jukeboxhound_backup | fic: eir's tomorrow, ch.8.2

Fortunately for Zack’s dignity Tseng didn’t attempt anything while flying thousands of feet above the ground, and so the SOLDIER took the chance to ramble at the top of his voice. Cloud listened with a small half-smile at topics that ranged from the weird jungle monster called a Touch-Me to just how awesome Angeal was at practically every time of day; he wasn’t smiling because he was actually interested in these things, but because Zack was so animated as he spoke, using both hands and sometimes entire limbs to illustrate a point. The SOLDIER was more ebullient than Cloud remembered, almost childlike, but he reasoned that the discrepancy was simply the fault of his own admittedly spotty memory.

The moment they touched down in Banora Zack was leaping out the helicopter and practically kissing the earth.

“Oh thank gods, I think Tseng has it out for me!” he bemoaned to the world at large. His voice was slightly raspy from having talked non-stop.

“If I did, you wouldn’t have enough time to complain about it,” the Turk replied dryly. Cloud had to hide a smile when Zack blanched and took the chance to look around.

It was the kind of landscape that could only be described as ‘pastoral’. Rolling green fields under a blue sky were broken up by the occasional small farmhouse or orchard, and the warm air was touched with a pleasantly cool breeze and the smells of hay and ripening fruit. Apples, if Cloud guessed correctly, with a hint of peaches or apricots.

“So this is Angeal’s home, huh?” Zack observed, turning in a circle to get the full effect. “This explains the paisley apron in his kitchen.”

Cloud grinned.

Tseng was already walking up a path shaded by the curved trunks of white trees that reminded the trooper uncomfortably of the forest near the Forgotten Capital. But in the clear sunlight they simply shone a brilliant marble-white, lacking the surreal glow that turned the Forest of the Ancients into an eternal twilight, and he was able to relax again.

“Weird trees,” Zack commented, pausing to peer closely at the hard pale bark.

“White Banora,” Tseng called back over his shoulder. “You probably know them as dumbapples.”

“Seriously? Man, awesome! Wait, Genesis is from Banora too? Since when?”

“Genesis and Angeal are childhood friends.”

“Hey, Angeal never told me that. How do you know? Do you have some kind of Turk mind-reading thing going on? I bet you do. You assholes always seem to know the things no one wants anyone else to know about.”

It wasn’t until now, being in the man’s company again and hearing him tease, that Cloud realized just how sorely he really had missed Zack. Unfortunately he didn’t have much time to bask in the other’s company; Tseng was forced to leap back a few steps as several monsters dropped down from the trees and brandished their weapons.

“Oh hey, company! Dibs!”

And Zack slaughtered the monsters without Tseng or Cloud having to lift a finger. He posed and flashed them a heroic grin.

…No, not monsters, Cloud was realizing as he crouched over the bodies. Humans, or at least humanoid, dressed in strange red armor and wielding sickles. No one tried to stop him as he pulled the helmet from one of them, though Zack said incredulously, “Hey now, Cloud, what’re you doing?”

Fully human face, as well, and damn him if it didn’t look exactly like Genesis Rhapsodos. There was something…wrong with the body that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but it reminded him vaguely of the mental buzzing he’d gotten whenever he was around a Sephiroth clone. He couldn’t hear the cacophony of ragemadnessvengeance that had always been Jenova’s trademark, but the sensation was making his skin crawl and his body tense for battle all the same.

“A Genesis copy!”

Tseng looked at Zack sharply. “Where did you hear that?”

“Sephiroth,” came the absent reply as he knelt down beside the other body and took off its helmet. It also mirrored Genesis. “How…?”

“Some technology was stolen from ShinRa,” said the Turk, a little reluctantly.

“You mean ShinRa can clone people?” When Tseng just arched a brow, Zack threw his hands in the air with, “Ugh, that is so creepy!”

Among other things, Cloud mused darkly, but he didn’t say anything. Instead he stood and removed his rifle from his shoulder, grasping it in a ready position. (Oh, what he would give to have Tsurugi or even Ultima back in his hands, particularly with the way he could feel his pupils contracting into pinpricks, and without the pollution of Midgar, the Planet’s presence was looming like a shadow behind his shoulder.) “Ready?”

The trooper’s calmness earned a strange look from Zack. Hell, he was a SOLDIER Second and was weirded out, how could this midget look so unperturbed?

