Zack
"So, it's been a few months, huh?" I looked over my hands and chest, taking in the various bits of wear and tear on my old uniform. It had been washed during my time of being unconscious, the rips and tears from bullets had been mended, but nothing could quite cover up the evidence of all I'd been through. Tseng shut his eyes as if to recall something before he spoke to me.
"Yes, you've been effectively dead for some time now," Tseng said, oh so elegantly, reopening his eyes to watch my face twist at his words. Why wasn't I dead, anyway? I remembered being filled with bullets, and saying my goodbyes. I remembered it all; not a bit of it was blurry to me. "We weren't entirely sure that you would wake up again."
"So, what now?" I sighed, turning my eyes away from him. "Do I get to be another experiment for a few more years?" I looked back, and Tseng seemed pained by my question, slowly shaking his head.
"I'm sorry, Zack. I had no choice back in Nibelheim," he said, sounding more emotional than he usually allowed himself to. Just for that, I had to believe him. "If I had tried to rescue you from that place, Shinra would have had me executed, or perhaps I would have joined you in Hojo's lab."
"So, you have a choice now?" I asked, almost before he could finish his sentence. He stared at me for a moment before saying anything else.
"I've already made my choice," he answered, stepping over to the boarded window. "Shinra does not know that you're still alive. That knowledge has been only between myself, Reno, and Rude."
"Tseng," I said, trying to figure out how to respond to something like that. He was risking his job and probably his life by keeping me alive. "Wait, what about Cissnei?" Tseng paused again, tensing as I said her name. It seemed as though I was hitting a lot of uncomfortable topics for him.
"...Cissnei is no longer with the Turks." He finally spoke, turning around and ever so slightly leaning himself against the wall. "Similarly to yours, Cissnei's life was spared only under the false pretense of her death."
"Hold on! What happened?" I said, jerking myself forward from my seat on the medical bed. My muscles ached as I moved, and I was reminded of how long I'd been lying there. Tseng barely reacted to my movement, but turned his drifting eyes back to me.
"She's living her life now under her real name. Other than that, I have no information." He seemed to be telling the truth, and I hung my head as I considered the possibilities. I hoped to myself that it wasn't because she let me get away.
"We've been monitoring you the whole time you've been unconscious." Reno piped up from the doorway to the small room we were in. "After we pulled a few bullets outta ya, you healed up pretty fast, and you're muscles didn't suffer the usual effects from laying on your back all day." He shrugged and snickered a little as he continued. "You oughta thank the doctor for all that Mako. Hey...!" Reno was interrupted by a well deserved smack to the shoulder by Rude, who attempted to hide that it was him by clearing his throat and looking the other way.
"You should be in top shape fairly soon," Tseng clarified, then he seemed to take notice that there was clearly something on my mind. "Is there something wrong?"
"Was," I started, still unsure if I should ask the question I wanted to ask, "was there anyone else with me in the rocks when you found me?" Tseng again stared for a long moment before responding.
"No. Only you were there to the best of our knowledge." I considered his answer. Nobody else being there was probably a good sign, since Shinra didn't bother to move me when they thought I was dead. However, I wasn't entirely convinced that Cloud could have made it into the city on the little strength he had in him. Tseng still seemed interested in my question, but rather than ask me about it, he simply extended his answer. "Also, the sword you received from Angeal was no longer on your person. A few materia were recovered, and I believe that some of them belonged to you." He reached into his pocket, drawing a shiny red orb and holding it towards me. "Including this one."
"My Ifrit materia!" I recognized it, and reclaimed it from him as he stepped closer.
"I recall the day when you first found that summon materia," he said, smiling a little by the foot of the bed. "You were rather... proud to have found such a rare item."
"Yeah," I agreed, thinking back on it. "I guess I did kinda show it off a lot..." Tseng laughed.
"You never could have been a Turk."
"Hey, why not?" I said, looking up from the materia at him, sporting an offended frown.
"You're very excitable, you can be clumsy, forgetful, you like to rush head first into battle, you adore public attention," he said, listing one thing after another with uncomfortable ease, "you could have probably taken a more stealthy path to escape the army, but instead you drove a motorcycle across the fields where the soldiers were encamped, and took the road to that army's home-city in broad daylight..."
"Okay, all right!" I waved my hand for him to stop. "I get it. I guess I made a good choice joining SOLDIER then... or at least I thought I did."
"You were possibly the best SOLDIER that Shinra had ever seen," Tseng said, getting serious again. "I'm sorry that things had to turn out the way that they did."
"Hmmm." I looked over my uniform again, and at all the spots that had been covered in my own blood, from the wounds I received from the people I'd worked for. "What's happened to SOLDIER now?"
"It has been reorganized and put under the leadership of Heidegger, alongside the military." I looked at him as he talked, and he didn't sound too satisfied with what he was saying. I wasn't either. Heidegger was always such a brutish man, prone to punishing his troops for his own faults. From the safety of SOLDIER, it was kind of fun to laugh to ourselves about his temper, but we were always glad that he wasn't in charge of us. "SOLDIER is still an elite force, but they're more commonly used for protecting important sites, rather than the special missions they used to receive. The latter has been directed to the Turks."
"And there's fewer of us now," Reno chimed in again. "We've been pretty swamped."
"I guess a lot has happened in four years, huh?" I let my eyes drift again, this time to the mostly boarded window, trying to catch a glimpse of the light from outside. From what I could see, the light was being blocked out by the plate above. We were in the slums. It made sense that the Turks would have had to hide me there so that Shinra didn't find out. That sent my mind in an entirely new direction. "Tseng... how's Aerith?" He looked me over for a moment and nodded.
"Wait here for a moment." With that, Tseng left the room and returned moments later with a bunch of closed envelopes, bound together by string. He set them down at the end of bed, almost looking hesitant as he took back his hand. "Eighty-eight letters, all from her," he said with a gentle smile. "She misses you, Zack."
I didn't really know what to do or say as I stared at the bundle. I had so many emotions going through my head at that moment, it was almost as though something snapped. I held my hand out to the letters, thinking about Aerith, thinking about Angeal, Lazard and even Genesis, and everything that I lost or that kept me from the life I wanted to live. Every thought, slowly but surely, brought me back to Cloud and how much I wanted to ask about him by name, but was too afraid to. I had to get out of there. Aerith must have said so much in her letters, but I wanted to hear every bit from her mouth, and maybe I'd even find something out about Cloud. I stood up for the first time since I'd fallen at the rocks outside the city, and turned sharply to Tseng.
"I need to go see her!" I said, packing the bundle of letters away into a pouch. My muscles fought against my standing legs, but I was too determined to let them bother me.
"I expected nothing else," he said softly, stepping over to a cabinet by the door. "But Zack, you must realize that once you step out that door and Shinra is aware of your presence, we're your enemies again."
"I know, I understand," I said, walking over to him. He drew a large sword from the cabinet, comparable in size to the Buster Sword, and held it to me by the hilt.
"I want you to take this," he said, and I grasped the hilt in my hand. "It's the First Tsurugi, otherwise known as a Fusion Sword. It's meant to bind to five other auxiliary blades to increase its power, but unfortunately, I only know the whereabouts of this one piece."
"Still, it's a pretty neat hunk of metal," Reno added, throwing his arms up behind his head.
"Thank you," I said, strapping the sword to my back where the Buster had once been. "Thank you for everything, Tseng."
"Take care of yourself," he said back, stepping aside to allow me through the door.
I looked back over the room behind myself, taking a final glance at Reno and Rude and the bed where I'd been laying for so long. Then, with a stretch of my muscles, I set out through the door to get my life back.
