Chapter Text
Cloud got out of childcare after the first generation and a half of Geostigma orphans. He didn’t think he was ever really good at it, but the kids needed someone and savior of the world or not, he was an asshole if he let Tifa do all of it, as Barret had told him at one point. So he stuck it out and did what he could, and he didn’t raise any megalomaniacs out of that batch so he figured he did all right.
But when Tifa died, he let that all go. It wasn’t like he didn’t still care for some of them, or that they wouldn’t welcome him into their homes in Neo-Midgar, but he just…wasn’t a natural at it, and without her he didn’t want to risk messing up anyone who was too young to have other choices. And he’d already stuck it out anyway, for decades, and they had other people at that point who could do that kind of thing better and so he just figured it was time for him to do something else.
Vincent got it. He’d been doing that already—dropping back in every few years, much to everyone’s initial surprise—and then disappearing to go live his life. Actually live, not just sit around in a cave and mourn the dead, although once when he and Cloud crossed paths in Junon and watched the sun drop over a couple drinks, he did admit resisting the temptation to do that had been harder than keeping his eyes open the first time they’d woken him.
“But it’s easier as time passes,” he’d said, and then he’d paused with his bottle just below his twisted lips. Sardonic, but a lot less depressed than Cloud was used to seeing on him. “Everything fades, it seems. Even what you thought would change your life forever.”
“Forever being the important part,” Cloud had said, before he could help himself. He hadn’t hit his first century yet, but it’d been starting to sink in, that he was going to. That he was going to and then some, and Tifa dying wasn’t even the first time he’d had that brought to his attention; it was just when he couldn’t ignore it anymore. “You really over what happened?”
“Is that the point?” Vincent had asked, and then he’d tucked his chin to his chest and chuckled under his breath, his gaze drifting wistfully over the ocean.
He’d always felt older to Cloud, sitting back and reserving his words for only the most critical moments, but something in that gesture had felt…not exactly young, but on the same level. And it wasn’t just that he’d shaken off enough of his past that whoever he’d been before Hojo was resurfacing. He’d had more time stolen from him than Cloud had—and he’d been older anyway, when that had happened—but right then, it’d felt as if Cloud might have caught up to him.
Anyway, they both had the same thing staring them down now: they were going to live on, and somehow, they had to figure out how to do it.
“I admit I put a good deal of energy into making the opposite case,” Vincent had gone on. He’d paused, not quite saying too much, and then had leaned back on his arms. “I loved her—I still love her, but now that I look back, loving her didn’t change my life. It interrupted it, but…if she had made me a different man, I wouldn’t have chosen the path that led into Hojo’s lab. I still find it easier to reach for a gun than for a phone, if I think something needs to be done.”
“So time goes on, and you’re still you,” Cloud had said, when Vincent had fallen silent for a few seconds.
Vincent had nodded. “Yes. So I find…I find that events are simply the past. They happened, I remain, and so…is it the point to move on? What happened moves further from me without my needing to do anything. So the only reason to do anything is simply because it’s—”
“Something to fill in the gaps?” Cloud had asked, and at that point Vincent had turned and frowned at him. He was never going to be the kind of man who made easy conversation, he’d given up on that a while ago, but it’d also been a while since he’d had anyone around who’d look at him that way, as if they remembered when he hadn’t made those kinds of jokes. “I’m not going to do something stupid—Tifa had a good life, Vincent, and she told me if I—”
“Then I’ll take your word for it,” Vincent had said. Not peremptory or relieved, just putting a resolution on the unspoken words between them. He’d looked at the ocean for another second, and then had taken a swig from his drink. “No, I think now if I do something, it’s simply to do it. I always was who I am, but—there also was always an apocalypse, or an impending threat. It’s only recently that that’s stopped.”
“Yeah. Yeah, and we kind of care if the world ends,” Cloud had said dryly. He always did, even when he was pretending not to, and maybe that was the part that took the longest to get used to. That he could be fucked up six ways to Sunday and still have that part of him, and still just…deal with it. Live with it.
Do something about it. Vincent had come around whenever they’d needed help, but they’d just run into each other that time, without any kind of reason to look for each other, and just sitting down and catching up—was actually kind of a new thing. Even with how old Cloud was at that point, and he was still figuring out how to be a real boy, like that one kids’ book had put it, and…that, he thinks, was when he decided he’d just try it out like Vincent was. What the hell, he had figured, it wasn’t like he didn’t have the time now.
He'd kept Vincent company for a couple of weeks afterward. They hadn’t ever had a chance to figure out if they could get along, not without the pressure of some looming threat over their heads, and Vincent had turned out to be decent company. Wasn’t exactly the kind of person you’d ask to watch your place when you were on a trip—when he said he preferred guns, he meant it, even if he always had good reasons and cleaned after himself—but Cloud wasn’t that presentable either. And he was observant enough to pick up all the little tics and habits Cloud thought he’d managed to hide that said Cloud was not enjoying himself, and then he’d do something about them. They didn’t have a hell of a lot in common, but they could talk to each other.
