Cloud Strife
Cloud opened his eyes, gagging on the filthy air. It filled his lungs, and he rolled onto his side and retched. Nothing came up.
He lay there for a moment, shivering both with cold and with the dread that always came with not remembering where the hell he was or how the hell he had gotten there. At least, though, he knew who he was.
"Cloud Strife," he whispered into the pavement, and his voice was a cracked whisper. It burned his throat to speak. His voice didn't sound like his own.
He took a moment to catch his breath as he stared at the pools of light that his eyes cast on the pavement. During this time, he listened for any sounds that might clue him in to where he was or who was with him. The world was mostly silence. There was a steady dripping sound, as of water from a gutter or a broken pipe, but that was about it. Deciding that he had to find out what was going on, and preparing himself for seeing someone he hadn't known was there (friend or enemy? He couldn't begin to guess,) he braced his hands against the ground and tried to push himself up.
His arms couldn't support him, and he fell immediately back down. He tried once more, only to fall again.
Now came the first moment of panic. He rolled into his back and held up his hands in front of his face. The first thing that struck him was how smooth they looked. They were like the hands of a stranger...a stranger who had never held a sword.
He looked at his arms. They were the slender arms of a youth who had never fought, who had never swam in the ocean or done pushups or...
Cloud sat up and tried to scramble backwards, as if he were trying to get away from this strange body. He noticed then that he had not a thread of clothing on. The rest of him was thin and weak, too. This was a body that had never been jogging or snowboarding or, god help him, through SOLDIER training. This body felt strange and ill-fitting, as if it were too small for him.
There were wounds, though. One on each arm, and one in the center of his chest. They were in the healing process, but the one on his right arm was still bleeding out a little.
Cloud wrapped his thin, useless arms around his chest and sat for a moment, trying calm his thoughts, trying to be rational, and trying to think of the last thing he remembered.
He felt some heavy material fall over his shoulders, and it startled him into action. He tried to say something, anything at all, but his voice seemed to be as useless as the rest of him. He also tried to lunge forward, but only succeeded in throwing himself to the ground again.
"I'm sorry it took me so long to get to you," a soft voice said behind him. "This old body doesn't move very fast."
Cloud listened for a moment, as he managed to sit up. The voice was familiar, unthreatening. The owner of the voice had draped some sort of clothing over him, and Cloud pulled it around his shoulders. He saw that it was a black coat.
Sephiroth's, he remembered. He turned his head to see who had given it to him.
"Reisei," he tried to say, but only managed a dry, broken rasp.
She was sitting down on the pavement, twirling her white hair around her finger. A bundle of some sort of material lay across her lap. "You're free," she said.
"I - I don't..."
"Be still. Close your eyes, turn them inward. Where is she?"
"She...?"
"Look for her. Listen for her. She's gone."
Cloud blinked. He knew Reisei, knew her from Cosmo Canyon, knew her from the past, knew her from
(The Lifestream...)
(Are you going to live, or die?)
life, but the sight of her wasn't bringing back any important information. She had told him to follow her. That was all he could remember.
"You made your choice to come back, to live," Reisei said. "But she had used up your body; you could no longer come back to it. You're Cloud Strife just as you always were. As you were meant to be."
It was too much to try to understand, but Cloud focussed on what he remembered, which was Reisei telling him to follow her. He had. He had followed her from the Lifestream. And if he had been in the Lifestream, he must have been separated from his body.
That's called being dead, he reminded himself.
And yet, here he was in...well, it didn't seem like his body, but...
(But it's not Jenova's, either.)
The last thougth startled him so much that at first he wasn't certain it had come from him. Cloud was so used to random thoughts and feelings that had come from the alien virus inside of him that he was never quite sure which were his and which were hers.
(Just as you always were. As you were meant to be.)
"Jenova?" Cloud whispered to Reisei.
Reisei pointed, as if indicating something far away, something neither of them could see. "Out there," she said. Then she pointed to Cloud. "But not in there."
Cloud stared at her, open-mouthed. "Am I a clone?" he asked.
"The body you're in was cloned from your DNA, uninhabited, wandering around Midgar." Reisei offered him a sweet, somewhat triumphant smile. "I counted on it, Cloud. I knew there would be one. That's why we had to come to Midgar."
