Title: Unbidden
Pairings: Implied Sephiroth/Cloud and Zack/Aerith
Notes: Oooh, boy. I have no clue where this came from, only it just took off from what was supposed to be a happy little fusion drabble, to an epic angst-fest.
The first of two parts. Second part up tomorrow, because I need to polish up the ending.
WARNING: I took some liberties with the whole Alchemy point. Nothing should be off…but I'm not perfect. Oh, and this is not a happy story.
XXX
There was snow on the ground. The icy top layer glittered gently as the lights in the compound came on one by one as night began to fall.
As the shadows in the office grew longer as sun was quickly lost, General Sephiroth worked more diligently on finishing the paperwork left over from the various missions his soldiers had been sent on in the previous week. There had been many casualties in the past week, the majority due to the rebel group Avalanche's bombing of one of city's sectors. Many soldiers had been lost, especially those in the higher ranks qualifying as Alchemists, and Sephiroth rubbed at his temples wearily at the department's loss.
The ringing of an office phone echoed from down the hall, and Sephiroth picked up his pen again to continue signing the various papers with photos attached.
Death certificates with faces - to be placed in folders to be placed in file cabinets located in dusty rooms where no one would ever see them again. A room of deaths in alphabetical order.
The phone was still ringing. Another minute and it had stopped. Sephiroth continued to sign, a frown marring his beautiful face. He was probably the only one still left in this wing of the compound, as Zack, who was usually the second to leave the wing, had come by at least an hour ago to say goodnight before heading off solemnly to see Aerith.
Sephiroth signed another form that acknowledged that the soldier in the picture had died; admiring what the man had looked like before he had become a corpse. Brennen, Mark had had a nose before the explosion had melted it off the sharp face and had also definitely had skin where skin should have been. The corpse had at least been identifiable, thanks to the cosmetic alchemic array that the man had tattooed below his rib cage.
Another form was pulled from the stack. Perhaps Zack was right; he thought as he looked at the picture of the blond clipped to the file, and that maybe he should pass this over to someone else lower in the department. He was working himself into exhaustion, especially after losing this man. Not even a man yet, the General reminded himself as he stared at the photo of Cloud Strife, but still just a child with a promise of true talent for the craft Alchemy.
Sephiroth had found Cloud personally when the Shinra government had sent him and a group of specialists to investigate a series of laboratories in the north. Zack had been left behind, to act as a substitute for Sephiroth's position. While the other man had fussed at being left behind, he had forgiven his superior immediately on his return in favor of cooing over and whisking the blond child away for several steaming bowlfuls of Aerith's homemade vegetable soup.
X
The farther north they went, the more bitter the winds became. The chill cut almost like how his Masume cut through flesh and bone, Sephiroth imagined as he led the expedition on foot. The train would only take them so far, and with a new snowstorm a looming threat this time of year to the roads and vehicles, the only way in to the snowy village was by foot. It was almost picturesque in the late afternoon, this village especially when Mathews and Lyons stopped grumbling to stare at the pretty scenery when they crossed the last hill. Stevens and Laws were right behind them and the silence that had somehow managed to settle between all five of them was broken when Laws opened his mouth, "Well, I'll be damned. For a cold gal, Shiva's work can sure be breath-taking." Murmurs of agreement fell from the others' lips, but Sephiroth's lips remained pressed together in a firm line. He disliked the cold – it was, beside the shore and in the rain, one of the worst environments for his elemental fire alchemy. Why Shinra thought it'd be a good idea to send their Flame Alchemist out to a snowy middle of nowhere, Sephiroth would never really understand. Besides, the humidity of the rain made his hair turn from pin straight to an almost wavy fall and the salt water and bitterly dry climate made it turn from shiny and sleek to dull and brittle.
That fact alone almost made him want to be back in his office, even if he had to listen to Zack ramble about his new toy – a camera that took pictures and developed them too.
