Broken Glass

“He’s gone.” Reno looked up from where he was crouched amidst a pile of broken glass at his dark-skinned partner. His aqua eyes radiating irritation at Rude’s painfully obvious statement.

“Thanks for pointing that out.” He answered sarcastically as he rose up to a standing position. “I had almost missed that what with the obviously broken wall and the emptiness of the viewing room after all. I don’t know what I would have done without you being here to let me know he was gone.”

Rude shrugged, more than used to his partner’s sarcasm.

Reno breathed out heavily as he rested his hand on his hips and surveyed the disastrous scene for what felt like the thousandth time. He should have known when he took this job that something was going to go wrong. Something always went wrong and then he ended up stuck with the burden of cleaning up. He fucking hated cleaning up.

“Hojo’s gonna be pissed as hell when he hears about this.” Reno muttered. “Where the hell do you think he went anyways? It’s not like he’s got any friends or somethin’. He couldn’t have gotten far, not lookin’ like a bloody sculpture. Is there a single non-good looking experiment in this whole damn program?”

Rude shrugged, once again more than used to Reno’s foul mouth and knowing well enough that the red-head was more concerned than his surprisingly light-hearted tone implied.

Instead of answer, all he did was adjust his ever present sunglasses. Reno sighed again as he ran a hand through his hair.

“And here I was expecting some vacation time.” He raised his hands up in the air in a sign of surrender. “Of course that was before Hojo’s newest pet project decided to throw a fit and then disappear off the face of the earth. Fuckin’ hell I hate my job.”

Rude shook his head. He knew better than to argue. Reno loved his job. Everyone knew it. He’d made it no secret even going so far as to call it ‘the best fucking job I think I’ve ever held in my whole fucking life’ more than a few times. That didn’t mean he didn’t enjoy bitching about how hard it was every chance he got, however. That was just how Reno was.

Both men turned to the doorway as they heard the door creak open, Reno’s hand twitching the general direction of his ElectroRod, something he’d been given a few years back as thanks from some nutty scientist or another. There were far too many of them to keep track of in Reno’s opinion, not that Reno was complaining. Receiving free powerful weapons was probably one of the best perks of a job that put one in danger on any given day of the week.

They relaxed when they saw it was just their boss.

“Any signs of where he might have gone?” Tseng asked, his face an impeccable mask of calm, which was impressive considering the circumstances. If having a potentially dangerous experiment running amok wasn’t a stressful situation then he didn’t know what was, not that he would let it get to him. He was far above something as petty as a stressful situation. He made his life out of hunting down problems in order to fix them. It was what he did, and he did it well.

“Well if you were expecting a note explaining that he took off to give his sick granny milk and cookies complete with an address and a timeline of when he was going to be coming back, then no.” Reno answered cheekily. Tseng resisted the urge to rebuke him for his manners. As uncouth and potentially offensive as Reno often was, he knew how to get results and results were all anyone was concerned with now-a-days. “As it stands, all we’ve got is one hell of a mess and an empty room.”

“And this.” While Reno had been distracted by Tseng’s appearance, Rude had been meandering around the small, square room that had once housed the experiment known to them only as J003. He held up a manila folder for the other two to see. “This was on the desk.”

Both men hurried forward as Rude opened the folder and laid it out on the desk in order for everyone present to be able to get a good look.

There was intense silence for a minute as each man stared down in shock at the picture held in place at the top of the file with a paperclip. They looked up at the same time, an uncharacteristic surprise evident on each face.

“I never thought we would ever see him again. Wasn’t he in a coma?” Reno asked, glancing down at the picture again almost as though he thought it would have magically changed into something more acceptable in the few seconds he’d looked away.

“Apparently not anymore.” Tseng answered, concern creeping into his voice. “Something tells me that we should locate and bring back the experiment before word of this reaches the highest level or the Professor at the very least.”

“What are the chances of the technology failing enabling him to revert?” Rude asked. He adjusted his glasses and began studying the picture once more.

