim?" Cloud said softly.
Of course they knew. They knew everything.
Heidegger hadn't said anything the entire time. The man sitting beside him—Palmer, Space Exploration, makes off-colour jokes in the Aerodrome, a snatch of memory supplied—shot the other director a quick look before shrugging. He cleared his throat, bringing up a pudgy finger to scratch at the side of his nose.
"Yes," Palmer answered. "You'll go there immediately."
Cloud scanned the long table. Aside from Lazard, all of the executives were there. The President sat at the head, watching Cloud with narrowed eyes. Heidegger and Palmer were on his left, the head of Security leaning back with his arms folded under his heavy beard while Palmer did most of talking. Across from him, Scarlet was reading a sheaf of papers intently, a flawless red nail tapping against the varnished black wood of the table. Next to her sat the head of Urban Development, a tall mousy man who'd never actually spoken to Cloud, as far as he could remember. Tuesti or something. He was always frowning.
Cloud hesitated. "Just me, sir?"
The AC was on full blast in the meeting room, its vent set high over the President's head in the same immaculate brushed metal that edged every door this high up the ShinRa building. Vaguely, Cloud wondered if his breath was crystallizing in front of his face or if it just felt that cold because of the frigid sweat running thin streaks down his back.
Palmer waved a hand. "You'll get a couple of Security grunts. And there'll be a Turk."
A recon unit, Cloud recognized. Small. Half of it disposable.
Mount Heidegger rumbled in warning, and the man finally sat up. "You will have command," he said, "But keep in mind that it remains out of your authority to question any secondary objectives I may choose to assign General Affairs."
Like Cloud could have forgotten. "Yessir."
Heidegger was still staring at him. "Angeal was a trap," he said bluntly. "He meant to lead the Soldier operatives out of HQ as a distraction for Genesis." His voice took on a rasping edge. "And Lazard was all too happy to oblige."
Cloud carefully focussed somewhere in the middle distance. Prickles jabbed at his nape, signalling that the rest of the occupants of the room were probably watching him now, too.
"So it's fairly likely that you'll find some form of trap in Modeoheim, too. If Genesis was sighted there, he wanted to be found."
"Yessir."
Heidegger didn't say anything else.
Cloud dug the tip of a tooth into his cheek, and he took a deep breath. "Sir? What's in Modeoheim?" What were they so afraid of that all of the execs had to be here? From what Cloud had heard, they got along about as well as a house on fire. With deadly poisonous snakes in the basement.
"Genesis. Snow."
Cloud blinked.
Heidegger leaned forward. "We're sending you to find out, Strife. What do you think is in Modeoheim?"
"And after I find out?" He paused, and then appended through the cracks in his teeth, "Sir?"
Heidegger's eyes narrowed further. "Officially, this is a recon. Once you've found them..." The man's mouth twisted, making the scar etched down his face stretch into a gleaming strip. "The company trusts your discretion," a beat of silence, "Soldier First Class Cloud Strife."
Oh. A threat. That was more familiar territory.
Cloud saluted crisply. "Yessir."
Behind him, there was a thin creak of leather, and then it stilled again.
Scarlet straightened up, tilting her head to smile at the President. "There is still the matter of amalgamating the Soldier program into the core company," she said. "The only reason Lazard was able to operate unchecked for as long as he did was due to an overabundance of autonomy. I propose the Soldier program would best suit becoming an adjunct to Weapons Development."
Heidegger's head snapped up at this. "Were you born an idiot or are you just trying that hard to be one? Soldier as part of Weapons? There's no way—"
As the shouting started at the table, Cloud stepped backward slowly, glancing over to the figure leaning against the wall by the door.
Sephiroth met his eyes with a dry look over his crossed arms. He motioned towards the door, just a quick jerk of his head, as he pushed himself upright. "Dismissed," he said quietly.
Cloud didn't even bother to smother the gratitude in his cracked grimace as he brought his arm up for another quick salute.
The sides of his PHS were warm in patches. He'd been fingering it for a long time. He swiped at the smudged glass, and his thumb streaked a clean—cleaner, anyway—swath.
He'd had to stop by Requisitions on the way out to pick up some supplies for the mission. He'd walked into the closet of an office, stopped in his tracks, and stared at the employee behind the counter while every one of the voices clamouring in his head told him to just turn around and walk out. It had taken a pointed cough to make him jump, sign off for the parcel, and head for the door. He'd stopped again, though, hesitant, and offered a stupid, awkward kind of apology. He still wasn't really sure what for.
Lazard's old secretary had just smiled thinly, but she hadn't responded. And he'd left because he couldn't quite remember her name.
Cloud exhaled loudly as he looked up, and the mass of condensation brushed against his jaw, barely perceptible. "Look," he said, aggrieved, "you could have waited for the pick up."
Tseng gave him an unimpressed look. "What?" His breath came in a ragged burst. His breath was starting to crystallize along his cheeks, making it look like the Turk had a patch of dead, paper-white skin dragging from his nose to this hairline.
"Your injury is slowing you down."
His own ribs were giving off a dull rhythmic throb. They'd just hit the mountain ranges that chained the Northern Continent to the sea when the chopper had triggered some kind of trap that had sent a shit ton of missiles streaking up out of the low-hanging blizzard up at the chopper. The Turk had managed to avoid enough of them that they hadn't hit the ground in a flaming mass of charred metal, but then something had sheared off an entire wall of the cabin and sent shrapnel grinding through the propeller blades, and they'd slammed into the white nothingness underneath. They'd plowed hard through walls of snow that had suddenly felt as solid as concrete slabs before shuddering to a stop.
Tseng grunted, turning his attention back to his feet. The Turk was having a hard time in the snow, where his fancy shoes had no purchase once the treads got packed.
"Or I guess Heidegger wasn't kidding about that secondary objective," Cloud said flatly.
He really should have known better because Tseng glanced at him again—and if he'd thought his tone had been flat, this was fucking mirror smooth and level—and the Turk said, "I noticed that Kunsel was not present to send you off, this time." The words suffocated in their blandness. "Did you perhaps—"
"Fuck off," Cloud snapped. He should have known. If they'd gotten Kunsel, there was no way the Turks weren't in on it, too. He shoved his hands into his pockets and stared fixedly at where his boots were kicking up jagged little shards of crusted snow.
There was no reply, just the crackling of ice.
Eventually, given the crawl that the Turk was moving at, even that faded behind him.
Cloud looked up at the horizon. It was that kind of faded grey blue that made it hard to tell where it touched the churned grey of the snow all around him. The path had climbed up, curving around steeply before opening out onto the lip of a precipice. He stood still, the sheer drop a couple of inches from the heavy black plates of his boots, and he rotated a shoulder. It creaked stiffly as if on rusted hinges in dire need of oiling.
Overhead, the sky was silent and still except for the fat mass of a cloudbank drifting ponderously in front of the watery sun. Nothing flew in Northern skies. Probably for fear of getting shot down like they were.
The ground stretched away, far below him, swallowing everything with its emptiness.
He wasn't sure how long he stood there. Must have been a good while. The tips of his fingers were starting to get that tingly-numb feeling that meant he'd been immobile for too long without shelter. They'd been walking for at least three hours now, and he hadn't seen or heard any sign of the others for the past couple of them. After he left Tseng behind. He had this vaguely knotted feeling somewhere in his gut that this was probably the kind of thing that Angeal would give him shit for, if the other First hadn't, you know, left first.
