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icedark_elf May. 1st, 2007 12:24 am)
icedark_elf May. 1st, 2007 12:24 am)Title: Replacement
Author: GW Katrina aka![[insanejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/ij-userinfo.gif)
icedark_elf
Beta:forgottenlover
Series: None
Pairing: Implied Sephiroth/Zack
Wordcount: 3,421
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
A/N: Yeah, not a pretty one. AU/AT, character death
Summary: What if Sephiroth had gone down in Wutai?
Replacement
Everything had been going good. It really had been.
He had gotten his promotion to First Class, which would take effect once they got back to Midgar, and he had caught Sephiroth’s attention. Really caught it. After almost a month of working with each other, the man had finally started talking to him about things outside the next battle plan, or next weeks supply list. It was so cool to talk to him. He knew that Sephiroth was smart. Scary smart. He picked out tactics and strategies like there was nothing to it, and they always seemed to work, which was more than Zack could say about most plans that he had ever seen pulled off.
Recently, it had gotten a to be a lot more than that, and Zack wasn’t sure how he found himself in Seph’s bed, but he had, and he found he like it a lot. Given that he was a teenager, and, well, had been a virgin before that, it was to be expected that he liked it, but he -really- liked it. Wasn’t just the sex, either. Just like everywhere else, they talked. The oddest conversations, but it was talk.
Pleased with life, even if they were still in the middle of this stupid war, Zack was happy to go along with the scout mission. Seph had been wanting to get out of camp and this was the best way to do so. With a few other of the higher ranking SOLDIERs, they had found themselves out in the woods that surrounded their current location, and Zack saw Sephiroth take a deep breath, a small smile flickering across his lips as he smelled fresh air.
Then...everything went mad.
He never saw exactly what did the damage. All he knew was the side of his face hurt, hurt worse than anything he had ever felt, and then everything went dark on one side. The next second, Seph...splattered. It was the only way he could describe it. One second Seph was turning to see why Zack had stumbled, and the next he was falling, and there was this red mist -everywhere-, and Seph didn’t have a head anymore.
Zack was sure that he was in shock. Nothing hurt, and he couldn’t breathe, but that was probably because he could see down Seph’s neck at the moment. Down his neck, which was all sorts of wrong. Shouldn’t be able to see down peoples necks.
He felt something creeping down his temple, and he wondered if it was a bug or if it was blood. If it was blood, was it his?
The grit of earth pressed against his cheek, and he found he couldn’t feel anything on his right side. Just pain and numbness. Did that mean the grit was on his left side?
His mind wouldn’t stay focused, and he suddenly found himself moving. Not because of him, and the way he found it hard to breathe suddenly said it was probably someone dragging him under cover by his shirt. He tried to struggle, wanted to struggle, but nothing listened to him, and all he could do was rasp something that might have been Seph’s name. It also might have been a sound of pain, but the one dragging him seemed to get the meaning.
“He’s dead, Fair. Not even the General can survive gettin his head taken off. Most the crew is hurt bad. General’s the only fatality, everyone else got caught by the edges.”
They didn’t stop moving, even as the man talked, and Zack found himself zoning out some as things started to go blurry for him. Shock, something in his mind whispered, but he didn’t really care at the moment. The pain was fading, and that was probably a bad sign since he hadn’t had anything to deal with it yet.
He wasn’t sure what had happened, but all he could see was that headless body falling, silver hair floating to earth to lay in a pool of blood that was all that remained of the head they had been attached to. Even when he couldn’t anymore, it was all he could see.
///
Things didn’t seem to calm down much after that, either. The ones hit were airlifted back to Midgar, to the labs there. A team went out and collected Sephiroth’s body before the Wutai rebels could get very far with it. Zack had nightmares, awake and asleep, seeing that body wrapped up in cloth and set in the same transport as the rest of them. Two more SOLDIERs had died before getting back to camp, both of them screaming in pain.
He still didn’t feel pain. Everything was too numb, though the dreams, oh, gods, the dreams were vivid as anything. He kept seeing the spray of red on black leather, the way the pale hair floated on the pool of blood, both blood and hair glittering in the sparse light of the woods.
Gore there had been plenty of so far during the war. Had seen lots of it himself. Had caused lots of it himself. Killed a lot of people, hurt a lot of people. Had seen his fellow fighters hurt and kill a lot more. Nothing like that. One second, Seph was there, the next, he wasn’t.
