The Park, Friday Morning

[intraspective]

Returning to Fandom made the vulnerable place between her shoulder blades itch. Not that it showed, because with everything, everything, Ino was locked down and practically barricaded behind her Turk persona.

In hindsight, that probably wasn't the best reaction. Not for her, nor for him.

"We've arrived," she reported to Tseng, her voice chilly, then shut her PHS and took a moment to just breathe. She probably should have stayed on the line for further orders. Ino decided she didn't give a damn. He could cope with a little insubordination given the circumstances.

The park was so green. It was almost dizzying after the endless greys and blacks and darkness of Midgar.

They should probably go find a set of rooms at the hotel, at least until she found them a more secure location.

But, given circumstances, she was disinclined to force Zack to move on very quickly. If the green was shocking to her then it had to be moreso for him. Her throat tightened and she swallowed but said nothing.

Zack	Zack wasn't saying anything either. At least, not right away. He had his hands on his hips as he looked around the park, eyes drifting over trees and water and sky. He had thought, once, that he missed the sky back when he'd been living in Midgar. He had no idea what missing the sky was like, in Midgar. "I want to say nothing has changed, here," he said, at length. "But I barely remember this place. How long has it been?"
Ino	His voice was like a salt in a wound. Her neck and shoulders were a mass of knots just standing there, letting him... move at his own pace. "Three and a half years, Gaia time," she said, still in that awful, chilly voice she couldn't seem to shake. "It's 2013 here. Two and a half years." This would be so much easier if she could just let herself cry. Ino knelt to pluck a flower from the dirt and stuck it in her hair. A small bit of whimsy that she didn't feel.
Zack	Zack turned mako-blue eyes back toward Ino, looking her over, a thoughtful frown on his lips. He had a friend back in Midgar who would've appreciated just how easily flowers grew, here. He wondered if Aerith knew he was still alive. Three and a half years was a long time to wait. "It doesn't feel like so long," he noted. "But... it feels like longer, all at the same time. It's hard to explain." He crouched down, running gloved fingers through the grass. "How long did Tseng say we should stay here?"
Ino	She wondered what he saw, when he looked at her. The Turk? Or Ino? "Until we hear otherwise from him," Ino replied, not meeting his gaze. "It's not safe for you on Gaia." It was a miracle they'd gotten him out. Her mind knew that. Her feelings were more conflicted.
Zack	Zack had fallen quiet again, looking her over. There was Ino's face, almost the same as he remembered it. And below that face, the uniform of a Turk. He was finding it impossible to reconcile the two. "Was it ever safe for me on Gaia?" These were the questions that kept him awake at night, these days. "They're afraid I'll go back for Cloud, aren't they?"
Ino	"They're right to worry, aren't they?" Ino picked another flower and twirled it absently in her hands. Something to do. She was tempted to wake Silly to have her chicobo be a distraction. That seemed cowardly, though, so she didn't. "And SOLDIER was never safe."
Zack	Zack picked a single blade of grass, contenting himself to stay put and just stare at it. It was easier to look at than Ino was. It wasn't wearing that uniform. "Of course they're right to worry. He shouldn't be there. I shouldn't have been there." It took some doing, but he managed to refrain from just shuddering outright. "The Turks can't keep me from going back forever. Not even you."
Ino	Her flower was slowly losing petals as she twisted it, unusually cruel to something she treated with kindness normally. "When you get sick of staying, what are you going to do?" Her blue eyes were as fathomless as the ocean. There was a faint, unfeeling smile on her face as she added, "Kill me to get to him?"
Zack	"Would you kill me to keep me from him?" There wasn't even a heartbeat between her question and his. Zack looked up at her, blue eyes cold and, if only for an instant, angry. "Don't do me any favors. Tseng wants me here to keep me out of trouble. Nobody but me is going to extend that same courtesy to Cloud."
Ino	"I don't have any favors to do for you," she said flatly, tightly, crushing the stem of her flower against her palm. "And you're right." About Tseng. About Cloud. She didn't know if he was right about her and him.
Zack	It would have chilled him once to even think as much, but the Zack of this very instant was fairly certain that he was. Fandom Island had been a comfortable place to spend his time, once. Now it was a sprawling cage. He knew cages to see them, no matter what shape they came in and how much sky you could see from where you were sitting on the concrete floor. "You're my new warden, then?"
Ino	She laughed softly and ducked her head, peering up at him in a pose that might have been coy if it hadn't been ever so slightly... off. "If I said I wasn't, you'd never believe me. Think what you want." It wasn't funny. It hurt her. None of the pain showed though. Ino didn't dare crack.
