Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Tenacity ❯ Recognize ( Chapter 1 )
[ Y - Young Adult: Not suitable for readers under 16 ]
By: Strange and Intoxicating rsa 
Under the Midgar plate...
Non Anime: Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Adventure / Action | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 08.31.2008 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.6K | Visits: 204 | Status: Work In Progress
Under the Midgar plate...
Non Anime: Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Romance / Adventure / Action | Type: Divergence | Uploaded On: 08.31.2008 | Pages: 3 | Words: 3.6K | Visits: 204 | Status: Work In Progress
Chapter One: Recognize
The city of Midgar was filthier than ever; the neon green light from the lamp posts made the dirt and grime of the sidewalks and buildings multiply. Glass shards littered the walkways while bums lay in the streets, covered in glass and their own faeces, bottles of whiskey clutched by their stubby fingers. The women, with their ‘come hither’ eyes and noxious perfumes mixed with the smell of decaying corpses, stood in front of cheap hotels, keys swinging from their long, pointy fingers. Children stood on street corners, makeup adorning their androgynous faces, some with needles filled with MM, the diluted form of Mako, hidden on their persons for the clients who would be coming for them later in the evening. This was the city every boy wished to adventure, a place where they swore they would become famous and make their fortunes.
Zack pulled Cloud closer to him as they passed a group of thugs, their mouths open, teeth dirty as the ground. The raven-haired man’s fingers itched for his Buster Sword strapped to his back, mocking him. The feeling of uneasiness gutted him, but what was he to do; he couldn’t outright pull the sword out and brandish it at the men. Zack caught the group waltzing off to the side, hiding between trash cans like gutter rats as they followed the SOLDIER and his companion.
“It’s a pretty boy,” one grumbled, his tongue running over his noxious upper lip. A grubby beard was present across his face, tangled into a mangled heap, unwashed. His hand touched the small switchblade latched to the ragged leather belt around his torn jeans.
“Mmm-hm, Jake, we could get a pretty gil for ‘im,” another whispered, reaching down to grab a shard of green glass, sharp and jagged. “How much do ya think he’s worth? Four-hundred? Maybe six if we’s lucky.”
Debauchery in the highest form, the group of men turned around and began to walk closer. The stink from their soiled bodies and open sores made Zack’s nose itch uncomfortably, but the teeming mako smell was much worse.
Enhanced senses. The SOLDIER almost laughed. When he, along with his fellow recruits, had signed his name in blood on the bottom of that contract, between death and dismemberment had read the words ‘enhanced senses’. At first no one could believe it. Then, as the sickly green fluid was pumped into their bodies, polluting their blood streams with the evil of Jenova and mako, Zack had felt the skies change, heard the screaming of his protesting body, the blood pounding in the teenager nearby, smelt blood and curdled milk deep inside his stomach.
The men were getting closer. Cloud’s body was shifted to the right, deep in the crook of one of Zack’s arms. His other began stretching for the Buster Sword. To the men it looked as if he was scratching his long mane of dirty black hair. Mercilessly, they began their attack.
Zack had just enough time to turn his body, one side protecting Cloud, the other jutted forward. His sword clashed with a small knife, sending the small blade flying through the cold air to clatter to the street. Another blonde man, weaponless, launched himself onto Zack’s back, tearing at his wild hair.
“Grab the kid!” the other yelled to the man with the glass, barely missing the swinging Buster Sword.
With gusto he hadn’t experience since his fight with Cissnei, Zack whipped his left arm over his head, blade slicing through soft flesh. The man gave a scream but did not let go of the SOLDIER’s hair. Blood began to pool down into violet eyes, dripping from the blonde’s wound. Despite the cut, the blonde was still clinging to Zack’s head, his grip inflexible.
Zack swung his head back and launched the blonde off his shoulders. The man with the glass took the initiative. He flew towards Cloud, one hand slashing the SOLDIER’s arm, a deep slashappearing on the smooth surface, the other snatching at the boy’s chocobo blonde hair.
At the same instant, Zack grabbed the fallen thug. “You let go of him right now or I’ll fucking kill your friend here,” the SOLDIER’s face twisted into a macabre sneer, the blood of his enemies running down his face in streams of death. His Buster Sword was positioned at the blonde’s throat, ready to slice at a second’s hesitation from the other two.
