[AN: Sorry about the late upload, everyone. I spent the weekend moving back home from Uni for the Christmas holidays, and I'm still pretty exhausted. Honestly, between packing/unpacking/realising I'd left something behind/driving back/realising I'd left something else behind/crying a bit/deciding to go without it, I completely forgot that it was updating day yesterday. Without further ado, here is Chapter Eight!]

Chapter Eight

'There's no point being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes.'

They took a helicopter ride to North Corel, and rode the cable car up to the Gold Saucer. Zack chatted animatedly for the entirety of the journey, not because anyone was engaging him in interesting conversation, but because the other two were so quiet he felt the need to fill up the silence.

Cloud could think of nothing but Nibelheim. One moment, his mind was rushing with a thousand last-minute plans to prevent his friends from ever coming within a hundred miles of his old hometown – ranging from the mundane to the agonisingly dramatic, in which he or they died in the process. The next moment, he'd believe that there was nothing he could do. Nothing that he could imagine would ever work. A few minutes of aching despair later, he'd have another plot that actually might work, he thought, and then he'd be back to planning again. Whichever way, he was quiet: busily running through his ideas, or sitting alone in misery that he couldn't explain to the others without losing his chance to save them.

Sephiroth was equally silent, but didn't appear anything like as concerned as Cloud. He seemed perfectly at peace, eyes half-closed and occasionally smiling at his own thoughts. It took several hours, but at last Zack ran out of stories that started with 'This one time, with Reno…' and decided to draw attention to it:

'So, have you two switched personalities or…?'

Cloud jumped in his seat, startled out of his fretting. Sephiroth twitched his head as though shaking away a daydream, and turned his eyes away from the cable car window and towards his dark-headed companion.

'What makes you think that?' he said. Zack stared in genuine disbelief.

'Dude. Cloud looks like his favourite pet just died, and you keep smiling. You haven't even said anything sarcastic; you're just smiling.'

'I'm not allowed to smile?' Sephiroth frowned. Zack pointed at his face,

'See, that's more like it.'

Sephiroth raised the eyebrow that he had spent his many years in Zack's company deliberately training to look as cynical as possible.

'Would you rather I was miserable all the time?' he said. Zack held his hands up in a gesture of surrender.

'No, no, but… well, you usually are anyway. You told me you'd kill me if I ever took you on holiday again, and yet you seem strangely okay with this.'

'Oh,' Sephiroth nodded, 'yes, I did, didn't I?'

Zack's eyes narrowed and he leaned forwards in the manner of a man interrogating a suspected murderer – which, technically, he was, even if the murders hadn't actually been committed yet.

'So you're not going to kill me for taking you to the Gold Saucer?'

'No,' said Sephiroth, with the deep and all-encompassing serenity that hermits in Wutai spent their lives trying to achieve. 'I was due a trip this year anyway.'

'Oh,' Zack said, and sat back. 'Huh.'

He glanced out the window, up at the ceiling and down at his boots. Then the meaning of Sephiroth's sentence seemed to come to him.

'I'm sorry, what?'

'I come every year,' said Sephiroth, who had now distracted even Cloud enough to warrant staring. He shrugged. 'It's unhealthy to be constantly working and maintaining a reputation; a decent amount of time should be spent stimulating the brain in ways besides signing reports and killing monsters.'

'So,' Zack said slowly, as though working out the most complicated mathematical conundrum known to man, 'what you do is: spend every day and night all year working yourself into a breakdown and repressing all of your emotions, and then for one day you come to a family theme park and… let your hair down?'

'Last year I came for a fortnight,' Sephiroth said wistfully.

'You said you were on a top-secret mission in Corel for two weeks last year,' Zack said. Sephiroth cleared his throat and turned to Cloud.

'So why are you acting so miserable, if Zack's assumptions are correct?' he said, over the sound of Zack's furious muttering. Cloud opened his mouth, closed it again, and started searching for a reasonable answer on the walls and floor of the cable car.

'I'm just… tired,' he said, lamely. Sephiroth turned back to Zack, immediately satisfied with this answer.

'See,' he said. 'Cloud's acting nothing like me. I'm never tired.'

Zack looked at both of them with doubt, but apparently couldn't think of anything else to say (which actually came to the others as a bit of a relief), until the cable car came within view of the glittering tower that was the Gold Saucer, and gradually shuddered to a halt at the end of its line, through a fat pink moogle's mouth.

'Three tickets,' Zack said, waving his radio prize at a man who was sweating profusely in a chocobo costume. He flapped a feathery arm at the gates to allow them entrance. Zack jogged across the big yellow disc and started scanning the map. He sighed,

'We'll have to go to the arcade and get some—' (Sephiroth tugged a nearly-bursting wallet out of his trouser pocket with some difficulty, and threw it for Zack to catch) '—G… P…'

Zack opened the wallet, and then jumped the catch the coins that spilled out all over his hands. Cloud bent to help him scoop them all up.

'Holy shit, man,' Zack muttered. 'Where'd you get all this?'

