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year 5, quarter 3
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[attr=class,bulk] There was little that Genesis feared in the world. He was impulsive, brash, and ultimately careless. They had both seen combat, and Sephiroth knew well that Genesis did not fear death unless, it seemed, if it came from within. He also feared the loss of his friends. Of Sephiroth. He had not feared any such thing when he had taken Angeal and left Sephiroth behind.
He wondered what had changed – Genesis, their circumstances, or himself.
Genesis scowled at the apple he had chosen to take into his hand. Sephiroth kept his eyes to the ceiling, watching him only in his periphery, listening to the words that tumbled carelessly from his lips.
Unsurprisingly, he quoted Loveless.
”Kill them all…?” Sephiroth echoed, his lip twitching into something like a smirk. ”Do you mean all of Shinra? Or all of humanity?”
Hatred pounded hot in his veins. Hatred, betrayal, and fear.
”I died.” It was simple. Direct. Hollow. ”I was thrown into the reactor. I remember…the mako. It flooded my lungs. I was burned inside and out, and it came to no end.”
He looked down at his hand, clasping and unclasping it experimentally. It felt somehow bare without the familiar tension of his leather gloves.
”My mind was broken by it. My memories. Everything which led to that moment. That path began at the end of the war. When you went missing in action.”
His smirk soured with bitter irony. ”After everything I’d endured…That was too painful to accept.”
Sephiroth knew his own fears. They did not include death or pain, but rather, a return to endless solitude and the fear that, no matter how he tried, he had never been more than a product, a weapon engineered by the executives for their own ends. The other subjects in Shinra’s science department were abominations, disposable and undeserving of life. He’d thought himself different.
He’d been wrong.
”What was the point of it? Of all of it?” He scowled and slid a hand to his forehead which pounded in rhythm with his heart. ”I am…nothing.”
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth slowly brought his hand before him as though to study it. For what, he didn’t know. Perhaps to see if it still looked, still felt, like his own. Nausea rose within him the longer that Genesis spoke. Buried memories pounded at the inside of his skull.
”What I…couldn’t accept…”
His fist clenched closed. It felt strangely bare without the cover of his gloves.
”You’re afraid.” His voice sounded foreign even to him. Distant. Hollow. ”That is a new stanza.”
Poetry. That was the least of his concerns. Perhaps that was why it was the safest to pursue.
”What would you do?” It didn’t matter. Their circumstances were not the same. Genesis had been hurt by them. Used by them. But he had still known a normal life. Sephiroth had never known such luxuries.
All that he had ever done, he had done to live up to expectation. He’d been told he had been meant for greatness. That he was to become the perfect soldier, the perfect weapon. All of his suffering was merely the cost. The price of greatness. Of superiority. And this...
Sephiroth was not one for vertigo. Hojo had tested his above average endurance to g-forces and he had no fear of heights. Still, Sephiroth remembered a time, performing on sterile obstacle courses in the sub-basement of the Shinra science department, staring down from the top of a narrow ledge and gathering the courage to force himself to climb down the other side.
He felt the same now, suspended above a dizzying drop into mysterious depths. His mouth was dry, acrid with the phantom taste of mako.
”I was told that I was special. But in the end, I’m nothing more than another of Hojo’s experiments.” Sephiroth sneered with the full force of his disgust, his anger, his shame. ”What would you do?”
[attr=class,bulk] Genesis started to answer. He tried. But something was stopping him. Some kind of forced hesitance that muffled the sound of the truth.
Genesis was loud. He was emotional. But he was stalling for time. He assured Sephiroth that he was not alone. He admitted that he had wronged him, which was as close to an apology as Genesis was capable. But a word stuck even in this admission. It stuck in that same part of his mind which Sephiroth could not consciously enter.
”A monster…” he muttered, and its very utterance sent a chill of dread up his spine. He stopped his pacing. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see black leather but instead inspected only his bare palms.
He half-listened to Genesis’ explanations. They were like an echo from somewhere far away. Professor Hollander had manipulated Genesis into defection. Genesis hadn’t wanted Sephiroth to become a “scientist’s lapdog.” Sephiroth let out a huff of laughter from the sheer irony of the idea. What had he ever been, if not the very same? What had he been born into? Raised into? Genesis had known that. It was an open secret that Sephiroth had been augmented from a young age. But the rest…
”I signed a nondisclosure agreement,” he said, his voice hollow to even his own ears. ”My childhood. It was…confidential.” It was more than he ever would have said before. He had never spoken of his childhood. Not once. Not even to Genesis and Angeal. To do so would be to go against Shinra doctrine and to put them all in danger.
