Zack's feet ache as he climbs the final, steep stretch of road to Kalm. It's been a long day, and the sword on his back feels that much heavier for every mile he's trekked.
They're all in street clothes to better to blend in with the Midgar masses, which put Zack back in the hoodie and leather jacket that Gloria picked. It's a little tight around the shoulders, but nothing he can't deal with.
At the last choco stop, Barret snapped a gleaming six-barreled minigun into his amputated arm socket and now everything feels imminent, the end of the road close at hand.
The anticipation is killing him after three soggy days at sea. Somewhere between the green foothills of Junon and the cracked, lifeless plains of the Midgar wasteland, he left his reservations in the dirt.
He's ready to face whatever awaits them in Midgar, if only so he can get his partner's stabilizing presence back between his ears. He'd forgotten in their time together just how unruly his thoughts are without Cloud there to organize them, how they bounce and ricochet all over the place until his body feels too cramped to contain him.
The result is that he's spent most of the journey being a bother, poking and prodding anyone nearby into entertaining him with endless, empty chatter. Kunsel, Zhijie, and Barret have had their fill of it, and stopped responding sometime yesterday. Elfe hadn't tolerated it from the get go.
Zack still isn't sure whether she put him on the forward team because she actually values his skills or because she wants to keep a close eye on him, but either way he has spent the whole voyage under the reluctant supervision of the Direct Action Committee.
He knows he's running out of time to change her mind, but the closer they get to Kalm the more ghoulish it feels to try.
Zack still remembers the screaming in Nibelheim, the wall of flames rising over the village, Cloud sprawled on the ground, crying for his mother. Who is he to tell her that she shouldn't want vengeance?
They trudge into the storybook village right at high noon, with the Eastern sun beating down on their heads. From the arched peaks of the wattle and daub houses to the babbling fountains and the sultry smell of freshly baked bread wafting out of the eateries, it's all just a little too perfect. So squeaky clean that it becomes unnerving.
If not for the massive mako tank built like a monument in the center, it would be easy to forget that Shinra ever touched this peaceful, green paradise.
Barret spits on it as they walk by, and for once Zack shares his enmity.
It's one thing to be evil, but to cover up evil with a quaint, saccharine veneer is another level down. Shinra isn't even being subtle about it. They built the tank in pride of place, as if they wanted to remind the villagers day in and day out that every gadget and modern convenience was brought to them by Shinra's benevolence.
He feels no small measure of shame that his younger self was so eager to believe the lies.
"Inside, quickly," Elfe urges, stepping under the overhanging balcony of a large, well-kept building and holding the door open for her team.
A man waits just inside, his wavy, chestnut hair brushing the collar of his gray wool vest. With a click of exquisitely crafted metal, he stows the timepiece he'd been checking, leaving the fine gold chain dangling between his pocket and the middle button.
"Ni hao," the innkeeper says cordially.
"Good to see you," Zhijie answers with a shallow bow. "Fellows, this is Broden, the owner of this establishment. He'll be our guide into the city."
"Is this everyone?" Broden looks at the lot of them.
"For now." Elfe looks up and down the road through the crack in the door before shutting it and flipping the welcome sign to 'closed.' "The rank and file will quarter here until the morning, then rendezvous at basecamp by fourteen-hundred."
Broden accepts the military jargon with a smooth nod that makes Zack suspicious. He lifts a heavy keyring from his belt and unlocks a narrow doorway under the stairs. A musty, damp smell rises up from the basement.
"Let's not dawdle, then," he says, leading them into a dusty, cramped store room full of beer casks and wine racks. "The situation in the city has changed since our last contact. Getting in will not be an issue, but after the most recent round of riots the Enforcers have started monitoring the trains. Once you're on their radar, you'll have trouble disappearing. If you're made, I won't let you back through. The tunnels have to remain secret."
"Noted," Elfe says briskly.
"Riots," Zack says. "In Midgar?"
"It's a different place than the one you left, buddy." Kunsel pats his shoulder with a pained expression. "Lotta shit's gone down, lotta people sick and starving."