“Look at his eyes,” the mangy-bearded man said, his own eyes widening with awe, “He’s a --“
“SOLDIER, First-Class. Now I suggest you and your buddies quit while your heads’re still attached to your bodies.” Zack lifted the blade from the blonde’s head by a millimetre. Sweat still beaded on the man’s face. “Now get the hell away from us, and don’t come back.” Zack swung the sword back over his head and into its sheath. The blonde on the floor scrambled up from the dust-mingled streets and the three men fled, tails between their legs.
“That was easy,” Zack mumbled, shifting his bloody wrist from the side of Cloud’s face, leaving the uncut boy covered in blood, running through his blondehair. A small trickle of red ran down his wrist, but it was nothing the mako inside him wouldn’t take care of. As he watched, the green tendrils erupted from his inner layers of skin, pasting the wound closed, kneading the skin together. The crimson lifeblood intermingling with green mako made the violet-eyed boy’s hands cold. Fingers scraping against skin, green liquid surrounding him, he felt he was bobbing in the middle of nothing, tormented screams cradling him to sleep.
Zack shook his head violently, wiping those thoughts from existence. He was a SOLDIER, dammit, not weak. He would not submit to the blood-draining memories. He would not, because then, what would happen to his promises? Slowly, he leaned against the nearby building, slumping to the ground, laying Cloud in his lap. Blood still bubbled down the blue-eyed boy’s face, but he seemed oblivious to it.
Zack sighed, pulling a small cloth from his pocket. “Cloud, what am I going to do with you?” Matted with blood and dried mako, he wiped the few blood drops from the corners of Cloud’s mouth before attempting to clean his own face. Already crusting, the blood left brown streaks on his skin that his adroit hands were not able to clean in time. The mess, slick and wet, turned the green cloth to scarlet reddish brown. The intricate pattern on the side, which Zack had been using to scrub his face, was a small lily. At one point it had been pure white. Now, dirty beyond all measure, there was nothing left to do but throw the old relic behind him.
A grumbling erupted through thick layers of SOLDIER-wrought material, startling the musing man. He looked down at his own stomach where the massive eruption had taken place before looking back to Cloud. “You hungry too?” he asked, nodding his head back and forth, answering the question for the blonde. “Well, of course you are. I forgot about you not being a SOLDIER. You’re just so much like them, you know, I forget you need meals more often than us.” Zack tossed the dirty cloth to the side, away from the blonde, before picking himself off the ground.
“’Course, that may be a bit different now...” he trailed off, leaving his words lingering in the night-time air. He shook his raven locks noiselessly. “Yeah, we’re both hungry. Let’s go get something to eat. My treat.” A chuckle rose from his throat, full and rich – something which hadn’t happened for quite a while – and he pulled the blonde into his waiting arms. Cloud’s eyes opened and were now staring almost lifelessly into the SOLDIER’s.
“What would I do to know what was going through your head.” Zack gave a small smile. The dazed boy returned the expression almost immediately.
--
The diner was one of the best in Midgar, the sign on the front of the door, missing several letters, proclaimed. Though Zack highly doubted its authenticity he wasn’t about to turn down the only place in the sector six slums that didn’t have a woman at the door or cockroaches under the ‘Welcome’ mat. It smelled decent too, something of a rarity compared to the cooking pots which hung above lit trash cans.
“What you want?” the cook, a man of massive size, grumbled, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. Zack pushed Cloud into a nearby booth. His head clinked against the glass. Zack slid in next to him, straightening the younger boy out. Several children stood at the glass, pointing at Cloud.
“Two of the biggest burgers you’ve got and as many fries as you can stuff on our plates.” Zack answered quickly, looking over at Cloud. His face dropped. “Uh, you know what, make that one burger and a bowl, like the size of my head, full of soup.” He smiled, rumpling the blonde’s hair.
“Whatever,” the obese man grumbled, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth as he walked away, mumbling under his breath about ‘practically necrophilia’.
“See, I told you I’d take care of you. Food, as much as I can get into you, and a nice warm bed. I’ve got a friend nearby who’s got an extra bed and she wouldn’t mind giving it so someone as adorable as you,” Zack grabbed both sides of the boy’s face, pulling on both cheeks, a smile adorning his face.
