Cloud was having a bad day, which was quite an accomplishment considering he wasn't even awake yet. It seemed that whenever he managed to dig himself out of the dark broody pit that was his past the Planet just had to hit him with something to send him tumbling all the way back down. "What do you mean adopted?"

Aerith giggled "You said that three times in a row."

Zack sighed, "Since you're still stuck on that, and not the, like three, other earth shattering revelations, Spikey, I assume you didn't actually hear anything but 'Guess what I found out, Cloud! You were adopted!'" Zack said in a passable imitation of Aerith. "Which I admit," He continued in his normal voice, "isn't the best way to start a conversation about saving the Planet again, but at least she didn't say..."

"Zack, if the next words out of your mouth," Cloud interrupted, "Are any variation of 'You're not who you think you are' I'm going to punch you in the nose and then pinch myself until I wake up."

"Ah man, you're no fun sometimes Cloudy..." Zack pouted.

Cloud pinched the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stave off the impending headache, "What was that about saving the planet... again?" Cloud sighed, "You'd think that after Omega Weapon the Planet wouldn't have anything left to throw at us... And what does being adopted have to do with saving the world anyway?"

"Well... Two thousand years ago, Yggdrasil the World Tree was corrupted by Jenova, turning it into a horrible monster with ten tails."

"A tree with ten tails?" Cloud interrupted, "That's the most ridiculous thing I've heard in years..."

"Please Cloud, this is important. The monster was so powerful that the strongest Cetra alive at the time couldn't destroy it. Instead he sealed the beast inside of himself and then used its own power to seal the majority of the continent it was on away, along with the thousands of Cetra that lived there, to prevent Jenova's Taint from spreading to the rest of the world, through Yggdrasil's severed roots."

"Wait this guy sealed a continent away? How does that even work?"

"I don't know the exact mechanics of his spells, but I do know that there were at least four separate barriers surrounding it, one to keep people out, one to keep people in, and one to hide it in time and space. The last one separated the already tainted Lifestream of the Hidden continent from poisoning the rest of the Lifestream."

"So, what's the problem, this guy sealed it all away right?"

"There's the problem Chocobo-head, that last barrier ain't holding up so well anymore. I don't think anyone's been doing maintenance on it for 1,500 years. The thing's leaking like a sieve."

"Zack's right, corrupted Mako is spilling into the Lifestream off of the coast of Wutai. Cloud... it's bad... really bad. Sephiroth could easily be reborn three times over from the amount of corruption present in the fourth continent's Lifestream."

Cloud began to massage his temples. "Alright I can see the problem, But I still don't see what this has to do with me being adopted."

"Well... you... kind of... were born there?"

"Why didn't I see that coming..." Cloud moaned with his face in his hands. "What does that make me? Some kind of Jenova monster?"

"Don't be silly Cloud, you're as human as I am." Aerith reassured him.

"Technically, Aerith, you're twice as human as he his..." Zack said with teasing smile.

"You're not helping, Zack." Aerith sighed as Cloud paled.

"What. The. Fuck. Zack." Cloud growled through grit teeth. "What the absolute fuck does that mean?"

"Well, you know how Aerith is half human, half Cetra right?" Zack asked with an easy-going smile, when Cloud gave a hesitant nod he continued, "As far as we can tell you're one quarter human and three quarters Cetra."

"H-h-how?"

"Well when a half Cetra daddy loves a Cetra mommy..." Zack began, before Aerith cut him off.

"Your father was probably my mother's half-brother." She said slowly, to give Cloud time to ask the question she knew he was going to.

"We're cousins?" Cloud asked, "Wait, you said our parents were half siblings... how did that happen?"

"When Shin-Ra began hunting for the last of the Cetra he tried to take his family to the Hidden continent, believing it to be the Cetra promised land from myth." Aerith answered. "He managed to get his son, through the barrier, but Shin-Ra attacked before he could open the barrier again for his wife." She smiled sadly, "They were separated in the attack. She believed he was dead and by the time he found her she had remarried, and had your aunt, the woman who raised you. Eventually he met my grandmother and had my mother."

"What about my parents, what happened to them? How did I end up here if I was born on this hidden continent?"

