THIS STORY WILL HAVE VERY VERY VERY MATURE THEMES I WARN YOU BEFORE HAND...

Hope you all like the fic!!

Chapter 1

The sky wasn't as bright as it should have been… the screams, jeers, the cheers… all drowned out as my mind faded to a happier time. A time when my life wasn't filled with pain, despair… betrayal… I could smell the air… thick and heavy. It was summer… I think either that or fall… the rain season had come and gone many days ago. I closed my eyes and the sounds faded… my memories… the cries… the screams… the pain… Zack… Tifa…

I wanted to cry… I wanted to save my mother… I wanted to be strong enough to help her… she didn't deserve to die. My friends… Zack, Tifa, Aeris, they were all gone…

Many years ago when I was a teen… the raiders came. They ransacked the small village I lived in. My small town, tucked away at the base of a mountain. It was so long ago… I remembered playing in the fields with Zack and Tifa while Aeris commented on how dirty we would get.

Aeris… she was always so perky and kind. She was the one girl that could plant anything and have it grow for her. I remember one harvest season, the entire village was on hard times. Aeris convinced me and Tifa to help her plant forty rows of tomatoes and forty rows of roses. I refused at first but she got Zack to bully me into doing it. We spent nearly an entire week preparing the ground, planting and caring for the crops and after it was all said and done, somehow… without the rain from the skies… the roses began to sprout and bud. A few weeks later the tomatoes all grew large and full.

She saved our village practically from starvation, but Aeris simply kept her modesty and stated that the gods had simply shined on her that day. I was just turning twelve that year. Aeris was midway through her teens at that time, just like Zack…. Zack.

Zack was my big brother figure… I was the only child that never fit in. I never did anything well like a normal kid could. I couldn't hunt, fish or plant crops, good enough to help the elders in our village. The other kids always taunted me for that. In all of our small village me and my mother were the poorest because without a true male, we had to depend on handouts from Zack's, Aeri's or Tifa's families for our nightly meals. We were always in debt to one family or another and without a way of repaying a meal me and my mom were in a tight spot.

I remember when I turned 13 how Zack forced me up from my bed in the middle of the night and made me learn how to wield a wooden sword. I hated him for it at first but over time it became something that connected us. Zack was the hero of the village if there ever was one. His father had passed while hunting a beast of the wilds and Zack had taken up his spot as the main hunter for his home while his mother and sisters tended to the small farm land they owned.

No matter how bleak I thought his existence, Zack never once doubted himself or the task before him. He was always confident and positive. Every situation had a happy outcome he used to say… now I realize that's only true if one is willing to do what ever it takes. As he had done…

Tifa… she was the girl whom I loved… the girl of my dreams. We met before either of us had a first birthday. She was a few months older than me and had always used that as an excuse to act like a big sister to me. She was beautiful to me even at age five up to the last time I saw her in my village before the raiders came… Tifa was bold, beautiful, elegant, smart and sophisticated in ever way. She always knew what to do even in the worst situations. She had a way about her that made anyone around her gravitate and listen to her ideas and beliefs. She was an extraordinary woman indeed. My mom always doted on how cute she was and I guess she wanted me and Tifa to get together and get married because she always saw us together… and knew I loved her.

Tifa was my angel sent by the gods to guide me. I remember it exactly as though it happened yesterday. The day before the raiders came, it was Tifa's 17th birthday… I remember getting her away from the other kids somehow and confessing my love to her. At first she said nothing and turned away from me. My heart held tight and for a moment my world fell all around me but then she turned and launched herself into my arms. We made love several times that night. I had never thought that the greatest night in my entire life would precede the most life-shattering one.

Tifa was everything to me and in one day I lost her. Years passed and the pain continued to compound itself upon daily. Five years from that moment and still the memory is as painful as when it first happened.

The raiders came the next night and killed so many. Few escaped their wrath while others like myself were captured and sold as slaves. I was once free to enjoy sunny days like this one but being caught in the snare of oppression changed the way you saw the world. The hell that I've gone through, the things I've been forced to do. It all begins chipping away at one's will to live to the point that the value of life leaves you. You no longer care if you live or die. You no longer bat an eye at another slave being thrashed and throttled into submission or beaten due to disobedience. You simply become colder or you crack and become weak…

At one point I wanted to be weak, but then anger rose deep inside me… The anger of such injustice… of betrayal… but slaves have no where to focus such feelings. That anger began a year ago… it ate at my insides as I continued to be beaten for disobedience despite being a slave for years. My former master thought to punish me in a different way… he thought that by selling me as a lamb to the slaughter that I would be killed… but he was wrong.

"DIE YOU LITTLE SHIT!!!" At those words my memories began to fade back to the depths of my mind. The happier days vanished and my hell was returned. I opened my eyes and gazed ahead as the tall, skinny but muscular man roared as he rushed me. The sky still wasn't bright as it should have been. The crowd's roaring was deafening but not crippling, not to me… for nearly a year I've stepped in this hell and just as the many times before… I'll be the only one to step from this place.

I leveled my large sword which I called the First Tsurugi, but the crowd and my new master called the Buster Blade for what was about to happen next. My opponent was named Gragor. He was revered in some remote corner of the world but here to these hundreds of thousands in the crowd I was a god… a god of death. Maybe I would have felt sympathy for him many years ago, years ago maybe I would have shed tears for what I knew to be his fate… but my heart had blackened and my soul long since gone… all that was left was darkness.

He came within my attack area and almost instantly I was behind him my large sword coated in blood. I walked several paces ahead and looked into the sky. The same sky that at one point I smiled and laughed under, but at this moment I simply closed my eyes, dropped my blade as Gragor's body dropped to the ground in two separate pieces. I lifted my hands to the sky and the crowd began chanting the name my new master had given me to use to fight in the coliseum.

"FENRIR…. FENRIR…. FENRIR!!!!" I inhaled deeply as the smell of blood and death surrounded me and their chants continued. My real name is the only thing that I swore I wouldn't lose to this hell. It was that last thing I had that my mother gave me… the crowd could scream 'Fenrir' all they wanted, but I knew my name to be Cloud Aurelius Strife.

SO WHAT YOU THINK? R&R and be on the look out for several other fics of mine to be continued and finished along with another couple to be released staring Lightning and Cloud