I've been wanting to do something with the Kingdom Hearts version of Cloud from the first video game for a while now. Never having played the game my knowledge is limited and I'm feeling unrepentant about that. Since Kingdom Hearts is an AU than I suppose this is an AU of an AU. Or perhaps it's entirely just for Final Fantasy VII instead. Either way, here we go. It's not at all what I had in mind originally and I'm not quite sure how it went over. Set just before the beginning of FFVII.

What Dreams May Come

by TamLin

When Jessie mentioned her dream lover Tifa couldn't help standing up a bit straighter. They weren't the best of friends but they were the only women in a rough and tumble group of men and if they didn't have enough in common to be friends, solidarity in the face of unequal odds proved enough. Still, they didn't talk about personal or intimate details often. In fact, they might never except for those nights when Jessie got herself just a little bit on the plastered side (well, they did operate out of a bar) and tended to forget to feel restricted in front of Tifa. Tifa, perpetual bartender with all the expected willing ear and shoulder necessary, never minded listening to the other woman while she cleaned glasses and Jessie sipped at her drink. Jessie never got thoroughly drunk. She just got… lonely sometimes. Tifa understood lonely and they all dealt with it in their own way.

So when Jessie mentioned the words 'dream lover' Tifa's ears perked up invisibly and she turned her head to look at the other woman as she continued to dry the mug she was working on. Jessie sighed and rested her cheek against the arm she had folded on the counter top.

"He's sweet and strong and he doesn't brag about big things he's never really going to do," the redhead's voice was drowsy and she closed her eyes with a little smile. "He saves me when I'm in trouble and he tells me how pretty I look. Me… pretty." She smiled at the thought and didn't open her eyes. "He's got nice eyes too. Really, really nice eyes…"

Tifa waited but the other woman didn't continue and so Tifa edged a little closer and asked hesitantly:

"What color?"

"Hmm?" Jessie sat up a little and looked over at the bartender with lazy eyes. Tifa shifted a little, toe of her boot tapping against the back of her other calf and repeated:

"What color are his eyes?"

"His eyes? Oh," Jessie focused for a minute and then frowned. "I don't know. Something pretty. He'd have pretty eyes."

"Oh." Tifa said it softly and her shoulders sank a little but she smiled gently at the other woman as she moved over to set the mug down and pick up the next one. Jessie hadn't been talking about what she thought the other woman - hoped the other woman - was talking about. Because… Tifa knew what color eyes her dream lover had.

Blue.

They were an impossible blue.

She knew they were blue because she saw them almost every night.

The night of Jessie's talk about a dream lover was no different. Tifa closed down the bar and got everything and everyone settled for the night and then she finally ran though the short routine of getting ready for bed herself. It had been a long day and she fell asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow.

She opened her eyes when she heard the heavy tread of his footsteps on the stairs.

If she could hear him than it meant he'd had a hard day himself. His body had a way of radiating his emotions. Which helped because his face so rarely did. She knew he could walk quietly but most of the time he walked the way he did now. With heavy, tired steps.

He had a way of breaking and filling her heart at the same time.

The door to her room pushed open but it wasn't the door she'd closed. The same way the bed she was in wasn't the bed she'd fallen asleep in even though it was unmistakably, somehow, hers just as much as the room. In her dreams, she always started off in the same place.

His head was bowed as he came in, face almost hidden in the cowl of his cloak. She knew that position and she sat up in bed, pushing the blanket back a little. She wasn't in the worn shorts and loose top she'd fallen asleep in. Instead she was in a tank top that was close but not the same as her daywear and the skirt was red. The same way the fingerless gloves she wore here were red and only came to her elbows, lacking the extra fighting gloves she so often wore in the slums. Here she was softer. Softer and, she'd found to her not entire surety, she was more feminine here.

She wasn't used to being safe enough to be feminine. He made her that way in this strange dream world they shared.

His head came up when she moved and he inhaled. The ridiculously huge sword he carried across his back as if it were an afterthought was suddenly unslung and he propped it against the wall as he approached the bed. Because it was him, because she was dreaming, because – here – it was all right, she shifted onto her knees and held out her arms for him. He made a noise as he all but collapsed forward into them, a quiet, throaty, humming sound of relief and need. It pulled the edges of her lips upward even as it hurt her heart and she buried her face in his hair and held him close against her.

