Chapter Text
To say that Cloud was having a hard time getting customers was an understatement. He was considering rebranding, even though he’d done that a half-dozen times with little success. The fact of the matter was that Midgar wasn’t interested in—whatever he was. He’d tried advertising as a shaman, because that was what they called people like him in Nibelheim. Then he’d tried spirit worker, then witch, warlock, medium. He was resisting taking the final step to “psychic.” He hated the word. There were plenty of psychics in the city, but that was a performance-based art. Being a psychic was a testament to being able to read people. It was picking apart clues from clothes to body language to scraps of conversation they weren’t meant to listen to in order to put together the perfect reading. It was giving a customer what they wanted with the appropriate amount of drama and flair. It was constructing a reading that was so vague there was no way for it to be wrong.
It was immoral.
Besides, even if he wanted to, the spirits would never let him. This was the cost of their aid; he had to play by their rules. When he’d begun his work all those years ago, still holding onto his mother’s apron-strings while she taught him their craft, it had seemed like a fair deal. And, of course, the spirits had no moral problems with taking the word of a child and making damn sure they held him to it. He’d learned everything he could from his mother and was happy with the work—until he wasn’t. Until she died, and everything seemed unfair and cruel. When she had been sick, the spirits tried to prepare him for it. His ancestors told him that this was the way of the world, that no one lives forever. Odin told him that death was sacred in its own way and that his mother was moving on to her next adventure. He’d thought he was ready for it until it came, until she died and he came apart at the seams.
He’d tried to renege on a lot of agreements during that time. He stopped making his offerings. He’d given up on his taboos, all the little rules the spirits gave him about how to live his life. He pretended not to see the consequences of those actions. He pretended that it wasn’t the spirits giving him his due when the town turned on him, when they seemed to sense the spirit’s lack of protection over him and let the children of the town beat him in the streets. When the butcher began up-charging him so much he had to turn entirely to hunting and gathering. When Tifa, the only one in town brave enough to befriend the shaman-in-training, turned her back on him. When the mayor found some obscure, long-lost law that let him repossess the home that was all Cloud had left.
The spirits took everything from him.
He’d tried to wander his way to Cosmo Canyon, where he knew they had similar practices, and hoped someone would take him in for the craft he’d turned his back on, at least to get his foot in the door. He didn’t even make it that far before it came. The shaman sickness, something his mother had tried to help him avoid. When the gods decided someone was to be a shaman, there wasn’t a way to say no. You did the work or you died—that’s how it was. His gods weren’t gentle ones. He’d thought that by choosing the path, he could avoid the sickness that forced one to touch death. Shaman sickness killed, every time. It was just that, if you were strong enough, if you were meant to, if it was in your blood, you tended to come back. But he’d never been comfortable banking on that, so he’d chosen the path, until he turned his back on it.
The sickness caught up to him on the road. He wasn’t even sure exactly where he was when it came. He remembered the fever, the chills, the shaking and weakness.
And then he remembered waking up in the back of a rattling truck.
He’d sat up, sweaty and shivering, but awake, and looked around. They were passing through wide grasslands of some sort. He pulled down the blanket that covered him and scooted back on trembling arms to knock weakly at the truck’s back window, watching as the man driving jumped in his seat.
The man who found him on the side of the road had taken care of him as best he could, but had been sure he’d end up with a corpse in the back of his trunk. He’d just hoped to get to Midgar, his destination, quick enough to find a hospital for him before he passed. Cloud had followed the man to the city, mostly because he had nowhere else to go. All he knew was that it was time to take up his old agreements and hope the ire of the spirits had passed with the sickness.
Those early days of homelessness had been hard. It had been Cloud finding scraps of food out of trash cans, selling recyclables to buy milk and honey to give to the gods and spirits. They told him that they would wait, that he didn’t need to give them anything until he had something within his means to give, but at that point he was afraid. It had taken a stern talking to from Odin to get him to drop the practice with the reminder that they had survived without his offerings before and could again. He continued to offer prayer, but it was the best he could do.
Eventually, the spirit of Midgar took pity on him. The spirit, a man with dark hair in a sharp suit, had come to him with a look of both pity and annoyance and laid one hand over the rune stones in his pocket, the last thing he had from home.
“Do readings. People will pay for them.”
It was arguably the best advice he’d ever gotten.
