Chapter Text
re·ver·ber·a·tion
/rəˌvərbəˈrāSH(ə)n/
noun
1. prolongation of a sound; resonance.
"electronic effects have been added, such as echo and reverberation"
2. a continuing effect; a repercussion.
"the attack has had reverberations around the world"
·
The marshes hissed beneath them like something breathing — shallow, wet inhalations from a creature buried just beneath the moss. The air reeked of sulfur, of bitter algae and the coppery spit of a dying world. Its heat curled around their ankles like wet smoke, a sick warmth that clung to the skin and whispered in tongues that predated language. Dragonflies drifted low and aimless, flickering like shattered emeralds over water still as oil. A storm had passed earlier, but the sky hung low with the same violence, brooding over the land like a withheld confession.
Their battle with the Midgardsormr had been relentless. It had not gone quietly. It twisted like something born of nightmare, all muscle and malice, hissing with an intelligence that felt older than any science or story. Each strike had landed with the weight of history behind it — bone-rattling, earth-churning, unrelenting. Cloud's sword, though massive, felt smaller than usual as it bit into scale. Barret's gun roared, Aerith chanted spells beneath her breath like prayers, and both Red XII and Tifa struck with the desperation of someone who couldn't afford to lose anything else.
But even monsters fall. They falter.
And just as the serpent reeled from a combined assault, its body pulsing with searing heat and bloodied wounds, it lunged not with fury but strategy — it chose. It saw Cloud. It saw something in him. Perhaps a memory. Perhaps an echo. It wrapped around him with a speed that betrayed its size, the coils folding inward like a mausoleum, and dragged him into the water.
The others shouted. Tifa's scream shattered the treeline. Barret cursed and fired uselessly into the muck. But Cloud was gone, pulled beneath the thick surface of the marsh where light and sound did not belong.
There was no air. There was only pressure. The swamp closed in like a second skin, swallowing him whole. His limbs moved, but they moved without force, without strength. The serpent squeezed and his ribs groaned. Something sharp splintered inside. Bubbles clawed from his mouth and vanished. He couldn't see, couldn't think, only feel — the burn in his lungs, the heaviness in his eyes, the knowing that this was how it ended.
Until he saw him.
Sephiroth did not swim. He did not walk. He arrived. The water blackened around him as though rejecting his presence. He descended through the dark with his long coat trailing behind like a funeral shroud. His eyes were open. Cold. Detached. Observing Cloud with a gaze that felt surgical, almost clinical, like a scientist measuring the failure of an experiment.
Cloud’s arm reached up without command. A plea. A reflex. Fingers outstretched toward the figure who had once been comrade, then monster, then myth. But Sephiroth did not move.
The serpent sensed him.
The coils shivered. Hesitated. Unwound.
The Midgardsormr released its grip, writhing toward the descending figure with a shriek that warped the water into trembling ribbons. It lunged, massive jaws parting with an audible snap however Sephiroth was already in motion. The Masamune sang. One slash, too fast to follow. The beast was split down the center, blood blooming like a flower.
And then he raised his hand.
Magic erupted with no incantation, no warning. A dark light pulsed from his palm, enveloping the serpent, lifting it from the mire with impossible force, the last thing that he would see before the darkness took him.
When Cloud finally came to, he tasted metal. His body was limp, bones cold and vision blurred.
Faces swam into view.
Aerith's was the first. Pale. Framed in dusk and rain. Her emerald eyes wide with something gentler than fear. "You remember who I am?" she asked, her voice trembling at the edge of relief and sorrow.
Tifa stood behind her, arms crossed tightly over her chest, trying to hold something in. The ache in her stare was quiet. Familiar.
Cloud blinked. Rain touched his lashes. He coughed once.
"Aerith," he murmured. The name came out ragged. Real. His hand reached slowly, instinctively, for the hilt of his sword. "Sephiroth...?"
There was only silence. The kind that dragged after horror, long and thick and wet with what hadn’t been said. The others stood a few paces away, rain dripping from their clothes, their eyes heavy with confusion that dared not speak its name. No one moved. No one questioned. Barret’s mouth twitched, but no words came. Red XIII’s tail flicked once — a slow, uncertain motion — before stilling entirely. Even Aerith, who so often filled silence like sunlight through broken glass, only stood with her arms drawn around herself, watching Cloud deliberately. The serpent's giant corpse creaked quietly in the wind like a church bell with no tongue.
Cloud sat up. Every muscle screamed. But his gaze was fixated on the beast, its mass dangling like a banner of war impaled upon a jagged tree that split its ribcage like rotten wood, and he exhaled slowly.
"I knew he was strong," he said. "but still..."
No one corrected him.
The silence remained thick.
They decided to make camp near the edge of the path, just before the entrance of the Mythril Mines — its mouth black as coal and twice as silent, teeth of stone hung open in perpetual yawn.
Barret, as always, grumbled loud enough to scare off birds that hadn’t lived in this place for years. Red XIII curled near the fire’s edge, watchful in that way he always was, as if listening to some deeper frequency the rest of them had gone deaf to. Aerith stretched her legs and picked absently at her boots, watching the stars with a thin smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. Tifa said little but her silences were always thick with thought. Her gaze flicked to Cloud over and again, the way one might watch a candle whose flame gutters too low. She was too attentive. And that made him uneasy.
Cloud sat apart. He had always preferred distance — it was cleaner that way. He polished his sword though it had already been cleaned twice. His motions were slow. Precise and repetitive, comforting. The blade caught firelight and returned it warped, bending his reflection into a stranger with every stroke.
His hands didn’t shake.
Not visibly.
But in his chest, something pulsed with uneven rhythm — a rhythm not of battle, but of something that followed close behind silence. Doubt.
The mist rolled thicker now, low and creeping, like a hand trying to find his throat in the dark.
He didn’t sleep.
It was almost as if he... slipped.
He didn’t remember walking, only that he was no longer by the fire, and that the swamp was no longer underfoot. The sky was different here. The moon was higher, too close, too white. The air smelled not of decay, but of smoke — a different kind of burning.
The ground beneath his boots was not moss.
It was wood.
Splintered and bowed, soaked through with something more ancient than rain. The planks groaned beneath his boots like they remembered the weight of people who no longer existed. It smelled of smoke long since settled into the walls, of mildew and ruin, of memory left too long in the dark. He stood not in a house, but in an echo of one — something skeletal and aching, a place that had once held warmth and now held only dust. The air hung heavy and damp, not quite breathable, curling into his lungs like fog spun from sorrow. Not a ruin. Not a sanctuary. This place had been exiled from reality, bricked into the walls of his subconscious like a tomb — and now, uninvited, it had opened its doors.
The beams overhead stretched naked into the sky, the roof gone as if it had never been built. The walls moaned, though no wind passed through. And on the far end of the room, the mirror hung crooked above a blackened vanity.
And someone stood in front of it.
Dark hair clung to her back like soaked fabric. Bare feet. A dress that once might have been white, but now was grey with ash and age. She did not move. She only stared into the cracked mirror, where her reflection twitched just a second too late, like an old reel skipping a frame.
Cloud’s mouth opened.
Nothing.
The figure turned — and it was Tifa.
But not.
