Muu... nobody reviewed the last chapter. What, did you not like the idea of Zack having a breakdown? I assure you that this was the first and only time he would ever have one. He was just stressed and his friend's look alike little sister was being a jerk by bringing up stuff that he was trying to suppress.

Anyways, on to the story.

Once again, not much action but we're getting there. But a lot of dreaming gets done!

Disclaimer: I don't own the Final Fantasy VII compilation. I do, however, own the main character who has been identified as Isabelle. Also, review please! I want to hear your input!

Gongaga

Zack cried himself to sleep.

I wasn't exactly sure how long it took for him to slip into the deep oblivion of his dreams but I estimated that his crying jag lasted about an hour or so, give or take a few minutes. Though I wasn't exactly timing him; just sitting there and waiting for him to let it all out.

The entire time he cried, Zack was apologizing either to Cloud or to other people who weren't there. He mentioned several names with Angeal, Aerith, Sephiroth, Tifa, a Mrs. Strife who was likely Cloud's mother, and... Rosalyn standing out among them. He also sobbed at his failure of being a hero, of being unable to protect those around him. He mentioned a Nibelheim and how it was in flames and burning down all around him and how could his friend and someone he respected to the highest degree do such a thing?

As I watched him cry and apologize to his inner demons, I could feel guilt gnawing at me and twisting my insides. It got worse the longer I watched. I wanted answers as to why Zack was being pursued by Gaia's world government and why he had decided to take some random girl along with him; not cause a breakdown.

There was still the occasional sniffle when he finally passed out but he had otherwise calmed down.

I waited a few minutes before moving towards him to see if he had really fallen asleep. Several seconds of watching his chest rise and fall with steady breathing and I confirmed that he was out like a light.

Which meant that I would be the one who stay would stay up tonight and make sure that nothing would came out of the shadows and attacked us. I didn't mind, considering that I just made the usual night watchman burst into tears.

It was the least I could do considering how much of an ungrateful jerk I had been.

But at the same time I felt that he needed this. Not the force into a corner and reduce him into a sobbing wreck part, but more of the 'to-let-it-all-out- before-the-weight-of-the-heavy-burden-crushes-me' part. It was obvious that at this point, Zack had been bottling up his emotions and stress from not only being betrayed time after time by those he had believed in, but also the trauma of being treated like some sort of lab rat and now running from people who wanted him and his friend silenced. I had no doubts that it was only a matter of time before it all caught up with him, but my interrogation had accelerated the impending breakdown.

I made Zack as comfortable as I could and then lay him next to Cloud.

"Hope you don't mind, Cloud." I told the blond. "But I think he needs some sleep too. It must have been exhausting watching over us the entire time."

I swore I saw something in Cloud's glowing eyes flicker, but it could have easily been light reflecting off of the fire and not Cloud showing any signs of life.

When I was sure that I couldn't make Zack any more comfortable than I had already tried, I went back to my place across the fire and sat back against the wall, bracing myself for the night.

Zack had taken me under his wing, looked after me when there was no one else around to do so and I how had I repaid him? By forcing him to talk about things that brought up painful memories and making him cry.

Fantastic job there, Belle. Way to go and break people.

If he decided to ditch me after this, I wouldn't blame him and would actually quietly comply with his demand. Even if it meant my survival rate plunged down by a landslide.

"Guess I'll have to wait and see tomorrow..." I muttered, even though no one could hear me.

For the first time in what felt like an eternity, Zack felt at peace.

Which he found odd because he shouldn't have. ShinRa was chasing him, Cloud was suffering from Mako poisoning, he had to protect both Cloud and Isabelle from both ShinRa and monsters and...

...

...and he had to see Aerith. How long had it been since he last saw her?

...

Zack couldn't afford to rest! There were still a lot of things he needed to do!

...

...

...but he couldn't move. No matter how much he tried, no matter how much he struggled, his limbs felt like they were being weighed down. He couldn't even open his eyes.

...And...

...

...he was so tired.

He was so, so very tired.

"Sorry Zack." A voice rang out, breaking the silence. "You can't rest. Not yet."

