A/N: Dear everyone,
Thank you so much for being patient with me! I've missed seeing all of you while I was away. Thanks for waiting, all my loyal readers! In case you're wondering, I was absent from the site because I was taking part in the amazing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) which I defeated with a word count of 56,000 words written in a single month! Needless to say, it distracted me from this fic a little... but I learned a lot, and now all of you get to reap the benefits! So here they are, back again, our extremely unhappy heroes! Many thanks to Rakuengaki, the author of the sequel, who was such a huge help with this huge chapter! (in fact, she wrote the first part for me!) If you haven't read The Good Doctor's Plan, go do it! It's awesome.
A special note to Frodo Silverlune!
Thanks so much for reading with me. I feel really bad, because you're super awesome, but Cloud isn't actually scheduled to appear in this fic. He is, however, the main character of The Good Doctor's Plan by Rakuengaki, which is the side story/sequel to this story (and was actually written first!) You should definitely go look it up to get your Cloud fix. It's super awesome!
Enjoy the chapter, everyone! I missed you all!
Chapter Eleven—With Direct Eyes
Zack thought he should get an award or ribbon or something just for surviving the look on the Silver General's face. He'd heard rumors of it, had even seen flashes a few times before but now as he faced the actual look, he thought he should be commended for not shaking in his non-existent boots.
"What woman, Zackary?" Sephiroth asked again, tone sharp with the unspoken order of an explanation and eyes narrowed as he waited. He had tensed when Zack mentioned his dream visitor and remained so now, shoulder blades pulled together, back ramrod straight, lips pulled into a thin line. Even his wing was stiff with the tension. Hesitantly, Zack swallowed down the nervousness in his throat and began to explain.
"She… I don't really know what she looks like. She sounds nice when she starts talking but then she starts talking about family and mother and she's always so cold. Do you--" Sephiroth stood abruptly, wing disappearing in a flurry of feathers, earlier weariness fading as he began to pace. Zack fell back at the sudden movement, catching himself on his hands and watched the man carefully, a shiver working up his spine as the image of long rows of book shelves flashed on either side of him.
"What—"
"It would be best not to listen to her, Zack. No matter how tired you are or what she says, ignore her and do not let her convince you of anything." Zack nodded slowly at the direct order and pulled himself off the cold floor onto the stiff cot, tracking his pacing friend with worried eyes.
"What's going on, Seph? Why are you so agitated about this? It's probably just my mind playing tricks on me or something!" Zack's attempt at laughing it off were ill received as Sephiroth glared sharply at him, pausing in his pacing to pull himself more upright, ignoring the pulling on his wounds and ran a hand through his hair in a rarely seen nervous gesture. Zack's worry grew as his mind raced.
"She is… not a figment of your mind, Zack, though I severely wish that she were. She is, perhaps, a secondary cause to our current situation."
"Secondary cause? What are you talking about?" Admittedly, he probably could have made the connection Sephiroth was implying but then again Zack had never been good at figuring things out when people were being vague. Mysticism and riddles bugged the crap out of him. Sephiroth heaved a frustrated sigh and stopped pacing, turning to look at Zack with hesitant, slightly down cast eyes.
"The secondary cause to our situation, Zack, is more than likely the woman you have been seeing in your dreams." Zack nodded slowly.
"The first cause being?"
"….Myself." Sephiroth ground, the word falling like acid from his lips. Zack leapt to his feet to deny the statement, his base instincts instantly denying that the damaged, enigmatic man could be responsible. The fact that he had thought the same thing himself only a day before didn't even occur to him in his outrage at the unfairness of the statement. Dizziness, however, caused him to choke on his words and stumble over his weakened ankle, Sephiroth catching him easily and setting him back down on the floor, hands stable once more. Quickly, Zack grabbed his arm and tugged to keep him from backing away, other hand pressed against his head in an attempt to stabilize the spinning whiteness of the room. Thoughts were crashing against each other in his mind creating a whirlwind of confusion. One thought would force itself upon him, drawing his quick agreement before an arguing statement caused him to reconsider. The denial that sprung to mind at Sephiroth placing the blame for their location and current treatment solely on himself was beaten back quickly with the fact that if Sephiroth hadn't locked himself away in the Shinra mansion basement and read over countless papers and books and gone on a rampage after reading them then they quite possibly wouldn't be here at this point.
