fic: gravity, ch.2 (wr+ffvii)

[jukeboxhound_backup]

Gravity

Pairing: Eventual OT3 (Sephiroth/Zack/Cloud)
Fandoms: Wolf's Rain (anime) + Final Fantasy VII (original game only)
Rating/Warnings: R - some violence, Hojo, drama, implicit sexuality, some language.
Summary: Wolves, humans, and the true nature of monsters.  Finding the Promised Land means losing a part of yourself in the process. 
Parts: | 0 | 1 | ...

Unbetaed.  Moves rather fast, imo, because it's meant to be a transitional bit.  >.>

2.

Sephiroth wasn't feeling much of anything as he stood at the window in his office and watched the tiny figures below scurry around on the Plate. They looked like insects, he thought absently, or a child's wind-up toys going through the motions in a city of monotone; mechanical routines, monochromatic settings, and each person as insignificant as the next. Grey and lifeless.

Except for the faint hum of the lights, it was silent in his office. Papers were stacked neatly on one edge of the desk, completed early without any distractions to interrupt. The sofa pushed against the far wall had been unused in several months. Without the distractions, without the color, Sephiroth's office was as monotonous as the Plate he looked down upon.

There was a sharp knock on the door.

Still in his own little world, Sephiroth turned towards it, opening his mouth without thinking to say Za –

Hojo opened the door with his usual scowl of bad humor. "You're late for your appointment," he snapped. "If my assistants weren't tied up in other things…"

"I'm coming," Sephiroth interrupted shortly, not particularly caring to hear the scientist grousing about having to run an errand himself like some lowly lab-tech. Still muttering under his breath Hojo turned and started walking away, apparently confident that the general would follow without question, and Sephiroth took a moment to get himself back under control.

If Hojo had heard you nearly slip up like that…

Hojo led him up several floors to the laboratories. The two of them earned stares and gawking, but no one was brave, or stupid, enough to comment when the famous General Sephiroth and the infamous Professor Hojo were both around. The scientist made a sound of displeasure in his throat when they came to the labs and found President ShinRa with his Turks standing around the entrance.

"Hojo," the President said cheerily, smiling his oily smile, "I was under the impression that you'd be here ten minutes ago."

"I had to fetch Sephiroth," Hojo explained, adjusting the round spectacles on his hawkish nose. Sephiroth was a looming presence behind him.

"Oh, good, good!" The President clapped his hands together as though he'd just seen a pet do a neat trick. "I thought that this might be a good opportunity to discuss the company's future prospects, Professor."

Hojo looked like he didn't want to discuss anything unless it involved the President and a tube of mako, but knowing where the grant money came from, he swiped his keycard and allowed the visitors in with a minimum of muttering. As the President chattered to his favorite scientist, Sephiroth walked behind them, distinctly aware of the Turks' presence at his back.

A look from Hojo and Sephiroth seated himself on the edge of a steel table, ignoring the chill he could feel through the leather of his pants or the antiseptic stench stinging his nose. This routine was so familiar it was practically muscle memory; he was already pulling back the sleeve of his long coat before the scientist turned back to him.

"Have you had any more success?" the President was asking as Hojo filled a syringe with mako from a specially designed, carefully pressurized container. The Turks Reno, Rude, and Tseng watched carefully, the first looking slightly sickened.

"A sense as delicate as a wolf's predilection for the Promised Land is hardly something that can be commanded," Hojo informed him tersely. "I've been working on a procedure that should enhance Sephiroth's ability, but having a natural specimen would have sped up this process."

His sneer at the Turks was thinly veiled. Reno smirked openly, but Tseng and Rude didn't react in the slightest.

"Sephiroth is the perfect imitation of a wolf in every other respect," Hojo reminded ShinRa, who just smiled smoothly again.

"Of course he is, Professor, but what use is that to us if he can't find the Promised Land?"

"Might've helped if the flower maiden hadn't escaped, yo," Reno threw in brightly, casually examining his ragged nails, and Hojo's expression darkened. Tseng gave the redhead a look that went entirely ignored.

Sephiroth stared distantly at the far wall while the power-plays went on around him and Hojo slowly injected the mako into his arm. The substance was thick, dense, making his veins feel like they were trying to channel mud, and the spasmodic twitching of his arm muscles was made worse by the prickling sensation growing on his skin. Fixing his eyes on a single point on the wall gave him the control to keep his expression entirely blank, even with Hojo's stare scrutinizing him with a peculiar intensity.