And, well, fuck each other. Cloud thought he’d made Tifa happy—she’d told him over and over that he had—and Vincent seemed interested in that kind of relationship. They weren’t in love, but Cloud didn’t need to be in love again and he didn’t have any reason not to.
But at the end of the month, Vincent had packed up his things and said something about going into Wutai, seeing Yuffie, and Cloud…didn’t feel like coming. Yuffie was sort of a friend of his too, but Vincent for some reason put up with her a lot more, and Cloud didn’t have to go. She was getting older, but as far as he knew, didn’t need help with running Wutai, and she wasn’t going to kick the bucket in the near future. He didn’t want to go.
So he didn’t. He told Vincent where he’d be instead and Vincent had nodded without protesting. Or promising to come find Cloud afterward, and sometimes Cloud wonders if he should have asked the man to. But he didn’t.
Vincent didn’t seem to take offense, and Cloud didn’t see him for a while. They kept their numbers in each other’s phones—still called each other if something big happened, since while Jenova was finally gone, it wasn’t like the Planet didn’t still have a lot wrong with it, or a decent-sized grudge against the people who’d made that happen. Sometimes when they saw each other it’d turn into a couple weeks or months here and there, but sometimes not.
And Cloud was fine with that. He met other people, who weren’t Tifa and Zack and Aerith and all his other dead friends but who were fine as friends for themselves, and he slowly got used to that idea. Back then, while he wanted Vincent to stick around, it didn’t feel like he needed the man with him, not all the time, and it seemed like Vincent felt similarly—at least, Vincent never gave him the impression that he’d fucked up something and Vincent was not shy about pointing things like that out when it came up. They just met when they met.
Years passed and Cloud tried a lot of different things, and some stuck like Vincent, while others fell away. Neo-Midgar became simply Midgar, as time receded enough for people to just see the period in between as a historical thing, something to talk about while they looked at bits of rubble in museum cases and shook their heads over fancy graphics about Mako overuse. Mako use, period—one of the funny things was it got so much easier to use other energy sources that all the extraction and containment you needed for Mako just was too much of a hassle for most people to remember how to work with it. Mako ended up being one of those things you built around, not with.
So it wasn’t the same Midgar as before but there was enough that carried over that Cloud found himself coming back to it—him, the country boy, and he laughed at himself even as he ended up owning a whole damn building, because it just got easier to take care of things that way whenever he came back.
And then the kids. He didn’t set out to start collecting them again, and the proof of that was the first one being Sephiroth, of all people.
There was something going on with the Planet again. They’d invented new technology to clean things up but equilibrium isn’t the same as stasis, as Reeve had told him a very long time ago, and like the rest of them the Planet lived on. Sometimes it just had some strange ideas about how to shake things up, Cloud had started to think, when he’d started running into monsters that looked like long-extinct species and then Vincent had called him from the southern Wutaian coast about a carcass that sounded a lot like a shrunken WEAPON. He’d been on his way out there when he’d walked into some angry mob in a border town and pushed it back enough to find a battered, bruised, wary woman trying to hide a little boy with Sephiroth’s face behind her.
Lucrecia had always been a single mother. She’d gotten pregnant off a short-lived relationship when she was still in college, defied her conservative family’s attempts to make her drop out, and then had taken a crappy job doing field biology studies on the border because they didn’t care if she took Sephiroth with her. She’d named him after the one Cloud had known, whose role in the whole Jenova mess had gotten kind of mixed up in the history books and who’d been sort of repurposed as a tragic figure in popular culture. In Midgar, anyway—on the Wutaian side he still showed up as a folklore villain, with the power to waste farmland with a single wave of his sword, and since there was an inexplicable blight in the rice fields right then, the lone woman carrying scientific gear around with her eerily well-spoken, silver-haired child triggered some connections.
Stupid ones, Cloud found himself thinking without thinking about it, and then he thought about it a little more as he escorted Lucrecia and Sephiroth back to his hotel room. It wasn’t just a lookalike, but was actually Sephiroth, he was sure of it—but Sephiroth without any kind of crusade against the Lifestream. And with a very, very protective mother, who was Lucrecia, as Vincent confirmed once Cloud got hold of him.
Although then Vincent declined to come meet the two of them in person, instead saying he’d handle the potential mini-WEAPON carcass on his own. Cloud wasn’t clear why for a while, since Lucrecia came away from the videocall considerably less tense, and for a couple months afterward she’d ask after Vincent in kind of an embarrassed, irritable way. She never exactly pushed on it, but it just…reminded Cloud she actually wasn’t that old at that point. Very determined and, though she wasn’t one to raise her voice, very opinionated, but at the same time she still seemed hopeful she might be able to find a happy life for herself and her son.
