*Sits slumped at computer with defeat*

Yeah...so...remember how I said I wanted to try and update every week for the remaining chapters, and if not, like every month? Yeah...wasn't that funny? I know I'm laughing. *Not laughing.* Anyyyywho. Here's the next chapter. Short and sweet. For anyone waiting on "Reclamation"...*sigh* You guys are the best readers any author could ask for. Somehow my long absences haven't kept you away. I don't deserve you ;)

Chapter XXIX

"Stop eating those, you're going to make yourself sick," Cloud's mother chided him as he dumped another small handful of one of his favourite foods into his mouth. Krenoah beans. He hadn't had any since he'd been at home. They hadn't been served at the Academy or the army base, and he wasn't surprised. The soils close to Midgar weren't conducive to growth of the plant. Growing up in Nibelheim there had always been bags full of them in his house as they were cultivated in abundance in the fields surrounding the town. They were typically boiled or baked but he had no problem eating them straight from their pods.

"I can't help it," he said with a small shrug, watching his mother stirring a pot of the beans boiling on the stove.

"I suppose the food's a little different in the city," she remarked while cutting through the water of the pot with a wooden spoon between her fingers.

He snorted a little. "Everything is. The food, the people. Everything moves so fast there. Not like here."

"I'd have thought you'd like that. You always complained this place was boring," his mother replied with a light laugh. "Don't tell me you actually miss it here," she added, looking at him with a raised eyebrow.

"Some things I miss," he admitted. "But there's no movie theatre or arcades here," he added fast with a smile she returned.

"You know who'd love to hear about Midgar?" she said with something of a mischievous grin before turning to retrieve something from the fridge.

"No," he spoke fast, following behind her. "You can't say anything to anyone about me being here, promise? Promise? Mom? Mo—"

"Yes! Alright, I promise!" she spoke back as she turned to face him, shutting the fridge door behind her and holding a bottle of cream. She placed a hand on his back and began pushing him out of the way. "Now get out of here, we have company you should be sitting with."

"It's just Zack," Cloud muttered as he took another handful of beans in his hand before leaving the kitchen and heading back to the table just around the corner where Zack was sitting, leaning back in his chair as he read over the notes he'd made in the notebook he'd brought with him. When asked what he was writing down, Zack had told him it was just basic information that he would need when filling out paperwork for the mission later. Cloud sat down across from him at the table and a moment later he looked up, dropped the pen in his hand on the notebook with a sigh and put his hands behind his head as he took a deep breath.

"Something wrong?" Cloud asked when he observed the slightly strained expression he donned. He smiled back, erasing any indications of stress.

"Nah. I was just thinking," he said vaguely. Not only were thoughts of Genesis and the mission on his mind, but he couldn't help thinking of Sephiroth and Rufus Shinra. He'd spent a lot of time dwelling over his feelings that Rufus had been up to no good, potentially sabotaging the company. Kunsel and anyone else he'd suggested his suspicions to had dismissed him. He wondered if he should say something to Sephiroth now that he was back. It may be optimal timing, since he had already suggested once that he had contemplated leaving Shinra. Obviously, he wasn't feeling the dedication he once did. "What are those?" Zack asked, tilting his chin and directing his eyes to what Cloud held in his one hand.

"Krenoah beans," Cloud replied. "Part of dinner."

Zack craned his neck a little to see the beans more clearly. Cloud opened his hand so he could view them easier. "Raw beans, eh?" he remarked.

Cloud shook his head. "I just like them raw. Here." He passed a few of the beans to Zack and watched him experience them for what he assumed was the first time. After chewing them for a few seconds, Zack smirked.

"You get weirder the more I get to know you, buddy," he commented. Before Cloud could respond to him, his mother had appeared and placed a covered dish on the table. Zack flashed her one of his charming smiles that she smiled back at.

"You seem awfully young to be Cloud's mother, Ms. Strife," he said with no hesitation. Cloud flashed him an angry gaze.

"Please, Claire's fine, Zack," she replied. "And, yeah, I suppose that's true. I was fifteen when Cloud was born," she revealed.

"Really?" Zack said back in surprise. "So that would make you only…30?" he questioned.

Cloud's mother nodded with another smile. "31 actually. Recently," she confirmed before turning to head into the kitchen again.

"How 'bout that…" Zack commented while watching her depart. "Uh, that hurts, buddy," he said when he felt Cloud kick his shin from under the table.

"It's supposed to," Cloud said back sharply.

Zack faced him. "Why?" he asked. Cloud gave him a scolding look.

