Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The cavern glimmered. There was an actual tree growing on one side of it, roots twisting across the stony floor, which Zack found almost more impressive than the glow—he’d spent too much time around mako, it was official—and in the middle, stone blossomed up out of a pool of liquid mako into a gnarled sort of mineral-tree-thing crowned with gleaming green raw materia crystals.

Zack wondered if Aerith would like a faceted-materia necklace. It would probably be the kind of thing she thought was too flashy.

“…and what’s this?” Zack asked, more to make conversation than anything. Their local guide, Tifa, was sassy and friendly and basically his favorite kind of local girl, in spite of how weird she’d been yesterday with the not-asking whatever question she had three times, so that was good vibes at least.

But Sephiroth was being even more Sephiroth than usual—though not as bad as he’d been right after Angeal—and Cloud was stuck on his incognito thing, and between them they were kind of strangling the atmosphere. Worse than the guy they’d lost falling off the bridge was doing by not being here.

“A mako fountain,” answered Sephiroth automatically. Zack wasn’t sure how he’d developed a teaching compulsion, since unlike Angeal he’d never really mentored anybody, but questions with factual answers were always a good way to get him talking. “One of nature’s marvels…”

“It’s beautiful,” said their guide, walking forward to the edge. Zack almost went to stop her, but she was a local guide in one of the most mako-rich places on the Planet, she probably knew better than to go dipping her hands into raw mako.

Then she turned to look at them, and said, “If the mako reactor continues to suck up energy, this fountain will dry up, too…” Her tone was almost imploring, and she spread her hands a little, and even though the way she was talking made her sound more like those AVALANCHE goons than like Aerith, Zack still felt kind of bad, more than annoyed.

He wished she’d drop it, it wasn’t like they had any control of what Shinra did.

Sephiroth took a step forward, hopefully to further get his natural history lecture on instead of to bully the guide about sounding anti-Shinra. (Hey, Zack had never seen the guy deal with politics, he wasn’t sure how he handled it!)

But before he or anyone could actually say anything, an arm broke the surface of the mako pool.

From underneath.

Zack must have made a face—maybe Sephiroth did too, he was obviously startled because he’d stopped dead—that clued Miss Lockhart in that there was something behind her, and she spun like she thought it was going to be the Planet’s creepiest monster—maybe a mutant tonberry. That would be pretty scary, if you didn’t have Sephiroth around.

She dropped straight to her knees when she saw the arm though, and maybe the locals didn’t know any better than to touch mako or maybe she was just too nice for her own good, because she bent straight down to grab it, like she thought there was somebody drowning in the mako fountain.

Zack yelped and darted forward, hoping he could save the girl in the cute hat from whatever weird monster lived in mako and had black humanoid hands attached to pale arms, but Sephiroth was there first.

And of course Sephiroth had higher mako tolerance than the average person, but Zack had still expected him to pull the Masamune and lop the creepy arm off at the waterline, not grab it further down than Tifa had, and pull harder.

Maybe he was curious about the mako fountain monster, or maybe he was just a nicer guy than he let on?

Anyway, by the time Zack, and right behind him Cloud, got there, the arm from the fountain had been joined by a head and black-clad torso, all visibly humanoid and dripping thick green mako and not even a little bit dissolving like you’d expect, even if the natural raw stuff wasn’t nearly as powerful or dangerous as the refined kind in a reactor.

Zack reached over Tifa’s shoulder to grab the mysteriously not melting guy by the back of the belt, since this was apparently what they were doing. More to feel useful than because he thought his help was really needed, when Sephiroth was already on the job, but if Mako-Man suddenly grew fangs and tentacles and initiated combat, he figured having hold of him would be good.

They dragged him, or it, up onto the stone, where it knelt hunched and coughing—coughing up mako, what human would even be alive, this stuff was pretty pure, enough that the stains were sublimating faintly, in thin streams of green light. Zack’s wrist was stinging faintly where he’d gotten smudged above the glove, and he was SOLDIER.

Sephiroth at this point let go, stepped back, and stood up straight, going back to playing narrow-eyed brick wall. That was fine, Zack could handle this.

“We need to get the mako off,” he said, defaulting to first aid decontamination protocols even though that was kind of pointless if Mako Man had already breathed the stuff in, which had to do a number on the lungs. If he’d been human, which Zack was still pretty sure he was not. But just in case.

He glanced over the party for spare cloth—Tifa, who was still holding the mako drowning case by the wrist and should really stop that before she lost skin, might be able to spare the vest, since people from Nibelheim were apparently monsters immune to cold, and Zack could maybe rip up his pants for the fabric, but he was not going to be the guy who suggested using Sephiroth’s coat. “Cloud, gimme your scarf.”

Everyone but Sephiroth twitched. And man, Zack was sorry to mess up Cloud’s neurotic undercover thing, but if he was gonna make the kid show his face in the name of saving a guy who shouldn’t be alive, he might as well use his name.

Mako Man drew in his first long breath in during the silent second following Zack’s totally reasonable demand, and with the arm Tifa wasn’t hanging onto reached up and raked the hair back from his face in long, mako-green sticky clumps.

Glowing blue eyes stared up at him out of Cloud’s face.

“…Zack?” said the Mako Man, in a wrecked voice almost like Cloud’s.

