InsaneJournal

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            He had been loitering through the naked mountains, as had been His wish and order, in search of something he knew not – stumbling over the uneven stone and cracked paths, slipping in and out of contact with the hive, forgetting and then remembering what he was supposed to do… and then forgetting again.

            Eventually he became aware of something holding a part of him – his arm, he identified after some thought. He looked back inwards and sent a question, and soon enough it echoed back to him, unanswered; he couldn’t remember that ever happening before, and was soon gripped by a cold, uncomfortable feeling that he identified as fear.

            The thing holding him started making sounds, and he recoiled, and recoiled further when it tried to reach him from inwards; where was His voice? He was lost. What was he supposed to do? Where was the guidance? The dread collecting in him encouraged him to look outwards – not to send images back to the hive, but to study them himself; maybe then he’d find a way back. It was strange at first, as the image was malformed, and he couldn’t remember the world ever being that way.

            That thought gave him pause.

            “Look, look, he’s focusing!” the thing holding him made other sounds, and he was surprised that he could recognize patterns in the primitive means of communication it was using. “This one seems strong. I bet he’ll regain his identity real soon!”

            “Be a little more careful, will you?” a different set of sounds invaded his ears; the world was now collecting into familiar shapes and colors, and he pinpointed two different beings steadying his shuffling gait and directing sounds at each other. “Look at his fingertips, they’re getting purplish. You SOLDIERs keep losing track of your own strength…”

            He was then aware of the throbbing on the edge of his arm. The unfaithful enemy, looking to diminish their numbers? Useless – they were separated in many bodies, yes, but they were a single mind… though he did seem to be disconnected. He looked inwards once again, but found the same strange rippling interference. Fear gripped him again, and he pooled all his strength together into tugging his arm away.

            “See, you hurt him,” one of the beings, again. The other started rubbing his fingers, and turned to look at him.

            “Sorry”, it sounded, and then turned to the other one, the volume of its sounds lowering noticeably. “Do you think this one is… a Nibelung?”

            “Even if he were, we might never know,” came from the other. “But the chances are slim. The Nibelheim copies were the first to be guided to the Crater, and if I heard it right, they were all killed. If those copies were really survivors of the Burning, then I don’t see how any other could have escaped like the Nibelungs did.”

            The first voice answered something, but could barely be heard. The two remained silent afterwards, and without the exchange of sounds to grasp his attention, he found himself drifting away again, tripping and being steadied by his captors over strange landscape designs.

            And then he felt it.

            Inwards, there was another nucleus, a bright pull that seemed to tug at his senses much like He did… but it seemed to remain at a distance, perceptible only through the ripples it sent through the hive, driving all the other parts of their whole away – so that was the cause of the silence. This nucleus, a rival god to their God, a rival king to their King, was trying to sever him from his origin, his final destination.

            He is much more powerful, he thought, smugly, and then the words and their meanings started to scramble and scatter and fall apart… but, with another ripple, they were driven back to the surface, at his reach, and he reached out.

            Looking outwards, he found he was facing one more being, surrounded by an uncomfortably bright color.

            “Are you alright?” it said – and he understood. And that understanding drove his knees to the ground, and he was aware of the pain it caused like he couldn’t remember ever being, and the chill of the ground under his hand made his arms shake; he was aware of the weight of his body pulling him down like never before, and when a screechy moan of pain seared his ears from too close, he was appalled to discover it was his own.

            He was thirsty. He was so very thirsty, and the blond man in front of him immediately stood up to wave at a girl in pink, who then handed the man a flimsy paper cup. Its texture against his lips was familiar and at the same time foreign, yet the water running down his throat was deliciously welcome, cleaning the path down his throat and splashing cold inside his burning, empty stomach.

            The man pulled the cup back, and he found himself looking at a pair of intensely blue eyes. “Are you alright?” the young man asked again; he tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come, and he struggled against the pervasive mist in his mind, trying to recall anything that would tell him how he came to be where he was. Momentarily lost in the mist, he heard the faraway hum of a crowd and ran that way—

            —but the man grasped his hand, and pulled him the other way.

            “What are you doing!” he said, struggling weakly against the blond man, who immediately stopped. He stood there, confused, before pointing towards the hum, somewhere in the mist that now coiled around them. “The people are all back there! There’s nothing the way you’re going.”

