Hawks and Handsaws

To follow the river upstream in hopes of crossing at the ford, or to build a raft and let the quick current carry him down the coast. He stared in each direction, contemplating his options in the last of the day’s sunlight. His back /hurt/, a combination of unusual exercise and an even more unusual burden carried. Zack tested the soft surface of the beach with his toe before sinking to his knees with a sigh. It was no feather bed, but his friend wasn’t likely to notice either way.

“Down you go, kiddo. Ol’Zack needs a bit of a break… Taking-stock time, I think.” He patted the blond on the head, neither getting nor expecting a reply. The blue eyes were glassy, unaware of words or waves or the sunset drenched vista.

For his part, the ex-SOLDIER, ex-lab specimen, could only collapse next to his fellow survivor and stare in awe. The colors alone were enough to make a man weep. “… Not too bad for a day’s work… yeah…”

And for a moment, it was enough. The smell, the sight of open sea filled him, pouring into empty places inside that he hadn’t realized were starving for it until they began to fill. Spring rains to a desert, he soaked the view up in silence. He’d never realized how good freedom had felt until it was gone. Such an important thing to have taken for granted.

Looking over at his unlikely partner, he couldn’t help but hope that the sight of something beyond their normal prison walls might jar the trooper awake. Something to shake him free of the drug riddled waking-dream he had been trapped in since the last batch of ‘tests.’ The scientists had out-done themselves again, leaving his cell-mate and only ally in the facility little better than a blank faced doll.

“Spike?”

He could sense the boy was still /there/, if only barely. The blond had retreated deep inside, as far from the pain as he could go, maybe too far to come back from. Zack had taught him the trick, when? He paused, uncertain where one year stopped and another started in the endless litany of experiments and neglect. It didn’t really matter. At some point, early, when he had still suspected interrogation rather than wholesale torture, he had pulled the boy aside, running through the basics of meditation, detachment and self-hypnosis. Nothing in any of the training he had received in the army, or again in Wutai, could begin to cover some of the shit he had seen and felt in the past years. He was grateful for it though, for margin of sanity it allowed him, breathing room between the part of him that was ‘Zack’ and the tangle mess of ‘baggage’ he seemed to have acquired. It had to be worse for the blond. He tried not to think about it.

“Cloud?” The dark haired man leaned over his comatose friend, shielding him from the wind-blown grit. “Hey, come on kiddo… talk to me…? Victory can be mighty lonely if a man hasn’t got someone to celebrate with…”

“…uhhhhh…” Blue eyes closed slowly, the trooper drifting into a fitful sleep. His eyes were so bright with Mako that they practically glowed through his eyelids. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t right.

“… Mako poisoning… and here I am without my BlueBag… hardly regulation, now is it…” The SOLDIER laughed ruefully, remembering just how much else they would have to do without.

“What do you think, Spike… Raft? Or river? Raft’d be fun… we could do a bit of fishing, eh? Just slide down the coast past Cosmo, get lost in the jungle for a bit, bet they’d never look for us there…” He patted the sleeping man’s arm.

“I was never much of a sailor though. Ask anyone… Shit, they’d tell you about the time…” Zack bit off his confession, frowning. “… But I already told you that story… just… repeating myself again… man loves to talk, that’s me… just talk and talk and talk… just to hear /somebody/…”

Seagulls. He watched a flock of gray and white birds circling over the surf, picking through the feast that the tide had brought in. They floated lazily on the breeze, seeming tacked into the sky. The sight cheered him out of his lethargy and smiling, he held out his hand as if to grab one of them, just for the fun of it.

“… You know, there’s a word for people who talk to themselves.” A quiet murmur interrupted his play, the voice very welcome despite its blandly sarcastic tone.

“What, ‘crazy’?” Zack didn’t turn to look, not yet, there was a risk after all that the voice was right. Better to wait and see.

“Something like that.” The cultured baritone almost sounded like a smile. That wasn’t likely, even as a dream, the general never showed much emotion. “… Seriously. Which ever way you travel, there are risks to consider. By sea there is an advantage of stealth… but if they do see you, then what? You can’t fight and swim at the same time… and what of the boy?”