Almost, though. Even though the wind was cutting through his winter uniform, the roar of an animal sounded in the distance. It was fierce sounding enough to easily cause all his men's heads to snap towards the sound. Human screams followed and Sephiroth could feel his pulse quicken as his body became rushed with adrenaline. This was what made being out here better than being in the office. "Laws, Mathews: make your way down to the center of the village and from there assist any villagers needing help to safety," he snapped out. Both men responded with a smart salute and an affirmation before turning to run to the village. "Lyons, Stevens: we'll make our way over to the town's laboratory. If that is a chimera, like I suspect, then we'll likely encounter it on the way. Follow me," and with that said, Sephiroth took off at a quick run, heading out towards a farther edge of the town instead of the center.
They passed side streets as they ran. Some villagers stared out the windows of their small wooden homes in confusion and fright as the three soldiers raced by – alchemy each soldier's specialty.
Lyons spotted the chimera before Sephiroth did, pulling behind to pull out a piece of paper with an already drawn array. There was ice everywhere and the chalk and ink each man carried would be useless in their current environment so already drawn arrays would have to be used, or time would have to be taken to scratch arrays on to the ice. Sephiroth was the only one that carried a weapon that wasn't related to the use of alchemy, and again Sephiroth wondered why Shinra would send out men that couldn't properly use their specialties to a winter Iceland.
The chimera roared again. Blood from some other animal, human a big possibility going by the screams from earlier, was slightly frozen too if not still dripping, from its maw. It was a great beast, a possible fusion between what looked to be a large dog or even a wolf and some sort of snake, if the abnormally long and scaly tail were anything to go by. Lyon's array was activated as Sephiroth drew his Masume from its sheath. Earth, once frozen, broke through the layers of ice and like tendrils, wound around the snarling creature and trapped it. The Masume flashed in the late afternoon sun and the dog-snake creature's head was severed from its body.
Mathews' voice rang loudly in the near dead winter silence from the next street, "Clear!" the man cried. "Aw, mother-fucker! It fucking got back up," Laws answered, as soon as Mathews had finished shouting the all clear. The chimera that Laws and Mathews must've found came bolting down the street. It loped along, letting out what sounded like a greater roar than the other chimera's when it saw Sephiroth standing in its path with his other men, the Masume still raised. In a fit of almost sudden intelligence, but still more instinct, its great hind legs gathered to the front and it pulled itself together to make a surprising turn away from the Alchemists waiting for it. Lyons was already activating another paper array as Sephiroth ran forward to kill this one too. The tendrils of earth fell short, and the creature's more powerful limbs kept Sephiroth from fully overtaking it in his chase. The rest of his team was behind him still. "Stay behind and check again that there are no more chimeras," Sephiroth called out, voice sounding thunderous.
The chimera was heading towards the tree line now, in the direction where the laboratory was located. It pushed through and Sephiroth followed it, running along the paths he found since Masume would have limited movement if confined in the more densely populated areas of trees. The trees broke and the Nibelheim laboratory loomed overhead, a giant gray eyesore against the pristine snowy mountains. Some of the front windows were broken and the giant double doors had been flung open, Sephiroth observed. The ground became more difficult to run on he had accumulated so much ice in the treads of his boots that they were almost useless, and he frowned. The chimera wasn't in sight anymore, and he turned his head to look back in the direction he had come from. The ice was so hard and thick that it'd be difficult to track, but as Sephiroth bent down on a knee to look at the icy ground better, he felt the small prickle of energy, which usually resulted when another Alchemist in the general vicinity activated an array, run across his skin. The chemical light from an array was shining through the windows of the laboratory, and Sephiroth picked himself up from the ground and ran towards the flashes of brilliant red light.