Her face was almost hers — eyes the color of scarlet embers, vivid and beautiful, yet glowing with a heat that did not belong in the hollows of memory. Lips parted as if caught mid-confession, cheekbones catching the low light like a memory fossilized in crystal. There was something feverish in the way her gaze held him, something both intimate and alien — like a firelit photograph warped at the edges, burning quietly from the inside out. But the features were arranged not by nature, but by something guessing what she should look like — an artist working from dream, not reference. Her beauty was uncanny, too precise, the symmetry too perfect to be real. She resembled Tifa only the way reflections resembled people — distorted at the edges, as if viewed through a fogged mirror at the end of the world. Her expression was too calm. Too smooth. A smile carved too deep. And her eyes… her eyes were not hers. They were deep. Endless. Hungry. Not tender, not kind — no warmth in her gaze, only the cold burn of recognition twisted into mimicry. She wore Tifa's face the way winter wore a field once green — distant, indifferent, a memory of something once alive but long since buried beneath frost.
"You promised you’d protect me," she whispered, and her voice was softer than breath but heavier than stone, trembling at the edges like glass before it breaks.
Cloud tried to move, but his body betrayed him. It felt as though his bones had liquefied, melted into someone else's weight. Every joint a hinge rusted shut. Every limb an echo. He stood in his own shape like an actor trapped in another man's costume — too big in some places, too small in others, and sewn through with memories that did not belong.
"You watched it burn," she said, her voice cracking like kindling in the cold. "You stood in the smoke and let it swallow everyone."
The room trembled, not from impact but from memory — hot and wet and rotting. The wallpaper shriveled like skin under flame. The floorboards groaned beneath them, not from motion but from the weight of moments long buried. Bloodless footsteps echoed through the walls — not present, but persistent. She stepped closer. Her smile never changed. It hung on her face like it had been carved there, a mask lacquered with grief. Her fingers twitched — not with nerves, but with recognition, as if something inside her had finally remembered the shape of betrayal.
"Do you even know who you are?" she asked, and the words felt like a hand reaching into his chest, pulling threads he couldn’t name.
Her voice deepened — not in tone, but in weight. It thickened, darkened, gathered around him like rising water. It was not one voice now but many, layered, overlapping, bleeding into each other like ink spilled across old letters.
"Or did you wear his skin like armor? Did you crawl inside his name and make it yours?"
And then her face began to shift. The hair darkened. Her eyes changed shape. Her shoulders broadened. And in her place — just for a blink — stood someone else. A young man with a smile made for sunlight, whose outline pulsed with sorrow and heat, a noticeable scar, delicately carved into the flesh of his right cheek like a whispered curse, its cross-shape etched in the soft tissue as though someone had tried to erase him and left a signature behind instead. A face Cloud had almost spoken. Almost remembered.
But the name slid through his grasp like water.
And that forgetting felt like murder.
"You’re not him," the voice said — but it came from nowhere. From everywhere.
The house started to collapse, ceiling caving in with the sound of lungs losing air. The walls folded like wings gone to bone. The mirror cracked and cracked again, and the floor dissolved beneath him.
Cloud didn’t fall. He folded — inward, backward, downward — into a self made entirely of stolen pieces and silence.
A voice pulled him back.
"Cloud — hey, Cloud, breathe —"
It was raining. Soft and cold. It touched his cheeks like an apology. His vision wavered, caught in the liminal space between dream and now. And hovering above him, lit by firelight and frayed starlight and something unspoken, was Tifa.
The real one.
Her hands were on his shoulders. Her gloves, soaked through and trembling, smelled faintly of leather and storm. Her face hovered just above his like a reflection barely clinging to the surface of water — too close, intimate in the way pain sometimes was. Her wine-dark eyes were blown wide, full of something that looked like fear but wasn’t — it was care, raw and unguarded, stitched with desperation. Her voice broke through the air like a secret that had lived too long beneath her tongue, trembling in the way only someone who had learned the hard way how to stay quiet could allow herself to break. Her long, chocolate-brown hair fell over her shoulders in thick, rain-slick waves, the ends brushing against his clothed chest like the trailing edge of a memory. Her nearness was disorienting, not unwelcome but unfamiliar — a closeness that felt like it belonged to someone else, someone real, someone whole.
"You weren’t waking up," she whispered. "You were shaking."
He blinked. Slowly. Grounding himself in the rhythm of her breathing. The fire snapped beside them, the marsh sighed in the distance. His heart remembered how to beat.
"Just a dream," he said, flatly. Mechanical — safe.
Cloud could see it in the small, strained corners of her expression — the way her mouth pressed too tightly into silence, the flicker of something knowing in her eyes. She nodded, yes, but her gaze held the soft ache of someone pretending. Not belief. Not really.
Her hand lingered at his jaw for just a second too long before she pulled away — and in that fragile pause, Cloud felt something flare to life and then vanish again. It wasn’t warmth, exactly. It wasn’t comfort. It was recognition. The unbearable sensation of being seen, not as a soldier, not as a weapon, but as something trembling beneath the armor — something breakable and barely held together. It terrified him. The contact left a ghost-print on his skin, and as her fingers slipped away, it felt less like release and more like being dropped back into a body that no longer felt like his.
"The men in the black robes went inside earlier," she murmured, her voice low, fragile — as if the mine itself might recoil if she dared speak louder. And in that moment, with the firelight catching her hair and the rain drying in long, soft strands down her cheek, Cloud thought she almost looked like the little girl from Nibelheim — the one who had sat beside him at the well with stars in her eyes and asked him to come back for her. The one who had waited. The one he had failed.
His breath caught, not in sorrow, but in something quieter — the kind of ache that moved behind the ribs when memory became too heavy. His mind flickered to the inn in Kalm. The roof. The way her eyes had narrowed when he told her she didn’t belong in his story, as if she were meant to be a name carved in stone, a ghost spoken of in past tense, not someone still standing there in flesh and ache and memory. How she had lifted her top with trembling fingers to reveal the long scar etched into the soft skin between her breasts — a pale wound that had healed, but not kindly, the kind of mark that lived not just on the body but inside it, like the ghost of a blade that never stopped pressing. It had startled him then, not for its ugliness, but for its intimacy — the quiet offering of a pain she rarely voiced, carried close to her heart and shown not for sympathy, but truth. He hadn’t apologized then — hadn’t known how. But now, with her voice wrapped in dusk and her closeness too gently real, guilt crept in like smoke through a cracked door.
He didn’t say he was sorry.
But the way his eyes dropped — the way he nodded too slowly — said everything he couldn’t.
Cloud sat up. Gloved hands fastening buckles. Checking straps. Polishing a blade already clean. A ritual to hold the cracks shut. A lie worn so long it had molded to his skin.
He was Cloud Strife.
First Class SOLDIER. The sword was heavy in his hand, but it grounded him. It gave him shape; meaning. Purpose. He reminded himself that the steel had always belonged to him — that the strength in his arms had always been his. That the accolades, the uniform, the memories of battle and brotherhood and blood spilled in the name of Shinra had always beat in his chest like second heartbeats. He rehearsed it now in silence, like a catechism.
The fire hissed in the background, throwing shadows too long and too sharp. Tifa had moved away, her figure now only a silhouette against the flickering flame, arms wrapped around her knees like a fortress made of flesh. Her gaze had not left him, not entirely. He could feel it still, like a pulse at the base of his skull. The others remained in their uneasy slumber, scattered about the camp like the aftermath of a vanished storm — breath shallow, limbs twitching with dreams they wouldn’t recall, their bodies curled into the stillness like leaves folding inward at dusk. The silence between them was not peace, but recovery — the kind that felt borrowed, precarious, like waking might've cost more than it restored.