Zack wasn’t sure what happened, and he couldn’t answer when they tried quizzing him as they unloaded him from the plane. He still couldn’t feel the right side, and that was the eye that was still dark as well. There was yelling, and he felt hands grab onto his hair and a man screaming at him, wanting to know what had happened. It had taken a moment to realize it was Hojo, but he didn’t care. He felt a little too lost at the moment to care. He hurt, and things weren’t right. They were wrong in so many ways at the moment, and nothing made sense in his head. Especially not with the screaming.
So he did the one thing he never had dared to before and ignored the man. Shutting his good eye, unsure if the other was open, shut, or even still there, he fell asleep. Sleep was good. Sort of. Sleep meant it didn’t hurt, though he still had the dreams. At least the pain wasn’t physical anymore.
///
Those that lived got shoved into the labs. Zack didn’t think the one other survivor besides himself was going to make it. The guy wasn’t too responsive, and he kept hearing them running to the other, alarms sounding.
Not that Zack was all that responsive. Everything hurt, a dull ache that sometimes tightened up to become jolts of pain so intense that they numbed him. Hojo had been in several times, trying to get answers, running tests, various things. He muttered things that made no sense to Zack. Things about possible nerve damage and clones and reunions. None of it made sense, and he would just shut his good eye when Hojo started going on about it, letting the man do his poking. It didn’t really make things hurt any more.
Now and then, he got shots of Mako. More and more often, too. He could feel the burn, and pried his eye open each time for that. He wanted to see them when they did it, as it still made no sense to him, and he couldn’t get them to answer him when he slurred out a question on it.
When they had first started the series, he couldn’t understand. They couldn’t be giving him his First Class shots now, could they? But from the sounds of the murmurs around him, they were. Setting it up for something else. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he knew Hojo was behind it.
He did have to admit that each shot seemed to help mute the pain, but he also knew that too much too soon could do a lot of bad things. Mako poisoning, overdoses that could melt brains, nervous twitches, and a whole mess of other bad things. They had forced that down their throats enough when they were preparing for the first series of shots.
Though at least he knew what the Mako was. He was used to the burn of it, to the way it made everything glow in his sight for hours afterwards.
It was the other stuff, the stuff that glowed violet, that really scared him.
“We can make it better. Stronger. Make it a fit first attempt at the project,” Hojo had told his assistant the first time he had pressed the needle to Zack’s arm and emptied it. The violet sludge had been so cold when it first hit. Zack could -feel- it creeping along inside his arm, surprise and panic making him want to jerk away from Hojo, from the needle, from what ever it was that was now moving in his blood. But he couldn’t. Too tired, too hurt, too weak.
Not so much anymore, but with each shot, it hurt less and less, and the biting cold was more of a numbing sensation anymore. Too much exposure, maybe, but he found he didn’t care.
He wanted things to go back to the way they had been.
///
The problem with being blind on one side, he decided, the very worst problem was that he couldn’t see anyone coming up on that side. Oh, he could still hear well enough, and he could finally move well enough that he could shift around and look at what produced the sounds, but sometimes that just wasn’t enough.
Hojo was used to SOLDIERs, he knew their abilities, and while Zack found that things weren’t quite right with him anymore, Hojo could still sneak up on him.
The crack to the side of the face was his first sign the man was there. Snarling, he instinctively went to swat back at whoever had struck him, but his reflexes were still too fast for his body to follow, and he almost fell before catching his balance.
Looking up, he glared at the man, standing up straight so that he could look down on the scientist. Not that Hojo ever seemed put off by subtle shows of power, but given who he was, Zack got that. Still, didn’t stop him from trying. Someday, Hojo would push too hard, and he would be so used to dismissing Zack that he wouldn’t see the danger till too late.
Zack wasn’t sure why his thoughts turned violent so often anymore. Maybe he had been damaged more than he thought during the ambush that had killed Seph. Maybe seeing the first person he ever liked in any way more than friendship die like that did it. Maybe it had to do with Seph just dying. He didn’t know.
There were all sorts of strange reports in now about SOLDIERs now that Seph was dead. Zack only got bits and pieces but, from what he could tell, the carefully ordered SOLDIER units were falling to pieces. More psychosis, more people suffering mental breakdowns on the fields, more rejections of the SOLDIER formulas. Everything that Shin-Ra counted on during their battle with Wutai was falling apart and nobody knew why.
Hojo was in an irritable mood, and was taking it out on everyone else. Zack found it almost funny that the man had run into a problem that he couldn’t fix.
