Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

If there was anything Cloud Strife had learned, it was that the high from saving the world never lasted. There was always that shining moment when everyone realised the imminent threat had passed, a brief instant when he, too, felt connected to the emotions around him. Then, it faded away like the sun disappearing below the horizon. 

He’d been at peace back in the slum church. The light had shimmered off the pristine water as it lapped at his knees, and it had been a truly perfect moment. He felt like he’d accomplished something, that events had come full circle. As he’d watched Aerith and Zack turn and leave, it would have been so easy to leave his body behind and go with them. But as they’d said, there wasn’t room for him in their world beyond. It wasn’t his time to move on.

Ever since then, he’d become aware that perhaps there would never be a time for him to move on. Something was wrong with his body; he didn’t age when he should have. He didn’t change but remained a static relic of times gone by, and while he watched, the world around him settled back into something approaching normalcy. There had been tremendous losses, that was true, but geostigma had been healed, and those who hadn’t succumbed to it were given a new lease of life.

Cloud had been optimistic for a while, riding the high and telling himself everything was different, including himself. But now, he stood and looked into the mirror at his bad arm - now mended as though it had never been infected at all – and felt…

Cloud didn’t know what he felt. That had always been his problem, feelings. Cloud’s emotions never felt quite correct; they were out of alignment with the world around him and what people thought he should feel. Instead of emotions, a hollow ache seemed to deepen, settling within him the longer he met his own glowing eyes.

He had looked at himself and felt almost sorry that he had been restored. Almost sorry, because feelings were hard.

 There had been a twisted satisfaction in the geostigma. Cellular degradation had felt earned. It happened to all SOLDIERS, and it should have happened to him a long time ago. Instead, he had a body that regenerated despite every bruise and scar he’d sustained, and the other SOLDIERS were all dead.

Sephiroth had impaled him straight through multiple times, something that would have killed an average person instantly, and all it had done was hurt. He’d been able to go head-to-head with him and come out his equal, which raised many questions because if Sephiroth was a monster, an aberration of the sins of humanity’s past, then what did that make Cloud?

The city of Edge grew every day, the remnants of Midgar shaping themselves into something new, something that shared one sky and one location again, no longer divided – at least physically – into the haves and the have-nots by the plate. However, society hadn’t been cured by meteorfall; there were still divides, hierarchies, leaders and followers. None of that made Cloud feel better, either. He’d preferred it in the military, where he’d been told where to go and what to do, a faceless blob in a crowd of other blobs, encouraged to shed his unappealing nature and become part of Shinra as a concept. People expected him to find his role in society here, and many hoped he was a leader.

He wasn’t a leader; he wasn’t even a SOLDIER.

It was the most authentic version of Cloud Strife that had failed the aptitude tests for SOLDIER. They’d vetted him out as too weak physically and mentally to endure the gruelling process of Mako infusion and stripped what little remained of his ambition. It was a long time ago, but the words still stung. They echoed through every failure since. They had called him “cynical and belligerent”; they’d told him he wasn’t a team player and that he had a damagingly misanthropic streak. It had been abundantly clear that he simply wasn’t enough, and he’d been so ashamed he hadn’t even had the balls to go home without a mission to force him to.

Wallowing in his failures, he’d looked at Zack, a man who had passed the assessments with flying colours and decided that if he wanted to be a SOLDIER, it would be about echoing his personality. Zack affected people; when he believed in you, you subconsciously wanted to become the idealised person he thought you were. For Cloud, though, this meant changing who he was, forced to uproot his personality like a weed and try to cultivate something new in its place. Maybe it wasn’t surprising that this had created a rift between who he was and who he was trying to be, which JENOVA and Sephiroth had found all too easy to exploit.

People liked Zack, and in turn, people liked Cloud when he acted like Zack, but it still felt like a performance, even now. That was the problem with Tifa, and it had never gone away. When he was a boy, when he was himself, she hadn’t cared about him, Cloud hadn’t been one of her friends, and there had been no prospect he would ever be. He’d been idealistic, imagining that he could be like Sephiroth and that, in doing so, he could swoop in and win her over. But she hadn’t cared about him as his authentic self. The night at the well, she had asked him to rescue her but offered him nothing in return. She wanted a hero, not him; he was convenient at that moment.

He’d come back with Zack, and she’d fawned over the guy. And when he’d saved her, she’d barely recognised him. In Midgar, he’d presented himself as Zack the hero, the version of himself she could love. But that wasn’t him, and it never had been. It was ultimately Zack, not Cloud, that she had saved from the Lifestream. It was bitterness he couldn’t help, a gulf between them that nothing seemed to bridge. The thing that stung most was that even as he resented the Zack act, he felt guilty and sick at himself. Zack would never grudge anyone this way; he was a good person who offered love and trust freely to anyone he met. Even in fiction, within Cloud’s mind, Zack was the better man. He’d openly asked Cloud to be his living legacy, and now Cloud was finding there was less and less of himself left.

Tifa ultimately needed someone to help her deal with her guilt over the reactors. She needed someone who could assure her that everything would be all right and help her rebuild her life. She wanted to be popular, loved, and lifted up and have that old clingy friend group she’d had in Nibelheim. It wasn’t something Cloud could provide. She probably missed her family; she’d had a good one growing up in Nibelheim, but Sephiroth had taken it all away. Tifa’s mother had died, but she’d been loved before that happened. Zangan had looked at her and seen boundless potential, choosing to tutor her above all of her peers. She’d been special, and her friends had envied her.

 Cloud only had his mother, who was coping daily with the shame of being a single parent in a hostile and gossipy little town. It left her a little detached from his problems. She’d loved him, there was no doubt about that, but it felt like she’d also loved some ideal that wasn’t the man Cloud was. She’d dreamed of a life she’d fictionalised for him, with a girlfriend who’d look after him and keep him out of trouble. Like everything else, he’d tried desperately to be worthy of that life and had fallen short.

Older now, he wanted to forgive her for dreaming of a better life. He wanted to feel grateful she’d wished for better things for him. But he harboured a bitterness that she’d been so oblivious to the bullied life she’d made him lead through her poor judgment of partnership and the fact that she never really saw him for the individual he was.

 Maybe that was why his father had left in the end; maybe he had slunk off, unable to meet the ambitious expectations she’d dreamed of for him. He’d gone beyond the mountains and never come back, once again reminding the young Cloud that he wasn’t exceptional or special enough for even a parent to stick around.

Sometimes, he resented his mother for never pushing him to be better and helping him meet the standards he needed for that ideal life. But it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her fault.

Mostly, he missed her so bitterly that it sat like a heavy rock in his chest. He could hardly brush against the memory of her these days, finding her placed alongside other unbearable losses in his heart.

Despite all his complaints about how he’d been raised, he would have given almost anything for one last hug from her.

Just one.

—

Cloud had really hoped that saving the world again might magically let him move on from his grief and regrets. But he was beginning to understand that no amount of helping others would heal the wounds he carried. His struggles were his own, and he’d have to face them alone, without hiding behind other people’s problems.

He’d been coldly indifferent to the geostigma as it gripped his body; the ailment had felt like an outward manifestation of some deeper decay festering in him since maybe even before the Nibelheim fire. It felt justified. It had made him realise that maybe there was a rot in him, a crack in his armour letting in all kinds of things that ate away at him. 

His problems were something he was going to have to deal with himself, rather than as a passive effect of dealing with other people’s.

He just had no idea where to begin.

Cloud had never been good at traversing his internal landscape; everything he’d learned he’d learned on the road with his friends from the planet itself.

Maybe a trip was in order this time, he thought, standing at the edge of Midgar’s ruins, where here and there, the grass was beginning to poke through the tortured earth. It had only been a decade since Meteorfall, but the world was visibly healing.

An unseasonably chill breeze seemed to blow in off the plains, and Cloud shivered, leaning a little closer to the warm steel of his bike.

No one else had been around when he’d pushed back Sephiroth, and he’d never breathed a word about his parting words to him.

I will never be a memory.

—

“I think I’m going to go away for a bit,” Cloud said, looking down into his glass at the bar in Seventh Heaven. He didn’t want to see Tifa’s expression. This wasn’t the first time he’d done this, and he knew she always perceived him seeking solitude as some guilty avoidance. She treated him like a little kid, and maybe, at one point, he’d HAD lost a chunk of years and lagged behind everyone else, but he was in his thirties now and had been through things other people didn’t have to bear.  

“Are you all right?” Tifa asked, her voice wavering with unspoken concern. “You aren’t sick again, are you?”  

Maybe I was always sick, Cloud thought to himself, but he shook his head outwardly. He’d learned that sullenly closing himself off to Tifa never got him anywhere.  

But being Zack did.