“In his protected environment, slim to none.” Tseng looked up at ceiling, refusing to so much as think about all the horrid ways this fiasco could end. “However, none of the test subjects were thoroughly tested to direct stimuli. If someone he used to know says something specific to him, or does something to trigger his memory… I don’t want to consider what would happen. Needless to say, if we don’t find him before that happens then we might find this situation could progress far over our heads, and that, my friends, is not something we want to occur.”

Tseng looked down again as his companions fell into another deep silence. None present wanted to be there. They didn’t want to deal with this. This was beyond them. This had nothing to do with them. This was far beyond what they were comfortable with doing, and they were comfortable with doing a whole hell of a lot in the grand scheme of things. Blowing up buildings, buses, homes seemed like cake compared to this.

It was painful in a way that it most definitely should not have been to look at the hauntingly beautiful blue eyes looking up at them from the file. Eyes they had never hoped to see again. Eyes they had prayed to never see again.

Tseng sighed and motion for his companions to follow him out of the room, leaving the folder lying open on the desk.

“This must be contained now. Find him, eliminate him. Don’t worry about the Professor. He can find a new plaything. I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of what fate awaits you should you fail?”

Both men nodded.

“Good. Kill the both of them. Burn the bodies. Leave no traces.”

~

I didn’t know what to think. First Cloud’s mad at me and threatening to throw things if I so much as look in his general direction and then he’s crying and pouring his heart out to me and I’d be damned if I knew what to do to comfort him, so I’d left, hoping that he would be able to work enough out on his own so that we could at least go back to being passing acquaintances. Then he disappeared from work without telling anyone. One minute he was there and the next he was gone and the treatment room we’d been previously cleaning had been closed due to maintenance issues. Like anyone was really buying that? The room had been perfectly fine ten minutes before.

And now I received a phone call from him where he sounded more excited than I’d heard him in a long time, since before the bus accident and ensuing coma. He’d told me to meet him at his apartment as soon as I could and that it was very important, though when I’d tried to question him further all I could get out him was more babble about how it was something I needed to see to believe and that I was going to be amazed once I did get there.

Well fine. He can keep his damned secrets for a bit longer, I thought as I continued about my regularly scheduled day, more than a little irritated at the blonde for expecting I had nothing better to do than drop everything and run to his side just because he’d decided to forgive me for whatever reason. He could have the entire line up for the next Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition chilling in bikinis in his kitchen and I still wasn’t going to give up a day’s pay to come see. Though if there had been a chance in hell of that occurring, I would have been extremely conflicted. As it was, I was sure this newest deal was nothing more than Cloud trying to make up for showing more emotion than strictly necessary earlier.

What was up with that anyway? I knew Cloud had been a bit messed up when he’d woken up from a five year coma, which, given the fact that he had been unconscious for five years after watching his best friend bleed to death in his arms, that much was fairly understandable and hadn't caused me much concern. I would have been more worried if it hadn’t bothered him. That didn’t mean he had to become a sullen bastard about everything despite all his friends best efforts to make him happy.

God, if there was one thing I hated more than cheesy commercials that lasted far too long during my favorite shows, it was emo kids. And if there was anything I hated more than emo kids, it was emo adults, and while Cloud had the excuse of being mentally sixteen for a while, he didn’t have that excuse anymore and none of us were pleased about it.

Two years he had been awake and back in the land of the living and in those two years he had managed to alienate himself from his friends and family. He had managed to chase everyone but me away, and the only reason I hadn’t gone was because in my own twisted way, I thought he’d needed me, which in a way he had, but not in the way I thought. Not in the way I had tried to help him, though the sex had been quite good and I never heard him complain. It was just a feeling I had, a feeling that had strengthened after the events of this morning.

Guilty.

Cloud had felt guilty about Sephiroth’s death. He had tried to drown out that guilt in whatever way he could, leaning on me when it became clear I was more than willing to provide such an escape. Now that I knew what the base of his problem was, I was still lost as to how to fix it. Maybe Aerith would know. She knew everything.

Shit, I should call her. She’d been worried when I’d come to her two days ago practically in tears because of my own guilt. She’d been so understanding considering I’d been cheating on her with another man for over a year before finally coming clean. I didn’t deserve such a caring woman, but, unlike Cloud, I wasn’t one to question my gifts. If Fate decided that I was going to be involved in a bus accident, ultimately becoming the only survivor, then I would have taken it for exactly what it was: A miracle.

