fic: eir's tomorrow (ff7) - ch.15, part 1/2

[jukeboxhound]

Slightly revised version.  Short explanation here.

Eir's Tomorrow
Chapter 15 (part 1/2)

Author: jukeboxhound 
Co-conspirator/beta: artimusdin

FF7 || R || Sephiroth/Cloud || chapter: 10,120 words
The Planet isn't willing to let death take away its greatest weapon. If Cloud can't save the past, then he'll be damned to watch history repeat itself.



15.

For the last two weeks, the SOLDIERs in Midgar had been uneasy. Rumor had it that Genesis and Angeal were in the city causing all the recent civil unrest, or maybe inciting rebellion within ShinRa itself, no one really seemed to know for sure. Zack Fair, SOLDIER prodigy, had been not only attacked but taken down, right in the middle of the ShinRa Tower. And Sephiroth, usually so cool and collected, was growing visibly agitated to the point that people flattened themselves against the wall as he passed. Something was going on, but the few people who knew weren't talking.

So when Genesis died, several unexpected things happened.

Every SOLDIER, in Midgar or abroad, felt it like a blow to the skull. The Thirds and most of the Seconds were only dazed; a few of the higher-ranking officers collapsed into what seemed eerily like the delirium of mako sickness. It was unspoken, uneasy knowledge that the three Firsts could manifest wings, but when Sephiroth suddenly disappeared from Mideel in a flurry of dark feathers, he left behind panic and confusion.

In Nibelheim's ShinRa mansion, Angeal felt Genesis' death as a soul-ripping agony. It was a Wutaian general's spear breaking his ribs all over again, it was every one of Sephiroth's cold and distant stares, it was every time Genesis' words had dripped with poison, all at once. But he had Zack in his arms and the mansion and its labs were burning, and he could hear the enraged roar of the beast that Valentine had become, and he couldn't. He couldn't save him.

In Nibelheim itself, Odin had called up a storm. He was the god of such things and the elements obeyed him: the sky turned black, the rain came in punishing force, the wind howled alongside the thunder. The fires that Hel's child had created weren't natural, were more suited to Muspelheim rather than Nibelheim, and were the kind of flames that couldn't be put out by mundane means. But he remembered the woman who had Summoned him (protect my child, keep him safe) so as he looked down upon the destruction being wrought by Hel's child, he extended his own version of mercy. The villagers, their flesh splitting and lungs shriveling with smoke and heat, dropped painlessly to the ground and their souls went Hel for her to deal with. Odin's storms would last long enough to drown the fire.

And through the unnatural connection created by mako and cells and Jenova-Cloud's will, Genesis had insinuated himself into the screaming chaos of Cloud's mind. When he died, he took part of Cloud with him.

Cloud's last thought was Sephiroth.

…

Cid was pissed. Seriously, the next time he saw that kid with the spiky hair he was going to be kicking some ass, SOLDIER or not. Focusing on the flames that had nearly consumed the Highwind was a fucking good way of not thinking about the village he'd just seen massacred.

He was getting too old for this shit.

He'd been in his cabin going over weather reports when one of his men on the top deck burst into the room, screaming his fool head off about fire, fire in the village, it's heading towards us! The ship was already lurching under his feet as his second-in-command got the motors running and the wheel spinning, and he'd burst onto the deck already yelling for the damn idiot to get the ship into the air, seven hundred feet at least, ain't no fucking way he was letting his Highwind go so easy.

As the ship rose, he heard screams over the roar of the flames, and he froze as reason kicked a space through his adrenaline and reminded him that there were people down there. Dying. And he had a big fucking airship that wasn't no damn good to any of them because the heat of the fire would turn her hull to slag. All he and his men could do was watch as the village turned into a nightmarish slaughter. They watched as the tiny, distant figure of a young man strode unhurriedly from the mansion, a red cloak and the feathers on arched wings buffeted by the wind of combustion.

They watched as the already overcast sky grew dark and angry and an Odin Summons tore it apart, bringing with it a storm that washed away the fires and made every poor soul in that village drop dead on their feet. When Genesis died, he apparently took the terrifying young man with him and both fell to the ground as useless corpses.

Was there fucking anyone left alive?

The ship's PHS on the navigation array started ringing. Cid scattered papers and cigarette butts in his mad dash to find the fucking thing, managing to ram his finger against a steel lever in the process. When he found it, he yanked a piece of gum off the earpiece and jabbed the button.

"What the fuck is going on?" he snarled.

"Cid?"

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Cid, it's Reeve. Cait Sith is my robot - just listen to me, Cid, you need to get them out of there. They're still alive - well, most of them, I don't know, Cait Sith is having trouble getting through all the static in that area - you need to fly down and get them!"

