A/N: My god, it's been so long since I updated that when I went back to read older chapters I forgot where that doctor dude came from. Which anime was it? I haven't watched anime in years. Nothing is real. Nothing but the constant cry of the Zack-Lives-AU in the back of my mind, begging me to set aside my thesis in favor of happier, just-as-painful writing endeavors.

Anyway here's an update after like 500 years ENJOY? It's 2019 and I'm still not done writing Zack Lives AUs.

Bombing Mission

"Of course I know AVALANCHE! They killed two of my friends!" Zack paced, fuming. "They took innocent people and experimented on them to further their cause. They're just as bad as Shinra!"

Tifa had forgotten to mention the name of their group, and it was going to take a little to calm Zack down. "Zack, we're different now, that was the old AVALANCHE! We don't—we haven't even done anything." She pulled at her skirt hem nervously.

Barret growled. "This is exactly why I didn't want a SOLDIER with us! Shinra's always hated anyone in AVALANCHE, he's not even listening to us!"

"Oh yeah, and you're not judging me by my past at all. I'm not with them anymore!" Zack glared.

Jessie spoke up from her box in the corner of the basement-hideout. "Can you two just stop? You both don't understand the whole story!"

Barret growled again in affirmation, and Zack grumbled before sitting back down on the sofa. Jessie went on. "Okay. We've established that Zack isn't a threat. He wants to help, Barret. Now, it's only fair that we explain everything to him."

Wedge nodded. "Really, we're not the same organization that killed your friends. The last one... They're all gone, now." He frowned.

"The last organization lost sight of their goals and became corrupt. We won't let that happen, this time." Biggs stood with his arms folded, leaning against the wall next to Jessie.

Zack looked around at them, skeptical. "So no weird experiments to turn people into killing machines?"

Barret was outraged. "How the fuck you think we could do that, in this shithole of a hideout!?" Tifa scolded him on his language. "Sorry, but geez-!" He scrunched up his face in indignation.

"Alright, okay! So you're different. I get it." Zack frowned. "But then... what happened to the old AVALANCHE? The last time I saw them was... a long time ago."

Tifa bit her lip. "Eventually, we stopped hearing about them. There was a huge explosion a few months ago in one of the sectors, but we haven't heard anything about them since. We... figured they were gone."

"So we took their name, and now we're gonna do their job right!" Jessie grinned.

Zack frowned still. "Aren't you worried that people will think you're the old group, still? They won't like you very much."

"Nah, we've been getting' the publicity out, people know we ain't bad. If we were bad, they'd know." Barret frowned, calmer than before. "We ain't gonna hurt no innocents, only Shinra!" He jabbed his finger into his thigh for emphasis.

Zack frowned, then sighed. "Okay. Okay, I get it. So we're totally different, and we're only gonna take out Shinra, and we're gonna do so by not hurting anyone."

"Only the ones who stand in our way." Barret scowled defiantly.

Zack frowned. "I guess... there are gonna be people trying to stop us. We can't do much about them. But they're just following orders. Can we try not to hurt them?"

"They're definitely gonna get hurt if they up against us! We don' have the time, nor the luxury of bein' merciful to those bastards!"

"It isn't their fault, they're innocent-"

"Okay, okay!" Tifa fumed in between them. "No more shouting, Marlene is trying to sleep. And you're giving me a headache."

Zack looked ashamed, but defiant to the end. Barret grumbled. "We can try. But they ain't gonna do the same for us. If we give them a chance to take us out, they will! We can't afford to take that kinda risk."

Zack let out a puff of air through his nose. "But we're gonna try, right?"

"You can do that, mister SOLDIER-boy." Barret sneered at him.

"We'll all try, as much as we can. That's really all we can do." Jessie piped in, mostly to avoid another argument. "We can only do what we can. And if we can't save someone... then we can't. Just think of all the people Shinra will hurt if we don't do this." Biggs nodded next to her.

The room was quiet as the members considered this. Zack frowned, then sighed. "Okay. So what's the plan?"

A bomb. Zack hated the idea, but he couldn't think of anything else. The others had made good points... They were going during the night shift at the Sector 1 reactor, to avoid the most casualties. And if they could, they'd warn the workers somehow, get everyone to evacuate. But until they were inside the reactor, they had no way of knowing how it was going to work. Zack was the only one who had been inside one, after all. His fingers twitched, ready for action.

The rest of the infiltration was kind of a blur. They navigated the deep parts of the reactor where staff or patrols rarely went, so they only had weird mako-mutated monsters to worry about. Biggs and Wedge stayed closer to the entrance while Zack, Barret and Jessie made their way down to the center of the reactor. Zack followed Jessie across a narrow beam on the wall of one of the rooms, being careful not to trip on the crumbling side structures and fall into the machinery and piping below. The reactors looked maintained from the outside, but the inside had some serious structural integrity issues and AVALANCHE was ready to exploit.

