I haven't posted on here in forever? Like years? I always forget to cross post otl. Anywaythis was my secret santa gift for nautilusopus for the secret santa exchange with gaiasanta over on tumblr. Happy holidays everyone! Also this story uses my personal headcanons and ideas about the religion and culture of the FFVII world. Please ask if you have any questions!
My prompt was Cloud returning to the Nibelheim Mansion for his and Zack's dog tags.
We talked about making it. I'm sorry that you never made it.
It had been years since the ashes had settled in Nibelheim, but the town was still as empty as it had been when the fire drove the citizens out of their homes. The north was superstitious. You kissed a carved wooden crow before eating, you didn't sing on full moons, you did not pray for more then you were willing to give, and you did not build your home on scorched earth.
The land was still fertile. There was no logical reason for it to remain abandoned, but here in the Nibelwyn mountains the old ways were still predominant. Cloud wasn't sure he believed them all, but he could not deny that he felt a sense of guilt walking on this ground, as though he were breaking some kind of invisible rule.
(You did not pray for more then you were willing to give- Cloud had prayed desperately for his own life, and he had given its equal worth, payed ounce for ounce in Zack's blood. It seemed that his mother had been right about the old gods.)
(It was ironic that the North burned their dead.)
The Mansion loomed in the distance, untouched by flames. It had remained virtually unchanged, aside from the wear caused by it's years of abandonment. Even the most daring trickster would not be willing to risk raising the ghost of what was left in Shinra's wake. Monsters were a best-case scenario, with Shinra.
Tifa had thought that Cloud was completely insane for going back, but she was gracious enough not to outright say so. He knew it wasn't the best idea he had ever had, though it could hardly rank among the worst. He wasn't at risk from Shinra- he let Tseng know what he was doing, to avoid any undue complications. Thankfully he hadn't had to endure more then a little of Reno's heckling, mostly because Tifa had stood behind him and cracked her knuckles, and Reno was still scared of Tifa.
Cloud had come back to the Mansion because he had left something behind.
It was strange, the memories that could survive in the human mind after it had been broken. He could not remember the name of his childhood cat, or how his mother's chicken soup tasted. But he could remember exactly how it felt when his dog tags were ripped from his neck, early on in their imprisonment in the cells of the mansion. He could remember Zack's indignation, even in the face of certain torture.
Those are mine! Hey! Hey you, ugly! Yeah, give them back!
He could not remember how it had ended, but he could imagine it was with a knee to Zack's gut and a muffled response. Zack had not given them the satisfaction of screaming. He held out longer then Cloud did, at least a month before begging them to stop.
He knew that their dog tags and original uniforms were still in the Mansion. According to Tseng, even the lab itself had remained virtually untouched since its hasty abandonment is Sephiroth's wake. There was every chance that his and Zack's things were still in the storage blocks in the Mansion labs.
He made his way up the steep hill that led up to the Mansion. He didn't want rubble getting in Fenrir's wheels, and no one was going to rent him a Chocobo up here. The view of the destroyed town was beautiful in its own way. Carnage had given way to the ghostly silence of the dead, and they seemed at peace. Cloud was far from comfortable here, but he felt no anger from the life stream. It too had become peaceful, now that Sephiroth's ashes had settled.
Cloud reached the large doors of the mansion. No one had bothered to change to passcode since the fire. He and Zack had been considered as good as dead, and it wasn't like a coded door was going to stop Sephiroth if he wanted to come back. It wasn't going to stop Cloud, for that matter. He wasn't above breaking the lock out of spite.
True to Tseng's word, hardly a thing had been changed since Cloud had last been here. Like a monument, everything had been left in place after he and Zack and escaped. Shinra only used locations once, then locked them away like archives in cryofreeze, waiting for some dumb bastard to stumble upon them. In this case, Cloud himself.
He tried not to stare at the tanks as he passed them. All the experiments had been removed, they were nothing but glass cases now. Just looking at them made it feel like he couldn't breathe, like there were tubes down his nose and throat and he was being submerged in chemicals again, waking up shackled to a wall with Zack calling his name and trying to talk him into breathing again.
He found himself having to lean on the wall and breathe in and out, slowly, about half way down into the labs. He felt ridiculous- he had faced down the end of the world without so much as a blink, stared death in the eye voluntarily more then once. But walking down stairs past surgical tables and empty tanks was like trying to walk barefoot across broken glass. Not impossible, but nearly. The walk up had been nothing, compared to this.