Those who had been back to the labs, who had made it to the labs, were starting to calm, at least all the ones that Zack had seen. He wasn’t allowed near many, and he could only get glimpses of them, but when he did, it seemed like it was a matter of days between them arriving, many restrained and drugged, to calm, back to their pre-break selves. One or two had been sent back to the field, only to break again. Those who stayed in the labs, though, seem to stay calm.
A clearing of a throat reminded Zack of his surroundings, and he found himself focusing back on Hojo. Damnit, how could he have spaced out like that?
“Your eye hasn’t healed. And your visual reports on the other one are not good enough for what we need.”
Need? And was Hojo actually -giving- him information?
“What is wrong with my eye, anyway?” he asked, trying to press for a little more. For all that had happened to him, he was remarkably uninformed about his own injuries, and he was tired of it.
“We’re unsure. Whatever caused the damage to you and to Sephiroth is not fully understood. Even the autopsies done on those who didn’t survive have not given us much. We’re not even sure why you survived when none of the others did.” A small smirk. “There have even been a few questions on if it was intentional or not.”
Oh, that was a dangerous tone. If they thought he had betrayed Shin-Ra, he was going to end up having a messy death of his own, and he -really- didn’t like that idea.
“However, given the reports I had received over Sephiroth and your’s...interactions, I was able to persuade them otherwise. I doubt someone like you would betray someone you were involved with on that level. It’s simply not in your psychological profile.”
How much did Hojo know? Zack felt himself go a little cold, furious that Seph hadn’t even had that much privacy.
“With the damage that you refuse to heal, you simply aren’t good enough for what I need you for. However,” Hojo continued, pulling out a needle and prepping it for injection, ignoring Zack’s wary eyes, “you do serve another useful purpose.” He moved, and only long practice kept Zack from flinching away. It wouldn’t do him any good, and he didn’t have the reflex at the moment to fight off the people he knew would come to Hojo’s aid.
The injection took hold, and he felt himself go hazy. What were they going to do to him now?
Sagging back onto the table he was guided to, he slumped to the side. When he had signed up for SOLDIER, he knew that they were going to do things to him, but not like this.
The last thing he really heard before blacking out totally was Hojo calling for someone to bring him samples of J-factor.
///
Everything felt odd, and he found he could move better, more stable, as if something that had been putting him incredibly off balance was gone. That was a good feel. He didn’t like being off like that.
But now, as well as feeling as if he had found his own balance, he found he felt a lot more than that. Like a buzz, a feel of things all around him that helped settle him. It was odd, but it wasn’t hurting, so he left it alone.
Hojo came to check on him more and more often, checking his responses and muttering about things. Given the upturn the man’s mood had taken, Zack came to the conclusion that he had figured out the SOLDIER problem. Which was good, Zack didn’t like the idea of so many people dying because of something gone wrong that they couldn’t control. Even the war made more sense than that.
He was allowed to roam a little more, even encouraged to go visit the other SOLDIERs. He wasn’t sure why Hojo was being so generous now, but he didn’t question it. He just went.
Being around the others was different, though. Zack had always been outgoing, friendly. But now he could almost -feel- them in the back of his mind, like that voice that was even louder anymore. It whispered of things he didn’t really understand. Not that the concepts were beyond him, just that it was just outside his understanding. Almost words that still had too much gibberish for him to actually get.
Though, for now, he ignored it as best he could, and focused on living. The SOLDIERs were so strange around him. On one hand, they seemed drawn to him, just like they had all been drawn to Seph, and on the other, they always seemed to stare when they found him. Mostly it was at the scars, which were healing nicely. Most of them had already faded to thin white lines. Stood out on his skin, though he was rapidly losing his color from being inside so much. Irritating, but he wasn’t allowed outside of the building yet.
Not liking the stares, but hungry for the company of those who might have news, Zack took to having his hair hanging down over the injuries. It tickled a bit, but it wasn’t like it got into his line of vision. He just wished that his good eye would get back the sharpness he was used to, instead of this annoying fuzziness it picked up whenever he looked too far away.
Still, it was good to find a spot where SOLDIERs gathered and settle in. Never lacking for company, he listened as they talked about the war, the strange period so many of them had just gone through with the uneasiness, the fear and uncertainty that none of them could explain. At least that seemed to be at an end, and Zack hoped it stayed away. He had been out of it for most of that, but he had experienced it enough to not want its return.
