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ficlets - ff50 Lazard/Sephiroth #012, 042
These two are out of numerical order because they happen to be consecutive, chronologically speaking. The first one dovetails with Prompt 008, but it's not critical to read either one or the other first.




Prompt: 042. Wasteland
Words: ~630

This follows after Prompt 11.


Of course as soon as he’d found his nerve and started to string the right words together in his head, Sephiroth vanished. He didn’t show up again for half a week, when he suddenly appeared in his office, duster buckled up to his throat and dark circles under his flashing eyes.

“Mako booster?” Lazard asked, quirking an eyebrow. Sephiroth reacted less poorly than most, having long since acclimated to the substance, but it still made him ill—chills and nausea, by the First Class’s own admittance. He checked the schedule. “You weren’t due until next week, though.”

“Hojo seems to still be… irritated,” Sephiroth explained, looking green around the gills. “I don’t think these last few days were advisable to have told him I’m moving out of the building. It only made him more unhappy.”

“Oh? So have you found someplace, then?” Lazard tried to keep his tone as neutral as possible, not wanting to give Sephiroth any impression that he was either unwelcome or too welcome to stay indefinitely on his futon. But Sephiroth seemed focused more on his upset stomach than on explicating Lazard.

“I haven’t had a chance to look yet, sir,” Sephiroth said. “I was hoping you could assist me. Though if you’re busy—”

“That’s why I’m here, Sephiroth.”

It took some wrangling and a bit of imagination to transfer sufficient funds to an accessible account without Professor Hojo’s permission (somehow, the scientist had managed to get himself into the system as Sephiroth’s legal guardian; Lazard tried to put it out of his mind), but once the General’s rightfully-earned gil was to be had, it was quite easy for Sephiroth to find a suitable apartment in the outer part of Sector Eight. In the meantime he’d continued to crash at Lazard’s, but the Director told himself that Sephiroth was too sick from the mako to bother with possibly awkward conversations. And after that he hardly saw Sephiroth at all, again, as the General was preparing to return to Wutai for another round of duty.

An exhausted Genesis was rotated back from the front a week after Sephiroth left, and Lazard found his hands full with demands from the reinvigorated front. The monsoon season was coming fast, after all, and the endless rains forecasted endless trials for soldiers and SOLDIERs alike. He lost himself in his work; running a war from two continents away was a full-time job. Even if his men comprised only a tiny fraction of Shin-Ra’s army, they were the ones being worked hardest. The suits in Midgar tended to see enhancements rather than people and, all too often, the SOLDIERs on the ground agreed. It was a small war in and of itself trying to convince certain Firsts that “improved” did not mean “invincible”; on late nights, getting a headache from the nagging blue glow of a computer screen, Lazard wondered which one of the Firsts would have to die to make them understand that even godly-strong young men, proud and brave each and every one, were still mortal.

It was a First named Eriksson, it turned out, a wiry youth from Corel, one of the SOLDIERs who had been culled from the ranks of the military cadets. The damn Wutes broke the New Year’s cease-fire they had begged so hard for, bombing Shin-Ra encampments all over Wutai with Comet and Fire, surprising the hell out of everyone except Sephiroth, it seemed. They lost a lot of hard-earned ground, and Godo came out of hiding to declare that Wutai would fight to the last man, woman, and child if they had to. There would be no furlough for First Classes; it was all they could do to keep even, to regain in the dry season what they had lost at Tet.

Lazard did not see Sephiroth again for almost a year.





Prompt: 012. Melancholy
~900

When Sephiroth came back to Midgar at last, it was with the baggage of having already been dubbed a war hero. Straight off the tarmac President Shin-Ra was trying to get himself photographed with the General and trying to stuff the war-tired young man into dress uniforms and herd him into his awful, endlessly ass-kissing dinner parties. Hojo, oddly, was the one who rescued him, crabbing that he was far, far overdue for his mako shots and a battery of examinations. Sephiroth wasn’t sure which he disliked more, but what he wanted or not had never been of concern to the Company. At least the harsh interior of the laboratory was a familiar evil.

