Title: If Not an Angel, then-
Drabble Challenge: Twisted Commentfic - take a prompt and twist it
Prompt: Zack and Cloud, feathers!
Maybe he wouldn't have worried so much, if the feathers had been white.
The mako had done strange things to Cloud...or maybe not just the mako, but everything that madman they called a scientist had. Zack wondered, sometimes, if Cloud hadn't fled into his own mind to get away from whatever Hojo had done to him.
Cloud had had it worse, that much Zack knew.
And now he had wings...wings as black as Genesis' had been. One large wing and then a smaller one, beneath it, and both of them rested uneasy.
Zack knew what that wing meant-had seen what happened to the people who had them. Genesis, Angeal...
He didn't know what exactly Hojo had done to Cloud, but he knew enough.
"Sorry, kid," he said softly, one day when the wings twitched and battered at him, raging somehow despite Cloud's stillness.
Once, he'd told Angeal they were angel's wings. And maybe, if Cloud's had been like Angeal's, he could have told himself that again.
But they were black, and he knew what madness those wings meant, and a little more blood on his hands didn't matter any more.