A tiny shrug was the only answer he received. Sephiroth stepped over all of the spilled GP – and Cloud – to check the map over.

'To the Battle Square?' he suggested. Zack's confusion at all the GP disappeared immediately,

'Ooh okay!' he said.

'No,' said Cloud, who – despite his planning/despairing – was still paying enough attention to current affairs to register exactly how badly Zack and Sephiroth playing on the Battle Square would go for everyone. The Gold Saucer was a lucrative business, he was sure, but they probably didn't have the sort of insurance that Shinra did, to allow First Class SOLDIERs to tear up entire training rooms on a weekly basis.

The other two glanced him. Zack looked rather disappointed, but Sephiroth only turned back to the map and said,

'Speed Square, then?'

'Sure,' Cloud said, relieved. How much damage could they do on a roller coaster?

'Okay, just hold the towel up like that for a moment…'

Zack glared out from behind a waterfall of blood. It cascaded from the gash above his eyebrow (to which he was pressing the once-pristine white towel that the Gold Saucer's resident nurse had passed him), and down over his left eye, cheek and the corner of his mouth. Attempts to stem the bleeding, while running to find someone with medical training on the premises, meant that his hands and forearms were also coated in blood. He looked like he had stepped out of a horror film, or, more accurately, a fight with Sephiroth.

'I still maintain that I could clear that up easily,' Sephiroth tutted quietly, watching the nurse dig gauze and bandages out of the drawers that took up all the space in her tiny office. It was difficult to tell under all that blood, but Cloud was certain that Zack was scowling even harder.

'I am not getting the guy who pistol-whipped me to clean up the hole in my skull,' he snapped.

'That is a gross exaggeration. I didn't get anywhere close to your skull,' Sephiroth said. 'I also didn't "pistol-whip" you. The rollercoaster turned a corner too fast and—'

'Fifteen years of SOLDIER training, the quickest reactions on the Planet, and the grace of a swordsman all went out the window in one blinding flash, leading you to lose control of a plastic gun a tenth of the weight of Masamune, and hit me on the head,' Zack said. 'I don't buy it.'

Sephiroth went rather red in the face and turned obstinately away from his furious – and furiously bleeding – comrade. The nurse gave Cloud a worried look and he tried his best to look apologetic. She got to work on cleaning up Zack's face. Cloud took a seat on the counter.

Zack was overreacting really, he thought. With all the mako in his bloodstream he was bound to heal up soon enough, and anyway Cloud was fairly certain that Sephiroth hadn't meant to hit him quite that hard, even if he was being beaten at the laser shoot. He'd looked quite shocked at all of the blood, anyway, although he hadn't technically apologized yet.

'You'd be surprised how often these things happen,' the nurse said, with forced cheer.

'You get a lot of psychotic SOLDIERs?' Zack said bitterly. The nurse gave him a faintly terrified look, probably because she thought that one of these SOLDIERs was now going to hunt her down and kill her, whatever she said. Noting her terror, Zack put on a more friendly face.

'Must be pretty sweet working here, head wounds aside,' he said. 'D'you get free tickets?'

'Fifty percent off,' she replied, suddenly very chirpy again. Zack had that effect on people when he wanted to. It was a talent that Cloud would really have liked to possess. Maybe if he was as charismatic as Zack, he'd be finding it easy to stop Sephiroth from going to Nibelheim…

He pressed his hand to his forehead. He wondered what it was like for normal people to walk around without headaches.

'Did I hit you, too?' Sephiroth muttered sarcastically, too quietly for the chattering Zack to hear. Cloud looked up at him with the expression a mother wears to look down at a naughty child.

'You should apologise,' he said flatly. Sephiroth looked flabbergasted.

'I didn't do anythi—'

Apparently all the worrying about Nibelheim had worn Cloud down enough over the last few days that he somehow managed to appear genuinely intimidating, or at least tired and annoyed enough to be a pain in Sephiroth's arse if he didn't get his way, because he relented. They glanced at Zack, who was now considerably less bloody and apparently much more cheerful for having a young woman in a nurse's uniform blushing and giggling at him.

Sephiroth sighed.

'I've had that high score at the Speed Square for eight years running,' he said, in the tone of someone giving up their beloved pet for adoption. Cloud gave him a thin smile,

'What was that you said earlier, about not having to keep up reputations here?'

When Zack was happily bandaged up and had his pockets full of painkillers, they thanked the nurse, who stared after Zack with longing, and left her office.

'She was nice,' Sephiroth said awkwardly.

'Yeah,' said Zack, in a stiff tone that didn't suit him. 'But I've got Aerith back home.'

'Aerith's nicer,' Sephiroth said quickly. Cloud lifted a hand to cover his chuckle. He'd heard from Aerith that Sephiroth was still visiting her church to help with the flowers. He and Zack had agreed not to bring it up to him, because they were reasonably certain that he would kill or maim them in some horrible way if they did. Cloud wondered what kind of a difference it would make later, that Sephiroth and Aerith had actually met…

Then again, they might have met the last time around, for all he knew. She'd kept Zack to herself; maybe she'd kept her other friends quiet, too, even if said friends were now the psychopathic murderer she was helping her new pals to stalk across the world.