So he set up on a little corner in the slums, sitting on his blanket and hawking until someone sat down across from him. He cast the stones and read them, accurate and true, and never once got a repeat customer. No one liked his readings—they hit too close to home. No one liked to be told that the cause of their problems was something they were avoiding, or putting off, or a behavior they could change but just didn’t want to, or that they had to give up something they weren’t ready to yield yet. But he was dutiful. The spirits, usually the customer’s ancestors or Midgar himself, told him the truth, and it was his job to relay it. They never came back, but they gave him his gil before they left, and that was what mattered.
Until, eventually, very late at night, right before he was ready to wrap his dirty blanket around his shoulders and curl up to sleep, a woman came up to him.
“What are you selling?” she asked. She had a basket on her arms with a few stray flowers and a rattling of coin in the bottom. Cloud looked up at her, took in her pink dress and soft eyes, and felt a swelling. It took him far too long to answer because that swelling just wouldn’t crest. Eventually, finally it did, the overwhelming pressure of the spirits’ interest in her fading enough that he could speak.
“I read the future, miss. I could tell you yours. Just a gil.”
“A gil? You should charge a little more,” she said, even as she sat down.
Cloud unfolded a clean, delicately embroidered cloth. On it was a tree with a smattering of worlds across its branches and tangled in its roots. He laid it out carefully and smoothed it before pulling out his quartz runes, long since rubbed smooth with use.
“I’d love to, but I charge what people will pay. Is there a question you want answered?”
She hummed and twisted the ends of her hair around a finger.
“How about… how do I help my business?”
Propitiate the spirit of Midgar; he has a soft spot for aspiring business owners. He likes white rum. He didn’t say it, but it was on the tip of his tongue. He’d learned quickly that suggesting offerings made customers leave.
Delicately, he pulled three runes from the worn leather bag in his hands and laid them face down on the cloth. He flipped them over, one by one.
“Berkana. You began your business to help a female relative and still use the funds to help her. It’s a worthy pursuit, one the spirits approve of. Take care of your family.
“Nauthiz. You began to help this relative, but you’re doing it now because you need the money. Pretty badly, by the looks of it. This has become your sole source of income and it’s not doing as well as you’d like.
He flipped the last over and felt his stomach sink when he saw that it was blank. He closed his eyes for a moment and drew in a breath.
Well, it’s not like she was going to come back again anyway. You might as well say it.
“Wyrd. The state of your business is out of your hands. It’s in the spirits’ hands. They’ll determine whether or not it will fail or succeed. If it’s mean to be, it will. If—… well, if you want to nudge things in your favor, try giving them some offerings. Pick who you’d like, but I’d recommend the spirit of Midgar. He likes white rum, if you can afford it, but he’ll accept cheap beer. Make sure it’s cheap though, nothing artisan. He’s specific about that.”
There was a long pause, where, with every breath, Cloud expected her to get up and storm off without paying him. Instead, she watched him closely. Very closely. As she stared, there was the pressure rising. It wasn’t the familiar press of the spirits, but something in the energy felt familiar. Something dead, like the ancestors. Something fecund, like Earth Mother Jord. It was odd, but it pressed very close to him, before falling away abruptly. The woman smiled.
“You really do talk to spirits, don’t you?”
Cloud watched her suspiciously.
“… Yes.”
She stood and fished out a gil from her basket. She handed it to him, and once he pocketed it, held her hand out again. He looked up at her in confusion.
“Come on. You shouldn’t be out here.”
“If it’s all the same to you, I’m good.” Something in him wanted to trust her, but it went against common sense to wander off with a stranger, no matter how sweet she looked.
She smiled at him.
“I have spirits, too, and they want me to bring you home with me. Maybe you can ask yours if you don’t believe me?”
He paused, eyeing her, but eventually shut his eyes. The second he opened himself up, there was a rush of yesyesyes. He didn’t need more than that. He opened his eyes and carefully refolded the embroidered cloth to put it with his runes back in his pocket. He then took her hand and stood, gathering up his blanket as he went.
He didn’t have to live on the street after that.
Aeris and her mother took him in happily. Aeris was happy to have someone who understood and didn’t think she was crazy, her mother was happy that her daughter had someone to relate to. They let him stay with them and he was still, to this day, staying with them.
