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three years is a long time.
long enough for midgar’s ruins to settle into something almost ordinary. the jagged skyline no longer gapes like a wound torn open, but resembles broken teeth, worn smooth by time and neglect. dust has been swept from the streets, debris hauled away, metal beams reforged into scaffolding for something new, something provisional yet stubbornly alive. people walk through the wreckage without flinching, their steps careful but unafraid. children play where fire once raged, kicking up clouds of dust and laughter in equal measure, the echoes of the city’s past hidden beneath their clamor.
long enough for the world to insist on continuing.
long enough for voices to adjust to absence. people no longer say zack’s name with the careful, measured pause— the one that stretches just a fraction too long, thick with pity, reverence, or disbelief. they do not avoid it. they simply let it linger differently in the air, like a relic, like something sacred but concluded, no longer part of the living world.
cloud still says it like a prayer.
he does not mean to. it slips out in quiet moments, unguarded, soft, unintentional. when the sun hangs low and the light turns molten gold against rusted steel, catching on shards of glass and twisted metal like scattered constellations. when the wind cuts through the streets just right, carrying a faint echo, half a whisper, and for a single breath he swears he can hear laughter—loud, carefree, and impossibly unrestrained—riding its currents.
zack.
three years, and the ache has not dulled. it has only shifted. what was once sharp and jagged, a grief that tore at him from the inside and clenched his chest in suffocating anguish, has transformed. now it is deeper, heavier, and permanent. it lives behind his ribs like a second heartbeat that does not belong to him, quiet but insistent, pressing against every motion, every inhale.
sometimes, he cannot even begin to say his name.
his mouth opens and nothing comes out but broken syllables. a stutter that catches in his throat and refuses to resolve. the name feels too large for him, too full. it threatens to crack him open from the inside.
tifa has learned the signs.
she slides down beside him without speaking, shoulder brushing his. she does not offer platitudes. she does not tell him it will get easier. her silence is deliberate, warm, and grounding. sometimes she presses a glass into his hand just to give him something solid to hold. something that does not vanish the moment he closes his eyes.
other times it is marlene and denzel.
they ask questions with open curiosity, with no understanding of how sharp their innocence can be. they want stories about his hero— about the SOLDIER who smiled too wide and fought too hard and carried cloud through hell like it was nothing. and cloud tells them what he can, leaving out the blood, the fear, the unutterable ending.
when he falters, when the weight of memory threatens to consume him, they quiet themselves instinctively. small hands resting against his arm, their comfort is wordless and startling in its sincerity. two children who have witnessed the worst humanity has to offer and remained kind anyway.
cloud does not know how to explain what that does to him. the ache eases, only fractionally, in their presence. the world does not become less empty, but it becomes softer, more bearable.
so he tells himself he has moved on.
he takes deliveries across the plains, the hum of his bike filling the empty stretches of road. the wind against his face is sharp and clean and sometimes, for a fleeting second, it feels almost like freedom. he watches over seventh heaven when tifa needs him to. he exterminates monsters that creep too close to settlements. he sharpens first tsuguri with methodical precision, the scrape of metal against stone steady and familiar.
he visits aerith’s church.
the roof has long since collapsed, but the flowers persist, stubborn and bright in the broken light. he kneels among them awkwardly, large hands gentling the stems with care he does not show elsewhere. he is clumsy. he overwaters. he forgets which roots are fragile. but he tries.
he keeps his eyes forward.
even when his mind keeps returning to the past.
grief is not the only thing that keeps him tethered.
it is the way zack lives inside him.
not in memory alone. not in photographs or stories told in low voices. not in the battered buster sword that still feels too large and too heavy and too his.
zack lives in the spaces beneath cloud’s skin.
cloud catches himself in the mirror sometimes and startles.
there are days when the reflection looks like him— pale, sharp, composed to the point of fragility. and then there are days when the mouth curves into something wide and reckless before he can stop it. a grin that shows too much teeth. a flash of confidence that does not belong to someone who grew up small and uncertain in nibelheim’s shadow.
he will stare at it too long.
watch the way his shoulders square without conscious thought. the way his chin tilts up like he is daring the world to try. sometimes he lifts a hand and presses his fingers to his own cheek, as if he can smudge the expression away. as if it is something worn, not grown.
he hears it, too.
words in his head that are too bright, too easy. encouragement that comes in a voice warmer than his own. jokes he would never make. promises spoken with unshakeable certainty.
you’ll be fine.
trust me.
we’ve got this!
cloud does not remember deciding to think like that.
