A snatch of Preview for those of you too lazy to tell me you desperately need me to send it to you! (j/k j/k) anyways, yeah. And cuddles to Ryu-sama, because I was mean. Sorry, hun. I'm just a bitch =3
So, this chapter and the last is what I'm leaving you lot with for now~ when my school and life lighten up, I'll be able to put more time and concentration into this.
Outside, a little girl walks past. In her arms is a solemn porcelain doll with blonde curls. The little girl looks cross, and she holds the doll uncarefully, her arm wrapped around the stuffed torso. The doll's arms hang blankly forwardand sway a little in the little girl's rhythm. The doll's neck is stiff, the head straight on its base. Tifa is distracted in watching the little girl who seems so angry. Her lips are pursed and her own neck is stiff. Her own blonde curls bounce concisely as the girl strides tightly up to Cloud.
'I have to give this to you but I don't want to,' she states. Cloud looks down at her in slight confusion. Tifa watches on as the little girl sort of half-throws and half-drops the doll at Cloud's feet. The doll remains uncomfortably on the ground, flat on her porcelain face. Cloud frowns and bends down to pick up the doll. Her face is cracked and bits of the porcelain lie on the ground, coloring it white like chalk.
'Are you sure you want to give me your doll?' He asks.
The little girl's face screws up and she won't meet his eyes or say anything. She scowls up at the doll, who is staring off into space, bits of plaster caught in the black horsehair eyelashes.
The doll lips are tiny and pouty, scraped white in some places. The little girl oversees the damage she has caused to her plaything, and lets out a bawl at an incredible pitch. Tifa's shoulders draw together in a wince and Cloud watches as the girl runs off, throwing a furious temper tantrum.
*
Cloud steps into the kitchen; it is small and packed with metal hardware tools. He rummages bravely -but only briefly so -through sticky cabinets. There are brownish dried splatters on the inside of something that was hopefully food, but that is all that there is.
He looks at his fingers dubiously, and then washes his hands in the sink. He uses a lot of soap. The faucet lets out a low wailing noise, and quickly he turns it off again.
'Alright..' He nods decisively to himself, and then stares blankly about for a bit. He really should clean this place up. His nose wrinkles and he leaves, quickly.
*
The first few months he would ask anyone he met about a girl with long brown hair in a white shirt and a black skirt, who helped people. No one could tell him anything. The ShinRa sattelites had gone down, and the PHS system went crashing with them. Right after he had called her that one time, when she hadn't gotten back on the airship, the phones had stopped working.
To be quite honest, it was mostly his pride that had not let him go with her right then and there. As they watched her walking away, growing smaller as she neared the horizon, the others had urged him to jump out and follow her.
'It's what she wants, you asshole,' Yuffie had said. Everyone had nodded. Cloud shook his head. If Tifa had wanted him with her, she would have waited. This was something she seemed to want to do alone, she didn't need Cloud.
*
One day Cloud wakes up, claustrophobic in his tiny room. There isn't anything in the room, not besides him and the bed and something that faintly resembles a closet. He does not keep his clothing in it. He only has three shirts and two pairs of trousers, anyway. He has a kitchen where he can cook simple meals for himself, and a quaint tub/shower combination thing which makes it infallibly impossible to take either a real bath or a real shower because of its questionable size. Each time he sees it he envisions a bent old woman using it to wash her cat.
His room is in a smallish inn built just outside Midgar. Besides getting severely shaken up, the place was left unharmed in the wake of the disaster. He pays a high rental, but that's alright. This way he's right close by to where they've asked him to support the building of a large communal farm. Midgar had exported steel and mako, and all ShinRa's products, but for the populace of Midgar's food, import had been necessary. Just like flowers didn't survive, neither did the animals in Midgar. Except for the pigeons, and they had been ugly buggers, big and smelly with thick tumorous claws, having absorbed more mako than they could into their fowl biology. At any rate, all the meat eaten in Midgar was from farms around Kalm, and near the forests to the west of Fort Condor. The fish had come from Junon, but the seas had been polluted, and good fish was expensive. Now the farmers who had exported all their goods to Midgar had been left hanging- until they received a notice from the Asgar Ring.
The Asgar Ring is a committee of people trying to give the survivors of the disaster, the current inhabitants of the Midgar Ring, the economical kick in the backside that they needed.