“Yeah, yeah, ready. Let’s go!”

Several clones later and a huge robotic spider thing that made Zack conclude ShinRa personnel were utterly blind if someone had stolen it without being caught, he and Cloud were walking into Banora village. Tseng remained behind to examine the odd grave beside the fair-sized manor, which Zack thought was even creepier and seriously, maybe one had to have a certain creepiness factor to make it into the Turks. Tseng had his unblinking Stare o’ Doom, and Rude was a walking statue, and even Reno – who played a mean game of poker, it should be said, and once brought Zack back an awesome titty-mag from some random place – gave off the creepy-vibes that made other sleazy characters give him a wide berth below the Plate.

Then again, Cissnei wasn’t so bad, although it was hard to believe someone who still giggled behind her hand was, technically, an assassin.

But Cloud, now…he wasn’t creepy so much as just, well, strange. He was way too calm and quiet for a trooper on his first real mission, but maybe Zack wasn’t the best judge of that kind of thing.

“’Puppy’, my ass,” he grumbled under his breath.

“Did you say something, Zack?”

Shaking himself back to the present, he said, “So, is it weird to be away from the whole city thing and plopped down in the country?”

The trooper gave him a small smile. “No. Banora isn’t that different from where I’m from, only there’re more fields and much, much less snow.”

“A country boy, eh? Where from?”

“Nibelheim. It’s on the west continent. What about you?”

“Gongaga…hey, don’t you snicker like that, or if you’re not careful a Touch-Me will somehow, mysteriously crawl into your tent at night!”

“More action than you might otherwise get, with so few people around,” Cloud replied, his tone serious but his eyes a bright, teasing blue, and Zack couldn’t help but laugh.

“You know what they say about villages in the middle of nowhere – “

“There’s a reactor in it!” they said simultaneously, and Zack knew he was grinning rather goofily as he slung an arm around Cloud’s shoulders and turned to look back up the path they’d taken. “Yo, Tseng, you better be careful or us country boys are gonna take over your stinky city!”

There was no reply, but neither had expected one. Feeling like he’d just won major points in making Cloud a little less stoic than Sephiroth, he kept his arm on the boy’s shoulders as he sauntered into the town. Upon approaching the first house, however, Cloud frowned and pulled away to inspect something green and glowing.

“What’d you find, kiddo?”

“A mako spring.” The frown was now pulling pale eyebrows into what looked like a well-practiced expression of worry.

“Eh?” Zack left off peering nosily through the darkened windows to look over towards Cloud. “Is that what a mako spring is? How’d you know?”

“We discussed it in our materia class,” came the smooth reply. “But springs usually only happen where there’s essentially zero human interference. For one to come up in the middle of a village means that either some really powerful magic was used, or…”

“Or what?” Zack prompted him as the trooper trailed off. After a moment of quiet, Cloud blinked and shook his head.

“I don’t know, just…it’d have to be something pretty drastic, right?”

Honestly, Zack had no idea. He was more the action type of guy rather than the bookworm kind, so as long as he knew that mako made him awesome in battle, he didn’t need to know the particulars. But he certainly wasn’t stupid or unobservant, and what Cloud said made sense.

“Yeah,” he agreed, some of his good humor slipping away as he scanned the tiny village with slightly narrowed eyes. The sudden retort of a ShinRa rifle had him whirling around, sword raised and ready for some smiting, but he had to bring himself up so short that he nearly fell over. Cloud was standing calmly over the corpse of a canine monster that had tried to sneak up on what is thought was the weaker of the two humans. A Blood Taste, he identified automatically.

“Shit, Cloud, you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” Keeping his hand on the trigger of the rifle, Cloud smiled at him. The SOLDIER couldn’t help staring until the other continued, “Did Tseng tell you which house Angeal used to live in?”

“Uh, no. No, he didn’t.”

“Do you want to start at opposite ends of the village and meet in the middle, then? The faster we secure the area, the faster we can move on.”

Zack wanted to protest, wanted to say You’re just a trooper and there’re monsters everywhere, you should stick with me – but Cloud had just killed a monster that Zack hadn’t even heard sneaking up (which was pretty fucking embarrassing), and really, the monsters they’d seen so far didn’t seem that dangerous.

And damn it, he wanted to find Angeal.

