Zack does squats in the exam room, unable to contain his energy after so many hours in a mako tank. When that doesn't quiet his nerves, he tries burpees. They're not much better.
"Hello?" he yells at the air. "Hojo? Anybody? Come on, I'm getting gray hairs waiting for you sickos to do whatever I'm here for."
His voice echoes a bit. No response.
"Damn it." He kicks the only chair in the room—one of those little backless ones with swivel wheels that you only see in clinics—and feels a little bad when it makes a chair-shaped dent in the wall. He still hasn't quite gotten used to the 1st Class enhancements.
"Subject Z," a smarmy voice tsks from the ceiling. He knows that voice and it feels good to be heard after so much time alone, even if he hates the man speaking.
"Hojo. What the hell is going on here?"
"A prescient question," the bastard chuckles.
Zack never liked him, for this exact reason. The dude never gives a straight answer when cryptic bullshit will do. "Is there a prescient answer?"
"There is always an answer, for those who seek it. We call that 'science,' my boy. Think of this as a training exercise. You always did want to get stronger."
"That was before I knew the truth."
Deranged laughter rumbles from the speakers, coming from all directions like a bad omen.
"Well, you did volunteer."
"Angeal didn't. Genesis and Sephiroth didn't ask to be born. Can any SOLDIER really say they volunteered, when we were lied to about the real purpose of the program?"
"Is that how you feel, even after we've had so many successful experiments together? I had hoped we could pick up where we left off."
"Fuck you," Zack says. "I know the Nibelheim mission was your idea. You put it all there for Sephiroth to find, just so you could watch him lose his mind. You're sick, I'm not helping you with shit."
Intellectually, he knows talking back is a bad idea. Hojo runs his department like a emperor. Once a subject's checked in, they're at his mercy until their SO checks them out. Zack couldn't have held it back though, not with the rage and guilt of the failed mission weighing him down and the smell of burning corpses haunting his sleep.
Hojo doesn't sound bothered by the accusation. The speaker amplifies the sound of his weight shifting in his chair, and Zack can picture him clearly. He always leaned by while he observed Zack's combat data, his legs crossing and uncrossing as his thumb stroked his chin.
"You should watch that smart mouth of yours, Subject Z," Hojo says darkly. "It's going to get someone hurt."
A grinding noise emanates from the metal wall to Zack's right. It sounds like a blast door moving, one of the heavy duty ones that seal combat simulators.
There's some kind of growling, monstrous noise. The ground shakes. And then, clear as day, a man screaming. Zack freezes.
"What the hell is that?"
"What does it sound like?" Hojo croons.
Zack runs to the wall. He expects to hear explosions and gunfire, but there's only frantic yelling and a beastly roar.
"This one of your mind games."
"Is that what your senses are telling you?" Hojo asks.
"Damn it, I'm not playing your games anymore, you creep. Shut it off." Zack hits the wall, but it's a standard lab wall, designed to take hits from things far stronger than him. It doesn't budge.
"The experiment will end when the hypothesis is proven or disproven. Now tell me, what are you feeling?"
"Disturbed," Zack grunts, kicking the wall to no avail.
"And?" Hojo sighs, like he's disappointed.
"Angry. Very fucking angry." Zack pries the husk of the swivel stool from the dent and starts beating the wall with it. It's nowhere near enough to burn off his pent-up energy, but it feels good to hit something.
The sounds of battle escalate. Bounding footsteps send vibrations through Zack's feet, and the sound of claws scraping metal gives him goosebumps. The man's yelling changes into grunts and yelps of pain. It sounds familiar, but it's too faint to place. An itching familiarity that gets under his skin faster than any of Hojo's taunts.
"I thought you said it was an illusion?" Hojo says. "Have I convinced you, or are you perhaps sensing the reality of the situation?"
He yells and unleashes a flurry of blows to no avail. He's far from spent, but sweat is starting to bead at his brow. The dent in the wall becomes a crater, but there's no sign of the other side. Zack lands one last, hard blow before giving up, and glaring at the camera in the ceiling.
"I'm sorry, okay, I'm sorry I mouthed off. Is that what you want to hear?"
"I told you. I want you tell me who you are destroying my lab to save. A name, a physical trait. Something distinctive."
Hojo wants him… to develop x-ray vision? Zack gapes, very nearly at a loss for words. "How the hell am I supposed to do that?"
