full_score
in
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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
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The whole subject was just too heavy to dwell on for too long, and for that reason Zack was relieved to be led into a Game Room where there were all sorts of things that could distract him. There were even televisions set up for people to play, though a lot of people had already gravitated to those. Zack figured he'd leave those to the kids and find something a little more adult.
Which was how he ended up sitting by himself with a pack of cards in hand. He shuffled them with a familiarity that came from being in the military. If there was one thing SOLDIERs loved to do to pass the time, it was play a friendly hand of cards. Or... not so friendly, if alcohol was involved. Still, it brought back some memories that were doing a decent job of getting his mind off of his own mortality.
He was going to need to find someone to play with, but for now he'd just enjoy the feel of the worn cards in his hands. Maybe he'd deal out a game of Solitaire and then see if anyone dropped by with an interest to play.
[For Cloud.]
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Cloud had caught a nurse leading the taller man into the game room and had followed. He didn't get to sit down and talk with Zack as much as he wanted to, though what they would talk about at this point he wasn't really sure. Future plans, perhaps. What to do with a night that seemed determined to end before they'd gotten anything done with it. (Or tossed them around in a way that made it feel more like they were someone's playthings than anything else.)
He sat down across from his friend without really asking. He knew a good few games on his own, though he hadn't spent as much time socializing with many of the other recruits outside of Zack. Sometimes there was just nothing better to do.
Uncomfortable conversation topics could wait. For now, he'd just let Zack deal.
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It would have been nice to just kick back like old friends and mess around, and they could do that, but Zack was also determined to get some answers out of Cloud, if he could. He wasn't going to push his friend if he was really that set against it (since he knew how that felt), but he also thought he deserved to know a few things, especially after that night when they'd all returned to Gaia.
"What did you want to play?" he asked as he let the deck slip from one hand into the other and then back again. They didn't slide as effortlessly as a new deck would have, but they were also easier to handle.
He was fine with starting things off casually, but he knew he was going to have to start asking some difficult questions eventually. Hopefully Cloud would be ready for that.
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...Wow, that was really depressing to think about.
Lots of things were depressing to think about right now, honestly, but when you had your old friend back from the dead and sitting across from you waiting to play simple game of cards as if nothing had ever happened, it was hard to stay that way.
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And so he started to deal out a simple game of poker. This tended to be the most popular of choices among grunts and SOLDIERs alike, so there was really no chance that Cloud wouldn't know the rules.
"So, how've you been? Last night was pretty uneventful for me. Got a weapon of sorts from Tifa, but other than that, didn't get too far." He shrugged, knowing that that was more common in this place than it should have been. Sometimes that was hard for him, seeing how he was so used to being able to set out on a mission and accomplish it without a problem.
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"Tifa told me about the weapon when I spoke with her earlier. You guys actually got further than I did." Not a difficult task. He'd made it a pathetically short distance - only to Yuffie's room and not even out of it. On the plus side, at least their ninja friend was still with them. Things could have been a lot worse.
He sighed, but it turned into a chuckle. "You'd think they didn't want us to get anywhere important. ...So what are we playing?"
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
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"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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