He wondered if Hojo’s little experiment on him had helped fixed it. The timing was right.
Somehow, he was sure that he would never really know.
///
Slowly waking up from yet another series of tests Hojo insisted he was unconscious for, Zack wondered absently if the man ever realized how aware his subjects where coming out of the drugs. Because he talked. Constantly. And Zack found it really annoying. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and was simply stuck listening to the man.
If he spoke clearly, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was must mumble after mumble after mumble as he wrote something. Zack could hear the scritching of the pen on paper.
“...no good for the cloning project. Attempts failed anyway, but the damage....” More muttering. One day, Zack was going to figure out the trick to moving things with his mind and brain the man for doing this. He -hated- hearing parts of conversations.
“...hive setup, possibility? The return of the “queen” seems to have settled....” Pen on paper again. “Proved somewhat useful.” Then it sounded as if he was drinking something, the clicking of his swallows making Zack want to twitch. “Jenova seems to be the key to the hive connections....”
He wanted the man dead. Dead as he could be. If there was anything else he wanted as much as he wanted Seph to be alive, it was for this man to die. After all the tests, all the pokes and the prods and the talking down to, this half heard mumble was what made Zack really want Hojo to die.
As if his wish was to come true, Hojo made a choked sound, just a little one, and Zack wanted to know what was going on. Hojo was on the wrong side for him to see, but he could hear the sound of someone standing, then the thud of a form hitting the floor. A few more moments of choking sounds, then nothing except papers falling softly to earth.
It took ten more minutes for him to recover enough to actually move, and the first thing he did was to turn his head and look at Hojo.
The man was purple in the face, and looked very, very dead. Well, then. Seemed wishes really did come true.
Absently, Zack worked at moving until he could stand fully. Dressing again, he ignored the body and walked outside the lab. Wandering down the hall, he grabbed the first assistant he saw and told them Hojo wanted to see them, and then walked out.
The chaos that followed was a wonderful thing, and for the first time since he had been brought back, Zack walked outside, past the distracted guards.
Ignoring the gibbering voice, he walked away from Shin-Ra and Midgar, as if they didn’t even exist anymore.
He liked chocobos. They were soft and smart. Raising some sounded pretty good.
What, he wondered, would it be like to raise chocobos?
Author: GW Katrina aka
icedark_elfBeta:
forgottenloverSeries: None
Pairing: Implied Sephiroth/Zack
Wordcount: 3,421
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None
A/N: Yeah, not a pretty one. AU/AT, character death
Summary: What if Sephiroth had gone down in Wutai?
Replacement
Everything had been going good. It really had been.
He had gotten his promotion to First Class, which would take effect once they got back to Midgar, and he had caught Sephiroth’s attention. Really caught it. After almost a month of working with each other, the man had finally started talking to him about things outside the next battle plan, or next weeks supply list. It was so cool to talk to him. He knew that Sephiroth was smart. Scary smart. He picked out tactics and strategies like there was nothing to it, and they always seemed to work, which was more than Zack could say about most plans that he had ever seen pulled off.
Recently, it had gotten a to be a lot more than that, and Zack wasn’t sure how he found himself in Seph’s bed, but he had, and he found he like it a lot. Given that he was a teenager, and, well, had been a virgin before that, it was to be expected that he liked it, but he -really- liked it. Wasn’t just the sex, either. Just like everywhere else, they talked. The oddest conversations, but it was talk.
Pleased with life, even if they were still in the middle of this stupid war, Zack was happy to go along with the scout mission. Seph had been wanting to get out of camp and this was the best way to do so. With a few other of the higher ranking SOLDIERs, they had found themselves out in the woods that surrounded their current location, and Zack saw Sephiroth take a deep breath, a small smile flickering across his lips as he smelled fresh air.
Then...everything went mad.
He never saw exactly what did the damage. All he knew was the side of his face hurt, hurt worse than anything he had ever felt, and then everything went dark on one side. The next second, Seph...splattered. It was the only way he could describe it. One second Seph was turning to see why Zack had stumbled, and the next he was falling, and there was this red mist -everywhere-, and Seph didn’t have a head anymore.
Zack was sure that he was in shock. Nothing hurt, and he couldn’t breathe, but that was probably because he could see down Seph’s neck at the moment. Down his neck, which was all sorts of wrong. Shouldn’t be able to see down peoples necks.
