To Nibelheim of Hel's Domain

Cid had known for quite a while that Nibelheim was always going to be a hurt for Cloud and Tifa. This was his first time being in the village himself, but Yuffie had blabbed about AVALANCHE's drive-by of it to him years ago, back when Cloud had gone--shit, there wasn't a good word to describe it--he'd gone and handed the black materia to Sephiroth, then disappeared in the collapse of the crater. The little oddities that had been there all along and the big fucking neon signs of underlying weirdness had come to the forefront of everyone's mind and they'd all talked about Cloud. Even him, newest to the group as he was, he'd noticed some things. But he hadn't known about the cover-up job done on the past Cloud had claimed to have, that Tifa had been adamant they'd shared.

"So they said it was gone, and we get there and hel-lo! Totally there. And I was thinking yeesh, I know someone said fire--what, like a kitchen fire? Because nothing was missing. It looked like your perfectly ordinary yawn-and-put-it-on-a-postcard dinky town. But then we got further in, and...some of the things there..."

The fact that Yuffie had then started to go quiet had told Cid a lot more than a thousand of her babbled words would have, and certainly more than her faltering conclusion of "there was seriously bad mojo" had. ("No shit, you found Vincent there.") When even the loudmouthed brat was tiptoeing on a subject, you knew it was sensitive like a sunburn.

( This is really just me poking around with how Cloud, Cid and Vincent might interact as a group. In Nibelheim. It didn't get to the reactor. )