Zack's fading mind became alert. He would recognize that voice anywhere! One of the voices he would know even if he lay on the cold, unforgiving ground dying.

"Rose!"

Zack could feel the relief flooding him at hearing his friend's voice, even if he couldn't see her.

"Yeah Zack, it's me. I'm glad you were able to get out of Hojo's clutches." Rose's voice echoed in his mind. "At the moment you're unconscious and I'm talking to you through your dreams right now and I don't have much time, so listen carefully."

Zack would have frowned if he could have. Rose sounded... tired. Sad. World weary. Granted that being Hojo's test subject would change people drastically, but hearing her as she was now just seemed wrong. He was used to seeing her smile all the time, teasing other people in a light hearted manner and then running away snickering whenever she got caught pulling off her usual antics as she ran away from the victims of her pranks. The only other times he had ever seen her upset was when Angeal and Genesis had deserted... and when she had thought that she had driven Genesis to his own death at Modeoheim.

But the last time he saw her, she was slowly becoming a shadow of her former-self. No longer did she did she come off as being younger than she really was, but older and wiser than her actual twenty two years of age.

She tried to hide it with smiles and happy stories, but both he and Cloud saw through the mask she often put up to hide her actual feelings. When she started getting her memories prior to being recruited into SOLDIER back, it revealed a whole other layer to her, one he hadn't know about despite the number of years they had known and worked together.

A more broken and human side to her, especially when she talked about the eight year old sister she had unintentionally left behind.

Because like Sephiroth, Rose didn't seem quite human to him. From her strength, to her vitality and to the stubborn nature that never allowed her to give up, give into despair or lose hope no matter how bleak the situation seemed. It was she who kept their spirits up when Hojo was conducting his experiments on them and she who hugged and comforted them after a particularly traumatic encounter with the mad scientist.

"Rose, where are you?!" Zack demanded. "When I woke up in the lab, I didn't see you anywhere. And I looked! The only other person in the Nibelheim Manor was a guy sleeping in a coffin!"

Silence and then a soft sigh.

"That's because Hojo deemed you and Cloud as failures and placed you in mako tanks to mutate. He... he tried to transfer me to Midgar for further studying." There was a faint bitterness in the unusually demure Rose's voice, which to Zack just sounded plain wrong.

"So where are you now?" Gaia, did Hojo still have her?

It wasn't the first time he had entertained this thought, but Zack actually wished that he had failed that mission back then and had allowed Genesis to succeed in murdering Hojo on Hollander's orders all those years ago. Hollander had been an amoral bastard too, especially considering how he had manipulated and used Genesis to do his bidding, but he had nothing on Hojo who saw nothing wrong with the fact that his 'subjects' were sentient beings who felt pain and screamed in agony whenever he cut into them with a scalpel.

As Rose had said more than once, Hojo was the true monster.

More so than what Genesis and Angeal claimed to be when they had discovered the spider's web they had been trapped in ever since birth. Even Sephiroth was a victim. He only became a monster that he had claimed to be shortly after being driven insane by what he had read in the library.

There was no excuse to what the former First Class SOLDIERs had done, but the revelations of what ShinRa had done to them since birth had broken something in all of them.

Zack, Rose and even Cloud who lost everything to Sephiroth's insanity had agreed on that.

And Zack was certain that had he not been witness to his mentor and his friends' rampages as well as Cloud and Rose's presence, he would have cracked too. He didn't want to think about what might have happened if he had cracked and done what the Big Three did when they lost it.

"I can't tell you Zack, but I'm hidden away from the clutches of both ShinRa and Jenova." There was a pause and Rose's next words came out rushed. "Look, I don't have long before she becomes aware of my presence, so I'll make this quick: look after Isabelle for me. Because right now, I'm in no position to." There was a pause. "...and I no longer have a right to call her my sister."

"So... Isabelle is your sister?" Zack knew that the girl he picked up a week ago and his missing friend were connected, but it was still a relief to actually have actual confirmation to the fact. Even if it was through a dream.

And what did Rose mean by 'she had no right to call Isabelle her sister'? Before he could ask her, she spoke again.