But more than that, he hadn’t spoken of it because of that horrible twist in his stomach when he lingered a moment too long on those days of solitude and walkways in gunmetal gray. There had been others there. Employees, mostly. The other test subjects…never stayed long.
”Strangers approached me. Some sought a fight. Others…only to talk. They told me…” Sephiroth hesitated. His fingers had gone numb. ”They told me…that Jenova was a monster. Is that what I am? What I’ve been all this time?”
He leaned back his head and laughed, hard and humorless. He’d been told he’d been meant for greatness. He’d been told he was the perfect soldier. He’d been told so many things, and yet, what else was Shinra known for but lies?
His eyes dulled on the ceiling. His arms fell limp at his sides. There was nothing funny about this.
”I only wanted to find my mother,” he said. ”I wanted to be…normal.”
[attr=class,bulk] ”Copies?” Sephiroth’s eyebrows raised – the only sign of his surprise. Had Genesis mentioned…copies? Zack had dropped the word so casually. As though it was something obvious and understood. Angeal had “fused with his copies.” Sephiroth’s mind raced to make sense of this information, and it did not have to travel far.
”Copying technology…It was developed in the Shinra science department…” He muttered it more to himself than Zack who, it seemed, was intimately familiar with the process already. Sephiroth had seen the hideous results of the experimentation during his time with Hojo. Had Angeal stolen the technology to create such a thing? No. That seemed least believable of all.
Angeal’s honor would never allow it. He would never steal such a cursed experimentation, let alone use it for himself…
But Zack told the truth of Angeal’s death. There was no reason for him to lie when Zack himself had delivered the killing blow. And Angeal’s last words…
Thanking him. Asking him to protect his honor. Those were…in character for Angeal.
Sephiroth’s stomach turned. He felt suddenly nauseous with both confusion and understanding. He could so easily imagine it – Angeal bleeding out on the ground, begging his protege to uphold his honor. Bestowing upon Zack the sword that meant everything to him. Was it in thanks for carrying out his last wishes? Had Angeal sought death in his shame? That his honor had broken so far as to…
Create copies. That part he still couldn’t imagine.
Zack was uncomfortable. Sephiroth felt somehow…accustomed to SOLDIER’s constant shifting and fidgeting. Somewhere within him, Sephiroth felt something like guilt for placing such pressure upon him. He had grown tired of feelings that he couldn’t understand.
”Keep it,” he said simply. His eyes flicked to the Buster Sword once more, a symbol of his friend and everything he had believed in, before they turned to the sky. ”It was his to give away.”
Sephiroth felt somehow empty as he watched the sky, vast and starry away from the lights of the city. Angeal had been left with no honor of his own. And so he had given it to Zack instead.
”Tell me something,” Sephiroth went on, pausing for only a moment as he formulated his words. ”Were we…friends?”
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth didn’t find it productive to argue with Genesis about the meaning of Loveless. It was a meaningless exercise at the best of times, but now, with his heart pounding rage and adrenaline in his ears, he could only process one thing. ’Yet how many people looked up to you? Including me before we met.’
Genesis…had looked up to him?
The thought had never occurred to him before. Haughty, above-it-all Genesis who had, as far as Sephiroth had known, lived a life free of torment had idolized him. Genesis, who had joined Soldier at the age of thirteen. How old had Sephiroth been then? Young. A child. Was that why Genesis had approached him all those years ago? It seemed impossible, yet Genesis’ admission only fueled the pain at Genesis’ fate.
Genesis hadn’t known of his own origins until his hospitalization. He spoke not of Hojo, but Professor Hollander, a scientist who Sephiroth knew considerably less intimately. Genesis spoke slowly, hesitantly, as though the words were dragged from his mouth. Sephiroth’s brow furrowed. His throat tightened. And Genesis told his story.
Sephiroth felt his breath catch, ragged and uneven. The science department. Cell infusion. Degradation. The phantom smell of antiseptic overtook the earthy tones of his coffee, and he placed the mug on the counter, only faintly aware that his hand was shaking. He needed to meditate. He’d been taught how to manage these feelings, and yet…
”And they only let her take him because…because Hojo had come up with an even greater success.”
