By: Mags

Cloud woke up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. He was bathed in sweat, his heart was pounding like a jackhammer against his chest, and he was taking quick, sharp breaths in an attempt to get himself back together. He glanced around the room quickly in a panic, but then when the blood reached his brain he was able to rationalize once again, and after realizing and convincing himself that it was merely a dream, he calmed down, although his heart was still pumping rather quickly. He wiped the sweat from his brow and felt something brush against him briefly. He looked down to see his soulmate for life, his life-long love, Tifa Lockheart, sleeping soundly next to him. He couldn’t help but smile as he gazed at her in the faint sunlight that was coming through the closed blinds on the window. Her long, brown hair faintly reflected the dim light, causing it to appear as an almost smooth brown surface that had a pillowy feel to it. HE loved how it felt. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek, briefly reveling in how soft her cheeks were. She snorted and rolled away from him, pulling a good portion of the sheets with her. He stifled a laugh as he crawled out of bed, and headed to the bathroom. It didn’t matter how annoying her old habits like that were or ever became. The important thing is that she was safe, and that her ill fate in his dream would never come to pass as long as he drew breath. After he returned from the bathroom, he snuggled up against Tifa, pulling back some of the covers for himself with only murmurs of protest from Tifa. He loved to feel how warm and soft that she was to be next to, especially at, Cloud rolled over to look at the clock that rested on his endtable, 5:47 AM. He knew that he’d have to be getting up again in about 2 hours, but he figured that another two hours sleep would do him some good, so he rolled over away from the clock’s illuminating, red LED screen, and calmly drifted back to sleep…

He was surrounded by blackness. He could not see his hand in front of his face. As far and wide as he could possibly look, it was nothing but cold, inky darkness, and there was certain forebodingness about it. For while he was incapacitated as far as his sight was concerned, he still had his other senses. Like his sense of hearing. But what he was hearing made him with otherwise. It was laughter. It was Sephiroth’s laughter. It was the same chilling laughter that he had heard in his other dream. Sephiroth was here, too.

"Of course I am here, child. Where else would you expect me to be?" inquired the voice.

Sephiroth was humoring him, and he did not like it.

"I don’t much care whether you like or dislike your current situation. I assure you that I am here to stay" was the voice’s response.

"B-But that should be…" he stuttered.

"What? Could impossible be the word you were searching for?" the voice questioned.

"Well… yes. It should be impossible!" he screamed, getting frantic.

"Impossible?" the voice laughed, "Nothing is truly impossible, to me especially. I would have expected you to realize that by now."

"But what the hell are you doing in my mind?" he demanded, not knowing if he was going to like the answer.

"I can once again assure you. You will not appreciate my purpose here, but know this. Your mind is not the residence of my choosing. It was quite literally a matter of my life or my death. Either I had to transfer my life essence into the Jenova cells in your body, or have by spirit wither and become absorbed by the Lifestream. But in a non-physical sense I have always been here. As you already know, Jenova cannot be kept apart, but will attempt to regain the pieces of itself to regain its greater whole. Well, dear child, since the only remaining pieces of Jenova exist in you and I, it was only natural that we would one day meet again in one shape or form. The genetic link of the greater whole of Jenova is something few people know of, and even fewer understand. Hojo, my father, and his mentor Gast were the only two on the planet who truly knew what it was."

"You knew that Hojo was your father?" he cried out in surprise.

"Of course you idiot! As I told you back at the Temple of the Ancients way back when, I gained the knowledge of the Ancients and those that came after them. Gast died well before I became one with the Lifestream. I gained all his knowledge of everything from WEAPON and the Ancient’s birthparents to the knowledge of my own biological parents. I became the greatest voyeur in the history of the planet when I merged with the Lifestream! It was quite an experience. Ha ha ha ha!" the voice began laughing again.

"Whoa whoa whoa, slow down there for a second. What does Jenova have to do with all of this?" he asked, getting confused. And he swore that if disembodied voices from inside his head could sigh, then that’s exactly what it did.

