Chapter Twenty-Five

Interlude: World on Fire

Cloud woke up with a start. His chest was heavy, his head was having trouble keeping the world straight. It was like he'd gone twelve rounds with a Nibel dragon… or a bottle of vodka.

He peeled himself from his bed — which, as it turned out, was just the ubiquitous concrete floor of the Shinra building — and couldn't help the one question that sprang to mind: just what had he been doing last night? He was fully dressed, thankfully, but couldn't for the life of him remember what he'd done to get himself here.

Checking his surroundings, the first thing he noticed was that there was little light to be had in his makeshift bedroom. He could spot a fluorescent light hanging haphazardly from the ceiling, but it hadn't been turned on at all. The only light was a faint red glow from a card reader near the door.

Stumbling over to the door, he swiped his card against the reader. At least the Planet was on his side for once, and with a barely audible beep the light turned green and the door slid open.

Well, the Planet being on his side might have been a premature conclusion. Outside the room the building ended abruptly, the concrete floor disappearing into bent rebar, which disappeared into nothing but rubble and twisted metal. Midgar stretched out to the horizon, a sea of wrecked and crumbling buildings, the plate having mostly collapsed under its own weight.

Did he really just sleep through the apocalypse?

Well, there was no point staying up here, in a building ready to collapse. Picking the safest path he could, Cloud slid, jumped and fell down the remains of the building, ending up standing on the top of a pile of rubble, his uniform covered with pale grey dust. Figuring that one direction was as good as another, he set off towards the edge of the city.

The thing that struck him the most was not just the lifelessness of the city, but the way it felt more natural in that lifelessness. It lacked the bustle that he was used to, that teeming mass of humanity that pushed through the arteries of Midgar; yet in its absence birds were flocking between the tallest buildings and small animals darted between their shadowy hideouts as he passed. The sun beat down against his bare skin, no longer blocked by the thick black pollution clouds that were once ever-present above the city.

It seemed to take most of the day to navigate the ruined city. The collapsed plate had knocked over many of the buildings in the slums, creating an impossible maze to get through. It was as he was reaching the edge of the city and the vast wasteland stretched out before him that Cloud saw the first sign of life.

A tall man dressed in a tattered overcoat was picking through the rubble, picking out small bits of metal — screws or nails, maybe, he couldn't quite see — and dropping them into a wheelbarrow. Shouldering his rifle, Cloud made his way over to the man.

"Excuse me, s-"

"You— how dare you!" the man yelled. Cloud was taken aback, shrinking back from the red-faced man. "How dare you wear that!"

Confused, Cloud pulled at the straps of his helmet. He didn't want to go for his rifle, he just wanted to defuse the situation. He knew the trooper helmet could be intimidating and troopers could sometimes be treated with hostility, especially by the slum dwellers.

"I'm sorry— I don't know…" Cloud said, pulling his helmet off and hoping that showing a non-threatening face would calm the man.

"Sir! I'm so, so sorry, sir! I didn't know," the man said, wide-eyed and stumbling over himself. He repeated his hurried apologies as he backed away from Cloud, nearly tripping over his own feet. Once he'd back-pedalled enough, he turned around and sprinted down into the maze-like rubble that surrounded them.

Too surprised to react and too confused to decide his best course of action, Cloud dropped his helmet in the dirt and followed the man. It was exactly the opposite reaction he had come to expect — he had been used to hostility out of his helmet, and only receiving respect once he put it on.

He lost the trail of the mysterious man, but that wasn't too surprising when the sun was lowering in the sky, the twisted husks that were once buildings casting long shadows along the ground. He kept going anyway, because what else was he going to do? It was too surreal, like he'd been dropped into one of those doom-and-gloom movies that predicted the end of the world at the outbreak of the war. The imagery was there, the dust, the barren wasteland, the ruins of civilisation.

All he needed now was a dog.

It was night that proved to be Cloud's saviour. He was starting to panic as it fell, dreading the idea of being alone in this cold, desolate husk of a city. But just as his hope was fading with the last light of the day, he saw a brilliant white glow on the horizon, a strip that lit a path from the city's edge out to the horizon.

