jukeboxhound_backup | fic: imperfect tense ch.9 (ffvii/ffviii)

Past memories or Jenova’s voice.
Thoughts.

Imperfect Tense

Hades’ Phoenix
Betaed by Mad Violinist & artimusdin

Doctor Kadowaki was a small woman with a pleasant smile, and though she was older in years, she was as strong and lively as someone half her age. She took pride in her work, and it showed in the comfortable order and cleanliness of the infirmary.

The young commander had sent to her saying that he was bringing in someone for a physical, so she was busily fixing up one of the solitary rooms when she heard the infirmary door open. It was followed by the familiar creak of leather and quiet clinking of belts.

Straightening the little spectacles on her nose, Doctor Kadowaki stepped out to see Squall, Quistis, and Zell accompanying a stranger with spiky yellow hair and a large sword. She took a moment to thank Hyne that the ‘someone’ wasn’t Squall or Seifer spurting blood left and right.

“I’m Doctor Kadowaki,” she said to the stranger with a kind smile, bowing slightly. He seemed restless, his eyes never resting on one place for long, and she hid a sigh. Mercenaries really were, she’d found in her long career, the worst sort of patients.

“…Cloud Strife,” he said finally.

Kadowaki spared another little smile for the three SeeDs and, asking them to stay in the waiting area, led the man into the solitary room she’d prepared.

“Take a seat on the bed. I won’t bite,” she added when he remained unmoving in the doorway. He stepped hesitantly forward, and she noticed that he left the door open behind him purposefully, as though unwilling to be alone with her. She decided not to argue about it this time.

“Please remove your shirt.” Cleaning a stethoscope, she didn’t see Strife stiffen before slowly slipping off the sword’s leather harness and the layers of black clothing. His long gloves remained on his hands.

When she turned back around he was sitting on the bed, chest bare, practically vibrating with nervous energy. He was moon-pale and thinner than what was strictly healthy, but Kadowaki never blinked twice, even when she saw the scars that meandered around his torso. (Some had the shiny look of burns or the roughness from monster claws, but many had the thin precision of a blade, and she wondered how sharp such a weapon would need to be to make such fine, purposeful-looking scars). His breath hissed when she pressed the stethoscope against his chest, just over his heart. It was beating as rapidly as a rabbit’s from his apparent anxiety, but she couldn’t hear any abnormalities.

“Breathe in,” she instructed, and he did so, sounding as clear as any other healthy person. He looked away towards the window when she wrapped the heavy cuff around his forearm to take his blood pressure, which was high but not dangerous.

“Why do your eyes glow?” she asked as she counted his pulse.

“…It’s personal.”

Narrowing her eyes, Kadowaki scrutinized him carefully. It might have been the side effect of a spell, though she’d never heard of it before; perhaps the shine was a unique aspect of whatever Guardian Force he might be Junctioned to.

She debated with herself for a moment about his gloves, but decided that she could work around them if they kept the man from bolting entirely. Taking his hand she rotated his wrist, then flexed his arm, one at a time, testing for strained tendons and stiffened joints. Experience had given her the ability to estimate someone’s physical strength by sight alone, so although Strife was as thin as Squall, the muscles under her fingers told her that he had the power of someone much larger. When she turned his forearm over, she frowned.

“Do you do drugs?” she inquired bluntly, examining the pinpoint scars nearly invisible on his pale skin. Because the gloves went halfway up his forearm, she could only guess how many more might be hidden by the leather.

“No.”

She clicked her tongue disbelievingly. Some sort of injected stimulant would certainly explain the track marks and the seemingly unnatural strength she could feel in his limbs. Though admittedly, the scars looked rather old, and if he were consuming such drugs, then his body should’ve been far bigger than it was.

“So where do these come from?” She gestured at his forearms and looked him in the eye, waiting patiently. Something dark passed over his features.

“They’re not self-inflicted,” he muttered, eyes flickering back towards the window.