Somewhere in the darkness, a frog croaked. A bird, long dead from these swamps, did not answer. The marsh was quiet again. Too quiet. As if the land itself held its breath, uncertain of what had just passed through.
Cloud could only sit there, cold sweat clinging to his skin like a second, translucent self, wondering if the fiction he'd built around his breath could last another night. If he could keep breathing in borrowed air, if the myth he wore as skin would hold through morning light. He searched the spaces between each breath, hoping the fractures wouldn’t widen. That the seams — hidden beneath steel, silence, and Shinra’s experiments — wouldn’t split open and show the trembling thing he refused to name. Was this the beginning of the unraveling they whispered about in low voices — the slow rot beneath the skin, the silent fracture in the mind, where identity frayed and muscle forgot its name? Degradation?
He tried to recall the young man's face — that flicker of warmth behind the mirror, the one whose smile felt like midsummer light and mourning stitched into skin. But the moment Cloud reached for it, something inside him recoiled. His mind ached, sharp and sudden, like a blade drawn too fast from an old wound. It was not forgetting — it was resistance. His own memory shutting a door, locking it from the inside. The image blurred, edges bleeding out like watercolor in rain. Only the dull pain remained — not the name, not the history — only that unbearable pressure behind his eyes, the quiet scream of something that should be remembered and could not. And the not-knowing cut deeper than truth ever could.
And yet, in the distant hush of the dying fire, in the shallow hush of water still cooling from blood, in the careful way Tifa looked at him like someone trying to map a constellation on cracked glass, Cloud could feel that absence pressing outward — a shape his body remembered even if his mind refused to. Not a ghost, but a blueprint. Not a dream, but a shadow too perfectly drawn. Whatever truth he had sealed behind the mirrors of his mind was not dead. It stirred, now, beneath the skin of the world, waiting for the next fracture.
And when it came, he would either shatter — or become it.
Notes:
Well this is my return to fanfiction after... ten years? I'm so excited but also very, very fucking scared, ngl. Seeing as FFVII was always my favorite game of all time and how Rebirth has taken me down another spiral ( on my third over 100 hour game run ), I just felt the need to deeply explore these characters in my more mature understanding of them. This will definitely explore the darker aspects of the world, such as Shinra and their experiments, and give even further exposition to the character's, their traumas and how they overcome it in their own ways... but of course, before all that, expect a lot of suffering. Regardless, I hope you enjoyed and if you've made it this far, I'm truly and sincerely very thankful despite how terrified I am!
Chapter Text
pulse
/pəls/noun
1. a rhythmical throbbing of the arteries as blood is propelled through them, typically as felt in the wrists or neck.
"the doctor found a faint pulse"
2. a single vibration or short burst of sound, electric current, light, or other wave.
"a pulse generator"
verb
1. throb rhythmically; pulsate.
"a knot of muscles at the side of his jaw pulsed"
·
Tifa stepped into the yawning dark of the Mythril Mine with the taste of iron still clinging to the back of her tongue — not blood, not quite, but close enough to stir the memory of it. It wasn’t metallic enough to name, but sharp enough to haunt. The kind of ghost that lived at the edge of the senses. Her boots met stone, her breath remained steady, her body moved with the grace of someone trained to survive. But her mind — her mind dragged behind her like a shadow too heavy to lift. She hadn’t truly slept.
A few hours, maybe, of eyes shut and limbs stilled, of letting the fire’s glow dance across her skin in mockery of comfort, nevertheless her thoughts had never stilled. They’d wandered far — back to the well in Nibelheim, where boyhood promises were, for the umpteenth time, spun like thread between stars and broken before morning could arrive. They drifted forward to the way Cloud’s hand had hovered the night before, fingers tensing where they shouldn’t — not from threat, but from habit. From something he couldn’t remember remembering. They curled sideways like dreams she couldn’t name but woke from with her jaw clenched and her palms aching, shaped like fists.
And when she had risen — quiet as always — she found him.
Not standing or awake. Instead folded in on himself beside the campfire, still as a corpse, sweat glinting on his temple like a fevered baptism, jaw locked, breath caught in some invisible grip. His body didn’t thrash. His limbs didn’t cry out. But something in his stillness screamed. It was the kind of silence that didn’t sleep — it endured. The kind that you only saw in SOLDIERS who had survived too much and were still being chased in the dark.
She had crouched beside him, hesitant but unable to leave him like that, as she had hours before. Her hand had hovered just above the curve of his jaw — not quite touching — fingers trembling with the weight of a thousand unasked questions. Were you dreaming? Were you remembering? Were you still there? She didn’t wake him. She couldn’t. She didn’t know who might wake up in his place.
That image haunted her now — the curve of his back in shadow, the tension that threaded through even his rest. It followed her into the mine, wound itself into her steps like an extra limb, one she couldn’t shake. Even now, as the walls closed in around them — damp, cold, humming with the weight of things buried and broken, she couldn't let it go. However that wasn’t what unsettled her most. It wasn’t the mine. It wasn’t the monsters. It was him.
It was the thought that she no longer knew if she was following Cloud through the dark… or something wearing him.
Still, to the others, she appeared as if her usual self. Calm. Capable. A quiet pillar in worn leather and measured breath. That was always her role — the one who steadied, the one who didn’t pry unless absolutely necessary. She wore it well. However beneath the surface, her thoughts were in bloom, slow and twisting, sprouting with questions she didn’t know how to yet shape into speech.
The moment they crossed the threshold into the mine, the air shifted — colder, older, not merely still but ancient. As if it had been waiting. It pressed in around them like water, layered with mildew and mineral and something subtler. Something that felt like regret. Like the kind of silence that had learned to listen. The walls themselves seemed to pulse, drinking in the torchlight only to exhale it in sighs of shadow.
She swallowed hard and kept walking.
The stone around them wasn’t just rock — it was memory set in earth. The passage breathed, deep and slow, like lungs filled with time. Every step felt less like progress and more like surrender — to the weight, to the dark, to everything she hadn’t said the night before.
And wouldn't say now.
Behind her, Cloud walked without hesitation, his boots quiet on the gravel, but she caught the slight delay in his step when the walls narrowed — a second’s hesitation, so brief it might’ve been imagined. Tifa noticed, she always noticed.
Cloud took point at Barret’s suggestion — unspoken authority yielding to the one whose blade knew fighting better than commands. His figure moved ahead of them like a myth chiseled from obsidian and breath. Torchlight danced along the ridges of the Buster Sword strapped to his back, turning steel into scripture. Each footstep was soundless, each glance deliberate, his shoulders bearing the task without complaint or pause. It was the quiet kind of leadership — not the shouting kind, not the kind that asked for loyalty. The kind you just followed.
The mine swallowed them slowly, layer by layer, as though reluctant to let them pass. Every stone bled shadow. Every turn of the tunnel brought with it the breath of old air, once trapped behind mineral and time — now loosed like ghosts returning to walk beside the living.
Barret’s voice cut through the hush, rough but low. “Y’know, this place used to work,” he muttered, like he was remembering something with the heel of his voice. “Back in the day. Used to be men swingin’ picks down here like they were tryin’ to dig straight into the heartbeat of the Planet.”