Which more than anything convinced Cloud he wasn’t going to do anything to Sephiroth—whatever the hell was going on this time, he’d give the kid a shot at being his own person first. For his mother’s sake, because by the time Cloud got them back to Midgar, he’d decided he liked her, and however the hell Sephiroth had come back, he was very clearly just a little kid at the moment.
* * *
Saving Sephiroth and his mother from that mob likely saved their lives, but that isn’t the moment Sephiroth thinks about when he remembers making the decision to follow Cloud. He’s only eight, but he knows he’s already far more intelligent than many of the adults around him, and once he’s grown tall enough for them to not overlook him, he knows he’ll be able to look after his mother and himself. It’s only such a slow, frustrating wait for that, his body catching up with his mind, and until it happens, all he can do is try to pass under the radar with a child’s harmlessness.
“No, I’m really thankful, but I can’t put you at risk too. You heard them out there, they’re just not—not rational right now. The Jenova Plague! Can you believe that?” his mother is saying as she and Cloud push a half-eaten container of takeout back and forth. “That wasn’t even zoonotic!”
“Actually, nobody even knows—what? What’s ‘zoonotic’?” Cloud says.
“It means it originated in animals and then adapted to infecting humans,” Sephiroth says under his breath. He’s finished his share and now that they’ve had a couple hours to sit without people chasing them, he realizes he’s actually very hungry. “Rice plants don’t catch diseases from mammals.”
“Yeah, that’d be…weird,” Cloud says, with a look on his face as if he preferred not knowing, which Sephiroth is used to. But then he sighs and just yanks the container from Sephiroth’s mother and pushes it over to him. “Here, you finish it if your mom doesn’t want it. I’m good. Look, I agree, nobody’s gonna listen to what’s really going on, but do we know what’s really going on? Because plants shouldn’t get diseases from animals, right, but I don’t think they’re imagining seeing things swim into their paddies and then all the plants start dying. That part sounded genuine.”
“Well, because it is, but no one is going to even find these things if they’re chasing poor children through the marketplace. Someone needs to just make them stop and think,” Sephiroth’s mother says, as she distractedly grabs some sauce packets out of the takeout bag and plops them beside Sephiroth. “Yes, you can have it, I’m full.”
“So stay in my room, I’ll give the mayor a call, you can tell him to his face and then see if he’s going to be reasonable. That’s not putting me at risk, that’s getting things to quiet down so I’m not stuck here either,” Cloud says. “It doesn’t bother me to include you.”
Sephiroth’s mother blinks hard. She’s been trying to talk to any local government official since their first week taking samples, going above and beyond her job duties and even spending her own money to file complaints to attract attention, but they’ve been utterly uninterested. She wants to take Cloud up on the offer, Sephiroth knows, but at the same time, she—rightly, he thinks—can’t quite believe how easily Cloud suggests that.
“I can’t ask you for that,” she finally says.
“Yeah, well, I’m calling him whether you do or not. I’m mad at him anyway, it’s not just you and your kid. What I’m asking is if you want to sit in on it,” Cloud says. And then he sits by and watches Sephiroth’s mother as she bites her lip, thinks it over, and then gives him a single nod. “Okay. You want the shower first? I need to call somebody else—I missed a flight—so if you want to do that, I’ll wait to call the mayor till afterward.”
“All right,” Sephiroth’s mother says. She starts to rise, then stops with her hand on the side of the couch. “I am—I can’t thank you enough for stepping in. But I can’t…I can’t repay you, or anything.”
Cloud shrugs. “Don’t really need you to, but I do want to know what you think happened in the rice paddies. If you think you know what did, if it’s not zoonotic, then what it is and all that.”
Sephiroth’s mother brightens a little bit at that, as she never can resist the chance to talk science. She almost starts right then, but catches herself, and then gives Sephiroth a kiss on the head and murmured ‘be polite’ before she goes into the bathroom. Then Sephiroth’s alone with Cloud, eating while Cloud flops back against the armchair and sighs and stares off into space. He’s not trying to make a call as he had said.
“Listen, if I go down and across the street for maybe ten minutes, is she still going to be in there? How long does she usually take?” Cloud asks, while still looking at the wall.
“Excuse me?” Sephiroth says, startled at being addressed.
“The mayor’s over there, that’s where his girlfriend lives, and I’m actually a lot more pissed off than I look. I can make a quick point to him, then come back and get on the phone from here, but only if you don’t make me chase you down again,” Cloud says, and then he looks at Sephiroth. There’s an odd, intent expression on his face. “Do you love your mom?”