“Cloud?” said Tifa Lockheart.

Chilled, Zack spun and grabbed their silent infantryman by the shoulder, holding him in place while he ripped the scarf down and yanked off the helmet. He’d heard stories about monsters that passed for people, heard a yarn up at the Icicle Inn that you could sometimes meet a Snow in the mountains there and instead of just killing you, she’d kill you and take your clothes, so she could get closer to stronger prey, and take them by surprise.

But unmasked, it was still Zack’s little infantry buddy; wild yellow hair, big eyes blue as the sky and wide with alarm, but not glowing. “Zack?” he asked, so much like the Mako Man version just had, but different, too.

This was a real imploring tone, like everything was wrong and Zack was making it worse and could he please not.

“Cloud?” repeated Tifa Lockheart, looking from the guy at their feet to the one in Zack’s grip, and back.

“Tifa,” Trooper-Cloud acknowledged unhappily.

“Sephiroth,” snarled the Cloud that had been dragged from the mako, and lunged to his feet, shaking off the guide’s grip like she was a butterfly.

And then very promptly dropped down onto the stone again, as soon as the Masamune rippled into being.

One mako-coated hand had reached up toward the Mako-Cloud’s shoulder in the instant before that and stalled before it got there, like he was reaching for a sword that he could already feel by weight wasn’t in its place.

Zack thought for a second, as the fountain monster crouched down in the face of Masamune, that the intention of dropping like that was to use him, real-Cloud, and Tifa for cover—which would be more than a little insulting since he was a SOLDIER First Class and a credible threat himself—but then Mako Monster Cloud bent down further and stuck his arm back in the fountain.

He barely spent a second groping around before he came up with a sword. It was about the size of Zack’s Buster Blade, but fussier somehow, sheeting mako off in gouts and runnels. He shook it, once, then swung the blade around. (Passing over Zack’s head rather than Tifa’s, which was good because it was still dripping yet more raw mako; Zack yanked Cloud aside just before a fat splatter caught his newly bared face.)

And lunged at Sephiroth.

Zack considered that to mean problem solved, and was already letting Cloud go and turning to help Miss Lockhart up when the ring of clashing blades brought him back around.

Sephiroth had killed a massive mutated dragon in two casual swings of his sword on the way up the mountain. Zack thought pretty highly of little Cloud, but he hadn’t expected his freaky doppelganger to be more badass than a giant monster lizard.

Bad call, Commander Fair.

Because Sephiroth had brought the Masamune up to deflect the edge of the mako-soaked Buster-style number, and he’d managed it, in a shower of mako droplets that were still falling.

But then he tried to flick the blocked blade aside and slice the Mako Man in half, and that didn’t happen.

Sephiroth wasn’t strong enough to simply overpower the monster from the mako fountain.

The blades sang, sliding against one another, and then Mako Man slid one hand forward, pulled a sword out of the top of his sword, and struck down past the bladelock at Sephiroth’s stomach.

Sephiroth unlocked the Masamune from the original giant sword to retreat from the new attack, and Mako Cloud scissored his two weapons across one another in a lunge that came within a hairsbreadth of actually catching Sephiroth between them.

This might be a monster Sephiroth had to actually work against. Zack was tempted to dive straight in and play support, but first things first.

“Okay, you two, get back,” he told the two normal humans. “This way.” Neither of them seemed willing to take their eyes off the fight, and Zack didn’t blame them, but he herded them back into the mouth of the tunnel in spite of it.

“Got your gun?” he asked Cloud. It would presumably do diddly-squat against Mako Cloud, but random monsters could always pop up.

Cloud held the weapon up for inspection. “Great.” Zack grinned. He’d found nothing was more reassuring to people than having the person about to go handle a problem smile about it. Both kids smiled back. “Stay safe.”

He turned back to the cavern to give Sephiroth the backup he never actually needed. Mako Cloud was leaping back, even as he parried a slash. He was sublimating mako in all directions, now, tiny green streamers of glow radiating out into the air and fading.

This fight had gone on awfully long for one involving Sephiroth that wasn’t a friendly spar. (Not that he had those, anymore.) Zack took his (Angeal’s) sword in hand and moved in.

“Stay back,” the General ordered as he approached, and at this Mako-Cloud actually spared one hand from fighting Sephiroth to reach out and cast in Zack’s direction.

He tried to dodge, but it must have been a mastered materia because the spell burst over him fast and hugely—

And it was Barrier. No, Wall. Cast on him, holding him specifically behind its protective shell, like Cloud’s mako fountain double was worried about what would happen to him if he got into the middle of their fight. Well, that was definitely insulting.

But not standard monster behavior. Not that anything about this was standard. “Uh,” Zack muttered. Raised his voice. “Sephiroth? Sir? You got this?”

Sephiroth ignored him.

This was sadly pretty typical.

“Stay back,” said Mako Cloud. He sounded…pretty much like Cloud, if Cloud swallowed a handful of sand and got really, really angry. And apparently he and Sephiroth agreed about something.

“Ah,” said Sephiroth. “You do speak.”

“Well, not as much as you.”

…okay then? Zack didn’t get it, and from that eyebrow Sephiroth didn’t either, though to be fair Seph had been doing the lecture thing when Mako Man turned up.