But now, footsteps approached, squeaking against the packed snow.
Cloud turned around.
It was one of the MPs that had caught up with him. It was a big guy, dark edges of tattoos peeking out from under his collar that were only really exposed because of the way he was hunched over, gloved hands braced on his thighs as he dragged in deep gulps of ice-brittle air.
Cloud watched the man gasp for breath, feeling the endless emptiness gape behind him and the odd itch in the back of his mind expand.
It wasn't as if he'd... actually been expecting something. Something else. He remembered seeing the Private get onto the helicopter with them. There wasn't any reason for him to think that it might have been someone else.
Just this weird lump in his chest. This wasn't right. Something about the world just wasn't sitting right. Like a medium sized man was trying to pull off wearing extra large boots.
He forced a lopsided grin onto his face. "Hey, you made good time," he said brightly. The chasm at his back seemed to magnify the sound. "Didn't you say you came from up North?" He didn't usually ask this kind of thing. Not at ShinRa, where "home" could be a touchy subject, especially since the war. It was usually best to just talk about the here and now, and if they offered the information, hey, they offered. But he had to ask—
The MP heaved himself up straight so quickly that he rocked backward for a brief second, but then the man snapped a perfect salute. "Uh, nossir," he said, a slight puzzled edge to his voice, "born and raised in Midgar, sir."
And that sense of wrongness, that yawning emptiness, stretched out further into the grey space. Something was supposed to happen here. Something really important, barely out of reach in the back of his head like a toothache that he couldn't quite poke with his tongue, and it had just gone...
They started out as nothing but a little buzz of sound.
... wrong.
Voices. A barely remembered conversation.
"...gaga."
Laughter.
"—laughing at me? What about you—"
Something important.
"—and everywhere else has none..."
The voice, so familiar, rang in his head, harsh and clanging like he'd knocked over a tangled mass of wind chimes. Cloud hissed, his fingers digging into his temple. His eyes had closed at some point, screwing shut against the quick jabs of pain shoving thin spikes through the nerves just at the back of his eyeballs.
"Sir?" The MP was saying something. It was hard to tell, like a mosquito's whine in a gale. "Are you—" The rest of the words were swallowed into a hoarse shout, and Cloud shot out a hand to snatch at the falling man.
He'd felt more than heard the snow slide under the MP's boots as the man stepped forward, too close to the edge, and now, his fingers twisted into the man's uniform, white with the strain of the awkward grip. One of the Private's legs dangled fully off the edge of the cliff, and dull thuds came from below as blocks of ice and snow thumped their way down the mountain side. The ground seemed to vibrate under his feet, matching the shaking that was starting to spread through his arm and make his bones feel like they'd been made of overcooked noodles.
The man was staring up at Cloud, face hidden behind those stupid red lights of his helmet, and so tense that his muscles vibrated cord-like up against the fabric of his sleeves.
"Careful," Cloud hissed through his tight teeth, yanking the MP back from the edge as the man skidded again trying to catch his feet. "It's hard to see where the edge is because of the snow."
Something down below was still rumbling, but everything was too white and grey to see any details. Cloud just hoped that they hadn't started an avalanche. That'd be just the thing to go on his record. Buried small rural village under a hundred feet of snow, check. At least back in Nibelheim, the majority of the village had been far enough away from the foot of the mountain to avoid the brunt of anything falling—he supposed it was still called snow, even if it was compressed to iron-slab hardness—and the Shinra Mansion worked like a fairly good diverter.
"Sir?"
"Huh?" Cloud was vaguely aware that the MP had been speaking.
Now, the man hesitated, and then made some kind of aborted gesture with a hand. "Um..."
Oh. Cloud smiled quickly, letting it fall away as he shrugged. How did he keep getting saddled with the idiots who wasted their time worrying about him when they were the ones who'd nearly died? First Timms and Forenz, and now this guy. He could have sworn that Timms had been following him around more than usual after that shitfest with Neo Bahamut. "It was just déjà vu or something." It was kind of... nice. Sometimes.
The man nodded again before straightening up. "Okay, sir." He looked down and seemed to scowl at the scraped leather over his palms.
Glancing out at the empty space behind him while the MP bent to pat away some of the thick snow plastered to his knees, Cloud grimaced. It had been the voice of his ghost, he realized, even if it hadn't actually been talking to him this time. He'd almost forgotten about it, given how long it had been since he'd last heard it.
When they finally found something down in a valley, stark black against the snow, Cloud almost dismissed it because of how obviously abandoned it looked. The ShinRa logo was a smudge of barely visible red paint on the collapsed remains of the iron roofing. Everywhere else, rust had eaten its way through the metal panes, leaving brittle edges and blackened wood around the holes in the structure. It looked like it hadn't been touched by anything except the weather for decades.
Cloud drummed his fingers on the boulder he'd found off the main trail. It was one of those massive things that appeared out of nowhere on flat land, carried along by the movement of glaciers at some point eons ago. He crouched behind it, squinting against the glare of the snow as he stared at the building.
It looked empty. But there'd been a flash of movement just behind the crumbling stone walls encircling the area. A man in dirty red picking his way down a corridor, walking with the unhurried plod of a guard making his rounds.
"This was once a mako mining facility," said Tseng's voice, low and just by his ear.
After a moment, Cloud hummed, trying to pretend that the Turk hadn't just scared the shit out of him. The other two had caught up eventually, and Cloud had let them rest for a few minutes before herding the group down toward the valley along the single mountain path. Even exhausted from the climb, the Turk moved like a fucking cat.
"The storage house looks disused, but if Hollander is here, then I'd wager that the structure above ground is simply a front."
"So they're underground?" Again with the damn tunnels. It was like the first thing anyone did after going rogue was turn into a mole.
"Most likely."
"Right." Cloud drew his sword from its sheath, wincing at the slight scraping sound it made under the smooth hiss of oil. He checked the blade, pressing the pads of his fingers against the overly shiny areas where he'd had to smooth out the nicks and scores. Fuck. He should have replaced it back in Midgar, like he'd been meaning to for months now. Biting back a sigh, Cloud stood. "I'll go check it out."
"Wait."
Cloud watched as Tseng picked his way around the rock.
The Turk nodded crisply down toward the warehouse. "Since our objective is mainly reconnaissance, it would be best to avoid direct conflict for the time being. I should take one of the Security operatives and investigate, while you remain on standby in case we require extraction."
Cloud felt a grim smile twist his mouth. "You want to go in without me."
"I believe it represents the best chance for success, yes," Tseng said solemnly.
Cloud couldn't help the short, sharp laugh. "Oh right. That objective."
A brief grimace crossed Tseng's face along with an unexpected hint of pure frustration in the man's eyes. "Strife, I don't know why you're so determined to believe that I am your enemy, or that I'm here in any other capacity than aiding you in this mission." The words came quietly clipped.
"You—"
Tseng raised his voice to interrupt him. "However, even if you are having a bad day, we have work to do here in order to protect the company and the people within it. So I trust you are able to set your personal grudges aside and focus."
