Notice: I'm gonna be completely honest with you guys. The reason this story hasn't updated in forever is that formatting it for is a pain in the ass and I just got tired of it. This chapter alone took half an hour, and it's probably gonna get more annoying from here on out as creative formatting becomes more and more common. On top of that, it's kind of a hassle to fix typos and consistency errors in this version, so that's been left alone too. Meanwhile on AO3 (where you should be reading this) we're all the way up to chapter 33, with 34 about to hit in a few days. Oops.
On top of that, this site has a lot of technical issues where it just doesn't seem to like me, personally, making putting chapters up here even and general maintenance more unnecessarily difficult.
My presence on this site was an experiment and one that I think didn't really work out, as noted on my profile. I'll probably archive this whole story here eventually, but in the meantime going through the trouble just isn't worth it considering the story's already up on another platform that's a lot easier for me to use and doesn't mangle my formatting every time I use it.
Before I forget, this chapter contains graphic depictions of violence and body horror.
Lastly, thank you to daily-kaley and belderiver for your fanart, which can be viewed here:
daily-kaley . tumblr post/171369828466/this-is-nautilusopus-s-rat-oc-remy-a-very-good
fury-brand . tumblr post/173112057987/cloud-very-angrily-eating-a-peanut-butter
(please go read this on AO3 i'm begging you)
Aeris watched the first rat scamper around in its isolated enclosure, rolling her pen back and forth on the desk in front of her. It and its seven surviving brethren were all still alive and kicking, with the first couple rats having lived an entire week and clearing a battery of tests that had checked for everything from prions to fleas. The transfer process hadn't scrambled any cells or merged them with the glass or cooked them with radiation.
The rat continued snuffling at the corners of its living quarters, perhaps looking for a way out. Each rat had been put into a sealed environment and kept apart from one another in case one of them was carrying something they shouldn't be, and none of them seemed to be enjoying it much. Rats were social creatures, Tseng had said. Zack really shouldn't have been petting them so much. They'd gotten used to it, it seemed. Aeris thought they seemed a little lonely.
None of the rats had sickened, though, so in theory Zack shouldn't either. Of course, they wouldn't know until they tried. Zack was a test case as much as he was an information gatherer. There really wasn't much else to do apart from proceed and hope for the best.
Still, the results looked promising. There were unknown microbes present in the air sample they'd taken, of course, but Earth's own native bacteria easily seemed to out-compete or even feed on them, given they were utterly unadapted for interacting with any other microorganism in its biosphere. Others, like staph and bacillus, were easily treatable on Earth. So long as he didn't eat any dirt, or "stick it in" any of the inhabitants, as he'd so daintily put it he should do well enough.
So, that was that. Someone was going now. And it wasn't her.
Tseng came up behind her, looking solemn, and nodded. Aeris put her pen away and got up to follow him into the fifth ring.
The mood changed a little as she entered the room. The tank had been drained for now - no point in wasting energy maintaining something that would be almost entirely redundant soon. Still, it was hard not to get caught up in the excitement of it all, just a little bit.
If she'd thought Zack had been fidgety before, he was absolutely restless now. Cissnei was on the intercom with him, walking him through how to say "hello", or at least their best guess on how it sounded. At least once they had someone talking to Cloud directly, the language thing could be resolved a bit more smoothly.
Zack was already finished getting suited up, though they'd had him shed several layers of it, originally meant for protecting him from extremes of heat and cold, as well as the helmet. Instead of a closed air supply, he'd been outfitted with an air filter that covered his nose and mouth, reducing both the weight he'd have to carry, and the amount of matter they'd have to move. Just in case.
She didn't speak much to him, only pausing to check a few numbers here and there. There was a lot of complicated work that went into these things on both their ends, and Zack was a lot bigger than a rat, or even three rats. She needed to focus. And maybe she was a little bitter, too, but if she was going to do this, she was going to do it right.
Adding to everyone's anxiety were the cameras set up around the room. This was going to be the footage they showed in history classes hundreds of years from now. Zack had been given a much simpler one, strapped to the chest of his suit, to achieve the same effect.
She'd been thinking about this moment for a while. She'd come up with something profound to say, but for the life of her she couldn't remember what it was now. Oh well. Cameras were rolling, and this time there weren't any speech cards being shoved in front of her. An overwhelming urge to say "fuck" suddenly came over her. She fought it down.
