When I was writing A Step to the Left, I found it really difficult to actually stop, and I wrote a whole different end to it that I scrapped because by that point the fic was eleven pages long and it was just getting silly. I wanted to write even more after that.

But then the people who replied to the fic on the areyougame comm asked if I could write more, so I figured I could resurrect this as an "alternate" ending.

Please note: given that this was the original ending to the fic, some bits of it don't match up with the fic and other bits are repeated.



A Step to the Left: Alternate Ending


“Yo, Cloud! I got us a mission!”

Cloud looked up from the tear he was mending in an old shirt, frowning. “We get missions every week, Zack.”

Zack waved the mission packet at him, grinning as he leaned against the side of Cloud’s door. “This one is special. This mission is with Sephiroth.”

Cloud dropped his needle. “You serious?” he breathed.

“Serious as I’ve ever been!”

“Tell me,” Cloud demanded.

Zack shook his head. “Nope, not yet. You gotta help me get the transport ready first. We’re in for a long trip. And then I have to teach you about junctions.”

*

“So how does this junction stuff work?” Cloud asked, jogging behind Zack as they made their way on a circuit of Kalm Garden.

“Don’t ask me the technicals,” Zack said, “but it’s like a deeper connecting to a summons. When you junction something it’s permanently connected to you until you un-junction it, which means that you can link other stuff to it and boost your speed or strength or whatever.”

Cloud thought about it. “You’re right,” he said, finally. “I really shouldn’t have asked you about it.”

“Oi!” Zack yelled. Cloud put on a burst of speed and ran ahead of his side-swipe, laughing.

When they’d calmed down and were back jogging side-by-side around the Garden, Cloud came back to the topic. “Zack, I’ve heard that a SeeD with a good junction can compare to a SOLDIER with full enhancements. I’m just ... I guess I just want to know if that’s true?”

“Huh,” Zack said. “Never really thought about. I mean, I did start off as a SOLDIER cadet—”

“Really?” Cloud interrupted. “Were you—”

“In the high risk group? Nah,” Zack continued, shaking his head. “Bannick damn near cried when I told him I was leaving. I’m so low risk they practically had to make up a new category for me. Kinda the opposite of you.”

“So why’d you leave?” Cloud asked, bewildered. Zack was talented, and if he’d been able to take the mako treatments, why wouldn’t he?

“It was kinda different back then,” Zack said. “The offworlders hadn’t been around too long and SeeD hadn’t got going yet. Shinra still dominated loads of things, and the longer I was with SOLDIER the more I saw that if I stayed, I was gonna have to do things I don’t want to do. SeeD still get the same kind of missions offered, but I can turn them down if I want to. Couldn’t do that if I was SOLDIER.”

“Oh.” Cloud fell silent, thinking about it. It did make sense. Zack had joined Shinra a long time before he had, and even so Cloud had seen the after effects of Shinra’s previous, not-so-friendly attitude towards anything and everything. Shinra couldn’t afford the same attitude any more, not now that SeeD had helped to shrink it so much.

Zack eyed him sidelong. “You still want to know how junctioning can boost you like the SOLDIER enhancements?”

“Yeah.”

“Heh heh. Good. Come with me.”

*

SeeD, Cloud decided, liked to dump you in rooms full of weird stuff.

Unlike the weapons room, the cavern didn’t have ... well, it didn’t have anything in it that Cloud could see. That alone made him nervous, hand twitching towards Ultima’s hilt.

“This is the summons room,” Zack had told him, not ten minutes before, gesturing towards what looked like a really large rock in the centre of Kalm Garden’s courtyard.

Cloud had stared at him. “Zack. It’s a rock.”

“That’s what you think,” Zack had said, grinning like a loon. “Go on, touch it.”

So Cloud had, and that was when Zack demonstrated that the rock was an illusion by booting him straight through it and down the hidden shaft underneath, Zack’s cackling laughter following him down into the cavern under the Garden.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Cloud grumbled to himself, squinting through the gloom. There was just enough light for him to make out the basics of his surroundings, but it was difficult to tell if there was an exit anywhere.

Something about the acoustics down here was bugging him, anyway. He kept ... hearing things, whispering just low enough that he couldn’t make out any sounds.

“It’s okay, Strife,” he murmured to himself. “It’s just echoes from outside. Caves echo. Nothing else.” Never mind that his own voice fell flat and dead in the air, dampened by something shifting around him.

Several somethings.

Strife, he heard, a sigh brushing against the back of his right ear. Heart thumping, Cloud spun in place to face – nothing.

Cloud, he heard again, to the left this time – but when he turned, again, nothing.

Old friend, came the whisper, a whisper that sounded of leather and claws and fierce, burning pride.

“Who are you?” Cloud half-shouted.

A chuckle came from nowhere, rumbled up his spine and shook the rocks on the floor. You should know who I am.

Cloud shook his head helplessly, twisting and spinning, trying to follow the voice and maybe catch sight of – whatever it was. “I don’t know you. I don’t know what’s going on.”

A sigh, this time, hot air that smelled of flame. No. No, you do not know me. It was another world, another time, another possibility. I am connected to all, I remember you just as the sword does.

“Ultima?” Cloud’s hand went to the hilt. “What – how can my sword remember me?”

It does not matter. We have both fallen sideways, between the gaps, and now we come back to the hand of our old friend.

“I—”

Enough of this. I am with you, my friend, as always.

“What—” Cloud choked, the air around him swirling and pressing and pushing in on him, through his lungs, through his skin, through his mind—

My friend, the voice whispered again, but this time it was small, contained, snug at the back of his mind.

Cloud opened his eyes and found he was kneeling on the floor of the cavern, and there were lights. Small, low and only at waist-height, set into the rock walls, and looking uncomfortably like red summon materia, but there was definitely more light than before. He could make out a small door, set into the rock face almost seamlessly, and stumbled towards it.

Zack was waiting outside when he pulled the door open. “Which one did you get?” Zack asked, practically bouncing in excitement. “I’ve been out here trying to guess the whole time, let me run a scan on you—”

Zack was casting barely before he’d finished speaking. Cloud still had no clue what had just happened, but he was too exhausted to care – there was something in his head, something that had pushed its way into him from outside and even now was rummaging around in there making room for itself.

It should have been frightening. It should have been disturbing. But instead, it felt ... like an old friend had come to stay.

“Holy—” Zack burst out, staring at him. “You got Bahamut? I knew you were special, Cloud, but how did you manage that? No wonder you look a wreck!”

“Bahamut?” Cloud asked, and then it clicked. He had a junction. The junction had picked him – no battling it to submission as the other SeeD often said they had to do. And his junction was Bahamut.

Maybe he was better at this SeeD thing than he’d thought.

Phantom aches all over his body, Cloud straightened. “Never mind,” he told Zack. “Shouldn’t we get going on our mission? And where are we going, anyway?”

“Oh yeah.” Zack rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. “We’re headed to Nibelheim.”

[ END ]

AND I WILL STOP SPAMMING YOU ALL NOW.