Chapter Text
Every day, he awoke from the same nightmare. Or rather, to the same nightmare. He was dragged from his cell by men he had tried and failed to overpower time and time again, pulled down a long, dark hallway, with no care from the men whether his feet were under him or not. He was taken to a brightly lit room with windows for walls, stripped down to his boxers, and strapped to the same cold exam table. Tourniquets were applied to both of his upper arms, and a man dressed in all white dug around in his arms with a needle until he was able to find a vein that hadn’t already been blown. He had struggled at the beginning, for what he could only imagine had been weeks, until he had been beaten into submission too many times to want to fight back. He wasn’t sure how many concussions he had been given, how many times he had his ribs broken by the man who stood in the corner of the room, obviously hired muscle to keep him under control if needed. He once smirked when the man would step towards him, welcoming the challenge. Now, due to a combination of drugs administered to him before “treatment” and too many fights lost, he sat as still and as quietly as possible when he was in the room.
Every day, it was the same set of questions. Any loss of vision? Headaches? Numbness or tingling in his hands or feet? Any loss of bowel or bladder control? He stopped answering eventually, the answers never changed and he was never truthful anyway. His head hadn’t stopped hurting since the day he woke up in this place, he wasn’t sure if he couldn’t see or it was the constantly dim light he was kept in, but he wasn’t about to say anything that could convince the Professor that something was wrong with him.
Every day, he responded in the same way to the questions:
“Where is he?” he would ask, voice level and clear. He had learned quickly that shouting only caused him pain and pushed him further away from the answers he wanted.
Another needle, this time into his upper arm, just below the shoulder. It burned and he winced as the liquid in the syringe was pushed into the muscle. Another injection was put into the IV, and it felt like fire coursing through his veins. He clenched his fists and tensed his body in response to the pain.
“I don’t know who you are referring to.” Another man dressed in white, carrying a clipboard and constantly writing things down replied to him. He scoffed, rolling his eyes.
“Bullshit. You know damn well who I’m talking about, and if you’ve hurt one hair on his --” he was interrupted by a body slamming into one of the glass walls of the room. His head snapped up to see what had happened, eyes squinted to see if he could identify anyone outside. His heart skipped a beat when the person on the other side of the wall stood up from the ground, blonde hair a mess and nearly naked, just like he was.
Their eyes met through the glass and he thought his chest might explode as he struggled against his restraints, trying to free himself and run to the boy on the other side of the wall. His stomach plummeted as his eyes quickly surveyed the boy, blood dripping from his blonde head down into his eye, marks from needles covering his arms and chest, red marks on his wrists and ankles from what he could only assume were restraints. The boy began to bang on the glass wall, doing no damage to the property, but splitting the side of one of his hands open, blood smearing across the otherwise pristine wall.
“Zack!” he screamed. “Zack, please, help me!”
Cloud was alive, and he was being tortured, just like Zack was. He struggled against the straps that held his body to the exam table. He saw movement near Cloud, a man in a dark suit with an electro-rod rounding the corner.
“Cloud!” he yelled, “Cloud, run!” But it was too late. The man in the suit held the rod to Cloud’s side and activated it, holding it there for much longer than necessary. Cloud shrieked, pain racing through his body. He fell to the ground, head cracking against the concrete floor. The man in the suit moved towards the now unconscious Cloud. Red hair flashed behind the glass, and Zack wasn’t convinced the burning in his veins was coming from whatever drugs were being injected into his system.
“Don’t fucking touch him, Reno! I swear, you lay one more finger on him and I’ll —“ the man on the other side smirked at him.
“Or you’ll what, pretty boy?” Reno yelled back. He activated his electro-mag rod again, pressing it to the glass before holding it against Cloud’s bare chest. The boy woke up just long enough to scream in agony, body thrashing about wildly. Reno watched as Zack struggled against his restraints, smiling. He felt the prick of a needle against the skin of his neck, then a slight burn, then he began to lose the will to fight against the restraints. He knew he had been given some sort of sedative, and focused on fighting against it long enough to speak one more sentence:
“Reno, please,” he swore he saw regret flash across the Turk’s face before he lost consciousness.
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he woke up from the drug induced sleep, back in his cell. He could still hear Cloud’s screams echoing in his ears.
Zack had always considered himself a tough person. He had been able to talk himself out of pain, both physical and mental to rise through the ranks of SOLDIER quickly. As he lay on the cold concrete floor of his cell, grasping at his head in a desperate attempt to quiet the cries of the boy, he realized that no amount of toughness would get him out of the situation they were in.
He continued to grasp his head and cried, the hardest he ever had in his life.