He felt something creeping down his temple, and he wondered if it was a bug or if it was blood. If it was blood, was it his?
The grit of earth pressed against his cheek, and he found he couldn’t feel anything on his right side. Just pain and numbness. Did that mean the grit was on his left side?
His mind wouldn’t stay focused, and he suddenly found himself moving. Not because of him, and the way he found it hard to breathe suddenly said it was probably someone dragging him under cover by his shirt. He tried to struggle, wanted to struggle, but nothing listened to him, and all he could do was rasp something that might have been Seph’s name. It also might have been a sound of pain, but the one dragging him seemed to get the meaning.
“He’s dead, Fair. Not even the General can survive gettin his head taken off. Most the crew is hurt bad. General’s the only fatality, everyone else got caught by the edges.”
They didn’t stop moving, even as the man talked, and Zack found himself zoning out some as things started to go blurry for him. Shock, something in his mind whispered, but he didn’t really care at the moment. The pain was fading, and that was probably a bad sign since he hadn’t had anything to deal with it yet.
He wasn’t sure what had happened, but all he could see was that headless body falling, silver hair floating to earth to lay in a pool of blood that was all that remained of the head they had been attached to. Even when he couldn’t anymore, it was all he could see.
Things didn’t seem to calm down much after that, either. The ones hit were airlifted back to Midgar, to the labs there. A team went out and collected Sephiroth’s body before the Wutai rebels could get very far with it. Zack had nightmares, awake and asleep, seeing that body wrapped up in cloth and set in the same transport as the rest of them. Two more SOLDIERs had died before getting back to camp, both of them screaming in pain.
He still didn’t feel pain. Everything was too numb, though the dreams, oh, gods, the dreams were vivid as anything. He kept seeing the spray of red on black leather, the way the pale hair floated on the pool of blood, both blood and hair glittering in the sparse light of the woods.
Gore there had been plenty of so far during the war. Had seen lots of it himself. Had caused lots of it himself. Killed a lot of people, hurt a lot of people. Had seen his fellow fighters hurt and kill a lot more. Nothing like that. One second, Seph was there, the next, he wasn’t.
Zack wasn’t sure what happened, and he couldn’t answer when they tried quizzing him as they unloaded him from the plane. He still couldn’t feel the right side, and that was the eye that was still dark as well. There was yelling, and he felt hands grab onto his hair and a man screaming at him, wanting to know what had happened. It had taken a moment to realize it was Hojo, but he didn’t care. He felt a little too lost at the moment to care. He hurt, and things weren’t right. They were wrong in so many ways at the moment, and nothing made sense in his head. Especially not with the screaming.
So he did the one thing he never had dared to before and ignored the man. Shutting his good eye, unsure if the other was open, shut, or even still there, he fell asleep. Sleep was good. Sort of. Sleep meant it didn’t hurt, though he still had the dreams. At least the pain wasn’t physical anymore.
Those that lived got shoved into the labs. Zack didn’t think the one other survivor besides himself was going to make it. The guy wasn’t too responsive, and he kept hearing them running to the other, alarms sounding.
Not that Zack was all that responsive. Everything hurt, a dull ache that sometimes tightened up to become jolts of pain so intense that they numbed him. Hojo had been in several times, trying to get answers, running tests, various things. He muttered things that made no sense to Zack. Things about possible nerve damage and clones and reunions. None of it made sense, and he would just shut his good eye when Hojo started going on about it, letting the man do his poking. It didn’t really make things hurt any more.
Now and then, he got shots of Mako. More and more often, too. He could feel the burn, and pried his eye open each time for that. He wanted to see them when they did it, as it still made no sense to him, and he couldn’t get them to answer him when he slurred out a question on it.
When they had first started the series, he couldn’t understand. They couldn’t be giving him his First Class shots now, could they? But from the sounds of the murmurs around him, they were. Setting it up for something else. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he knew Hojo was behind it.
He did have to admit that each shot seemed to help mute the pain, but he also knew that too much too soon could do a lot of bad things. Mako poisoning, overdoses that could melt brains, nervous twitches, and a whole mess of other bad things. They had forced that down their throats enough when they were preparing for the first series of shots.
Though at least he knew what the Mako was. He was used to the burn of it, to the way it made everything glow in his sight for hours afterwards.
It was the other stuff, the stuff that glowed violet, that really scared him.
