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FF7/His Dark Materials -- Zack & Sephiroth prequel
This is something I wrote ages ago, for the FF7 with daemons verse (actually for a planned sephzackcloudaeris divergent AU that I ended up never writing) and I never posted it because it does spoil the deal with Zack and Seph's daemons. But it's been so long since I touched this AU, I figured it didn't matter too much anymore.
Zack's daemon (smaller, golden variety).
--
Day 3
In some places Zack knows that it's seen as kind of rude and invasive to talk to someone else's daemon, especially in public and with people you don't know well. In Wutai, for example, or in the richer circles of Midgar society, it's pretty much shocking. (Which is funny because both societies get hives when you find a point of comparison between them.)
In the army it's not that way, especially not in SOLDIER, but that's because you don't become SOLDIER in the first place if your daemon's going to be dead weight, and being able to take orders and relay them is just the very start of usefulness. (Along with using Materia independently of your human, and fighting a variety of differently-sized, differently-shaped daemons. Predators are the overwhelming majority.)
Zack knows of nowhere it's looked down upon to chat with your own daemon.
He never sees Sephiroth speak to his. Or look at him, either.
"You think it's because he's male?" Callie asks him in her low, rumbling voice. Zack ruffles a round and velvety ear between index and thumb. "I don't see why that'd be an issue, but... eh, maybe he's ashamed?"
Because yes, Sephiroth's daemon is the same gender he is. Zack knew it happened sometimes, for some reason no one has ever been able to pin down, but he's the first they've ever met. Rare as it is, he might be the last too.
"No idea," he says. He doesn't say 'I don't think it's that simple', but when they glance at each other he can tell they both feel that. There's something else at work there. Deeper, at least.
It's not a brand-new Third's place to go question the General, anyway. Or the General's daemon.
"Think he'd talk to you?" he asks Callie, squirming back to make himself comfortable against her flank. She curls her thick dragon-tail around his legs, rests her heavy head on his thigh in a way that'll cut blood flow in a minute. He rests his hand on her head.
"Eh." She sighs. "Maybe someday." Her eyes look closed, but he's near enough to see them slit open. He knows what she's watching; the smoke-gray beast that sits by the door of the open command tent like a temple's stone guardian, his human nowhere in sight.
He looks somewhat like a wolf, if a slightly too long-bodied, long-necked one. The underside of his neck and belly are furless, armored; his dewclaws look big and mobile enough to be called thumbs. His long-furred tail is weird in a way they can't define, and he moves less like a wolf and more like a snake, or maybe like a cat. Zack doesn't know what the species is called.
He doesn't even know what the daemon is called.
"They're right," Callie muses. "Those two are kinda creepy."
Zack grins and scritches the base of Callie's ox-horns. Like either of them thinks creepy means uninteresting, or 'maybe we should keep our distances.' Sephiroth and his daemon are interesting; the creepiness is more weird and sad than scary, anyway.
Would be just as dickish to work at getting closer to them because of sheer curiosity as because they're angling for a promotion. They don't use people, never have, never will.
Great General or not, there's something about Sephiroth and his daemon that make Zack and Callie want to fix them. Those people who laugh over Callie being the biggest mama cat they've ever seen in their life don't have a clue how right they are.
At some point, he remembers, she was thinking of settling as a chocobo. Zack has to say, it might not have been quite as right as what she is now -- behemoth, drake-lioness -- but a hen might have been right enough.
Day 35
Horrible as it is, Zack is starting to get used to seeing daemons explode into golden motes before their person's body has even hit the ground.
He's never been in the backwash of one before.
Second Class Ulweiss sprawls at his feet like a lump of clay, a dull thud and then total, heavy immobility. Zack falls to his knees and shudders and fights not to scream, bathed in death-sparks, in dissipating bits of soul-stuff, as what used to be a coyote washes through him, already turned shapeless, already forgetting itself.
Callie roars beside him, heavy drake tail thrashing around them in wide circles; it might help clear enemy ninja, but it's nothing but reflex. She doesn't have the presence of mind to fight. He doesn't have the presence of mind to do anything but kneel and shudder and try to grasp at Ulweiss and Neyli, at what they are, were, at least keep an imprint of them. He didn't even know them well but now he knows them as he has never known anyone, soul-deep.
