Fred looks down at the files, then nods. "Okay, yours first. We can take a break and switch- or just stop- anytime you need. I'll try to keep an eye out, but please, tell me if you can."
She expects him to get stuck in his head at least once during this whole thing. She's not going to push this just to get it done (as much as they both might like that).
She carefully slides his file towards her, just enough so she can open it. The text faces her, and she starts reading aloud. She'll glance up at him every so often, just to make sure he's not shutting down.
He's not, and he might, but hell if he's going to sit here and admit to it. It's just a bunch of words, he shouldn't need breaks.
The file begins with a summary of his childhood. How he was too shy to fit in, fearless enough to save a friend doing something dangerous but unable to convince anyone he wasn't the one to put her in danger in the first place. How he covered up his loneliness and lack of self-esteem with arrogance and hostility, which didn't help him or his single mother, whom the village looked down on for not getting re-married after Cloud's father died when he was an infant.
Starting off strong for the Strifes, apparently.
Present-day Cloud folds his arms and looks down while she reads, brow slightly furrowed. The truth is, there's a lot about his early life he doesn't remember very well even now - some of it was just irretrievable, especially the details. But he still remembers the feelings. He remembers the loneliness, the longing to be a part of Tifa's friend group, the way he blamed himself even then for being an unlikable weirdo. He remembers getting into too many fights despite being smaller than the rest of the boys, and how losing or getting hurt never stopped him from doing it again. He remembers convincing himself he was better than everyone else so he could pretend he was always alone by choice.
Maybe that's why he developed such an obsession with joining SOLDIER, Shinra's elite fighting force of supersoldiers - the best of the best. And the best of those was Sephiroth, the Demon of Wutai, the hero of Midgar. Everyone loved Sephiroth! If Cloud was a hero like that, then everyone would have to love him, too. Especially Tifa.
So as soon as he was old enough - the spring before his 14th birthday - he left his village behind and moved to Midgar, the biggest city in the world, to join Shinra Public Security as an infantry trooper. He intended for that stint to be short-lived, but when he applied for the SOLDIER program once he turned 14, he was turned down. He studied hard, trained hard, tried again and again and again, but was rejected every time.
Needless to say, his self-esteem sure wasn't getting any better.
Fred suppresses the desire to roll her eyes at his insistence that he's 'good'. Honestly, she's sure she's heard Angel say something exactly that way, and it wasn't like he was 'good' at the time, either! But she keeps her response to an eye twitch and a nod. No need to give him a hard time when the file was already going to do so.
As she reads, she finds her heart already going out to him. It's not like she was the Popular Girl during her public school experience, after all. She's also honestly a little surprised to see Sephiroth described as a Hero, but- it makes some sense. There has to be something between them that Cloud caught onto. And aspiring to be a hero for everyone, to be loved, that's just life.
She ends up stopping her reading for her own question. "They let you join up at fourteen? No, thirteen. That's- I wouldn't have even been able to work a summer job at that age. I know it's different worlds and all, but we don't do military service until eighteen years old."
"Mm?" Cloud glances up. "Sure, why not? Most kids waited another year or two, but thirteen wasn't unheard of or anything." What the hell do teenagers even do with themselves all the time in her world if they can't get jobs?
Once Fred starts reading again, the file says that a few years passed with no change in Cloud's situation, and since he was too ashamed to report back to his mother and Tifa that he was a failure and all that boasting had come to nothing, he just...didn't go back to visit the village at all.
Things started to look up for Cloud when he was sixteen, because he was assigned to a mission with Zack Fair, SOLDIER Second Class - a name Fred likely recognizes as a warden on the Barge. Zack was impressed with how well he kept up and how he never hesitated to give everything his all regardless of the odds. They became fast friends, which was something Cloud had never had before. Zack was supportive and upbeat, and he encouraged Cloud to embrace his dreams - to keep his head up, keep trying. Cloud looked up to him as both his best friend and a role model, especially after Zack's promotion to First Class.
Eventually, they were both assigned to a mission with Sephiroth to inspect the mako reactor just outside Nibelheim, taking Cloud home for the first time in nearly three years. That mission was the first time he'd had the chance to spend any time with Sephiroth, and found the hero a quiet, thoughtful man full of curiosity and gentle sass, who was kind to Cloud and spoke to him warmly despite the massive gap between their ranks.
The shame of Cloud's continued failure (as he saw it) led him to keep his helmet on so none of the villagers would know it was him, including Tifa - and then everything fell apart. Sephiroth learned of his origins as a science project for Shinra, a hybrid of human and alien DNA from an ancient, excavated corpse. He spent a week obsessively devouring every scrap of information about the project he could find, and then he burned the entire village to the ground and killed the villagers. Cloud tried to save his mother, but passed out in the attempt after desperately texting Zack for help. By the time he came to, everyone was already dead.
