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prismaticpichu · 18 hours

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I'm craving a concept only you can deliver: Sephiroth comforting Zack during a personal crisis? What would that be like?

YESSS MY BEANS!!!! <333 I adore these kinds of scenarios with them 💙💚 You’ve come to the right place, my un-rotten friend! I shall do my best! <33

It happened on Angeal’s birthday.

Crumpled on the floor; fists clenched into veiny, trembling balls of cement; thin pillars of candlelight quivering and flickering against the apartment’s gloom, deserted atop the vanilla terrain of an abandoned birthday cake as, like a feather, left to the mercy of even the slightest gust of wind, too weightless to resist the current, their fragile flames bent to the mercy of wherever the wintry draft whispering through the apartment pulled them.

This was the state Sephiroth found Zack in.

At first, he almost left. Sincerely (and he had trouble lying), that was what he wanted to do. Leave the document, leave a pen, leave a note explaining that it required his signature—and then leave without saying a word. Everything in his mind was screaming at him to do just that. Go, leave, you don’t know what to do… And when he stayed, when he didn’t budge, the reins tugged harder: GO… now! Leave! You don’t know what to say…!

And it was true: he didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what in that moment, standing in an ajar door, cracked open only a fissure, cracked open only after three unanswered knocks, watching his lieutenant sob unrhytmically into his knees, what he could possibly do. Zack didn’t even seem to notice his presence—oblivious to the gauzy belt of light stretching across the apartment, unaware of the two conflicted emeralds peering inconspicuously into his darkened quarters. And the sheer frequency of his rattling breath masked any groan or creak that his weight against the door would produce.

Yet…

For every tug and lash of the reins in his mind, demanding him to go there was an anchor thrown over the hulls of his heart and keeping him rooted in place. Don’t go, don’t leave… And as he tried to uncomfortably wriggle out of its grasp, it would beat louder in his chest: Don’t leave him… Please, don’t go. Don’t abandon him. Don’t you understand why he is hurting…?

The man’s eyes had seemed to flicker.

Oh… he understood. He understood good and well. He, too, had also felt a toxically-stifling cloud billow in the wake of his thoughts throughout the day. From the moment he woke up, he knew what day it was. Angeal would be turning 26 today. Had he still been with him, he would have added another year to his life, another block of wisdom to stack atop the castle of what seemed to be the spirit of an elderly father encased inside the bones of a young adult. He would have been here to celebrate that growth. He would have been here to honor himself.

Admittedly, it hadn’t occurred to him how Zack may be feeling. Perhaps that was because he had swallowed every last bit of pain today like a gallon of vinegar—or maybe it was because he had blindly assumed that Zack would be finding a way to resist the same acid. Clearly, he had tried to do something to cope with it. Only it was just as clear that he ended up buckling under the leaden pressure that had been building throughout the day—and now he had cracked, imploded, left broken and bent on the cold hard floor of his home away fro—

“Monster…”

And it was that word, choked viscously from the depths of Zack’s throat, cold and hard as the floor he lay crumbled upon, that made Sephiroth stay.

He pushed open the door, golden light dilating across the room.

“…Zack?”

The First’s head shot up from his knees—blue eyes sleek and wet with a boil of burning tears, swollen cheeks vaguely catching the light like tiny stones glistening against shallow water, the Mako-fueled gems narrowing slightly yet unclear if it was out of annoyance or surprise or an attempt to see better amid the darkness.

Sephiroth took a step closer.

“What are you doing here?” Zack bit out then.

Sharp, serrated, rancorous.

Sephiroth didn’t move any closer.

“…You’re upset,” he observed. Stated, more like—considering the sheer lack of emotion he managed to gouge of the two simple words, as if a straight and businesslike approach was the only compromise his mind could compromise for intervening.

Immediately, Zack wiped at his eyes.

“…Yeah?” His response was just as emotionless. “What about it?”

Cold, bitter, and edging on venomous. The tone admittedly stung Sephiroth—pierced something in his heart that he didn’t know was there, like an inconspicuous crack in the mortar where a tender swathe of his heart was beating. He knew the boy was upset; he wasn’t that blind, nor was he that ignorant. But it was hurtful nonetheless. Their last interactions didn’t seem to have this poison—unless, of course, it had been festering underneath, had been hiding under his tongue as he warmly saluted goodbye on that warm Junon evening by the dock.

I’ll hold you to that!

All again, Sephiroth’s eyes seemed to flicker.

“…I know you miss him, Zack,” he said, attempting to defrost as much cold professionalism from his voice as he could. “I know it’s—“

Whatever he said, it was the wrong thing.

Zack’s eyes began boiling with tears once more. Only this time, the mist seemed to be daggerous—acidic, sharp, spearlike—and there was no ambiguity anymore as to what the narrowing of his bloodshot eyes signified.

And he erupted.

“GET OUT!” Zack’s voice exploded around the den like a deadly, roaring echo. “GET OUT!”

Sephiroth took several steps back.

“Zack…—“

“I SAID GET OUT!” He threw his arm toward the door in jagged emphasis.

“Zackary.”

“SHUT UP AND GET THE HELL OUT!”

He had never seen Zack in such a state. By all means, he knew the young First wasn’t as happy and cheerful as he masqueraded for the rest of the world to see. That much he knew, that much he had learned, as someone who wore an oppositely-temperatured mask himself. But that didn’t make the degree of his SOLDIER’s temper right now any less unsettling. It didn’t make it any less painful.

It didn’t make it any less concerning.

And maybe that was why, against the boy’s blazing demand for him to leave, Sephiroth chose to stay.