He can't hold anything back, of course. He still tries. It feels wrong and bad and wrong but he can't abandon a comrade, he can't.
Callie's blind-thrashing tail slaps into his flank and he topples to the side with a cry of very physical pain and she yowls in turn as his pain echoes; she broke one of his ribs.
More ninjas than the rocks ought to be able to hide pour out into sight. They're surrounded. They're fucked. Zack stumbles to his daemon; Callie makes a circle, a wall of herself, she tosses her massive ox-horns. The ninjas dodge and charge back in.
Zack's hand is on his sword but all he can think is that it feels off, that it isn't a spear.
Ulweiss is dead he likes tea and he had a completely tortuous sense of humor and was a bit of a sadist but only in purely consensual situations and he volunteers at an animal shelter when on leave and Zack now knows all the people he's ever loved in heart-aching detail, and how at the last second Ulweiss' last thought was a faintly surprised, disgruntled 'shit, I'll never know how that book ends now'.
Zack's own thoughts are a scattered mess and at the center is dismay that he can't think of anything better but some other man's death thoughts, that they feel more real than his own.
A Wutaian ninja lands on top of Callie, knife already arching down into a vicious arc toward her spine. On pure animal reflex Zack punches at the woman's marten. He's going to miss.
Impact. Explosion. Thunder. A man in black flies overhead, his coat like wings. His daemon is a long smoke-gray serpent, no, there are paws. Zack topples over against Callie's heaving side. The daemon's belly zips past so close, it ruffles his hair.
Sephiroth glances back at him, and Zack doesn't have the strength to lift his hand, say they'll be okay, and...
... there's something terrible on his face but Zack is busy passing out.
Crunch. Splatter.
Zack's eyes are closed but no rain is ever body-warm.
He brings into his dreams the vision of a wolf-serpent shifting, stretching, a flare of wings like Sephiroth's coat in flight, and ashen fur turning into hundreds and hundreds of little half-moons of silver, razor-edged.
Day 37
Callie is about impossible to evac without a chopper and a dozen big daemons to roll her into the transport net, so it isn't too unexpected to wake still lying down on the same rocks. Someone managed to slip a couple of blankets under Zack to soften the pointy pebbles a bit, pull him by the feet out of that spine-bending ball he'd ended up in, but he's still sprawled in the inner curve of her curled body, his head propped up at an awkward angle against her flank, the end of her drake tail draped heavy on his legs.
He stares at the tent they've erected over the two of them for about five minutes before she breathes in and notices they're not alone.
Her head is too heavy to lift; she flicks an ear, trying to listen to what she scented. He plants his heels and pushes himself up a little higher on her flank ... ahh, there it is.
There they are.
There's a little camp desk in the other corner of the tent -- the command tent, he recognizes from the size, and Callie and Zack are eating about two thirds of its floor space. There's the ash-gray wolf-serpent daemon, sitting perfectly still, paws gathered, staring unblinkingly at them. There's Sephiroth, his back turned, writing away.
They don't exchange a word, but Sephiroth turns anyway.
"Lieutenant Fair."
"General, sir." There's no way he can stand; he tries to sit up a bit more, ignores the crick in his neck, salutes.
Sephiroth stares at him, wordless, pupils two hair-thin lines even in the dim tent. Zack hesitates. There's something in the atmosphere here that... bothers him. The silence is too oddly charged.
So he shrugs mentally and keeps going. "Thanks for the rescue, sir."
Callie manages to lift her head just enough to add a nod of her own.
Somehow it was the wrong thing to say. Somehow the silence grows more stifling, somehow Sephiroth seems more remote, his sword closer at hand, even though he hasn't moved an inch. His daemon hasn't moved either, though the ashen fur on his nape is rising slow like dandelion fluff in the wind, flashing its silvery-white undercoat.
People often look at Callie's sheer mass and think that because she's huge and oxen-horned and all over muscle that she has to be stupid, that Zack has to be slow. They're anything but, though the false impression sometimes helps.
They've said two things, and only the second one might have offended. They remember the rescue. Sephiroth and his unnamed daemon would have preferred they didn't.
"It wasn't a hallucination, then," Callie concludes, and rolls so she can rest her chest on the floor, front paws spread to keep her steady, head tossed up in something that might look like defiance but is really only so her big head doesn't flop back down midway from exhaustion. Zack sits up straighter as a result, not all his own choice, but it works better that way.
