It Is What It Is

Zack is many things, but he’s not stupid enough to cross Angeal Hewley with a baby chocobo. Angeal would confiscate the chick, deliver a sermon on how “a SOLDIER who can’t manage his own laundry is unfit to nurture life” and probably make Zack write an essay on the ethics of wildlife preservation. So Zack drags it to the cadet barracks at 4 AM to ruin Cloud Strife’s only free morning of the month.

*Cloud answers the knock at his door, half asleep, and sees Zack standing there covered in mud and cradling a fluffy, bright yellow baby chocobo*

Zack: :)

Cloud: No.

Zack: Wait, wait! You don’t even know what’s going on!

Cloud: That’s probably a baby chocobo you found on the side of the road. And the answer is no.

Zack: What do you mean “no”!? You don’t even know what I’m gonna ask!

Cloud: You came here to ask me to help hide the baby chocobo, who you probably named Flash, so we can co-parent it in secret, construct it a diet plan out of gysahl greens and stolen cafeteria apples, and bond over the shared trauma of keeping it quiet from the floor supervisor. Then, as the chick grows, our co-parenting dynamic will inevitably force us to confront our unspoken feelings, leading to domesticity where we raise this bird to be the fastest racer in the eastern hemisphere. In five years, we’ll enter it into the Gold Saucer Grand Prix, win first place, and use the prize money to buy a cottage in Cosmo Canyon—where we’ll get married because we “already built a family together.”

Zack: You’re completely wrong.

Cloud: Which part of that was wrong? The timeline? Our future?

Zack: No, all of that you got right. I’m talking about the name! I didn’t name it Flash.

Cloud: What did you name him?

Zack: Cloud Jr.