It’s one long... drawn out... headache. You can’t pin down where it is, what it was, why it is, where it’s from—just that it’s there. It implodes you from within. Pathetic.
“Get the hell up! Look at yourself! Have you no ambition, SOLDIER?”
You’ve always had short sight; always been missing most of the puzzle. However, right now doesn’t feel like something missing, so much as, more is there than should be. Clutter, mass, packed into a small vestige in your brain, bursting and shooting invisible spikes through the rest of it. You wish there was something significant in it, some sort of clarity. But there is just pain. Splitting, collapsing pain.
There are fragments of images still flying around. You can’t piece together any of them in this current state.
“Wow. It is... so unusual to see someone of your kind around here. At least when you're not terrorizing us.”
SOLDIER... how the hell did you ever make into SOLDIER? Why would you ever try to? Is there some starry-eyed putz in there who believed in something once? Everything you know about Shinra, about the old kingdoms, about the history of the sullied ground you walk on. And SOLDIER? Really?
“You.” Who even is “you”? Are you better than this vacant shadow figure that you think you are?
“Cloud! Oh my god! Cloud, is that you?”
Cloud “Strife.” He probably knew something once. But he… whoever he is… everything that once made the body you inhabit “Cloud” has gone missing. Although for some reason, the world doesn't seem to think so. The people treat you like an authority when you’re around. People act like they’ve seen you before. And you have to live up to this image that is projected onto you. Why? Why does anybody presume anything about you? Why do you play along?
More images. More images. You keep grasping at them in your mind, and they keep shattering in your hands the moment you get close. You’re swimming in an ocean of broken pieces, that break into even smaller pieces as you labor to rebuild them. You hold them up in the light to see, and it just burns them away. “Cloud Strife.” You break everything that falls into your hands. “Cloud Strife.” You don’t even have to try; things just know to break apart instinctively the moment they touch your hands. You are... destruction. You are venom. The end of good things.
You and this... damned headache. You don't know what you are. But you are something. You still have to be. The dirty asphalt you lie sick face-down on, it has immutable history the same as your bruised and polluted body. Your mind is only one piece of it. Nobody from your history would recognize you from your “mind”; they see your face, your features. But do you?
Trying to conjure more images sends another rain of glass shards through your head. Stop the pain, “Cloud Strife.” Stop the headache, “SOLDIER.” Aren’t you all heroes, like—?
Mako poisoning. That must be it. The great headache… it’s always because of mako. The blood of the lifestream, the source of the all sentient life on the planet, and an instrument of death and decay. It not only contaminates your mind and dismantles your body, it warps your very biology to become dependent on it to function. But it’s not just the infusions of mako you endured to become a SOLDIER—you suffer from something else. A different exposure. If only you knew how it happened…
O, woe is you, “Cloud Strife.” You’re always one step removed. Just a little too behind the curve to see what everyone else does. But who among us still knows you well enough to know that? Which little parasite, prancing around in your mind? Be careful how deeply you look to find out. The truth may be upsetting.
Try to think again. If you keep trying, at some point it will work. Try to remember: what’s the last place you think you were?
Somewhere... indoors. Dark; a tint of blue. Nighttime, maybe, or some deep and moody location away from even a distant glint of sunlight. Metal grates clanging under your boots. Steam. Valves, pipes. A nebulous urgency. A nebulous pain. Soot, blood. And behind you... her dead b——
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Don’t be stupid. Get rid of that. You know that there’s somewhere more recent. Just keep swimming, however much your body screams. You’ll find something eventually—assuming you don’t fall apart first.
He was... asleep. Or trying to be. Or he wasn’t. His head could have been lying on a pillow, or he could have been smothering it with a pillow to blot out the noise and the light. Noise... there was so much noise. So much talking. Incoherent conversations buzzing in his ears, the voices of lunatics and failures. The nauseating stench—that unholy blend of sweat, cigarettes, and cheap liquor.
Now his eyes were open. They were shot open, broken from their comfortable rest well before they were ready. It was all there in front of him—the single gas light bulb hanging from a wire on the concrete ceiling; multi-colored stains on the plaster walls; a broken spring mattress on the floor underneath him; dozens more mattresses around him, and dozens more people on and around those; a mess of cracked creaky plywood making up a floor. The tenements.
He remembers the tenements, almost. They were L-shaped rooms stacked on one another in an L-shaped building. One window on the two ends of each floor. A hole in the ceiling. A gaping hole in the wall of the longer side of the room, which let people poke out and see through the smaller hole on the shorter side, or fall out of the building. It reminded him of boot camp, the disrepair and all.
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It wasn’t the swell of talking voices. It wasn’t the cacophony of the streets below. His rude awakening was the opening tone of the military radio.
A short, prideful melody that precedes the voice of Shinra’s public radio correspondent. It was the broadcast the people heard for news about the war with Wutai for years. They would announce small bits of information, new hour by hour developments from the front lines and the Shinra administration. And between every single news bit, every single update, there was that tone.
