The climb to the top of the tower was nothing short of harrowing. The whirr and whine of machinery was all around us like fog, pulled into my chest and lungs as I breathed, and it rattled in my head and made my teeth ache. The sound of our footsteps; Cloud's unusually deft, quick strides up the stairs, Cid's heavy boot-thumps, and the metallic clinking of the tips of my own feet against the steel grills. Up and up and up, to the polluted Midgar sky.

Every step up reminded me of every step down into the basement-- that accursed den of dripping, bleeding sin. It had always stricken me as a kindness of fate that such a horrific place was kept underground, away from the eyes of the innocent, away from the light of day. But this, atop this tangled mess of beams and girders and engines, this wretched beast, piloted under a whirlpool of chemicals by a man whose only desire was to further rape this wounded world-- this was an affront. An insult. Here Hojo and ShinRa and every arrogant, lazy monster in its glass-and-silver bowels turned their sneering faces to the heavens, filled their blubbery cheeks with the vomit of their industrial splendor, and spit in the face of God.

I reloaded.

The rage was an exercise in futility; the more anger I felt, the more surprised I was at my own intensity, and I began to cling to that hatred as I had done with my misery and loneliness. It fueled me then, until all I could think about were the two eyes that had been the last thing I had seen before the coffin lid. All those years of numbness, of feelings dissolved in memory, only to face this madman who had become nothing but an ugly road block on the path the real threat; even after all he had done, he wasn't the one we wanted, he was just conveniently in the way, and that only made it worse.

As we crested the top, where Hojo worked at the controls, and he and Cloud began to speak. More of Hojo's nonsense; science and the like, Cloud as a failure, but there were no words that made it through the watery thickness of my hearing; there was nothing but my own pulse, until that disgusting laugh burbled up from his oddly distended throat.

"Ha, ha, ha... Although he doesn't know. Ha, ha, ha... HA, HA, HA...!! What will Sephiroth think when he finds out I'm his father? Always looking down

on me like that. HA, HA, HA...!!" he cackled, voice pitching higher and higher with every breath.

Cloud balked. "Sephiroth is your son?"

"Ha, ha, ha... I offered the woman with my child to Professor Gast's Jenova Project. When Sephiroth was still in the womb, we took the cells of Jenova... HA, HA, HA!!"

He was laughing. Laughing. He didn't even use her name... I couldn't work my voice enough to speak. But in the back of my mind I thought, offered? I had known all along that it was Hojo's disgusting, hairbrained scheme, but had he really just given her up like that? Had he been planning it all along; had he just been using Lucrecia from the start? I bit my lip to keep from screaming and felt the hot, metallic taste of blood well up around my tongue.

"I can't believe you're the one who did this... The illusionary crime against Sephiroth..." Cloud began to put it together; for him, Sephiroth as a person was a far more real image than for the rest of us, having known him before he'd gone mad. And he was right; the crimes committed against him as a boy were unknown to him entirely, and the ones that drove him to madness had all been the delusions of a soul trying to find its place in the flow of life on the Planet. I felt my claws dig into my palm through the leather glove.

"Heee, hee, hee, hee! No you're wrong! It's my desire as a scientist! Heee, hee, hee, hee! I... was defeated by my desire to become a scientist. I

lost the last time as well. I've injected Jenova's cells into my own body! Heee, hee, hee! Here are... Heee, hee, hee! ...my results!!"

And then, painfully sudden, I felt it all snap back into place. All those nightmares and torturous memories, all of Lucrecia's pain, and the suffering of that poor little boy whose mother had been too overwhelmed and sick to protect him.. None of those things were my fault at all. Even if I couldn't save Lucrecia or her child, I hadn't been the one to do those horrible things! I, who had loved her, who had wanted to raise our son as a family-- of all the blame that could be laid at anyone's feet, though I had failed her as a lover and a friend, this burden was not mine to carry.

Cid flashed me an electric-blue gaze from across the platform as he hefted his lance and spat his cigarette over the rail. The red glow caressed the side of his cheek as it fell, and his teeth were white against the black of the darkened sky behind him. He looked like Death, and in his eyes I saw the end of the me that had been. He smiled.

I turned back toward Hojo, whose body had begun to bulge and contort with the cancerous growth of Jenova cells. He had lost to his ambition, and now he would lose to the ones he'd sinned against.

