Obligatory reminder that I'm not a therapist. Thanks for the wonderful support so far, everybody!

A strong sense of déjà vu settled over Cloud as he sank into the couch again and gave a cursory nod towards the therapist – Doctor Ayla, or just Ayla as she had insisted he call her. She gave him a warm smile and sat back to assess him. He fidgeted.

"How did you sleep last night?" she asked into the empty room, and he almost flinched at the thought. The truth was, he didn't sleep much at all the night before, as he knew the bags under his eyes bore witness to. Every time he'd closed his eyes, all he had seen were the deaths of those he loved and the upset and disappointed faces of Tifa and the kids. A phantom pain had taken up residence in his chest cavity and had made itself a home there, leaving him feeling empty.

He'd also been afraid, if he was willing to be truthful with himself. The panic attack he'd experienced in this very room the day before weighed heavily on his mind, and he felt constantly on edge that the feeling would come back and take him over again. Above all, he didn't want that.

Cloud realized he hadn't said anything yet and Ayla was waiting patiently. "Fine," he lied quietly as he picked at a thread on his pants.

It was a few more moments of shameful silence that filled the air and threatened to suffocate him before he heard shuffling and glanced upwards to see Ayla stand and head over to the window. His brow furrowed and he tried to glance around her body to see what she was looking at.

"It's a nice day, let's head outside for some fresh air," she said simply as she turned back around and looked expectantly at him.

Glancing from her face to the window, he frowned. "It's cloudy," he pointed out mildly. The beach was devoid of people today since the forecast was calling for rain and the wind coming off the sea was chilly.

"Exactly," Ayla replied as she grabbed a coat hanging on a standing coatrack in the back corner. She smiled and added, "Less people are always better in tourist towns."

Well, he couldn't argue with the preference for less people, so Cloud stood up and moved to grab his sword and follow her. They left the office, walked down the hallway, and stepped into the crisp autumn air of Costa del Sol.

Just as the window view had shown, almost no people were at the beach today. The one exception was a young father and his daughter who were playing in the sand. As they walked by, the little girl lifted a mold out of the sand to present the castle she had made. He made noises of encouragement that followed them as they began to walk the boardwalk.

Being used to a quick pace, Cloud made himself slow down enough to appear more leisurely and match Ayla's taller but more relaxed stride. He glanced uneasily around them, feeling the constant prick of wariness that accompanied him in public. The sea looked gray and waved choppily at him in bursts of white against the sea. Palm fronds swayed and shook as a gust of wind picked up around them. He thought he could smell rain in the air and he wondered if he'd be leaving this appointment looking like a drowned cat. He really hoped not.

"I couldn't help but notice your sword there," Ayla mentioned casually as she drew him out of his thoughts. He glanced in surprise over to her. "Where did you get it?"

Reaching around for the hilt to adjust it, he answered, "I designed it."

"Oh wow, that's amazing!" Her eyes lit up in excitement. "It looks so intricate and large! You seem very confident with it, too."

He let the smallest smile slip over his lips at the praise. "Thanks." And then, because he couldn't help but to share a bit more, he added, "The metal is made from bits of the meteor that hit Midgar a few years ago."

"Isn't that something…" Her eyes drifted towards his back where the sword lay. "Can I see it?"

They paused on the boardwalk and Cloud removed his sword from its sheath and held it out for her to examine. Her eyes drank in the intricately locking patterns of the blades and her fingers ghosted over the top of the steel.

"This is an impressive sword," she told him honestly with another smile. "What made you decide on this design?"

Cloud thought back to the memories with it as his eyes traced the outline of the well-kept weapon. "The design is based off the first sword I used," he explained. "I like the large broadsword style. There are six different blades here, see?" He unlinked one of the side blades to show her. "It gives me options in battle."

Ayla smiled, clearly impressed. "You take your swords seriously," she teased a little. Cloud felt his face warm at the compliment and nodded. He put the blades back together and slung the sword on his back again as they resumed walking. The palms lined the empty path like a runway and the sound of the waves to his right was soothing.