"Are you not a SOLDIER? Why should your abilities be limited to swinging swords and calling lightning, when the power of the planet lives inside you?"
The man in the other room's cries take on a breathless quality, like he's getting tired, and Zack doesn't what to do. The distinct cry of a person taking a powerful blow ripples through his ears and Zack winces.
"It's a man," he says. It's not enough. He reaches, helplessly. "He's, uh… hurt. And scared."
"Can you give me anything more specific?" Hojo sighs. "Hair color, eye color, age?"
Maybe it's childish, but he feels a kick of satisfaction at Hojo's irritation. A bloodcurdling scream sours that victory.
"That's all I have, I swear! Come on, you have to stop this."
Hojo's fist slams on something hard enough to make feedback crackle from the speaker.
"Cut the simulator, this experiment is a failure."
The feed cuts out and the rumbling stops. Zack hovers in the sudden silence.
"Hello?" He puts his ear to the dented wall. "You okay in there, buddy?"
There's no yelling or crying or anything, no signs of life. No growling either, though.
The mangled chair is nothing but a bent pipe in his hand, all the other parts destroyed by repeated hits. He throws it at the floor just to hear it clatter.
They leave him in the exam room long enough that he has to use the attached bathroom twice. A food tray gets slid under the door at some point, and he doesn't eat it. It's probably laced with sedative so they can get him back in the tank.
The quiet eats at him after a while. That's what drove him out of Gongaga in the first place—peace and quiet. He was never good at sitting still.
It used to be a rowdy working class place, the rotating shifts at the power plant making it a twenty-four hour town. Then the reactor blew, and the street music stopped. People migrated for work until it was just a circle of shacks succumbing to jungle vines.
His neighbors moved to Midgar to join Shinra and make something of themselves, but his family had been banana farmers for three generations, and so he'd been stuck kicking rocks in a declining village. He joined SOLDIER to become a hero, but this is where it got him. Locked in a cage with nothing to do but contemplate the shit he let slide while working for Shinra.
It's humiliating, how obvious it is with the benefit of hindsight. The newspaper headlines, the thrilling war dramas on the radio. He should have known better, but it was easier to put his fingers in his ears and focus on his goal.
Pacing the walls like a caged animal, he can't escape the truth that his life's goal had been a big lie. They'd been lab rats all along, just dressed up to look like warriors and celled in the Shinra building where they could convince themselves they were free.
There's no mission to distract himself from it, no crisis to avert. Just cold, hard facts. Angeal is dead, Genesis is dead, Sephiroth is… hopefully dead. He hopes Cloud survived, but it seems unlikely. Zack saw Masamune run him through, saw him pick Sephiroth up by it and toss him into the core. Normal humans didn't walk away from that, not like a SOLDIER might.
If death spared Cloud from this laboratory, Zack can't help but see that as a better outcome. It's quicker than whatever Hojo has in mind for him.
Tired of his circulating thoughts, he puts himself through a thorough workout. As thorough as a ten by ten room with no weights in it allows, which isn't much. A SOLDIER's stamina makes any normal amount of exertion the equivalent of strolling around the block, so after what feels like hours he's still vibrating with energy. If the exam table wasn't the only remotely comfortable place to sit, he'd have ripped it out of the floor and bench pressed it.
Eventually, he gives up and flops on the padded table instead. No amount of activity stops the quiet creeping in. He taps his fingers on the side of the table until he falls asleep.
That's day one. Days two, three, four, and five are much the same.
By day six he's wondering if the toilet is deep enough to drown in. He's too numb from boredom to actually get up and try, but the thought does take up residence in his head. It's probably a bad sign.
Day seven is memorable because it's the first time since Nibelheim that he's sure he's going to die.
It starts like any other day, with the lights coming on and a new food tray replacing the old one. He does some squats and ignores the food. Although every meal comes with a juice box and a bottle of water, he drinks what he needs from the sink. Just as he's going to scratch another notch into the wall where he's keeping count of the days, the door of the exam room opens up.
For a long minute, he just stares at it. It's a trick. It's gotta be. Or maybe he's dreaming.
Tentatively, he steps into the threshold and looks both ways. It's not a corridor so much as a tunnel with stone walls and a compacted dirt floor. Compared to the steel plates, it feels gritty and harsh on his bare feet. He revels in the novelty.