Cloud eyed the churned snow underfoot, tracing the jagged crusts poking out into the air as his face burned in the bitter cold. It wasn't even so much the humiliation from being lectured on shit he was supposed to know. It was some kind of sheer, impotent fury roiling in his stomach like the clouds of water vapour spinning their chaotic vortices in front of their faces. Because there were people counting on him, again, just like back in Wutai when he thought they were all going to die buried like rats underground.
But... Genesis was here. Maybe Angeal. And, he realized with a force that pretty much punched all the wind out of his gut, that all that loyalty to the Company, to Soldier, was just about as strong as a drenched sheet of paper in front of his need to finally get some goddamn answers. He'd chased Angeal this far, like a good fucking puppy, and he'd be damned if he stopped now.
Cloud wondered if that made him a traitor, too.
Tseng seemed to take his silence as a sign to smile that thin, controlled smile all the Turks used when they were playing bodyguard to the Vice President during public events intended to boost ShinRa's popularity standings. "Don't worry, Strife. I know there's been reason for you to assume aggression on the part of the Company lately, but I'm certainly not on assassination duty today." It was probably a joke, given the dry morbidity of it all.
Cloud raised his head and didn't bother holding back the ugly sneer on his face. "Like you trust me with whoever goes to that weird ass church in the slums?" he said, loud and hard.
The silence was tense as the smile slid off Tseng's mouth.
His stomach churning, bitter bile stinging at the back of his throat, Cloud stepped past the man. "We all have something we want to protect," he said. "Stay out of my way, Turk."
Cloud peered down at the murky space below, under his dangling boots. He'd found what turned out to be a skylight on the roof of the building once he'd pried away some of the rusted crust clinging to it. The guards had been a joke, either unenhanced or deteriorated to the point of having their brains calcify. They hadn't even reacted to the sound of Cloud ripping out the frame of the skylight.
The warped iron of the roof was starting to feel like the wrong edge of a knife digging into his hands as he hung in space, twisting one way and the other as he squinted downward. There was a hint of metallic gleam over to his left, and so he heaved, swinging to get up some momentum.
This was probably going to hurt, he thought, as he let go.
He hit the ground on one ankle—which screamed in protest—and collapsed into a roll. Flipping over on to his back, he blinked up at the little square of bland grey sky. The pebbled floor was cold and lumpy under his shoulder blades, and off in his periphery, he could barely see rusted railings separating him from a solid wall of black nothingness. He tried to breathe, feeling like someone had strapped belts over his lungs and started jumping up and down on him.
Maybe it was a whisper of sound his ears heard and hotwired to his brain without crossing any conscious bits of his mind. Maybe it was some rush of air movement that brushed against his skin. Or maybe it was the voiceless shriek in the dark spot behind his eyes that made him wrench himself to the side just as something slammed down into the space where his throat had been. Black razor claws gouged grooves into the metal flooring, accompanied by a screech that reached earwax melting frequencies.
The serpentine neck of the monster swung around as it followed him with a blunt, eyeless snout. Its claws retracted and extended like some nightmare version of a cat kneading at the ground, and Cloud's eyes skittered away from the still Angeal face plastered to the top of its head and looking way too much like a death mask for the comfort of the blender running in his stomach.
With a rumbling growl, the thing turned to face him fully, and an inane thought floated aimlessly through his mind.
What did it need vocal cords for? It wasn't like the thing had a mouth.
It tensed, muscles rippling under its silvery fur like so many trout stuffed into a fisherman's net, and when it leaped this time, Cloud was ready.
He'd seen cats trying to pounce on chocobo chicks before. They'd stare, unblinking, unheeding of any obstacles. The monster had fixed him with the same laser focus, even if it didn't seem to have any eyes to focus with. And just like the cats that had run full-tilt into the fence the chocobo farmer had put up surrounding the corral, the monster seemed to barely notice, just a little too late, when Cloud collapsed backward under the leap and planted both boots into the thing's belly before heaving up and over.
Yowling, spitting somehow, the monster smashed through the railing that edged the walkway.
It fell for a very long time.
Cloud picked himself off the ground, gingerly testing the ankle he'd landed on. It sent spark-like shocks up his shin, but seemed to hold alright. Limping slightly, he hurried off in the general direction he remembered the side gates being. Whoever was holed up in this dump was bound to figure out their guard dog-monster-thing was missing at some point, and he didn't particularly want to be caught alone when they did.
The place was huge.
An entire mining village could have, and probably had, lived in the building. After letting the others in, Cloud had ventured further into the facilities with the rest of his team in tow. He'd found some living quarters, with slab-like beds built into the walls that still had some remnants of mouldering sheets littered over them.
In one of the stall-like rooms, they found a body.
It was an old man, lying on his back on one of the beds. His skin had pulled down away from his face, giving him a skeletal appearance, but at least it hadn't turned to goop like some of the other bodies Cloud had seen. A black mass of dried blood covered his chest, fragments of bone mixed in with the fibres of the nightshirt he'd been wearing. The body smelled musty, like any decay that was going to happen had come and gone long ago.
"Bullet wound," Tseng said, from where he was bent over the corpse.
"Did the deserters kill him?" said the MP—whose name had turned out to be McCaul, born in upper middle class Midgar, where his family had done office work for ShinRa for years—from the door, where he had to hunch to peer past the low frame. They'd left the other ShinRa Security op hidden near the exit, where he had a clear view of the grounds and a hand on his radio.
"No." Tseng shook his head. He gestured at the wound. "See how it barely bled despite being directly over his heart? The scorching on the edges of the wound indicate that the bullet was shot at close range, as well."
"So he was already dead?" Cloud said.
"For some time, yes." Tseng glanced up at him from where the Turk crouched.
The small bed took up the majority of the space in the room, and Cloud had had to squeeze in after the Turk and stand with his back pressed against the wall so that the harness of his sword was digging in between his ribs. There definitely hadn't been room for McCaul's bulk, even though Cloud had never been that big, and Tseng was, well, a Turk.
"Why would they shoot him, then?"
After a moment, Tseng stood up. "I don't know. Perhaps they had standing orders. And I'm sure you have noticed that the behaviour of the Copies is erratic at best."
"Oh." Cloud watched the Turk move towards the door.
McCaul stepped backwards to get out of the way.
"Wait," Cloud said. When two heads snapped to him, he hesitated, gnawing on the inside of his lip. "Shouldn't we, I guess, bury him?"
In the quiet that descended like a smothering blanket of dust, McCaul shuffled his boots in the hallway, and Tseng stared at him.
Fuck. Wait. Cloud shook his head. "No, wait. I know we can't afford to carry him outside, but at the same time, we can't just leave him here. He's already been here for a long time."
Tseng just kept looking at him.
Cloud's mouth opened, and closed again. "What?" he said finally, probably just a bit resentfully.
The Turk made a movement that could almost be interpreted as a shrug. "I was simply thinking that you haven't changed as much as you probably think." And he gave Cloud that ambiguous little smile that he could never tell was real or not.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Cloud demanded.
"Nothing, Strife," Tseng said. He tilted his head towards the body. "Well? Go ahead."