I could run, he mused. I could slaughter them before any of the Turks could raise their weapons.

He could. But he didn't.

"Wutai was the last place on this Planet to resist me," the President was saying. "The only thing left to do is find the Promised Land. Whatever it takes."

This drew Sephiroth's attention, because though the man was speaking in the same condescending petulance as ever there was a new undertone of slyness. Even Hojo seemed cautious of it, for he growled lowly, "Sephiroth is my project – "

"Think about who's footing your bill and covering up your little side projects, Professor, and then reconsider," ShinRa replied, chortling. "I want results on your next departmental report, Hojo, or I'm pulling the plug on your lab."

Hojo's expression had never been so full of hate.

...

It was a good thing that when Cloud talked about surviving in the mountains, Zack had been listening. When the adrenaline started wearing off and the sounds of screams and crackling flames no longer echoed through the valley, even Cloud's slight weight was beginning to feel like a burden in the SOLDIER's arms. He kept his eyes open for a safe place to stop. Unfortunately, with exhaustion blurring his wits all he could see in the dim moonlight was the shifting of shadow in an already dark landscape.

When he stumbled onto a roughly circular ring of trees, Zack gently laid Cloud at the base of a wide trunk and began digging into the snow. It was icy from alternately melting and freezing over again, and it didn't take long before the pads of his paws turned cold and raw; but he persevered, doggedly scraping away until a shallow, concave hole was made. Then he carefully maneuvered Cloud into the makeshift den, which was just deep enough for two wolves to be out of both sight and wind, and finally curled himself as tightly as he could around the smaller wolf without aggravating the other's wounds.

Then the exhaustion finally caught up with him. The sudden fear, the anger (the betrayal; Zack himself didn't feel any obligation for the villagers, but Cloud had been born and raised alongside those people's children, damn them), the fire, the running…he had gone through worse in Wutai but at least he could expect those kinds of things there. Places like Nibelheim, what few were left in a dying world, weren't supposed to leave someone with a knife in his back.

Or bullets in a mother's body.

Cloud's breathing was shallow but steady, pale fur slightly singed in places and smelling of smoke, but his bandages didn't appear to have fresh blood on them. Zack pulled him closer and buried his own muzzle into Cloud's scruff, breathing in deeply the scent of youngness and tangled mountain wilderness to cover the memory of fire. The crispness of the high altitude's air meant that the SOLDIER had been followed by the stench of smoke and charred flesh deep into the mountains, at least until the wind had shifted. So many people – Zangan had probably managed to get out, but Brunhild –

With a long sigh and a bit of shifting against a dark-furred chest, Cloud slipped quietly from unconsciousness into true sleep. It was a reassuring reminder that although Zack couldn't have saved everyone, at least he had managed to protect what was most important to him.

He joined Cloud in exhausted oblivion, the two wolves curled together in a shallow hole scraped into the ground hundreds of miles from anywhere.

...

Cloud woke up and immediately wished he hadn't. Body parts he hadn't known existed felt like they were on fire, his limbs heavy and limp like noodles. It took a few moments for his nose to start working again. Strangely enough, said nose was telling him that he was in a damp, cold place that smelled like ice and wolf, certainly not the musty but earthy familiarity of his mum's cottage.

Sound was the second sense to wake up, and it took another minute to realize what he wasn't hearing. There were no muffled voices gossiping, no distant footsteps hurrying about on daily errands, none of the familiar bustle of early morning which had always managed to reach even the farthest-flung house in the village.

Had he been sleepwalking? Not that he'd ever done so before, but his mum sometimes did and didn't somnambulism run in families or something? Speaking of which…

"Mum?" he ventured timidly. Then, "Zack?"

When no one answered his raspy calls, Cloud tried opening his eyes. He'd learned over the years to do it slowly, letting his pupils adjust to the sudden light, but he saw from the red-golden light cast on the tallest treetops that it was near evening anyway.

Treetops?

"Zack?" he called out again, coughing and then wincing when his bruised ribs were jostled. Gauze was wrapped around his limbs and torso in white strips, slightly pink with blood in some places, and he carefully he turned over onto his stomach to gradually lever himself up to his haunches. He peered out of what looked like the mouth of a small den dug into the snow, confirming that, yes, those really were treetops, and apparently he'd taken to sleeping in holes in the ground.

Zack had to be involved in this somehow.