Zack	"It's difficult not to think that when you're dressed like one of them," Zack noted, his own voice carefully neutral as he tugged the blade of grass that he'd been holding in two. "I don't have any love for that uniform these days."
Ino	"I didn't have anything but the uniform," she said flatly. Once he'd 'died', she really hadn't. "It's given me a home, Zack." Even if he didn't understand that.
Zack	"Ah." Zack was tempted to leave it at that. He dropped his blade of grass back onto the ground, and then reached down again. His hand paused briefly, hovering over a little yellow flower. He stared at it quietly for a moment, and then reached down and picked it. "I'm sorry." That it was the home that she'd found. Not for leaving. Him leaving was at least partly on the heads of those other parts of her home, after all.
Ino	It was. She couldn't even deny it. "Don't be," she said quietly, a little less frost in her voice. "The choices I made... I can live with them." It was the ones that she hadn't been aware she'd made, like leaving him to rot, that burned and blistered.
Zack	"Well, good for you, then." That wasn't sarcastic. It wasn't even bitter. It was just flat. Tired. He was keeping his eye on that little yellow flower, now. The church had been full of ones like it, in that wreckage of Midgar that they'd wandered through, once. He'd dreamed about that church more than once, with his sword - Angeal's sword - standing as a monument to his life. "No regrets. What does that feel like?"
Ino	"No regrets?" she echoed incredulously. "You think I have none?" Her internal litany of them started up in the back of her mind. Ino squashed it down, refusing to dwell. "I had a home while you were gone," Ino said, struggling to keep her voice from turning vicious. "That doesn't mean everything was fine."
Zack	Zack glanced up from his flower, took in her black suit, and winced, looking back down again quickly. "So, are we supposed to be staying together, now that we're here?" Yes, it was a topic change. But it looped around again in his head, intermingling with the conversation at hand. He hadn't had a proper talk with another human being in years. If this particular discussion was running itself around in circles, that was his excuse.
Ino	Her shoulders slumped, once he wasn't looking. "Yeah," she said, her voice back to frost. "How else am I supposed to keep an eye on you?" Ino supposed she could stalk him with her mind, but that... that seemed worse than staying together.
Zack	Some violations were far less forgivable than others. Zack would rather live with her right there in the same room as her than have her prodding around in his head. Inside of his head wasn't a pleasant place, these days. "I don't need a babysitter," he noted, idly. "I was doing pretty well before Nibelheim. And it's not like I can book a portal back to Gaia without your family knowing."
Ino	Her eyes flickered over to him, then away. "How stupid do you think I am?" she asked. As if he wouldn't find someone her family didn't have tabs on and get them to call. Right.
Zack	"You trust the Turks," he replied, as though that was all the answer he needed.
Ino	"I am a Turk," she said tightly.
Zack	"Then you should know better." What else could he say? Maybe the Turks looked after their own, but he'd been Tseng's best friend, once, and Cissnei's too. What good had that done him?
Ino	"Well, goddamn," she said, in a drawling voice that held echoes of Reno's tones, at his most sarcastic, "I guess you've got it all figured out then. It's not like it was the Turks that got you out or anything, no. They just went, nah, let's let him go, right?"
Zack	"And you think Hojo carried Cloud and I down into that basement on his own?" Come on, Ino. Make that one better. "Should I be thanking you? The Turks managed to talk my way out of a hell that they dragged me into in the first place? I suppose I owe them now." He was smiling again. Around his mouth, it was the same, warm smile he'd always worn. It didn't touch his eyes at all. His eyes were just empty, looking back at his flower. It was already starting to wilt. He shouldn't have picked it.
Ino	At least his flower wasn't the mangled, sorry thing that Ino dropped to the ground. The worst part was, he was right. But she hadn't known. She felt crumpled and brittle and hated herself for feeling that way. "Owe them or not, it's up to you! But stop blaming me for what you went through. You think I'd have carried you down there? You think I was hanging around, going 'oh, that's a great idea, I don't need him any longer, it's not like he's my whole bloody world or anything!' You think that? And stop smiling!"
Zack	"Of course not," Zack said simply, still staring down at his flower. "But you're wearing your pledge of allegiance to them for the world to see. And you're keeping me from going back. What do you want me to think? What would you think? I'm glad they gave you a home." And he meant that part. There was a break in his voice as he said it, a waver. Something small and damaged and bleeding out from the inside that he never intended to let show. He was so, so happy that she had been given a place to belong, that she hadn't been on her own while he'd been unable to be there. And it made him want to cry. "But you're them too."
