[AN: I don't do this very often, because I find author's notes are distracting, but I'd like to just say thank you for all the support this fic's been getting. I've had over a hundred hits on AO3, and loads of positive feedback both there and here on FFnet. Especially thanks to Think Outside the Tesseract, who gave me the longest and kindest review I think I've ever received. And to Sunset In Love: well, being mean to Cloud is what FFVII fans do best… it's what the game taught us to do!

As an extra note, if you enjoy the way I write Zack and Reno especially, I highly recommend looking at Thorne-Scratch on Livejournal, because my headcanons are heavily based on her writing.

Anyway, thanks for all of your comments, reviews, hits and kudos! I promise to keep updating every Sunday, and I hope that you all continue to enjoy my writing!]

Chapter Three

'Logic, my dear Zoey, merely enables one to be wrong with authority.'

It was dark, and Cloud hurt. The mako poisoning must have worn off, however, because although every muscle in his body ached, his head felt clearer than it had in hours. He didn't move, but began to run through a list of the last few things he had done in his mind.

He'd thrown up on Sephiroth.

No, no… he'd blown up some materia in an old Shinra machine, given himself a concussion, and dreamed that he'd thrown up on Sephiroth. This sudden clarity was obviously him waking up from a bizarre nightmare. Tifa and Cid must have found him and woken him up. Everything was going to be fine.

He opened his eyes, and found that he was in the Shinra infirmary again.

'Oh no…'

'Oh, you're awake. Good.' A thermometer was shoved in his mouth so hard it stabbed his tongue. 'Let me know when it beeps, this time.'

Cloud looked miserably at the nurse he'd run away from earlier. He tried to sit up, but couldn't: one of his wrists was handcuffed to the bed railings. Apparently, the Shinra nurses took fleeing patients personally.

He slumped against the pillows and started chewing on the thermometer. The trouble with this situation, he realised, was that it required figuring out, and he wasn't much of a figuring out kind of person. Point him at a monster and he could tear it apart; he wasn't even that bad at strategising, in battle. But present him with a trippy, completely impossible conundrum, and all he could do was stare blankly and hope everything went his way. What he really needed was Tifa: someone with a sensible head who could work their way out of things like this.

Of course, Tifa was here, technically. She was a thirteen-year-old girl in Nibelheim, miles and miles away, with precious little understanding of who Shinra really were and even less understanding of what was going to happen to her over the next few years.

Cloud snorted, imagining how that phone call would go.

'Hey Tifa, it's Cloud. Now, bear with me on this, I need some advice: what do you do if you get sent back in time by a machine locked in up the old Shinra building, which by the way is a ruin in the future? Also a few other things happen and Sephiroth is evil, but that's not important… Tifa? Tifa are you still there?'

He was already chained to the bed. He didn't want to be put in a straightjacket as well.

Okay, he thought reasonably. There are two options: this is real, or this is a weird-arse concussive nightmare and I'm going to wake up soon. If it's a dream, then nothing that happens matters. If it's real… everything that happens matters.

It was simple, then. If there was even the slightest chance that any of this was real, then it was worth trying to change things. It was worth trying to stop Sephiroth and fix everything. If all of this was just a dream, or a hallucination, then… well, changing things wouldn't hurt anybody. He'd just wake up and laugh at how stupid he'd been.

He'd rather wake up laughing at himself than wake up guilty.

He nodded against the pillow. All right, then. That was that sorted.

Now for the bigger problem: how to change things.

Aerith had told him things, in the Lifestream. He closed his eyes and tried to remember what they were. They hadn't seemed important, at the time. The only important thing had been that Aerith was talking to him, but now he realised that, if it was Aerith, she wouldn't have been telling him anything he didn't need to know.

You will be as you were.

That was the first one, and now it seemed so obvious. It had started seeming obvious, in fact, around about the time the weight of the Buster Sword had dragged him to the floor.

He was fourteen years old, and he was sitting in exactly the same body he'd had when he was fourteen years old the first time. For all that the nurse had claimed he was flooded with mako, he wasn't a SOLDIER. That mako had probably been some kind of residue from being thrown about in the Lifestream; none of it had actually been absorbed. He was a normal, weak teenage boy.

In eight years time, when he would be physically and technically at his very best, fighting Sephiroth would be the most difficult battle of his life. He would almost die a dozen times, he'd use a pile of phoenix downs, and he'd get nowhere near succeeding without the help of his friends

Fighting Sephiroth now, as a pathetic fourteen-year-old, would get him killed in an instant. He couldn't believe he'd been so stupid, and was even more surprised he was alive to ponder it.