If sitting up had been difficult, however, then moving about was out of the question. Cloud finally gave up when he put his snout into the snow several times by tripping unsteadily over his own paws and resolved to wait. Whatever scheme Zack had devised to humiliate him, he would at least have to come back to make it happen.

Cloud was just beginning to doze off again when he heard snow crunching under boots and Zack came into view. His black hedgehog hair was a mess, clothes rumpled, and a stack of branches was being carried in the crook of a strong arm. But there was no jaunty smile, no lighthearted whining about forced labor, just a frown that made Cloud uneasy.

"Spike, you're awake!" Zack cried when he looked up, serious expression suddenly disappearing under the weight of a broad smile. The abrupt change made Cloud suspicious, but he didn't comment on it.

"Where are we?" he asked, coughing when his ribs ached, and then coughing some more.

"Um." Zack let the firewood fall to the ground and put an arm behind his head in a classic gesture of embarrassment. "I was kinda hoping you'd know."

"What are we doing out here?" Cloud tried again.

But when Zack's smile flickered back to that uncharacteristic somberness, Cloud's unease deepened.

"What's the last thing you remember, Cloud?"

"What?"

"Please, Cloud." Zack let the firewood fall and then dropped to his knees in front of Cloud so that they were eye-level. Cloud shifted, eyeing him from under his long bangs.

"Um, Mum made us dinner, and then we went to sleep," a slight blush on his cheeks passed on unremarked, "and I woke up. It was hot. I remembered you liked those mushrooms we had for dinner, so I thought maybe I'd go grab some." Thin brows furrowing, Cloud frowned down at the snow in thought. "It was cold out. Grey. I think I heard someone yelling, and then…Mr. Lockhart…"

He tensed, suddenly feeling the blows all over again. How could he have forgotten, even for a few minutes? It was one thing for the other kids to throw rocks or garbage, but an adult had never – well, not beyond words…

Zack patiently waited for him to find his bearings, for which Cloud was absurdly grateful. Now that he'd been made fully aware of them, the bruises on his limbs and torso started aching worse than ever, and the younger boy couldn't quite bring himself to lift his eyes. "Mr. Lockhart said something about Tifa before…before he started hitting me. I think I must've passed out."

The hand on his back startled him. Cloud was still getting used to Zack's tendency for physical contact, but this time it felt as though the SOLDIER was unconsciously reassuring himself of the other's existence.

"He pretty much beat the shit out of you," Zack murmured, making Cloud flush again with renewed humiliation, but the other's voice wasn't mocking at all. If anything, he sounded angry on Cloud's behalf, and that was a new thing. "Your mom and I heard the crowd and stopped him, though."

Now Cloud wasn't sure if he should be even more embarrassed at having to be rescued, or guiltily pleased that he'd had someone willing to do so. But there was something in the way Zack wasn't quite looking at him that made his stomach tighten.

"Zack?" he asked. "Zack, what happened? Are you all right? Where's Mum?"

When the SOLDIER bit his lip indecisively, Cloud was feeling a full-fledged panic attack coming on. "Zack…"

"She's dead, Cloud," the older wolf said softly.

The world came to a halt.

"After we got you away from Lockhart, she went back to his house. She killed him, but the villagers, they got to her."

She's dead.

She's…dead.

After a long silence, Cloud calmly stood up, wobbling but managing to stay upright.

"Excuse me."

He brushed past Zack, who was still kneeling, and disappeared into the trees with a stiff spine and a frighteningly blank expression. His stumbling stride broke into a jog and then a desperate, limping run; his paws were nearly silent in the snow and he ran until his ribs made him wheeze for breath, stumbling around the bases of tall trees with pain and exertion. The sun was setting, casting long fingers of shadow through the twilight, and the cold had sucked all sensation from his lips, nose, and paws. The odd sensation that time had simply stopped still lingered, emphasized by the stark tones of shadow that the forest was fading into.

He ran until he tripped and fell to his knees, shocks of cold sending spikes through his palms. For a long moment, head spinning, he watched the way his breath puffed out in clouds of mist like tendrils of smoke.

"Fuck!"

A startled bird took flight as Cloud's fist smashed into a tree once, then twice, and finally three times before he slumped against the trunk, bloodied knuckles still pressed to the bark. He couldn't even see the contours of the forest anymore through blurred vision, and already torn-up muscle was protesting his lashing out by turning the gauze a deeper red.

