Trapdoor (Part 29)

by anza (29.12.05)

As soon as the plane left, he went back to the apartment. He wasn't sure if there was anyone following him, or if someone had followed Kadaj onto the plane, but now that it had left, nothing short of discovery at the Wutai City Airport could touch his youngest brother now. Cloud half-expected there to be someone home when he arrived. He had pried the window earlier in the day. The fire escape creaked under his feet as he shifted his weight to the flimsy windowsill. The empty kitchen met his eyes, his and Kadaj and Zack's mugs all neatly propped on the drying rack. Anxiety and regret clutched briefly at his heart and his throat. He closed the window and padded to his and Kadaj's temporary bedroom.

He stared in shock. The two Valentine cases were gone.

All Cloud had now was the gun concealed in his briefcase that he had snuck past the airport security. No clothes but the ones on his back, and way too much money in his wallet. There was nothing to do now - Zack, or the Turks, had his belongings now. His laptop bag had everything he needed, though, everything important was in there. The essential things were all memorized in his head already - the most secure place for anything, he'd found with experience.

He got as far as the train station when briefly, when the crowds parted, he spotted Rude.

Immediately he got on the train, not knowing or caring which one it was, just as long as he escaped the Company Security head. But as he dashed onto the train, he was met face-to-face with another suited man in sunglasses. This one he didn't spare. Instantly the compartment burst into a flurry of fists. It couldn't be long before Cloud was overtaken, forced against the nearest wall with his arms behind him. The feel of cool metal around his wrists and the click of the handcuffs brought his hopes right down on his head. Gritting his teeth, he gradually stopped struggling.

A redhead with two curved tattoos curling under his eyes gave a "Sorry-but-I-gotta-do-this" look at him right before he punched Cloud straight into unconsciousness.

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He wasn't sure how long he'd been awake or how long he'd been asleep, but the four gray walls imprisoning him certainly didn't provide any answers. The ceiling was a mishmash hodgepodge of pipes both big and small, overlapping and circling and twisting around each other. Cloud was reminded of his own situation, and of people's fates in this world, circling, knotting, not knowing where they were going but trying to understand with the people around them, clinging to each other for lack of anything else to hang on to.

The sound of the metal door rasping open brought him out of his reverie. Cloud had been thinking for a long time, contemplating everything from the bruise on his cheek to where Kadaj might be now. Undoubtedly Yazoo and Loz would be dragged into this now. He closed his eyes, staring down into his lap. Failure stared at him with his own face. He couldn't hope for the best - he knew better than that, always...

The redhead who'd knocked him out entered first, giving him a nod and an apologetic look. Next was Rude, head shining dimly in the light of one swinging lightbulb overhead. Like a butler, he looked in the door, past where Cloud's vantage point, and announced, "The Godfather."

He didn't know who he was expecting. Tseng, perhaps. Even Sephiroth. Reeve, or Rufus, or Tifa. But when Zack walked through the door, eyes set and face blank, something in Cloud cried out sharply, crumbling into nothing. What friendship? What camaradie? What fun? They had always been enemies from the start.

And Zack had known. Zack, the only person he dared trust even a little for the entire month, was the head of the very organization he'd been trying to avoid.

Cloud laughed, a surprisingly merry sound echoing in the room. Everyone turned to look at him in amazement, but he just sat there, hands handcuffed behind his back, laughing. Maybe they thought he'd gone mad, but in truth Cloud was just very, very happy. Now he knew exactly what he was up against. And he was laughing because he'd let Kadaj escape, right under Zack's very nose.

Zack looked faintly pained when he finished chuckling. "Cloud, I'd rather not make this any more unpleasant than it is." His voice conveyed something Cloud could only describe as nauseousness.

Somehow Cloud couldn't keep the smile from his face. He supposed his mind had already gone out the window with his incoming death, and he just didn't care anymore. "If it's already unpleasant, Zack, then making it a little more painful won't do anything."

The room fell into an uncomfortable silence. Cloud leaned back against the brick of ice that was the wall, and waited for the questioning to begin.

