Chapter One

'People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… timey wimey… stuff.'

Cloud charged down the stairs when the walls began to rattle. He tried to draw his sword on the way down, but the very task of twisting the enormous Buster Sword around his body in such a narrow passage, while hurrying forwards, almost tripped him over. He jumped the last few steps and landed on the ground floor with the Buster up and ready in front of him.

Marlene and Tifa's eyes were comically wide with the shock of having Seventh Heaven almost collapse on top of them. Cloud jerked his head towards the staircase.

'Get her upstairs,' he said. Tifa barely paused to nod; she scooped Marlene up and ran. With the little girl out of harm's way, Cloud crept to the door. He opened it a few inches; just enough to view what was happening outside.

'Ifrit,' he muttered, hearing Tifa's footsteps as she came back downstairs to help. It wasn't quite an Ifrit, though: the usually humanoid face of the summoned monster had been replaced with something more pig-like, upturned snout snorting and grunting at the little people around its feet. Fire elementals though they were, he'd also never seen an Ifrit look so comfortable on with its entire body in flames.

'Big Ifrit,' Tifa noted simply, ducking under Cloud to peek at the monster through the gap. 'Ice materia?'

'Should work,' Cloud said, taking the materia she passed him and pocketing it. 'Let's go.'

They took a breath in unison, and then Cloud shoved the door open and they charged.

Most of the Edge's inhabitants were already hiding behind the sturdier buildings; the others were running for cover. It was a challenge just to get to the monster, weaving around the panicking people. One man grabbed Cloud's shoulder and screamed that he was going the wrong way, idiot! and even tried to tussle with him for a few moments before a fire spell hit the ground near them and he gave up to save himself.

Tifa reached the creature first, but came to a scrambling halt when she realized that any kicks or punches thrown at something completely on fire would only end in her getting burned. She frantically dug a materia from her pocket and hurled a bolt spell. It hit and the Ifrit jumped, startled that the tiny people had actually managed to hurt it. Just as it turned its attentions on Tifa – who immediately turned her attentions on running the hell away from the next fire spell – Cloud got close enough to hit it with the ice spell. The monster made a yelping sound as deep as a thunderclap and swung around to attack Cloud instead, who threw the ice materia right over its head and steadied the Buster Sword out in front of his body.

Tifa had to make a dive to catch the thrown materia, skidding on her bare knees and tearing the skin open. She set the ice spell off the moment she had it in her hands. At the same time, Cloud ran forwards and swung the enormous Buster Sword at the Ifrit's legs. He was less careful about the fire than Tifa: sprinting between the creature's legs to land a heavier blow on its knees landed him with burns all over his skin.

He managed not to yell in pain, and grabbed Tifa's arm as he continued to run, pulling her with him around the corner and behind a building just as a tidal wave of fire exploded across the street.

'I think we made it angry,' he said, fumbling with a restore materia. Tifa shoulder-barged a door open, grabbed his shirt and hauled him inside. He didn't manage to hold back the yelp of pain that time, as the cotton that had become welded to his skin was ripped away. He hadn't even noticed the Ifrit coming around the corner, but he felt the heat of another fiery attack against his burned cheek before Tifa slammed the door closed.

'Give me that,' Tifa said, taking the restore materia from Cloud's blistered red and slightly shaky fingers and casting the cure spell. Cloud sighed and slumped against the wall as the worst of his burns were washed away.

'Your knees,' he said, indicating the blood dripping down Tifa's calves.

'Later,' she replied simply, because then the Ifrit's enormous clawed hand tore through the doorway and started pulling bricks apart like a child with a sandcastle. Tifa set an ice spell on it, and then marched forward as it stumbled back and cast another. Cloud took a bracing breath and hefted up the Buster Sword.

'What I wouldn't give for a white mage…'

He slipped out of the wrecked doorway and faced up to the creature. Tifa was advancing on it, casting one ice spell after another without giving it room to fight back. The fire on its body started to sputter. Its chest, where most of the spells were hitting, was accumulating a thin layer of frost.

Cloud came up past Tifa and started hacking at the creature's – now less fiery and therefore safely targetable – legs. The Ifrit let out howl after howl of pain and frustration, trying to simultaneously claw Cloud away from its ankles and avoid Tifa's materia attacks. It was stumbling; they had it down to its last legs – literally: it was hopping on one foot to avoid further hurting the mangled stump of the other – when Tifa cast a final ice spell with a shout of victory.

