fic: trustverse - give or take (ffvii)

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TrustVerse
Give or Take

Gift-fic for artimusdin, for her help betaing and being the most effective idea-board.  Ever.

Unbetaed.

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“Gotta admit, it’s a war wound you can’t mistake for anything else,” Zack grinned, but it was a painful expression, not at all like the carefree optimism it used to have.

 

Cloud didn’t respond.  He was focused on threading the surgical-steel needle he’d swiped from the trooper infirmary, and ignoring the slight discomfort of kneeling on the hard floor of Zack’s quarters to sit on his heels.

 

“Talk about a conversation-starter.  Or stopper, I guess.  Can you imagine, kiddo?  Ten or twelve little brats staring up at me and saying, ‘Hey Gramps, what happened?’  And me telling them how kick-ass their grand-daddy Zachary Fair is—used to be…”

 

The rambling trailed off.  Cloud was almost grateful for that because Zack was trying too hard to be cheerful, trying too hard to pretend that things from now on wouldn’t be different from the things that had come before that stupid fucking mission.  He silently raised himself off his heels so that he could reach for Zack’s shoulder.  The SOLDIER had already removed the top half of his uniform, so the only thing to stop the cadet’s hands was Zack’s unblinking, almost challenging, stare.

 

The left limb, once so powerfully muscled and trained, now ended abruptly about two inches below where the elbow once was.  It wasn’t a clean cut.  He didn't know the details of what had happened, exactly, on the recon mission to Wutai—something about an ambush, and materia misuse, and the death of four troopers with the fifth wounded but alive.  Alive, because Zack had been there with the buster sword and the willingness to sacrifice a limb to save a life.

 

Cloud gently pressed against the edges of the wound.  It was unlikely that the damaged nerves would register pain, but he didn’t think that an excuse to be reckless, and so he looked it over with great care.  Whoever cauterized it had done so inexpertly, but fairly effectively, so it only took a few stitches to close up the last of it.  He opened his mouth but thought better of it.

 

“What is it, Cloud?” Zack asked.  He spoke mildly, but in a way that dared Cloud to say something.

 

He bit his lip, then said softly, “I think you should go back to the infirmary.  I don’t want to…”

 

“What, mess it up?” Zack’s smile was noticeably wrong.  “News flash, kiddo, but I don’t think there’s that much there to get messed up.”

 

Cloud thought back to the time when one of the younger men in Nibelheim had gone into the mountains and come back missing a good part of a forearm and several chunks out of his body.  He hadn’t died of blood-loss, but it wasn’t long until gangrene set in too quickly for the outdated Nibel medicine to counteract it.  But that man had been a nobody, to ShinRa’s way of thinking, not the second-in-command under General Sephiroth himself, who received only the best of medical care.  So Cloud kept the worry close to his own heart.

 

“Maybe it’ll impress the ladies,” Zack said suddenly, continuing in the same vein from before.  “You know, self-sacrifice and all.  Chicks love that shit.”

 

Aeris wouldn’t, Cloud thought, but he pushed it away.  Instead he leaned against the inside of Zack’s knee and used a clean, damp cloth to wipe away the streaks of blood.  He could feel the warmth of the man’s leg through their clothes, solid and reassuring in its familiarity, and wondered how he could possibly make any of this…well, better.

 

“How long did General Sephiroth put you on leave?” he asked in a small voice.

 

Zack snorted.  “As if I’d sit good and pretty in his office for two fucking months.  Months.  That—“  He abruptly cut himself off, unwilling to voice the insults that were obviously rampaging around his head.  Sephiroth was only doing his job, but maybe that was part of what made it so painful, Cloud observed.

 

“I’ll help.”  He chanced a glance up into Zack’s face and found a shuttered expression.  “…Please?”

 

“Thanks, kiddo, but don’t worry about it.  Nothing can keep me down for long.”

 

Maybe that was true, in normal circumstances.  “Zack,” Cloud said carefully, “why aren’t you more angry?”

 

The sudden silence sent a shiver down the cadet’s spine.  Zack’s quarters were quiet, devoid of the usual mass-produced rock music he liked to blare at all hours, and the man himself was holding his body very very still.  Unthinkingly, Cloud pressed his ribs more firmly against Zack’s leg as though to reassure himself that he wasn’t going to get up and disappear.

 

“Of course I’m angry,” Zack smiled.  It looked unnatural.  “Hell, who wouldn’t be?  But the assholes are already dead, and it’s not like I’m going to take it out on you—“

 

“But that’s the problem, isn’t it?  At least part of it,” Cloud interrupted smoothly, making Zack’s mouth close with a sharp click of teeth.  He laid a hand on the mutilated remains of an arm.  “Didn’t you once tell Sephiroth that sometimes showing how he felt wouldn’t make him weak?  This…this doesn’t either.”

 

Zack jerked away from Cloud’s touch, leaning back from the edge of the cot he sat on.  “Hey, when did you try picking up psychology?” he joked, but the warning was clear.  Cloud blinked at him slowly, intimidated but refusing to back down.

 

After a long moment, Zack was the one to look away.  Cloud wordlessly finished the suturing, cut the extra thread with his small boot-knife, and began laying out a roll of fresh bandages.  The whiteness of the bandages was startling against the SOLDIER’s tanned skin and the angry darkness of the wound.

 

When the heavy silence stretched, Cloud almost wished Zack had continued his meaningless rambling.  His own fingers had started trembling as he moved the bandages around and around the—the stump, and oh.  Oh.