However, a growing part of Zack didn't believe that to be true. There were circumstances and reasons behind all of this that were so confused and jumbled in his head that they slipped through his fingers like the wispy smoke of a cigarette. And the distracting buzzing in his ears and dizziness didn't help at all. Vaguely, he recognized someone shifting him around to lay flat on his back, a voice speaking to him that he couldn't understand though he thought he heard something about sleep. His confused mind latched onto that idea and ran with it, dragging him off into the darkness of exhaustion, the last effects of the drug still swimming through his system. Before his mind shut down completely, he forced himself to vow to think this over before making any solid opinions on Sephiroth's statement. He blinked his eyes open one last time, the distorted image of bright green eyes and blood-stained lips filling his view. When he faded away into dreams, he promised himself silently that he would remember to ask about the woman.
Of course, in the morning, he had no time to ask. When he awoke to strong hands on his shoulders, Sephiroth was gone once more. It was the same routine, and yet...
And yet something was irreparably different. Sephiroth was his again, not that he ever had been before, but it was there. Sephiroth had risked his life for Zack Fair, and nothing Hojo and his cronies said or did would change that. Zack ran like hell that day, and didn't bother with stumbling weakly, his wounded ankle screaming in protest after no more than an hour. He could feel himself damaging it, and didn't care. Every time he came close to quitting, Sephiroth's voice echoed in his ears. 'Show them you're strong.' With a wide grin, and a skip in his uneven, injured step, Zack ran until he passed out. Sephiroth was on his side now, and Zack was secure in his belief that no one could stand against that man. Not for long, anyhow. For the first time in ages, Zack had hope that he would one day get out of his tiny room, and away the evil treadmill and the empty people
"He's lying about me," a wounded musical voice warned him in his dreams. He almost laughed in her face, but instead he just shook his head and worked on toning her out. It suddenly became much harder as she started screaming wordlessly at him, enraged by his rejection of her previously welcomed comfort. As she was shrieking he snickered softly to himself, thinking of the stoic Sephiroth's heartfelt warning, and made a mental note to get a full explanation of who the crazy head-bitch was and why Sephiroth knew about her.
The screaming only increased as the moments passed, until finally Zack fell into a deeper, true sleep, more out of self defense than any actual need. She never seemed to be there unless he was only half asleep. Another mystery, he thought to himself with a wistful sigh as the screaming faded out. For a moment, he was able to utterly enjoy the peace of his own mind. Then the whiteness appeared.
It was his holding cell times ten. So cramped and small he felt like he couldn't breathe, pressing his hands to either wall without even straightening his arms fully, and the entire, minuscule cubical so white he wasn't sure if he was even seeing it, or had just gone blind. He started screaming, and couldn't stop, slamming his hands against one wall desperately, trying to find room, space, make a hole, anything. He was running out of air, and trapped, and alone. And then he wasn't anymore, because the space lengthened and ballooned outwards to accommodate a second shape, slumped like a body in the corner. Zack's desperate, panicked breaths stopped dead in his lungs at the sight.
Hair matted into dark, twisted swaths falling down in front of his face, over his shoulders, into his lap, before merging, shining, like chains with the white walls around them, twisted black holding the silver strands together.
"Seph?" Zack croaked to the still figure. The hair shifted, though the body remained slumped, and the, like a puppet, the hair pulled back away from his face tilting his head back to the light. The gaze was dead and empty, and his mouth gaped open, bright red blood and utterly black stigma staining his lips and chin, trailing down his neck and chest, his hair sticking to it and obscuring his body. Zack drew back, pressing against the white wall behind him.
