Midgar High School

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It's the empty restaurant and the empty cup and Zack can't stop staring, his eyes fixed on nothing on the table and the nothing presses in on him like it's important. Everyone has left. Seph and Vincent escaped when they could, leaving his shabby restaurant and his inability to understand and his lack of skill in anything other than muffin-making: Zack has always been the caretaker, the silent blanket in the background, provider-of-nourishment but not much else. Loz left as they left, little-boy still. And Shera and Elena walked out together holding hands in that camaderie that makes him both happy and sad, and inexplicably lonely.

Zack almost told Elena everything, and it's so close to the surface now that it pinches his mind like a headache. He's not really sure why he had said it in that way, chosen those words, because they weren't right, because now he's afraid she'll think he's evil: life for Elena is a black-and-white, good/bad, yes/no, and Zack is insanely jealous but scared of being sorted.

He starts talking half in his mind and half aloud to the restaurant. This cafe has heard all of Zack's secrets and it holds them in its walls like warmth and makes this shabbiness feel more like home than his own room upstairs in the tiny apartment. The walls know I really want to go to college, they felt I wish I had someone to talk to. The walls hear I have a crush on a girl, her name is Aeris corrected by Now I think I'm in love with two girls at once, but they're in love with each other.

This place had a bar once, Elena, did you know that? Zack's eyes may be pointed towards nothing but in his mind's eye he can see it again, the bustle and noise of back when Midgar's slums were more prominent and they made their living catering to the shabby. When he was young and it was only him he spent his nights in the basement. Da would put the empties in the chute and the bottles would roll, roll, roll down the slope and young Zack would pick them up once they stopped and put them in the boxes to be returned. Once there were sisters they all stayed down there and played games with stones and chalk and fought over who got to grab the bottles as they continued to roll.

Once I was twelve I was old enough to wait tables and eventually I waited the bar, too. Zack remembers the clinking of glass most. Glasses being tapped, being toasted. Bottles rolling down the chute, bottles being thrown, bottles being broken. Glass everywhere, empty to be filled. That's where I learned to fight. Da was usually too drunk to deal with anyone and so Zack learned quickly how to block a punch, how to throw one. How to get the best of someone twice his body mass. How to get the drunks out of the bar. How to look threatening swinging a chair at the age of thirteen.

I should have stopped him. But Zack was always too busy to keep too much of an eye on Da. And Da was always drinking his own wares, staying energetic, cheerful when the glass was full and belligerent when the glass broke and sank into the floor. I should have been paying more attention. But Zack has never been the brightest kid in the world and he only had so much attention to spare between the sisters and the cooking and all the glasses. And it was normal, so no one really saw when Da left the restaurant on his smoke break and ended up getting in the car.

There was glass everywhere there, too, windshield shattered as a spiderweb and the shards picking up the streetlights and lying on Da's empty broken body like the tatters of a blanket and Zack still has scars on his hands from brushing it off like dust to get to Da.

That year Da lay in the hospital unmoving. This is the year of anger, El. The year of hating. Zack started to get in fights at school, but not the typical ones: he'd throw a couple punches for his own dignity but then he'd just stand there, let the kid hit him over and over until bruised and bleeding Zack could feel it, finally feel pain. He never got sent to the nurse (now he knows why). He did get sent home a lot and eventually Ma just kept him home to work at the restaurant.

That's a whole year. Zack is a full year older than his friends, a full year behind in school because he spent an entire year hating. He hated Da for his alcoholism, for his accident, for doing this to them. He hated Ma for taking him out of school. But most of all Zack hated Zack, furiously and uselessly, for not watching Da, for not doing better in school, for being useless, for being empty. I bet you didn't know that either, El. I'm a whole year older than you. And a whole year less.

Da came home in the wheelchair that would hold him for the rest of his life and Zack took one look at his father and it felt like somebody had punched him in the gut. He still can't look at his dad sitting there, with no fire in his eyes because there's no room with all the guilt and the pain, without feeling like somebody just socked him one in the stomach. Zack stood there, doubled over and winded and shattered like a glass on the floor, the glass on the ground, all those cuts still in his hands, and the ability to get angry just poured out between the cracks in his now-broken heart and sank into the walls.

Life has taught Zack that hating isn't worth it. He could have spent the year studying. He could have spent it loving his father, who needed it. Instead he spent it hating and angry and ended up losing a year and winning back a father who makes him nauseous with anxiety and guilt. His broken heart doesn't pump out hate any more because it's like an empty glass with cracks in it and everything drains in the end.

It's why Zack always gives second chances, and more if it's needed. No one is worth judging because anyone can change if the crash is big enough. Sephiroth is worth a second chance because he wants it, and that is enough for Zack because his father never wanted it at all.

Bet you didn't know that. No one knows. It's not a big secret that Da can't walk anymore but since Ma turned the bar into the cafe nobody comes around anymore that knows the whole story.

But the walls know, the floor knows and the empty cup on the table in front of him is humming the song of broken glass and Zack wonders that with everything going on around them all that he can still think about himself.