"Contact point established," she said aloud. Next to her Angeal nodded and gestured to Zack through the glass. Cloud had described the process of them referencing his location and using him to triangulate their bridge as "a little uncomfortable". She quietly mouthed "sorry" as she finalised their coordinates. It seemed like the right thing to do.
"He's been made aware of the staff change," she said to Zack, or rather, to Zack's left shoulder, since she still couldn't quite look at him. "Just be polite. He'll... walk to you to where you need to be." Officially, that was right back to Edge, where he was definitely heading, to speak to someone in charge.
Unofficially... she didn't know anymore. She hoped to god Zack would think of something. They were a little far from Edge at this point for the second phase of their plan to work, but they didn't really have much of a choice not to proceed anyway. It seemed nobody really had much of an idea what they were doing anymore. That figured. Cissnei had been half right with the Apollo project comparison, but they were more along the lines of 13 than 11 by now.
Speaking of which, she'd been taking notes almost nonstop since getting back her improvised syllabary. "There are four different writing systems," she was saying now, muttering excitedly to Aeris as she sat down in a chair next to her. "Culturally and structurally it makes sense for it to be some sort of pidgin, but none of the other cultures you mentioned have any relation to it. Or perhaps there's only three writing systems, and we only consider two of them separate due to our own relationship with how Latin evolved out of Greek? I could write about a hundred papers on the subject... I just wish I had more to compare it all to."
As predicted, she was over the moon about the whole thing. Aeris just nodded and smiled. "If I really concentrate, it sounds a little like Welsh. But then, that could just be my brain making it sound like something familiar all over again."
"Welsh makes sense," said Cissnei, "If they had Romans and Greeks, as well as Celts, and they all just decided to settle down together, which would explain the composite nature of it all... they probably didn't, though. If they don't have an England, or an Augustus Caesar. Or... a lot of things." Cissnei gave her a significant look.
Oh right. Magic. That was real, and existed. And now her whole team knew about it.
She'd admitted almost everything at that point - almost, anyway. Not the plan, at least, not that there was much left of the plan to execute anyway. But everything else. Dragons, and magic, and the Lifestream... Tseng had been furious at first, until she began to explain the concept of a sentient planet and its symbiotic relationship with the humans on its surface.
"You're going to make a lot of people very angry with that transcript of yours," he'd said after her third visit. "You're going to be accused of inserting politics."
"Something came along and decimated the population and I'm supposed to not mention what it is?" she'd said irritably over her container of allsorts, when they'd been in the lab together. Not to mention, they were way past the point of inserting politics into things, at least as far as things were concerned on Cloud's side. "There isn't any -"
"I didn't say I would," interrupted Tseng. "I think it's very telling about human nature, actually. I just thought I would warn you."
"Well... thanks for the warning," she had said, shrugging. "Do you have any theories on how it all works?"
"Besides 'spirit energy?'" said Tseng, and Aeris nodded. "I'm... afraid I don't, and the mathematical evidence you've supplied does seem to make sense. I'm assuming, anyway, that's not my field. Hewley's been taking it in stride."
"Oh?"
"Yes. One would assume he'd be a bit more bothered by it."
"Aren't you?"
Tseng made a dismissive noise and turned his attention back to his notes. "Personally, I'm wondering whether or not I should reclassify what we've found from humans to something else. Clearly there's more at work here in their reproductive processes than what our current definition of animalia will allow for."
Aeris wasn't entirely sure how, but she had a sinking feeling that was in some way racist. Species-ist? Magic-ist? They were going to need a lot of new words to describe what they'd found in English. It was a good thing they'd have Cissnei around.
They could think of what to call everything after the fact. For now, they had a universe to punch open.
Zack had no idea how Aeris was sitting there as calmly as she was. He didn't really expect her to be too happy, and he didn't exactly want her yelling in his face or holding back tears or something, but the non-reaction was, again, spooky. Maybe she just didn't want to look bad on camera.
Now, him, he didn't ever look bad on camera. Cameras loved him. He'd had a camera shoved in his face since day one of this mess, and even before it, back when he was playing sports in college. He slipped the charismatic grin back on, as easy as putting on an actual mask, and gave a tiny salute to one of the cameras. "Ready to go exploring," he said, his voice probably sounding compressed over the speakers installed in the sixth ring in order for anyone outside of it to hear him in the first place. That was fine. Even compressed-lab-speaker Zack had sex appeal. That's what the public wanted, really. Most scientists weren't young and attractive enough for the ignorant, horny masses to take interest in. That wasn't to say other groups might.