It wasn't fair. Fucking hell but it wasn't fair, wasn't right. Maybe his mum hadn't been quite right in the head but she'd never hurt anyone before. Mostly she just stayed in the cottage and spent her days cooking and dreaming and cleaning, she rarely even went out to the market since Cloud got big enough to do it himself, and it wasn't fair. Cloud had never really talked to anyone else, the Planet knew Zack was the only person who had ever stuck around after the stone-throwing.

What was he supposed to do now? It was always him and his mum, a tiny two-wolf pack, but now he didn't even have that.

Shifting slightly, Cloud's shoulder hit the trunk, and he let gravity do the rest until he sat at the foot of the tree with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees. He'd never felt so alone.

...

Zack sighed and slumped forward. If there was a way to break that kind of news to someone tactfully, then he sure as hell didn't know it. The worst part was that Cloud hadn't let him get to the rest of it before taking off. There was a reason he'd always hated doing those next-of-kin notifications for fallen soldiers, but this wasn't the same as a casualty of war. Not really.

The SOLDIER went to work snapping the branches into more manageable pieces and throwing aside the wettest ones. He used the weakest spell in the fire materia equipped to his sword to light the pile of splintered wood, and he wished again that he'd thought to carry a Heal. Being both SOLDIER and a wolf there wasn't much that could take him down, but Cloud was only sixteen, not too many years out of puppy-hood. If Zack himself was only eighteen, well, he usually felt a decade older.

Your failure this time was rather epic, Fair.

Sitting with his arms resting on his knees, Zack stared quietly into the fire. The sun was setting and Cloud hadn't returned, but he didn't go looking for the kid. He trusted Cloud not to do anything stupid with things like high cliffs or pointy objects.

At least, until he finished sharing the bad news, about the whole fire and mass death thing. Sephiroth had been right, he thought wryly, to claim that Zack was a walking disaster. Perhaps the general had been referring to the way materia and weaponry tended to disappear around him, but Sephiroth had a habit of being correct even without intending to be.

When Cloud stumbled back, it was already dark. The fire Zack made cast flickering light through the trees, guiding the blond, and he collapsed into a shivering bundle of wounded boy on the far side of the flames. Zack stared at him for a moment before getting up and moving around the fire to sit close at the other's side, gently pulling Cloud's arm across his lap to check the bloodied bandages. He wished he'd had time to grab fresh linens. Not even a wolf was immune to infection.

"I suppose we can't ever go back," Cloud finally murmured, staring into the flames. His eyes were shadowed with grief and bloodloss and the pain of his injuries.

Zack bit his lip. Nothing for it but to just say it. "Cloud, there isn't a village to go back to."

Frowning in confusion, he asked, "What are you talking about?"

So Zack explained that while Cloud had been unconscious, the villagers had tried to smoke them out of the cottage. Missus Strife's actions had made them paranoid and angry, and Zack hadn't had any choice other than to leave with only Cloud in his arms and the clothes on their backs. But the fire got out of control, spreading to the rest of the village, and without Zangan's help even Zack might have gotten caught in the inferno. Cloud was silent as he spoke, almost unnaturally so, and when Zack finished there was a long, uncomfortable silence.

"I'm glad," he suddenly declared in a fierce voice. "I'm glad they're dead."

"Don't say that, Cloud," Zack told him quietly, and Cloud gave him a vicious glare.

"Why not? Why shouldn't I be happy that those murderers got what they deserve?"

"Because it's too easy." Zack glanced towards the fire. "I saw it in Wutai, you know. It was so easy to be happy that the other guys were dead, but some of the men in my platoon…it made them into something worse. They started enjoying the killing because they forgot that the enemy was human too."

But we're not human, was the protest that Zack knew was running through Cloud's head, and they never let us forget that.

"Cloud – "

"I want to go back," the younger wolf interrupted, making Zack blink.

"Where, Nibelheim? What the hell for?"

Cloud looked away with a scowl. "I want to see for myself what happened. Besides, what're we gonna do? We don't have any food or change of clothes, we're in the middle of nowhere!"

"Hey, hey, calm down, kiddo," Zack broke in, putting an arm around Cloud's shoulders. When the boy tried to shrug him off, he held on stubbornly. "First off, the full moon's just about a week away, and I once survived a month without eating thanks to that shiny round thing. Now, Rocket Town isn't too far away, we'll go there."

"Fine," Cloud replied, but before Zack could breathe a sigh of relief, he continued, "I can't stop you. But I'm going back to the village."

Realizing he wasn't going to be able to change Cloud's mind, he reluctantly agreed on the condition that they wait until Cloud's body healed a little.

