Chapter Text
There was an unwieldy weight to Nothing, the kind that pressed on a body from all sides and exhausted it down to the bones. He didn’t know how much more of it he could take, not that he really had a choice.
Dry, still air burned his lungs as he walked, drawing in small, sharp particles of dust that lacerated his nose and throat. His ears rang, not from any loud noise but from the empty lack of sound, as they strained to hear anything besides his own footsteps and heartbeat. His skin turned red in the unmitigated sunlight, bubbling angrily until it dried and peeled, falling to the ground while a new layer began the cycle again.
Cloud stopped when he reached the shore, gazing out at the ocean. His eyes traced over the cracked, dead earth, at the bleached bones of life that once swam here when water still existed.
He stood and watched as the last few hours of daylight ticked by and the sun sank below the horizon. The stars came out, unfathomably bright with no remaining atmosphere to block them, and the moon turned the bones into a shining sea of silver reflections.
His body ached and grew sluggish with the telltale signs of frostbite, until he finally moved and creaking muscles had blood pumped back through them. The cold bit into every exposed area of skin, making it crack and bleed, as he turned and walked away.
How long since Meteor? When did he stop counting?
Probably when the days stopped bringing anything new and the seasons stopped making a difference. He couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a plant, or the last drop of water he saw. There was nothing left on Gaia anymore but dust and bones, remnants of what were, that radiation and gods only knew what else were gradually stripping away.
Cloud paused when he felt Sephiroth stir. It only lasted a few moments, as the One-Winged Angel bothered to assess his domain for the first time in ages, the faintest tingle of his attention lingering briefly on Cloud. There was a brush of satisfaction as he found what he was looking for, making sure his pet was still here.
Sephiroth stayed in the pretty slice of paradise within the northern crater, and never set foot outside of it. It was the only place with life, lush and green and warm and safe, and Cloud refused to go near it anymore.
He did sometimes, in the beginning, out of sheer desperation, just to see and hear something besides death and silence. The sickening knowledge that the beautiful mountains, so similar to Nibel, had clearly been carved just for him and only him was enough to make him quickly leave again, even on the very rare occasion Sephiroth himself wasn’t.
Cloud was allowed to run, never stalked and brought back. It wasn’t like there was anywhere for him to go.
Up among the stars, something briefly flashed. One of the small satellites that carried communications from Gaia to other planets. Jenova put them up there, back before the Cetra interrupted her plans, but Sephiroth had continued his “mother’s” plans and finished this nest for himself. It was strange, to think he had a people out there, Jenova’s people, with whom he communicated and socialized.
Despite cleansing this planet for himself, Sephiroth wasn’t alone. There were other planets out there turned into similar nests, some already devoid of life and some cleansed of it first. Jenova’s species were few but powerful, all somehow connected but physically semi-solitary. Cloud had learned that much from Sephiroth at some point, but he could infer for himself what would eventually happen: his tormentor would connect with one of his kind he could possibly reproduce with. Sephiroth would either use the hidden ship is mother arrived on to go to them, or they would come here to him.
Cloud didn’t know or care which one was most likely. His forced unlife would continue either way, until Sephiroth got bored enough of him to sever his leash and finally let him die.
Something moved on the ground, and Cloud stopped walking. At his feet the dirt shifted as a flower forced itself up, leaves unfurling and petals opening, the air becoming scented with something sweet. More followed suit, followed by grass rolling out around him, and a sudden rise in temperature to that of a lovely summer night. Cicadas called in the distance, where trees stretched up from the dead ground, and a wolf howled in the distance.
A sob caught in Cloud’s throat as he clenched his teeth and choked it back. He was not going to give Sephiroth the satisfaction of knowing how tempting this invitation north was.
“Still no.” His voice was hoarse as he said the words out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he spoke. “Still never.”
No anger, no demand. Just a smug feeling of suit yourself and that infuriating sense of knowing. Cloud was not a god. Despite the ever-multiplying number of alien cells making up his body, he was a man. A spiteful man, but still a man, and eventually he was going to break spectacularly. Sephiroth had all the time in the universe to wait.
The presence receded, and so did the warmth and greenery. The world died again before his eyes, and Cloud resumed walking through the barren landscape.
Outside of the Northern Paradise, there was nothing to do but walk. Ravenous and parched as he might be, there was nothing to eat or drink. Exhausted as he felt, there was nowhere strong enough to shelter from the extreme temperatures, and so nowhere to sleep. He didn’t need food or water or rest to survive though, not with what he was slowly becoming.