            “There’s a lot of space the way I’m going,” said the young man. “It’s nice to have company, but there’s too many people that way. You won’t have any room to stretch…”

            He blinked, a strange thought just occurring him. “Weren’t we in some sort of house just now?”

            “Yes,” said the man.

            “There were a couple of other people, I’m pretty sure,” he continued.

            “Yes,” the boy nodded again.

            “Where are they?”

            “Back outside,” the boy said, scratching the back of his head. “Look, can we clear this stuff up later? These mists are dangerous, it’s too easy to lose yourself in here. I don’t want to go through all that stuff again.”

            “What stuff?” he asked, confusedly – but the young man in front of him tugged his hand again, and he let himself follow; somehow, that boy seemed to know where he was going, despite the thick fog he only just noticed was around them.

            The path they were following – if there was even one – quickly became steep and treacherous; more than once, he lost his footing, and would have fallen back in the fog if the boy hadn’t been firmly holding his hand.

            “It’s hard,” said the young man, looking back to him. “It was hard even the first time I came this way, and the fog wasn’t half as bad back then. But I’ve had to retrace these steps a few times already, so I’m pretty sure of the way.”

            And then the young man smiled, a soft, small smile; but it was so sincere and simple – the man felt his eyes tear up; he couldn’t remember the last time someone had smiled at him.

            The path evened; the fog faded in a gust of fresh wind. In front of him, there was an endless stretch of green, grassy hills punctuated by little houses and crisscrossed by paths between them – and a forest that felt so near he could swear he would reach it in a few energetic leaps. It was refreshing and almost painfully familiar.

            “You can build your new home here,” said the young man, and he turned to thank him.

            Behind the boy, however, he could see the ravine they had been in; it was covered by an ocean of fog, the faded gray stretching into the horizon and lapping at the feet of mountains. He shuddered, and turned to the boy once again.

            “There really was no way I could have left that place on my own,” he started. “I… thank you for guiding me.”

            “Maybe you’d have surprised yourself,” answered the boy, still with a soft smile. “Many people have made it out on their own, by luck or guts… but I was around and saw you, so I helped. Don’t worry about it. But…” and the boy stepped ahead; as his eyes followed him, the scenery behind the blond head shifted, from a sea of fog to a sea of grass.

            The boy walked a few steps away from the ravine, and waved a hand to the hills.

            “First you’ll have to build your home.”

            He nodded; it made sense, yes… he’d need a place to come back to. He walked absently, glancing at his surroundings, until he stood in a spot that felt good enough; he had a wonderful view of the forest, and the few houses between them were set up in a picturesquely squatty triangle, which pleased some sort of geometrical sense in him.

            Suddenly, he was aware of an urgent problem.

            “How will I build a home?” he squeaked out.

            “What do you mean?” asked the boy – who had apparently been by his side all along.

            “I don’t have anything to build a house with. No tiles,” he started, waving his arms at the ground, “no cement, no shovel, and maybe I could use some wood, but I have no axe! Then how?”

            “You don’t need any of that,” said the boy, frowning. “A home is made of memories.”

            He raised an eyebrow, about to retort, when he became aware of an even more urgent problem.

            “…I don’t remember.”

            “Don’t remember what?”

            “Anything.”

            He let himself fall on his knees, shaking his head. “I can’t even remember my own name.”

            The boy looked extremely thoughtful at those words… and then he leaned down, asking in an almost shy tone:

            “…do you like ice-cream?”

            The absurdity of the question was such that he couldn’t help snorting in mirth. Ice-cream! He had just said he was amnesiac, and the boy was asking him about ice-cream!

            “That’s some priorities you’ve got!” he said, feeling a little bit of anger.

            “I’m being serious,” said the young man, eyes narrowing fiercely. “Your answer could make all the difference in the world.”

            “Yes, yes,” sighed him. “I like ice-cream. How is that going to help me remember my own name?”

            “Your name is not important,” huffed the boy, dismissively. “Are you going to stop liking ice-cream if I call you Norman, or Totsy, or Maxim Powers? Of course not. It’ll come to you eventually anyway,” the boy shrugged, “and if it doesn’t, then you can just choose yourself a new name. Tell me your favorite flavor.”

