Work Text:
The first time it happened, he dismissed it as a fluke.
It was nothing but a trick of his mind — and full of fog as it was, it wasn’t that hard to imagine. Over the years, he had come to learn his mind couldn’t be always trusted, and this… well, it was no stranger than anything else. To Cloud, it felt like an appropriate time to just go with all of it.
His bones ached deeply — alarming, considering he hadn’t done much to truly strain them in a long while. The last time they saw a pain like this, he had been digging people out from under the Midgar rubble, building shelters or makeshift hospitals from the steel scavenged around the crumbled plates. The team had very little rest those early nights: Cid on supply runs containing donations from all over the planet, Tifa and Barret organizing communities and resources, and Cloud was left rallying any that could stand and help rebuild.
They sowed those early seeds of life after so much death, and watered it with the blood, sweat and tears of the few able to contribute. And it had paid off, when that ground they labored on slowly emerged and took shape, one day becoming the bustling community of Edge. It brought everyone closer together in the end, but Cloud would be lying if he didn’t acknowledge how exhausting it was for their ragtag group. The soreness after… it reminded him of his days in the infantry, being forced to run hours of drills before dawn.
It was this thought, the flickers of memory filtering through on his old Shinra days, that he attributed to producing the hallucination.
In his fevered state — with his mind running away from him like one of Barret’s coal mine trains — he felt caught between the waking and sleeping worlds. He blinked away the dryness of his eyes, coming semi lucid. He found himself in the church with his head of sweat matted hair pressed to the coolness of the stone floor for what little comfort it could provide to the stigma induced fever. And that’s when he noticed Zack.
Zack’s hands, ungloved — with the calluses on his palms softened by time — brushed his bangs from his forehead. He knelt beside him, his knees braced near Cloud’s shoulders.
He heard Zack breath in, just as Cloud seemed to lose his own breath. He heard the scrape of his boots against the stone floor, while Cloud’s scrabbled to struggle upright. He felt it, the warmth and pressure of Zack’s hands at his shoulders, ushering him back down. Cloud collapsed into it, yielding to the inevitability of Zack.
Cloud said nothing, yet quietly wished he was stronger; wished he had the fortitude to look his friend in the eye and have the conversation about everything, to confess, to apologize, now that Zack was here. He wanted to acknowledge all that had happened, and how unfair it was, and
how much he missed him,
how dark the world had been without Zack in it, how sorry he was,
how much Cloud wished it had been him that died that day instead of Zack,
how much better off the world would have been with that outcome,
how—
how—
how—
But— he wasn’t strong. Not then, and not now.
He noticed his shuddering shoulders as he collapsed. It was just fever chills Cloud told himself, he wasn’t letting himself fall apart here or now. He wouldn’t allow himself that indulgence in front of someone he had effectively killed by his own ineptitude — but Zack ignored it all, seeing him fall apart and just embracing him.
Zack’s arms wrapped around him, almost desperately wherever he could grab. The weight of Zack’s hold pulled Cloud up short in his spiraling thoughts and fever, but he eased into it, and Zack scooped him up like he weighed nothing at all, hauled him by the arms. He brought Cloud’s curled form up to half rest in his lap, and with mercifully cool hands, rubbed soothing fingers all along his neck.
When the mottled blackness had first appeared on his upper arm, he heard the phantom death knells of the church ringing in his ears. He looked up at his empty expression, staring back at him in the mirror and immediately left the bar in a panic. He ran, driving for hours through the wastes, burning gas and rubber in his desperate need to calm his frantic heart. Without meaning to, hours later, he found himself at those olden wooden doors, running gloved hands over it’s ancient iron handle.
Over the following weeks, he had spent less and less time around Seventh Heaven. Hiding from his family — from Tifa, Densel, and Marlene. He didn’t want their hope, their kindness, or comfort. In a way he could never admit to them, it was a relief to see he had Geostigma. An exhale of a breath he never knew he had been holding in. The other shoe had dropped. He wouldn’t die on Sephiroth’s sword, no matter how often the man had tried to end his life with it. It was like a pass. He wouldn’t have to live through each day trying to make everything right, to honor the dead, to live with struggling steps, trying to find a purpose to it all.
He wouldn’t have to deliver a package tomorrow, inevitably to someone who insisted on him staying for tea, regaling their stories of war heroes and Shinra once they saw his glowing eyes. They wanted news from him, inside stories of the WRO’s investigation, always they wanted him to share things from his past he couldn’t even provide himself.