His buster sword is propped up against the entrance post of the tent, far enough from his reach it might as well be in Gongaga.
"And what might you be hallucinating about, Lieutenant?" Sephiroth inquires silkily. His daemon is flowing inch by inch from that guardian-liondog stance to one of coiled-snake.
They've seen the General and his daemon fight. Even if his sword were in reach and his inner magic wasn't so fucked up and nauseatingly wavery that they'd left him his materia bangles he would manage exactly jack shit. Bang, skewered, his taking in Ulweiss' daemon dust made him crazy, so sad.
He looks at Callie, one eyebrow arched. Callie hums in answer, looks at the gray daemon. Her voice is curious, quiet enough not to carry past the tent but utterly unafraid. "You haven't settled, have you?"
The General and his daemon are made of stone.
Zack watches them, curious, unafraid -- either he's already dead and can't do jack shit, or he isn't and being scared is stupid. It's so strange it doesn't even feel quite true, even though he cannot doubt it anymore. He remembers that glimpse of it, fur melting into coils and sharp pointy angles like a striking snake -- a wyvern -- a dragon...
"You know that is utterly ridiculous, don't you, Lieutenant?" Sephiroth inquires, voice urbane, disinterested, like he's at some gala or other and doing the polite chitchat boring thing. "Instances of stunted mental development might take longer but there is not a single case of a daemon going unsettled once their person has gone through puberty. I assure you my teenage years are quite over by now."
Zack chuckles, surprising everyone including himself. "Yeeeah, sir, I can see that."
They blink, the daemon and the man both; they have the same lambent green cat's eyes, the only touch of color on either of them, another oddity. Zack's eyes were gray before the SOLDIER process, Callie's were golden-brown, though now they both have a purplish materia-glow overlay.
"Must be convenient," he continues, though his voice softens without his conscious decision because he knows between convenience and normalcy Sephiroth might have chosen otherwise, if he could have. There's a difference between extraordinary and freak of nature, and a lot of people would see an unsettled adult daemon as the second.
"Only when we plan on leaving no survivors," the daemon speaks, for the first time ever in Zack's earshot. His voice is low and rich and oddly raspy, Sephiroth's cultured intonations in a throat gone unused for weeks or years.
He uncoils slowly, pads to them, head low and forward like a hunting wolf, muzzle too long and nose strangely flat, blunt like a snake's. His needle-tipped fangs are long enough that they peek out under his chops, even when they aren't actively bared; Zack wonders about venom.
Callie inclines her lioness head, forward-curved horns framing her own muzzle. Her skull alone is three times as big. They touch noses. At the desk Sephiroth is frozen, staring, expression subtle enough to be unreadable but nothing like what Zack has gotten to see before.
The gray daemon shifts, and it's at the same time like and unlike a child's; it goes slower, not over and done in a flash but slow enough that Zack can follow the morphing fur, the stretching limbs. Still fast, two seconds tops maybe, and then a male behemoth crowds the tent and them both, bigger than Callie, nape bristling with a drake crest of stretched hide between long rattling spines, horns so long he might have trouble getting food to his mouth. He would have no trouble with the goring part, though.
He's not golden like Callie is, like Lesser Behemoths ought to be, not purplish like a Greater one, he's still ashen all over. Color variants are pretty uncommon in daemons in the first place, and gray isn't either melanistic or albino. Probably another side-effect of the thing that made him not settle, that gave him those strange eyes.
"Stop," Sephiroth says between gritted teeth, like he wants to say 'what are you doing' instead, and that's a pretty damning thing to ask out of your own daemon.
The daemon's huge drake tail slithers on the dusty rocks, slow, thoughtful, as he looks down at Callie still sprawled down, at Zack against her flank, hunkered down to fit without knocking down things, and then he blinks his eerie eyes, slow and thoughtful. "This one doesn't suit anyway."
And he's a wolf-serpent again.
"Neat," Zack concludes, and offers an impressed little nod to the daemon. Sephiroth's shoulders are stiff and he's going to break his pen in a second if he keeps squeezing it like that, so Zack turns a smile on him. Not a big one, he'd feel mocked, just a small sympathetic one. "Thank you, sir."
