This short story has a rating of T.
It may not be appropriate for very young readers.
Open Office 2.0 has been used for its composition.

Disclaimer – The main Final Fantasy series – from the original Final Fantasy in 1987 to Final Fantasy XII in 2006 – is the property of Sakaguchi Hironobu and Square Enix (the former Square Co., Ltd.). The story itself is the property of the Samuraiter and may not be posted at any web site but his private web page and FFN without his permission. This fanfic has not been posted for gain or profit in any way, shape, or form. It is dedicated to Frank Verderosa and his contributions to Final Fantasy VII fandom in its infancy.

Note – This story, though it is based on Final Fantasy VII, does not use the Ultimania Omega canon, and it has nothing to do with either the Advent Children movieor the video game sequels. It takes place during the course of the original game, and it uses canon only as it is presented in that format.

I Abibde / Samuraiter Presents
A Sankakukei Studio Production
Of A Mako Reactor (LJ) Fanfic
Formatted For FFN

Final Fantasy VII:
Perspiration

1:04 AM

Noise was a fact of life below the plate. It was inescapable, and, if a person stayed in one place and took one minute to sit and notice it, it had several layers, from the dull roar of traffic to the rumbling of the trains to the cacophony of voices arising from too many people in too small a space, sporadically punctuated by gunshots and the blare of the public broadcast system. The trick was noticing it. Years of being submerged in it had a way of creating a certain numbness that was very hard to shake.

Jessie had come to enjoy the noise, having been surrounded by it almost since birth, and she liked to add to it in little ways. She tapped her right foot as her fingers flew back and forth across the keyboard in her lap, bobbing her head as the newscaster on the big television behind her droned on and on about the bombing of Mako Reactor 1 as recycled footage of the explosion played in a loop, the cloud of fire and smoke – from her bomb – mushrooming again and again. She had a chuckle at the screams and sirens that the company censors dubbed into the film for added effect.

She punched her Enter key and sighed happily as her printer – almost as old as she was, but as reliable as only a non-Shinra product could be – hissed and hummed its way through the first of the falsified identification cards that she had clicked into its queue. She then spun in her chair three times before clamping one of her electric fans to a black pipe in the basement wall and pointing it at the printer to try and keep it from overheating.

Life had already stopped at the bar, for the most part. Wedge was asleep in his hammock with a back issue of Occult Fan – out of print, shut down by Shinra several years ago due to subversive articles – opened over his face to block out the light. Biggs was either nursing his beer very gradually or asleep with his head on the work table in front of him, and it was not easy to tell which was true. Barret had gone upstairs to put Marlene to bed for the night, and he was most likely dozing in a chair outside her door.

That left Tifa and Cloud. The former had offered to go on a quick patrol of the slum before calling it a night, and Jessie, keeping one ear open for the little bells that had been attached to the saloon doors, had not heard her return from that. The latter ... was too new to the group for Jessie to have learned his habits, his patterns, but he had not left to follow Tifa, and it was possible that he was still upstairs, sitting at the bar, staring into space.

If there was a certainty, it was that the heat of the basement was stifling, no matter how many electric fans Jessie had to her name. She left the printer to its function before turning off the big television, taking the half-empty glass from Biggs, and making a point of climbing up the shaft to the main floor without using either the elevator or both hands. Barret had taught her the trick to doing it, and she pulled it off easily, adding a tally mark to the score in her head for not spilling any of the beer on her way up.

The bar was empty, and the sound of Barret snoring – like a power tool with a bad wire – drifted down the stairs. Jessie stopped to wash out the glass in the sink behind the bar before taking a seat at one of the tables, drumming her fingers on the nicked, scratched wood as she waited for the printer to finish its job. The hard part was over and done, but she still had to apply black magnetic strips to the backs of the cards before laminating them.

She heard a bump over her head, and she looked up at the ceiling. The second floor of the bar was only a half-floor, and she was not sitting below it. That prompted her to check the clip on her pistol – a high-class Turk model, black and silver, that she had liberated from its owner during her very first assignment – and pull on her fingerless gloves before walking through the saloon doors to see who was playing on the roof in the middle of the night.

Cloud was sitting on the edge of the roof, his Buster Sword across his knees. As Jessie expected, he did not seem to be focused on anything, his head tilted back as if to stare up at the plate and the various cables and hoses hanging from it, leaving peculiar trails in the haze. The neon sign was buzzing like a hive of bees to his left, and its light made him seem eerie, like a legless ghost out of a Wutai folk tale. If he saw Jessie, he gave no sign, but she had expected that, too. The SOLDIER had aloofness down to a science.