Scowling, Cloud bit off the rest of the words trying to bubble their way out of the mess in his stomach. He touched his fingers to his bracer, feeling the cold smoothness of materia through the pads of his gloves. The first one crackled with thunder. Next was the half-acrid wash of healing magic. He found the Firaga in the last slot. Pausing, he blinked down at the body, and then reached out to draw the tattered sheet over the figure. Then he concentrated, making the magic as tight, controlled, and precise as he could manage, and he fed it into the gleaming orb.
When they shut the door behind them, McCaul looked a bit queasy at the smell of scorched hair and grease. Then again, Cloud figured, he probably didn't look much better himself.
There was a heavy steel door. It gleamed, far newer than anything else they'd found in the place so far.
"Looks promising," Cloud muttered, mostly to himself. Considering how decrepit everything else had been.
A bit further back, Cloud had found a large open area, made even bigger by the gaping holes in the ceiling. Fragmented tiles and bits of shingle had crunched and turned into fine powder underfoot. It was as if the elements had rolled up their sleeves, spat on their palms, and taken a hatchet to the room. Rock dust plated the bottom of a recessed area off to one side, the bottom of which had looked a good few feet deeper than the rest of the flooring.
"Oh," McCaul had explained, "it's a bathhouse."
When Cloud had turned to look at the MP, he'd pulled his rifle higher on his shoulder and waved a hand like it should have been obvious.
"You know, the communal type."
It'd turned out that McCaul's father had been sent to the nearby Icicle Inn for some kind of properties negotiation back before the guy had joined ShinRa Security, and he'd tagged along.
Then, when Tseng suggested that McCaul could probably have gotten a desk job like his father's, given his education, the MP had just made a face with what was visible under his helmet, and then he'd grinned and shrugged.
Tseng had actually smiled at this, and nodded.
And Cloud had been reminded why he didn't like it when people smarter than him talked to each other.
He did wonder how the Mayor back home would have reacted to some kind of communal bathhouse in Nibelheim, though. It probably would have been hysterical. The man had had a stick shoved up his ass for as long as Cloud could remember.
Cloud ran his hands over the door. No ID keypad. No fancy mechanisms. Just a huge chunk of metal with a thick bolt across the other side of it. It fit so closely in its frame that Cloud had to look out of the corner of his eye to see a shadow of the crack around it.
So. The old-fashioned approach. He looked at Tseng.
The Turk scanned the door, the wall around it, and the ceiling before shaking his head. "The wall around here has been reinforced to support the door, but the ceiling hasn't. I'll bring the roof down first before I could budge the door itself."
Well, that left one option. Cloud drew his sword.
Off to the side, he could see the others step back hurriedly.
He looked down at the length of his blade, where even the dim lighting reflected off the edge, and he winced.
"Sorry," he whispered, grasping the hilt in both hands.
He swung twice, once diagonally across, and once horizontally, ignoring the squeal of metal and the shower of sparks that fizzled out towards the ground as steel sheared through steel. Shifting his weight backward, he lifted a boot and slammed the heel hard into the spot where the slashes intersected.
With a deafening crash that seemed to rattle Cloud's teeth without actually relying on his ears to do any relaying, the door crumpled in on itself. Three of the pieces thumped and tumbled their way down into the pitch black space beyond, accompanied by a series of shuddering, artificial earthquakes, and the last clung stubbornly to one warped hinge.
Cloud peered past the mutilated door. The other pieces had sounded like they'd fallen downward, and now that his eyes were adjusting, he could just make out the outline of a narrow staircase dropping into a sharp turn. The edges were overlaid with the faint, gritty green of the mako shine from his eyes.
Jackpot. They'd found the rabbit's warren.
He turned to the other two, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dark opening.
For a moment, McCaul didn't move, and then, quietly, he said, "Holy shit, sir."
"Hah," Cloud said, holding his sword in one hand and groping for the railing with the other. "That bad, huh?"
Yeah, sounded about right.
Almost monstrous, eh, Angeal?
Whatever Cloud had expected to find at the bottom of the staircase, it wasn't Genesis, grey splashed across his hair and down his coat like an infestation of vigorously aggressive mould, holding his blade pointed to Hollander's throat.
Cloud stopped just inside the room. It was bright; hard, varnished wood glowed under the yellow incandescent lights set into the high ceiling. Black, iron gating stood at the edge of the floor, a thin border between the brightness and the empty space beyond it. It was a continuation of the same mine shaft that he'd found earlier, when he'd smashed his way through the skylight.
A click, just by his shoulder.
Cloud jerked his head around to see Tseng, pistol raised and braced against a steady wrist, just a second before Genesis snapped out his free hand and a trio of fireballs blistered the air and sent the Turk flying into the metal panels lining the wall behind him.
Tseng made an inarticulate sound, shifted like he was trying to draw his knees under him, and slumped forward.
There was the unpleasant smell of something that had gotten singed, but Cloud could see the faint iridescent shimmer of Shell, barely visible against the Turk's ashy skin. He turned away. It had probably been the impact that had knocked the man out, more than anything else.
Cloud was aware of a loud rasping sound. It turned out to be his breath.
But Genesis ignored him.
"So tell me why, Professor, I shouldn't spit you where you grovel."
"You need me!"
"You lied."
Cloud watched Hollander's face turn red and purple in blotches. "I'm the only one who can possibly operate the genetic manipulator—" The scientist's voice cut off abruptly at the cold touch of blade to his throat.
"You lied to me."
There were spots of dried blood on the lapels of Hollander's white coat, wherever grey and black grime hadn't ground itself into the heavy fabric, anyway. Thin scratches etched their way down his cheek and chin to match, as if he'd dived headfirst into a vat of splinters and scraped his way down to the bottom.
"—know the initial solution I proposed wasn't ideal," Hollander was babbling, fear laced through every word, "but I'm absolutely confident that I now have the answer. With just a small supply of S cells, I can easily reverse your degradation and—"
"And Sephiroth is simply delighted to share, I assume."
Cloud's eyes jumped back to Genesis at the caustic tone.
"Well, no... I mean. The extraction process is somewhat invasive, but Hojo's supply—"
"Your time is up, Professor," Genesis interrupted again, softly.
Hollander shuffled backward as the deserter took a slow step. Dark stains crept down the back of his shirt collar.
Whatever the crazy in Genesis' head whispered to him on a regular basis, it hadn't let him neglect his sword. The sabre edge glowed the way something did when it was so sharp that it split pieces of light. Cloud wet his lips.
Fuck. He could really have used Tseng right about now. Fuckity fuck.
"Genesis," he said. And stopped. Because damned if he wasn't complete shit at hostage negotiations.
Luckily, for whatever reason that made sense to the former First, Genesis turned his head just enough to regard Cloud out of the corner of his eye and said, almost pleasantly and nearly not deranged at all, "You made it, Strife. I'm impressed." As if the last time Cloud had encountered the bastard, Genesis hadn't been trying to turn him into Soldier flambé or whatever it was called.
Cloud eyed the decaying man.
As if he hadn't nearly succeeded.
"You just keep coming back. Everywhere. I turn around, and there you are again."
His sword was still up, but he'd stopped advancing. Cloud could see Hollander, inching backward, wild eyes racing from him, to Genesis, to the open door McCaul had just come through.
"One minute," Genesis continued, mouth pulling into a crooked grin and voice rasping like it had suddenly grown barbs in it. "I'm sure I've got a dog biscuit around here somewhere."