“Za--“ Cloud suddenly whispered, his tongue almost flapping out of his mouth with the annunciation. A small flicker of understanding flashed ever so briefly through bright, mako-blue eyes and Zack’s fingers tightened around the skin. “Nggh,” suddenly erupted from Cloud’s mouth, a painful moan.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” the violet-eyed man apologized, extracting his fingers from the boy’s face. He began rubbing gently, trying to make the finger marks fade against the pale snow skin. “You kinda gave me a heart attack there.”
“Here’s your food. Sixty gil.” Zack snapped his violet eyes away from the blonde, hands moving automatically towards his pocket, grabbing out his ragged excuse for a wallet. The side-stitches had given out years ago and the leather which had at one time been polished and new was now faded and grotesque. The gil inside was still gil though. The long dunk in a mako tank hadn’t even warped the golden color from the paper.
“Yeah, yeah.” Zack handed over several bills to the cook, who stared at them for a moment in foreign distaste. “What is it? My money’s no good here?” His eyes narrowed at the paper wedged between the cook’s fingers.
“No,” he said, walking back to the kitchen. One darkened eyebrow cocked up for a single moment but the smell of the food before him was far too overpowering to think of much else besides the pleasing aroma.
The burger tasted like heaven and as he took turns taking a bite out of his own food and feeding Cloud with the spoon, the feeling seemed to be mutual between the two.
“Sure, it isn’t a burger, but you apparently like it,” Zack laughed, a few of the other customers peering over their own food to see why a large, SOLDIER-like man was feeding a teenager, who had a look of almost comical blankness sprawled across his face. Occasionally, the blonde boy would laugh or try to lift his arm to grab at the spoon, causing the larger one to chuckle.
It was, for the onlookers, a very confusing sight.
“Oh man, I can already imagine how you’ll react when Aeris makes you her chocobo supper.” Zack’s eyes widened a fraction, realising what he’d just said, before going into complete hysterics. “Haha, chocobos, Cloud! Chocobos!” He wiped tears of mirth from his violet eyes.
Cloud cocked his head to the side, just barely, looking at Zack, another emotion clear within his eyes. His hand, which had failed on repeated occasions, rose to touch the man’s raven hair. Zack shook his head and grabbed the spoon from the half-empty bowl, raising it to the boy’s lips.
“Za--“ the boy stumbled over his words, the letters slurred, but remotely recognizable. “Zack,” he finally managed.
Zack dropped the spoon.
“Oh, shit,” he cursed, fumbling for a napkin, placing it over the boy’s now slightly soaked pants. The spoon was shoved back into the bowl with haste. He looked up into sky blue eyes, noting the same flicker of recognition, though unlike the time before that understanding seemed to stay.
“Zack,” the boy repeated, hand rising again. His small fingers slid against the metal of the spoon, a look of concentration on his face. He lifted it to Zack’s lips, eyes inquiring.
The man took a sip.
“You know what, the soup is better than a burger!”
--
Zack carried the small blonde through the slums, the boy sleeping deeply. Merely swallowing the meal had taken the remaining energy from him; his body was limp and unmoving.
Sector six had always been one of the worst slums, Corneo and his drug-pimping minions spreading like a disease. Slum-babies and rats stuck in the grisly afterglow of the money-making process. The monsters on the outskirts of the human population weren’t too nice either, with their rocket-wielding backs, hands filled with poison darts, teeth dripping with the blood of the hobo who hadn’t moved swiftly enough.
Cloud was lucky, Zack mused as he cut open another hell house. “You’d be having trouble with this right now,” He laughed as he pushed the sword into the monster, mako trickling from the open wound and flying in all directions as it thrashed about. It released an unearthly shriek before crumpling to the ground. It was easy, almost too easy.
“You’d be struggling with a sword, or those terrible standard-issue guns they handed out.” There was no response. “Hey, you conked out on me?” Zack pushed his sword onto his back, pulling himself and the blonde inside a pipe too small for any of the monsters to be able to try a surprise attack.