He went back to work, no longer grinning at the camera but consciously exuding the same stage presence he knew the world wanted. The world wanted a show, but if he milked it any more than that Aeris would probably come to his house and choke him to death with her ribbon.
Slipping on his air filter, he went over his instructions again one last time. The vast majority of them were useless. Why not just tell him what he needed to do directly? What a waste of time. What an expensive, stupid, mentally taxing, overcomplicated, pointlessly draining waste of time.
He took another look at the other five people on the other side of the glass. He'd have no contact with them at all until they recalled him ten minutes later. Brain signals could be sent along the pattern they'd discovered, but things like radios would still have nowhere to transmit to.
Remy seemed okay, though. They'd even talked about allowing him back in the sixth ring with Zack once he returned and went through decontamination, since they'd both been exposed. Something for him to look forward to. He wondered if CERN would let him keep it.
"Camera's up and running," he said, switching it on.
"Initiating transfer in E-minus two minutes," said Angeal. "The best of luck to you."
Zack stepped into the gateway chamber and heard the door hiss shut behind him. This was really it. He decided, just for that moment, he could let go of every pretense of what he was doing and why, and just enjoy the fact that he was really going to another planet. This was every kid's dream. This was his dream, before he learned NASA was getting defunded to hell now that the space race was over and there was no way he'd ever get to go to space.
Well, they might be getting defunded to hell right now. That was about to change. All of it could change. He was going to space (sort of)! He was going to meet an alien (mostly)! Aaron, his little brother, would probably want a lot of stories about this. He wondered what he could sneak around the gag order to tell him.
Angeal's voice began counting down around him from a speaker inside the room. Was this what it was like for Aeris? When he did the same? Would he do this right? Had he remembered to put the sample bags in his pockets? Too late to worry about that now.
"Five."
He wondered if it would hurt.
"Four."
The rats didn't seem like they were in any pain, but then again, they were rats. Who knew what they were thinking?
"Three."
He did build this thing, technically. He should trust his own skills. He was good. He knew he was good.
"Two."
CERN thought he was good enough, obviously. Or maybe they were doing this because they didn't trust his math.
"One."
...He shouldn't even really be here. Not in this whole facility.
"Cre g
g
a
t
e
w
a
y."
Time slowed to a stop.
Time wasn't real in the literal sense. So it probably wasn't slowing at all. If anything was changing, it was him.
So this was what ceasing to exist was like.
There was nothing here, he knew - not even himself. He wasn't even entirely sure he was thinking. Everything was jumbled and strange.
Deep things moved in the dark.
Zack wasn't falling. He was being pulled. By what, he didn't know. There was no sight here; even the darkness wasn't an absence of light - it was absence itself.
He still found himself trying to look around, even if he wasn't sure he had eyes at that exact moment (but he must, because he had a brain, because he was thinking, wasn't he?), but try he did anyway. He could feel something all around him that wasn't absence, or maybe was, and yet was there and wasn't, that was infinite and nothing, billions upon billions strong and only one, and he turned and Saw
.
Field? Was standing on a field. Zack blinked his eyes, and looked around the field. The one he was standing in. Standing here.
He shook his head to clear it. That was... certainly something. Never mind that. There was business to attend to.
"We're here," he said aloud into the microphone mounted to his suit. "We made it. It's..."
It really did look a lot like Earth. Maybe not as claimed by urban development, but then they were in a rural area. He was standing on a small hilltop overlooking a small lake. A herd of some sort of rodent he didn't recognise had grouped up by the shore and appeared to be sunning themselves. A great deal of birds had taken to the sky, probably disturbed by his arrival. The wind blew over the grass and through the few small trees that were growing nearby.
He hated it. He hated looking at it. He didn't understand why - by all accounts there was nothing wrong with what he was seeing, but somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that this was wrong, that he was seeing something impossible, and that there was nothing to be seeing, and he should shut his eyes right away. Aeris had described something like this briefly on her first couple bridging sessions, at least, but he hadn't imagined it had been this intense.
