Ff7 zack snippet
The smell of cloves, even as he juggled keycard and coffee
in the hallway, proved he was not the first into the office. Sephiroth glanced at his watch, shouldering
the door open, and confirmed that it was
“… yeah. Guess so.” Seeming to notice the cigarette still dangling from his mouth, the SOLDIER moved to snuff it among the remains of its pack-mates in the ashtray. Sephiroth counted the butts and calculated that Zack must have been quietly smoking for the better part of two hours. “… Sorry about all the smoke.”
“It is a little toxic in here.” He replied, too curious to be annoyed just yet. “Is there a reason why our office is your new-found meditation spot? Someone lock you out of your apartment?” His sardonic question got a brief smile out of his distracted friend. Whatever had sunk the southerner into his moody state, it didn’t seem easy to shake off.
Zack scrubbed his head briskly with both hands, setting his hair to standing on end with his frustrated gesture, “Nah… just… strange night… and I always seem to be able to think better when I’m here. If I had gone home I’d have just drunk the place dry and spent the morning puking.”
“So instead you do your best to kill your lungs, not to mention mine… brilliant.” Sephiroth crossed his arms, “Go to bed and don’t come back until you’ve showered and tamed that mane of yours.”
“Aren’t you even going to ask me how my night was?” The dark haired man reached for his pack of cigarettes only to set them aside when glared at. “Right, right, sorry…”
“Judging by the look of you, I’d wager your attempted romance went badly.”
“What, my date with Trudy?” Zack blinked, “Shit, I totally forgot, yeah, her. She’s to blame I guess… if she hadn’t stood me up, I’d have gotten happily laid, come home on time and not be around to bother you for at least two more hours. I went out to meet her at nine… by the time ten rolled around I gave it up as pointless.”
“You got stood up?” It was hard not to laugh at the man’s ill fortune. Normally his friend’s success with women was legendary. “I hope you weren’t too crushed.”
“Nah, god knows I’ve dished it out far too many times to complain when I have to take some myself.” He shrugged philosophically, “but that was just the start.”
“Do tell.” Deciding he would need his coffee if he was going to try and comprehend an epic Zack-style adventure, he fetched it and settled in his friend’s chair. “I’m assuming you went looking for something else to occupy your time?”
“Well yeah. I mean, I went cruising the bars, and bumped into some guys I know, and one thing lead to another, and we were all catching the subway down to the slums to eat at this place one of the guys knows… and then the car in front of ours catches fire…”
“You joke.” Sephiroth snorted.
“Nope. We’re talking serious flames and smoke.” Zack shook his head and sighed. “So there we were all decked out in our cool clothes, walking along the tracks with a herd of janitors, pimps, garbage collectors, junk sellers and hobos being evacuated to Mid-Level Station 2. And then, when we were all crammed onto a service train, I got separated from the group because I’m caught in the back of the car behind this man who must have weighed easily four hundred pounds and smelled like dead fish.”
Sipping his drink, the general could sympathize. He hated riding the public trains. They were always over crowded, and people had a habit of staring at him in a way that was very off-putting. “I’m surprised you didn’t give up and come home.”
Zack made a face. “Believe me, I wanted to, couldn’t escape from the corner I was wedged into by the whale sitting next to me without stepping over him, and I had a hunch starting a fight with a guy that big would probably make the evening news. Besides, I don’t think there’d have been an ambulance big enough to carry him.”
“He can’t have been that big.”
“You weren’t there.” His friend grimly disagreed. “Doesn’t matter, I rode the damn train all the way to the second to last stop when my friend tubby got off, and found myself down in Sector 6. Got a drink at one of the bars to help me cope with the ride back up… stepped out into the street, and promptly get hit in the face with a quarterstaff. Really hurt too!”
“This story is going to end with you explaining how you broke out of jail, isn’t it…” Sephiroth idly wondered when the phone calls would start coming in asking him to justify his officer’s actions. “Tell me there wasn’t any property damage?”
“Like anyone would notice in the slums?” Zack snorted. “As it turns out, I was just lucky enough to catch the backswing. The girl was actually aiming for some punk on her left.”
This time he couldn’t help but grin. “So let me get this straight, you got stood up, evacuated, cornered by human-gargantuan, and then beaten by a girl?”