"I don't have the full story but I do have a name. Go to Wutai, and look for a man named Jiraiya of Myoboku."

"Hey Cloud," Zack said, uncharacteristically serious, as the blinding white of the dream world started to fade, "Before you go there's something for you where I died. Make sure you keep it with you all the time for me, okay?"

XxXxX

Cloud woke with a gasp to dim light streaming through the bedroom window's curtains, and Tifa's head buried in his shoulder.

"Something wrong Cloud?" Tifa murmured. Apparently his abrupt waking had disturbed her sleep.

"Nothing that can't wait." He replied pulling Tifa a little closer. "Go back to sleep. We can deal with the Ghost Brigade when its actually morning."

xXxXx

"I won't let you kill anyone else!" Uchiha Sasuke, twenty-five year old Rokudaime Hokage of Konohagakure no Sato, stood between his fallen teammates and the Snake Sannin Orochimaru, while around him Konoha burned. Forcing himself to ignore his wounded side, Sasuke took a defensive stance, his katana held sideways between himself and Orochimaru.

"Ku ku ku, little Sasuke-kun thinks he can stop me? I've razed Konoha before and this time I won't leave anyone alive to rebuild this thrice damned place." Orochimaru punctuated his statement by licking Sai's blood off of his sword, the Kusanagi no Tsurugi.

Sasuke resisted the urge to turn around and check on his teammates. The last time he let his attention wander during the fight, when Orochimaru had hit him with a ridiculous 'the sky is falling' genjutsu and he was momentarily stunned by the absurdity of such a thing, he was nearly bisected by Orochimaru's damnable sword.

Not that he needed to look anyway, Sai's ragged breathing had already stopped, and Hinata's breath came in short shuddering gasps, she would be lucky to bleed out before the Kusanagi's poison killed her.

"Aren't you going to say something, Sasuke-kun?" Orochimaru hissed, "No vows of vengeance for the theft of your brother's eyes? Or the death of that old goat, Sarutobi?" Orochimaru's coal black eyes, so different from the slitted gold Sasuke remembered from their last battle, turned blood red with three black tomoe lazily circling a contracted pupil, mirroring Sasuke's own. "Or... how about the loss of your wife, hmm?"

Ignoring the thrumming in his ears, Sasuke ground out, "There is nothing I want to say to you, you old monster." Sasuke's eyes morphed into a crimson six pointed star, "Except goodbye! Susa..."

Orochimaru slashed through Sasuke's partially completed Susano'o and into his uninjured side before he could finish his technique. "Ah, ah ah!" Orochimaru wagged a finger in Sasuke's face, "Show me your original Jutsu first. How can I collect all the Jutsu in the world if I send you to your grave before I steal them?" Orochimaru pointed the tip of Kusanagi under Sasuke's chin, "Use them."

The thrumming in Sasuke's ears increased in pitch and volume until he felt he would get lost in the noise, "Never."

Orochimaru's theatrical sigh was almost entirely lost in the rising wind."Ah well... I was so looking forward to killing you with your own jutsu..." By the end of his sentence Orochimaru was all but shouting to be heard over the strange noise and suddenly strong wind.

Sasuke barely had time to realize that Orochimaru could hear the strange thrumming noise too, before he sensed something hurtling down at them.

Sasuke and Orochimaru leapt away from each other as a dark shape crashed into the spot they had been standing moments before.

"Who dares interfere?" The Snake Sannin hissed at the man who had landed between them.

Sasuke stared at the stranger in shock, as he rose from the shallow crater his landing created. How could Orochimaru not recognize the man in front of them? Sure the man's clothing was incredibly strange, consisting of loose, baggy pants over leather boots, under what looked like half a skirt, or maybe an apron, on his left side. A partially unzipped, sleeveless high collared sweater covered his chest, with single pauldron over the left shoulder that had a loose sleeve made out of the same material as his half skirt hanging from it. All of it was black, in fact the only color to be found in the stranger's ensemble was the silver wolf's head on the pauldron and the four silver buckles on the multiple belts holding it all together.

But all that was inconsequential to the man's most striking features, messy bright blond hair spiked up in a dozen different directions and eyes as blue as the sky. Any Konoha-nin could tell you what that meant.

"Yondaime-sama?"