Chapter Text
The storm has been raging for days, and it doesn’t look like it’ll change any time soon.
Cloud glances out of the window to see the wisps of green amidst the rain. His skin prickles and his reflection shows his glowing, pale green eyes.
Eyes that are not his.
His eyes haven’t been blue in… he doesn’t even remember. The more time passes by, the fewer details he remembers. His hair is still blond and pointy, but he’s paler.
Cloud doesn’t recognize himself anymore.
He sighs and moves to get his mug—chocobo-shaped, salvaged from rubble decades ago—and pours it full of coffee. It’s not easy to get milk these days, so he has learned to drink his coffee black.
Wind howls in the corners of his small cottage, and the roof creaks precariously, but it will stand against the storm. This isn’t the first time, after all. Cloud built the cottage himself, and it has materia embedded into the wood in strategic places for extra protection.
He sits down on the couch and grabs the remote. It’s interesting how people these days have found a way to make their lives easier—in the early days, there wasn’t electricity at all. Just mako storms, fiends and earthquakes. Millions of people died.
With Cloud watching and being unable to do anything about it.
But it’s been… how long? Cloud isn’t sure. Not decades. Centuries. When you’re immortal, time loses its meaning.
One of the channels is showing a movie. It’s not very well shot because of the poor equipment, but he starts watching it anyway.
The coffee tastes like shit, but drinking it gives Cloud a semblance of normalcy. Same as eating, even though he doesn’t need to. At least famine doesn’t affect him. They’re rarer now. Droughts too. The planet is recovering, but it will take a long, long time.
The movie ends up being a lot better than Cloud anticipated. He watches all of it and even laughs a little. It feels foreign on his face.
He flinches when thunder explodes right above him. Something flashes outside and he almost falls from his couch in his haste to run to the door and yank it open.
The moment he steps outside, barefoot, the green wisps wrap around his arms. It stings and itches—the lifestream is trying to get rid of him, to purge him, but it’s not able to.
Cloud looks around in the clearing. There’s no one else, but there’s a hole close by, still smoking, evidently from the lightning just before. He walks toward it and crouches to take a look.
It was just regular lightning. Cloud is angry to notice that his stomach twists in disappointment.
He hasn’t been controlled in a long time. His body and mind are his own, but he’s not able to die. Sephiroth made sure of that.
Everything—the current state of the world—is Cloud’s fault. It’s his fault that everything he once knew is dead and gone. It’s his fault that the planet was destroyed and only a fraction of humanity survived.
Sephiroth left Gaia decades ago. Undoubtedly to find a different planet to conquer. He left Cloud behind as a steward, a reminder. He’s tied to the planet, forced to watch over it, outside of the flow of time.
Cloud falls to sit on the grass and looks up to the churning sky. He’s already soaking wet, but he doesn’t even notice.
He doesn’t know how to cry anymore. He doesn’t know how to… feel. Centuries of being forced to live here, watching time pass and the world heal, have rendered him unable to experience life as a human.
He just… exists.
The first decades had been the hardest. Back then, Sephiroth’s hold on him had been strong. He’d only been a puppet, an extension of Sephiroth’s will. It’s also part of the reason he’s not able to feel now.
Cloud still doesn’t know how Sephiroth decided to move on. But on the day he did, he allowed Cloud to regain himself, but told him to keep living and ruling the planet in his stead.
Cloud, of course, had declined the honor. As soon as Sephiroth had disappeared, Cloud had tried to die. Multiple times in many ways. Nothing worked. Lifestream just spits him back out. He doesn’t get injured, no blade can harm him. He can stop eating altogether and it doesn’t affect him.
In a way, he’s still Sephiroth’s slave.
“Fuck,” Cloud mutters, but the anger just isn’t there. He can’t feel sad or happy, either. Sometimes, very rarely, a small laugh escapes, but it’s fleeting and he can’t control it.
He gets up from the grass and walks back inside. He might as well make more coffee.
When you have an eternity, it’s important to have routines.