Her frown deepened. “Cloud, I’m not trying to pry for the sake of gossip. These are things I need to know.”

He glanced at her from under his hair briefly. “I know.”

She sighed when he stubbornly kept his mouth shut, and the rest of the exam was spent in silence. When she lifted a syringe to take a blood sample, he stood.

“It’ll only take a moment,” she tried, but he shook his head, apparently transfixed by the needle.

“I’m fine,” he said roughly.

“Cloud, please sit down, for Hyne’s sake—“

“No.”

“Cloud—“

“What’s going on?”

Having heard slightly raised voices, Squall appeared in the doorway with his arms crossed, taking in the agitated swordsman and the frustrated doctor.

Kadowaki sighed and put the syringe away, not wanting to cause more of a scene. “It’s nothing, Squall.”

The commander was holding a fierce staring contest with Strife. “We had an agreement.”

“And I’ve allowed her to do everything but take a blood sample,” Strife snapped, and Squall raised a brow.

“Are you afraid of blood now, Strife?”

The huge sword moved so quickly neither Kadowaki nor Squall had time to react; the razor tip hovered dangerously close to the commander’s throat, held utterly still though the weight of the blade should’ve been difficult for the slender man.

“Don’t fuck with me, Leonhart. I don’t like doctors, but I’ve gone along with your command anyway.”

Kadowaki surveyed him with new eyes. He claimed those scars hadn’t been self-inflicted—could they have been from a doctor, then? Was that why he’d spent the entire time in the infirmary looking like a chocobo ready to bolt?

“I can’t find anything wrong with him,” she told Squall. He didn’t acknowledge her at first, but then the commander just shrugged a shoulder smoothly, entirely unperturbed by being held at sword-point.

“Zell will take you to your quarters, Strife. Be prepared to leave at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”

xxx

The train ride to Galbadia felt longer than ever. Without the controls of the Ragnarok beneath her hands, Selphie had little to distract her from the image of a messy, terrified Rinoa, and she played with the hem of her yellow jumper absently. Beside her, Irvine had his feet propped up on an empty seat across the narrow aisle and Exeter resting easily against his shoulder. The sight of the rifle, usually so reassuring, made something in her stomach twist painfully.

Hyne, I hope we don’t have to resort to that. But Selphie was, despite popular consensus, a practical girl, and she knew that if Rinoa looked so bad only hours ago then she’d probably only gotten worse.

Selphie had always liked Rinoa. She was more relaxed than Quistis, quicker to laugh. After growing up as a mercenary, sometimes it was nice to have someone Selphie could just be a teenage girl with. But what made a mercenary different from a civilian—even one as politically active as Rinoa—was what had kept a subtle division between the Sorceress and the SeeDs, and Selphie was willing to bet that said differences might be one of the reasons that Rinoa and Squall hadn’t been able to make it work together.

She glanced at Irvine, lounging carelessly in his seat and staring out the glass with distant blue eyes. She could understand what it was like to care for someone who saw the world differently.

“So, Irvy,” she started, reaching over to swipe his hat and mimic his pose, “whaddya think of Cloud?”

Not bothering to fight for his hat back, the cowboy just shrugged smoothly and settled lower in the seat. “I don’t trust him.”

“You sound like Squally-poo.”

Irvine snorted softly. “Think about it, love. We know almost nothing about him except that Squall saw him in his dreams. He came out of nowhere predicting the return of a Sorceress, and then Rinoa—well.”

“Do you think Cloud was right? About Knights?”

“I don’t know.”

“If he was, and if Squall is Rinoa’s Knight…Hyne, this totally sucks!” she cried, flinging her arms in the air and earning a few strange looks from other passengers. Irvine watched her pout with a secret smile. “What’re we going to do if it is another Sorceress?”

“This isn’t like you, darling,” he commented offhandedly, though his pretty eyes were concerned.

Selphie sighed and drooped in her uncomfortably narrow, poorly-padded seat. It was like looking at a wilting sunflower, and just as sad. “It’s like we busted our asses against Ultimecia for nothing. We get a few months of peace, just enough for us to get comfortable, and then boom!”