"It's like I'm in a movie or something. How could so much change in just four years?" He sighs and follows the others down.
Cobwebs stir on wooden cross beams as they gather around one particular wine rack, which Broden drags aside with a grunt.
Zack's surprised to see him do it alone. The man's not old by any stretch, but he's no spring chicken either. His hair is almost entirely gray on the sides, and his back is hunched in a stoop that hints at pain and poor health. When he saw the man approach the shelf, he'd fully expected him to ask for a hand.
"Through here," Broden says, lifting a series of false floorboards with hooked, arthritic fingers and setting them aside. A rock chasm with a ladder appears out of the depths.
"A secret passage," Kunsel sing-songs, leaning over the pit with an air of intrigue.
"Right into Midgar's waste disposal," Broden confirms. "The route is marked by graffiti. Look for Stamp."
"Stamp?"
"Shinra's recruitment mascot. Without Sephiroth to fill the newsreels, they had to cook up new ways of brainwashing children." Elfe says, lowering herself onto the ladder and then sliding the rest of the way down.
Broden points to a faded poster of a beagle in a war helmet. Zack crosses his arms and slumps his shoulders in defeat.
"Man, is there any part of my childhood that wasn't secretly sinister?" he moans.
"Always hated that damn dog," Barret mutters, descending after Elfe in a more controlled pace. The rest of them follow suit in turn.
The sewers are exactly as wet and slimy and foul smelling as Zack remembers. He'd only been sent down there on missions a handful of times, but the stench and the rot was burned into his brain for life. His boots slip and slide in the muck, and he takes each step carefully so that he doesn't end up face first in it.
He was the last of their party to go down, so Broden ends up right behind him after he locks the storeroom from the inside and replaces the floorboards.
"You're retired military, right? Where'd you serve?" Zack asks, if only to distract himself from the cloying smell. The older man nods, fussing with his keyring.
"Ex-SOLDIER, if you can believe it."
Zack blinks back over his shoulder in surprise. Sure enough, the innkeeper's eyes shine with the characteristic glow of mako.
"No shit," he grins. "Don't think I've ever met a SOLDIER over forty."
"Aren't many of us around," Broden says with a sly wink. "I had a good run for an older model, but degradation gets us all in the end. Figured I ought to slip out the back before they put me in a petri dish, and then it just made sense to use what time I had left to stick it to them."
"And we're glad to have you," Kunsel chimes in. "Getting into Midgar without documents these days is no joke."
"Yeah, what's that about, anyway?" Zack frowns, squatting low to duck under a pipe and finding a rusty metal ladder on the other side. When he looks, Barret's already most of the way up. "The Midgar I remember was an open door. People rolled in on the train every day looking to strike it big and live their dreams. What changed?"
Broden's lively expression dims, and the wrinkles in his face seem to cut deeper.
"Geostigma," he says. "A degenerative illness that disproportionately targets children. The first cases started appearing around two years ago. Shinra called it a Wutaian bioweapon and locked down the city."
"Which is complete bullshit," Zhijie says sharply, up ahead.
"Yikes." Zack winces as he starts up the ladder. "And it's still locked down two years later?"
"At this rate, it'll be locked down forever," Kunsel says. "The slums are overflowing with sick people, and all Shinra wants to talk about is purging immigrants and the President's glorious plan to lead Midgar to some magical 'Promise Land,' whatever the hell that means."
"Promise Land…" Zack repeats, the phrase itching at something deep and dormant in his brain. He hops up the top of the ladder. "I feel like I've heard that before."
"Probably just heard it on the news. The press never gets tired of lickin' Shinra's sweaty ball sack," Barret says with a bitter laugh.
"Ain't that the truth." Kunsel snorts, offering a hand up to a wheezing Broden when he finally reaches the top of the ladder.
"So much to say," the older man pants, stopping to spit a quiet thanks to Kunsel, "that a hero's welcome awaits you in the slums. Anti-Shinra sentiment is at an all-time high and the company has only become more extreme in response. The people are clamoring for change."
