Crisis Core: The Novel

Chapter 56 - Those Wings

Zack breeched the surface of consciousness for a split second, his eyes fluttering open and closed. The fade-in fade-out of cognizant thought found him on a stretcher in the reactor. The EVAC team had finally arrived.

Cloud lay strapped to an ambulance board across from him, unconscious and on oxygen, while company guards and personnel hovered in and out of Zack's focus. A white lab coat engulfed his view.

"...paralyzed from the waist down..."

"...SOLIDER? No, the little one is just a Shinra Guard..."

"...the parent host is dead. Will these child hosts suffice?..."

"...Yes. Yes, these specimens will do nicely. He he he..."

Zack recognized the mercurial laugh of Dr. Hojo, and faded from the light. Everything Sephiroth said was true.

He awoke to another harsh light blaring in his face, with no way of knowing how long he'd been out. His vision blurring into focus found surgical lamps beaming down on him.

Two masked figures in hair nets loomed over him, lifting bloody organs away from his field of view. It took Zack a moment to realize they were his organs, and his mind reeled in terror. From somewhere beyond the cusp of horror, Sephiroth's words filtered back to him.

They were going to do it all to you!

He braced for the oncoming wave of pain that assailed his being; the eviscerating slice of scalpels into his skin, angry gnashing of a bone saw biting into his body, probing tools entering him in ways he couldn't combat, a sick groping pressure on his genitals. When everything was over, he could move his legs again, but Hell had not yet reared its full might.

They imprisoned him in a sensory-deprivation tank, hooked up to tubes and wires. In his brief moments of coherent awareness, he discerned two white lab coats leering like onlookers at a zoo.

"In order to turn him into Sephiroth, we'll need to erase his self-concept."

"A simple task I've performed on his father before him. Let us play some war-games."

And Zack's world faded to black.

He came to strapped in a chair somewhere in the old testing facilities of the Nibelheim Reactor. Interrogation. All of his SOLDIER training flew back to him from when he'd gone through SERE School.

In a hostage situation, a SOLDIER remains silent at all costs. Your teammates' lives may depend on it.

Before him stood a cryotank filled with Mako like Zack's had been. But to his horror, he saw Cloud floating unconscious in a deep coma. He couldn't react, couldn't show how important this boy was to him. If Zack wanted Cloud to live he'd have to pretend like he wanted him dead.

Two scientists loomed just outside of his field of vision, their white lab coats flashing in his peripherals. Hojo and his assistant leered in scrutiny.

"What is your name?" Dr. Hojo asked, but his voice filtered through Zack's ears in a reverberating treble, as if he were speaking under water. Sodium Penethol. Zack felt a microphone taped to his throat, and understood the sick game that was going on here.

If he spoke, his voice would activate electro-follicles that would shock Cloud in front of him. His name would hurt someone he cared for, attaching a negative stimulus to his very identity, and that's how they would delete him. He remained expressionless, exuding a blank lull as if he gave two damns about the person in front of him, glass eyes like stone staring a thousand miles ahead.

"WHAT. IS. YOUR. NAME!" the mad scientist roared in his face. Rank breath filled Zack's nostrils, coffee and gingivitis. Zack stayed stoic like he was already dead, and the scientist lost patience. In a raged stupor, he grabbed the diode controller, cranked it up to high, and shocked Zack with a voltage that made him scream for wont of murder.

After that, the torture intensified over time Zack had no way of measuring. They played low-frequency theta waves in his tank to make him hallucinate ghosts, and cause visceral nightmares that turned his brain activity monitor into a scatter plot. They adjusted the temperature in his tank all the way down to freezing cold and then straight to near-boiling. They stuck a VR helmet on him and played snuff films until he'd seen more death than any war veteran at the VA, then switched the channel to child pornography and kept him awake with an epi-pen. They injected him with lethal levels of Dancer to prompt an addiction, and withheld the drug as collateral. Zack was too stubborn. He rode out the withdrawal symptoms like a champion without ever uttering a sound. They threatened to paralyze him again, but Zack knew they wouldn't do that. He was no use to them as a vegetable, and they wouldn't risk not being able to bring him back.

"What is your name?"

The same question always came, and the same answer was always given; Zack's unrelenting silence. A time came where the scientists stood before his tank with perplexed expressions.

"He is too strong. He's reached an age where he is past programing. We will start on the other one."

A panic so great it seized the clasps of his mind made him flurry, raking his fingernails down the inside of the tank so hard that scratch lines remained in the glass. Now it was Zack's turn to go into a coma, and his mind took him deep into the realm of unconscious sleep, protecting him.

He fled to some serene place in his deeper psyche, to where the sky was water and the ground was made of glass. He felt arms around his neck, the faint fluttering of fingers across his face, but he didn't know who they belonged to. For the life of him, he couldn't remember her name.

Alone, he drifted in the swell of melancholy, memories fading to crystal, his identity dutifully extracted, his strength, his valor, his will, all concocted down to a chemical compound. He was fading, flowing into the sorrow of time in the shade of angel's wings. The nightmares faded back to stardust, and he dreamt other people's dreams. Hopes and feelings that were not his own lifted him up, splaying in lilac lines against blue water. Was this...the Lifestream? He felt himself connected to a swirling collective unconsciousness, where all souls in the universe were part of him and he was part of them.

Speak, young angel. Tell us your name. Tell us about honor and dreams. Under your wings, we suffer alongside you. Your struggles, adventures, successes and failures, are things we carry with us in our own lives. Know that you're not alone, we've been with you every step of the way. We've followed your story and shared in your feats. We know, we're here, and we're listening. What is it that you want?

"I...want to be forgiven."

Oh Zack, to forgive is divine, and we are but human. As people, we get as close to perfect as humanly possible, which usually ends up killing us in the end. We seek the strength to not become part of the nightmare ourselves; the terrible things that are done to us, that we witness done to others, and that we in turn do unto others as they have done unto us. In the end, we are all monsters, and honor is something we strive for, something we'll never quite get all the way. But maybe if we can endure like you, and not give into hate, then we can have honor as well.

Sleep now, young angel. You've given enough. Know that you haven't failed. Death is a part of life. The acceptance of death is a virtue of manhood. Everyone has to die. Only when one has acknowledged their own death as absolute can one begin to help others. Death is the warrior's way. When his sword has been taken from him, a warrior takes his own life in shame, to preserve his honor.

But you, Zack, you deserve to live.

"Those wings...I want them too."

He closed his eyes against the ocean sky, and prepared to let the darkness take him.

[Received Soul of Thamasa]