There was blood. Everywhere. Thick tendrils of red flowed from his mouth and down the side of his sheet-white skin. It dripped from his eyes, pouring from his nose. The scarlet liquid seemed to even be draining from his pores, paling his neck, his fingertips, as it departed. Blood dyed Cloud’s shirt front red, dripping to the concrete cylinder, the blatant sound joining the symphony of raising pulses and sheer terror.
Where was it coming from? There had been no wounds from the fight, which was clear, but the rivers of blood still drained. He was bleeding from every orifice without explaination.
Zack grabbed for his sword where a small shard of green materia, which he had been able to steal from the Shinra Mansion months before, twinkled in its metal casing.
“Fuck!” he snarled when the level one materia did nothing. Blood still pumped out, and his heart, his melancholy heart was slowing to the pace of a funeral march. The piece of junk was thrown to the ground with loathing as he grabbed Cloud and pulled him through the tiny pipe, hoping there was a clear way on the other side. The church was too far, and east. East, Zack’s mind screamed, his feet following an eerily memorized route, east was Aeris’ home. Aeris, she didn’t need materia to heal. Aeris.
Pull yourself together, Zack chanted, his feet moving in synchronized movements of left, right, left, right, move, move, move.
The slums were closer, so close Zack could make out the line of women and men sitting by the local bathroom, waiting their turn to bathe in a place with dozens of others, all forms of humiliation surpassed and ignored. He may have smelled the flowers, which regularly grew around the Gainsborough home, but the blood was intoxicating him, the smell of copper and sugar, of soup, and mako.
She was there. He could feel it in his bones as he rushed past the masses of people, their normal faces and normal lives nothing like the girl he was searching for. The last time he had seen her, she had been wearing a blue dress. Zack had told her she would have looked wonderful in pink, handing her a ribbon of the clearest rose color. He looked for pink, any sign of pink, a rose clutched in someone’s hand, a sea of brown hair tied up with a pink bow, something.
Anything.
Cloud took a small shuddering breath, coughing out more blood, leaving a red trail in their wake.
“Aeris!” Zack bellowed, running to the area which was so common, but uncommon at the same moment. A home, built of wood, stood in the middle of what seemed to be a field of blooming flowers – not something all too ordinary in such a place as Midgar.
“Yes, may I help you?” the woman looked up from her flowers, fingers entwined in a rose bush, clipping shears in the other. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw who stood near her, approaching with the body of a boy in his strong arms, she gasped. “Z-Zack?”
“Aeris,” the violet-eyed man’s voice broke. “Please, do something,”
She didn’t waste a moment, rushing past the two, Zack matching her stride. The door to her home was open. As they entered, Aeris began pushing various articles off the kitchen table.
“Put him there!” she yelled, running to the kitchen sink and turning on the cold water.
Zack followed her orders, gently placing the bleeding boy on the table. His eyes opened, glazed over. He gasped, coughing up a
copious amount of life.
“Calm down,” Zack said reassuringly, unsure who exactly he was attempting to comfort. His fingers itched as Aeris swept by, pushing a cloth into a bucket of icy water.
“Wipe him down,” she ordered, shoving the bucket into the black-haired man’s hands, already pulling at her hair. “What in the world happened?” Her fingers grasped for the white materia wrapped in her hair and began yanking on the pink ribbon.
“I’ve got no fucking clue,” Zack answered, grabbing a rag and dunking it into the waterHe trembled for a moment.
Aeris took a deep breath, hands grasped together with her materia. Zack was sliding the cool rag against Cloud’s pallid skin. Every inch was bloody. His heartbeat seemed to be slowing.
“Come on, come on,” Zack prayed, letting the bloodied rag drop to the ground with a squelch. “We’ve come too far. You can’t die. Not now,” he repeated his mantra over and over, his fingers entwined with the blonde’s. They were growing cold, so very cold.
Cloud’s heart gave a thump, then went silent.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Zack’s fingers turned white; the taste of copper invaded his mouth.
“I-I’m sorry, Zack,” Aeris said after a moment, her voice low. “I couldn’t do anything.”
A thump. It was small, so small the black-haired man almost did not hear it. But it was there.
“Oh, thank the heavens,” Zack whispered, his fingers loosening a bit as he bent down to his knees in a prayer. “Thank you, Aeris.” Soft tendrils of green grasped the blonde’s body. The beat, like a drum, grew stronger. The wispy, smoke-like substance glided over Zack’s own honey skin for a moment.
