AN:/ I'm like a bus - you wait ages for one, then two come along at once. Thank you for leaving reviews! I really appreciate them. To answer a couple of questions: yes, unfortunately this will be a Long Fic but I'm aiming to get the chapters out faster now (no promises except my standard I Will Leave No WIP Unfinished, sadly!); and yes, Cloud's time in the past has had an impact on the future :)
There is a quietness built from the sound of countless voices, the murmur of a crowd that's larger than the human mind can conceive. The silence of isolation, the peace of being surrounded, the soft susurrations familiarly unheard.
Apart and a part, a memory (a man) is held tight as water in a clenched fist, spilling and gathering and pouring out of cracks and crevices in the grip. But as it loses it gains, as it reduces it grows, each fine trickle pulled back into itself through rejection by the wider river. If it had enough room to think, to reflect, in this endless void of rebirth and renewal, it might name itself and reweave the threads of his existence so he could watch from the other side of the mirror hidden in the world.
It doesn't.
Part sees, part knows, part is. No part can act as the whole anymore, as no part wants to. There was a severing, it thinks, unlike the inevitable severing.
Unlike. Incomplete?
It is waiting. The start is too early; the end is too late. A moment of choice that still exists in the rippling wave of changes cascading through – a chance for a choice to be changed.
It is quiet. It is waiting for a moment.
As time passes like silk over skin, it starts to snag. Pockets and pieces and short delicate instances that cling a little tighter, that drag a little more than the glossy indifference of the millennia prior.
A gasp of breath, a passing shade and-
Cloud opened his eyes.
The ceiling above was cracked and stained slightly yellow, and Cloud had been lying on the bed staring at it for about fifteen minutes. Each slow blink threatened to force tears to spill, but he wasn't sad. They felt like the inevitable overspill that happens when you force something into a container too small for it, a physical manifestation of what was happening inside.
His memories slopped around in his head, waves of remembrance colliding and unsettling him as he unpicked the chain of events that had led to him lying on a bed in a strange place. It took time, but eventually he rolled to his side and levered himself upright.
Where am I now? was his first real thought.
Vahana was nowhere to be seen, but he wasn't surprised. From the noise outside and the thick smell of metal and smoke, he had been brought forward into the future; she could be in one of several places, but none of them were a sparse and dingy room in a city.
He had known that Jenova was an alien in a female body, and he had vaguely been aware that the body once belonged to someone else, but he'd never really thought about the person who had been taken over. It was a dead body, more parasite than not, without a name or a history beyond the misfortune of being the last to attract Jenova's attention. As far as he was aware, nobody had for a very long time.
He could almost still feel the ghost of her hand in his, and hoped that her death had been quick and as painless as possible. If his past experiences with the Lifestream were at all accurate, at least she would have joined the people who loved her. Perhaps she had welcomed her brother, too, when it was his time to go.
Cloud really wanted her to have been given the peace that he hoped to have himself one day.
But grief was a luxury he couldn't really afford, thrust as he was into an unknown time and location, and he had done all he could for her while she was alive. If he was lucky, he would have been sent back to his own time, but he had never been a very lucky man. It was likely that she would be better off where she was than with him at this point.
The room was small, worn but not dirty. The patches on the blanket of the bed were immaculately done, and although the paint on the walls was peeling a little there was no dust or filth on the floor. There was a bed, and a bedside table, and a trunk at the end of the bed with shoes kicked off to the side. There was no sword, no armour, and only one door and one window. It was enough to put him on edge, and feeling uncomfortably vulnerable.
The window was fairly tiny, barely as big as his head. Outside, he could see cars and trucks trundling by, and when he looked up all he could see was pipework and grimy metal plate. He couldn't see much more, even with his face pressed against the window, but trying to force the window open proved fruitless even with him leaning his full weight against it.
It didn't matter. He was probably in Midgar, unless there was an urban planner in the distant future who would come up with the bright idea of having a two-storey city again. If there was, he'd stab them himself.
Pulling away from the glass, he squinted a little to see if he had gone through any changes. After his submersion in the slick and oily blackness of Jenova, he wouldn't be surprised (distressed, maybe, but not suprised) if there were further changes to his body. Silver hair, perhaps, or slit-pupiled eyes, or perhaps something closer to degradation.
It wasn't a clear reflection – it was a pane of glass in what passed for daytime under a Plate – but the face he saw looked wrong and familiar in equal measure.
He rubbed at it with his sleeve, trying to get the smudge of his faceprint off the glass to see more clearly, and his heart stopped.
Looking back at him was the delicate, almost pretty face of his teenage years.
This is too much. This is too much.
Cloud pulled back his sleeve (his old sweater, why hadn't he noticed) to look for the scars inflicted by Hojo's needles years ago, that had faded but never fully left, and saw clear young skin. His hands were soft and uncalloused; checking his reflection desperately showed no mako glow to his eyes. He didn't want to look any further.
He was back at the beginning. Weak, powerless, pointless little Cloud Strife, useless and pathetic in a body that couldn't even open a fucking window.
Not even a fake SOLDIER, just a dumb hick kid from the mountains…
He curled himself onto the bed, focusing on his breathing in one of Orothe's exercises in an effort to avoid hyperventilating as the enormity of it hit him.
I can't do it again.
Originally, in the brief time when he genuinely believed that he could become a SOLDIER and was training his hardest to get into the programme, he had been on the lower end of mediocre. A few points higher than those barely scraping in, he had managed to qualify with his test scores and had gone with the others to the labs for the mako sensitivity test. It was there that his body had betrayed him (saved him?) by evidencing a severe mako sensitivity that rendered him ineligible for the enhancements. It was impossible to become a SOLDIER through training alone, so he was ejected from the program and dumped into the role of grunt solider for ShinRa.
Cloud had failed before he had begun, and hadn't even known it until it had been rubbed into his face.
The only other way for him to get his old strength back was unthinkable.
Not that place. Not again.
He needed to find out what the date was. Whatever the Planet had done to him would be made obvious then. He might even be back in his own time, just with a new body untouched by J-cells. That wouldn't be so bad; there weren't any world-ending monsters or delusional generals left to fight at least. He would have room to be weak.
Tifa would laugh at this. I'm sure she would. Barret would.
…Nanaki wouldn't.
A persistent ringing broke through his slow descent into panic. Lifting his head, he tried to find the source of the noise.
On the bedside table was an obsolete PHS model from over a decade ago, scuffed and worn with a sticker of a sword half peeling off the back. It was ringing one of its standard tunes insistently and vibrating itself into the wall. It was an almost perfect replica of the one he'd scrimped and saved for as a teenager, that may have had crappy service and a cracked screen but was still able to make and receive calls.
That's not a replica.
Carefully, he picked it up, pressed the call button and brought it to his ear.
"Hello? Cloud Strife speaking."
"Cloud? Cloud, can you hear me?" a woman answered, her voice warm and familiar and very much loved.
…what?
"Mom?"