And nothing happened.

The materia made a weak fizzing sound and died. The Ifrit stumbled against a building and tried to get its balance as there was a sudden halt in the onslaught. Cloud and Tifa shared a slow look of horror just as the clouds seemed to break on the Ifrit's fate and sunlight shone on its chances of living long enough to destroy everything within sight.

Tifa, drained of magic, lobbed the materia back at Cloud and ran for her life as the furious Ifrit began to return her attacks. Stomping after the woman with a vengeance (wincing slightly with every other step), the Ifrit seemed to have forgotten that it was actually fighting two people. Cloud caught the materia and sent the biggest ice spell he could conjure straight at the monster's back.

It stopped in its tracks with a bellow and whipped around to face Cloud, who steadied the Buster Sword.

The Ifrit teetered for a moment, as though preparing to take a leap. Cloud glanced to his sides and really hoped he could run fast enough to avoid being crushed. Then the Ifrit's eyes rolled right up behind the lids, it teetered over backwards and it crashed to the ground.

Cloud remained in his fighting stance for just a few moments after the Ifrit's demise, as through petrified in place. When the ground finished shaking, he relaxed and swung the Buster Sword back up onto his back, where it clipped to its harness with a clunk.

'That was—Tifa?'

She was sprawled on the ground behind the Ifrit, face-down. Her legs were burned black. The lower end of her long, ponytailed hair was still on fire.

'Tifa! Tifa!'

He ran to her faster than he'd run for the whole of the fight with the Ifrit. Gently, he rolled her onto her back. Her mouth was hanging open slightly but her eyes were closed, as though she was frozen in the shout of pain he hadn't heard. He pressed two fingers to her throat.

'Tifa! Tifa, can you hear me? Tifa!'

Nothing. No pulse. For a moment, Cloud thought his pulse had stopped too. He rifled through his pockets, throwing out half a dozen potions and several ability materia before getting hold of a phoenix down. He tore the cork out of the bottle with his teeth and tipped the tiny red feather straight on to Tifa's face. It touched her cheek and she jerked upright and clutched Cloud's shoulders, somehow managing to gasp and scream at the same time.

After a moment, she slouched back.

'I—' (she hiccoughed), 'I hate doing that.'

'Dying?' Cloud said. 'I don't think it's anyone's favourite pastime.'

Tifa only hiccoughed in response. She looked around and noticed the fallen Ifrit, smiled with relief, pointed, opened her mouth to say something, and hiccoughed again.

She gave Cloud a thumbs-up.

'Remind me why the fuck I'm here again,' Cid muttered, stepping through the debris that had once been Midgar.

'Monsters,' Cloud said simply, and received a look of profound loathing. Noticing this, Tifa chose to take responsibility for the explanations.

'It was expected that mako leaks in Midgar might cause animal or human mutations,' she said. 'That's why Edge had to built so far away: to avoid the contamination area. But we've been seeing way bigger and way more monsters than we'd anticipated; almost more than we can handle. Last weekend we fought a mutated Ifrit, and it tore down half of the streets around Seventh Heaven. People think there might be something wrong with the reactors… none of them are running, obviously, but it could be something else. They were each built with a special lockdown mode in case something went wrong, and that's how they should be now. We locked them down when we started building Edge, but we think one of them's malfunctioning, so even more mako is leaking out than usual. Probably just an animal sat on the controls at Shinra HQ and they need to be set right again.'

'So,' Cid summarised, 'I'm here because lots of monsters.'

Tifa thought for a moment.

'Yes,' she said.

They continued to pick their way through the ruins of Midgar for a few more moments before Cid added,

'And why me?'

Cloud and Tifa shrugged, but the honest answer was that Cid had been a godsend. He'd 'dropped by' Midgar in the airship to check on them, something it seemed the gruff man had been doing with everyone from their party (although any suggestion that he might be doing so out of concern for his friends was met with a torrent of curses). With Barret halfway across the Planet looking for oil, Cid had instantly been enlisted into their Check the Reactors Haven't Gone Into Meltdown team.

'Don't see why I couldn't have stayed at fuckin' home and babysat the damn kid,' Cid grumbled. 'She fucking loves me.'

Tifa looked faintly alarmed at Cid's idea of Marlene 'loving' him – he had almost put her in tears because she didn't know how to make tea just a few hours ago – before realising that he probably wasn't being serious. He would have hated looking after Marlene and he knew it. He just liked to complain.

