onepassingnight | oo1 ❄ I've seen this somewhere before

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oo1 ❄ I've seen this somewhere before

The scenery within this new (perhaps not quite) foreign subconscious is a confused jumble, as if its unsuspecting creator cannot quite decide just where to be — a snowy mountainside has burst up from beneath the streets of a staircase city set into the rise of sheer, seaside cliff. The pieces are whole, details sharp and clear on narrow, towering buildings all crammed close together and rocky outcroppings with their blankets of heavy snow (still falling, as it is, in weird pockets only over corresponding ground).

But these little scenes are shattered among each other, shifting constantly, uncertain as the blank, white sky above, which reflects a dull grey in the ocean below. Where these two endless, colorless stretches of space reach to meet on the horizon, they blend seamlessly, as if meeting the edge of this conflicting reality might be as easy as setting sail for the fragile inner boundary of the eggshell shape it almost appears to be locked within.

Bright and cold, the silence falls as heavy as the inclement weather, in each vacuum of space that covers the mountainside, doing its best to muffle the staccato beat of his boots on uneven pavement broken over icy faces of stone and the competing race of his heart, now trying its hardest to burst clear out of his chest. (And in a dream, who's to say it mightn't?) With his rifle hugged tight against his back by its strap, where it beats a solid rap against his shoulder blades, a sharp reprimand for every stumble, a lone soldier in drab blue is fighting a very literal uphill battle.

The uniform he wears obscures all of him but the lower half of the pale, strained expression writ across his face, solemn as he barrels up the insurmountable slope in leaps and bounds, shadows chasing behind as he rounds a street corner onto another craggy patch of open ground. Snow kicks up in misty clouds around his ankles as he stumbles, but doesn't stop, always only one step ahead of his pursuers.

They're monsters, or maybe only the distant memory of a child's imagining of such, solid enough as they crumble up out of the earth in his wake. But they fade to dust as phantoms while he manages still to evade the catch of claws and snapping jaws at the heels of his badly scuffed black boots, the shirttail tucked under his belts. Shameful as it is not to stand and fight, outpacing them is this dream's objective, instead, and he can't seem to stop his feet from moving on, hands scrabbling at each new hold to pull himself higher.

At least not on his own.

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Sephiroth, for his part, doesn't think a great deal about Cloud's words, though they register. He's come to expect that infantrymen look up to him and doesn't always find them coherent in his presence. Maybe it's a little amusing, but other than a wry smile or two at times, he doesn't acknowledge such behavior. It's natural enough. A commander should respect the men who respect him. That's the honorable thing to do, he thinks, though lately the word honor rings a little hollow, considering some of the people he works with and first.

He follows Cloud's gaze with his own. Junon he recognizes at once, and at the sight of Modeoheim, he feels cold. He wasn't there until after what had happened there, after Angeal and Genesis' deaths. He doesn't like the thought of sending an infantryman ahead alone in this terrain. There may be more enemies, or other dangers. He won't leave him.

He's unsure why this Cloud is so much more similar to the one he's vaguely heard of in his waking hours than to the grim Cloud in his other dreams who speaks of killing him. Accompanying him now may help solve this puzzle.

"Then we'll ascend together."

Together? That's a strange prospect, in this kind of nightmare. Natural as it is to be the same here as he is in the waking world (a bit uncreative, perhaps, but that's Cloud), he's rarely ever so in the dreams that involve actually meeting his idol. He has at least enough practical sense, ordinarily, to see himself in SOLDIER before entertaining even the passing notion of crossing paths in any significant way with someone who so thoroughly outclasses him.

And yet, here he is, still only a faceless infantryman - but Sephiroth knows his name? Knows him, on sight? He feels a little numb, and it probably isn't just the cold, but he has enough sense left (somehow) to nod his head.

"Sir." It isn't as if he wouldn't prefer to have the company, at any rate.

Still looking a tad dumbfounded, stifling about a thousand and one questions, he starts, again, one foot in front of the other, a far easier pace than before. The snowfall is slowing, now, where it still drifts downward out of the nothing (there aren't any clouds in that bleak, white sky). The winds dying down to reveal more of the absentmindedly mashed together landscape. For the moment, at least, the danger seems to be negligible, so long as neither of them puts a foot wrong on the unstable ground.

