Nanaki stirred in the large cage. The brand the male scientist had stamped on him still burned a little, and his head spun when he thought of the strange substance with which he had been injected. He wondered how long he could carry on in this cell without losing his mind. He could see a dozen or so monsters in a similar situation as him in the dim light. Most of them were sleeping, some growling lowly as if in pain. He couldn't tell if it was day or night stuck in this windowless room.
"Hey, what's your name?" a child's voice asked. Nanaki looked around, having trouble pinning down the direction the voice had come from. None of the other creatures were children and no one was paying him attention. But he had a vague feeling the voice was directed at him.
"I'm in the room opposite. Are you hurt?" So monitoring device then. He'd heard about people in the city being monitored constantly. It still made him feel uncomfortable being watched like an animal.
"I'm not looking at a monitor, you know. I can see through the walls. I felt your pain from the branding earlier, wanted to know if you were alright."
Nanaki decided to stop pondering the strange monitoring mechanics someone was using on him and answered the child, "I'm feeling fine, the brand still burns a little, but It will heal. The scientist called me Red XIII. Who are you?"
"They call me Subject N. I don't have a name yet," said the voice, sounding small and tired. "Hey, Red, want to break out of here with me? There's an air duct in your room. Do you think you can jump up there?" Of course, who wouldn't want to escape this rotted hell? But Nanaki doubted anyone could bypass layers of security and find a way out that easily. The voice went on. "You don't need to answer with words. Just think clearly and I can hear you in my head."
"Are you reading my mind?" Nanaki had never heard of such a thing as possible. Perhaps that was the reason the kid's here.
"Sort of. I've been waiting for a chance to talk to you. The assistants are asleep. It would be a few hours before anyone would come to check on us."
"Well, if you could open my cage, I'll try my best."
"Got it." Nanaki thought he could almost hear the smile in the child's voice.
Nanaki waited for half an hour, but he might have miscalculated as each second seemed to stretch into minutes in his anxiety. A small metal door in a wall suddenly opened a crack, a tiny human child with spiky blond hair wearing a hospital gown crawled into the room, a duffel bag on his back. He couldn't tell if the child was a boy or a girl by appearance alone, and some acrid chemicals had completely drowned out his sense of smell.
The kid pressed a long string of buttons on a console panel, and one by one, all cage doors in the room were opened. Heart pounding with hope, he leaped out of the cage immediately and followed the kid, leaping into the small opening in the ceiling without looking out for the other beasts. He marveled at the child's strength in jumping so high and was grateful that he hadn't had the major growth spurt yet, otherwise he wouldn't be able to squeeze into the narrow vent.
After climbing up for half a minute, he heard a crackling sound, followed by a loud bang as if something was blown up, then a series of ear-shattering explosions made his legs shake a little. He hoped he could make it out alive before the building collapsed from below. The child only paused a little as if listening intently before continuing to climb through the vents, changing direction from time to time. Finally, the kid pushed a grating away and jumped down into what looked like a toilet. The kid smiled happily at a nearby window and turned back to him, blue eyes almost shining.
"I'm going to jump out of the building. You will follow me, right?"
Nanaki couldn't help grinning. "Of course, thank you for helping me escape."
They landed on the ground covered in snow three stories below. "Do you know where we should go from here?" asked Nanaki when the child didn't immediately start moving.
The kid looked around and then looked up at the starry sky in wonder. "Give me a second. Never been outside the labs before." A minute passed, and the kid finally nodded and started running towards the back of the huge building they just jumped out of, stumbling a little in the process. "This way." The child's steps were uneven as he ran in the snow. "Ugh! The ground's swallowing my shoes!"