Hair slid down from the ceiling, apparently reaching around from behind him to fall from above, and wrapped around his wrists, drawing them up to his chest, then out towards Zack, the head tilting limply before being yanked back once more to reveal that gaping mouth, those glazed eyes. Zack looked quickly away, down to the hands being thrust out towards him, and wished he could scream.
Blood streaked across porcelain skin, as cold and white as death, as Sephiroth offered him a still beating heart, still connected to the gaping hole in his chest, and spurting blood across the floor, his hair, his body, his face. Tears streaked down Sephiroth's cold, dead cheeks from empty eyes, and it was like watching one of the legendary weeping statues in Wutai. There was nothing left alive of the man save for that fragile, dying heart, and as Zack stood frozen against the wall, he wanted to save it, so badly it hurt him as though his own heart was shattering apart.
Then he woke up in a freezing cold room, stripped bare, and shuddering convulsively against the cold. He was getting numb, and his teeth were clacking together so hard that it was painful.
"Fucking hells!" he hissed through his clattering jaw. He was so cold it hurt. He struggled to sit up, and managed to rise to a sitting pose, breath huffing out of him in curls of mist that managed to look darker than the stark walls. His eyes burned at the freezing temperature, and he closed them firmly for a moment, letting them water again rather than drying out in the frigid air. He lifted his hands to his mouth and puffed a breath of air onto fingers that felt as distant from him as though they were really made of ice. When he blinked his eyes open again, it was because the claustrophobia he'd begun to develop was always worse when he wasn't looking. He hated the light, but he hated the small worse.
He froze in more ways than one upon looking around. Sephiroth lay immobile in his corner, and Zack could have sworn his saw steam rising from the silver warrior's body as his unnatural heat was stolen by the frozen room. He lay inches away from a pool of the stigma, and Zack could have screamed with frustration at how bored he already was with this routine of torture, and disappointment, and pain. Instead, he just bolted to the other man's side as quickly as his frozen legs would allow. He touched the once-general's shoulder and jerked his hand back instantly with a gasp. It felt to Zack's frozen fingers like Sephiroth was an inferno contained in flesh, but apparently the cold of his fingers was severe enough to awaken the larger man slightly,
Sephiroth let out a soft breath of air which, Zack decided right then and there, he would henceforth regard as a Sephiroth Moan. It was the closest the bastard seemed to get when any other being with any sense would be groaning like hell. The elder man turned his head just a little, looking up at Zack from the corner of a slanted eye with obvious confusion, even as he shifted in discomfort, his long limbs curling slightly inward.
"Zackary?" he grated, turning just a little more so that his chest was awkwardly compressed, but he could see Zack. His voice was little more than a whisper and a puff of misty breath. Zack stared down at his blue tinged skin, and the black stains on his lips and felt himself shivering convulsively in the freezing room, and blinked slowly, then huffed softly, his nose so deadened by the cold that he couldn't even smell the stigma, and pulled Sephiroth's shoulder around, helping him to turn to his back, revealing the faint, pink scars from the test the day before, which under less strenuous circumstances would have healed completely already. Zack settled beside him, more because his muscles had seized again than for any other reason and shot him a scowl.
"You're not gunna kill me for touching you this time, are you?" he asked, the bitterness in his voice cut by the fact that he was frozen to the bone. He was keeping his hands close to his chest, and clasped together now that they weren't on Sephiroth's burning hot skin. Sephiroth's eyes fell wearily closed and he shook his head with slow, painful reluctance.
"I will not," he muttered softly, and Zack nodded, then immediately flopped down next to Sephiroth and flattened himself against the larger man. The gasps of utterly awakened, stunning cold that greeted Zack's contact only served to amuse the younger man, even as he basked in the near painful heat of Sephiroth. The older man's brief halting struggle against the hold was cut short by another soft breath, and then he slumped, heart thundering in his chest.
