Thanks to: Arafel for beta reading, Hideto for the word supply, Håkan Nesser for creating a city with three Novembers a year and Rainy Town for being a beautifully ugly place.






Homeward Bound



by Fire Ceremony (Strength_Love)

Zack picked his way slowly across the snow covered compound, the sound of laughter and loud music still sitting in his ears, the smell of cigarette smoke rising from his clothes in the cold air. His warm breath formed plumes of condensation which spread and quickly dissipated into the dark winter morning.

He stopped and craned his neck to gaze up into the sky, shifted his weight backwards, reeled a little and took another step back to steady himself. Shielding his eyes from the glare of the floodlights illuminating the compound with one hand, he found a patch of night between the golden grey clouds. He fixed his eyes on the darkness and relaxed. At the periphery of his vision he could make out the faint shine of a few stars. In Midgard, stars could only been seen in winter when humidity was low and the smog reduced.

Zack remembered a sky filled with light and showers of meteorites in the fall in Gongaga. Memories of boyhood; sitting on the verandah, his father reading out the names of the constellations for him, Cygnus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, names as as foreign as the worlds Zack imagined illuminated by those stars.

But that was then. No point in hanging onto it here. It was five a.m. in the morning, sub zero temperature, the first of January and he ought to be on his way. Zack smirked at his own reminiscing and continued on his gently drunken path home from the New Year’s celebrations in the Shinra main building.

In the muted silence and warmth of the barracks corridor, he ran into Sephiroth, his superior officer and commander. Zack saluted him and opened the front door to a gust of wind and a spray of ice crystals.

“No New Year’s party this year?” he asked grinning, knowing his commander’s distaste for the New Year’s party and its main protagonists. “If you hurry you can still catch the last bit of it. When I left, Scarlett still hadn’t managed to persuade Heidegger to perform his annual limbo dancing, so I’d say they have a good two hours left.” Sephiroth smirked and shook his head.

“No thank you, Zack,” he said, preparing to exit the door. “It’s best to leave the limbo dancing to the experts, too easy to break one’s back on it otherwise. If you’ll excuse me…”

“Where are you off to at this hour?” Zack asked, suddenly feeling bold.

“Dr. Hojo’s lab,” Sephiroth replied. “The Mako treatment of this half year.“ Zack winced. He associated Mako with nausea and discomfort for days. He was glad it wasn’t him.

“New Year’s Day isn’t the day for that,” he commented sympathetically. Sephiroth shrugged.

“The sooner it can be done, the better. You know how it is, there’s no way past it.” Zack nodded and put his hands in his pockets.

“Yes, I know,” he said. Sephiroth exited without further comments. Zack watched the door glide shut and continued on his way to his room to sleep off the remnants of the night’s festivities.

The phone rang with a loud noise, rousing Zack from deep sleep. He reached out to pick up the receiver. Suppressing the urge to simply let it fall back onto the cradle, he slowly lifted it to his ear.

“Odegard speaking,” he muttered, wondering what the hell was so important he had to be woken at, he turned to peer at the clock to ascertain the time, seven a.m., on New Year’s Day for it.

“Adjutant Odegard,” a hurried voice said. “Could you please come here and pick up your commander forthwith?”

“Dr. Hojo…,” Zack acknowledged.“Did you just come home from the New Year’s party?” he asked in order to buy himself more time to wake up. Ignoring the joke, Dr. Hojo continued with the obliviousness to appropriate communication and personal discretion of the socially inept.

“I’m really too busy to get him down to you myself, Odegard, not to mention he is much too heavy for me to carry anywhere, or I would have done so to move things along. I’m beginning to think he sets the time too high so he’ll be sick just to inconvenience me. Could you please come here and fetch him now, so I can continue with my work?”

“Ok, ok, I’ll be there as fast as I can,” Zack mumbled into the phone, grimacing at the thought of having to leave the warm bed. Without further ado, Dr. Hojo cut the line. “And a good morning to you,” Zack muttered to the beeping phone.

He walked across the compound the same way he had come a few hours earlier. Snowflakes fell slowly through the beams of the sodium floodlights. The inch thick layer of snow dampened all sounds from the surrounding city. The sun was still hours away. A set of footprints in the process of being covered by the silently falling snow crossed the compound in the direction of the Shinra building. There were no tracks leading back towards the barracks.

The thick glass doors slid aside with a hiss. Zack stepped beneath the blast of hot air from the heater above and into the building proper. The spacious foyer lay in silence, still lit low for the night and bearing traces of the New Year’s party in the form of paper confetti and streamers on the obsidian floor.

Zack passed the empty reception desk. He wished the receptionist had been there, then he could have smiled to her and asked if she had seen Sephiroth go up to Dr. Hojo. But since she wasn’t there, he’d have to try and find the commander on his own. Scanning the large room, he caught a movement in the low light, his eyes were pulled towards the twin staircases in the middle of the foyer. On the bottom steps of the right staircase someone was sitting, head down, hugging his knees. It was Sephiroth.

As Zack approached him, Sephiroth glanced up. “Zack?” Sephiroth asked with a thick voice. “Didn’t you go to bed after the limbo dancing?” His face looked puffed and was covered with a film of moisture. A rusty rivulet of dried blood reached from one nostril to the chin. The veins on his naked hands and underams bulged darkly, distended with blood. Mako poisoning. Zack frowned, then crouched down, put Sephiroth’s arm across his neck and pulled him up.

“Come on, let’s go home,” he said.

He half carried and half dragged the commander back to the barracks, his body tense and heavy with illness. On the way he had to stop three times to let Sephiroth throw up on the snow.