“We can make it better. Stronger. Make it a fit first attempt at the project,” Hojo had told his assistant the first time he had pressed the needle to Zack’s arm and emptied it. The violet sludge had been so cold when it first hit. Zack could -feel- it creeping along inside his arm, surprise and panic making him want to jerk away from Hojo, from the needle, from what ever it was that was now moving in his blood. But he couldn’t. Too tired, too hurt, too weak.
Not so much anymore, but with each shot, it hurt less and less, and the biting cold was more of a numbing sensation anymore. Too much exposure, maybe, but he found he didn’t care.
He wanted things to go back to the way they had been.
The problem with being blind on one side, he decided, the very worst problem was that he couldn’t see anyone coming up on that side. Oh, he could still hear well enough, and he could finally move well enough that he could shift around and look at what produced the sounds, but sometimes that just wasn’t enough.
Hojo was used to SOLDIERs, he knew their abilities, and while Zack found that things weren’t quite right with him anymore, Hojo could still sneak up on him.
The crack to the side of the face was his first sign the man was there. Snarling, he instinctively went to swat back at whoever had struck him, but his reflexes were still too fast for his body to follow, and he almost fell before catching his balance.
Looking up, he glared at the man, standing up straight so that he could look down on the scientist. Not that Hojo ever seemed put off by subtle shows of power, but given who he was, Zack got that. Still, didn’t stop him from trying. Someday, Hojo would push too hard, and he would be so used to dismissing Zack that he wouldn’t see the danger till too late.
Zack wasn’t sure why his thoughts turned violent so often anymore. Maybe he had been damaged more than he thought during the ambush that had killed Seph. Maybe seeing the first person he ever liked in any way more than friendship die like that did it. Maybe it had to do with Seph just dying. He didn’t know.
There were all sorts of strange reports in now about SOLDIERs now that Seph was dead. Zack only got bits and pieces but, from what he could tell, the carefully ordered SOLDIER units were falling to pieces. More psychosis, more people suffering mental breakdowns on the fields, more rejections of the SOLDIER formulas. Everything that Shin-Ra counted on during their battle with Wutai was falling apart and nobody knew why.
Hojo was in an irritable mood, and was taking it out on everyone else. Zack found it almost funny that the man had run into a problem that he couldn’t fix.
Those who had been back to the labs, who had made it to the labs, were starting to calm, at least all the ones that Zack had seen. He wasn’t allowed near many, and he could only get glimpses of them, but when he did, it seemed like it was a matter of days between them arriving, many restrained and drugged, to calm, back to their pre-break selves. One or two had been sent back to the field, only to break again. Those who stayed in the labs, though, seem to stay calm.
A clearing of a throat reminded Zack of his surroundings, and he found himself focusing back on Hojo. Damnit, how could he have spaced out like that?
“Your eye hasn’t healed. And your visual reports on the other one are not good enough for what we need.”
Need? And was Hojo actually -giving- him information?
“What is wrong with my eye, anyway?” he asked, trying to press for a little more. For all that had happened to him, he was remarkably uninformed about his own injuries, and he was tired of it.
“We’re unsure. Whatever caused the damage to you and to Sephiroth is not fully understood. Even the autopsies done on those who didn’t survive have not given us much. We’re not even sure why you survived when none of the others did.” A small smirk. “There have even been a few questions on if it was intentional or not.”
Oh, that was a dangerous tone. If they thought he had betrayed Shin-Ra, he was going to end up having a messy death of his own, and he -really- didn’t like that idea.
“However, given the reports I had received over Sephiroth and your’s...interactions, I was able to persuade them otherwise. I doubt someone like you would betray someone you were involved with on that level. It’s simply not in your psychological profile.”
How much did Hojo know? Zack felt himself go a little cold, furious that Seph hadn’t even had that much privacy.
“With the damage that you refuse to heal, you simply aren’t good enough for what I need you for. However,” Hojo continued, pulling out a needle and prepping it for injection, ignoring Zack’s wary eyes, “you do serve another useful purpose.” He moved, and only long practice kept Zack from flinching away. It wouldn’t do him any good, and he didn’t have the reflex at the moment to fight off the people he knew would come to Hojo’s aid.
The injection took hold, and he felt himself go hazy. What were they going to do to him now?
Sagging back onto the table he was guided to, he slumped to the side. When he had signed up for SOLDIER, he knew that they were going to do things to him, but not like this.
The last thing he really heard before blacking out totally was Hojo calling for someone to bring him samples of J-factor.