Sephiroth returns the nod. Cloud says nothing to him of the other dreams they've shared. They didn't exactly share a rapport, but they were aware of each other. Now, Cloud simply stares at him and nods as if they haven't spoken before.

He takes the lead, but he doesn't stray far from the infantryman as he goes ahead, and he doesn't lower his guard. There might be more monsters, or other dangers ahead, especially as the terrain wasn't exactly trustworthy, nor their path straightforward. There's no true sense to be made of this place, so nothing can be expected or unexpected here. The landscape, though unlike the solid, confidently built scenes he tends to encounter in his own dreams, reminds him of his own recent confusion and uncertainty.

The primary thing he's sure of now is the man accompanying him, who is solid and real enough, if not as he was the last time they met. "Tell me, Strife, what's your opinion of Shinra? The company as a whole, not the army or SOLDIER in particular." A pause, before he adds, "You have my permission to speak freely."

He turns to view Modeoheim again, through the inscrutable falling snow. "You were there."

The question stops him in his tracks, an overt wariness that has very little to do with the possibility of enemies reemerging overtaking his quiet calm. Everything that Sephiroth says is important by default, but the significance of a blunt question like that is obviously more than just that attributed by Cloud's high opinion of him. If he's being evaluated, somehow (no matter the dismissive nature of "speak freely" - it's never truly so to a superior), he's got to tread carefully.

"I... Don't know what you mean, sir."

Shinra provides for him, Shinra is the means to his ultimate goal, but- What does he think of the Company? Without SOLDIER, he would never have joined; it hasn't once occurred to him that there may be something worth examining in the rest of the outfit, and his only real complaints seem too petty to present to someone like Sephiroth. A good soldier doesn't complain, anyway. He does his job - and if half the time, Cloud's not even sure he's managing that, it only makes good sense to keep his mouth shut.

When Sephiroth's attention turns to the town in the bleary, misty distance, he's a little relieved. That mission is fresh in mind, and as he turns back to the snowy mountainside, more of it overtakes the terrain. "Um, yeah. I was..."

"Don't you?" He seems mildly amused by this, unsurprised that an infantryman wouldn't be willing to air his grievances to the general. "I think you might. They are your employers, after all, and there are few men who have no opinion about their superiors." His own loyalty has always been to SOLDIER rather than Shinra as a whole. (There are certain people in Shinra he actively dislikes and would be glad to be well away from, for all that he keeps his peace about it.) His comrades and the men in his command are the people who matter most to him. Ever since he'd been a child, he'd wanted to be part of SOLDIER, just like most of the others in SOLDIER. In his case, however, there'd been little chance of him doing anything else.

"I've always been with the company. I thought perhaps another perspective would be helpful. Untainted, as it were, by the politics of the upper echelons." Sephiroth notes the expansion of Modeoheim, and he watches it grow in the distance. He's often been there in his own dreams recently. Those cold and empty streets are a familiar sight. He wasn't present in the abandoned town at the same time Cloud was, but he had investigated it afterward. He can still see it clearly in his mind.

"That's where I read your name, in the mission reports. Zack Fair spoke of you in his debriefing, as well."

"I'm sorry, sir. I guess- I just haven't thought about it." Which is true enough, though he doesn't suppose he really could lie to Sephiroth, even if he thought for one second it would potentially benefit him. There's something in those inhumanly green eyes that promises he wouldn't get away with it, anyway, if he tried. So even if it does make him sound a little dull to someone whose opinion he respects far too much, it's honesty - and maybe that counts for something.

"It's SOLDIER I really..." he begins, trailing off as he drags his feet back through the snow (and the mountains in the distance, bordering in the horizon, are an unfamiliar silhouette, now, sharp and dark and just like home). "I wanted to join SOLDIER."

But he hasn't made it, yet, and sometimes it seems pretty hopeless - like clawing his way up a mountain slope that never ends, running from something that never catches up but never leaves him behind, either. The hollow, harsh gust of the wind picks up fresh powder in whorls and drifts, and the town in the distance is hard to see, once more, as Cloud watches his feet. The awkward moment's blessedly short-lived, however, when Sephiroth casually drops another familiar name.

"He... Did?" He doesn't have to wonder why Sephiroth read those reports, as devastating as it'd been for SOLDIER First, but it shocks him again to think of being mentioned by name - even by someone who seems, on brief first impression, as curiously ordinary and down to earth as Zack. ...Then again, perhaps he'd only mentioned how useless Cloud had turned out to be.