“But, Zack,” the woman stated, her hand covering her mouth, “I hadn’t been able to do anything."
The city of Midgar was filthier than ever; the neon green light from the lamp posts made the dirt and grime of the sidewalks and buildings multiply. Glass shards littered the walkways while bums lay in the streets, covered in glass and their own faeces, bottles of whiskey clutched by their stubby fingers. The women, with their ‘come hither’ eyes and noxious perfumes mixed with the smell of decaying corpses, stood in front of cheap hotels, keys swinging from their long, pointy fingers. Children stood on street corners, makeup adorning their androgynous faces, some with needles filled with MM, the diluted form of Mako, hidden on their persons for the clients who would be coming for them later in the evening. This was the city every boy wished to adventure, a place where they swore they would become famous and make their fortunes.
Zack pulled Cloud closer to him as they passed a group of thugs, their mouths open, teeth dirty as the ground. The raven-haired man’s fingers itched for his Buster Sword strapped to his back, mocking him. The feeling of uneasiness gutted him, but what was he to do; he couldn’t outright pull the sword out and brandish it at the men. Zack caught the group waltzing off to the side, hiding between trash cans like gutter rats as they followed the SOLDIER and his companion.
“It’s a pretty boy,” one grumbled, his tongue running over his noxious upper lip. A grubby beard was present across his face, tangled into a mangled heap, unwashed. His hand touched the small switchblade latched to the ragged leather belt around his torn jeans.
“Mmm-hm, Jake, we could get a pretty gil for ‘im,” another whispered, reaching down to grab a shard of green glass, sharp and jagged. “How much do ya think he’s worth? Four-hundred? Maybe six if we’s lucky.”
Debauchery in the highest form, the group of men turned around and began to walk closer. The stink from their soiled bodies and open sores made Zack’s nose itch uncomfortably, but the teeming mako smell was much worse.
Enhanced senses. The SOLDIER almost laughed. When he, along with his fellow recruits, had signed his name in blood on the bottom of that contract, between death and dismemberment had read the words ‘enhanced senses’. At first no one could believe it. Then, as the sickly green fluid was pumped into their bodies, polluting their blood streams with the evil of Jenova and mako, Zack had felt the skies change, heard the screaming of his protesting body, the blood pounding in the teenager nearby, smelt blood and curdled milk deep inside his stomach.
The men were getting closer. Cloud’s body was shifted to the right, deep in the crook of one of Zack’s arms. His other began stretching for the Buster Sword. To the men it looked as if he was scratching his long mane of dirty black hair. Mercilessly, they began their attack.
Zack had just enough time to turn his body, one side protecting Cloud, the other jutted forward. His sword clashed with a small knife, sending the small blade flying through the cold air to clatter to the street. Another blonde man, weaponless, launched himself onto Zack’s back, tearing at his wild hair.
“Grab the kid!” the other yelled to the man with the glass, barely missing the swinging Buster Sword.
With gusto he hadn’t experience since his fight with Cissnei, Zack whipped his left arm over his head, blade slicing through soft flesh. The man gave a scream but did not let go of the SOLDIER’s hair. Blood began to pool down into violet eyes, dripping from the blonde’s wound. Despite the cut, the blonde was still clinging to Zack’s head, his grip inflexible.
Zack swung his head back and launched the blonde off his shoulders. The man with the glass took the initiative. He flew towards Cloud, one hand slashing the SOLDIER’s arm, a deep slashappearing on the smooth surface, the other snatching at the boy’s chocobo blonde hair.
At the same instant, Zack grabbed the fallen thug. “You let go of him right now or I’ll fucking kill your friend here,” the SOLDIER’s face twisted into a macabre sneer, the blood of his enemies running down his face in streams of death. His Buster Sword was positioned at the blonde’s throat, ready to slice at a second’s hesitation from the other two.
“Look at his eyes,” the mangy-bearded man said, his own eyes widening with awe, “He’s a --“
“SOLDIER, First-Class. Now I suggest you and your buddies quit while your heads’re still attached to your bodies.” Zack lifted the blade from the blonde’s head by a millimetre. Sweat still beaded on the man’s face. “Now get the hell away from us, and don’t come back.” Zack swung the sword back over his head and into its sheath. The blonde on the floor scrambled up from the dust-mingled streets and the three men fled, tails between their legs.