He smelled like sun baked sand and dust and blood and shadows and black lightening.

His arms didn't rise to wrap around her but he leaned a bit harder into her. It pulled a stifled laugh out of her as he almost tipped her over and in response he hummed again, sounding, just a little, as if he were smiling.

Reaching up with one hand, she dragged her fingers through his hair. Golden hair. Soft golden hair with the most alarming set of spikes framing his face she'd ever seen. Only once…

Only once had she ever known anyone that had hair that might have been close to competing with the rampant spikes of his.

That hair had been gold too…

She knew why the man in her arms now had gold hair. The same way she knew why he had breathtaking blue eyes. In her head, she even had a name she called him.

But he wasn't fourteen and if there was anything innocent about him, she'd never seen it.

She was a long way from Nibelheim. Even in her dreams, she was a long way from Nibelheim.

There were nights they stayed this way all night long but tonight she smelled the blood on him and so she pushed him back just a little. He went but the way he did so indicated he was only letting her move him and if he'd had other ideas they would have been doing things his way instead. That had used to frighten her at first. Waking up in a strange bed and dealing with a strange man who was so much more dangerous than anyone she'd ever dealt with before.

Because, somehow, she recognized that, to her, the blond with her now was even more dangerous than the man that had burned her home to the ground, slaughtered her father and almost killed her. How fitting that the man in front of her now had started showing up in her dreams during those first fever sick months following that waking terror.

That had been almost four years ago.

He hadn't left her dreams since.

He watched her as she stayed resting on her knees on the bed, as she reached out and unwrapped the cowl of his ragged cloak and drew the entire blood red mess off of his shoulders.

His wing came free as she did.

Wings… what kind of strange make up did she have in her subconscious that she had given him wings? Or rather, wing. Just one, and that like an ornate bat's, though she knew from experience it felt as soft as suede. If he used it to fly, she'd never seen it. It seemed more to be another extension of his emotions – the ones he never showed on his face.

He had used to shy away from her touching that wing.

He'd gotten over it.

She caressed it with her fingers now and his shoulder on that side relaxed. Just a little. Almost as unnoticeable as his sighed exhale and the way his glowing blue eyes closed briefly.

His eyes hadn't used to glow. Not when he'd first started coming into her dreams in this strange place that was hers and yet wasn't. The same way he hadn't always had the wing.

Or the golden clawed glove.

Four years had seen quite a few changes in the way he looked and moved. It had seen changes in just how much heartbreak her heart had grown to be able to bear as well. Light, she stroked his cheek and his eyes found her face. She saw a rueful wryness in that blue and it made her own lips curve in answer. Gentle, she leaned up and kissed his forehead and in answer he ducked his head and kissed her throat.

They never went far. Something inside both of them seemed to hold back and Tifa was never sure if it was a whispered 'not yet' in her head or a 'it's not really him' that stopped her. She didn't know what he heard in his own mind but there was always a chain around him as well that seemed to stop him. Sometimes… when he looked at her, she saw the distrust in his own eyes as well and she wondered who he thought she was and what she looked like to him if he looked so much like a broken promise to her.

She couldn't ask. There were no voices in her dreams of him.

Or his dreams of her. Sometimes she wondered which of them was dreaming and which was the dream.

His teeth scrapped her throat and made her stomach jerk in weightless reflex. Sometimes he left marks on her. They were never there in the morning when she woke up. She just felt them all day long.

She shut her eyes and sighed his name, though all that came out in the world of their dream was a low murmuring sound without meaning. He heard her anyway and knew that she had named him even if he couldn't hear it. Because his voice, low and just a little bit raw, moved his lips like liquid fire against her throat as he said hers. A mumble, a murmur, but she recognized the sound of her name even if the dream wouldn't let her hear it with anything more than her heart.

She wondered what name he really said when he was like this with her. She wondered what name he thought he heard her say…

She wondered when she'd stopped thinking of him as nothing but a dream and started thinking he was real.