Tifa glanced sideways. There was a tone in him she rarely heard — reverent, almost. Nostalgia without the honey.
Aerith’s voice came like water skipping over stone. “Really?” she asked, tilting her head with a small, curious smile.
Barret nodded, still surveying the glitter-veined walls. “Mythril. Real rare. Can’t find it up top — only way down’s through the belly of this here mine itself. Grows like veins. Feeds on pressure.”
Tifa’s gaze slid along the stone. In the dim glow, silver strands shimmered just beneath the surface — like frozen lightning caught in blackened quartz. It was beautiful in a way that hurt the eyes. Too fragile. Too sacred.
Aerith stepped closer to a narrow seam in the wall, its gleam faint and fading. “Should we take a piece?” she asked softly. “For good luck?”
Barret let out a low laugh. “Nah. Shinra don’t use raw mythril anymore. Got somethin’ harder now. Reinforced alloys. Still polish it with that silvery sheen so it looks like mythril. Keeps the shareholders feelin’ like they’re buyin’ magic.”
Cloud’s voice came from ahead, level and without inflection. “They probably infuse it with materia now. It’s not about purity. It’s about power.”
Barret snorted. “Ain’t it always?”
They walked a little further, and for a moment, it almost felt like a real conversation — the kind that used to fill the Seventh Heaven after hours, when the sky hadn’t cracked and they’d still believed things could be won with enough fists and fire. It felt like before.
But “before” was a place they couldn’t go back to.
Not really.
They moved through the spine of the earth, swallowed whole by the bones of a world that remembered too much. Around them, the mine groaned with the slow breath of forgotten industry — rusted chains swaying gently from unseen rafters, water dripping from stalactites like a clock with no hands. Ahead, always ahead, the robed figures drifted. Black-caped shadows pulled not by will, but by something stranger. A hunger. A summons. Their feet barely lifted from the ground, their gait strange and somnambulant, as if each step cost them memory.
They did not speak. Not to one another. Not to themselves. Their silence was not the kind born of reverence or fear — but of distance, as though they had already passed some invisible border and left speech behind with the rest of the living. Hollow-eyed and slack-jawed, their faces bore the same expressionless vacancy one sees in open graves. Some kept their arms limp at their sides, fingers brushing stone with unconscious repetition; others stretched their arms forward, hands trembling slightly, not in plea but in pull — reaching for something unseen, like sleepwalkers chasing a half-remembered dream.
It was not devotion that drove them. It was not belief. It was pull — a gravitational thread spun from the marrow of something deeper than language, something that pulsed not in the heart but in the absence of it.
Tifa watched them from behind her bangs, each figure a question mark drawn in ash. She had grown used to ghosts. To remnants. But this — this was different. These weren’t men. Not anymore. They were memories still wearing flesh. Echoes made visible. Puppets of some larger shadow.
And yet… part of her wanted to ask them where they were going. What hunger called them forward, so fierce it asked them to vanish to answer it? What secret waited in the dark, so heavy it required their names be left behind?
And then — the ground turned traitor.
It began with a whisper; the tiniest fracture that sang beneath their boots. The sound was not loud, but intimate, like bone cracking beneath skin. Then the stone yawned wide, splitting along a seam too ancient to remember its reason for being. A tremor passed beneath Tifa’s feet, subtle and sudden, like the earth had taken a breath inward — and exhaled wrong. The floor crumbled in an instant. Not an explosion, not a quake. Just a slow, hungry collapse. Two of the robed men were there, and then they weren’t. Swallowed whole without protest. Dust bloomed upward in a dull, choked breath. Pebbles danced and dropped into silence. And the others — the rest of the shambling black shapes — didn’t so much as blink. No scream. No looking back. The rest of the robed men did not flinch. They stepped around the rupture as if it were nothing.
Barret cursed, loud enough to startle the walls into echo.
“I’ll go check it out,” He said, voice low but laced with reluctant concern. He cocked his gun-arm with a hiss and nodded toward the ragged edge of the pit. “I don’t feel right just leavin’em down there like that. Even if they ain't talkin’, they’re still... human, or used to be.”
Tifa stepped forward instinctively. “Then let me go with you.” Her voice was steady, sure in its register — but beneath it, something else trembled, like a chord held too long. A readiness that never left her, and something else beneath that: guilt, maybe. Or duty dressed in the rags of memory.
There was something about the way those men moved — that hollow shuffle, that silence too deep for mourning — that unsettled her in a place she couldn’t name. As if she’d seen them before ( and yes, in Midgar, she indeed had ). Not their faces, but their shape, their pull — like a dream glimpsed too often to be coincidence. The rhythm of their steps rang like a memory she hadn’t lived, but still carried. Or rather one she couldn't quite piece together currently.
She didn’t know why it felt familiar. Only that it did.
Barret shook his head, a gruff kindness behind the motion. “Nah, you four keep movin’. Someone's gotta follow the rest of ‘em. I'll catch up.”
Red XIII, standing by his side, looked up at Tifa with calm, burning eyes. “I’ll go with him,” he offered simply, his voice carrying the weight of quiet conviction. “Better to have two sets of eyes in case there’s something more waiting for us.” Then, with a pause — almost gentle — he added, “If we find anything… we’ll howl.”
Aerith glanced between them, her brow furrowing slightly. “Please, be careful.”
Cloud, who had been silent for a stretch too long, finally nodded. “We'll keep moving after the others,” he said. His voice was flat. Not cold — just focused, with a hint of his usual cockiness. “but don’t take too long.”
Barret gave a short grunt of acknowledgment and started down the ledge, Red XIII following him with the grace of something half-spirit, half-warrior.
Then they were gone, swallowed by shadow and silence.
Cloud nodded, almost absently, and kept moving forward.
So did Aerith. So did Tifa.
They walked in quietude, a stillness too fragile to last — the kind that settled before a storm, or after something terrible had been said and left to linger. Shadows clung to the walls like half-forgotten thoughts, and the further they pressed into the mine’s throat, the more the lull thickened — not empty, but watching.
As was expected, sometimes they ran into fiends. Not all at once — not in great numbers — but like teeth in the dark, sharp and scattered. Things that crawled from cracks in the stone, blind and gnashing. Sinewed nightmares with too many limbs and mouths that hadn’t forgotten the taste of miners long gone. The fights came in bursts — sudden and necessary — forcing them back into breath and instinct, into motion and violence. Cloud moved like a blade loosed from thought, his strikes clean and cruel. Aerith danced between the carnage, her spells weaving light into a place that had forgotten what stars looked like. Tifa — she was fire given form, fists breaking bone and silence alike. Each impact was a question she refused to ask aloud: How many more shadows? How much further before the end?
And after each skirmish the quiet returned, heavier than before.
The torches along the walls casted strange lights on Aerith’s features, softening the angles of her cheekbones and turning her chestnut hair into something that looked like fire when it caught the wind. She kept close to Cloud. Not too close — never obvious — but near enough that her laughter filled the silent spaces when it got too still. Near enough that she brushed his arm once, boldly as was usual of her. Near enough that she called his name in a tone just a little too light, a little too teasing.
Tifa watched.