In Sephiroth’s private quarters, Zack let the commander down on his bed. Sephiroth slowly undressed, Zack helped him with his boots. When Sephiroth stood to pull the covers aside, he nearly lost his balance. Zack quickly took hold of his shoulder and steadied him.

“I’m all gone today,” he apologized with a laugh.

“Take it easy,” Zack replied, disregarding the other’s embarassment.

Sephiroth lay down on the pillow and passively let Zack pull the covers over him. Remembering a comforting gesture of his mother’s, Zack reached out and put his palm on the other’s forehead.

“Is there something I can get for you?” he asked. “Water? Painkiller?”

“No thanks,” Sephiroth muttered.

“Ok.” Zack turned, switched off the light and opened the door. The illumination from the corridor formed a white oblong on the floor. He looked back at the form in the bed.

“I’ll see to you later, if you want to,” he said into the darkness, not expecting any answer. There was a slight pause.

“The code for the door is 2-1-6-6-3-4,” Sephiroth said.

“Got that. Sleep well then.” Zack entered the brightly lit hallway and shut the door quietly behind him.

The dark morning turned into a reluctant dawn and a cold and overcast day. The light from the sun never managed to fully penetrate the snow saturated clouds, but instead graded into a protracted dusk until the sodium lights again was the only illumination of the compound. Little sunlight reached down to the barracks even in summer. Winters seemed like one long night.

Zack spent the day putting as much distance between himself and the hangover that was lingering in his body as possible. He didn’t have the conscience to go to sleep when he was virtually the only person left with the commander in the building. Instead, he nursed a coffee and a bottle of lemon and lime flavored soda in his room, then had a quiet breakfast in the empty cafeteria. He composed a letter to his parents, at eleven he browsed through the lockers in the locker room to see what images had been left in the metal doors by the recruits. One more hour saw Zack falling asleep in front of the tv and an inane soap opera on the third rerun in the common room.

After lunch he did his laundry and phoned up Rennes.

“Do you miss me Zack?”she asked quietly over the static of distance and winter weather raging in the planet’s atmosphere.

“Yes I do,” he confirmed without hesitation. He patiently listened to Rennes and her complaints about the boredom of attending New Year’s festivities and family dinners for half an hour, wondering what constellations were visible from Mideel. When the short day had turned to night, Zack returned to Sephiroth’s quarters.

Zack opened the door and entered the dark room, navigated by the light shining in from outside. He sat down in one of the chairs by the window. Sephiroth stirred, woken by the sound of his presence.

Through the quiet of the room, Zack heard the other’s slow breaths.

“How do you feel?” he asked.

“Much better,” was the reply, sounding surprisingly genuine.

“Good!” Zack said. There was a slight pause.

“Thanks for coming for me today,” Sephiroth said. “I wouldn’t have managed on my own. If I had had to wait for someone else… that would have been humiliating.”

“Don’t mention it,” Zack reassured him. “It’s not like I had a full schedule today.” There was a moment’s pause. Zack got to his feet. “Well, I’d better…,”

“No, please… stay for a while,” Sephiroth asked. “Unless you’re busy, of course,” he added. Zack shook his head and sat down again.

“No, I don’t have anything else to do, I can stay.”

There was a short pause, then Zack heard Sephiroth pull the covers aside.

“Are you getting up?” he asked.

“I need to brush my teeth, got this taste in my mouth.” He heard the sound of bare feet crossing the floor and saw a dark form pass him. Sephiroth opened the bathroom door, switched on the light and closed the door behind him. Zack waited.

When Sephiroth reentered the bedroom, he was dressed in a white bathrobe with the Shinra logo on the left breastpocket. He shut the light in the bathroom off, crossed the floor and sat down in the chair opposite Zack’s, facing the night outside. Zack regarded him through the faint light, not knowing what to say, but nevertheless feeling at ease with the silence.

“Some say this city has three Novembers a year because of all the rain. Too bad it only has one December,” Sephiroth said. Zack turned and looked at him and smiled. They both watched the snow falling leisurely through the beams of sodium light.

“Why haven’t you gone home for New Year’s?” Sephiroth asked. Zack shrugged.

“There’s no point in going home just for a few days,” he said. “Unless I’m lucky to hitch a ride with a Shinra Osprey going all the way south, I’ll spend two days on the train, then two days at home and two more to get back.”

“If you would like more days off for traveling, that could be arranged.”

“Thanks, but no, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. Not many of the people I grew up with in Gongaga are left, it’s a small place, they’ve moved to the cities to find work. I see my parents in the summer, but there is little reason to go back during New Year’s. The friends I have are here now.”

Sephiroth looked at him with clear eyes, his face calm. “Besides…,” Zack continued. “I have trouble leaving this place. When I first got here I couldn’t imagine thinking of Midgard as home because of the air pollution and the bad weather, but now I‘m reluctant to leave.”There was a short pause, an absence of words which only seemed to add to the ease of the moment. Sephiroth smiled, his teeth white in the half darkness.

“It’s Midgard,” he said. “It grows on you. Every time you’re some place else, you want to go back, even though when you’re here, you want to go some place sunny and clean.” Zack laughed and nodded.

“Yeah that’s it,” he said, relieved to hear someone understood. After a moment’s thought he added: “I suppose that’s what home should feel like.” Sephiroth made a little smile and expressed his consent with a nod.

Zack smiled, no longer regretting his decision of staying in Midgard over the holiday. He sat easy in the chair and gazed out of the window and the golden snow, feeling the light of thousands of stars shining overhead.