The door on the far end is locked, though he can hear people inside. There's a camera in the ceiling following him.
"What the hell is going on here?" he demands. Nobody answers. "Hojo? I know you're watching, you sick fuck. Answer me."
A crackling of static announces the man's presence. "Subject Z, please proceed to the combat simulator."
Zack frowns. He's in a fucking hospital gown with his ass hanging out. He's got weapons, not even shoes. Remembering that first day after the mako tank, he wonders if this is some kind of elaborate public execution. Hojo had called him a failed experiment, and every SOLDIER knew what that meant.
Shinra was a business. Failed experiments aren't profitable. Unprofitable assets get terminated. Swiftly.
He knows there's no arguing, but he can't help trying. It's the pesky human spirit perking up in him, not wanting to die in some dark, anonymous cave. "You're joking. I'm practically naked."
"Proceed to the simulator or we will move you by force."
A fear he's not used to feeling tightens his throat.
"I'm a SOLDIER, for fuck's sake. You can't treat me like one of your toys. When the President finds out—"
"The President has signed off on Project Reunion," Hojo says. "And even if he hadn't, you were declared KIA after Nibelheim. As far as the public is concerned, you are not here and you never were. For now this is a clerical error, but we can make it official."
Four Shinra-issue gatling guns fold out from the ceiling and point at him. Zack crouches into a defensive stance, but he doesn't have any fight left in him. He's reeling from the realization of just how much trouble he's in.
"Proceed to the combat simulator."
He's in for a world of pain either way. If he stays, he'll get a gutful of bullets. If he goes, he'll get ripped to shreds by whatever program Hojo chooses.
Numbly, he walks in the direction of the nearest door. Maybe the VR monster will put him to sleep and he won't feel a thing. Fat chance, but there's still a chance.
The door slides shut behind him, and the rest is a blur of brutality. Elite guard troopers, Shinra dogs, grenadiers. He fights waves of them with just his fists and his wits, and somehow he keeps winning.
It's almost a relief after the inactivity. Almost fun, once he realizes it isn't rigged. It's the same program he's been using for years, and he knows how to approach each enemy and avoid taking hits.
But then he gets to the end of that program and another one starts. A behemoth appears in front of him, already reared up on its hind legs.
"Oh crap." He breathes heavily, sweat dripping down his back and adrenaline spiking in his veins.
A great paw slams into his side, and the battle is over before he's swung a fist. Claws rake his side and back and send him flying into the wall of the arena. Massive fangs puncture his leg and shake him before sending him tumbling face-first into the ground.
Darkness edges his vision as he struggles to get up. His whole body is shaking. Bright light glows behind him and he knows what's coming, knows that he has to get out of the blast zone but his leg is gushing and useless. He tries to stand and falls flat.
"No, no, no, no—" he chants, curling up and bracing. Heat hits him before the pain, like a thousand flamethrowers loaded with rocket fuel. It crawls up his body in an instant and whites out his mind. It only lasts a second before he's out.
It's not like his usual brushes with death. He isn't unconscious, he's just not in his body either.
A white, weightless void surrounds him. There's nothing and no one around. The quiet tightens around his heart like it's choking him, and he longs for the chaos and crowds of Midgar. He wants things to go back to normal, to go back to a few months ago when everything was alright.
Instead he feels a pressure on his skin, like being underwater. It's strange, but oddly soothing.
"What…" The pressure takes the shape of a person.
Cool skin touches his back. It should hurt, he should be wailing, but it's the first time anyone's touched him since the fire and it feels like rain, like the gentlest version of a waterfall. The burning goes away and he presses into the hug, hungry in a way he doesn't understand.
Zack.
The word trembles into his skin, gives him goosebumps. There's something familiar about it, something hanging on the tip of his tongue. He spins to get a look at them, but the motion makes them dissolve into mist.
"Hello?" His voice echoes. Nothing, no one. Everything bathed in white.
An awful ache opens in his chest, like all his organs have been sucked out and now there's this unnatural empty space beneath his ribs that shouldn't be there. He feels cold, suddenly. Head to toe freezing.
Far out, barely visible, he sees the faintest suggestion of a figure. A shadow without a form to cast it. Between one blink and the next it's gone.
"Who's there?"
