InsaneJournal

The Story of Zack: Dreams/Happy Place/Lucky Boy/Marking Time/Confidence
Title: Dreams
Characters: Zack
Rating: G
Team: SOLDIER
Word Count: 100

The first hours were idyllic. Zack Fair was riding off towards Destiny. He lay back and spun dreams out of clouds in the sky. He dreamed in the way of children and fools on turnip trucks.

He'd take Midgar by storm. He'd learn to fight and use magic and rescue kittens from high places. He would be the best SOLDIER there ever was.

You who are older and wiser may know deeply how life spews gravel in the face of dreamers. May it comfort you to know, while you grind your own personal millstone, that Zack Fair was absolutely right.


Title: Happy Place
Characters: Zack
Rating: G
Team: SOLDIER
Word Count: 100

It rained on the second day. Zack earned his keep pulling a tarp over the turnips and swatting at the pests that dared creep beneath. It was hot under all that plastic, hot and muggy like a swamp. And the bugs, always the bugs.

All that would change when he was a SOLDIER, Zack thought. Pesky insects didn't have the nerve to try eating SOLDIERs alive.

By the third day it was sweltering and some of the turnips were starting to turn.

It wouldn't be like that at all in SOLDIER, Zack reasoned. It wouldn't be like that at all.


Title: Lucky Boy
Characters: Zack
Rating: PG-13
Team: SOLDIER
Word Count: 100

The truck went as far as the river docks. Zack had to find his own way from there. He asked, then begged some of the boatmen and captains. They exchanged glances he didn't yet understand. They looked him over appraisingly, their eyes agreeing that he just might do.

But one stepped in and asked him to flex his arm. Even haphazard training might do some good. Zack swung grain sacks onto the barge at the docks and off again at del Sol. Two weeks to reach the coast and, lucky boy, he did it by his back, not on it.


Title: Marking Time
Characters: Zack
Rating: PG
Team: SOLDIER
Word Count: 100

Zack was a willing worker, and a fast learner. Still, it cost money to get on a boat. He scrounged a bit but del Sol was an easy place for that. He moved deck chairs, took odd jobs at the docks and even managed a brief stint in tourist information (before tiring of people asking for 'information' about his working hours, anyway). It took two months to get his ticket and it was high time he wrote home.

“Dear Mom,” he said, “Almost there. Still moving so you can't write back, but I'm okay. How's Dad?”

Delaying the inevitable, really.


Title: Confidence
Characters: Zack
Rating: G
Team: SOLDIER
Word Count: 100

He was old enough, strong enough and more than willing but he had no training whatsoever. He was a nobody from a hiccup of a town half a world away. SOLDIER was a big dream, they said. Getting in was hell. Besides, there was no shame in the regular army.

They laughed at his eagerness, at his cocksure attitude. He'd learn. Oh, he might make SOLDIER someday. He had the build for it. But, they warned him, it would take ages. Still, Zack wrote home in prophetic fit: “I'll be SOLDIER before the year is out, Mom. Count on it!”