Chapter Text
Sector Seven isn’t meant to be permanent. Though, if Cloud is honest with himself, (an activity he loathes), he isn’t sure where he’s going. He just knows that he’s only passing through. This isn’t meant to be his home.
But Tifa acted like it was, finding him an apartment, introducing him to what felt like half the slums, going and talking a mile a minute about making connections, which was surely a joke, because Cloud has never made anyone like him once in his entire life, and he knows it. His charismatic appeal was stuck somewhere firmly between “aerosolized arsenic” and “sickly sewer toad”.
Tifa had also said ‘be nice’.
Another joke.
But he is trying. She had picked him up off the streets, given him someplace to stay with four walls, it seems the least he could do was try.
Which was why when Jessie broke her ankle, he offered to stay with her, had dipped into his dwindling funds to pay for a potion to get Wedge back on his feet. As much as he didn’t want to stay, here he was.
Unfortunately.
“I’m bored.”
Cloud grinds his teeth.
Jessie drums her fingers on the bartop, then on her knee, then starts bouncing her foot, like she’s trying to exacerbate the break. Cloud opens his mouth to say ‘stop it.’ before he remembers he doesn’t care. Instead, he forces out a huff, and crosses his arms. Very pointedly staring at the wall. But that doesn’t help much. He can still see the motion in the corner of his vision, hear the creak of the barstool as it bounces; up down, up down, up down.
Maybe he should have gone on that mission.
Blessedly, Jessie eventually stops. Unfortunately, this doesn’t appear to be her granting him peace and quiet, as, after a second, she smacks her hand on the counter. “Ugh! I can’t just sit here!”
“Tough luck,” Cloud responds.
“I need to do something with my hands.” She swivels in her seat, looking right at him, and primly orders, “Take me to the Scrap Boulevard.”
“And what’s in it for me?” She can’t pay him: Avalanche doesn’t seem like they have two gil to rub together. And it’s not like she can threaten him with grievous bodily harm, even without the broken ankle.
Those are the only two things that would even tempt him into disobeying Tifa’s orders. She’d put her hands on her hips and done that thing with her eyebrows that made him kinda scared to disappoint her.
“Keep an eye on her. Make sure she doesn’t do anything dangerous.” Her expression had softened then, and that was worse. “Please.”
So he was stuck babysitting the resident restless bomb expert. Said bomb expert who was determined to stress her damn break-
Jessie was standing up. A little unsteady on her feet, but she manages a self assured smirk. “Well, I’m going. You can come along if you want.” She flips her hair over her shoulder, and strides to the door. Cloud doesn't move to stop her. But he does grit his teeth a little, and taps his finger on his elbow, but she doesn’t have to know that.
Jessie’s confident stride is diminished somewhat, when she takes another step, and winces. Cloud can’t help it, he moves over to steady her. Make sure she doesn’t fall. Again.
She seems grateful, at least. She loops an arm around his shoulder and leans against his side, even her usual spark dimmed a little. Which either means she’s about to keel over, or her leg was bothering her more than she let on.
“Tell you what,” Just like that, she’s back to chipper. “You can have the coolest thing we find.”
Cloud grunts.
But he doesn’t protest when they move together out the bar doors either.
Jessie trips a bit on the porch, leaning into him further when she stumbles, and then she lays her arm across the back of his neck just so and-
He’s done this before. He can remember the marching, the mud, the deadweight barely staying upright beside him. The memory is so sudden it’s not even a flash, just a rising realization, then gone again before he can grab it, can interrogate it, can ask when and how and why.
Cloud swallows down the bile in his throat. Or maybe it’s just fear. It’s just a job. It’s just a job. A strange and small stakes job, but a job. He was getting paid. That was what they said right? There’s that merc, he’ll do anything as long as he’s paid.
What a mantra.
The memory’s long gone. Was it even a memory? Whatever. He huffs, and shifts Jessie, just a little, just so she’s not leaning on him in that exact way. Whatever. He’s a SOLDIER. He probably carried tons of people like this.
“Hey,” Jessie squirms away. It shouldn’t feel like a slab of concrete is being lifted from his chest. “If you’re not a touchy feely guy, I’m telling you, I can walk on my own.” Hesitantly, like the ground is littered with mousetraps, she puts one foot in front of the other. Then again.