Hojo waited impatiently as the helicopter finally started to descend. He had been called back to Midgar to concoct the enhancement cocktail for the new batch of SOLDIERs. As the war with Wutai drew near, the president was reinforcing the army with newly-recruited SOLDIERs, increasing the science department's workload substantially. No matter. Most of these Soldiers would soon die from monster attacks or gunshots on the battlefield anyway, except his young son Sephiroth, who had been the best of the best. None of the newly-made SOLDIERs had piqued his interest, not when he'd finally started to uncover the secret of the extraterrestrial being Jenova.
Although many had speculated that the mako they gave their elite soldiers would flow in their veins to enhance them, the truth is more complicated in that the cocktail they'd derived through countless trial-and-error contained more substances than mere mako. First, their genetic makeup had to be altered by Jenova cells, making their bodies more tolerant of the mako. Then they could absorb and store the mako as a source of energy that can be unleashed when needed, thereby enhancing their physical capacities, making them stronger, faster, and more agile. Jenova cells also granted them enhanced healing and senses.
None of the enhanced humans had been found capable of either telekinesis or telepathy except for Subject N, who was the biological son of Jenova herself and a First Class SOLDIER, Kyle Strife. Hojo had tried using his semen and those of several other scientists', but none had yielded any result. Then he realized that SOLDIERs were more genetically attuned to Jenova compared to normal humans, and tried again using the few follicles that somehow miraculously remained alive within Jenova's frozen body, finally giving birth to the long-awaited hybrid with the help of a surrogate mother. Unfortunately, Sephiroth had been too young to donate his semen at that time, or Subject N could be his grandson. The boy was only six years old but had already surpassed all his expectations, and the specimen was only in his early stage of development.
The problem remained, though, how he could detain said specimen. The subject's power had been growing rapidly during the past few months. He'd already called up a construction team to start building a new cell with the highest security measures specially designed for the subject, and he would have SOLDIERs guard him as soon as he'd been moved to Midgar. He'd also have to upgrade the tranquilizers he gave the subject. However, with the increasing amount of mako said subject's been consuming recently, he doubted these precautions would be able to hold it for very long. He'd need to come up with an approach to control it better. Perhaps a microchip in the brainstem would do the deed.
He wasted no time stepping out of the helicopter and starting toward the basement of Shinra Manor. As he passed the threshold, the smell of burnt metal and mako assailed his nostrils. He seized a lab assistant and demanded, "What happened? I've only been gone for a week!"
Seriously, he must have been in a too-good mood this past month to allow such incompetents into his labs. He'd have to punish the fools who caused this and use them as the specimens for the upcoming experiments after he'd found proper replacements for his staff.
"Professor, we had an accident last night. You see, some of the hypnosis gas leaked so the staff on duty all fell asleep. They didn't hear the monsters escaping. The cage of one of the monsters should have been lightning-proof but was not, and all the specimens in 209 escaped after the electrical system was damaged by lightning. They tried to break out from the room, making the ceiling of 209 and the wall between 209 and 210 collapse." The man paused, looking terrified and uncertain.
"Hmm, as long as the precious specimen is intact, all can be repaired in due time. What else are you not telling me?"
The assistant grimaced and paled even more. "You agreed to let us make 210 into a mako process room so we set up the containers a couple of days ago. One of the containers in the room might have been broken during the commotion. The mako flooded the floor and caught the electric spark in 209. The followed explosion destroyed all the other mako containers. The gushing mako induced a large explosion that burnt down 205, 206, and a couple of other rooms surrounding it."
"What about 208?" Sweat began to form on his forehead. 208 was adjacent to 210 after all, and that room contained Subject N, the most important experiment in his career.
"I checked the video footage of the room. The boy was still in the mako tank before the explosion, and then the video blacked out. The explosion must have destroyed the cameras. When we got there the fire had already died down. No footage had shown the boy escaping the scene."
Stepping into the room, Hojo was greeted with one of the most devastating sights in his whole life. Everything that wasn't metal was burnt to ashes, leaving nothing to be salvaged, not even cells.
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!" Hojo banged his fists into the blackened wall. He was one step too late moving the boy to the main labs in Midgar, and now he's already paid the price.
