Chapter Text
Aerith tells him he isn’t dead.
If he’s honest, he finds that hard to believe. What kind of living person ends up in the lifestream with a friend who’s been definitely dead for ten years?
She punches his arm, even though he didn’t say anything. “Weren’t you listening, silly?” she scolds. “You’re in between right now. Not dead, not alive. And because Zack and I called in a little favor for you…” She coyly twirls the end of her braid around a finger and grins in a way that makes him shiver. “One serving of inescapable happiness, coming right up!”
“What?” he says. Or maybe complains. “Aerith—”
“No arguments, mister! I’m talking soulmates!” She prods his chest, right over his heart. “I found the perfect place, too, they have marks and dreams and bonds and everything, so you can’t miss ‘em, even if you try!”
“I don’t need a soulmate—”
The flatness of the look she gives him makes his jaw shut with a click. He looks away and rubs the back of his head. Alright, so maybe his isolationist tendencies had won a little too much at the end there, before he wound up here.
Aerith sighs, put upon. “Oh fine, I’ll bring out the big guns. You also get to go on a power trip and save their planet before any of the big stuff gets going. Will you agree now?”
Save the planet? That sounds nice. He’s definitely developed a lot of planet-saving skills since his cadet days. He mulls the offer over, crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes slide back to Aerith. “The soulmate nonsense is unavoidable?”
She nods sagely. “As inevitable as death and taxes. I’m not setting up a power trip for free.”
Cloud thinks she’s underestimating him. He makes sure it doesn’t show on his face.
“Deal,” he says.
A wicked grin crosses her face and he suddenly realizes that he may have been underestimating her.
“No take-backs!” she says, and everything goes dark.
Cloud wakes up with a gasp.
Cold mountain air stings his lungs. When he sits upright, he finds himself in a cradle of fresh snow. After a few bewildered moments, he realizes that he’s next to the road leading into Nibelheim. He’s dressed right for the weather, and Fenrir is nearby.
“What…?” He shuts his eyes and presses a hand to the side of his aching head. “Right. Aerith. Saving the world.” His mouth twists into a grimace. “Soulmate.”
The soulmate thing is way (way, way… way) down on his list of priorities, though. He stands up and dusts the snow off. A flash of black ink on his chest catches his eye, peeking out from the open zipper of his shirt. It takes a bit of awkward craning to see what it is, but he determines that it’s some kind of abstract pattern under the dip of his collarbone. The only non-abstract element seems to be a wolf’s head, one that looks remarkably like his earring.
“Soulmark,” he mutters, because that’s what he assumes it is. Aerith didn’t exactly elaborate. He shrugs and zips the shirt all the way to the top of the mockneck collar.
Once again, a problem for later.
A quick inventory of his gear reveals something much more delightful: he has a full arsenal, not just what he habitually carries for work. Tsurugi is stowed in Fenrir, and his entire materia collection is either equipped or stored as well. He has even more spare equipment and supplies where he would usually keep deliveries.
He looks in the direction of the Nibelheim reactor. A slow, delighted grin crosses his face.
He changes his equipped materia to something a lot more suited to the annihilation of industrial construction than fending off monsters on his delivery routes.
This time, saving the world is going to be fun.
The Nibelheim reactor is the first to go, and Jenova with it. Cloud laughs like a madman as it burns, painting the night sky in beautiful red and orange.
“BURN, BITCH!” he yells, arms spread wide.
Who cares how insane he looks? He earned this easy win.
The mansion is next, but he has to wake Vincent first. He uses the edge of Tsurugi as a crowbar to pry the lid off, then promptly destroys it. Vincent blinks languidly at him from the depths of the coffin.
“If you don’t get up in the next thirty seconds, I’m going to make you figure out where Lucrecia is encased in crystal by your damn self,” he threatens. He’s having too good of a time to make it sound as menacing as he wants, but whatever. Vincent sits up anyway. “Good, now get out, I’m about to reduce this place to ash.”
Not long after, his old friend—or at least a version of him—stares a hole into the side of his head as they stand together in the snow and watch the old place burn from the basement up. Cloud grins so wide it hurts. No one is ever going to be hurt by this place and its awful experiments ever again.
“You,” says Vincent at last, voice raspy from disuse, “are not normal.”
