Mama's Boy, Final Fantasy VII (Cloud)
Title: Mama’s Boy Author: Aiko Namika Rating: PG? Warnings: None, really Word count: 441 Prompt: Final Fantasy VII, Cloud: Survival - Mother Used to say if you want, you'll find a way Bet mother never danced through fire shower. Summary: Cloud’s learned a lot of lessons from his mama.
The other troopers in Cloud’s squad liked to tease him and call him a mama’s boy – he didn’t actually have a problem with that, because he’d seen his mama take down a Nibel Wolf at point-blank range with a shotgun, and if you couldn’t aspire to that, then what could you?
She was the one who had taught him how to ignore the teasing and yelling and everything that he went through in training. When the older cadets would sneer at him and talk about how he didn’t belong there, so short and scrawny and definitely going to fail out, he’d just pretend that he was his mama when the villagers whispered about her behind her back. She’d hold her chin up proudly and just ignore that they’d said a thing, and so he did the same and it was enough to get him through each day.
When Sarge hauled them out to a forest that most of them had never been to before (and some of the guys from Midgar hadn’t been to a forest ever), he’d been one of the first to catch the enemy tracks they were going to follow. It wasn’t half as hard as looking for the marks of passing prey in the mountains at home, and they were sneaky bastards, because you had to be if there were Nibel Wolves and dragons around. He’d also been able to outfox one of the best guys in the squad when it came to playing hound-and-rabbit, and he’d been the rabbit. Mama had taught him the best ways to shake a predator off his trail.
During the SOLDIER tests, he’d gritted his teeth and waited through the burning in his veins as mako had been pumped through them to see if he could take it, and he hadn’t screamed once. He would be a SOLDIER, he’d show his mama that she could be proud of him, that he’d learned everything that she’d taught him. He wouldn’t make her any sadder. Even when he failed, he’d sucked it up and kept going, because she’d always told him that you don’t let yourself get dragged down if you can.
But when Nibelheim was burning at the hands of his idol, and his mama was dead in his arms, he didn’t know what to do. She’d never taught him how to go on without her there, even if their only contact was through rare letters. Eventually he lowered his mama to the ground and promised to come back and bury her properly, and ran into the flames after Zack and Sephiroth. He wouldn’t give up now. She would never let him.