~Another Story~

*post ff7: ok, long story short. Seph&zack cloned (big surprise) new bosses, new angst, new villains… whatever… imagine the Highwind on the journey home, all quiet on the western front… just a whole bunch of Avalanche people trying to cope, and a bunch of soldiers resting up from the fight.

(SCENE: ZACK’s crew quarters. ZACK asleep and slumped against a bored SEPHIROTH, enter CLOUD door on stage left.)

~entre~

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“Is Zack…?” Cloud froze mid question, looking like the child he was only years beyond as he leaned casually around the half open door.

“Shhhh.” The white-haired man spared him a quelling look, worried his noisy arrival might have interrupted his friend’s rest. Zack continued to snore gently against his shoulder however, and relieved he gave the dark head a soothing pat just in case.

“Oh shit he’s sleeping isn’t he…” The blond seemed torn between fleeing at the sight of them on the bed together and torn between checking on his only surviving family. Even if surrogate, and cloned at that, the dark haired soldier was the closest thing to blood kin that the boy could lay claim too. Sephiroth had never been a keen believer in sharing his most cherished possessions, but in this case he had little choice and less say. What Zack and the former trooper shared went beyond the ordinary. He wasn’t sure he would want to be a part of it even if it would have been possible.

// Being haunted by the specter of my best friend, for years, and not realizing it… no, no that would be too bizarre… and horrible. //

“… you two need to learn to lock your door.” Deciding to tolerate what he couldn’t change, Cloud slouched into the room with a quiet murmur. “I mean, I’m thrown and I’ve gotten the full chapter verse and subsection with annotations from him, repeatedly with a stick… The rest of the team… jeez.”

“… still think I’m the cloned equivalent of some diabolical cross between the bubonic plague, and the source-of-all-evil?”

“… Well. Sorta. Yes.”

Sephiroth snorted in sardonic amusement and returned to his previously interrupted labor. His partner had fallen asleep in a rather convenient if untimely fashion, and unable to extract himself from the sleepy embrace, he had opted to make the most of his time. Deciding the current lock of hair had been twisted enough; he let it fall and gathered up a new one. There was still half a head to go if he wanted to finish before Zack woke up from his impromptu siesta.

Proving curiosity was his besetting sin, Cloud couldn’t help but look on with interest as the pale man twined a thick lock of pliable hair around a finger, coiling and smoothing it in a meditative way with his thumb until it metamorphosed from tangled mass to sleek ringlet. Each lock was finished with a final stretch and snap, the new curls springing back into their tight coils with delightful elasticity. “Shit, I didn’t know his hair did that…”

“Natural propensity to curl, it just needs a little encouragement, and combing… five years stuck together and you never played with it?”

“… no… human contact was kept to a minimum…” The words were out without any particular comprehension behind them, voice a distant sort of monotone.

// Like he was remembering what someone else told him, not the actual pain of living it for himself… //

It was, he considered, a potentially accurate diagnosis of the situation. There was no telling just who Cloud had been during those years, and for how long he had been that person, or persons. The only one who might have been able to speak for those personalities now healed or destroyed, was Zack, and he wasn’t talking about his years under Hojo’s ‘care’ any more than he had to. Some secrets were meant to die, the SOLDIER had said, and he was probably right.

The blond blinked, remembering himself with a jolt. “Shit… no I never played with it, separate cells and all that… that’s… really cool… does he know what you’re doing?”

“… No, hence my doing it while he sleeps…”

“He’s going to murder you when he wakes up.” Cloud’s smiles were rare, almost as rare as his own. If nothing else, their shared propensity for misery was forming a reluctant bond between them. That and the fact that they were both in their way, madly in love with the man currently doing an impression of a very quiet buzz-saw.

