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Paint The Town

I Wanna Be Like You

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Zack was in much better spirits the next morning when he made his way to Sephiroth's office. His back felt great and Aeris had not laughed too much at his shorts. There was pep in his step and a smile on his face. The smile froze when he got a look at Sephiroth's new secretary.

She was long-limbed and blonde and sat behind the huge desk outside the double oak doors with just the perfect air of primness. Zack was intrigued till he realized that she seemed to be wearing a week's worth of makeup. The cold look she was giving him did not help either. It was as if she did not recognize him at all. Then Zack saw her suit.

Top military personnel had military staff, right down to the gofers and coffee makers. This woman, in her very low-cut suit of black, devoid of any badge or indication of rank, had more likely been assigned from the general Shinra secretarial pool. Zack could not for the life of him figure out why the General would have a non-military secretary. What was Sephiroth thinking? Zack raised his hand to push the door open and find out.

"Where do you think you're going?" A high pitched voice rang out. Zack turned with a sigh. This was one of the problems with civilian workers.

"Name's Zachary Donovan. I'm the General's Second. I'm just going to…give him a report." That was not exactly true, but then the other secretaries, temps carefully assigned from the army, had always recognized him and never questioned his business. The blonde woman seemed only a bit mollified.

"I have to announce you before you can go in," she said imperiously. Zack grinned broadly. There was nothing the old Zachary charm could not get out of the ladies. All he had to do was rub this one the right way and she would not hold him back anymore.

"You go right ahead." He held his hands up, away from the door. "I understand. Protocol and all that." For the first time that morning, she smiled at him, but just as quickly wiped the look from her face. She leaned over the speaker phone and fiddled with it.

"Um…" Her hand hovered over the buttons and she mumbled under her breath. "Which one is it, come on, which one?" Zack could hear every word thanks to the mako in his system. He tiptoed up and leaned over her shoulder.

"It's that one." He pointed. The girl jumped with a squeal and just as quickly stiffened up.

"I'll thank you not to sneak up on a person like that, Mr. Donovan." Every word was blowing frost. Zack had to smother a grin. What was up with this icy act? It was almost like she was trying to act like…Zack drove that thought from his head. It was too spooky and weird.

The girl pressed the button and looked a bit perplexed. Zack leaned over her again and was about to speak when he noticed that her neckline plunged much deeper than he had first realized. He leaned back quickly. He ordinarily was not one to complain about women pushing the limits of the workplace dress code, but that seemed like an awful amount of skin to be showing in the office. He stared at the ceiling, considering the possibility that dating Aeris might have actually given him standards.

"What is it?" A deep angry voice came over the phone. The girl twitched excitedly.

"Sir, a …"she turned halfway to look at Zack. He mouthed his name at her and she swiveled back sharply on her seat. "There's a Zachary Donovan here to see you, Sir. Shall I send him in or have security escort him out?" Zack was shocked. Security? Toss him out? Was Sephiroth mad at him?

"For God's sake, woman, send him in and don't hold him back any longer!"

"Yes, Sir! Right away, Sir!" The girl turned, flushed and gasping with excitement. Her jacket bloused open enough to reveal her dubious cleavage. "You may proceed."

Zack nodded, carefully keeping his eyes above her neck. "Thanks. You can stop pressing the button now." What the hell was going on here? He slid into the office and shut the door firmly behind him.

Hell was just what greeted him. There was paper flying everywhere and the air seemed smoky. Zack looked around. There were scorch marks on the ceiling and as the dark-haired man stood there, a fine powdered ash floated down before him to settle on his shoes. Zack swallowed and approached the desk.

The leather executive chair swiveled around rapidly, causing Zack to jump back in alarm. Sephiroth stopped the chair by slamming one heavily-booted foot on the desk and then looked up at Zack, wild-eyed.

"Zachary, you're finally here! Good!"

"Eh?" Zack could not believe his ears. Was the General actually glad to see him? That could not be a good thing, not when the silver-haired man was setting his office on fire. Maybe he had gotten tired of aiming at furniture and wanted a moving target. "Sir, what happened here, if you don't mind me asking?" Zack edged away even as he spoke. His General was in a dangerous mood.