"Do you think they'll send someone after us?" Nanaki asked for the second time, he still couldn't believe his luck even when the night passed and the sun began to rise, dusting the snow-covered land in a light gold shade. Even Nanaki felt the late autumn air a little freezing, but the kid seemed utterly unfazed by the cold.
"Nah, I don't think so. After that explosion, I doubt they'll believe we are alive. And the falling snow will cover our tracks," said the boy, his skin so pale as if he'd never seen the sun. In the several hours they'd spent running down the hill, Nanaki had learned that the kid was six years old and had been an experiment since birth. Most of the time he didn't even need to voice his questions before the boy would start to answer. It felt strange at first but both were too tired to worry about such minor things. He felt bad for the creatures caught up in the explosions, although they were all savage monsters at first glance. Didn't people who didn't know him consider him a monster as well?
"Sorry I couldn't rescue those. Couldn't communicate with them as I conversed with you," said the kid as he noticed that Nanaki was feeling guilty for those left behind. Nanaki felt comfortable in the company of the child. Although the kid was a strange one, he was not unkind and was quite considerate, probably because he could hear others' thoughts.
They continued to walk until almost noon and finally found some dry grassland not covered in snow. Nanaki sprawled on the grass and curled his fiery tail. "Do you think you should think up a name for yourself? We may run into other people soon and you shouldn't tell them your name's Subject N."
The child was lying on his back, looking up at the cloudy sky, appearing to be thinking intently. "Cloud, I'll be Cloud now that I'm free." The kid raised a hand with a dreamy expression looking as if trying to touch the clouds. Realizing that the child had never seen a sky before today, he said, "I don't know if it's a real name, but I suppose it suits you."
"Are your wound okay?" the boy asked.
Nanaki looked at his brand that was already covered by dark scars. "It's scarred and not infected." He looked at Cloud, who was already breathing slowly in his sleep.
Later that day, they followed the rivers and caught fish and a rabbit before night came. Cloud looked amazed when Nanaki started a fire, using his burning tail to light the wood. He taught the child how to roast the animals they'd caught. Nanaki could do with cooked meat, but he liked raw meat better. Cloud looked as if he'd never tasted anything more delicious.
"What did you eat in there, Cloud?"
"Um...last time I ate something, it was...maybe a couple of weeks ago? They seldom gave me any food recently, just dumped me into mako tanks saying that the hungrier I got the more mako I would assimilate."
"They dumped you into a mako tank?" Nanaki wondered if he'd heard wrong. He knew humans couldn't survive when they got drenched in mako, let alone submerged in it. And he felt horrified someone so small could be left starving for so long.
Cloud shrugged. "Yeah, they said food wouldn't do as much good to me as mako."
"How did you even survive? Did you eat mako as a substitute for food? What are they hoping to do to you with that?"
"I'm not sure. I used to think everyone consumed mako as an alternative energy source, but I realized later that wasn't true. They infused mako into humans and monsters to make them stronger. Have you ever heard of Shinra's SOLDIER program?"
Nanaki shook his head. His hometown Cosmo Canyon had never been on good terms with the company that extracts mako from within the Planet to generate electricity. His grandpa always said that mako was the condensed form of the Lifestream flowing through this Planet.
Cloud blinked and looked surprised. "Huh, I've never thought of mako that way. None of the scientists told me that. All they'd ever taught was biology and math and stuff. I wasn't even allowed to ask unscientific questions! Can I ask your grandpa about this Lifestream?"
"I'm sure he would love to teach you. He's incredible, he knows everything!"
The rest of their journey passed relatively in peace except for a couple of small monsters they easily got rid of. Nanaki had a good sense of direction. Cloud could sense potential danger from half a mile away when in open areas, so they avoided being confronted by larger monsters. Between their navigational skills and good stamina, they made it to Cosmo Canyon on the fifth day of their journey.
AN: Thanks for reading! Feel free to comment or leave criticism!