"Understandable," says Sephiroth. "There's no need to apologize. Why should you consider it?" Much like himself, though their ranks are vastly different, it is Cloud's duty to follow Shinra's orders. Neither of them are meant to question said orders. It's something they have in common.

Sephiroth is the one who is behaving in an incorrect manner. Technically, he shouldn't be asking these questions of an infantryman, or encouraging him to question the company, however obliquely, but as he recognizes it as a dream, there can be no harm in it. "To join SOLDIER is a worthy goal, and a great honor. We need more good men. I wish you luck." The words aren't insincere, yet they feel hollow to him after he says them, because he thinks of his friends--no, not his friends any longer: Angeal and Genesis. They'd been great men once, assets to SOLDIER.

"He detailed every aspect of the mission. Or I hope he did." Another small, wry almost-joke on the general's part. "You showed initiative." No one expected an infantryman to achieve what a SOLDIER could not, so any perceived failing on Cloud's part wasn't viewed as such, or at least had not been reported as such. In the end, Hollander had been taken into custody, so the mission had been successful in some respect.

Edited 2012-03-30 10:21 (UTC)

Luck from the general - he should laugh and say I'll need it, perhaps, shake off the sudden bolt of badly self-deprecating humor he masks in neutrality with something lighter. Maybe that's only what someone else would do, though, someone who didn't really; it's a thought that doesn't feel fitting on him, either way, and so Cloud merely dips his head in another slight nod, and says again, "Thank you, sir."

His loss for words is a continuing thing, it seems, and bound to be so for most of this baffling existence. Rescued by Sephiroth, complimented by Sephiroth. He should be positively ecstatic, but all he can do is second guess, unable to remember what extraordinarily good deed he must've done to deserve such a commendation. To be noticed, at all. As far as he can recollect, his presence in Modeoheim hadn't done a damn thing - except for maybe hinder that SOLDIER a time or two, and Cloud makes a mental note, here, to thank him later for not painting him in such a bad light.

(He won't, of course, because this is a dream and it'll all be that much more ridiculous once he's woken up, again, and facing the grey of reality and not just that of the blustery, stormy mountain path painted across the insides of his eyelids, now. He'll probably never see Zack again, anyway, so he'll call it a moot point before he forgets this whole fantasy altogether.)

"We should... Keep moving, sir." They have a lot of ground left to cover, yet, and the return to consciousness may be a much farther trek than to that empty, abandoned village, in the distance.

"You're welcome, Strife." It's a relief, in a way, to be traveling with only this infantryman who looks up to him so obviously and doesn't ask for more from him than that, who follows along beside him and would follow any order he gave. Unlike the executives and the President, always with their demands, reasonable and unreasonable alike. Though at the same time, in another way, it is a burden to have the trust and admiration of so many. To be a hero.

Shinra's heroes are dying, one by one.

Zack had pointed out Cloud's initiative and had had a generally positive view of him, mentioning him more than the other troopers. Sephiroth had never been particularly close to Zack, but now, suddenly, he's the member of SOLDIER that Sephiroth knows best, and he does trust his judgment, in spite of the fact that Zack can be--overly enthusiastic at times. He was Angeal's protégé. He reminds Sephiroth of Angeal, sometimes.

"We should," he agrees. It's best to keep moving, not to linger and dwell, not in a place like this. He starts forward, taking the lead in moving toward the destination Cloud pointed out, keeping a pace the other will be able to match.

"Have you had a dream like this before, one you shared with another?" he asks after a few moments. Because Sephiroth is rather certain now that this is not the same Cloud he's met in dreams before, yet it is like one of those odd dreams. They have a distinctly different feel, at least when he's in another's dream and not his own.

He doesn't have any trouble keeping in stride, steady now on the mountainous terrain without those demons to spur him on. As the dream settles almost immediately into something nearing a lull, bits of grey sky begin to show through the formless white, though the day remains cold and pale as the ground beneath them. Even that obvious concession enlivens his exhausted spirit by miles, odd as it feels to even pretend at holding his own in such a mundane conversation.

Or one that is rather routine, anyway, until Sephiroth asks him a question that really does come right out of left field. Suddenly things seem sort of hazily surreal - the world blurs out of focus, again, as he tries not to stumble in his surprise. He doesn't, by some miracle, and everything snaps back into place (more or less), a second later.