“Yeah,” Cloud agrees. He hands over a paper with exact coordinates to Lucrecia. “Anyway, bye.”
He takes a nap on the way to Gongaga. This proves to be a mistake.
“It’s you!” Zack shouts, practically in his ear, and suddenly he’s staggering as a heavy body slams into him.
Cloud gasps, disoriented. “What—?”
He’s standing in Shinra Tower, if Shinra Tower became a little fuzzier around the edges the farther it got from where he stood. Zack is hugging him. When he looks over Zack’s shoulder, he finds Sephiroth and two vaguely familiar men with mako eyes. He squints at the latter two, confused.
Are those… boob windows in their SOLDIER uniform shirts?
No, wait, Tifa said they were called keyholes.
Zack pulls back, holding his shoulders. He, too, has a keyhole opening in his shirt. It perfectly displays a tattoo that looks… familiar…
“Oh what the fuck?” Cloud swears, agog. This can’t mean what he thinks it means.
Right?
“Yeah, the goddess said you’d be confused,” says Zack, who is still grinning. “It’s fine. We’re so happy to meet you, Cloud! You’re our final soulmate!”
…no.
Cloud shakes Zack’s grip off and backs up a few paces. Unnamed—mostly disbelieving—emotions tangle in his chest. With no other recourse, he whirls around and shouts at the heavens.
“AERITH, WHAT THE FUCK???”
“Cloud—”
He’s not done yelling at his friend. He points an arm blindly back at Zack. “THAT IS YOUR ENTIRE-ASS BOYFRIEND!!! WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO SET ME UP WITH AN ALTERNATE VERSION OF HIM?? WHY WAS HE OKAY WITH THAT?? WHAT DOES THIS MEAN???”
Someone politely clears their throat behind him. “Ah,” says one of the vaguely familiar men, “the goddess… left a message for you about that, actually. She said, and I quote, ‘Zack is the one person you’re worst at resisting’ and, also quote, ‘you need no less than four soulmates to overcome your… stubbornness.’”
Cloud turns, agog once more. The dark-haired man is the one speaking. Zack has a very interesting expression on his face as he mouths Aerith’s entire-ass boyfriend? Sephiroth and the other one are closer, but mostly just watching.
“Th… wh… bu… what?” Cloud gracefully articulates. “Four? FOUR???”
The unknown SOLDIER with red-brown hair coughs. “She guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting… four is unusual, I will admit, but not unheard of. The goddess heavily implied we would need at least four to chase you down.”
“That’s—” Cloud struggles to find the right word to encapsulate his outrage. He settles on, “CHEATING.”
Sephiroth takes a step forward to stand next to the others, and Cloud’s eyes automatically snap to him.
“I am starting to see,” Sephiroth says, “why the goddess was so adamant. And why she gave us such a thorough strategy guide.”
“Wh—” His thought catastrophically derails when he finally realizes what Sephiroth is wearing. “Oh my gods your tits are covered!”
Because they are. Thoroughly. Unlike Cloud’s version, he’s not only wearing a shirt instead of letting his pecs fly free, but it doesn’t even have the same keyhole opening as the others. For a split second Cloud is hopeful that means he doesn’t have the same soulmark.
But then he remembers that they’re in a magical bullshit dream and the hope dies a short, screaming death.
Sephiroth gives him a strange look. “So are yours? Did… your version of me dress differently?”
Cloud’s outrage returns as he realizes Aerith must have told them not just everything, but everything everything.
“Yes. He hated shirts. Passionately. And tried to kill me several times while shirtless,” he reveals flatly.
Sephiroth winces minutely.
The still-unnamed ginger grins and wolf whistles. “Sexy,” he says.
“No, not sexy!” Cloud snaps. “Insane and homicidal!”
“It can be insane and homicidal and also sexy.”
Zack steps between him and Cloud, hands raised and smile apologetic. “Ignore Genesis,” he says. “He’s insane and homicidal himself.” He then seems to realize that’s not exactly a winning description of ‘their’ soulmate and backpedals. “I mean, he’s very nice! Just a little dramatic sometimes and he thinks it’s funny, but he’s a great soulmate!”
“Uh-huh.” Cloud crosses his arms and deliberately makes sure not to directly meet Zack’s eyes. “Not interested.”