That night, Cloud refused to lie beside Zack. He isolated himself a little ways from the dying fire and curled himself into a tight ball, but didn't sleep, instead staring out into the darkened trees and losing himself in his own tangled thoughts. When morning came and the shadows were even darker under his blue eyes, Zack didn't say anything.

It took two days of doing very little before Cloud finally demanded that they move. Personally Zack didn't think the other wolf was ready, physically or otherwise, but once more that stubbornness didn't give him much choice. They set out at a slow pace backtracking the way Zack had taken them. Even though the SOLDIER's footprints had long since disappeared, his scent hadn't yet faded completely from the trees and undergrowth.

It was mid-morning on the third day after the fire by the time the wolves returned to Nibelheim. Except for startling a few birds they hadn't seen another living being since dawn, and now, looking at the village was like stumbling over a sad, desiccated corpse. Cottages were roofless and hollowed out, stones blackened, and the water tower had half-collapsed upon itself. Crows scavenged among the deathly silent ruins, every so often croaking at one another irritably. Zack and Cloud stood on one of the trails overlooking the village in silence, humbled by the devastation.

"Oh, gods," Cloud whispered. He took a few steps forward before breaking into a run, ignoring the pain in his ribs as he sprinted into the remains of the village.

"Cloud, stop!" Zack cried, shaking off his stupor and chasing after him. He caught up to the blond, but before he could grab him Cloud abruptly halted, nearly making Zack trip right over him. "Cloud, what the hell – "

But Cloud was ignoring him. Eyes wide, he turned in a slow circle, unable to block out the sound of still-crackling embers underlying the quiet or the foul stench of burned flesh. It was amazing, in a sense, to consider how quickly, how easily, the only place he'd ever known was reduced to less than firewood.

Zack watched as Cloud wandered along the main road in a daze, the crunching of his feet over charred remains startlingly loud in the otherwise dead silence. There was…nothing. Nothing but drifting ash and filthy snow and the beetle-black eyes of the crows.

The SOLDIER followed at a respectful distance, unwilling to leave Cloud alone but not wanting to intrude on his grief. It was impossible to hope that Cloud didn't see the remains of people underneath the debris or the charred bones of farm animals unable to escape their pens or ropes. Then he paused, and especially hoped that Cloud didn't notice the circular burns on some of the bodies that were more suited to electromag weapons than fire. What really happened here?

No, Cloud just stood in the center of the town and asked, "Why?"

Zack wished to the gods that he knew what to say.

Eventually Cloud walked back to him, bangs covering his face as he stared at the ground and clenched a fist into the front of Zack's shirt. Zack put his arms around those bony shoulders and almost managed not to hug him too tightly.

"Now what," said Cloud, breath coming warm through the weave of the fabric.

"We go find the Promised Land."

As they were leaving, Cloud managed to pull himself away from Zack. Not completely, he let one of Zack's arms stay around his shoulders, but with the tears drying on his face he stood up straight and looked forward.

…

Sephiroth floated in a sea of green and tried not to think. If he did, then he'd get angry, and if he got angry then he would kill either himself or someone else.

Through the glass of the mako tank he could see Hojo and several lab-techs illuminated by the green glow and the lights of their computer arrays. Thick cables ran from the consoles to the tank, some of the thinnest ones all the way through the glass itself and into his skin. Live currents of electricity arcing through his body. Mako stinging his eyes and long nose. Paws hobbled so that his claws couldn't scratch at the glass. Whispers in his pointed ears of freedom, more powerful than the wires and the hobbles, pulling on every cell like lateral gravity. The full moon and endless forests and freedom.

But it was too much, too much for too long and he tried to howl out his misery, releasing only bubbles instead that rose very slowly through the thick mako, kicking with legs so weighted that he couldn't do more than twitch. A voice whispered and he couldn't find her. There was something in his head that wasn't right and he couldn't find her.

Hojo's lips were moving and the techs were scurrying around, but Sephiroth couldn't see them through wide-open eyes, just green and so much wrong. When the mako starting draining out through the floor of the tank Sephiroth was slowly lowered until he lay on the bottom in a loose ball of matted fur, too senseless to sit up. Hojo was shouting but he couldn't understand what he was saying. Humans sounded so strange, sometimes. Apes. Apes with opposable thumbs and far too much intelligence for their nature.

The longing was like an invisible string tied around his heart and leading off to some distant, unknowable point.

…

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