"He actually spoke to you, right? It wasn't some weird telepathic thing?"
Zack basically hid himself away for the rest of the day while he...processed...all the new information about himself, about Angeal, about the entire fucking SOLDIER program. He walked throughout the building, stairs and hallways, and looped around through many rooms. He walked and walked and walked.
He left the building and walked around the mining complex, stinking air be damned. Dust and ash kicked up around his feet in puffy gray clouds. The grimy stuff coated his shoes and trousers. He'd have to change when he finally went back to his new...home?
How could a place like that ever really be a home? With all the bullshit going on?
Messy bullshit.
"Biology is messy," Hollander had said.
Not just messy. Horrifying.
Everything Zack had learned in school, everything he'd always believed about biology, it was all thrown onto the ground and trampled into dust. He knew he was one of the "uneducated dross" Hollander had scorned. He'd always believed all the simple, straightforward lessons his teachers had preached about how humans formed and were born. It had always seemed cut and dried. To learn something so radically different from the conventional knowledge...
Zack could be a...a natural chimera and not even realize it! He could have absorbed a twin in the womb! No one would ever have known. He inspected both his hands. The skin tone was the same. His eyes had always been the same color before his mako treatments, too. But Hollander had said it wasn't usually obvious. Testing was required, and most didn't bother. He dropped his hands and stared straight ahead at an old mining machine, some sort of digger to judge by the toothed bucket attached to a robotic arm. Abandoned and rusting, probably nonfunctional.
What if he got tested and learned he was a natural chimera? It would be awful, but at least he would still be human.
He scratched at his arms. They felt itchy again. He knew it wasn't real, just his nerves, but he scratched anyway, a few times, then forced himself to stop.
The idea that parts of his body were composed of alien cells...cells "implanted" in him as part of the SOLDIER enhancement process...what did that make him? What?
A SOLDIER, a calmer part of his mind insisted. He was still a SOLDIER. That hadn't changed.
SOLDIERs weren't monsters. Wasn't that what he'd told Angeal and Genesis, so long ago? He'd insisted SOLDIERs weren't monsters so many times.
They'd known he was wrong. That was why he hadn't been able to reach either one with his "rationality." Hah. Rationality. Right.
"Genesis and Angeal were right. SOLDIERs really are monsters, after all," he said quietly. A brisk, dry breeze stirred the back of his short hair.
"So you finally get it." A light tenor came from a little behind and above him.
Zack turned around. There was Genesis, hovering above the ground with his black wing extended. He kept his arms folded over his chest and his head tilted at a cocky angle as he descended and lightly touched down.
"Bastard," Zack said, but without heat.
"Yes, yes, get it out of your system."
"What are you doing here, anyway?" Zack was annoyed and didn't try to hide it. He'd have been annoyed even if it was anyone else pestering him. He'd deliberately been avoiding his "roommates."
"Sephiroth asked me to check on you."
Zack frowned, experiencing a weird sense of déjà vu at those words for a moment before he remembered Angeal's ghost saying the same thing to him early in the morning. "He actually spoke to you, right? It wasn't some weird telepathic thing?"
Gaia, it was only his second day here and things were already looking batshit crazy.
Genesis gave him a very strange look. "Of course he spoke to me."
"Great. Glad to hear it." His question answered, Zack started to turn away.
"Look, you've been gone for several hours and, though I hate to ascribe normal human feelings to him, he was worried about how upset you were. He said you got the birds and bees lecture today from Hollander. We can all totally understand how you feel, you know."
Zack turned to face him again. "We?"
"Me, Angeal, even Sephiroth. We've all been there. We've been aware that we're part-alien lab freaks for quite a while, though from what I understand Sephiroth hasn't known as long. Still, I doubt Hojo broke the news to him any more gently than Hollander did to me."
No, Hojo hadn't. Sephiroth had gotten suspicious long before, just from paying attention to conversations, reading heavily redacted reports, and from Cissnei's more complete information, but Hojo's pronouncements had been harsh. Zack remembered the encounter in Hojo's fortified lab, the mad scientist's gloating and ranting explanations, bragging about what he'd done to Angeal, how he'd created Sephiroth and what else he wanted to do to make his "greatest achievement" better...
An immortal god, Hojo had said. He wanted to make Sephiroth into an immortal god. Zack didn't want to ever know what that meant to a ruthless psychopath like Hojo.
"So we all do understand," Genesis said again. He brushed a lock of gray-streaked, dull auburn hair away from his eyes. "I know it's a shock, but honestly, you're still human, unlike the rest of us." He held up a gloved hand, pinching his thumb and index finger together. "You regular SOLDIERs only have a tiny bit of alien crap in you, especially compared to those of us who were created to be non-human monsters before birth. It's so little I'm surprised it makes any difference at all, but Hollander says it probably accounts for the bullshit you've been experiencing. Think of it more like a supplement, rather than fundamentally different biology and physiology."
"What, like alien vitamins?" Zack sneered. "I'm supposed to suddenly not care and just pop one every day with my morning juice?"
Genesis scowled. "Stop being such a drama queen. Just be glad you're a real boy."
As though Genesis had any room to talk about drama! Zack felt a sudden urge to hit the man. He'd been having such violent urges a lot lately. Between Hollander and Genesis, he was sure that one of these days he'd finally give in. He clenched his fists, relaxed them again.
"Some of us are envious of you, Zack."
Zack closed his eyes as memories crowded his thoughts. He remembered Angeal talking about being a monster. Zack had insisted Angeal's wings were angel's wings, not monstrous, and was rebuffed: "Angels dream of one thing. To be human."
Zack remembered the anguish in those words.
Wasn't that his own issue, too? His humanity? Angeal had put great store in his own humanity, then learned he had never been fully human, not even at his very conception. Now Zack wrestled with the same questions. What made a person human? Just genetics? Or maybe attitudes and emotions, or was there something even more? It had been easy to tell Angeal he wasn't a monster. At the time, Zack had only seen pretty white wings and hadn't grasped the full scope of Angeal's problems. Zack had believed he himself was fully human in all senses of the word. He had been secure in his assumption that of course he was right and reasonable, and Angeal just upset and misguided. Now his own condescension came back to bite him, shame him. He should have tried better to understand.
Well, he understood now, didn't he?
Did the alien cells inside him make him a monster, or was he still fundamentally human as Genesis claimed?
He felt exhausted, so weary he didn't want to think, let alone hold a conversation. "You've delivered your message. Now go away, Genesis."
"Don't you want to know why Sephiroth didn't come himself?"
"I know he's guarding Angeal from Hollander. The data gathering is still going on, right? So he'll stay in Hollander's lab until it's done."
Genesis snorted and fluttered into the air. "The least you can do is go reassure Sephiroth that you won't do something stupid, like run off on your own to concoct ways to take down Shin-Ra in revenge for what they did to you." He uttered an ironic laugh, directed at himself. "Since he can't come to you."
Zack blew out all the breath in his lungs, suddenly defeated. "Fine. Just go."
"Make sure you're home by dinnertime, real boy, or next time I'll bring some copies along and we'll drag you back kicking and screaming. Even if the morrow is barren of promises, nothing shall forestall my return." With that poetic threat, Genesis flew off.
"Asshole," Zack muttered. "I'd like to see him try."
Nonetheless, he turned around and trudged back through the ash, the dust, and the filthy, reeking air towards the modified office building.