Grace

In case any of us forgot Cloud is just a half bubble off plumb.
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I know I could love you much better than this—Sarah McLachlan, Full of Grace

Cloud was used to cold. Hell, he was from Nibelheim. Winter was just another season, and in Spring the world was reborn. Truth be told Midgar was too warm and oppressive for his taste, save for the few freeze-your-balls-off days Gaia threw in just for fun. He wore a coat just often enough to forget where he put it and it snowed just seldom enough to make snow tires a waste.

This wasn’t cold. And extended assignment for the Turks up past the Northern Crater meant they could bring their families, and Cloud was now family. It was either come along or spend two long months apart. Tifa had accompanied Rude as the two had decided to start a family, and the last thing Cloud wanted was to be left behind in Edge, alone without his love and his friend. Besides, he loved Reno enough to support him in anything. Hadn’t they pledged to walk through hell with each other?

This was hell. Cloud was pretty sure someone had been there and taken a picture.

No, this was not cold. This was the end of the world. The planet swallowed in ice as it had once been threatened swallow itself in fire. He sat by the window watching the wind swirl the snow into patterns and thought back to their arrival.

The half circle of utilitarian cabins provided basic shelter for the Turk families stationed at Crater Base were little more than layers corrugated metal separated by insulation. Cloud picked at the wall with wry amusement. Obviously ShinRa did not hold with luxury in the face of the apocalypse.

Reno hopped down behind him from the transport. “We got a pond, yo!” Sure enough, there was an iced over pond in what passed for a front yard, a thin frozen sapling beside it. Cloud wondered if it had ever grown in his lifetime. “Guess the fishing sucks,” Rude commented as he and Tifa walked to their own cabin next door. Tifa’s eyes, barely visible between scarf and parka hood, looked as depressed as Cloud’s but they were happy supportive Turk families. Gods forbid they admit to anything else. “It’s only two months, Teef,” he said comfortingly.

The cabin contained nothing but a bed, a kitchen with a two burner camp stove and a sink so small it would not hold a full size plate, a bedroom, and a living room with a window seat. “A window seat? What’s there to look at all day, snow?” Reno laughed. “What’s this say, babe?” he pointed to something that had been written on the wall.

It was in the slang of Nibelheim which, while not really a foreign language, was nearly unreadable to anyone not growing up there. It was a small world, apparently. “It says, ‘The Fimbul-winter has come at last’.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s folklore, the end of the world. The winters will get closer and colder, until spring never comes again. Finally a wolf will swallow the sun as it sets behind the mountains, then a second wolf will swallow the moon, and darkness will consume the world as brother kills brother. I heard that story when I was seven. Scared the shit out of me.”

“Someone hates cold more than I do, yo.” Reno put up their clothes and the new cold weather gear they had been issued. “No television?”

“You really think you can get a signal up here?”

“At least there is a bar. Let’s go!” They trudged through the fimbul-winter to the brightly lit common room at the center of the cabins.

There was nothing to do at the base. Few other spouses had made the trip so it was achingly lonely, even for an introvert like Cloud. He and Tifa read all the books left behind by previous shifts, even the trashy romance novels. They learned origami and made absurd things, then made up other things to make. Tifa even tried to teach him how to knit; it seemed to have a point to her as she wanted to have a baby. Cloud only wanted to knit a way out of there.

The boredom became a malignant thing, eating at them all. They couldn’t even cook a meal in the cabins’ meager kitchens; not that there was a need, the base had a mess hall. Tifa took to bitching and screaming at Rude, but Cloud was horrified. What a thing to do, he thought. Weren’t they up here to be supportive, he thought as he sat in his window seat and watched the snow swirl. The sound of the wind took on a tone of screaming in itself, as if the planet were angry at them. How much Gaia must still hate humans, to have a place such as this.

Reno and Rude played checkers for the hundredth time while Tifa bitched. Cloud looked out the window, then at his own reflection. His eyes looked sunken. He raised a hand to trace them, then pressed his fingers harder and harder into the cold glass.

Without warning it broke. He stared at the blood on his hand as though it belonged to someone else; Tifa’s scream was a distant thing. “What the fuck, babe? What happened?” Checkers scattered on the floor.

“The pane must have been loose.”

Reno took him into the small kitchen to wash and bandage the cuts. “You ok?”

Cloud stared at Reno blankly. How long had they been here? He tried to count the days back to when they joked by the pond, tried to grasp some kind of reference point. It seemed a lifetime ago. He felt disconnected. He felt…

He was losing his fucking mind in this place.

“Just tired. Can’t sleep in this damn wind.”

Reno reached out and cupped Cloud’s face as if seeing him for the first time since they arrived. “Go on to bed, I’ll be in shortly. OK?”