Cloud kept his blade ready and loose in his hands, and his face neutral. Even if that had stung way more than it should have, coming from a lunatic.
That was about when Hollander screeched and dashed for the stairwell. McCaul jumped at the sound, but the MP rallied fast enough to take a couple of steps to the side and reach out to bar the way, even if his rifle wasn't particularly suited for close combat. Actually, it just got in the way, and when Hollander lashed out with wild arms and elbows and knocked into the butt of the weapon, part of the stock caught under the lip of the Private's helmet. The armour piece ripped upward until it flipped back and cracked on the ground with a metallic gong, the scientist managed to score a bloody groove across the inside edge of McCaul's eye socket and up the bridge of his nose. Hollander ran, his steps a fumbling cacophony of noise, up the dark stairs.
McCaul glanced at him, blinking hard against the trickle of blood leaking into one eye from the gash in his face, and Cloud twitched his chin toward the doorway. "Go after Hollander, McCaul!"
The MP nodded quickly before spinning. The back of his buzzed head vanished rapidly into the gloom.
Genesis hadn't moved through it all. He'd watched Hollander run, his face a disinterested mask. Now, though, he lowered his arm as the steady thump of footsteps faded, and the length of his blade gleamed red under the oppressive yellow glare of the light bulbs. It looked like dried and pressed fire.
Cloud was pretty sure he'd be able to match the other First's speed by now. Probably. After whatever it was that Hojo had adjusted in him. But Genesis was still just standing there, acting as if he didn't give a flying elfadunk that the guy he'd been about to spit had taken off on him.
"The arrow loosed; the bow string slackens
The Goddess reaches out with golden Gift and closed eyes
She flies; Song of air and memory—"
Genesis stopped. A bitter little smile touched his mouth as he eyed Cloud. "Act four, scene two," he clarified, like that made it sound any less like gibberish.
There was another pause as Genesis stared at him, something almost expectant in the acid mako glow. Whatever he'd been looking for, it was obvious he didn't find it in Cloud's utter incomprehension, because he sighed, and he started talking again.
"The Goddess laments the inevitable battle between the friends. She pities those who have abandoned her Gift, but she knows that no other path exists for the three."
Cloud realized that Genesis was actually explaining himself about halfway through. His jaw slackened, but the other man continued his interpretation with something approaching patience.
"The Prisoner must be saved. The Wanderer must return. And the Hero, he must fight."
And it hit Cloud, then. Genesis was right.
In Wutai, all those weeks ago, he hadn't wanted— He hadn't had any idea what he was doing, really. He hadn't wanted to be there. He hadn't wanted to fight. He'd still been hoping, maybe, stupidly, that Angeal would just show up out of nowhere, crack a couple of his usual, sarcasm-laden jokes, and then all of a sudden time would rewind, everything would be back to where it was supposed to be, and none of this would have ever happened. He hadn't been thinking about anything else. He hadn't been ready for anything else.
And he'd been terrified and useless, and he'd endangered everyone that ShinRa had sent to follow him into that vipers' nest.
He'd almost died.
But somehow, he'd made it back, even with the lingering stench of fire and soot choking him, and he'd found his home under attack—and fuck it all if it wasn't depressing that ShinRa was home to him—and then he'd almost died again, and somewhere along the way... he'd stopped. He wasn't afraid anymore. Well, yeah, the black uniform and the accompanying enhancement spike helped, but it wasn't just that. Genesis was right.
Angeal wasn't coming back.
Lazard and Genesis, too. They'd chosen something else, something not ShinRa. Given the way his clones had pretty much torched the city, it was probably safe to say that Genesis didn't have any lingering attachments to the place, either. They weren't going to just turn around and say "Whoops. I didn't mean to desert. Silly me." Apart from how completely retarded that sounded, Cloud knew that they'd thought about this. Probably for a very long time. They were the people who did the thinking, anyway. They always were.
And then there was him. He'd chosen, too.
And he'd chosen the other people. Not ShinRa. He didn't give two shits what ShinRa wanted, not when it was buying out people who used to be his friends and turning them into spies. He'd decided to fight for the people like McCaul and Robertsson and Timms. The ones who saw him for the freak he was and decided that they didn't care. And Forenz, who did his job so quietly that no one remembered that he was there. And Jordon, and Geoffreys, and Hoffe, lost somewhere in the massive cogs on which ShinRa slowly spun as it ground its way through burnt time, money, and mako.
And Sephiroth, who didn't know how to be anything else.
They were the reasons why he wasn't running away anymore, and why, as Genesis put it, this battle was inevitable.
"So you're the hero?"
Genesis tilted his head in response.
"And I'm, what? The prisoner?"
"Naturally. Trapped within the walls of rank and rote."
Cloud snorted. "Right. Naturally."
Genesis had been moving, as he spoke. Cloud's feet had followed, somehow, some unconscious thought guiding them as the two traced a wide circle, keeping his distance. Each facing the other, each ready. Waiting. Some kind of macabre dance that promised violence.
Cloud watched Genesis' eyes, trying to remember if he'd ever seen actual malice cross the other man's face. And it occurred to him that this was some kind of pre-battle ritual, some delicate posturing, some kind of fucked up mind-game that he was going to lose because he hadn't known that he was playing and no one had ever told him the rules.
Frustration a solid lump throttling his throat, Cloud threw the game. "What is the point, Genesis?" His free hand came up, stretching open and clenching shut helplessly. "Is this all you wanted? Recreate some scene?"
No response.
Biting back a curse, Cloud squeezed his eyes shut. The pounding behind his temples intensified as whatever was stomping on his brain started to really get into a groove.
"It's fairly simple, Strife."
There was the faintest noise, a tiny whisper of air. And Cloud was spinning hastily to turn his duck into enough of a parry that he could knock Genesis' blade aside as it changed its trajectory from quick stab into a whistling slash coming down towards his shoulder.
"If you do not fight, I will kill you," Genesis continued as he watched Cloud step back into a better defensive stance. "How's that for a point?"
Cloud didn't have a chance to answer before he had to leap over a swipe at his knees. He threw himself to the side, turning his tumble into a roll even as he snapped out a quick kick that clipped the armoured brace covering Genesis' wrist and forced the First to either fall back or lose his grip on his sword. Cautiously, he straightened. "Just peachy," he said, air whistling through gritted teeth.
And then he was diving again, massive fireballs making violent spitting sounds as they sailed over his head.
Thunder. He had thunder in the first slot. He tapped at the materia, a quick jab of energy that connected to the crackling core of magic that stuck, holding open a channel for the lightning spell. He'd always thought of it as the initial depolarization, the one that was always necessary before the thunderbolt could follow the path laid out for it back down to the ground. Thunder was fast. Thunder was flashy in the way it could split and throw up a light screen, just enough to hinder the vision of someone who wasn't expecting it.
Cloud shot off a blitz of quick spells in the general direction he remember Genesis being, not bothering to look over his shoulder to check to see if any actually hit home.
He skidded, backpedalling furiously to avoid colliding with the metal rails that lined the floor, and he pivoted just in time to see Genesis blast another wave of fire at him.
"Shit!"
He rolled himself into another dodge.