Sephiroth stared at him. He felt nauseous. No. No, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be…
”I didn’t…” he started, but that felt insufficient. ‘I didn’t know?’ Of course he hadn’t known. If he had, he would have…
Would have…
Sephiroth turned and began pacing. Something, anything to get out the restlessness inside of him, that horrible strangled feeling that threatened to break his composure. If he did…
No. He’d locked away that memory deep inside of himself. He’d locked away all of them. They were unproductive. They would only distract his thoughts.
”Jenova,” he muttered, pacing back and forth through their kitchen like a caged animal. ”Hojo told me it was my mother’s name. I still don’t know who or what she is.”
Something whose mere cells had power. Something which Shinra longed to control. Something they had grafted onto children. Prototypes. All for…
’I must say, Professor Hojo, that this is your best work yet. The subject has excelled in every metric! Before long, we might just have a weapon that will finally bring down those brutes in Wutai.’
Sephiroth stopped pacing. His nausea rose again, closing tight around his throat.
”If you’d told me,” he said. ”I would have defected.”
He understood now Genesis’ desire to burn it all. He understood everything except for why they had left him behind.
”You didn’t trust me.” His hand rose up to his forehead, steadying himself. ”You and Angeal were…close. You didn’t trust me.”
He had been called many things since his promotion to First. He was used to hearing the whispers through the streets of Midgar. ’Shinra’s lapdog,’ they’d called him. He hadn’t known that his friends had thought the same.
”Why?” His voice was rough in a way that it never was as he asked that single question. Why? It was an accusation. A plea. If they truly had thought him nothing more than Shinra’s perfect soldier, their weapon, and nothing else…
His mind was a flurry of thoughts. They leaked through the cracks in composure and manifested in pain. He was powerless against them. If he lost control…
[attr=class,bulk] For a moment, Sephiroth remained motionless, listening to the wind and the rustle of pine needles. Within the mountainous underbrush, the animalistic whines faded as the life left his last target. Behind him, he heard the scampering of paws through the snow as the remaining wolf fled from a conflict it could not win. Behind him, he heard the woman’s footsteps, no doubt turned to face him.
She expressed her suspicions. She demanded answers. Natural, he supposed. He could almost respect her skepticism.
Finally, Sephiroth glanced behind him to meet her gaze. Her steely gray eyes, sharp with distrust met his own – cool, impassive, and glowing with mako’s telltale light. He had been told that his eyes were unnerving to the common people. Thankfully, he cared little of their judgments.
”I heard your struggling,” he answered simply. ”You needed help. And so I came.”
It was not lost on him that this woman had her sword set directly against him. Sephiroth sheathed his own. Perhaps it would set her at ease. If she chose to attack, she wouldn’t pose enough of a threat to warrant the use of his blade.
Sephiroth looked skyward towards the mountain’s summit. Though he could not see his intended destination, he knew that he had a long trek ahead of him. He’d hoped that it would be a quiet, uneventful journey in which he could relish in his own solitude. He still hoped as such.
”You’ll find a path twenty paces east of here. It will take you down the mountain to the hiking trails.”
He didn’t know what this woman was doing so far past said trails. He didn’t know what she was after or why she had come so ill-prepared. He did not care to ask. He had saved her once already. It would be on her to bring herself safely back to civilization.
[attr=class,bulk] Fair looked uncomfortable as he searched for words, rubbing at the back of his neck in an obvious tell. Sephiroth remained impassive, watching him and the sword with the same cold scrutiny as before. Zack didn’t want to talk about the Buster Sword. That much was obvious as he bought for time, merely stating that it was complicated before pausing again.
Sephiroth watched him.
Zack wracked his brain for the right words.
And Sephiroth continued to watch.
Finally, the other Soldier spoke. ”To keep it simple, in the other world, Angeal was killed. He told me to take it before he died. So now I have it.”
Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t need prior knowledge of Angeal’s past to sense that Zack was hiding something. His own intuition told him that. Zack had used the passive tense, ’Angeal was killed,’ rather than expose the supposed killer. He brushed aside Angeal’s last words and seemed curt with the ending. Sephiroth was no interrogator. He left those matters to the Turks, but even he could sense a lie in the making.
And as it was, he did happen to have prior knowledge to dispute him.
”Genesis said that Angeal committed suicide,” he said coolly. Could it be that Zack was trying to shield Sephiroth from such a distasteful truth? Possibly. But this was not a point that Sephiroth wished to debate. Genesis had said, again and again, that Angeal had “left him.” Genesis was known for his theatrics, but on this, Sephiroth believed him whole-heartedly.
”Who was it that killed him? And why did you inherit his sword?”