"Don't fidget," Zack scolded, his skin soaking up the other soldier's warmth like a sponge. "You're warm. Why are you warm? Don't you do anything normally?" Zack's words were filler, and they both knew it. He was uncomfortable, and insecure, and covering it up with speech, and therefore Sephiroth didn't answer him. Zack placed one hand over his heart, uncaring of the smears of Stigma clinging to the Soldier's skin, and thereby his. The steady rise and fall of Sephiroth's chest was comforting in the unfamiliar atmosphere, especially after the dream. Zack let himself calm down, though it meant he got slightly colder in the parts of him not directly connected to his superior officer. In frustration at his own susceptibility, he rose smoothly away from Sephiroth and stepped away to start doing stiff squats, the blood rushing back into frozen limbs.
"That is ill-advised," Sephiroth warned. "You'll burn calories and freeze more later."
"Oh, stop being so sensible," Zack scolded breathlessly. "It's obnoxious. Tell me about crazy brain bitch instead." It was hard to watch Sephiroth's facial expressions while bouncing up and down in his trademark exercise, but Zack saw eyebrows rise over wearily closed eyes.
"Crazy...." he repeated to himself in confusion, a little lost at Zack's new nickname for his dream lady. When comprehension finally caught up, Sephiroth cracked open an eye again, fixing Zack with a disbelieving look for a moment before sighing, settling back on the hard floor once more, voice raspy and confused.
"What, exactly, do you wish to know? She is to be ignored." Sephiroth answered his inquest, as ever expecting that Zack would be satisfied with an order, as he himself would be. Unfortunately, Sephiroth wasn't a general right now, and Zack was bored. He dropped to do pushups instead of squats once the circulation returned somewhat to his legs.
"Yeah, I got that, but who is she? And why is she in my head?" Zack glanced over to him with a narrow-eyed half-suspicion. "And how do you know she's in my head?" Zack's eyes widened and he stilled, pushed fully off the ground and gazing over at his bewildered friend. "Are you in my head?" Sephiroth raised an elegant hand to forestall any further questions.
"I am not in your head," he replied calmly. "I would fear still more for my sanity if I were." The shot of wry humor nearly made Zack drop himself to the ground. As it was, he locked his arms into position before he dropped. The faintest twitch of lips upwards was the only response to his reaction.
"As for the woman..." he humor vanished from that smooth baritone voice, and Sephiroth's eyes opened again to slits of green through jet black lashes, face once more taking on a statue like expression of blankness.
"She is Jenova," he murmured, his voice laden with some burden that Zack could not place. Then he gave up trying to exercise and flopped to the cold ground, sitting up to speak to the reclining general from a short distance.
"Your mom Jenova?" he asked carefully, and Sephiroth nodded, very very slowly, but with something in his narrowed eyes that tipped Zack off that something was wrong. He swallowed, and actually managed to make his next question soft, and half-gentle, though he wasn't sure how he would react to the answer.
"Was... was that monster in the reactor..."
"Yes," Sephiroth answered, with a note of utter despair and resignation coloring his voice. Zack closed his eyes in sorrow, and nodded slowly, attempting to accept that, then scowled, and snapped his eyes open again.
"Bull shit!" he cried, so suddenly that Sephiroth actually bolted to his feet, eyes wide and startled. Zack ignored the startled move in preference of putting his hands on his hips, in his seated position, his back straightening and gaze leveling at his superior. "No fucking way is that your mom. It didn't even have a vagina! I looked!"
Sephiroth's eyes got wider than Zack had ever seen them, and his lips twitched furiously at the corners, flashing in amusement, but Zack didn't stop, extending a single finger to scold the man.
"Besides, you're, like, manly, and human and stuff! And isn't that chick supposed to be some relic of an ancient civilization or something? No way in hell did that thing give birth to you!"