“No,” he said with a faint smile, easing into his Zack voice without missing a beat. No, I’m not sick. I want to go on a trip now that things are calm again, before the next crisis.”

Tifa shook her head. “No more crises!” she said, but he could already see how her posture loosened up and the relief in her expression.

“‘All right, no more of those,’ he conceded. ‘I just want some time with my thoughts. Maybe do a bit of photography and find things to trade. Stretch my wings for once, without desperation forcing my hand.’”

Tifa nodded. “... Yeah,” she said, smiling at him with more faith than he felt in himself. “I think that sounds nice, Cloud. You’ll call me?”

He nodded. “Yes.” He wasn’t sure why he felt so obligated to call her, but Seventh Heaven was also how people who needed to pass on messages did so. Keeping in touch for Denzel and Marlene’s sake was good, too. Speaking of which...

“Are you all right to be left alone with the kids?” he asked. Tifa nodded, seeming heartened that he had even thought to ask.

“Yeah, they’re getting older; they’ve been getting involved with all sorts of things besides their schooling. Don’t worry about me being overwhelmed. Besides, Barret has been running his new oil company out of the bar, so he’s always around.”

Cloud did laugh at this. “Oil company? Don’t let him hear you calling it that; he’ll flip his lid. The Wallace Power Company.” 

The strained distance faded as he laughed with her, but something in him tightened. He played Zack, slipping into the easy charm he’d worn for her all these years. Staying here, it was all he’d ever do.

“But yeah, I’ll catch up with Barret before I go. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone, but I’ll let you know as soon as I have any idea. I’m taking some materia, for my safety, not because I intend to go looking for trouble.”

She nodded. “I’d feel better if you did, anyway. You’re too valuable to lose.”

He knew she meant it. But imagining himself as “valuable” was uncomfortable to him. Reactors had been valuable. The Sister Ray had been valuable. Mako had been valuable, and valuable didn’t always mean good.

“I’ll be all right,” he said. But the words felt hollow, just empty promises even to himself.

—

Cloud went to bed, trying to hold onto the brief optimism he’d felt earlier that he could find some real meaning on a trip. Instead, he tossed and turned for hours and didn’t remember falling asleep.

—

Cloud was standing in the Lifestream, up to his knees in the church at night, but this Lifestream was as thick and viscous as the geostigma secretions, flecked with black pools of pus and slime. The sun wasn’t shining, but thick flakes of polluted snow fell through the rafters and died on the surface. Recoiling, Cloud tried to move to leave the pool but found that it dragged on his legs like quicksand, making every movement interminably slow.

It reminded him much, much too keenly, of times spent fighting his body and screaming internally as he tried to pull away from the next atrocity. Memories of the black materia burned like black holes in his mind.

He had too much gear on, a bag of heavy materia burdening him as he tried to move, and he reached back to undo the straps and gasped as he found that it wasn’t a pack.

His fingers came away with a clump of white feathers tangled in them.

As he twisted for a better look, he felt the thing move of its own accord, splaying muscles he didn’t have to flare a wing with too many joints in all the wrong places. It looked broken, and as he tried to process what he saw. It initially grew slowly, the shift subtle enough to be dismissed as an illusion. But then the feathers tore through him in faster and faster waves until his body couldn’t deny what it was becoming with twisted, heavy splinters which erupted through his skin like knives. 

Desperately, he reached for the edge of the pool, only to find that the feathers were not only growing along the wing but spearing through his flesh and jutting out like terrible daggers from his left arm, more like blades than anything a bird had ever borne. He was repulsed by himself, suppressing the desire to wretch, wanting nothing more than to claw the things away like a frantic animal.

And with the feathers, there came flesh, flesh that wasn’t anything like his, flesh in hues of blue and purple, rotted and despicable, aberrant in every possible way. He screamed, trying to pull away from himself now, reaching the edge of the pool with his good arm and tugging with all his might to wrench himself free.

But still, the monstrous appendage grew more and more until it wrapped itself around him, breaking his fragile bones into new shapes and blotting out the light. More and more, it hunched him over until he was gasping in agony, face-to-face with his reflection.

The surface of the boiling Lifestream fractured. He saw the monstrosity he’d become. But that wasn’t what scared him most.

At first, he thought it was his own reflection, warped by the roiling surface. But no, it was her. Her grey, decomposing face stared placidly back, eyes opaque and unmoving, as if waiting for him to join her.

His mother.

—

Cloud woke with a start, his pulse racing and his mind fogged by the dream’s grotesque images. He didn’t remember falling asleep, but now he was very wide awake. He stumbled downstairs in a haze, but thankfully, Barret’s voice grounded him as he caught up with him over breakfast.

“You all right, Spikey?” Barret asked, and the earnest concern managed to coax a laugh out of Cloud.

“When am I ever?” he said, giving Barret a half smile. He’d always gotten along with Barret. Of all his companions, the other man was one of the few who brought out a more truthful side of Cloud. When Barret said something he thought was bullshit, Cloud told him it was bullshit. Barret had no real patience for the Zack persona to the degree that it even put him on edge when Cloud used it.

The “hotshot SOLDIER” persona won Cloud no prizes with the big man, and it was such a relief.

“I didn’t sleep well, is all,” Cloud said, waving off Barret’s look of worry. “Bad dreams.”

“Ain’t none of us sleeping well with what we’ve seen,” Barret said. “Just warn us if you start having those freakouts again, or I will kick your ass.”

Cloud shook his head. “No, these are just the normal sort of nightmares.”

The freakouts Barret mentioned had been waking nightmares, out-of-body experiences where Cloud went somewhere else and sometimes could only look on while his body did its own thing.

Maybe because I didn’t want to be myself, it was easy for someone else to do it, he thought cynically.

Barret nodded. “Just keep us updated, you hear?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Cloud said, rolling his eyes. “You’ll be the first one to know if I’m losing my mind.”

Barret let out a huff but didn’t nag him further.

“So you are leaving?” he said. “Where to?”

“Don’t know yet,” Cloud said. “Maybe Icicle Inn. I’ve not gone snowboarding in a while.” If he was honest, he wasn’t sure how Icicle Inn had fared during Meteorfall, or if it was even still standing.

“Shit! The coldest place there is.” Barret scowled. Cloud wasn’t surprised; the northern continent was a far cry from the arid heat of Corel, even before it became a desert. Barret thrived in warmth.

“I don’t mind the cold,” Cloud said. “And I’ll have materia too.” The right materia in the right slot would make the cold a breeze

Barrett waved this explanation off. “You don’t need to explain yourself to me, " he said. I know how it is. I ain't your mother. If you want to go off and risk your life, fine. Just don’t make me regret trusting you.”

The word mother sent an icy jolt through him, the kind no materia could have dampened. Cloud clenched his jaw, forcing the reaction down.

“Just…” Barret’s voice softened, and he looked away. “Just don’t expect to find what you’re looking for out there in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, you find it in people.”

Cloud laughed at this, finding it a jarring break from Barret’s usual tone. “Since when have you been a people person?” he asked.

“Since Biggs, Wedge, and Jessie taught me what I’d be missing without ‘em,” Barret said, and the sharp honesty cut Cloud’s laughter short.

“I didn’t-” Cloud said.

“No. Don’t apologise,” Barret said quickly. “That’s worse. What I’m sayin’ is, sometimes you gotta make room in unexpected places to get unexpected answers, right? I let your ass into my life, and… well.” He gestured vaguely as if words failed him. “Just don’t do anything stupid, you hear?”

Cloud pat Barret’s big shoulder.

“I hear.” He said. “Tell Marlene I’m sorry if I miss the festival.” Marlene had taken charge of tending the church alongside Denzel, and one of the things they’d planned was a flower festival, where they could give out seeds for the inhabitants of Edge to plant. Cloud had promised her he’d be there, but now he didn’t know if he would be.

“Nah. You’ll tell her yourself, when you get back.”

—

Cloud’s Chocobo always perked up when he arrived, probably because she knew he had The Good Greens. 

“Goldie.” He said fondly, petting her beak. She was a glorious chocobo, with feathers that gleamed like spun gold. The others had made fun of him for giving her such an obvious and uninspired name, but he didn’t care. No other Chocobo in the world was quite as gold as she was. 

“We are going on a trip.” She’d been cooped up in her stable for a while, getting out only for the odd race or when the stable exercised her with the others, and Cloud knew this wasn’t to her tastes. She was a Chocobo that could run anywhere and fly beyond any height; she wanted to see the world, as was her birthright. It felt demeaning to ask her to run errands with him, which was why his bike had become the default mode of transport he used.

“Guess you knew I’d come around eventually, or you wouldn’t have waited here so long.” He joked as she nudged at the bag of greens encouragingly, earning herself a Sylkis green that she gobbled down with gusto.

