His name is Cloud, and he was born in a small backwater town at the foot of the Nibel mountains. A hick town, some would call it, but most of those who knew the town as it really was are not alive to tell the tale, dancing in the forever footsteps of the voiceless. Cloud is not voiceless, but he never speaks, so he might as well be. He's quiet because the local children call him a bastard and unwanted and never include him in their games except when they want a scapegoat. He's almost nine, and he's quiet and the look of his face in repose makes people think he's sullen. -Introspective, says his mother, just like- but she falls silent when he asks who like, and he's waited too many times for answers that never come to press for something that she'll never tell. They're in the part of their one room house that serves as the sitting room. She's knitting and humming softly, and he's sitting stiffly at the window staring out, to hide the spectacular bruises blossomed purple-black-blue on his cheek. It disturbs her to see them and he hates it when she gets hysterical, then tearful, then angry. In his own way he understands her behavior. There is nothing she can do to change the way the townsfolk see them, and she is angry, frustrated; she is just as much a prisoner as he is. He's spent all day in the house to avoid being beaten up again; yesterday the innkeeper gave him a good thrashing for the window everyone says he broke, even though really he didn't. His clothes hide more bruises and his body is sore-stiff but he doesn't move, staring out into the back garden and the sky beyond, dark clouds gathering too far away on the horizon for the ground to meet the rain. Cloud likes it when it rains. There is something about its constant patter that he finds vaguely hypnotic, vaguely calming. Something about its cool that promises to wash away all pain. He closes his eyes, but the clouds don't break and the rain doesn't fall. Instead, there is the howling of the wolves, spectral and ominous, spiraling from far away into the heights of the mountains, the great peaks echoing with that desolate sound. Equally desolate are the howls of the thousands of motor vehicles that race past him, smoke from their passing staining his vision with swirls of dark gray. His name is Cloud, he's sixteen, and he's a soldier in the army of a glorified conglomerate; his past doesn't matter because he's only a lowly private and there are thousands more soldiers in the army just like him, country boys run to the city for fame and honor. When he first arrived in Midgar he had wanted to join SOLDIER, the corp of biologically enhanced soldiers that formed the elite of the Shinra army, that he'd seen in a thousand posters and heard countless tales of, even far away from Midgar in a backwater town like Nibelheim. He'd listened to all the stories people would tell him, and in them SOLDIERs were vibrant and strong and always respected, always admired. Cloud thought that perhaps if he got accepted into SOLDIER, he would be noticed, be taken for someone other than the village scapegoat. Perhaps- the word blind and foolish and based on faith, to think that without changing himself he could change the way the world saw him. To think that he could change the way the world saw him at all. But faith is the only thing he has left of hope. Faith is blind. It always is. He's had four years with Shinra now. Two years running errands, scrubbing pots, and dodging predators. Two years as a recruit. He's still a rank-and-file soldier. Nothing much has changed in his life since he left the mountains, only the names of the details. His fellow soldiers in his unit pick on him because he's the shortest and the slimmest, and because he has the face of a girl. Because somehow, like wolves, they sense the weakness in him. Because they're stuck in a dead end of life, nothing to do, no impetus to carry them further, and for that they hurt. Misery begets misery. The sergeant lets them get away with it because he wants to get into Cloud's pants, and Cloud won't let him. The beginning of spring. Cloud's standing sentry duty on a slum warehouse half-full of sacks of sand, watching the traffic as it goes by him. It doesn't rain in Midgar, either. Midgar is a city which never sleeps, a city where there is no night or day. He hasn't seen the sun for so long that he's almost forgotten what sunlight on bare skin feels like. It scares him sometimes- what does sunlight on bare skin feel like? He thinks, and is disconcerted that he doesn't know whether he has forgotten or he has simply never known. His sergeant comes by, ostensibly on inspection but really looking for an excuse to punish him. Cloud keeps absolutely still, doesn't turn a hair as the man walks past, greasy eyes scouring every inch of his body. He doesn't know why the man hates him so much, really. He's never done a thing to irk him except say no, just once- and there have been no further propositions since. Cloud's mask is on crooked, to block the fumes of exhaust. Its filters have never worked as they are supposed to. The sergeant is quick to notice, and pounces. Third degree infraction, he says. His breath is fetid, stinking of a mix of alcohol, tobacco and other low vices. I'm disappointed in you, trooper. Do you want your punishment in full, or saved? -In full, sir. Cloud says. He's thankful for the mask, for under it all his emotions are his own. He takes his punishment in full because that means the sergeant has to pick them out of a Shinra rule book; saved means that come year end the sergeant punishes him at his own discretion, and he doesn't want to think what that might be. The sergeant looks disappointed. Cloud pretends not to notice. He continues to stand straight at attention as the man fumbles with the rule book for a suitable