“Yes!” Sephiroth snaps, and then frowns. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“No reason—stupid question. Just…I think you’ve been listening, and if you think you and your mom can sneak out and get away without help, that’s going to be really hard to do. All the roads are fucked-up and whatever’s in those fields probably is causing it,” Cloud says. “So I want the mayor to make sure you’re left alone, and then I can kill some of them, and your mom can probably do something with the dead bodies to figure out what’s happening. Would that help?”
“…yes,” Sephiroth says. “But—but why?”
Cloud looks at him for several seconds, Sephiroth remembers. It’s not like how other people look at him, not with disgust or hatred or fear—and it doesn’t have any of that off-putting curiosity a few have, where Sephiroth can tell they’re constantly thinking I am speaking to a child the way one would when speaking to a gifted mimic like a parrot. In fact, Cloud genuinely seems to be speaking to him the way the man’s just spoken with his mother, and this is why Sephiroth remembers this moment.
“Because I do this kind of thing,” Cloud mutters. He shrugs, runs one hand through his hair, and then leans over and frowns at the food container Sephiroth is eating from. “Do you need more food while I’m out? How much do you eat right now? Can you ballpark it?”
Sephiroth also remembers how awkward the man was with children. But even so, he ends up deciding to follow the man, and he never regrets that decision.
* * *
Cloud figured he’d just make sure Lucrecia and Sephiroth were all right, but he was going to leave after that, because he and Vincent did need to look into this reincarnation thing. It had to be connected to the WEAPONs and no matter how many times he had to deal with those, he didn’t get any fonder of it. So he already had some money and a place to live, but he went and got a job too so he could make sure the two of them would be protected.
Science has advanced enough that physical aging is more of a lifestyle choice these days, even if overall lifespan’s still capped at way below what Cloud’s hit, and Cloud had given up on hiding his immortality a couple generations ago. He’d scared the mob as much because they recognized him as that guy who periodically showed up to kill the monsters as because it was well-known science hadn’t come up with something that could take him out, and so it’s not really that hard this time around to work his way up the chain. He’s not any bigger on politics than when Shinra was the only game in town, but he keeps tabs on people. He gets a position in the current Midgar government overseeing external threats, hires Lucrecia into one of the R&D teams, and figures once she’s established herself and they’ve ruled out Hojo coming back, he’ll resign.
He never does.
He thinks about it, especially at the beginning, but things always just seem to come up. Lucrecia’s the one who starts to pull the pieces together, figuring out a way to detect trace compounds in the water that eventually lead to the discovery of WEAPONs spawning off Junon’s coast and under the Northern Crater. They’re a lot smaller than the ones Cloud remembers, but they breed—they’re a damn species now, not just one-off opponents the Planet pushes out whenever it thinks people are getting too uppity, and the only purpose they seem to have is to poison all the resources wherever they are.
So Cloud’s position goes from shiny figurehead trophy to actually seriously necessary, and he ends up building a group called MSec—it's SOLDIER, but he’s not calling it that because he doesn’t need that many reminders—as a worldwide defensive strike force. Which, okay, he’s not bad at it, considering he’s mostly been a lone wolf his whole life and the times he wasn’t, he was working with people who’d been screwed by Shinra R&D same as him, but it’s still weird.
It gets weirder when a couple years later, Lucrecia goes to Banora for a field expedition and brings back grade-school versions of Genesis and Angeal with her, along with Angeal’s terminally-ill mother and blood samples indicating that, even though nobody was running an experimental genetics lab down there, they’re still shaping up to have some unusual stuff in their genes. When they’d first gotten to Midgar, they’d put Sephiroth through a battery of intelligence tests purely so Lucrecia could get the documentation necessary to get him approved for home-schooling, but they hadn’t checked him for anything else. She does that now, and then sits in Cloud’s office in the dark until he gets back from some meeting, clutching the test results.
“I told her nobody was going to call them mutants and send them off to get experimented on,” Cloud tells Vincent a couple hours later, since while Vincent still doesn’t come to visit, he does answer his phone. “They pull that this time around, I’d like to see what my test results look like. And then I’m going to wreck things till people stop having those ideas.”
Vincent’s somewhere with bad reception, but the videocall quality is still good enough to show he’s cut his hair off. Chin-length, clean-edged, and the bit of his collar that occasionally shows looks like a tailored suit. “Was she reassured?”
Cloud grimaces before he can help himself. “I think she believes me, but she’s also still trying to figure out if it was her bringing him into her college lab as a baby that contaminated him. She’s still got a guilty streak over it.”
“It wasn’t,” Vincent says, which is more than enough for Cloud to look at him and regret not following up on that mini-WEAPON in person. Vincent presses his lips together, then tilts his phone so that Cloud can see he’s standing in some Wutaian temple. “I ran across Tseng, purely by accident. It’s not a lab experiment, it’s something in the environment.”