"...It's pretty amazing," he finished lamely. If they were going to send anyone, it should have been Angeal. He'd probably have something eloquent to say.
There was something underneath one of the trees. Zack realised with a double-take that it was a human. They were asleep, by the looks of things. Laid out next to them was a completely impractical-looking sword. Was this Cloud? It had to be. He wouldn't know for sure until he saw the eyes, but there was no one else around that could've been used to get him here, anyway.
Zack stared at him - the very first person they'd met here. The guy that they'd been introduced to an entire culture through. This was Cloud Strife.
He was... kinda small. He hadn't been expecting that. And he looked kind of sick. Pasty. Too thin. Maybe it was because the clothes he was wearing seemed a little too big on him, or maybe the sword just made him look smaller. Or maybe because he was asleep, and lying down, and not able to glare at him and spit insults yet.
Here goes nothing.
"Hello?" he said.
Cloud slept on, oblivious. Zack rolled his eyes. Some first contact this was.
"Hello?" he said, a little louder. "I made it."
Cloud stirred beneath the tree, looking around in confusion for a moment before his eyes fixed on Zack. Zack shivered and looked away.
Those weren't human eyes. They weren't. He'd been told, he'd read the transcripts, he'd had so long to get used to the concept, but actually seeing them - they weren't human. The pupils weren't actually the worst part, he realised. It was the glow. Unnaturally bright, especially under the shade, radiating a cold, foreboding presence that seemed to have a life of its own, and he could have sworn the light was moving...
Zack hated looking at that too, but he was 100% sure that it was him that felt that way, and not just his brain.
He blinked and forced himself to look Cloud in the eyes again, and frowned.
Had they been that brilliantly green before?
Wake up.
Cloud's eyes snapped open, unsure of where the voice had come from or whose it had been. He could have just been hallucinating again. There was nothing else out here, except...
Cloud stared up to see something standing in front of him. A person? It didn't look like a person. It didn't look like anything. He didn't want to look at it. But it was a person, he realised. It looked like one. There was a person here. The something didn't look like a person at all. There was someone here. There was someone here to see him. A person. Someone came back for him.
He was very tall, and looked as though he spent a lot of time outside. There was a certain haughtiness about him that Cloud didn't really care for, nor the way the man shuddered and turned away from him in disgust.
Aeris said he could trust him, though. Couldn't he? He could trust Zack. Cloud trusted Aeris. He had to trust Zack...
...and he would. He didn't care anymore if he didn't like him. He didn't care that he'd never speak to anyone else again. He didn't care about anything else in this single moment besides the fact that he wasn't alone anymore. He wanted very badly to reach for Zack, to touch him, and he only barely stayed his hand. It had been so long.
The man was saying words (they were always important, words, but he could never make himself understand them fast enough), but Cloud was having trouble picking them up. His head was all fuzzy. All he could think about was that that this was the first person he'd been around in almost a month, since he'd woken up in a cell.
He needed Zack to stay. He needed him. Just having him here felt like... like being whole. He needed him to stay. The thought of him not being here, of going back to feeling sad and empty and incomplete was unbearable. He had to know what the point of him was. He wouldn't have a point without anyone else. Nobody had a point without anyone else.
Had to stay here, though. He needed to think. But the feeling was getting stronger, and his mouth didn't seem to work anymore. Zack was still saying something to him, and maybe it wasn't his fault he couldn't understand it this time? He continued to stare blankly at him, uncertain of what he was supposed to do.
Until suddenly, he felt it.
Come here.
Cloud slowly stood, the thought blighting out all others. He'd been told to come here. He had to. He'd been in so much pain recently - pain he didn't even know he was in, and he'd tried so, so hard to ignore it... and here was Zack's presence, washing over him like a balm, alive and speaking to him, and closing the holes.
He wanted to be whole. He couldn't stand another second of his life the way it was, an incomplete thing trying to fill itself with parts that weren't even him. He needed to be whole. Mother wanted him to be whole, and now he was ready for Mother.
He kept approaching Mother, who was all around him now, singing Her songs, warm and complete and peaceful. He felt lighter. His body knew what to do, or rather, Mother knew what to do for him. No more hurting. No more emptiness. No more quiet. No more cold. No more Cloud.