Now that he had access to food and shelter, he was free to change. He began charging more, one extra gil for any additional stones after the first three. He was able to leave out offerings again, able to leave them outside on the grass. He missed Sunna and Mani, the sun and the moon, from his place below the plate, but he still offered to them, still prayed to them. He didn’t forget them, and they didn’t forget him.
Eventually, he built up his practice. It took years, but he saved up enough to rent out a ratty little storefront. He made friends with the owners of the nearby occult shops where he bought the herbs he needed and they referred new customers to him. Aeris helped him with his rebranding when it came time for that. He struggled to get clients still, but he could rely on the owners of those other stores to send people his way. Always, always there were people who were trying to get real readings who went through psychic shop after psychic shop, finding no help there. They’d go to the occult stores and vent their exhaustion, or ask for help, where they’d be passed off to him. Those customers, even though they often disliked him after their readings, they knew he actually did the work instead of playacting. They referred their friends and came back themselves when they needed it. It worked, it gave him enough to continue affording the rent for the storefront and let him contribute to the household’s food cost, as well as the cost of his offerings. He was even able to rebuild his altars after time.
Which was all well and good, but it left him here, staring out the storefront’s window, waiting tiredly for someone to wander in.
He spent a lot of time staring out that window.
He couldn’t say how many times he’d reorganized the shop out of sheer boredom. Sometimes he prayed at the little altars he had in the store. Sometimes he meditated. Sometimes he spoke to the spirits. But always, always it was slow, and he spent a lot of his time alone, waiting for someone to come in.
Still, there was always a little rush of excitement when a customer came. Usually, there was at least one spirit around who let him know someone was coming, and he had a chance to prepare himself, but even when they came in without warning, he felt that burst of energy.
Finally.
It was no different this time. He got a brief brush of a warning (“Incoming,”), and looked up in time to see his door being pushed in, and his heart stuttered.
He’d never seen someone so handsome.
He’d definitely never seen someone so handsome in here.
But he shoved that aside quickly and smiled up at the man. The very, very handsome man. How did he even get his hair to look that nice?
No, focus.
“Hi, can I help you?”
“Are you Cloud? The medium?” the man said, his deep voice smooth and even. Cloud fought back a shiver.
And then he looked closer at the shiver.
And then he focused on the shadow that laid wrong over the man’s shoulder.
Damn, he really was distracted if he didn’t notice it before.
Still, something in him found time to be grate at the word “medium.”
“I am. You’re in a bit of a tight spot, aren’t you?” Cloud said, standing up, still staring over the silver-haired man’s shoulder.
“I—Yes, I am. How did you know?”
“Well, most people don’t come here unless they are, but yours is a bit obvious. Let me guess, there have been disturbances at home? Things moving on their own? Sounds you can’t explain?”
“… Yes, actually.”
Cloud hummed, walking around the counter and up to the man. He stood on his toes to squint over the man’s shoulder. The energy around the man was all wrong. His own energy wasn’t surrounding him at all, and his spirit body was halfway out of his flesh body, sucked backward toward the shadow. Cloud frowned. He held up a hand.
“What are you—”
“Hush.”
Cloud hovered his hand around the shadow, feeling its strong aura of power, the way it vibrated wrong. It twitched back away from his hand.
“I have good and bad news.”
“How do you have any news? You haven’t asked me anything yet.”
“Mister…?”
The man paused, confused. He seemed baffled that Cloud didn’t recognize him.
“Sephiroth. No mister, please.”
“Sephiroth, you came to me for a reason, and I’d like to think you were referred here because I’m good at my job. Will you let me do it?”
Sephiroth frowned, refusing to be chastised, but took the correction. He nodded as Cloud pulled his hand away from the shadow.
“You’ve got a spirit attached to you. A nasty one, at that. It’s trying to pull your spirit body from your physical one. It’s probably try trying to feed off it.”
Sephiroth’s face was colored incredulous. He didn’t even answer.
Cloud sighed and shrugged.
“Look, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, so here’s what we’ll do,” Cloud said as he rounded the counter to return to his stool. He rested one elbow on the glass counter and propped his chin in his hand. “I’ll tell you what’s going to happen, you’re going to leave here still not believing me, then you’ll come back later when you believe me, and I’ll take care of this thing for you. How does that sound?”
“… Like you’re bullshitting me, to be honest.”
Cloud laughed, sharp and bark-like.