I most certainly wouldn’t have blamed myself and then proceeded to fuck up the lives of those trying to help me recover.

Though that was a little unfair to Cloud. He’d never been an outgoing person, even before the accident. I suppose everything made some sort of sense seeing as Sephiroth had been the only one in our group privileged enough to get Cloud to open up back then. With Sephiroth dead, and Cloud left assuming it was his fault, there really wasn’t any other way for the blonde to react.

It didn’t give him the right to be an ass about it though. I’d just been trying to help, in my own fucked up way.

And now I’m distracted and rambling and the nurses are starting notice. Just great. The only thing I need to top this wonderful little shit cake I seemed to be baking was to get fired on top of everything else.

Fucking fuckity fuck fuck! I sighed deeply, drawing some concerned glances from the two nurses who were filling out charts down the hall. I was going to leave right now and go see Cloud, wasn’t I? I just can’t seem to be able to say no to him, not when he sounded so… Enthusiastic? Bubbly? Effervescent? Whatever, he sounded happy and that was good enough for me.

I hurried to the main nurse’s station and sweet talked the head nurse for awhile, claiming to have a family emergency that needed to be taken care of immediately and that I would take an extra shift next week to cover my absence if only she would let me go just this one time please!

She didn’t believe me, I could tell. She also wasn’t too pleased with that fact that my best friend had taken off less than our hour ago, vanishing without a trace, without bothering to ask for permission. If Cloud showed up tomorrow looking anything other than two seconds away from an early grave, he might not have a job to show up to any longer, though there was a nagging thought at the back of my mind that insinuated Cloud had found a damned good reason and that he wasn’t going to give a shit whether he still had a job or not.

Hopefully that little thought was true because I didn’t think I could take another round of ‘Cheer Up the Unusually Emo Adult’ ever again. In fact, maybe this whole Cloud being mad at me thing was a blessing in disguise. I wasn’t going to lie to myself anymore. Our relationship had long ago taken the turn into unsettlingly unhealthy. As much as I wanted to be his friend again, I wasn’t quite ready to risk something like, oh… Me breaking down and consenting to fuck him into the mattress again. I knew I was weak, it was something Aerith had taught me to acknowledge in myself a long time ago, but I was trying to learn to be strong.

Since trying usually seemed to have some amount of failure to it, I was less than enthused to find myself in front of Cloud’s door hoping against all hope that he really had been happy and that this wasn’t some sort of trap to lure me back into something I had never wanted to be in. Not that Cloud would do that.

Would he?

Swallowing my darker than usual thoughts, I raised a fist and rapped my knuckles lightly against the hard wood of the door, pray for a moment that there would be no one home and that I would get to leave. It was a silly thought, and a vain one at that, but I never could help myself when it came to my mind. Often times I found myself thinking and saying things that I had no right to just because it popped into my head.

There was a loud crash and then the door opened and Cloud poked his head out into the hallway, his eyes brightening as he saw me. I raised my hand weakly in an attempt at a wave. He didn’t seem to notice, however and practically dragged me inside closing the door firmly behind us.

I watched in uncharacteristic silence as he began to bounce around the room happily picking up with floor lamp that had been the source of the crash. Something was off about him. He was humming for one thing. Cloud didn’t hum. I didn’t think he listened to music at all come to think of it. And he was smiling. Cloud didn’t smile. He frowned. He frowned a lot. He frowned so much that there were times when I seriously considered his face was stuck in a permanent look of displeasure.

“He’s alive.” Obviously Cloud thought I knew what the hell was going on. Unluckily for him, I knew no such thing and I was actually starting to believe he had lost his mind. He was still smiling after all. Something must have shown on my face because after a small pause he elaborated. “Sephiroth. He’s alive.”

As far as elaborations went, that one had been the only one that was completely batshit insane. Totally fucking crazy. Cloud was obviously having some sort of mental breakdown and I suddenly really didn’t want to be here. Violent Cloud was a scary Cloud and once whatever drug he was on wore off and he reverted back to his usual gloomy self, Violent Cloud was sure to make an appearance. Violent Cloud always made an appearance almost immediately following Happy Cloud.

