InsaneJournal

CC:FF7 - more ff50 prompts
Holy crap, an update? And you all thought I had abandoned this thing, didn't you? --Anyway, hmm, yep, the bug is still biting. Here's some morose sort of stuff.


018. Depressing [~1,340]


“Hanne, this is Lazard—“

“Are you alright, Director, sir? Everybody’s been looking for you all day! Where are you?”

He sighed. “I’m fine, Hanne. I need you to put me through to the President’s secretary, if you would be so kind.”

“Of course, but—”

“It’s rather important.” Hanne was a nice woman, very competent, but he was having trouble not hating her right now.

“Yes, sir.” There was the crumpling noise of lines being rearranged, and then the neutral tone of another phone ringing twice before a different woman picked up. “President’s desk.”

“This is Lazard Deusericus. I need to speak with the President, if you would be so kind as to put me through. It’s important.”

“I’m sorry, Director, but he’s not here at the moment. I can take a message, if you would like.” She sounded coy-sweet, like a Honeybee girl saved from the sordid life only to be left answering phones. Probably bottle-blond, leggy, rather insipid but eager at her tasks. He wondered how recently she’d sucked the President’s dick.

“No, I really need to talk to him personally. Could you give me the number at which I could reach him now, please?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t distribute the President’s personal information—”

“Then can you put me through to him, at least?”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t—“

“For fuck’s sake, woman, this is important,” Lazard snapped, “now put me through to the President, or so help me Ramuh I will see you fired and back on whatever street corner it is you came from. Is that understood?”

There was a click and more crackling, and for a second Lazard thought that the bitch had hung up on him. Then another bland ringtone started, going almost to voicemail before someone bothered to pick up. “Who is this?” the President said by way of greeting, sounding wary and cross.

“It’s Lazard.”

“Huh.” If anything, he sounded even more suspicious now. “Well then, what couldn’t wait until tomorrow morning? How’d you get this number, anyway?”

“I just thought you should know that—that Magdalene passed away this morning.”

“Huh.” There was silence on the line for a long moment, and Lazard couldn’t help but hope that maybe this was the moment, that maybe Maman hadn’t lied when she’d petted his hair and told him that his father was a good man. “I expect you’ll be taking a leave of bereavement, then? You’ll need to speak with Heidegger about arranging that, not me—”

He blinked, not knowing how to do anything but stumble on. “I don’t know when the funeral is yet. I’ll tell you, though, when it’s been sorted out, if you… if you wanted to come.”

“Call Administrative Research about that. I’m sure they’ll pass it on.”

“I don’t want to talk to your damn Turks, I want to talk to you!” He sounded like a spoiled, petulant schoolboy, like fucking Rufus, but it was difficult to care. “Didn’t you hear me? Magdalene’s dead. She’s dead. Did you even know she was sick? Do you even care?”

“Mind who you’re talking to, Deusericus,” the old man growled, but Lazard just hung up on him. Blood and the muffled noise of Midgar above him rang in his ears, his breathing loud in the quiet kitchen that ought to have been full of music and of Maman’s beautiful voice. He flung the closed PHS to the floor and, when its clatter and bounce didn’t satiate him, smashed it under his heel until it snapped and crumbled into its component technologies. After that it seemed quieter in his ears and more empty in his chest and throat; he swept up the mess with a dustpan and threw it in the bin, sat down at the kitchen table and cried.

* * *

He’d been sitting on the couch at home and staring at the wall, half in a haze and still not really convinced that any of what had happened during the long, godawful day was real. Heidegger, of all people, had provided the most conciliatory and gracious moment he had had since returning to the upper Plate, granting Lazard leave and even seeming to be genuinely, personally mournful to hear that Magdalene Deusericus had passed away. “Magda’s dead?” he’d said, sounding startled. “Does the President know?”

“He knows,” Lazard said. Then, “Thank you, Heidegger,” three words he’d never thought he’d have cause to speak, before hanging up.

What a fucked-up world he lived in, he thought, resting his head on his knees, when the Peace Preservation Director seemed more bothered by his mother’s death than his own father. For a moment on the train back up to the Plate he’d felt as if he were mad, as if he’d invented the idea of his Shin-Ra inheritance in the hours since the morning, as if perhaps the President had every right to be callous when a member of his Board presented himself so unprofessionally. But Heidegger knew. Maybe all the good old capitalist pigs on the Board knew, Palmer and Scarlett, everyone who’d been with Shin-Ra from the start and had watched Magdalene come and go, forgotten in the giddy, greedy wake of a greater success than the Planet had ever seen.

He pinched himself, in the soft meat under his upper arm. It was real, grotesquely so, and he didn’t think he’d ever hated anyone as much as he hated President Shin-Ra in that moment.

It had gotten quite dark when a knock at his door roused him from his half-aware funk. “Who is it?” he called, wondering slightly if that croaky voice were really his.

“Sephiroth,” the general replied.