He followed Sephiroth and Zack all the way up the mountain to the reactor. By the time he got there, Sephiroth had defeated Zack, killed Tifa's father, nearly killed Tifa, and was in the process of stealing the remains of Jenova - the alien he now believed was his true "mother." Cloud grabbed Zack's enormous sword and took Sephiroth by surprise, stabbing him in the back. Sephiroth survived and was furious. Cloud tried to finish him off but ended up impaled on Sephiroth's sword instead. Somehow, he managed to drag himself further along the blade and then use it to fling Sephiroth into the reactor's core, killing him.
Cloud and Zack were in the process of bleeding out when Hojo, the scientist responsible for the Jenova Project, captured them and took them back to his secret lab.
She's about to argue the literal child soldier thing, but she honestly knows she wouldn't get too far. It's how this world works, telling as it is, and they have much farther to go. So she merely says, "Hmm." And then she's reading on.
After reading the bit about working with Zack, her one comment is, "He does seem like that kinda guy. Glad I didn't have him pegged wrong."
The rest of it, Fred read without comment. But she can't help but to frown, and by the time she reaches Hojo, there are tears on her face. "Oh no," she practically whispers, and she looks up to Cloud. "I'm so sorry, Cloud. For all of you. I- I'll keep reading, I know there's a bunch more, but this is not something anyone should've had to go through."
Cloud can tell she's not a fan, but he's not sure why and she doesn't press him on it, so he lets it drop, too.
Her comment about Zack marks the closest Cloud has come to smiling all day, even if he's still not quite there. "Mm. Zack's the best." Then his face falls back into pensive anticipation, knowing what's coming next in the file. Zack's the best, and Cloud's the reason he died.
When he sees the tears start to well up in her eyes, that's when he starts thinking maybe he should leave after all. She doesn't strictly need him here to read this, right? He got this kind of reaction once already when he told Aerith the truth of what happened, and he really doesn't want to endure it again. By the time she looks up, his gaze is firmly elsewhere.
"Should's got nothin' to do with it," he mutters. "It happened, it was a long time ago, it's over and done."
But he sticks around for now, at least, as she keeps reading.
The file explains events in such clear and chronological terms that it sounds bizarre to Cloud. His memories of childhood may be vague and distant, but his memories of this portion are nearly incomprehensible - nothing but brief, foggy snippets of pain and confusion and fear drenched in green, bracketing huge gaps of absolutely nothing. And he didn't learn what really happened or why until much, much later.
What Fred reads is that Hojo was testing what he called the Jenova Reunion Theory. Jenova was a mimetic, psychic predator with the ability to absorb the memories and forms of its prey, as well as merge its own genes with other life forms, mutating them to be more like it. Sephiroth was the perfect hybrid Hojo wanted, so he moved on to a different hypothesis: that bits of Jenova's genetic material separated from the source would act to rejoin that source, influencing their hosts' minds and bodies to reunite with the whole. To test this, Hojo used Sephiroth's cells and infusions of mako - the lifeblood of the world, the material element of the Lifestream, which contains the memories and knowledge of every soul to ever have lived on the Planet and then died to return to it - to create so-called 'Sephiroth clones' and spread them out across the world.
Zack already having been a SOLDIER with a First's level of mako infusion made him immune to the experiments, so Hojo declared him a failure. Cloud, on the other hand, was found to be so susceptible to the deleterious effects of mako on the human brain that he suffered severe brain damage from mako poisoning over time and, eventually, fell into an amnesiac and catatonic state that really should have been permanent, medically speaking. Hojo declared him a failure, too.
But after four years of captivity, Zack broke them both out. He found a spare SOLDIER's uniform to replace Cloud's mako-soaked clothes and then escaped, taking the catatonic Cloud with him. For another year, Zack kept Cloud safe and alive as he avoided Shinra's forces, traveling across two continents to get back to Midgar and bringing Cloud along every step of the way, taking care of him and talking to him as if he could respond.
Meanwhile, Sephiroth's body had returned to the Planet as usual when he died, but his mind was so alien to the Lifestream and his will to maintain his memories and identity so powerful that eventually, after five years, his consciousness awoke from inside the Lifestream. Cloud's genetic and psychic connection to him plus his natural tenacity and survival instinct combined to allow him to slowly claw back to consciousness as Sephiroth did; and since the mako had scoured away so many of his memories, drowning them out with its billions of identities and lifetimes of knowledge, that connection took hold strongly.
Cloud gradually became more aware of his surroundings until he could almost respond...just as Shinra caught up to them with an army. And then this happened.
Fred takes a moment to collect herself after her apology. She disagrees with his assessment, but of course he would. He's had to carry this for ages. Her job is to help him, not get over-emotional about what happened to a friend. To do that, she needs them both to get through this, the whole thing. All the details.
