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27. Zack – Puppy

With all the insane things that had happened in his life, Zack still managed to be surprised by the quality and quantity of craziness and pain the world continued to throw his way. You couldn't make up stuff like this. Seriously. Put a hundred monkeys and a hundred typewriters in a room for a year and you'd still end up with something that made more sense than his life.

It wasn't bad enough that he'd lost Angeal. It wasn't bad enough that his core beliefs had been shaken by watching his mentor's body decay, his mind fragment, and watching him question everything about himself – right up to whether he or not he was even human. Angeal had more human love and compassion in his big toe than over half the people in Shinra had in their whole bodies, but he'd considered himself a monster right up to the end, and the fact he hadn't been able to either save or soothe his mentor still ate away at Zack.

Save Angeal? Oh, if only. It wasn't bad enough that Zack hadn't been able to do that single thing – had, in fact, been forced to fight and kill one of the most precious people in the world to him. Neither was it bad enough that Genesis had also gone off the deep end, and was still running around unchecked somewhere, or that Zack himself been denied compassionate leave, shipped out to Junon for a fresh assignment only hours after hearing Angeal's death rattle, and damn near got his platoon killed when anti-Shinra militants jumped them while he was too dazed to notice the tail.

Nope, apparently none of that was bad enough. Fate had decided to stop messing around and bring out the big guns – madness, betrayal, mass murder, treachery and deceit, all condensed into a single evening that was only the start of the really bad stuff. Just when Zack had thought things were settling to a more sane level of Shinra-endorsed craziness, his world tipped sideways again and everything went to shit in the biggest way possible.

He still couldn't believe Sephiroth had turned on them – turned on him. The clang of Buster Sword against Masamune was the knell in a nightmare only he witnessed, over and over and over. Even when he was strapped to a metal table, his pain threshold being tested to its limits by the inventiveness of sick minds, a part of him continued to feel like he'd missed a vital episode in the TV show of his life and was still trying to catch up with the plot.

His life had dissolved at the seams. Very few people knew what it was like to wake up each day and remind yourself that the world around you was real, not just whatever chemical cocktail they'd put in your intravenous today. He used to rely on touch to reassure himself that his eyes could be believed, but after they broke both his legs and put him in a recovery tube full of mako, and he became convinced the glass was sentient and trying to stab him, he couldn't even rely on that anymore. It was a struggle just to keep going instead if finally saying 'fuck it' and giving up. He'd be perfectly within his rights. No one person should have to go through what he had and be expected to take it.

The scientists in charge of his case liked to introduce mitigating factors to see what happened. Bunch of sadists. They'd push him to his physical limits, to where he was literally clinging to life by a thread, and then douse him with the mako that would help his SOLDIER-enhanced body recuperate. It was supposed to test the durability of a SOLDIER body, to see whether or not repeated exposures to mako dulled its effectiveness, he thought. It was the only explanation he could come up with that made sense, apart from the idea that these were all just sick bastards Shinra kept on payroll because they sometimes came up with a good idea and he was now the human equivalent of a stress ball. He was Shinra property, after all. He'd been told that countless times. It was their right to use him as a test subject.

Yeah right. Zack wasn't so far gone he didn't know that was a pile of dragon dung.

Each time they took him out of the tube to test him, his captors would introduce a random element to see how his body reacted. An overdose of painkillers, denial of oxygen, complete sensory deprivation, a higher concentration of mako, or what they termed a 'Costa del Sol Cocktail', meaning a stasis tube of water with only the barest hint of mako in it 'for flavour', just like the weak cocktails served at the average Costa del Sol bar. Zack remembered all these and more, though with varying degrees of clarity.

What he did remember was Hojo's face outside his tube each time. The bastard had seemed to live at the facility in the beginning, but now only dropped in on the days when his 'specimens' were woken, extracted from their tubes, and put through the kind of twisted experimentation that made ritual torture look like a luxury spa treatment. When they were put back into the tubes and Hojo's team debriefed, he stayed to watch his 'specimens'. Many times Zack had summoned the last vestiges of his strength to give the guy the finger, but more often than not he was too exhausted to do more than try to focus on the sicko's smile – the one that might have been more effective if it hadn't completely missed his cold, dead eyes.

Zack didn't know how long he'd been here. He didn't even really know where 'here' was, since he'd been anaesthetised and just plain passed out more times than he could count. They'd started at Nibelheim, that much he was sure of, but now it could be anywhere. During his chemically-induced sleep, anything could have happened. He could have been moved to a different facility and never know it. He could have been unconscious for months and it would felt like barely a few minutes had passed. He didn't seem to age (something else attributable to the huge amounts of mako constantly repairing his body). There were no windows to tell from the changing seasons outside, no calendars hung on the walls, and nobody ever talked to them unless it was part of the tests.

Them. Not just him. Another thing he had to remind himself of, and more often than anything else. He'd never be able to forgive himself if he forgot Cloud.