Ino	"Who am I supposed to be?" she demanded. "What was I supposed to do? All alone, not even eighteen, in a world that wasn't mine. I knew the work, I knew the people, it gave me stability 'cause if I hadn't had that, Zack, I'd be dead by now, by my own hand." It had been a close call anyway, after she'd been told he'd died. "Fandom weren't an option, none of my friends were reachable, you were gone. I had nothing else." She searched him, wishing she could read his expression, knowing she could read his mind and yet giving him that privacy because he deserved it. "I didn't even have hope. Who am I supposed to be?"
Zack	"Be whoever you need to be, Ino," Zack replied simply, suddenly and almost desperately lifting his hand to pull the petals from his flower one by one. "Be whoever you are. If that's a Turk... then that's a Turk. I haven't been around for a few years. I don't really get a say in this." He shrugged his shoulders as he plucked another petal. "I see that suit before waking up screaming at night. It's difficult to see you wearing it, that's all." That was probably about as much as he was ever going to say on the matter. And probably about as close as he would ever come to admitting just how damaged he was after Hojo's experiments.
Ino	The idea of going without her suit was almost like she'd be walking around naked. It protected her, in more ways than one. "Would it help," she asked quietly, "if I didn't wear it while here? I'd still be just a Turk." Didn't she deserve to be uncomfortable after everything he'd been through?
Zack	Zack wasn't going to leap on that offer, though it was a near thing. He'd gotten so far as to look up at her again, to open his mouth and to pull in a breath. He clamped his mouth shut again a moment later and looked back down at his flower. "You would be," he agreed. "But you wouldn't be constantly reminding me of it all the time."
Ino	"And yet, you can't even ask," she said, turning away and glancing up at the sky. "Wouldn't want to be thankful to a Turk, I guess."
Zack	"If that's what you want to think it is." It wasn't nearly so simple as that. Nothing was ever so simple as that. That much was a hard lesson to learn, but Zack finally had. He'd nearly died to learn it. He'd lost his freedom and he'd lost Angeal and now he had lost Cloud to learn it. Ino was sitting right there, fiercely clinging to the enemy. He was pretty sure he'd lost her, too.
Ino	The Turks weren’t the enemy. They weren’t. Though she couldn’t blame him for thinking they were. “How else am I supposed to take it?” she asked, one hand on her hip, the other dangling down her side. “It’s like you’d rather suffer than be here. Like maybe you’d rather be dead than have a chance at life since I haven’t heard anything that means you don’t want to throw it all away. You want to ask me to change and you can’t even bring yourself to do that. I’d say it’s not the Zack I knew but, yeah, it is.” And damn it all, but it destroyed her in ways she hadn’t even suspected she could still be destroyed. Maybe that was the problem. It was all about him. It was all about her, though, in her own head. She hadn’t had time to come to grips with any of it. No more than he had.
Zack	"If I had my way, I would be marching back to Nibelheim and getting Cloud out of there myself," Zack replied. "If that meant that I was on the run, if that meant that ShinRa would hunt us down for it... I guess that's what it would mean." And a shrug, as though it was really no big deal at all. Some things really were that simple in Zack's mind, apparently. Loyalty to his friends had always been one of those things. It always would be. "I don't know what I can ask you right now, Ino. I know the answer isn't 'anything.' The last time I saw you, it was."
Ino	She realized, in a moment of painful clarity, that Reno—Fandom’s Reno—hadn’t lied to her about the moment of Zack’s death. Years, he’d promised her. But that meant Zack had been tortured for those last years. Ino’d thought Reno had lied to her, out of some bizarre attempt to spare her feelings. It was… complicated… to realize he hadn’t. “You’d die,” she said simply. “If that’s what you did, you’d die.” That had to be it. Somehow, in the original timeline, he’d gotten out anyway… and died. With a sigh, she turned back to face him. “It’s not ‘anything’,” Ino said agreeably, amicably. “But you won’t know if it’s not ‘nothing’ until you ask.”
Zack	"Help me save him." Zack was looking up at her with a sort of cool ferocity in his sky-blue eyes. "He's there because I wasn't strong enough, he got wrapped up in my mess with Sephiroth and Angeal and Genesis. He shouldn't be there. Help me get Cloud out of there." She wanted him to ask. There it was. The one thing he wanted most right then.
Ino	Why was she not surprised? Her face was expressionless. "I can ask Tseng what's being done," Ino said. "I can tell him that, if we don't, you'll do something stupid." That wasn't going to be enough though, and she knew it. "I won't help you get yourself killed. I won't put myself in a situation where I have to kill my family to help you." He had to understand that, didn't he? "I can't gamble my whole life on a guy I don't care about."