"I was wrong, the one who should have slept was ... you, Hojo!"

The battle raged for what seemed like hours, though I knew it was only minutes.

Sword and lance and gun blasts, tearing through mounds of sickened flesh; the glow of Materia as the hurt of claw strikes and magic were soothed by a teammate. The blur of combat dissolved my immediate ability to tell Cloud from Cid; blond was good, monster was bad, and that was all I needed to know. I felt my pulse in every fiber of every muscle, I felt the throb in my teeth and my eyes, my fingertips felt tight and restrained against the warmed metal of the trigger. The Galian Beast gnashed its teeth and I felt my jaw tighten as I reflexively beat it back.

The thing-that-had-been Hojo curved around Cloud's sword and flung its arm-claw into me; it found purchase in my chest-- I howled and felt the fangs shift in, and though it barely had a face to speak of, I knew the thing had grinned at me.

The blood poured out over the metal, and almost before I could stand again, Cid was there, Cure spell settling over the gaping wound and knitting the skin and bone like it had never been injured at all. I looked at him, teeth bared and shaking with the rage that wanted to take shape and burst out. In the past I had been wary of succumbing to the beast, knowing that no amount of violence or coaxing could calm it once it was loosed to do as it wills, and did my best to keep myself in check until it was safe to let it free. I looked up at him, feeling my mouth realign with the beginnings of new teeth. "It wants to come forth," I managed.

Cid, bruised around one eye and with a bloody patch at the corner of his lip, pulled me close, long enough to sink his teeth into my ear. The pain was sharp and violently erotic, rushing through the underside of my skin like boiling water, and as he pulled away, he grinned. The pain had called the Beast forth irrepressibly and I hunched, trying to urge him to flee with my eyes.

"Do it," he said, and lept into the sky.

The last thing I saw was the gleam of the light of Meteor, edging his lance as he eclipsed it in my vision.

I spent several hours in a whirl of red haze and claws. The Beast eventually glutted itself on its violence and slunk back off into my mind and the cells of my body, and slowly, some time later, I dredged myself out of the deep darkness that permeated my mind after the transformation. I could feel the Galian Beast's satisfaction as it curled up somewhere inside me and lazily watched the goings-on, as it is wont to do.

The hum of the Airship's engines was gentle in my ears. I felt drained, exhausted, and sore, but I opened my eyes to the clean white light of flourescent ceiling lamp, and the carnelian glow of sunset filtered through a dusty porthole-- someone, probably Cid, had undressed me and laid me on a thick quilt, and thrown a linen bedsheet over me for good measure. It was soft and smooth and felt clean, though an odd smell seemed to hang about the room. The simple bedding was a pleasurable sensation that soothed the soreness and itching and general body pain of having my flesh rearranged to express my unfathomable rage. Part of me wanted to sit up, but it felt so good to just lie still, safe and knowing that Cid would be there to look after me while I rested. But I couldn't recall ever seeing a sick bay or infirmary in the airship, and so I inspected the quilt-- homemade, I was certain, though I wondered what it would be doing up here. Under that-- straw.

Straw. He'd put me to bed in the chocobo stables.

That explained the smell, anyway, I had thought. At least it wasn't terribly offensive. Cloud's only interest in chocobos had been breeding them, and had yet to come up with any that he liked. Only one or two had ever even set foot in the place; whatever odor there was came from the underused feed bins and the general funk of bird in a small room.

I had closed my eyes to rest when Cid returned, my clothes bundled up in a lumpy square under one arm. "Yo," he said, casually waving. "Sleep okay?"

"Well enough." My voice was rough. The Galian Beast had enjoyed its work, it seemed. As I smiled at Cid, I felt a kind of non-reaction from the Beast as it saw Cid through my eyes, and this was odd; often, it regards others with a mindless need to kill, but when it's done its job, it mostly just hates all life. But Cid, it seemed, was okay in its mind, and in its place in the reptilian, sub-human corner of my brain, the Galian Beast seemed to approve of our closeness. Though the opinions of my other selves are not things I strive to know or change, it made me feel better to know that the Beast inside me was not adverse to this.

"You sound like shit," Cid said succinctly, and sat down in the straw at my side, and offered me my clothes. "I patched 'em up for you... you started going all purple and bulgy about halfway through the beginning of all that, so you busted some stitches."