He expected to find one of the laboratory scientists, and expected the bottles of open chemicals around the floor, but he had not expected the waif of a child kneeling on the open floor in front of one of the most brilliantly beautiful arrays Sephiroth had ever seen drawn. Sephiroth tore his eyes away from a further mutated carcass of what had once been the chimera he'd been chasing. The creature looked like it had been torn apart many, many times and it looked like those parts had been spread everywhere. Chunks of it looked like it was missing though, and Sephiroth stared from it to the child that was covered in blood. His hair that should have been a bright blond was matted with blood, and the boy's small body seemed to be trembling.
"Mama," the child sobbed, eyes the brightest of blue with tears, "the chimera that killed Mama… the rebound from Mama's array killed it." The child let out a chocked laugh, another sob as the horror of what that beautiful array was for and had done dawned on Sephiroth as he sheathed the Masume.
Sephiroth's green eyes widened in horror at what was in the center of the array: a twisted human body twitching, groaning. The child was crawling, reaching towards it, one small hand outstretched. "Mama, I won't come here and play with Dad's alchemy anymore. Just please wake up, Mama," he begged, now close enough to touch the long tendrils of blonde hair and Sephiroth was there at the child's side, pulling him away from the monstrosity reaching back. Blood was spilling from its imperfect body, and soaked in to the snow and ice caked on Sephiroth's boots as the child in his arm kicked and clawed to get away, still screaming for his mother.
"What the hell," Mathews' voice came from behind him. Sephiroth turned, child still screaming for his mother in his arms, to face his newest addition to the party. "What happened, Sir?" Mathews asked, stepping over a bit of chimera, a look of confusion on his face at the flailing child who couldn't have been more than ten or eleven years of age in the General's arms.
"Ah," Mathews' look of confusion softened to one of pity, "that must be Cloud Strife, then."
The child was still screaming but the sobs were starting to decrease as the boy succumbed to exhaustion. "Do you know this child, Mathews?" Sephiroth asked, as Cloud finally just closed his bright blue eyes and passed out.
Mathews stepped forward to survey the array, gasping in shock and looking a bit sick while staring at the body inside it. "Not personally," he admitted, "but when me and the other's cleared the town, the villagers came out and started yelling about how the chimeras were probably an act of the Strife family, and that we should be hunting them as well as the chimeras. They gave a pretty good description too of the family; a mother and her son. Father used to be one of the top scientists, specializing in new arrays.
"Seems like Shinra doesn't know that about eight or nine years ago all of the scientists left and abandoned their research for some reason, but they were never really obligated to Shinra."
"An independent branch?" Sephiroth questioned, lowering Cloud from his arms and to the ground. Mathews made a noise of agreement as Sephiroth circled the creature in the circle, trying to decide the best way to deal with it.
"They're kind of uncommon nowadays," Mathews' answered, "But not unheard of. Apparently even though the father left them to go with the others, the mother and her kid," he gestured to the limp form on the lab's floor, "stayed behind." Mathew's scratched thoughtfully at his chin, before saying in a soft hush, "I wonder why they left in the first place," as Sephiroth continued to circle the imperfect body. "Uh, what exactly are we going to do with that, Sir?" he asked. Sephiroth was already tugging out his pristine white gloves and pulling them over his chilled hands. The arrays on them glowed brightly as he snapped his fingers, and the imperfect body went up in flames. The flames flared out of control for just a second, going up even high to lick the vaulted ceilings and the room began to smell faintly of sulfur.
X
Cloud had been special, Sephiroth remembered. The Nibelheim labs had been the expedition's last investigation, and while they never had found out why the researchers had left, they had found the remains of the chimera experiments prowling the basement. The power grid had given out long ago, and the chimeras had been let free, and only until then had some found away to escape. Miss Strife had been their first and only victim, as the chimeras had escaped from behind the labs and ran blindly towards her as she came up from another path to collect her son for an early dinner. Or that was what Sephiroth and the others had assumed, since the corpse of a once beautiful blond woman was found torn from limb to limb close by.