Sephiroth surveyed the mess of paperwork scattered all around the floor. "Julia came in early," he said, with a pointed glance toward the wall that separated the grand office from the blonde in the hall. "She…rearranged my work. She said she was organizing it."

"Oh. Oh!" Now Zack understood. "Mixed it all up, didn't she?" He relaxed and took his usual seat on Sephiroth's desk. "Isn't that the thing with aides and interns and secretaries? Wives too, I hear. Always cleaning up and then you can't find anything. And she's not from the army either, is she? What'd she do? Scramble the serial-numbered files? Well, what are you going to do, eh? What's done is done and she'll learn. Eventually."

The hard drumming of long fingers on wood made him stop. He turned around to find the General actually slouched in his seat, with one hand holding his head and the other beating a tattoo on the desk. Zack had a bad feeling about this. "That's not all, is it?"

Sephiroth took a deep breath, then another and another until his chest was heaving with the violent rapidity that Zack had learned meant that the man was struggling to keep his temper under control. "Seph," he urged. "Don't hyperventilate on me now. What happened?"

Sephiroth actually seemed to reign himself in at Zack's careful suggestion. "Did you see what she was wearing?" Zack scratched the back of his head as he nodded.

"Yeah. You might want to recommend that she start wearing a shirt under her clothes."

The General sat up and gripped the edge of the desk so hard it was as wonder it did not break in his grasp. "Did you see the whole thing, Zachary?"

The dark-haired man shook his head. "She was sitting down." Sephiroth leaned over and reached for the phone.

"Julia, bring in a pot of coffee."

"Yes, Sir, right a-." Sephiroth did not wait for her to finish.

"Observe, Zachary." He straightened in his seat and interlaced his fingers.

The door flew open and Julia entered, pale blonde hair swinging. "Here's your coffee, Sir! Shall I pour you a cup?"

"Just leave it on the desk," Sephiroth said curtly.

"Absolutely, Sir!" She hurried over. Zack could only stare in the few seconds it took her to cross the room.

Julia's long jacket was clasped so low he could see her belly button above the large belt she wore to hold her short, leather skirt up. The triangle of pale flesh that showed above it might have been enticing if not for the fact that there was no indication whatsoever that the girl actually had any womanly attributes alongside it.

The blonde set the coffee down on the desk, bending low from the waist. Zack did not envy Sephiroth's position. In periphery, he saw the man close his eyes. Julia straightened slowly and gave Zack yet another cold glance.

"You should NOT be sitting on the General's desk!" she declared. Zack bristled inside. Who did this woman think she was?

Sephiroth's head shot up. "He'll sit where he wants, Julia! Get out!"

Zack smiled at the way the girl paled. Sephiroth's prickly nature had its uses. Julia turned with her nose in the air and walked out. Zack may have been mistaken but it seemed that she tried to wiggle her rear a bit before she left. He could not be certain because her tight skirt revealed that she had no real rear to speak of. He waited for the door to click shut before he spoke.

"Well, that one's trying a bit too hard. Is she in a contest with Scarlet or something?"

The General only sighed. The air grew too still for Zack's liking, so he rushed to stir it up again. "Come on, Sephiroth. It can't be all that surprising. Women throw themselves at SOLDIERs all the time. You should have seen what this floozy did to Whitstone from Division Seventeen the other day."

"She was trying to dress like me, Zachary." Sephiroth slumped forward and buried his face in his hands. "She's trying to act like me, and talk like me, and even walk like me, though I don't think it's possible in pumps." He took a deep breath and leaned back into his chair, seeming more or less composed. "I don't know what's worse, the fact that she's too eager to please or that she wants to be just like me."

"That could be a really pickle if you did decide to ride her," Zack mused. "Would it really be sex or just masturbation?"

Sephiroth grimaced. "You are a sick man, Zachary."

"I never claimed otherwise," Zack said, grinning. Sephiroth only shook his head.

"I have got to get rid of this woman."