He didn’t know how long it had been since Meteor, and he didn’t know how long he had until there was more Jenova in him than human. As much as he told himself he was merely a pet, there was a far more horrifying truth he was less willing to confront; someday he would be like Sephiroth. Not as a person, goddess he hoped not, but physically and genetically, they would be one kind.
It offered both hope and a curse. Maybe Cloud would be so beaten down when the time came that he’d accept his fate, crawl into the open arms of this disgusting alien species as one of their own.
Or, maybe, he would regain full autonomy and be able to end his nightmare permanently.
Cloud walked for a few more cycles, feeling every tormented hour of solar fire and every bone-chilling moment of lightless cold. His body suffered and broke down, only to regenerate fresh and deteriorate again. He walked until he reached a curious chunk of thick, battered steel, jutting up out of the ground so high it might as well be a mountain.
Is that…the plate?
The wrath of Meteor scoured everything from the face of the northern hemisphere, and Sephiroth’s follow-up had cleared the rest. No landmark was the same as it had been when he’d first carried the Black Materia up into the northern crater, lulled by a siren song tingling in his very blood. Cloud had walked without direction because there was no direction anymore, he honestly didn’t think he’d ever stumble across anything familiar before it was all gone.
But no, that was the plate, or at least a large chunk of it. The sheer size and mass of it meant it would take some time for it to be fully destroyed, but even from where he stood Cloud could see that destruction was well underway.
It took two more days for him to reach it, it could be spotted at such a distance. Not that he had expected any different after coming across other cities, but the sea of human bones here hit him particularly hard.
Was Marlene here somewhere? Elmyra? When Cloud went mad and broke off from the others, did any of them return here to regroup?
Cloud’s arm itched as he stepped across the border between the sun’s scalding rays and the decrepit plate’s shadow, a wildly strange sensation. It wasn’t the ache of dried, peeling skin, but an actual itch. A sign of biological life he hadn’t experienced in quite some time, enough to bring him to a halt.
There were some spots there, red ones, about midway down his forearm. Bright red, like beading blood, even though he wasn’t cut. They didn’t wipe away, but the itch did die down when he rubbed at the skin.
Maybe he’d luckily managed to catch the last living disease on the planet. Cloud mentally crossed his fingers that it was deadly.
Farther on, the slum was surprisingly intact compared to the rest of the world, mostly shielded by the degrading plate. No life had survived the immediate effects of Meteor, but there was still a shape to the streets and the echoes of what might have been homes.
Cloud knew these streets, or at least, what was left of them.
He walked by memory, curving where there would once have been a building or trash heap even where nothing still stood, following a path his feet had only walked a few times but remembered. He was only in Midgar for a few days before they’d all fled, maybe a week at most, and had only ventured to Sector 5 once or twice. But some part of him knew the way, even if his conscious mind didn’t. When he made the final turn he stopped dead, wondering if Sephiroth had abruptly tired of his refusal to play and killed him.
The church was still standing.
Not just standing, it looked sturdy and regal, rising up from the stretch of nothing around it like a phoenix from the planet’s ashes. But even if it was completely crumbling inside, Cloud didn’t care. He pushed his feet into moving and pushed open the door, still heavy and solid as it always was.
The air inside was fresh, fragrant even, impossibly cool despite the fire leeching down from the sky. Sunlight filtered through stained glass windows, once blocked from it by the plate but now somehow immune to its rage. A sound echoed from above, freezing him in place even as his eyes darted upward.
A bird. A bird.
He took a step forward to get a better view and felt something soft under his foot, jumping to avoid crushing it. To his shock it was a flower, a beautiful, cream-colored lily. One of many, he saw now, growing throughout the church, having forced their way up through the floorboards.
The whole church was alive. Flowers, vines, birds, and what looked like a pool of fresh, clean water up where he remembered a small patch of flowers once stood.
Absently, he scratched his arm. The itch was stronger here.
As he watched, the bird from the rafters flitted down to the floor. It hopped a few times, then spread its wings and seemed to fall into the water.
No, not into it, through it. And as Cloud took a few cautious steps closer, he realized it wasn’t water.