"How the fuck do you expect me to do that when it's fucking raining cats and dogs and all this fucking lightning and whatever's going on down there is fucking with my navigation systems?"

"You're the captain, Highwind, figure it out!"

Cid threw the phone somewhere to his right and started barking at his crew as he switched from autopilot to manual. "Stop staring like it's a goddamn peepshow and get your asses in gear! You two, take the rudder, keep us from getting shoved sideways against a mountain. You, get over here and keep an eye on the system while I take the wheel. The rest of you, get the fuck down to the engine room and keep her from fucking blowing herself up!"

The power of the wind outside made the wheel push against his hands with the strength of a bull. Cid ground his feet into the deck planks and heaved, tilting the Highwind at a dangerous angle before the rudder forced her back upright. He turned in the direction where the ShinRa mansion used to be, cursing ShinRa engineers and SOLDIERs and the goddamn kitchen sink just to be thorough.

When the PHS crackled again, he yelled at his copilot, "Get the fucking phone!"

"We see you!" came Cait Sith's voice, no longer cheerful but rather manic. "Approximately five hundred feet starboard!"

"Give me some fucking margin for error! You, check the gyrocompass, I can't see for shit out there!"

"But sonar - "

"How do you expect to use the sonar in this weather? Check the fucking gyrocompass!"

As suddenly as it had come, the wind dropped, the rain dissipated into a light drizzle, and the deep gloom began to lighten as though someone had flipped a switch. The Summons must've been dismissed, Cid thought wildly, as the ship rolled under their feet with the sudden shift of balance. Fucking Summons and their unnatural magic, screwing with everyone's heads -

"Let down some ropes!"

His men threw rope ladders over the side. Cait Sith kept up a running commentary to warn the crew when to start pulling them back up, and that was how Cid knew that some rather unpleasant sounds were coming from the mako reactor, a mile away but still large enough to make that distance mean nothing.

"It's a meltdown," Cait Sith groaned, voice broken up by white noise. "I don't - shit!"

There wasn't any time to worry about the cat as the first people were pulled up. A giant red feline had somehow managed to keep a firm enough hold on an unconscious Elena to get her to the ship, and then Angeal followed, his body hunched over Zack's defensively.

"Where the fuck is everyone else?" Cid demanded. "Where's Cait Sith?"

"He went back for Tifa," Angeal grunted.

"And that flower-girl?"

"She was in the village," the general said hoarsely.

Aeris, meanwhile, could hear the engines of the Highwind and the groans of the reactor. She looked at the distance towards the mansion, where the ship hovered, and back down at Cloud, and nodded to herself.

She'd never be able to move him with those broken wings flopping about all over the place, so she pulled out Vincent's cloak from under him and wrapped it around the wings, pinning them safely to his body. Then she knelt behind him and pushed him to a sitting position. She could have cheered when she realized that he was still in there, somewhere, enough that his body would respond to being moved, less like being outright dead and more like being in a mako coma. Thank you, thank you, thank you, it meant he wasn't gone, but then something up near the reactor exploded and she really shouldn't be getting distracted right now. Aeris stumbled a few times, but she managed to get one of Cloud's arms around her shoulders and him on his feet. His balance was shot but he could just about move one foot in front of the other as long as she held him upright. Aeris tried hard not to look at him too closely, not because of his nakedness but because of the bruises and half-healed scarring.

Cloud was pressed close against her side. He was far too cold, and she still couldn't sense anything that was Cloud, and even Fenrir seemed to know something was wrong from the way he kept nudging Cloud's dangling hand and whining. "If we get out of this," she murmured, "you and Zack and I are going to take a nice, long bath before wrapping ourselves up in blankets and eating ice cream until we're sick."

Cloud didn't respond, but she could imagine how he'd just shrug and go with it because he seemed to trust her that much, and the tears she had to blink back weren't from smoke. She kept speaking as they stumbled towards the Highwind, not just to reassure herself but to give Cloud something real to hold onto, to remind him that there were things worth coming back for.

"And you know Zack's going to want to watch one of his bad horror movies, so I'll need you to distract him while I change the disc, and maybe Sephiroth could join us too. I'll make another apple pie, but I don't think you've ever tried my peach cobbler, and we can watch Zack flail or how Sephiroth probably eats like a cat and make fun of them both…"

It was slow going. The bruises around her midsection were hurting like hell and her breath was coming out in short gasps because of the smoke damage, but she didn't stop. She just kept talking about Zack's loud music and how Sephiroth really needed a vacation, so who better to spend it with but the three of them? Underneath it all Aeris knew that the Planet was angry, as angry and terrified as something so ancient and enormous could be.

