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Chapter 9

The moment they walked into the bar, Tifa knew there was trouble. It wasn't exactly hard to tell; the pained look on Cloud's face matched the unusually grim one on Zack's, and neither was a sign of good things to come. She knew Cloud well enough to be able to read the subtle nuances of his various brooding and dark expressions, and in the week and a half since Zack had reappeared she'd come to learn that any sort of expression on him other than a smile was unusual.

"Don't tell me," she sighed, wiping her hands on a towel and turning off the faucet where she'd been washing dishes. "Sephiroth has found a way to come back despite the lack of Jenova bits, and we need to go save the world. Again."

She'd been attempting to inject some levity into the conversation and remind them that it couldn't be that bad, but the way Cloud's eyes went wide and startled was not reassuring. "How did you... did the Turks come here first?" he demanded, staring at her like she'd grown a second head.

That earned him an elbow in the ribs from Zack, and when he glared at his friend the older man rolled his eyes. "She was kidding, Cloud," Zack pointed out.

"Oh." Sheepish, Cloud realized that if Tifa had already known the truth, she would have headed straight for them to make sure they knew as well. Not stood around doing dishes. "Right."

Staring from one to the other, Tifa tried to find some other explanation for Cloud's outburst and couldn't. "You're not serious," she said flatly. "He's back?"

"Apparently." Cloud slung himself onto one of the bar stools. Automatically she reached beneath the bar and grabbed him a beer; he took it from her and then looked at it like he couldn't remember what to do with it.

"He's been sighted in several places around Midgar over the last week or so," Zack elaborated, seating himself next to Cloud and accepting the beer she offered him. "As well as in Kalm the same night Cloud and I were there." He flicked the cap off with his thumb and drank about half of it in one long gulp, like he was dying of thirst; now that she was looking more closely she could see signs of hastily cleaned up sweat and blood on both of them.

"Have you fought him?" she asked, startled. Surely even with the two of them, it wouldn't have been as easy as all that. And Zack had only said he'd been sighted, not that they'd seen him. "Why do you both look like you've just come out of a battle?"

"I told you she'd notice even if we cleaned up," Cloud muttered with a faint smile, and twisted the cap off his beer as well. He copied Zack and went one further, drinking as if he had every intention of finishing it off without coming up for air.

"Doesn't mean the effort was wasted," Zack countered, swatting the back of the blond's head and nearly making him choke on his drink. "I doubt she'd have appreciated us showing up covered in blood. We were sparring," he explained to Tifa, who was waiting with one eyebrow raised to hear the explanation. "And then the Turks got involved. But that's not important."

"You try coming in here covered in blood and I'll hose you both off in the doorway," she threatened them, grabbing another couple of beers. On second thought she added a third for herself, then moved to lock the door and close the shades to indicate the bar wasn't going to open any time soon. "So. He's out there again. Somehow, I don't find myself terribly shocked."

"You and me both," Cloud sighed, leaning one elbow on the bar and rubbing at his forehead as if that would help ease the headache. "I don't understand it, though. Jenova's gone. If there had been any more pieces of her out there, Kadaj and the others wouldn't have been so desperate to get the one Rufus had. There's nothing left for him to use to come back, damn it."

"Well, that's not entirely true," Zack said speculatively, picking up his second beer and toying with it. "That there's not anything at all left of Jenova, I mean."

"What do you mean?" Tifa asked, pulling up a stool behind the bar so she could sit facing them. She took her bottle and opened it, though something told her this conversation might end up requiring something stronger than just beer. "The last piece was destroyed when Kadaj absorbed it to become Sephiroth. Cloud's right, if there were any more chunks out there, things would have gone differently."

"No pieces, sure, but that doesn't mean she's gone entirely," Zack replied. "For one thing, every ex-SOLDIER in existence has Jenova cells in his system. Probably not enough to make them vulnerable, even the 1st Class, but still. There were enough of us around that collectively, it's a significant amount. And Hojo was trying to turn us all into good little Sephiroth clones, right? That means he would've had to inject us with a lot of Jenova cells, not just the piddling amount SOLDIERs get. So anyone who survived Nibelheim and was taken to the labs is a potential carrier for Sephiroth. He must've managed to activate one of them somehow."