“Doesn’t look like a swimmer, does he.” The dark man sighed, eyes fixed on the surf. “Could tie him to the raft I guess.”

“And what do you have that would be strong enough to hold him, pray tell?”

Solid sounding, so close he wondered that he couldn’t reach behind him and… Finally giving into his initial impulse, Zack turned and smiled for old-time’s sake. “… There you are… I was wondering what happened to you.”

Sephiroth, the memory of him at least, sat on the bare sand as if he had been there all along, watching him with a look that could be described as ‘fairly worried.’ If he concentrated, he could see right through his old friend to the broken seashells and beach grass behind him. He tried hard not to.

The southerner smirked, knowing full well that it wasn’t /this/ beach the general was really sitting on, maybe the one near Costa del Sol, or on the shore of one of the islands of Wutai, Junon even, the South Islands. It really didn’t matter. The memories blurred together on inspection. Again, it paid not to think.

The pale haired officer continued his analysis, ignoring his audience’s distraction. “On land you have a fighting advantage, even in your current condition. There’s more cover, and at worse you can hide the boy and come back for him… It would be all together /safer/ to travel by land.”

“It’d take longer.” Zack reasoned with the specter. “I’m not exactly in top form here… and we’d still need food, gear, shelter… We’d be crossing hostile country where Hojo’s /bound/ to be expecting us… Sure there are benefits, but they’re not /that/ great… better to swing way south and then go west…”

“… You’d take a raft across the ocean? Be reasonable. Go south of Gongaga perhaps, but you’ll need professional transport to survive an ocean crossing. The freighter to Junon would be best, or steal a seaplane... There are chocobos on this continent…”

“Could do with one now, but there are no tracks to be had around here anyway… nothing to lure one with if there were tracks…”

Sephiroth tilted his head, seeming resigned to the compromise. “… by sea then, but stick close to shore, you’re no Boatwright to make something tolerant of the swells in the channel.”

“Could even disguise us with leaves… we’d look like a pair of crazy locals…”

“If they don’t come to close…” The general gently poked holes in his idea. “Or if the boy doesn’t have another fit…”

“There is that, yes.” Zack sighed.

Green eyes watched him, a little grim. “You could leave him behind you know… still could, even now.”

“No.”

“Silly martyr.”

“Of the two of us, I’m the one still alive here…” The dark haired man ran his hands through the tangled mop his style had become. Nothing sporty or trendy about it now, he probably looked like an escaped lunatic. He smirked. It probably wasn’t far from the truth.

The pale ghost simply dipped its head, conceding that the point would not be argued. Zack sighed again, making a fist to test his strength. Muscle had atrophied, there was no getting around that, but he had lost a lot of weight as well, that could be an advantage if he adjusted his style accordingly. “… good fishing I bet… I could use the protein.”

“Eeeeeh. I hate fish.” Sephiroth made a face at the idea.

“Well you won’t be the one eating it, now will you. Silly figment.”

Surprisingly, the general smiled at the comeback, the long familiar smirk from years ago almost painful to see. Turning to examine the sea, Sephiroth’s hair caught in the wind. Fine silver strands took flight with the breeze, spilling around his collar and across his cheek. “… Building a raft will take time, Major. You’d better get it done tonight. By tomorrow they’ll notice you’re gone… if they haven’t found the bodies already.”

Of course the phantom knew about /those/, Zack winced. Figment that he was, the general knew everything that /he/ knew. That was the way things worked. Only selective forgetfulness made their having conversations at all worthwhile, but any child playing make-believe knew that. “… I’ll get up in a minute.”

He rested his elbows on his knees, wanting, needing a few more minutes of peace before getting back to work. “… I had to do it… didn’t I? There was no other way… not and be sure… It had to be today…”

“You did what you had to.” The general tucked his errant strands of hair behind his ear and watched him sternly. “It couldn’t be helped. They worked for /him/ after all.”

“Yeah…” Zack looked down to check the boy again, the habit ingrained from years of practice. “…I’m not going back there, old man… I’m /not/… I’d kill the kid and myself before I let that happen…” The memory snorted, a characteristic response to his melodramatic statement.

“As if they’d give you the opportunity. If you’re that worried you might as well kill him now and spare him the agony of potential failure.”