Irvine reached over to ruffle her hair. “We’re SeeDs. I don’t think life is ever going to be easy for us, but it’s what we’re trained to handle. And even if the world goes to hell, at least you’ll be going down with us, right?”

Selphie smiled.

“Besides, love, would you rather be a meek little housewife?”

Scowling, she pushed his hand away. “I’m no one’s housewife!” She blinked and added, “I don’t even know how to cook.”

Irvine chuckled. “I bet when you get married, it’ll be you out killing the food and him wearing the apron, right?”

She smirked, privately grateful that Irvine had distracted her from her moody thoughts. “Naturally.”

xxx

Guest quarters had been put near the entrance to Balamb Garden, where security was greater and they were farther from the offices and conference rooms. They were larger than the typical two-person dormitories of SeeD cadets and came complete with their own kitchenette and tiny bathroom, but because Garden was a training center and not a four-star hotel, there was little else in the way of luxury. They were practical, Spartan, and held just enough amenities for the occupant to be comfortable.

Comfortable, but not entertained, Cloud thought dryly.

It’d been a few hours since a noticeably pensive Zell had taken him to his temporary quarters, and after removing Ultima and balancing himself on the windowsill, Cloud hadn’t moved in all that time.

He hated white.

It was cold and stark, like a dead body, the same shallowness and lifelessness. It was clean, sterile, and always, always brought pain.

A black-and-white blur hovered over him and he thought he could hear sound, a high reedy voice-noise that grated in all the wrong places, and white hands were touching him, running over his arms with the thin glint of (needles).

“Specimen C is responding—“

The door hissed open on the other side of the room.

“—beautifully. The childhood influence of mako on his immune system is working in our favor…his cells are beginning to assimilate the injections…“

Ultima whistled softly as the blade sliced through the air, stopping a hair’s breadth from Leonhart’s face. Shaking off a vague sense of déjà vu, Cloud realized he’d been entirely unaware of his surroundings and reacted without thought.

What did Zack and Sephiroth always tell you? he chided himself. The young commander waited for Cloud to lower the sword. He must have the overriding entrance code, though I don’t think he came here to see how I was settling in.

Leonhart leaned against the other edge of the open window to openly stare at Cloud, who turned his own gaze back to the twilight falling over Garden. It smelled like late summer, or early autumn, and flowers and unseen rain.

Neither man spoke, nearly allowing Cloud to forget that he wasn’t alone. He wasn’t sure what to make of the commander; he was cold, insensitive, and his pride bordered on outright arrogance, and had they met on a battlefield Cloud doubted he would’ve thought twice about killing him.

And yet…

“Selphie told me about Seifer.”

Leonhart visibly tensed, his eyes flashing and looking more blue than grey.

…it’s all so familiar.

“You two were close.” Cloud canted a sidelong glance at him without moving his head. The younger man turned away with a slight sneer.

“We were enemies.”

“Not in the beginning.” He looked at the dark scar running over Leonhart’s nose to his left cheekbone, and thought of the Masamune, sliding so sharp and clean through his heart that the scar it left was a line of silver spider-silk.

“…Does it matter?”

Laughing without humor under his breath, Cloud murmured, “No, I suppose not.”

xxx

“This doesn’t make us best buddies, Puberty Boy.”

“…Whatever.”

“No, we were never friends,” Squall found himself saying quietly with knit brows, staring at his hand like it was a fascinating bit of art, “but…”

“He was the person that pushed you to become stronger,” Strife finished, just as softly. “And even when no one else was there, he was.”

Was.

Perhaps it was the note of—not sympathy, but understanding—in Strife’s voice that prompted Squall to ask one of the questions he’d been mulling over.

“You said that Jenova’s possessed someone before. Who was it?”

It didn’t seem like Strife would answer at first, but then he seemed to sag boneless against the windowsill.

