Zack Fair (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
colorofthesky) wrote2020-12-03 09:35 pm
colorofthesky) wrote2020-12-03 09:35 pm
Entry tags:
IC Contact for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
lastvoyages
text ~ audio ~ video ~ action
“Hey, it’s Zack. Leave a message after the beep.”
[ beep ]
IC Contact for
text ~ audio ~ video ~ action
“Hey, it’s Zack. Leave a message after the beep.”
[ beep ]
a text
text
And I've been good. Hanging out a lot with Aerith.
What about you?
no subject
Can't honestly say I'd mind if I never saw another snowflake in my life, but doing well enough.
no subject
And yeah, Shaw’s good. I’m glad you got her.
You know I don’t ever say no to food.
no subject
My place or yours? Give me a few either way to see what I can scrounge up.
no subject
And my place works. As long as you don’t mind the dog.
no subject
I never mind dogs. I'll bring something extra.
[In fact it's going to take him nearly forty five minutes to turn up, tray in hand, to knock on the door. With no knowing how things might go, there's both the temptation for something comforting and something that could be easily reheated later if nothing actually gets eaten. Both is a challenge.
And dog treats. Those are required.]
no subject
His cabin is a near replica of the home he grew up in, so it’s cozy to say the least.
Zack opens the door promptly when Angeal knocks, and he does smile a bit when he gestures for the other to come in. He’s got some drinks set out - alcoholic and not - since he’s not entirely sure how this will go either.
Regardless, he’s going to do his best. ]
Hey. Come on in.
no subject
Hope you like cornbread.
[And stew, one went with the other and the idea of not having them together was borderline sacrilege. But he enters when invited; no surprise that he's a bit subdued. There were plenty of encounters these past months where daily life happened and didn't require serious indepth personal conversations.
He avoided them on purpose. And even now he's pretty sure it won't actually do any good. What was the point of words? Words didn't fix anything.]
Brought some peanut butter sticks for the furball.
no subject
[ There's a spot on the table that he's dog-proofed as much as he can from a certain nose - and speaking of whom, the black lab is up and trotting over to inspect the goods. Lots of tail wagging! ]
Spoiling both of us, huh? He'll love that.
no subject
Hopefully he won't lose a finger in offering it; some dogs take gently and other dogs think the whole hand is the treat.]
.. I'll try to keep this as clean as I can.
[This was already going to be an upsetting night for Zack. Maybe the food would help later, in some fashion. Drawing things out was a disservice.
Not to himself. He deserved it and more.]
I told Shaw apologies aren't going to mean much if it's just words. There's nothing I can say that'll change the things I've done, and you deserve better than ... lip service.
no subject
As for Zack...he gets a piece of cornbread while Angeal talks. Not so much because he has much of an appetite, but it gives him...something to do while he's absorbing what the other man has to say.
He chews and he thinks, and though his eyes are clear, the smile morphs into something much more serious. Pensive. It takes him a minute to figure out what he wants to say, too - because he doesn't want to hurt with what he says. But...he has to be honest. ]
You're right. An apology right now wouldn't mean anything - and I think we both know why that is.
[ Because Angeal would do it again. Maybe not to Zack himself...but the things that drove Angeal to do that in the first place are still there. ]
The other thing is... I think before you can do that - you need to know about all the things that happened after you were gone.
[ In other words -- all the things he had left on Zack's plate because no one was there to help him. ]
no subject
Zack's right of course, and he doesn't deny it; the silence is weight enough of that. If he thought it was happening again he'd do what he had to in order to make sure no one was hurt. The lesson learned is making sure someone else isn't involved the next time. He'd been a coward.]
.. Sephiroth, I assume.
[He had the overview; it had been enough to tell him they'd both made a mistake leaving Sephiroth behind. But Genesis was dead, and he ... was on his way to a similar fate. What could they have done?
