Horror Madness
By NetOwl, with apologies to all horror movie fans
Chapter 1 – Bleeding Heart of the City
Cloud Strife used to think his mother hated him. He used to wake up every morning despising her and nursing his wounded self-esteem. For a while, this even brought him to hate himself a little bit. He hated himself, and he pushed himself to join SOLDIER in order to prove to himself that he was not worthless and alone. He was not the loser his mother implied he was. He was a strong, independent young man, with dreams, skills, and a snazzy sense of fashion. For the first sixteen years of his life, everything he did was to spite the one who raised him.
He knew she cared nothing for him because she had given him quite possibly the dumbest name in the history of Nibelheim. Cloud? One of those wispy white cottony fluffy things that look like flowers to cute little girls and evil deathmutants to bloodthirsty young boys? Cloud could deal with the deathmutants, but the connection between his name and cotton was too strong and entirely too wimpy for him to let go. Too many bruises administered by all the other schoolchildren drove this message home.
Cloud's military career was by no means the first time in his life he overcompensated for his name. From an early age, he made every effort to keep himself from looking at all fluffy. This he accomplished with copious quantities of hair gel. Though he still had to endure "witty" classmates comparing him to such hairstyling luminaries as John Stamos and The Fonz, he never minded as much as when his second grade teacher made a crack about him floating through his schoolwork. True, he was impressed that she somehow made a pun on the word cumulonimbus, but he had long since forgotten just how she did so, and only the bitterness of the memory lived on in his heart.
Shortly before leaving to train with Shinra, though, Cloud discovered the shocking truth. His mother did not give him his name out of parental neglect or loathing or even really, really poor foresight. No, she had simply celebrated his birth by tossing back a few too many glasses of bubbly with some of the other new mothers at Nibelheim Hospital and Black Market Organ Boutique. The mothers had all decided to give their newborns geographic names using a wall map and some darts. Cloud's mother, alas, failed to notice that she was throwing at a weather map, and he was thus doomed to live with the second worst name in the maternity ward, behind Cosmo Canyon Johnson.
Cloud learned all of this in time to regather his ego and find a career path that wouldn't turn him into a warrior for a corrupt government, a mercenary, and then an ecoterrorist, but he wanted to impress a girl as badly as he wanted revenge on his mother, so off he went. Five years later, he, together with a ragtag crew of a spunky childhood buddy, a smack-talkin' battle-scarred ideologue, a garrulous flea-ridden mutt, a ditzy-but-cute girl who spoke to the Planet, a stupid plush toy con artist, a chain-smoking wife-beating dirty-talking hard-drinking dandy of a pilot, a bratty ninja girl, and a self-loathing transient who slept in a coffin instead of the subway like most other hobos, saved the world from a demigod with a raging Oedipus complex. Along the way, he fell in love with the ditzy girl and in lust with the childhood buddy and the ninja.
He would have been happy to have an obvious wife and two devoted mistresses, but unfortunately, the demigod killed the ditzy girl. He sneaked up behind her while she was, of all things, praying, and he ran her through with his impractically long sword. Poof. No more ditzy girl.
History would view the event through a number of different lenses, of which three were important. The first view was the sane view, and the other two were the most popular of the insane views. The sane view held that the events occurred more or less as Cloud later narrated them to a newspaper reporter. Aeris knelt on a pedestal in the City of Ancients, praying for the safety of the Planet, and just as Cloud arrived at the scene to deliver a box of chocolates and some flowers and to join her in prayer for the world's needy population, Sephiroth came out of nowhere and offed her like a Mafia don dealing with a witness. Sephiroth turned out to be just a piece of another godlike being, Jenova, and Cloud and Company killed him on the spot and then gave Aeris a proper burial by tossing her in the lake.
The first of the insane views was that Sephiroth did not kill Aeris at all. Why would he even be there? If he got into a fight with Cloud afterwards, and Cloud won, then why was he trying to destroy the world shortly thereafter? What was all this business about a piece of Jenova, or a clone? Nothing made a lick of sense. The real killer was not Sephiroth, who may or may not have been dead already (rumors of him assassinating President Shinra notwithstanding). No, the real killed was a jealous romantic rival of Aeris's, who took advantage of the blinding scenery of the City of Ancients to hide on a nearby glassy knoll and take a potshot when nobody else was looking. If the murder weapon had been an inconspicuous ranged weapon, like a poisoned shuriken, instead of a ridiculously large melee weapon like Sephiroth's, then it could have killed Aeris without leaving a big pool of blood on the ground. These people would point to the bloody trail everywhere else Jenova would go and then crow about how there was none found at the scene of the crime. Could someone really stab Aeris and leave no mark on her?