Gentle, she pushed him away again and, reluctant, his lids low over his eyes, he let her. Barely. Some nights he didn't let her push him away and she didn't know about him but she would wake up from those dreams tense and nervous and breathless and straining toward something she didn't understand. At almost sixteen, it had been confusing and a little frightening. Luckily, at that age, he hadn't been as aggressive as he'd grown over the years. At almost twenty, she understood a great deal better thanks to the area she lived in and the things she saw. It was too late by then though. She'd already learned to melt for him.

Reaching up now, she started to unbuckle the numerous belts and fastenings he wore. He wasn't dripping blood onto the stone floor the way he sometimes did but she still wanted to check and make sure the blood she smelled wasn't his. At almost sixteen it had bothered her. Now the only thing she thought when she smelled blood on him was the hope that it wasn't his.

Far too often, it was his.

It had made her rearrange her priorities.

As usual, she grumbled over the number of fastenings he was wearing and as usual, he made sounds in his throat that were barely discernible chuckles. The iron shoulder pauldron came off and landed on the bed next to her first and the various leather straps followed the way they always did.

She didn't know why he always let her do this. He had to be capable, even with the metal claws on his off hand, of doing it himself since she never saw him in the morning and each night the straps were back in place again. She just knew that it had started the first time she'd clipped her chin on his shoulder plate when they were both younger because he'd hugged her too hard one night. He'd been impossibly devastated over the blood on her chin that she'd already known wouldn't be there when she woke up and the next night he hadn't gotten anywhere near her. It had left her so lonely inside her heart that the next night she'd jumped him as soon as he'd hesitantly opened the door and taken the shoulder armor off immediately just so that she could hug him. The pattern had started and over the years they'd never changed it.

She knew to be careful with the razor sharp plates on his dominant hip and thigh and she peeled off his golden claws last, making the same noises she made every night at what they'd done to the pale, callused skin of his fingers.

Some nights there was blood between the claws and the skin. Some nights, it was even his blood. Tonight wasn't one of them.

Without the extra gear, his outfit looked surprisingly like a SOLDIER's. But that didn't surprise her. If he was going to wear the face and form of her lost promise, why wouldn't he wear the clothing she'd expected to see?

It was his turn to gather her into his arms then, now that he was just warm, solid flesh, stripped of all his cold, hard armor and the sharp edges of rending metal. His heart beat against hers through their chests and his fingers knotted in the fabric and flesh of her, tangling strands of her hair along with them. She found him again with her arms and held on tightly.

There was always at least one hug like this during their nights together. A hug of desperation and need and familiarity. Two children in adult bodies clinging to each other because…

Because they were all either of them had left. Everything else was gone. Every last familiar landmark and touchable memory and familiar voice. All gone forever. He was all she had left that she could call 'hers'. Really, always, truly, only just 'hers'. She clung to that, and him, even though she sometimes wondered how horribly pathetic it made her, clinging to something she knew was only a pretend of what she knew wasn't even there anymore.

Except… he always held her just as tightly…

Still holding her, he joined her on the bed, careless as he knocked the armor and leather and cloth out of the way. In his arms, the change began.

He had grown a wing and a man's body through the years.

She'd learned to glow.

It was a soft light. It reminded her of nothing so much as moonbeams reflecting off her skin. But it stayed no matter how she turned or what shadowed over her. In his arms, her skin glowed a soft, white light.

He hated the dark.

In response, her dreams had taught her to be a light for him. Now he only had to touch her to set her skin warming and radiating under his touch. Pulling her down onto the bed with him, he buried his face in her pale, moon-colored skin and exhaled. His wing came forward and covered them both. Protection. Privacy. Careless of the fact they were both still wearing shoes, that he was filthy, that they had only just greeted each other, the sleep overtook both of them.

They didn't meet at night to spend time together. They met each night because it was the only way either of them could find true sleep.

They met because the nightmares outside were too strong to bear alone.

One night, maybe soon, Tifa knew that she wouldn't wake in her dreams in an empty room listening to boot steps coming up the stairs. No woman could live her entire life in the arms of a dream.

What she didn't know, couldn't know, was that she would lose him only to find him again on the other side of waking, wingless and confusing.

And still, somehow, completely, only just hers.