“Do you think it’s the WEAPONs?” Cloud asks, because the Planet’s never reincarnated people before, but if it can pop out WEAPONs over and over again, they probably should have asked why not. “He wasn’t a supersoldier the first time around. I mean, they aren’t either, but I was figuring they were all Jenova test subjects.”
Vincent shrugs. He’s walking, and then he moves around and shows Cloud what looks like a stack of strangely curved metal plates—pieces of WEAPON carapaces. From more than one, judging from the different colors. “He’s not one this time either. He’s just a child—an orphan. From what I understand, one of the new WEAPONs crawled into the water tank in his neighborhood and poisoned everyone but him.”
Cloud inhales sharply at the sight of the plates, almost pushing up from his seat. Then he pauses and looks at Vincent again, the sliver of profile that is still in frame. “Have you been looking for Hojo?”
“It’s not him either. I made sure a long time ago,” Vincent says, and then moves the phone so that his face is back in frame. He’s frowning because Cloud’s letting out a rough laugh. “Were you hoping it was?”
“No, I—but he did come back?” Cloud asks. “And you found him?”
Vincent pauses for a moment, then nods. Cloud isn’t sure what Vincent does to make money now, but right then he thinks about how he’d tried a bunch of other jobs himself and then ended up a soldier again anyway. There aren’t Turks these days—covert ops sits in MSec and reports to him—or Shinra, but the hair and the suit make Cloud remember those days.
“It’s not him, and it’s not anything lab-made. I confirmed that, you can tell her so,” Vincent says, and he sounds certain but flat, like he’s reporting on the weather. It’s with the next part that he warms up, a distinctly interested thread in his voice as he picks out an armored plate the size of his hand from the stack. He turns it so that Cloud can see how the edges don’t look cut, can tell it’s just the whole plate and not a fragment. “These WEAPONs…some of them can be very small, even at maturity. It’s been too long to check around her old lab, but it might not be to check wherever she found Rhapsodos and Hewley.”
“Yeah. Yeah, we’re going to send a—I’m going to make this into one of our top initiatives. We’ve got to figure out where they’re coming from before they hit a major city,” Cloud says, and then gets up, but this time it’s because he’s heard something in the next room.
It’s Lucrecia. Looking up from blowing her nose, with puffy red eyes and printouts of the test results spread out all over the tablet in front of her, along with scientific papers. History books that Cloud has around, because every so often he’ll crack one open and read something hilariously wrong. Printouts from the Internet of old-timey engravings of dramatic monster-hero confrontations, with captions about folklore. Printouts of conspiracy theory bullshit with modern graphics of men and women with glowing eyes and black patches on their skin and stuff about doomsday around them.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be so loud,” she’s saying, and then she follows Cloud’s line of sight to the tablet precariously balanced beside her, which is showing a news story about a WEAPON carcass that’d washed up on the Wutaian coast. “I can—I should probably leave. I know you have work to do.”
“I’m just—” Cloud glances at his phone and only then realizes that Vincent ended the videocall at some point. For a moment he frowns, but then he shrugs and puts it down and takes a seat. He can call Vincent back later. Right now, something about this scene’s nagging at him, in a way he’s learned to pay attention to over the years. “It’s about the same thing you’re looking into anyway.”
Lucrecia tries out a smile on him, and halfway through gives up on it and starts to look grim instead. “It can’t be determinative, not this early. They haven’t even started puberty, for Gaia’s sake.”
Cloud picks up a printout, reads a line about Geostigma zombies sucking the lifeforce out and decapitation and drops it with a grimace. “Determinative of what?”
“Of—Cloud, you can’t—I know it sounds insane but there are traces of this, back in the records of the—”
“That was all laboratory stuff and this isn’t. You didn’t sign up for anything beyond standard genetics screening, you said that, and Gillian didn’t even get the usual tests because she couldn’t afford prenatal,” Cloud reminds her. He sees a flash of hope in Lucrecia’s eyes, but then she takes a deep, shaking breath, while her gaze steadies to iron. “Just what do you think is going on, exactly?”
“This is my son, so I have to know. Whatever it is, I have to—I have to know, and if it’s that he’s showing signs of mutations that—that that alien plague from the Shinra era…” And then Lucrecia takes another ragged breath. Her fist is white-knuckled where it’s pressed against the table. “Gaia. You know, the ob-gyn I had—he told me, that name was probably going to bring bad luck. Sephiroth died young, before the plague even really got going. But there has to be a cure. There has to be.”
Jenova’s been rationalized to just some kind of meteorite-borne illness at this point. Cloud still has genetic markers from her in his cells, even if she’s long gone, and that theory, distorted as it is, has let him handwave a lot of the changes in his DNA as stuff that shouldn’t be replicated, ever. It suits him okay to have genetics concentrate on eradicating diseases rather than trying to make supersoldiers again, but here the Planet’s gone mucking around in that, and now…now Lucrecia thinks Sephiroth’s going to die young. If she doesn’t do something drastic to stop it, and Cloud’s known her long enough at this point to know what she can do when she puts her mind to it.