"And we're going to give it to them," Elfe says.
Fresh, warm oxygen rustles Zack's hair as the Commander wrenches open a rusty, dented old door. Mountains of litter and scrap metal greet them on the other side.
"Midgar!" Kunsel cheers, running joyously into the refuse pile and turning a jaunty spin on one foot. "Home, sweet trash heap. How I missed you."
"You gotta be joking," Barret says, flattening an empty soda can with his boot. "This place is worse than Corel."
"Our basecamp is below Sector Seven." Zhijie points to a narrow dirt path and pulls a baseball cap out of his backpack, bending and flexing the bill until it looks less matted. Covering the black parts of his hair with it, he zips up his pack and starts toward the distant sound of crowds and traffic. "This way."
Broden salutes them from the sewer door, catching his breath before braving the return trip to the inn.
The stench in the slums isn't much better than the sewers, but at least the occasional fresh breeze drifts in from the wasteland.
Zhijie guides them through the chaos of the streets like it's his natural environment. Zack does a poor job of not staring.
Everywhere he looks, he sees suffering. People living in tents, men brawling in alleyways in broad daylight, children wrapped in muddy bandages begging for food in the streets.
His stomach twists itself in knots when one of them meets his eye and he has to tell her that he doesn't have any money.
"Was it always this crowded?" he asks in disbelief.
"What, were your fancy SOLDIER quarters too high up to see the poor peons under your boot?" Barret growls like a fiend as he stomps ahead of him.
"It's definitely worse." Kunsel pats his back sympathetically. "People were always broke, but back then you could at least work a food stand and get three square meals. With the farmland in Junon drying up, prices have gone through the roof."
"That I noticed," Zack sighs.
"Enough chatter. Shut up and walk," Elfe snaps.
Within a few minutes they reach the main drag of Seven, which at least somewhat matches his memory of the place.
The marketplace is still there, still bursting with life. Merchants heckle and jukeboxes play upbeat, discordant tunes. A pair of geezers man a Queen's Blood board, perched on five gallon plastic pickle tubs and arguing over the rules. There's even a saloon with a big, festive sign that looks like it would be a fun pit stop in simpler times.
Two right turns later, Zhijie stops in front of a square, white building with a red cross painted brightly on the side.
A sign hangs askew over the doorway, 'Free Clinic' barely legible through streaks of rust.
"Basecamp," he says, pointing his thumb at the sign. "It's a working facility during the day, but we've been granted access to use the basement at night."
"Granted by who, exactly?" Elfe lifts one brow like she already knows, to which Zhijie offers a cherubic, guiltless grin.
The door of the clinic cracks open. A gruff, muscular man in a green headband and a tank top peers through.
"Elfe…" he says, his expression unreadable.
"I'm going to murder you, Zhijie," the Commander whispers.
"So, uh, the back door," the Wutaian says quickly, jogging around to the other side of the dusty yard.
The team makes trips in and out of the basement, carrying in Kunsel's radio gear and the other supplies Barrett has been lugging for the soon-to-be-established command center. Zack doesn't have much to contribute on that front, so he ends up bouncing on his heels near the doorway, watching Elfe and the man's conversation become more clipped and irate.
He tries not to listen in, but then Elfe throws up her hands and storms away, her thin figure pushing and sliding through the dense crowd.
He checks around the alley to gauge the other fellows' reaction, but they're all busy working downstairs. If she gets into trouble, he'll be the only one who saw her go.
Adjusting his sword on his back, he decides to tail her just for a bit. Just to make sure she doesn't do anything rash while she's upset. He follows her through the ruins of a dilapidated highway and up a set of listing fire escapes to the top of a decrepit brick warehouse.
She sits on the edge of a blinking billboard, a black and yellow eyesore which proudly boasts the glamour and sensuality of Andrea Rodea's Honeybee Inn. A twinge of nostalgia hits him as he takes in the view of Wall Market.