"You know why," he fired at him quietly, glancing once toward the kitchen. "Don't hit on my mom, Zack," he warned.

Zack waved him off. "Oh, relax."

Cloud's mother returned to the room then and put a steaming pot of potatoes on the table. "You actually seem a little young, yourself, to be a first class in SOLDIER, Zack," she said while looking at him.

"A bit," he agreed with a nod.

"You must be very smart," she said.

Zack looked down at the table a brief moment before saying back, "I had a good mentor."

During dinner, Zack couldn't help himself. He had to ask about something that had made him curious since the day he'd met Cloud.

"I must say," he started, looking at Cloud's mother. "I've been dying to know how you decided on Cloud's name."

Cloud rolled his eyes from across the table. "Ugh, this story," he groaned.

His mother smiled brightly, looking from Zack to Cloud. "He never told you?"

"For good reason," Cloud claimed. "It's lame mom. Nobody cares."

"I do," Zack was fast to argue.

Ignoring Cloud's expression that was begging her not to say anything, his mother began to tell the story of his name. "Well, see, when I was pregnant, I read that it could be good to play music every day, for the baby, and sing because the baby knows your voice and is soothed by it. So I used to play this one record every night after dinner to try and get Cloud settled down because for some reason he was determined to just kick up a storm the minute I'd try to lay down. There was this one song on this record called Life Again that was about a world that had become a desert and suffered through a hundred year drought until finally one small rain cloud was able to bring life back with only eight drops of water. Whenever that song would play, Cloud would finally settle down. He loved that song and I would call him my little cloud because he brought me so much joy when I really needed it." She looked from Zack to Cloud as she finished, reaching across the table to place her hand on Cloud's briefly. Cloud turned his eyes toward Zack.

"You see why I didn't tell you now, right?" he said and Zack laughed.

"It's a really cool story," he spoke honestly. He shrugged then. "I mean, I was just named after a grandfather. Yawn."

"You want to see some pictures of Cloud when he was little?" she asked and Zack nodded emphatically.

"Mom!" Cloud protested again but it was too late. She was already heading to retrieve the albums. Muttering to himself that he didn't even look any different than he had when he was four, he started clearing the dishes from the table. He half listened to both his mother and Zack laughing and poking fun at him. As he was picking up the last of the things from the table he could see Zack pointing to one of the pictures and asking who it was.

"Oh, that's Tifa, Cloud's little girlfriend," Cloud heard his mother reply as he was heading back into the kitchen.

"Not my girlfriend, Mom," he called back over his shoulder sharply.

"Well she's a girl friend," his mother retorted.

"Ohhhh, Tifa huh? Wonder if we'll run into her around town," Zack said loud enough that he knew Cloud could hear from in the kitchen while he was filling the sink with water.

"She's a very pretty little girl—" Claire went on.

"Not a little girl," Cloud spoke up loudly over the sound of running water.

"All the boys in town are pretty keen on her," his mother explained to Zack while waving off Cloud's comment.

"Including Cloud, eh?" Zack said with amusement, watching Cloud's shoulders sag as he shook his head to himself.

Chuckling, Claire said, "It used to make all the other boys jealous when she would give him attention." She turned her head to look toward the kitchen. "You should find the time to catch up with her, honey, there's a few boys vying for her affection right now."

Cloud glanced back at her, his hands still busy washing the dishes. "Who?" he asked, trying not to sound too interested.

"Hmm…well one is that Jordon Willmont," she answered and he turned away with a sound of disgust. "He's a sweet enough boy," she added, speaking mostly to Zack. Cloud scoffed, picking up a nearby dish towel and turning around to face them while drying the dish in his hands.

"Jordon Willmont, mom? That guy's a jerk," Cloud stated.

Claire appeared to be thinking then. "Oh wait," she said after a moment. "Is that the boy who kept taking your shoes in second grade?"

"Third grade," Cloud corrected.

Zack couldn't help but laugh. "Why'd he take your shoes?"

"He's a moron," Cloud muttered while turning to face the sink again.

"What'd he do with them?" Zack inquired.

"I dunno. He would hide them or something. It was strange," Claire answered and Cloud turned his eyes their way again fast.

"Yeah, if by hiding them you mean tying the laces together and throwing them up onto whatever he could find that was ten feet tall or higher, than yeah he hid them."

"What? Like trees?" Zack asked.

"Trees, telephone lines, roofs," Cloud clarified.

"It was only two or three times," Cloud's mother stated and Cloud laughed.

"More like twenty times," he announced. "The two or three times you're thinking of were the times I wasn't able to get them down and had to come home without them."