"The black clones?" Tifa asked, surprised. She hadn't thought about it in exactly that way, but it made sense that they'd all be carrying lots of Jenova cells. If there were any left. "But they were all destroyed in the North Crater," she pointed out. "There aren't any more."

"You sure about that?" Zack retorted, raising an eyebrow at her. "Really damn sure? Did you count? All it would take is one who didn't make it to the crater in time to join the Reunion. If one had been trapped somewhere, or hell, was being held for his own good in a hospital or something, then he'd still be alive."

"Zack's right," Cloud realized, groaning. "The way they were all walking around like zombies, it wouldn't surprise me if some well-meaning person did hospitalize one or more of them."

"And having done so, they wouldn't let them just wander off because they got it into their heads to go north," Zack agreed. "All they'd have to do would be strap them down or lock them in, and you've got at least one clone that didn't die summoning Meteor."

"Great." Tifa threw her hands into the air. "So somewhere out there we've got one or more remaining clones, and Sephiroth can take them over at will? Why'd he wait until now?"

"Maybe he wasn't strong enough before this," Cloud suggested. "We damaged him pretty badly in the last battle in the crater, and again when I fought him just recently. From the way Reno described it, I think he's not completely in control, either; the fact that he hasn't done anything yet makes more sense if it's because he's still fighting to get total control over the body."

"So we need to find the clone before he gets strong enough to take over completely, and kill it," Tifa concluded. "If we can do that before he..."

"Whoa, wait a minute, hold on," Zack interjected, frowning. "We can't just kill them out of hand. They haven't done anything wrong." When Tifa and Cloud both gave him blank looks, he made a frustrated noise and struggled to find the right words to explain something that should have been obvious. "Whoever this guy is, he was just some poor bastard who happened to be in Nibelheim at the wrong time, right? He hasn't done anything wrong."

"We can't take the chance that Sephiroth could get control," Cloud told him, shaking his head. "Better to end it quickly without a fight. Besides, whoever they might once have been, they aren't anyone now. The black clones are just... puppets. Empty shells."

"Yeah, and there but for the grace of the Ancients go you and I," Zack reminded him. "It's only luck and sheer stubbornness that kept us from being two more clones in the line, remember?"

"I remember. Better than you do," Cloud shot back, hunching his shoulders. He would never forget the way it had felt when Sephiroth had invaded his mind, taking him over and forcing him to obey the other man's will instead of his own. He'd been closer to becoming a clone than Zack had been, after all. "But that doesn't mean we should just sit back and let Sephiroth do whatever he wants, Zack! Wouldn't it be smarter to nip this in the bud?"

"Yeah, but..." Shaking his head, Zack's frown turned into a scowl. "Look. I had to kill enough innocent people when I was working for Shinra. I'm not going to start doing it again now! Even if we find one of the clones, there's no guarantee it's the right one! They're still people, not things, and we can't just start slaughtering them indiscriminately!"

"You make it sound like we're going to go out and start shooting babies or something," Tifa protested, uncomfortable. But she couldn't entirely argue with Zack's logic. She'd gotten by thinking of the black clones like... animals, not people. Certainly not people she'd once lived with, seen every day and smiled at or spoken to on a regular basis. Nibelheim had been her home, after all. And it was a small enough town that she'd known everyone in it. "Why don't we find the clone first, and then decide what to do? Just finding them will be difficult enough."

"By the time we do, it may be a moot point," Cloud muttered sourly. "Sephiroth may have taken over completely by then. From what Rude and Reno said, he's been appearing more frequently as time goes by."

"Which also argues for the carrier being someone with at least some mind of his own left," Zack insisted, unwilling to just drop it until he was sure the other two weren't planning to run the poor bastard through at the first opportunity. Granted, Zack couldn't really offer a better plan as a substitute, but he couldn't shake the feeling that what they were talking about would be wrong. "If he's fighting back well enough that Sephiroth is only appearing sometimes, even if it's becoming more frequent, then maybe we can help him fight harder."

"All right, all right!" Tifa gave in, shaking her head. "We won't just kill them, unless there's no other choice. The question is, how do we find them? I mean, we can let people know that we're looking for anyone who fits the description of a black clone, and they ought to stand out in a crowd. But if you're right and the carrier still has some of his own mind, it might not be that easy."