His name is a whisper of wind, a sigh under an unknown person's breath. Zack can't make it out, can't grasp it. He reaches his hand into the white mist, only to see it dissolve into black specks of ash.
He comes back slowly, like the whole world is shrouded in fog. The raw burns on his back ache in time with his heartbeat, and his whole body pulses with heat.
Murmuring voices blur together into a wall of sound. They have a fervent quality to them. Even if he can't parse the words or phrases, he can tell it's an argument. His eyes are painfully dry when he pries them open.
The room is dim and long, lit mostly by desk lamps and glowing tanks of mako. It's the laboratory's main work room, where he'd been before they dumped him in the exam room. There are bookshelves all down the walls, and desks set up anywhere they'll fit.
Belatedly, recognizes the coldness behind his back as glass, and the unfriendly ground as metal. He's back in a mako tank, one of two in the main lab.
The other tank is empty, though streaks of drying mako drip down the sides like it was used recently. Zack puzzles over that, feeling a conclusion so close but out of reach. His head feels like it's stuffed full of cotton, like a wound packed with gauze.
A huddle of people in lab coats take up most of his vision, tall compared to his hunched form and circled around a wooden table.
Blinking slowly, Zack looks down at himself. He's naked, aside from a few scraps of charred hospital gown clinging to his clammy skin. Claw marks crisscross his chest, and his whole body is covered in smeared black ash. His right thigh is a horror show, and the pain all down his back speaks for itself.
Although he sees nothing wrong with his belly, there's an ache curling in his stomach like a box of rocks. It's like bad Wutaian food and mako poisoning all at once. Not good. Not good at all.
He opens his mouth to demand some fucking pain killers, but nobody seems to hear the weak, incoherent croak that comes out.
It's fine. He's alive. He just needs a minute.
Zack makes himself shut his eyes and breathe, but that only lasts a few minutes before he notices a strange, wet feeling on the bottom of his feet.
Mako. The tank is filling. He feels something akin to dread. As a SOLDIER 1st Class, he's already had the maximum amount of mako a human body can sustain. It's dangerous to expose him to more. Even so, is altered body wants it. It'll numb the pain while he heals.
Zack shuts his eyes and breaths in the vapors. It's a sharp, acidic smell, but better than smelling his own burnt flesh.
It rises steadily, up to his ankles and then his knees. One way or another he'll have to let the mako into his lungs, but he tries not to anticipate it. He imagines he's in a big, pearly tub getting a much-needed bath.
It would be better to submerge and get it over with. That's what the pamphlets in the SOLDIER clinic said, and what all the 3rd Class guys told him before his first infusion. It goes faster that way, and hurts less, but Zack never managed to do it. He can't suppress the voice in his head screaming that he doesn't want to die and he needs air to live.
This time is no different. He follows the air all the way up, treading water to stay afloat with his hands splayed and slipping on the walls of the tank. He fights to the last breath, until he's practically kissing the lid.
Time runs out and oily, corrosive liquid drips past his lips. It clogs his throat, trapping the last of the air painfully inside and forcing him to cough and hack under the surface and such more mako down.
It's like dying, except it doesn't kill him. It suspends him in a sea of sluggish bubbles, longing for air that's out of reach and gravity that no longer applies to him.
Through sheer force of will he takes an awkward, sludgy breath. It's liquid but it's thick like dish soap, and it never stops feeling wrong.
A lab coat walks up to the glass and he curls in on himself, aware of his nakedness even as he knows that she sees a specimen in the tank, not a person. She doesn't care what his name is or what his dick looks like. She doesn't care that his parents are about to get a death letter for him while he's being pickled alive in a vat of ooze.
He puts his fist against the glass, a pathetic imitation of the punch he wants to throw. It doesn't even make a sound.
The mako high kicks in right about then. His thoughts drip out of his skull like melted wax, suspending him in a pleasant stupor. His hand slowly slides down.
The doctor doesn't notice. She pushes her glasses up her nose and loops a pen across the paper on her clipboard.
A slight smile touches her lips as she dots a period at the end. The freckles under her eyes transform into constellations. Ramuh's Staff, The Dragon Tamer, Fate's Ladder, Gilgamesh's Throne.
"Trust a SOLDIER to make a mess of things," she sighs. "That's all you meatheads know how to do."