Author's Note:

Hiya Everyone, this is Hchan speaking. As you all have read, the very kind and generous Chocobo has allowed me to partake in this awesome on going fic of hers. I can't say how truly honored I am to have been asked, and I really look forward towards writing alongside her. I hope you all enjoy this fic just as Chocobo and I have enjoyed writing it for you all. Thank Chocobo for it all though, it was her idea. . Anyway, enough of my rambling. On with Chapter Nine!

¤ Hchan.

Chapter Nine: The Murky Depths of Inquiry.

Without much realization or even thought for that matter, the Avalanche members were back on board the Highwind. It wasn't that thoughts hadn't been executed throughout the minds of Avalanche, it was the fact that when strange or even bizarre mentionings had been spoken from one of their kin, they didn't think. They just acted. Being the savior of the Planet once, they were use to abnormalities and freakish encounters. It was all in the line of what they did. Which is why when Cloud spoke the eerie and almost chilling words of going back to Midgar, from out of nowhere in the blue, that his fellow comrades and partners didn't question his sanity. They simply nodded and got back aboard their flying transportation vehicle, Cid entering the new coordinates into his beauty and setting off into the newly appointed direction.

Despite the lack of questioning, there was no doubt, a high tension that hung severely over the atmosphere. It seemed to stifle and blanket everyone's moods, keeping them all either in their own rooms or in a far corner near nobody else. Only one person seemed to be excluded from the ideal mood set and that was Reno. He seemed all too happy to carry conversations on with the nearest thing around him. As long as there were bars and booze, he was easily handled. It was everyone else that was loose cannons, especially Cloud, Tifa, and Barret. The brunette beauty had been sitting nervously in her room earlier, pacing back and forth unconsciously as the Highwind engine made the machine flooring rumble lowly beneath her careless and distracted footsteps. Cloud had attacked her and left a nasty wound in her side earlier on. He had attacked her. Ran his keen metallic Buster Sword blade along that one side of her body. She couldn't process it. And yet, even after he had come back, she told him it was okay. He didn't have to leave and put distance between them. This made Tifa feel better, this unannounced feeling of thankfulness. Cloud bruised her and it was okay with her. As long as he stayed. Because Tifa knew that it wasn't Cloud who had done it. It was the Jenova inside him, cursing his actions with venom tipped course.

With this familiar growing feeling of optimism and hope, the self reassured Tifa left her room. Spikey locks were held firmly within the sweaty grasp of concentrated hands. Eyes held shut with his hands cradling his head, Cloud was enduring the poison torture of the multiplied thoughts streaming endlessly throughout his brain. Gentle green pools staring up at him, the ever so cheerful smile turning up as they fixed themselves upon his form. And then gorgeous locks of Holy, swaying forward with decay from forced momentum from another. The innocent green aura closing over, the smile never fading, the piercing slice of death embedded into a being so pure.

Aeris.

No.

Not again.

Fingers tightened against the straying blond, wrenching the straining hair nerves. He wasn't going to go through this overly trodden guilt for the hundredth time this day. Before having any more power to try and actually get ahold of his spontaneous thought process, Cloud's paining mind was thrust into another world of awaiting demons, which were just waiting to taunt him. The powerful, stronger, commanding voice within himself telling him to obtain the White Materia. His childhood friend fighting to get him to hand it over. The blood dramatically soaking her white belly shirt moving agonizingly slow as though in a terrible nightmare. Her expression of shock and surprise.

Stop it.

Her eyes clearly convoying the deafening message.

No…

How Tifa must have felt at that moment. Her own childhood buddy, gutting her without an hesitance at all.

"STOP IT!"

The last note of rage was far from being kept inside the mind's jailed universe of Hell, and was carried onward towards the living realm of Fate. Cloud's eyes were ablaze; looking wildly around the room and prowling for anything that looked even remotely like Jenova. His breathing exhaled heavily coming out in frustrated and pent up gasps. Unexpectedly, the door to his room threw itself open and before it stood a very worried Tifa.

"Cloud..?" Her voice was laced with caution and extreme reserve, her mouth only finding one appropriate word to suit what she was trying to say while still getting the point across.

Handsome blues took her sudden appearance and rather short question in quickly. He battled to come up with a reasonable answer and instead let the current odd situation step into play in order to formulate his reply.

"…Tifa?" Having spoke the unsettling words of the unknown, Cloud immediately realized what he had spit out and went to retort with the correct version.

"I mean-"

But he was cut off with a gruff shout from Cid that they had reached their mysterious destination of Midgar.
"We're finally &$ here!"

Cloud arose from where he had been sitting on his bed and nodded towards Tifa. Tifa and Cloud joined everyone else on the main deck of the Highwind in order to consult just what they were doing in Midgar now. Cloud quickly became the center of attention and topic, as it was he who had led them to this veer out of nowhere. Calmly, Cloud addressed the rest of Avalanche with what was on his mind.

"We came to Midgar because…" His voice faltered, unable to try and explain what he expected them to accept and believe. Many expectant pools were set on him, waiting for him to spill the rest out. Reno made a sweeping motion with his hand, his eyebrows lifting with impatience.
"Well? Let's hear it Fern-head."

Cloud sneered at the name call but decided to continue with the rest, as it was the only way out of the situation.
"…I have a very strong feeling as well as visual that we have something here that's going to help us out with this current crisis."

"What in hell? So yer sayin' yous dun even have a clue where we're actually goin' to go in Midgar? Spikey-haired jackass, do you even know where to look for this 'hidden thing'?" Barret made both his index and middle fingers do a mocking gesture of the quotation signs, his face twisting in approaching anger.

"I know where we have to go." Cloud's voice was dipped in cool iron, sentencing that he didn't want receive any more insults or arguing.

"We can start with the Shinra remains." He said as though it were the simplest thing in the world.

And the rest of Avalanche and the Turk's mouths dropped like it were the most complex.