He was approaching the labs now. The lights had gotten brighter, and underneath the years worth of dust white tiles and steel counter tops were visible. Medical equipment seemed to have been left where it was last placed. A table covered in scalpels, syringes, and a particularly sharp looking pair of pliers sat in the middle of the room. Cloud's ribs ached with the memory pf what they had been used for. It was lucky they had given him the ability to heal scars, because otherwise he would look like a body post autopsy. He certainly felt like it, some days. After nightmares about the labs, he found himself pressing his fingers to his chest just to feel that his heart was still beating, that it really had not been cut from his chest and put in a jar somewhere.
Behind the labs, there was a storage area. He remembered the technicians going in and out of it, and Zack busting his way in. His awareness had been foggy at best for that whole year on the run, but he remembered the night they escaped. Zack and killed the two techs and the security guard left there at night, and grabbed spare uniform from the back room before grabbing Cloud and running.
The room had been more tightly sealed than the rest of the mansion, undisturbed by four years of abandonment. On the back wall, there was a series of boxes, the kind that sealed to prevent organic biohazard materials from leaking. Whatever had come from Sephiroth and Jenova would be dead by now, so Cloud was not particularly concerned about opening them for that reason. He examined the boxes, until he found the two labelled #667 and #668, numbers he had learned were Zack's and his when Avalanche had broken into Hojo's files.
Subject number 667 is resistant to treatment, likely due to prior Mako exposure. However, 668 is showing great progress. His healing ability has developed impressively, as demonstrated by an administered gunshot wound to the sternum proving non-fatal with no medical intervention
Slowly, he reached out and undid the latches holding the box closed. What he was looking for was sitting right on top, on a pile of folded uniforms, still bloody and singed from the night of the fire. Two sets of dog tags, standard issue on silver ball chains. One was slightly damaged, marking it as having been worn on the field for long periods. The other was practically new looking, not having seen much in the way of combat.
Zack Fair. Rank Soldier 1st class. Gongaga.
Blood type B+. South Gaianate. Mako lvl 223
Cloud Strife. Rank Cadet. Nibelheim.
Blood Type O-. North Pagan. Mako lvl 012
His and Zack's dog tags. They had been taken from them when they were brought to the labs. After all, science experiments had no identity. It didn't matter what their rank was, or how either of them wanted to be laid to rest. It didn't matter where they were born or what holidays they observed. For three long years, they had the same value as weapons that had malfunctioned. They were to be used and improved, and then disposed of when they did not perform as asked.
Weapons did not love. Weapons did not scream themselves raw when their lovers bled out in a wasteland, far from home.
Weapons did not have to lean against the wall and sink to the floor, clutching old dog tags to their lips as tears fell down their cheeks.
Cloud curled in on himself in the basement of the Shinra mansion. He had not cried in a long time- he was better now. He smiled more and spent time with Marlene and Denzel, walked them to school and helped Tifa at the bar whenever he had time. He was better, but he was not healed. He never would be, he thought. He did not think there would ever come a day when there was not a ragged edged hole in the centre of his heart, a place Zack had lived and had been forcibly cut away.
Loss was a part of him, in multiple forms. Zack, his mother, Aerith, Nibelheim. Himself, for a while. He may not have been possessed like Vincent, but he had been gone- hadn't known who he was or what he had done, what he had seen. He had lost a lot.
But he had these back. He had these dog tags, his and Zack's. One's that had sat above his heart and the one that had sat above Zack's. The last thing other then Cloud that had pressed itself to Zack's chest to find it still beating.
He took a deep, shaking breath, and lifted the two chains over his head, resting them around his neck. Having them back felt right. The familiar weight of the metal of the tags against his chest was relaxing. Like he had regained some tiny part of what he had lost.
Slowly, Cloud rose from the floor of the lab. He looked around himself. This place, this hell, was no longer what it used to be. It no longer held the same power over him that it used to. He had reclaimed the pieces of him that it still had hold over. Once he left here, there would be no physical traces of him left, if Rufus had been true to his word and destroyed his and Zack's blood samples.
He made his way over to the door, and up the stairs. Once he got outside of the mansion, he took one last look at the monstrous building. It was beginning to degrade, just like the rest of Shinra's empire. Soon there would be nothing left, the grandiose structures and scientific equipment lost to Gaia and the lifestream.
Everything came to an end, one way or another. No matter how powerful, eventually there would be nothing left but rubble and a few dog tags.
With a deep breath, Cloud turned away from the Mansion, and began the journey home.