“That was easy,” Zack mumbled, shifting his bloody wrist from the side of Cloud’s face, leaving the uncut boy covered in blood, running through his blondehair. A small trickle of red ran down his wrist, but it was nothing the mako inside him wouldn’t take care of. As he watched, the green tendrils erupted from his inner layers of skin, pasting the wound closed, kneading the skin together. The crimson lifeblood intermingling with green mako made the violet-eyed boy’s hands cold. Fingers scraping against skin, green liquid surrounding him, he felt he was bobbing in the middle of nothing, tormented screams cradling him to sleep.
Zack shook his head violently, wiping those thoughts from existence. He was a SOLDIER, dammit, not weak. He would not submit to the blood-draining memories. He would not, because then, what would happen to his promises? Slowly, he leaned against the nearby building, slumping to the ground, laying Cloud in his lap. Blood still bubbled down the blue-eyed boy’s face, but he seemed oblivious to it.
Zack sighed, pulling a small cloth from his pocket. “Cloud, what am I going to do with you?” Matted with blood and dried mako, he wiped the few blood drops from the corners of Cloud’s mouth before attempting to clean his own face. Already crusting, the blood left brown streaks on his skin that his adroit hands were not able to clean in time. The mess, slick and wet, turned the green cloth to scarlet reddish brown. The intricate pattern on the side, which Zack had been using to scrub his face, was a small lily. At one point it had been pure white. Now, dirty beyond all measure, there was nothing left to do but throw the old relic behind him.
A grumbling erupted through thick layers of SOLDIER-wrought material, startling the musing man. He looked down at his own stomach where the massive eruption had taken place before looking back to Cloud. “You hungry too?” he asked, nodding his head back and forth, answering the question for the blonde. “Well, of course you are. I forgot about you not being a SOLDIER. You’re just so much like them, you know, I forget you need meals more often than us.” Zack tossed the dirty cloth to the side, away from the blonde, before picking himself off the ground.
“’Course, that may be a bit different now...” he trailed off, leaving his words lingering in the night-time air. He shook his raven locks noiselessly. “Yeah, we’re both hungry. Let’s go get something to eat. My treat.” A chuckle rose from his throat, full and rich – something which hadn’t happened for quite a while – and he pulled the blonde into his waiting arms. Cloud’s eyes opened and were now staring almost lifelessly into the SOLDIER’s.
“What would I do to know what was going through your head.” Zack gave a small smile. The dazed boy returned the expression almost immediately.
--
The diner was one of the best in Midgar, the sign on the front of the door, missing several letters, proclaimed. Though Zack highly doubted its authenticity he wasn’t about to turn down the only place in the sector six slums that didn’t have a woman at the door or cockroaches under the ‘Welcome’ mat. It smelled decent too, something of a rarity compared to the cooking pots which hung above lit trash cans.
“What you want?” the cook, a man of massive size, grumbled, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips. Zack pushed Cloud into a nearby booth. His head clinked against the glass. Zack slid in next to him, straightening the younger boy out. Several children stood at the glass, pointing at Cloud.
“Two of the biggest burgers you’ve got and as many fries as you can stuff on our plates.” Zack answered quickly, looking over at Cloud. His face dropped. “Uh, you know what, make that one burger and a bowl, like the size of my head, full of soup.” He smiled, rumpling the blonde’s hair.
“Whatever,” the obese man grumbled, pulling the cigarette out of his mouth as he walked away, mumbling under his breath about ‘practically necrophilia’.
“See, I told you I’d take care of you. Food, as much as I can get into you, and a nice warm bed. I’ve got a friend nearby who’s got an extra bed and she wouldn’t mind giving it so someone as adorable as you,” Zack grabbed both sides of the boy’s face, pulling on both cheeks, a smile adorning his face.
“Za--“ Cloud suddenly whispered, his tongue almost flapping out of his mouth with the annunciation. A small flicker of understanding flashed ever so briefly through bright, mako-blue eyes and Zack’s fingers tightened around the skin. “Nggh,” suddenly erupted from Cloud’s mouth, a painful moan.