Why was it not Genesis who had taken it, Angeal’s best friend, to properly lay it to rest in a manner as respectful as Angeal would have wished for the greatest symbol of his honor? Why had Shinra not collected it upon discovering his friend’s body? In short, why should Zack of all people be worthy of wielding such a precious blade?
Sephiroth’s fingers twitched with the desire to test Zack’s worth. To reclaim the blade that should not have been his by right. But he stayed his hand, his patience waning as he waited for a suitable response.
Nothing in their interaction had, so far, given him reason to trust the eager young Soldier.
[attr=class,bulk] Sephiroth did not need a mission to explore the upper reaches of Mount Hotan, and indeed he had none. Missions, objectives, they were all part of a different time. A different life under the rule of Shinra and its expectations. Now he moved with his own purpose, no matter how uncertain that purpose may be. In this case, he had heard tell of sacred and secret places amongst the mountain peaks where the snow never melted and the wildlife had grown vicious and territorial. Sephiroth worried little of the dangers. Such deterrents would keep the paths quiet but for the light crunch of his boots in the ice-hardened snow.
Sephiroth’s thoughts threatened to overtake him. His emotions, always packaged neatly away, threatened to break free. As always in such times, Sephiroth sought isolation.
The light of the setting sun shimmered across the ice, each tree seeming to sparkle in its gaze. He listened to the call of birds, to the howling winds across the mountainside, to the subtle whisper of shifting pine needles. The cold was bitter and sharp. It struck his chest, leaving him breathless. It settled into his nose and cheeks, leaving them with a dull ache that reminded him that he was, in most ways, still human.
As though he had ever been anything else. As though he had not, from the moment of his birth, been human and something else.
Something which smelled of antiseptic and mako injections. Something which flickered in the dull sheen of fluorescent lights on gunmetal gray. Its echo swelled viciously, and Sephiroth recentered himself, taking in the scent of pine needles and the ever present ache of the cold.
Nature would ground him. There was life here, as inhospitable as it was, and none of it could ever thrive in Midgar.
Sephiroth heard movement ahead and slowed to a stop, hand shifting instinctively to his sword.
There was a rustle in the foliage, and from it it emerged an arctic wolf, its thick fur dusted with snow, its eyes sharp upon him. It regarded him for a moment, perhaps considering him as prey or an intruder upon its territory. Sephiroth answered its gaze with his own cool regard. The wind howled between them, spinning icy flurries in its wake, and then in the distance, there came a howl that was far removed from the wind.
The wolf raised its head at attention, ears flicking in thought, before it turned and dashed back into the foliage to answer the summons. Sephiroth watched it go, motionless as he listened.
He heard the thundering of paws through the frozen undergrowth. He heard the snaps of tree branches and the clumsy crunch of human footsteps growing louder. Then the crash of flesh upon flesh and the staggering of boots against the icy terrain.
Sephiroth sighed. He had not expected to find anyone stupid enough to climb this high alone into the mountains. He had, apparently, been wrong.
He walked towards the sounds of the scuffle without any sense of urgency. The wolves were territorial, not malicious. And any traveler who could not defend themselves long enough for his arrival did not deserve his support.
What he found as he rounded the bend was not entirely unsurprising. A woman was standing her ground, barely, against the wolf he had faced only moments before. Its hackles her raised, its fur bristled, and its fangs were bared, but its true purpose became clear as Sephiroth looked past the combatants to catch sight of two more wolves charging shoulder to shoulder to close in on the woman’s flank with another only a few feet behind them.
Sephiroth’s eyes sharpened as he took to the air, launching himself weightlessly above the woman as he pulled his sword from its sheath. A single downward slash cut through the two leading wolves as they prepared their attack, stopping their momentum in yelps of surprise and pain as they fell bleeding to the ground. Sephiroth landed lightly behind the woman and skewered the third beast upon his sword before it had a chance to react. He sent it flying into the underbrush with a flick of his blade where he heard it tumble into the foliage, its last breaths turning to a pitiable whine.
With that done, Sephiroth glanced behind him without turning his head. Either the woman would finish the last of the beasts or it would have the intelligence to turn tail and flee. Either outcome meant nothing to him.
[attr=class,bulk] At that one word, Genesis’ expression changed. Gone was the tight-lipped anger. The frustration. The mania. In its place was a kind of empty shock. His hands loosened involuntarily, and the apple fell from his grip with a soft thud.