sometimes he stands a little taller without meaning to. sometimes he claps someone on the shoulder in a gesture that feels instinctive and foreign all at once. sometimes he laughs too loud at seventh heaven and sees tifa go still for half a second— not disturbed, not upset, but just noticing.
there are worse moments.
moments when he says something that sounds nothing like him and everything like— and the silence afterward stretches thin.
he will look at his reflection and genuinely not know where he ends and zack begins.
the lines are blurred, smudged by trauma and mako and jenova cells and grief and longing. blurred by that desperate, clawing need he once had to be someone else.
zack had been everything cloud wanted to be.
strong without appearing to strain for it. kind without hesitation. brave in ways that felt effortless rather than forced. he moved through the world like it would bend for him if he simply asked nicely enough. people gravitated toward him. trusted him. loved him.
cloud had watched from just behind.
always just behind.
in nibelheim, he had been the awkward boy on the outskirts, too proud to admit how much he wanted to belong. too ashamed of his failures to let anyone see them. he had carved empty spaces into himself— hollows shaped like validation, like recognition, like being enough.
zack filled them without even trying.
every insecurity. every loneliness. every desperate hunger to be more.
zack had been the blueprint.
if cloud studied him hard enough, mimicked his posture, copied his tone, borrowed his confidence— maybe he could build himself into something worthy. something solid. something that did not crack under scrutiny.
and then, somewhere along the line, it shifted.
it stopped being admiration. stopped being simple hero worship.
there were moments— quiet, and wholly unguarded— when cloud found himself watching not the way zack fought, but the way he smiled afterward. the way he tilted his head when he was listening. the way his hand would settle at the small of cloud’s back, steady and grounding and thoughtless in its intimacy.
it became the warmth of a shared tent under unfamiliar stars. the brush of shoulders as they walked. the steady cadence of zack’s breathing in the dark, close enough to count.
it became the way cloud’s chest tightened when zack laughed with someone else for too long.
not just an idol. not just a hero.
something warmer. softer.
something that made cloud’s pulse stutter in his throat.
he had not known what to name it then. he barely knows now.
all he knows is that when zack looked at him— truly looked— cloud felt seen in a way that was terrifying and intoxicating all at once. like every jagged edge inside him had been acknowledged and accepted without question.
cloud does not remember the exact moment it shifted.
memory is unreliable like that. it blurs at the edges, softens what should have been sharp. he tries, sometimes, to trace it back. to isolate the instant admiration became something that hurt to hold.
maybe it was the first time zack ruffled his hair and laughed like he was something precious instead of pathetic. not a just some tag-along, or a failed recruit from a rural mountain town. but like someone he was worth teasing, worth noticing. no one had ever looked at him that way before. not in nibelheim, where he had been the boy trailing behind. not in shinra, where he had been another uniform, another failed experiment.
zack’s hand had been warm and grounding. and cloud remembers standing there afterward, stunned by how light his chest felt.
“first class,” he would say, grinning. “and then? who knows. we’ll be heroes.”
we.
zack always said we.
cloud would listen in silence, pretending indifference, while every word rooted itself deep inside him. he had never allowed himself to imagine a future that bright. but when zack spoke, it felt possible. like proximity alone might make it real.
perhaps it maybe was the way zack said his name.
“cloud!”
the way his name slips from zack’s mouth was never flat. never dismissive. but always charged with warmth, with certainty. like it meant something. like he meant something.
or maybe it was later.
maybe it was during that broken year on the run, when memories fractured and reassembled themselves into something survivable. when the world narrowed to dirt roads and abandoned barns and the constant, suffocating awareness of being hunted.
zack who carried him.
zack who refused to leave him behind.
cloud remembers it in flashes. the smell of rain and the ache of mako burning through his veins like acid. the numb, unreachable fog he had sunk into blurring his mind. he had been dead weight— catatonic and unresponsive, a liability that slowed them down.
zack talked anyway.
he filled the silence with stories, with plans, with dreams about a future that stretched impossibly wide. he complained about rations. he joked about promotions that would never come. he asked questions and answered them himself when cloud could not. he nudged his shoulder. he shook him gently. he pressed water to his lips and wiped the blood from his face.
zack touched him constantly. not carelessly—never that— but insistently. fingers curling into his uniform to keep him upright. an arm thrown over his shoulders. hands bracing his jaw to force eye contact that cloud could not give. sometimes he would cling in a way cloud had never seen from him before— desperate, and almost frantic. like if he let go, even for a second, cloud would dissolve.
the isolation had been closing in. shinra just right behind them. an empty horizon ahead.
and zack, who had always seemed untouchable in his confidence, crumbling apart in those seconds.
alone.
cloud had not been fully conscious. not fully himself. but he had felt it.