            The man was left open-mouthed at those words. How was his name not important? Of course it was!

            But he could remember sitting in a whitish table, eating a bowl of ice-cream filled with several scoops of the same flavor…

            “…pistachio.”

            And from there own, it came a lot easier; there was a woman eating across from him, her bowl filled with strawberry and cream balls, and she grinned at him with slightly crooked front teeth. Later, though, she had started using braces…

            And these small snippets of memory became each a brick and a support for the home he was building around himself. And as four small walls started taking shape around him, despite being small, uneven, frail and full of holes, the young man took a few steps back to survey the work.

            “Don’t worry about those holes right now,” he said. “Eventually you’ll have new memories to fill them with… and the old ones might just come back.”

            He nodded happily, leaning back over his barely started work; behind him, the boy continued.

            “And if the fog ever comes this way… don’t leave your home, even if you’re missing a ceiling. Someone will come for you if it’s too dangerous. Most times, though, it’s pretty harmless…”

            The man once again nodded his understanding; and, with a final wave of his hand, the boy turned back and started walking down the path that had just started to form, connecting his barely formed home to the other ones, some of them small, some amazingly big; some surrounded by fences, some by high walls; some tall and narrow as office buildings, some simple and cozy as country houses.

            The house the boy walked to, it was surrounded by nothing but a small pathway.

            And in the world outside the man’s mind, Cloud looked up to the worried ex-members of the terrorist group AVALANCHE with a tired smile.

            “This one will be back on his feet pretty fast, I bet.”

            And then he sat back on his chair with a tired sigh, while Barret carried the unconscious man away.

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            That man had been one among hundreds, maybe thousands of those who had, somehow, come in contact with Jenova cells, or mako, or both, and had their mind slowly eaten away by either Sephiroth’s will or the jabbering of unrestful souls in the lifestream.

            After Meteor hit, the numbers of such people seemed to increase on a daily basis. But they were not all lost; often, a droning, vacant-eyed minion would shamble toward the Nibel mountains, whether by Sephiroth’s will or not, and slip out of his influence with a helpful nudge of Cloud’s own mind. Sephiroth had amassed enough power to be a god, but failed – and seemed unaware of that fact.

            They had fought against him with all weapons at their disposal; Aeris almost died at the Northern Capital. Holy had failed – and yet Meteor, too, had failed. The mental battle for the control of Holy had left Aeris weak and spent, and when Cloud’s mind was attacked, he had had to fight it out on his own; many other SOLDIERs were attacked as well, and fell under Jenova’s control. But Cloud held his ground.

            The world’s climate was getting increasingly colder; snow was said to have fallen on Mideel. Yet humanity still lived, and the world, somehow, resisted the pain of its two great wounds. Whether Sephiroth was aware of the chinks in his great plan, however, it was hard to tell, even for Cloud.

            Cloud, who of all SOLDIERs could most easily push Sephiroth’s prying will away.

            The curse of carrying Jenova became a twisted blessing for him in their new, deteriorated but struggling world. The same attribute that had somehow allowed the scattered cells to attract and “communicate” with each other allowed Cloud to track down carriers and deal with them. Most were deformed, rotted past the point of recognition; some were aware enough to beg for help in disconnected words, and these always hit their wandering group the hardest.

            “I wish I could feel these people as well,” said Zack, somberly, after one such encounter; he eyed Cloud as the latter sat forlornly in front of the half-assed grave they had dug. “Then I could just go out while he’s asleep and dispatch these heart-breaking cases. But my head is just like a brick…” he smiled ruefully. “I can’t feel anyone or anything – I don’t even know how it feels to have Sephiroth lurking in my head.”

            “You are a true SOLDIER,” muttered Vincent, startling him; he had only really expected Aeris’ sympathy. “Your mind is tightly closed to outside influences. I suspect Sephiroth doesn’t know you are alive, and a considerable number of first-class SOLDIERs are unaffected by him as well.”

            “What about you, Vincent?” asked Zack; the man didn’t answer, but Zack suspected the man’s nightly disappearances were already alleviating their burden.