He's also known enough people who’ve gotten lost in their obsessions, however well-intentioned, to know what the early stages of that looks like. She wanted to listen to Hojo at the beginning, he suddenly remembers Vincent telling him once, when the man had opened up about how things had started to go wrong. And she was a better scientist than him, if anything.
“Wait,” Cloud says, and then, when she jerks her head up the same way she does any time some bureaucrat tries to dismiss her findings, he puts his hand up. “This is all really old info, and nobody’s fact-checked it in decades. Longer.”
“Because it’s not allowed,” Lucrecia points out.
“Because it’s not allowed to replicate the genes, and if you want to work with it, you have to have a specimen for testing in the first place, right? Otherwise it’s all just what people heard from their grandparents about the bad old days,” Cloud says. Then he has to raise his hand again, guessing from her expression where she thinks he’s going with this. “I’m not saying put Seph—”
“Well, that’s what everyone else is going to suggest. In the best scenario, where they’re not just demanding to put him and those two poor boys in quarantine,” Lucrecia says, fear making her tone rough and grating. “Because we were on the border with Wutai and Genesis and Angeal were in Banora, and so far apart—the spread of this must already be—”
Cloud sighs and rubs at the side of his face. “I think we’re jumping ahead.”
“And why? Why do you think that? What do you know, Cloud?” Lucrecia snaps. When he looks up at her, she stiffens but she doesn’t lower her gaze. “I know—I know you’re older than you look, we all know that, but…you’re not a scientist.”
Nope, he thinks. Nope, and it’s not like in the aftermath they’d been doing careful tests to document exactly what went down in Shinra R&D. Even now, if he’s got to walk into a lab, he thinks about how long it’d take him to break out if he had to. So he knows but he doesn’t have the details, never wanted the details, and—well, he still doesn’t want to end up a lab test subject. But on the other hand…they have to do something about this. He has to.
“Damn it,” Lucrecia says quietly, dropping her head into her hands. She massages her face, then raises it to show only darker circles under her eyes than before. “I’m sorry. I’m—not trying to say that you—it’s not like you haven’t risked your life enough times, I just…I don’t know what to do with this. I always knew Sephiroth was different, but I just…”
Wasn’t expecting this. Not that any of them were, except the goddamn Planet with its crazy ideas about restoring balance, and inability to fucking talk to anyone since the Cetra are extinct. If it could bring back Sephiroth, it could’ve at least tried to undo that, clearly nothing’s stopping it, Cloud thinks sourly, and right then he decides he isn’t doing this again either. “He’s not going to die.”
“I know you’re trying to make me feel better, Cloud,” Lucrecia says after a moment, half-laughing in the way you do when you’re out of tears. “But it’s all right. You’ve helped us more than you ever needed to anyway, and—and I can’t ask you—”
“Yeah, you’re not, and I’m still saying it. I’m the Director of Midgar Security, if I can’t make sure we handle this without sacrificing some kids, I don’t know why I’m even bothering,” Cloud says.
Lucrecia just stares at him for a few seconds. She looks vacant enough that he wonders if he might need to repeat himself, or add some more, but just as he’s starting to, she shakes her head. She looks at him, comprehending but still in shock. “Oh. I…didn’t even think you liked children,” she says, and then flushes with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it came out, I know what you’ve done for us, but you—”
“Yeah, I just wave to them and then walk out,” Cloud says, with a sigh. It’s just…eerie, to look at the kids and know they’re kids but see exact miniatures of other men, and Cloud has plenty of excuses to not stick around, but he can deal with that better. Talk about ways to make a kid think he’s got no one to think about but himself…he can do better. “I’m bad with them, but that doesn’t mean I want to see them get treated wrong. Just…figure out what you need to look into this, and tell me, and we’ll make it happen. If you need exceptions, I’ll get us exceptions. Okay?”
And this, he thinks, as Lucrecia finally starts to look like she believes him—this is going to be the difference. Because he’s old enough, now, and has been through enough bad times to know what the good times should look like, and so when he fights for them, he knows what he’s aiming for. He knows what he’s got to put up against this. It’s not just a prayer and a dream, but actual memories. And he’s had his mind fucked with enough, he should know what’s harder to take away for good.
“Okay,” Lucrecia says. She puts her hands flat against the table. They tremble and it goes all the way up to her shoulders, but she shrugs it off. She takes a breath, and then looks up at him. “Yes. Yes, we’re going to beat this. I’ll—we’ll find a way.”
“Great,” Cloud says, reaching for his phone again. “What do you and Sephiroth want for dinner?”