Sephiroth and the others never knew the whole story, as Cloud had been deeply traumatized by the events and had blocked out almost all of his childhood. Just asking had caused the blond boy to tremble, until he froze completely and didn't respond at all, and the majority of the compound that knew Cloud treated it with a sensitivity that was uncommon in the military.
But Cloud had been a genius, the only thing that Cloud chose to remember from his childhood were the spiraling lines of the arrays his father had constructed and the chemistry to know what could make what. He didn't even need an array most times - a simple clap of his hands not only formed them, but activated them as well.
Zack and he had watched in surprise when Cloud had first done it. Zack, of course, had been super enthused with Cloud's trick, pleaded with the blond to show him how it was done and then proceeded to get Cloud to alchemize another flower wagon for Aerith so he could then take pictures of the blond. The following day was the most annoying one of Sephiroth's life, because not only did Zack proceed to place an obnoxiously large memory board filled with pictures of everyone in his department to Sephiroth's office wall, but he also tried to mount the board by clapping his hands. It took at least three hours of constant clapping before his Second-in-Command declared that he didn't have Cloud's blond hand clapping prowess, and then pulled put a hammer and for the next half hour banged the board to the wall.
The board was still there, on Sephiroth's office wall. Zack had managed to bang the nails in at such an angle, that removal meant removing at least half the wall with it.
The same picture, meant to represent Cloud in death, which Sephiroth held in his hands in the present came from a group shot. He wondered why the person that compiled the folders chose this picture of Cloud in general, when there had been several others available on the board. So many in fact, as Zack had made sure that there were many pictures of himself, Cloud, and Sephiroth together, that they were starting to creep off it to be tacked to the wall. This picture of Cloud for the death papers had been cropped from the original one sitting in the frame on Sephiroth's desk, which Zack had managed to take with his newest camera's automatic timer. Zack had all but thrown the device down on the nearest available surface, which had been the low stone wall outside, to run and huddle them all together within ten seconds so the flash could blind them temporarily – much to Sephiroth's annoyance, Cloud's confusion, and Zack's delight.
When the picture had been taken, Cloud had just turned seventeen years of age the previous month and been in the military since the age of thirteen. His father as next of kin had been untraceable and the village wanted nothing more to do with the Strife family. Sephiroth knew that he probably should have left the boy in a children's home, somewhere in Midgar, or should have just left him in that ruined picturesque village, but with Cloud's selective amnesia it seemed almost cruel. More so because Cloud had a sharp mind and when Aerith and her mother took him in, he tore through their small collection of Alchemy texts. Zack had been the one to recommend he leave Cloud with Aerith, and his Second-in-Command had always visited the family on Sephiroth's behalf to deliver new texts from Shinra's research library.
Sephiroth wondered how the Gainsborough family was going to take it when they heard the news from Zack. They luckily had not been affected from the blast as their home had been on the other side of the city, but they still would have known that there were bound to be casualties.
So far, Cloud Strife's certificate was taking the longest for Sephiroth to sign. There had been many casualties, and Cloud had been caught far enough away from the epicenter, but still within distance, to die instantly from the inhalation of heat. The corpse had been hardly recognizable. Sephiroth knew he should know, as he wove and looped the lines of his signature as lovely as he wove and looped the lines of his arrays that even though Cloud may have tried for his dead mother, there were still no arrays to bring back the dead – only to kill the living. And so Cloud, as Sephiroth put the finishing flourish on the h, had been killed by his hands.
XXX
"Sephiroth," Zack started as he stood leaning against the doorway as he addressed his superior officer, "don't you think you should take a break from that?"
Sephiroth looked up briefly before turning back to his papers. He heard Zack sigh in frustration before the office door finally closed and Zack gave up for the moment. If it had been eight months ago, Zack wouldn't have given up so easily. Instead he would've left briefly to bring Cloud back with him, and the blond would have sat there on the suede forest green sofa (thanks again to Zack, "See! Look how it's all awesome and matches your memory board!") reciting the theory behind an array that would specifically change the shades of a color of several materials and Sephiroth would have to leave his desk to supervise and make sure that Cloud and Zack didn't follow through with their thinly veiled threat. Sephiroth didn't think it was that funny the first time that Zack had managed to convince Cloud that the Shinra military compound would look better in a light pink than the deep rust color. While it certainly had been an improvement, and Zack had taken several pictures before Cloud had been ordered to turn it back, there had been an overwhelming amount of paperwork.