“We’ve got a long way to go.” He said.

Behind him, Chocobo Billy hefted a saddle onto the fence, carrying as many packs as it could. “And we are packing for a long trip.”

“Kweh!” Goldie declared, and Cloud took it to mean she wasn’t afraid of a silly saddle.

—

It had taken a few days, but as Cloud stood on the hilltops overlooking Edge and the ruins of Midgar, he finally felt ready to go. The northern continent had been nothing more than a whim, a place that had been only scarcely explored. When he’d been there last, he’d been consumed by his mission.

But he still wasn’t really being honest with himself, was he?

There was no one else here but himself and Goldie; he didn’t need to keep tucking his emotions away as if they were shameful or inconvenient.

The Forgotten Capital lay in the north, a place he strove to visit when he could. Beyond that lay the great cavity where even his companions feared to tread. He’d avoided it because of a strange and latent sort of guilt about going there. It was a contrary streak in him; he’d been pulled there as part of the Reunion and, ever since, had been sullenly resolute that he wouldn’t fall for that shit again.

Maybe that was also planned, and he found himself questioning his aversion more and more. If anyone should check out what remained down there, it was him, especially when Shinra had found Sephiroth copies last time, amongst other things.

Part of dealing with his emotions was coping with his fears and heartache, and all of those things had their deepest roots up there in the snowfields.

Goldie let out a triumphant sound as Cloud spurred her forward. She spread her wings, strong as a condor’s, and soared up into the sky, due northward.

Cloud stooped close to her feathered neck as the chill northern wind hit him.

He'd caught up with everyone, but sometimes memories caught up with him instead. The cold wind brought her memory with it, a quiet, unspoken and always loved presence that lived eternally in the spaces he tried most to forget. He missed her every day, but couldn't let himself think about what had happened or he'd fall apart.

So, up there in the sky, in absolute solitude, he finally let himself think about Aerith.

Chapter Text

Goldie alighted nimbly on a snowy ridge overlooking the ocean and folded her wings. It had been a long trip, and as soon as they were on the ground, Cloud dismounted the chocobo to just sit on the snow until the world stopped spinning. Motion sickness had always been a problem for him, and it had made his time in the Shinra army a nightmare. Chocobos weren’t as bad as trucks or airships, but spending long enough in the saddle still left his stomach in knots. Goldie nudged him with her beak, a gesture she’d used on countless chicks and - at times when she deemed that he needed it - Cloud. He patted her neck with a faint smile, muttering, “I’m all right, girl.”

It was strange that during the hunt for Sephiroth, his travel sickness had vanished, as though his fixation on the black caped man had taken him out of himself. For a while, he had been able pretend to be Zack, say “I never get travel sick” and really believe it. Of course, once he remembered who he really was, all the flaws who had made him Cloud Strife had come rushing back, and with them had come his travel sickness.

It took a few minutes for the world to return to normal for Cloud today, but when it did, he rose to re-mount Goldie and get on their way. It would be a little better on her back than in the air, and they took off across the thick snow in the direction of Icicle Area, her massive feet easily allowing her to skip across the surface of the deep drifts of snow. The sky was clear for the moment, but Cloud knew too well how easy the weather could turn up here.  Above the vast north crater, the weather felt like a living thing, circling like a scavenger, caught up in the planet’s relentless struggle to mend an injury too deep to truly heal.  It had drawn Cloud here too once, to the heart of the whirlwind maze and the man he’d been pursuing all along.

-

It felt good to be out on the road again. The desolate lands around Midgar had been oppressive and stifling, but the northern continent sprawled in snow-capped grandeur that reflected the brief but blazingly bright sun. It was gorgeous. Cloud adjusted his goggles and nuzzled his nose into his scarf as he took in the breadth of it. The last time he’d come here he’d been reeling from one of the most significant losses of his life and the beauty had been rendered nothing but the desolation of a world without Aerith in it.

Aerith. He almost didn’t allow himself to think about her any longer. It wasn’t that he didn’t value her friendship and care for who she was, it was simply that the memories were so raw and painful that he found himself veering away from it.

Goldie slowed to a trot as they found a more well-trodden path through the snow.

No, that wasn’t the whole of it, not really. Cloud tried not to think about Aerith because when he did, it was confusing. His memories seemed to shape into something that wasn’t his own when he thought of her, and so much of the time they’d spent together came back to him as though through a dream. It brought in doubts that he couldn’t adequately process. Would Aerith have liked him at all without the front of Zack, the man she had truly loved? Would she have tolerated the cruelty and bitter resentment that lurked within him when she had so little patience for evil in the world around her?

Aerith had borne her burden with dignity and good humour, the last of a race she barely understood, never of their world and never really of humanity either. She’d been pulled between two worlds, and maybe now more than ever, she was the only one who could have understood how Cloud felt.

But she was gone.

Cloud carried his burden with none of her grace. As one of Shinra’s last experiments, his legacy held no dignity, only the shadow of greed at any cost. He felt close to the Gi, entombed beneath a tourist trap, their only legacy an endless and seething hatred for the world that rejected them.

When he first met Aerith, he’d mistaken her for his mother, and even now, he felt similar mixed regrets about them both. In the end, it always felt like his fault that he couldn’t save them from Sephiroth’s madness, and he found himself constantly tracing down the roots of all his grief and misery to himself. Maybe if he’d made it in SOLDIER, he could have changed things, perhaps he could have saved Sephiroth and prevented everything that came after.

If he’d made it into SOLDIER, he could have met Zack’s girlfriend as himself, as the best friend of a fellow 1st Class. What kind of world would that have been?

The questions chased each other around in his head, until – as he so often did – he pushed himself to think of something else entirely.

—

It was only the afternoon, but dark already when Cloud arrived at Icicle Inn and found it thrumming with activity. The catastrophe of Meteor had been kinder to places far from the epicentre at Midgar, and little towns like this had patched themselves up and moved on. Even geostigma, which had ransacked Midgar, had laid a gentler hand upon these outlying areas. A group of loud kids skimmed past on snowboards, and Cloud couldn’t help but smile, caught in the fond memory of careening down the mountain himself.

“Whoa,” one of the kids said, stopping mid-sentence. “That guy has SOLDIER eyes.”

Cloud felt his blood turn to ice and paused in his tracks, Goldie’s lead rope in his hand, unsure how to respond to the kids who now clustered around him, staring at him. He’d raised his goggles absently on the way into town, simply wanting to admire better the flickering lanterns that hung outside the houses along the snow-lined streets and hadn’t for a moment considered that it left his eyes uncovered.

“I’m not SOLDIER or Shinra,” Cloud said, the words leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. Every denial felt like an insult to Zack’s memory. Zack had been so proud of his rank.

“Nu-uh.” One of the kids said petulantly. “My dad told me all about SOLDIER. He says they have glowing eyes, and your eyes are definitely glowing.”

Another kid, wide-eyed, asked. “Have you ever killed anyone?”

Cloud didn’t like this question one bit, flinching away from the kid. Goldie seemed to pick up on his body language, letting out a reassuring little kweh as she nuzzled his shoulder.

“I’m not Shinra.” Cloud repeated, not feeling cool or slick. Zack would have had an easy answer for these kids; he’d have made it sound casual and effortless, but right now, Cloud was finding it hard to slip into the old familiar mask.

A heavy-set man, dressed in thick furs wandered past with what seemed to be his wife in tow and laughed. “Don’t go bothering this man you lot.” He said, turning a friendly grin towards Cloud, before he really took in the scene, and the smile turned rictus. Cloud wanted to hang his head guiltily even though he’d done absolutely nothing wrong.

“Shinra.” The man snapped, his mouth in a thin line. “I thought your kind were all gone.”

Cloud felt his anger rise at this repeated accusation, raising his voice as he finally snapped. “I AM NOT SHINRA!”

Cloud couldn’t stand the association with Shinra. The closer people came to that truth, the more unbearable it felt. Zack had been seen as a hero, untainted by Shinra’s muck. Cloud wasn’t Zack. The closer he stood to Shinra, the more apparent that became.

This anger felt like entirely the wrong response as the man’s eyes went wide, his wife taking hold of his arm, trying to get him to leave, clearly afraid. Cloud softened his tone immediately. “Look, look. Sorry, I’m not Shinra, I’m a delivery driver.”

“But you were with them once, right?” the man said. The raised voices had drawn the attention of some of the people in the nearby inn, and a few people had come out to inspect the street theatre. Cloud felt outnumbered, the crowd’s energy seeming to coil around him, claustrophobic. Goldie pressed against his back, a quiet reassurance amid the hostility. “Doesn’t matter if you’re with them now, you’re one of their experiments, aren’t you?”