And the other rules… you may not tell anyone what may be? Well, he'd already worked that one out, and it ruled out calling up little Tifa for help, as though that had ever been an option in the first place. But then, Cloud thought with a feeling of defeat, it also meant that he couldn't warn anybody about the future. He couldn't tell Sephiroth that Hojo was a liar and Jenova was not his mother; he couldn't tell Zack to leave Shinra now, before they filled him with bullets, and he couldn't just race down to a certain church in Sector 5 and just outright tell Aerith not to start using the holy materia on her own, without her friends close enough to protect her from the inevitable attack…

He couldn't tell anyone anything, so how was he supposed to convince them to change the mistakes that got them killed?

The thermometer started beeping, but he didn't need to call the nurse. She swept down on him like a lavender-scented bird of prey and snatched the tiny instrument away. Grunting with disapproval, she stormed away from her least favourite patient.

Cloud sighed. There was no point worrying about that rule, and the limitations it placed on him. He'd never have been able to convince anyone that he was from the future anyway, so what did it matter whether he was allowed to or not?

He couldn't remember the last rule for some time, but lay in the pristine white bed, staring at the ceiling as though it knew the answers to everything and enough glaring would force it to reveal them.

You will be as you were, no telling people what will happen, and…

'You may only change one life,' Cloud said aloud. The nurse had turned from one of her other patients to look at him, so he shook his head at her. 'Nothing, nothing.'

Only one life? How could he only change one life? Did that mean that he would have to choose, between Zack and Aerith? How was he supposed to do that; he couldn't just choose, it wasn't fair!

Maybe, he thought, it means that I can't kill more than one person. I killed Sephiroth in Nibelheim. Maybe if I don't kill him, something else will happen?

He didn't know; he didn't understand. What was the point of sending him back in time, if he could only make a difference to one measly person? There were so many things that needed to be made better: Shinra had to be destroyed, Sephiroth had to be stopped, Zack and Aerith and everyone in Nibelheim and Midgar needed to be rescued… there was just so much that would go wrong; so much he had to make better.

Even just bringing down Shinra or killing Sephiroth alone would save more than one life. Combined they saved hundreds.

He pressed his hands to his face and sighed. What the hell was he going to do?

Cloud was released from the infirmary a few hours later, when the nurse was finally forced to admit that there was nothing physically wrong with him. He was advised to stay in the barracks and rest, because he'd been relieved of duty for the next few days.

'If you feel ill – even the slightest bit – you are going to come straight back, do you understand?' the nurse had said, waving her stethoscope at him like a deadly weapon. Only after he'd agreed and read a several pages long list of the symptoms of mako poisoning did she finally allow him to leave.

He'd done as he was told, because he had no idea what else to do. The shame of having emptied his stomach all over Shinra's poster boy also had something to do with it, and the bone-deep terror of what Sephiroth would do if he saw him again.

Cloud had fairly well forgotten where the MP barracks was, and got lost trying to find it. He stood in one lift for fifteen minutes, stopping on every floor until he reached one he was certain he recognised.

The barracks for Shinra's infantrymen was deeply unimpressive. It was better than living under the plate, of course, but still fairly grim. No one particularly cared how clean or regimented they were, so their sleeping quarters were allowed to become a dishevelled mess. The floor could barely be seen under the piles of dirty laundry, and the walls definitely could not be seen behind the pin-ups. A picture of President Shinra was up on one wall, pock marked with darts (several of which were around the groin area, which Cloud presumed was the makeshift bull's eye).

Most of the beds were unmade, but for some reason Cloud's was perfectly neat: pillow fluffed, corners folded and tucked under the mattress so tightly it took all of his strength to pull them back. There weren't any posters on the wall around his bed, and all of his belongings were still tucked under the bed in his suitcase.

Cloud wondered exactly how long ago he'd come to Midgar. It seemed as though he'd only arrived earlier that day. He was probably trying to be neat, to make a good example of himself and hopefully stand out as organised and militant. He'd probably once thought that those were good traits for a SOLDIER.

He had to laugh at himself for that. As if Shinra cared whether their killing machines kept their beds tidy.

Flopping on the stiff mattress, he tried to follow the nurse's commands. Rest. Sleep. Don't be ill.

Cloud was a long way away from home. Eight years away.

He couldn't even close his eyes.

It took a week to get used to it.

There was so much to get used to, Cloud didn't think that anything would ever feel normal until he got back to the present day, but as it turned out, he'd been fourteen before and it wasn't all that difficult to get back into.

The nurses couldn't keep him off duty for long; not when physical signs of his sudden illness disappeared the next day. A timetable of marching around the tower, guarding whatever doors he was posed at, and practising his aim with the standard issue rifles in the shooting galley took up most of his time. He wasn't as fit now as he would be in the future, and he went to bed every night so exhausted he felt that even the other men's snoring couldn't keep him awake.

He was wrong, of course. For several nights, he barely slept at all, and got up feeling worse than he had when he'd gone to bed. It took four accumulated nights of insomnia for his exhausted brain to finally give up on worrying and let him pass out.