"A... Dream, sir?" Lucidity in the dream world is nothing Cloud's ever experienced, before, of an utterly unremarkable normalcy, in his sleeping habits (as with most everything else). And he isn't about to start, now, if he can at all help it. "I don't understand."

He strides on with Cloud, keeping an eye out in case the demon-monsters make a return or some other enemy appears. When the landscape distorts, he's aware of it, frowning, but as also he's aware that it's a dream, it may be unexpected, but it's not unexplained.

"A dream, that's right." He's had lucid dreams before this, but they're not common. Usually, in his dreams, he's a monster--or a child. Or a monstrous child, which he supposes was what he was once, looking back with a harsh eye on his past, on himself.

"I have these dreams, that seem real. The same people keep reoccurring in them, telling me certain things. I almost think they're real as well, in other times and places."

He laughs, then. That must sound ridiculous. Maybe he's going mad. Like Genesis. He'll be sprouting wings soon. He'll lose himself... But he stops that train of thought, grounded by the trooper's presence and glad of it. No, he's Sephiroth. He isn't a monster. "That must sound odd to you. I'm not sure what to make of it myself."

He may be sprouting extraneous appendages, already, if the way Cloud's looking at him as he speaks is any indication. The disquiet is quite impossible to suppress entirely, though, and surfaces smoothly from his shock, in spite of any hope to quell the potentially insulting look. And yet the knowledge, the certainty that this is a dream is calm and quiet beneath it all, strangely insidious; he won't accept the unreality willingly, but to take the opposite route entirely would be to think Sephiroth insane - or at least incredibly unsettled from whatever stressful undertaking he'd been about, last.

Which leaves him in a weird and terribly uncomfortable balancing act between doubting himself and doubting the object of his unchecked admiration.

"But you're not-" (real) "-dreaming. Y-You can't be. I can't be."

(...am I?)

His slowing gait comes to a halt, entirely, and Cloud looks down at himself, at his hands. He feels solid, alive, still - but he can't make that awareness coalesce with the sudden obviousness of the truth. The white steals away more of the landscape, taking back the sky and the shapes of sharply carved mountaintops in the distance, blanking over details as unconscious concentration becomes an effort and begins to fail him.

It is true that Sephiroth has been unsettled lately, due to both stress and overwork, but he isn't insane, though these dreams do make him doubt himself sometimes. Yet at other times they speak so clearly, and they make sense, touching directly on his worries about Shinra, his idea of leaving the company. The fact that they're so to the point could mean that they're simply pointed messages from his subconscious, but the people themselves feel decidedly real.

He doesn't blame Cloud for his disbelief. He has found it hard to believe himself, and still does, when he's awake and it's all so much farther away. He stops as Cloud stops, watching the landscape change. His doubts aside, there is one thing he's sure of: "I am myself, yes, as unlikely as that may sound."

What is it about this person? The two of them seem to have something to do with each other, although he doesn't know Cloud, and he, logically speaking, has no reason to.

The white eats away at everything, until there's no scenery left at all, no solid ground, although the invisible plane on which they stand doesn't shift beneath them. But that nothingness never touches Sephiroth, even when Cloud himself feels as if he might disappear. (As if he might just like to, in the face of this impossible revelation.) And that is confirmation nearly as clear as the general's word.

"Then- This is really happening?"

Unlikely is being entirely too kind to the situation at hand. Just as much, Cloud would rather know what could possibly have brought someone like Sephiroth into his (mind) presence. Of all people, a lowly cadet - and his dreams?

"It doesn't make sense."

"This isn't real." He looks at the landscape surrounding them, or the lack of landscape now, as it fades into whiteness around them, then back to Cloud. "This place. But we are. Our thoughts and awareness."

Not that he can always remember dreams, even these strange dreams that seem to belong to others, clearly, but perhaps this is the first time he's admitted it, in any setting, sleeping or waking, that what he hears here in this dream world, the people he talks to, might be real.

He's still reluctant to accept it entirely, but he has to admit that there's something to it, whatever that might be. "I confess, it doesn't." He has a great dislike for things that seem unlikely or irrational, which is why he's been telling himself it could be the stress, wearing on him. Yet he can't deny that he, himself, is here. He knows himself that well.

"I haven't been able to determine why it's been happening. It began after Modeoheim." He's not one for such open reflection with infantrymen ordinarily, but in this case, he's thinking aloud, while asleep, so it's acceptable enough. "Not very long."