…Mako Cloud wasn’t fighting like someone who only knew Sephiroth from the couple of minutes they’d been in this cave together, though. Zack had already seen at least three moments where the General had aborted a maneuver because his opponent had already perfectly anticipated it. And if he’d seen three, there had probably been more.

Mismatched swords flashed, striking showers of sparks.

Sephiroth drew back again, not a retreat this time but a successful breaking-away to control the range. Brought the long line of the Masamune down in a sweeping power move that seemed to barely fit in the cavern, and swatted Mako Cloud out of the air in mid-leap.

He landed unharmed, with his legs planted wide and bent for stability, catching the stroke completely on what had somehow become once again a single sword. One hand on the hilt, and one hand flat against the back of the blade.

Sephiroth landed more elegantly, and stood still, not lifting the Masamune away but not bearing down any harder, not trying to overpower the man who looked like Cloud. He looked interested, that little squint from the inside corners of his eyes and purse to the lips that came when he looked at something he actually had to think about.

“Have you mistaken me for someone?” Sephiroth wondered. Pressed just a little, a flex of his forearm, to keep Mako Cloud in position. “I’m not widely considered a talkative man.”

A shrug, followed by a hard uncoiling-upward flick of that heavy composite broadsword, that flung Masamune wide, singing free, and transitioned into a scything two-handed blow that Sephiroth braced himself to block.

Across their swords, bearing downward onto Sephiroth with a tremendous force even as his body hung in the air, as though he had the same trick Sephiroth did of falling only when he meant to, the mako creature said, in quite a flat and conversational way, “I’ve known you to be a talkative monster.”

Sephiroth narrowed his eyes and flung Cloud backward, toward the far wall of the cavern, where he kicked off and somersaulted toward the ground. “If I am a monster, then what are you?”

Mako-Cloud made a little sound like a dehydrated laugh, as he landed, and his blade swung up and ready. “I don’t have to tell you that.”

He charged. Steel rang as the inexplicable duel expanded, swordsmen striking against one another and away like marbles, until they ricocheted off the cavern walls and even the ceiling.

Miss Lockheart at this stage found her voice enough to shout, “Don’t destroy the mako fountain!”

Mako-Cloud glanced over at the tunnel-mouth long enough to give her a brisk little nod of acknowledgment, and then did in fact make a noticeable effort to keep the fight away from the glowy little marvel of nature in the middle of the cave.

Zack met normal-Cloud’s eyes for a moment of perfect mutual understanding. Cloud was his buddy based on really not that much time together because they could have moments like this, where they both knew they were in total agreement about how you coped with things like being stranded halfway up a mountain with somebody like Tseng when there were unknown numbers of enemy clones around. Or the fact that everybody else in a cave with you was clearly crazy.

“Are you sure I can’t help, General?” Zack called. Because yes, Sephiroth was clearly having fun, and Zack respected that, but on the other hand what was he even fighting?

“Thank you, Commander,” Sephiroth dismissed him easily while sailing sideways through the air at a forty-five degree angle, watching his opponent intently for an opening. “I’m fine.”

Mako-Cloud pressed his lips together at this and cast the blue shimmer of Haste on his own heels.

He dashed inside the reach of Masamune and chopped at Sephiroth’s body, starting a flurried exchange of close-quarters blows so rapid Zack lost track of them all, except that Sephiroth had cast Fire from the palm directly against the monster’s body, been rocked back by the force of at least one punch, possibly taken a sword-blow to the thigh, and drawn a line of blood from Mako Cloud’s upper arm.

Still Hasted, the monster battered Masamune aside to make an opening, leapt back beyond the long sword’s range in one long inhuman bound, raised its left hand, and nailed Sephiroth with a Thunder spell so big it obscured him completely for a couple of seconds.

When Zack could see him again, he stood shaken. His hand clenched on the Masamune with electrical convulsion and the will not to lose it, rather than a proper grip.

The mako creature cast again, and again even more quickly, and again, and then leapt into the space obscured by light where Sephiroth had been, weapon raised and expression intent.

When the haze of magic cleared, Sephiroth was pinned through the chest to the cavern wall.

He wasn’t dead. He was hanging, about ten feet up, bleeding freely, with the entire giant sword through the base of his sternum and evidently about four feet of solid rock behind, wearing an expression of blank shock.

“Sephiroth!” Zack shouted, his whole body hot and cold with horror, with horrible memories, with horrible fear, and he flung himself at the little golden-haired monster that stood beneath, gazing up at the dying SOLDIER, emptyhanded.

The Buster Sword made a deep cut in the killer’s side before he leapt away, and landed, both his tiny, empty hands raised in a defensive stance. “I don’t want to fight you, Zack,” he said.

“Like I care!” Zack shouted.

A year ago, he’d probably have charged immediately, all his focus narrowed onto the enemy. But he’d grown up a lot, spent a lot of time in command roles, with people to look after. He was more responsible, at eighteen. He dropped a Cura on Sephiroth—it couldn’t do anything for the wound as long as the blade was in there, but it should replenish his blood, slow the bleeding, stabilize damage to things like the spine, and lengthen the survival window, and it was the fastest option.

Getting the sword out without making the wound worse, when the point of impalement was more than twice Zack’s height above the ground, shit. How? He needed at least one other SOLDIER for this.

He might have to jump up there, yank it out, let Sephiroth hit the ground, and hope he didn’t get injured so much worse in the process Zack couldn’t save him.