Cloud nodded, still numb. What had happened at the window? Not only was he not sleeping, he wasn’t eating and he only bathed out of habit—it was torture in the drafty cabins. And they hadn’t made love in…gods. Thanks to the frigid cold, they never actually undressed. And with Reno gone all the time…

Reno crawled in some time later and Cloud did something he had never done before. He pretended he was asleep.

The incident was forgotten, the window taped over with the flap from a discarded box.

Days ticked by, blown over by more wind and boredom. Reno had three days off while ShinRa trained their replacements and by the third day he was getting a taste of spousal life at Crater Base.

He whined one too many times about missing cable.

Cloud actually stepped away from his precious window to look at him as if he were the one losing his marbles.

“And just what the fuck do you think I’ve been doing all day for the last goddamned month and a half?”

Reno stood rooted to the floor. He could not have been more galvanized with shock had Cloud up and announced that he was straight.

“Babe…” he said in what he hoped was a comforting tone. “I know this is a shithole but just hang on. Soon, we’ll be home and it will be spring there…”

“Well, how fucking refreshing. Because spring never comes to this gods forsaken place. You go off to your job with your Turks and whatever the fuck you do all day.” Cloud desperately wanted to stop. It wasn’t all Reno’s fault; it was his job and Cloud had never asked him for help. But it was too late, it was like a cut artery. The hurt kept flowing like blood on the floor.

“I sit here and watch the dark and listen to the blowing wind all fucking day and I don’t even have a meal to cook, I couldn’t wash the dishes if I did, nothing but the goddamned wind day after fucking day!”

“Cloud, I…” Reno held up his hands as if fending off physical blows.

“No. Just no. If I’m a failure so be it. I cannot sit here and suck it up and pretend in this hellhole one more minute.”

Reno’s voice was deadly quiet. “I never asked you to suck it up. I only asked you to love me. Now get out.”

They stared at each other in horrified silence for a moment, neither quite believing what lay broken between them. Cloud took his hated parka and left the cabin for the common room.

“You know, I did that origami until my fingers hurt. I knitted for a baby that isn’t coming because I hate him too much to have sex. But it doesn’t matter because it’s all pointless. Hobbies just fill the time but they don’t change how much this sucks, at some point you have to stop moving.”

Cloud nodded. He knew this song and dance all too well; it was a relief to know that he hadn’t actually lost his mind. Well, that he hadn’t lost it alone at least.

She went on. “What I miss about Edge isn’t the weather, isn’t my friends. It’s who I am. I run a business there. I’m good at it. Here there is nothing to do but wait on the calendar. And it’s not Rude’s fault, I know it would be so gods fucking awful if I were away from him too, I just wish some days I could deal with it and be stronger. With more grace.”

I didn’t ask you to suck it up, I only asked you to love me.

The realization hit Cloud with such suddenness, he had to turn away so Tifa wouldn’t see his eyes fill. “That’s it.” He grabbed up his parka and scarf, pulling them on with such haste he bent his finger backwards.

“What’s it?”

“We weren’t meant to do this alone, Teef. Ask Rude for help. You won’t hate him anymore.”

“Where are you going?” she smiled, the first one he had seen since they came here.

“To borrow some grace.”

The trip back to the cabin was longer and colder when it wasn’t fueled by grief and self righteous fury. He half feared Reno wouldn’t forgive him, but the expression he saw through the crack in the door was relief and not anger.

He must have been watching for me.

“I was getting worried.” Reno pulled him into a hard embrace and breathed into his snowy hair, unwrapping the scarf as he did so.

“I was busy getting my head pulled out of my ass. I’m sorry. I was just trying so hard to prove to you that none of this bothered me, the dark, the wind, the boredom. That I was something more than, whatever. And I turned into a raving asshole.”

Reno rested his cheek against Cloud’s forehead. “And I’m sorry that I didn’t see you were going batshit crazy in this place. It’s ok to be miserable here. It’s a miserable place. I’ve noticed, trust me. You didn’t let me down by hating your first stint as a military spouse. I let you down by not telling you that.” He kissed Cloud then, gently.

He’d meant for it to be a comforting kiss, a soft one. But Cloud returned it deeper, as one between lovers who had been to war and come out on the other side of battle.

Later that night, after they discovered several dozen unsuccessful ways of having sex with most of their clothes on and at least three that worked just fine, Reno sighed contentedly.

“You know the first thing I’m gonna do when we get home?”

“Take a real shower?”

“OK, second. I am going to fuck you senseless, buck-ass naked, in the middle of the hard wood floor with the windows open. Fuck this cold shit.”

Cloud laughed. Possibly for the first time in nearly two months.

“Reno?” he said some time later.

“Hmmmn?” came the sleepy reply.

“You hear the wind?”

“Nope.”

“Me either.”

Two weeks later, the Turks and their families boarded the ShinRa transport and left Crater Base. Pushing bravely through the edges of the cabin pond were the thin green shoots of deeply buried bulbs; the first signs of a late and chilly spring.