"Also, the guy is obviously moving around," Zack sighed. "If he was in Kalm at the same time we were, then... I wonder. Was he following us, or drawn there because of us? And is it me or Cloud that's attracting him? Hell, for that matter, it might be something else that was in the labs with me, and it got out when Cloud and I were distracted by finding clothes for me and getting the data he was after. That would certainly explain the timing of it."

"Do you suppose we could use the two of you as bait, somehow?" Tifa suggested. "If he's following you, or attracted to you, then if you went somewhere else where there weren't a lot of people it'd probably be easier to catch him."

"Or we could end up leaving Edge open to attack since we wouldn't be here to stop him, which may be what he's really waiting for," Zack countered, frowning. "It's only a theory that he's appearing sporadically because he doesn't have full control yet, after all. Cloud? What do you think?"

Cloud hadn't been following the conversation at all. When Zack had pointed out that the available information indicated the person carrying Sephiroth within them still had a mind of their own left, he'd been struck by a thought so horrible he could barely stand to contemplate it. Yet he didn't have much of a choice, because not to think about it could bring disaster down on all of them.

As Zack himself had said, he and Cloud were carriers of Jenova cells. Failed clones they might have been, but not for lack of trying on Hojo's part. And Zack had been in Hojo's hands longer than Cloud; the gods alone knew what else might have been done to him after he'd been recaptured.

Zack had been locked away, unable to follow the call to Reunion that the rest of the clones had answered. He'd admitted to Cloud that he had very little memory of the extra years he'd spent in the lab; was that because he'd been in a comatose state like Cloud had been, or had he descended into the true mindlessness of the other clones? Sephiroth had first appeared the night Cloud had released Zack from the labs. Surely that couldn't be a coincidence.

And if there was anyone who was stubborn enough to repeatedly fight off Sephiroth's control, it was Zack. Cloud couldn't imagine anyone else being able to do it more than a few times before the bastard would have taken over completely; he of all people knew just how hard it was to fight against Sephiroth's power.

Did Zack know? How could he not, if he was having to fight off Sephiroth every time he turned around? But surely he'd have said something. Unless his insistence that they think twice before killing whoever was carrying Sephiroth was because he was nervous they would just kill him out of hand if they found out the truth?

No. Cloud couldn't even consider that Zack would hide something like that. If it was Zack, then his friend somehow wasn't aware of it. But that only made it that much more complicated to find out the truth.

"Cloud?" Tifa prompted when the blond didn't answer Zack's question after several long moments. Cloud looked... stunned, like someone had just smacked him with a Confuse spell. He was staring down at his beer bottle, but somehow she didn't think he was actually seeing it. "Hey, are you okay?" she asked, concerned. Reaching out, she put one hand over his, and that seemed to jolt him back to reality.

"What? Yeah, I'm fine," he answered automatically, trying to get his spinning thoughts to settle into some kind of order. He couldn't tell them his theory, not yet. He could still be wrong, after all. He had to be wrong. Because the alternative - that he would have to face and kill Zack in order to destroy Sephiroth this time - was simply not acceptable. "I just... can't get rid of this damn headache. It's hard to think," he said, groping for an excuse for his inattention.

"Can't blame you," Zack said wryly, patting his friend on the shoulder. The pinched look on Cloud's face was worse than ever, and he could only imagine how much pain the other man had to be in for it to be showing that clearly in his expression. Zack knew better than anyone how much pain a SOLDIER could take and brush off. Small wonder Cloud was suffering, though. This was literally a nightmare come true for him. At least for Zack, this was only the first time he'd had to face his one-time friend and hero since that night Sephiroth had gone insane.

"We need to find out exactly when and where he was sighted each time," Cloud said gruffly, trying to get their attention off him before they started asking questions he couldn't answer easily. "If we can find a pattern, we may be able to at least narrow the search area. Or if we're lucky, we might be able to anticipate where he'll show up next, and either confront him or just follow him to see where he goes."

And maybe, just maybe, they'd find out that Sephiroth had been sighted at times when Cloud and Zack had been together, and therefore it couldn't possibly be Zack.

