A.N.: Okay, this update is for sanctum, who left me a lovely review that, a loooong time after the fact, still makes me blush ever so slighly.
I'm very, very sorry that you guys had to wait this long. I wanted to write more, but the story isn't cooperating. (Don't worry, it isn't dead, it's just... hibernating.) As for the backstory I mentioned, it's pretty much planned out, but right now I can't write it. *sigh*
Here is what Zack thinks of this whole mess.
Zack didn't know if he should be feeling proud or pissed about the latest turn of events. So he settled for feeling both. He was proud for having been able to pick out the one woman Seph would actually take an interest in, he was proud of Seph for having had fun with her, he was even (bizarrely) proud of the girl herself for being so damn kickass. (Ha, he'd always known the "wilting flower" type wouldn't do anything for Seph, no matter what everybody said.) On the other hand, he was pissed at himself for encouraging Seph to take an interest in someone who'd run, and he was pissed at her for running, and he was even pissed at himself for not being there to catch her, somehow. (Why should he care that she was an assassin? The important thing was that she'd gotten Sephiroth to trust her and then, however accidentally, broken that trust. The important thing was that she'd hurt him.)
Plenty of women wanted to be the one Sephiroth would choose. They sighed and imagined a thousand little stories in which he loved them, and protected them, and saved them from imaginary evils. They imagined a man he was not: secretly tender and sensitive, someone who'd whisper sweet nothings in their ears and swear eternal devotion. Zack shouldn't blame them for their fantasies, he knew: they didn't know any better, since they'd never gotten to know Sephiroth. They'd never had the opportunity (or the will, and that Zack had a problem with). There were also plenty of women who liked to imagine themselves on his arm in public, watching everybody's faces and laughing to themselves, and those were the ones Zack hated. (Nothing wrong with a few delusions of grandeur, not at all – it was just the part where they saw his friend as a stepping stone that irked him to no end.)
It figured that Seph would choose the one woman in the party who didn't want to be rescued from her life. And Zack couldn't bring himself to feel guilty that he was angry at her for not wanting that rescue. Usually that wouldn't be such a big deal – usually that would be a good thing, that the girl only wanted some fun before going on her way. It would mean that he and Seph wouldn't have to deal with even the shadow of a scandal, with the constant attempts of contact from somebody Sephiroth was no longer interested in. It would mean another person they could be comfortable around. And maybe Zack could have met her again, and if he liked her that much he'd bring her to meet Sephiroth again, in another setting this time, and maybe that way they'd get another… friend, a friendly acquaintance at least, someone around whom Seph would be able to relax his guard.
The first problem with that scenario, of course, was that Sephiroth was still very much interested in her. And even Zack didn't know why he was interested – for all he knew, Seph would execute the girl as soon as he got his hands on her. But Zack had never seen his friend determined to execute someone before; it was equally likely he'd go down on a knee and propose. (…okay. Okay, no it wasn't. But at least he'd gotten a few laughs out of the absurd image, and he could even see the stupefied look in the girl's face; he could picture it so clearly because it would be the same look Seph had given him so many times before, the look that Seph would give him should he walk up to him and start counseling him on the best ways to propose to such a skittish girl.)
And of course Seph had to go and get interested in an assassin girl. If it turned out she'd been trying to use Seph, Zack swore he would get rid of her. Seph would come around, eventually. He was kind of angry at her for being an assassin too, after all – so many things she could have been, a thief or a whore or a maid or whatever, and she turned out to be the most dangerous of them all. The only way this could be worse would be if she were a spy, and Zack couldn't be sure she wasn't a spy as well.
Damn it. He'd liked her.
He'd been the one to encourage Seph to approach her, because he'd been impressed at the way she'd held his friend's gaze, at the way she looked back levelly at him when he'd checked her out; he'd liked the color of her eyes and the easy grace of her movements, the confidence in the sway of her walk – not sophisticated, not elegant like many nobles and courtesans and famous beauties, but she walked like she knew exactly where to be even while she stalled; she walked like no one would, could stand in her way, and heaven help those who did.
She walked, therefore, like himself. Like Sephiroth.
She'd been wearing riding boots under the long skirt of her purple dress, he remembered, and scowled as he realized that the memory had made him smile. (Someone needed to keep their head around here.)
He knew now that her grace was the result of an entirely different kind of training than the one most women had, that her walk wasn't the only similarity to the two of them – she'd knocked out a couple of guards in her escape from the Castle, three more leaving the city, and she was apparently brilliant with a sword.
It was also interesting that she hadn't killed any of the guards so far. It was harder to disable someone than to kill them, but maybe she knew that killing his men would harden Sephiroth, would up the game. Zack liked her better for avoiding other people's deaths, and was annoyed at himself for liking her even a bit more before he'd had time to verify her actual intentions. Not as annoyed as he was for throwing her and Seph together, though.
If he hadn't nagged at Sephiroth so much, he'd never have danced with her, never have invited her to his bed, never have fallen so furiously and so fast for a mystery he couldn't quite manage to hold down. So Sephiroth's current obsession was as much Zack's fault as hers, and Zack had always taken responsibility for his actions. Though honestly, he would be doing all this even if he'd had nothing at all to do with it. Because Sephiroth wanted this girl.
And Sephiroth so rarely wanted anything at all.