Shaking his head at the impossibility of the statement, the SOLDIER simply shrugged. “Who’d have thought a stupid little jaunt to the mountains would end like this…”

“The world has never been a particularly fair place…” The phantom stood and slowly moved to study the boy. “… he doesn’t look very good, does he…”

“Mako”

“He’s going to need a professional, Zack, or you’re going to lose him.”

“He’ll be all right. He’s tough, he’ll walk it off… you’ll see…”

“Hmmmm.”

It was strange to see concern in the pale features. Strange to see any obvious emotions, really. The southerner wondered if maybe his own needs were coloring his old friend’s memory. /His/ general was far more chatty than the original had probably ever been.

// Absence makes the heart grow fonder…? // He almost chuckled at the thought, but sobered quickly. It really was good to see the sharply chiseled face again, even if it was only a mirage.

“… Why did you do it, Seph…”

Green eyes met his, transparent enough to see the clouds moving behind them. They were just as unreadable as the original’s had been. “I can’t answer that, Zack…”

“Because you’re not really here… I know…” The SOLDIER shook his head, closing his eyes against the salty prickle of the wind. “Still… if you had known…. Everything that I know now…. If I could have told you… would you still have…?” When he opened them again, he could see himself.

For a moment it was as if he stood outside himself looking down at a pallid, bedraggled, careworn old man. A man talking to himself on the beach, babysitting a kid who might as well have been a scrawny corpse… and suddenly laughing, cackling loudly into the air. It was so funny, the shear oddity of everything. A crazy old geezer on a beach, no sign of the brash young officer he used to be at all.

He blinked and the vision was gone, a broken-sounding chuckle dying on his lips. Something about the sea air. It burned in his eyes. He had forgotten how much the spray could sting.

Moving his hands to wipe his face, he was startled to feel the tears. He couldn’t remember the last time he had allowed himself to cry, and somehow, that was funny too.

Out-of-practice, the sobs came out in awkward, painful bursts. There was a knack to it. He tried to recall how it was supposed to go. It didn’t matter, they faded as quickly as they had come, leaving behind only hic-ups which lost their novelty in minutes but persisted a while longer. Through it all the specter from his past watched him with quiet intensity; almost, but not quite the same as the real thing. He smiled at the memory, still tasting the salt of his tears.

“Shit. I really miss you ol’man…”

To that, Sephiroth had nothing to say.

The southerner looked down, instinctively responding to the whimper, the needy fingers suddenly gripping at him, tangling in the loose fabric of his pants. He wasn’t surprised to see the kid was crying in his sleep. They’d spent so long with each other for company, it seemed only natural that they start to echo each other’s emotions. “Shhhhh… Its ok, Spike… I’m cool now… everything is cool-o, so just forget it, ok? We’ll get through this.”

When he looked up, the phantom was gone. Sent back to whatever corner of his head that the figment lived in when he wasn’t needed. Zack nodded to himself, accepting the absence as calmly as he had the specter’s arrival. He wasn’t crazy. Not completely anyway. He didn’t like to worry about it. Really, things had been sort of fun since the general had first appeared, a voice in the darkness to keep him company when forgotten in ‘the hole’ for days on end. Sephiroth might be a figment, but he wasn’t that bad, at least he was someone to talk to.

Besides, everyone was a little crazy, he rationalized to himself. People had to be in order to cope with the world. It was all a matter of degree, really. Hojo was bug-shit crazy in a seriously dangerous and fucked-in-the-head sort of way. Cloud was crazy too, but not all the time. He worried about Cloud. Worried that the kid wouldn’t wake up, or worse, woke up as someone else. That could be dealt with when the time came. Compared to Spike’s problems, or the delusional ‘geeks,’ there really wasn’t all that much harm in talking to a dead friend every now and again.

Finding energy somehow to stand, he picked up his sword and dusted the grit from his pants. “Sit tight, kid. I’m going to go see a man about a boat… or maybe a tree about a trunk… I don’t really know yet.”

He’d always had good luck with making useful things out of ‘nothing.’ He only hoped the skill hadn’t faded with time. Giddy with freedom he set about scavenging the woods for anything that might make a serviceable raft.