Cloud, whose mind had already snapped under the strain of what had been done to them. Cloud, whose shock at Sephiroth's behaviour had eclipsed even Zack's, and which had gone a long way to reducing him to his current state. Cloud was by no means a weakling, but he had never undergone SOLDIER training. Zack had a resistance to mako exposure that Cloud didn't, and the strain it put on Cloud's body and mind each time he was dumped into it was intense. Zack remembered how, when he entered SOLDIER and was given his first mako injections, he had hallucinated so badly he'd had to be restrained so he didn't hurt himself. He'd lost touch with his conscious mind ten minutes after the jab on Monday and couldn't remember a thing until the following Friday. It had taken a long time for him to get used to the treatments enough that restraints weren't needed, and he still tended to lock himself away in his quarters the evening following a booster.

Cloud didn't have those experiences or that resistance. Eventually the combination of experiments and successive mako treatments had eroded his mind like a sandstone cliff, leaving him alive but unresponsive. One of Zack's worst but clearest memories since first waking, naked and trapped in green liquid with a breathing tube down his throat, was of chattering to Cloud in the next tube to keep him positive, only to realise that Cloud could no longer hear him.

Part of Zack was convinced he'd already lost his mind. The rest of him told that part to shut up. He no longer thought they'd be rescued, but he'd be damned if he'd die just to give those scientist bastards some interesting test results and the prospect of an autopsy – although they'd opened him and Cloud up so many times an autopsy probably wouldn't be necessary anymore. The scientists were confused when he just kept talking to Cloud, and that pleased Zack more than words could say. He talked incessantly, day and night, whether they were around or not. When the breathing tube was inserted his words were slurred, and sometimes the liquid around him stained red when he cut the inside of his throat, but he kept talking. When the liquid was emptied, before they were gassed into unconsciousness for Gaia-knew-how-long again, he cracked jokes and laughed as if Cloud had replied.

"Specimen C is a complete failure!" Hojo pronounced on one such occasion. The words carried clearly to Zack with no mako to muffle them. "Totally unreceptive to all stimulants. Barely enough brain activity to even qualify as a vegetative state. Worthless! Useless to the programme's ultimate objective. And you're telling me this is a simple case of mako poisoning?"

"Um, not simple, Professor -"

"Yo, Hojo!" Zack called. "Can't you figure it out? Cloud just got tired of looking at your ugly face and decided the inside of his own head was better."

Hojo fixed him with a blank stare before turning back to his team. "And Specimen Z still retains an individualised identity at this late stage?"

"Um, yes Professor."

"What are you people doing? Are you complete idiots, or do you just like baiting me with new variations of old failures?"

"W-We've tried all the inducers, but he rejects them and recovers back to a fully functioning, independently minded state each time. The other subjects responded well, but it's possible Z's previous experiences with mako are inhibiting responsiveness to the Reunion underpinnings each time we try to put them in place."

"Or perhaps you're just waiting to long to trying putting them in place," Hojo snapped. "Like you did with Specimen C. You let his psychological damage go on too long without introducing the directives forcefully enough. By the time you were giving him orders, he was too far gone to take them!"

Zack didn't understand their babble. What he did understand was that look from Hojo – the one that promised pain in the name of scientific discovery and catharsis.

"Perhaps I can rectify Specimen Z before your bumbling loses the programme another subject. It's all a matter of knowing which chink to focus on in order to shatter the boulder, after all."

"Professor?"

"Specimen Z is defined by the set of laws by which he governs himself and his actions."

"I-I don't -"

"His honour, you cretin. All this time and you still haven't figured it out? That archaic set of values and behaviours is what characterises Z. Break that and you've broken him."

Sure enough, Zack was yanked from his tube, restrained, and put through his paces under the scalpel. When Hojo made the first few incisions Zack was so full of adrenaline he barely felt them, and managed to keep up his litany of abuse. With nothing to do except talk, he'd invented brilliant new cusses during his waking hours and saving the best especially for Hojo. He loosed them in volley after volley of yells that were more about anger than pain. He could feel his own skin being pulled back, but instead of bucking against the restraints he focussed entirely on telling Hojo exactly how much of a bastard he was, and also his mother, his father, his extended family, his fleas, his head lice, his tapeworm, his toe-jam, his sycophantic associates, and every human being he'd ever had dealings with right back to childhood.

By the time Hojo had gone deep enough to strike bone, however, Zack's eyes were blurring with pain and he couldn't stop a violent shudder. His voice faltered. His vision began to fade as blood rolled down the sides of his chest in widening rivulets. He heard the disturbing crack of his own ribs, recognised the sound from previous occasions, and wondered if this time he really would choke to death on his own vomit. Hojo sawed and pulled and yanked at things that shouldn't have been sawed or pulled or yanked – not unless the owner was already dead. Zack kept himself from losing control, but something was screaming inside his head; a high, inhuman sound that had no beginning or end.