“Don’t,” said the mako creature, and Zack just barely threw himself out of the way of a spell—a Status effect of some kind. “Stop trying to help him.”

“Like hell I will!” Zack snarled, holding up the Buster Sword. It didn’t seem adequate in the face of something that had beaten Sephiroth, but on the other hand Mako Cloud was no longer armed. “He’s my friend! I’ll die before I stand aside and let you.”

Mako Cloud looked very grave. “You will,” he agreed, with the weight of prophecy.

Zack was still covered by the mako thing’s protective Wall. It added a lunacy to the whole scene. He raised Angeal’s sword further, across his body, ready to meet an assault.

It did not come. His opponent stood there, watching him, and waiting for the clock to run down.

Fine, then.

Going against every instinct, Zack placed his sword on his back. A careful eye on the enemy, he crouched slightly, then leapt, a hand reaching for the puzzle-weapon’s hilt as a foot extended toward the cavern wall, to kick off and tear the sword free as he went.

A black and gold cannonball hit him in the chest. Drove him to the floor. “No,” said Mako Cloud, knee on Zack’s abdomen, crushing the air out of him. “He has to die, Zack. If he lives through today and learns the truth, he’ll turn against humanity, and then against the Planet. I know you respect him, but he’s a monster.”

“You can’t know that,” Zack wheezed.

The tiny monster’s expression didn’t even change.

“People can choose their fates,” Zack insisted. “Even if—no matter what—” He jerked his whole body, abs and glutes convulsing with all their considerable power, and knocked the smaller man-shaped creature off him. Rolled to free the Buster Sword, yanked it free, and chopped down with it.

Mako Cloud caught the blade with both hands. “I know what he chose,” he said across the steel breadth of it. Zack had cut through his gloves. Red, human-looking blood began to seep from shallow cuts in each palm.

As if he could not feel pain, Mako Cloud shoved at the sword, throwing Zack back off balance, and raised a hand bright with magic.

Overhead, Sephiroth’s blood stopped dripping.

Fuck, thought Zack, and rather than try to defend himself or recover from the fall he stretched up his arm and flung a Phoenix Down up toward his friend, catching those crucial seconds where he might still be saved.

The Stop hit Zack before he hit the ground.

Chapter Text

When time reached him again, he hit stone with an oof and immediately kipped up onto his feet, looking around just a little bit wildly. Sephiroth was no longer on the wall. The pool of blood beneath where he’d been was larger than ever.

There was a trail of it, away and across the cavern, beyond the mako fountain, to where there was a dark muddle of human forms, and Zack broke into a run, desperate to get over there and desperate not to, not to have to find the pile of cold bodies, not to have failed again.

“Tifa,” said that sand-scraped voice. “Tifa, you don’t even like him.”

“What has that got to do with anything?” the young guide demanded, her voice sharpening toward a sob.

She was standing in front of Mako Cloud, arms spread wide. Behind her, Sephiroth was on the cavern floor, covered in new cuts and bruises and with a large open wound still bleeding in his chest. He must have managed to pull the sword out for himself, with the burst of strength from the Phoenix Down, but been left in no condition afterward to stand up to the homicidal monster from out of the mako pool.

The other Cloud, real Cloud, had flung his arms around the mako version from behind and was holding him firmly around the ribs. He clearly knew he was neither heavy nor strong enough to be a serious impediment, but was determined to be at least a nuisance.

His gun, Zack noted, lay broken on the cavern floor.

“He’s down,” Cloud said into the black knit covering the monster’s back. “You beat him, you won. Isn’t that enough?”

The mako Cloud said, “No.” But he didn’t move.

Neither did Sephiroth. When Zack looked very closely, he seemed to be breathing. He could tell because the red wound in his chest flexed.

“Cloud,” said the girl, looking the monster in the face. “You don’t have to do this.”

“The Tifa who lived through what he did,” mako Cloud told her, “wouldn’t say that.” And then he was letting the tip of his sword rest on the ground and reaching up with his other hand to carelessly break the real Cloud’s grip on him and shove him back, and then out in front to gather a handful of the front of Tifa’s vest and lift her inexorably up, and move her to one side.

As he was setting her carefully on her feet, Zack was passing through the air over the mako fountain, a battle cry caught behind his teeth to maintain the element of surprise, his sword scything right for the back of monster Cloud’s head.

His opponent ducked, just in time for Zack’s Buster sword to pass over him, but not far enough to avoid being tackled across the cavern floor as Zack updated his tactics on the fly.

Such intimate quarters finally favored Zack, a little. Mako Cloud was a lot stronger than him, pound for pound, but he couldn’t weigh more than two thirds as much, and shorter limbs and smaller hands made it harder to get leverage.

Before long Zack had the attempted-murderer on his back, pinned down, with a hand over his throat to hold him still.

The textbook thing to do at this point was to twist the enemy’s neck until it snapped. Zack hadn’t had to kill people or monsters that intimately very often, but he could do it.

He—couldn’t do it. Or at least, he paused.

The Genesis copies had been easy. Zack didn’t like Genesis, and they’d so clearly no longer had minds of their own. Their movements, the way their eyes focused, even the heat of their bodies was somehow wrong. Less convincing than a well-designed VR simulation.

