Chapter Text
Cloud was heading back from an exhausting delivery run, cruising through the outlands on Fenrir. He was intentionally heading through monster infested areas, hoping for some to attack him so he could relieve some stress. Normally it didn’t take long to encounter a hostile beast, but Cloud found this particular outing to be unpleasantly peaceful. He even came across a few slain Grand Horns on his path home, which was an odd sight, but he didn’t think too much of it.
Over the horizon he could start to see what was left of Midgar, the dilapidated city that was a permanent fixture of the calamity years back. Memories of the battle he had there Sephiroth and the three fanboys started to loop in his mind. Like that moment he was shot in the face (thank Gods he didn’t cheap out on his goggles), or when he had the top of Shinra tower dropped on him. Oh, and his personal favorite, when Sephiroth decided to make a Cloud-kabob. Good times.
Two years had passed since those events, and while he thought he finally did away with his personal demons after killing off the one winged asshole for a third time, he quickly found new ones coming to haunt him.
He started to have feelings of remorse over the fate of Kadaj, Loz and Yazoo. They were as lost as he was long ago, acting as obedient puppets to that alien space parasite. And what did it get them? Kadaj was bodyjacked by Sephiroth and the other two threw away their lives in the aftermath.
Was Cloud ever thankful his friends were there to drag him out of his puppet phase.
But the more he thought about those three, the more troubled his thoughts became. They were remnants of Sephiroth himself, projections of his fractured mind, never truly alive. Cloud tried to keep his stance on Sephiroth simple: the man was a monster and a threat to the world. If he ever returned, he needed to be stopped. But those three threw a wrench into that mantra, Kadaj in particular.
He didn’t see much depth to Kadaj during their brief interactions, just the angry Jenova humping part of Sephiroth. But after watching the boy die in his arms when he had just run his possessed self though, well it certainly didn’t make him feel like he was doing the right thing. A nice chat with Rufus after everything settled down shed some more light on Kadaj’s demeanor.
Kadaj was certainly filled to the brim with anger, but Cloud had assumed that anger was channeled towards him and the world in general. To his surprise, Kadaj’s anger and hatred was almost entirely directed at Sephiroth. This struck Cloud as odd, but because of Kadaj a seed was planted in Cloud’s mind that maybe, just maybe, Sephiroth loathed what he had become. He began to think those three were a cry for help more so than some stupid plot to destroy the planet, but he was too single-minded in his own hatred for Sephiroth to see that before everything went to shit.
Cloud put a pause on his thoughts as he rolled up to the Midgar ruins. Parking his bike he hopped off, strapped on Fusion Blade and trudged through heaps of rubble, kicking a few rocks along the way. He descended a narrow tunnel, the light quickly fading. Rifling through his pockets, he took out a Lightning materia and gave it a tap. Immediately, the orb lit up and gave some much-needed light to the creeping darkness.
He stopped at a massive slab of steel and eyed it for a moment. To any passerby it was just some wreckage, and much too large and heavy to think someone had placed it there. Cloud gripped it and slid it aside, revealing a small room.
He stepped inside, setting the light ball down, and stopped at a small table. Adorned on its knotted surface were a few trinkets: a black feather, a bracelet with materia beaded onto it, and a silver cuff. He picked up the bracelet and rolled the glittering materia through his fingers. Fire, Lighting, Ice, Earth, Cleansing, Revival, and a few he wasn’t sure of.
The Revival materia had him curious, and the best explanation he could come up with was having the option to get someone back up on their feet so Sephiroth could run them through again.
He had considered giving the mysterious materia a test run, a burning curiosity of what off brand magic his foe has access to. They were purple-black in color, reminiscent of the Black materia, which was enough to send a wave of dread through him. He figured no good would come from toying with them and left it at that.
With a sigh, Cloud placed the bracelet down and turned his attention to the wall, which had a few weapons mounted on it. The first his eyes met was Mako Katana, a dingy looking blade with a core of mako on the hilt. He had found it during one of his scavenges into the demolished Shinra tower, and surmised it was a beta version of Masamune.
Above the Mako Katana was a creepy looking weapon that Cloud found unsettling. The blade was jagged and hooked with no real rhyme or reason to its pattern. It looked more organic than intentionally designed. At the hilt was an eye ornament to round out the weirdness factor. Well, he hoped it was an ornament. The design reminded him of the freaky stuff Vincent turned into, perhaps it was another beta sword experimenting with whatever the strange shit they had prodded Vincent with.
Above the spooky blade was an elegant one. Silver and black, with a wing like swoop on the handle and ornamental designs on the long, thin blade. He couldn’t ever imagine Sephiroth wielding this one, but he found it alongside the other swords and figured he went through a few weapons before he found one to his liking.
Cloud put his observations on hold and leaned against the wall, arms folded and eyes to the ground. After Sephiroth’s defeat he thought he could push him back into the recesses of his mind and never unearth the memory of his tormentor again.
Boy was he fucking wrong.
No more than a month after the incident did his memories of Sephiroth invade his thoughts and dreams, a non-stop playback of their encounters, everything he took from Cloud, that silken voice chiding him of his failures, and of Cloud killing him over and over. He had hoped it was Sephiroth fucking with his mind again, that would have made it easy to accept. But there was no static, no feeling of someone else rummaging around his thoughts. The invasion of memories was his own doing.
He tried to drown out the thoughts during his delivery outings, but being alone, even with the mighty howl of Fenrir rattling through his ears, only seemed to make the intrusive thoughts louder and more demanding. He tried hanging out with his friends more often, hoping their company would soothe his erratic thoughts, but it got to the point where he could barely hold a proper conversation with the cacophony of memories clawing in his head.
Cloud never told his friends, and while there was a screaming voice of reason demanding he do so, that they could help him through this, he refused. They already had to deal with his remorseful bullshit when he was infected with Geostigma, and his existential crisis before that, he didn’t want to keep throwing his never ending well of baggage onto them.
There came a day when his thoughts became so aggressive that Cloud stopped during a delivery outing, fell to his knees and began shrieking into the nether that he was sorry. That seed of doubt Kadaj had planted blossomed, leaving Cloud feeling grief for the monster that tried to drop a goddamn meteor on the planet.
Only with that admittance did those demanding thoughts retreat ever so slightly.
It was then Cloud decided he needed to do something to pay respect to Sephiroth, however shitty a person he was. Something he could visit on occasion to quiet his mind. His first thought was placing Masamune alongside Buster Sword in the church, but that was quickly dismissed as he mentally slapped himself for even having the idea of placing anything Sephiroth related near Aerith or Zack. Next, he considered setting something up in the house Tifa and him shared, but decided there was no way in hell his friends would be down for that.
So instead he found himself a little room in ruins nobody goes into, hidden away by a sheet of metal no non-mako enhanced person could move, where he placed any artifacts of Sephiroth he found. There wasn’t much, the man didn’t really keep much in the way of belongings, and he had a knack for vanishing into dust anytime he was slain.
Whenever Cloud’s violent memories came scraping back he’d pay this place a visit to subdue them. With a sigh he turned his attention back up at the wall, he had been avoiding looking at the last sword adorned on it, Masamune. Cloud grimaced, feeling a phantom pain in his chest from where the blade had been so intimately embedded in him, twice. Without further ceremony he allowed his eyes to finally fixate on his foe’s signature weapon.
Cloud’s heart sunk to his stomach, a cold sweat breaking out on his back as his wide eyes locked on where Masamune should have been, but instead was an empty rack.
“Oh. Fuck.”