The will to survive. The relativity of events. Destroying one cell to save the rest.

Someone on the airship must've had a sharp eye. Angeal was coming down a rope ladder already, a harness in hand for the very unhappy wolf. He gently took Cloud from her, and they all watched from the deck as the earth shuddered when the reactor snarled and spat to the background of ripping, screeching metal. Its enormous external pipes shattered into pieces and there was raw mako flooding out, streaming down the mountain like a flooding river and swallowing up everything in its path. By the time the Highwind left, the Nibel valley was a lake of glowing green.

"Where're Tifa and Cait Sith?"

"Where's Cissnei?"

…

When Sephiroth later tried to consciously reconcile himself to everything that was happening he found himself at a loss for words. Human language simply didn't have the words for the way one being could be so intrinsically tied up with another, what it was like for a small animal mind to hear the planets singing.

Resisting Cloud when screamed into the Lifestream was like trying to stop a hurricane with his bare hands. It pulled at every cell in his body like an enormous magnet to metal filings, it resonated through him like a tuning fork on piano strings, until the external world and every one of his other senses were drowned out. When his wings manifested, it was because that was the only way his human mind and physical body could understand his soul being yanked out of him.

All SOLDIERs had some level of Jenova cells, but the Firsts had the most. They also had the highest level of pure mako in their veins. Perhaps that was what gave the Firsts, and only the Firsts, their wings. Perhaps that was why Cloud had manifested two complete ones. And perhaps that was why some measure of rationality calmed the mindless instinct when Sephiroth pressed himself against Cloud's body, buried his hands into the blood-stiffened feathers. Cloud was grown now, fully grown, but in his shock and confusion Sephiroth couldn't find anything strange about that. Of course Cloud was older, that was how Sephiroth had first known him and that was how he should've been all along anyway.

So Sephiroth wrapped his larger body around Cloud (in a bed, he was dimly aware that they were lying on a bed) and curled his single wing over them both to block out the soft evening light coming in through open windows. He wasn't sure where his coat or gloves had gone - had he taken them off? Might've been lost in the fight with the WEAPON. He couldn't remember but it didn't matter. Not when he could slide his arms around Cloud and tangle his fingers in the downy feathers at the curve where wings met skin. Mineminemine was the only thing his thoughts and senses seemed to agree on, one voice crying with a child's relief at feeling safe again, another voice urging him to crawl into Cloud's skin and take him. To take him and keep him, to dominate him so that Cloud could never leave again or hold that kind of power over Sephiroth again.

Two days passed without change.

…

Cloud was in a future that no longer existed.

Sephiroth had been stopped three years ago, though not without consequences. The Remnants' arrival six months ago had been taken care of before more irreparable damage could be done. But now, now, something else was going wrong with the Planet.

Not that anyone knew what it was, exactly. The groundwater was coming up from wells with a dark oily sheen and Cloud had the bodies of mutated frogs and fish for the WRO researchers in his pack. He was just outside the door of Reeve's office when he heard Tifa's raised voice.

" - falling apart," she was saying with what sounded like tears tightening her throat. "He's gone for weeks at a time. I thought things would be better now, that maybe he isn't quite so bad as before, but I don't know what to do."

"Tifa," said Reeve tiredly, "he's trying to help us figure out what's going on, and you're expecting too much of him."

What does that mean? Cloud thought in bewilderment.

"What are you talking about?" she echoed.

"Hojo took him when he was sixteen, Tifa. Do you remember what you were like at sixteen years old, in the middle of puberty? Whatever sense of his own identity he might've had was completely taken away from him. He didn't even know he was Cloud until five and a half years later."

Cloud started wondering if he should leave or burst into the office and demand to know what the hell, Reeve, shut up. Tifa was tellingly silent.

"From what I understand, he didn't exactly grow up in a supportive environment," and if his voice had been any drier it would've rivaled Cosmo Canyon, "and he lost both his best friend and idol. If Cloud didn't have post-traumatic stress, then I'd truly start worrying."

Stop talking about me like I'm something to study.

Stop treating me like I'm weak. Not you two.

Cloud pushed the door open with a blank expression, ignoring the combined guilt and surprise on Reeve's and Tifa's faces. He slung the pack he held onto Reeve's desk, uncaring of the paperwork, and said quietly, "I got these down near Gongaga for your scientists about two days ago. They should still be fresh enough for them to study."

He left without another word, not wanting to hear whatever else they were going to say.

…

When Zack woke up to a room with silk wall hangings and a gentle breeze coming in through the open windows, he thought he'd died and gone to the Promised Land. Which was, okay, a nice thought, wasn't like he rather wake up somewhere a little more fiery, but it would've been nice to have company.