He slept unsoundly. The place he’d picked seemed too empty, too chill, too quiet, especially compared with the packed encampments and the muggy jungle he’d long become accustomed to. Strange, that he would wake in the night to the gloom of peacefully sleeping Midgar and desire, strangely, the chaos of the battlefield, the burn of casting and the taste of ether, the way the Masamune cleanly cleft the skull of a Wutanese assassin, leaving him fallen and aware of his death before he could even call to his comrades—for where there was one, there were always more, in the trees, in the canebrakes, hidden in rock fields or behind the friendly-seeming guise of civilian villagers. “Yāo guài” had become his name there, or “báiyínmó”—devil himself, silver demon.

He supposed one could get used to, and grow to miss, just about anything.

Perhaps, he thought, as he did has kata in the morning before the sun even rose behind the smoggy sky, it was his body’s longing; the body, after all, sprang back more quickly than the mind, and had strange, often unfathomable methods of voicing its demands. He fought the worst the Training Room could give him and came away unsatisfied, hard and rubbing himself against the shower wall as he washed away the sweat. Even that seemed not to last him long, as he’d wake up at odd hours aching again, or sticky-thighed and with a moan caught in his throat, a dream fading from his memory.

Lazard caught up with him eventually. “Gods, you got tall,” Lazard noted, eyeing him with a quirk in his brows that Sephiroth found he couldn’t quite identify, but decided was a particularly Lazardly form of concern. “Let me buy you lunch. And not at the corporate canteen, either; let’s go somewhere. What do you want?”

“Junonian food would be fine, Lazard, sir.”

Lazard chased him out of the Shin-Ra building and towards the motor pool. “Good thing I drove today. I’m never going to get you to stop calling me ‘sir’, am I,” he bemoaned. “It makes me feel old, you know that?”

“You aren’t old, though—Lazard,” Sephiroth caught the “sir” at the last moment.

“Why, thank you,” Lazard said, opening the passenger door to his off-white electric coupe, perhaps as though he thought Sephiroth couldn’t manage it himself. “I appreciate your vote of confidence.”

They drove off towards Sector Three. “There’s a lovely Junon seafood restaurant there. Or, at least I’ve heard it’s lovely; my secretary recommended it. She knows how much I enjoy authentic Junon cuisine, though, so it should be decent, right? She’s a good woman, works herself half to death, poor thing…” Lazard made a cross face. “I’m babbling, aren’t I? Ah, you can stop me whenever I get too insufferable, prattling on and on like the gossip I’m afraid I secretly am. Oh, there I go again. Ugh!”

Sephiroth didn’t mind, and he said so. “It was good to get mail from you, in Wutai,” he said. “Thank you.”

“It’s my job,” Lazard said, but he sounded fond.

They ate in companionable silence. Sephiroth hadn’t realized how hungry he’d been, when faced with real food after months of MREs, putting away a whole fish in broth and all the bread the waiter kept bringing, while Lazard supped, finicky, at his chowder—“I don’t much care for red soup,” he explained, before passing the rest of it off to Sephiroth in exchange for a piece of bread. “You need it more than I do, anyway, if you plan on getting any taller…”

They headed back out; Sephiroth was glad of it, glad to be with Lazard only and not a room full of peeping, whispering strangers, however genteel. “I think we attracted some attention,” he mentioned.

“Hm?” Lazard glanced back as he opened the door for Sephiroth again. “Ah, yes, that,” he said as he settled himself in as well, fussing with his cravat in the rearview mirror. “You did well, Sephiroth, very well at New Year’s; you saved a lot of men’s lives. The President has been… outspoken about your success, of course. People like to hear good news, they want to hear about courage under fire, they want heroes. He thinks he can give them that, with what you’ve done. And you’ve done well, Sephiroth, you really have.”

“I did what you asked me to.” It was not a particularly upsetting statement, Sephiroth thought; it was only true. But Lazard looked so sad because of it.

The Director turned the engine, laying a hand briefly on Sephiroth’s arm before heading back out into traffic. “I’m glad you’re back, you know,” he said.