It was the wind that was the most prominent force atop the tower of metal and blood and Mako, a rushing blast that tore his hair and sent it slapping against his face, a rip of claws from beasts of the wind that picked and pulled at his dirtied and shredded lab coat. A shame that it had become so dirty over time – he would have liked to find a new one, had he the time to do so, but, no, there was no time, not now. Important matters were at hand, he told himself, and now was not the time to worry about shredded lab coats or dirt stains in his uniform.
Hunched low over the panel before him, his slender, bony fingers moving deftly over the smooth, metal keys of the control system, he worked away, his midnight-black eyes narrowed into slights against the falling acid rain that was so common to Midgar and the wretched wind that made his eyes water. He blinked to clear his vision, but he did not move to wipe his eyes. There was much work to be done – there was no time to move his hands away, because it was now or never. The time to test all of his past theories, a lifetime of work that had seemed to have no conceivable end, had finally reached that one pinnacle point that would tell if he had been correct in every assumption he had ever made.
He did not care that Sephiroth might die, would most likely die. He had had no attachment to the child in the first place, no real attachment. His attachment to the man had been merely like the attachment he felt toward the metal tools and supplies and bitter smelling chemicals he surrounded himself with day in and day out. The man was something to be discarded when he found no further purpose for him. Now, however, there was a change, a gathering of energy, a slight alteration in the blueprints he had made of how things were going to go, and he was going to intervene. Divine intervention in the form of a Mako-powered blast from ShinRa's newest weapon – it was ironic, and it made laughter bubble from his throat and spill into the night air.
There was no time. Already he could hear the failed experiment and his friends tearing through everything ShinRa had built up – he had laughed, still laughed, at the thought of the idiotic ex-President ShinRa and his idiotic President son, how they had watched helplessly as a failed experiment tore everything to pieces just by merely existing. A failed experiment! Of all things!
Dark humor made him laugh, and dark poison in his veins made him shake with visible side effects to the solution he had injected in himself. There was no time. Like a virus, he could feel it spreading through his system, tearing apart what he was now and making him into something different, inside and soon out, rearranging his DNA and chemical makeup, making him as much of an experiment as his son has been, as his wife had been, as the failure running up the metal stairwell with gunfire at his side – oh, he knew the cry of that weapon well, and it filled him with a rush of perverse delight that the Turk would be here to see both the beginning and the end.
He was cornered, he knew. This did not bother him as much as it would have bothered any other man, for he knew from the very beginning, all those years ago in the cold, cold mountains of Nibelheim, in the depths of the mansion-turned-tomb, that he had been cornered. It had merely been a fact he had come to realize: all men were cornered from the very start, cornered by their own actions. Even if the failure and his gathering of misfits could stop Sephiroth, could defeat Jenova, there was no hope. Man had cornered himself ages ago.
The footsteps came up behind him, hard combat boots against cold metal, and in that instant he knew that it had all come to this point, this last pinnacle point of completion, and he was there to see both the beginning and the end.