he loved him.
the realization comes now with a clarity that feels cruel.
he had loved him in ways he never had the language to articulate. love had not arrived like lightning. it had not announced itself. it had settled in slowly, stubbornly, woven through exhaustion and gratitude and longing. it became the reason his body kept breathing when his mind could not follow.
zack’s voice had been an anchor. zack’s warmth had been proof that he was still here, tangible in a way that cloud had never known before. it had been light in the dark corridors of nibelheim, a steady hand in the chaos of a runaway life, a quiet certainty in a world that felt perpetually unkind. every word, every laugh, every reckless grin had settled into him like roots into soil. cloud had clung to it, maybe without even realizing, because it was the first time someone had chosen him completely. without hesitation. without expectation. just chosen.
and then—zack died.
not in a blaze of glory. not in that kind of cinematic sacrifice that the bards and history would remember, the kind that would echo in stories and monuments. no. he died in mud and rain and relentless gunfire, under a sky that had been grey with sorrow and smoke, on earth that had soaked up every drop of their struggle, with the air thick and biting with the tang of iron, gunpowder, and blood.
he died protecting someone who could not even stand on his own.
he died protecting cloud.
protecting him.
and that more than anything else was the part that never stopped clawing at him.
zack’s last stand had been neither about destiny nor heroism, neither about saving a world that would never remember the cost. it had been about cloud. about the fragile, broken boy zack had seen under the armor of his own fear and hesitation. bullets tore through the one person who had ever chosen him without question, without reserve, without calculation. cloud had been crumpled against a rock, barely conscious, feeling the searing realization that the man who had been everything to him was being erased, thread by thread, before his eyes.
he had lost someone he loved, and inherited everything about him.
zack’s sword. zack’s dreams, uttered so often they had become scripture. zack’s legacy—unfinished, unfulfilled, a life cut brutally short.
and then, in the fractured aftermath of mako, jenova, and every lingering trauma, something stranger still took root.
zack’s identity.
for a long time, cloud did not know where he ended and zack began. it happened gradually, instinctively, like sinking into footprints pressed into soft earth. he took the shape of the man who had once lifted him, guided him, protected him, until the lines blurred completely.
cloud strife. SOLDIER First Class. confident. unshakeable. the kind of man who could walk into a room and command it with nothing more than presence, a man whose gaze steadied those around him. it felt natural, because it had always been what he wanted. it felt right, because zack had worn it so well.
people believed it. they saw the broad sword, the uniform, the steady gaze—and they believed it.
cloud let them.
he let the persona wrap around him like armor. he let the borrowed confidence settle into his bones. he repeated stories that were not his, claimed battles he had not fought, mimicked the ease and recklessness that had made zack unforgettable. he shaped himself into the version of zack the world had admired, because in doing so, he felt closer. closer to the man who had once been the light in his darkness, the hand that had held him upright when the world had threatened to swallow him whole.
if he acted like zack, spoke like zack, fought like zack—then maybe zack was not truly gone.
maybe he lived on in the spaces cloud had hollowed out to make room for him. maybe the ache would ease if he carried him not just in memory, but in motion. in posture. in voice. in the steadiness of presence.
maybe this was what survival looked like.
maybe this was what together meant now.
not side by side. not shoulder to shoulder under an open sky.
but layered. interwoven like threads upon threads. indistinguishable from one another.
he told himself it was practical. easier to be strong than broken. easier to carry the legacy than collapse beneath it.
but there were nights—sleepless, sharp, when the world outside was quiet enough that his own heart sounded like a drum—that he would lie awake and wonder where the performance ended.
if he peeled away the SOLDIER, the bravado, the easy grin that wasn’t truly his—
what would be left?
the boy from nibelheim, the one who had never been enough?
or nothing at all?
cloud does not know where admiration ended and replacement began. does not know when grief twisted into imitation. he only knows that when he strips it all away— the titles, the sword, the persona — what remains feels frighteningly small. and without zack inside him, filling the cracks, he is not sure there would be enough left to stand.
he could reach for himself in those moments of melancholy, and there would be only the echo of zack’s laughter, the ghost of his hands steadying him, and the warmth of his presence that no amount of time or grief could erase.
and yet, even in that emptiness, cloud could not stop himself. he could not let go. he carried zack in every breath, every step, every heartbeat that reminded him he had survived—and survived because zack had loved him enough to give everything, even life itself.
and that was a kind of together, too. isn't it? it may be cruel and aching, an impossible together—but they're together nonetheless. it's what mattered to him, he realizes, that zack’s still with him in every way.
