_Lucky
Strike_
ff7 - zack snippet
*yet again, in some strange post-post-post game reality…*
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Cloud blinked as the quiet sitting area was interrupted by
the burst of noise and movement that seemed to perpetually surround his old
friend. Zack waltzed-in in grand style and slapped a hundred gil note on the coffee table in
front of Cid. “Ok, come on. Cough up one from your stash.”
“Huh?” The pilot gave him a confused look. “What the hell
are you talking about, Ghost-boy.”
“Come on, sourpuss… I know you have to have a crate of
smokes on this barge somewhere… and I’m not bumming off of Rude all the way to
“Oh.” Understanding
dawned for the blond pilot.
Cid stomped over to one of the junior officers standing near
by and sent the youth scurrying off for the necessary item. He grumbled his way
back to the couch where he was crammed in with Tifa
and Yuffie, demanding that his old bones get some
respect.
The ninja-girl’s comment that Vincent, being the eldest,
deserved the spot instead only got her a glare.
Zack laughed at their antics, content to perch himself on the arm of
Cloud’s overstuffed chair. Cloud elbowed him in annoyance, but only a little. If
pressed he had to admit he didn't mind the larger man's presence at his
shoulder. It was still a novelty that the SOLDIER
was there at all. Cloud slouched down a
little into his chair, subtly increasing his contact with Zack's arm. Tifa and the others didn't notice, but the dark haired SOLDIER did, glancing down with a quick smile
before reaching out to ruffle his hair.
"Looking good, Spike. You're starting to look like an ordinary guy
again rather than the beat up remains of 'the savior of the known
world'..."
Blushing at the almost paternal gesture of affection, he
grumbled under his breath in reply. "Says the 'formerly known as Deceased'
guy..."
Zack merely chuckled again and settled down to tease Yuffie mercilessly. He was just sharing his much-heckled
opinion of how cute girls were in flowery dresses when the deckhand
returned. Teasing forgotten, he leaned
back to catch the box carefully
tossed his direction. Cloud watched
the able fingers stripping the plastic off the small carton and suddenly
remembered another day and another pack.
"You were smoking that day in the parking lot."
"...'cuse
me?" The dark haired man peered down at him in surprise, nearly
fumbling his catch of Cid's lighter because of
it. The small plastic container bounced
off Cloud's head, to his chagrin, and then so did Zack's knuckles as the man
caught the
lighter on the rebound.
"Ow."
"Sorry kiddo. Didn't mean to bop you
one." His friend got the butane to light on the first try and
inhaled with a happy sigh. "Man I missed you my little tar-filled darlings.
Now..." He looked down, "what was that you said?"
"He said something about you smoking in a parking
lot." Tifa volunteered helpfully when Cloud
tried to wave the question away. He shot his teammate a glare that she easily
stared down. "What. It's good that you're remembering things, isn't
it?"
"Yeah, I suppose."
He shrugged.
"Now which parking lot would this be?" Zack leaned back and studied him. "Not
the first one?"
"Yeah." He couldn't meet the man's eye, feeling stupidly
sentimental all of a sudden.
"Well shit kid, your brain's not as cracked-in-half as
I thought if you can remember that... I sorta had to
blot that whole year out and make it over as I went... sorry..."
"Nah, I liked your version better anyway." He forgave the man with a shrug.
"What happened in a parking lot?" Red looked up
from where he was lounging by the window, drawn into the conversation in spite
of himself.
Cloud sighed and stared pleadingly at his tall friend,
silently begging him to at least pretend to not torture him. The shaggy haired
fighter gave him an incredulous look in reply. "You remember enough to be
embarrassed by it? Well damn,
boy. I'm impressed." Frowning,
he thought a minute. "I don't remember you doing anything remarkably
stupid... you implied that I was a fuckin' motor mouth,
but that's not news."
"Ummm..." Cid caught the
man's attention with an eloquent 'get on with it' gesture.
"Oh. Well. Nothing to tell really.
I first bumped into Spike here sitting on that bit of wall outside the Shinra motor-pool area, you know, the one just outside the sublevel
parking for building 2?"
The pilot blinked. "Yeah, I know it. Really, you met
the kid there? What the hell was he doing standing guard or something?"
