Zack yawned, stretched, and smiled up at the ceiling sleepily. He'd slept better last night than he had in a while, thanks in part to the puppy that had come home with him last night. He wasn't planning on keeping the dog, not by any means, but he hadn't been taking to being alone very well, and neither had the puppy, after his siblings had all ( Read more... )

To say that it was surreal to be back on the island again after so long would be something of an understatement.

To day that it was surreal to be in an unfamiliar apartment, staring out one of the windows at an all too familiar island, not having to worry about anything more dangerous than a gremlin ( Read more... )

The chanting of monsters still echoed loudly in Zack's ears as he slumped down into the overgrowth, holding Cloud close in his arms and trying not to look as shaken as he felt. Genesis had been there, and Hollander, and while they'd given up on him, saying that his cells had already been mutated as part of the process of becoming SOLDIER, Cloud's ( Read more... )

Zack was tired. Bone tired. Bone tired and heartsick, following the road toward Gongaga with a sort of exhausted stubbornness that would have seemed at least slightly more reasonable if he wasn't hauling a comatose kid around with him all the way from Nibelheim. Cloud was slowing him down. There was no question about that. He'd been able to stop ( Read more... )

Okay, so Zack and Ino had come up with their Awesome Vacation Plans (tm), which so far had included a trip to see a play in Midgar, and then a long trip to the next continent over, where they'd be spending a much larger chunk of the week ( Read more... )

It was sheer habit that had Zack up before the sunrise. Every day, without so much as an alarm set to rouse him, he'd wake, pull himself out of bed, pull on his SOLDIER fatigues, and head outside, stopping along the way only to grab his sword, to have his run about the island, to practise and to keep himself in shape for whatever might come ( Read more... )

It had been a bit of a roundabout trip out of Junon for Zack and Ino, yes. They'd managed to thumb a drive as far as Fort Condor, and the walk to the cave from there hadn't been terrible. Actually, Zack had been pleasantly surprised to see that at least that much hadn't changed. Caves were going to be caves no matter what year he was wandering ( Read more... )

Okay. So, Mideel had been a bust. But once Zack had been given clearance to leave the clinic that they'd found there, he and Ino had hunted down transit to get them the hell out of there. It didn't even matter where, at this point. Civilization. Any continent would do, so long as it wasn't Wutai, and wasn't drowned in mako. Fortunately, for some ( Read more... )

"No way."

There had to have been some sort of mistake. Zack and Ino had hopped a portal to Gaia as soon as they could manage to get one out of... out of what was left of Konoha, and Zack had been expecting to step out of the portal and into the tourist attraction town that made its living on its hot springs, which would have been nice, after all ( Read more... )

( Zack had been here before, sent to this very same place on a mission not long back, to help remove the last remnants of the war against Wutai. )