He didn’t have to spend the rest of his days seeing pink ribbons in little girls hair and thinking of his failures.
He looked at that necrotic skin now, and felt a resigned sense of rightness to it all. He had done what he could with his time, to attone for what all he had done or been unable to stop — but now he was going to be released from this burden of living through the outcome of those sins. He was weak, a coward maybe. He knew he hadn’t done enough, but… now he wouldn’t have to keep trying to do more. He had done his best, and that failing standard of perfection didnt matter anymore. And that finality was a comfort he couldn’t share with the others — they wouldn’t understand his contradictory mixture of grief and release. So, he slept in the church, came back to dinners less often, weaned them off of his presence and himself off of the comfort of theirs.
It was better this way. That's what he told himself anyway.
Cloud decided, then and there, that even if he was just hallucinating Zack… well, could he really be blamed for allowing himself this one weakness? Just this one comfort, when he had denied himself nearly every other? No one had to know. Cloud almost felt ashamed by it — but Zack wasn’t even real, he was dead, he couldn’t complain about his memory being used this way.
“I love you,” Cloud whispered to the still, empty air, saying it instead of all the things he should have been saying. He repeated it, again to the nothingness, knowing that was all that held and waited for him. He said it to his Zack, knowing he wouldn't hold it against him. He never had before, Cloud knew. The Zack from his memory had done nothing but care for him even when he never had anything to offer. He barely knew his own name, but Zack had stayed, been through it all with him and still carried Cloud out of the Hells and back, talking to him through the haze of the mako fog, making sure he still ate and drank.
No, Zack would not mind his weakness. He was safe here, in these imagined arms.
His fist tightened to ball up the loose fitting pants that cradled his head, with the other reaching further to grab onto the ribbed sweater of the old, worn, black SOLDIER uniform. Now that he allowed himself this moment — this one taste of comfort where no one else could really see…he found he was desperate for it, leaning into the warmth he had to have imagined.
“Cloud…” Zack whispered, somewhere between heartbroken and longing, leaning over so close that Cloud felt the ghost of his name across his skin.
“Don’t go,” Cloud choked out, fully shaking now. He weakly wrapped his arms around the other’s torso, pulling himself closer, his muscles losing their strength halfway through the movement. “…Don’t go, this time.”
“I’ll be here,” Zack said his voice was steady like a lighthouse in the stigma’s storm, lending Cloud his light to navigate by. “If you need me, I’m there, sunshine.”
If Cloud squeezed a little tighter before falling asleep, no one else was there to notice.
Death was not as painful as living.
This was the first thing Cloud thought when he reached the lifestream, the blinding whiteness of it burning through what would normally be his frazzled senses. He remembered the bullet in his back, the Remnants, the explosion. It was blinding, a bright whiteness that felt as unending as this one.
He didn’t mind death, if it meant Zack was there with him.
And then, he was floating, and there were hands on him. Warm hands, familiar hands, cradled his head. They were large with knuckles gnarled from punching trees when he was younger — trying to prove his toughness to the other Gongagan boys — he had once said. The water was cool, and he could feel the healing effects of it. When he blinked drops from his blond lashes, he noticed the sunlight streaming in from the rafters above.
The church?
Once his eyes could focus again — it was like they were remembering how to be alive just as much as his brain was — they immediately found the glowing violet blues above him. That bright, kilowatt smile he would know anywhere, was focused on him like a flood light. It was blinding, and he found himself frozen to it.
“Hey sunshine,” those lips said, framing around the words. “I told you I’d find a way to get back to you.” That name, those words… ones that he’d only heard in his dreams for the last three years. And how he ached without them — without knowing if they were real or just part of his mako-addled brain’s creations — projecting longing and affection where there was none to be had. But here Zack was, warm and real. real.
“Zack…?” he grumbled, the words painful as his throat felt like he’d drank raw mako. It’s likely this new fountain in the church had come from the lifestream itself. He felt Aerith nearby in spirit, the scent of lilies heavy in the air. He couldn’t help the slow smile that formed as a result. “How…?”
“Figured I’d hitch a ride back with you to Midgar, like the old days.” He grinned back, the dark spikes shining in the light like a halo around his sharp features. “Miss me?”
“More than anything.”
When their lips met, warm and soft, they didn't let the moment pass. Their kisses quickly turned to laughter, biting and chasing each other as the vibrations of their joy broke their hold.
Cloud knew that finally, just maybe, things would be alright now.
He wasn't alone, not anymore.