Cloud slid lower into his chair with a sigh, realizing it
would be a long day. To his surprise, his friend took pity on him.
"Actually, I never did entirely figure it out. I just saw him looking
pretty glum and went over to offer a smoke and a moment's cheerful company...
He in turn told me to mind my damn business and stop talking his ear off."
The older man chuckled. "Given who my /other/ friend was at the time, I
instantly felt I knew what the kid was all about."
"I have nothing in common with that man." Cloud
grumbled, knowing that denial wouldn't change anything but still preferable to
the alternative. Strangely, he was fairly confident Sephiroth felt exactly the
same way.
"Yeah, well at least you don't criticise
my smoking. That puts you like thirty years ahead of him in terms of mature
behavior." Zack sighed. "He used to call them obnoxious-little-cancer-sticks."
"Heh," Cid snorted
lighting up a smoke of his own. "I'd have figured that smoking wouldn't
bug you guys in the slightest... being pickled with all that Mako and shit..."
He only blinked as several pairs of eyes turned to shoot him
disbelieving glares for his lack of tact.
"What!" He blinked. "What the fuck did I
say?"
Cloud glanced up at the man lounging next to him but didn't
see any sign that the irascible pilot had struck a nerve. If anything his
friend's expression was meditative. "... Actually Cid, SOLDIERs are/were more likely to get
certain forms of cancer than the average guy." He grinned broadly. "I
may say that I'm living proof of it. Or at least revived
proof."
"Shit!" Cid cringed at the gentle reminder. The
ninja girl reached out and smacked him upside the head for good measure.
"I totally forgot, man. Sorry."
"No worries, Cid."
Zack stared at his cigarette in thought. "I had leukemia, not lung
cancer. Big difference."
"Oh."
"You're partly right though. We don't get
environment-based cancers like you would.
I could probably smoke like a chimney for forty years and still be just
dandy. Even radioactive crap doesn't do more than make us a little sick. It's the Mako, you see...
It's not too friendly to outside stimulus, so things like that are a non-issue."
The dark haired man reached down to ruffle Cloud's head. The young man
looked up, wondering if the gesture was for his benefit. After everything else
he had been told, and had lived through, he couldn't bring him self to worry
about something so alien as dying of sickness. It seemed far more probable that someday
someone would drop another meteor on him.
Zack left his hand there, curling gently into his unruly
spikes, seeming to gather his thoughts as he did. "It's the Jenova cells that are the pisser. Highly mutagenic.
That was their strength, and their weakness. Unexpected internal... irregularities...
were always a problem. Bits of a person's body can just suddenly go haywire,
usually not malignant, but always very sudden. My friend Pavan
had a lump scraped off the back of his neck when he was 32, some weird sort of
melanoma. There was a guy named Jack-something who had massive tumor take over
one of his kidneys and had it removed. He was on his way out just as I was
joining up."
Taking another long drag on his cigarette.
"On average it was one case of 'something' a year in a population of around
400. They kept a real close eye on it, and kept it quiet too. Hormone fluctuations
they said were the primary cause... that's why it was nothing but guys allowed
in."
"I had wondered about that." Yuffie
mused. "Were there ever any women?"
"Conclusive testing on rats demonstrated that the
probability of ovarian cancer in females exposed to SOLDIER levels of Jenova and Mako was 99.7 percent." He smiled nastily as the girl went pale.
"Of course, Hojo was too stupid to accept that,
so he tried it on a willing participant or three."
"What happened?"
"Don't know all the details. Hojo
kept lousy records during his early years, even worse than his usual. As far as
I can tell, the first woman died of internal hemorrhaging. The second survived
the initial conditioning, and got cervical cancer and died about a year
later... and then the third, who Sephiroth actually knew fairly well... She was
the strongest, went three whole years before abnormalities cropped up in both
her ovaries. Luckily they caught it early and through surgery and drugs were
able to catch it before it killed her... however she wasn't fit for duty after
that... retired with a cushy pension to Mideel or
somewhere. Don't remember what happened to her after that."
"Don't know what happened to whom?"
"Julia Wessex? Remember
her?" Zack didn't bother to turn around, knowing full well who had just
stepped through the door behind him. The rest of the group just twitched uncomfortably
and waited for the pale haired man to decide whether he meant to stay or go.