“… I doubt it. I’ve done it before and am here to tell the tale…” The former general tilted his head, realizing that the statement wasn’t entirely true. “Well, at least my previously deceased status had nothing to do with poor hair styling…”

Settling on the mattress, the blond was not above reaching out to try his own luck at making ringlets, discarding his gloves when he found they got in the way. Zack stirred slightly under the new assault, grumbling but not fully awake. Giving the rebel-turned-hero a look that promised obliteration, or at least minor mayhem, if he made so much as a peep, Sephiroth patted the SOLDIER’s head again. “Go back to sleep.”

“…What time is it?”

“Time for nothing to be happening. Go back to sleep.”

“… was supposed to meet the kid… do something later…”

Fixing the blond with another sharp look, Sephiroth sighed. “That was an hour ago… he came by to check on you and said you looked awful and could use all the sleep you could get, so go back to sleep.”

“… but…”

“He’s already gone off with the ninja-girl or something… you can play with him some other time.”

“…ok…” Burrowing his head back against the general’s accommodating shoulder; Zack seemed content to be oblivious again.

Seeing an advantage he couldn’t ignore, the pale man prodded his friend before he slipped completely away. “Here, turn over before you pass out, I don’t need to have you snoring in my ear.”

“… don’t snore…” Barely awake, Zack was easy to coax into shifting his head slightly, cheek resting on a patch of finished curls while leaving the rest exposed for styling. It took several minutes of cautiously listening to the pattern of the man’s snores to convince them that he was actually asleep. Only when he was confident that the SOLDIER wasn’t just playing possum did he resume his work. Cloud watched him in disbelief a moment before picking up where he left off on his current lock.

“… why the hell did you say I was out with Yuffie?”

Sephiroth rolled his eyes at the shorter man’s failure to see the obvious and be grateful. “… look at it this way… when he wakes up and realizes what’s been done to his head, you’re going to either need an alibi, or some bandages. Which would /you/ prefer it to be?”

“…You’re going to cover for me?”

“This is mostly my handiwork; I really don’t see that you have to be involved.” He shrugged philosophically.

“It is kind of fun, isn’t it.” Finding his stride, Cloud was making quick work of his side,

“Good for a laugh, anyway.”

His dry comment earned him a quizzical stare. “Zack’s right, you really do have a perverse sense of humor.”

“He likes to say I was poorly socialized as a child. That must have something to do with it.”

“Heh, why /do/ you do it? I mean… why are you… why do it at all?” There was something rather endearing he decided about the puzzled bright blue stare. Maybe it was because there was still some shadow of Zack’s habits and nature permanently burned into the younger man’s way of moving, speaking. Maybe it was some echo of /himself/ he saw in the baffled expression.

// How many times have I caught Zack doing something… and asked the same question… maybe less politely… but still… //

Looking down, he considered his progress and the overall effect it had on the sleeping man’s appearance. It was very much like he remembered. “… wish I had some ribbon…”

“… ribbon?”

“It’s a long story.”

“I’ve got nuthin’ but time…” There, that lazy drawl. It wasn’t quite right for a sharp little kid from Nibelhiem, definitely out of place on a cadet desperately trying to fit in on the streets of Midgar. It was Zack, and yet not Zack, both comforting and alien all at once.

// Not so much friend… almost… like family, a little brother patterned after a beloved sibling… his way of talking… but only here and there… Maybe that’s what Zack sees in him that I could, would, never allow… malleability… or just simply the willingness to /try/ to change…//

“Indeed… and the task /will/ go faster with two…” It was hard to say where to begin, unlike his old friend, there was no common history with the boy off the battlefield. There was no way to start with ‘remember that time when…’ like he would so often do with the dark-haired man. It was a testament to his friend’s memory that the SOLDIER could tolerate the non-sequiter conversation starters year after year.

Sephiroth had never been good at telling stories. They always came out ending-first, or in a muddle or not at all. He liked Zack’s stories better, the man just had a gift for spinning tales, real or imagined. Usually it was just better to keep silent and leave the job of relating anecdotes to the professionals, but somehow he felt the blond would understand, if he got things wrong along the way. “… I… contrary to public opinion, and probably official records, I had a rather normal childhood… at least in the beginning…”

Blinking at the unexpected pronouncement, Cloud frowned. “… how was that?”

