omg I just realized.
The reason Cloud took Zack’s story like he did was because of the Jenova cells that Hojo injected him with when the guy drug him and Zack back to his little torture dungeon in the basement of ShinRa mansion (they couldn’t even say ‘Hi’ to Vincent! He was still asleep because Hojo did pretty much the same thing to Vincent!) So Cloud is having this extremely intense, horrible, prolonged experience after berserking out and killing Sephiroth and the only person with him, is Zack. He knows Zack and the mako has scrambled him so badly that he’s no longer sure who he is. But Zack keeps talking about how he’s going to be a mercenary and go to Midgar and, do we know what happened to that chick, Tifa? I bet she escaped--she was limber and shit. Hot. Totally hot, Cloud. And she was your childhood friend? You just missed some damn fine opportunity, man. And he talks so fucking much to fill the silence that Cloud just is like;....a bit of clay. And he absorbs all these ideas and attitudes getting thrown at him by Zack, because Zack feels all right, he’s certain. Tired. Voices of the damned, but that’s just Tuesdays and Saturdays for me. Funny, right? That’s a good one. Shut up, I’m keeping it. I can see you laughing inside, Cloud. Oh goddammit, Cloud. I’m so sorry, buddy.You didn’t deserve this, kid. Fuck. It shoulda been...me.
Zack breathes through the intense flashes of the testing chambers, watching Cloud deteriorate in the glass case next to him, enraged at his own helplessness. As the mako filled him up and his eyes began to glow and then burn ice blue. And before Cloud stopped talking, he would have these horrible conversations to himself. He’d talk to people that weren’t there. He’d scream and cry and holy shit, his mom died in Nibelheim. He’d checked on her himself because shit, I thought Cloud was dead--he was lying in the street. But he wasn’t. He got up and followed us all the goddamn way to the reactor.
Zack looked back at Cloud. Dazed, mostly silent. He had to help the guy eat. And so Cloud just absorbs all of this about Zack. The power of Jenova, as Sephiroth told us, is to embody intangible things. Memories, thoughts, feelings and so he knows he’s still Cloud. But he’s not sure of anything else. So he just takes what sounds good and his mind blurs the edges together to protect himself.
Because oh fuck what if i wake up in another test tube--
And then suddenly, Tifa appears again.
Cloud has had some seriously fucked up shit happen to him in Hojo’s science dungeon. And for some reason...the game never really delves into it. Its something they gloss over because you can play the whole game and miss the ‘hidden’ cut scene of Cloud and Zack heading to Midgar--and you never know the difference.
I’m interested to see how the remake will (hopefully) flesh some of this stuff out. Cause I have some mad respect for someone going through that kind of horrible shit and being experimented on for two years and you can’t even fucking remember your own name and he somehow managed to become a functional bi-pedal human again.
His nightmares must be fucking terrible.
