Cloud awakes to a scream in his skull, but he doesn't recognize it as his own. A steady drip has kept him under for so long that waking is pure panic. The room is too bright. That scratching noise, too loud. He is nauseous. His head is pounding. There are sounds inside his head like whispers, rapid and nonsensical. Signals of pain immobilize his arm. His whole body is distant.

Darkness coalesces into artificial light. He is lying on a metal table. There is another person nearby. The walls spin. He wants to go back to sleep. It would be better that way.

The other person leans in, examining, and the sight of those bespectacled eyes shoots instinctual fear through him though he can't understand why. The man looks frail, harmless.

Then he sees the white lab coat, the Shinra identification badge. Professor Hojo. The brilliant scientist leading the science division. The one who'd put those humans in the Mako condensing tanks. Why would he be here in the Reactor?

Cloud tries to speak, but his mouth is numb and throat dry. He hears his bones creak. Needles press into his skin. Something hot runs through his heartbeat, and he fades away.

These wakings happen twice more, each time allowing him a longer view into this other world. Each time he remembers a little bit more. He tastes smoke. He sees Tifa, lying unconscious on the metal grating inside the Reactor. It's hard to think with all that whispering.

The final waking is in a different place altogether. He's in a hospital bed. Beige-colored walls surround a window showing ambient city lights and steel skyscrapers beneath a black sky. The pain in his arm is just a sting now. He gazes over at the scaffolding of tubes nestled in his veins and feels sick. He wants to throw up.

Professor Hojo is there. He's always there.

"Do you know your name?"

Cloud finds the question absurd. Of course he knows his name. But when he says it his voice sounds unfamiliar and faint.

"And your rank?"

He tries to recite his Shinra identification number but finds he can't remember the digits. He can't remember even the proper rank name. He did graduate from the training academy, he knows, and he was on a mission with—

"General Sephiroth," he says, his voice stronger with the solid memory holding him. "Where is he?"

The General had gone mad. That's right, he'd become violent without allegiance. He'd set fire to the town. He'd decapitated that thing in the Reactor and carried its head out like a trophy, spewing insane rhetoric.

"What happened to him?" Cloud demands. Because he thinks he knows, but it doesn't seem possible.

Hojo doesn't answer right away, though in that silence Cloud understands the immense loss.

"The General is dead," the professor says. "It seems you killed him."

So it's true, all these memories. Cloud closes his eyes, exhausted from the exertion of speaking.

"Where am I?" Cloud asks softer.

"Midgar. Shinra Tower." The professor is checking vitals and scribbling notes. "There is much you need to know."

It takes a week for Cloud to fully recover.

He's been in a coma for five years, Hojo tells him, the result of massive hemorrhaging from his encounter with Sephrioth then compounded by severe Mako poisoning. But an experimental Shinra gene therapy allowed him to survive. Cloud is required to remain on Shinra property under the care of the science division to monitor side effects, but this doesn't bother Cloud because Nibelheim is gone. His mother burned to death, and he is sure that Tifa did not survive either. There is nowhere else for him to go.

The official story to the press is that Sephiroth is missing because the public and the company would otherwise be devastated. He's forbidden to speak of the incident to anyone.

Cloud takes it all in, and the scarred burns on his body corroborate a desperate struggle to find his mother in the fiery wreckage. Five years is a long time. This is the hardest part to deal with. Not the constant whispering or the stench of Mako that follows him everywhere. He lost five years just like that.

He's confined to the Shinra Tower, but it isn't so bad. The science division is underground, but he's given a room near the top floor with a window. Each day he is put through rigorous training tests and physical fitness exams, exceeding all marks with ease. The gene therapy treatment has really improved his reflexes and strength. He spends hours doing military drills and developing lethal skills with a variety of weapons. The academy had given him a gun, but he finds he much prefers a sword.

There aren't any other active SOLDIERS, and Cloud gets the impression that the Shinra military has faded in superiority since Sephiroth's demise. He's pitted against oversized mechanical monstrosities with Mako-based weaponry, Shinra's newest investments. A departure from the biological, he overhears Hojo lament. The company is too focused on robotics, ignoring that its greatest scientific achievements have come from human assets.

An asset is what Cloud is. He's heard the professor call him this when speaking to others. First-Class SOLDIERs were also called 'assets' but he wasn't first-class. He wasn't anything. Just lucky. He watches the bits of Mako glow in his eyes in the mirror. He wonders if that's the cause of the voices.

One day he's told to report to a man named Heidegger. He's being transferred to the department of Public Safety, and he doesn't see Hojo again.

"Ah, the professor's little science project," Heidegger says to him when they first meet. Cloud hates him right away.

The war with Wutai may be over, but Shinra remains under attack by terrorists living right here in Midgar. Right under their noses. Intel from the Administrative Research team suggests the terrorists are plotting to blow-up the Reactor in Sector One. Tonight.

Cloud must intercept and stop the terrorists.

"You better be worth the resources," Heidegger says with a scowl.

"Don't I get back-up?" Cloud asks, waiting to be assigned a squadron.

Heidegger laughs, loud and cruel.

"Aren't you a First-Class SOLDIER?" he retorts. "If so, you don't need any."

Was that his rank now? Maybe Heidegger is making a joke.

He's given a company sword and shown the exit. This is the first time he's been outside in… could it actually be five years? The air is choking, nothing like the purified interior of the Tower. He looks up, expecting to see stars but it's just darkness in the cloudless sky. Midgar, the floating city, is an amalgam of metal and light. He's studied the maps, and he knows where to go.

At some point the whispering in his head stops, or maybe he just stops noticing it. He crosses into Sector One, heading towards the Reactor.