It shimmered a little, like the surface of a pool, but was just an open space. Impossibly, he could see twinkling stars and the beautiful colors of a far-off galaxy, invisible to human eyes but so painfully lovely with his enhanced ones. Gingerly, he crouched down at the edge and reached down to touch the surface.
Something else touched back. Grabbed, in fact, and before Cloud could brace himself and find his balance he tumbled through the shimmering space.
In his head, something shrieked. Pure fury struck out, digging jagged claws deep into the very fiber of his being. He was falling away but something was trying to hold on, digging and shredding at him even as he slipped through its grasp. Goddess it hurt, burning and freezing all at once, like a piece of his very soul was being stripped away.
“Oh. Shit. Wrong one.”
Cloud panted, the blurry field of red receding from his vision, eyes focusing on the person holding his wrist. In that moment he knew he had to finally be dead, because there was no other way he’d be looking into the startled eyes of the very deceased Zack Fair.
“I’m over here,” a tired voice grunted.
Cloud’s eyes flicked to a blond who was stumbling to his feet, brushing dust off his jeans. He looked up, and Cloud found himself staring into his own shocked face.
“Zack, put him back!” The other Cloud hissed. “You can’t just go grabbing people out of other timelines!”
“I saw him and thought he was you!” Zack looked ready to panic. “I mean, he’s obviously you, but I thought he was a different you! Sorry man, just forget you ever saw us! Um, this is just a spooky dream…”
He tried to nudge Cloud back through the…portal that still shimmered at their side. Cloud’s free hand shot out, grabbing onto a sharp rock outcropping, the pain and blood of the resulting deep cut ignored.
“No.” Gods, it was just so damn long since he talked, he even sounded like a barely reanimated corpse. “I don’t care what’s going on, but I’m not going back there.”
The whole exchange lasted less than a minute, but it was long enough for Cloud to pick up on one very important detail: he couldn’t feel Sephiroth anymore, at all. Even when he was quiet, the slimy bastard was always slithering around in the back of his skull like a venomous snake, but now that space that held him was blissfully empty.
He had escaped. The how didn’t make a damn lick of sense, but he had.
Zack looked helplessly up at the other Cloud, who made his way over to join them. The copy looked down at him for a long moment, then scrunched up his face in a frown.
“You look like ten pounds of shit forced into a five-pound bag,” he stated.
Oh, yeah, this was definitely another version of him.
“You look like the bag,” Cloud returned. And it wasn’t a lie; this Cloud looked a year or two younger than him, at most, but his mako-glow eyes had dark circles under them and he clearly hadn’t been eating.
But he wasn’t Jenova. He had some cells, Cloud could feel it, but not to the extent Cloud himself did. He was studying Cloud, hugging himself like he saw something he didn’t like, not that he could blame the guy.
“Did you go?” The copy asked, voice sounding thick. “When he called? To the crater, I mean. You feel like he…had you.”
Cloud looked away, nodding as he got to his own feet.
“We were in Wutai,” he replied. “Right after…right after the Cetra temple. The others decided we should go our own ways, they didn’t trust me anymore, so I left. Vincent tried to come with me, but I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to figure out what to do on my own, but it just kept getting worse. I gave in, I went north.”
The copy nodded slowly, almost seeming lost in his own memories of a similar struggle.
“It’s hard,” he said. “And it just gets harder every day. Meteor?”
“Yes.”
“Is anything…?”
“Nothing.”
Zack looked back and forth between them, not understanding the exchange. It hurt to see his face, alive and well, as much as it elated him. The copy offered Zack a hand, helping him to his feet.
“Leave him be,” he said. “He doesn’t need to go back.”
“We can’t just pull people out of timelines,” Zack argued. “Especially not you. I was actually listening, you know. You’re one of the key players, without you—”
“Yeah, well, his game is over,” the copy said sharply.
“What about his friends?” Zack pressed. “What about—”
“They’re dead, Zack,” the copy was a little gentler on that revelation. “They’re all dead. He gave Sephiroth the Black Materia, Meteor killed everybody. I think the only reason he’s even still alive is because of how much Jenova he’s got in his body now.”
Zack whipped around, and the look of sheer pity on his face made Cloud balk. He didn’t need that look, and he sure as hell didn’t need the misplaced feeling behind it.
“Again, I have no idea what’s going on,” Cloud cut off whatever Zack was going to say. “And I don’t care. Whatever you two are doing, feel free to go on your way. I’ll figure out what to do next myself.”