It wasn’t jealousy. Not exactly. It was something older, submerged, more difficult to name — like the feeling of returning to a house rearranged in your absence. A tension curled just beneath her ribs, not sharp but constant, like an ache weathered over time. Aerith was kind — that wasn’t in question. Brilliant, even, with laughter that seemed to float above danger like light above deep water. She wasn’t an enemy. Yet watching her draw near to Cloud with that easy grace, with intentional touches and beautiful smiles that lingered like petals in bloom — it unsettled something in Tifa that had nothing to do with rivalry. It was the way Cloud let her. The way he didn’t flinch. The way he leaned — maybe without knowing — into her warmth like it was familiar. And in that moment, Tifa felt displaced. As if she had become the ghost, orbiting a memory she wasn’t sure she’d ever been part of.
She walked a little slower. Let the distance hold her.
Up ahead, the tunnel bent sharply, narrowing into a passage draped with time — wide and cavernous, the air was heavy with the scent of rust and long-abandoned passage — as if every footstep that had ever passed through still echoed faintly in the stone. Just as Cloud motioned to press forward, voices echoed from around the bend, low and too sharp to belong to the dead.
Tifa and Aerith both froze. Cloud raised a hand, all three hidden behind a large boulder.
Two silhouettes flickered in the orange glow: one broad-shouldered, tall and silent as a tombstone, the other restless, her hands cutting through the air as she paced with a kind of caged energy. Their backs were turned to the corridor, but their voices curled around the mines like smoke.
An unfamiliar female voice rose — sharp, but laced with something almost playful. “You sure he's okay? I mean... last I heard Reno got his ass handed to him.”
Rude’s reply came slow, deliberate. “He’s fine. Laid up. Ordered to take time off.”
“Time off?” she scoffed, the words dancing with wry humor. “That sounds like a very expensive, very well-catered vacation.”
Rude paused — just long enough for the air between them to fold in. "Yeah,” he said at last, voice low and even. “but he's losing his mind without something to hit. Man like that isn’t made for stillness.”
Tifa’s brow furrowed. She traded a glance with Cloud, who said nothing. Aerith leaned slightly forward, her expression unreadable.
The woman again: “So what are we even doing here? Tracking these... ghouls through a cave that smells like bad decisions?”
“Orders are orders. We're not paid to know anything else, just get the job done.” Rude rumbled.
There was a pause.
Then her voice turned, darker. “Well, maybe we should just kill them. It’d be a kindness.”
Tifa’s lips parted before she could stop them. The word slipped out like breath on glass. “Assholes.”
Silence. Then the scrape of a boot against stone.
“Who's there?” the unfamiliar voice snapped, suddenly sharp, a pistol already half-raised.
Cloud stepped into the glow first, the others at his back.
The two strangers turned. The woman was young — blonde, armored in navy and pride. Her stance was practiced, but her eyes were still too quick, too bright. The man beside her — all calm mass and coiled strength — needed no introduction.
“Well, well,” the woman said, eyes narrowing. “didn’t think we’d run into the fan club so soon. I'm Elena, by the way,” she added with a wink that didn’t reach her smile. “Since we’re about to trade punches, seemed polite to introduce myself.”
Cloud didn’t speak. He just shifted his stance, Buster Sword rising slightly.
Rude stepped forward, his presence like a storm cloud dragged in from another room, as he pushed his sunglasses further up the bridge of his nose. “AVALANCHE.”
Aerith tilted her head, her expression somewhere between curiosity and recognition, like someone trying to match a name to an old photograph. Her voice, when it came, was gentle — almost amused. “You’re new, aren’t you?” She let her eyes linger on Elena for a beat longer than necessary. “You must be new. You still talk like you haven’t seen the worst of it yet. That’s rare.”
The words hung for a moment — not unkind, but not empty either.
Before Elena could reply, the man beside her shifted. Massive, unreadable, and impossibly calm, Rude took a quiet step forward, the light glinting off the lenses of his sunglasses. His voice, when it broke the space between them, was low and steady, a warning dressed in gravel. “Don’t underestimate her,” he said simply. “she’s still a Turk.” Then he turned his head slightly, directing his next words to his partner without ever fully taking his eyes off the group. “You ready?”
Elena’s hand went to her weapon with practiced ease, her jaw tight but her eyes gleaming with adrenaline and something just shy of bravado. “Yeah,” she said, lifting her chin. “just like we practiced.”
There was no ceremony to it. No dramatic pause.
Only the breath before the brutality.
It began with Elena — a flash of motion and the gleam of her sidearm catching torchlight. Tifa lunged, intercepting the shot, her boot slamming into the concrete as she twisted and brought her fist up, catching Elena’s wrist with a brutal snap.
Rude was already in motion, his fists heavy as cinderblocks. Cloud met him in kind — blade against knuckles, sparks hissing as steel clashed with sheer strength.
The cavern roared to life.
Aerith barely ducked under a sweep of Rude’s arm, casting a barrier that shimmered briefly before splintering like glass. She retaliated with a flicker of green magic that arced like wind through the hollow.
Tifa drove Elena backward, dodging bullets, each punch a question she refused to leave unanswered. Her strikes were poetry in motion — rage honed into precision. Elena snarled, lashing back with feral grace, but Tifa was faster.
Cloud fought silently, methodically, his blade carving through the smoke and dust like it was cleaving through thought itself. He moved with purpose — not fury, not pride, but with a protective instinct sharpened to a point. It wasn’t Rude he focused on, not really. It was the space between them and Aerith — the unspoken need to keep her beyond the reach of those heavy fists. Every clash of steel and skin was a redirection, a barricade, a calculated draw.
Rude grunted as he caught the flat edge of the sword against his ribs, retaliating with a brutal hook that rattled Cloud’s bones and sent vibrations singing through his spine. Still, he did not flinch. Not once. Tifa caught only a glimpse of it — the faintest narrowing of Cloud’s eyes, the way he shifted to pull the fight away from the others — but the next instant demanded her full attention, and the thought slipped like dust between her fingers.
The mine shuddered around them, as if disturbed by the violence.
And still — none of them yielded.
Until Elena misstepped, boot sliding on loose gravel, and Tifa’s elbow connected with her collarbone. She went down hard.
On cue, Rude moved to stand above her protectively, his own chest heaving. Cloud’s blade hovered inches from his face.
The four froze.
Breathing. Watching. Waiting.
Elena groaned, one hand pressed to the stone floor, the other still curled tightly around her sidearm. Blood shone like warpaint along the curve of her lip. Slowly, deliberately, she rose to her feet — not with defeat, but calculation. Her posture still carried defiance, her movements carefully measured.
Cloud didn’t raise his sword again. Not yet.
Rude remained beside her, his breath steady, body still holding the coil of unspent ferocity. Their eyes locked — something silent passed between them. Subtly, Elena’s hand began to twitch toward her belt but before she could complete the motion, a crack echoed through the mine like lightning off steel.
A barrage of gunfire exploded into the chamber.
Stone chipped from the ground, sparks spat from the impact.
Everyone turned.
At the mouth of a higher tunnel, Barret stood like a tower of fury, gun-arm smoking, jaw clenched tight beneath a fresh sheen of sweat and grit. Red XIII crouched beside him, eyes glowing like embers in the dark, fur bristling.
