Field of Innocence: Ch.3

Chapter Three: Explanations

A blinding flash of red shot out of the little orb, and suddenly Zack and I were standing on cracked stone, everything had heated up several degrees, and we were facing a very angry-looking Ifrit.

"Blizzara!" I cried, flinging a spell at the creature before scrambling away. Your best bet when fighting a summon was not to stay in one spot. I didn't like this. Generally, I wasn't fighting against summons, I was fighting with them. "Use ice, Ifrits are fire elemental!" I called to Zack. He was already on the move, however, circling the creature while darting in to land a couple of good physical strikes. I continued my magical assault from afar. Everything was going great until it started using its fire attacks.

I'd been hit with fire spells before, but when  the creature actually was fire elemental, it seemed to make them hotter. They were hot enough that I had to stop for several long moments to recover and put out the flames that had caught on my uniform. Meanwhile, Zack stepped in to distract Ifrit while I recovered. Just when things were looking bad, though, we got a saving grace.

There was a flash of silver and black, and then Sephiroth was standing there, Masamune in hand, and Ifrit now fatally wounded. The environs melted away with the defeated summon, back into the tiny, harmless looking red orb.

"Thanks," I panted, glancing at the General as he went to investigate the fallen soldiers that had attacked us earlier. I ran a hand through my hair with a tired sigh.

"Genesis?!" Zack suddenly exclaimed, staring over Sephiroth shoulder, and I strode over to investigate. Surely not...

Sephiroth removed the helmet of another of the fallen warriors, to reveal yet another flawless image of Genesis.

"Wha..." Zack started, clearly confused.

"Genesis copies," Sephiroth corrected Zack.

"Copies?" I asked curiously. He nodded with a 'hmm'. The great hero looked around the clearing quickly, something that Zack probably didn't catch, but I did. Sephiroth stood, and I got this strange feeling of foreboding.

"It seems that Angeal has betrayed us as well," he announced clearly, glancing at Zack. I did too; I knew this wouldn't turn out good. I may be a little disbelieving, but my Second acquaintance seemed...in shock.

"What? He'd never betray us!" Zack insisted, backing away from the both of us, as though we were suddenly the enemy. I felt inexplicably guilty.

"Zack," I started to try to reason with him, but he ignored me and turned, running back along the road. I watched him go worriedly.

"Think he'll be okay?" I asked.

"I'm pretty sure there aren't any more around," Sephiroth pointed out. I shook my head.

"I meant, will he be okay?"

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Zack avoided everyone for a solid day before he tried to go back to being normal. I somehow found myself spending more time with him, and we talked a lot about pointless stuff. I could tell he was distracted by worry over his friend, though he tried to hide it. However, he hadn't forgotten that he'd wanted to ask me something.

"So," he asked one day, the two of us sitting in my room. We hadn't had anything to do that day, so we'd headed to my apartment, which I really didn't count as an apartment, seeing as it was inside the ShinRa building. More like military quarters, really. "What's with the eyes?" I looked away from him uncomfortably. I really did not want to talk about this. He'd been trying for several days to get it out of me, though, and I didn't know how much longer I could hold out.

"Can't we talk about something else?"

"No, I wanna know! C'mon, I won't tell anyone!" Zack persisted. I sighed.

"It's not a very good story," I muttered, without hope that he'd back down.

"And? Go on, tell me!" Zack looked up at me with huge puppy-dog eyes, and I found that it was incredibly hard to tell him no.

"Oh, fine then!" I snapped, folding my arms and looking away. Jeez, I hated when he did that! "Warning, this story contains a lot of blood and gore and mental scarring."

"Um, hello, I'm a SOLDIER, I see that stuff on a daily basis!" he said, and I knew he was trying to get me to go ahead with the story. I took a deep breath.

"Okay, it all started eleven years ago, at my fifth birthday party. And yes, I do have to start that far back; it's a long story. So, I was born here in Midgar, though my family wasn't exactly wealthy... I grew up in the slums, for at least the first five years of my life, and though my family wasn't rich, we were happy.

"We'd invited the whole neighborhood to my birthday party, because our community was fairly small and everyone knew everyone anyways. I remember I was really, really happy," as I stared into the distance, I could see it all again, the childhood that had been cut short for me. "I...still don't know, to this day, exactly what happened, but there was a mass murder there. Don't ask me who it was, I don't know. People ran, tried to hide but everyone was gunned down. My parents were trying to protect me... I hid under our porch."

"Wait, how'd you get away without a scratch?" Zack interrupted.

"I never said I did; I got hit in the leg, and it was bleeding really badly. But adrenaline does funny things when you're in danger. Anyways, so then, as you can imagine, the Turks showed up to cover the whole mess up like they're paid to do. Of course, leaving a witness wasn't an option, so I ended up at ShinRa." I paused. Half of it was, I wasn't sure how to approach the next part of the story. The other half was the fact that the long buried desire to cry was trying to make itself known. This story made me sad, that why I avoided telling it at all costs. It had been so long since I'd been forced to remember it like this, I'd forgotten. Nightmares were one thing; I usually forgot most of them after about five minutes of being awake. But really thinking back, really remembering...