Zack dispatched some weird humanoid monsters (were they human at one point? From the horrible things he'd seen Shinra do over the years, he had to wonder) and finally followed Barret to where they stopped in front of a huge cylinder with a pressure valve on the side. Zack didn't know what it was, but Jessie had said it was the best place for the initial explosion so that's where they were putting it.

Barret had gone on about how Shinra was sucking the life out of the Planet and how it was just a matter of time before nothing was left, and now he was going on about how the reactor wasn't going to be anything more than a hunk of junk after the meltdown, and Zack was pulled out of his head by Barret offering him the bomb.

For him to arm.

Zack blinked, then glared. Barret said something about wanting to make sure Zack didn't pull anything. Right.

He knelt down to place the bomb below the valve, and suddenly his head was full of static. A harsh ringing filled the space between his ears and toppled his sense of balance. His thoughts seemed out of control as he suddenly heard inside his own mind, Watch out! This isn't just a reactor!

Then as soon as it came, the feeling was gone. The static left, and Zack blinked as his vision cleared, and he saw his hand outstretched towards the bomb. Barret was talking to him. He blinked again. "What?"

"What's wrong, Zack? Hurry it up!"

Zack shook his head again, clearing his thoughts. Was the pressure getting to him?

Then the bomb was set, immediately followed by a blaring klaxon somehow signalling their infiltration and sending a huge security robot to dispatch them. The whole last ten minutes of the mission went by in a haze as AVALANCHE barely escaped the reactor's blast with their lives—and in Wedge's case, with his trousers.

The blast was much larger than they had calculated it would be. Jessie was noticeably distraught as they all convened outside the blast zone, Barret quickly dispersing them so that they wouldn't be caught. They'd meet back at the 7th Heaven to debrief and discuss their next move. Until then, Zack had to make his way through the terrified populace and rampaging security forces without being seen-

He nearly ran into her.

As he looked around the corner of a building into the Sector 8 square, he saw a man rush by in front of him and slam into a girl in a pink dress, knocking her onto her rump. She cried out, dropping her basket of flowers and scattering them, but doing nothing to reprimand the man. She looked scared. There was smoke and bits of debris in the air and people running around crashing into each other, and Aerith was scared and alone.

Zack turned around and ran the other way, terrified that she might have seen him.

His heart hammered in his chest, but his enhanced SOLDIER hearing didn't pick up her voice calling to him. She must not have seen him. Still, the guilt wrapped around his heart and squeezed, begging for him to go back and help her while terror and shame drove him further and further away. He knew that he'd have to face her one day, but so much had happened recently that he'd pushed all of his guilt-ridden thoughts of her away. He had been so ready to see her just a few months ago, ready to grovel and beg. But then…

So much had happened. How could he explain it to her when he was having trouble explaining it to himself?

He told himself she'd be just fine, that she was strong and could get home safely. She would be fine, as she had been all these years without him… He made his way towards the Sector 7 train station and tried to put it out of his mind. Again.

########

He should have expected security to be watching the station, so he could have at least avoided killing about seven more of them before leaping onto the train below. At least they hadn't sent SOLDIER out; that would have been bad for his whole cover of "being dead" and all. He didn't want that revealed until he was inside Shinra HQ, holding his blade to the president's throat.

Was that what he really wanted to do? They were already going for the reactors—the direct source of the Planet's coming demise—but they weren't doing anything about the corrupt and evil leadership that made the decisions that caused this. The only people they ever encountered were poor saps just following orders, scared about their family's fate or their next paycheck. There was no way he would feel at peace until the man in charge of ruining his life and so many others was out of commission.

He'd only met President Shinra a few times, but he'd always had an uncomfortable feeling around the man. Zack hadn't put much thought into it during the time he worked for Shinra, but he'd always expected the worst from the President. He never cared about the lives of his employees, and he made rash decisions that had permanent consequences without a second thought. Zack had simply accepted that the President of a company would always be like that, no matter who it was, and that it wasn't his duty to object. He just tried to do the right thing, no matter what his orders were. He killed for the company, telling himself that Wutaian troops would die no matter if he killed them or not, so he may as well end the battle as soon as possible. He fought Angeal, telling himself that the President's orders to kill him on sight were secondary to Angeal being a troubled man in league with a deranged lunatic. He cut down AVALANCHE troops, brainwashed into following a corrupt scientist, because his President had ordered him to. Everything he had done for the company had been justified, he told himself. And he'd never argued that maybe, just maybe the President could have put a little more thought and consideration into his orders before giving them.