"Jenova… is what kept me alive all these years. I owe it my life, however because it abandoned me when I fell to you, I have declared our debts to each other clear. It is true that Jenova attempted to manipulate me so that it could take the power of the Planet for itself. But I am stronger than that. As you well know, those who are joined with Jenova cannot die so easily. All those years that you thought me dead after you defeated me in the Crater, all I had merely done was transfer my life essence into the Jenova cells into your body. All that time you thought that I was dead, all I had been doing was biding my time in your body, waiting for the right time to reveal myself to you.

"Bu-bu-but…" he stammered, attempting to get a word in edgewise, but was once again cut off.

"However, seeing as how you destroyed my physical body, I will need your body as a vessel for my life force. Quite plainly, your body is my ticket back to the corporeal world. All I need to do now is dispose of your life force. While I obviously could just leave you buried in your own mind, it would be rather bothersome to deal with your constant meddling, so I will just dispose of you immediately. But…" he paused, chuckling to himself.

"But…" he questioned the voice, now definitely positive that he would regret asking that.

"But…" the voice continued, "I think that I will have some fun first! I will take control of your body; you can rest assured that that will happen, but not as I originally planned. I will gradually eat away at your life force, the very core of your sanity, and you can watch as I strip away your very moral fiber from your soul. You will see all this, but all that you will be able to do is sit back and watch as I destroy everything that you hold dear to yourself. Everything from your beloved Tifa to the Planet you so selflessly coddle and protect." The voice once again began to laugh malevolently, as he felt the rage inside him reach its boiling point.

"Y-you bastard!" he cried, surprising himself even, "Don’t you dare touch my friends! I s-stopped you once, and I’ll d-do it again!"

"Ha ha hah ha ha!" was the only reply. "Ah, my dear Cloud, you just don’t get it do you? It is no wonder why Hojo, my father, dubbed you an inferior model! You never did beat me! You merely left me for dead in the Northern Crater. Granted, you ‘killed’ my physical body, but my spirit lives on inside your very body!"

"I’ll never give into you" he declared defiantly. "I will never allow you to take my body, and I will never allow you to harm my friends anymore than you already have! I would rather kill myself then allow such events to come to pass!"

The words shocked him as they left his lips. Surely he could not be capable of such an atrocity. But he wondered if there was going to be any other solution to this predicament. Still, nonetheless, he was quite shocked at what he had said. Sephiroth, to say the least, was not impressed.

"I’m not impressed" Sephiroth stated bluntly "I think that we both know that you would never go through with such a drastic move, even to save your precious planet. Especially now that I have a definite hold on your psyche! You will notice it gradually at first. You will begin to get annoyed at things that never bothered you before. Then it will get more extreme and you will begin to have fits of uncontrollable anger. Until you finally begin to boil and seethe with a black rage beyond anything that you can possible hope to imagine. Your heart will become as black as the darkest night, as dark as your current surroundings. That is when I step in. That is when I take control. That…is when the world ends!"

This speech was followed by even more maniacal laughter. He couldn’t stand to hear it and covered his ears to block out the noise. This was a futile effort however, because the laughter seemed to be pounding against the base of his skull like a giant metal club pounding against a wall. And he was afraid that sooner or later that it would crack and he would lose control as well as his sanity. He completely forgot about being cautious and cool. He could feel the enmity that he felt for this cold-hearted man as though it were tangible. At that point he lost all control and began screaming like a madman until his lungs began to ache and his side began to cramp.

"NO! I won’t let you get away with this! I WILL find a way to stop you once and for all! I swear on my own flesh and blood that I will kill you, you goddamn Son of a Bitch! I will now sit by idly and let you destroy everything that I care about, like you did when you burned down Nibelheim and killed Aeris in front of me. I –won’t…I –can’t… let you…do it…" He suddenly became very dizzy, and fell unconscious. His body hit the ground hard with a hard thump, and he fluttered back into consciousness inside his bedroom. He sat up with a start, accidentally bumping heads with Tifa, who had been trying to get him to wake up for the past 15 minutes.