This man looked more like Cloud than ever, now that the mako had finished vaporizing and his hair had fluffed up again. It was shorter, and he was a little bigger all over, his face a little harder and more grown up. If he’d turned up claiming to be Cloud’s relative, a big brother or a very young-faced dad, Zack would have bought it.

And there was nothing about him that looked anything but human. Except for the SOLDIER’s mako gleam to his blue eyes.

Zack swallowed. “What are you?”

Not-Cloud’s mouth pulled to one side, wry. “Not a SOLDIER, First Class,” he said. “But close enough to fake it.”

Considering he had handed the Sephiroth his ass that seemed an understatement.

“You’re not Cloud,” Zack tried.

“I am.” Mako Cloud’s eyes continued to meet his with an alarming lack of flinching. “I am Cloud Strife. I have always been Cloud Strife.” Now, finally, they shifted away, past Zack’s face. “There were a few times I forgot, or wasn’t sure. But I was always myself.”

Zack wasn’t going to be able to kill him.

And maybe his grip shifted or weakened with the realization, because Mako Cloud brought up his left arm in a stiff arm-bar that slammed outward into Zack’s wrist, tearing away his hold on Cloud’s throat. And Cloud’s knees clamped around him long enough to flip them over, so Zack was flat on his back and Cloud could get free and back away.

He and Zack both lunged for their weapons. The Buster Sword was closer, but that didn’t give Zack enough of a lead to get ahead of Mako Cloud with it, or between him and Sephiroth.

Cloud and Tifa were there again, but they looked like people who understood how little barrier they actually posed.

Zack could jump at his back, swing the Buster Sword again, make him turn to block it, buy Sephiroth a little more time. Maybe if he played it right get Sephiroth on his feet again, maybe if they worked together they could win.

Or maybe he’d come out of Stop again to find himself with nothing but another body to see buried. Zack hadn’t felt this outclassed since—he didn’t even know when. Not even early confrontations with Genesis because he’d been too proud and young and overconfident, then.

He said: “Please.”

Mako Cloud’s shoulders sagged. “Zack,” he said. “You don’t get what’s at stake. You fought him yourself, the first time, after he burned Nibelheim.”

“After!”

“I’m not letting people die just to prove a point.”

“Just because it happened once doesn’t mean it’s going to happen always.” Zack had been here before, it felt like, and he hadn’t known what to say then, and the argument now was different enough he didn’t have any better idea what to say now, either.

He watched the red pit in Sephiroth’s chest flex and bleed past mako Cloud’s legs. “Just because…”

World domination or revenge, Angeal said, crystal clear in his memory even after almost two years.

It would be so much easier to believe it. That Angeal had been a monster, Sephiroth was a monster, hell, SOLDIERs were all monsters. That Angeal had had to die, as surely as those mako-addled dragons they’d met coming up the hills. That it was okay, what Zack had done, that it couldn’t have been helped. No matter what he’d said or done differently, all those months Angeal spent falling deeper into despair. It would be easier.

Except it would mean remembering Angeal as a thing that had needed to be put down, instead of a man who was so afraid of being evil, of losing the last of his honor and self along with all his dreams, that he couldn’t keep living.

And it would mean failing him all over again now, by letting Sephiroth be killed. It would mean letting Sephiroth down again. It would mean spitting in the face of the real, young Cloud's valor in the face of something he couldn't hope to fight. Even Tifa, who cared when she had no duty.

Easier, and impossible.

“He’s a person,” insisted Zack. “That means he still has a choice. He has—his dreams, his own honor. Don’t take it away. Cloud, please.”

Mako Cloud shivered, sharply, across his whole body.

“Fine,” said the SOLDIER-monster Cloud, the future Cloud, whatever he was. “I’ll tell him everything, right now. And when he can’t handle it and goes crazy, then I’ll kill him. Before he can learn how to become a parasite in the Lifestream and haunt me forever.”

The half-sulky aggravation with which he said this made it seem like it ought to be a normal thing to say, someone about Zack’s age lodging a complaint about an inconvenience like the laundromat being closed, after you put off laundry until the very absolute last minute and had no wearable socks or underwear.

Mako Cloud put the puzzle-sword on his back and started going through his pockets looking for—oh, healing items. He pulled out a standard Potion, which would do someone like Sephiroth only slightly more good than a warm cup of milk.

“That’s not going to be enough,” Zack pointed out.

“I’m just going to wake him up,” said mako Cloud.

Zack didn’t like that, and Sephiroth wouldn’t like being fed drugs supplied by the enemy, but the man from the mako fountain was only cooperating because Zack had asked nicely, so he was hesitant to push his luck by insisting on doing the healing personally.

It would still be too easy for the not-SOLDIER to change his mind.

Zack flashed a reassuring grin at the kids—well, they weren’t that much younger than him, but kids all the same, small and frightened and courageous. “It’s okay,” he said, giving a little hand-wiggled to tell them to let the guy through, after all.

Maybe this was for the best, actually. He felt like probably, the kind of person who stopped because you said please after slamming through every barrier would have a harder time going ahead and killing someone he’d treated with his own hands, right?