punishment. "Sanitation detail tonight, soldier!" He barks. "Dismissed." Cloud salutes stiffly, and the sergeant walks off, leaving him to find a way back to barracks by himself. Cloud waits for a while, until he's sure that his commanding officer has truly left the area. It's the end of his watch duty, so he knows without having to check that it's already far past the time dinner is served in the barracks. He doesn't need to wait for a replacement, but to get back in time for duty means that he has to skip dinner, which he doesn't really mind; since he left his mother's home he hasn't seemed to have any appetite at all. What bothers him is that he's tired, so tired.. his mask is his armor and from it the view is shaky and disoriented; the world looks all gray and even the lights are blending into each other, twining sinuous blurring beams, merging together and dancing away. He sways on his feet. He has never asked to make an enemy of his commanding officer, or of his fellow soldiers in his unit. He has never asked of the world hate, or love, or anything at all, not even release. He has never asked to be created. Cloud closes his eyes for a single moment, listening to the lonely sound of silence, descant above the noise of traffic. Then he makes his way to the local train station. This time he's lucky; the barracks he's assigned to is a nice one, where the floor tiles are all still intact, and the showers separated into stalls by curtains. It's a SOLDIER barracks, but it's leave day, so most of the barracks occupants are out in town and the shower rooms are empty. Cloud is on his knees, scrubbing the floor. He's soaked in grimy wash water, which makes him shiver uncontrollably, the building heater turned off, because mere cleaners do not merit acknowledgement of basic human need. But Cloud is human. He hurts, so he knows he must be. What is humanity? That he has no answer for. Like the soul, like the mind, the human body has a threshold from which once passed, there is no return. This night Cloud comes chillingly close to it; close, but even as he slumps into the cold, murky water he is pulled back. Afterwards he sometimes wonders if it might have been better, if he had simply let go. His rescuer is one of the SOLDIERs who inhabit the barracks, returned unexpectedly early, generous in the way that only those abundant in strength of circumstance and spirit may be. He finds Cloud half-concious and half-dead. Pulls him back, breathes in life. Cloud wakes up later warmed and dry in the SOLDIER's bed, its owner on the floor. His first reaction is fear, quickly soothed away once his savior awakes. His name is Zack. He's not stunning but ruggedly attractive, in an ordinary, cool-guy kind of way. His hair sticks up all over the place, and is if anything as unmanageable as Cloud's own, or even more so because he keeps it long and untouched over his back, like a lion's mane, as free and as wild as his spirit. When he speaks, Cloud hears the energy and warmth in his voice, like nothing can possibly be wrong in the world that cannot be fixed and there's a firm confidence in it, so that hearing it Cloud can almost bring himself to believe that the promise of the voice is true. When Zack is around, it is. Cloud doesn't quite know why the older man starts spending more and more time with him, apprehensive and suspicious at first, but quickly he learns to enjoy being around him. Zack knows well the meaning of freedom and how to grasp it, but to Cloud, Zack is freedom. It is Zack who first teaches Cloud how to ride a motorcycle. He owns one himself, a monster of a machine, and he insists on riding it whenever he takes Cloud out. Cloud always rides on the back of the vehicle right behind Zack, both of them fast and free and leaning into the feel of the wind and each other, Cloud's arms wrapped around Zack and pressing the two muscular, lithe bodies close to each other, misgivings carried away by the wind and living only for the moment- It is then that Cloud wishes life would carry on forever. -and Zack has a friend. A rare summer's afternoon; the sun shines bright, but the wind is cool and crisp, bearing whispers of the beginning of autumn. Grinning, Zack pushes Cloud to the forefront. Before them both is the field commander of all the Shinra military; relaxed, out of uniform, and trying, in his own way, to smile. If Zack is the sun, Sephiroth is the fury of a wild winter storm, controlled and contained in the sleek, elegant shape of a predator- passion burning like ice beneath a calm veneer, Cloud thinks, although he doesn't know why he knows this. Around Sephiroth his thoughts run in the lines of poems; paeans, odes, interwoven with a secret lament of longing. In the posters he is beautiful, but in person he is something beyond that; if he has beauty it is melded with the feral, unearthly lines of a bird of prey, the features of a star god, like nothing and no one Cloud has ever seen. He is everything Cloud has ever dreamed of, and of being. Cloud has stared too long. He realises this, and in realisation trembles. Sephiroth's smile tames itself to a subtle curve of perfect chiseled lips. Tilts his head, the movement noticeable only because the rest of his body is so poised, so still. Your name is Cloud, he murmurs, voice deep and rich. It stirs something primal in Cloud, liquid sound washing over him, filling every cell of his body with fire. A stir. Zack, saying something. Cloud shakes himself out of his reverie long enough to find that both men are teasing him, smiling at him, one smile free, one restrained. He wants to be embarrassed, but something in both their expressions makes him smile back. The weeks that follow the day pass like the falling of the leaves from a great tree in autumn; in profusion and disorder, but also in beauty.