“…You’re upset, Zack…” he stated again, only his voice had completely thawed. Softening his eyes, steeling his resolve, the man took another step forward. “You’re upset. You’re grieving. I know how you—“

“YOU DON’T KNOW SHIT!” Zack’s throat was beginning to close as he bellowed. And then, as if having suppressed the poison for so long: “You weren’t THERE, were you?! No! I don’t THINK SO! I was THERE, Sephiroth! I had to DO IT! Do you know that? Do you know that’s why he’s DEAD! It’s because of ME! ME, DAMNIT! I killed him! I… I killed him. Oh Gaia… Oh Gaia… I did it… oh man… I did it… I killed him, Sephiroth… I killed him…”

And then he was crumpling back to the floor, his voice slowly trickling away like tendrils of smoke from an inferno.

“I’m… I’ma monster…”

Sephiroth watched the broken SOLDIER, his mouth hanging ajar. Hardly even breathing. His chest was twisted at such an angle that he was certain he would snap at any moment, like a feeble twig, his lungs on the verge of imploding in on themselves and shutting down the entirety of his shock-drugged body. Swells of different emotions were raging inside him at such a speed him that, like roaring rapids during a storm, flowed too fast and viciously for him to grasp and even begin to digest. If all simply crashed against him, tumultuous and unrelenting. Almost suffocating. Paralyzing.

He was numb.

The only thing to stay afloat, echoing clearly in his ears, as if it was the only thing his mind could seem to hear, as if it was louder than anything else despite being the softest thing mumbled, was the same unyielding word that had drawn him into the apartment to begin with. Raw and cold, but no longer venomous—as if the poison had been wrung out of it, leaving only a deadly and poised blade behind, and was now balancing under Zack’s chin, the spear digging into his pulse and aimed only to harm himself.

Even in his numb and drugged state, it drove him to speak again.

“No…” Sephiroth vaguely shook his head, his voice edging on a whisper. “That’s not true.”

Slowly, Zack lifted his chin once more, the shadows of torrents now glistening on his reddened cheeks. His incision shone bright in their wake, shimmering in a rich and ghostly red—still to heal, still raw, and probably burning like acid into the deepest layers of his skin.

It made Sephiroth’s chest snap.

Gingerly, as if there was glass strewn about the floor, Sephiroth took another delicate step forward. He then took another step after that, and then another step after that, gradually closing the distance between them until only a tiny creek of wooden floor separated them. His shadow looming over the distraught teen, he carefully bent down until he their gazes were level: green eyes staring into blue, glistening sapphires mirroring the small shimmers of light radiating from the tame, softened emeralds.

And Sephiroth spoke again.

“You are not a monster…” The man’s voice had turned to porcelain, gazing deeply into those anguished azure eyes. “Don’t ever say that. Zack.”

A snuffle, a choke, and a thin trickle of tears bled through Zack’s eyes as he strained them shut.

“…You weren’t even there,” he whispered. “You don’t know what happened.”

There was a moment, a lull, where Sephiroth questioned it he should say what he wanted to say next. His lips briefly hovered, floating in the painful purgatory of uncertainty and obligation. Of righteousness and potential regret. Of fear and endangered friendship.

But just like the candles, bent only by a single wintry draft, a single pained beat of his heart opened them wide enough to speak.

“Then tell me.”

Silence, then Zack let out another choke.

“…I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll hate me.”

“No… no I won’t.”

“Yes you will! You would want me dead.”

“Don’t ever say that.”

“You will though… You’re gonna hate me…” He sucked in his breath, choked again, lowering his chin back into his knees. “I don’t want you to hate me…”

Never had Sephiroth’s chest ached so fiercely.

“Zack…. Zackary. Look at me. Please.”

It took a beat, a strained one, but Zack eventually did.

And Sephiroth held him steady in his gaze.

“You are all I have left, Zack. You are my… last friend. My only friend. So, please… believe me. There is nothing that will ever make me hate you. Nothing at all.”

He reached out then, hesitant, but not enough to stop him from gripping his teary friend’s shoulder.

He squeezed.

“It’s alright…” Sephiroth said gently, delicately. “Tell me what happened.”

And so Zack did. Every detail, every cry and shout and plea for his mentor to stop the madness—he retold it all. He told of finding Angeal in the bathhouse; he told of the brief swell of hope he felt; he told of how the hope was violently extinguished; he told of the way their cherished friend mutated, how he was forced to fight him, how he was forced to take the blade and stab it through the beast’s heart after it nearly tore his face agape; he told of crumbling on the ground after the deed was done, looking over his mentor’s blooded face, reverted back to a human, and just how monstrous he himself had felt.

By the time Zack was done, the dam had completely splintered, and he was leaning so far that he was on the verge of the falling over.

So, when he did, Sephiroth caught him.

He wrapped his arms around the boy as Zack collapsed into him, pulling Zack close against his chest and letting him cry. Letting him cry, letting him grieve, he held him steady, like an anchor rooting him to the ground, trying his best not to move as Zack rattled and quaked and lifted his own arms to wrap around him in turn, resting him chin against the bed of harmless spikes, holding him close, and then holding him even closer.

“Gaia… I killed him…”

“Shhh… He didn’t give you a choice.”

“He would be here, Seph… he would—“

“He left long ago, Zack. You know that.”

“I know… I…”

“It’s alright…. Shhh. It’s alright.”

“I—I miss him, Seph…”

“I know you do. I do too.”

And they stayed like that, side by side, in each other’s arms, until the candles on the cake went out.

#sephiroth #ffvii #crisis core #zack fair #ff7 #asks #ty!!#pichu writing #angeal hewley #angst #floof #saltwater floof

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