"Well, if you know anything about the science department here, you know that 'injured human' roughly translates to 'experiment' in their language. Particularly Hojo," I suddenly wanted to...to...hit a wall or something. Even mentioning Hojo pissed me off to no end. "So I was steadily injected with mako and who knows what the hell else. For a long time that's all I knew. I hated it. When they tried to stop the injections, it's like I...shut down or something. It's not that I can't take mako, my body just wanted more. Like when you give a little kid chocolate. Or, more accurately, when someone addicted to drugs tries to give them up cold turkey. When the experiments were done, I was left more enhanced than even usual SOLDIERs, except with one weak point. I have to have mako, every day. I won't die if I don't get it, but it's better than just...stopping like that. It was...bad." I suddenly froze when I realized...he was hugging me. Anyone else, any other time, I would have shoved them off with a murderous death glare. But Zack...it was different. He really did feel sorry for me, and he didn't think I was a freak or weird or anything else. Maybe I actually found a friend. That's new. I couldn't remember having friends. I never thought I would. For the longest time after they had died, I had blamed myself for my parents' deaths, and though I now knew better, I still carried a little guilt with me. So, I'd decided I wouldn’t get close to anyone, so it wouldn't ever happen again.

But this little Second class had got me to open up, come out of my shell, thaw out, however you'd like to word it. I hadn't even known him for two solid weeks yet, but I felt like I'd known him forever. I suddenly felt like crying again, and so I did, as quietly as I could manage. After several moments I gently shoved him off and wiped my face dry.

“You don’t think I’m weird?” I asked quietly. “I’m not normal. I’m a fre-”

“Normal’s overrated,” Zack insisted, grinning at me. I couldn’t help but grin back. “But that all explains why you’re so…anti-Turk. I never thought it was something like that!”

“What’d you think it was?”

“Oh, something along the lines of killing a dog or something,” he shrugged offhandedly. The pure absurdity of it made me laugh. It was a real laugh, and it felt nice. I hadn’t really laughed for quite some time. It was an even longer moment that I realized…I was happy. Really and truly happy. It felt so much better than being mad and depressed all the time. I resolved to spend more time with Zack so I could be happy more often; it seemed to be the only thing that worked. Suddenly he was digging around in his pocket, before pulling out his PHS.

“Yeah. Who is this?” Zack answered a question I didn't hear, listened for a moment, then said, “Yeah, we'll be there in a sec.”

“Who was that?” I asked curiously as he snapped it shut and stuck it back in his pocket.

“Dunno, but he said Lazard wants to see us in the briefing room,” Zack shrugged.

“Then let's go.”

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“Hey Lazard, what's up?” Zack greeted, walking in just ahead of me. I narrowed my eyes at Lazard, who seemed to be being very careful about not making eye contact with me. He's probably about to do something to piss me off, I thought to myself, still glaring at him.

“I want you both to go to the hometown of our missing First Class Genesis,” Lazard told us. “We sent two employees some time ago, but they haven't made contact in some time. His parents say they haven't seen Genesis, but they can't be trusted.”

“Why not?” Zack asked blankly.

“Because they're his family,” I told him quietly. He 'hmm'ed and nodded seriously. I rolled my eyes.

“I want you two to investigate this. He will be going with you,” Lazard suddenly was being even more careful to not even look in my direction. I suddenly knew exactly why, without even looking at our new companion. When I did look, I saw it was a young man with his black, straight hair pulled back into a ponytail, a dot in the middle of his forehead, and a very dark blue-ish suit. My eyes narrowed as he introduced himself briskly.

“Tseng, of the Turks.”

“This job's starting to look real gloomy...” Zack muttered. I turned my glare on Lazard as Tseng told Zack to let him know when he was ready to go.

“You are not making me work with a Turk,” I hissed in Lazard's ear, probably too low for Tseng to hear, not that I really cared.

“Some of his coworkers are missing; he needs to go to look for them,” Lazard still wasn't looking at me. He knew he'd stepped on the wrong land mine this time.

“You know that, at this very moment, I hate you, right?” I asked sarcastically. “You know, I don't even know if I'm going on this mission.”

“Fuyume,” finally, he turned to look at me, and it was with cold professionalism. “I am your superior, and I'm ordering you to go on this mission.”

“I can't work with someone I can't trust.”

“Fuyume. I need you to go on this mission.” For a long moment, we stared each other down. Tseng seemed to be purposely ignoring us.

“Fine. I'll go. But don't think I'll be happy about it.” I turned to stalk away, not even glancing at the Turk that I was now being forced to work with.

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I must've looked like a hurricane storming out of the briefing room doors, because everyone other than Zack in a twenty foot radius took a tiny step back. It was nothing compared with how I felt. I was murderous.

“Hey, what's up?” Zack asked concernedly, bending down a bit to look me directly in the face.

“He's. Making. Me. Work. With. That.” I didn't even think 'that' deserved a name at this point. When I was fourteen, while Shin-Ra was trying to figure out something to do with me, they had given me two options; SOLDIER, or Turks. I picked SOLDIER because I hated the Turks. I figured I'd never have to work with them. And yet, here I was, about to have to work with them.

I wasn't forgiving Lazard for this for a very long time.

“Whoa, chill out, you're way overreacting!” Zack blurted out. I raised my glare from the floor to his face.

“Chill out? Chill out?! Zack, I just finished explaining to you why I hate the Turks so damn much, and you're telling me to chill out?!” I said this all as quietly as I possibly could, but it was hard to keep my voice down.

“Hey, hold up! I'm sorry!” he took a step back as he said this, and I instantly felt terrible.

“No, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have snapped at you. I'm just...not very happy about this,” I muttered, looking back at the ground.

“No, don't be sorry, it's understandable! I mean, I can't get it because I'm not in your shoes, but...oh, you know what I mean!” Zack struggled to be sympathetic while at the same time not sure what would piss me off more. I almost laughed. I turned to stalk back into the briefing room.

“Well, let's get this over with.”