Cloud doesn’t need sleep, but he sleeps anyway. After he wakes up, he makes coffee and eats a light breakfast. He starts his days slowly, and if he sees nightmares (which is often), he writes all of them down into his journal. He has filled a lot of them. He started writing after Sephiroth left, and he leaves the filled notebooks around for anyone to find. At the beginning, Cloud wrote down anything he remembered about the past, just so that it could survive at least somehow. He has seen a few of those earlier ones mass-printed in bookshops.
The people know he exists, but they don’t know his appearance, which is a relief. If Cloud travels to the nearby town, he doesn’t introduce himself.
Everyone knows he’s a recluse who rarely makes an appearance. When there are questions about the fact that he doesn’t age, he just says he doesn’t understand it.
It wasn’t like that at the beginning, though. Back then, Cloud was very visibly Sephiroth’s, exacting punishment upon people if Sephiroth wanted it.
Cloud was Sephiroth’s executioner, his weapon. Continues to be, to this day—or that’s what he should be, but Sephiroth isn’t here to see if he punishes the people or not, and he’s more than happy to leave them be.
Today, Cloud leaves the cottage, packs the necessities and secures them in the trunk of his car. He gave up using motorcycles a long time ago, because they’re not as comfortable for traveling as a car is. At least he can live in there if there’s nothing else close by.
He drives to the town outside of the forest—Mistmoor, if he remembers the name correctly—and refuels at the gas station.
Looking around, it’s impossible to notice the fact that they’re living in a post-apocalyptic society. Mistmoor was built from the ground up, using the scrap easily available all around the planet, but time has passed enough that it’s not really noticeable here. Children are screaming and running in the streets and there’s an enticing scent of fried meat and onions coming from a nearby street stall.
After refueling the car, Cloud parks it in a good spot and makes his way to the general store.
“Good morning, sir,” the shop assistant greets him cheerfully. She’s pretty young, in her early twenties, with dark brown hair and deep red eyes. In a way, she resembles Tifa a lot, which always throws Cloud off. It always makes him hope, hope that the girl is Tifa’s descendant, even though he logically knows it’s impossible, as Tifa never had time to get any children.
Cloud quickly stops that line of thought. He can’t go there, can’t think about his friends, because otherwise he remembers the screams, the desperate looks, the blood—
“Sir? Are you alright?”
Cloud shakes his head and offers a smile, knowing full well it’s rehearsed and not at all real. “I’m alright, Rose. Just got a little light-headed.”
Rose nods, an uncertain look lingering on her face, until she refocuses her attention on the box in front of her.
Everyone around here knows him. Knows not to ask questions. Cloud likes it that way. Even if he sometimes hears whispers that he doesn’t contribute to the community. Which he thinks is bullshit, as he doesn’t even live here. He built his cottage in the forest to be alone, and the clearing is protected with traps and materia. Ordinary people are not able to enter. They don’t even know the clearing exists, thanks to the powerful illusion Cloud cast around it.
You get really proficient with magic after centuries of practice.
Cloud buys a few things for the road—a few canisters of water and easily preservable food, along with some other small things. He buys a big pack of matches just in case he won’t be able to use fire magic, and batteries for his flashlight.
“Up for a trip again?” Rose says good-naturedly as she starts scanning the products.
“Yeah,” Cloud mumbles. His voice has gotten rough from disuse—he might go through days of not speaking aloud at all.
“Well, safe travels,” Rose says and smiles. “And stay safe. It’s pretty unstable out there.”
Cloud nods. “Thanks. I know.” Earthquakes are common all around the planet now, as the lifestream is restabilizing and finding new routes. He takes the plastic back to his other hand and the canisters to the other, ignoring Rose’s incredulous look as he carries everything out of the store. He knows perfectly well that a normal man shouldn’t be able to carry all of this so easily—the canisters aren’t light—but he doesn’t care.
He hauls everything to his car and shoves them in the trunk.
After casting one, final look towards the town, Cloud sits behind the steering wheel and drives off.
The road trips are Cloud’s way of breaking the routine. He needs it, the travel, to see the planet and how it’s healing. Mistmoor is located north of where Gongaga once existed (the village has now been completely taken over by the jungle), so Cloud proceeds further north.
He doesn’t really know where he’s driving, but he never does. The destination isn’t the most important part—it’s traveling itself.
Since Cloud doesn’t really need sleep to survive, he drives without a break until he reaches the former Corel. From there, he turns and heads towards the coast.