            Once, though, the psychic network of Jenova’s cells had guided their group to a circle of miserable little shacks, not unlike those in Midgar’s now crushed Slums; these, however, stood under the orange evening sky in all of their ugliness.

            A worn-out woman ran out of one of those houses, stopped in front of their group and asked, glancing from face to face anxiously.

            “Did you just arrive?”

            They could only nod in confusion.

            “Please come to my house!” she asked, and ran back into her shack without waiting for an answer. Cloud ran after her, pushing the curtain at her door aside and awkwardly squeezing his armored self through the narrow opening.

            “Someone must be infected inside,” said Aeris, and so it was.

            Inside, Cloud sat on the floor by the sick old man who had called him there. He was laid on a pile of dirty rags like a cat in litter, and the rest of the shack wasn’t much better; a party of four would completely crowd the remaining space. The old man smiled toothlessly at him, though, as if amused by his horrified expression as he looked around.

            “I knew you were coming,” he rasped, and the woman – his widowed daughter, they’d later learn – burst into tears.

            Cait Sith ventured into the shack as well, and recorded the conversation that followed for the benefit of those outside. It was a long conversation; when Cloud walked out, still stumbling at the narrow door, he had their group set camp nearby, and listened to the record along with everybody else. Later still, he, Red, Aeris and Vincent had sat around Cait for another go at it.

            “I was lost in a mist,” had said the old man, “and I could hear a gathering of many voices close by… but I’d hear my daughter’s voice, bless her, coming from the opposite side! But no matter how much I ran or walked, I couldn’t seem to find anyone… and I’d get tired…”

            And, after slowly closing his eyes as if falling asleep, the old man suddenly opened them wide.

            “Then I understood… there was someone who was trying to drag me away! He was beaconing me somewhere and I couldn’t say no… he was stronger than me, stronger than anything I’ve ever seen. But then I heard your footsteps,” the old man grinned. “I saw you through the mist. I know you came to rescue me… we all know. Now the beacon is gone. I’m back to my daughter.”

            After much philosophical considerations, pseudo-scientific theorizing, and stubbornness, the group set forth, carrying the old man and his daughter, with a different method in mind. The mid-day sun saw Cloud kneeling on the dirt, clutching the hand of a writhing man as Zack and Tifa held his remaining limbs down; his hair roots had been bleached silver, and black pus oozed from his mouth. After minutes of struggling, Cloud’s head suddenly sagged, and the infected man went limp.

            An hour later, Cloud staggered to his feet, tired but with a victorious smile in his lips.

            That was just the beginning; Cloud insisted on keeping the infected close until their physical health was improved, and soon enough they were moving in a group of chocobo-pulled carts. Even people who seemed otherwise fine would sometimes come after him, afraid of the murmur in their ears and the impulse to walk into the dreadful “mist”. More than once they would be received at a settlement like one would a parade, and worried relatives would usher the embarrassed young man to care for cases that had nothing to do with Jenova (which he would happily pass to Aeris or anyone with competent materia).

            Still, Cloud was only truly distressed by that situation when Johnny, of all people, trekked over to the small caravan that was now following him around (to Cloud’s embarrassment, Zack’s amusement and Cid’s annoyance), resting as they were at a beaten-up, deserted earth road.

            “It… it really was you!” he had gaped, walking around the blond man like he couldn’t believe his own eyes.

            “…me?” Cloud had repeated, numbly, his own enhanced sight glued at the strands of silver in Johnny’s red hair and the eerie sheen in his eyes; a bucket of ice settled in his stomach at the thought that one of the few things that had remained constant in his life – his bumblingly stupid, harmless childhood acquaintance and the third survivor of Nibelheim – was also, somehow, being victimized by Sephiroth.

            Before he noticed it, the “caravan” was surrounding him, all of them with identical expressions of worry; Johnny, however, looked crestfallen.

            “Dude, I… had no idea you’d hate to see me like that,” mumbled the young man, and Cloud hurried forward, shaking his hands.

            “No, no, no!” he had stuttered, grasping around for words. “Johnny, what happened?”

            “Well,” started the young man, still staring at Cloud’s face dubiously. “Costa del Sol was flooded… but everybody knows that. Biggest wave I’ve ever seen. I managed for a while with my girlfriend and the other survivors… but then she dumped me.”