"Ow…." Groaned Tifa, who fell backwards rubbing her head. She looked at him, then with a huge grin gave him a punch in the arm.

"That hurt…" she said with a grin.

"Ow…" was all Cloud could say. Now his head and his arm hurt. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand and looked around. He realized that he must have been dreaming again and fallen out of bed. He slumped back down into the tangle of sheets and blankets. Tifa was standing in the doorway, apparently waiting for him to get up.

"She looks so beautiful" he thought. "Her long, brown, shiny hair, her cute little smile, her long, slender legs, her nice red shirt…" he stopped at that last one and thought for a minute.

"Wait a minute. Tifa wasn’t wearing a red shirt when I got up." He looked over at her again. Sure enough, her shirt was red as a brick. But something was wrong. The red was almost…shiny. As if the red dye on the shirt had not yet dried. Something was defiantly wrong. He decided to find out what.

"Tifa… Tifa…" he called out. But there was no reply. Her back remained turned to his, but she made no response to his call, not even a gesture. He decided to go to her to find out and after untangling himself from the mess of sheets he was wrapped in, walked quietly up to his love. He put his hand on her shoulder.

"Tifa, I…" was all he could get out of his mouth before he froze up in shock. As he had begun to speak to her again, he had pulled on her shoulder in an attempt to get her attention and get her to face him, but when he did so, his face became a mask of terror as he looked upon what he was facing. Oh, it was Tifa, all right. What was left of her. He found the reason for her red shirt to be her slit neck. His hand went to the back of her neck, which hung limply and hung over his hand. When he brought it away, there was a red handprint on the back of her neck. He couldn’t believe it. She was dead; her eyes had rolled into the back of her skull and her body was getting colder by the second. This couldn’t be happening. IT COULDN’T! This was too cruel. He held her limp body close to his as if somehow she could regain her life by taking a bit of his, and when he finally was able to rationalize that she was gone, he let out a scream of pity and sorrow that sounded nearly inhuman. He was getting dizzy. He couldn’t stand. His legs fell out from under him, and he ended up on his knees again. He looked down at the dead body in his arms and bowed his head and began to cry. Suddenly, he felt the body stir in his lap. Overcome with joy, he looked down but to his horror, he saw that the body was not entirely Tifa’s any longer. It now sported the face of Sephiroth. Sephiroth reached up and kissed him on the cheek in a mock display of affection, and then loosened himself from Cloud’s grasp and got up, brushing himself off. He looked down at Cloud with an evil smile, and Cloud gave him a look that could stun a Midgar Zolom at 50 yards. Sephiroth just kept smiling.

"Hi honey, I’m home," Sephiroth said, using Tifa’s voice.

Cloud just stared at him, with black thoughts running through his head.

"Don’t I get a ‘hello’ at least" Sephiroth asked wit his own voice, clearly amused with Cloud’ state.

"…"

"Well, it hardly matters. There are much more important things that need to be done. There are people to kill, planets to conquer, that sort of thing. I’m sure you get the idea"

"…"

"Tell me, dear Cloud, what do you think should be my first order of business?" Sephiroth asked, just to get a response from him.

"Get out of her body" was all Cloud said, still kneeling in the same place. He didn’t even bother to look up at him; it was just too painful.

Slightly amused that his toy was attempting to fight his obviously superior will, he decided to humor him and continue the conversation.

"And why, why, why would I do that?" Sephiroth asked, hoping for a response.

He was not disappointed.

"You corrupt her initial design. I will not ask you again. Get Out Of Her BODY!" he replied bluntly, yet coldly.

"Ha hah ha! If it means so much to you, then fine." Was Sephiroth’s reply.