"Tell me about your first sword," Ayla encouraged then.

The thought of the Buster Sword brought Cloud's mind to a pause as a flash of regret filled him again. He knew it was still standing back in the church, now devoid of rust but still clinging to his grief. He stared at his feet. "I inherited it from a friend," he finally admitted in a poor attempt to gloss over the details. "It's similar in shape and size to the sword I have now."

"What happened to it?"

A gust of wind picked up his bangs and blew them in front of his face. The air smelled of saltwater and crisp autumn. "I left it in an abandoned church in the ruins of Midgar," he said. "It's a…reminder of a time I can't remember well."

They walked in silence for a few minutes while Cloud turned over his words and his fist held the memory of placing the sword in the spot where it now stood, watching over the healing water from the lifestream, from Aerith.

"Let's sit for a moment," Ayla said calmly as they approached a worn wooden bench. He sighed and followed her dejectedly to sit. Removing his sword beforehand, he propped it next to his shoulder and let it rest comfortably against his warm skin.

He took in the waves as they came crashing in. The occasional seagull would scream as it battled the wind to land along the shore, looking for food. Gray clouds, fluffy and blanketing, took up the whole of the big sky. In another time, this would have been peaceful to him.

"Would you be willing to talk about your past?"

Ayla's voice was calm, understanding, and not one he felt he could refuse. Cloud sighed again and his gaze darted to meet hers quickly before glancing back to the sea. "There's not much to say," he responded dully. "I grew up in a small town west of here called Nibelheim. I joined the Shinra infantry at fourteen, and at sixteen I was involved in an altercation with Sephiroth after he burned down my hometown. Then I was experimented on by Shinra's Professor Hojo, where he tried to turn me into a clone of Sephiroth. When I was twenty-one, I fought Sephiroth and helped stop Meteor. Now I live in Edge."

Reciting his life story was tough. He squeezed his eyes shut and leaned into the comforting coolness of the flat edge of his sword. He didn't like to think about the past. He wished Tifa was here to talk for him.

"It sounds like you've had a tough life for your young age," Ayla said kindly. He opened his eyes and looked towards her again. "You said you joined Shinra at fourteen? What made you want to leave home so young?"

Cloud fought the bitter taste of bile in the back of his mouth and responded, "I wanted to be a SOLDIER." But of course, he'd never made it…just another failure for the record books.

"That was a lofty dream, especially for one so young!" Her voice was encouraging and ignored the obvious caveat his story had. "What do you remember from your time at Shinra?"

Grainy, dim images fought each other for dominance in the forefront of his mind. Everything from that time period had been slowly coming back, but for now he could only pick out bits and pieces. Most of the rest of his memory was centered around Zack's stories. "I don't remember much… I had some issues with other cadets," he reminisced out loud. "The first friend I made was…a SOLDIER named Zack. He was the only friend I really had."

"Ah," Ayla said softly. "This is Zack Fair? I remember reading about him."

Cloud nodded painfully. "That's him," he whispered, his voice barely rising above the roar of the waves. This was difficult to talk about.

"Is there anything else you can remember about your time there?"

The grainy images were beginning to give him a headache and he closed his eyes again and shook his head. "No. It's too faint."

There was a gentle pressure on his arm and his eyes flew open to see her pressing a comforting, cool hand against his skin. She smiled. "That's okay," she reassured. "Memory issues are normal and we can work together to recover them."

"O-okay," he affirmed quietly.

"If you would like, I do have connections to the WRO and they maintain all old Shinra files," Ayla offered then. "I could put in a request for your file. We could go through the information together. Would you like that?"

Cloud was instantly on edge. He stood up and eyed her warily. "What?" he asked. "The WRO has my file?"

"They keep everything for information purposes only," she said comfortingly. "Everything is private and only the owner of the files can look at the information. It's for situations just like this one."