            At that point, the conversation was derailed by his spotting Tifa in the circle around them and making a beeline for her, wearing his usual smitten smile; he then proceeded to apparently try and woo her breasts with tales of his hard trip, seemingly unaware of Tifa’s shock over the slight but noticeable changes in him.

            “There were voices,” he would continue, later on, “just… this indistinct muttering in my ears. And sometimes I’d just feel this weird impulse to, you know, stand up and start walking and go somewhere, anywhere. Some other guys felt the same… but they were- strange, you know? They just kept getting stranger and creepier, and it creeped me out that I could turn out like them. But then I just got this idea in my mind all of a sudden, you know! Like, ‘Hey! Cloud Strife can help you!’ I don’t know, it seems completely random, but as soon as I thought this I just couldn’t unthink it. And the voices were also getting louder, you know, and I kept waking up in my pajamas outside, and I was out of money, and now I found you and the voices are gone and I’m way better.”

            Once again, the group’s wise trio sat down with Cloud to think it out – but there was little need; the caravan itself provided answers.

            “I also learned of you this way,” said a Second-Class SOLDIER, who had also come to Cloud for help and stuck around as an extra pair of arms. “Someone I heard in the sea of mist was spreading your name, and if anyone in the sea of mist can hear my voice, I’ll sure as hell be pimping your name too.” this story was confirmed by many others.

            Around that time, the caravan had reached Nibelheim, and their group went to the Shinra Mansion. There were a number of corpses on the ground, most of them wearing black cloaks; it seemed Sephiroth remembered the wealth of information the laboratory possessed on him, but couldn’t be assed to get rid of it in person, and the monsters within had gotten stronger than they remembered.

            The boring, troublesome and, for Cloud, stressful task of walking in and out of the lab, carrying all books related to the Jenova project, was quickly over with thanks to the help of their caravan; they were stored in one of the rebuilt houses, now already heavily modified to suit its new owner.

            “Shinra’s gone,” she had said. “Nobody’s even paying me anymore. Why keep up appearances?”

            And with those wise words, she had hosted Vincent and Red as they poured over the books, then a couple of elders from Cosmo Canyon and an ex-member of Shinra’s Science Division, who volunteered to help.

            In the time it took to decipher thirty years of Hojo’s notes – at a pace that wouldn’t drive them insane – the caravan started settling around the square, at the inn and up the mountain path, first in tents, then in more solid, makeshift houses. People from Cosmo Canyon came to help, and Reeve, wherever he was controlling Cait from, sent materials. The influx of pilgrims in search of Cloud’s “healing” powers was constant; the small country town of Nibelheim was finally reborn after 5 years of being suspended in limbo, and was quickly filled by people who had hardly cared about the region before. Of the town’s original dwellers, only three remained; Zack jokingly dubbed Cloud, Tifa and Johnny “The Nibelungs”, a name they would later use to describe all the original dwellers.

            Eventually, though, Sephiroth made a move of his own.

            The town was surrounded; hundreds, maybe thousands of shuffling figures in tattered clothes stood in a semicircle around the valley entrance, swaying in the wind like the leafs of a tree. They stood in front of the city, as if waiting for permission to stumble in; rows upon rows of gaunt faces, all of them framed by silver hair, stared ahead as if the town wasn’t actually standing in front of them.

            The most recent pilgrims had stayed away, shaking their heads in pity and revulsion; the populace, half of which used to be in those people’s shoes, had stood paralyzed in both fear and sympathy.

            From somewhere behind the frozen villagers, Cloud stepped forward. His eyes were red, his pale face smeared with pink, and his shirt was stained with blood; he swayed slightly on his feet, and Tifa held his hand anxiously, as a nurse would a sick man. Behind him, Aeris strode without a shred of worry or fear on her face, followed by Zack, sword at his back.

            Cloud’s entourage stopped in front of the diseased army; he leaned back on Tifa, and his soft, almost childish mumble was somehow heard by enough people to be repeated in giddy disbelief for years to come:

            “…this is gonna take forever.”

            And he slid down to the ground, stretching a hand towards the frozen human trench; a minute went by before one of the twisted figures stumbled forward, sagging to its knees in front of Cloud and holding the offered hand.

