The first thing Cloud noticed, still somewhere between sleeping and full consciousness, was that his mouth tasted like butt.

The sensation was so gross and so overpowering he bullied his eyes open, hazily focusing on a blurry shape that was probably a person, and told them so. This was the single most important sentence he had ever had to say, and now that it was said, his eyes closed again and he sagged boneless into whatever surface he was on, mission accomplished.

"Look who's awake!" came a delighted female voice. It was the kind of patronizing voice that accompanied congratulations when a baby managed to poop its diaper, or perhaps when a puppy managed to sit on command. It annoyed Cloud so much he opened his eyes again as well as his mouth, preparing to cuss them out—but he never quite made it.

There was a flurry of activity before him and Cloud blinked a few times, distracted, until it all started to make some sense. His hearing improved too; previously it had felt like his ears were stuffed with cotton, but now he could hear the clacking of heels a short distance away, the soft whirring of machines, the rustle of sheets as he moved…

"Cloud!"

"Ohhh no," Cloud mumbled, screwing his eyes shut as soon as big, watery brown eyes came into his field of vision. Tifa was hugging him, and he was in bed, but not his bed.

He was in the hospital.

The nurse that had witnessed his less-than-graceful awakening was fiddling with an IV in Cloud's right arm, but he paid her no mind. Tifa cupped his cheek and made him look at her.

"You look like shit, Tifa," Cloud said blankly, pupils blown wide with the effects of painkillers and traces of the anesthesia he'd been under that morning.

Tifa didn't even frown, bless her; she was more than aware of Cloud's often brutal honesty when under the influence of just about anything. Her hair, uncharacteristically greasy, was tied back in a messy ponytail and she was wearing one of her old Midgar U sweatshirts. There were bags under her eyes and she wasn't wearing any makeup. Gaia damn it, but he was in the hospital.

"What happened?" he asked her.

Tifa's eyes strayed from his and trailed down his body to his left leg. Cloud glanced down and winced.

"You got hit by a car," Tifa answered, squeezing his hand. Her fingers were warm and firm and Cloud hadn't even realized he was trembling until now. He squeezed back. Cloud eyed his leg, swaddled in ugly cream-colored bandages, and sighed.

"On Fenrir?"

"Yup."

"How is he?"

"…Not that good," Tifa answered evasively, glancing away from him.

"No," Cloud repeated with a groan, his head digging back into the cheap hospital pillow.

Four days. For four days he'd been unconscious, hooked up to various machines like a vegetable. A doctor came in and filled him in on all that happened. He'd been struck by a driver who blew through a red light—the whole thing was apparently filmed by a security camera from some bank at the intersection where he'd been hit.

Cloud had been thrown from his motorcycle and flew through the air at least twenty feet, landing on the hot pavement and skidding for another fifteen, coming to rest in the gutter.

"Good thing you wore that helmet," the doctor tried to joke, but Cloud didn't crack a smile.

He'd suffered basically a broken everything in his left leg; they'd had to perform surgery after he was airlifted to the hospital in a helicopter. Prospects seemed good, though—he might not ever be a dancer, but he'd be able to walk and run on it just fine. The rest of his body had some serious scrapes, some of which had required stitches, but all in all it could have been a lot worse. Magic users were extremely rare these days, but there'd been a witness at the scene who'd rushed out of a café and managed to hit him with a low-level Cure before he'd been packed up and shipped off by EMTs.

Cloud could just imagine dozens of self-absorbed hipsters drinking their twenty-Gil coffees looking up from their laptops in time to see him be thrown through the air. (It was all rather impressive, he liked to think, like something out of a movie. He deserved his own personal Oscar. In this town there was one of those on practically every block anyways.)

At any rate Tifa had been worried sick about him, and she didn't deserve that. She'd taken a few days off from her bar to wait almost constantly at the hospital. He didn't have any remaining family or a spouse—like a lot of people who came to this city, he supposed—but Tifa was his emergency contact on all important forms anywhere so she'd been more or less allowed to see him.

After a week, when Cloud was sick to death of the smell of antiseptic, the dude on the other side of his room who had broken his leg jumping off the balcony of his second-floor apartment while drunk, and the nurse with the terrible voice, he was discharged. They gave him a wheelchair, the promise of crutches in a few weeks if he took it easy, and a giraffe sticker because he had insisted.

He never recovered any memory of the accident, or even that day. He fuzzily remembered the dinner he'd had the night before, but after that nothing; he just woke up in the hospital. It was probably for the best, to be honest.

Tifa took him home, waved off Cloud's repeated apologies for all the trouble he'd caused her, and even managed to wheelchair-proof his house (kicking all the stuff that he wouldn't be able to squeeze by into the closet by the bathroom) before leaving.

"If you need anything," she told him, squeezing both his hands in hers and staring earnestly into his eyes, "You just need to call me."

"I know, Teef. Thanks a lot."

"I was so damn worried, Cloud." She punched his shoulder, and it was a great deal harder than it needed to be.

"…I know. I'm sorry."

They hugged for a long moment, clinging to the only other person they had in this big, scary city. He then kissed her cheek and she was gone, giving him a last worried glance before shutting the door to his apartment behind her.

There was a message from his boss, Cid, on the answering machine saying he could take off as much time as he needed to recover, and then a few choice curse words and a demand to never make him worry like that again. There was food in his fridge, easily microwaveable stuff that he didn't need to use the stove for, which he couldn't easily reach—Tifa's doing, most likely. There was even a shiny bottle of painkillers in his coat pocket which he took a few of a few hours after returning home while he sat, grumpy and irritated, on his couch.

As it turned out, Cloud didn't take very well to being confined in a wheelchair. He was an active dude, always had been—he worked two jobs and went jogging and was thinking about getting a dog one of these days; he was thinking a Husky. He wasn't the type to watch daily soaps and lie on his bed with his foot propped up on pillows day after day on his laptop, reading news articles and motorcycle reviews because he was too exhausted to even watch porn.

It was a miserable existence, and it only got worse.

A week and a half after going home from the hospital it came in the mail. He had been expecting it, honestly, but he couldn't stop the jump of fear and dread in his stomach as he opened the fat envelope from the hospital.

The bill was worse than he had even thought. He had insurance, the couple who hit him had insurance, but shit—being airlifted, all that surgery, the wheelchair—Cloud unfolded the paper, peered at the sum at the bottom, and let it flutter to the floor as he closed his eyes and dug his head into the back of his couch.

"Oh, no."

Hey hey hey, and welcome to the intro chapter of Correlation Isn't Always Causation, a fic written for Savvy27, who digs GenCloud. Happy Birthday, Savy! Updates will be quick, and I hope you like it. Reviews are, as always, awesome as pie. Thanks, and see you soon :) -Tobi