He couldn't see. He couldn't move. He couldn't even breathe anymore. That was alright. He smiled inwardly, knowing that, at long last, he was whole. Where he should be. Part of Mother.
There was a very tiny part of him, somewhere far away, a part that wasn't needed anymore, that had one last thought.
Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is wrong. Something is -
Cloud had been staring at him for a while.
Zack had been talking for a while, too, actually.
...He couldn't remember what about. That was weird. Come to think of it, there wasn't a whole lot of reason for him to be talking anyway, knowing neither one of them could really understand one another yet. He'd been explaining about... knowing where to go? It was all a little blurry. Which was odd, considering it had only been moments ago.
He felt strange. He hadn't before, but now... maybe he was motion sick? Everything felt heavy.
Cloud had gotten up and was approaching him, looking utterly entranced by his presence. He would have taken a step back, only he realised he didn't know exactly where he was in relation to Cloud. The world seemed to bend around him.
Suddenly he didn't want the thing approaching him to take a single step more. It - Cloud - wasn't there. Or maybe he was there. There was something behind him. There was something behind everything. A horde of spiders, or something, just teeming under the surface, waiting to burst.
Cloud was in front of him now. He couldn't see anything right anymore. He tried to look away, and found only more of himself, and more of Cloud. They were both everywhere. There was nowhere else to look, even when he shut his eyes, except he couldn't shut his eyes - he caught a glimpse of his arm, maybe, or a leg, or Cloud's arm, or -
The world was thinner. There were things in his head that didn't belong there, fleeting, skittering bits of thoughts like a thousand little needles in the back of his eyes - another glimpse of himself - god - bone slowly poking through the skin - his whole body numb - a wet crunching, crackling, dripping noise - a noise he couldn't even begin to describe, louder and louder and louder and louder and louder - his own jaw, twisting and parting and then dropping and folding into - god it was so loud - inside, eyes, and things crawling in from nothing and everything - make it stop make it stop - help me -
By the time he wanted to scream, there was nothing left to do it with anymore.
Lazard's voice cut through the silence. "Five minutes remaining."
Nobody had said much. Partially because the cameras were still rolling. Partially because there was nothing to say. All of them were still waiting. The only words exchanged were diagnostics, regular sound-offs confirming everything was working as intended, and Lazard keeping track of their time.
They'd have footage from Zack's chest cam waiting for them when he got back. Aeris tried to keep her focus on the screen in front of her, but the urge to just stare at the now-empty gateway chamber was overwhelming.
Someone said something to her that she couldn't quite catch. She looked up and turned around. "What?"
Cissnei shrugged. "Didn't say anything."
"Sorry." She went back to looking at her screen. The data kept streaming in as usual. They seemed to have gotten all of him over successfully, without leaving an arm behind in some quantum hole or anything.
"One minute remaining," said Lazard. "Get the sample boxes ready. If anything survives decontamination, I want a look at it."
"On it," said Aeris. She got up from her chair and went over to the compartment by the wall to the sixth ring. She was halfway through unpacking the containers before realising they were out of rubber gloves. She didn't really want to miss the return, but they did need gloves. She began shifting the contents of the shelves aside, wondering if there was a box somewhere in the back.
"Ten seconds," said Lazard. She didn't find a box, but she did find a few more loose pairs of gloves. They'd have to do. She would need to have words with the others about putting things back. They were an internationally-funded medical team, not a bunch of line chefs.
A loud beep was heard from the console on her computer. Zack was back.
She paused when she got a look at the lit indicator on the screen - yellow, and red.
Additional contaminants. A lot of them. And red meant something wrong with his vital signs.
"Get him out of there," she snapped immediately. A million images filled her mind - maybe Cloud had stabbed him. Maybe he'd gotten infected by some alien disease, and fallen over dead in a second. Or there was a leak, or maybe the inside of the chamber had exploded, filling him with shrapnel, or it had splattered him against the wall the way it had her parents, or they'd brought him back sideways and there was just a pair of disconnected legs waiting in the chamber for her, or maybe (God, please let it be true) the machine was in a panic about nothing and he'd taken his breathing filter off, or maybe the filter had malfunctioned and he'd suffocated -
It was worse. When the door opened, it was a million times worse than anything she could have imagined.