Zack nodded. "How'd you get her anyway? A civilian handling military documents and all that?" Sephiroth's eyes narrowed.

"I believe Hojo had something to do with her assignment. Something to do with me needing stress relief, so I'm stuck with her for the foreseeable future. I don't pretend to understand Hojo's reasoning, but he and Heidegger worked out an arrangement." He clenched his hand. "I should kill them both."

Zack laughed nervously. "Come on, Sephiroth. It can't be that bad." Sephiroth looked up sharply.

"Zachary, she's been here three hours and already I'm dying to fire the woman. Preferably from a cannon." He sighed. "But first I need to get my files sorted out." He stood and gave the other man a long stare. Zack took a while to get the hint.

"Oh, right, you want me to help." Zack bounced off the desk and got down on his knees to gather up the closest pages. Sephiroth shrugged off his long coat - minus pauldrons since he was not in battle - and joined the dark-haired man on the floor.

"Just gather the pages and pass them to me. I'll sort them properly."

"Okay," Zack shrugged. "Seems like an awful lot of sorting for one person though."

He need not have worried. Sephiroth began sorting the pages into neat piles after just a cursory glance at each one. While Zack crawled around the floor and scooped up the mass of paper, occasionally pausing to brush ceiling ash from his hands, Sephiroth paced around the room. The General would walk a few steps, then swoop in, gather a page and place it in one of the many neat heaps being built on the floor. When Zack handed him the last page, one he had fingered out from beneath the couch, the silver-haired man immersed himself in a flurry of sorting. For a long time, there was no sound in the office but the rustling of paper.

The work was done and the coffee pot was still steaming. Sephiroth opened a drawer and tossed a stapler at Zack. He pulled out another and together the men began stapling the relevant pages together. It was quieter work than the sorting had been.

"Sephiroth, how come you're stuck doing all this desk work? Aren't there lower ranked people who should be handling this?"

Sephiroth did not look up from his task. "I requested these files be sent to me." Zack frowned.

"You want to handle MIAs?" That was a thankless, difficult job, full of red-tape and dead-ends, what with tracking down reports, getting testimony, accounting for dog-tags and notifying family of the findings. Only a masochist would want that job and here Sephiroth was, handling the entire war's worth of files on his own. Most severely depressed people just cut themselves. "Wouldn't you rather be out drilling the troops and making sure the army's ready for the next war?"

"Next war, Zachary?" Sephiroth never paused in his endless stapling. "We've annihilated Wutai. No one is in a position to present that level of resistance now." He looked up though his hands kept moving, never faltering.

"I've been on the battlefield constantly since I was fifteen, Zachary. I've been there so long it's a wonder I could wash the smell of blood away. Whenever I came ho- when I came back to Midgar, it wasn't for leave." His eyes shifted askance for just a second. "Is it so hard to believe that I would want a break from fieldwork?"

Zachary would never be considered a genius, but at that moment he had an insight that was beyond most people, blinded by image and propaganda. The General was the perfect soldier, a great swordsman, loyal, dedicated and fierce in his duty, but it was only that - duty.

Sephiroth did not love what he did. Why else would he shy away from his fields of glory? Why else would he insist on going through the agony of accounting for his decisions in human lives?

Zack drifted away as he considered the possibilities. Sephiroth looked up at him with a scowl. "Keep stapling, Zachary. Make yourself useful."

Zack jolted away from his thoughts and set them aside for later. "Hey, Sephiroth," he began. "These files aren't going anywhere and it's been a rough morning. How about we actually drink that coffee?"

Sephiroth put his stapler down and almost smiled. "Coffee would be…nice."

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Time: 2 hrs, 55 mins

Music: I Wanna Be Like You - 'The Jungle Book'

Notes: Yep, I went with 'Donovan' as a last name for Zack. It's been around for years and years. 'Zachary Donovan' does have a nice ring to it, and the name means 'Dark Warrior'. It just fits him, as do goofy shorts. I can't actually recall many fics with Zack wearing funny undies, but then /cough/ in most of the Zack fics I read, underwear is just a thing to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible ;)