But now, since Cloud's death, Zack left without the threat of mayhem in the works. The man still came by often, as was his job, but it was like their connection from before had been somewhat severed. At first, they had tried to go back to the way it was before, but that proved almost impossible. It was too easy to expect Zack to come into Sephiroth's office uninvited, Cloud somewhere down the hall just in case, or to continue to wait for Zack to drag him and Cloud down to the cafeteria so they'd get a chance to eat lunch before they forgot.
A cooling cup of coffee plunked itself in front of him, as Sephiroth looked up in surprise having not heard his Second-in-Command return. "Excuse me, Sir, for saying this, but as your friend I have every right to tell you how much like crap you look," Zack stated as he raised his own coffee cup to take a long drink.
Sephiroth chuckled dryly, asking, "You do realize that I'm not the one with dark splotches under my eyes. When was the last time you've actually gotten a decent night's sleep?"
Zack snorted, sloshing some of the coffee from the cup, "Well, at least I've actually gotten sleep. When was the last time you actually slept in your bed?" he asked.
Sephiroth sipped at the offered coffee. It was slightly too sweet and creamy, vanilla flavored, like Cloud would have liked. Since Cloud's death, Sephiroth had been throwing himself at his work more than he had before, and while it had helped ease the loss, he rarely made it back to his home and to his own bed every night, opting to sleep instead on the couch in his office. Extra uniforms and food were easily obtained from the Quartermaster, given Sephiroth's rank, and the gyms on site had showers. His house was most-likely dusty, now that he thought of it, and it caused him to grimace in to his coffee cup.
"Unhu," Zack chided, "if you have to think about it, then it must have been forever ago you actually slept on a mattress, and no. Don't look at me like that. I am telling you: that couch is not an acceptable bed, regardless of how many times I come in here to nap."
Sephiroth didn't say anything as he drank the rich liquid. Zack was talking enough for both of them. "Okay, now that we got that in us, time to get down to business," Zack stated, throwing his paper cup across the room to land precisely in the trash bin near the door.
Zack was running a hand through his short raven-colored hair, trying to decide where to begin, before letting out a long sigh. "Well, it's like this: I was just told that we may have found evidence to what Doctor Hojo had been working on in our labs before he went AWOL."
"That was?" Sephiroth asked, rising from his seat to stretch his legs.
"It's suspected to be Life Alchemy, or at least reanimating corpses," Zack said simply. Silence seemed to stretch between him and Zack as they considered the implications to what the scientist could possibly want to use that particular branch of alchemy for. "We've been asked to investigate the area where the Turks have found his newest lab; it's now abandoned, Sir," Zack stated, a concern look on his face.
Of course Sephiroth had told Zack of Cloud's previous attempts at a life transmutation. He had explained about the single attempt that Cloud was lucky to have survived, the array rebounding and taking the chimera instead.
Finally letting out his own sigh of frustration, Sephiroth turned to Zack. "And what are we expected to do when we get there – Life Alchemy isn't exactly a well known form, and the only one we know of that has tried…" he trailed off. Cloud would have been a valuable asset to bring Hojo in – the blond had rarely gone and done field work, but had specialized in researching arrays like his biological father.
"Hojo apparently has succeeded where, well, you know, failed," Zack explained softly, "and the results of his successes or failures may still be around so we've been asked to accompany those that are specialized enough in the area."
XXX
Just polishing up the second part now, but it should be up tomorrow. Oh, boy, this was fun to write but I really should've been working on other things. Like, ick, chemistry.