“Hands in fuckin' the air,” Barret barked, voice like an landslip bearing down. “Now. Or there'll be a nice bullet-shaped hole in between your eyes.” Elena stiffened. Her fingers lifted, slow and reluctant. Rude followed suit without a word, ever the professional, unreadable even as the barrel of Barret’s weapon centered on his chest. Tifa’s breath caught. She moved to Cloud’s side without realizing it, her knuckles bruised and heart pounding. Barret’s voice came again — quieter now, but more dangerous for it. “You got a lot to answer for. Blood on your suits, blood on your hands. Shinra’s shadow dogs — always showing up too late or too eager.”
The air thickened with tension.
And then another voice rang out — calm, cool, cutting through the heat like the edge of a sharpened coin.
“Spare me the sermon.”
From a high outcrop, just above the tunnel mouth, a figure stepped into the firelight — suit immaculate despite the dust, black hair slicked back, a pistol in one hand held with casual certainty.
Tseng.
“Coming from you,” he continued, leveling the barrel of his gun toward Barret, “that’s rich. You’ve killed your share. Bombed reactors. Left graves behind you too.”
Barret raised his gun again, teeth gritted. “We did what we had to. We were fightin’ back.”
“So are we,” Tseng replied evenly. “Only difference is, we’ve learned when to pick our battles. Perhaps you all should do the same in kind.” He glanced toward Aerith, and the edge of his mouth curled into something that might’ve been a smirk — or something else entirely. “Take care of her for me.”
That made the silence quake.
Cloud stepped forward instinctively, the hilt of his sword twitching in his palm.
Tseng fired: not to hit — but to distract.
The bullet struck the ground between Cloud and Tifa’s feet, ricocheting with a shriek of metal against stone. Tifa moved, instinct already spiraling into motion — but she was a second too late.
“Elena!” Tseng ordered, sharp and sudden.
The blonde didn’t hesitate. From her belt, she produced a compact grenade — sleek, army-green — its pin already half-twisted loose. She grinned, a smear of blood still on her teeth. “Showtime,” she whispered. With a fluid sweep of her leg, she kicked the grenade forward like a soccer ball, sparks trailing behind it as it spun through the dust-heavy air toward the group.
Red XIII leapt, fur flying, jaws clamped, he snatched the device mid-air and twisted his body in mid-leap, hurling the grenade behind him into the yawning shaft where the stone had already begun to crack. It vanished into the vast darkness, then detonated a second later.
The blast wasn’t fire — it was force.
A subterranean roar cracked through the mine like thunder shaking loose an old god’s jaw. The very ground groaned — stone split, gravel slid. The floor beneath them all gave way entirely.
“Cloud!” Aerith’s scream echoed just as her footing vanished.
Tifa reached out, but there was nothing to grab.
She fell.
The world spun in grey and black and noise, and then — nothing.
Water.
It was the first thing she felt — cold, merciless, ancient. Not just wetness but weight. It draped itself over her like sorrow — not content to touch her, it sought to claim her. It filled her mouth, her ears, the hollow beneath her ribs, pressed its salt-stained palms against her skin until she was nothing but the echo of herself. She rose through it like a ghost climbing out of its grave, lungs burning, limbs shaking with some memory older than muscle. Surfacing with a broken gasp, her breath ragged like torn cloth, every inhale edged with salt and fire. Her body heaved forward, splashing through the shallows, hair dragging behind her in heavy ribbons. The chamber opened around her, vast and echoing, as if she had washed up inside the ribcage of a dead being. Her breath misted in the crystalline air. Each exhale marked her presence in a place that felt untouched by time, untouched by mercy.
Followed by — a splash! Quiet but near, a break in the stillness that slammed her heart into her throat.
She turned sharply.
There he was — Cloud, half-floating, half-suspended by the weight of the Buster Sword that clung to his back like an anchor carved from memory. His limbs were slack, his head tilted, expression serene in a way that made her skin crawl. He looked like something painted by a dream, or dragged up from the deep. His brow twitched faintly, as if troubled by thoughts she couldn’t reach.
“Cloud,” she rasped, voice thin as thread.
No answer.
Only the pulse of water, around them — light.
The darkness lifted in waves, driven back by the slow thrum of crystal veins embedded in the stone. Pale blue, ghost white, hints of amethyst and silver flickered across the jagged walls. Light bloomed from mineral flowers, fracturing across the cavern like broken starlight. It was breathtaking. Terrible. Too beautiful for a place that held such silence. The kind of place that begged you to lower your voice — because something listening did not like to be disturbed.
Hurriedly, she reached for him. One arm curled under his chest, the other anchoring them both as she moved through the shimmering water. His warmth was faint, dulled by shock, but there. Still alive. Still hers. His body shifted slightly under her grasp — a tremor in his hand, a breath caught in his throat — and her heart threatened to give out from relief.
“I’ve got you,” she whispered, and her voice shattered as it left her.
The mine exhaled — slow, seismic — and everything changed.
Cloud stirred. His eyelids fluttered once, like a curtain tugged by wind. Then again. And then his eyes opened. For a moment, they were just eyes — familiar, weary, blue. And then they weren’t. The mako inside him came alive, swirling with unnatural vibrancy, too luminous to be human. It was not its usual SOLIDER infused glow — it was a storm, caged beneath his irises. Blue and green writhed together like flame and sea, fighting for power, a thousand ghosts screaming behind glass. They caught the crystal light and made something monstrous of it. His pupils dilated, her breath caught.
She didn’t even have time to flinch.
In one seamless motion, Cloud moved — not like a man waking, but like a weapon activated. His hands rose, coiled around her throat, and began to squeeze.
It was so fast. So quiet.
There was no warning. No fury. No sound except her own gasp, choked off mid-breath as her spine arched in panic.
It didn’t feel like Cloud.
It felt like the shape of him had been worn by something else. Like something old and hollow had reached through the skin she knew and taken hold. His fingers were cold, unshaking, his grip unflinching. Clinical. Despite that, the force of it felt personal — as though it wasn’t function, but cruelty.
“C-Cloud,” she croaked — a desperate plea cracked in half.
Her hands scrabbled against him, nails digging into fabric, bone, anything — but it was like fighting marble. Her lungs began to tremble, vision stained black at the edges. And still — he stared at her with those wild, detached eyes. As if she wasn't there. As if she were someone else. As if she were nothing. She tried to say his name again, but it dissolved in her throat. Long legs kicked beneath the shallow water, limbs desperate to rise — but there was no surface. No sky.
Only him.
Only this.
“Stop — please — it’s me —”
Her words were sobs now, guttural things gasped between bruised breaths. The tears came before she noticed. Not out of fear, not yet — but grief. A slow, dawning heartbreak that settled into her bones with terrifying clarity: he didn’t recognize her. If he had, he'd had stopped by now, wouldn't he?
Still his face remained void. Focused. Terrible.
There — the last breath escaped her lips, and with it: “Cloud.” Her voice was a whisper, thin as breath over glass. And something… broke.
Not a noise. Not a scream. Just a flicker.
His eyes blinked — once, then again — and the light changed. The tension fled from his brow and, suddenly, his hands dropped.
Like they had never been clenched at all.
“Tifa?” he breathed, and the way he said it — like a man waking from a drowning sleep — nearly undid her.
She collapsed forward, coughing, gasping, hands slapping the water, retching breath into lungs that had almost forgotten how to take it. Each inhale felt like a blade. Each heartbeat an accusation.
He caught her. Not forcefully, not urgently — but like instinct. As if the part of him that remembered her had rushed to the surface.