”Oh,” Genesis said when reason seemed to come to him again. ”I thought you didn’t remember.”
Sephiroth’s brow furrowed. Then he had been hiding something. He’d been hiding it since the moment they’d first met in this unnatural new world. He’d known that Sephiroth’s memory was incomplete. He’d known how it had frustrated him, and yet…
Sephiroth watched him carefully, eyes cool and calculating. Genesis was, perhaps, the only one who could give him the story in full, and yet what he said left him with more questions than answers.
”Us…three?” Did he mean the three of them? But what did Angeal or Genesis have to do with this? The way that he had heard it told, Sephiroth’s unnatural state had stemmed from experimentation, and while the thought turned his stomach, he couldn’t call it a complete surprise. He had been raised in Shinra’s laboratories, after all. Whereas Genesis and Angeal…
Had something become of them after the Wutai War? Had Hojo...?
Genesis pulled his knees to his chest, somehow managing to perch on the kitchen chair with his arms wrapped tightly around them. He looked like a child, defensive and scared. Sephiroth felt a sudden rush of anger well inside of him. What had Shinra done to them?
What had they done to his friends?
As always, Genesis answered with Loveless.
This time was different, however. These were no direct quotations, but a summary. Sephiroth knew the play, of course. He knew the poem better than he wanted to admit. Genesis identified them all with the characters of Loveless. At most times, Sephiroth might have found himself irritated with his friend’s delusions, but he could feel nothing now but that anger, beating like a drum within his chest.
His fingers twitched for a sword that was not at his side. He longed to spill blood on their behalf.
Genesis looked vulnerable in a way that he never was. Genesis was often haughty. He was often hot-headed. He used words as a weapon and followed it with his blade. This was not the Genesis he knew so well, and the sight overpowered all else.
”I was no hero,” he muttered because he couldn’t merely ignore something so personal to his friend, no matter how irrelevant it might seem. That name, Jenova, had unlocked something in Genesis that had been long sealed away.
”You and Angeal,” he said slowly, ”Did they…?” But he didn’t know how to find the words. Perhaps because there were no words for what Sephiroth had experienced. Perhaps because he had never told them of his past. It had defined him, molded him to meet Shinra’s every expectation, and yet he found no reason to dwell upon it.
Until now, at least.
”I thought it was only me.” His voice was quiet, hushed like a secret made manifest. ”You came from Banora. So how…?” His chest tightened again. With fear. With rage. With all the thoughts he never allowed himself. With the memories he wished had been purged instead.
[attr=class,bulk] Zack seemed nervous. Uncomfortable though, as Sephiroth recalled, it had been Zack who had called to him. Interesting. Though Zack tried to hide his discomfort, Sephiroth caught his slightly uneven breaths and the way his eyes flickered as though trying not to stare. He was afraid. Of what, Sephiroth couldn’t say, though if he had to guess, he would place it as the same fear that all the others had shown.
Apparently, Sephiroth had snapped in a remote mountain village and burned it to the ground.
Apparently, Sephiroth had become a sort of monster threatening the planet itself through means he could not understand.
If that was so then why did Zack not attack him on sight? Why did he not flee? Instead, he seemed insistent on acting casual like a child caught disobeying an order.
Zack insisted that he had not been searching for him, but had merely come down this nearly abandoned path at night by coincidence. Sephiroth weighed the likelihood of Zack’s honesty. In all other cases, he would have placed it at nearly nothing, but he sensed no falsehood in his words, and Zack, as he recalled, had always been earnest above all else. In truth, he felt something tugging at the back of his mind. It was a feeling that he could not name and that was perhaps beyond description, but it was the same he felt when Angeal or Genesis were near.
They had found each other by mere coincidence as well. Could this seeming coincidence not be driven by the same nameless force?
There was a short pause before Zack added more. In that pause, Sephiroth scrutinized him more closely. He noted a scar on the man’s left cheek that he could not recall before. Along with his change of uniform, Zack had changed his weapon as well. Sephiroth’s eyes narrowed at the familiar form carried on Zack’s back. The Buster Sword.
But why…? And how…?
”So,” Zack asked as though searching for the words, ”How long have you been here on Zephon?”
It was as though Zack were asking him about the weather in the halls of Shinra Tower. Sephiroth had never been one for idle chatter in the best of times. These were not the best of times.
”Long enough,” he answered simply. His eyes flicked once again to the sword on his back. ”That’s Angeal’s,” he said, though that much, he assumed, was obvious. ”He would never give it away.”
