first row, two across
Jun. 30th, 2020 11:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seleniasTitle: first row, two across
Fandom: Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core
Characters/pairing: Zack/Tseng, pre-slash
Rating: T
Word Count: 764
A/N: Zack's such a friendly busy body, I enjoy his partnership with Tseng a lot. There's a lot of things they have in common I want to unpack in more works, though it's hard to bridge Tseng's personality as presented in the OG with his persona in Crisis Core. It makes me feel like Zack's death was very trans-formative for him, or other, worse things were simultaneously taking place.
This story occurs during the end of the Banora Mission in CC.
-
-
Tseng talks with the pilot then returns with a headset for him.
The copter’s noise becomes a dull hum after the roar of the fire, but the bombs dropping overhead like lead weights still make his ears ring with their destruction. Zack’s seen things at this point in his military career, but the charred houses are a failure screaming back at him. Angeal’s mother will have the whole town over head, a burial for criminals and losers. He’s pretty sure that’s how ghosts are made.
Zack watches the flames until they fall out of sight -- not long, as the speed of the copter isn’t doing the strain on his neck any favors. When his eyes start to hurt he rubs his thumbs into the creases and hopes the ache abates. He sees something else.
There’s parents in a grave, bodies stacked on top of each other from other unwelcome visitors. Mass graves -- he’s seen them in Wutai, when there were too many deaths at once and no place to keep them. In Shin-Ra there were trucks with freezers, and sometimes the labs -- though he wondered what purpose that served. Shin-Ra style is starting to mean more than just company secrets. He knows what the old Avalanche looked like -- he can’t really get the image of a dead uniform out of his head -- and Shin-Ra’s the bigger, meaner cousin. Related. Maybe.
Tseng’s got dirt all the way up to his elbow, smeared gray along his bicep.
He’d had to dig deep.
“Were you close?” Zack asks.
Tseng looked dully at him, processing, mouth hardly moving at all. “I knew them. I sent them here.”
“Angeal’s mother said they were occupied over a month ago. When did you lose contact?”
“Two weeks ago,” Tseng says.
Zack imagines what a two week old corpse looks like. Bloated, pale white, starting to swell up like a balloon while the insects move in. He can feel himself getting green at the edges. “Don’t think about it,” Tseng says. “It’s for me to worry about.”
“Sephiroth was right to refuse,” Zack blurts. “I couldn’t reach Angeal at all. He wouldn’t even look at me.”
“He’s guilty. You’re his student. Doubtless, he doesn’t want you involved.”
“Tough shit,” Zack says. He scrubs his face, irritable. His whole body’s humming from the blades overhead. A headache is starting to form between his brows, sloppy and obvious when he moves his head too fast -- and he realizes all at once there’s a wetness creeping in. Ridiculous.
Helpfully, Tseng leans against the constraints of his seat-belt to place a clipboard in his lap. “There’s a crossword in the back,” he says.
Zack looks at him, then at the board. Starts flipping through to the back pages, mind whirling, brain threatening to explode out his ears and his mouth and every synapse in his body wanting to fly to pieces. Not so great when there’s a whole lot of space between him and the ground. No need to wreck a chopper for the sake of a tantrum.
...There is a crossword in the back. He stares at it. “...A seven letter word for something bright that emits brilliance.”
“Splendor. Radiance. Grandeur.” Zack scribbles them off to the side, checks the next box down.
“A three letter word for a total.”
“Sum. You know that one.”
“Yeah,” he says blandly. “It was a test for you. You passed. Congrats. A thirteen letter word for an intersection of sorts.”
“...Perpendicular.”
He hums. Exactly how he’s feeling. Like he just hit the crossroad from hell and was trampled over by the cross point, the little proverbial dot on the map where a town used to be -- there’s still a faint heat lingering in the cab, slightly acridic, like maybe something more than a shiny veneer was stripped off when the bombs went off. Tseng’s forehead looks damp.
“There’ll be time to mourn later,” Tseng says point blank, the pause stretching. Placating words. For a little boy.
You do this a lot? he wants to ask. Distract people from imminent disaster with word puzzles while you close your eyes against the burning? He doesn’t. He doesn’t think about Angeal either.
“I have letters for Sephiroth,” he says instead. Taps the blue pen against his lower lip, which had been in Tseng’s hands previous, the hands that were handling dead bodies not an hour ago. Now moving on to other things. Reports. Reconnaissance. Next priority. Me.
“Is there a column for that?”
Zack scratches his chin, readjusts the headset over his ears. “Not yet,” he sighs. “But there will be.”