His mother just waved her hand at him again and smiled at Zack as Cloud went back to the dishes. She let Zack flip through another of the photo albums, pointing out a few things every few pages. Zack noticed that in a lot of the pictures Cloud was accompanied by some sort of animal. He hadn't thought about it before but something about that made sense.

"Cloud had a rough time growing up and I know he had a really difficult time at the Academy," she said at one point, a little quieter, glancing back at the kitchen. "I never imagined he would suffer injuries the way he did though," she spoke gravely. "Not that I know much about them besides what I was told by the infirmary." Zack looked up at her, meeting her eyes. "He's so young to have gone through as much as he has. He had only just turned 14 a few weeks before leaving here to go to Midgar. His birthday being in August, he barely made the cut-off to get in for that year's cadet program. That's sort of what made it so hard. He was my little boy. It was so hard to imagine him wanting to grow up so fast. I still can't believe the SOLDIER program takes in boys so young. Or the army for that matter. Not sure how I feel about that whole thing."

That was another thing Zack hadn't known before now, though he should have. He knew when Cloud's birthday was and how old he'd been when arriving at the Academy but it never occurred to him that he'd been only barely out of his thirteenth year.

With a smile Zack said, "Well…he's tough. That's for sure. But I've tried to look out for him when I can," he assured Claire.

She returned a smile of her own. "I can't tell you what that means to me." Her smile faded as she asked "The army doesn't put boys his age on active combat duty do they?"

Zack grimaced. There was no easy way to say it. "Uh. Unfortunately…"

She shook her head then. "I don't think I could take it. If he were sent away somewhere."

Zack just nodded. There was no reason to tell her where Cloud had been heading before he'd managed to keep him from going by bringing him back to Nibelheim. "Well, I promise you Claire, I'll do everything I can to make sure he's safe. You don't have to worry," he spoke confidently. And he meant it. He felt a great deal of responsibility for Cloud. He had for some time. When he thought back, he realized he'd opted to make himself responsible from the moment he'd met him, back in that courtyard at the Academy when he'd saved him from the hazing he was about to receive from Ben Weeks and the others. It was more than that too. He felt closer to Cloud than anyone else, besides Kunsel and Aerith. He was the closest thing to a best friend he felt he was going to get and was like the little brother he'd never had.

Zack asked to use the bathroom about the time Cloud had finished washing dishes and Cloud showed him the way, leading him up a narrow staircase to the small second floor of the house. When he had finished washing his hands he could hear Cloud and his mother talking. He opened the door slowly and listened a moment. It sounded like Cloud was opening some old gifts.

"You'll grow into it I'm sure," Claire was saying.

"How big do you think I'm going to get?" Cloud said back and she laughed. "Thanks, mom," he said, his voice sounding a little muffled. Though he couldn't see it, Zack imagined him and his mother to be engaged in a hug.

"Please tell me you're going to visit more," Claire's sad voice pleaded.

"I dunno," Cloud replied. "If I want to take leave I have to apply for it," he explained.

"Then apply for it," she joked before saying seriously "I know it's hard for you to come back here."

"I just thought it'd be different," Cloud said back. "I thought I…would be coming back as something else."

"You can't change who you are, baby," he mother said softly.

"Can I ask you something, momma?" Cloud questioned after a brief silence.

"You know you can."

"Are you…lonely, when I'm gone?"

"Of course," Claire responded with a light laugh. "I miss you with all my heart. But it makes me so, so happy to know you are following your dreams, no matter how long it takes for you to reach your goals. I wish I could come be closer to you."

"That's what I want," Cloud returned quickly. "When I'm a SOLDIER, I'm going to get you the house you always wanted, wherever I'm stationed out of. You won't have to work someplace you hate. I'll be able to take care of everything."

"You're so kind, my little Cloud," his mother said back while it sounded like she was hugging him again. "Don't worry about me."

The exchange was so heart-warming, Zack actually felt the urge to call his own mother right then and there. He'd never considered how much pressure Cloud had probably been feeling the past year. For him, SOLDIER meant more than accomplishing a dream. It was a better life. One with fewer concerns.

"I should go," he heard Cloud say. "We have to be up early."

"Be careful, alright? Strange things have been happening here lately. People going missing. Others seeing things in the mountains they can't explain…I'm worried," Claire spoke back nervously.

"You don't have to worry, mom. There's nothing out here General Sephiroth can't handle," Cloud said firmly and Zack smirked a little to himself before leaving the bathroom and heading back downstairs.

Let's hope Cloud's right, Zack thought to himself.