Getting to the centre of Midgar was challenge enough. Once at the centre, the three of them looked up at the towering, broken remains of the Shinra Headquarters and grimaced. The front door was fifty feet above them.

'Well,' Cloud said, 'better get climbing.'

It took them three quarters of an hour. The first quarter was filled with the – actually rather comforting – sounds of Cid's swearing. With Cid doing it all for him, Cloud felt less inclined to curse himself and saved his breath for the climb. By the second quarter, Cid's breathlessness resigned him to only the odd bark of cussing whenever his hands or feet slipped. The third quarter was eerily quiet. When Cloud turned a concerned eye on Cid, he realised that the older man had resigned himself to silently mouthing his curses so that he could keep them going in a constant stream.

'That wasn't so bad,' Tifa said brightly upon arriving at the top of the climb, where a small section of the plate was still standing, jutting out in a ring all around the headquarters. Cid, gasping for breath, said nothing, but glared at her with enough strength to make his message clear: I still have the strength to wring your neck if you say one more chipper thing today.

'Umm… best get looking,' Tifa added. Cloud decided to stand in between the pair of them, just in case Tifa did decide to chipper up again.

The door didn't need opening. It had been kicked down on the previous visit, during Edge's early construction. Cid pressed the button by the lift doors, but his belief that they would still work was optimistic at best. There was a heavy clunk from somewhere in the building and the lift doors opened to an empty shaft. The snapped wires of the lift dangled in front of his face.

'Oh fuck this.' Cid lit up a cigarette and followed Cloud and Tifa, who were already halfway up the stairs to the next floor.

Even the building's interior was in ruins. Although he made no comment and kept an expression of disinterest, Cloud felt a little ache in his chest to see the place where he'd once lived and worked in such a state. It was still difficult to remember sometimes which memories were real, but he was sure he'd once lived in the barracks on this floor, and practised his shooting on this one… he hadn't been allowed all the way up to the SOLDIER's floors, but he'd spent two years of his life around the floors below.

'Floor 30. This is the one,' he said. Again, the door had been kicked down on the previous visit.

Floor 30 was crammed with rows of electronic consoles. Little lights were still flickering around the various buttons. Display screens indicated rises and falls in power and whatever else; most of it was incomprehensible.

'Hey,' Cid muttered as Cloud picked out a console and started reading the dials, 'if the power's still on, what the fuck's with all the kicked-in doors?'

'Reeve helped us direct all the emergency power to this floor; I'm not sure the doors work anymore,' Tifa said. 'And also literally kicking Shinra's doors down was the most satisfying feeling ever.'

Cid grinned, clamping his teeth around his cigarette. Tifa was immediately forgiven all crimes of chipperness, and they joined Cloud in checking over the consoles. Cloud and Tifa started to mutter between themselves, offering information about each console as they passed it and discussing any differences in the information shown and whether those differences meant anything. Cid, who had not been lucky enough to learn from Reeve what any of the consoles were for, spent five minutes staring blankly at numbers and dials before wandering off to play with other things.

'Where's this go?'

The other two looked up from their consoles and blankly at the door Cid had pointed out. Cloud shrugged and Tifa shook her head.

'Don't know. Probably more stuff to do with the reactors,' Cloud said. 'Reeve never said it was important.'

'Well there could be a God damn monster building machine in there,' Cid, who was apparently desperately bored, suggested.

'You two look,' Tifa said, going back to her console. 'I can do this on my own for now.'

Cloud nodded and wandered over to Cid. There was nothing unusual about the door: no warning signs suggesting that there was anything radioactive behind it. Cid gave Cloud a look of gratitude, and then moved aside when he realised that Cloud was stepping back to take a run-up.

The door didn't fall down when he kicked it. It burst into the next room and crashed against the far wall hard enough to leave a dent.

'Hmm,' Cloud said, peering around the dimly lit room. 'No monster building machine.'

'The fuck is that?' Cid said.

They wandered further into the room and Cloud found a light switch. It took three or four flicks before the lights actually turned on, and then they buzzed ominously.

The front of the room was a thin platform, which they were standing upon. Tables covered in papers were lined up along the wall. A few monitors were tucked in the corner, which Cid glanced at in disgust.

The majority of the room, however, was set a little below the platform. The space was taken up entirely by an enormous circular tube, built in a big loop. The tube was wide enough for someone to fit their arm down, and long enough that the tubing at the far end of the room looked only as thick as spaghetti. It looked, overall, like somebody had gone slightly mad with a length of drain pipes.

