I don't own FFVII. This isn't the least bit happy or fluffy. Those of you expecting or hoping for that, I apologize. Thanks for reading.

The kids were gone; it was a Tuesday. Usually the bar wasn't empty on a Tuesday afternoon. Cloud paused in the doorway, thinking; there was something he was supposed to remember. Last week, though he could barely move, Denzel had a doctor's appointment with some non-WRO specialist, and Marlene had a top-secret no-boys-allowed clubhouse meeting with the pigeon-toed, cross-eyed, gap-toothed girl down the street. Denzel was the exception to this one-rule group, but he pretended like he didn't know it, for fear of purple glitter and flashy tiaras and being stuffed in a frilly dress. Cloud sympathized, and Tifa smothered superficial snickers. It was the thought that counted. Moments like that were the closest thing to normalcy they had: a game of pretend that the past couldn't hurt you; and boys, crippled with pain, weren't shut in shared rooms most of the time; and little girls were able to prance through hallways with lace and plastic pearls; and there were enough kids still around and kicking to form a top-secret no-boys-allowed clubhouse. Give it a few months, and they couldn't be so picky.

Cloud shook his head in agreement? disagreement? He didn't know, but in a way the motion worked to clear his thoughts and return his focus to the problem: the doctor's appointment and the clubhouse meeting had been last week, or maybe the week before. He still didn't know what it was he was supposed to remember for today, right now. But it was important. He was sure of it.

It's what he thought, at least, and he thought he'd thought about it a lot already in the two or three minutes he'd been back, since he'd discovered there was something he forgot. But as he saw it, he didn't really have two or three minutes to spare to think about what it was he couldn't remember. His life was dominated by long lists of other things he had to think about, things he had to do.

There were, of course, the usual fragments: Fenrir (more speed, more power, more cargo space), deliveries (who, what, when, where—not so much why), family (it's still Tuesday. Maybe it wasn't an appointment today. Maybe Denzel got dragged outside by Marlene? Maybe one of them was taking a shower? Maybe they left?...he wondered). He thought about coming home on the occasional early evenings, and the clank of the spoon on the pot of stew as someone stirred it to keep the dish from juggling the lid and boiling over. He thought about her hands, a contradiction of tough and smooth, and the way he focused on them when she had her back to him when he walked in the room or couldn't meet her eyes. He thought about the empty couch when he arrived home and the empty bed when he was away.

He thought about other things, too.

Injections, sword polish, monsters on the road to Junon, monsters on the road to Kalm, monuments to the dead in the middle of the city, a happy family portrait that had come out all wrong, and solitary field trips to unmarked graves in the middle of nowhere. An empty, abandoned church.

Easy thoughts to get lost in on an empty Tuesday afternoon.

And because it was a Tuesday (with Marlene at her meeting and Denzel at an appointment and Tifa with Denzel or something like that or like it not at all), Seventh Heaven was dead, and the quiet stillness afforded him this moment's reflection upon those lists of things that he knew.

As for the things he didn't, that was what the books were for, tucked inside a brown paper sack with an S stamped on the front, followed by a heavy black mark then the word Emporium, as if a sellout had already cost too much to alter the name completely, or the bags had been left behind and it seemed a shame to let something still in working order go to waste.

He'd run across the shop on a trip to Junon, delivering a crate of ginger root from Wutai and picking up a case of local spirits for Tifa. The nameless shop with a serrated silver S and a heavy black dash on the window had been right next door, and as soon the scent of dust and moth-eaten pages had registered with him, it'd been so easy to ask about their stock of medicinal texts. The shopkeeper, an equally dusty and moth-eaten old man, had pulled three leather-bound books from even dustier shelves and suggested an exorbitant price to start the negotiations over tea. But Cloud had been in no mood to haggle, and he'd forked over the gil without a word or a smile, at which the shopkeeper entered into a bout with his recurring phlegmatic cough and thrown them in the complimentary paper bag. A bonus. A remembrance. A remnant. Free for the young man's equally rich and reckless friends.

Now cradling his purchase under his arms, Cloud trekked upstairs, pulling the books out of the brown paper bag marked with an S, only when he was safely within the confines of his office. The first was an old, cracked tome—something worth a delivery of produce from Edge to Kalm—The Salus Medical Manual and Encyclopaedia, Revised Seventh Edition.