“Okay,” the copy let out a little huff, turning to look out over the darkened, rocky plane they stood on. It was ethereal, a world between worlds. “Just be careful. The timelines…they’re not all stable, we’re trying to fix that now. And you can’t just hop into any one you find, you need to find one where Cloud Strife either was never born or is already dead. If there are two of the same person in any one timeline, the universe deletes a copy and combines the two together.”
“You can kind of tell what’s going on if you touch one of the mirrors,” Zack said helpfully. Cloud realised he was talking about the weird portal he’d been pulled through, which did look like a mirror. “If you rest your hand on the surface, you can get flashes of what it’s like there. Cloud says he can feel himself that way, so you should know if there’s already a version of you in one of them.”
Cloud nodded. That was really all he needed to know.
Zack reached out to put a hand on his shoulder, but Cloud jerked back. This wasn’t his Zack, it was his copy’s, and he didn’t want pity from a ghost. Especially not the ghost of a man whose death he was personally responsible for.
“He’ll be all right,” a light pleasant voice interjected from Cloud’s right. “He’s ours now, I’ll see him back.”
All three of them spun around, pulling out their swords. The copy and Zack, Cloud noticed, both wielded the Buster sword. Cloud’s weapon, though, was a six-bladed fusion monstrosity he’d built in the first days after the destruction, when he still had hopes of killing Sephiroth.
The “threat” standing before them was a woman in a white dress, her thick brown hair pulled back from her pretty face. Her eyes were green, like new leaves in spring, and her mouth curved up into a sweet smile.
“Wait…Aerith?” Zack asked, stupefied. The woman laughed.
“It sounds like you know my little girl in every lifetime, Zachary,” she replied. “No, my name is Ifalna. I’m here to collect Cloud, so no need to worry. He won’t be in your way.”
His copy took a step forward, between the others and the woman, suspicious and defensive.
“Collect him for what?” he asked.
Ifalna, for her part, looked completely at ease.
“For every timeline where the world goes on, there’s one where it has to end,” Ifalna replied. “His timeline is over, it continued to exist only because one of Gaia’s children has been surviving in it. He was unable to die and return to the lifestream, so he had to be removed completely. It was destroyed the moment he separated from it, there’s nothing for him to go back to. He was always meant to leave it, he would have fallen through the gate if you didn’t pull him.”
All three of them looked back at the portal, still shimmering at their feet. Cloud remembered the shriek in his head, the clawing of something—Sephiroth? The whole timeline itself?—trying desperately to claw him back. And now the silence, as if there was nothing there to begin with.
“There are worlds,” Ifalna said, “call them dimensions, if you like, and within each there are multiple timelines. Gaia rules this world, but the timelines have been split so often they’re becoming unstable. She isn’t able to help you and him at the same time, so he’s been offered to Odin. He belongs to the World of the Wolf now.”
“I don’t belong anywhere,” Cloud argued. “I don’t want to go anywhere. I just want this all to be over, to be sent into the lifestream with everyone else.”
Ifalna’s smile wavered.
“You can’t, Cloud,” she said gently. “You’re more Jenova than not, now, Gaia’s lifestream won’t have you.”
So that was it, then. In the end, Sephiroth won again. Cloud hadn’t escaped and he never would, it was written down in the most basic levels of his own DNA. But really, what more did he deserve after what he did?
As if reading his thoughts, Ifalna stepped past his copy to take one of his hands in hers.
“Every decision you think you made was already made for you,” she murmured. “For every timeline-altering choice that’s made in a world, its opposite must also happen. For a timeline where everyone is safe and happy to exist, there must be one where nobody survives. This version of you has suffered tremendously so a different fork can have a happy ending, Cloud. That was your duty and you’ve shouldered it well, and now your job is done.
“You haven’t been thrown haphazardly off to another god,” she added. “Odin sends his Valkyries to collect only the fiercest of fallen warriors, and there’s a place waiting for you in one of his most favored halls. Come on, Cloud and Zack have their own war to fight, we don’t want to keep them from it.”
Cloud looked over at Zack and his copy. The former, despite his exhaustion, managed a little smile, and the latter shifted impatiently from foot to foot. He nodded, letting Ifalna take his other hand as well, and before he could so much as say goodbye the ground dropped out from under him.
Literally. The rock fell away and the world around him cracked into a million pieces, shattering like glass and falling away to leave only pitch black darkness. The first sense to return was his hearing, picking up the sounds of dripping water echoing through rock caverns.
