After Gast's death, Ifalna cries.
She cries all the way to Shin-Ra ship on the shore; doesn't care who sees and what they think. She sits on the bench in the van, holding her sleeping daughter, and weeps quietly, looking at her small face. She doesn't look at the men on the opposite bench. Gast returned to the Planet, and she is alone, alone and afraid of what is about to come.
Her cabin on the ship is small, but it has a porthole, and she looks out, to the ocean waves and bright sky. She suspects there will not be much opportunities of seeing the sky after they reach their destination.
Hojo comes in, stands at the door and smirks at her, his eyes hard and cold. She thinks, "How did we come to this." She wants to scream, to strike him, to run away, but instead sits straight, still and silent.
"Wonder how did I know for sure you were a Cetra?" He asks.
She doesn't want to know, but he answers anyway.
"You admitted it yourself." He smirks again. "All rooms in the Mansion were bugged."
She looks away, asks, her voice barely above a whisper, "Why then did you let him go? You could stop him from leaving Nibelhem."
"Gast's desertion was exactly what I needed to get Head of Department," He says, "Why would I prevent it?"
In Junon, she is led to another van by two Turks. She knows them, but doesn't bother with talking.
They are Turks. They do their job. She is just a part of their current mission, and their previous association means nothing.
She knows that much.
Back in the headquarters, she meets more of familiar people. Most of them turn away, as if they do not know her. Several of the scientists look at her with curiosity and caution, as if she was a new interesting monster to be studied.
Her cell is white, windowless, and the lights never completely go out. She puts Aerith in the transparent plastic crib and sits on the bed. She looks at the bare walls, at the small black camera in the upper corner, and thinks, "I have to find a way out."
She is studied like just another specimen - blood analysis, tissue samples, scans - and then the scientists discuss the results, talking of her in her presence as of "Specimen I".
Some of them she knew since the times before the Jenova Project. They were having lunch breaks together, once upon a time, discussed books and movies, laughed about jokes, but now they look at her and don't see her anymore; she wonders, what they see.
"I have a name", she wants to say, "You know it, don't you?"
They do, but they don't see her.
She is sure, this phenomenon must have a name. Did anybody study the reasons and the process behind depersonalization? She cannot recall.
The only one who still calls her by name is Hojo - Professor Hojo, now.
She would prefer him to stop doing this.
Hojo takes inventory of her possessions, the White Materia included.
"What is this?" He asks.
"A family heirloom," She says indifferently.
He squints at her. "And what if I will throw it out?"
She shrugs, looking at the simple wedding ring Gast put on her finger half a year ago. She supposes, the Materia will be safer in trash dump than in Hojo's hands, and wonders where Gast's Keystone is. She thinks, they both failed spectacularly as keepers. She thinks, they failed in everything they tried to do.
Hojo puts the locket back on the table.
They take her blood and talk about chromosomes, locuses and alleles. They are analyzing differences between hers and human genome. She knows their equipment is good; Gast himself supervised its installation.
Ifalna is docile, waiting for a chance to escape.
"So, you knew Jenova was not a Cetra." Hojo says.
She nods.
"How long did you know it, Ifalna?"
She answers, "Since the summer of 1978."
"And Gast?"
"I didn't tell him until the last autumn, but by then he already came to the same conclusion."
"You tried to stop human experimentations."
She nods. "Yes."
"Why?"
She looks at him, frowning. "Because it was dangerous. Jenova was an extraterrestrial life form with unknown characteristics. We should not infuse humans with its cells." Isn't this obvious, she doesn't add.
Hojo snorts. "You have to risk," He says, "If you want to achieve anything."
"What did you achieve," She mutters, "Your wife..."
"My wife," He spits out, "Knew the risks and took them consciously. And my son is much more than just a human. I would not be surprised if one day he will become a god."
Ifalna looks in his eyes and sees fire, an insatiable hunger for knowledge, an unstoppable urge to disassemble, to analyze and to rebuild.
"Your soul is burning", She wants to say, "Don't you feel it?"
"Your soul is burning", She thinks, looking him in the eye, "And someday you will set all the world on fire."
She wants to say, but in his eyes she sees understanding, and remains silent.
He feels, he knows, and he doesn't care.
She meets Sephiroth, once. He is following Hojo to the main lab, and Ifalna is being led to her cell by one of the scientists. The boy is taller than she remembers him, and his hair is longer. He glances at her and turns to his father.
"Where is Professor Gast?" He asks.
The man looks at him, impassive, answers matter-of-factly, "He died", and continues his walk.
Sephiroth glares at Hojo's back, and in his eyes she sees the fire of another kind, but no less fierce than in his father's.