“He was a general.” Strife refused to meet Squall’s stare, instead watching their reflections in the window. “The kind of man who could command the stars to fall, if he wanted them to.” No pun intended. He paused, then added almost inaudibly in a slight tone of puzzlement, as though he’d only just remembered, “Sephiroth hated it when we ran out of tea in the morning.”

The murmured little aside brought out more questions rather than answering them.

“You were there when Jenova was defeated last time. Why?”

“…I killed her.”

Squall had suspected as much, or something similar; there were simply too many coincidences for it to be otherwise. It wasn’t that surprising, not when one witnessed the inhuman ease with which an admittedly short, skinny man swung that great blade around. And when one witnesses a Sorceress nearly succeed in squishing the flow of time, talking to someone from so far in the past didn’t seem so strange

“And Sephiroth?”

Strife’s jaw tightened. “Him, too.”

“What’s his weakness?”

His half-smile was black. “I am.”

Lips curling into a frown, Squall looked at Strife askance. What does that mean? Were they…?

“I don’t doubt the skill of you and your SeeDs,” the blond said bluntly. Liar, thought Squall. “But even the little shows of ice magic you’ve been putting on won’t do a damn thing.”

“I’m Junctioned to Shiva,” was Squall’s cool reply. “She reacts to my emotions.”

Strife smirked, and the gunblader could practically hear the snide remarks.

“Careful, Ice Princess, wouldn’t want you to develop any feelings.”

“So tell me, Leonhart, is Shiva as cold in bed as you are?”

But the smirk quickly faded and Strife looked away, falling back into that inward world of his.

“If Ultimecia could be defeated—“

“You don’t get it, do you?” Cloud interrupted him, his voice quiet but fierce. “Your Sorceresses only expressed small aspects of Jenova’s taint. If you go against her expecting another Ultimecia, then you’ve already lost. I spent years in a fucking laboratory, and even we barely won.”

“A laboratory?” Maybe that was why he’d barely been able to handle Kadowaki even looking in his direction.

Strife bit his lip in a rare show of indecision. He appeared to be having an inner debate with himself, and finally someone won because he slowly began pulling off his left glove. His hand was pale, like Squall’s, and calloused despite the protective leather, with strong tendons standing out in sharp relief. He turned his hand over and on the back was a mess of white scars that didn’t quite hide the number three that was once tattooed there.

“Five years. The scientist, he…was crueler than Jenova could ever be.” His voice was hollow, like that of a man who’d survived a war with little more than the tatters of his sanity. Squall had grown used to seeing Strife looking cold, lost, or entirely disconnected from reality, but only now was beginning to realize how deep those waters might run.

“That’s how I know Jenova so well, Leonhart. She’s been in my head, and I’ve seen what she does to her enemies.” Strife looked at Squall with those eerily glowing eyes that suddenly seemed so inhuman. “When you and Seifer became Knights, you literally became her puppets.”

“Who are you?”

“Cloud. Cloud Strife. Although sometimes I don’t know, myself.”

Not for the first time Squall noticed that Strife stuttered slightly over that last word, and things…well, they didn’t make any more sense now than they did before, but Squall knew he couldn’t keep making excuses to himself. Strife wasn’t a dream fragment, or a strange manifestation, or a problem that would just go away if ignored. He should have known that anyway, but then, Squall was good at ignoring things that were inconvenient, or stubbornly bulling his way through the rest.

“How did you kill her?”

A small shrug, and Strife was pulling his glove back on. “I had help.”

If Strife was the one to defeat her and still had help even then, how will we stop her this time now that he’s alone?

“Was Sephiroth also a…’guinea pig’?”

The way Cloud had drawn up his knees to his chest made him look younger than he really was. The silence stretched, and when Cloud finally spoke, it was the answer to a question that Squall hadn’t asked, but perhaps should have. “You can’t underestimate Jenova.”