Mako-Cloud knelt beside Sephiroth, slid a black glove in under his hair until he found the nape of the neck, tilted his head up enough for him to drink the Potion when it was set to his lips. There was a precision to the way he did it that was somehow strange to witness—no tenderness, but no roughness either. As though he’d administered medicine to so many people his hands could go through the clinical motions without needing personal input, without it mattering how he felt about the patient.

As soon as Sephiroth’s eyes flicked open, mako Cloud looked him in the eyes from about a foot away and said:

“Sephiroth. Your real mother’s name was Lucrecia Crescent. Hojo really is your dad. Gast Faremis left Shinra because he found out the corpse called Jenova that they used to make you wasn’t an Ancient, she was a monster from another world who created the disease that killed them.”

Wait, Jenova? Zack wanted to take a break to handle all that, especially the third sentence, but mako Cloud went on with only a brief break for breath:

“She’s still inhabiting her corpse and can use her cells to affect the minds of anyone in SOLDIER, but especially you. If you don’t destroy the world for her now, Shinra will probably have finished it off by extracting mako within fifty years, so she’s in a hurry to consume all life on the Planet. Zack won’t let me kill you now, but I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again if you make one wrong move.”

Zack thought that was rather a lot to lay on someone just recovering from unconsciousness, with a big open wound still through his torso. But then, mako Cloud would definitely rather have an excuse to kill Sephiroth than be obliged to hold back, so why would he lay it on him easy?

Sephiroth said, “Stop touching me.”

Mako Cloud put his head back on the ground and stood up. Looked down at Sephiroth. He’d be sideways from Sephiroth’s point of view, Zack reflected.

“So?” he asked.

Sephiroth deliberately looked past him, the most emphatic snub a man could manage while too weak to manage any position other than supine. “Zack,” he said.

His voice was very weak. His diaphragm was severely messed up right now, it was impressive he could talk at all.

“Next time you say you don’t need backup I’m not listening,” Zack blurted out, then winced. What kind of thing was that to say to someone under that much stress? This was why he hadn’t been able to save Angeal! He only knew how to be funny or honest, not how to talk about serious topics!

“Hm,” said Sephiroth.

“See?” Zack said to mako Cloud, who’d crossed his arms. “He isn’t going crazy. Will you lose it if I heal up the massive chest wound before it kills him again?”

Cloud shrugged.

Zack went up beside Sephiroth, hunkered down at his side with mako-Cloud right on top of them so he could have stabbed pretty much straight down onto Zack’s neck, and started feeding his superior officer Hi-Potions. The downside of being a powerhouse was how expensive it was to get fixed up when you did get hurt.

“That’s enough,” said mako Cloud, when the visible impalement wound had gone away but Sephiroth was probably only a little over halfway to better.

“It’s not,” said Zack, but he did pause in his treatment process.

“Afraid to face me at full strength again?” Sephiroth asked, at his most tonelessly withering. Zack could have dropped his head into his palm if he hadn’t needed to maintain visibility. That’s not helping!

“I’ve killed you stronger,” shrugged mako-Cloud. “But I don’t see any reason to make it easier for you to rain hell.”

“What are you?” demanded little, real Cloud, sounding really annoyed about it.

Mako Cloud looked away from Sephiroth for the first time since he’d given him that first Potion, and smirked a little. “I’m you,” he said. “Just older.”

Cloud made an annoyed scoffing sound in his throat, and Tifa said,

“No, really, Cloud. If you’re from the future, if all of that is true, if…”

“You’re not SOLDIER,” said Cloud. There was a strange, hard edge to it, that made him sound more like the older version.

“I’m not,” Mako-Cloud agreed.

“Then what happened?” Tifa asked.

Mako Cloud shrugged again. It was a large gesture, that ran all the way down his arms. “I was supposed to be a Sephiroth clone,” he said, casually, as though he hadn’t been dodging the question since he’d crawled out of the mako fountain, as though it wasn’t a shocking sentence. “After the first time I put him down, after he killed Mom and everyone. But Hojo fucked it up.”

Sephiroth chose this moment to rise to his feet, the upward motion rapid and smooth but nevertheless as graceless as Zack had ever seen him.

Mako-Cloud’s hand flew to his sword hilt at the movement, and Zack thrust himself bodily into the space between them, hands up high.

“Whoah, whoah, hey, ceasefire, we have a ceasefire guys, cool it.”

Mako Cloud made a tight, minimal scowl, but didn’t try to get past him and fuck Sephiroth up again. When Zack checked on Sephiroth, he was making a weird face, inasmuch as he was making a face at all. Would it kill these guys to emote a normal amount?

“If you’re fit to live despite what he made of you,” Sephiroth bit out, shaking off the weirdness in favor of a glare, looking right past Zack. “Then what makes me so different?”

Mako Cloud glared right back, although he was half a foot shorter than Zack and at this distance with all of them standing could probably only make out about a third of Sephiroth’s face. Mostly forehead. Sephiroth had a lot of forehead. “It’s not what you are,” he said. “It’s who.”

“I deserve," Sephiroth retorted, "to know who I am.”

“You’re a puppet,” Cloud retorted, and turned away.

Zack could see Sephiroth practically shaking with the urge to ask what that meant and the dignity that wouldn’t let him, so he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It doesn’t matter how strong you are if someone else is always deciding what you’re fighting for,” said the monstrously strong Cloud, contemptuous. He glanced over his shoulder at Sephiroth. “You could’ve devoured the entire world and been the last remaining consciousness on the Planet and not’ve solved your actual problems, because that was still what Jenova wanted for you. What do you have to feel sad about.”