When Aerith is six month old, they take her away. Ifalna returns to her cell, and the crib is gone. When they come for her the next time, she screams and fights, and demands to see her daughter, and gets sedated. Somewhere in distance she hears Hojo's voice telling that it is for the child's safety, that her reaction to treatment could be unpredictable.
She loses the track of time after that.
Between long, tiring and intrusive examinations, and injections that sometimes make her perception painfully clear, and sometimes leave her mind covered in thick fog, she sleeps and dreams.
She dreams of golden leaves swirling with the wind and of three young scientists in white lab coats walking through an overgrown garden, talking about their research and opportunities and future, and the one who runs towards them, his glasses askew, his footsteps sharp and loud on the stone path, with the news of their first success.
She dreams of a young woman with long hair and big round belly and too-thin wrists, hunched over the computer console, typing frantically, and a barely visible outline of a naked human body in a glass tank behind her.
She dreams of a fire at the edge of tropical forest and of two people sitting beside it, smiling at each other and talking, and of Spirits roaming around them, whispering about time and space and life.
She dreams of a small boy with white hair, hidden under a table in a room, where the setting sun casts patches of crimson upon the wall and the floor; the boy's knees are drawn to his chest, his face hidden in shadows, and he sits there, waiting for someone who will never return, and somewhere below him, downstairs, someone is pacing back and forth.
She wakes up to bare white walls and harsh artificial light and feels the light coming right through her mind and body, feels herself becoming less substantial, less real.
They let her see her daughter once in a while. She takes Aerith in her arms and sings the same lullaby Gast was singing to Sephiroth. The girl is growing, she is already learning to walk, and Ifalna doesn't even know what month it is now. Her mind mixes up dreams with reality; she cannot distinguish anymore if voices she hears are voices of living people, or Spirits, or her own imagination.
After her first time in Mako tank, Ifalna slumbers for days, unable to fully wake up. In her scattered visions, she sees a boy with long silver hair, standing on a field of death, surrounded by bodies of dozens of people. He is covered in blood, and his eyes look as dead as the corpses around him.
She sees a young girl with emerald eyes and curly brown hair - her Aerith, dying on a cold metal table, joining the Lifestream.
She sees a familiar town being consumed by flames and a silver-haired man walking away, to the dark mountains.
She sees a man in a white lab coat, laughing madly at the top of a huge cannon that is towering over a big city, and blasts of energy flying to the North.
She sees a huge red meteor falling from the sky, smashing to the ground, hears a scream of millions of souls dying instantly.
She wakes up finally, looks at the white ceiling and thinks, "This future doesn't exist yet. It's only a possibility, a most likely scenario."
She thinks, "I have to get out of here."
But the opportunity never arrives, experimentations continue, and Ifalna slowly loses herself in visions of the past and of the future. She is lost, a drop in the ocean of time, edging closer and closer to the Lifestream.
Aerith looks older and older each time she sees her; she wonders, how much time passes between their meetings. Time is flowing like sand through her fingers; she does not know what year it is now.
The people around talk about the war raging in Wutai, and about Hojo wanting to send Sephiroth there. They doubt the boy will return alive; he is only twelve. "Twelve," Ifalna thinks in one of rare moments of clarity, "It must be 1992, then." She remembers cold wind and bare trees, and a newborn sleeping in an incubator.
The Head of Department leaves for Wutai, and in his absence staff unwinds a little. Security measures around Ifalna were always strict; she was never left alone outside of her cell, even in her current poor condition. But young women in white lab coats are bored overseeing her interactions (or lack thereof) with her daughter, and one of these days they go out to smoke, leaving two Cetras alone.
Ifalna sits on the couch, staring absently at the lab coat left by one of the girls. In the pocket she can see a dark outline of a keycard. Her mind is slow and numb, but she knows it must mean something. Aerith is sitting on the floor, colouring pictures with bright felt pens. She wears light blue dress, and Ifalna wonders briefly, who chooses clothing for her. Her own new dresses always resemble the one she was wearing when Hojo killed her husband.
"What are you waiting for," A voice sounds at the edge of her conscience, raising above all others. She doesn't remember who it is, but her mind clears slightly.
She stands up, unsteady, walks to the chair and picks the coat up, dons it, takes Aerith by hand and whispers, "Let's go."
"Where to?" The girl asks, looking at her with huge green eyes.
"Out of here," She answers simply, and opens the door.
They make it to the elevator, before one of the scientists notices them. "Hey!" He exclaims, but the door is already closing, and he stays outside, his expression puzzled. In the car, the man stands, his face seems familiar to Ifalna, though she does not remember his name. He is clothed in Turk's suit, and she thinks, "We got caught."