Given the nature of things, here, he may actually be losing a good few inches of height just to the feeling of being suddenly so incredibly small. He won't believe it once he wakes, of course, no matter how real the memory may feel, the denial will be infinitely more vehement. But, for now, there's no escaping the utterly terrifying notion of someone he reveres so completely being able to effectively read his mind.

It's undeniable, now. He's definitely shrunk a noticeable measure in Sephiroth's presence.

Modeoheim reminds him where he's supposed to be, though - and the white is replaced with the faint afterimage of Junon, instead. That's right. Modeoheim is over, in the real world. Come and gone.

"Has it- ...Is it supposed to feel like I'm losing my mind?" He shakes his head, not meaning to speak the words but hearing them anyway, and he feels the brief, white flash of horror come from the inside, this time. "N-No, that is- I didn't mean..."

Sephiroth stills, studying him for a moment. The general, never considered a big talker, is known for his reflective pauses, and some dread them, as it's very hard to tell what he's thinking while looking someone over thoughtfully, and he is undeniably intimidating.

Sometimes, he doesn't say anything, and people are left forever wondering what he was thinking about, but this isn't one of those times. He notices Cloud diminishing in size, and that's not an effect he wishes to achieve. Someone else might say something hearty to bolster him, but heartiness, though it may be in Sephiroth's vocabulary, is not in his repertoire.

"I don't believe it's supposed to feel any particular way," he says finally, with what, for him, counts as a reassuring smile, small and cold as it is. Genesis and Angeal had lost their minds, or as far as he can tell, that's why they acted as they did. But that's not what Cloud means, he knows that. He knows Cloud isn't implying anything about him. "But it is unusual and disorienting, so it's understandable that you might feel that way." He wonders, could Cloud really fade away to nothing in this dream? He's so different than the older man Sephiroth has spoken to.

"When I said you could speak freely, I meant it. It's likely I won't believe this was real, when I awaken." For him, it's his icy logic and his desire to avoid anything that might mean he's unstable that makes him convince himself of the dreams' falsity in his waking hours. Though lately, they've grown more difficult to reason away.

It's perhaps a good thing Sephiroth isn't the boisterously encouraging type, anyway; Cloud most likely wouldn't be able to handle that kind of shock to the system, after such a distressingly long pause. (In which he does not regain any of his height, but somehow blessedly doesn't appear to lose much more of it, either.)

As it is, he still probably isn't exactly handling this whole mess with anything so much as approaching aplomb, but maybe he hasn't embarrassed himself too fatally, if his hero is not yet writing him off as a hopeless case, is - smiling? Kind of. Maybe. But he probably just imagined that.

Wishful thinking can't account for the fact that that's an oddly generous response, no matter how his insecurities eat away at him throughout, though, and Cloud finds himself nodding shallowly, in spite of himself.

(I don't think I wanna believe this is happening, right now...)

"Thank you. Sir." Speaking freely isn't one of his strong points - but then, talking idly at all is something he tends to avoid wherever possible. If he knew the phrase "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to speak out and remove all doubt," he'd most heartily agree to the sentiment behind it. "I'm- Sorry for the trouble."

If there's one thing no one need ever fear from Sephiroth, it's boisterous encouragement. There are much worse things to fear, where Sephiroth is concerned, but he doesn't mean to do any harm at present.

It's possible that it's the older, harsher Cloud that interested Sephiroth initially, but he doesn't mention it, far too circumspect for that. How would he bring it up? Say he's dreamed of him before? That sounds--ridiculous. A little like Cloud himself, the general isn't the greatest conversationalist. Though unsurprisingly, no one criticizes him for that, and his enigmatic, imposing air goes a long way toward rendering the trait unnoticeable.

"It's no trouble. It's none of your doing. Something has brought our subconscious minds together, that's all." He doesn't often have the chance to speak freely himself, though he's limited in very different ways. "I'm simply asleep and dreaming, which I would be in any case." He might not want Cloud to shrink any further, but he doesn't see any reason not to mention the situation.

"It is a curious phenomenon, but I don't believe there's any harm in it." Not that he's seen so far. It's only odd. He hasn't had dreams this vivid since he was young.

He turns toward the summit again. "Let's go on together."

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oo1 ❄ I've seen this somewhere before

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