The neon lights and thumping music are as lurid and lively as ever, the narrow avenues still teeming with partiers, bookies, and professionally attractive women. The smell of piss and sizzling street meat takes him right back to his cadet days, when Kunsel first slung his arm over Zack's shoulders and promised to show that small town boy the big city sights.
Back then, the red light district felt like a magical place where adventure and excitement lurked around every corner. To his older eyes, it looks predatory and sad.
LIfting his sword from his shoulders, he leans it against the billboard and sits gently on the creaking metal.
A twilight wind lifts some of the body heat from his leather jacket.
Elfe's posture is curled and small, her usual fire dimmed to a flicker.
"So, uh… that looked rough," he says.
She bends her head so her chin is resting on her knees, and the gesture is so soft and human that it throws him for a loop. He flicks his nose with his thumb and dons a salesman's smile.
"If he's bothering you, I can run him off." He gives a mock punch into his own elbow."One of my many five-star merc services. And for the very reasonable price of two thousand gil. Satisfaction guaranteed!"
Elfe's face doesn't so much as flicker into anything other than dour melancholy. He drops the act with a sigh.
"You know, people actually like it when their leaders show a little humanity. It makes 'em feel like they can trust you, cause you're dealin' with the same shit they are."
Elfe rolls her eyes like she doesn't believe him.
"No, really," he says, leaning closer. "When I was a SOLDIER, my superior officers kept defecting and going insane and nobody ever told us anything. They just kept shoving things under the rug and handing me promotions. Nobody ever said, 'hey, here's how you keep morale up,' or 'you know, Zack, the secret to being a great leader is x, y, and z.' They just stuck me in a fancier uniform and expected me to have some big idea about how we should fix the clusterfuck."
Shaking his head, he gives in to the ache in his travel weary spine and flops back, eyes tracing the steel beams and exhaust pipes of the eternally half-constructed Sector 6 plate.
"I tried my best, but in the end… I don't think I managed to save a single person I cared about. I felt like a total fraud, but everyone kept telling me I was the model SOLDIER and that they were inspired by me. So I put on a brave face and pretended I was fine. But I wasn't fine, nothing was fine, and looking back on it now, I really wish someone had cared enough to notice."
Lifting his head, he looks at Elfe—at her worn uniform and wiry frame, at the shadowy hulk of the Midgar superstructure dwarfing her with its oppressive might—and waits until she looks tiredly back.
He raises his brows, prodding her to say something. She chews the inside of her lip, her fingers picking restlessly at a loose thread on her shirt sleeve.
"It's really not your business," she says, following Zack's gaze up to the steel sky. "I just wasn't prepared to see him tonight."
"He's Shears, right?" Zack guesses. The frizzy, tangled fall of her amber-brown hair twitches, a nod.
"He has some nerve telling me what to do," she confides, her body coiling tighter around her legs. "He's the one who abandoned the cause. He's the one who let Fuhito get away with his treachery and then left me to pick up the pieces by myself. How dare he, how dare he swan in from the sidelines and judge me for how I've handled the mess he made."
He recalls the scene they had made earlier. Shears, earnest and open, reaching for her with concern etched on his face. Elfe, closed off and hurting, refusing to let him in.
He was trying to talk her down, Zack's pretty sure about that. With their history he might even be able to reach her, if she ever gave him a chance.
"I mean… that's not how it looked to me," he says delicately.
Elfe's chin tips ever-so-slightly towards him. "And what exactly did you see?"
Zack works his jaw and sits up, his own bellyful of anxiety drawing parallels that he hadn't really thought of before. Draping one leg over the edge of the platform, he leans forward so he can read her face better.
"He looked like a guy who knows he screwed up, and now he's scared that if he doesn't act fast he might never get another chance to fix things."
"You're reaching," Elfe huffs. "You have no idea what you're talking about."
"Gah, you're just like Cloud sometimes, for real. I'm speaking from my heart here." Zack pats the center of his chest with his palm for emphasis.