"Weren't you the one who was insistent that she was?" There was a light teasing tone in Rose's voice and for a moment she sounded like her old self. "But to answer that question, yes, we're related by blood. Check her necklace if you have to."

Just when Zack thought Rose was done talking, she left him with one last slightly chilling statement.

"...also, one last thing. Don't make any reckless or hasty decisions. It could get you killed." A pause. "No, it will get you killed. Be... be careful, Zack."

At those words, Zack nearly retorted that he was NOT a headstrong reckless idiot who flailed around with a sword in hopes that he would hit something. Angeal, Sephiroth, Genesis and even Rose herself had taught him better than that!

But he wasn't able to as he suddenly found himself being jerked back into the world of wakefulness.

I thought that the next day I would be completely exhausted and that I was going to have trouble keeping my eyes open.

Instead I was still a little sleepy but otherwise fine. Must have been used to pulling all-nighters or something.

A groan had me snapping my head up and looking in the direction it had come from. Zack was pushing himself off the ground with one hand while the other was clutching his head. There was a grimace on his face as he looked around, likely to try and figure out where he was. He did just pass out after emotionally exhausting himself.

When his eyes landed on me, I gave him a shaky smile and waved.

Zack's response was to stare blankly at me, blink, and then turn bright red as the memories of the night before hit him full force.

"Um... have a good sleep?" I asked.

Lame, but it was the best thing I could come up with considering last night's events since 'good morning' didn't seem all that appropriate.

"Uh..." Zack said. "Yeah. It was pretty good."

"Great." I smiled again, making it a bit bigger than the first one I gave him. "You deserved it."

Zack was suddenly staring at me again.

"What?" I said, when he wouldn't stop staring.

"You..." His eyes widened and he broke out into a huge grin. "You just smiled! Twice!"

That comment had me taken aback. Was it really that big of a deal? Then again, the only thing I could remember ever doing the entire time was keeping quiet and talking when it was necessary or if Zack was asking me something.

Okay. Yeah. I could see where Zack was coming from. I hadn't been very emotive in general.

Zack chuckled, a grin on his face. "You should smile more often. You have a nice pair of dimples and its a shame to not show them off."

"Thanks?" Wasn't quite sure what to say to that. I searched my brain for something else to say when Zack spoke first.

"So..." Zack looked sheepish, his eyes looking to the side to avoid my gaze. "About last night..."

And already I could tell where this was going. I cut him off before he could start apologizing for the breakdown that I had caused.

"You have nothing to apologize for." I said. "It's me who should do the apologizing."

This had sounded so much easier in my head.

Before I could even think about backing down, I continued on. "I... I brought up some painful memories when I was asking all those things last night, thinking of only answering my own questions and not even considering your feelings on the matter." I took a deep breath and finally said what I had been planning the entire time I had been watching him sleep. "And, um, I'm sorry."

I felt as if I should have said more, but sometimes simplicity worked best.

That and I had no idea how else to proceed.

Several minutes passed and when it was obvious that Zack was just going to continue staring at me (because that's what he did after my apology- just stared) I decided to say something before this became a long, drawn out staring contest with neither of us willing to break the silence.

"What?" I said. "Do I need to apologize more?"

I hope I didn't. Did he have any idea how hard it was to get that out?

My words snapped Zack out of whatever daze he had been in and he held out his hands and chuckled. "No, no." He said quickly. "Sorry, it's just that... I... wasn't expecting you to apologize. Er, I mean..."

"Yeah, I don't really think I'm the type to apologize either." Considering how much effort it took to get the words out and apologize for my insensitivity, apologizing was probably something that I wasn't used to. I hesitated, before saying, "Also, I understand if you wouldn't want traveling with you any more."

I decided to change the subject. We've had enough awkward moments and silences to last us a life time.

Though in hindsight, talking about how I would willingly leave the group if he wanted me to was not the way to go.

'Woah, woah!" This time, it was Zack who interrupted me. "Who said anything about that?"

"Well I assumed that you-"

"Okay, no." Zack cut me off again. "You're still coming with me and Cloud. I'm not kicking you to the curb just 'cause you made me cry."