            “We were kinda unnecessary here,” said Barret to Cid, through PHS, as he lowered his gun arm. Standing in the middle of the gathered crowd, he could see the gathering of swaying zombies extend to both sides, and into the plains to the south; still, he doubted Cloud would consent to rest before they were all freed.

            Juggling between his own PHS and Cait Sith’s eyes, Reeve insisted on being part of the moment.

            “That’s because Sephiroth decided to be a mother bee,” he told Vincent, an audible grin coming through his voice. “The people he infects are extensions of the hive, and his will moves through them like in a network … but Cloud became strong enough to have a network of his own, and it’s different from a hive – it’s a 24 hours support network, that’s what it is – and Sephiroth is probably sputtering at himself right about now. He has no idea how Cloud became strong enough to stand toe-to-toe with him. So he tried to jerk Cloud around, well, he made his own Lucifer, it’s his own fault! Oh, if I could stare at his face, I’d ask him ‘who is your God now, bastard?’”

            Vincent patiently listened to Reeve’s victorious rambling. The Midgar and Junon areas were crawling with Jenova creatures; the man couldn’t be blamed for rejoicing at a blow against their enemy.

            And his rambling theories did seem to be correct. From the rooftop he was crouched on, Vincent could see some people step ahead towards the now paralyzed, harmless human wall – an old man, a woman, and wasn’t that one an ex-SOLDIER… –and, offering their hands to the swaying clones, joined the young man in his prayer.

 -------------------------

            The whole world came to hear of the man whose presence alone pushed Sephiroth’s influence away.

            “But I can’t do it alone, you know,” would say Cloud, a shy smile playing at his lips. “This is a city full of people who don’t want Sephiroth around. When he pokes his head in, we all push him out together.”

            Whether Sephiroth had truly sent those half-dead humans as an army against them, or if they had dreamily stumbled to the mountains because Sephiroth’s attention had momentarily turned that way, it was hard to know. The fact that they had all stopped short of entering the city spoke a lot, but so did Cloud’s weak legs and bloodstained clothes on that day.

            “He did attack me, actually,” confessed Cloud to Johnny, many days later, as they drank at a local inn. “It felt like he was trying to push my brain out of my ears. But… I didn’t feel at all afraid. And you know why? Because I’m protected.”

            And he proudly lowered the collar of his sweater, revealing a thick, mechanical looking bakelite necklace to his astonished childhood neighbor.

            “It looks like a toy choker to me,” said the redhead.

            “Looks are deceiving,” grinned Cloud; and, with a gasp, Johnny remembered the bakelite medallion he had lately seen draped right on Tifa’s collarbone. How could he not notice, when he was constantly looking at that area? Glancing to her, sitting with a group of girls at another table, and then back to Cloud, whose grin had grown to a level he’d never seen before, he could only reach one conclusion.

            “Uuh,” he said, stupefied.

            “Sephiroth will never have me,” said Cloud, his grin turning downright evil, “because I put my life in her hands.”

            “C-congratulations,” stammered Johnny, his heart plummeting down to the other side of the planet.

            Cloud just started flat-out laughing at that; he leaned to the side of his chair, slapping the table once, in a display of amusement the likes of which Johnny would have never imagined coming from the man in front of him.

            That’s kind of mean, was what Johnny thought. But he had to admit he deserved something for all the hard time his group had given Cloud way back when. Almost as if guessing his thoughts, Cloud put a lid on his hilarity, slapping a hand on his shoulder.

            “Johnny, Johnny, don’t look so down…” he said, though he still seemed to be holding back a huge grin. “Anything can happen…”

            And then he started snorting uncontrollably, lowering his head onto the table and making Zack stomp by and proclaim it was time to bring out the coffee.

            The next day, most of the city had heard of the matching necklaces Cloud and Tifa were using. Whenever asked about it, Tifa would shrink like a rabbit and quickly find an excuse to leave the perimeter, sometimes helped by a glaring Aeris; Cloud would either look amused or embarrassed, depending on whether or not Tifa was around.

             In truth, the choker was a bomb and the medallion was the trigger, but Sephiroth didn’t have to find out that much.