"For?" Sephiroth asks, harshly. He feels confused and doesn't like it, it seems. His daemon doesn't share it. Those two don't talk enough, Zack thinks, and shares a quick glance with Callie.
"Taking such a huge risk to save us, sir." He meets the man's eyes, straight on, lets him see how serious, how sincere he is. "We won't talk," he says, because he knows where the conversation is going, how much like torture it must be not to know if by saving one of his men Sephiroth has damned himself to lose control and respect from them all.
A quiet, almost-silent, disbelieving huff. The gray daemon turns his head to stare at his human. They don't look at each other two seconds before Sephiroth is breaking eye contact, and it hurts seeing a man so at odds with himself.
"You were loyal to us, sir," Callie says, all soft-gentle, "so we will be loyal to you."
And she settles herself like a loaf of huge bread, paws curled in, tail curled around, head set back comfortably, eyes closed almost all the way, and she starts to purr. Zack laughs, feeling the vibrations rattle their way through his whole body. "Oh Ifrit's teeth, Callie, you vibrate like uncle Mick's old truck, are you trying to knock my teeth off?"
She opens an eye, and says, "I would never," and she only purrs harder.
Sephiroth is still staring like he's lost control of the situation and it's getting him frustrated, and he doesn't yet feel safe enough with Zack to let it go, to appreciate feeling like they're not taking him seriously.
Zack straightens up again, rolls his neck a little, distracted by the painful twinge for a second. "You'd know it's us if it got out anyway, sir. No one else was around to see, were they?"
"No," Sephiroth answers with a frown.
"So we'd have to be really stupid to talk, even if we wanted to, and even if anyone believed us without proof -- and I have to say, sir, we might act a bit flaky at times but an act is really all it is."
"This only tells me that you routinely present a façade to the world and that before using this information you would be smart enough to prepare yourselves an escape route." Sephiroth's heavy-lidded, unimpressed look is very clear on what an awesome escape route it should be in order to escape him.
Zack bites his lip to keep from laughing. This would be a bad response, no matter how absurd the situation is. "It's usually not bad pretending, sir. It's mostly so we don't step on people's toes unnecessarily. We like being friendly. It makes interaction easier, makes people relaxed, makes us relaxed, builds trust which builds commitment which raises morale and makes us all safer. It's..."
He's pretty much telling Sephiroth that they're a pair of born conmen. Argh. He didn't want to lie to the guy and there's a part of him that wants to show Sephiroth everything he wants to know about them, if only so they can repay the flash of himself he didn't mean to show. (Maybe also so that one day he'll feel safe showing them more. God they want that.) But with paranoia like that...
Callie takes over, eyelids heavy, relaxed, cool like there's no need to stress out. "Behemoths live in prides, sir. There's not a lot of space for individualism. If one of us goes hungry, we all go hungry. If one of us dies we lose another defense between our cubs and predators and famine. If you were to be discredited, it would be the same, the whole company would be at risk, the war might be lost. It's just... no. Of course we also have personal ambition, but the squad comes first."
"Hm."
They let the man think. They're still exhausted, their magic feels weird, choppy like a post-storm sea. (They still remember Dierk Ulweiss and Neyli, though the immediacy of that knowledge is muted, details lost, space put back between Dierk-Neyli and Zack-Callie.)
The daemon doesn't speak, doesn't try to play sounding board to the man, not devil's advocate, nothing. He just sits, watching them. Not coming closer, but not retreating either. It occurs to Zack that he has little idea how much wolf there is in him, but maybe there is enough to understand that pack, that pride thing, no matter how Sephiroth wants to be cynical about it.
Or maybe that's wishful thinking.
"As it happens, I need a new aide de camp."
Zack and Callie both twitch. A promotion was about the very last thing either of them expected. Maybe they should have; an aide de camp needs to be underfoot pretty much half the time, and is useless if they're not easy to find. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
Still, it gives them a chance to get to know them. Maybe one day to get a name to go with Sephiroth's ashen daemon.
"Sir, yes sir!" they answer, and salute, because there's nothing else to be said, and they try very hard not to grin.
Perplexed frustration surfaces briefly on Sephiroth's face, proving they didn't quite manage, before disappearing again. The man stands, eyes them up and down once again like maybe this time he'll be able to read their mind.