Zack makes a sad noise.
The dark-haired SOLDIER says, “Yeah, the goddess told us you would say that, too. Our mandate is to, quote, ‘not let that shit slide.’”
“Not interested,” Cloud repeats forcefully. This is ridiculous. A pang of worry makes his gut twist. Has Aerith really thought of everything?
Or—shit, has his Zack?
The other Zack tries to grab his shoulders, but Cloud smacks his hands away and ignores how it makes him feel like he’s kicking a puppy.
“Aww, grumpy,” says Zack, quickly recovering from the attempted rejection. “Don’t worry! We’ll be seeing you soon.”
Startled, Cloud forgets his strategy and makes eye contact. Zack is grinning. “What?” he asks.
And then he wakes up.
He double-times it to Gongaga after that, looking over his shoulder with raw paranoia the entire way. No one stops or accosts him on the road. Honestly there aren’t even that many monsters. As much as it pains him, he prioritizes evading any of the stronger enemies in favor of speed. He also adamantly refuses to sleep.
Just in case.
When he reaches Gongaga, he circles it twice just to make absolutely sure it’s not being actively surveilled by Turks. It isn’t, but that almost makes him more paranoid. He tucks his hair up under a black bandana before entering the town to check on things and pick up a few supplies.
“You alright there, son?” the shopkeeper asks him as he’s perusing some canned goods.
Cloud blinks. “What? Yeah, I’m fine.”
The man’s eyes drop briefly to the zip of his shirt before rising again. Distinct skepticism creases the corners of his eyes. “Are you sure? It’s not often you see someone covering their mark.”
He stares blankly, can of peas in hand. “My what?”
The shop keeper stares back. It quickly becomes awkward.
“...maybe you should go see the medic, eh?” says the man in a slow, gentle tone. “Did you get a knock on the head on the way or something?”
Cloud finally connects the dots and almost fumbles the can in panic. Shit, he’s making himself memorable!
“OH,” he says too loudly. “Sorry, we just, uh, call it something different where I’m from. Little mountain town, you know. We consider the, uh, curs—uh, blessings sacred, so we cover them.”
The shopkeeper processes that and suddenly looks pitying in an entirely new way. “I see. Well, to each their own, I suppose. We have plenty of shirts if you change your mind. It’s harder to find your soulmates if they can’t see the mark, and you’re out in the wider world now, eh?”
“Oh yes, of course,” says Cloud. “Thank you. I’ll just, uh, take this for now.”
He sets down the can of peas and decides that eating reasonable amounts of food is for chumps. He can eat when the world has been saved.
After the pitying shopkeeper takes his gil and lets him leave, he quickly returns to Fenrir, gears up, and begins a roundabout trek to the reactor. It would be smarter to wait a day or two so he isn’t necessarily easy to connect to the immense, permanent, and non-explosive but exceedingly expensive damage he’s about to cause, but his paranoia is getting the better of him.
Something is off.
He’s still willing to bank on his own ability to get in and out of trouble too fast to stop, though.
The reactor is entirely automated, which makes sense for a mostly ignored town like Gongaga. Cloud also knows for a fact that the security system is CCTV contained only to the on-site databanks, not sent out to Shinra for monitoring. He strolls right into the reactor, casual as can be, and immediately finds and destroys said databanks.
“Alright, Reeve,” he says, fishing a notebook out of his pocket. “Let's see exactly how much I can cost Shinra in the next thirty minutes.”
He got drunk with Reeve, once, and spent three straight hours spinning up a wild plan for how they would deal with the reactors if they could do things over. Cloud wanted to blow them to the Promised Land or use Knights of the Round; Reeve wanted to systematically target the most prohibitively expensive components and obliterate them without setting off the reactors. He’d been drunkenly, rapturously gleeful as he’d tallied up the gil cost of each destroyed component and the labor cost to replace them.
Cloud is more than happy to see his dream fulfilled, even if it’s in another world. Hopefully this world’s Reeve won’t have a heart attack when he reads those same numbers.
Impeller assembly? Gone
Refinement lattice? Smashed to smithereens.
Pressure seals, regulators, and delicate flow-control microchips? Nothing but slag after a few well-placed Firas.