“Yeah, okay, that sounds good. Just – just be careful, okay? If you get ambushed by something you don’t think you can handle, don’t hesitate to scream for me.”

Cloud just gave him another one of those small smiles and moved away to the first house on the right, spine straight and stride as confident as any larger, more experienced SOLDIER. After a moment Zack shook his head and started with the houses on the left.

As luck would have it, Zack was the one to find the first sign of human inhabitants. It was an old woman seated at the kitchen table, face roughened with the stress of a hardworking life and dressed in a patched but clean white peasant’s smock. Given how worn she appeared to be, he couldn’t tell how old she actually was.

“May I help you?” she asked kindly, making Zack feel like a bit of an ass for just walking into her home without knocking. It wasn’t like he expected to actually find anyone!

“Er, sorry, ma’am, but are Angeal’s mom? I’m Zack, and I’m kinda looking for him…”

Her face crinkled into a smile. He wondered why he seemed to be getting so many smiles today. “Are you Zack the puppy?”

“What?” he yelped, and she laughed behind a callused hand.

“My son told me about you in his letters. Just like a puppy, he said, so much enthusiasm and no attention span whatsoever.”

“Oi!”

He was aware of Cloud silently slipping into the room and standing beside the door, no doubt alerted by Zack’s indignant outburst, but the trooper didn’t interfere.

Angeal’s mother glanced over Zack’s shoulder briefly. “You aren’t friends of Genesis, are you?”

“No ma’am, not at all. I’m just here to find out what happened to Angeal and if he’s all right, I promise.”

“Has something happened to him, then?”

The note of resigned sorrow in her voice was like a string, tugging Zack forward a step before he could stop himself. “I don’t know. I hope not, but…”

“A month or two ago, Genesis came back with some soldiers under his command,” she said abruptly, looking down at the table where her hands were folded together. “He started killing the other villagers. I believe he only spared me because I’m the mother of his best friend. He used to be such a good boy…”

Mrs Hewley’s words left a bitter taste in Zack’s mouth. The thought of a man returning to the village of his birth and slaughtering the people sickened him. It was nothing that someone with any honor – hell, someone with humanity – would do. Zack had only met Genesis briefly once or twice before, usually as they passed each other in the hall by Angeal’s office, but if this was what the SOLDIER general was capable of, how could he have been Angeal’s closest friend?

“What about Angeal?”

“He came back for a while,” she said after a long pause, “and he left his sword here. That sword…I had it made for him when he became a SOLDIER. It was meant to defend our family’s honor.”

He drags it around with him into battle without ever even using it…and he leaves it behind now?

Shit.

“I’ll find Angeal,” he said with sudden fervor. “In the meantime it’d probably be best if you went into hiding.”

“Genesis won’t kill me.” Mrs Hewley’s voice was quiet and firm; Zack wondered if it’d be rude to ask why she seemed so sure of that when Genesis had apparently been able to kill all the other villagers. But then he felt Cloud’s hand squeeze his shoulder as the trooper went to Mrs Hewley’s side and got down on one knee.

“I’ve never met Angeal, but Zack told me that he’s an honorable warrior. Is that true?”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“Then Angeal still has a chance to come back. Genesis is probably using their old friendship to manipulate and use him. But if that sword means what you say it does, then on some level he already understands the hypocrisy of his actions.” For a moment Cloud’s words seemed to freeze, but the moment passed and he tossed a wryly amused look to Zack. “He just needs the puppy to beat some sense into his thick skull.”

Zack contemplated the appeal of sitting on Cloud and knuckling that chocobo head until the blond begged for mercy.

Turning back, Cloud continued seriously, “But if Genesis thinks Angeal betrayed him, then he’ll probably go to whatever means necessary to get revenge. Including killing you.”

Mrs Hewley didn’t reply.

“If you come back with us, Midgar can protect you.” Zack blinked and wondered why Cloud didn’t say ‘ShinRa’. “Otherwise you’ll just become a liability to your son.”

“Hey now, Cloud, wait a minute, that’s not fair – “ Zack started, but Mrs Hewley interrupted him.

“My son is a general. I know too much about ShinRa. Sooner or later I’ll die, be it by Genesis’ hand or by the Turks. At least I’m one of the few people who ever cared about Genesis for himself.”

Zack couldn’t see Cloud’s expression, so he could only guess what it looked like from the flat tone of his voice. “I understand.”