damned_institute | Day 52: Game Room

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Day 52: Game Room

Lunch had taken his mind from his worries, if only for a few minutes. But after the intercom sounded and the nurses began leading patients onto the next activity, one look at the bulletin board brought everything back in full force. No replies from Ashton, Dias or Dad. By now Claude felt like he was practically counting down until the end of the day, when he was going to have to finally grapple with the real possibility that most of his friends from before Landel's, as well as his own father, had fallen victim to the institute.

And now he was going to have to deal with his mother being here on top of that. It didn't seem like a coincidence that she'd show up right when his father's whereabouts were so up in the air. But what did it mean? Why couldn't Landel leave his family out of this?

Normally, the announcement about new video games would have made him perk up, but his eyebrows only knit together with concern as his nurse led him into the game room. That didn't seem to stop her from trying to get him to unwind, though.

"Oh, come now, Thomas, you've worn that expression for most of the day!" she told him with a frown. "Why don't you have a bit of fun now that your eyes are all better? I'm sure you could use it."

The last thing he wanted was to be reminded of his "sleep studies", he darkly thought to himself. But before he could protest, his nurse had sat him down in front of one of the television screens. There was an old gaming console, one Claude had never seen before, and he glanced at her with a confused expression. "Go on," she encouraged as she placed one of the controllers in his hands. "I know how much you enjoy these kinds of things. Someone will come play with you soon, too, I'm sure. Doesn't that sound nice?"

He didn't have time to answer her, because she'd soon bustled off to tend to some of the other patients. Claude watched her leave with a sigh. He realized the daytime staff meant well, which made knowing what they turned into at night even worse to think about. But now he was just being negative for the sake of it, wasn't he?

Taking in a small breath, he reached over to the console and turned it on. As long as he was waiting for some kind of answer from the bulletin, there probably wasn't much he could do except pass the time. Claude watched the title screen appear on the television, his expression growing more curious in spite of himself. Super Mario Bros....

[For Prussia!]

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When Cloud made that statement, even though it was mainly in jest, Zack realized himself that it was probably true. If the two of them sparred right here, right now, who would even win? He remembered the way his friend had swung that huge sword around when they'd been fighting that Tonberry, and it was nothing to sneeze at. It just went to show that joining SOLDIER wasn't the only way to become that strong.

Although that brought up yet another question. Cloud had been wearing a First Class uniform when they had suddenly ended up on that airship the other night. Did that mean he'd actually joined up with Shin-Ra again to get to the top of the ranks? There was no way that they would have allowed it, unless he'd disguised himself. So maybe he'd stolen the uniform for some reason? None of the explanations were really making sense, though.

Zack was jerked out of his thoughts by Cloud's question. He'd barely heard what his friend had said before that, except that he apparently hadn't done anything the night before either. "Poker," he eventually responded. "Five card draw. We'll keep things simple." As Zack picked up his five cards and looked them over, he saw that he had a decent hand. He had a pair, but the other three cards could go into the discard pile.

"So," he started as casually as he could, "I had a few questions. You know, about the other night, and just... about things in general." Was Cloud going to try to weasel his way out of this? Zack hoped not. That was just going to make it ten times harder on both of them.

Poker was simple enough, even if Cloud had never been terribly great at it. He was fairly certain he remembered the rules (and if he didn't he was sure Zack would remind him). The cards were just a front, though, clearly. His friend had other things on his mind, and he was making them known right off the bat. Never mind their exploits the night before. Those seemed to have been waved aside as the fault of the Institute, and understandably so.

He'd expected this to happen sooner or later (and really, he was surprised it hadn't been sooner). It had just been one distraction after another, hadn't it? The portals, Aerith... Cloud glanced at his hand. It was... pretty damn terrible. At least he thought it was terrible. What were all the combinations he could make again?

"So ask." He was going to have to spill it all eventually anyway. They might as well get it over with. The longer he put it off, the more awkward it was going to be once they got around to it. This was something he'd learned from experience.

It looked like Cloud was still trying to decide which cards to keep and which to toss away for new ones, and so Zack left him to that; he was much more interested in picking his friend's brain for some answers. It was difficult to tell if Cloud was reluctant to answer or just resigned, but either way he wasn't refusing him from the start or anything. Zack was glad for that, since he figured an explanation or two was the least that he deserved after everything that had happened.

"Well, I guess I'll start at the beginning," he said with a sigh as he leaned back in his seat, holding his cards in a fan while still taking care to make sure that Cloud wouldn't peek. (He doubted the blond would ever cheat, but it was force of habit. Most SOLDIERs weren't above trying to crane their necks in all directions to catch a glimpse of someone's hand.)

"I know that you... met up with all of those people, a lot of who I knew too, and then went on to stop Sephiroth from - what, destroying the world? But how did you even run into all of them? What made you guys meet up and decide to stop him together?" He'd never gotten the full picture there, and it was Aerith that he was the most curious about. Zack had never really gotten the chance to introduce his two friends to each other, so the fact that they'd met up after his death almost seemed like some sort of fate.

Cloud held back a sigh. Yeah, this was... this was going to be tough. Did he just dump it all out at once, or did he try to just reveal little pieces at a time? He needed to tell him all of it, but he had to take it at a decent pace, right? Otherwise it was just going to be one big confusing mess.

Though, to be fair, it was going to be one big confusing mess no matter how he explained it.

"I told you about how Tifa helped me, right?" He really wasn't interested in the cards, and he set his hand aside face down. "She found me and recognized me, and I recognized her. She was already a member of that resistance group. Thing is... I didn't really recognize myself."