So she nods to herself, wipes her face, and takes a deep breath before diving further. She's frowning, but promises herself not to show anything else until they get through it. She can always break down on her own time.
And boy, does it get worse. Her jaw sets as she continues reading about Hojo. She asks about mako and the Lifestream in a little more detail, but for the most part she's interested in plowing through it.
She manages not to cry while reading over Zack's escape and his journey to Midgar, and subsequent death. "He really is the best, isn't he?" she says quietly.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
She expects him to get stuck in his head at least once during this whole thing. She's not going to push this just to get it done (as much as they both might like that).
She carefully slides his file towards her, just enough so she can open it. The text faces her, and she starts reading aloud. She'll glance up at him every so often, just to make sure he's not shutting down.
no subject
He's not, and he might, but hell if he's going to sit here and admit to it. It's just a bunch of words, he shouldn't need breaks.
The file begins with a summary of his childhood. How he was too shy to fit in, fearless enough to save a friend doing something dangerous but unable to convince anyone he wasn't the one to put her in danger in the first place. How he covered up his loneliness and lack of self-esteem with arrogance and hostility, which didn't help him or his single mother, whom the village looked down on for not getting re-married after Cloud's father died when he was an infant.
Starting off strong for the Strifes, apparently.
Present-day Cloud folds his arms and looks down while she reads, brow slightly furrowed. The truth is, there's a lot about his early life he doesn't remember very well even now - some of it was just irretrievable, especially the details. But he still remembers the feelings. He remembers the loneliness, the longing to be a part of Tifa's friend group, the way he blamed himself even then for being an unlikable weirdo. He remembers getting into too many fights despite being smaller than the rest of the boys, and how losing or getting hurt never stopped him from doing it again. He remembers convincing himself he was better than everyone else so he could pretend he was always alone by choice.
Maybe that's why he developed such an obsession with joining SOLDIER, Shinra's elite fighting force of supersoldiers - the best of the best. And the best of those was Sephiroth, the Demon of Wutai, the hero of Midgar. Everyone loved Sephiroth! If Cloud was a hero like that, then everyone would have to love him, too. Especially Tifa.
So as soon as he was old enough - the spring before his 14th birthday - he left his village behind and moved to Midgar, the biggest city in the world, to join Shinra Public Security as an infantry trooper. He intended for that stint to be short-lived, but when he applied for the SOLDIER program once he turned 14, he was turned down. He studied hard, trained hard, tried again and again and again, but was rejected every time.
Needless to say, his self-esteem sure wasn't getting any better.
no subject
As she reads, she finds her heart already going out to him. It's not like she was the Popular Girl during her public school experience, after all. She's also honestly a little surprised to see Sephiroth described as a Hero, but- it makes some sense. There has to be something between them that Cloud caught onto. And aspiring to be a hero for everyone, to be loved, that's just life.
She ends up stopping her reading for her own question. "They let you join up at fourteen? No, thirteen. That's- I wouldn't have even been able to work a summer job at that age. I know it's different worlds and all, but we don't do military service until eighteen years old."
no subject
Once Fred starts reading again, the file says that a few years passed with no change in Cloud's situation, and since he was too ashamed to report back to his mother and Tifa that he was a failure and all that boasting had come to nothing, he just...didn't go back to visit the village at all.
Things started to look up for Cloud when he was sixteen, because he was assigned to a mission with Zack Fair, SOLDIER Second Class - a name Fred likely recognizes as a warden on the Barge. Zack was impressed with how well he kept up and how he never hesitated to give everything his all regardless of the odds. They became fast friends, which was something Cloud had never had before. Zack was supportive and upbeat, and he encouraged Cloud to embrace his dreams - to keep his head up, keep trying. Cloud looked up to him as both his best friend and a role model, especially after Zack's promotion to First Class.
Eventually, they were both assigned to a mission with Sephiroth to inspect the mako reactor just outside Nibelheim, taking Cloud home for the first time in nearly three years. That mission was the first time he'd had the chance to spend any time with Sephiroth, and found the hero a quiet, thoughtful man full of curiosity and gentle sass, who was kind to Cloud and spoke to him warmly despite the massive gap between their ranks.
The shame of Cloud's continued failure (as he saw it) led him to keep his helmet on so none of the villagers would know it was him, including Tifa - and then everything fell apart. Sephiroth learned of his origins as a science project for Shinra, a hybrid of human and alien DNA from an ancient, excavated corpse. He spent a week obsessively devouring every scrap of information about the project he could find, and then he burned the entire village to the ground and killed the villagers. Cloud tried to save his mother, but passed out in the attempt after desperately texting Zack for help. By the time he came to, everyone was already dead.