"I see.. thank you." I smiled, and examined his handiwork. "It seems that you've a knack for repairing things that have come apart at the seams."

"Somethin' like that," he said, and laughed. He sobered quickly, and lit a cigarette. "Cloud and Tifa are on the bridge. Cloud says he wants us to go out and remember why we're doing this, what we're fighting for. See our friends, family, stuff like that."

I nodded. "Shera, then?"

He looked at me with an expression like he'd just swallowed a bad lemon. "Shera? Fuck no, man..." He calmed quickly, and took another drag. "It's not like I don't care about her..."

"You're practically married anyway, Cid," I pointed out. And it was true. Cid and I had become lovers at the edge of the knife, as it were, and our affections for one another were forged in the heat of battle. Cid and Shera had lived together for years. Blaming Shera for the failure of the space program was over and done with, and without that to roughen his tone, he was actually affectionate with her; I thought they would do very well together.

But he looked uncomfortable for a minute, and then frowned. I got the feeling he wasn't saying what he was thinking, but he said, "I couldn't go see her now. If I went and told her what we were up to, she'd know I wasn't planning to come back, and right now, I think having a mopey Shera in my arms isn't going to do me as much good as thinking of her waiting for me to get back. I need to know there's someone at home who believes in me, you know?"

I didn't. I started to nod, but he'd know I was lying, so I looked away. "Everyone who has ever believed in me is in this room, Cid."

He put his arm around me, and I leaned my head against his. "What about Lucrecia?"

I shook my head. "She and I were never what I wanted us to be; she trusted me as a confidant, and as a bodyguard around town, but nothing more than that. She was a doctor, she had colleagues and research and noble pursuits; I was a Turk. The work I did for ShinRa wasn't something we could talk about and the company had already erased everything else about me.. in truth, I don't think she ever really knew me at all. But that's in the past," I said, and I meant it. "Have you decided? Why you're doing this, I mean?"

Cid moved me over on the blanket and laid down, hands under his head. "The world's worth saving... all the best stuff is here.. you figure, the world is full of people, and every single one of those people thinks shit up, all day, even if they don't realize they're doing it. Somewhere on this chunk of dirt, somebody is thinkin' shit up, and some of it's good stuff-- maybe they invented something new in the back of their head, and tomorrow they're gonna build it, or maybe they just had an idea to write a book about and it'll change the way everyone who reads it thinks. Maybe they just hit on some kind of new philosophy that'll start a new religion. Maybe the guy who wrote Loveless is working on something new. Everything starts out an idea, and if everybody gets their brain mashed in from a Meteor landing on it.. no more new ideas."

"And no more tomorrows to act on them."

"Yeah," Cid took another drag on the cigarette, smoke curling up from his lips. "What about you? You got a reason for doing this?"

"Sephiroth deserved a chance to be a person." The words came almost before I could think them. "He was born to cruel parents and raised to fulfill the expectations of men who sat in a board room to decide how he would be bent, folded, and mutilated, in the most cost-effective way. But for now, the only thing we can do is rid the world of him, before any more damage is done... The world lost much meaning to me long ago, but once we put Sephiroth to rest, I can start over... he's the last broken piece."

The words steeled me somewhat, and Cid's arm around my waist was warm and made me feel grounded, secure. He pulled me down to lie beside him, and threaded his fingers through my hair.

"Start over, huh.. what are you gonna do?"

"I don't know. What about you?"

"Dunno."

He kissed me then, gently, and with a familiar ease that reminded me of all those nights in all those inns across the world. The warmth of his touch and the roughness of his hands, the comfort of having him near. The blue in his eyes, and the gold of his hair, and even as I pinned him down on my cape, seeing the bright red under all that breathless sky in Cid beneath me, I felt us both rushing to find comfort in one another's arms. I hooked his knee over my shoulder and pressed my lips against the inside of his thigh, and we moved together, desperate to make what could be our final moments count; his voice rang through the metal chambers and it was music to my ears, even as we collapsed together on the blanket, exhausted and in the core of ourselves afraid.

Tomorrow we would fight the greatest threat to our Planet we had ever known. We would fly into the Crater, we would confront Sephiroth, and we would stop Meteor.I wouldn't have anyone at home to believe in me, but I would have him beside me, and that was all anyone could ask for. The world might end tomorrow, but it would wait until dawn.