Lucrecia looks oddly at him, then bursts out laughing. “Noodles,” she says, and then lifts her hand as if she’s going to take that back and say something else, but she can’t stop giggling long enough. “Noodles. Noodles, from that one Wutaian place…oh, Gaia, you really think so?”
“Yeah, after we eat,” Cloud says, because he’s not kidding but also, he’s hungry. And he knows they’re just getting started here, so they might as well.
Lucrecia snorts again, then wipes at her eyes. She gives him one last look like she might be wondering how sane either of them are, and then she starts diving into her research. And this, Cloud thinks later, is when they stopped being people who’d crossed paths and started being friends.
* * *
As glad as he was to leave Banora, with the memories of his family collapsing one by one from incurable illness in various rooms of his home, Genesis expects very little out of their new hosts in Midgar. He’s unfortunately not old enough yet to be eligible for emancipation, but he knows people and he knows how they dress up misdeeds in fine clothing to sit next to you at the dinner table, and no one ever does anyone a favor without wanting something for it. All he wants is for them to take Angeal and Gillian with them, because Gillian tried to nurse Genesis’ family when no one else would touch them for any amount of money and when she’s gone, Genesis needs Angeal nearby if he’s going to help his friend. Since Gaia knows Angeal’s just like his mother, and will build someone else a house before tying on a tourniquet to keep himself from bleeding out.
Dr. Crescent at least seems intelligent, and practical, even if her son is infuriatingly haughty for a fatherless merit-scholar who thinks he’s already got a bibliography of published papers as long as his mother, just because he helped cite-check her references. She doesn’t have to be asked to ensure they have adequate schooling, and readily explains when questioned that their respective family assets have been put into trust until they come of age. She’s a little denser when it comes to society networking, but so long as Genesis can demonstrate it might have a smidgen of educational value, she usually gives in.
“I wish you’d stop throwing in the guilt-trip, though,” Angeal says to him. “I’m pretty sure she was going to say yes anyway, you didn’t need to make it sound like she wanted to get us out of her hair that fast. Sephiroth noticed.”
“Sephiroth can come debate it with me once he’s decided on what ridiculous book he’d rather read about swordplay instead of finding a good rapier,” Genesis snorts. “Then we’ll see how he does.”
Angeal looks at him, worried—why, Genesis doesn’t know, since he wouldn’t have been first in his age-group in Banora if he wasn’t good enough to keep a first-timer from hurting themselves—and then straightens up sharply. “Hi, sir.”
“Don’t call me that, you’re not enlisted,” General Strife says as he magically appears in their section of the store. He doesn’t bat an eye at how Genesis almost yelps in surprise and Genesis wishes he could resent the man for being exactly the legend he’s claimed to be. “Is that what you’re going with?”
“Yes,” Genesis says warily, clutching his new blade a little tighter. Fencing’s as popular with the elite here as it is in Banora, and also he put far too much effort into his ranking to let it drop. Since they could barely sneak any personal items out of quarantine before they came to Midgar, he’s determined to have something just as good as his old one, and this as close as he sees. “Why?”
“It’s kind of long for you. Right now, I mean, I guess you’ll grow into it,” General Strife says, with a strange twitch of the head that he shakes off. He looks at Angeal. “And that one’s way too short.”
“Yeah, I—I didn’t really—do this. But Gen and Sephiroth are signing up, and I’d like to learn too,” Angeal says, faltering and then making an effort to spur himself, even before Genesis kicks his calf. “I do know a little about swords—machetes, anyway. I helped my parents outside.”
“I can manage this,” Genesis says. “It’s only a little longer than the one I had before.”
General Strife is someone Genesis can’t quite understand. He has far too much clout and far too much to do with it than rescue a pair of orphans, even if they’re connected to what seems like the R&D projects he’s most interested in, and he doesn’t really seem to be comfortable around children. Genesis has the strong impression that Dr. Crescent specifically asked the man to wave to them whenever he sees them. But he’s also not afraid of them, or any contamination they might carry, since Genesis has heard him chewing out various people for implying that. And every so often, General Strife will suddenly take an interest in them, and when he does—it’s never quite how Genesis would expect.
“Yeah, well, then your teacher was an idiot. You already tend to overextend, that’s just gonna make that worse,” the General says, and then he turns to the rack. He frowns at it, then picks out another rapier. “You use this, and work on centering yourself.”
“How do you know? You’ve never even seen me fight,” Genesis snaps.
“I’ve seen you two chasing each other with brooms instead of cleaning the porch,” General Strife mutters. Then he grimaces and ducks his head, as if he’s the one who has reason to be embarrassed. “I was just in to grab something I forgot, happened to see. Wasn’t just looking to look.”
“We…live in your house,” Angeal says, sounding as confused as Genesis feels about General Strife…apologizing to them for spying on them? “Well, anyway, that’s really nice of you. Right, Gen?”