It was a hefty book—well over a thousand pages—but with the kids gone, he had the perfect opportunity to do a little research. He set it on the edge of his desk and reached into the bag again, retrieving another. Something about the ancient Wutain healing arts, but at the sketches of needles sticking out all over a recumbent man's body, he promptly shut the book and tossed it on the floor, where it slid under his office bed. He didn't worry about anybody finding it. Tifa usually left the office alone, unless she was searching for a receipt or penning an order, and cleaning days, though now few and far between, were Thursdays. He still had time to pick it up if he didn't want Tifa to find out what he was doing.

He didn't.

He opened Salus' Manual, skipping over the introduction of who Salus was and why he or she had a manual, and flipped to the index. He scanned the list—not for Geostigma, as it was a relatively new and unknown disease—but for something about black death or pus or some other telltale sign, but he found nothing other than a long list of incomprehensible and unpronounceable names. He'd have to start at the beginning of the thousand-page book.

But when he opened to the first chapter, there were words and more words in small type about things that didn't matter to him. Things like cancer and strokes and heart attacks.

He swept the pages back to the front of the book, to the table of contents, and skimmed the list. There was a chapter entitled Disease Prevention and Control, so he hurriedly thumbed to page number eight-forty.

The first section talked about basic hygiene, the importance of eating well, stress and the causes of disease, and the benefits of a good home life. Maybe to Salus those were fine and dandy reasons for disease, and maybe they would've worked in this case as Geostigma had infected a lot of orphans and street kids. But there had been homeless, crying, poor people since the beginning of time. Surely dropping the plate and cutting ties to mako hadn't triggered a disease that attacked a troubled past, shitty diet, and a hopeless demeanor. That would be pretty damn stupid of it.

He sat at his desk, tapping the corner of the page unceremoniously with his fingers, and the words blurred before him, as he recalled the morning's routine. A stilted family breakfast they still playacted their way through—though not so well, at least according to Marlene. If Denzel noticed, he didn't say anything, although that might have been a good thing if it kept him from remembering the past. How different his life must have been with his real family, versus the poor substitute hodgepodge of misfit heroes and orphans he had now.

Cloud scoffed. Tifa had all the makings of a good mother (granted, the only real example he had of one was his own, now dead), but he must have been assuming the role of devoted father real well. The kind that came home to welcoming arms everyday because he'd done something worthwhile from nine to five.

Father/Man: (Honey, I'm home.)

—I want to drink alone.—

Woman: (Oh, there you are! The kids and I have missed you so much!)

—Go drink in your room!—

Man: (I've missed you, too.)

—You can't bring back lost lives.—

Woman: (I love you.)

—We're not enough?—

The scene was an unfinished black and white, though it faded to silver screen silence when he turned another page. He didn't have time to waste on silly imaginings like that. There were deliveries to make, books to peruse, kids to save. It was the only chance he had in making something right, especially since he hadn't gotten the job done the first time.

He wondered.

Maybe that was what Tifa had been after. Maybe that was what he wasn't supposed to forget. But the last time that he'd been a hero had blinded him so much in mako haze and blood and adrenaline. And he'd gotten the perfect happy ending and maybe the perfect romance for all he knew, but fuck—there were people still dead. And they'd saved him and he hadn't done anything for them.

And now he was supposed to be okay because tomorrow he would wake up again to another happy greenless morning like he'd done today and yesterday and the day before that and everything would be the same. How many had it even been now? Thirty minus—

Wait...

—A year and a half, or two years times three-sixty-five, but did it even matter? Did he even care? Not really. He'd always sucked at math. But the number was still there, looming, and it would keep getting bigger like the dosages of those injections and cocktails they used to pump him full with until he didn't know who he was and he was nothing but a fucking fake, and there were still—forever—always two people dead. And he remembered when the WRO tried to conduct its first census after the crisis and Tifa had asked him a question about Barret and if they should include him or not, he walked out of the room because all he could think of was the number two and he didn't have a clue how many people were in his family or if they were a family. And he walked to his bike and he rode it until he came to a cliff overlooking the crumbling city and simply stood there, thinking about all the numbers and stuff like two pairs of dead eyes and one that sometimes looked almost red.

When he finally came back, he knew Tifa wanted an answer for all these numbers (though didn't she have one? She wore a ribbon, too) and for him to think of the family. But what number was that? Did he count Barret or not? All of AVALANCHE? Aerith and Zack? Did he count himself?