Everything felt odd, and he found he could move better, more stable, as if something that had been putting him incredibly off balance was gone. That was a good feel. He didn’t like being off like that.
But now, as well as feeling as if he had found his own balance, he found he felt a lot more than that. Like a buzz, a feel of things all around him that helped settle him. It was odd, but it wasn’t hurting, so he left it alone.
Hojo came to check on him more and more often, checking his responses and muttering about things. Given the upturn the man’s mood had taken, Zack came to the conclusion that he had figured out the SOLDIER problem. Which was good, Zack didn’t like the idea of so many people dying because of something gone wrong that they couldn’t control. Even the war made more sense than that.
He was allowed to roam a little more, even encouraged to go visit the other SOLDIERs. He wasn’t sure why Hojo was being so generous now, but he didn’t question it. He just went.
Being around the others was different, though. Zack had always been outgoing, friendly. But now he could almost -feel- them in the back of his mind, like that voice that was even louder anymore. It whispered of things he didn’t really understand. Not that the concepts were beyond him, just that it was just outside his understanding. Almost words that still had too much gibberish for him to actually get.
Though, for now, he ignored it as best he could, and focused on living. The SOLDIERs were so strange around him. On one hand, they seemed drawn to him, just like they had all been drawn to Seph, and on the other, they always seemed to stare when they found him. Mostly it was at the scars, which were healing nicely. Most of them had already faded to thin white lines. Stood out on his skin, though he was rapidly losing his color from being inside so much. Irritating, but he wasn’t allowed outside of the building yet.
Not liking the stares, but hungry for the company of those who might have news, Zack took to having his hair hanging down over the injuries. It tickled a bit, but it wasn’t like it got into his line of vision. He just wished that his good eye would get back the sharpness he was used to, instead of this annoying fuzziness it picked up whenever he looked too far away.
Still, it was good to find a spot where SOLDIERs gathered and settle in. Never lacking for company, he listened as they talked about the war, the strange period so many of them had just gone through with the uneasiness, the fear and uncertainty that none of them could explain. At least that seemed to be at an end, and Zack hoped it stayed away. He had been out of it for most of that, but he had experienced it enough to not want its return.
He wondered if Hojo’s little experiment on him had helped fixed it. The timing was right.
Somehow, he was sure that he would never really know.
Slowly waking up from yet another series of tests Hojo insisted he was unconscious for, Zack wondered absently if the man ever realized how aware his subjects where coming out of the drugs. Because he talked. Constantly. And Zack found it really annoying. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and was simply stuck listening to the man.
If he spoke clearly, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it was must mumble after mumble after mumble as he wrote something. Zack could hear the scritching of the pen on paper.
“...no good for the cloning project. Attempts failed anyway, but the damage....” More muttering. One day, Zack was going to figure out the trick to moving things with his mind and brain the man for doing this. He -hated- hearing parts of conversations.
“...hive setup, possibility? The return of the “queen” seems to have settled....” Pen on paper again. “Proved somewhat useful.” Then it sounded as if he was drinking something, the clicking of his swallows making Zack want to twitch. “Jenova seems to be the key to the hive connections....”
He wanted the man dead. Dead as he could be. If there was anything else he wanted as much as he wanted Seph to be alive, it was for this man to die. After all the tests, all the pokes and the prods and the talking down to, this half heard mumble was what made Zack really want Hojo to die.
As if his wish was to come true, Hojo made a choked sound, just a little one, and Zack wanted to know what was going on. Hojo was on the wrong side for him to see, but he could hear the sound of someone standing, then the thud of a form hitting the floor. A few more moments of choking sounds, then nothing except papers falling softly to earth.
It took ten more minutes for him to recover enough to actually move, and the first thing he did was to turn his head and look at Hojo.
The man was purple in the face, and looked very, very dead. Well, then. Seemed wishes really did come true.
Absently, Zack worked at moving until he could stand fully. Dressing again, he ignored the body and walked outside the lab. Wandering down the hall, he grabbed the first assistant he saw and told them Hojo wanted to see them, and then walked out.
The chaos that followed was a wonderful thing, and for the first time since he had been brought back, Zack walked outside, past the distracted guards.
Ignoring the gibbering voice, he walked away from Shin-Ra and Midgar, as if they didn’t even exist anymore.
He liked chocobos. They were soft and smart. Raising some sounded pretty good.
What, he wondered, would it be like to raise chocobos?
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*snerks* But what a way to kill Hojo. Wishing really *really* hard for it...