A hiss of a match, then a lighted lantern. He and Ifalna stood in a huge cave, the roof so far above it wasn’t visible in the light. They didn’t have to go too far before they reached an iron door, which she opened to lead him out into a beautiful marble hallway. At the end of it was a room lined with open windows, fresh air drifting in from the scenic mountains all around, their snow-capped tops lending a scent of fresh snow. It was chilly, he noticed, but a huge hearth in the corner set a flood of warmth over his skin as he sat in the chair she pointed him to.
“Mead,” she said as she handed him a cup. “This will cleanse you of your last ties to Gaia, and allow Odin to take you.”
Cloud looked at the cup, and found he felt nothing. Even with all of the unknowns, anything was better than what already happened to him. So he sipped it carefully, a warm sliver of delight curling in his stomach at the taste of something so similar to what he’d once found in his mountain home.
“Odin’s world is different from Gaia’s,” Ifalna said as she sat beside him. “Although the same in many ways. It has the same people and the same places, and many similar timelines. But Gaia’s is the World of the Tree, its peoples’ strongest bonds are with the planet itself. Odin’s is the World of the Wolf, its peoples’ strongest bonds are with their packs.”
Cloud knew of Odin, of course, one of the gods worshipped secondary to Gaia by the dwindling people of old Nibel. Fenrir the wolf was Cloud’s own patron, chosen when he turned thirteen in a rite of passage into adulthood that very few families still practiced. He wondered, idly, if Odin had heard his desperate prayers over the last few years as well as Gaia had.
“You’ll develop a mark,” Ifalna continued, bringing his attention back to her. “It will guide you to your intended lifemate, but your pack will be bigger.”
Cloud snorted a sip of mead by accident, choking it back so he didn’t spit it down the front of himself. “Lifemate? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I told you, life here is different,” Ifalna offered him a handkerchief, seemingly created from thin air. “The strength of this world’s people is in their bonds. Each has a soulmate, bound to them from birth, or in your case bound to you from the moment you arrive. The bond is weak in the beginning, but grows as the people do, until they’re ready and a mark develops to lead them to each other. This bond is important, so the mark won’t be hard to understand. It will be a name.”
“Wait…where am I going exactly?” Cloud sputtered. “I’m still not clear on that. You’re dropping me into some timeline where I’m going to get assigned a soulmate?”
“And a pack, yes,” Ifalna replied. “Though, your pack will be different from your mate. They’ll become your closest friends and family, but I’m afraid that mark will be a little harder to decipher.”
Cloud fell silent, looking at his cup. Aside from surprise, he still didn’t feel…anything. It had been so long since he felt anything, though, so that wasn’t a surprise.
“There cannot be two versions of the same person in one timeline,” Ifalna broke the silence. “The Cloud Strife in the timeline you’re going to is about to die. He’s been missing since he was twelve, and captive for over a decade. You’re both twenty-three years old; he will pass away, and you will take his place. This is ideal, since your lack of knowledge will be assumed to stem from being captive since childhood. There is no pre-existing identity for you to step into, you can make your own.”
“As a…captive?” Cloud asked, raising an eyebrow. It was starting to feel like nothing was changing after all.
“There are two different species in this world, and Cloud belongs to one,” she said. “He’s been held captive by the other, experimented on with mako. Unfortunately, he’s simply not strong enough to keep surviving under these conditions, and certainly not strong enough to stay alive until help arrives. You, however, are.”
“It’s going to suck, isn’t it?” Cloud sighed heavily, throwing back the last of the mead.
“It will be temporary. Help is three hours away, Cloud can only hang on one more.”
That was a small reassurance, at least. What was two hours of being poked and prodded at compared to years of endless torment by the universe itself? Two years of endless torment, from the sound of it, if he was 23 now.
“There isn’t really time for me to tell you all you need to know, unfortunately you need to go,” Ifalna said. “In your own world, I believe you would have gone to my daughter to help you decipher such puzzles, but I’m afraid she won’t be able to help you in this one. You’ll need to consult with children of Hel if you need answers.”
Cloud nodded, tiredly, only now noticing how heavy his body felt. The empty cup seemed to weigh several pounds, and his body was slowly sinking down under its own weight. He tried to speak, tried to ask one of the questions still on the tip of his tongue, but a cool, pleasant feeling washed over him, carrying him into his first sleep in years.