Zack's face flushed red at the last sentence.

I found myself smiling again; guys didn't like admitting to the fact that they cried. Even with his friendly, bouncy nature Zack was no different.

"Hey! You smiled again!"

Zack's scream of pain echoed in my head as gun shots cracked through the air. Afterwards, everything was just one huge blur as I raced out of my hiding place and drew my own weapons.

When I became aware of everything again I was holding a gun in each hand, smoke drifting out of the muzzle of my weapons and it was raining. Within seconds, I was soaked. But it didn't matter when I spotted the four figures sprawled a few meters away from me.

There were four men lying on the ground: three of them dead and one of them barely clinging on to life.

I could feel my eyes widen in complete disbelief.

The one barely clinging on to life was the one who had picked me off the road and took me along with him when I had no where else to go, even when he was already on the run from a corrupt corporation that intended to kill him and his comatose friend.

"Zack!" I tried to go over towards him but tripped and fell on to the ground, my guns hitting the earth with a clatter. Ignoring the pain that throbbed in my side, my arm and now my knees, but I ignored that. I needed to go over to Zack now.

The pain was temporary. I would live.

Not bothering to pick up my guns, I crawled over to where he was, pulling myself by the tips of my fingers.

"Oh...god..." I wretched, feeling sick to my stomach and wanting to throw up. "Zack..."

One look told me that he didn't have long to live. He was riddled with more bullets than I though possible and he was still alive somehow. I guess that came with being a SOLDIER since they were ShinRa's strongest and most famous warriors. But being more resilience meant just that; they were harder to take down but that didn't mean they were infallible.

Because in the end, SOLDIERs were still human.

And humans had short, mortal life spans.

It was also likely the infantry troops were carrying weapons that specialized in taking down a SOLDIER. You did not create that kind of power without coming up with a back up plan in case things went horribly wrong.

Which had already been proven several times within the past seven years with the insanity that inflicted ShinRa's poster boys - The Big Three.

Zack's eyes that had been staring up at sky soon focused on me when I approached him.

"Izzy..." He said, a relieved smile on his face. "You okay?"

Me? He was worried about me? He was soaked to the bone, pumped with more lead than should be possible, bleeding out his life in agony and he was fucking worried about me?

There were a multitude of things I wanted to say from how he should be worried about himself when he was the one dying to how sorry I was about being so goddamned useless.

But instead, I summed up my answer with one word that I was barely able to choke out.

"...yeah."

I stared, feeling something pricking the side of my eyes. I lifted my hand and rubbed them.

I couldn't cry. Not now.

I couldn't break down. Not yet.

I could do that... after it was over.

As the feelings of despair and utter helplessness swept over me, I couldn't help but be amazed as well.

How could he just smile like that? He was broken and bloody; lying on the ground with numerous wounds all over his body bleeding out on to the rocky floor, clutching the Buster Sword and waiting for death to inevitably take him. Most people in his situation would curse their fates, scream at the heavens that life was unfair or sob at the fact their lives were ending much sooner than expected and that they still had a lot to do.

And Zack had every right to do that.

But... the very guy who kept having everyone else's problems, issues and stuff in general shoved on to him because they couldn't solve it themselves was asking if I was okay. As if he just hadn't been manipulated, deceived for a good chunk of his life and then killed when he became more of a liability than asset by the very company he had worked his hardest for and sworn his loyalty to.

Used and then tossed to the side like his life, his dreams and his ambition meant nothing to them.

And what was I going to tell Cloud? He just woke up earlier, before the battle, extending his arm towards his friend's back and then calling his name when Zack left to fight off the army that came for them.

How was I going to explain to him that his best friend was dead? It was bad enough being catatonic after constant experimentation, but to wake up to this?

Life could not be crueler to him any more than it already was.

I heard something behind us and whirled around to see who it was, cursing that I had left my guns where I had dropped them.

It was Cloud, crawling over and desperately making his way over to his best friend just as I had moments before.

"...Iz...Izz...Izzy..."

"Ngh..."