"Right," Zack agreed, latching onto the suggestion as something constructive for them to do. "I'll bet the Turks have that information. We can shake it out of them one way or another." Drumming his fingers on the bar, he thought for a moment. "We also need to look over the information we took from Hojo," he declared. "There could be something in there that would tell us how Sephiroth is doing this. Or even how to stop it from happening, though it doesn't seem like stopping him was any part of Hojo's plans."

"Oh!" Tifa jumped, and smacked herself in the forehead in exasperation. "I'm an idiot. Just a second." While the two men stared at her in confusion, she slipped off the stool and pushed through the door into the rest of the house. She grabbed the large envelope that had arrived just that morning, and returned brandishing the disks that had been inside. "Reeve sent these over earlier today. I was going to come and find you later if you hadn't dropped by, but your news drove it out of my head completely."

"He cracked them already?" Cloud exclaimed in delight, taking them from her and scanning the brief note that accompanied them. As Zack had predicted the files had been encrypted, and he'd sent them off to Reeve with a request for help. From the sound of the letter it hadn't been easy, but Reeve had apparently understood the potential urgency of the situation. "Figures. That's Reeve for you. I don't think there's anything he can't do with a piece of electronic equipment. Let's take them upstairs to the computer in the office."

From the thundering of their feet as they all hurried up the stairs, Zack thought with a hint of amusement, you'd think they were five and playing tag or something. Well, this was sort of like the deadly adult version of hide-and-seek, so maybe the comparison wasn't all that far off the mark.

The office was small, but Tifa and Zack crowded close behind Cloud as the blond slid into the desk chair and booted up the computer. The moment it finished loading he pushed the first disk into the slot and bought up the directory.

File name after file name scrolled by on the screen. Most of it was just strings of letters and numbers - project codes and experiment numbers, Zack supposed. "Try something that starts with 'J'," he suggested. "The Jenova project seems the obvious place to start."

"Right," Cloud agreed, and clicked on the first 'J' file he saw. It opened to show pages of data, graphs and charts, and paragraphs of notes and conclusions. He scanned the writing and realized with a sinking heart that he had no clue what was being said. "I don't even know half of these words," he declared, frustrated. "Do either of you know what the hell this says?"

"Don't look at me," Zack grimaced. "I ran away from home to join the army same as you did, remember? I don't have much formal schooling. Tifa?"

"Are you kidding me?" Tifa gave them both a disbelieving expression when they turned to look at her. "I might've had more education than the two of you, but we didn't cover this kind of thing! This is specialized science."

Cloud tried opening a few more files, not just 'J' files, but none of them made any more sense than the first had. "Well, I think we can safely say that you're right that the 'J' files are for the Jenova project, since they're almost the only ones that contain that word," he finally concluded after running a search, leaning back in the chair and rubbing at his eyes. "It also comes up in the 'G' files for Genesis, but Odin alone knows what that is. 'C' is for Chaos - we should give those to Vincent," he added in an aside to Tifa. "He probably won't be able to make any more sense of them than we can, but he may want to have them just in case."

"I'll see if Cid can get hold of him, or get them to him somehow," Tifa agreed. "And you never know. Maybe he picked up some of the lingo along the way."

"We need someone who can speak science-ese," Zack said, shaking his head. "Obviously it's not any of us. Any contacts I might've had are probably dead or somewhere I can't find them, after all this time. Who do you know that understands geek?"

"Reeve?" Tifa suggested tentatively. "He did crack the files for us..."

"Reeve is an engineer, not a bio-scientist," Cloud argued. "Give him a computer program with a bug in it or an engineering blueprint with a flaw and he'll find it in three seconds flat, but this is way outside his area of specialization. Even he can't be a genius at everything."

Something clicked in Zack's head, and he blinked at them. "Wait a minute. Reeve, he's the one who was Shinra's mole through Cait Sith, right?" he asked Cloud, who nodded. "Are we talking about Reeve Tuesti? The guy who designed Midgar?" When Cloud nodded again, Zack whistled. "Geez. I know you said he was high up in Shinra, but I didn't realize you were talking board of directors kind of 'high'. Even if he can't understand it, he might know someone who can translate it to layman's terms for us."