One of the older men jabbed a stocky finger in Cloud’s direction. “SOLDIER!” He cried and gestured in the direction of Midgar, commanding the attention of the mob. “They caused ALL OF THIS. Everything happened because of people like you. No, not people MONSTERS like you.” The word sliced through the air like a falling icicle, more cutting for how familiar it was.

In the moment Cloud was a little kid again, backed into a corner by Nibelheim bullies who hated him simply because he wasn’t one of them. He put his hand up in what he hoped was a placatory gesture, regretting that his sword was impossible to hide, strapped to his back. “I’m not a threat to you.” He said, small and pathetic sounding. “You are safe.”

This only seemed to rile the yelling man up more, and the crowd was taking cues from his energy. “SAFE?” he shrieked in incredulity. “Safe? Your kind brought Sephiroth down on us! Should have been rounded up and destroyed along with the other abominations that they made. If one can go bad, they all can.”

In the leaden dark, the once-handsome flickering lanterns seemed to cast threateningly long shadows across the snow from the gathering crowd. The hatred in their eyes twisted Cloud up inside, but not because it wasn’t deserved, but it was. They feared him for what he might become, the same way he feared it himself. And if anything, they were underestimating him.

A grave-looking woman put her hands on the shoulders of one of the kids protectively, taking his snowboard from him to try to lead him home. “You should leave.” She said to Cloud. “All Shinra ever caused here was heartache and ruin.”

Cloud tightened his clammy grip on Goldie’s bridle. He’d planned for a warm bed, running water and a moment of quiet peace. But peace wasn’t for him, not here.

Monster.

The word struck harder than it should have, a splinter lodging deep. How long had it been since someone had said it outright? And were they wrong? Everything Sephiroth had done, was Cloud responsible for it too? It could have been him instead.

He’d heard the word monster before, long ago in Sephiroth’s voice. A monster made by Shinra. The thought of it had driven Sephiroth mad, and even now, was it driving him mad too?

“I’m sorry.” He stammered. “I’ll go.”

He started on his way towards the exit out of town, and as he went, a snowball hit him in the back, cold and sharp. It was a childish act of rebellion, a kid following the gathered adults, but he felt it shove him closer to an edge than he’d been. Cloud had lashed out at the bullies in Nibelheim once, when they pushed him further than he could stand. They had been shocked by the ferocity with which he fought, and after that, had taken up shunning him rather than actively trying to make him angry ever again.

He wasn’t sure which he’d preferred.

It took everything in Cloud not to turn around and show them what a real monster could do, to see the looks on their faces when they realised that he wasn’t some shadow of Sephiroth but his equal in power. Every step felt like a struggle, like holding back a dammed avalanche of anger. Today more than ever, he was aware that his decision every day to turn the other cheek and be kind was indeed a very conscious, very difficult choice.

He chose to shoulder their hatred and leave. The cold seemed to bite harder with every step as he did, as though the world itself wanted him gone.

—

Cloud hadn’t been intending to go much further than Icicle Inn. He’d mostly wanted some peace to look at the snow and think, but now the rage and hurt thrashed in him like a caged beast. He felt like it was difficult to breathe, stumbling through the dark with Goldie as his only anchor. The argument had been a nothing encounter, some rude locals and a snowball, but he felt like he’d been wounded in a way that nothing in his packs could soothe or heal.

He’d never felt so lost.

What did he hope to find up here? What did he think would be different?

The landscape didn’t care about him; it was indifferent to his small and insubstantial life. 

Or maybe that was another illusion he was deceiving himself with; the planet didn’t see him as a saviour, it likely saw him as a dangerous but persistent pathogen. Cloud could tell himself he’d helped save the world, but Aerith’s voice had sought mercy for them all.

Cid had said from space their planet looked like a little kid, small and helpless in a vast universe, and that was why he wanted to protect it. Cloud wished he had such clarity. To Cloud, the planet wasn’t anything like a person; it was incomprehensible. It probably hated him, too.

As if to affirm this thought, the weather rapidly turned, and what had been a clear night started to pour flecks of glittering snow down onto Cloud, clustering in explosions of fleeting light around his flashlights. He thought to himself that he should mount Goldie to avoid the harshness of the snow, but right now walking felt like what he deserved. He didn’t even know where he was going. Out. Out was all that mattered. Out of Icicle Inn and out of civilisation.

As the storm picked up, so did the chaos of his thoughts, Sephiroth’s voice rising from a memory unbidden and cutting through the storm like Masamune’s blade.

“Through suffering, you will grow strong. Isn’t that what you want?” The words echoed in Cloud’s mind, overlapping with the bluster of wind. Wasn’t that what he wanted? To be strong enough to bear the things he had to carry and fill the emptiness within himself?

God, maybe it was. He was strong now, stronger than most humans could ever dream of being, but it was built on a thousand calloused scars, the result of a lifetime of hurt and pain. Strength had brought him nothing but more battles, losses and loneliness. Sephiroth had turned his suffering outward, wielding it like a weapon, while Cloud had turned it inwards. Sephiroth had been like a supernova, brilliant and luminous, while Cloud was a black hole that pulled in everything he cared about.

Goldie made little sounds of crooning concern at his back, but he didn’t respond, simply led her more deeply into the night.

The snow came down more heavily in large flecks that settled across his shoulders, making it difficult to see. He didn’t stop because he didn’t need to see to keep walking. So, he walked, hunched against the encroaching elements. The snow stung the sliver of his face that peeked between scarf and goggles like a row of tiny needles, and the cold crept through even the best efforts of his clothes, numbing his fingers and feet. The weather felt as though the planet was intent on punishing him for existing at all.

But he was a SOLDIER, and the elements would not kill him, but they would try.

The weather pressed in on him like a physical weight, hunching him down and forward, his shoulders low under the assault and the howling wind. The wall of white devoured the light that had led him. And yet he stumbled onwards, hunched like the cloaked figures in the whirlwind maze. He’d hated them, groping ever forward with desperation towards a Reunion most of them would never reach. Was it jealousy? Had he felt like Sephiroth belonged to him?

Maybe they had simply ached to be put back together, and so -even now – did Cloud.

The drifting snow consumed his boot prints as though he’d never left them, as though he’d never been there at all. He felt like he could scream and howl out his anger, and no one would hear it, not even the planet he was supposed to have saved.

Goldie crooned more insistently this time, and her beak bonked him on the forehead from above, as if to remind him she was still here with him. He reached out without thinking and pressed his gloved hand to the downy plumage of her neck. Beneath the snow that had crusted on her, he knew she was warm, and for a heartbeat, he felt steadier.
Below him, the ground dropped off rapidly into darkness. Where was he?

He had come to the edge of the slopes without even realising and staggered to a halt. This was the slope people snowboarded down, and as always, there were rental boards stacked up near an unattended hut. The locals knew better than to snowboard in a blizzard. They came here to show off to their friends and for the thrill, but Cloud wasn’t here for fun.

Why was he here?

He stared with wide eyes and quickened breath down the slope, struggling with the Thanatos urge to throw himself forward, to let the storm take him and try to outrun the pain that pursued him to the ends of the earth.

“If suffering is supposed to make you strong.” He sobbed, the words whipped away by the uncaring storm. “Then why does it leave me so fucking hollow?” If this was what it meant to be strong, then what was the point of surviving?

WARK.

The answer to his questions was a full-throated comment from his companion that jarred him out of his swirling melodrama and made him bark a laugh that surprised himself. The timing had been so keen, so perfect, that he turned to her with a softened expression. Goldie stared at him with intense focus, her feathers ruffling in the wind, shielding him from the wind with her body. She wasn’t just scolding him. She had reminded him that there was part of the world that wasn’t trying to kill him, that he loved quite dearly.

“Wark, huh?” he said. “Very philosophical of you.”

She pecked at his hood as though he was an errant chick, and he waved her off, her golden feathers gleaming like they were molten in the swinging flashlight and whirling snow.

“Hey hey!” Cloud protested, heading for one of the brightly coloured snowboards to try and excuse what he’d just been thinking. Maybe this was also stupid and dangerous, but at least it was something he could throw himself into that wasn’t the void. The memory of snowboarding was a fond one for him, reminding him of his friends. Holding the brightly colored object, he could almost hear Barret’s laugh, the way it had rumbled as Cloud hit the ground during his first attempt. That memory, at least, didn’t hurt, not like the others.

“Look, I’ll take a board. I’ve done this before.” He protested.

Cloud hesitated. Around him, the storm still screamed, daring him to race it, to outrun the void. Goldie gave him another stare as he strapped himself onto the board with slow, stiff fingers. “Fine” he muttered, his voice trembling but not from cold. “We’ll wait till the snow clears a little.” 

But he knew that on this journey he was on, he wouldn’t wait long.