“I mean, I thought I was an orphan… and I underwent testing regularly, so I knew I wasn’t… /normal/ normal… but still… I lived in the old mansion with Professor Gast, and his wife, and they took care of me… and it was, normal, mostly.” He shrugged at the incredulous look. “There were times when whole months would go by without my seeing Hojo, and sometimes Gast too would be called into Midgar… and it was just me and Ilfana and the interns or whoever was around.”

It was strange to think back on his childhood. Despite Zack’s curiosity, he could never bring himself to share much. It has always struck him as a waste of time. Childhood was nothing more than the few awkward years spent waiting for it to end. There was a reason children were sent to school. They had nothing more useful to do than sharpen their minds while their bodies grew.

“…I think I liked those times best. When there were no scientists, just she and I and the servants… She never thought of me as a ‘project.’ If anything she was adamant about me having some time to just do things children were supposed to do… play with toys, or climb trees, or read books that were about fairies and magic and had nothing to do with the real world.” He finished his last ringlet with a sigh, trusting Cloud to get the last few locks that he couldn’t easily see from his angle.

“She was a lot like Zack in that sense I guess, trying to show me I had options, that I didn’t have to follow the path planned for me… she bough me this one book, it was my favorite for the longest time… an illicit pleasure… the scientists were away one week, and she and the servants conspired to take me shopping in town with them…” Sephiroth shook his head, already loosing his focus. “Anyway, the story was about a little boy… from a small village next to a deep dark jungle… and the boy was a ribbon-seller… I can’t remember why…”

“… ribbon…?”

“Yes… he was just a little boy, but he had to sell ribbons because he was poor and it was how he earned his living… and all the little girls of his village looked down on him because he was poor and had to work instead of playing all day like they did… and all the little boys of the village looked down on him because he sold something as silly and useless as ribbons… so the little boy was very sad…”

Somehow it was easier to tell the story to the blond then it had been to explain it to Zack all those years ago. Maybe it was just that Cloud wasn’t a prone to interruption; maybe it was that they were still just strangers enough that it didn’t matter if he said something embarrassing, he didn’t know.

“… one day after being teased, the little boy decided to flee to the big city where no one would know him, and so set out to go through the jungle where the dangerous animals lived… vowing it would be better to be eaten by lions or dragons than to have to face one more day in that miserable village where everyone made fun of him… but in crying and complaining to himself he manages to walk right into a gigantic lion who tells him his problems are solved as he will soon be eaten in one bite.”

“… he gets eaten?!”

“Hush… So confronted with the actual reality of being /eaten/ the boy realizes that he’d actually really prefer to go on living… so he tries to run away, but the lion is faster and soon pounces on him, making his bag of ribbons burst open in a colorful mess…” The little panted image in the book, with the boy trapped under a paw as the lion happily batted at the rainbow colored array of ribbons was etched indelibly in his memory, almost making him smile despite himself. “… Naturally the lion, being a cat, is distracted by the ribbons and starts to play…”

“Cute.”

“So it turns out, the lion is actually a very vain lion, so vain in fact that it had been left behind by all its friends because he had been trying and trying to groom his mane with his paws and failing miserably… and his mane was full of burrs and tangles and looked rather frightening. What the lion secretly dreamed of was being beautiful, and going to the big city to make his fortune. When he learns the boy is a ribbon seller, he agrees /not/ to eat him if he can make his mane clean and beautiful.”

One of his feet was showing a distressing tendency to fall asleep. He tried to wiggle his toes to stir some life in them, but the heavy weight of Zack’s limp body was wining the fight. Sephiroth briefly wondered why he didn’t just roll the man off, forget his story, and go find someplace more comfortable and solitary to be. Maybe it was just easier to play things out to the end.

