Final Fantasy VII, Cloud / Zack / Sephiroth: Mistletiptoe, #4, #10, #26; #2 coming soon

[chibirisuchan]

(sweatdrop) I keep failing miserably in the attempts to write short. Originally this was going to be a three-parter and now it's gone and turned itself into a four-parter. Getting the first three posted, at least. (And yes, I do know there's a smoking gun out there; it's for part 4, which, believe it or not, was the section that started the whole

Comments

[edenfalling]

Yeah, that's a smoking gun all right... and I would stake ten bucks that it has to do with the title as well. :-)

I like Devious!Zack, especially the way he knows how to push Sephiroth's buttons -- he seems not to have quite so fine an estimate of Cloud's reactions, but then, he hasn't known Cloud as long. I am ridiculously proud of Cloud for actually finding the nerve to go after Zack, and to succeed in landing a kick (though I suspect Zack probably let him land it).

Is General 'Sparkles' going to make a reappearance? It seems like a suitably holiday-themed nickname... *tempts you*

[chibirisuchan]

yep! The mental image of the height difference was what actually got this started rolling in my head, except (headdesk) I SO CANNOT WRITE SHORT...

and Zack just keeps DOING things; honestly, when I started writing, I thought his box was going to have the etched rocks glasses and something like a good bottle of whiskey in it, and then he GRINNED at me, and there was the form, and up 'til about 3/4 through I thought it was going to be an actual horrific lava lamp except he nudged me and went 'hey look at that again,' and auugh.

He kind of did - there's not really a direct visual translation for 'sparkles' into something two-dimensional that can get etched in glass after all, but the frost pattern thing was trying to lean that direction... And now Zack's after me to let him braid the twinkle lights into Sephiroth's hair, and Cloud is hiding under Sephiroth's desk hoping the ceiling beams are structurally reinforced enough to deal with Sephiroth's reaction to Zack braiding twinkle lights into his hair...

[edenfalling]

If it won't work as a serious fic, there's always chibi!vision... *hands Zack some tinsel*

[chibirisuchan]

ChibiSephiroth (stuffed in a tree suit with his own hair tangled through everything to make its own tinsel and with a lopsided star perched on top of his head, and tied in place with the twinkle lights, and fuming): ...you just HAD TO GO AND GIVE HIM IDEAS, DIDN'T YOU.

ChibiCloud (stuffed in a Rudolph the Red Nosed Chocobo suit, blinking nose and all): It could be worse.

ChibiTreeSephiroth: HOW? HOW COULD IT BE WORSE?

ChibiZack (hauling in one of the Mako tubes with an evil gleam in the eyes): Hey guys! I figured out how to turn you two into walking snowglobes! It's gonna be awesome - you're totally going to win the Shinra holiday costume ball for me...

ChibiTreeSephiroth: ...

ChibiChocoCloud: I told you so.

ChibiTreeSephiroth: ...shut up.

[arete]

Oh. OH. *pushes down the growing Zack muse* *cuddles Seph & Cloud-muses* I love how you put together different challenges into into long story, though they can be separated into different fics. *sighs as the Zack-muse shows up again, and just grabs him to cuddle as well* Zack having cider, cocoa and juice disguised as fancy liquor is just funny... and now I want a set of shot-glasses like that. Hmm, I probably could get them made...

[chibirisuchan]

^______^ If I was really devious (or ambitious) I'd go and hunt down a URL for somebody who does glass etching, but I'm not that devious/ambitious at the moment... I do glass etching, but it's been forever since I hauled the stuff out of the closet...

now I'm kind of wanting a set too... hmm...

[crazy_toffee]

You... are the absolute queen of FF7 now (at least to me, seriously!). I don't think I've enjoyed anyone's fics quite so much as yours... save perhaps for Madamhydra's, and that pretty much tells you when was the last time I liked an FF7 fic. XD

I love how you manage to make Cloud a mixture of ballsy anger and cute adoration. And Sephiroth, he just cracks me up. It's hard to portray him as emotionally stunted without making socially stupid, but you bypass that just fine. Wonderfully in character, if you ask me.

And... ahahaha... then there's Zack. I can't have enough of your Zack, really.

[chibirisuchan]

^___^ yay! (I didn't know Madamhydra wrote for FF7 -- last I heard of her was Kenshin, which probably dates me severely too; that was what, nearly ten years ago now? I feel so old...)

I'm so glad "not socially stupid" came across -- I'd been trying for "socially ignorant but not stupid"; there are things he knows like the back of his hand, things he knows better than anyone else on earth, but then there are things that everyone else on earth knows that he's never had the chance to learn, like holidays and families and what a home looks like as opposed to living quarters or barracks or a lab, and he's aware of the places where he has gaps in his knowledge and tries to cover for them but there's only so much he can do... his curiosity in-game about what it was like for Cloud to have a home kind of drove that one home at me

[luriko_ysabeth]

She wrote FF7 before Kenshin.

And I love your characterization, and I think you got the socially ignorant thing down -- it's not that he can't do it at all, it's like a talented linguist who speaks five Romance languages trying to hold a conversation in Japanese or Arabic. There's only so much matching vocal patterns and body language can do if you haven't picked up the vocabulary yet.

[laylah]

*glee*
These just continue to make me so happy.

flaming chocolate-covered thermonuclear summoning device had me *crying* with laughter.

And I love that Zack always knows when he actually has to back off, and when he can keep pushing.

[chibirisuchan]

^____^ I liked that one too. I spent a while trying to get the grammatical structure of the sentence to work out in a way that let it sound like Sephiroth was equating it with an oddly-shaped-and-caged summons materia that would invoke the solar equivalent of Ifrit (possibly crossed with Meteor), but given what all else the sentence had to get across, and whose voice I had to do it in, that was about as far as I thought I could push the nested subclauses. (sweatdrop: I read WAYYYY too much Shakespeare and Victorian literature before the age of 10, it's left permanent linguistic scarring in my head, I think...)

(scurries off to try to get the actual mistletoe bit written some time this YEAR... ^^;;)

[laylah]

I read WAYYYY too much Shakespeare and Victorian literature before the age of 10

...There's no such thing.

And I think the sense comes across really well the way it's phrased now -- you can clearly tell that Sephiroth is imagining it as something truly dire. Which is just cute.

[owleyes_arisen]

This is simply a wonderful story in a wonderful set of stories. You find all too few good fics on the 'net - you have to apreciate the ones that are simply GOOD.
...Now I have an unrepentent Zack running through my head, giggling at the images he's sending me. They primarily revolve around one question - "If he did this for Christmas/Yule/whatever - WHAT is going to happen on Valentine's day?"

...I have a vision of a hysterical Zack dragging a lava-red Cloud through a smoking building, as Sephiroth stalks them, Masamune unsheathed.

Chaos is probably going to take up residense. And although Chaos is intimatly aquainted with Valentine (look! I made a pun!) I don't think it'll be of that variety.

Hope you don't mind my speculation. Write more soon!

[chibirisuchan]

*^__^* Glad you like! And yeah, the chibivision version of Zack getting his hands on Valentine's Day is terrifying. Hopefully I can get the mistletoe piece to stop wrestling with me some time this year... ^^;;