He lay Tifa’s body on the ground and lifted his ethereal body out of her corpse. Her skin withered and peeled away, her skin literally powdering and falling away from her bones like she had been dead for years.

"Knowing Sephiroth, she probably has" Cloud thought to himself. "At least he doesn’t seem to be reading my mind anymore."

He looked up at Sephiroth who was concentrating on materializing his body into a physically tangible system. His clothes materialized in short order, and with a flick of his wrist, Tifa’s withered bones flew from her skeleton and formed a sword-like structure in his hand. As he ran his right hand up the blade, it turned to metal, and pretty soon, the entirety of Tifa’s skeleton was turned into Sephiroth’s old sword, his Masamune.

"Its good to have you back" he said to his sword as he gave it a few test spins before finally holstering it in his trenchcoat’s belt.

Cloud looked up at Sephiroth, fire in his eyes. Not only had he disgraced Tifa’s body, but he had now defiled her remains as well, fashioning them into a weapon of war. That tore it. He had had enough. It was time to take out Sephiroth once and for all, sword or no, this was it. One of them would not walk away from this fight.

"Ah, I feel as good as new. How do I look, Cl…" Sephiroth did not get to finish his sentence, and Cloud launched himself at the villain. He landed on top of him, and calling upon ever ounce of rage and sorrow he had ever had welled up inside of him suddenly came gushing to the surface and he channeled it into his fists as he began to beat Sephiroth into an unrecognizable pulp. But no matter what he did, or how strong he hit, he could never stop the…laughter. And just as he predicted, the room once again began to fade, and he once again woke up with a start. But this time it was different. This time he felt…nothing. He felt great because staring at him in the face was a living, breathing Tifa Lockheart-Strife, complete with her own face and her same beautiful smile. She was attempting to wake him.

"Cloud…Cloud…wake up. You’re dreaming, Cloud. CLOUD!" Tifa screamed in his ear.

He opened his eyes. There were feathers everywhere. He looked to his right. His right hand was poised in mid air. He looked down at his pillow, or rather, what was left of it. It was by now a pillow sac with a few Chocobo feathers left in it. He felt like an idiot. Tifa was looking at him with a stern face and was tapping her shoe on the ground, and giving him a glance that read you better have a damn good excuse, buster! He grinned sheepishly at her, and without warning she burst out laughing. She got up off the floor a minute later, brushed herself off, wiped a tear from her eye, and regained her posture as though nothing had ever happened.

"C’mon ya big lug, I have lunch ready for you."

"Lunch?"

"Yeah, lunch. Y’know, too late for breakfast, too early for dinner. That lunch. What did you expect? It’s 2 o’ clock, you slept through breakfast. Now come on, get your ass outta bed before I drag it outta there.

Cloud hurriedly complied, not wanting to go through that again. His ass had hurt for a week.

While he got dressed, Tifa went over to the window and threw the blinds open. Cloud winced and shielded himself from the bright light of the sun.

"Aaugh, light!" he murmured, as he attempted to get out of the light, to no avail.

"What are you, a vampire?" Tifa joked. "C’mon, get dressed already. It’s a beautiful day out. I told you before that Cid was going to come over here in a couple hours last night before you went to bed, remember?"

"Quite honestly, it slipped my mind" Cloud confessed.

"I don’t see how anything can stay between those two ears of yours with all that muscle you have up there." She said, giving his head a playful tap.

"Cut it out okay?" he said, just a bit annoyed.

"Oh alright, just hurry up okay. I want you to be able to get outside at least for a little while today" she called to him as she walked out the room.

"Gee, thanks mom" he said to himself.

"I heard that!" Tifa called to him.

He grinned to himself, but it faded as Cloud had a flash in his head and a thought passed through his mind, and although it was gone as soon as it arrived, it Cloud got enough of it to make him go pale.

It had said, "Prepare yourself. I am coming!"

Feeling sick? You poor thing, you should take a break