Cloud picked one of the papers up from a table at random.

'"Materia Accelerator",' he read. A few moment's of scanning later, he added: 'It looks like they were trying to mash different types of materia together to make new spells.'

'Huh,' Cid said. There was a pause. 'Would that work?'

'I have no idea,' Cloud said honestly. 'I thought Materia Development was up on the higher floors. Why were they doing it down here?'

He flicked through a few more sheaves of paper while Cid went to inspect the tube machine.

'Looks like it was shut down pretty quickly,' Cloud said, waving a notice for funding cuts in Cid's direction. 'Things didn't go the way they planned…'

'Oh!' Tifa suddenly cried from the other room. Cid and Cloud glanced up.

'I'll go see what she's got,' Cid said. 'Ain't nothing interesting in here, anyway.'

Cid stomped out but Cloud continued to read through the papers. He had to disagree with his teammate; this machine was plenty interesting. None of the reports really described what had happened when the machine was turned on. There were a lot of theoretical explanations for what should happen and what they wanted to happen, and a lot of build up to the day that it would be turned on, but it seemed as though the machine had only been used once, and the results had been so disappointing they hadn't deserved a mention.

Cloud dug around in his pockets for a moment and started sorting through his materia.

'Either of you have a restore materia?' he called to his friends through the door.

'I got one.'

'I have one too! Are you okay?'

'Fine. Everything's fine.'

Now he wouldn't feel so guilty about using his. He picked out a time materia as well; he knew he had another of those at home somewhere. Judging by the unimpressed reports in the papers, nothing was going to happen anyway. Still, he felt he'd rather not waste something too precious just for the sake of curiosity.

There was a little opening in the top of the tube near the platform. He placed the restore materia inside, and pulled one of the levers on the console. For a moment nothing happened, and Cloud thought he knew what the report's disappointment had been all about. Then, with a sputter, the machine seemed to wake up. The materia was whisked away from the opening and along the tube.

Cloud went back to the papers and scanned them again. He checked the dials on the console.

He pulled a second lever down and dropped the time materia in the slot. It shot away in the other direction to the first. The machine began to roar a little more loudly.

There was a crash at the far end of the tube, and then it exploded open in a burst of fire. Cloud felt a punch in his chest and was lifted up off of his feet, eyes stinging, ears whooshing. The walls seemed to warp and tear apart. He braced for a heavy, graceless landing.

It didn't come.

Everything was soft and white. Cloud couldn't feel any of his limbs. He was floating, getting a feeling almost like seasickness, but rather less unpleasant.

Oh Planet I've died, he thought. I've survived the apocalypse and fought the world's most dangerous psychopathic warrior twice and now I've died playing with a stupid materia machine.

The panic wore off gradually, and Cloud slowly realised that he had experienced this feeling once before. The weightlessness, the blindness… he had mako poisoning. This was how he'd felt when Zack was recuing him from Hojo's laboratory, when he'd barely been able to concentrate on the world.

He tried to take a breath. Nothing. He couldn't feel his lungs.

Well, that wasn't good. He really, really needed to breathe. That was important.

Tifa, please for the love of the Planet find my burned, bloody corpse and use a phoenix down on it, he thought. You owe me one.

Cloud Strife, you are not dying.

If he still had working nerves in his arms, Cloud would have reached for his sword. Instead he could only hang wherever he was, and be slightly relieved. He'd heard voices in his head before. This one didn't sound like Sephiroth or Jenova, so he decided he might has well trust it for now.

Where am I?

You are in the Lifestream.

Oh, well that made perfect sense.

Why am I in the Lifestream if I'm not dead?

You are travelling.

Travelling where?

You are travelling to fourteen.

The voice was starting to sound familiar, but the flat, dead tone it carried made it difficult to place. He wondered where he'd heard it before.

To fourteen? What's fourteen? What're you talking abou—

You will be as you were. You may not tell anyone what will be. You may change only one life. These are the rules. Breaking of the rules ends the chance. Do you understand?

No! No, what's going on?

You are travelling to fourteen. You will be as you were. You may not tell anyone what will be. You may change only one life. These are the rules. Breaking of the rules ends the chance. Do you understand?

Suddenly he knew whose voice it was.

Aerith?

Do you understand?

No. Yes. Whatever. Aerith, is that you?

You are here.

No, wait! Wait Aerith! Ae—

'—rith! Aerith!'