"But," Sephiroth's smooth voice interrupted, intending to correct Zack's statements even as he sank back to the floor, but Zack's scolding hand flattened into a flat, physical denial.
"No. Your opinions are no longer being accepted in this matter. It's not your mom. The end! Time to move along! Even if she was, who cares? You're Sephiroth, and what you are has nothing to do with who your mother is! I mean, look at Angeal! He and his mom are... were... nothing alike..." Zack's statement lost a little momentum there as both men felt the pull of dark memories on them, but it appeared to serve its purpose. As the grief of loss weighed down on Sephiroth again, the strange, inhuman blankness that had slowly been encroaching on his amused gaze was replaced with a sorrowful look, and a careful shake of his head.
"I agree that Jenova and I are not the same, but I think you are mistaken about Angeal. He and his mother were very similar, Zackary. Consider it a moment." Zack sat blankly for a while, his mind feeling as frozen as the rest of him, but...
Yes, he decided after a while. Much though he hated to say so, Angeal and his mother were very much alike. Both of them had a tortuously warped sense of responsibility—both guilt-ridden from events out of their control—and both eventually running away from it. He bowed his head a little, feeing an old, sick rage at his mentor well up in him at the memory of what it had felt like to cut through... He refused to finish that thought, and set his mouth in a determined scowl.
"Reno then. His mom was a schizophrenic drunk, apparently. He's a weirdo, but he's not Schizophrenic or drunk. Most of the time. Or... Or Kunsel! His mom's a religious fanatic! Convinced Gaia's end is approaching! Even if that thing were your mom, Seph, that doesn't have to define who you are!"
Sephiroth went silent for a long moment, then sighed, eyes flickering slightly. With a soft shake of his head he lowered himself back to the ground, and Zack thought that, somehow, he looked weaker than he had the day before, with the fresh pink scars on his arm and torso. Leaner too, for one reason or another. Sephiroth lay on his side, eyes closed once more in what had to be a parody of peace, then glanced briefly up to Zack.
"...You will freeze," Sephiroth proclaimed after a moment of watching his former second stand shivering, his entire body starting to go numb. Zack started to protest, then Sephiroth lifted one arm, and beckoned him down. The gesture was so bizarre and unexpected that they both froze in that arrangement for a while before Zack cleared his throat.
"Seriously?" he asked quietly.
"If I cannot be normal," Sephiroth said with something that looked suspiciously like amusement, "we may as well make use of it." The usage of the word 'we' was all the encouragement Zack needed to drop to the floor, snuggling close with his back to Sephiroth's chest and his hands on the long, pale arms now encircling him. He would have been lying to say it wasn't more than awkward, and that he didn't wish for all the world that it was him holding Aerith rather than being held by Sephiroth, but it was warm, and it had been offered which was such a vast improvement in the other man's attitude towards him that Zack almost knew where he stood again. With a contented sigh, he curled his frigid feet a little closer, carefully placing his ice-cold toes against Sephiroth's finely-haired legs, drawing warmth even from there, and pulling another soft gasp of discomfort from Sephiroth before sliding off into sleep, too worn out to care about social norms at the moment.
The woman briefly yelped at him but it was cut off as he felt her attention turn elsewhere. A slow frustrated yowl escaped her, and Zack felt a strong hand land on his shoulder, looking over to see a dream of Sephiroth as he had been standing by his side.
His silver hair was blazing in an unseen light source, set off by the sheer blackness of his long jacket, powerful look accentuated by the heavy, solid pauldrons on his shoulders and the gleaming length of his sword beside him. The silver warrior was utterly calm and composed, as though his best friends had never abandoned him to die, and he had never lost his lover, and had never gone mad. The woman vanished, and Zack vanished back into the normal undertones of sleep, but not quite before swearing that, one way or another, he would get his Sephiroth back.