But the man looks at her indifferently and turns away, takes his keycard out and pushes it into a slot beside the elevator's controls, enters a code.
The elevator goes all the way down without a single stop.
On the wall there is a big mirror, and for the first time since Knowlespole Ifalna sees her reflection. Her hair is much shorter than it used to be, barely shoulder-length, and there's streaks of grey where previously was only brown. She doesn't remember when or how her hair was cut. Her face is pale, sickly grey, and gaunt, and her eyes are more blue than green. She tries to calculate her age; must be around forty years, but she looks sixty.
In the lobby, they go out of the elevator, and the Turk stays behind.
No one looks at them twice as they go to the main entrance. She supposes, nobody here knows her face anymore, and a lab coat is as good cover as a Turk's suit, if less intimidating.
Aerith is clutching at her hand silently, darting curious glances around.
Nobody stops them, and they step out of the building into the cold air of a rainy day. The vast, open space around - tall houses, wide streets, and the sky - suddenly frightens Ifalna; she feels a strong urge to run away, to hide in her familiar cell. She stops for a few seconds, breathing deeply, trying to calm down. Her heart is beating rapidly, irregularly, tiny black dots are dancing before her eyes, and her skin is covered in cold sweat.
Aerith looks at her. "Did we just escape?" She asks.
Ifalna tries to smile, but her face seems to have forgotten how to form this expression. "Yes, we are running away."
"Then we must go, or else they will catch us," The little girl says seriously.
She nods, and they walk down the big stair to the street level.
When they are far enough from headquarters, Ifalna takes the lab coat off and throws it into the trash can, but keeps the keycard and wallet. They pass several houses, and then she asks a passer-by, where the train station is. He explains the way.
In the train, she sits down on the bench and pulls Aerith to sit beside her. The train goes to the Sector 7 slums; she hopes to find the way out of the city. She doesn't know where to go from there. The world has moved on, and she doesn't know if there's any friends in it anymore.
"Bugenhagen," She thinks. "If he is still alive, he will help."
The train begins its spiral descent, and her heart momentarily contracts with sharp, blinding pain, causing her to double over. She breathes through it, tries to scan her body. Her mind is as messed up as it was, but she manages to understand the most important thing.
"I'm dying," She thinks, "Oh Gaia, I'm dying."
She finds the locket on her chest and pulls it out, accidentally breaking thin, fragile chain. Her daughter is kneeling on the bench, peering through the window to slums below. Ifalna takes Aerith's hand, puts the white orb in her small palm. The girl looks at it, then at her mother.
"Keep this," Ifalna whispers in a way of explanation, "It's important."
The train goes closer and closer to the ground. Ifalna feels herself slipping into slumber, filled with darkness, and fire, and snow swirling over the edge of a giant crater, over the thing that is sleeping there, pretending to be dead and waiting for a chance to strike.
Aerith tugs at her sleeve. "Mom, the train stopped," The girl says, looking in her mother's face.
She barely manages to stand up. They walk out of the car slowly, to the dim light and stale air of the slums.
Limping down the stairs from the platform, she loses her balance and nearly falls. Aerith helps her to sit down.
"Are you alright?" Someone asks. She tries to look up and tumbles back, her head painfully hitting the stone step.
"Oh dear," The same voice gasps, "You look bad. We need to get you to hospital."
She tries to focus her eyes. There's a woman beside, her round face worried.
"Please," Ifalna whispers, "Take Aerith somewhere safe."
Her heart makes another painful thud, and flutters, trying to beat and failing. Her vision darkens.
In these last moments, she sees the possible future again.
The emerald-eyed girl, calling out to a young, dark-haired man lying unconscious amidst the yellow flowers.
The same girl, now older, walking through half a world among the weirdest bunch of people - not only humans, for Ifalna glimpses the familiar red of Nanaki's fur and someone resembling a cat riding on a big stuffed toy moogle.
The White Materia, glowing green, falling into the depths of water.
The Meteor, stopped - first by the white glow of Holy, and then by green waves of the Lifestream, led by the spirit of the same girl.
"Aerith," She remembers, "My daughter, Aerith."
The images fade away along with pain, and she feels light, and strong, and sane for the first time in long years. She can see sunshine through all the metal and concrete of the Plate and through thick clouds above, she feels the Planet around, and sees the Spirits greeting her. She looks down at the small girl, standing beside the dead body, and whispers:
"I'm here, Aerith. Don't worry. I will always be by your side."
The girl raises her head and smiles.