“I didn’t mean to,” he stammered, voice thin with horror. “I didn’t — I don’t —”
She couldn’t answer. Her arms were weak, her throat aflame. She simply let herself lean against him, even as her body screamed to run. She wanted to believe the voice that cracked with guilt was his. That whatever had taken hold of him had left. That the one holding her now was still Cloud.
But the tremble in his arms betrayed him.
He let go.
Stepped back like her breath was a sin, like his skin remembered what his mind had tried to forget. He wouldn’t look at her.
And the silence that fell between them was not forgiveness.
It was aftermath.
It was mourning.
Tifa sat there, throat raw, knees to her chest in the shallows, staring into the trembling mirror of the water. She didn’t weep anymore. Her body had moved past that. Her hands, trembling, ghosted over her own neck — not to measure the damage, but to believe it had really happened. He stood near the edge, his back turned, posture like statue — forged, not grown. The Buster Sword gleamed behind him like a warning. She rose slowly, muscles stiff with pain, soaked hair clinging to her skin like lamenting cloth.
“You okay?” she asked, voice paper-thin. Still, worried for him.
No answer. A shift of his shoulders. A nod or maybe a lie.
“Back there…” she started, the words uncertain on her tongue. “You weren’t yourself.”
He didn’t flinch.
“Cloud,” she said, stronger now. “I’m not asking you to explain. I’m asking you to let me in.”
Finally, he turned.
And his eyes — gods, his eyes — were dimmed, not dulled. Guarded. There was a door closed behind them, and she didn’t have the key.
“We don’t have time for this,” His voice cut through the cavern like a shard of ice snapped from some merciless glacier — blunt, unfeeling, final. Not a defense nor even anger. Just the quiet, cold cruelty of dismissal. A door slammed without sound. A knife twisted with no intent of healing. His back turned on her once more before the words had fully reached her.
In that moment, something inside her — something soft and long-held — flinched.
He didn’t mean it. Not truly. She told herself that. Yet the ache didn't care. The ache was real. It took root in her chest, spread like frost over stone. It wasn’t just the words. It was everything in them. The way he didn’t pause. The way he didn’t see her — not the way she needed him to. Not after that. Not after he had nearly taken her breath from her body and then acted like the wound could be walked away from.
She stood there for a beat too long, weight sinking into the soles of her boots, breath catching in her throat — again — but this time from something quieter, crueler, and harder to name. Not fear.
Loss.
A new kind of loss. Worse than when he vanished from Nibelheim, worse than when he didn’t write, worse than the first time she saw him again slumped on the floor of the Sector 7 train station and didn’t recognize who he had become. This was a loss of access. Of trust. Of the illusion that she still held a place inside him untouched by mako, memory, or madness.
Her fingers twitched at her sides. Not fists. Not fight. Just futility.
Still, her legs moved.
She followed him.
Because she vowed she always would ever since he'd come back.
Even as a girl beneath the well, standing in the dusk of her own heartbreak, she had still believed — foolish, hopeful — that he would keep his promise. For now, she'd do what she could to keep her own secret pledge to him. Maybe he’d fallen long before Midgar. Maybe he’d never stopped. However, here she was again, trailing behind the echo of someone she deeply cared for — someone who couldn’t reach for her, even when he was the one breaking. A choice all her own for reasons she couldn't, yet, fully understand besides the fact that her gut told her he needed someone to be there for him.
Even when she was the one bleeding.
She didn’t speak. Didn’t protest. Her silence wrapped around her like a second skin, stitched with restraint and self-preservation. But inside her chest, the words churned. Not the ones he’d said — those were already fading like smoke — but the ones he hadn’t. The ones he refused to give.
She watched his masculine form ahead of her, the faint glow of the crystals limning his figure in pale hues — pulsing blues, glowing whites, the color of memory dissolving. Hauntingly gorgeous and untouchable.
He didn’t look back.
Not once.
And still — she continued to walk beside him.
Even now.
Even as his silence scalded.
Even as his retreat carved itself into her like a second wound.
Because caring for Cloud — whatever name she dared not give it — had become a pilgrimage through fog: each step forward met by the outline of him retreating, always drifting toward something unseen. He was never still. Never here. She reached and reached, and still he walked — toward memories he couldn’t name, toward shadows only he could see. It felt like trying to hold onto a dream that left no warmth behind. And yet, she remained with him because some fragile part of her — buried under years, grief, and silence — still believed that if she stayed close enough, attentive enough, steadfast enough… he might stop running.
He might finally turn to look at her not as someone from before, not as an reflection of the life he’d left behind — but as someone real. As someone who was still there. And she wasn’t ready to give up on that.
Not yet.
They moved wordlessly, adrift in the mine’s luminescent hush. The crystals above them pulsed like patient hearts, their glow soft and slow as candlelight underwater. Motes of dust floated like suspended breath, trailing the rhythm of their footsteps, catching faint glimmers before vanishing into shadow. It felt like walking through the belly of a myth — mineral light, stone silence, and a weight in the air that had little to do with pressure and everything to do with memory.
From the fractures in the rock came monsters — born not of nature but of the wrongness that festered in the dark places of the world. Sludge-like, iridescent things, all hunger and hiss, their tendrils flicking like the tongues of serpents. They oozed toward Cloud and Tifa with the senseless need of things that had never known light. But the battles were brief — a dance of muscle, magic, metal and reflex. Cloud moved like a blade sharpened too finely, cutting through the fiends with an almost indifferent grace, his fire materia blooming against the slick hides with surgical precision. Tifa was already moving beside him — fists lit with chi, her body all momentum and intent. She ducked low beneath a flailing arm, spun into a rising kick, each motion practiced, each breath controlled. Between them, they carved a path forward — not speaking, not touching, but dancing like storm and flame.
She watched him from the edge of her vision: the way his body moved without pause, how his gaze remained fixed ahead, not cold exactly — but sealed. Like whatever lived behind those mako-lit eyes had been locked away, and only the shell had come along for the journey. He didn’t look at her since he'd come to. Not once. Yet, he stayed just close enough, always just close enough to intercept the danger she didn’t see.
They came across the fallen not long after — robed men strewn across the stone like prayers abandoned mid-sentence. Their bodies were wrong. Folded in on themselves, arms splayed like broken wings. Some with faces slack in something like peace. Others with mouths still open as if waiting to speak. A silence clung to them that wasn’t restful.
Tifa slowed, her pulse echoed faintly in her throat. “How do you know they’re really leading us to him?” she asked, the question half-breathed.
Cloud didn’t turn. Didn’t stop. His voice came flatly, as if from another room.
“I don’t. It’s just… a feeling.”
She swallowed the rest of her questions because deep down, she knew; this path wasn’t drawn by logic. It was carved into him by something else. A whisper, a wound, a memory too loud to silence. Something guiding him that didn’t belong to him at all.
They climbed higher. The passage narrowed into a brittle spine of stone and crystal, sloping ledges etched with runoff and the glitter of ancient minerals. Water ran in silver seams along the edges — gentle, clear, and endless — like strata in the mountain’s skin. The light shifted with every step, fractured by facets of quartz and mythril, until it wasn’t clear where the tunnel ended and dream began.
Then — ahead — the silhouettes of their friends.
Barret.
Aerith.
Red XIII.
Framed by distance, lit by fractured light. Like memories come to life.