He turned away from her, clenched a fist, and took a deep breath. The fact that the WRO had that sort of information still was alarming and he highly doubted there were many people in similar situations to him, but he knew he trusted Reeve. Calming himself down, he finally said, "Okay."

Ayla stood up to join him and they began to walk back the way they came. A couple drops of misty rain began to hit Cloud's face and he brought his hand up to absently wipe them away.

"So when you were sixteen, Sephiroth burned down – Nibelheim, was it? – and you were, as you put it, 'involved in an altercation' with him. Do you mind telling me what happened there?"

He looked away from her towards the nearest palm tree and studied the large, green leaves until they passed it. "Uh…there was this thing with Sephiroth and the alien Jenova – she caused the geostigma," he told her lamely. "He went mad and burned the town down. I…lost my ma – um, my mom – in the fire." He took a shaky breath. "I followed him up to the nearby mako reactor and confronted him. He…" Cloud clutched at the fabric above his chest as that phantom pain of his sixteen-year-old decision sat as a reminder of that fateful day. "He ran me through."

His chest was heavy and his lungs felt like they were drowning in liquid. He tried to breathe evenly, but his breath betrayed him with a hitch.

"It's okay to be upset, Cloud," Ayla told him gently. "You have every right to be upset, even if it happened seven years ago."

He nodded his understanding and stretched out his fingers, splaying them across his chest and feeling the pounding of his heart. "I don't like talking about this," he admitted weakly.

"I imagine not," she agreed. "Let's head back inside now and see where you want to go next."

As he followed her back into the building, Cloud took a steadying breath and squared his shoulders, his promise to Tifa that he would try this thrumming in his mind. The open wounds of talking about things he didn't like to think about felt unpleasant, but he knew it would be harder before things could get better. If they got better. He wasn't sure he deserved to feel anything else, despite his drowning in the emotions of his past.

When they had settled back into the office and familiarity, he sat up straight and waited aptly for her to speak, his determination to make Tifa happy fighting the uncomfortable feeling he had.

"Do you want to continue?" she asked.

Cloud nodded, ignoring the dread settling into his gut.

"Okay, let's move onto the next part. You said Sephiroth 'ran you through,'" she quoted back to him. "What happened next?"

His mind's eye transported him to that horrible reactor like it was yesterday, and he watched the events of the next few minutes play out as he described it. This was a memory that refused to fade, no matter what happened.

"I had wounded him with Zack's sword before he stabbed me. Somehow…I found the strength to use his blade to throw him into the reactor. It was…I was really injured. I was pretty sure I was dying but at least I did what Zack asked me to do." He took another shaky breath. "Zack and I were both unconscious when Shinra arrived. From what I've been able to piece together, they declared all three of us – Sephiroth, Zack, and me – KIA and that left Professor Hojo with the motive to…experiment on Zack and me –" he cut off as his voice became choked, and he clenched his fists again as anger and fear coursed through him. He couldn't remember much of what he was describing, but what he did know was that experience, however faded from memory, had given him a fear of doctors. His body trembled as he thought to those blank years while he was trapped…

"Do you know what happened while you were with Hojo?" Ayla asked, breaking through his thoughts. He shook his head. "And how long were you kept there?"

Uncertainty flooded his mind and he slowly answered, "F-four years, I think." He rapidly thought back through his memories for some sign of the timeline. He'd known it had been five years since he'd last seen Tifa when they first met, which meant… "Four years in the lab and one year on the run. I don't remember any of it."

"And why is that?"

He gestured vaguely to his eyes for the obvious indication. "Mako poisoning."

The gentle sound of scribbling against paper filled his ears but he kept his focus on that stupid statue on the table instead. It reminded him of Tifa; she liked dolphins. He wondered if she would appreciate something like that.

"I'm going to skip over the next part of the story because all of Gaia knows it," Ayla said as she wrote. Cloud glanced up at her uncertainly. "You and your friends saved all of us. I imagine the stories are a little embellished but the plot remains the same?"