... Besides be there.]
no subject
[ Zack agrees with that easily enough. ]
Genesis, too. We found out later - but he didn’t actually die in Modeoheim. So things got messy again even before Sephiroth went off the deep end.
no subject
Survived the fight, survived the fall.
His best friend since they were little kids, alone in a hole in the ground, and he hadn't died there. Why hadn't he checked? Why hadn't he been sure, either to help or hinder? Genesis had been at Nibelheim and it doesn't sound like it helped any.
Red in the dark. Had it been blood, or a crimson coat?]
... What else do I need to know.
[It's anything but a refusal. The rest was needed now.
Sephiroth ruined Nibelheim, but all Angeal can think of is a crumbled walkway and blood on the ground.]
no subject
He picks another piece of cornbread and lets out a soft sigh. ]
The thing with Genesis…went on for a while. Even after what happened in Nibelheim. But to understand that…you need to know what happened there first.
[ Zack fishes a tape player out of his pocket. ]
It’s been three years ago now - but I gave a statement to a friend about…what happened in Nibelheim. I was trying to help him understand me and what we were dealing with in Sephiroth better. He left me a copy of it before he left.
[ Zack offers Angeal the recording. ]
That’s everything. The way I remember it.
no subject
He hits play and sets it on the table, pulling out a chair to sit in. Even knowing what he did about Nibelheim, this won't be a good story, surely. It couldn't be. It ended badly for everyone, even if as the tinny voices play it sounds routine at the start. SOLDIER was called in to handle monsters all the time.
But even the early stuff has a few surprises. Sephiroth, loyal to the end - or so he would have thought - actively planning to leave?
It's going to take a while to play the entire thing, but Angeal neither moves nor speaks, brow furrowed, gaze focused on some nowhere middle spot between himself and the table.]
no subject
He remembers it like he said it all yesterday, too. Even though none of the spookiness is left to the recording…Zack remembers how it all felt. Vividly.
It feels strange listening to himself recount the events of Nibelheim, but it’s better than having to say it all again.
So he just sits. Still and quiet. At one point, Zeke comes over to lay his head on Zack’s lap, and that’s a welcome distraction.
The sequence goes through the encounter with Genesis in the reactor, the return to Nibelheim…and Zack going down to try and help Sephiroth in the basement of Shinra manor. ]
In hindsight…I don’t know why I left. Why I didn’t try to stay down there with him. Because I’d already seen how bad off Genesis was and…how Angeal basically ended up with a death wish, learning whAt he was. It was stupid of me, just…thoughtlessly expecting a better outcome.
[ Zack hears his own voice say that, and he looks down at his hands. He couldn’t save any of them, in the end - Angeal, Genesis, or Sephiroth. ]
no subject
But it's not Zack's fault and he knows it. Zack was caught in .. yet another bad circumstance he shouldnt' have had to contend with. Sephiroth wasn't going to listen to just anybody if he fixated.
Maybe Angeal could have, if he hadn't been dead. Maybe between the two of them Sephiroth could have been pried away from his dusty books and forced to rest, forced to remember he still had friends, people who cared about him deeply.
If Genesis hadn't been left to die at the bottom of a pit, perhaps all three..]
Is this why he doesn't remember? Jenova.
[It's quiet, barely over the voices on the recording as Nibelheim's gruesome fate is outlined.]
no subject
And then, the end: ]
He fell into the Lifestream. His body died, but his spirit, his consciousness — it wasn’t absorbed. He spent the next five years inside the Planet learning everything he could about it. And when he emerged? He set in motion a series of events that almost destroyed our world.
[ Jon's voice says, Statement ends, and the tape stops. Zack takes just a moment to collect himself...and then answers the question. ]
Jenova's not the reason, no. He told me once that he released those memories into the Lifestream. So it was a decision that he made.
no subject
Afterwards ... Hojo. A man Angeal didn't deal with much, had no real opinions on, but the trauma the man inflicted was obvious in others. To go through the hell of Nibelheim, then years in a tube..
