#g:ff

Cloud finds the answer to his holy pilgrimage lying on his back beneath the stars, 30 klicks northwest of Midgar's wasted husk. He spent the end of a long day riding from Fort Condor in the far south, bypassing Edge and skirting Kalm, winding over terrain that slowly shifted from the emaciated weeds steadfast in their refusal to be sucked dry by Midgar, to the greener and softer fields cradling Kalm, across the rock and gravel roads cut through to the coastal cliffs of the Eastern Continent. By the time he pulled up onto the wind-bitten overlook, imagining that he could see all the way across the sea to the Northern Crater, his hands had long gone numb from the vibration of the handlebars.

Behind his back, Cloud could feel the discomfort of a rock, missed in his hasty attempt to sweep clean a comfortable patch, where it dug in to the point of his shoulder blade. It had a grounding effect for which he was grateful as the expanse of the stars above him set his head swimming.

"Can you hear me Se-Sephiroth?" he began. He folded and unfolded his hands uncertainly. What level of formality or familiarity were you expected to show when you were praying to the God you had killed and denied godhood to? This was the first time, really, that Cloud considered his one-sided conversation to be a real prayer and not just an extension of his delusions.

"I know you can hear me," he decided aloud as he crossed his arms over his chest, "because you can hear everything I say. Because you're...listening to me when I call you, aren't you?"

There's an immediate, nearly searing heat that cuts through his chest and across his scalp, tingling and raising the hairs as he hears her voice.

"I am always listening for you Cloud. I will always hear you," comes her answer that he feels more than hears.

Cloud can feel the way his heart is thumping hard enough that it echoes back through his skin and hits against the rock. He feels the too-fresh air of the night, sharp in his sinuses and chilling his face. He can feel the goosebumps along his bare arms and the itch of his palms beneath his gloves that can only be alleviated by the weight of a sword, and perhaps most embarrassingly Cloud can feel the heat pool within his stomach and sink lower with Sephiroth's pleasure reflected back through their connection infinitely, like two mirrors held face to face.

It's overwhelming. Like Reunion without the thread of fear, it's at once foreign and intimately familiar to Cloud.

"It's the feeling of being known, Cloud" she tells him, her deep voice falling over his shoulders like a blanket.

"I feel. Known by you. You see me as someone who can see you. We know each other," she continues. But Cloud shakes his head, sitting up snd looking up at the stars with petulance on his face.

"I can't know you like you know me. I can't make it go both ways, Sephiroth," he argues, "You can't pray to me."

There is no answer for a long moment, only the muted sound of the waves far below and the whip of the wind cutting up the rock face.

And then the creak of leather, and the fall of silver hair replacing the dark watercolor of the night sky in Cloud's vision as Sephiroth leans her tall frame from where she stands above his head and shoulders.

Sephiroth wasn't operating from a place of rage in Rhadore, but instead operated on pure function. Go here, do this. Computer logic type output from the limited input she was given. Of course we kill the children and the elderly, to do so is the ounce of prevention to an inevitable resistance that would take a pound of cure.

The rage can be hers alone (even when she's manipulated this is an unassailable truth to her)

It's what's left after the desertion of Genesis. The sense of loss is too dangerous to hold because it echoes walking around as a child with a picture of her mother, asking Shinra staff if they knew Jenova.

Rage is safer but she can't turn that on Angeal because as long as his little protégé is haunting the halls of Shinra, there's something that could bring him back.

It's rage in Nibelheim, grown from the seed of disgust at the experiments in the mako pods. Stoked higher in Crisis Core by Genesis, who took everything else, and even higher by the books in Shinra manor. It becomes beautiful and purifying. It becomes a righteous gift from her mother who was stripped of the planet.

Cloud is a mirrored image, or rather a photo negative. Raised with the love of a mother but the disdain of a community. He failed to achieve the status that Sephiroth was lab-grown to exemplify. In contrast to the desertion of Angeal and Genesis, Cloud's friend refused to abandon him even when he was little more than literal dead weight, not even dragged but carried carefully by a man on the run for his life.