Fire was the strongest of the elemental magic, in terms of pure power. It didn't have to rely on breaking anything or frying any particularly necessary circuits for its effect. It just destroyed, rolling through flesh and armour alike and eating, devouring everything as it went until nothing but brittle ashy dregs were left over. But fire was a bit slow. There was always that moment of recoil, of concentration that was necessary to prevent the magic from blowing backwards into the channeller's face.
Cloud used that time, that split second of breath, to dodge and spin.
He came up behind Genesis, just as the deserter started to pivot, to raise his hand for another volley of fire magic, and he snapped his own lightning spell out, hammering it down towards the sliver of an opening Genesis left in his back as he turned.
It struck. Not strong enough to do any permanent damage, but just enough to sting, to crackle down the man's arm and make him hiss.
Genesis completed his turn, and fireballs whistled towards Cloud like a stream of missiles. The thunder magic must have had some effect, though, some kind of nerve damage as it had shot its way through the man's arm, because the magic went wide. As the fire whipped past Cloud's shoulder, he took a few half-leaps, half-sidesteps until he saw just enough of Genesis' back—red, grey decay, black soot—and he threw another flurry of thin lightning streamers.
There was a sick sucking noise, and black feathers burst out of Genesis' shoulder.
The lightning hit the feathers, but it seemed to have about as much effect as throwing drops of water at river. Whirling as it unfurled, the wing brushed aside the thunder magic like so much glitter confetti.
Through the storm of feathers, Cloud barely saw Genesis' face, teeth bared in a snarl as the wing pumped, flattening feathers to the ground at the same time as it flung even more up into the air, and then Genesis was right in front of him. The wing had propelled him, shooting him forward with about as much force as a battering ram, and all of it hit Cloud, focussed behind the fist that buried itself into his gut and lifted him off his feet.
A moment of pure weightlessness—
And Cloud came down hard, bouncing against the thick metal flooring with a meaty thud that echoed through the sloshing that filled his ears. Agonizing fire shot up his spine as vertebrae clacked against vertebrae and his joints rattled like dice in their sockets. He'd managed to curl up enough that his head just barely escaped cracking open against the ground, but part of his skull that did slap into the metal screamed and sent liquid lead searing through his scalp.
Flashes coloured his vision, coruscating bright spots against the blackness that edged them.
Gagging, the walls of his airway contracting and rubbing dust dry against each other. His chest convulsed, heaving, but unable to force anything up.
And he knew that he couldn't—he didn't have time to—
He had to GET UP.
It felt like strings, tied to his head, his ears, his collar. It felt like they'd yanked him up, surged him into a hunched crouch even as his sword arm came around in front of him, hilt in a tight, backhanded grip. And blindly, hopelessly, he slashed forward.
Maybe it was some kind of precognition that activated in his moment of sensory deprivation. Maybe it was Genesis, broadcasting somehow straight into his mind. Maybe it was dumbfuck luck.
He connected.
Wheezing, scrabbling for breath as the stars fizzled out in his eyes, Cloud looked up into Genesis' white, strained face.
The black wing arched over them, blocking out all light, and so Cloud could only feel the trickle of hot liquid running down the hilt of his sword where it had bitten into Genesis' side. It oozed, warm and thick, into the cracks between his fingers where they were clenched around the worn leather. He could only smell the sticky sweet scent of decay, centred on the slippery mess that was slowly sliding down the back of his hand, inching closer to his wrist.
Genesis' hand, the one that wasn't buried somewhere in the darkness below his feathers, clutching at his sliding guts, came up to Cloud's face. And for one brief moment, suspended somewhere between terror and hysteria, Cloud wondered if the man intended to claw out his eyes or something as retribution.
But then the cold, cooling fingers slid whisper-light across the ridge of his cheekbone, and Genesis' mouth opened in a smile.
Bloody spittle pooled at the corner of his lips before overflowing, sliding down his chin. And Genesis said,
"Even if the morrow is barren of promises
Nothing shall forestall my return."
With a slick, slurping sound, Genesis wrenched himself up and back. He stood, swaying, slow shuffling steps taking him backward to where the iron fence stood between him and the mineshaft.
"This world, which demands my death... These broken wings."
He gasped again—a bubbling, wet gurgle—red teeth against a red tongue in a red—red everywhere—mouth, and leaned back.
There was a thick flutter of feathers, and a sharp flap of leather catching on metal for a moment, and Cloud watched as Genesis tumbled backwards, over the railing, and down into the blackness.
The first steps had been hard.
What the fuck.
He'd half-dragged himself, half-crawled towards the edge of the lighted area.
What the fuck.
But then he'd stood, somehow, on legs that felt like they'd been poured in a jelly mould, and he'd stumbled his way over to the railing. Peering down, he'd seen a lot of dark nothingness.
What the FUCK?
He couldn't figure it out. What it was that Genesis wanted. What he thought Cloud was supposed to do. What the point was.
He stepped over the last couple of steps up to the mining village level, air rasping through his lungs as the rest of his body ached and protested the climb, and the steep steps made harder by Tseng's dead weight hanging off his shoulder. There was something that he was missing. Something about that goddamn play that he just didn't understand—right, like he understood any of that bullshit—and then with Genesis toppling off the edge and falling into the bottomless pit almost... deliberately.
Nothing made sense.
But it wasn't like he had time to blubber over how he never seemed to get a break. Not with Hollander somewhere on the loose, the MPs alone up there, and an unconscious Turk to deliver back to Heidegger's bearded sneer.
Hah. Poetic, almost.
He'd almost reached the bathing pit thing when he stiffened.
Quietly, gently, he lowered Tseng to the ground, propping the man up against a mud-streaked wall. Something mildly sadistic in the back of his head cackled over the fact that the Turk would probably have to throw out his suit after this mission and blew a raspberry when he told it to shut up. He ignored it as he crept towards the open entryway. The door had rusted off its hinges ages ago, and it leaned, sad and sagging, against the opposite wall of the corridor.
Someone was in there.
Weak, filmy daylight was coming through the gaps in the ceiling, but the light travelled straight, barely scattering against the dust hanging in the air, so the bathing room seemed to be criss-crossed with lines of glowing white against the murkiness. It didn't so much illuminate the space inside as delineate the shadows in sharp relief.
He could see pieces of shapes. A wide back, in silhouette. A glint of metal over the shoulder—a buckle, maybe. And a swatch of gleaming haze as the broad blade latched to the back collected any stray droplets of light and seemed to magnify them into a fuzzy glow.
Cloud stood still, his knees rusted into place.
And further, beyond the shadow, in a puddle of light—
The body lay still, streaks of blood like angry crimson welts slashed across the ripped ground. Rough, woven blue and hints of tattooed curlicues sliding out from under the cloth. It emblazoned itself across his retinas, blue and red. No yellow filter of underground lights. Stark blue and dull red. It filled his field of vision, was all that he saw as he charged.
"Angeal!"
The First—traitor—stepped smoothly out of the path of his wild hacking swing. He turned, almost languidly, watching as Cloud barrelled past.
Cloud skidded to a hunched squat beside the crumpled form. His eyes on Angeal, he reached out to press the pads of his fingers to the pulse point in McCaul's neck.
He needn't have bothered, given the amount of blood running into the communal bath the man had tried to explain to him, guttering between broken tiles and gleaming black red where the drain had clogged years ago. They made rivers and tributaries flowing around the litter.