"But I'm...I'm..."
"You're still you." Reisei stood up slowly, painfully. "And you still have work to do. Jenova's gone from you. She's not gone from the Planet."
Cloud stared up at her, processing this, or trying to. In the end, he didn't have much to think about after all. What he did have, however, was a purpose.
The body was frail and, even worse, untrained. The person inside of it, though, accessed the well of will and strength he had always drawn from. His mind remembered training. Cloud stood up and began to walk away from Reisei.
"I'll find her," he said. "I can probably still sense her out. You should stay where it's safe."
"Uhh, Cloud!" Reisei called after him.
He turned back, impatient, ready to find and fight Jenova. Just then, he wasn't allowing himself to feel anything. Whether this was out of habit or to keep himself from completely freaking out, he didn't know.
Reisei was holding a pair of pants and a shirt. "You can't go...like that. You look like a flasher."
Flustered, Cloud pulled the coat closed. Reisei handed him the clothes and then primly turned her back.
"Thank you," he said.
"I took them from the Tempest. There's a man there. Fletcher. I left him there."
"Okay," Cloud said, as he tried hurriedly to pull the pants on. It took much of his strength to stand on one leg, and he almost toppled over. His arms were already shaking by the time he was pulling the shirt over his head, and he understood that this was because he had never used his muscles before for anything as simple as this. He, or at least this body, had spent all its life strapped to a table. He had no idea how he was supposed to fight Jenova.
"But I will," he muttered under his breath as he finished dressing.
"You will," Reisei said. "And you don't have to sense her out or listen for her. I can bring you there. Follow me."
"The last time you said that to me, I was dead."
Reisei smiled again. "And now you're not."
Speechless, Cloud nodded. Reisei began walking. Still not allowing himself to feel anything or think about anything other than what was necessary, Cloud followed her once more.
The first thing he saw was not Tifa's strained, confused face, or Cid's disbelieving eyes, or the man he had once idolized and later feared and hated lying motionless on the pavement.
The first thing he saw was a pulsing mass of white, firm and smooth as marble, but flexible. It gelled and massed, glided along on rolling legs. It was a large thing, bigger than he was.
Jenova.
He had thought the word, and waited tensely for her reaction in his body and in his mind. It didn't come. The creature kept moving away from him, the bottom of it never leaving the pavement, though he could sense a human gait about it.
Cloud narrowed his eyes, though it did nothing to enhance his already perfect vision. At least that hadn't changed. He saw everything crisply, knew depth and lines just as he always had. Jenova fascinated him for a moment. There was no skin on her, but he could sense, more than see, the smallest of cells. Billions of them, it must have been. Billions on the surface, and billions more beneath.
And in the midst of the writhing, pulsing cells, gliding along inside of her and never in one place for long, was a slightly darker, oblong mass.
Her battery. Her heart. By Shiva, her heart.
Perhaps even her brain, because he could see it clearly, could even see the radiant beams it sent out in tendrils like lightning to every other part of her form. Like a net of nerves, lightning beams to every cell in her body. He could see her perfectly.
And it seemed that she hadn't seen him, because she was moving away from him, towards something that, at first, he didn't think he had time to observe. Then the thing she was moving towards stirred, and Cloud decided to see what Jenova was threatening. It was hard to tear his eyes away from Jenova's secrets - the gods knew that she had watched his for long and long - but he did look away.
Sephiroth was gaining his feet, but slowly, gratingly, in a way that Cloud could never have imagined him moving. Even after their last battle, in which Cloud had triumphed over him, Sephiroth had somehow managed to hold onto his majesty, and Cloud had to admit, hateful as it had been at the time, that it somehow seemed right.
Sephiroth stood up and shook his head, like a fighter shaking off the effects of a sucker punch to the jaw. He turned away and impassively spat a bloody tooth onto the street, then turned to face Jenova again. He was looking at Jenova, but at the same time, he...
I see you...