He’d heard that tone hundreds of times. Every day in infantry training, following beat by beat as the war he dreamed of fighting in coasted to an end, along with his chance of glory, herodom, legacy, et cetera. Every day, that damned tone. Through every radio, everywhere. The dormancy—the repetition—the same fucking melody, over and over and over and over—
Even the slightest hum of the notes in his ears underneath the noises of the tenement was enough to pull the pin once he recognized it. He instinctively grabbed the buster sword at his side and slogged out of bed. The clunky blade dropped and cracked through the floor, and he dragged it across searching for that radio. The sight of that foot-wide, 5-foot-long behemoth hushed people it scraped past.
“Where’s that comin’ from?” he grunted, without context. No one answered. There was still too much noise pollution for him to locate the broadcast. A sudden pulse from the headache stopped him from shouting to quiet down. His vision frantically skittered past piles of trash on the floor, open backpacks, torn up sheets everywhere, junk, junk, random shit no one here would care to lose—
The tone rang a second time. The volume on the radio was not high, but it physically rattled him like a bomb going off ten feet in front of him. “Turn the radio off!”
He meekly flailed the giant sword over his shoulder and caught the blade in the thin ceiling. He tugged it loose, and it clanged back onto the floor. Not the proudest display, but it got him attention.
“Shit! Put that thang away!”
“Where the hell’d you get that?”
“This dude’s a SOLDIER, chill out!”
He clutched the side of his quaking head, and a shirtless freak with a gut and tattoos tried to grab the sword. The hands touching his hand was more searing to him than the headache.
He easily overpowered the freak to deck him in the face with the conflicted hand, then yanked the sword free and cut through his forehead. He fell back screeching amid “whoa”s and laughing from the crowd as blood trickled down the bruise forming on his cheekbone.
The tone rang in his ears for a third time. He hoarsely demanded again, “Turn that radio off.”
Water was dripping down from the hole in the ceiling the sword left, probably from a nicked water pipe. Each drop into the wood floor produced tiny green particles into the air that swiftly dissipated. A mako tanker had recently spilled and contaminated the sector’s water supply. That’s what that was.
The radio. A person down the room near the bend turned around around in their bed. “Heuh?” their horn-pitched voice gawked. “I have the volume down! Fuck d’ya want?”
He towed the sword to the magnet on his back and marched down. The Shinra broadcaster was coming from the table next to that person’s bed. “Turn it off.”
“C’mon, can’t a guy read the news in peace here? I gotta brother who—!”
“Turn it off!”
The radio correspondent kept talking. So did this person. “—next Sunday to commemorate five years since the death of—” “—mind ya own business, freak?! I ain’t gonna—” “—suspension of the SOLDIER program. The following streets will—” “—a veteran, dammit! If I wanna keep listenin’ to the—” “—President Shinra gave the following statement on—” “—anyway?! You look fuckin’ crazy! Did you fall out of a fuckin’—” “—and hero of the Wutai war, Seph#&*>^]—”
A bludgeon of static rushed through and knocked him off balance. He ripped the sword off his back while tumbling backwards. His figure recentered. The sword hung wound up over his shoulder, vision unclear, thoughts unclear, hearing unclear; every sense static. Seeing static, feeling static, thinking static—seeing those speakers and dials. The sword heaved down, tearing through the ceiling again, and slashing the radio in half. It split into the table as loose wires sparked against the metal.
“I wuz listenin’ to that, you jackass!”
He tugged the sword out, cutting deeper through the table making it split in half and collapse. The tip of the blade slumped back onto the floor. No more. He could return to his corner, his attempt at resting. Close his eyes again. Even in the rising angst and chaos in the tenement, it now started to feel quieter. Everything else fell away. All was well again.
Yes, all things became well, of course. In that moment. You idiot. You solved the great mystery of the “tenements,” but where the hell are you?!
Go back. Try looking outside this time. You remember what it’s like out there, don’t you? The sun… the grass… fresh air… other qualities? Probably ruins from a war you never fought in? Monsters outside the gates of your hometown? Clouds of smoke streaking through the sky leading back to the nearest mako reactor?
Think of… home. Not that one. Home is not the place you know, home is the place you belong. It is not skies, not the moon, not the ground, not joy or memory. You gaze around at the sea of sheet metal, dirt, and wood—look up at your iron sky—feel the dusty stone surface beneath you—smell the vapor of processed mako drilled from the earth beneath you that leaks from the city above—and know that your true home lies here. The fabled Midgar, the city on top of a city. Or rather, the city on top of you.
The signature company town of Shinra, Inc. The greatest city in the world. The eight perfect mako reactors along its circle of perfect defensive walls. The perfect company HQ towering in the center of it all, like a great beacon of corporate civilization. Its perfect people, and their perfect dreams and aspirations of working for the company and fighting for the company in war. The eight perfect sector plates extending from the capitol, looming over the skies of the perfect undercity. “The rotting pizza,” the ungratefuls call it. It is perfect rot. A perfect vanity project. Perfect hubris; inequality without flaw. Perfect separation between sky and dirt; between incomplete undercity and achievement of the plates above; between power and the subjugated; between you and them.
You understand it, though. You’re just what they want you to be, just how they made you. Serve your leader duly, “Cloud Strife.” Be like your heroes. Answer the call.
