"You don't know who you are? Do you know who we are?" Cloud asked.
Zack shook his head. "It's cold!"
"What do we do now?" Yuffie asked the others, as Zack shivered on the floor, seemingly too weak to walk. Rude took his jacket off and put it around him.
"We've got to get him out of here." Cloud insisted.
"So we go see where he came from. If it's not a way out, it might have supplies or something." Reno said calmly, the surprise of seeing Zack again having snapped him out of his snit.
"Am I supposed to know you all?" Zack asked them as the two Turks picked him up off the floor and supported him as they continued down the passageway.
"Don't worry about it." Cloud reassured him as they turned a corner and were confronted with snow and a few small rocks on the ground. More snow fell down from an opening in the ceiling above them
"Too high for us to reach and to small to climb through even if we did." Rude frowned. "At least this is where he got covered with snow, but it's not where he came from." he said, looking at the marks in the snow showing Zack's path started beyond it. "So we should keep going."
After what seemed like hours of more twists and turns they were confronted with more boulders blocking their path. A puzzled look appeared on Zack's face. "Warm." he said, pointing towards the blocked path.
"There must be something beyond them. Let's see if we can move the rocks out of the way." Yuffie said, and climbed on top of the biggest ones on the ground to get the smaller ones out of the way. "Hey, there is warmer air coming from behind them!"
Reno and Rude carefully leaned Zack against the wall for support as they helped Yuffie clear enough of the boulders for a crawlspace big enough for each of them to fit through. Rude went first, then Reno handed Zack through to him and Yuffie followed them.
"Why did you have sex with Tifa?" Cloud asked the question that had been plaguing him since his confrontation with her as soon as he was alone with Reno.
"What? Is that really any of your business?" Reno couldn't think of anything he wanted less than to talk about his sexual encounter with Tifa with the man who just broke her heart.
"Just because I can't be happy with her doesn't meant I don't want her to be happy." Cloud told him. "And I definitely don't want her being taken advantage of by someone just looking to score."
"It was consensual, buddy. At least until she started freaking out about it blowing her chances with you, then it became the worst mistake of her life." Reno said in an accusatory tone before clambering up the rocks and through the hole, leaving Cloud without a chance to respond until he climbed through to the other side as well.
The chamber was indeed warmer than the rest of the Crater, and the walls shone with shifting opalescent patterns, giving the cave a mystical yet somber air. Everyone looked around, and Zack pushed himself away from Rude and went to a corner where there was an unusual depression ringed by stumps of stalagmites, which were matched by a ring of broken stalactites on the ceiling. The debris littered the floor, but it didn't seem to bother Zack, he curled up and was soon fast asleep.
"It looks almost like some type of cage." Rude remarked as he examined Zack's sleeping area. "The earthquake must have freed him."
"But how did he get past the boulders in the passageway?" Yuffie asked.
"Maybe they weren't there when he escaped. An aftershock could have done it. It did look like he collapsed where the snow was coming in from the hole in the ceiling." Rude answered her.
"Who cares? It's nice and warm in here. I think Zack's got the best idea yet. Let's get some sleep and figure how to get out of here in the morning." Reno said and laid down on the floor, promptly falling asleep as well. The others shrugged and followed his example.
In the morning, Tifa and Aerith got a nasty surprise when they unzipped the door to their tent after breakfast, and snow fell in.
"It's as high as our tent!" Tifa cried out in dismay as she shook the snow off her hands and immediately tried to get their supplies away from the snow.
"We'll have to leave the tent behind, but we can still make it to the Crater by noon. We just have to get on top of the snow." Aerith reassured her.
That was easier said than done, the snow was light and powdery and once they had all the supplies except for the tent in the sleds, they just kept stepping down a couple feet through the snow and stumbling. Eventually the snow became firm enough for them to have a stable path. They kept checking the compass to make sure they were still going north, because there was a heavy fog that made it hard for them to know which way they were facing.
"Let's stop for lunch here." Tifa said suddenly, tired of endlessly trudging through the snow. Her winter holiday was turning into as much of a joke as her love life was.
"Okay, let me find the lunch packs." Aerith said, and when she stopped and walked back to the side of her sled, she suddenly cried out as she fell into a snow-covered hole.
"Aerith! Are you okay?" Tifa hurried over to her sled and peered down into the hole. "Aerith?"
"I'm fine, it wasn't that long of a fall." Aerith looked around and realized what she had fallen into. "This is the Turks' helicopter! The earthquake must have made it fall on its side and I fell into the cargo hold. We've got to be close to the Crater!"