The third theory, and the second insane one, was that Aeris was not dead at all. She could not be dead because that would be too depressing. The struggle against Sephiroth was supposed to be an uplifting story, and so only nameless extras could die in it. Aeris dying would violate a rule of good storytelling (i.e. Doyle's Law: if your fans love a character enough, you have to work around his or her death no matter how absurd you have to make things). For a short time after the story was first published, no one could explore much of the Internet without running into people in utter denial of Aeris's demise. She was alive, they said. She was working as a cocktail waitress in Midgar, some said. She was singing backup for Elvis, others said. She was replaced in the band by the Tooth Fairy, said still others.
Cloud desperately wished for the third group of people to be right. In fact, he'd sacrificed a great deal in an epic attempt to bring Aeris back from the dead, following an internet rumor that a properly executed arcane ritual, using spell components scattered around the world, could do the job. In the process, he managed to destroy his marriage to Tifa, his childhood friend, and he only nearly avoided alienated the Great Ninja Yuffie, but in the end, after countless sidequests and wild goose chases, two of which were overly long and involved putting up with Red XIII, he'd only partially succeeded in conquering death. Aeris remained in her grave, but at least he brought back some guy named General Leo. Plus, he got to make out with a hot alien babe on one of the sidequests.
Yet still, Cloud's passion, once for proving himself unworthy of his name, then for bringing back his one true love, burned as fiercely as ever. Nothing could make him happier than a resurrected Aeris. Nothing.
XXX
"I did not kiss him," Cloud told Yuffie as they left the old cathedral.
"That's what it looked like to me," said Yuffie. "Is there something you've been hiding from me?"
"No, dear," said Cloud. "Nothing. Nothing at all. You're absolutely the only one for me, and I'm never going back to Tifa, and I would never kiss a guy. Especially him. If it looked like I was kissing him, it's only because all that Lifestream gunk blocked your view."
Cloud gulped as he gestured to Yuffie to move faster in hopes of leaving General Leo in the dust.
"You don't like him?" said Yuffie.
"I don't," said Cloud.
"I don't blame you," said Yuffie. "Look at those clothes! Yuck! Barf!"
"Glad you see things my way," said Cloud. "Now why don't we just dump him?"
"Good question," said Yuffie. "I've got a better question, though. Why didn't my materia appear? Did we do everything right?"
"Apparently not," said Cloud. "Probably shouldn't have listened to those rumors."
"At least had some fun and made some money," said Yuffie. She ran her left hand through one of her pockets, enjoying the texture of the Gil stashed there.
"At least," said Cloud. "I'll still feel better when we dump Captain Dork back there."
Behind them, General Leo said nothing. In fact, he hadn't said much at all since materializing in that old, dank church. He did a lot of whistling, including a pretty tune he mentioned was called Aria de Mezzo Carattere, but he didn't do much proper talking. He didn't seem overly nervous, either, after Cloud and Yuffie assured him that no one was out to kill him.
"Captain Dork is right," said Yuffie. "Isn't he a little old to be afraid of clowns?"
"Yet he is still following us," said Cloud.
Yuffie looked behind her. General Leo, with his stoic countenance, looked hardly like someone who had just risen from the dead. She marveled at how he seemed to have switched places with the church where he had appeared. Though animated was hardly the word she would choose to describe him, he at least seemed to have enough life in him to get by for a while, and she had no doubt that he would carve out a happy living somewhere. That separated him from the church, which looked to be on its last legs. The quake during the resurrection ceremony had just about finished the building off. A few sparks of Lifestream still escaped from the cracks in the walls, giving the place the appearance of a bleeding, dying animal. Good riddance, she thought.
XXX
One should always exercise care when dealing with an animal in its death throes. Dying things, having neither adequate judgment nor cause for restraint, can give even sturdy predators a dash of comeuppance as they depart for the afterlife, be it in the form of a quick kick or a slash of the claws or, in this case, a spark. Lifestream was curious thing, only vaguely understood by even the foremost authorities on it, and its spilling from the dead church made for more than a light show. Had Cloud or Yuffie stopped to think about that fact, they might not have been able to walk away so nonchalantly.
Most of the Lifestream dripped out onto the dirt below and returned harmlessly to the Planet. A few splotches landed on a patch of brown grass, which slowly regained its color and began a second, greener life. One small ray hit the back of Yuffie's head, tickling her.
Then, the building collapsed. It did so with a crash unlike anything heard in the slums of Midgar since the Plate fell. The noise reverberated up into what passed for the heavens there, and for a split second, a stronger beam of green shot from the rubble and up along the path light used to take when it filtered down into Aeris's old flower garden. Had they been looking, Cloud and Aeris would have noticed a beam of sunlight – actual sunlight – reaching down into the slums one last time before being blocked again by the construction in Upper Midgar. The Lifestream met the sunlight, and the two mingled in a brilliant display of green-yellow before the green zipped through the top of the city and out to parts unknown and the light lost its path downward.
It was a shame Cloud and Yuffie missed all of that, but such was the price of drowning out General Leo's maddeningly off-key whistling using iPods with the volume turned all the way up.