When she still looks doubtful, he sighs and throws his other leg over the edge. Leaning on his elbows, he stoops forward, following the aimless steps of a bachelor party in stupid, matching party hats with his eyes.
He spent so many aimless afternoons down here in the undercity, trying to bury his grief in Aerith's smile and her rambling, whimsical stories of life in the slums. The world seemed so much smaller down here, where he could lose himself in the mask of sunny-funny-perfect Zack Fair and forget the unsolvable problems he left up on the plate.
In retrospect it feels gross, like he was taking advantage of her kindness and innocence to sooth his own grief and heartache. He shakes himself, his hands balling up into fists.
"I just mean—" he huffs, searching for the words. "There was this girl, okay. Beautiful. Kind. She was everything good about humanity wrapped up in this perfect, sweet little package. She and I stole so much of each other's time just talking, dreaming, never saying what we really wanted to say. I kept telling myself that I would tell her next time, next time, but there was so much going on in my life and I was terrified of taking that one good thing and screwing it up."
The memories get the better of him as he talks; the way she floated when she walked, the way her hair bounced and twirled, the cute pink ribbon that she never took off after he gave it to her. And her voice… strong yet melodic, like a church bell.
He catches himself rambling, senses Elfe's interest waning.
"So I told myself, okay, for real, as soon as this mission's over I'm gonna call her up and tell her how I feel," he pauses, hanging his head. "But then I got trapped in the lab with Cloud and my life went down a different path. I missed my chance back then, and now I'm gonna have to go face her and tell her something totally different than what I wanted to say five years ago."
Rubbing his face, he takes a steadying breath and makes himself sit up. Elfe's face is unusually open, her thin brows bent in jagged little arcs of sympathy. Figures, all this time he's been trying to reach her and all he had to do was confirm that he's as much of an idiot as she thinks he is.
"I don't know what exactly your beef with Shears is, but if you've got something weighing on your heart, you should talk to him while you have the chance. Don't let this moment become something you regret."
Elfe's gloved fingers come to massage the hidden, solid mass in her right hand. Her shoulders square as she draws in a full chest of stale, undercity air.
"You might be right," she says. He feels something like relief as he watches her rise gracefully to her feet. The tip of her scabbard rattles and scrapes the billboard frame.
He lingers there long after she's gone.
Bit by bit, the windows and string lights down on the street flicker on. The sky changes seamlessly from orange to pink to the deep indigo of night. He tries to find the courage to take his own advice.
Sparing a thought for Cloud and how bored he must be, sitting around the base alone with nothing to do, he pushes himself up and takes the fire escape two steps at a time.
It's going to suck, but it'll be worth it to put these failures behind him, and to prove to that insecure little boy in Cloud's head that nobody outranks him in Zack's heart.
Zack pauses at the gate, breathing in the scent of old wood and tiger lilies.
He feels like he stepped outside of time, or perhaps into one of those vivid shared memories that Cloud plucks from his head sometimes.
Every detail is exactly in its place, from the babbling brook to the gently nodding flowers to the handmade pots swaying from macrame hammocks on the porch. It feels like a homecoming, except that no one here is expecting him
Maybe he should turn back. Maybe she's already moved on, and he'll just be opening her wounds again for his own selfish benefit. The tightly folded letter in his pocket begs to differ.
He opens the gate.
"Does anybody know where a guy can get some flowers?" he rehearses in his head.
No, no, that makes it sound like he still likes her, that won't do. It sounds like he's picking up where they left off, and that's not why he's here. It's bad enough that he has to let her down, he definitely shouldn't get her hopes up first.
"Hey, hey, guess who's back," Gods, no, that's even worse.
Maybe something simpler, something unpretentious like, "Hey."
That's what Cloud would do, no doubt. He'd somehow make it charming too. He'd say it like he'd distilled a whole epic poem into that one, single word and make whoever was lucky enough to hear it swoon like the princess in Loveless.
Realizing he's mooning over Cloud while figuring out how to break up with Aerith, he stops that thought in its tracks.
By that point he's already crossed the garden, and so he just raises his hand and knocks twice. He's never been all that big on plans anyway.