The former general didn't bat an eye at the obvious way Tifa
still glared at him, moving instead to the windows to look out at the scenery whizzing
by.
"Haven't thought about her in years... but yes, I
remember the captain well, she retired to photograph shorebirds or something, north of Mideel."
"Was she still alive?"
The pale clone turned back to look at Zack, expression thoughtful.
"Yes. Well... she was as of the winter of '07... I was on her holiday card
list. No idea if she's still alive now though." He frowned. "Why the
sudden interest?"
"We were having a discussion about Jenova
cells and cancer." The dark man blandly replied. Even Cid noticed the way
the taller man flinched, Zack snorted at his lapse. "Give it a rest ol'man, no-one was ever able to prove anything, you're just
paranoid."
"Prove what?" Ever tactless, Yuffie's
question was genuine even if it did provoke a room full of groans from her
elders.
"Prove that Sephiroth was a modern Typhoid Mary."
Zack explained gently. "Not that he is. That's just bullshit."
Cloud watched Sephiroth turn back to the windows, momentarily
ignoring the lot of them. He found he couldn't blame the man, but still, if
even half of what the doctors had hinted at was true. Then it was possible that
his friend was white-washing something for the sake of
keeping the peace. Zack had certainly
done it before. He caught the dark
haired man’s eye firmly. "... Dr. Kind said... that the abnormal Jenova cells that were probably to blame for your illness
were almost identical to his…"
"Dr. Kind is a jealous bint."
"Actually, Cloud, it isn't impossible." Sephiroth
didn't turn, speaking to the window more than to the room at large. "If there
is exposure in large enough quantities, my cells were proven to be carcinogenic
in a laboratory setting. However, it would require a significant amount of
material in direct contact before there would be any risk of overwhelming even
the weakest immune systems." He
looked back with a tiny smirk. "And if any of you think to try to steal or
ingest several quarts of blood from me, I'll kill you."
"Like anyone would want to."
Cid rolled his eyes in disbelief. Seeming more relaxed, the former officer
snorted in agreement.
"Only Hojo was ever that
perverse. It doesn't matter. All it means is don't expect me to be donating a
kidney to anyone or anything foolish like that." Sephiroth bent down
slightly to scratch behind Red's ears. The sentient beast allowed the touch, tilting
his head until a particularly itchy spot was attended to. The pair had formed a
remarkably congenial relationship since the clone had joined their little team.
Cloud chocked it up to the fact that Red finally had someone his intellectual equal
to talk to. As to why the normally aloof man would bother to seek such a strange
friendship, he hadn't a clue. Maybe there was something to Zack's 'kindred spirits'
hypothesis after all.
Sephiroth looked over at him, or more correctly, at the man
perched on his armrest, and suddenly glared. "Are you /smoking/?!"
Zack simply blew some of the sweet smelling smoke in the
pale man's direction. The former general wrinkled his nose in a rare display of
annoyance. "I thought you quit."
"I was off them for quite some time, ol'man, but I'm back on them now."
"It's a disgusting habit." Cloud knew he wasn't
the only one startled to hear something as ordinary as a scolding coming from
the normally remote fighter. Confused, annoyed, exasperated even, the white
haired man looked more human than he had in days, maybe even more so then when
he had emerged from the ruined base covered in cuts and grime. It was a novelty
to see.
Of course Zack laughed in his face.
"Look. If it makes you feel better, it's only my third
this week, and hell... before that... it's been what... /Ten
years/, was it?" The dark man
grinned crazily. "I think you can cut me a little slack, ya bastard."
Nonplused, Sephiroth stood at a loss as to how to retaliate.
Knowing he had won the battle if not the war, the dark haired man chained a new
smoke onto the end of his old one, flicking the butt into a convenient empty
cup before getting his last dig in.
"Not that I would recommend to anyone my particular
method of going 'cold turkey.'"
"Idiot." His former
commander huffed softly.
"I'll switch to cloves once we get to town, if that
will soothe your poor nose."
"Do whatever the hell you want." He threw up his
hands in defeat and resumed his study of the sky.
"Damn right I will." Unrepentant, Zack ruffled
Cloud's hair once again for good measure and let the conversation turn to what
they would all do upon their return to civilization.
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