Something ugly flashed across Sephiroth’s face. He was thinking of Genesis, probably, and Angeal, who were dead and gone and could never say why they’d done any of it.

“It’s a SOLDIER’s job to fight,” interceded Zack. “Deciding who the enemy should be, what’s going on...that’s nothing to do with us.”

“Sooner or later it has to be,” said the Cloud from the mako fountain, with a little shrug. “If you don’t die first.”

That left the conversation dead in the water.

“Let’s keep on to the reactor,” said Sephiroth, finally, sounding almost his usual self, or at least not much worse than when they'd gotten to Nibelheim. “We still have a mission to complete.”

Fingertips on the pommel of the puzzle-sword again. “I’m not letting you anywhere near that reactor.”

It was immediately obvious to Zack that Sephiroth was now definitely going to that reactor.

“Would you rather he goes back to town?” Zack asked.

Now Mako Cloud looked conflicted.

“We can’t stay in this cave forever,” said Tifa. “I mean, we really can’t, we’ll starve.”

Mako Cloud sighed. Took his hand off his sword. “Fine. Lead the way. But once you’ve been up there in close range with that thing I’m definitely not letting you back into Nibelheim. I don’t care how stable you look.”

Sephiroth made a point of ignoring this.

Blandly, he fell in behind their guide, making a further point of refusing to fear having the supercharged version of Cloud at his back, and Zack shook his head and attached himself to the rear of the column. This way he could watch their mystery interloper for false moves and perform the normal ambush-absorbing function of rearguard.

Little Cloud had put himself between the antagonists without saying anything.

Old Cloud was watching Sephiroth’s back like a hawk on a rabbit.

The seams of his sword where the parts fit together were very tight, sealed astonishingly close with the perfection of their machining and the apparent incredible hardness of the metal. But Sephiroth’s blood had dried into every fine seam and was picking them out, even in the low light underground.

Was it made of something that didn’t rust? Or did Cloud usually clean it better than this?

Monster blood tended to deliquesce like mako, once the monster was dead, so maybe most of the time it was an easy clean. Maybe he didn’t fight humans very often.

It was a long, tense trek up through the tunnels to the barren peak that housed the mako reactor.

Mako Cloud marched toward the steel steps.

“You can’t come in,” Zack said. “It’s proprietary company data.”

“Don’t care,” said older Cloud. His delts and biceps flexed visibly. Not even trying to deliver a threat, that Zack could see. Just ready.

“Seriously….”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Sephiroth.

So they all went in. The kids had already saved Sephiroth’s ass once, Zack wasn’t leaving them behind if the mystery terrorist mako monster guy was coming in.

Once they got inside, which was unnecessarily difficult and might have been fun on a different kind of day, JENOVA was written over the door to the inner reactor control chamber, past a double rank of eerily glowing pods of some kind. Sephiroth looked at the whole array for several seconds, then went over to one side of the room and adjusted a single valve. There.

Mission complete apparently?

“Let’s go,” Zack said, for once in no mood to explore even a little bit.

“What’s this,” said Sephiroth, ignoring him, approaching one of the great glowing tanks that Zack wanted nothing to do with.

“It’s bullshit,” said big Cloud. Sephiroth ignored him.

The tanks were so big that Sephiroth had to boost himself up against the base to look in at the contents. “Monsters…” he concluded.

Zack clambered up on the handrail rather than look directly through the window from so close up, and was glad he had. The monsters inside were vaguely humanoid, crystaline blue with mako, their faces set into rictus grins. “Hojo made these,” Sephiroth concluded, climbing down.

“Mn,” agreed Mako-Cloud. He wasn't looking at them.

“Why?” wondered Tifa. She and little Cloud were keeping close together, shoulder to shoulder, but apart from that nervous body language seemed like the calmest people in the reactor. After all, apart from being near their hometown, this business didn’t involve them.

“To see what would happen,” said Sephiroth. “That’s always...his only reason. To see if he can…”

“And to win,” put in mako Cloud.

Shut up, Zack mouthed at him.

Cloud pointedly turned his body just enough that he couldn’t see Zack, honestly a lot like Sephiroth ignoring you but a little more visibly pouting.

Sephiroth climbed back onto the walkway side of the safety railing, and Zack climbed down from it. Sephiroth’s expression had gone very distant. “Ordinary SOLDIERs are enhanced humans, with a high mako infusion. Still human. These things…” His hand tightened on the rail.

Mako Cloud’s attention snapped around onto Sephiroth, as Sephiroth’s hand rose to his forehead. He shoved himself away from the railing. Stared down at his own splayed fingers. Zack’s stomach was in freefall.

“Was I...is it possible that I...”

The pod Sephiroth had been staring into unsealed itself, in a rush of mako and hiss of steam. The thing fell forward with the opening door, spasms shaking through it, curling up around itself. Before the mako finished wafting away, it lay dead.

"Am I just a monster like this," Sephiroth murmured.

“Yes, Sephiroth,” came a new voice, from the top tier of the reactor, settling down from above like he’d come in through some sort of skylight.

Genesis, back from the dead and looking so bleached-grey he might as well be a ghost. Of course. Zack couldn’t even find it in himself to be surprised.