There was a second of panic, as Lazard considered sending the man away, loath to have to put on a fond and friendly act for anyone at a time like this. But then Sephiroth would really know that something was up, and even if he did try and order him to leave it would probably only result in further complications—of the kind involving broken doors and offended Generals, most likely. Might as well let him in and deal with it as it came. “Just a minute!” He cinched his bathrobe more securely and tried to unruffle his hair a little, as if it might make him look less like someone who’d been sitting around sniveling in the dark.

Sephiroth’s scan of him earned him a look of concern as the taller man followed him into the apartment. “No one saw you all day,” he offered, “and then Heidegger came in to tell us—”

“I’m taking a leave of bereavement, yes,” Lazard said, sitting down at the far end of the couch, folding his limbs up again. He was getting unfairly resentful of having to tell everyone what was going on. “My mother passed away this morning.”

“…Oh.” Sephiroth hesitated, standing straight and taut as a drawn line in the middle of the room. “I’m… sorry.” There seemed to be a faint layer of questioning under the words, of discomfort regarding this inadequate expression. He shifted cautiously closer, as if hesitant to disturb the air of the room, as if Lazard’s grief were an unknown and dangerous beast. “Is there anything—”

“No,” Lazard said, rather more sharply than he’d meant. An aimless anger in him threatened to point itself at Sephiroth. “I’ll be back in a week. I have a lot of things to get done. I need—” He rose abruptly, brushing Sephiroth’s concerned hand away. “I want to be alone. I’ll call you.”

There was a kind of ill pleasure to be had in the brief look of hurt in the General’s eyes as he left, the exposure of his social ineptitude. No one could be perfect at everything, not even Sephiroth; even Sephiroth could be dragged down, made as inwardly naked and anxious and disowned as the wretched masses. Lazard choked on it. Soon he’d be missing the solid, animal comfort of a shoulder to rest his head on, a fellow-creature to kill unhappy time with; but Sephiroth was gone.





026. Secret [~600]


Lazard’s apartment was a subtle wreck. Coffee and cream, only half drunk, was room temperature on the table; clothes were rumpled in ajar drawers; the desk in his home office was stripped bare of anything more incriminating than a mismatched collection of pens. The Turks knew that someone had tipped the Director off roughly two hours before he was to have been siezed, and the man had made good use of the time—if there had been any notebooks, papers, or diaries of Lazard’s apparently long and intense career of siphoning off Company money, it was gone now.

“Son of a bitch,” Reno muttered, having shook out every remaining book on Lazard’s shelf to search for hollowed-out tomes or stashed recipits. “Ain’t nothing left here, boss.”

“Keep checking,” Tseng said, treading carefully as he collected sundry personal items and bagged them. Checking for evidence at this point was mostly an exercise in seeking possible accomplices or leads to AVALANCE and other thorns in Shin-Ra’s side; they had suspected for a while now that Lazard was a fraud, and his flight from Midgar had incontrovertably proved it.

Reno pulled a strip of condoms out of a bedside drawer. “Magnums? Damn.” He whistled. “Hey, boss, can I keep—”

“Absolutely not.” Tseng snatched them away before Reno could get too attached, and dumped the rest of the drawer into another liter bag. Reno couldn’t help but comment on the packets of lube and what appeared to be a high-end gay porn magazine, and Tseng couldn’t help but tell him to shut up and go search the kitchen.

The Director’s sexuality had been an open secret, professionally denied but still plentifully obvious. Of course the Turks had been carefully monitoring Lazard since his entrance to the Company; records of occasional dalliances existed, discreetly noted, background-checked, and hidden away. It would have been unwise, after all, to let the President’s bastard get kidnapped or seduced by terrorists. After he’d been made SOLDIER Director, Lazard had gotten busier and seemed to have given up on relationships, however brief. All that had been left on Lazard’s file with the Turks was his train schedules, his gym use, his visits (few) and visitors (almost none). Having to monitor the Director’s life in secret, Tseng had felt like a voyeur, and had gone through a phase of somewhat desiring the tall blond. Then it had turned out that he was stealing huge amounts of money from Company coffers.

Tseng had gone to great lengths to ensure that the identity of the one who had alerted Lazard to his imminent arrest would never be uncovered.

He folded down the rumpled sheets. They still smelled human, like sweat and sleep and sex, making Tseng frown. There were a few hairs still on the pillows, gold and fine, and a strand of gray. Lazard, wherever he’d run off to, would soon be celebrating his fortieth birthday in ignomious exile. But when Tseng pulled idly on the gray strand, it reeled endlessly out from between the sheets, foot after foot of taut hair, strong as silk. The thread of hair was more than a meter long, and when he held it to the light, it proved to be distinctly silver.

Reno called from the kitchen, having apparently found nothing more interesting than a bottle of Wutai whiskey. Tseng let the hair fall from his fingers in a less incriminating location; perhaps it could have simply hitched a ride home on Lazard’s clothes or in his papers. There was a lot of useless, meaningless debris left behind here, after all; finding what was relevant was up to his discretion. He answered Reno and shut the bedroom door carefully behind him.