Lights flash and klaxons blare as the mako reservoir drains back into the ground below. Cloud’s face hurts from how wide his manic smile is as he stands in the middle of all the destruction and watches.
“ENJOY THE EIGHT-HUNDRED AND FORTY MILLION GIL BUDGET GAP, SHINRA!” he cackles. “THERE’S MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM!”
The air shifts minutely behind him.
Cloud rolls his head to the side, dodging automatically, and is surprised when he sees that it isn’t a weapon that was aimed at his neck, but a bare hand.
Zack Fair’s hand, to be specific.
Ohshit, he thinks as he follows through on the dodge and rolls back to his feet. Without even a split second of hesitation, he uses the dregs of his momentum to turn and book it out of the destroyed reactor.
“HECK,” says Zack.
Cloud almost trips over his own feet. “Heck?” he echoes incredulously, unable to help himself.
If it had been anyone but a SOLDIER chasing him, they wouldn't have been able to hear it, but Zack is and does. “Habit! Cussing is bad for my reputation. Now get over here and let me touch you!”
Cloud kicks off of the walls to rapidly ascend from the depths of the reservoir. “Don’t you think that’s a little forward?” he teases without thinking about it.
Zack follows with ease. “If you think that is forward, wait until it’s Gen’s turn!”
Ominous.
“No thanks!” Cloud says, pretending he doesn’t feel an ice-cold curl of nervousness in his gut.
Zack’s hand brushes against the sole of his boot. “I’m not about to disappoint the goddess, bud! Get back here!”
Cloud curses under his breath and speeds up. It’s been a while since he really had to push himself like this.
“You’re the one I like most, Zack,” he says, “but I’m not gonna do that even for you! The soulmate stuff is Aerith’s idea, not mine!”
“I know!” He sounds closer, but all Cloud has to do is make it out to Fenrir and no one can catch him. He can see the light of the exit ahead. “And I bet that means you haven’t been paying attention to what it comes with!”
What?
Cloud has no time to think about it deeply, because Zack finally manages to grab him. Specifically, the bare portion of his right arm. It’s not the kind of grip that could stop a SOLDIER, under normal circumstances.
These are not normal circumstances.
Euphoria sweeps over him in an overwhelming wave. The world is suddenly whole, and so is he. It feels like every limb in his body was out of joint until this exact second. He thinks he blacks out for a moment from the sheer force of it, because he blinks and suddenly the only thing between him and the unforgiving concrete is Zack’s arm.
“Whoa, okay. Didn’t expect it to hit you that hard, but I’ll take it.” Zack folds to the ground and draws Cloud into an enthusiastic, puppy-like snuggle, because of course he does.
You’re exactly the same, Cloud thinks fondly. His teeth are buzzing from the good feelings. He thinks there might even be a tear or two on his cheeks as his eyes slide shut.
Then, as abruptly as it all came on, it stops. His eyes pop back open and he goes rigid with alarm. “What the fuck?”
“No, come on,” Zack whines, tightening his grip. “Snuggling is nice, don’t run off yet!”
“What the fuck was that?” Cloud hisses, struggling to free himself.
“I’ll tell you if you stay still for five minutes,” Zack wheedles.
It must be some soulmate bullshit. Cloud is really paying for his deliberate ignorance here. Still, five minutes sounds distinctly like a trap, so he forces his way free and ignores the sad noise Zack makes when they’re standing and facing off again.
“What was that,” Cloud tries one more time.
Zack eyes him. Then he holds out his arms and makes grabby hands. “Get back here or no deal.”
Fuck it, I’ll figure it out on my own, Cloud decides. He turns on his heel and books it out of the reactor.
“OH, COME ON!”
This time Cloud has the fear of the gods in him, metaphorically speaking. He sprints through the jungle and makes it to Fenrir with time and space to spare.
“I WAS THE NICE OPTION, YOU KNOW!” Zack calls. He doesn’t sound like he’s trying very hard anymore. “THE OTHERS AREN’T GOING TO BE SO CHILL ABOUT THIS!”
Cloud scoffs as he kicks Fenrir into gear and goes roaring away from the Gongaga reactor. Zack is Zack—an exception. Cloud wasn’t willing to go full-force against him, but the others? They’re fair game.
And besides, he doesn’t intend to get caught like this again.