"You killed him," Cloud said. He noticed the shake in his voice, but it was dim, drowned out by the rage.
"Friend of yours? You did make friends quickly." There was a faint smile.
"Why?" It burned him, inside out, scorching his lungs and mouth and poured his bones through smelters' pots. White, red, bloating him, filling him up until he couldn't feel the ground underneath his boots. Metal acid, the taste of mako, plastered itself to the back of his tongue and made it press thick and heavy against his tight teeth.
The smile faded. "Why not?" came the soft reply.
"Don't give me that shit, Angeal!" Cloud surged to his feet, squinting hard when his vision swam black and his ears clanged like he was underwater. His arms were probably wobbling, but the tip of his blade was steady, pointed at Angeal's impassive face.
It wasn't for McCaul, the rage. McCaul who'd been told to follow him to Modeoheim, probably knowing that the Company didn't particularly care if he made it back. Not completely, and that made it even worse. It wasn't even for Angeal, who killed like he breathed, because Cloud wasn't any better himself. It was for him, for thinking that it would have been different this time. For believing somehow, in some imbecilic, fucking retarded part of his dense head that maybe, even if everyone told him it was a trick, even if he knew somewhere inside that he was walking straight into a trap, that maybe it'd work out somehow. For trusting the bastard who'd left. Again.
Angeal barely glanced at the sword. Eyes and face empty, he raised his hands, just a bit, palms out. "Well?"
"What?"
"Come on, Cloud. You dealt well enough with Genesis. So come."
Cloud scowled. "Why should I?"
Angeal gave him a thin, wry grin as the other First reached over his shoulder. A soft click, and the Buster came loose in his hand. It hummed as he brought it forward to face Cloud. "Because you want to." He took several measured steps forward, and stopped.
Fucker. He was in the space, the short distance that fell within their differences in reach. The Buster was longer than the standard issue broadswords the Seconds got issued.
And the rage, the boiling corrosiveness in his gut, it did want him to attack. To take advantage of the likelihood that Angeal wasn't used to his increased speed, and that he could potentially get off a surprise pre-emptive. But—
Then, he was ducking under a horizontal slash, bringing up his sword to smack against the flat of the Buster. He shoved, generating a spray of stinging sparks as the edge scraped against the side of the Buster sword, grinding until it hit the cross-guard, and pushing upward to force Angeal off balance into a quick leap of a retreat.
Cloud hopped back himself, sinking into a defensive stance as he followed Angeal's recovery with wide eyes. He hadn't actually expected Angeal to attack. He didn't think that—
"Angeal!" said a new voice.
Cloud backpedalled even more hastily, moving until he could see both of the other occupants of the room. Hollander's coat was garish bright where sunlight struck it. He hadn't even heard the scientist come in.
"Good. Good, my boy!" Hollander clapped his hands together approvingly. "Now, I want you to kill Strife," he said, pat and matter of fact.
Angeal wasn't looking at Hollander. He stood quietly, where he'd landed, just watching. Against his silence, Hollander's triumphant exuberance seemed all the more harsh and grating. It seemed forced, somehow unnatural, like the scientist was trying to fake something more to himself than anyone else.
Cloud looked between the two. He didn't trust his paralyzed vocal cords, anyway.
"Do it, Angeal! Prove to him that Project S is nothing more than a fake, inferior copy!" The words spat vitriol into the dust.
In the continued lack of response, Hollander seemed to slowly deflate, pressed down by the heaviness of the air. Finally, softly, Angeal spoke. "Him, who? Cloud? Or Hojo?" There was a light, mocking lilt to his voice that Cloud had never heard before. "Should I be so proud to be a plaything in your petty power struggles?" Almost singsong in its malevolence.
"Who cares?" Hollander snapped. "Both! If not for your pride, then for the pride of your father—"
A roar cut him off. "My father is DEAD!"
Hollander broke off, and the sound of Angeal's harsh breaths filled the room, as if the First had exhausted himself with his outburst. Then, the scientist stepped closer to place a hand on Angeal's shoulder. And he said, soft and unctuous, "Then for your mother, for Gillian, who gave so much for—"
With blinding speed, Angeal spun around, fingers curling back as his palm drove into Hollander's chest. The scientist flew backward, his trajectory fast and straight enough to make him look like nothing more than a ragdoll, before slamming into the floor with a sickening crunch.
"My mother," Angeal told the unmoving, prone form, "took her own life for the shame of being your Project G."
Something must have shown on his face, because Angeal looked at him, utterly calm but for the white tightness around his mouth, and he said, "He's alive. But he might not be for much longer if he doesn't get medical attention."
"Okay," Cloud nodded, words escaping him in a gush. Angeal hadn't—he'd turned away from Hollander. Relief pounded at the inside of his ribs. "Then let me call for—"
"Which is too bad, really."
Cloud's mouth snapped shut.
"Because neither of you are going to leave."
"What?"
Angeal raised the Buster sword again and pointed it at Cloud.
"What are you doing?"
"I told you," Angeal said, utterly unreadable. "I'm a monster. What do monsters want?"
Cloud snarled. "Stop saying that! You keep saying that, but all you ever did was try to save—"
Angeal interrupted him again. "Didn't you hear, Cloud? Project G."
Cloud shook his head sharply. "Project Genesis, yeah, I know—"
"Idiot. It's Project Gillian. Project Gillian Hewley."
Cloud's teeth clacked together and grey blankness flooded his mind, washing away whatever he'd been trying to say. What? He couldn't—didn't—
"You see Cloud? Genesis and I are products of the same experiment. Hollander's game pieces, pitted against the results of Project S."
"What?"
"Project Soldier. It was the one that gained official support in the company. Hojo's brainchild. And me? I'm just like Genesis. A remnant of a failure. A monster, rotting away as I speak." A slow, hard smile crossed Angeal's face. "You shouldn't have chased me all the way here. Haven't I taught you anything? You still walk straight into traps, not a single thought in that empty blond head—"
"Bullshit!" Cloud finally found his voice. "You keep playing victim as much as you want, but have you forgotten? Me, Sephiroth. We're just as changed as you! The difference is that we don't just call ourselves monsters and let it end there! We fight it! We do shit with it so that we're not—so that we can be something else! So that we can go home at the end of the day and be us!" Cloud paused, mouth still working soundlessly, searching for exactly what he was trying to say. "Because. Because we're Soldiers!"
To Cloud's shock, Angeal burst into laughter, the hard and deep-down kind that meant something like pure joy. He raised a hand, hovering where he could have dropped it on top of Cloud's head if he hadn't retreated clumsily at Angeal's approach. The other First just smiled. "Cloud. That Soldier's Pride. Honour."
"What?" Suspicion clung to his voice.
Angeal kept smiling. He kept talking, like it was all so obvious and if only Cloud could see it. "Genesis called it the Gift of the Goddess, you know. He wanted it so badly. He wanted you to prove to him that it existed."
"I—proof?"
Cloud felt bile rising in his mouth. Like the picture had fragmented, and all he was getting were bits and pieces, and maybe if he could find an edge, he might be able to put it back together. Like he was falling and falling and desperately reaching out for a handhold, for anything. But Angeal... Angeal looked at him like he was expecting something.