Zack	"Well, then let me gamble my life on Gaia," Zack replied, his voice still soft, still even. "If you won't risk your family, then at least let me do what I can to save our home. You were there too, Ino. You saw Edge. It wasn't me who kept Meteor from completely destroying that future Gaia. I wasn't even in the picture, anymore. I was... dust, somewhere. A whisper in the Lifestream." For someone who so often played perky and stupid, Zack sometimes had a terrifying capacity for remembering the things that mattered most.
Ino	"That's what I want to prevent," she said, looking away, her hair falling over her face. "I've always wanted to prevent that." Only everything she wanted to prevent was messy and tangled and complicated. "I won't let you go off on a suicide charge," Ino said firmly, lifting her gaze to meet his. "You're not well. I could take you." She'd have to cheat outrageously to do so, but she thought she could. "You wouldn't make it. You didn't make it, in another world." Had he figured that out yet?
Zack	"You don't think that other me didn't put up a fight, do you?" Zack almost sounded affronted, at that. "You could take me right now, sure. I could probably still take out a good chunk of ShinRa's Infantry without batting an eye." He let the remains of his flower fall to the ground. She loves me. "The other world did make it, even if I didn't. Maybe even because I didn't. Everywhere I go, things seem to break, Ino. Haven't you noticed?"
Ino	"I haven't!" she said sharply. "I haven't noticed that at all! Nothing's broken because of you and I don't see why you need to break all over again just to have a chance that the world will be different! It's already different! There's no way of knowing the fallout so why the hell would you want to make it the way things were?"
Zack	"Angeal," Zack said, a little too softly. "Sephiroth. Now Cloud. How is Wutai doing these days? That was on me. If there's anything I can fix..." He pulled in a deep breath. "If he saved the world before, why are you so confident that it's okay to leave him there to rot now?"
Ino	"Fix yourself," Ino told him, an edge in her voice. "Do that first. Worry about everything else after." Hurt flickered in her eyes, briefly, then was gone. "As for why it's okay for him to rot, you just wouldn't believe me if I told you." She didn't care about Cloud. It had always been Zack, to her.
Zack	"I wouldn't," Zack replied, softly. "Because it's not okay." He pulled in a deep breath, and then shook his head and pulled himself to his feet. He reached back, then, and let his hand rest on the handle of his sword. Just... rest there. He wasn't going to draw it, but he needed the contact with it. It was something real, something that he understood. "But if what I need to do is get stronger, get better... I will. Right now, you can hold me back. You won't be able to forever."
Ino	She took a deep breath, repressed a shiver, and straightened an already straight back. "I won't be," Ino admitted. "I'm not the kind of fighter that could take a healthy you on and ever expect to win in a fair fight." Even a dirty one would be dicey, at his level. Chewing on her lip, Ino paused a moment before saying, "Tell you what, though, you get better, and I mean really better, not just a little, and when you go storm the gates of hell, I won't stand in your way." Though she'd tell Tseng to get the hell out of the way.
Zack	Zack was silent for a moment, eyes closed, hand on the Buster Sword's hilt. He seemed torn, somehow, at those words. It was difficult to take her at her word, knowing she was a Turk. Knowing she was one of them. But with his eyes closed, even just for a few seconds, he could listen to her and hear Ino. "... Then I guess I have a lot of work to do, don't I?"
Ino	Her smile was sad but there. After all, he couldn't see it, so there was no harm in it. "Yeah," she said quietly. "You do."
Zack	He was quiet again at that, just standing there in silence, finally drawing his sword and holding the cool metal of the side of it against his forehead. It was heavy in his hand, almost too heavy for him to lift. Still too heavy for most people to even think about carrying. "Will you help me do that much, knowing that I'm going to go running back once I've recovered?"
Ino	She clenched her hands tightly. "Yeah," she said, eyes fathomless. "If you're healthy, I think you could do what you want." Ino had always believed that.
Zack	Zack turned to look at her, still holding his sword in front of himself before nodding, once, and then sheathing it at his back again. There was no fancy twirl of it, today. He couldn't handle one even if he'd wanted to. "Thank you, then, Ino."
Ino	"Don't thank me," she said, with a mirthless laugh. "Just... don't." If she'd looked for him, he wouldn't have had to suffer so long. Thanks weren't something she deserved.

[Preplayed with the always amazing puppy_fair. And the post is open!]

Comments

[puppy_fair]

She didn't want him to thank her? ... Fine, Zack supposed. Things like thanking people tended to be force of habit anyway.

So he picked another flower, and he contented himself to sit there in silence.

He couldn't get over how much these flowers looked like yellow flowers that he already knew.