“… And it gets better!” Starting to cheer up, the dark haired man rubbed his neck tiredly. “So, once I recovered from getting a pole shoved up my nose, I figured I might as well help my damsel in distress… except it turns out that she’s not a damsel, she’s just a kid!” Zack looked mournful. “Cute, but no breasts, no breasts at all.”
“Zack!”
“What?” The man chuckled. “So of course, since she’s completely not legal, and otherwise not my type, she latches onto me like a lost puppy and demands I buy her a drink…”
“You didn’t.”
“I did.” He stated candidly. “She got an ice cream float, while I polished off a piece of pie and two cups of coffee at the diner.” Zack glared at him in annoyance, “Of /course/ I didn’t get her alcohol you ass, she was fifteen! What the hell were you thinking?”
Rolling his eyes at Sephiroth’s dismayed expression, Zack slouched backwards to bang his head against the edge of the couch. “And still, the chit would not go home! She just talked my ear off for hours as I ambled around. I was afraid to get back on the train for fear she’d follow me…”
“So what did you do?”
“Let her talk herself out, and bought her a lot of crap… what else?” Zack’s grin faded a little as he thought about it. “She was a little weird though. She… some of the stuff she said was exactly what you’d expect from a kid, but some of it was really strange. You’d have been blown away to hear her take on religion or environmental protection, it’s like, we’d be having a perfectly normal conversation about nothing… and then she’d go off about how Midgar is a symptom of some sort of global decay...”
Sephiroth smiled into his cup, “Sounds about right.”
“Yeah, you two would have gotten along like a house on fire.”
His friend shook his head. “So at around
The general did the only thing a man with a mouthful of hot beverage could do when hearing something completely absurd. He choked on it. Sputtering and coughing to clear the fluid out of its attempted assault on his lungs, he looked up in time to see his friend banging his head against the couch again. “Determined little thing, you think?”
“Fucked if I know…” Zack chuckled.
“Always knew your charisma would get the better of you some day.” Sephiroth smirked. “So what the hell did you tell her?”
“What /could/ I tell her…?” His friend raised his hands in defeat. “I defy even /you/ to look a sweet little girl in the eye after buying her ice cream and mittens and a stuffed penguin, and tell her that you can’t marry her because she’s a flat-chested little kid.”
“No,” The general disagreed mildly, “I’d tell her that I couldn’t marry her because I’m a deeply closeted gay man.”
“Yeah, well, you’re faster on your feet than I am at
Sephiroth sat back in amusement. “So you said yes?”
“She’s just a kid!”
“You accepted the proposal of a 15 year old who lives beneath the plate…”
“She’ll grow out of it. Give her a few weeks and she’ll realize that by the time she’s legal, I’ll be within spitting distance of forty, and she’ll find someone more her age.” Zack didn’t look as confident as he sounded.
“… I think congratulations are in order.” Sephiroth murmured. “For both of you, since I do believe this is the first time a woman has ever figured out a way of getting you to commit. A novel approach, I grant it, but still, she got you to say the words.”
“Very funny.”
“So after this alarming development, you came back here, and tried to dull your sorrows in nicotine?”
Zack smiled grimly. “Oh no, I still had to take her home… Wanted to yell at her mother for letting the kid run amuck on the streets at night in the first place. I mean really, I don’t care if living down there does toughen the sprats up young, there’s no excuse for bad parenting…” He sighed. “So we get to the house, and does the girl stick around to explain anything? No! She ditches me on the doorstep and bolts for her room! /I/ am left standing in the street, gaping, while her mom chews me out for thirty minutes straight!”
“You should have run.” Sephiroth laughed quietly, “I take it you didn’t get a word in edgewise?”
“No! I was too busy trying to figure out how to defend myself against accusations of being a pedophile! Damn, I mean that woman... she was /scary/. She called the cops on me!”
“You seem to have avoided them.”
“Yeah,” Zack snorted. “First lucky thing that happened all night. Anyway, got back here and it was already three in the morning… got this far and just didn’t have the energy to go up a floor and crash, so here I am.”
“A truly impressive tale.” Standing up, he generously offered a hand to the southerner, pulling him to his feet. “Go get some sleep. If you don’t surface in time for afternoon drills I’ll get one of the others to take over for you.”
“Thanks.” His friend slouched towards the door.
“Oh, by the way…” Sephiroth caught him as he was leaving. “Does your fiancée have a name?”
“She is /not/ my fiancée, asshole.” Zack rolled his eyes as he opened the door. “And yes, for the record, her name was Aeris.”
*****