Of course, I didn’t have much experience with this new Mentally Deranged Cloud, but assuming he was anywhere close to Happy Cloud, I didn’t have to. It all ended the same way after all… With me in a metric fuckton of trouble and no easy way out.

“Cloud.” I began calmly. Overreacting this early in the game would probably only be counterproductive. “Sephiroth is dead. As much as I hate to remind you, you saw it happen.”

Cloud shrugged. “I saw wrong. He’s alive.”

“Hey, I know you’re five different kinds of guilty about what happened.” He snorted at that so I amended the statement. “Okay, so maybe you’re more than five kinds of guilty, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he’s really most sincerely dead, Cloud. Whatever feelings you think you need to get off your chest, pretending he’s alive isn’t going to do anything but make matters worse.”

“I’m not pretending anything.” Cloud crossed his arms over his chest in a defiant gesture. I took an involuntary step back. I had been on the receiving end of his temper far too many times since he’d woken up. None of those times had ever ended positively for me. “He’s alive and probably still examining the toilet.”

“Toilet?” Now I was beyond confused. There was no conceivable reason for a toilet to be involved in anything, much less the unlikely revival of a dead man. “Assuming you’re telling the truth and he somehow managed to come back to life as something other than a flesh eating zombie, I don’t see how a toilet fits into any of this. Unless he really is a zombie and is attempting to use the toilet to join his undead mob in the sewers.”

“Zack, zombies don’t exist.” Cloud said patiently, as though explaining to a three year old why eating paste wasn’t a good idea. “He’s examining the toilet because he says he’s never seen one before and he wants a better idea of how it works.”

I didn’t know what to say to that one. Was there anything to say? Perhaps there was someone out there who was far wittier than I, and he or she would have managed to come up with a response to Cloud’s claim, but I, sadly enough, was not this mysterious person so I chose to stare at him in blatant shock.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that he thinks he’s a one thousand year old robot whose only job is to watch humans interact and then write about it.” Cloud shrugged as though it was every day that his dead friends came back to life only to reveal that they were actually robots in disguise. Thousand year old robots at that.

“Well that explains everything.” I answered sarcastically. Cloud was obviously insane. Whether he was the dangerous kind of insane that required a padded cell and a twenty-four hour guard or the kind of adorable insane where everyone just kind laughs when he says something crazy and passes it off as nothing more than a little joke (Oh, that’s just Cloud. Don’t worry about him. He thinks his dead best friend is a thousand year old robot obsessed with toilets. So how are you enjoying the family bar-b-que?) was still up for debate. I was hoping for the second option.

“You don’t believe me.” It was a statement more than a question so I said nothing in response. Of course I didn’t believe him. There wasn’t a soul on the planet that didn’t dress in tin foil that would.

“Did you really think I would?” I asked, not waiting for an answer before I continued. “Look, Cloud, you’ve had a hard day. I understand that you’re not exactly feeling up to par, but this is insanity, and I think you know it. Sephiroth is dead and if this is some twisted way for you to pretend that he’s still alive so you don’t have the guilt of being responsible for his death hanging over your head, then fine. You’re screwed up. We all know it, and, to be quite honest, I’m surprised you haven’t done something like this sooner, but this isn’t right. There is no one in your bathroom. Sephiroth is not alive in any way, shape or form, be it human or robotic, though the robot thing was a nice touch. I guess if you’re going to go crazy, you might as well go the full nine yards, huh?”

“I want you to take a moment to calm down and then we’ll call someone, Aerith perhaps. She always did like you. We’ll get you some help.” He didn’t stop smiling, though his enthusiasm had been curbed a bit. I went on, hoping that by continuing to ramble on about nothing he would eventually come down from whatever high he was on and turn back into the broody Cloud I knew how to deal with. “Face it, man, imagining stuff like this isn’t good for you. It means you’re sick. Sick people need help, right?”

Cloud nodded. “Yeah, of course sick people need help, but I’m not sick, Zack, and I’m not imagining anything.He is alive. Something’s happened to him though. He seems human enough but he keeps saying strange things and he doesn’t remember me at all, trust me I tried everything I could think of short of jumping him and I got nothing. He spent two minutes explaining how he apologized for going off-line when he woke up. It had something to do with his having to reboot his systems because of some virus or something like that. There was more techobabble to it, but I think that was the general gist.”