Wincing at the memory of his plights plastered on every tv station and newspaper for the first year after meteorfall, Cloud was grateful he wouldn't have to relive that part. He shoved it quickly from his mind and thought of happier times as he glanced up from under his bangs to see her expression. "Yeah, it's pretty accurate. Afterwards, we helped build Edge. Tifa built a new bar and I started a delivery service. We took in our friend Barret's daughter, Marlene, and an orphan named Denzel."

Ayla's eyes lit up at the last part. "You have two kids now? How old are they?"

"Denzel is nine and Marlene is six."

"I see." She wrote something else down and he watched her nervously. "All right, we'll look at that next time, but before you leave, I wanted to ask you a couple more questions. If that's all right with you, of course."

Cloud sighed a little to himself and sat up straighter. "Go ahead," he told her as he braced himself.

"Why are you here?"

He blinked in surprise. "Why?" he echoed uncertainly. "Because Tifa asked me to come."

Ayla chuckled and set down her pen and paper on the table again. "No," she said, shaking her head, "why are you here? What is your goal?"

"Uh…" he trailed off and thought to himself. His mind was suddenly strangely blank, as if he didn't have anything to provide. His hands fidgeted with a crease in his pants. "I don't get what you mean."

"Do you remember what I said yesterday?" she asked gently. "You have to choose to let me help you, Cloud. I can only help you if you know why you're here."

He sighed in frustration and looked out the window, the view quickly becoming his go-to when he wanted to avoid her gaze. "Tifa said I have a lot of issues to work through, that I've been through too much. She thought seeing somebody would help or something."

Ayla stood and wandered over to her bookshelf in silence, the only sound coming from her muted footsteps against the carpeted floor. She rummaged around the mismatched shelves of literary items or a minute while he watched her. Then she turned around, her arm snaking behind her back with whichever book she had grabbed. She headed his way and sat down on the couch next to him. He backed away on instinct, watching her warily.

"How do you feel right now, Cloud?" she asked simply.

Body coiled at the sudden proximity, he took a steadying breath before replying, "Fine."

"No." She shook her head and held his gaze. "What are you feeling, truly? You can choose one word if it's easier, but I want a real answer."

The air left his lungs and he froze. The emotions from the previous day's session and his sleepless night slammed into him full force. That gaping chasm in his chest pulsed angrily. His eyes widened and he stared at her while his mind screamed various answers for him.

Suffocating. Grieving. Worthless.

"Failure," he found himself whispering into the silence of the room. "I feel like a failure."

Ayla sat up and eyed him for another moment. "Good," she finally concluded before she stood up, brought her hand back around, and deposited the book in his lap. Cloud looked up sharply but didn't get a word in edgewise as she continued, "The first step in my helping you is accepting your own emotions and being able to share them. It can be scary, but it's important for me to know how you're feeling, okay, Cloud?"

He nodded shakily and looked down at the book. It was navy blue with a picture of an inverse triangle set into the embossed cover. The title was "Memory as a Weapon."

"I want you to take the day off tomorrow, and I'm assigning you homework to practice." Ayla crossed her arms and smiled. "I want you to do three things for me."

She paused for emphasis and he blinked at her, waiting as his mind inwardly winced like a child at the thought of homework.

"First," she held a finger up, "I want you to spend at least two hours in public spaces outside of your villa. Second, I want you to make small talk with two people who greet you on the street. If nobody greets you, you have to greet them first. Be polite," she emphasized in a way that made Cloud reminiscent of both Tifa and Aerith's similar chastising when he'd first met them in Midgar all those years ago. "And third, I want you to call your family back in Edge and have a conversation about your feelings. This one will be particularly tough but it's important that they know where you stand, okay?"

Before he realized it he'd let out a pained chuckle. Instead of complaining, however, he just nodded that he understood and held up the book. "What is this for?"

"That's for you to study," she explained. "There are some great concepts in chapters three and four that may help you focus on your memories and be able to see them a bit better. You can keep the book while we work together, okay?"

He studied it with new eyes as grainy memories began to flash in his mind again.

"Okay," he said.