Fandom: Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core
Characters/pairing: Zack/Tseng, pre-slash
Rating: T
Word Count: 764
A/N: Zack's such a friendly busy body, I enjoy his partnership with Tseng a lot. There's a lot of things they have in common I want to unpack in more works, though it's hard to bridge Tseng's personality as presented in the OG with his persona in Crisis Core. It makes me feel like Zack's death was very trans-formative for him, or other, worse things were simultaneously taking place.
This story occurs during the end of the Banora Mission in CC.
-
-
Tseng talks with the pilot then returns with a headset for him.
The copter’s noise becomes a dull hum after the roar of the fire, but the bombs dropping overhead like lead weights still make his ears ring with their destruction. Zack’s seen things at this point in his military career, but the charred houses are a failure screaming back at him. Angeal’s mother will have the whole town over head, a burial for criminals and losers. He’s pretty sure that’s how ghosts are made.
Zack watches the flames until they fall out of sight -- not long, as the speed of the copter isn’t doing the strain on his neck any favors. When his eyes start to hurt he rubs his thumbs into the creases and hopes the ache abates. He sees something else.
There’s parents in a grave, bodies stacked on top of each other from other unwelcome visitors. Mass graves -- he’s seen them in Wutai, when there were too many deaths at once and no place to keep them. In Shin-Ra there were trucks with freezers, and sometimes the labs -- though he wondered what purpose that served. Shin-Ra style is starting to mean more than just company secrets. He knows what the old Avalanche looked like -- he can’t really get the image of a dead uniform out of his head -- and Shin-Ra’s the bigger, meaner cousin. Related. Maybe.
Tseng’s got dirt all the way up to his elbow, smeared gray along his bicep.
He’d had to dig deep.
“Were you close?” Zack asks.
Tseng looked dully at him, processing, mouth hardly moving at all. “I knew them. I sent them here.”
“Angeal’s mother said they were occupied over a month ago. When did you lose contact?”
“Two weeks ago,” Tseng says.
Zack imagines what a two week old corpse looks like. Bloated, pale white, starting to swell up like a balloon while the insects move in. He can feel himself getting green at the edges. “Don’t think about it,” Tseng says. “It’s for me to worry about.”
“Sephiroth was right to refuse,” Zack blurts. “I couldn’t reach Angeal at all. He wouldn’t even look at me.”
“He’s guilty. You’re his student. Doubtless, he doesn’t want you involved.”
“Tough shit,” Zack says. He scrubs his face, irritable. His whole body’s humming from the blades overhead. A headache is starting to form between his brows, sloppy and obvious when he moves his head too fast -- and he realizes all at once there’s a wetness creeping in. Ridiculous.
Helpfully, Tseng leans against the constraints of his seat-belt to place a clipboard in his lap. “There’s a crossword in the back,” he says.
Zack looks at him, then at the board. Starts flipping through to the back pages, mind whirling, brain threatening to explode out his ears and his mouth and every synapse in his body wanting to fly to pieces. Not so great when there’s a whole lot of space between him and the ground. No need to wreck a chopper for the sake of a tantrum.
...There is a crossword in the back. He stares at it. “...A seven letter word for something bright that emits brilliance.”
“Splendor. Radiance. Grandeur.” Zack scribbles them off to the side, checks the next box down.
“A three letter word for a total.”
“Sum. You know that one.”
“Yeah,” he says blandly. “It was a test for you. You passed. Congrats. A thirteen letter word for an intersection of sorts.”
“...Perpendicular.”
He hums. Exactly how he’s feeling. Like he just hit the crossroad from hell and was trampled over by the cross point, the little proverbial dot on the map where a town used to be -- there’s still a faint heat lingering in the cab, slightly acridic, like maybe something more than a shiny veneer was stripped off when the bombs went off. Tseng’s forehead looks damp.
“There’ll be time to mourn later,” Tseng says point blank, the pause stretching. Placating words. For a little boy.
You do this a lot? he wants to ask. Distract people from imminent disaster with word puzzles while you close your eyes against the burning? He doesn’t. He doesn’t think about Angeal either.
“I have letters for Sephiroth,” he says instead. Taps the blue pen against his lower lip, which had been in Tseng’s hands previous, the hands that were handling dead bodies not an hour ago. Now moving on to other things. Reports. Reconnaissance. Next priority. Me.
“Is there a column for that?”
Zack scratches his chin, readjusts the headset over his ears. “Not yet,” he sighs. “But there will be.”