Maybe that was the reason he couldn't confess to her that he'd wasted precious gil on a few old dusty books. How was he to explain his actions if he didn't even know where he fit: living or dead, with a family or alone.

He felt stuck between past and present like that lingering steel-sharp S leftover from long ago, and like that S, he knew something was still there. Something was...inside him, brewing or boiling or exploding. Would it die with him? or with the kid? dammit, would it die with the kid, too!—the kid who had done nothing wrong except be born in the wrong city, wrong year, wrong life?

He just didn't know.

He clawed his fingers through his hair and sank his head atop another page in the textbook, and when what he saw registered with him, he felt his hopes plummet at the reality glossed over by 3x5 pictures and academic text. The black ink almost seemed derived from the necrosis and seepage oozing off the page along with all the other medical bullshit spouted by someone who knew nothing of what it felt like to die, hadn't killed anything more than a pig yellow and bloated on formaldehyde, and then, saw it purely scientifically. Labels, names, and needles in all the right places. It was a kind of conscientious clinical crap that stemmed from removing themselves from the situation to heal it but...(Here he paused. Did that work? he wondered, before recalling the subtitle 'Quarantine' on page 932. Maybe it did)...fuck.

Licking his finger, he flipped to that section. The small font blended together. I's became e's (even after c's) and if there was a cure on this page, he had no idea where to find it. What would a cure look like? Maybe someone with a doctorate in medicine could've pieced the answer together; maybe there was an injection or an amino acid (page 433, paragraph 6) that would do the trick.

But how was he to find it?

There were things he couldn't understand, no matter how fast he drove, or how far he went, or whom he saw or what he read. His mind was an anfractuous tangle. He pulled the thread of one memory, and a piece of his soul that had been haphazardly stitched on, fell out and away. The frantic maneuvers to get it back in place left his fingers ensnared in sutures, slipknots, and nooses. He couldn't get free. Someone would have to cut him out, but how to do that, when a snip here could easily rend away the rest of his soul or maybe even gut him? What would happen to him? Where would he go?

He didn't know why they all depended on him, or why Tifa had wanted him around a long time ago, or what she saw in him, or if she still saw anything at all. He didn't know how to be a father, or what to do when Marlene asked him to read her and Denzel a story. He didn't know what Geostigma was or how to save his kid. He didn't know how to fight this. He didn't know how to heal the past, or bring back lost lives, or even be forgiven. He didn't know how he could save people he didn't deserve.

He didn't want to know the look on Tifa's face when he failed.

Maybe then they'd lay him out on a steel plate, his heart hanging hollowly in an empty cadaver, so much like that black and white photograph on page ninety-six with a man cut open on a table to show his still heart. Silent life. A shiny surgical instrument was the only part of the picture to stand out from the gloss of the page as he started scanning the next. Would that heart still beat for those here, echoing throughout time in a slow, useless promise? Three pairs of eyes begged him to say yes—two young and trusting, and one deep, fathomless pair he couldn't look at, much less meet in assurance of something he didn't know. What was love when they hurt? For all the crock about it and feelings and all the nights he'd spent with her and he'd been so happy to hold and be held—where had it left him but alone for most of his life, mako'ed out of his fucking mind, stabbed and beaten and sick? He saw the way she wrung furious dry hands on the towel when he walked into the kitchen for something as simple as a glass of water. For all she'd been through, she'd never done that before, buying a little time instead of confronting him immediately or saying hello. She was confused and hurting, Denzel was dying, he didn't even know where Marlene was today, and there were two more he'd already lost.

And loved; he had loved them all in some shape or form. Did the two—love and pain—go hand in hand on some sick carousel? Had he unknowingly purchased a fatal ticket by loving them, by waiting in line to be loved? He considered that they might have hurt less if they hadn't loved him. Perhaps the way to peace and enlightenment came from sitting alone in a holy place: a bridgeless mountain or a broken church, seeing nothing, feeling nothing; being nothing.

(Quarantined.)

But what did he know?

He didn't—and he probably never would. Maybe it was supposed to be that way. Maybe it wouldn't do him any good to think about it anymore. Maybe all he had were the simple, stupid, meaningless things he knew.

Like how the kids were gone. It was a Tuesday.