They stopped talking then, until the first stars began appearing outside and the guest apartment slowly darkened with the lack of light. Squall had come with the intent of figuring out what Strife’s goal was, how quickly he might turn on them all, but it was slowly dawning on him that perhaps it was something he no longer had to worry about. That wasn’t saying much in the grand scheme of things; there was still Jenova to deal with, and Rinoa, and the monsters tearing apart the northern regions, and Laguna wouldn’t stop pestering him about that damned Garden-Esthar treaty—then there were still his mundane duties as SeeD Commander, since Xu could only cover for him for so long.

There was nothing in Strife’s posture or expression to give away what he might be thinking. Even so, Squall found some of the omnipresent tension in his shoulders relaxing, just a little. Maybe it was because some of the pressure had been lifted from his shoulders; after all, fighting Jenova would be difficult enough without having to worry about betrayal. Maybe it was the fact that Strife seemed to understand some things without needing the unbearable heart-to-heart conversation people tried to subject him to.

For some reason, the danger of the situation suddenly seemed much more real. Squall hadn’t realized that even he had fallen into the trap of thinking that their defeat of Ultimecia meant everything from then on would be easier, and that the rest of their lives would be centered around the simple, mundane concerns of being a SeeD. The thought of another enemy at least as powerful as the first…he’d felt removed from it, as though this was all happening to someone else. He should’ve remembered that in real life there was always some other obstacle after the one you survived, until you finally didn’t.

Squall immediately pushed those thoughts away, having a poor opinion of people who complained without doing anything about it, and turned back to the present.

Strife’s words hinted at some kind of history between him and this Sephiroth. While Sephiroth wasn’t in the picture anymore, it was another level through which Strife was connected to Jenova; now the question was whether or not that would prove to be a problem. If he and Sephiroth had been close (and it sounded at the very least like a close friendship, though a little voice whispered that it was probably much more), would that impede Strife’s judgment at a critical moment?

“What exactly happened during the Time Compression? It’s like you left part of yourself behind.”

He glanced unseeingly out of the window, arms crossed defensively over his chest in reaction to his uncomfortable thoughts.

“You say that, but man, you live in the past more than any of us.”

It was especially uncomfortable to know that he couldn’t tell himself he wouldn’t hesitate if it was Seifer at the end of LionHeart. It wasn’t that he actually liked Seifer, and they’d never been friends, but…it was Seifer, who didn’t believe in heart-to-heart conversation any more than Squall did and didn’t think there was something wrong with the younger man for being such a cold bastard. The blond’s leaving had hurt more than Rinoa’s, and Squall didn’t see anything strange with that.

“Sephiroth and Seifer do have one thing in common,” Strife said suddenly. His voice seemed to float through the silence rather than break it. “They might’ve been weak, but it was Jenova that broke them.”

“It isn’t Seifer we’re fighting.”

Squall didn’t think he was going to get any sleep that night. It figured that Seifer would manage to do that to him when he wasn’t even around to gloat about it.

xxx

“This is it!”

Irvine whistled softly. “Looks like the princess went down in the world a bit.”

He grunted when Selphie dug a none-too-gentle elbow into his ribs and waved the envelope in his face. “Read the address if you don’t believe me, you fat meanie.”

“No, no, love, I believe you.”

She skipped forward energetically towards the half-built apartment complex, ignoring the odd looks she received from the Galbadians working around them. With a fond shake of his head, Irvine followed at a more sedate pace, absently tapping Exeter against his shoulder. Dust was already coating his boots and the hem of his long coat, but he didn’t notice.

He might have hated Martine, but Galbadia Garden had still been home for a few years. At least the Garden had escaped relatively unscathed, unlike the partially broken Balamb Garden and the nearly annihilated Trabia Garden. But as a bored teen looking for entertainment, he’d gotten to know the streets very well, and it was startling to see what they’d become.

Though he would sooner put Exeter’s bullet through his head before admitting it, Irvine felt a deep gratitude towards Rinoa and her selflessness in getting her hands dirty for a people that had oppressed her beloved Timber. He fervently hoped that they would find her and bring her back to Balamb Garden quickly, and that on this mission Exeter wouldn’t be anything more than an accessory.