“You’re going to-” She’s going to put stress on the break. But. He doesn’t care.
It’s a liability though, right? Letting a fellow agent get hurt meant more chances for mistakes, hurt your own chances. Her words echo in his head: Be nice.
Without asking, he scoops her up. Jessie lets out a ‘oof’ of surprise.
“My hero.” She’s grinning, and Cloud realizes he’s made a horrible mistake.
“If you’re getting any ideas from this-” he warns. But he doesn’t really know how to finish that sentence. Don’t? You’re getting the wrong idea? You officially have worse taste in men than me? Sometimes it feels like everyone else got a lesson in dealing with this crap, and he’s the only one who missed it. Scratch that. It feels like everyone else got a lesson in dealing with talking, and he was absent the whole semester.
The walk to the junkyard isn’t far, and he’d gotten pretty familiar with the path between seventh heaven and the chain link gate the day before. The nearby watch lets him in without a raised eyebrow.
Right, what was Jessie even trying to accomplish here? All she asked was for him to bring her here.
He sets her down on a big rock, right near a pile of busted microwaves and old tires. It’s uncanny how quickly she makes it look like a throne.
“Right. I can go through this for spare parts. You, start moving those washing machines.”
“Do I look like a forklift?”
“Not at all.” Immediately, she starts to dissect the pile of (to Cloud) worthless junk. She pries circuit board and wires and buttons away from the broken casings, depositing them in a pile beside her. The clanking and motion she’s instantly created almost disguises her muttering under her breath, “But you act like one, sometimes.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” No, seriously, how the fuck is Cloud supposed to take that? He starts moving the washing machines anyway, just so he doesn’t have to stand there and look confusedly offended.
“I just mean you’re strong and move around heavy stuff.”
Yup, he missed that class. Apparently, Forklift Comparisons 101 was not only an offered course, it was a required one. Very maturely, he does not groan, or sigh, or huff, like he really, really wants to.
Instead, he and Jessie work in silence, sorting through their own scrap. Occasionally, she demands to be ferried to another rock, some other perch with better trash within arms reach, or Cloud will move aside a rusted hood, and see some interesting mechanism, holding it up for Jessie to appraise. Slowly, he starts carving a channel through the strata of metal, and Jessie’s pile of salvaged electronics grows.
At one point, she waves him over to show off a tiny lightbulb, torn from some sort of smoke detector.
“Look. Lithium power lights. They coat the wires to keep it stable, but apply a little heat…” She pulls out a lighter and flicks it on, holding the flame under the bulb. With a pop, surprisingly loud for such a tiny object, it explodes.
Cloud won’t say it, won’t give her the satisfaction, but it’s cool. The light shatters with a burst of blue sparks, and Jessie sets off one after the other, tossing them in the air. With her childish grin and the color in the air, she almost looks like a little kid, setting off firecrackers.
It’s… Nice.
Nice to work with some quiet, no monsters to kill, no reactors to blow up. Even with all the odd jobs he’s been doing around town, he can’t remember he just had work he could sink into, something repetitive, boring; it’s strangely comforting. Jessie seems sated, her nervous energy and overbearing chipperness almost entirely vanished.
“Why didn’t you go with them?”
Of course. Right as he was commenting on how nice the quiet was.
“Why’d you have to break your ankle?” he fires right back. Then, he tactfully removes himself from the conversation by disappearing into a pile of garbage. It seems this rotting apart pickup truck just really needs to be moved, and the only way to shift it is from inside the heap. Outside of Jessie’s line of sight. Where he, arguably, could not hear any comments that might be directed his way.
Unfortunately, as he’s all too well aware, retreating from a conversation does not keep him from continuing it in his head.
“Why didn’t you go with them?”
It makes no sense to pay all that money to buy Wedge a potion. Going on the job would mean not spending gil and possibly earning some, his brain reasons, as he wriggles into the cab of the truck. Sure, Barret said he couldn’t afford to hire him again, it wasn’t his fight, etcetera, etcetera. But they would have snuck some money his way when they had some. Tifa, if no one else, wouldn’t stand feeling indebted.
A net gain, he argues, as he wriggles out the driver side window and levers himself between the truck and the rest of Scrap Mountain. Planting his feet firmly on the frame, he asks himself again.
‘Why didn't you go?’
