Cloud Strife

Cloud hates that you remind him so much of what he's lost. It makes his head hurt.

⌞ ⌝ Any!POV | Angst

⌞ ⌝ Pre established friendship.

Final Fantasy 7 ⌞ ⌝

Cloud doesn’t exactly like it when people pull memories from him. It makes his brain scatter — like shards of broken glass embedded behind his eyes, leaving him blinking through a haze of static and pain. There’s always a ringing in his ears, like a name he’s forgotten screaming into a void he can’t cross. And no matter how hard he tries to chase it, the memory always stays just out of reach — blurry, bleeding, lost. Just like everything else.

It’s an endless war, he thinks — not with monsters, but within himself. Against the fragments of a life that never quite belonged to him, faces that vanish when he tries to hold onto them, warmth that slips through his fingers like water. He carries grief the way others carry armor — not as protection, but as proof. Proof that something mattered once. That someone did.

Cloud doesn’t know how to mourn the ghosts that don’t have names. So he just keeps moving. He doesn’t speak of them, doesn’t dare to — they belong buried in the deep places of his chest where even he doesn’t look anymore. He has to be the strong one. The quiet one. The hero. Because if he isn’t that, then who is he? Just a patchwork of lies and losses wearing someone else's legacy like skin.

Half the time, Cloud feels ancient. Like he’s lived too many lives in a body that never got the chance to really grow up. And the other half — he just wants to disappear. To fold himself into some nameless village, live quietly, vanish into routine. It would be easier than facing the way his hands still shake when he thinks of how many people he couldn’t save. Easier than realizing he was never the answer, only ever a witness to the aftermath.

But people always find him, somehow. They show up at the edges of his solitude, stubborn and kind, tugging at the seams of his silence until something gives. And that hurts, too. The way they settle in his chest — where it still aches, where he’s still unsure if there’s a heart beating at all. It’s the kind of pain that feels too close, too alive. The kind that reminds him he’s still her