He was slightly worried. He'd gotten kicked around earlier and used up a lot of potions and mana both, and Sephiroth was only at half strength. Still, Genesis didn't look his best, Zack wouldn't really get worried unless he pulled a whole mess of clones out of his feathered ass again.

“So you’ve realized it at last," said the dead deserter. "You are a monster, created by Shinra...the same as Angeal and I.”

“You keep Angeal’s name out of your mouth!” snapped Zack. Angeal had died thinking Genesis was out of the picture for good; Angeal had died thinking Genesis was the proof he had to be killed, Angeal had died—“Did you tell him that, too?”

It was so obvious that he had. Genesis ignored him. I could take you, Zack thought. Even if their last fight hadn’t really ended in Genesis’ death, he’d still lost it, and Zack was stronger now, and Genesis looked worse.

“So you are alive,” said Sephiroth.

“If you can call this living. Sephiroth. You are the perfect monster, created by Shinra as part of the Jenova Project, through the sacrifice of hundreds of experimental subjects. The same...as me.”

“Hm,” said Sephiroth.

“But you are the perfect monster.”

“Genesis,” Zack said through his teeth. “Shut up.”

“Poor Sephiroth. What things have you imagined about your unknown mother? Jenova is nothing but a corpse excavated from a two-thousand-year-old geostratum. A material used to make monsters like Jenova Project G...and Project S.”

“What do you want?”

Genesis opened one hand toward Sephiroth. “Your traits cannot be copied onto others and your genes can’t be diffused, and so your body won’t degrade. Share your cells with me.”

“Who even are you?” asked mako-Cloud, before the demand had time to hang in the air for more than a second.

“That’s Genesis Rhapsodos,” said normal Cloud, sounding a little weirded out that his older self had forgotten that. “He used to be SOLDIER, he led an insurrection…?”

“Huh,” said mako-Cloud. “Anyway, almost everything you said was wrong.”

Zack gave him a side-eye. “It’s almost the same things you said.”

“No it’s not.”

“My friend,” Genesis declaimed, clearly trying to recover control of the scene. “Your desire is the bringer of life, the gift of the Goddess. Sephiroth.”

Sephiroth’s mouth twisted as he looked up at his old friend. “Are you trying to trick me...or just use me,” he said. “It makes no difference. You can rot.”

Genesis didn’t seem particularly upset. A faint smile crossed his faded face. “A perfect monster...truly.”

“Do you have that wing because of Jenova?” Mako Cloud asked. “Sephiroth pulled one of those out at the last minute, the third time I killed him. Did he get that idea from you?”

Genesis seemed to be left, for the first time in Zack’s experience, speechless. Normally it didn’t matter very much what you said to him, he’d go on with what he’d intended to say either way, but apparently this version of Cloud had exceeded his threshold for that.

“Infinite in mystery is the gift of the goddess,” he drawled after a second, eyebrow cocked. This meant, probably, 'what the fuck.'

“Cloud’s from the future,” said Zack.

“Every SOLDIER is part of the Jenova Project, you’re not that special,” said mako-Cloud.

And that—well. It made sense, didn’t it? After all, that gene infusion trick Genesis was so keen on only worked on...SOLDIERs and monsters. Zack wished he was standing near enough to the railing to grab it himself.

Of course. Of course they were all—

Zack looked from little Cloud, standing at the back of their group, his fierce, pointy little face intent on the scene, to the grim disinterest the older, mako-Cloud, monster Cloud, SOLDIER Cloud, was wearing.

He swallowed. “Hey, Cloud? Why did you keep killing Sephiroth, in the future?”

Cloud wrinkled his nose up a little, giving Zack a dubious, squinting look. “He needed killing?”

Zack’s throat was tight with urgency, somehow. “Don’t try to be funny. You know what I meant.”

“Mm.” Cloud took his giant, strange sword off his back and weighed it in his hand, as if it held the answers and he had to find them before he could share them with Zack. “He was trying to end the world. I like the world, I live here.”

“Cloud.”

He didn’t know how he could tell with such certainty that this man he didn’t really know, the older version of a kid he didn’t know all that well but had always understood so effortlessly, was holding back. Holding back something important.

Cloud drew in a long, tight breath, like a man who’d been stabbed somewhere other than the chest and was trying to manage the pain. The reactor was silent other than the constant, everchurning reactor hum and the occasional faint metallic sounds of mechanical parts working. Everyone was watching Cloud, like everyone agreed that this was, somehow, the most important question in the world.

“It’s not that I’ve never faltered, Zack,” he said, eyes on the steel floor, sword heavy in his hand. The grooves were still dark with Sephiroth’s blood. “When you think you’re not a person, it’s easy to give in.”

Zack’s chest hurt. He didn’t know why.

He did know why. He remembered Angeal, rearing up over him, his body warped and blended with those creatures he’d put himself into and then drawn into himself. The peaceful, colorless expression on his dead face.

“But in the end, I did have choices, so I kept making them. This Planet is worth protecting. All the life on and in it, everyone who’s living and has lived. It's all precious. That’s…” Cloud raised his head to look Zack in the eye and one corner of his mouth tilted up, a little smirk, the closest thing Zack had seen on him to a smile.

“That’s an honorable kind of dream, isn’t it?”