"Or Cid might," Tifa put in. "Most of the people in Rocket Town were scientists and engineers left behind when the space program fell through. He's probably still got contacts in that area."

"If worse comes to worst, we can always try coercing Rufus," Cloud decided. "I bet he's still got contacts all over the place. But we'll try Reeve and Cid first; I don't trust Rufus to give us all the information. Or even the right information, if it suited him better for us to be working in the wrong direction."

"I'd sooner trust a sea worm than a Shinra," Zack agreed grimly. "We should probably get everything translated, just in case; you never know what's going to be relevant. There's a lot of stuff on there that I've never heard of."

"I think some of it is about the development of the monsters, and the effect the reactors have on the life in the areas around them," Cloud said hesitantly, clicking through more of the files. "A bunch of this is definitely about the SOLDIER program, and it looks like there's some files on Sephiroth specifically as a subset of the Jenova project. We'll want that information first. If there's anything we can use directly against Sephiroth, some kind of weakness, it'll be there..."

He trailed off, rubbing at his temple again and shaking his head as his headache suddenly intensified. "Cloud?" Tifa rested a hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

"I just... ah, gods," he gasped as the dull throb of the headache abruptly became blinding pain stabbing through his skull. Behind him Zack choked and doubled over as the pain hit him as well, and both men clutched at their heads.

"Cloud? Zack?" Tifa took a step back, her eyes wide, not sure what was happening. "What is it, what's going on?"

"Sweet Shiva, that hurts," Zack groaned, leaning his weight against the desk as he struggled against a sense of pressure, like something was pushing at his skull from the inside and trying to make it burst. "What in Odin's name..."

"Jenova," Cloud gritted out between clenched teeth. "It's Sephiroth, exerting his power, and it resonates in us because of Jenova's influence." He looked up, and Tifa's heart beat faster when she realized that this time his eyes had gone green and slitted like a cat's.

And so had Zack's, she saw when the older man lifted his head as well. Just as they had the last time, glowing faintly with green mako and looking even more disturbing in the setting of a normally friendly face. Now she wondered if Cloud's eyes had changed as well last time, too... he'd still been face-down on the floor, she hadn't been able to see him at the time.

As suddenly as the pain had started, it was gone. Zack half-collapsed to sit on the desk, panting. "Okay, that's at least the second time that's happened," he said carefully, finding it took a real effort to string words together coherently. He felt like he'd just been through some kind of mental battle, and was just as battered as he would be after a real fight. Too bad there wasn't such a thing as a mental hi-potion. "I think maybe it's happening sometimes when I sleep, too - that would explain some of the weirder nightmares I've been having."

"Yeah, me too," Cloud agreed, trying to keep his breathing slow and steady as he rubbed at his eyes. His headache was gone now, but it felt like it should be there, so he kept anticipating pain that wasn't happening any more. "It must be happening at moments when he's trying to exert his influence."

Did that mean Zack wasn't the carrier after all? Or just that Sephiroth was getting bolder, trying to push through even when Zack was around others? Hell, for that matter, it might have been a reaction to Cloud's realization that they might find something to help them stop the bastard in the files on Sephiroth. The timing was a little suspicious. And that argued for it being Zack, because how else would Sephiroth have been aware of what they were discussing?

"He's getting more powerful," Cloud said with weary certainty. That much, at least, he could be sure of. "If we're going to have any hope of stopping him before he takes control completely, we need to move fast."

"I'll get the disks to Cid, and ask Reeve to look into it as well," Tifa replied, trying not to be too shaken by what she'd just seen. Their eyes were back to normal; Cloud's a clear blue like the summer sky, and Zack's a deep indigo. The shining haze of mako was still there, but not green like it had been a moment before. Even so, she couldn't shake the distinctly unnerving sensation that Sephiroth had been looking at her out of their eyes for just a moment - and the idea that it could happen again without warning was enough to creep her out completely.

"I guess that's all we can do for now," Zack said, sighing as he looked from Tifa's spooked expression to Cloud's haunted one. "Then we wait for answers. And in the meantime, try to get on with our lives, because letting him disrupt everything is just another kind of victory." Now, if only it wasn't easier said than done.

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