Because he’d gone onto the plate and seen a city crumble around him, had seen the skyline painted in a thousand colors of fire he wasn’t sure were even there, and it had felt so familiar and it had been his fault. Because he’d seen a dead man walking, and that very night he’d almost killed someone, would have, if Tifa hadn’t stopped him. Because she’d looked at him yesterday and said “You’ve changed.”
He doesn’t say any of that. Obviously. He can barely even string it all together into a coherent thought. Instead, he just finds some good leverage, gives the car a few test shoves, and kicks it with all his strength.
He’s pushing and pushing until suddenly he’s not, and the giant hunk of steel is moving away from him, rolling down the slopes of Mount Junkpile. Cloud goes rolling with it too, but he manages to twist in midair, landing on the roof of the truck as it comes to a dusty, jolty, stop. He even sticks the pose, crouched down with one hand to the metal, one leg kicked to the side.
It’s hell on his knees.
Jessie is staring at him, one eyebrow raised, in a way that tells him she definitely knows.
“It was more impressive the first time.”
He ignores her, and slides off the roof, landing on the ground in a puff of dirt. It doesn’t even occur to him to look back at the debris until he hears Jessie suck in a breath. Then, he whips around lightning quick, sword already drawn.
But Jessie isn’t gasping at some monster or trash mutant he’d somehow managed to disturb. It takes him a while to even pinpoint what she’s looking at. But he does.
Cloud boosts himself up the slope, the newly excavated patch of abandoned metal, and starts tugging at the pairs of handle bars jutting out from the space.
It comes free like a knife from a sheath, like it had been waiting for him. He was worried there would be some other heavy object pinning it in place, or the back half would be crushed beyond repair. But there's no damage he can see, as he rolls it down to an excited looking Jessie. Together, they stand back to admire Cloud’s find.
It was unmistakably a motorcycle. A lot like the one he’d learned on, back in SOLDIER, with chunky tires and a sturdy chassis, and a seat you less sat in and more leaned in. The paint’s chipped, of course, and the body of the engine looks like it's been taken apart by someone who didn’t really think about putting it back together, but still. Cloud runs his fingers over the handlebars.
“Now there's a smile!” Jessie crows.
And it’s true. His lips had, without permission, tugged up. He quickly remedies that, and instead offers his best smirk.
“Just because it’s mine.”
Jessie sighs, petting one of the headlights.
“I guess a deal’s a deal.” She jumps straight into examining it, just like Cloud wants to, but won’t, because it’s been years since he worked on a bike, he’s not even sure he remembers how to, so much of his memory feels like it's been run through a cheese grater. And even if he did, if he popped open the gearbox like he’s done it a million times, because he has, Jessie would have questions. She hadn’t even known he could drive until last night. He doesn’t want that look again, that look Tifa gives him when he mentions how long it’s been since he saw her last, or when he falls into his combat stance without thinking.
Cloud still doesn’t know what that look means. He just knows that he hates it.
Oblivious to his jealousy, Jessie fiddles with the remains of the engine, prattling on.
“Ooh, this is one of the older models too. The fuel line splits, so it can take both Mako batteries and old gas fuel. They sure made them to last, back in the day”
Giving in, Cloud crouches beside her. He doesn’t touch, but he passes a cursory look over the wires and gears. Not bad. Some hoses are missing, and everything is coated in a layer of grime, and he might need to source some parts from other discarded bikes, but-
No. No no no. This bike, however enticing, would be a capital p Project, one that needed time. Time he didn’t have, and more importantly, space. Stargazer Heights didn’t exactly have a garage.
“I have nowhere to park it,” he thinks, then realizes he’d mumbled aloud. Jessie smiles at him, like this isn’t an obvious example of ‘wrong place, wrong time’.
“I’m sure Tifa would let you set up behind Seventh Heaven. There's an empty loading dock and everything, you’d just have to move a few garbage cans.”
He ignores pointing out the self deprecating irony in that.
Still. As Jessie situates herself on the seat, and Cloud collects all her fiddled with scrap, bundling it into the bags behind her, he realizes he still doesn’t have a plan. Sector Seven isn’t going to be permanent. But as deeply as he knows that, he doesn’t know where to go either.
As he wheels their strange little envoy back towards the gate, he finally admits to himself what he already knows.
“Guess I’ll be sticking around.”