Cloud considered that. No, actually, she probably would have mentioned it.

He came back to reality in time to watch Sephiroth apologise to Zack's boots, which apparently accepted the request for forgiveness as their owner grabbed him in an enormous hug. Sephiroth managed to straighten out the expression of utter terror and confusion in time for Zack to let him go, but Cloud saw it and knew he would spend the rest of his life wishing he'd had a camera ready.

'Chocobo racing?' Zack suggested.

'Zack, you have a head wound and you are doped up to the eyeballs on drugs,' Sephiroth said. 'I'm not going to say that racing on a flightless bird is the stupidest thing you could ever do, because I was actually listening to those stories about Reno on the way here, but it's still probably a bad idea.'

'You can't race anymore,' Zack said with a wave. 'Some guy fell off the track and tried to sue them. You just bet on a bird, give it a pat on the head, and watch a professional race on it.'

'Oh.' Sephiroth thought for a moment. 'That sounds dull.'

Zack, already on his way towards the Chocobo Square, snorted back at him.

'That's just because you know I'm going to back the winner, and you're going to lose all those pretty GP coins to me. Sephiroth's fists clenched at his sides.

'I highly doubt that.'

Sephiroth spent so long going over the statistics of the chocobos and their riders the three of them missed their opportunity to bet on the first race. The second time, he poured over the information cards for each chocobo as fast as possible, and then bet a good half of his GP on a hot pink bird called Geraldine.

'It is the most likely, statistically, to win,' he sniffed at Zack, who couldn't stop laughing.

Zack and Cloud had to put their own measly GP together to bet on a yellow chocobo called Frances, because Sephiroth refused to lend either of them anything.

'If you want my GP, you'll have to win it,' he said.

Cloud had never been to the Gold Saucer until his debacles with AVALANCHE, at which point people were no longer allowed any access to the birds beyond betting on them. So the chance to 'meet the chocobo' was a strange experience for him, although that could easily have been attributed to Zack repeatedly pointing out how much Frances and Cloud resembled one another and to Sephiroth attempting to bully Geraldine.

'I have put half of my GP on you, so if you don't win I swear that you will be an ingredient in microwaveable soup come tomorrow,' he growled into the area that chocobo's ear was probably hidden under the pink feathers. 'I'm a SOLDIER, First Class. I could do it.'

'Seph,' Zack said loudly, startling both him and Geraldine, 'if you were anyone else, I'd have to remind you that you are threatening a chocobo. As you're you, and you probably are capable of blackmailing birds: stop it. That's cheating.'

All the cheating in the world didn't make a difference: Geraldine came last, and Zack and Cloud spent their winnings trying to distract Sephiroth for long enough to stop him going back and strangling the jockey. Cloud even gave up and let him wreck the Battle Square, which the employees were not happy about, until they realised that it was Shinra's favourite soldier that had done it.

'We're sure it can be fixed,' they said, flushing and bowing furiously. 'Just go on home and tell everyone how great the Gold Saucer is!'

'We will,' Zack assured them, while Sephiroth stalked off to try and beat his high score on the Speed Square again.

'It was supposed to win,' he muttered despondently on the way home.

'We know, Seph,' Zack said, and made another tick on the tally he was keeping on the back of his hand.

'The statistics said it would. It was the damn jockey's fault.'

'Maybe you should've threatened him, instead of the chocobo,' Cloud suggested. Zack's eyes widened and he shook his head at him. Sephiroth thought for a moment.

'Yes, I suppose that would have worked better,' he said.

'But you'd have to get to the jockey first,' Cloud said, backtracking quickly before Sephiroth decided to turn the cable car around. 'I mean, they're upstairs in the…'

Zack's head-shaking was getting frantic, and he was drawing a finger across his throat. Cloud cleared his throat and started again.

'Well, you don't see them until the race starts.'

'I suppose,' Sephiroth muttered. He pondered it for a moment, but only said, 'It was supposed to win…'

Another tick added, Zack said,

'Look, if you want the GP back, you can have it. I don't even go to the Gold Saucer that much anyway.'

'No, keep it,' Sephiroth said, and rattled his still-rather-full wallet. 'I still have all this.'

'Take it as compensation for us ruining your one day of having emotions and stuff,' Zack suggested. Sephiroth smiled,

'I'm not the one with a bleeding cranium.'

'So you admit it!' Zack cried, jumping to his feet and immediately banging his head on the low ceiling. He slumped back into his chair with a groan, holding his head with both hands.

'I admit to nothing,' Sephiroth said. 'But don't worry about my "day of having emotions", as you put it. I'm sure there will be another opportunity for me to let out all of my pent-up rage.'

And then, as if Cloud hadn't already shrunk back into his seat far enough with the pain of those words, he just had to go and add,

'You two will be the death of me, though. I swear it.'