 

His motions slowed to a stop without realizing it until Zack jerked backwards out of his loose grasp.  The end of the bandage fluttered.

 

“Sink in, finally?”  The SOLDIER was halfway standing, saying something nonsensical about understanding how weird it was and how he didn’t blame Cloud before Cloud suddenly put his hands on the man’s hips and forced him to sit back down on the cot’s edge.  Most people tended to avoid direct contact when embarrassed or ashamed, but Zack met the cadet’s eyes a little too forcefully, too fiercely, and the intense attention made Cloud’s tongue fumble a bit.

 

“I’m not disgusted,” he said, and when he was met with blatant disbelief, he added more firmly, “I’m not.  Seriously.  It’s…”

 

Cloud wasn’t quite sure how to put the thoughts to words when they were still only half-formed impressions.  Zack was looking at him as though fully expecting to hear condemnation and was determined not to let it hurt him; he and Cloud were so different that way, one who was made stronger in the face of adversity and the other who crumbled before it.  Cloud could only admit to himself in the periodic depths of his self-loathing that he was envious of Zack for that.  Even now, the man had lost a fucking limb and was still unwilling to take it lying down.

 

Except that there was something vulnerable in Zack’s expression that Cloud understood too well, and wasn’t it a fucking mind-bender to realize that the hero was human too?

 

Part of him was ashamed at the relief that accompanied that little revelation.  Relief that Zack wasn’t as untouchable as he made himself out to be, that being able to keep Cloud from falling apart and the General from losing his humanity entirely didn’t mean that he was strong all the time.  Which only made the cadet feel guiltier.

 

But looking up into Zack’s averted face—he was still kneeling in front of the cot between the SOLDIER’s knees, and very quickly losing feeling in his lower limbs—Cloud realized that, for once, he couldn’t let his own insecurity take over.  He could crawl out of the room with his fear and doubt, and probably hurt Zack irreparably, or he could suck it up and learn that he wasn’t the only person who saw the darkness when he closed his eyes.

 

Zack jumped when Cloud’s hands removed themselves from his waist and met behind the SOLDIER’s back, looking understandably surprised when a spiky yellow head was pressed into his chest in a tight hug.  He didn’t seem to know if he should wrap his remaining arm awkwardly around Cloud, or allow it to remain limp at his side.  In the end, it stayed in place.

 

“There was this Nibel wolf a few winters ago,” Cloud whispered, muffled by warm, firm skin, and his hands fisted together just above the back of Zack’s thick leather belt.  “Broken leg, or something.  I think it must’ve fallen somehow.  It was on the edge of the village, probably because it couldn’t hunt so well.  The other kids, they always chucked rocks at it, and some of the older men kept trying to drive it away.  But I, I always thought…even though it was hurt, and everyone thought it was too wild to try helping it…I thought it was still beautiful.  In a scary kind of way.  And it didn’t give up, ever.”

 

Cloud was embarrassed—he didn’t like talking about home, not even when it’d been over a year since he last saw it—but he was determined.  And he could be even more stubborn than Zack, when he really wanted to be.

 

He tilted his head back to look at Zack, whose expression was closed into careful neutrality.  Thinking back to the wolf, Cloud remembered how strange it was that something so innately powerful and uncontrollable had been humbled by a very mortal wound, and how its will to survive hadn’t been diminished even at the very end.  Daring himself, he slowly lifted his hands to either side of Zack’s face, as though the SOLDIER was an animal that would lash out if surprised.

 

“I’m not disgusted,” he repeated without leaving room for argument, “though it will take some getting used to.”  When Zack opened his mouth, Cloud continued forcefully, “I won’t watch you destroy yourself over this, Zack.  Call me selfish, but I won’t.  And if you’re as strong as I know you are, and as angry, then you’re going to do something about it.  For starters, proving that the only drawback to having one arm will be on your enemies’ part, because they’ll underestimate you.”

 

The words simply tumbled out of his mouth without permission, growing in conviction until Cloud was practically glaring at Zack. 

 

“Second, you’re always getting on my case about bottling emotion, so you’re going to challenge Sephiroth and get your ass kicked.  Then when you’re less likely to explode, we’re going to figure out what the hell happened and make ShinRa have a few new job vacancies.  Right?”

 

His fingers were a little too firm against Zack’s cheekbones, but he knew he couldn’t hurt the SOLDIER, not physically.  Cloud refused to look away, refused to be cowed by nearly purple mako eyes or his own flaws, as Zack stared at him like he was a particularly weird specimen from ShinRa’s science department.  The long silence had crept back into the room, and the boy refused to think about what would happen if the profound trust he’d given away was broken.

 

Then something that had been bleeding in Zack’s head when the physical wound wasn’t finally slowed to a level that could, in time, be healed.

 

“Hey, Cloud, you got real talkative when I was away,” he said softly, and his hand finally rose to ruffle Cloud’s hair.  But instead of removing the hand, he left it tangled in the softer spikes at the back of the cadet’s skull.  “When did that happen?”

 

It was a rhetorical, absently-spoken question, but before he could lose his nerve, Cloud replied seriously, “When you forgot that it was okay for you to be human too.”

 

Zack stilled again, but it wasn’t because he was expecting an attack.  It was the sort of stunned silence he adopted on the rare occasion that Cloud managed to surprise him, so the cadet didn’t feel bad releasing his hold on Zack’s face and returning to the task of wrapping what remained of the SOLDIER’s arm.

 

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