Cloud started at the faint intuition he had felt, because it couldn't have been called a voice. Still, he recognized it as communication. He had been trained by the man who stood on the other side of the creature, the man who, before he had gone mad, had been the subtlest, slyest person he had ever known. Sephiroth hadn't even glanced at him, quite possibly hadn't looked away from Jenova, but Cloud had recognized the shift in the soldier's focus. Sephiroth was aware of him. Sephiroth hadn't given away his position.
Cloud glanced around frantically, suddenly aware that Sephiroth wasn't the only person in this situation. In quick succession, he saw Tifa, hitching in a breath. Cid, on the ground, staring wildly at him. Barret, about to point him out. An entire group of people, from friends and allies to former enemies, seeing him, watching him, about to acknowledge him.
Cloud held both hands out and shook his head quickly. Please, all of you, not a sound. I'm not here, he thought, and he hoped that it would show on his face. It must have, because no one made a sound. He nooded curtly back to the creature, indicating that they should all look there, instead. Don't call her attention on him.
Tifa - gods love this woman, he thought - looked away first, and Cloud knew that it must have killed her to do so.
"Human clone, your pathetic longsword," Jenova said to Sephiroth, and the sound of her voice hurt Cloud's ears, split his head, for it was the sound of all voices at once. No one else seemed to react to it the same way he had.
Amazingly, Jenova seemed to be offering the Masamune to Sephiroth. It rose in the air as Jenova's white arm seemed to twine around it.
"Does it shame you to accept your sword from your enemy?" Jenova asked.
Cloud gritted his teeth against the sound of her voice, and against her words, as well, because he knew that she was right. In ordinary circumstances, someone like Sephiroth would never cry mercy by accepting the weapon he had lost.
But both soldiers knew that circumstances were not ordinary. Sephiroth held out his hand, palm up. He still looked at the creature impassively.
Cloud didn't have to wonder if Jenova would decide to spear him with it instead. Jenova wouldn't kill Sephiroth quickly, just as she hadn't killed Cloud quickly. She killed by inches, with shame and isolation. She didn't see Sephiroth as a threat. How gratifying it must have been to her, using the one who had once called her "Mother" for her own games. Sephiroth took the blade in his hand and Jenova laughed, a bright, splintered sound that had the potential to drive Cloud to distraction.
But Cloud wasn't entirely distracted, and when Sephiroth lifted the Masamune by the blade and then threw it it, sending it flying in Cloud's direction with no prior warning that he would do so, Cloud was mentally ready.
Physically, he was not.
Later on, he would thank every Fate for the fact that he had been too weak to catch the sword in his hand. Had he caught it, Jenova wouldn't have heard it land. She would have known that it was in the hands of someone else and she would have been alerted, and Cloud might have lost the precious few seconds he had gained on her.
As it happened, Cloud did drop the sword, and it clattered to the ground. To Jenova, it looked like Sephiroth had joined in her game, and rejected his weapon instead.
"Your stupid, unfounded pride!" she cried joyously. "What would you fight with, your wit?"
She kept babbling, buzzing, the sound becoming a strident string of nonsense to Cloud as he retrieved the sword as quietly as he could. It was heavy in his hand, so damned heavy, and already both of his arms were shaking under the weight of it. His thin, useless, untrained arms! He hated them, hated the fact that this body had spent its entire life strapped to a table...
("and it doesn't matter if you've spent weeks in a hospital bed, the power to manifest physical strength has little to do with it...")
Sephiroth's voice, but not in the present. From the past. Sephiroth's training.
It was Yuffie who finally gasped when she saw Cloud begin to run toward Jenova, Masamune in both hands. She gasped, and Jenova caught the glitch in attention, and perhaps she might have turned and seen him.
She might have, but it didn't matter, because Cloud's world became two points: the pulsing, oblong center of energy that he could see so clearly inside of Jenova, and the tip of the Masamune. The only thing that mattered was bringing those two points together.
Sliding the Masamune into her was like sheathing the blade into a cleft rock. It scraped and squealed like metal on stone, but there was no resistance.
Her voice soon overrode any other sounds. Threads of black shot out from every tendril on her nerve-net, and then those threads flared white, like electricity. It was blinding, and her scream was deafening, and Cloud thought his head would split with it, or fly into as many screaming cells as she had in her own body, but he held onto the hilt. He held on until it felt like the weapon had fused to both of his hands.