—

The storm had abated slightly, but the wind and snow still fought Cloud as he began his descent, scattering the powder that had settled on him. Goldie, carrying only their supplies, followed close behind, her strides sure and steady as she moved effortlessly through the snow.

Cloud struggled awkwardly through life, fumbling over social interactions and weighed down by trauma. But racing, fighting and riding were different. The snowboard felt like it was part of him. Whatever it was that the JENOVA cells had done to him, physical tasks came easily as breathing.

Hurtling down this mountain, nearly blinded by snow, the snowboard was an extension of his body and a control he hadn’t felt in months. His head pounded, but his mind narrowed into a pinprick of focus, with no more room for the worry that had beset him for so long. He wasn’t hurtling towards the void any longer. As he hurtled down the mountain, he felt like he was flying.

Visibility was low, and as he moved into the loosely forested area of the slope, Cloud had to rely on his keen instincts to avoid crashing into a tree hard enough to shatter his bones. Every drift was a danger, and every dip in the terrain could snare the edge of the board. The darkness smothered the moonlight that had been trying to break through the storm, and the only sounds he could hear were the roaring wind and his own heartbeat in his ears. Crouched low, the world whipped past at breakneck speed, his muscles singing with exertion. The wind tasted sharp and fresh, and even with his scarf, the air he dragged into his lungs was as cold as the snow around him. A branch narrowly missed taking his head off, and he found himself giddily laughing in delight at surviving. This wasn’t self-destruction, this was freedom.

But he’d learned freedom couldn’t and wouldn’t last. He’d need to stop sometime.

No, he couldn’t think about that now. He needed to focus.

Only survival mattered. Only the right now.

The mountain didn’t judge him as he skidded up a steep mound of snow and launched himself a ridiculous height into the air. The townsfolk might have murmured in fear, but the mountain didn’t care.

The storm thinned as he raced ahead of it, the oppressive stifling flakes giving way to a swirl of dampness. The wind clawed at his soaked scarf and clothes and drove a chill deep into his bones. He was cold, but the exertion made it barely a consideration at the speed he was going. Even Goldie - a world champion racer in her prime - was struggling to keep pace.

But he didn’t slow down for her because he needed this.

Out, again, he felt the board crash down on nothing but raw ice dusted with powder. It was enough to keep him going with his momentum, but an ominous creak ran up through his boots. If he stopped here, the deadly water beneath would consume him, but he had no intention of stopping, simply adjusting his route to skid past harsh and lethal rocks that jutted up from the ice, smirking to himself at how close they came.

But never close enough.

Inside, he might have been trapped in a cage of emotions, but outside, he could go anywhere and do anything; wasn’t that the point of this trip, really? If he couldn’t escape the inside, he would escape the outside.

Swerving to the left, Cloud found himself cast out of the wind entirely, into a beautiful cavern he remembered from his first descent down the mountain. Raw materia structures jutted from the walls and floor, their vivid green contrasting with the natural colours of the semi-transparent rocks. There was no wind in here, and without it, Cloud was unnervingly aware of the sound of his own breathing and the crunch of his board across the snow.

The beauty of the place was not without peril with the crystalline structures jutting into the path razor sharp and gleaming in the light, many of them the colour of Cloud’s own unnatural eyes. They dragged him back to the memories of Nibelheim and the cave where Sephiroth had taken a moment to admire raw materia just like this. It had been a rare glimpse of the true nature of the man who might have existed before everything twisted up into chaos and madness.

The planet was saved, and this cave would endure now, but Cloud found it hard to feel invested in what they had managed to achieve, because it was a world that still didn’t like him.

A loud CRASH shattered the quiet as one of the crystal clusters exploded, scattering shards everywhere. Cloud swerved instinctively, catching sight of Goldie as she leapt from a ledge overhead. She must have taken a shortcut he hadn’t known about, clever as always. With easy strides, she caught up to him, her movements steady where his were wild, even as the twisting caverns tried to slow them both.

The exit loomed ahead, a dark void against the glittering cave. But Cloud glanced back at Goldie instead and smirked.

"'Good job, girl!' he said, his voice lifting with a rare flicker of pride.

“Glacier next!” Cloud called against the whipping wind outside the cave, crouching lower to his board to pick up speed. Goldie let out a triumphant wark, her strides lengthening as she shifted into a gallop, head held low in a sprint. Cloud realised - despite himself - he was having fun.

“Let’s see if you can keep up!” he called, grinning. Goldie answered with a playful chirp, and together, they hurtled headlong toward the precipice.

The storm broke entirely as they reached the edge. Beyond, the world opened into a breathtaking vista, a dazzling sky scattered with stars, the snow below fresh, glittering, and untouched. Cloud’s mind felt clearer too, the storm inside him fading as they raced neck and neck toward the brink.

With one final mighty leap, he launched himself off the edge, the great glacier stretching wide beneath him. Goldie fluttered alongside, her golden wings catching the moonlight.

For an instant, as the rush of air lifted him, Cloud felt as though he’d sprouted wings of his own.

Chapter Text

Cloud landed a long way from the snowboarding area. He knew this because he was falling for a very, very long time. In the air, there was no way of ascertaining up or down; the wind, the snow, and even his own wind-whipped scarf made it damn near impossible to tell what he was hurtling towards.

He should have been afraid. But he wasn’t. It was chaos, it was surprise, and in some bone-deep way, that was something he’d longed for. 

 He had to have been close to the ground when Goldie scooped him up in her massive claws, slowing his dangerous momentum with her fluttering wings and ditched him more gently in the drifted snow. Unfortunately, more gently was still a tumbling, careening and utterly undignified faceplant, and Cloud dug himself out before laying still with a sigh as he adjusted to the blinding world of white. Even with his goggles on, his surroundings were overwhelming, snow still sweeping around him in swirling, wild sheets. He sat up and tried to get his bearings, or at least to divide white sky from white earth.

The only landmark he could make out was a distant smear of darkness, but at least in the oppressive whiteness, that was something. He pulled himself up onto Goldie’s back, strapped the snowboard to her saddle and urged her towards what surely had to be a jutting stone just ahead of them. It would give them a point to strike out from and explore.

 A marvel of natural abilities, Goldie’s claws worked like huge snowshoes, and she strode confidently across the surface of knee-deep snow that would have hobbled Cloud to a crawl.

As they went on, the smudge of darkness seemed to move ahead of them, out of reach. Cloud realised what had looked like a simple rock had coalesced into something far larger than he’d guessed. Out of the snow jutted a rock face, cleaved down the middle by a massive cavern. Cloud’s mind was immediately drawn to the Nibel mountains and their jagged blades of stone, but the mountains here were different, hewn patiently smooth by the great glacier itself. Even the caverns and hollows felt different, worn down by time like ocean rocks.

Regardless of how unfamiliar the landscape was, Cloud didn’t have time to be picky. The snow was thickening, making it difficult for him even to see the cliff. That cavern might be the only shelter they’d encounter before this endless white swallowed them both up.

Of course, he knew that monsters sought shelter too, and Cloud was incredibly wary as they moved towards the shadow of the cavern. He knew that he and Goldie might be walking into the den of something dangerous. He’d certainly run into some truly monstrous things in the past in the icy caves on the glacier. He hoped that post-Meteor, it would be less dangerous.

Drawing his ever faithful blade, he gripped it tightly in his thickly gloved hand and urged Goldie onwards towards the darkness.

Inside, the cavern was relatively small, with a luminescent, mako-veined glow on the walls. However, Cloud immediately noted the lived-in smell and the heavy scent of fur permeating the space. Goldie baulked at it, immediately, and he dismounted, letting her back off to a more comfortable distance. He didn’t need her getting hurt in the close quarters. Cloud’s heart hammered in his ears as he entered, and he switched on a chest-mounted flashlight he’d brought with him to drive back the pitch blackness.

The light was enough to stir the inhabitant of the cave and reflected the startled eyes of a solitary Bandersnatch. Regardless of how surprised it was, the wolf was hungry, perceived a food source and seized the opportunity, leaping towards Cloud with a snarl. There wasn’t even time to think about what was happening. Cloud’s instincts were honed to a monstrous degree at this point, and if he excelled at anything, it was murder.

Hot breath on his face. Fangs bared. He reacted. The creature barely had a chance to yelp before he cut deep, clean and final. At least, he told himself, it was a quick dispatch; it would never know what hit it.

Blood splattered him as the beast’s body hit the ground, and he winced at the sensation.

“Sorry, boy.” He said, feeling a stark twist of guilt over what he’d just done. It didn’t make sense to be feeling pity now of all times, either; they’d had to dispatch hundreds of these creatures in their travels over the years, but those beasts had been on the snowfields hunting with their packs. This one didn’t have a pack; it just had its cave, and now Cloud had it instead, and it was dead. It felt worse, somehow. He understood the feeling - that desperation had to have felt. Lone wolves just survived until they didn’t.