“Sorry ‘bout that,” the violet-eyed man apologized, extracting his fingers from the boy’s face. He began rubbing gently, trying to make the finger marks fade against the pale snow skin. “You kinda gave me a heart attack there.”
“Here’s your food. Sixty gil.” Zack snapped his violet eyes away from the blonde, hands moving automatically towards his pocket, grabbing out his ragged excuse for a wallet. The side-stitches had given out years ago and the leather which had at one time been polished and new was now faded and grotesque. The gil inside was still gil though. The long dunk in a mako tank hadn’t even warped the golden color from the paper.
“Yeah, yeah.” Zack handed over several bills to the cook, who stared at them for a moment in foreign distaste. “What is it? My money’s no good here?” His eyes narrowed at the paper wedged between the cook’s fingers.
“No,” he said, walking back to the kitchen. One darkened eyebrow cocked up for a single moment but the smell of the food before him was far too overpowering to think of much else besides the pleasing aroma.
The burger tasted like heaven and as he took turns taking a bite out of his own food and feeding Cloud with the spoon, the feeling seemed to be mutual between the two.
“Sure, it isn’t a burger, but you apparently like it,” Zack laughed, a few of the other customers peering over their own food to see why a large, SOLDIER-like man was feeding a teenager, who had a look of almost comical blankness sprawled across his face. Occasionally, the blonde boy would laugh or try to lift his arm to grab at the spoon, causing the larger one to chuckle.
It was, for the onlookers, a very confusing sight.
“Oh man, I can already imagine how you’ll react when Aeris makes you her chocobo supper.” Zack’s eyes widened a fraction, realising what he’d just said, before going into complete hysterics. “Haha, chocobos, Cloud! Chocobos!” He wiped tears of mirth from his violet eyes.
Cloud cocked his head to the side, just barely, looking at Zack, another emotion clear within his eyes. His hand, which had failed on repeated occasions, rose to touch the man’s raven hair. Zack shook his head and grabbed the spoon from the half-empty bowl, raising it to the boy’s lips.
“Za--“ the boy stumbled over his words, the letters slurred, but remotely recognizable. “Zack,” he finally managed.
Zack dropped the spoon.
“Oh, shit,” he cursed, fumbling for a napkin, placing it over the boy’s now slightly soaked pants. The spoon was shoved back into the bowl with haste. He looked up into sky blue eyes, noting the same flicker of recognition, though unlike the time before that understanding seemed to stay.
“Zack,” the boy repeated, hand rising again. His small fingers slid against the metal of the spoon, a look of concentration on his face. He lifted it to Zack’s lips, eyes inquiring.
The man took a sip.
“You know what, the soup is better than a burger!”
--
Zack carried the small blonde through the slums, the boy sleeping deeply. Merely swallowing the meal had taken the remaining energy from him; his body was limp and unmoving.
Sector six had always been one of the worst slums, Corneo and his drug-pimping minions spreading like a disease. Slum-babies and rats stuck in the grisly afterglow of the money-making process. The monsters on the outskirts of the human population weren’t too nice either, with their rocket-wielding backs, hands filled with poison darts, teeth dripping with the blood of the hobo who hadn’t moved swiftly enough.
Cloud was lucky, Zack mused as he cut open another hell house. “You’d be having trouble with this right now,” He laughed as he pushed the sword into the monster, mako trickling from the open wound and flying in all directions as it thrashed about. It released an unearthly shriek before crumpling to the ground. It was easy, almost too easy.
“You’d be struggling with a sword, or those terrible standard-issue guns they handed out.” There was no response. “Hey, you conked out on me?” Zack pushed his sword onto his back, pulling himself and the blonde inside a pipe too small for any of the monsters to be able to try a surprise attack.
There was blood. Everywhere. Thick tendrils of red flowed from his mouth and down the side of his sheet-white skin. It dripped from his eyes, pouring from his nose. The scarlet liquid seemed to even be draining from his pores, paling his neck, his fingertips, as it departed. Blood dyed Cloud’s shirt front red, dripping to the concrete cylinder, the blatant sound joining the symphony of raising pulses and sheer terror.