He'd abandoned all of them. All the people he'd cared about; Genesis, Sephiroth, Zack, his mother too, could he have tried harder .. if he'd been there, could any of it have changed? Or would he have made it exponentially worse by inflicting his degrading unpredictability on already unstable situations?
The doubt and guilt seesaws back and forth as he just sits there for a time, looking ever so much older than his relatively young twenty-five, a lifetime of worries etched like a map across his features, settled only darker by a fuller account of what happened after he was removed from the equation.
The eventual answer changes nothing. In a way everything can be traced back to him. Inadvertently or otherwise, his actions created an opening for other dominoes to fall, and fall they did. He'd accepted the Admiral's offer for the chance to make it right but ... how could he ever make that right? How could he make any of it right?
How does he apologize to the dead? How can he say sorry and have it mean something to a man who doesn't remember? How can he undo years of damage Zack endured, the suffering Genesis must have had on his own?]
..I begin to understand why he's been here for years.
no subject
Still…he feels as though at least some of the weight he’s been carrying has been lifted off his shoulders. There’s more, of course…but at least this part is done with. ]
…he’s better than he was when I first got here. I came a few months after he did, and it was…hard. Especially until he got a Warden.
He’s never going to be the same man he was, but… he’s moving in the right direction.
no subject
As much as I want him to remember, it might be better if he doesn't.
[Not for himself. The blame would go where it should. But Sephiroth didn't need to live through that twice. Didn't need to lose his friendships again. Didn't need to be alone again. Here at least.. he had something. Something important. Angeal didn't know if it was right to intrude on that, risk stirring things that had died and might be better left dead.
Some distant bitter part of memory supplies that according to Loveless.. Genesis would have claimed the long wanted position of 'Hero', with himself and Sephiroth dead.]
...And Genesis. How long did he last before.. [The inevitable.]
no subject
I don’t think it would be better. Pretending he didn’t have a life before Jenova doesn’t help him or anyone else. He might have thrown it away, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important.
[ As for Genesis…well. Zack reaches over for one of the whiskey bottles and pops it open with a sigh. ]
It was about four years. Once Cloud and I got out…we kept running into Genesis all over the place. They - he and Hollander - figured out that a sample from me wouldn’t reverse the degradation. But from Cloud, who wasn’t in SOLDIER before the experiments…well, they were after him for that. Since Hojo was trying to make…Sephiroth clones or whatever - that was what they were after.
Eventually…I tracked him down in Banora. He’d found some…underground shrine to his Goddess. I offered to help him - but he didn’t want it. Turned himself into some kind of monster down there. We fought; I won.
I carried him out and left him under one of the dumbapple trees. As far as I know…that’s where that story ends.
no subject
[Even before he and Genesis disappeared. Remembering a lifetime of suffering and loss, how would that ever help towards a goal of a better future? It could just make everything seem unbearably worse.
In the end, Sephiroth's redemption or lack thereof was not actually his to see to one way or another even if he would regardless. That was between Sephiroth and his warden. And Angeal's warden wanted this conversation.
For all the good it did, really. It did at least outline that he had a lot more to try to find a way to make up for than he thought.]
I didn't know any of the trees survived the bombing.
[Two fights, two not-deaths. Left out in the open, Genesis was good enough to find shelter if he was capable, but ...would he have been at that point? Was he again left to die alone? He raises one calloused hand, scrubbing briefly at his eyes as if it would somehow help anything other than the mild tension headache that's sprung up. So many terrible things he had been too much of a coward to face.]
Thank you for telling me, recording and all.
[It fit pieces into the growing picture of a puzzle he wasn't sure he wanted to see the greater picture of.
When Angeal speaks again, his tone is morose.]
You asked me not long ago, 'what happened to honor?' I don't know. The same thing that happens to dreams. None of it got anyone anywhere good, did they? I used to think if I could just hold onto my ideals, then everything would work out in the end. Genesis used to chide me for being naive. Maybe he was right.
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)
(no subject)