"Well, Cloud?" And Angeal raised his sword again. "Show me, as well. A Soldier's Honour."
"What? What are you talking—"
A dozen of the beasts that wore Angeal's face bounded into the room, snarling, hissing, and Cloud crouched defensively, but they passed by him without a second glance.
They piled into a thick mass of fur and naked claws, and from their midst came the wet, organic sounds of slurping, chewing.
They were eating each other alive.
Cloud looked up wildly, past them at Angeal, who had moved across the room to lean back against the far wall and sag down as if completely exhausted.
The deserter saw him looking and his mouth twisted. "I wouldn't take my eyes of it, if I were you. That thing is vicious. It came from me, after all."
Cloud's eyes snapped back to see fangs, tipped with red and gore, bearing down on him.
And he screamed and brought his sword up.
He didn't remember much of the fight. The monster had attacked relentlessly, claws and teeth everywhere, but it hadn't operated on any sort of strategy. It didn't dodge attacks coming head on, at point blank range, simply brushing them aside in favour of sinking another set of fangs into whatever it could reach.
It was probably the ugliest battle he'd ever gone through.
He'd hacked and hacked, no space to step back, no space to think or breathe.
He didn't remember anything, not really. Not until he was sobbing for breath, standing over a mangled mess of matted fur and slippery entrails while blood slowly dried where it clung to his face, his neck, his arms. Stinging his eyes. He wasn't sure how much of it was his, and how much was the clone monster's.
Can't have been all that much his. Not with the way his pulse was beating at his eardrums.
Gasping, spitting out the metallic taste permeating his mouth, Cloud looked up at where Angeal stood.
And the haze fell away from his mind in the one, molasses slow moment of clarity as he watched Angeal dart forwards and raise the Buster Sword in both hands. Sight and sound tunnelled, roared; white emptiness everywhere except where he watched Angeal come towards him, blade descending down at his head in increment by silent increment.
The clang of his broadsword coming up to meet Angeal's slash deafened him.
Time seemed to rush back, along with the rest of the world, and Cloud was painfully aware of the sound of Angeal's laboured breaths, of the biting chill spiralling in from the broken patches of roofing, bringing with it crystals of ice too small and compact to be called snow. The mako glow that engulfed every inch of his vision.
And he heard the cracks, the brittle crunches, small and slow at first, but rapidly spreading and gaining volume as spiderweb fissures raced through the blade of his sword, starting where the Buster had bitten into its edge and unfolding into the heart of the metal.
Another moment of suspended time, hanging by a wisp of a thread, and it gave.
Crunch.
Snapped in half, just like his broken sword.
He knew it. He knew he should have replaced that blade. He knew it was far too weak to sustain any more damage. He knew. The sudden loss of pressure made half of it shoot backward in Cloud's hands with the recoil, biting deep into his shoulder and scraping along his collar bone in a way that made black and white sparks explode in his vision as he bit his tongue against the scream and heat flooded his mouth. The other half, the tip, spun tightly, flashed in the dank air, and ripped straight through Angeal's chest.
He didn't manage to catch Angeal as he fell.
Dust rose, billowing around them, as Cloud thudded down onto his knees. Retching, arms jerking around just as much as his seizing vision, he pressed a palm against the hilt standing out from his flesh and shoved. The broken blade came free, the edges of his skin sucking and dragging at the metal, and the pain shot beyond sensation to manifest as blazing, unimaginably hot light searing through his eyes. Mouth open in an ugly croak, he slapped his other hand against the gash, the ozone smell of healing magic already coating his fingers.
Choking on nothing at all, he pulled air forcibly in through his burning nostrils, since it wasn't getting through his mouth.
Four shuddering breaths later, the pain descended from something beyond any physical comprehension to merely debilitating, and Cloud leaned forward, feeling his ribs creak like the thick hull of a galleon under tension. Pins jabbed at all the nerve endings up and down his arm as he felt ripped muscles and cords knit themselves back together while magic dragged them along like a seamstress's needle threaded with green.
When he was sure—he thought—maybe—he wasn't going to keel over from blood loss or anything, anymore, Cloud raised his head.
The crippled metal stood up from Angeal's heaving diaphragm, where he lay on his back. It glowed, misty bright in the half-light. The First shook, gasps jolting his body.
Cloud crawled over to Angeal. That thin, high sound he was hearing. It came from him, didn't it?
He reached out, and Angeal's eyes flicked to him, wide, white all around the mako-soaked blue.
His mouth opened in a soundless scream when Cloud hesitated, and then pressed his glowing hands into the blood-soaked cloth surrounding the blade.
He couldn't pull it out. Cloud knew. He couldn't. Angeal would die immediately. He'd seen these wounds before, where the weapon was the only thing stopping the man from bleeding out. But if he... He squinted, the haze in his head making it hard to think. He could close up the vessels around it. Maybe. Stop it temporarily, just enough to get the blade out and align the severed tissues. Even a fullcure couldn't do anything if the alignment was off. Yeah. He remembered hearing that. Someone taught him.
Words, fragmented thoughts rambled through his head. They yanked his attention, dashing one way and then the other. He shook his head hard, even if that made his shoulder shriek at him. Shut up shut up shut up!
His hands glowing, he pressed healing magic into it over and over. The spell beaded off, inert, like rain off a tarp. Angeal wasn't shaking anymore. He lay still, watching Cloud, his expression something open and clear the way Cloud hadn't seen for a really long time.
He didn't notice that he was talking until the litany overpowered even the noise in his ears.
"Close! Why won't you fucking close!" Panic coated his voice liberally.
Angeal's hand closed over his wrist, and it squelched, warm and sticky. "Cloud." He sounded... calm. "Quit it. It's the degradation. You can't heal me."
"No!"
"You can't do anything."
"No no no NO! Don't tell me what I can't—No!" Cloud cut himself off, and his head came up. "Hollander told Genesis that S cells can—"
"I said quit it," Angeal's reedy voice cut through his. "That's not what I wanted. It never was."
"Then what did you want?" Cloud said, hoarse, numbness starting at the base of his tongue and spreading down his throat.
Quietly, a slow smile spread, oozing like the blood flowing in thick rivulets. Ragged bits of cloth were starting to stick together and congeal.
"My honour."
Sephiroth was waiting for them at the heliport when they made it back, eleven hours later.
Cloud had waited for Tseng to wake up, and it was the Turk who'd arranged for a pick up. The Turk had looked at Cloud, and then said nothing.
Sephiroth barely acknowledged the MPs leading Hollander away. His eyes kept coming back to the sword clutched in Cloud's hand.
Cloud raised the Buster, flat parallel to the ground, and as he offered the sword, his mouth opened. And closed again aimlessly.
"Sorry," he settled on, eventually.
There was a hint of movement in his peripheral vision, and Sephiroth's hand fell onto the cross guard. When Cloud raised the Buster higher, though, the General pushed, gently, pressing the hilt into his grip.
Cloud looked up.
The other First was watching him. With a faint nod, Sephiroth let go of the sword.
TBC
Like I said, liberties with canon. But since I'm not following the plot of Crisis Core through to the end, I wanted to make it so that there seemed to be a bit of resolution in the game plot, even for the people who haven't played the game before.
So... here's hoping the next one doesn't take another year...