“Not the first time I’ve heard that,” he said with a smile. “So, what’s going to happen. You’ll go home, and the disturbances will have stopped. The spirit can’t hear us, but she can feel my energy. She knows what I am, so she knows what I’ll try to do.”
“She?”
“The spirit is female. Don’t interrupt.”
“How do you know?”
“Her energy reads female. Stop interrupting.” Cloud paused, making sure he’d stay silent, and then continued. “She’s going to try to pretend like going here rid you of her to try and lull you into a false sense of security. I don’t suggest you let that happen, but I expect it will, no matter what I tell you. She’ll wait a while to convince you, and then things will come back, worse than they were. If things haven’t been violent yet, they will be. Broken items, things flying across the room aimed suspiciously near to you, scratches, bites, the works. If you have anything dangerous in your home, knives or firearms, I suggest you get rid of them before this starts, but I doubt you’ll do that. While this is happening and likely progressively getting worse, you’ll start feeling hazy. Distant. It’ll be like watching a movie or moving through a dream, you’ll feel just a breath removed from your skin. Your reaction time will slow, so I don’t suggest you drive. You’ll have difficulty concentrating. Eventually, you’ll realize that everything I’m describing is happening, and then you’ll come back, and I’ll fix things. Does that make sense?”
“No, none of this makes sense, at all.”
Cloud sighed.
“Let me rephrase: am I clear?”
“Crystal,” Sephiroth grumbled.
“Now. I’m going to give you a little motivation. If you let me take care of this now, it’s 100 gil—I know that’s steep, but this will be a big undertaking, and judging by your clothes, you can afford it,” Cloud said as he stood and crossed to a calendar hanging on the wall, grabbing a pen as he went. He scrawled Sephiroth’s name on the little square representing today. “Every week you wait, my price goes up 100 more gil.” He crossed back to his stool and sat back down, folding his arms on the counter. “So I recommend you come to your senses quickly. Unless you’d like me to handle this now?”
Sephiroth wrinkled his nose, turned on his heel, and stormed from the store. Cloud sighed as he went. He glanced over at his ancestor shrine, where he could feel his mother’s energy radiating amusement, and saw her perched on the little altar.
“I tried, okay?”
I know you did, Cloud. There’s nothing else you could do about it.
“Then what’s so funny?”
Your little price stunt, for one—no, don’t, I’m not mad about it, it’s fair. Mostly, though, it’s that you’re clearly smitten with him.
“Smitt—I’m not smitten with him!”
A smug, knowing look came to her face.
Cloud, I know you. You’re smitten.
“Mama, we’ve had this conversation, I don’t need you pressing me to find a boyfriend.”
You can deny it all you want, but we both know you’re interested.
“Even if I wanted to—which I don’t!—I can’t date a client. That’s unprofessional.”
If we were still home, the entire village would be your client. Are you telling me you wouldn’t date at all?
“Shaman aren’t even supposed to date.”
The line has to be carried on somehow. Odin ordered it.
“I can’t carry on the line with another man anyway.”
You could adopt. It would still count. The important thing is that you raise your child in our ways.
“Children are just not on the table right now, Mama.
Yet.
“Gods, but you’re insufferable sometimes.”
She laughed brightly, and Cloud sighed, but stood. He crossed to the shrine and pulled out a piece of juniper incense, lighting it for her; it was her favorite, and it would cleanse the shop of any remnants of that spirit’s energy. She took a deep breath in and smiled. She ruffled his hair.
Be gentle with that boy. He’ll be in quite a state when he comes back.
“I know. I wish he would have let me take care of it. I didn’t like the feeling of that spirit. The energy was all wrong.”
There’s nothing else you could have done about it. Be patient; he’ll be back.
Cloud folded his arms and dropped his weight into his hip, letting his head tilt to one side.
“I’m not sure if I hope it’s soon or not. I want to handle this quickly, but at the same time, it wouldn’t be bad if he let me drive the price up. I could use the money.”
She laughed again and leaned back on her hands.
He’ll come when he’s meant to. Accept what price it ends up being.
“Not much else to do for it, huh?”
Nope. Now, how about you go work on that drum of yours? I get the feeling you’ll need it for this one.
He sighed and walked toward the back where he’d stored the drum; he was still in the process of painting the head.
He had the sneaking suspicion that she was right.