"Izzy... Izzy..."

"...go...away...five more...minutes..."

"IZZY!"

"GAH!" I said, unintentionally flailing my arms at being so rudely jerked awake.

"Hey! Izzy!" When I didn't stop flailing, Zack grabbed my arms and forced them to stop moving. "Calm down!"

I did as he said. It wasn't like I could do much with the SOLDIER holding me by the wrists and pinning me down with that sky blue gaze of his anyways.

Blinking several times, I realized that the scene of watching Zack die in the rain was all dream. Considering that he was standing in front of me, bullet free and well alive, it must have been.

But it had been so vivid that for a moment, I thought that Zack was actually right in front of me dying. I could have sworn that I was still feeling pain coming from the places where my dream self had been shot at when she burst out from the rock she and Cloud were hiding behind and killed the mooks who dealt Zack the final blows when he was down.

The cowardly tactic that I had seen made me seethe.

That was the extent of just how real it had felt to me.

"Can you let go of my arms, now?" I asked when he was still staring at me and holding my wrists in a tight grip. My arms were starting to hurt.

"Are you calm now?" Zack shot back.

"Yes." As if I was going to say no.

When he let go of me, I immediately stood up and grabbed him by the head, jerking him towards me. Zack let out a startled exclamation at this, but I ignored it in favor of getting a closer look at him.

It was a dream.

It had been a dream.

But I just had to make sure.

In my dream Zack's face was smudged with dirt and he was bleeding from the head. But now, his face was perfectly clean and dirt free, though I did find his eyes fascinating. Absentmindedly, I gripped his cheeks with my fingers and pulled as hard as I could.

Huh. They were pretty stretchy.

"H-hey!" My wrists were back in Zack's hands again and for the first time since we met, he gave me an annoyed look. "What's that for?"

I didn't want to tell him that it was because I dreamed about him bleeding to death in the rain so I said, "I wanted to see just how far I could stretch your cheeks!" I declared.

...

...

"What." Zack simply said in a tone that seemed uncharacteristic deadpan of him as he dropped my arms and stared.

"...yeah. Just wanted to test out my theory." I threw in a smile for good measure.

Zack blinked and then shook his head, his face pressing into his hand in exasperation.

"Okay," He said slowly as if he was talking to a crazy person. "I just thought that I'd let you know that we reached my home town."

I was out of the passenger cart in a flash. Zack's home town? After being on the road for over a week, it would be nice to stop at a place that was bustling with people. It was nothing against Zack or Cloud, especially considering their situation of being on the run, but it got kind of...

...ugh, it was hard to describe. Forget it.

I squinted my eyes as I tried to see where Zack's hometown. "What's it called?" I asked.

"Gongaga."

I let out a giggle before I could stop myself. Gongaga? Seriously? Who named a village that?

"Gon-ga-ga." I said out loud. It was pretty fun to say. "Gon-ga-ga."

"Okay, okay." Zack ruffled my hair after I repeated the name several times, amused by how it seemed to roll off my tongue. "I get it. It's a bit of a funny name, but hey, it's the name of the place I've lived in since I was thirteen."

Thirteen? Where the heck has he been for the past ten or so years? I didn't know his age, but I estimated that he was in his early to mid twenties.

"I ran away from home and went to Midgar to join the SOLDIER program." He said, interpreting the unspoken question I wanted to ask correctly.

Oh.

"Zack, what's that over there?" I pointed in the direction of the metal ruin, changing the subject before he could start thinking of painful memories again. I noticed it when I was trying to find his hometown; it was hard not to. "It looked like something over there exploded."

"What?" Zack said, eyes squinting in the direction I was pointing at. "That wasn't there before. Funny, that looks like where the-"

Zack's voice trailed off and his face paled.

"Zack?" I waved a hand in front of him, not liking the shade of white he was turning. "Zack, are you okay?"

Next thing I knew, I was being shoved into the passenger cart and Zack was gunning the engine of the motorcycle at the speed of what had to be 300 miles per hour. I held on to Cloud for dear life.

