Author: Kerfect

Email: kerfect@hotmail.com
Rating: R
Couple: C/Z

A/N:  The story is an AU. It starts off with Cloud and Zack sharing an apartment in Midgar.  Zack never died on the cliff.  Some of the events that took place will also probably be changed to fit the story...so please pretty please don't throw stones at me.. : )



The Bone-Flower Elegy


“Not sunflowers, not

roses, gray rocks in patterned

sand grow here.  And bloom.”

~excerpt from ‘Approximations’

by Robert Hayden



Morbid, groping darkness.  Dilated beyond belief.  Sensations drifting.  Brilliant green like an explosion.  Like violation.  Like death.



Zack woke up in cold sweat again.  Trying to catch his breath, he grabbed the night table by his bedside, aching to feel something sold beneath his fingertips.  Careful not to wake the sleeping form beside him, he slipped out of bed and gingerly walked up to the window.  He saw the broken and wet street below.  So far down.  So far away.  Leaning his forehead against the cool sheet of glass, Zack listened to the murmur of the rain, absorbing the night. The nothing.  Calming down his racing heart.



A gentle hand slipped around his waist. A soft kiss on his collar bone.



“Did you dream about the before again?”



He turned away from the soft voice, shoulders sagging, eyes still full of jagged pieces of green ice. “Yeah…” a soft sigh. “About the before.”



“Come back to bed.  There’s still hours left until sunrise.” Beautiful, blue-rimmed eyes gazed at him with boundless affection.



Zack’s throat closed up.  It was hard to speak.  “I…I can’t, baby. I just –” shaking his head with denial.  Words thick with emotion. “Not right now.”



“Ok.” A quick peck on the cheek.  “I’ll go make us some coffee.”



“No, Cloud, you don’t have to.  Go on to bed, I’ll be ok by myself.”



“I don’t mind.  Really.”  The kid sounded convincing enough. Gently rubbing Zack’s shoulder. Pleasant.  “I can’t let you stay in the dark by yourself again.” Soft.  Loving.



“Cloud, you know—”



“Yeah, Zack, I do.  Which is why I want you talk to me.” The blue gaze didn’t waver for a moment.  A shuddering pause and a quiet whisper. “You’re scaring me, baby.  Leaving in the middle of the night without saying a word.  Wondering the streets, going gods know where.”  Cloud looked down, finding the dirty carpet fascinating.  Struggling with the words.  “Zack…I know I have trouble remembering some things.  The really important ones.  But if it’s that, you wouldn’t just—“



Something broke in Zack.  He wrapped his arms around Cloud, clutching him as if he was about to evaporate.  “No.”  Fierce.  Squeezing his eyes shut.  “Don’t you think that.” Inhaling the sweet scent of sunflowers.  Lost.  “Don’t you ever think that.”  The world was going on without him while he was still lost in the past. “This couldn’t have been easy for you.  I’m really sorry for that.”  The voice unsteady.  On the verge of tears.



“Zack, whatever happened, I wish you’d tell me.  I know it’s hard, but you’ve got to talk to me.”



Desperation evident in the voice.  “You don’t understand, Cloud.”



“So make me.”  He sounded determent and frightened.  Like a kid opening the door to a dark basement.  “I feel like I’m loosing you.”



Cloud looked solemn and worried.  His blue eyes filled with chilling puzzlement.  Zack felt the tears choke him from the inside.  He turned away, silently raging inside.  Remembering.  Sheets of cold, green ice.  A vise-like grip, killing him from the inside.  Choking him, drowning him in his own fears.  Zack snapped out of it.  How ironic, he thought, one of them unable to remember his past, the other is trapped in it, doomed to relive it forever. Feeling the fine tremble in his hands, he slid them around himself.



“I gotta—”



“Do not say leave.  Don’t you dare say leave.”



Gotta get out of here.  Can’t be here with you. You’re…you’re you.  And I’m…I’m polluted.  The rattling, the screeching in his head.  Wanting to scratch his ears out, just so he won’t hear it.  Gotta get control. Concentrate Zack!



Dragging himself from the edge of the abyss.  Finding strength in those infinite eyes.  Swallowing hard.  He asked.  “What is the first thing you remember?”



Cloud regarded him with caution. “Us on the cliff. Coming to Midgar.  You know that.  I told you that thousands of times.”



Zack nodded. “I know, just making sure.”  He sighed again, looking around the crammed room, he spotted his discarded pants and pulled them on.  “Come on, lets get dressed.  We have quite a walk in front of us.”



Cloud reached out and touched his arm.  Eyes almost pleading.  “Zack, what is all this?”



“You wanted to know, Cloud.  Well…this is the only way I can tell you.”  He paused for a moment.  “The only way I know how.”



~*~

The mountain range was steep and went on for miles, circling the city of Midgar in it’s vast grip.  Zack climbed the impossible crag, pebbles tumbling from beneath his feet.  The loose, clay dirt slipped between his fingers.  He looked over his sholder to see if Cloud needed help.



“How’re you doing?” he said, gripping a branch of an old dead tree, trying to hang on.



“I’ll be ok,” he heard from a few feet below him. “Do we have a long way to go?”



“Nope, just up to that big rock.”  He saw Cloud pull himself up, gripping the same branch.



“Don’t tell me you go here every night,” he said, panting, trying to catch his breath.



When Zack didn’t answer, Cloud continued just to break the uncomfortable silence.



“Why here?” he asked as he continued to scale a virtuly vertical wall.   “There are thousands of places to go to forget things, why go to the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night?”



He clutched harder at the rocks, climbing inch by painful inch up the mountain side.   Suddenly the rocks beneath his feel fell away and Cloud realized that if he’d let go, there’d be nothing else but a painful death.  But before he even had a chanse to fall, Zack caught him.  Holding him aroudnd the waist, he dragged Cloud over the edge of the clif.



The air was crisp and cool as Zack replied, “I don’t go here to forget, Cloud, I go here to remember.”