“Right,” Genesis says reluctantly, because he has manners, even if he…he looks at the rapier General Strife has. The man is known for his swordsmanship, and he should know what he’s talking about. “But I am going to grow taller.”
“Then we can buy you a new one. I’m not saying you have to stick with that your whole life,” General Strife says, and then that odd twitch goes through him again. “Buying more doesn’t bother me, and you don’t have to put up with the same one once you outgrow it. You can get one that actually suits you.”
He presses his lips as if he’d stopped himself from saying more and just hands Genesis the rapier. It does feel better in Genesis’ hand, he has to admit; the other one is closer to what he’d been working with in Banora, but his old sword also had been a bit lighter.
“You sure you want to?” General Strife is now saying to Angeal. “You don’t have to, we can still take you to the lessons if you just want to watch.”
“I’m only going to the first few,” Sephiroth says as he comes over to them, book in hand. “Kendo starts in another month, and then I’ll be going back to that.”
Genesis blinks in surprise and he sees a smirk briefly flash over Sephiroth’s face. The other boy hadn’t mentioned he had any kind of sword experience at all, and he’d let Genesis assume…Angeal steps on Genesis’ foot again, but then puts a hand on Genesis’ shoulder.
“Nah, if Genesis is doing it, I figure it must be interesting,” he says.
“Seriously?” General Strife mutters, but he doesn’t sound as if he’s agreeing with Angeal or with Sephiroth. He actually sounds as if he’s commenting on something completely different, but he’s still looking at them, not at something happening somewhere else. Then he straightens up. “Okay, whatever you all want, it’s not like we don’t have the money. But you should just—if you want to do it because it’s fun, then fine. But if you’re doing it because you think it’s gonna get you something else, that’s not how you learn to use a sword. That’s how you learn to be showy, and there’s a hell of a lot of other ways you can do that.”
“I’m good at it,” Genesis says, feeling a little stung. “I’m good at it, and—”
“Hey, look, I’m not saying you can’t be showy,” the General says, and at least he sounds a little regretful. “Show off or whatever, but not with a sword. You’ll hurt people that way.”
“Well, you do. That’s why you have a sword, in case you have to,” Angeal points out, in a very quiet but still audible tone.
Sephiroth stiffens and then gives him a vicious glare which has Genesis glaring right back at the boy. But the General himself seems unoffended. “Yeah, I know, I do. I try to do it for the right reasons, but at the end of the day, when I take my sword out, I’m probably going to hurt somebody with it. Which is what I’m saying, you should know what you’re doing when you take one out. I know you’re good, Genesis, but do you want people to pay attention to your skills or to whoever you just beat?”
That’s not why Genesis fights, he starts to say, except that he realizes that he’s not sure what he’d say after that. He closes his mouth and Angeal looks over at him, then steps closer to his side.
“Fuck. Okay, let’s just—we’ll get that one, and…forget I just cursed too,” General Strife says, looking increasingly uncomfortable. “Never mind, I didn’t want to make this into a mess. You’re kids, you should get to try what you want and see if you like it. No one’s going to hold it against you, unless they want to see me.”
“Then…thank you, I will take this one,” Genesis says after a moment. He still doesn’t understand the General, but strangely, he doesn’t feel as if he’s being exploited or belittled. He wants this sword, and he wants his lessons again, and when things feel a little more settled, maybe he’ll think about what General Strife is saying. But he does agree, it’s not like it hurts to do it till then.
“Great,” General Strife says. “Angeal? You want that one?”
“I…no.” Angeal glances quickly at Genesis, but still hands over the sword he has. “No, I want one, but not that—it doesn’t feel right. I want one that feels right, so if I’m going to try it, I know it’s me and not it if it doesn’t work out. I’m sorry, I know we’re taking longer than you said.”
“Mother wanted us back by dinner,” Sephiroth says, ignoring Genesis’ glower.
General Strife checks his phone, grimaces, and then looks off into the distance again for a second. “Yeah,” he finally says. “Yeah, I know, but I…Sephiroth, just tell her we’re running a little late. Okay, Angeal, c’mere, let’s look at the sabers. I just want to see how it feels to you.”
“Okay,” Angeal says, trailing after Cloud to the next section.
It’s obvious in hindsight that that was the beginning for him, with Angeal moving from saber to broadsword once he started gaining muscle mass in puberty, and then straight into MSec once compulsory schooling was over. But it’s many years before Genesis does do that thinking, and sees that it was the same moment for him. Holding his sword in his hand but thinking about it differently, thinking about it not as a channel for everything he felt but wasn’t allowed to say but as…one thing he could do. One thing among many he’s tried, because they’re all simply tools at the end of the day.
What he’s never given up on is wanting the power to show the world, to speak and make sure it listens to him. And, he thinks, he was listened to that day. That was the first day.