“Are you not listening to me, or are you selectively choosing not to care? There is no Sephiroth! There is no robot! There are no system errors or whatever because, once again, there is no robot! I’ll bet there isn’t anything in your bathroom either…”

WHOOSH…

I was suddenly cut off by the unmistakable sound of a toilet flushing from somewhere behind Cloud.

I stared at the closed bathroom door with something akin to abject horror. Cloud merely looked triumphant. I tried to remember how to breathe and think at the same time. Cloud grinned. I considered killing myself. Cloud kept grinning.

“There’s someone in your bathroom.” I finally managed to choke out. I knew I was doing nothing more than pointing out the obvious, but considering I could barely think more than a single word at a time at the moment, stating the obvious was a major accomplishment.

“I know. I’ve been trying to tell you that for the past five minutes.” Cloud responded completely unfazed. “Like I said, he thinks he’s only heard of toilets. He wanted to try one out for himself.”

“Cloud, who’s in your bathroom?”

“Sephiroth.”

“I’m not fucking kidding around here! Who’s in your bathroom?”

“I’m not kidding. Sephiroth’s in there.”

“I swear to you that I’m only going to ask this one more time and you’d better answer truthfully or I’m going to have to hurt you. Who is in your bathroom?”

Cloud sighed. “Would you believe me if you saw him?”

“No because there’s nothing to see. Now, you’ve got someone hiding in your bathroom and unless it’s a producer from Candid Camera, we’ve got a problem.” I toyed with the idea of this being nothing more than a sick joke. As horrific as it was that someone could think up a joke as terrible as this, it was a much better option than thinking that Cloud had picked up a hobo off the streets as was calling it Sephiroth because he’d turned into a psycho mother fucker somewhere between work and home.

And that wasn’t even mentioning that the thought of Cloud being right made me queasy. It was best not to even consider it. I couldn’t believe that I had allowed myself to consider it for even the briefest of moments. That would have meant I was just as crazy as Cloud was. I wasn’t crazy.

At least I didn’t think I was crazy.

Was I?

Okay, maybe I was, at least a little bit because as there came another flushing noise from the bathroom I really did begin to think that Sephiroth was in there. Hell, maybe he really was, and maybe he had a choir of angels keeping him company while he discovered the miraculous device that disposed of all of humanity’s excrement. What the fuck? Maybe he’d brought Jesus down for a surprise visit.

“J003!” Cloud called out that damn smile of his growing wider, if that was at all possible. Hell, I was about to get butchered by a hobo while my previous best friend watched. He’d probably mark it off as some special robot greeting. Knifing people is fun! My CPU told me to do it. “Come out here. There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“J003?” I asked, far too exhausted to argue any further.

“It’s what he told me his name was when he woke up or rebooted or whatever.” Cloud’s smile seemed to dim a bit at that, but it was back in full force before I’d had a chance to really notice. “It’s like his serial number or something. He thinks there are others out there, not as old as him though. According to him, he was the first successful experiment, but he’s sure there were others that came after him.”

“So there’s like a secret society of robots watching and cataloguing everything we do?” I was fast reaching a level of paranoid dementia where such an idea seemed so plausible that I was beginning to wonder why I hadn’t always known this, or at least suspected it.

Cloud chuckled. “I don’t know if it’s true or not. He certainly seems to think so, but he’s obviously not in his right mind.” He paused and took a deep breath. “J003!”

I felt my stomach begin to fall as there cam e another flush and then the knob on the bathroom door began to turn, slowly in my mind’s eye, so agonizingly slowly. I watched with wide eyes and a held breath as the door eased open and someone stepped out into the brightly lit living room.

Someone that looked strikingly familiar…

“Holy bloody fucking son of a god damn bitch. You weren’t lying…”

And with those eloquent words, I fell back directly onto my rear end, the world suddenly becoming fuzzy around the edges.

The last thing I remembered before the darkness took over for good was a pair of unmistakable jade eyes.

Eyes I hadn’t seen in seven long years.

Sephiroth…