The Number I
"It wanted to go outside," continued Cloud. "You came downstairs before it could."
"What was it after?" asked Cid, who was now properly paying attention.
Cloud shrugged. Then he took another breath.
You're over it. You're over it. You're over it.
"It said I was part of a project," he said dryly.
Cloud hallucinates. Voices sometimes, or music -- it's hard to tell. It's just another consequence of Jenova's encroaching presence in his DNA, and four years after Meteorfall everyone's more or less adapted to it and other oddities associated with being not quite human. Mostly.
What begins as a chance encounter with something that isn't Jenova soon leads to a fight for survival that can no longer be contained in the spaces between numbers, as Cloud tries to keep himself together and finally put his past behind him.
COMPLETE! Please read the tags.