"I'll call for a medic to check on you, lieutenant," he says, and sweeps out. The wolf-serpent pauses in the doorway to spear them with his otherworldly eyes, and then he's gone like smoke.
Zack's daemon (smaller, golden variety).
--
Day 3
In some places Zack knows that it's seen as kind of rude and invasive to talk to someone else's daemon, especially in public and with people you don't know well. In Wutai, for example, or in the richer circles of Midgar society, it's pretty much shocking. (Which is funny because both societies get hives when you find a point of comparison between them.)
In the army it's not that way, especially not in SOLDIER, but that's because you don't become SOLDIER in the first place if your daemon's going to be dead weight, and being able to take orders and relay them is just the very start of usefulness. (Along with using Materia independently of your human, and fighting a variety of differently-sized, differently-shaped daemons. Predators are the overwhelming majority.)
Zack knows of nowhere it's looked down upon to chat with your own daemon.
He never sees Sephiroth speak to his. Or look at him, either.
"You think it's because he's male?" Callie asks him in her low, rumbling voice. Zack ruffles a round and velvety ear between index and thumb. "I don't see why that'd be an issue, but... eh, maybe he's ashamed?"
Because yes, Sephiroth's daemon is the same gender he is. Zack knew it happened sometimes, for some reason no one has ever been able to pin down, but he's the first they've ever met. Rare as it is, he might be the last too.
"No idea," he says. He doesn't say 'I don't think it's that simple', but when they glance at each other he can tell they both feel that. There's something else at work there. Deeper, at least.
It's not a brand-new Third's place to go question the General, anyway. Or the General's daemon.
"Think he'd talk to you?" he asks Callie, squirming back to make himself comfortable against her flank. She curls her thick dragon-tail around his legs, rests her heavy head on his thigh in a way that'll cut blood flow in a minute. He rests his hand on her head.
"Eh." She sighs. "Maybe someday." Her eyes look closed, but he's near enough to see them slit open. He knows what she's watching; the smoke-gray beast that sits by the door of the open command tent like a temple's stone guardian, his human nowhere in sight.
He looks somewhat like a wolf, if a slightly too long-bodied, long-necked one. The underside of his neck and belly are furless, armored; his dewclaws look big and mobile enough to be called thumbs. His long-furred tail is weird in a way they can't define, and he moves less like a wolf and more like a snake, or maybe like a cat. Zack doesn't know what the species is called.
He doesn't even know what the daemon is called.
"They're right," Callie muses. "Those two are kinda creepy."
Zack grins and scritches the base of Callie's ox-horns. Like either of them thinks creepy means uninteresting, or 'maybe we should keep our distances.' Sephiroth and his daemon are interesting; the creepiness is more weird and sad than scary, anyway.
Would be just as dickish to work at getting closer to them because of sheer curiosity as because they're angling for a promotion. They don't use people, never have, never will.
Great General or not, there's something about Sephiroth and his daemon that make Zack and Callie want to fix them. Those people who laugh over Callie being the biggest mama cat they've ever seen in their life don't have a clue how right they are.
At some point, he remembers, she was thinking of settling as a chocobo. Zack has to say, it might not have been quite as right as what she is now -- behemoth, drake-lioness -- but a hen might have been right enough.
Day 35
Horrible as it is, Zack is starting to get used to seeing daemons explode into golden motes before their person's body has even hit the ground.
He's never been in the backwash of one before.
Second Class Ulweiss sprawls at his feet like a lump of clay, a dull thud and then total, heavy immobility. Zack falls to his knees and shudders and fights not to scream, bathed in death-sparks, in dissipating bits of soul-stuff, as what used to be a coyote washes through him, already turned shapeless, already forgetting itself.
Callie roars beside him, heavy drake tail thrashing around them in wide circles; it might help clear enemy ninja, but it's nothing but reflex. She doesn't have the presence of mind to fight. He doesn't have the presence of mind to do anything but kneel and shudder and try to grasp at Ulweiss and Neyli, at what they are, were, at least keep an imprint of them. He didn't even know them well but now he knows them as he has never known anyone, soul-deep.
He can't hold anything back, of course. He still tries. It feels wrong and bad and wrong but he can't abandon a comrade, he can't.
Callie's blind-thrashing tail slaps into his flank and he topples to the side with a cry of very physical pain and she yowls in turn as his pain echoes; she broke one of his ribs.