"Where is Kadaj," Zack asked first. A chair was brought in, and the Godfather sat gratefully on it.

"In Wutai by now, I'd imagine. It's only a one-hour flight."

Zack's bright eyes seared him through, as they often did. But now Cloud couldn't feel anything; he identified the emotions in him one by one: anger at Zack, relief for Kadaj, hysteria for himself. Everything coalesced in his head, melting into one giant bubbling pot of confusion that Cloud simply ignored for the time being. Like at so many meetings, he wasn't listening to his emotions, just thinking and analyzing in an impossible situation.

Well, what do you know, the sardonic voice in his head told him, something productive came out of almost a decade at Shin-Ra Company.

"Where is Kadaj headed, then?"

Cloud just smiled.

Zack gave a disgusted, exasperated and altogether tired sound at his response and snapped orders at the redhead and Rude. "Just find Kadaj at the airport. How hard is it to find a silver-haired teen, anyway? Why haven't they found him yet?"

Accusations flew back and forth between the redhead and Rude for a few minutes, all of which Cloud tuned out. His mind was on Kadaj, on his own strange mix of emotions, on the discovery of Zack's true identity.

Finally Zack turned to him and asked, "How did you know?"

"That you were a Turk?" His eyes snapped clear at the question.

Zack seemed surprised he suddenly had Cloud's full attention. "Yes."

And then Cloud smiled again - he couldn't help it. He, calm and serious, couldn't stop smiling. Somehow the thought of him being merry made him smile even wider. "That's just it," he answered, "I didn't know. I guessed. There were plenty of signs along the way, plenty of coincidences. I don't know why you planted them, but I became reasonably sure I couldn't trust you."

"You know in order to research the policemen being bribed in Wutai, I had access to everyone's bank accounts. You must also know I didn't find any trails leading to any of the executives. But even before that happened, I couldn't believe that you weren't involved, so I opted for another plan: to escape as soon as the opportunity presented itself."

"I made that my goal the moment I made the decision to become your Sales Manager."

"I believed you were reasonably sure we would join you when the time came, either by force or by persuasion. You could threaten Kadaj, as he was right there ready to be kidnapped. But you also needed SOLDIER Jeans Co. as your legal front, so you wouldn't put that in too much jeopardy. You would have allowed us to go to Wutai, and undoubtedly under heavy guard so we wouldn't try to escape. But now I've diverted your attention, so that will buy time for Kadaj to escape."

Zack stared at him intently. "So, you never suspected what Kadaj might know of Item 523?"

Cloud shook his head. "I thought it might be something about that. I never asked. I thought it might have been something his father passed onto him, but to me, that didn't matter. All that mattered was getting him out of Nibelheim. Since we accepted your offer, we couldn't run off in the middle, as the entire town is probably chock full of Turks - so I had to develop a way to get Kadaj with or without me off the Continent completely." His eyes stared straight at Zack. "I didn't care what happened to me, as long as Kadaj was safely away."

"So you never knew Kadaj was actually what we were after the entire time?"

He blinked in surprise that Zack would unveil that information in front of him, but then stilled. "No. Even if I did, I still would have bided my time to escape."

A cellphone rang. The redhead snapped it open, frowning. Cloud listened with some satisfaction as everyone argued over not finding Kadaj. Of course they wouldn't find him. He and Kadaj had made sure of that.

"Your mistake was trusting me not to run, and also trusting my fear of Turks," he told Zack once the phone had been put away. His face was emotionless, blank towards...who was Zack to him now? A betrayer? A man after his own goals? An enemy? "You trusted my fatalism on the inevitability of becoming a Turk. Maybe I would become a Turk someday - but my goal has always been to keep Kadaj from becoming one."

Zack sat irritated and motionless, just staring at him. And then finally he asked Rude, "Just how hard is it to find a silver-haired guy at an airport full of Wutaians?"

Cloud grinned.

Zack saw it, and the thought finally dawned in his head. "Damn there're ways around everything," he muttered softly to himself. Cloud watched his face change, snapping quickly to fury, and when Zack threw the chair across the room where it shattered in a million fragments of fury, the blond knew he'd won.