The cavern would do for shelter for the night. There was one tunnel leading out that had a sharp breeze blowing down it, likely leading deeper into the pass. It was a path he could use to press onward tomorrow. For now, though, Cloud opted to block it off with a few large boulders to prevent any unexpected visitors during the night. He set aside the wolf carcass as something to eat that wouldn’t impact his limited rations; he didn’t like to waste good meat.

Outside, he retrieved Goldie, bringing her in and letting her settle down at the far side of the cavern. She didn’t like the smell of blood and death and fussed about it for a time. Still, with enough distance from the corpse, she conceded to some of her favourite greens in a nose bag and, as her feathers defrosted, she quickly replaced the smell of wet dog with the more familiar smell of warm chocobo.

The last thing Cloud did as the light outside began to fail was shovel up snow to conceal the exterior cavern entrance and block out the last of the cutting cold that still swirled in from the storm raging outside.

And then it was almost cosy, a word Cloud found himself surprised to be thinking in such a hostile place.

Once he did a final check of his perimeter, Cloud unpacked some of his belongings from the saddle, setting up a low-energy lantern that cast a warm glow about him, reflecting in beautiful, brassy ways from Goldie’s feathers. Next, he retrieved one of his most valuable wartime relics to get dinner on the go.

Cloud fished out the portable stove from his pack. It was a rare example. Only the highest-ranked members of the Shinra military were issued these things. Cloud had never been that rank; he’d looted it after a fight years ago, recognising what it was. They used so little energy that their mako cores could last for hundreds of years if properly maintained.

The absolute fucking irony of using Mako energy wasn’t lost on him, but he consoled himself by reminding himself that if these souls, these memories had been converted into Mako already, something that couldn’t be reversed, then he owed it to them to make good use of them. He would never recharge it.

Once the stove was set up, Cloud set to carving up the Bandersnatch, and before long, the smell of sizzling meat filled the cavern. Goldie didn’t appreciate the smell of blood and death, but she really did like meat scraps and settled down admirably when fed a little treat or two. Chocobos lived on greens, but they were more than happy to supplement their diet with whatever protein they could find. It was part of keeping them in tip-top shape.

The warmth in the cave drove back the chill enough that Cloud could lose some of the layers he’d been wearing. In here, the howl of the wind was muffled by the snow that blocked them in, and the warmth from the stove pushed back the freezing temperature. He’d almost forgotten what it was like to breathe normally, not forced to inhale pure cold directly into his tortured lungs.

Eating the wolf he’d killed felt like a final act of penance to Cloud. He told himself that it hadn’t been killed simply because it had been in the way, coming to an abrupt halt, but that, like this, it would continue to be part of the cycle of the lifestream. Meat into strength, into life, its soul returning one day as something else.

But doubt crept in slowly.

Would it?

The thought ran down Cloud’s spine like a rivulet of ice water. Would the wolf be part of the lifestream again if he ate it? He didn’t know what was going on with him, but the planet seemed to perceive him as an obstacle, an infested dead end. Perhaps Cloud had consigned the wolf to never return to the planet; maybe it would simply reside within him forever, the way souls consumed by Jenova lingered within her stagnant energy.

That was a truly horrific thought, the innocent wolf forever trapped inside his soul like a cage, the way the mako, still faintly lighting the room, was caged within the stove. 

Cloud didn’t know if he could even die; maybe anything he touched, anything he interacted with, would be trapped with him forever and ever and ever.

Goldie butted him with her head as she begged for more scraps, and it was enough to pull him up out of the suffocating thought. He laced his fingers through her warm golden feathers. No, he couldn’t think like that; he didn’t know anything for sure. He’d done everything he could to set things right and would continue to do so until his last breath.

The meal was good, the meat hearty and surprisingly edible, and after the day’s hardships, Cloud found himself in far better spirits with a meal in him. Icicle Inn had driven him out, but he’d found his own little hotel room against all odds. It made him feel good, persistent. He was stubborn, and this whole trip was a testament to his stubbornness against the elements. When he’d come here before, he’d had an entire crew of people to help him, but now it was just him and his chocobo, and they were still doing very well.

His bedroll was comfortable as he finally slipped into it, Goldie settling down on the wolf’s pelt by him. With her living warmth beside him, Cloud found himself falling into an easy and mercifully dreamless sleep in the absolute darkness of the little cavern.

It felt more like home than anywhere he’d been in months.

--

The next morning, Cloud broke up camp, packing some of the spare cooked meat away in his bags for later. He even rolled up the pelt of the Bandersnatch and tied it onto the saddle. The way he saw it up here, you didn’t waste perfectly good materials. Goldie cheerily devoured her morning rations, and before long, they were ready to depart.

Cloud checked his phone in the gloom of the cavern and wasn’t at all surprised to find that there was no signal at all. He was completely off the grid.

The howl of the wind and snow had died down outside, and Cloud took that to mean that the storm had finally broken. After the sound of the distant elements all night, it felt almost too quiet. If the snowfall hadn’t actually broken and was still falling heavily, he could come back here and hunker down for a while. Honestly, if it came to it, he could probably make a living in this little cave; it was small enough that it retained heat well, and defensible at either end. Even if he did that later, for the time being, he needed to scout out the tunnel he’d temporarily blocked and see where it led to.

Levering the boulders out of the way was simple enough, and switching on his flashlight, Cloud headed into the breezy darkness beyond. Goldie followed behind him. Chocobos didn’t like enclosed spaces or the indoors, but she trusted him completely and seemed to know that he was only looking to lead them out of here. The tunnel was a fairly simple one, a fissure in the rock that seemed to reach all the way up to the top of the cliff. He could see glimmers of daylight up there and used them as a thread to follow to the other side of the rock crack. The breeze also led the way, and before long, Cloud and Goldie emerged on a vast expanse of completely untrodden drifted snow that sprawled in front of them as far as the eye could see. 

Goldie hesitated at the sight of it and let out a little warning trill, something that surprised him; if anything, he’d have expected her to be more nervous about the cave, not leaving it. It was hard to think anything really negative about the vista that stretched ahead of them under endless clear blue skies that felt utterly vast and empty. The main downside to it was that it almost felt laden with too much potential. The memory of the storm was gone, replaced by a world that looked like it had never known inhabitants, crisp and new, with only the whispering touch of the long-gone wind in the cast of the drifts.

There was no sound here, no life, no plants, no birds. The silence seemed to whine in his ears, and if he let himself believe it, he could convince himself he could hear the planet’s song in his own strained hearing. Was this what it had been like when the Cetra first arrived here?

“It’s ok, girl,” he said, reassuring the fretful chocobo, surprised by how much the soft snow ate up his words when he spoke. The way it seemed to stifle him was a reminder that, as a human, he was still small and fragile in this place. He gestured for Goldie. “It’s a big, wide world, but it’s nothing we can’t handle, right?”

It felt a little like reassuring himself. It didn’t really work, and Goldie didn’t look too convinced either, ruffling her feathers and preening at the saddle in the way she always did when she was nervous.

Cloud certainly couldn’t scale the mountain from here, but with a clear view, he could make his way around it and see if he could find the old place where they had managed it before. Goldie let him climb up onto her back again, and they set off on their way. It was odd, though, even far from the cavern, Goldie was still restless under him, and he could tell she was on the alert.

To Cloud, her hyper-vigilance made no sense at all. The way was clear as far as the eye could see, without a single movement. Even the wind had died down, and now the only sound was the gentle crunch of Goldie’s feet on the snow and the creak and rustle of their packs as they shifted with the locomotion. It should have been relaxing, but the calm peace of the night before was gone, and Cloud found the nervousness of his companion contagious, making his own nerves jangle alongside her.

Goldie was a bulletproof chocobo, typically unphased by even the most intimidating creatures in their world. Cloud had seen her chocobuckle a dragon once, caught off guard but certainly not unprepared. She was as tough as he was and then some. Feeling her this spooked wasn’t right, and even the swell of her breathing between his knees was deeper and more anxious than he’d ever seen her.

And yet, when he scanned the horizon, again and again looking for anything that could be any threat at all to them both, any reason why she’d be this stressed, he came up with nothing but sunlight gleaming on snow that could have been a scene from an icicle inn postcard.

“What is it, girl?” he asked, but knew she couldn’t tell him. That was the problem with most creatures; they weren’t like Nanaki, who could say whatever he pleased. Goldie knew something, and she couldn’t share it at all. Instead, the chocobo merely answered his query with a quiet kweh, fluffing and resettling her crest of feathers.