A… thing spilled out of the chamber. A pulsing, twitching pile of flesh, as though he'd been melted and rolled into a pile of components roughly suggesting a human, but nearly triple the size of one. Things crawled beneath the surface of the skin, and occasionally something would punch through, exposing a bit of bone, bits of flesh only barely hanging onto it, disconnected from any tendons, or an organ, or -
It kept spilling, and spilling and spilling. Aeris found herself stepping away from the window, even as it stopped expanding and lay there, shuddering and convulsing. A flap of skin parted, exposing an eye that seemed to rapidly melt and merge back into the skin. A limb, devoid of any skin -with entirely too many fingers, part of a jaw extruding from the palm - flailed itself into being before collapsing back into the pile, spraying some sort of clear-ish fluid all over the floor. Beside her, she heard Angeal vomit.
There were parts there that didn't look remotely human, either. And the noise it was making...
She couldn't stop looking at it. She couldn't bear looking at it. Why couldn't she stop looking at it?
"Z - Zack?" she choked out. The thing in the cell didn't respond. Around it on the ground were shredded bits of clothing and a few pieces of metal. As she watched, more and more scraps of cloth were excreted as it shifted and undulated, structures forming and unforming like globs of oil in water. She caught a glimpse of another eye then - dark blue, almost purple. Undeniably his. It split in half a moment later as some sort of claw pushed its way out, before it too was claimed by the rest of its own mass.
"Oh god…" She forced herself to look away. Angeal was staring, transfixed, through the observation window into the sixth ring the way she had, looking pale and drawn. She turned to Cissnei, who seemed to be hyperventilating. Before Aeris could say anything else, she stood up and ran from the room. Lazard had crossed himself. Tseng seemed numb.
What was left of Zack suddenly lurched again, exposing part of its underside, covered in eyes - not all of them the right colour, way more than two, why were there more than two, why were there so many - which began splitting open into mouths, or something like them and let loose another, louder noise; a low, reverberating howl that sounded, in some twisted, inhuman way, like screaming.
Tseng was the next one to move, reaching up and closing the shutters on the room. He then reached down and switched off the microphone, and sank back into a chair.
"Is - is he dead?" asked Angeal after another moment of silence, his voice hoarse.
"If he's not," said Aeris slowly, "would that… would it be any better?"
Nobody said anything else for another moment. The same silence as before blanketed the group, and still nobody knew what to say.
"Shut the cameras off," snapped Aeris suddenly. She got out of her chair and ran to the nearest one. "Shut the fucking -" She fumbled with it for a few moments before opening the back and ripping the battery straight out. Tseng, almost robotically, got up a moment later and began to help.
Nobody said anything for several more minutes, even once the last camera was disabled. Lazard just sat there staring at the closed shutters, his face stricken with grief. Cissnei could be heard in the fourth ring airlock, in near hysteria. Eventually, she let herself back inside and sat against the tank, staring at the wall under a desk.
Aeris forced herself to get back up and went over to the wall switch.
"God, don't -" groaned Lazard.
"I have to see," she said, her breathing ragged. "I have to see him. I have to -"
"Aeris, you don't need to look," said Lazard. "You don't have to look at any of it -"
"I have to see!" said Aeris, her breath hitching as tears began to well up in her eyes again. "I have to -"
The shutters went back up, and there it was, in all its glory. There. She'd looked. She'd keep looking. She had to.
"I didn't know," she said quietly.
Angeal came up behind her and put his arm around her shoulders. "Nobody did. Nobody could have known." He, too, was crying. "Aeris, please just close the shutters."
"We have to look," she said again, her voice trembling. "What - we have to figure out what to do."
"Do?"
She nodded, turning away and looking at Angeal again. "We can't just… we can't just leave him like this…"
Tseng spoke up again. "It may be kinder to…"
They knew what he was suggesting. Aeris said nothing in reply. She wasn't even sure how she'd do it. They didn't have any guns. She wasn't even sure that thing had lungs to be deprived of oxygen with. Maybe it would starve to death -
Zack. Zack would starve to death. Unless they killed him first, because he -
She knew she couldn't do it. She didn't know if her coworkers could bring themselves to do it either. But there couldn't be a way to fix this, could there?
Nothing in modern medicine -
...Not their medicine, maybe.
She turned back to Angeal. "Go find our signature again. I'm going to talk to Cloud. Now."