More ninjas than the rocks ought to be able to hide pour out into sight. They're surrounded. They're fucked. Zack stumbles to his daemon; Callie makes a circle, a wall of herself, she tosses her massive ox-horns. The ninjas dodge and charge back in.
Zack's hand is on his sword but all he can think is that it feels off, that it isn't a spear.
Ulweiss is dead he likes tea and he had a completely tortuous sense of humor and was a bit of a sadist but only in purely consensual situations and he volunteers at an animal shelter when on leave and Zack now knows all the people he's ever loved in heart-aching detail, and how at the last second Ulweiss' last thought was a faintly surprised, disgruntled 'shit, I'll never know how that book ends now'.
Zack's own thoughts are a scattered mess and at the center is dismay that he can't think of anything better but some other man's death thoughts, that they feel more real than his own.
A Wutaian ninja lands on top of Callie, knife already arching down into a vicious arc toward her spine. On pure animal reflex Zack punches at the woman's marten. He's going to miss.
Impact. Explosion. Thunder. A man in black flies overhead, his coat like wings. His daemon is a long smoke-gray serpent, no, there are paws. Zack topples over against Callie's heaving side. The daemon's belly zips past so close, it ruffles his hair.
Sephiroth glances back at him, and Zack doesn't have the strength to lift his hand, say they'll be okay, and...
... there's something terrible on his face but Zack is busy passing out.
Crunch. Splatter.
Zack's eyes are closed but no rain is ever body-warm.
He brings into his dreams the vision of a wolf-serpent shifting, stretching, a flare of wings like Sephiroth's coat in flight, and ashen fur turning into hundreds and hundreds of little half-moons of silver, razor-edged.
Day 37
Callie is about impossible to evac without a chopper and a dozen big daemons to roll her into the transport net, so it isn't too unexpected to wake still lying down on the same rocks. Someone managed to slip a couple of blankets under Zack to soften the pointy pebbles a bit, pull him by the feet out of that spine-bending ball he'd ended up in, but he's still sprawled in the inner curve of her curled body, his head propped up at an awkward angle against her flank, the end of her drake tail draped heavy on his legs.
He stares at the tent they've erected over the two of them for about five minutes before she breathes in and notices they're not alone.
Her head is too heavy to lift; she flicks an ear, trying to listen to what she scented. He plants his heels and pushes himself up a little higher on her flank ... ahh, there it is.
There they are.
There's a little camp desk in the other corner of the tent -- the command tent, he recognizes from the size, and Callie and Zack are eating about two thirds of its floor space. There's the ash-gray wolf-serpent daemon, sitting perfectly still, paws gathered, staring unblinkingly at them. There's Sephiroth, his back turned, writing away.
They don't exchange a word, but Sephiroth turns anyway.
"Lieutenant Fair."
"General, sir." There's no way he can stand; he tries to sit up a bit more, ignores the crick in his neck, salutes.
Sephiroth stares at him, wordless, pupils two hair-thin lines even in the dim tent. Zack hesitates. There's something in the atmosphere here that... bothers him. The silence is too oddly charged.
So he shrugs mentally and keeps going. "Thanks for the rescue, sir."
Callie manages to lift her head just enough to add a nod of her own.
Somehow it was the wrong thing to say. Somehow the silence grows more stifling, somehow Sephiroth seems more remote, his sword closer at hand, even though he hasn't moved an inch. His daemon hasn't moved either, though the ashen fur on his nape is rising slow like dandelion fluff in the wind, flashing its silvery-white undercoat.
People often look at Callie's sheer mass and think that because she's huge and oxen-horned and all over muscle that she has to be stupid, that Zack has to be slow. They're anything but, though the false impression sometimes helps.
They've said two things, and only the second one might have offended. They remember the rescue. Sephiroth and his unnamed daemon would have preferred they didn't.
"It wasn't a hallucination, then," Callie concludes, and rolls so she can rest her chest on the floor, front paws spread to keep her steady, head tossed up in something that might look like defiance but is really only so her big head doesn't flop back down midway from exhaustion. Zack sits up straighter as a result, not all his own choice, but it works better that way.
His buster sword is propped up against the entrance post of the tent, far enough from his reach it might as well be in Gongaga.