Where was it coming from? There had been no wounds from the fight, which was clear, but the rivers of blood still drained. He was bleeding from every orifice without explaination.
Zack grabbed for his sword where a small shard of green materia, which he had been able to steal from the Shinra Mansion months before, twinkled in its metal casing.
“Fuck!” he snarled when the level one materia did nothing. Blood still pumped out, and his heart, his melancholy heart was slowing to the pace of a funeral march. The piece of junk was thrown to the ground with loathing as he grabbed Cloud and pulled him through the tiny pipe, hoping there was a clear way on the other side. The church was too far, and east. East, Zack’s mind screamed, his feet following an eerily memorized route, east was Aeris’ home. Aeris, she didn’t need materia to heal. Aeris.
Pull yourself together, Zack chanted, his feet moving in synchronized movements of left, right, left, right, move, move, move.
The slums were closer, so close Zack could make out the line of women and men sitting by the local bathroom, waiting their turn to bathe in a place with dozens of others, all forms of humiliation surpassed and ignored. He may have smelled the flowers, which regularly grew around the Gainsborough home, but the blood was intoxicating him, the smell of copper and sugar, of soup, and mako.
She was there. He could feel it in his bones as he rushed past the masses of people, their normal faces and normal lives nothing like the girl he was searching for. The last time he had seen her, she had been wearing a blue dress. Zack had told her she would have looked wonderful in pink, handing her a ribbon of the clearest rose color. He looked for pink, any sign of pink, a rose clutched in someone’s hand, a sea of brown hair tied up with a pink bow, something.
Anything.
Cloud took a small shuddering breath, coughing out more blood, leaving a red trail in their wake.
“Aeris!” Zack bellowed, running to the area which was so common, but uncommon at the same moment. A home, built of wood, stood in the middle of what seemed to be a field of blooming flowers – not something all too ordinary in such a place as Midgar.
“Yes, may I help you?” the woman looked up from her flowers, fingers entwined in a rose bush, clipping shears in the other. Her eyes were bright, and when she saw who stood near her, approaching with the body of a boy in his strong arms, she gasped. “Z-Zack?”
“Aeris,” the violet-eyed man’s voice broke. “Please, do something,”
She didn’t waste a moment, rushing past the two, Zack matching her stride. The door to her home was open. As they entered, Aeris began pushing various articles off the kitchen table.
“Put him there!” she yelled, running to the kitchen sink and turning on the cold water.
Zack followed her orders, gently placing the bleeding boy on the table. His eyes opened, glazed over. He gasped, coughing up a
copious amount of life.
“Calm down,” Zack said reassuringly, unsure who exactly he was attempting to comfort. His fingers itched as Aeris swept by, pushing a cloth into a bucket of icy water.
“Wipe him down,” she ordered, shoving the bucket into the black-haired man’s hands, already pulling at her hair. “What in the world happened?” Her fingers grasped for the white materia wrapped in her hair and began yanking on the pink ribbon.
“I’ve got no fucking clue,” Zack answered, grabbing a rag and dunking it into the waterHe trembled for a moment.
Aeris took a deep breath, hands grasped together with her materia. Zack was sliding the cool rag against Cloud’s pallid skin. Every inch was bloody. His heartbeat seemed to be slowing.
“Come on, come on,” Zack prayed, letting the bloodied rag drop to the ground with a squelch. “We’ve come too far. You can’t die. Not now,” he repeated his mantra over and over, his fingers entwined with the blonde’s. They were growing cold, so very cold.
Cloud’s heart gave a thump, then went silent.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Zack’s fingers turned white; the taste of copper invaded his mouth.
“I-I’m sorry, Zack,” Aeris said after a moment, her voice low. “I couldn’t do anything.”
A thump. It was small, so small the black-haired man almost did not hear it. But it was there.
“Oh, thank the heavens,” Zack whispered, his fingers loosening a bit as he bent down to his knees in a prayer. “Thank you, Aeris.” Soft tendrils of green grasped the blonde’s body. The beat, like a drum, grew stronger. The wispy, smoke-like substance glided over Zack’s own honey skin for a moment.
“But, Zack,” the woman stated, her hand covering her mouth, “I hadn’t been able to do anything."