Rapture
The first time Sephiroth heard her, he was a child of indiscriminate age. He was crumpled on his knees, clutching the toilet seat so tightly that his unnatural strength cracked the porcelain. He had just returned to his chamber after an unusual treatment and he was throwing up hot blood and ropy, viscous strings of mako. The acidic mixture sheared the tissue of his throat as thoroughly as if he'd taken a vegetable grater to the lining of his esophagus. His vision acquired a murky green tint but he dismissed it, assuming he was just leaking mako from his eyes again. Another wet heave sawed through his stomach and, gagging loudly, he expelled another caustic stream of vomit. His vision turned from green to black, and even as he fell, striking his chin against the toilet seat, his sweaty hair spilling into the sticky, ruinous sewage he had upheaved, he was vaguely aware of a cool touch lingering on the slope of his bent neck, and the faintest, static-distorted whisper. The voice was indescribable—unending, bottomless, engulfing.
Can you...hear me...?
Even as a child, he always knew he was different. He had a voracious mind. His depth of intellect shamed Hojo's lab coated assistants. He had faultless photographic memory, and his absorption of facts was unparalleled. The one luxury allowed to him was his books and he accumulated heaps of tomes and leaflets concerning every possible topic. He was always asking questions, even when he was strapped to the examination table like a ferociously docile lamb. The cuffs had grown too small, and they gnawed zealously at the flesh of his arms, leaving behind splotches of violent blue bruises. Although Sephiroth was unable to experience physical pain the same way other individuals did, he contented himself with the knowledge that he could shatter even this customized metal alloy should he so desire. Hojo was somewhere to his left and he listened to the professor rifling through his collection of stainless steel surgical tools, but due to the tight shackle around his neck, he was unable to turn his head to fully observe the scientist.
"Who is she?" Sephiroth asked when he grew tired of counting the tiny fissures in the pitted plaster ceiling. Hojo almost instantaneously appeared above him, and his chapped lips curled away from his yellow teeth in a gesture that signified a sense of pleasure. He caught Sephiroth's pale, narrow face between both of his spindly hands and breathed, "Oh my perfect, perfect boy! She is your mother."
Mother...yes. I will be your mother.
All of Hojo's experiments were born and bred for a specific purpose. Sephiroth had little difficulty accepting his. Tactics and fighting were effortless for him. Oftentimes, Hojo and his aides deposited Sephiroth into a classified area of the training center. There, he was expected to slay various monsters with no tools except his brutal strength and sheer savagery. The boy had electrodes taped to his temples and chest and the scientists charted his progress behind a thick wall of safety glass. Sephiroth never minded the gristly task, and the more gruesome the killing, the more praise he received.
Then one day, Hojo unexpectedly pitted him against two boys whom he estimated to be nearly the same age as he. ("Hollander's inferior subjects," Hojo scoffed. "They're nothing compared to you.") He thought they might be like him, but their bones crunched like pebbles and they bled like everything else. He would have ripped them apart and splattered the floor with their eviscerated remains, like he did with the behemoth last week, but he wasn't allowed to. Genesis never forgot that it was Hojo's monotone command over the intercom and not mercy or sentiment that spared him and Angeal.
Due to President ShinRa's order, the three were briefly sentenced to intermingle in a controlled environment. Hojo was enormously displeased by this, but he irately conceded to the President's ("...intrusive and ill-informed!") instruction.
Mostly, Sephiroth watched mutely as Genesis and Angeal interacted with one another. Angeal attempted to elicit a reaction from Sephiroth, but he generally treated the scruffy youth with silent rebuttals. But Sephiroth did like the way Genesis regarded him with naked loathing. After a week, the two were removed but he hardly noticed. She was getting louder. Sometimes at night as he lay in bed, he could feel her sliding her ephemeral touch over the bumps of vertebrae on his back.
I am here...
Even by ShinRa standards, he was shockingly young when he took the SOLDIER entry exam. He was sent on a mission into the crystalline depths of the Mythril Mines where he was to exterminate a hoard of genetically enhanced monsters that had escaped from the labs. He excelled of course. The First who accompanied him filed a report hailing Sephiroth's cunning and skill, but concluded with the enigmatic statement: "Sephiroth will undoubtedly make a remarkably effective but ruthless SOLDIER." Ironically, the First, whose name Sephiroth never gleaned, died shortly after when another First went berserk following an intensive Mako treatment.
Sephiroth was transferred directly into the SOLDIER program. Hojo was reluctant to permit Sephiroth's departure, but in this matter, Sephiroth was uncharacteristically unyielding. The labs had become unbearably stifling and he had begun to believe that if he failed to grasp this opportunity, he would never leave them. From the doorway, he studied his chamber for the last time. It was bare, except for the gouges he had left on the walls from his thrashing when the agony of the Mako treatments used to be unbearable.
He will miss you, she told him.
"He will replace me," he answered.
Wutai was a magnificent place, even as it fell. He felt alive there, in a way he had never before experienced. The sun always shone on the battlefield. The sun of Wutai was not like the muddy sun in Midgar. In Wutai it was diamond bright and as sharp as a dagger. In Wutai he again encountered Angeal and Genesis, freshly dispatched from the SOLDIER headquarters. Angeal wept when he killed his first man, and Genesis draped his arms consolingly around his friend's broad shoulders. Sephiroth tilted his head in puzzlement, his silvery bangs falling over his luminous eyes, fascinated by their distress. "Why are you so upset?" he asked them.