“It takes all day, and even all night, the boy brushes and brushes, and braids and braids… and uses every ribbon he has… when morning comes he has fallen fast asleep between the front paws of the napping lion, not caring anymore if he is eaten or not… he doesn’t wake up until much later, and finds the lion happily staring at his reflection in the pond. Instead of the dirty shaggy mane, he now has all the rainbow colored ribbons tied in his clean shiny hair… There was this little drawing of the beast all covered in bows… like some sort of demented cat-faced-flower… but the lion looked so pleased about it I guess it was a good thing…”

“The lion and the boy swear to be best friends, and the beast carries the child easily on his back through the dangerous jungle and back home… all the mean boys of the village run in terror at the sight of the lion, and all the mean girls are speechless at how brave he must have been to tame such a lion… and the lion threatens to eat the mean baker who always overcharged for his bread and so the little boy gets a sack of cakes for his journey, and a sack of sausages for the lion, and together they set out for the big city there in to make their fortune… and they live happily ever after…”

Sephiroth looked up from toying with the finished curls only to realize he had a rapt audience. The blonde’s bemused smile made him look far younger than twenty. Embarrassed, he hunkered down in a pathetic attempt to hide behind Zack’s comforting warmth. This was why he didn’t tell stories. He always got carried away with the wrong things. “…. Anyway… I told /him/ about the book once… I don’t know why… I must have been drunk at the time… It was strange because I hadn’t thought about it in years… I mean… when Hojo came and took me away to Midgar, I wasn’t allowed to take anything with me, nothing but the close on my back, practically… well that and some shitty book about Shin-Ra history that I was supposed to be reading.”

Cloud blinked at the change, but thankfully said nothing. “… He told me that Gast… was reassigned, was no longer going to be working on my project and therefore wasn’t allowed to see me anymore… he told me that Gast and his wife were a bad influence for me, that they’d make me weak. Being young and stupid… I believed him…”

“heh.”

“Oh I didn’t /trust/ him… Hojo was a snake, I think he was born one… but I desperately wanted to be strong… Months later Gast contacted me… I have no idea how he managed it, the number of bribes it must have taken for him to do it would have been incredible. Hojo was very careful to have only his most obsequious toadies and sycophants as my watchdogs and they did an excellent job of keeping me away from anything remotely resembling human beings… But somehow Gast found me… told me that he and his wife had fled, that Hojo was to blame, that he couldn’t be trusted… Gast wanted to ‘rescue’ me as well… I told him no.”

A little voice in the back of his head was telling him to shut up about it and get on with the story, but somehow the words just continued to poor out. “In hindsight… I said some cruel things… they say children can be incredibly cruel without meaning to, their view of the world being rather ego-driven… He didn’t say anything for a little while, but then said, that if I… changed my mind… If I needed him, for anything… that I should call, and he would find a way…” It hurt, how many years had it been? Why did it still hurt…?

“… a few months later, Hojo dropped a newspaper clipping on my desk on top of my homework… an obituary for Gast… He stood there as I read it… I couldn’t even… I… he was waiting, you see, for a reaction… sadistic slimy little toad that he was he was watching to see how I’d react… if I’d be hurt by the news… So I just threw the paper away, and went back to doing my work… because there was nothing else to do…”

“… that fucker.”

“… I never heard of Ilfana again… I never even knew she was pregnant… not until…”

“Not until I keeled over and Zack suddenly played his trump-card by having me speak in tongues back in Dr. Meryl’s lab…”

“… Yes.”

“So wait, what’s this got to do with torturing Zack?” Cloud frowned again, obviously trying to extract the original story from the mess he had made of it.