That sounded silly after he said it, and Cloud rubbed at the back of his head. "I mean, I was pretty messed up. I'm surprised I could even recall which way was up and which way was down. I knew my own name at least, but aside from that..." and here went nothing... "I thought I was you, Zack. Or rather, my past history became a mix of yours and mine. For a while, I didn't even remember you existed. Tifa did, of course, and you could tell I was confusing the hell out of her whenever I talked about the past, but she just went along with it because she didn't want to confuse me even more."

At first, it was easy enough to follow what Cloud was saying. Tifa had decided to join that AVALANCHE group after her Shin-Ra had basically marched right into her hometown and ruined her life, and when Cloud had reconnected with her he had obviously been beyond out of it. Seeing how Zack hadn't even gotten a word out of him during their trek across a continent and a half, it was shocking that Tifa had managed to talk to him at all.

But then, as Cloud went on to explain, Zack paused and stared at him, also forgetting the cards as he set them down. He didn't know if it was due to what Hojo had put Cloud through, or if his own shattered mind had just tried to pick up the pieces and had gotten confused, but...

What really hit the hardest was that Cloud apparently hadn't even remembered him, the one who had gotten him out of that basement and back to people who could care for him. While Zack knew that Cloud was grateful now, it was still hard to hear that after everything he'd done. He was relieved it had worked out in the end, of course, but it was a hard thing to be blindsided with all of a sudden.

Couldn't Cloud have mentioned it earlier? Zack realized it had to be hard to break that kind of news, but now he felt like he'd been lied to for the past few days.

After a long stretch of time, Zack finally looked up again, his bright eyes meeting Cloud's. "When did you realize? How did you snap out of it?" He could have asked more clarifying questions, or blamed Cloud for it, or done a number of other things, but there wouldn't be any point to it. Cloud had worked past all of that and had recovered, and so Zack was going to focus on that.

Besides, he really didn't even know how to respond to or cope with the rest of it. His own living legacy. He remembered the words, but hearing about the result filled him with too many conflicting emotions than he could handle.

"It was... Sephiroth, actually. And Tifa. Mostly Tifa." The blond ran a hand through his hair, spikes sticking out every which way. He should have said all this sooner, that much was clear, but no time had just seemed right for it! And at least he wasn't waiting any longer than this, right? At least he was telling him now.

He shook his head. Relating this all was a bit painful. "Sephiroth took advantage of the holes in my memory for a while, made me believe I was something I wasn't - a clone of him, genetically created in a lab without even a number like all the others. It didn't help that Hojo kept referring to me as a failed experiment. Tifa helped me realize that we both shared memories of our childhood, and that I couldn't have just been created. She helped me piece together all the missing pieces. You, me, Sephiroth, everything."

Cloud looked up, eyes somewhat wet. "I'm really sorry, Zack. I should have told you some of this sooner. I just... didn't know where to start." And there was still so much else he could tell him, but what he'd shared just then might be hard enough to take in as it was.

Just hearing Sephiroth's name once again was almost enough to make Zack toss his cards to the side and slam his fist down on the table. It wouldn't have bothered him so much if he hadn't once looked up to the man with such admiration, only to have that trust ripped into shreds and then tossed in his face. He hadn't wanted to turn his sword on the general; he hadn't wanted to turn his sword on Angeal or Genesis, either. But things had always gone from bad to worse, and it seemed like that pattern had only continued after his death.

Considering how bad Cloud's mako poisoning had been, Zack could believe that he'd been able to be convinced that he was a creation rather than a real person with real memories. And with Shin-Ra's track record, it wasn't that impossible, either. Zack felt terrible that Cloud had been forced to work through all of that uncertainty, but he was extremely grateful to Tifa for helping him out of it.

"I'm going to have to thank her personally for that," he said with a small smile, quickly regathering his composure as he always did. And yet Zack didn't keep things lighthearted for too long. This wasn't really a situation where he could constantly play it cool. So when Cloud apologized, he only shook his head. "It's fine. I'm sorry. That I couldn't be there to help you through that. That I... left you to try and work through it on your own." Cloud had obviously gotten himself together in the end, but it had probably cost him a lot of strife. His last name was about as apt as it could be.

Cloud could tell Zack was taking all of this in and wasn't too happy about it. He couldn't blame him, after the incident with Sephiroth. Hearing that the man had continued to mess with his friends after his death couldn't sit right with him. But he shook his head at that apology.

"Don't. You couldn't have known. I wouldn't be alive right now if it wasn't for you." Would he have preferred that Zack hadn't died then? Of course. But it was hard to look back on everything that had happened and not see it as inevitable, painful as the thought was. It was enough to have him back now. That was more than he'd ever dreamt of.

He couldn't say he was too comfortable with the idea of Zack talking to Tifa about this, but he knew it would happen sooner or later. She'd probably handle the even more embarrassing aspects of it.

Even though Zack knew that Cloud's words were completely sincere, it was hard for him to take them to heart in light of everything he'd just learned. He did nod, to show that he'd heard and processed what Cloud had said, but in the end all he could do was move onto the next question.

"So, you thought you were me... sort of," he said. "Is that how you ended up running into Aerith? And Yuffie?" Cloud hadn't met any of them back when Zack had been alive, so this was all starting to feel like some weird coincidence. Some might have called it fate, even. Zack tried to remember if he'd ever told Cloud about the snotty "treasure hunter" who spammed his mail, but he couldn't be sure either way.

"And why were you wearing a SOLDIER uniform when we were back on Gaia?" he went on to ask. It was weird to even be phrasing a question that way, but he didn't know how else to say it. "You didn't go back to them, did you?" If Cloud had been confused and thought he was him, maybe he'd tried. But Zack sincerely hoped not.

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Day 52: Game Room

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