Author's Note: Hey, thank you all for sticking with this fic. I promise I will try to update as much as possible. Ok, a few things. I started this fic before Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII ever came out and I know it is only in Japan and came out two weeks ago (9/13/2007), so this may be inaccurate because there is still little known about Zack. Also, someone raised the question of no heaven or hell but the Lifestream and I just wanted to let everyone know that I am full aware of that and that I am using the Lifestream as sort of a gateway to heaven and hell.
Disclaimer: I own nothing that has to do with Final Fantasy. It belongs to Square Enix. Everything else is mine, so if you'd like to use it let me know.
Chapter Two: Stuck In Neutral
Youth. You never appreciate it while you have it. You never respect it while you are alive. And I wonder why I never thought of all the things I wanted twenty years from now instead of the things I wanted that day in time. There are all those dreams you never thought you'd lose and now your time has passed you by. I wish I could get it back but I don't think I can.
I remember the day I left Gongaga for Midgar. I thought that I would make something of myself. Become a real man, not like my father. He thought that just because you held a gun it made you a tough guy. That day he laughed at me and said that I would never amount to anything. That pansies like me would never make it in SOLIDER. I had told him that he was just jealous because he was old and washed up from his days at SOLIDER. That he had let life become bitter and had treated his wife and child in the worse possible manner. I kissed my mother good-bye and told her not to cry that I could handle myself. That was the last time I had saw my father alive. I wish I hadn't been so cold and immature. I wish I could have seen things from his point of view. Maybe he wasn't really the asshole I had thought him to be. I know now that Shin-Ra Corp. destroyed the man that he was. That was their job. To take strong young men and turn them into machines to do their bidding.
I look down on earth and I see how it is slowly being destroyed from the mako reactors and I can't help but be angry at myself for being a part of it. I can't help being angry at those who I had trusted. How they held me captive for four years and did horrid experiments on Cloud and Me. I look down there and see how he is struggling. How he believes that he is me. I wish he believed that he was someone more pleasant. Someone who lived a happy life. But for some reason unbeknownst to me his mind chose me. I see how he looks at Aerith because of the way I felt about her. The one thing that I see that is still him is that same brooding darkness. He still has that same anger that boils beneath the surface. I wish he wouldn't push the people he cares about away from him.
That was one thing that I learned far to late. That you needed people whether you wanted to need them or not. Just like I had needed my family and Angeal and Sephiroth. Ironically they all eventually turned their backs on me. But was that my fault or through faults of their own. Even now I can't figure out what was real and what wasn't. It feels like it was all a dream. Things that were once in my grasp now feel like air slipping through my fingers.
Here in the afterlife nothing is what it seems. One minute you think that you know what's going on here and down there and the next minute everything contradicts itself. I miss life. Here its like being stuck in neutral and you can't get out of it.