Please, someone, make it stop, he thought desperately. Just make it stop. Angeal, help me …

He'd never been especially religious, but now he was willing to believe in anything if some higher power would reach down and make this nightmare go away. As Hojo slipped his fingers inside and cradled organs that should never have known the touch of another person, Zack's eyes rolled back and he caught a glimpse of Cloud, floating insensate in mako. Cloud's gaze was on the table, but he couldn't see a thing of his friend's ordeal.

"One squeeze and I could end it all," Hojo was saying somewhere that sounded very far away. "The heart is a very delicate organ. I'm literally holding your life in the palm of my hand. I will, however, spare you if you beg for your life. Come along, Z. Or are your stubborn SOLDIER pride going to get in the way again? Honour. Pride. What nonsense. Don't you think it's time you abandoned those ridiculous notions when you have much more important things to concentrate on? They didn't save your mentor, did they? And they won't save you now, so what good are they?"

It was blatant power politics. Hojo just wanted Zack to acknowledge that he was helpless in this situation. Getting someone to admit they were powerless was the first step to breaking them to your will. It wasn't even complicated psychology; it was stuff you found in the playground; albeit with a warped element to keep things interesting.

Angeal's voice floated back to Zack through the years: "Never let go of your dreams. Always keep your honour." He had promised Angeal. Nothing would ever make him betray that promise. A shot of hatred mainlined to the heart beating against Hojo's hand.

"Is … iiiisss …" Zack's mouth refused to work properly. It was worse than being drunk. As a SOLDIER, his high tolerance for alcohol meant getting truly plastered was nigh impossible, but as a kid in Gongaga he once got into his father's stash and ended up being sick in his mother's flowerbed. That same spinny, achy feeling suffused him now, as he concentrated hard on forming words. "Iz that … yuh … youuur …"

"Hm?"

He sucked air. Tried to ignore the sensation of his lungs pushing against a foreign object. Reached for the last of his strength and got everything out in a rush. "Is-that-your-face-or-did-your-neck-just-throw-up?"

Hojo's scowl was magnificent.

At least until he made good on his threat. It felt like a true coronary. Zack gasped and blacked out almost instantaneously, even his enhanced body coping the only way it could: by shutting down.

Zack almost wished he wouldn't reboot this time.

Almost.

He didn't know how long he was lost to the darkness, but eventually he surfaced and found himself drifting in his tube once more. His chest had been roughly slapped back together, like a careless kid building a model train, for the mako and his own enhanced healing to fix. His ribs felt like loose milk-teeth, the left half of his jaw hurt where it had caved inwards at some point, and both sides of his collarbone had been snapped. From the bottom of his clavicle to his navel was an open wound, discolouring the mako a horrible dark brown as red mixed with green around him.

He faded in and out for a while. The world was always reduced to flashes while he was recovering: Cloud in the next tube, some scientist or other looking up, bubbles from around his own breathing mask, strip-lighting in a corridor ceiling whipping by as he was gurneyed somewhere.

This time, however, the flashes were fewer, and when he came to properly Zack knew he hadn't been allowed the same amount of time to recover as usual. His chest wasn't an open wound anymore, but it hadn't fully healed either, and talking was a bitch with a busted jaw. He was strapped down again, this time to a chair with electrodes stuck all over his body and a curious metal helmet over the back of his skull.

Oh fuck …

Electrocution was bad even for someone brimming with mako. They asked questions in between doses, sometimes gave orders or told him things in that forceful way teachers sometimes did when they expected you to remember stuff just because they'd said it – the way Angeal never had. The voices all blended together after a while. If the volts were supposed to cement what they were saying in his mind, then boy, had they made a mistake.

By the time they put him back this time he could barely breathe and every nerve ending in his body felt like it had been held in an open flame. Before he could sink into blissful unconsciousness, however, there was a prick in his arm and the world snapped into the frenetic focus usually attributed to twenty cups of coffee and a bag of sugar.

"What is your name?"

What the hell kind of question was that? "Bwuh…?"

"Who are you?"

"Mrrf …"

A flicker of excitement in the tone. "Are you one known as Specimen Z?"

"No … M' Zuh … Zaaack … Faaaaii-"

He heard a slap and realised with some surprise it had been delivered to someone else, and not by him.

"Idiot. It didn't work. He's still retaining his own identity!"

"Sorry, Professor, I was sure that with all the trauma to the brain, the suggestions, and the distress of the pre-existing injuries -"

"Idiot!" Another slap, but Zack couldn't take any pleasure in it. He bet it wasn't even a fraction of his own pain right now.

He faded out, still muttering his name and repeating it in his head, since it seemed to piss Hojo off so much. Zack Fair. I'm Zack Fair. Zacky-boy. Zack Attack! Zack the Man. Zackamundo. Zack Fair, First Class …

Puppy.

Just because Zack was a man now, and the time had passed when Angeal would come to rescue his pupil from whatever latest scrape he'd gotten himself into, didn't mean Zack had stopped longing for it to happen.