Not because I was scared or anything. Just thought that Zack wouldn't have appreciated his blond best friend being tossed out on to the side of the road because of his crazy driving.

"...no."

"Zack?"

"...no. No! This can't be!"

This had been going on for about ten minutes. When we got to the base of the twisted metal structure, Zack braked the motorcycle and jumped out as if possessed. He rushed closer to the base, stared at it for three minutes of mouth gaping silence and then collapsed on his knees. He was in extreme denial about something, but I had no idea about what.

Getting tired of him not answering my question of what he was in denial of, I decided an intervention was in order.

"ZACK!" I hit him upside the head as hard as I could.

Should you ever come up with the fantastic idea of hitting a SOLDIER, here's a word of advice: don't. Punching Zack was akin to punching a steel wall. It hurt. A lot.

However, my impromptu use of violence did get his attention as he was now wincing and rubbing at the spot that I hit with a grimace.

"I... uh... Izzy?"

"Mind telling me what has you so shell shocked?"

Zack ran a hand through his spiky hair. He looked really upset; but not to the point of a break down. Thank god, because I don't think I'd be able to handle another breakdown.

"I... this... there used to be a reactor here."

Reactor... reactor...

The only reactor that came to mind were the 'mako reactors' that ShinRa employed to draw out energy from the Planet.

"'Used to'?" I repeated. "Well I don't see anything except metal... oh."

Now that I thought about it, the pieces of metal weren't the only things lying around my feet. There was also debris and broken concrete and...

Huh. Looks like my theory of something exploding wasn't so far fetched.

The disfigured metal object I saw from the distance made so much more sense now.

Zack was back on his feet, his eyes burning with determination.

"Izzy, you wait here with Cloud while I go check on my parents!" I didn't even get a chance to say anything as he turned away and headed, presumably, where his parents lived.

"You're leaving me to babysit Cloud AGAIN?!" I screeched after him.

The foliage of Gongaga's surrounding plant life rustled, silent spectators to the unfolding battle.

...but what no one realized was that the thick bushes hid very real spectators, two figures, watching the clash with a taut, eerie silence. It was a distance too great for an average man to observe from, but these observers were hardly 'average' in any sense of the word. Not with the air itself quaking from the power hidden just below the surface of reality.

Fortunately for everyone on Gaia, neither of them were interested in world domination or world destruction as most Psychopaths and their cousins Sociopath and Megalomaniac were known for, both of them too cold and bitter to waste time with such fanciful dreams.

It was the man who drew the eye first.

A midnight black jacket, edges in jagged tatters, shifting in the faint breeze. It covered a white, collared shirt, his black gloved hands hidden in his pockets, the man was a study in monochrome, his entire ensemble summed up in deep black and stark white. It was only in looking closer that a speck of color became apparent. Hidden behind narrow, black shades, shadowed by a fringe of smooth, jet-black hair, were the man's eyes.

A left eye of burning gold, and a right eye of blazing red, crimson sparks dancing from it.

A strange individual, to be sure...but to any multiversal wanderer, the rumors made him unmistakable.

A monochrome shadow, the stranger whose age remained a mystery, sightings of whom abounded throughout the eons on multiple worlds, the ghost between light and the dark, crushing evil and injustice without remorse or pity.

Only ever mentioned in passing, he was only there if you knew where to look, hidden in the background behind the heroes and legends of the worlds he'd been to.

Never in the spotlight, but always, always a power to be reckoned with.

Tens of thousands of lifetimes in his wake, those cold eyes had seen civilizations rise, and worlds fall, often with his hand involved in one or the other, always pursuing justice, and his own unknown goal with a single-minded ruthlessness that often struck his allies as bordering on the cruel.

He was the greatest of allies...and the most terrible of enemies.

He was both salvation and destruction.

He was justice.

He was the nightmare.

He was the man they called Alexander.

Alexander J. Darkbreaker.

Not since the monstrous Calamity had hurtled towards the planet two thousand years ago had such an entity existed upon Gaia's surface. Had it not been for the constant masking of his power, of what he was, it was no small feat to imagine the great and terrible WEAPONs of Gaia stirring from their slumber once more, to instinctively confront him in a battle that would scar the planet regardless of the victor.

