🫀 – who taught them what love is? did it hurt?
the beauty of memory loss is that cloud gets to learn about love three times - and yes, it's always painful.
growing up, there was really no one in his corner except his mother. his father was long gone, his peers rejected him, and while tifa lived right next door, she was about ten years away. cloud strife was a lonely, awkward, bitter little boy, and claudia strife adored him despite it all. with his mother, love was all about gestures: steaming hot chocolate on a hard day, a reassuring squeeze of the hand, returning home to find a newspaper clipping of sephiroth on the table. love was indulging his SOLDIER dreams despite her reservations.
a mother's love should never hurt. it didn't. claudia strife's love was unconditional and all-consuming - and cloud shied away from it with childish embarrassment, squirming away from her affections and taking her gestures for granted. his mother took as little offense as she could, putting it down to a childhood phase. what hurts is that she never lived to see him outgrow it.
when zack broke him out of his pod in shinra manor, cloud learned what love was for a second time. with zack, it was much more about feeling than a sentiment shared. cloud wasn't capable of anything else. barely conscious, unable to speak or move, cloud hardly knew where or even who he was – but he knew that he was loved.
this time, love was an arm gently guiding him to water, a damp rag dragged across his face, being sat in the sun to dry. love was a hand under his chin encouraging him to chew. love was a fresh pair of clothes. it was the way zack would rearrange his limbs after setting him down, straightening out any unnatural angles to keep him comfortable. it was the steady stream of chatter in his ear even when he couldn't respond. it was a canteen between his lips, and the hand that diligently wiped water from his chin. love was unwavering patience, dignity and kindness at the risk of both their lives. cloud couldn't push it away this time. he was drowning in it.
zack fair was love incarnate. he loved like breathing. everyone and everything deserved his affection, his respect, his mercy. it was the loss of him that hurt – not watching him die, but knowing that the world had lost him, and that cloud's heart was about three times too small to ever replace his. it hurt to forget. it hurts to remember, in the strange, out of body way that he does. as if the love was there, but it belonged to someone else entirely.
the third time was a team effort. it wouldn't be right to credit just one person; he learned about love from tifa's patience and forgiveness even when he deserved none, from yuffie's devotion to her people, and barret's dedication to the planet (and his little girl). he felt it in nanaki's head in his lap, aerith's healing wind, and even cait sith's cheeky little doll-smile.
what hurts, this time, is the fear of losing it all again. that if he doesn't appreciate it enough, all he's learned will be ripped away, and maybe this time there will be no one around to teach him.
(bonus: one day, cloud will look into marlene and denzel's trusting eyes and decide he has never known what love means until this very moment.)
🧭 – where would they go if they could disappear tomorrow?
as a general rule of thumb, if you can't find cloud (and he's not off working), he's probably at the church in sector five. where else would he be? it's the hole he already crawled in once to die, and the final resting place of two of his closest friends. but that's such a basic answer, right?
the truth is, there aren't very many places left for him to disappear to. nibelheim is a soulless imitation of his hometown. midgar was destroyed by meteor. most other places hold no significance to him. maybe he could make like cissnei, and start fresh in gongaga. the lifestream, perhaps, though that has pretty dark connotations. it's not as if he's about to run off to the gold saucer, or costa del sol, or something.
(and going back in time is just a hassle. there are no sweet spots for cloud strife. either the people you love are alive, and you're suffering, or they're gone and you're slowly getting better. or you go back to the infantry, where you're just kind of miserable, and also you don't even know most of them yet.)
no, cloud is better staying right where he is. he's done enough disappearing acts for a lifetime.