Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ When Asked, Say "No" ❯ When Asked, Say "No" ( Chapter 1 )

When Asked, Say 'No' [1]

 

 

“She got to where she was trippin' me and beatin' me to the floor."- Randall McMurphy, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

 

 

 

The tent was clean. The Teflon, bleached white kind of clean.

 

All was quiet and sanitary, until Zack popped in. He was usually dirty and stinky - all the men at the camp in Wutai were. It was a fact of the war. But on that particular day, when he came into Sephiroth's private quarters, Zack was slathered in chocobo feces and could probably have been smelled from half way across the base. In the corner, hunched over a thick volume, a mass of sleek, grey hair swirled around to face the horrid exhibition in the entranceway. Other than the gnarled expression on his face, Sephiroth was being rather calm about the whole display. He was the Zen master. [2]

 

“What, exactly, have you been rolling in this time?” He half mumbled through his startled expression. With each shallow breath he took, his nostrils flared outrageously, in spite of the calm expression he had been trained to keep.

 

“I almost thought you would say something like `You look like shit'.” Zack had to duck when he was finished speaking, to avoid being shot down by the unused book that went whirring by. Sephiroth, always being the snappier of the two, tripped him with a second volume as gravity pulled him back down. The black-haired menace [3] laughed the whole way, pausing briefly to say “Ow!” before continuing with an admirable amount of gusto.

 

“Ok, ok. I admit defeat,” He stood and bowed, silver hair dropping in his face, “What happened today?” The emphasis on `today' spoke volumes about camp-life in Wutai. When one is in a position where one must wait, patiently, for weeks at a time in a stinky, muddy camp, one must jazz life up. One wears a jacket to dinner. One plays chess by mail with the opposing army. One writes embarrassing letters to one's commanding officer and follows up the next day by kissing him on the cheek. These unspoken rules are what made life relatively palatable, and are possibly what helped ShinRa win the war. Sadly, these are not the kind of things that make the history books. [4]

 

“Maybe `what' isn't the right word.” Zack began removing the offending uniform, stripping down to what should have been his underclothes [5] and stretched out on the now definitely not clean cot. “Maybe `who' would have fit better.” There was no change in Sephiroth's expression. Not enough information had been yielded as of that moment.

 

“Lieutenant, explain yourself.” He stood up and glared down as menacingly as he could muster while looking at Zack's well-constructed form. “There is no room for both your coyness and your smell in this tent. One of them has to go.” [6] He secured the lower-ranking SOLDIER's clothes behind the bookcase at the opposite end of the tent as ransom. Zack scrambled to swirl the cot's blanket around himself, to avoid vulnerability. Sephiroth had that effect on everyone, and knew it. This was especially apparent when he used this special power to manipulate the “lessers” around him - which was everyone. It worked best with Zack however, because 99 percent of the other soldiers weren't naked around him most of the time.

 

“Anything for you, Sir.” He saluted and propped himself up on one arm, curling his legs back. Grey hair bounced up and down, nodding at the cue, and then bounced again as Sephiroth sat down next to the story-teller. Zack took a deep breath and pulled the blanket up farther. Sephiroth expected results, and he intended to generate them.

 

-_-_-_-_-

 

Zack woke up that morning in the midst of a mood he knew far too well. There was no English word for it, and Gongagan slang [7] had not produced one either. The symptoms made themselves known by infiltrating first the unobvious things: an unusually bouncy step, a quicker wit, and, as Zack would put it to Sephiroth later that day, “I looked too damn hot to be authentic, man!” To the untrained eye, nothing would have changed about him. He was attractive, yes, and he was clever, but to those who knew him best, he was in turbo mode. Something had to be done.

 

“I felt better than I had in weeks. I felt refreshed, like I'd slept twelve hours instead of three.”

 

By the time Zack left his tent, nothing had been done to prevent the symptoms from spreading, and so Phase Two set in: thought processes became interrupted, sentence forming became difficult, and the most prized part of his anatomy became … engaged. The virus had truly rooted itself, and it was time to spread.

 

“Where did you go? It is not as if you would eat breakfast, and there aren't any bars around for miles.”