“Hey! You okay?” Aerith’s voice lifted across the drop, soft and bright as she waved her arms.
Tifa hesitated — just a second.
“Yeah,” she called, her voice light as glass. “We’re good! How about you?”
She didn’t mention the bruises. Didn’t mention how the air in her lungs still felt borrowed. Not with Cloud standing beside her, quiet and distant and — in some way — unknowable. She held the line for him, quietly, faithfully, without permission.
There was no bridge, no handhold, no passage the earth hadn't already swallowed. The ledge lay fractured — a wound in the mountain’s spine — and the chasm below stretched too wide, too deep, to tempt fate. Cloud, voice low and even, offered the only path left: the others would press on toward the exit above, while he and Tifa descended into the deeper coils of the mine. Whichever group emerged first would wait. No argument. No pause.
And so, once more, it was just the two of them — drawn into the throat of the world, where the rock closed behind like memory, and the heavy silence sealed them in.
They walked through the last stretch in that same silence. A silence that throbbed like a bruise under the skin. The air grew thick, clotted with dust and quiet, as the crystals dimmed. The weight of the mine pressed closer — not collapsing, not hostile. Just watching. Just remembering.
Tifa moved forward with tight fists, her heartbeat rising against her ribs like a voice that wanted out. Cloud walked beside her, his boots almost soundless, his presence too loud in every way that mattered.
The mine opened without warning — one final chamber.
Vast. Echoing. Waiting.
At its center stood a beast — massive, plated in a shell of raw mythril, its body shaped like a titan forged in greed. Its skin was stone and steel, its eyes the color of burning gold. Limbs like towers, hands like hammers. Each breath it took sounded like grinding metal, as if its entire body mourned the weight it carried.
It charged.
And Cloud met it head-on.
He struck first — sword flashing through the dim like a comet. Tifa followed — breath tight, body coiled, her fist finding the joint behind its knee. The creature roared, the chamber shaking with the sound of it. Dust rained down in silver showers. Every strike echoed. Every dodge left the air scorched. Together, they moved — not perfectly, not cleanly — but as one. As survival. As memory.
Somehow — together — they brought it down.
The beast fell in a cascade of mythril and ruin.
The chamber exhaled.
And for the first time in what felt like forever — there was space to breathe.
The tunnel beyond led to light.
Real light. Not crystal. Not magic. Sunlight.
They stepped into it, and there, against the sky — the others.
Aerith moved first — the way illumination does, when the storm begins to break.
She didn’t speak, didn’t gasp, didn’t smile wide like she so often did. Her body simply closed the distance in a hush, and her arms folded around Tifa in a way that felt like warmth rediscovered. Like mercy, gentle and immediate. Tifa stiffened, instinctively — not from fear, not from shame, but from the brittleness clinging to her bones. The kind that followed when breath had been torn away, when your body forgot it belonged to you, even for a moment. Aerith didn’t force closeness. She didn’t squeeze tight. Her arms were soft, her embrace unassuming — as if she knew that too much kindness too fast might make everything unravel. It was the kind of touch that felt like listening.
Her fingers brushed along Tifa’s damp long hair. Paused briefly at her upper arms, then slipped — featherlight — to the hollow of her neck. There, they lingered for just a beat too long. Her gaze followed. She saw. Of course she did. The bruising hadn’t risen yet, but something darker had — the hush of pain not yet voiced. The memory of pressure. Of hands. Of silence made physical.
Aerith’s expression barely changed. Just a soft narrowing of emerald eyes, a faint twitch at the corner of her lips, like a smile interrupted by stormlight. She didn’t ask.
She didn’t need to.
Without ceremony, she let go — and the space left behind felt colder for it.
The flower girl then turned to Cloud. And her voice — that lilt, bright and ringing, the kind that never quite belonged underground — lifted into a laugh, as if they’d only been separated by coincidence. As if nothing had cracked wide open between the three of them. Her arms wrapped around him with the kind of audacity only she could carry — joy painted over ruin, light daring to reach the edges of something jagged.
He didn’t flinch. He didn’t reciprocate either.
But he let her.
He let her hold him.
After all she'd been through, Tifa could only stand there, not far, not near, her boots rooted in cement that suddenly felt like glass beneath her. She couldn’t look away. Couldn’t pretend it didn’t sting — that he had allowed Aerith that closeness so easily. That she, who had held his name like a prayer since childhood, had received no such permission. Only distance. Only cold.
Her fingers curled into the hem of her skirt. Her mouth stayed closed, jaw tense, eyes too dry.
Barret’s voice cracked the silence like a firework fired too soon. “Damn, merc,” he called, his arms folding with the ease of camaraderie, his grin wide, unknowing. “you get lost tryin’ to read the rocks or somethin’?”
The words, light and teasing, struck like stones thrown anyway.
Cloud’s voice followed. That old dryness, that sharp-edged cool he wore like a mask. “Took a detour,” he started. “had to give a Golem a dance lesson.”
Barret barked a laugh, full-bodied and unaware. Red XIII offered a low, amused rumble. Aerith giggled — soft, amused, the sound of wind returning to a field after a long silence as she looped her arms around Cloud's right arm.
And Tifa —
Tifa felt the laughter fall across her shoulders like rain in winter. Icy. Inevitable. A noise she remembered once loving, now pressing too hard against her chest. It filled the space around her but refused to touch the place inside her that had gone quiet. The hollow behind her heart where fright still echoed, where Cloud’s hands still lingered like ghost prints.
She didn’t move.
She barely breathed.
For a second, he looked at her.
Just a flick of his gaze. Not long or deep. Not meaningful, if someone else had seen it. Just a moment. Just a sliver. Like he was checking that she was there.
Her heart stopped for that half-second.
Waiting.
Maybe for care. Maybe for warmth. Maybe for something that said I’m still in here, even if I don’t know how to reach you.
But all she saw was a glance.
A blink, then nothing.
It wasn’t indifference. It wasn’t kindness. It was that soft, impassable veil he always wore — the one that made him unreachable, even when he was right in front of her. The one that made her wonder if she had ever really known him at all.
The others kept talking jovially.
The cave, suddenly brighter, rang with voices that sounded like celebration.
Yet, she said nothing.
Because the words she needed didn’t exist. Because if she opened her mouth, she might scream, or sob, or ask him why his silence hurt more than his hands ever could.
So she stood still, like a shadow in someone else’s memory, and told herself what she always did: they made it out.
That had to be enough.
Even if her body still remembered the water.
Even if her throat still ached from the ghost of his grip.
Even if his eyes, glowing like fire buried beneath frost, had passed over her like a stranger in the street.
She would carry this, too, like she carried everything else.
Alone.
Notes:
Hi! Updating much earlier than expected, but that might be because I spent a month writing about four chapters of this story before posting so yay! It's about to get darker here, and while it's still following Rebirth somewhat, as the chapters go on it will diverge in different ways. Thank you for the kudos! Thank you for reading! With or without comments, kudos, whathaveyou, I'm just glad to write. And to train myself to get better.
Ano0605 on Chapter 2 Thu 17 Apr 2025 06:38PM UTC
Comment Actions
bochoxx on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Apr 2025 09:52PM UTC
Comment Actions
JustAReader08 on Chapter 2 Sun 20 Apr 2025 10:39PM UTC
Comment Actions
bochoxx on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Apr 2025 09:53PM UTC
Comment Actions