Angeal stared at her for a minute before comprehending what she was asking, then stationed himself back at his desk, stepping over the mess on the floor. It was probably absolutely wrecking the "clean room" aspect of the facility, and they should have cleaned it up ages ago. But then, there was also a giant pile of meat in the other room probably infected by some unknown alien contagion, so keeping the facility "clean" was a moot point by now. Aeris dashed off to get into her jumpsuit, not bothering with the chemical shower first. They could get yelled at for damage to company property later. This, she thought, was exactly the sort of thing that magic should be able to fix. Shouldn't it?
She ran back into the fifth ring and was halfway through shoving the lid off the tank before Angeal spoke up again.
"It's gone."
Aeris froze. "...What is."
"The waypoint. Our pattern. It's… it's not there anymore."
"What do you mean, it's not there anymore?" she said sharply. "How is it -"
"It's not there, Aeris," Angeal fired back. "It's gone. Cloud's - he is gone."
She could see the glass-covered disc from where she was standing. There were no longer any lights active on its surface.
"Look again," she breathed. Her mouth had gone dry.
Angeal ran another scan. The disc remained unlit.
Gone. They were both gone.
"Do another one," she said. "We must not be doing something right, we -"
"Aeris," said Tseng gently.
"No. No, I can fix this, I can -"
"Just stop, okay?" said Cissnei. "Just… just stop it. He is dead. Or should be."
Aeris went back over to the now-useless tank and sat next to Cissnei.
"What did we do wrong?" she asked.
Cissnei shook her head. "I don't know."
"...Did he have a family?" asked Aeris.
"I think so," said Cissnei. "I don't know if we're allowed to notify them -"
"Well, they're going to fucking notice, aren't they?" she spat.
"I don't know what to do!" Cissnei's eyes darted between her and the glass, her voice cracking as it rose to a near-shriek. "Don't yell at me for not knowing."
"...Sorry."
She chanced another look back up at the observation window. She couldn't see much from where she was sitting, except for the spray of blood across the glass. He was still there.
She wondered if he was awake enough to feel pain. It wasn't necessarily screaming he was doing. It only barely sounded human in the first place.
Zack was… maybe dead. Cloud was probably dead. She'd never know. Had they gotten into a fight? Did Cloud do this to him? Was there -
"Zack was wearing a body camera," said Aeris suddenly. "Maybe… maybe it…"
"Does anyone want to go in there and get it?" said Cissnei.
She went silent again.
"...Euthanasia is an option," said Lazard. "If there aren't any others."
"What other options would there be?" said Aeris, her voice flat.
Again, no one said anything, but Aeris could imagine for herself well enough. Every lab in the world would be fighting for a chance to study him. Whether or not he was aware of it happening, that seemed too cruel to consider. But what else could they do? There was nothing left of the pattern Ifalna had uncovered years ago for them to establish contact again. They couldn't send him back. She wasn't even sure what that would have accomplished.
Aeris got back up and switched off her own computer. Tseng was already standing, gesturing for her to follow him. She did so in a trance, not reacting much as she was handed a box of powder and led back to the small puddle of vomit on the floor, which she helped clean up.
Nobody wanted to leave the room after that. It seemed wrong, to go back to their quarters while whatever was left of Zack continued to twitch and convulse a few metres away. They all sat there, waiting for one of them to leave first.
In the middle of the silence, Aeris heard a muffled sob. She didn't bother to check whose it might be. Occasionally, the computers chimed, reminding them that there was someone in the sixth ring, but the microphones were off. For safety reasons, please enable microphone communication between the fifth and sixth ring.
Zack was gone. Cloud was probably gone too. The air went cold as life support began the process of filtering and sterilising the air around them. A reminder went up for the tenth time that even though there was someone in the sixth ring, microphone communication between the fifth and sixth ring had been disabled. For safety reasons, please enable microphone communication between the fifth and sixth ring.
Tseng got up to close the shutters again before Lazard caught his arm and shook his head. "I need to watch," he'd said. "I'm his doctor." Tseng nodded and sat back down. Behind him, the computer reminded him that microphone communication had been disabled despite the fact that there was personnel still active in the fifth ring. For safety reasons, please enable microphone communication between the fifth and sixth ring.
Eventually, it wound up being Aeris. She couldn't stand another second it all. And while she returned to her quarters and buried her face in her pillow, she couldn't manage to shed a single tear.