Elmyra opens the door, her face scrunched in her usual stern grimace until her eyes widen in recognition. He braces for a lecture, or maybe a punch in the jaw. Instead she hugs him. Hard.
"Thank the Planet you're alive."
A bad feeling creeps up his spine.
"It's… good to see you too." Tentatively, he draws his hands up to her shoulders and hugs her back. He peeks over her head into the cozy interior of the cottage. Everything looks normal and orderly at first glance. Despite this, his instincts scream that something's wrong.
"Is Aerith home?"
Elmyra's body shakes with what feels like a sob. His heart stops.
The longer he looks, the more distressing details he notices. Scorch marks on the floor. Half of a broken vase in the sink. A crooked line of bullet holes traveling up the stairs.
"It was the science department," Elmyra says, each word sharp with rage and anguish. "I don't know what changed, I thought we had an understanding. She didn't do anything unusual. She followed all of their asinine rules. And then they came in the middle of the night—a woman in a white coat with a whole squadron of troopers and dogs."
He eases back, holding her gently like she might crumble right in front of him. She visibly schools her face into a mask of bleak restraint.
Her grip on his jacket loosens and her hands fall away, leaving only an echo of lost pressure on his chest. Zack shakes his head and stumbles back.
Several hours too late, he remembers where he's heard mad ramblings about the 'Promise Land' before.
Nasal, cruel laughter reverberates through his ears and his gut clenches with the urge to empty his stomach. In an instant he's back in the lab, back to meal trays, hospital gowns, and Bennet's emotionless voice picking away at his sanity, one question at a time.
A memory of Cloud's eyes rolling back and his body convulsing on a kid's rainbow carpet sends him straight into the nearest flower bed, dry heaving.
"A woman—" Yellow cat-eye glasses glint white under fluorescent lights. "Was she blonde? Tall?"
"Yes. Pale skinned, about my age."
"That bastard… that ratfucking bastard," Zack yells, shock shattering abruptly into rage. "Where did they take her? Why didn't you stop them?"
"What could I do?" Aerith's mother snaps.
It's unfair, he knows it, but his mind is spiraling out of control and it's everything he can do just to keep talking, to remind himself that the things he's seeing aren't real.
"I asked every merc in town and they turned me down. Too spineless to draw Shinra's wrath. Too greedy to risk their own skin to save someone else's. But not you, Zack, not you—"
She stalks over to him like a bomb on the verge of detonating and drags him up by his collar, leaning in his face and snarling.
"I spent the last four years cursing your name, but the Planet has a sick sense of humor. If you have any honor at all, any sense of decency, you'll take responsibility and bring my daughter back to me."
"But Tseng… how… he promised."
"I said as much, and that woman laughed in my face. She acted like I was speaking nonsense even though that's the deal we've had for years."
"Oh no," Zack slumps.
It's his fault, isn't it? Another one of Hojo's mind games. As much as he always wanted Aerith, he wants his precious Sephiroth clone more.
Somehow he must have figured out Zack's weakness, must have decided he was tired of waiting on the Turks to bring them in. He's toying with them, pulling their strings like the puppetmaster he is.
Another wave of bile threatens to come up. Elmyra sees his panic rising and slaps him across his left cheek.
"Get a hold of yourself, for gods' sake. You call yourself a SOLDIER?"
Zack's head whips to the side. The pain sharpens his senses, revealing the phantoms of his memory for the illusory nightmares that they are. Pain of a different nature grips his chest.
"When did this happen?"
"A week ago. Saturday."
He covers his face in despair. "She could be anywhere."
"They were Midgar troopers. They can't have left the city without a two week quarantine. She's in their headquarters, she has to be."
"I can't just charge in there alone," he says helplessly. "That's like one man taking on an army."
Aerith's mother is a stonewall when he drags his hands away from his face. The motherly aura that normally cushions her sharp edges has turned inside out and weaponized. She lifts her chin, daring him to tell her no.
"Then get help."
If only it were that simple.