They moved onto glacier ice layered with snow, but it was nothing Goldie couldn’t easily traverse; snow, mountains, lakes, oceans, nothing was too difficult for her. They could use the incline to scale the hill at a more leisurely pace than a cliff face, using the glacier’s own eroded path to get closer to the summit. She fluttered across gaps in the ice and pushed onwards, but her head still snapped this way and that, unsettled.

Cloud knew he couldn’t be helping; he was holding the reins too tight and close, his posture tense, not moving against the motion of her stride, but he felt odd, too. Even his geostigma arm, which had long healed, felt like it ached, and he had to remind himself it could only be a muscle strain, nothing more sinister. 

And then, as they leapt past a break in the ice, Cloud saw something that couldn’t be real. A single terribly familiar long black feather settled on top of a pillar of ice, taunting him. The vision hit him like a spear through his head, and he almost tumbled out of the saddle.

No. Sephiroth was gone. He was dead! Cloud had seen him die, he’d seen him die and die and die, and then he’d torn him from the lifestream; it was OVER. It had to be. This feather was in his mind; it was all in his mind. Sephiroth was a nightmare that was over, and Cloud had ensured it.

It had been so long since he’d had an episode that for a moment, he wasn’t even sure how to cope with it. He sought every bit of advice he’d ever been given and came up blank. Back then, the others had been there, Barret would have whacked him on the back of his head and told him to sort his spikey ass out. He missed it. Out here on his own, all he could do in the end was try to say to himself it was nothing, that he had to be reacting to so much empty space, and to focus on moving on, away from it. Don’t react. Stay calm.

However, before he could get distance between himself and the thing, Goldie turned her head and flinched at the sight of the feather, letting out a defiant trill and stamping her feet, before tossing her head as if trying to dislodge a sound or thought that had climbed in there.

And then she ran. They leapt ten feet forward in terror, Goldie scrambling with her wings as she carried them both further up the glacier. “Whoa, whoa!” Cloud called to her, but there was no soothing her; the feather had spooked her almost as much as it had spooked him. 

If it wasn’t real, why did she see it?

What had previously been careful leaps and calculated flutters was now a crazed life-or-death scramble away from something that had the chocobo in a frenzy. They were running at a racetrack pace up uneven terrain. Goldie paused only once to kick out with her huge feet at something in pursuit. She was trying to protect Cloud and herself from an assailant who, with all the jolting and leaping, Cloud couldn’t even see.

All he could do was hunker down and hold on as best he could, but the bird was so fast, so strong, and so afraid, it was a battle he was rapidly losing. No amount of SOLDIER agility and strength could overcome a golden chocobo in full flight. Below him, the glacier flickered past in a blur of chasms and permafrost, the wind whipping at him brutally. It was hard to turn, hard to see, and though he looked behind, he couldn’t see what Goldie was running from.

Until he finally could.

As Goldie hurtled across a flat plateau of ice, Cloud finally got a clear look at what it was that the chocobo was running from. Behind them shambled a monstrosity of twisted flesh and scant amalgams of humanity. It's bare skull, proportioned in ways no human ever had been, watched them with hollow squirming sockets as it slithered across the ice, and as soon as Cloud looked at it, his mind screamed with a terrible, familiar whine.

Jenova.

Cloud felt it reach into his mind through his eyes, through his veins, the cold deeper than any chill he had felt here, but he shoved it back. He was no longer the man he had been; he was no longer a little boy.

He drew his sword on instinct, but doing so distracted him from Goldie’s leaping. The chocobo let out a scream of terror, and Cloud tumbled from her back onto the snow and ice. She didn’t look back, but he didn’t blame her; he could only imagine what horrors this monstrosity could conjure in the mind of a gentle beast.

The fall was hard, and Cloud’s sword almost skidded away before he seized it back towards him. On the ground, there was always the warrior’s awareness that to fall was to die; the longer you lay, the more likely you would never rise again.

He pulled himself to his feet, breathless and furious. His mind was screaming, but partially it was screaming in anger. This wasn’t his first fight against this abomination. He’d fought her before. The audacity of this nightmare, still lurking in the crevasses of the world, filled him with a rage that made his chest tight.

It wasn’t over.

And maybe you enjoy that. Perhaps you are glad.

The words slithered into his mind, and they sounded like him. The thing was almost upon him now; it moved in spasms and jerks across the snow, trailing ichor in its wake, but he knew as it gurgled and thrashed like a dying beast that it was coming for him.

Cloud screamed, a guttural, animalistic roar of defiance, against this, against the planet, against everything that led him again and again to this aberrant entity.

Every time he thought he could rest, every time he tried to heal his wounds, it came back, and maybe that was how this fucking planet felt, too; maybe finally here and now, he saw eye to eye with it.

He lunged forward, bristling with anger that seemed to fill him up. The cold receded, the world receded, everything faded to red. The infection was still here.

But Cloud didn’t have WEAPON to do his dirty work. He-

A flash of brilliant red cut through the crimson blaze of his vision, of his thudding heartbeat and of the blood that splattered the snow as he severed one of the superficial arteries of the Jenova creature, hardly even scratching it.

He roared his defiance and was met with another. A roar that shook the very ice beneath his feet, a roar that resonated like a rasp in the hollow of his chest. It didn’t scare him; instead, it lifted him. Cloud jumped over a swiping bladed tentacle just as a shadow fell across his world.

Summons were a strange experience; you became their conduit, their priest, their vessel into this world, and in exchange, they gave you their godly powers for as long as you could sustain them. During their journey to save the planet, the blessing of the summons had come easily, and maybe that was part of the planet’s blessing to them back then, part of the deal to assist it.

Afterwards, the summons didn’t come at all. The red materia was an expensive paperweight most of the time. 

Cloud had kept the Bahamut one as a memento of sorts, hiding it from Yuffie and lying that he’d lost it. He’d never expected to see it glow again, let alone to have that stretched feeling that he was looking out of two separate sets of eyes. He was above the world, looking down on the snow, able to see the tortured rim of the wounded crater in the world. His mind was infinite, eternal, and not his own.

He knew as he soared and as he swung, as he screeched and dodged, that it was because of his rage this had happened. It was because of the murderous, indignant fury he felt towards this damned thing and everything it represented that the king of dragons had come once more to his side.

And he didn’t feel ashamed at all.

—

When the world returned to Cloud, it was shattered; the Jenova thing was gone, obliterated into ash, but so was a broad scar of the glacier, so deep and sleek that the idea of climbing out was almost laughable. Cloud was at the epicentre of it, feeling weak and hollow, still reeling from the memory of having wings and breath that tore the world.

Snow glittered down towards him from the shockwave that had ripped through the mountains, and Cloud fell to his knees.

Goldie was gone, his supplies were gone.

“What am I doing?” he asked the uncaring sky, the wispy clouds still scored with the power that had rattled them.

But no answer came, because he was once again completely alone.

—

While he waited for Goldie to return, Cloud got to work figuring out how to get out of this bind. The glacier scar was deep, and falling back into military habits, he scouted out its perimeter. He was equal parts impressed and horrified at how deeply Bahamut’s breath had shattered into the glacier.

The northern crater was a scar like this, and he couldn’t help but uncomfortably feel the parallel. Back then, Sephiroth had been lurking deep within it, waiting to be reborn, and now Cloud was stuck down here waiting to- 

No, he cut that off before it could form. That wasn’t how to think about this. He’d give up if he started being fatalistic.

All around him was unnaturally exposed ice that glittered in the morning sunlight and offered him not a single handhold, not a single tunnel up out of his plight. Beautiful and utterly indifferent. But that didn’t mean anything; all he needed was to have overlooked something or for Goldie to find him.

He hoped she was okay. His only relief was that whatever had been chasing them had stopped to attack him and let her run on. He felt sick as he imagined a scenario where she had run away from the creature, only to double back in time to be killed by Bahamut. If Cloud had harmed her, he wasn’t sure he could live with himself, and even if he hadn’t, she had to have been terrified by what she saw. It would not be easy to regain her trust.

And so as the hours ground on, Cloud got colder, and though at first the morning sunlight had made the chill easier to bear, he was beginning to feel it in his bones, along with a rising sense of panic. The clear sky had been a false friend, letting him ignore the creeping chill until it had eroded him by inches.

By midday, he told himself that Goldie would return at any moment. By afternoon, he had stopped believing it entirely.

How high were the walls? Cloud tried jumping. And this wasn’t normal jumping either, SOLDIERS could almost fly, leaping from motorbike to motorbike or up and up and up, through the rubble of an actively crumbling building. It was part of their flash and style, and part of what had allowed Cloud to stand a chance against Sephiroth at all in hand-to-hand combat.