Costa del Sol is one of the few cities of the past that still exists in that name, and even now, it’s a tourist resort. Since no one uses mako as energy, nature has started to heal around Corel as well, the desert now showing patches of green.
Cloud does like the sight. At least he and Sephiroth didn’t manage to destroy everything.
He feels like traveling to the eastern continent this time, so he drives to Costa del Sol and parks near the port. It’s already too late to go buy ferry tickets, so he eats a little and then gets the car ready for the night. He has built curtain rails inside so he can cover the windows, and instead of the backseats, there’s a narrow bed. Cloud is too tall for it, but thanks to numerous road trips, he has learned to make himself comfortable.
Cloud falls asleep quickly, and sees more nightmares.
The voyage over the sea is short and boring. Cloud hasn’t suffered from motion sickness in ages, so now he’s able to enjoy the cruise more.
He still doesn’t like it that much, though.
The ferry anchors in the town of Junia, built around the remains of old Junon. The new name is some kind of spelling error from the past, when people were trying to figure out the history of this place, but then it got stuck.
Cloud looks around the city for a while as he drives out of the ferry and feels a pang of nostalgia. The ruins of the fortress are still there, but other than that… It’s not that recognizable.
The plains beyond Junia are more familiar. There are more ruins and rubble, both from the war between Junon and Shinra and from Meteorfall.
As Cloud drives, he notices a spot further down the road, with evident signs of a mako spring. He drives closer and parks to the side of the road before getting out to take a closer look.
Mako springs are his favorite places to visit. This, like the others, is surrounded by grass and flowers, with a crystal formation growing in the middle of it. As Cloud glances over his shoulder, he sees that it’s actually a pretty secure location, easy to miss if you don’t know where to look.
Cloud walks closer to the spring. More tendrils of the lifestream rise up to meet him.
“What do I have to do?” he whispers. “I just want to pass on. Haven’t I done enough already? Was it my fault that Sephiroth enslaved me? What could I have done differently?”
It’s all so unfair, yet he still can’t cry about it. It’s not his fault what Sephiroth discovered in Nibelheim. It’s not his fault that Hojo experimented on him for four years.
It is his fault that Zack died, though. He would’ve survived if he hadn’t carried Cloud with him. But he shares cells with Sephiroth, which made him susceptible to his manipulation, his control.
“I just want my friends back,” Cloud adds quietly. The lifestream doesn’t react, of course. “I want to see Tifa and Barret again. To hear Zack’s laugh. I want to… have long conversations with Vincent again…”
But it’s no use, is it? He has jumped into the lifestream many times, and he always gets thrown out. He’s not allowed to be a part of it. He’s not allowed to pass on.
It just isn’t fair.
Cloud stands there, for a while, to look at the spring. Mako has a distinct smell—sweet and sour at once, something that makes Cloud feel it’s a scent he has smelled before but can’t place anywhere. It’s mixed with the scent of fresh grass and flowers.
Earth shakes under his feet, but he doesn’t lose his balance. Not even when the shivers get stronger, quickly gaining intensity until it proceeds into a proper earthquake—one of the strongest Cloud has ever witnessed. He sways, struggles to hold his balance.
Until he can’t.
For a short moment, he feels like he’s hanging in mid-air.
Then he falls into the spring.
It feels a lot like falling into water, but Cloud is immediately assaulted by a stream of thoughts and memories, too much to make sense of. It always happens to him like this—and usually it takes less than a minute to find himself from dry land again.
Not this time, though.
Cloud feels himself sinking deeper. His lungs are full, the pain is unbearable, yet he can’t drown, can’t die.
Please, he begs the lifestream. Please, let me go. Let me rest. Free from Sephiroth’s hold—
The pain gets worse—until it suddenly disappears. Cloud floats through the darkness. His eyes itch. He can’t see anything. All sounds are muffled.
A current catches him before he can even consider that it can happen. He can’t separate up and down as he tumbles through the lifestream. Soon, green speckles fill his vision. The more he sees them, the more tired he feels. His thoughts become muddled. He tries to lift his hand, but he can’t see it. To be honest, he can’t even feel it.
Then he closes his eyes.