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The SOLDIER stops just outside the ruins of Midgar. Before he had lost contact with the Handlers - they had been eliminated, he knows now - his last objective had been under it's plate. He had been stationed in Corel to carry out a hit on one of the original AVALANCHE members when the Meteor had fallen and his next mission hadn't come in.
He waited for two months for a transmission or a helicopter carrying one of his Handlers to appear, but nothing came for him but a thick and unyielding silence. The SOLDIER, for the first time that he can remember, does not know what to do. There must be a mission. He just doesn't know how to find it.
Returning to base is the closest thing the SOLDIER has left to an order, so he goes.
Nothing is solved when he gets there. The city before him lays still in death, and no answers appear.
---
He waits on standby.
Without an order, he doesn't know what else to do. He slinks around the ruins of Midgar like a ghost, killing only what he needs to survive and avoiding everything else. He has never been active long enough to have to do this himself. In theory, the SOLDIER understands the human condition of hunger, but he is capable of going many days without eating - this is normally enough time for him to finish his mission and return to Midgar to be put back under.
The SOLDIER eats whatever he can get his hands on when he feels unexplained pangs in his stomach. Sometimes, he finds old canned food in the ruined apartments and houses he explores. (He never checks for expiration dates - rotten food can do little to hurt him.) Sometimes, he eats monsters.
He doesn't have a preference. Anything that he can get his hands on will do. He was not programmed to make choices beyond which angle to snipe from, or which humans needed to be cut down first to make the rest of the mission easier to complete.
---
Mostly, the SOLDIER waits within the ravaged ShinRa building. He spends his time there collecting things of use, sharpening his sword, cleaning his rifle, and pouring through old documents for any hint of a mission that could have been left to him. He finds a whole room filled to the brim with his reports, but the last file there is the hit from Corel. He leaves without looking through the others.
On rare days he inches out into the wreckage of Midgar, farther and farther. He commits every hiding place and street left untouched to memory. His Handlers had always stressed that a successful job was followed by a successful escape, and for that he needed to always have his surroundings memorized.
He is ghosting below the plate for the first time since he returned to Midgar when he finds it.
A large church sits at the end of the wreckage of Sector 5, seemingly untouched by the Meteor. Compared to the rest of Midgar - it is a pristine pedestal in a sea of ruin.
He spots tire tracks in the dirt, and slips into combat mode. They're the prints of a motorcycle, and a large one, at that. The SOLDIER is quieter than the death he brings as he creeps closer to the church, careful not to alert the unknown factor to his presence. He sees the motorcycle itself, finally, parked to the side of the church. It is almost hidden. The SOLDIER pulls his dagger from its sheath on his leg. Cut, cut - he slashes the tires. If the unknown is a hostile, it will not escape this way.
The SOLDIER uses the uneven bricks in the church's wall to silently climb up to its roof. As he had hoped, a hole in the paneling is near the middle. Swiftly, the SOLDIER kneels beside it, careful to keep his body out of the sun and out of vision from the unknown inside. He looks down.
Below him, a blond man is crouched in the middle of a small patch of colorful flowers growing up through the church's floorboards. He is carefully trimming out those that have died, and gently tipping a pink watering can over the living. Beside him, an enormous pool of sparkling water shines and lapps softly in the breeze.
The SOLDIER is struck by a sudden, unexplained sense of oddness. There is something not right about this picture, but he has no idea what. He shrugs the feeling off. It is unimportant.
Squinting down, he takes in the man's features. There is a familiarity. The SOLDIER has seen this man before. Where? He thinks. A flash through his mind - a list of faces and names on a computer screen. The current AVALANCHE members. He hadn't been sent after them - his mission had been to pick off those that had scattered into hiding.
He remembered. The man below him is 'Cloud Strife,' the leader of the new AVALANCHE group. AVALANCHE. The SOLDIER has no mission officially assigned to him, but taking out the remnants of the old AVALANCHE group had been his last mission. The man below him is AVALANCHE. The pieces fit together in the SOLDIER's head, and as he slowly reaches behind his back to unhook his rifle, he feels a sense of calm that he hasn't felt since his Handlers had been eliminated - probably by the man below. He has a mission.
The SOLDIER's hands shake as he peers through the scope and lines up the shot. Irrelevant. The crosshairs of his rifle hover perfectly over the back of the man's blond head. With a deep, uneven breath, the SOLDIER fires.
In the split second in between his shot and the bullet reaching it's intended target, Strife moves. The round digs into the ground behind where Strife's head had been only moments previously, and the SOLDIER meets startling blue eyes through the scope of his rifle.
A gust of feeling blows threw him, but the SOLDIER can't place why or what it is. It is similar to what he feels when he is successful on a hit, so it makes no sense that he feels it now.
In another few moments, Strife kicks off the ground and leaps into the air. He lands gracefully atop the roof with the SOLDIER. Slowly, the SOLDIER rises to his feet, leaving the rifle on the shingles below him. If Strife comes straight at him, he won't have a chance to use it. The SOLDIER puts his hand gently on his sword's sheath. It's been a while since he's had to use it.
Strife is looking at him, though, very oddly. The AVALANCHE leader's face is twisted up and his blue eyes are wide with an emotion the SOLDIER does not know. (This is no surprise - the SOLDIER does not understand emotions. He is not programmed to feel them, he cannot recognize them unless they are obvious. Anger, he sees. Agony, he sees. Fear, he sees. This? This, the SOLDIER cannot place.)