"They're men!" Genesis spat.
"They have—had families, homes, loved ones," Angeal explained.
Sephiroth still failed to comprehend the meaning behind their words. Those notions were incomprehensible to him. Genesis waved his hand to flamboyantly encompass the trail of butchered Wutains Sephiroth had strewn among the city streets and said wickedly, "You are a monster, aren't you?"
A solitary feather, charred by the flames that immolated one of Wutai's sacred pagodas, drifted down, and Sephiroth caught it in his gloved palm.
No. You are not a monster. You are different. You are special.
Sephiroth did not want to be special or different anymore. Genesis's accusation plagued him. Surely he was not a monster. Monsters had no meaning to their existences other than to mindlessly slaughter. He was not a beast...was he? Alone in his tent, he feverishly paced its rectangular perimeter, repeatedly analyzing the same thoughts and still lacking a resolution.
Monster. Alien. Inhuman.
He had always considered himself human. An evolved and superior human, but a human nonetheless. But he was not required to consume food or rest, like others did. He recovered from any injuries almost immediately. He had never been ill, except for the side-effects caused Mako injections in his early childhood. Only he heard her. He hardly even resembled other people physically. But that...he could change. He seized a fistful of his silky, metallic hued hair, and hacked at it with the serrated edge of a previously untouched meal knife. He recklessly hewed sheets of it from his head. In his fervor, he did not notice when he inflicted shallow cuts in his neck and scalp. Clumps of gleaming hair littered the ground when he was done. What was left was more or less and inch in length and when he examined his reflection, he deemed it to be improved. By morning, it had grown back to its previous, sweeping length. She tried to console him, but for the first time, he ignored her. After that incident, he pretended to be vain over his hair. Everyone had always assumed it was a product of narcissism anyway, and he fooled them all but himself.
The universal assumption back in Midgar was that Sephiroth, Genesis, and Angeal were all the best of friends. Even the two Banora natives acted as though they too believed it. Only Sephiroth knew better. Genesis and Angeal only ever had room for each other. Sephiroth was never included in their shared jokes or off-duty forays, and every invitation for him to join them on the training grounds was an afterthought. They were the closest thing to 'friends' he had (except for her), but truthfully, he could barely tolerate either of them. Genesis had always been jealous and every obnoxious quote spewed over the brim of the redhead's Loveless novel was delivered with a darkly knowing look and sniping undertones. Sephiroth regretted slashing Genesis's shoulder open during the mock fight but it was not an accident that he had.
Even worse than the near constant stream of Loveless recitals were Angeal's lectures about honor and dreams. It was easy, after all, for Angeal to say such things. He had grown up poor in a quaint little village surrounded by family and friends and buoyed by his ingrained virtue.
Maybe if Angeal had lived through what Sephiroth had, he would not resent Angeal's monologues so much. Maybe if the inside of Angeal's elbows bore coin sized scars from innumerable, excruciating injections, or if Angeal had spent months of his childhood having strips of skin peeled off to determine his regenerative properties, well, maybe then Sephiroth would start to take his talk of honor a little more seriously.
(She always bristled defensively at the sight of them. They make you sad. If you want...we could hurt them back.)
Sephiroth was not surprised when Genesis and Angeal eventually went M.I.A. together, or when the order came for him to track them down. But Sephiroth was surprised to discover that, in spite of everything, he did not want to hurt them. But he didn't want to save them, either.
In another time and place, Sephiroth would have considered Zack a genuine friend. Zack was spirited but without Genesis's guile and pettiness and, unlike Angeal, his beliefs were not preached with and edge of hypocrisy, but rather shared with the base honesty possessed solely by undamaged children. Tomorrow, Sephiroth and Zack would begin travelling to a backwoods town dubbed Nibelheim.
Despite his inopportune demise, Angeal's talk of dreams had infected SOLDIER. Even Lazard had badgered new recruits with that nonsense, and with both of them gone, Zack carried on the unfortunate tradition. Sephiroth had one secret though, which he had kept hidden and barely acknowledged even to himself. He had a dream of his own. In his dream, he was free from SOLDIER and Hojo, from the hopes and expectations pinned to him with dissection needles. In his dream, he was not a war-machine, or a being grappling to attain some sense of his own humanity. In his dream, he had no past, only a future, and he lived somewhere far distant, maybe up north, in the snow which he has read about but never seen. It is this dream, he shared with Zack when he said, "After this mission, I may leave ShinRa."
But already, Sephiroth knew that his dream would never become a reality. Even as he stood in Lazard's abandoned office, conversing calmly with the one man who would have been his friend, she snaked her arms around his waist, as though trying to absorb herself further into him. Phantom feathers graze his cheek and her eternal voice whispers, You are not alone. I will always be with you.
A/N: The 'she' is Jenova, in case anyone is wondering... Anyway, a special thank you goes out the reviewers of Artwork. Your critiques are hugely appreciated!