"And what might you be hallucinating about, Lieutenant?" Sephiroth inquires silkily. His daemon is flowing inch by inch from that guardian-liondog stance to one of coiled-snake.
They've seen the General and his daemon fight. Even if his sword were in reach and his inner magic wasn't so fucked up and nauseatingly wavery that they'd left him his materia bangles he would manage exactly jack shit. Bang, skewered, his taking in Ulweiss' daemon dust made him crazy, so sad.
He looks at Callie, one eyebrow arched. Callie hums in answer, looks at the gray daemon. Her voice is curious, quiet enough not to carry past the tent but utterly unafraid. "You haven't settled, have you?"
The General and his daemon are made of stone.
Zack watches them, curious, unafraid -- either he's already dead and can't do jack shit, or he isn't and being scared is stupid. It's so strange it doesn't even feel quite true, even though he cannot doubt it anymore. He remembers that glimpse of it, fur melting into coils and sharp pointy angles like a striking snake -- a wyvern -- a dragon...
"You know that is utterly ridiculous, don't you, Lieutenant?" Sephiroth inquires, voice urbane, disinterested, like he's at some gala or other and doing the polite chitchat boring thing. "Instances of stunted mental development might take longer but there is not a single case of a daemon going unsettled once their person has gone through puberty. I assure you my teenage years are quite over by now."
Zack chuckles, surprising everyone including himself. "Yeeeah, sir, I can see that."
They blink, the daemon and the man both; they have the same lambent green cat's eyes, the only touch of color on either of them, another oddity. Zack's eyes were gray before the SOLDIER process, Callie's were golden-brown, though now they both have a purplish materia-glow overlay.
"Must be convenient," he continues, though his voice softens without his conscious decision because he knows between convenience and normalcy Sephiroth might have chosen otherwise, if he could have. There's a difference between extraordinary and freak of nature, and a lot of people would see an unsettled adult daemon as the second.
"Only when we plan on leaving no survivors," the daemon speaks, for the first time ever in Zack's earshot. His voice is low and rich and oddly raspy, Sephiroth's cultured intonations in a throat gone unused for weeks or years.
He uncoils slowly, pads to them, head low and forward like a hunting wolf, muzzle too long and nose strangely flat, blunt like a snake's. His needle-tipped fangs are long enough that they peek out under his chops, even when they aren't actively bared; Zack wonders about venom.
Callie inclines her lioness head, forward-curved horns framing her own muzzle. Her skull alone is three times as big. They touch noses. At the desk Sephiroth is frozen, staring, expression subtle enough to be unreadable but nothing like what Zack has gotten to see before.
The gray daemon shifts, and it's at the same time like and unlike a child's; it goes slower, not over and done in a flash but slow enough that Zack can follow the morphing fur, the stretching limbs. Still fast, two seconds tops maybe, and then a male behemoth crowds the tent and them both, bigger than Callie, nape bristling with a drake crest of stretched hide between long rattling spines, horns so long he might have trouble getting food to his mouth. He would have no trouble with the goring part, though.
He's not golden like Callie is, like Lesser Behemoths ought to be, not purplish like a Greater one, he's still ashen all over. Color variants are pretty uncommon in daemons in the first place, and gray isn't either melanistic or albino. Probably another side-effect of the thing that made him not settle, that gave him those strange eyes.
"Stop," Sephiroth says between gritted teeth, like he wants to say 'what are you doing' instead, and that's a pretty damning thing to ask out of your own daemon.
The daemon's huge drake tail slithers on the dusty rocks, slow, thoughtful, as he looks down at Callie still sprawled down, at Zack against her flank, hunkered down to fit without knocking down things, and then he blinks his eerie eyes, slow and thoughtful. "This one doesn't suit anyway."
And he's a wolf-serpent again.
"Neat," Zack concludes, and offers an impressed little nod to the daemon. Sephiroth's shoulders are stiff and he's going to break his pen in a second if he keeps squeezing it like that, so Zack turns a smile on him. Not a big one, he'd feel mocked, just a small sympathetic one. "Thank you, sir."
"For?" Sephiroth asks, harshly. He feels confused and doesn't like it, it seems. His daemon doesn't share it. Those two don't talk enough, Zack thinks, and shares a quick glance with Callie.