"...Zack?" Strife's voice comes out in a wavering whisper.
The SOLDIER glares. "Who the hell is Zack?" The name rings no bell in the SOLDIER's mind. It is possible 'Zack' was one of the SOLDIER's targets, before, but it leaves the question of why Strife is calling him that.
Strife's head is shaking, and he takes a small step back. A sign of confusion, agitation, or fear. This is good, the SOLDIER thinks. Strife is not the leader of AVALANCHE for nothing. He may have trouble taking Strife out normally, but if he can take Strife by surprise while he is still distracted -
The SOLDIER charges forward, pulling his sword from its sheath and stabbing forwards in one fluid motion. Strife stumbles backwards, barely evading the hit. The SOLDIER gives him no time to catch his footing, and Strife nearly tumbles from the roof of the church trying to dodge his attacks. Strife is babbling the whole time, 'wait,' and 'Zack,' being the only words the SOLDIER really catches.
Something is building in the SOLDIER's chest.
They fly around the roof, Strife doing nothing more than dodging the SOLDIER's nonstop onslaught. AVALANCHE's leader jumps across the gap in the roof that the SOLDIER had first seen him through, and the SOLDIER leaps to follow and raises his sword high above his head.
Strife whips around suddenly, bringing his strange sword up for the first time, and soundly blocks the SOLDIER's overhead swing.
With no leverage under his feet, all the SOLDIER has time to think is, 'Oh' before he falls through the gap in the roof into the church below, and everything goes black as his head cracks against the wood.
---
The SOLDIER comes back into awareness all at once.
His wrists and ankles are held together with a material that he can't snap - something he tests within the first ten seconds he's awake. The air around him smells sweet. He is still in the church, surrounded by flowers. Something about this scenario is... familiar. A scuff of noise.
Strife is standing to the side, staring at him. His face is pinched in the same look from earlier that the SOLDIER still cannot discern. He has a phone to his ear, and the SOLDIER's enhanced can pick up a woman's agitated voice coming from the speakers.
"Hold on," Strife says. "He's awake. I'll call you back." And he snaps his phone shut.
The SOLDIER prepares to be interrogated or eliminated. This is the most logical course of action for AVALANCHES' leader - he is a hostile assassin, and he has made an attempt on the man's life. This, he understands.
Strife, however, does nothing.
He stands stiffly in the corner of the church, watching the SOLDIER with a tight frown and furrowed brow. Finally, after what feels like years, the man folds. His shoulders curve in, and his posture goes slack. His hand not resting on the hilt of his sword clenches in front of his stomach, and his head falls. It makes him look tiny. The SOLDIER is unsure - is the man attempting to make him drop his guard by appearing weak? It will not work.
"...Zack?" Strife asks again, voice wavering.
The SOLDIER remains silent.
Strife waits for a heartbeat, before shaking his head and breathing out a long breath of air. "Why did you attack me?" He murmurs, but the SOLDIER gives him no response.
---
Strife asks him many questions, but never tries to force the SOLDIER to give answers. He simply asks, and when the SOLDIER does not respond, he either asks again or moves on. It's maddening and illogical. The SOLDIER does not understand why the AVALANCHE leader is not resorting to threats or torture. That, at least, he was trained for.
Eventually, the woman that the SOLDIER guesses Strife was on the phone with earlier arrives. He recognizes her after a few moments as another face on the current AVALANCHE member file - Tifa Lockhart. She takes one look at the SOLDIER and grabs Strife's arm. Lockhart drags him off into the farthest corner of the church they can go and still see him, and they mutter to each other low enough that the SOLDIER can't pick up anything they're saying. At one point, Lockhart gets agitated enough to shout ("- he tried to kill you!") but quiets back down quickly.
When they return to the center of the church, the SOLDIER manages to pick up the tail-end of their conversation. Lockhart is reassuring Strife that 'Reeve' is hunting through the old ShinRa database for any encrypted files that might have anything to do with 'Zack.'
Zack, Zack, Zack. The SOLDIER is not a fool - he knows that Strife, at least, is under the impression that he is 'Zack.' Whoever 'Zack' is, the SOLDIER does not know. He has never seen the name in any of the files his Handlers had routed to him.
Lockhart leaves, and the SOLDIER is left alone with Strife once again.
Strife creeps into the SOLDIER's space (keeping a safe distance between them) and kneels down before him. "Hello." He says, blue eyes fixed on the SOLDIER's.
The SOLDIER narrows his eyes and doesn't speak.
Strife bites his bottom lip. "You- your name is Zack Fair. You grew up in Gongaga. Do you remember Gongaga?" He begins.
Leaning backwards, the SOLDIER frowns. This is not true, he knows - the SOLDIER was always a ShinRa asset. He has never been anything else.
"You were a SOLDIER in ShinRa's military - First Class, the best there was." Strife continues, but the SOLDIER cuts him off, this time.
"That's incorrect." He grunts. "Even if you say I was a SOLDIER First Class, once, I couldn't have been the best. Sephiroth was the best - everyone knows that." This much also, the SOLDIER knows. He has been debriefed on Sephiroth many times, on every successful mission the man had completed. "And there was no 'Zack Fair' in SOLDIER. I've seen the personnel files."
Strife stares at him for a moment, face regaining the pinched look from earlier.
"... No." The man that is familiarstrangedifferent says softly. "You were the best. You always will be."
—