 

Each person Zack strolled past noticed first his winning smile, followed by the incredible size of the folds in his pants. Each of these people stopped to strike a pose that is most often glued to nostalgia; arms dangling useless at the sides, head angled up and to the left, lips parted only slightly. Each of these people had been at the wrong place at the wrong time, and had tripped over Zack's charm and had fallen headlong onto that perspectively incorrect fold in his pants.

 

“The chocobo stables. I wanted to check out the new arrivals, and give my black one some extra greens. You know, some t.l.c.”

 

He slid, unnoticed, into the tent housing the big birds, and ambled down the aisle, checking out the plumage and personality of the animals. He paused once or twice to double check a few things before heading straight back to his personal bird and giving it a bear hug. He ran his hands through the bird's long feathers and lovingly scratched around the beast's beak. The usual regimen of love, followed by his gift of supplemental greens, went smoothly, until the flaps of the makeshift stable that served in place of doors flew open and a girl came bustling through. [8] She was dressed well, and in a camp such as the one instituted at Wutai that meant she was clean. Her hair was tied naively to the back of her head in a ponytail, which suggested to all the horny soldiers in the area that she was simple prey. The freckles browned over her nose secured her that position. Zack stopped what he was doing and forgot it twice as fast.

 

“You met the new stable girl, didn't you? Please, spare me the gruesome details.”

 

What Zack accomplished in his poor bird's stall could hardly be called sex. Sex was meant for reproduction. Sex was beautiful. Sex was the product of a connection between two people regardless of how depraved or miniscule. What Zack did to the girl was the kind of thing that people talk about in whispers, after their children went to bed. When two people do the kinds of things that those two did, one of them usually ends up on the side of a highway, panties inside out, duct tape over her eyes. [9]

 

“Zack?” She rolled over in the hay, turning to face him. She inspected all of the features on his face, looking through the chocobo droppings spattered across his face. His smile won over his entire face, complimenting the unnatural blue of his eyes and the darkness of his hair. She couldn't help but pluck a piece of it from the mass and run it between her fingers as she waited for him to respond. In return, he wiped his hand off on his thigh and slowly reached across to gently rest his hand on her face.

 

“Yeah, Babe?” He leisurely moved his finger in circles on her cheek, looking at her face softly.

 

“Oh, good! So `Zack' is your name then?”

 

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

 

“And that takes us up to now.” He flopped over on his back and sighed, his face tinged just slightly more red than usual. His eyes rolled over towards Sephiroth, who seemed to be stuck sighing again and again. Finally, he stood and stretched his arms up, his hands grazing the top of the tent.

 

“I suppose this is another one for the books, then.” His voice was filled with exasperation, and lined in exhaustion. He walked slowly to his bookcase and ran his slender fingers over the spines, coming to a surprisingly normal notebook. Flipping it away from its brethren, he opened it to the last page. The whole page, and presumably all those prior to it, was filled with tally marks. He started a new bunch with a tiny dash and shut the notebook by dropping it on his desk. Unbeknownst to either of the men, or anyone else at ShinRa, there were precisely 35, 571 marks in that notebook, which said more about the desperate situation at Wutai than anyone wanted to know.

 

-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-

 

1- The working title was "Zack is a slut".

2- He was the Zen master, and so was Jack. I am proud to admit that I say this constantly.

3- Constable Hallahan looked at the mess in the convenience store. He shook his head and

sighed several times before looking at the reporter and muttering, "The Black-Haired Menace

strikes again!"

4- Very few good things make the history books. Here's an example

(http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040402.html). I am totally not advocating that.

5- His underclothes that he totally wasn't wearing.

6- Someone once told me that the famed poet Oscar Wilde's last words were something to the

affect of "This wallpaper is hideous, one of us has to go." My yearly Wilde reference is now

complete.

7- Great fanfic (much better that this B-sided crap):

http://roodinverse.dreamhost.com/fiction/zack/Potato.html. It's priceless.

8- I just drew a blank. What was this note going to be? Oh! Picture her like a Tifa/Lindsay Lohan

mix ... without the breasts. If you can.

9- Kind of like what Marla says in Fight Club. Except it was electrical tape. Yeah. Well, he fucked

her hard in any case.

10- Last note: Clarification, complaints or anything else can be emailed. I appreciate it.