He hadn't even had a chance to object before his President swept him under the rug because of an inconvenience. He didn't realize the true evil of Shinra until he woke up in a freaking laboratory and realized the extent of the President's disregard for human life. He'd served Shinra since he was fourteen, and he'd been rewarded with an army tracking him to the edge of a cliff and shooting his best friend dead. But those troops thought he was a dangerous specimen, escaped from a lab, and he showed them just how dangerous he was. They didn't have all of the information, or the liberty of refusing their orders. The man that had allowed this all to happen had all the power to prevent it, and he had done nothing.

So yeah. He did want the president dead, he supposed. And the best way to ensure that would be to stay hidden as long as possible. He had to stay away from other SOLDIER, and hope none of Cloud's old friends from the army didn't recognize him. If he hadn't already killed them all.

He clenched his teeth. He was doing his best. He tried not to kill anyone innocent, and that was the best he could do, just like Jessie had said. He reached down and unclipped the train's door, throwing it open and swinging inside before they went through another tunnel.

His boots clanged against the floor of the train, and he heard multiple gasps as his AVALANCHE comrades jumped at his entrance. "Zack!?" everyone except for Barret cried.

He shut the door behind him, banishing his dark thoughts in favor of his more amicable front. He shrugged nonchalantly. "What? You guys shouldn't all be in the same car, you know."

Barret raged, as usual. "There's only one train, asshole! We all gotta get on here, so when you didn't... You come in here, makin' a big scene… You're late!"

Zack raised an eyebrow. "Uh, sorry? The train was moving, I had to bust a cool move to get inside."

Barret fumed. "You little—There were gunshots right outside! Havin' everyone worried like that, you don't give a damn 'bout no one but yourself!"

Zack shook his head, bewildered. "You were worried about me?" He looked to Jessie, who blushed at his gaze. "I told you, I'm a SOLDIER, First Class. No one's gonna take me down but another First, and there are none."

Barret pushed himself off the wall of the train, growling. "Cocky little spikey-haired shit. Wake up! We're movin' out. Follow me!" He headed towards the front of the cargo car, into the next, without another word.

The other three at least seemed happier to see him. That made the ride down into the slums less uncomfortable, and took his mind off of the dark thoughts that kept surfacing. Jessie talked at him about trains, since he'd never had the need to use them while he'd lived in Midgar, and Barret raved some more about how the "damned Pizza" was the worst design ever. Zack couldn't disagree with him—it was pretty bad. Complicated, and just bad.

They reached the Sector 7 Slums and everyone dispersed. Zack didn't really know why, since half of the slums knew about the AVALANCHE meeting place, but he did as Barret asked to avoid more of his ill-placed wrath.

They planned the next mission—blow the Sector 5 reactor. Zack managed to avoid Barret's ire, though he was pretty quiet. The tone up in the bar was celebratory, but down in the meeting room it was solemn and tense. He didn't have anything to say that didn't bring back those dark feelings he was trying to keep secret. Jessie was wrecked by the power her last bomb had, and she vowed to make the next one smaller. None of them were innocent, but they'd all accepted that to ensure a better future. They dispersed, and they went to sleep.

########

About a week later, they were prepared. Jessie had her altered bomb—hopefully of the desired strength this time—and Tifa announced that she was going this time, too. Zack didn't doubt Tifa's skills for a second, but that meant leaving Marlene alone in the bar. Barret and Tifa trusted the people of the slums, and Zack knew they all looked out for each other, but he didn't like leaving a little girl by herself with only a locked door between her and whatever could happen.

Marlene herself saluted him, stating that she would protect the bar while they were gone, and he felt a little better. Not many things could scare that girl. Besides, if anyone stormed the place, they wouldn't be after a little girl. Marlene would be okay.

His bigger problem was the looks Tifa kept giving him, like she wanted to say something. It wasn't exactly a good time to talk, so she must be waiting for later or something. He made a note to talk to her soon. Zack set out on his second mission against Shinra, determined eyes clearing a path in front of him. The dear President must be waiting for them to strike again, and Zack aimed to deliver.

A/N: Go watch the FFVII Machinabridged by teamfourstar on youtube, please god, it's what kept me alive in grad school. Their characterization gives me life. Also M.J. Gallagher's unofficial novelization is the best FFVII novelization I've ever seen, go read that if you want tons of detail and dialogue and worldbuilding that as far as I am concerned should be canon lmao.

Also, in light of the E3 2019 announcements about FFVII:R I just hope to do this fic as much justice as we're hoping from the remake. Thank the gods for Tifa's gorgeous redesign, I would die for her.

And finally... Compilation of FFVII isn't canon? Excuse? I have a lot of feelings about this. More on that later.