Where there were lights, there were people. Maybe civilisation had survived. The thought kept Cloud going as he walked through the night, rifle clutched against his side.

Even at the late hour, the signs of life were apparent as he edged closer to the light. The rumbling of a truck engine on late night deliveries. The incomprehensible yelling of someone who had a little too much.

It had to be early morning by the time he arrived in the new city on the edge of Midgar. The streetlights bathed everything in a cool white glow, and though the streets were abandoned, it was a different feel from the ones he had wandered in Midgar. The paths were clean and the buildings, though some haphazardly constructed, were well-maintained, in their own way.

He wandered into the only place that would be open at that unseemly hour — a bar. Hoping that they wouldn't just kick him out for being underage, he pushed the door open with one last glance at the sign.

Seventh Heaven

Cloud shuffled on the spot, trying to simultaneously tighten his grip on his rifle and draw attention away from it. The bar was filled with some of the most dangerous looking people he had ever laid eyes upon. Worse than that, as soon as he had entered, they all stood from their seats and were subjecting him to an uncomfortable level of scrutiny.

Was this about his uniform again?

He gave them a nervous smile.

"You're shitting me."

An older blond man was looking at him with eyes wide in disbelief. The rest of the group gathered around him like they had spotted the most interesting exhibit at the zoo.

"Is that…" a younger, Wutaian looking girl said.

"Spiky-headed nutter screwin' things up again."

"Oh, no," Tifa said. Wait…

"Tifa?" Cloud blurted out. Ok, he could deal with the end of the world, the destruction of Midgar and the rebuilding of civilisation, but Tifa being here at the end of the world was just completely out of left field.

"Uh… hi, Cloud," she said.

"What's going on, Tifa?" he asked. "Uh… you look… different."

"There's a lot to tell you, Cloud. It's not going to be… would you stop looking at my breasts?"

"Sorry," he muttered, blushing furiously.

"Told ya he always looked like a teenage squirt," the blond man said.

Tifa couldn't help but stare at Cloud — Cid was right, it wasn't just how young this Cloud looked to her, but how young he didn't look. There was no mistaking that this was the Cloud from the past that her Cloud had gone to, but the differences weren't obvious… he was a little shorter, with more baby fat and a rounder, less defined face. But it was his expression and demeanour that were the most obvious signs that this wasn't their Cloud.

"How old are ya, squirt?" Cid asked.

"Uh… I'm fourteen."

Cid took a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it up. "Hm… figures. So he hasn't gone back in our time."

"How'd ya figure that?" Barret asked.

"If he had, we wouldn't be havin' this discussion, see?" Cid replied, putting his two index fingers next to each other. "Say this finger is us, and this is him," he wiggled his fingers in turn. "If he went straight back, everythin' would change an' we wouldn't know about it. But, if he went back an' sideways, so to speak," he moved his fingers around to demonstrate the timeline, squiggling the Cloud finger back up to demonstrate them being scrubbed out. "Then it looks to him like he's gone back, but to us life goes on. Apart from this squirt appearing." He nodded his head towards the younger Cloud.

"Alternate dimensions," Yuffie said.

"No, no." Cid shook his head. "A dimension's something that exists in our world, or our universe at least. Like we live in a three dimensional world, so ya can't see something four dimensional, but you could sorta see its three dimensional shadow."

Barret fixed a wary eye on the pilot. "How'd you learn all this science crap?"

"Fer feck's sake, muscles." Cid sighed, taking another cigarette from behind his ear and lighting up. "D'ya think I just shit out airships? There's a bit of goddamn science involved in making giant-ass steel boats fly."

"Yeah, but what do we do about him?" Yuffie asked.

Tifa looked over the faces of her comrades. They were all at a loss for what to do, just like she was.

She laughed. "I feel sorry for Cloud. Our Cloud."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean… this is Cloud. He's definitely Cloud, but he's not. I guess that's what he's going through, where he is, it's everyone else that's different."

"Yeah," Barret said. "Tha's gotta be weird."

"Is anyone going to tell me what's going on?"

They exchanged nervous looks.

"Well…"

"Hey, Cloud," Yuffie said. "Wanna hear about the time you saved the world?"