Chapter Text
He wakes from a dream of agony and fire to a reality no kinder. A cruel knot of pain beneath his fluttering heart crackles like a nova flare when he tries to move, and cleaves like a knife when he remembers why it hurts in the first place.
He cycles through it. Forgetting. Remembering. The blissful haze of willful ignorance, and the sharp unrelenting burden of memory. He doesn’t know which is worse.
The pain follows him in sleep, if the fitful bouts of unconsciousness he falls into could be called as such. Mom. Tifa. The village. Zack. Sephiroth. It bubbles up inside of him, scorching through his core, until it leaves him hollowed out and brittle as ashes. So he forgets, for a little while. Loses himself, drifts in a green haze where his troubles can’t find him.
He’s distantly aware of someone beside him. Of the cries, shrieks, and desperate pleading of the others, nestled in their own little worlds of pain deep within the dark bowels of the manor. When he was a kid, Tifa’s friends would all dare each other to slip through the weathered wrought-iron bars of the twisted gates. One of them had almost made it once; Cloud had watched them, tucked safely away, where he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be found. He’d watched as that friend… Tyler, was it? Had shimmied and contorted himself, shoulders popping through the bars, when the mayor had come hollering, running down the gravel path and brandishing his fist. The kids had all scattered, even Tifa, and Tyler had to be cut out of the gate, red-faced and weeping.
Had the mayor known what laid beneath that old, stale ground? Or had he simply been following some vague orders from ShinRa to protect their apparently unused asset? The manor was the birthplace of the ShinRa Electric Power Company, after all. There was a little museum in the back of the town hall detailing its storied history.
Or, there had been. Gone, all gone, nothing but scorched rubble and dust. Nibelheim now exists solely in the past tense, the present nothing but pain.
He sleeps.
.
Cloud wakes from dreams of agony, and fire.
He gasps, instinctively, even though he doesn’t think he’s been holding his breath. A white-hot flash of pain erupts from a pulsing point in the middle of his chest, just beneath the frantic flutter of his heart. Sephiroth.
He clenches his teeth, blinks his burning eyes to try and clear his watery vision.
It’s dark.
How many times has he done this now? This cruel cycle of sleeping, of waking, being torn between grim reality, and the better world his burdened mind has conjured for itself.
He’s not in the tank today. Above him, he can just about make out the thick metal struts that hold the mansion’s lower floors above his head. It’s quiet enough that he can hear people walking up there, the muffled thump of dress shoes on old wooden floorboards.
Beneath him is cold metal, the bite of worn leather straps digging into his skin, already chafed and raw around his wrists and ankles from a hundred times before. Time means nothing. Everything froze the day his world went up in flames. He can still smell burning wood, his ears still ring with panicked cries. His palms still throb from the red-hot scald of heated metal.
It’s too easy to get lost in that moment, to let his mind wander tired tracks through that same fixed point, as if this time he’ll find something new, and fate might change. He shakes the fog away, focusing on the rub of leather against his sore skin, and the biting chill of the metal table leeching through his flimsy paper gown and trickling up and down the bony bumps of his spine.
He’s awake, free of dreams, free from the trap his mind has created for him in a desperate bid to keep him sane. A stray tear slips from his eye and runs down his temple, but his vision finally clears, and he can see everything.
Zack, floating quietly in the tank tucked into the far corner of the room. The large terminal that dominates the wall beside them, brandishing a picture of his own face. There’s lines upon lines upon lines of text that he can’t bring himself to read, because he knows what it says.
Failure.
He doesn’t really know what they’re trying to do, or why they keep trying to do it. He shifts on the table in a pathetic attempt to find comfort. The air is cold, and he can feel himself shaking. There’s wires everywhere, burrowing beneath his skin like greedy worms, up his nose and coiling down his throat into his stomach, between his legs. Is he even worth the effort? Despite his apparent failure, Hojo keeps him alive, always managing to think up some other twisted experiment to use him for. Something with plenty of pain, and little science. Sometimes, Zack disappears. Not as often as in the early days, however long ago those were, and never for very long. On the brief occasions when they’re both awake at the same time, Cloud tries to ask him where he went, clumsy fingers bending into military hand-signals in a mockery of everything he actually wants to say, but can’t.
The only noise that ever penetrates that thick glass is the sounds of screaming.
Voices now, coming closer. Hojo’s nasally whine, barking out orders to assistants that scurry like ants and try very hard to pretend that Cloud is no longer a person. The door to the underground lab creaks open, pale light crawling across the floor and slicing across Cloud’s pale face.
“Well,” Hojo grouses, lips twisted as he stares at Cloud and Cloud helplessly stares back. “Let’s try and make some use out of you.”
Hojo’s still talking, but Cloud isn’t listening. His mind is already slipping away, soul untethering from his bones to float somewhere above his trapped body. It watches as Hojo stalks the room, knocking the knuckle of his crooked index finger against his chin before smirking wickedly. Cloud’s soul, or his mind, or whatever is left of him is so distracted by watching Hojo that he doesn’t see the lab assistant come up beside him to plunge a syringe into the tender crook of his elbow. Even without the meds, Cloud is already slipping further and further away as Hojo contemplates his next steps.
“ – cellular level,” Hojo says, his voice warped and warbling as if underwater. “… yes! Mako –”
Cloud sleeps.