However, unfortunately, despite his impressive abilities, he couldn’t fly. There was no style in the undignified falls and painful landings he endured again and again as he tried to get out of the scar. He jumped until he was covered with cuts and scrapes. Before long even his gloves were shredded. His palms stung. Desperation choked him, and every jump left him rawer than the last. He became more frantic, scrambling at anything even resembling a ledge, but to no avail. Eventually, he slumped onto the ice, humiliated. SOLDIER strength and he couldn’t even climb a fucking wall.

Zack wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. He’d never have succumbed to such crass anger; he’d be somewhere warm, settling in for another night with his chocobo.

 Cloud hadn’t eaten since last night and had nothing on him. He could still taste the memory of the wolf meat, and it made his mouth water to recount its greasy, gamey flavour. 

It was late afternoon, and if things had gone to plan, he’d have been settling down to some rations around now. And man, when even salty, cheap rations sounded good, you knew you were in trouble.

The sun continued to creep west, and the more the shadow of the chasm slipped over him, the colder Cloud felt. It felt like the world was consigning him to shadow, sealing him away in a tomb he’d built for himself, forgotten.

The temperature shifted quickly, dropping into a free fall. Cloud’s breath had already hung in the air, but now it steamed, crystals of ice crowding his eyelashes.

“Goldie!” he called, again and again, hoping his voice could lead her back to him. She had always forgiven him when it mattered. The sound just rebounded and echoed in strange ways off the sleek ice walls. A hollow imitation of his voice. It almost sounded like it was coming from behind him, fooling him for a moment that someone was answering his cries, mocking him for trying.

The more time marched on, the more aware Cloud became that his life was in very stark danger. His joints stiffened, and when he realised that he’d been pacing up and down mindlessly for almost an hour, it drove home that his thoughts were slowing down too. It was harder to think of a way out of the chasm when his brain was switching gears from thinking to just survival. If only he could have gotten back to the cavern and its warm, stable scent, he might have had a chance. Out here, he was dead meat. Didn’t matter that he’d saved the planet; it would kill him just the same.

Standing at one end of the gouge in the ice, he looked up at the unscalable walls for the millionth time, and then continued up and up to the sky overhead.

The stars had come out, and up here there was no light to mar their beauty. The scene above his head was the swirling tapestry of the cosmos, almost like it had been that night in Nibelheim when he’d sworn to Tifa beneath the stars. It was the kind of sky that felt like you could fall into it, that the planet was an insignificant pull against something so bottomless and vast.

It had been a turning point for him then, the beginning of a new life, as he told himself he could make everyone proud. Here, it felt like an ending, a failure.

Clumsy with the cold, Cloud’s knees gave out, and he stumbled backwards to the ice to sit, but his gaze was still turned ever upwards to the spiralling stars that reached out and out and out. He could hardly feel the cold now; he could hardly feel anything.

He remembered looking down on the planet from Cid’s rocket, so small, so far away. The stars up there had been just as distant.

In his thoughts, there was only the stars.

Tifa had made him promise back then. Promise a return.

But no one ever promised him. No one to save him when he needed them.

That was stupid; he never asked. He told himself he didn’t need anyone. 

The stars were like cells, tiny and innumerable, each one a fragment of the lifestream, rising from every rock and root, reaching up towards his memory of a meteor that blotted the world.

Glittering fragments of lifestream that sparkled from her “useless” materia.

 Damn it. He couldn’t think. 

No. There had been one. A promise. Not a promise to return to him but a promise never to leave

I will never be a memory.

A star moved, falling towards him. He flinched.

And a weighted rope struck the ice.

Someone abseiled down the rope they’d just dropped, effortless and familiar with the terrain, and Cloud barely allowed himself to believe it was real at all. He’d been rescued once on this glacier by a kind man who lived by the summit, and Cloud wondered if this person was any relation to that man.

The figure dropped to the ice and flicked frost from their goggles. Thickly layered in fur and cloth, they were impossible to read. No voice, no face, just a shape in the dark, a void of shadow against the spiralling array of stars. They peered down at him over a thick scarf, the majesty of creation reflected in their goggles, and when Cloud tried to thank them, nothing came out at all.

Arms slid under him, and he was too far gone to wonder at their strength.

Picked up. Helpless.

Terror twisted its claws in his insides. Not again. The chasm became a long corridor, a gurney instead of arms under him. Test tubes. Captivity. He couldn’t even struggle.

And the smell. Not mako but something worse. It was everywhere, the way it used to get into his clothes, into his skin, saturating his sinuses. It had haunted Nibelheim like a ghost, on the test tubes, on the uniforms.

Jenova.

The smell was here. It was real. It was coming from the person carrying him.

And the terror was enough to pull him under.

—

The inferno had consumed everything in the town, the wood cracking under its onslaught, and Cloud had remembered that sound the most, like the sound of a massive beast cracking bones in its teeth. Every crack made him flinch, and the flames licked closer and closer.

He tried to rise, tried to run, but he couldn’t, pinned to the ground by his own inadequate strength.

He opened his eyes. In front of him was a fire, but one that a domestic hearth had tamed. He wasn’t in a lab, nor was he in burning ruins; he was in a stranger’s cabin instead, wrapped in furs that had driven the cold out of his body.

He’d been having a nightmare. The relief stuck in his throat.

Alive, his first thought was to come up with an excuse for what he’d even been doing in that strange ravine. The delivery service was as good a reason as any; if the person pried, he’d blow them off by telling them he’d been collecting something for a client and had been thrown off course.

His second thought was that he was incredibly hungry and thirsty. Weak as a baby.

He sat up in his blankets, realising as he did that he was wearing a different pair of clothes, ones that didn’t fit him well at all, much too large and baggy for his slight frame. They didn’t smell right, not bad, but a hint of campfire smoke and freshly tanned leather hat wasn’t him. 

 More urgently, his sword and materia were nowhere to be found nearby. He was vulnerable and knew he needed to play his cards as close to his chest as he could. They might want something from him.

He was in what appeared to be a living area, with plenty of furs and blankets over every surface and thick draft-dampening tapestries on the walls. Some had patterns, others had artwork stitched into them in a style reminiscent of the more isolated communities that called this desolate continent home.

At first, he thought he was alone, until someone seated in another chair, over by the door, turned the page of a book they were reading in the blinding snow light that filtered in through the window.

The sun caught the man’s short hair like a halo, and for a moment Cloud thought it was blonde, like his, until he realised that it was silver instead.

His heart skipped a beat almost out of habit.

The man paused, sensing the eyes on him, and turned his face towards Cloud.

“Oh, you are awake,” he said.

The voice was what stopped Cloud’s heart. Calm, composed, it lived in his bones.

For a moment, all he could do was stare, waiting for the nightmare to shatter.

It didn’t.

Sephiroth.

In a heartbeat Cloud was on his feet, but rather than leap into battle, Sephiroth only tilted his head, puzzled. His eyes made cloud feel helpless and weak, as though all the warmth had drained away from his body.

“You shouldn’t be on your feet yet,” Sephiroth said evenly. “You’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

“What the hell do you want!?” Cloud snarled. It felt like staring down Jenova earlier, an absurd reminder of a life he’d thought was behind him, of suffering and pain that had seemed unending. He’d tried to heal, but all the wounds were opening again.

Sephiroth blinked once, slow and deliberate, as though the question itself baffled him.

“Nothing. You were in peril; I intervened, that was all. You aren’t the first traveller to get into difficulty on the glacier.”

Traveller?

“Don’t you know who I am?” Cloud knew he sounded petulant and ridiculous, but he needed to know, needed to understand what he was dealing with.

Sephiroth studied him for a long moment, then shook his head.

“No… I don’t. You feel familiar, but so many things do. My memory is…” he paused “… a bit hazy. Should I know you?”

Cloud’s chest hollowed, his breath catching despite himself. Shame twisted in deeper than anger ever had. Being forgotten felt so much damn worse than being hated.

What could he say? How did he put into words the relationship between them? Would reminding Sephiroth put them at odds again? 

No. He couldn’t risk it.

So Cloud did what he did best, and avoided the question.

“Never mind.” He said gruffly. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Then it doesn’t matter,” Sephiroth agreed, eyes dropping back to his book as if nothing had been said.

Cloud didn’t know what to do. Heading out there like this was a death sentence. He was hungry and frail and so, so utterly tired. Barret would have never given in; he’d have kicked up hell, he’d have dragged Sephiroth into a fight, stormed into the snow, and he’d have stuck to everything he believed in.

But Cloud Strife was weak and tired, and right now, he folded helplessly onto the furs, onto his side, like a puppet with its strings cut.

“I’ll make us some soup,” Sephiroth said, tucking a bookmark neatly into his page.

And Cloud closed his eyes against the absurdity of his situation, and nodded his head.