But once your eyes drew away from the cold, ominous figure of the monochrome stranger, it was to see the girl next to him.

A white cloak wrapped itself around her slim frame, features concealed by a hood. Like her companion, she too radiated an otherworldly sense of power...but in a different sense. Where the Darkbreaker radiated the cold of space, a distant, inexplicable phenomena, she was wounded. A sense like peering through a broken glass to see the painting on the other side, something once beautiful, now appearing distorted and damaged through the cracks in the glass. Not physically, as from what little could be made out under the voluminous cloak, she possessed a willowy, slender beauty, but a heavy, pressuring aura hung around her, as if despair itself had draped a mantle over her shoulders.

It was the pained beauty of one crushed under a devastating emotional weight...but still stood upright nonetheless, forcing their way onward despite it.

It was enough to unsettle any normal person simply by looking at her...but the man next to her seemed to ignore it entirely, a black, alien monolith amidst a sea of anguish.

The sense of power from her was not as great as the Darkbreaker's...but in a way, it was more understandable, something from the laws of the world, something that could be believed...unlike the alien, otherworldly feel of the monochrome figure, something from beyond the edges of human comprehension.

"...you're not going to do anything?"

The air resonated slightly, the Darkbreaker's voice sounding.

"..." The woman kept her gaze on the girl identified as 'Isabelle Maxwell'.

"...no. I see no need to at this time."

Her voice was soft; tinged with sadness and defeat.

A silence.

"Even if it means watching that girl be thrown around like a rag doll in the process?"

"You and I both know that she will make it through the battle alive." His cloaked companion scoffed. "Hollander is hardly a challenging opponent compared to the other obstacles and trials she and her friends will go through. If she cannot beat an obese scientist who is now dying because of his desperate stunt of injecting Genesis Rhapsodos' cells into his own body just to prolong his survival, then she would hardly stand a chance against that Thing and her son."

"The Calamity of the Skies..." The Darkbreaker spoke again, light flickering across his shades as files of data scrolled through the lenses.

"Considered an Eldritch Abomination by even the most saintly of cosmic powers. Was vastly weakened by the now mostly extinct warrior race, the Virtus, but was still able to wreak havoc and destroy most of the Cetra civilization when she landed on Gaia 2,000 years ago in her half dead state..." It was an unneccesary gesture, almost all recorded knowledge of the Calamity having already been perused by him previously.

"They call it Jenova."

His red and gold gaze slid briefly across to his companion, their depths unreadable. After a minute, he simply exhaled, readjusting his stance as he turned back to the spectacle unfolding in the distance.

"Jenova, huh...?"

His eyes fell now on the girl who was spilling her grievances to her comatose companion about how the 1st Class SOLDIER Zack Fair kept ditching them and leaving them on their own to fend for themselves. The girl Isabelle Maxwell may not have known it, but she was the one at the heart of his companion's desperate plan to end Jenova, her legacy, and all it entailed, once and for all.

The monochrome stranger was silent for a moment.

Then, for a brief instant, the ghost of a smile played across his features, smooth and dangerous.

This...could prove interesting.

Whew finally done! I promise that there will be action in the next chapter as it will be... dun dun dun dun dun... Belle vs Hollander!

And that's all I'm going to say for that tale.

Anyways, the last part has DarkShiftRising's character, the Darkbreaker, crossing over to the FFVII universe. I cannot thank him enough for letting me use the Darkbreaker for my story. The white cloaked character is mine by the way.

In case you haven't realized it yet, this story is about to become AU really fast. Some parts that will deviate from canon and others, well, I'll try and make it a surprise.

Also, review! I'm not one of those authors who threaten to hold her story hostage unless the reviews start pouring in, but it would be nice to know what you guys think! And it would also make me feel very appreciated, because right now I'm getting really frustrated about whether people like reading this or not and whether I should bother continuing. I'm not saying that you have to write an essay, but it would be really nice to know what you think even if its a 'I like this' or 'Please continue'.

Guess I'll see you guys in the next chapter!