Selphie’s bouncing, yellow-clad form was easy to track up the bare wooden stairs towards one of the upper levels of the complex. She counted off door numbers before squealing loudly.

“Oh, it’s this one! I think…”

“Don’t forget to knock, darling.”

The sound of her fists against the door echoed strangely in the bare place, and she called out hesitantly, “Rinoa, you in there? It’s me, Selphie. Will you open the door?”

There was no reply. With the tension growing in his shoulders, Irvine clicked off the safety on the rifle and held it, barrel towards the floor, in a relaxed grip.

Selphie knocked again. “Rinoa?”

“Let’s go,” the cowboy murmured, feeling a small spike of adrenaline. It seemed he wouldn’t be getting his wishes granted that day.

Tightening her hold on her nunchuks, Selphie opened the unresisting door and peered inside. “Rinoa…? Oh, Holy Hyne.”

She stepped over the threshold and flicked on the light, revealing what must have once been a cozy, if a little sparse, apartment. Every glass object, including the window, had been shattered, scattering razor shards on almost every available surface, and when Irvine entered he found his boots crunching on slowly melting ice.

“Well, shit,” Selphie muttered.

Irvine let a tensely amused smile cross his lips as he searched the other rooms, a small bedroom and an even smaller bathroom. He shook his head. “She’s not here.”

“Who are you?”

Both SeeDs whirled around, weapons aimed, and the blonde girl standing in the doorway cried out in surprise.

“Sorry, sorry!” Selphie said hurriedly, and stashed the nunchuks behind her back with a sheepish grin. “You surprised us. We’re SeeDs.”

“SeeDs?” she repeated blankly, her eyes nervously running over Exeter.

“We’re looking for Rinoa Heartilly,” the cowboy said smoothly, tilting his hat at her. She blushed. “Have you seen her?”

“I-I didn’t know her last name was Heartilly,” the girl said with obvious shock. “Uh, y-yeah, I’ve seen her. We’ve had lunch together a few times.”

Irvine bit back his impatience. “Perhaps you could tell us where she is now?”

The girl bit her lip. “She stopped showing up for work a couple days ago. When I came to see if she was feeling any better this morning, she never answered, and I just thought she was still asleep. You mean she isn’t here?”

Obviously. “Do you have any idea where she might’ve gone? Maybe she mentioned someone, or a place?”

A negative shake of the head.

“Well, thanks anyway,” Selphie chirped reassuringly, and the girl hesitantly returned her smile. Then she turned to Irvine and said quietly, “I’ll let you tell Squall we couldn’t find her.”

“Why?”

“I like my head where it is, thanks.”

xxx

Outwardly, Cloud was doing a very good impression of a rock. It was harder than it sounded, but his time with Hojo had been very effective in that sort of training—the scientist had always preferred having his specimens scream and wiggle about, which was a damn good incentive to learn self-control. It’d only gotten easier when Tifa had helped separate the outgoing Zack-part from the quieter Cloud-part in the Lifestream.

He’d already put his glove back on, but it didn’t make much difference. He knew every line of white scar and black ink on the back of his hand. The tattoo had been put there before Hojo finally declared him a failure, and when he’d still been wandering in that half-comatose daze after Zack’s death, Cloud had tried to carve it off without fully understanding why it repulsed him so badly or even knowing where it came from. He knew now, of course, and his admiration for Nanaki’s ability to regard his own tattoos as symbols of his survival had only grown.

Cloud discretely fisted his left hand, feeling the pull of the scarring. At the time, he’d been lucky not to sever the tendons of the hand in his delirium; as things were, it still wasn’t a very pretty sight. He hated himself when a very small part wondered what Sephiroth might have thought.

________________

Previous | Next
________________

Chapter Index

fic: imperfect tense ch.9 (ffvii/ffviii)

no subject

no subject