"Taking such a huge risk to save us, sir." He meets the man's eyes, straight on, lets him see how serious, how sincere he is. "We won't talk," he says, because he knows where the conversation is going, how much like torture it must be not to know if by saving one of his men Sephiroth has damned himself to lose control and respect from them all.
A quiet, almost-silent, disbelieving huff. The gray daemon turns his head to stare at his human. They don't look at each other two seconds before Sephiroth is breaking eye contact, and it hurts seeing a man so at odds with himself.
"You were loyal to us, sir," Callie says, all soft-gentle, "so we will be loyal to you."
And she settles herself like a loaf of huge bread, paws curled in, tail curled around, head set back comfortably, eyes closed almost all the way, and she starts to purr. Zack laughs, feeling the vibrations rattle their way through his whole body. "Oh Ifrit's teeth, Callie, you vibrate like uncle Mick's old truck, are you trying to knock my teeth off?"
She opens an eye, and says, "I would never," and she only purrs harder.
Sephiroth is still staring like he's lost control of the situation and it's getting him frustrated, and he doesn't yet feel safe enough with Zack to let it go, to appreciate feeling like they're not taking him seriously.
Zack straightens up again, rolls his neck a little, distracted by the painful twinge for a second. "You'd know it's us if it got out anyway, sir. No one else was around to see, were they?"
"No," Sephiroth answers with a frown.
"So we'd have to be really stupid to talk, even if we wanted to, and even if anyone believed us without proof -- and I have to say, sir, we might act a bit flaky at times but an act is really all it is."
"This only tells me that you routinely present a façade to the world and that before using this information you would be smart enough to prepare yourselves an escape route." Sephiroth's heavy-lidded, unimpressed look is very clear on what an awesome escape route it should be in order to escape him.
Zack bites his lip to keep from laughing. This would be a bad response, no matter how absurd the situation is. "It's usually not bad pretending, sir. It's mostly so we don't step on people's toes unnecessarily. We like being friendly. It makes interaction easier, makes people relaxed, makes us relaxed, builds trust which builds commitment which raises morale and makes us all safer. It's..."
He's pretty much telling Sephiroth that they're a pair of born conmen. Argh. He didn't want to lie to the guy and there's a part of him that wants to show Sephiroth everything he wants to know about them, if only so they can repay the flash of himself he didn't mean to show. (Maybe also so that one day he'll feel safe showing them more. God they want that.) But with paranoia like that...
Callie takes over, eyelids heavy, relaxed, cool like there's no need to stress out. "Behemoths live in prides, sir. There's not a lot of space for individualism. If one of us goes hungry, we all go hungry. If one of us dies we lose another defense between our cubs and predators and famine. If you were to be discredited, it would be the same, the whole company would be at risk, the war might be lost. It's just... no. Of course we also have personal ambition, but the squad comes first."
"Hm."
They let the man think. They're still exhausted, their magic feels weird, choppy like a post-storm sea. (They still remember Dierk Ulweiss and Neyli, though the immediacy of that knowledge is muted, details lost, space put back between Dierk-Neyli and Zack-Callie.)
The daemon doesn't speak, doesn't try to play sounding board to the man, not devil's advocate, nothing. He just sits, watching them. Not coming closer, but not retreating either. It occurs to Zack that he has little idea how much wolf there is in him, but maybe there is enough to understand that pack, that pride thing, no matter how Sephiroth wants to be cynical about it.
Or maybe that's wishful thinking.
"As it happens, I need a new aide de camp."
Zack and Callie both twitch. A promotion was about the very last thing either of them expected. Maybe they should have; an aide de camp needs to be underfoot pretty much half the time, and is useless if they're not easy to find. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
Still, it gives them a chance to get to know them. Maybe one day to get a name to go with Sephiroth's ashen daemon.
"Sir, yes sir!" they answer, and salute, because there's nothing else to be said, and they try very hard not to grin.
Perplexed frustration surfaces briefly on Sephiroth's face, proving they didn't quite manage, before disappearing again. The man stands, eyes them up and down once again like maybe this time he'll be able to read their mind.
"I'll call for a medic to check on you, lieutenant," he says, and sweeps out. The wolf-serpent pauses in the doorway to spear them with his otherworldly eyes, and then he's gone like smoke.
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Hopefully Zack solves the mystery of the name of Sephiroth's daemon eventually.