Jessie was soon sitting next to him, but he stayed where he was, unmoving, and she said, nudging him with one elbow, “Can't sleep, or don't sleep?” He blinked once, as if snapping himself out of a daydream, and he turned his head to look at her, his green eyes half-open in a squint, as if he was having a hard time telling whether or not the perky brunette was real. His right hand tightened on the hilt of the Buster Sword, but only for one second.

“I ... don't sleep,” he replied, turning back to look up at the plate. A shape that might have been a Shinra helicopter passed through the haze, almost brushing the cables and hoses, its rotors practically inaudible due to all of the other noises of the city. Jessie waited for him to say more than he had, but there was only awkwardness and silence, and he did not seem to care. For Cloud, that was par for the course, and she had already become used to it. No one could live in Midgar without developing little quirks.

“I can't sleep, myself,” she said, crossing her arms behind her head as she leaned back and took her own look at the plate, “not 'til I get all of these cards done, at least. There's always something that needs doing, and I can't trust the boys to do it.” She thought that referring to Barret, Biggs, and Wedge might cause the SOLDIER to crack a smirk, but there was nothing. It was impossible to tell whether or not he was listening ... to anything.

Taking a slightly different approach, she asked, “Did you and Tifa get into a fight? She looked a little flushed when she left.” That registered a small response at the corners of his mouth, as if he thought of answering, but wished to take his time in formulating a statement. She was content to swing her feet back and forth as she waited for him, whistling a tune that had been playing in the bar earlier in the night, shortly before Barret had issued the order to leave for Mako Reactor 1 with Cloud in tow.

He said, simply, “No.” Jessie then nudged him again, and he qualified, “I ... didn't remember something that I should've. It's not a big deal.” That made her curious, since it had been Tifa who had first found Cloud, and it had been obvious to everybody in the group that it was not the first time she had met him, but the young bartender had been reluctant to say anything on the subject, particularly in his presence. There was a slim chance that he might answer at least one of the unspoken questions himself, as Jessie hoped.

Instead, he said, looking down at the street in front of the bar, “Really, it's not a big deal.” That was that, shut down like the average light switch. Jessie sighed, swinging her feet back and forth again, but watching him out of the corner of one brown eye. In spite of his stoic appearance, she noticed little signs of tension, from the tightness of the musculature in his forearms to the set of his jaw. Being surrounded by a press of people at all times made it almost too easy to learn things about how they thought and acted, though a few of them were not quite as easy to figure out.

“If you say so,” she answered with a shrug, “but you'd better know that she's the heart and soul of our little family, so don't you go upsetting her.” A normal person might have flinched at the statement, but, as it was, one of his fingers twitched in a way that was barely noticeable, and he rose to his feet, balancing the Buster Sword on one shoulder before jumping down to the street with a fluid, practiced ease that made Jessie slightly jealous.

Once he got to the street, he did not move, standing where he was, his face impassive, and Jessie noted, as soon as she finished the short climb down the side of the building, “Lemme guess, you'd rather be somewhere else, but you don't know where else to go, huh?” He did not answer her, and she added, stepping in front of him, “Well, you're not going anywhere unescorted. That's not on Barret's orders, either. Who's to say that Shinra hasn't got the army out? We can't have you dying on us.” At first, she thought that he might shove her out of the way, but he did not.

“D'you think they'll be watching the Sector 7 pillar at this time of the night?” he asked, looking past her to where the pillar in question vanished into the smog over their heads. She frowned at him, but she also shook her head, and, before she could give him a spoken answer, he started to walk off towards the pillar. She considered protesting, but the question had been his wordiest reply of the evening, and she followed along instead, keeping her pistol handy in case she was wrong about the army and its scheduling.

He paused long enough to say, “I just ... wanna go up there, have a look at it.” That was all the explanation that she was given, and he kept walking, though she noted that he kept his pace slow enough that she did not have to strain to follow him. If he wished, he could run inhumanly fast, and she took comfort in the fact that he did not seem to mind her presence, trusting that he would true enough to his word that they would be back at the bar early enough for her to finish up the cards and have them ready for the next mission.

Jessie thought to herself, soaking up the noises of the city at night, from the traffic to the trains to the voices, near and distant, Well, aren't you the enigma, Mr. Cloud? What's going on in that spiky head of yours? I guess it's up to me find out for myself. The air was humid, and the heat caused a sheen of sweat to form on her skin, but she had a new challenge in front of her, and, seeking to overcome it, she followed him.

To Be Continued