The Masamune jerked a few times in his grip, and then a great weight pulled it down, and pulled him down with it.
Jenova had stopped screaming. The screams that followed - Tifa's, perhaps a few others - seemed quiet in comparison. Cloud sensed that everyone was running towards him. The world tilted, and when he opened his eyes, he saw the pavement coming up fast. He had a moment to envision the mess it would make of his face, and then there were hands on him, hundreds of hands, it seemed like. Hands and hoarse cries, so many people calling his name, so many people touching him! Then a flash of green, a swirl of silver, and somewhere in the din, very low:
"Well done, Soldier."
But that was receding and the voices were receding, and the hands were mostly gone, save for a few. And then two. And right before complete darkness, a vague scent of rosemary.
Sephiroth
It was a blessing that Reeve was unconscious, Sephiroth thought. He didn't have to watch Elena and Rude scrape Fletcher's brains off the wall of the Tempest.
"Scarlet," Rude had muttered when he had first seen it.
"Can we prove that?" Elena had asked.
Rude had shrugged.
And now Elena was sitting next to Reeve, who was regaining consciousness. He, like the others in their party who were injured, was on the floor of the airship. There was no other place for them. When she saw that Rude hadn't disposed of Fletcher yet, she cast Sleep on Reeve before he had a chance to open his eyes. Then she sat with her back against the wall and sighed.
"...done well..." a voice croaked from a different corner of the Tempest. Tseng was leaning on his elbows and watching Elena with a look of calm appraisal.
Elena looked at him, surprised. "Sir?"
Tseng cleared his throat. "I said that you've done well, Elena."
She answered him with an unashamedly proud smile. "Thank you, sir. It's good to have you back."
"If you intend to come back," Rude said. He had covered Fletcher's body and was now kneeling next to Reno, checking to make sure he was all right. He didn't look all right, but whatever Rude saw must have satisfied him, because he didn't seem too worried just then. "Now that we're functioning as a group again..."
"The position you left behind is still yours," Elena said. Her smile faltered. "Although, I don't know what we'll be doing. We have to answer for Midgar."
"Scarlet," Reeve muttered.
Elena's focus shifted back to him immediately. "I know she was responsible for setting it up," she said in a soft voice. She slyly stroked his hair under the pretense of checking if he had a fever.
Reeve opened his eyes, though the simple act seemed difficult, and looked steadily at Elena. "I can help you," he said.
"You can, I'm sure. But I think we still have to answer for it."
Reeve closed his eyes and put his hand over hers. Then, suddenly, he was struggling to sit up. "Reno," he said. "And Vincent and Cid. Are they...?"
Elena gently pushed him back down. "I'm pretty sure they're going to be okay," she said. She stood up and walked over to where Reno lay beside Tseng, and looked them both over. "Only a full physical will tell for sure. But as far as we know, it seems like clones and people in SOLDIER weren't the only ones Hojo saw fit to inject with Jenova cells. I know Reno was in the ShinRa sick bay hospital for a while, and I guess that Cid was, too. They lived all those years with her inside them and they never knew. It was like she was keeping quiet about it so she would always have some of herself hidden away until she was ready to completely reunite her cells. It must be the end. I think the only one who could say for certain is Cloud, but I feel safe in saying that I think she's gone."
"I can't tell," said a soft voice from the other end of the airship. Sephiroth turned to see Tifa Lockheart gaining her feet next to Strife, who lay like a broken doll on the floor. Beside Cloud, Vincent and Cid lay bleeding but alive. Lockheart stood among them. "You're right, Cloud would know, and..." Tifa glanced at him, her lips pressed together. She was shocky and pale, but resolute.
For the first time in his life, (or in any of them,) Sephiroth found himself acknowledging beauty and strength in someone else. It pleased him. He looked again at Elena, and saw that she and Tifa were similar, even if they didn't like to admit it - both of them standing among their injured comrades, both of them having faced Jenova even if they hadn't been the ones to finally kill her.
"Here we all are," Reisei said from the hatch. "Alive."
Two more chapters after this, both very short. I could combine them into one, maybe. If not, though, I might post them both on the same day. :)