three years down that line, and he doesn't know if he'll ever see through the blurred lines.
the problem with grief is that it does not fade simply because you are pretending to be someone else, because you have taken on a mask stitched from the life of another.
some nights, when the world grows impossibly quiet and there is no mission, no battle, no weighty distraction to hold him upright, cloud lies awake and feels the fractures in himself. he feels them in his bones, in the hollow of his chest, in the long, restless stretch of limbs that were never quite his own. he feels the seams where borrowed memories, habits, and words rub against the raw edges of his own life, sharp and unyielding. he feels the jagged divide between the shy, uncertain boy from nibelheim—the boy who flinched at raised voices, who could barely speak without trembling—and the man zack had been: brilliant, reckless, unshakably confident, warm in a way cloud could only imitate.
he wonders, often, if zack would even recognize him like this. would zack laugh, loud and unrestrained, clap him on the back, and grin that wide, fearless grin that made the world seem so small and safe?
would he say, “that’s my legacy,” and mean it in the way only zack could, proud without reservation? or would he look at cloud with that rare, quiet seriousness reserved for moments when the rest of the world fell away, and say, “you don’t have to be me, you know,” leaving cloud unmoored, trembling with uncertainty?
cloud does not know which answer terrifies him more. because if zack would be proud, then cloud is clinging to a ghost, chasing a shadow in the hollow of himself. and if zack would be disappointed, then everything he has done, every step he has taken to survive, to honor, to live up to the man who believed in him… has been built on something fragile and wrong, a house of borrowed bones and borrowed laughter, teetering on the edge of collapse.
three years have passed.
three years since zack fell in mud and rain and gunfire, protecting a boy too weak to stand, too poisoned to even try.
and yet cloud still reaches for him in his sleep, still dreams of him standing beside him in golden sunlight or beneath the fractured sky of midgar, sword raised and eyes bright with the simple certainty of his existence. three years, and he still measures himself against a standard that no longer exists, against a boy he barely knew when they first became fugitives, against a man who shaped everything he wanted to be.
it is not just that he misses zack. it is that he does not know who he is without him. zack had been his hero, his friend, his first anchor in a world that had never been kind. zack had been the one person who looked at cloud—not at the concept of him, not at the potential, not at the failures that haunted him—but at him. and loving zack had felt like being seen, fully, and painfully, without compromise.
now, loving him feels like being haunted.
cloud tells himself he must move forward. he must. zack would have wanted him to survive, to live a life that belongs solely to him, to forge his own path rather than follow a ghost. but every step forward feels like betrayal, every act of joy tainted by the memory of what he has lost. every smile, every laugh, every small moment of triumph is shadowed by the absence of zack, the way the sun can be too bright when it illuminates everything he can never reclaim.
how do you move on from someone who shaped you so completely? how do you untangle yourself from a man whose dreams you still carry in your hands, whose laughter still echoes inside your skull?
sometimes he feels the weight of the sword in his hands not as protection, but as a tether—its steel, a cold reminder of the boy he once was and the man he became in zack’s absence. he catches himself speaking in zack’s cadences, moving with gestures learned from observation, from memory, from instinct. and for a fleeting instant, it feels as though zack is still there, still present in the arc of his movement, the tilt of his head, the steadying of his breath.
he does not know where he ends and zack begins anymore. perhaps he never will. the line has blurred so completely that they are layered together, indistinguishable, inseparable, one echo of the other. and in that, there is both solace and despair: solace, because he is never truly alone; despair, because he is never truly himself.
it's been three years.
time has moved on. the world has shifted. people have rebuilt cities, carried on with lives, said zack’s name without pain or pause.
but for cloud, three years is not enough.
not for the nights that stretch endlessly in silent rooms. not for the wind that whispers through rusted steel and over gold-lit fields, carrying the laughter and warmth he will never hold. not for the reflection in the mirror that stares back at him with unfamiliar eyes, familiar only because they once belonged to zack.
he remains folded into the past, interwoven with a memory that refuses to loosen its hold. he still whispers zack’s name when he wakes, still feels the tremor in his chest when the thought crosses his mind, still wears a copy of that broad sword, still moves through the world as if carrying another’s shadow.
and somewhere between who he was and who zack had been, cloud stands—unfinished and aching, a fragment of the boy and the man who once walked beside him.
he does not know if he will ever move on. he only knows that loving zack has changed him irrevocably, shaped him in ways that cannot be undone, carved him out of grief and memory and devotion.
and perhaps, he thinks bitterly, that is the cruelest part of all: to survive, to continue, to live in a world without him, while carrying the man he loved, who still lives inside him, and who will never, ever truly be gone.