It only took a few days for him to remember perfectly the layout of every floor in the building (he'd already known a good deal of it anyway), but it took twice as long to get used to his reflection in the soap-spattered mirrors of the men's room.

His eyes and mouth were bigger; the rest of his face had yet to grow around them. His cheeks were plump and the line of his jaw was softer from puppy fat. Worse than his face was his body: his arms were thin as wires, his stomach flat but deficient of even a tiny bit of muscle. He was short and skinny, and with the spiky blond hair on top he resembled a stick of corn. It was no wonder he couldn't lift the Buster Sword. It was amazing that he could lift anything as heavy as a sheet of paper.

The knowledge that it was possible for him to have muscles, and that he someday would have them and would be strong, made his current situation all the more frustrating. When he was fourteen, Cloud had perhaps hoped he'd be a strong SOLDIER, but hadn't ever really known what it would be like to be stronger than everyone else. The downgrade was nothing short of infuriating, and it was that fury that drove him to spend his small amount of spare time in the Shinra gym.

And it was at the gym that he met Zack once again.

Cloud was just coming off of the rowing machine when he walked in; not in his SOLDIER uniform for once, but a t-shirt and jogging trousers, with a towel thrown over his shoulder and a bottle of water in his hand to replace the absent Buster Sword.

Cloud didn't know whether to duck or call in greeting – Zack, after all, only presently knew him as that sick guy who vomited on my boss – but was saved the decision when Zack waved to him.

'Hey buddy! Been wondering when I'd see you again.'

'Hi,' Cloud said. He'd taken to saying as little as he could lately, purposely cutting his sentences down to one word wherever possible, to avoid accidentally spilling something he shouldn't know yet. The fact that he was half the size of the other men had something to do with it, too: he remembered how to duck and dodge, but if he managed to really piss somebody off saying something dumb, he wouldn't be able to fight back. He had no interest in becoming Cloud, the Incredible Human Punching Bag.

Zack took the rowing machine next to Cloud and started to work. Cloud noticed with despair that Zack could do three strokes in the time it took him to do one. Surely he was never going to be that strong, no matter how much mako was pumped in him?

'Tch,' Zack said. 'I don't see my best friend for a whole week and all he has to say is "hi".'

Despite being rather dubious as to the 'best friend' claim, Cloud said,

'Sorry.'

Zack glanced at him over him shoulder.

'You're feeling all right, aren't you buddy?'

'Yes,' Cloud said, so quietly he almost couldn't be heard over the roaring rowing machine.

'No headaches, nausea…'

Cloud went red.

'No.'

Zack grinned, but didn't turn to look at him. Rather desperate to turn the conversation to a topic besides his embarrassing sickness, Cloud said,

'I haven't seen you in here before.'

'I come in every day.' Zack was just starting to huff now; the exercise finally taking its toll. 'Usually later than this, but Reno's got a mission in Wutai over the weekend so we're having our games night tonight.'

'You have a games night with Reno?' he said, trying to imagine Reno playing a board game. The closest he could imagine was Twister. Strip Twister.

'Yeah; we make our own games up. Mine are the best ones, like the Hojo's Lab Eating Challenge. Reno's are usually just streaking or setting things on fire.' Zack paused thoughtfully. 'Sometimes a combination of the two.'

Cloud stared.

'Hojo's Lab…'

'Eating Challenge, yeah. You have to eat something in Hojo's lab. Last one to be sick or transform into a horrifying monster wins.'

For his own mental wellbeing, Cloud chose to ignore the second part of that and concentrate on the important words.

'You can get into Hojo's lab?'

'Yeah.'

'While Hojo isn't there?'

'Yeah. Reno's a Turk, dude. He can do all sorts of sneaky shit.'

Cloud thought about that for a moment. Maybe there were two Renos.

'Reno the Turk can hack into the doors to Hojo's lab?'

'What? No. We just grease him up and push him through the air ducts.'

'Oh.' Okay. There was only one Reno after all.

Zack powered through another few strokes on the rowing machine, and Cloud sat rolling back and forth on his seat, thinking. If he could get to Hojo's lab, he might be able to get into Hojo's files… and if he could do that, he might be able to find things. Things that could stop Sephiroth from ever going insane, without having to kill him; things that proved that Jenova was not, in fact, Sephiroth's biological mother, but a raving mad alien that only wanted him for his planet.

Vincent had told him everything he needed to know – or, Cloud corrected himself irritably, Vincent would someday tell him everything he needed to know. He just had to look for the name 'Lucrecia'; find some small piece of evidence to suggest that she was Sephiroth's real mother…

It was perfect.

He looked at Zack, still storming through his rowing.

'Can I come?' he asked. Zack gave him a quick look.

'Huh?'

Cloud cleared him throat and spoke up.

'Tonight? Can I come?'