He followed Sephiroth and Zack all the way up the mountain to the reactor. By the time he got there, Sephiroth had defeated Zack, killed Tifa's father, nearly killed Tifa, and was in the process of stealing the remains of Jenova - the alien he now believed was his true "mother." Cloud grabbed Zack's enormous sword and took Sephiroth by surprise, stabbing him in the back. Sephiroth survived and was furious. Cloud tried to finish him off but ended up impaled on Sephiroth's sword instead. Somehow, he managed to drag himself further along the blade and then use it to fling Sephiroth into the reactor's core, killing him.
Cloud and Zack were in the process of bleeding out when Hojo, the scientist responsible for the Jenova Project, captured them and took them back to his secret lab.
no subject
After reading the bit about working with Zack, her one comment is, "He does seem like that kinda guy. Glad I didn't have him pegged wrong."
The rest of it, Fred read without comment. But she can't help but to frown, and by the time she reaches Hojo, there are tears on her face. "Oh no," she practically whispers, and she looks up to Cloud. "I'm so sorry, Cloud. For all of you. I- I'll keep reading, I know there's a bunch more, but this is not something anyone should've had to go through."
no subject
Her comment about Zack marks the closest Cloud has come to smiling all day, even if he's still not quite there. "Mm. Zack's the best." Then his face falls back into pensive anticipation, knowing what's coming next in the file. Zack's the best, and Cloud's the reason he died.
When he sees the tears start to well up in her eyes, that's when he starts thinking maybe he should leave after all. She doesn't strictly need him here to read this, right? He got this kind of reaction once already when he told Aerith the truth of what happened, and he really doesn't want to endure it again. By the time she looks up, his gaze is firmly elsewhere.
"Should's got nothin' to do with it," he mutters. "It happened, it was a long time ago, it's over and done."
But he sticks around for now, at least, as she keeps reading.
The file explains events in such clear and chronological terms that it sounds bizarre to Cloud. His memories of childhood may be vague and distant, but his memories of this portion are nearly incomprehensible - nothing but brief, foggy snippets of pain and confusion and fear drenched in green, bracketing huge gaps of absolutely nothing. And he didn't learn what really happened or why until much, much later.
What Fred reads is that Hojo was testing what he called the Jenova Reunion Theory. Jenova was a mimetic, psychic predator with the ability to absorb the memories and forms of its prey, as well as merge its own genes with other life forms, mutating them to be more like it. Sephiroth was the perfect hybrid Hojo wanted, so he moved on to a different hypothesis: that bits of Jenova's genetic material separated from the source would act to rejoin that source, influencing their hosts' minds and bodies to reunite with the whole. To test this, Hojo used Sephiroth's cells and infusions of mako - the lifeblood of the world, the material element of the Lifestream, which contains the memories and knowledge of every soul to ever have lived on the Planet and then died to return to it - to create so-called 'Sephiroth clones' and spread them out across the world.
Zack already having been a SOLDIER with a First's level of mako infusion made him immune to the experiments, so Hojo declared him a failure. Cloud, on the other hand, was found to be so susceptible to the deleterious effects of mako on the human brain that he suffered severe brain damage from mako poisoning over time and, eventually, fell into an amnesiac and catatonic state that really should have been permanent, medically speaking. Hojo declared him a failure, too.
But after four years of captivity, Zack broke them both out. He found a spare SOLDIER's uniform to replace Cloud's mako-soaked clothes and then escaped, taking the catatonic Cloud with him. For another year, Zack kept Cloud safe and alive as he avoided Shinra's forces, traveling across two continents to get back to Midgar and bringing Cloud along every step of the way, taking care of him and talking to him as if he could respond.
Meanwhile, Sephiroth's body had returned to the Planet as usual when he died, but his mind was so alien to the Lifestream and his will to maintain his memories and identity so powerful that eventually, after five years, his consciousness awoke from inside the Lifestream. Cloud's genetic and psychic connection to him plus his natural tenacity and survival instinct combined to allow him to slowly claw back to consciousness as Sephiroth did; and since the mako had scoured away so many of his memories, drowning them out with its billions of identities and lifetimes of knowledge, that connection took hold strongly.
Cloud gradually became more aware of his surroundings until he could almost respond...just as Shinra caught up to them with an army. And then this happened.
no subject
So she nods to herself, wipes her face, and takes a deep breath before diving further. She's frowning, but promises herself not to show anything else until they get through it. She can always break down on her own time.
And boy, does it get worse. Her jaw sets as she continues reading about Hojo. She asks about mako and the Lifestream in a little more detail, but for the most part she's interested in plowing through it.
She manages not to cry while reading over Zack's escape and his journey to Midgar, and subsequent death. "He really is the best, isn't he?" she says quietly.