“hmmm? Oh… damn…” Wracking his brains for what parts he had meant to say, and left out, the pale SOLDIER backtracked mentally until he found his place. “… well I told Zack once, some random drunk orgy of self-pity… not all of it, but about the book, and Ilfana, and the boy and his lion… and about childhood lost… and wouldn’t you know it but what should be waiting for me on my desk the following morning but the damn book! It wasn’t even like the silly thing had still been in print, god only knows how he got his hands on it in less than twelve hours, not to mention at what price… but there it was… lions and ribbons and all…”

The shock, embarrassment, and reluctant joy at being able to flip through the little book again had been a rather unique experience; one he had been sure to thank his friend properly for later on, after the initial desire to do the man bodily harm had faded. The body pressed against him twitched, settling back down quickly but leaving him with a suspicious feeling. Distracted by the past, he hadn’t been paying attention as he should have been. “… anyway, to make a over-long story short, I made a connection between his particularly leonine style and the book, and the rest, as they say, is history… just an inside joke, so old it’s past remembering.”

Zack gave another suspicious twitch. Sephiroth looked down to see his companion hadn’t visibly moved, but was still willing to bet better than even money that he was no longer asleep. The shorter man followed his gaze and made his own, similar conclusions. “He’s awake.”

“…m’not…”

“… Dare I ask exactly how much you heard?”

“… does it matter?”

“Yes.”

“…just bits… here and there… you were telling the story about… the story…? The one Ilfana gave you…”

“… yes.”

“…who’re ya talkin’ to…”

“Cloud.”

“…Spike?” More awake by the second, the dark man sat up with a huge yawn only to blink in surprise at the sight of the blond perched on the edge of the bed. “… I’ll be damned.”

“Yo.”

“…Yo yourself… got treated to a ‘Sephiroth Special’ anecdote, did ya?”

“… special?”

“Shit, would one of the two of you please learn to talk with complete sentences? I feel like I’m having a conversation with two parrots.” He reached out to ruffle his younger friend’s spiked hair. “.. you can be the cockatiel.”

“Bastard.”

“Yup, that’s me.” The SOLDIER’s grin was unrepentant. “Did he actually tell a story that had an ending? And if so, did it have a beginning…? And if so… was there a middle?”

“… yes, yes, and yes.” Cloud thought a moment then shrugged. “I think.”

“I’m amazed.” Zack turned to pat the white-haired general on the shoulder. “You’re getting better.”

“I told it in the wrong order… the boy is just too nice to say so.”

“No, it made sense… was a little loose in places… but it was understandable…”

“I /am/ amazed…” Laughing at their nonplussed expressions, the dark man raked his hand through his hair in an absent-minded gesture. His fingers only got as far as pushing his bangs back off his forehead before his expression grew comical. Moving with deliberate care, the SOLDIER detangled a curl from the mass he was sporting, stretching it down in front of his eyes before letting it go, nearly going cross eyed as he watched it bounce back into place. “… oh shit.”

“It’d look better with ribbon.” Proving that he did indeed have balls of steel, the blond dared to silently nod in agreement with his statement.

“…Seph.”

“I thought perhaps, that being cloned and all, your hair might have changed… but it was exactly the same.”

“…Curls, Seph! Not Funny!”

“… he was right… you /do/ look like a fashion-disaster-lion…” Sniggering, Cloud knew when to fight and when to flee. He was off the bed and out of the room before the older man could make a coordinated effort to pounce. Growling, Zack turned on his only other available target.

“… Start running, old man… and run fast, because when I catch you… I’m going to pull your idiot head off and stick it on a /pig-pole/…”

Wiling to face his fate, the former general reached out and stretched another spring-like curl, allowing it to bounce back with silent amusement.

“Not going to run?” There was something rather predatory in the frustrated glare.

“I’m not afraid of lions…”

Zack maintained his ‘angry’ face for less than a minute before throwing up his hands in exasperation. “I’ll have to soak my head to get these things out now… can’t face the world looking like a poodle, I’ll die of mortification.”

“Could be worse.” Sephiroth commented philosophically. “I could have had ribbons.” He had just enough time for a classic smirk before he was tackled. Wrestling like children they soon ended up panting on the floor.

“Bastard.”

“Usually.”

And at that, Zack could only laugh.

*****

*****

Right, go about your business. -- Lunar