"Zack?" came Aeris' voice from somewhere to his left, and hey, awesome. Wait, that'd mean Aeris had died too. Not cool, heroes weren't supposed to let their girlfriends die. Although if the pain that was starting to wake up in his body was any indication, maybe he was still alive after all.

"Ow," he managed, and wished he hadn't. Seriously, ow.

Aeris giggled. "How do you feel?"

"Like Genesis just kicked my ass." That guy never bothered to pull his punches, however much Angeal bitched at him for it. It hurt to talk, but not because of his throat. More like the words throbbed inside his head, too loud and close. So maybe he really wasn't dead, and Aeris was looking pretty good herself, and Cl -

"Cloud!" he yelled while trying to sit up, but gravity had other ideas and his vision swam. "Aeris, Cloud - "

"He's here, Zack, it's all right, he's here." She gently pushed him flat again and remained sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand in his and the other stroking through his mussed hair.

"Where?"

"We're in Wutai. Cid brought us here in the Highwind, but you were unconscious. Cloud's in the room down the hall."

"Angeal?"

"He's here and walking about," she smiled. "I think I saw him in the garden a few hours ago."

Zack stared up at the patterned wooden ceiling for a few quiet minutes, absently wondering how many more times he was going to wake up from a concussion worrying about the kid. "How is Cloud?"

When Aeris didn't respond immediately, he added, "When I found him, it was…horrible. Hojo had him, I don't know, strapped in these restraint things, and there was blood and gods know what else." He didn't realize he was starting to cry until Aeris put a cool hand over his forehead. "What's wrong with me?"

"Cloud was the one that knocked you unconscious," she said quietly. "He didn't want to hurt you, so he - well, think of it as smacking you really hard inside the head. You'll probably feel off-balance for a little while. But Zack." She stopped stroking his hair to cup his cheek instead. "You saw something horrible happen to a good friend. I think you're allowed to be upset."

He wrapped his fingers around her wrist and held her hand there, feeling the warmth of her palm. He repeated, "Aeris, how is Cloud?"

Her visible hesitation made his chest tighten. "He's still asleep. I honestly don't even know where to start. I can't feel him anymore, and his body's healing so slowly. Sephiroth's with him right now."

"Sephiroth? I thought he was in Mideel?"

"He was. I think that Cloud might've…called him."

Zack's first thought was where did Cloud get a PHS with Sephiroth's number? "Oh." He blinked, asked inanely, "Are you wearing a kimono?"

"Yukata, I think Yuffie called it." It was made of light cotton and dyed a soft red with small pink cherry blossoms, tied around her middle with a cream-white obi. Stay focused, Fair, c'mon, this isn't a vacation.

"Yuffie?Oh man, she's here?"

"This is her house," Aeris said wryly, but then she bit her lip. She told him about the ShinRa mansion and its labs burning, about Nibelheim being completely destroyed with Elfreda Strife and Gillian still there; that Genesis had died to stop Cloud, that Angeal had gotten Zack out. When he asked about Hojo, she shook her head and said he was probably dead but she didn't know who had done it.

"And all those construction workers and lab assistants…?"

"They all died."

Most of those people had probably been innocent. Zack was finding it difficult to care.

"Zack," she went on softly, "we lost Cissnei and Cait Sith. After you were knocked out, the fire moved too quickly to get everyone out. Cait Sith went back to get Tifa, and Reeve called us later to say that he managed to get her away from the mako before it got her but that he didn't…oh. Oh." She paused. "Zack, the Nibel reactor had a meltdown. There was nothing left."

A guy goes to sleep for a little while and suddenly half the world ends. "The others?"

"Elena and Nanaki are also here. We haven't heard from Vincent, and the last anyone heard of Tifa was whatever Reeve managed to get from Cait Sith before he died. Cid's been terrorizing the poor people in the ship hangar."

As he listened Zack wove his fingers between Aeris'. She squeezed them lightly. "Zack, you did it. You were a hero. You got Cloud out, and now we can start healing him. We'll move forward."

"Then why do I feel like shit?" he whispered, staring at their joined hands.

There was a snuffling sound from the far side of the room, and then a hundred-fifty-pound Nibel wolf was jumping on Zack's bed and shuffling to the empty side. Fenrir didn't seem to notice that he had nearly given Zack a heart attack.

"Fenrir saved me," said Aeris, reaching over Zack to pat the wolf's haunch. "He's really quite a big teddy bear."

"Fenrir, huh?" Zack muttered, remembering a story of sacrifice and honor. The wolf's fur was coarse under his fingers, but also thick and warm.

…

part 2
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