Midnight Nirvana

FN: Hey everybody, this James Firecat, I'm the one who wrote this story thegr8sephiroth is a good friend of mine, and he's the one who edited and posted it. A long time ago I armed with nothing but my quirky sense of humor, a rudimentary understanding of how the English language really worked, (not to mention how to spell some of the words that made it up) a few OCs based off of my best friends, and a desire to rewrite the plot of Final Fantasy Seven to cut down on the angst and make all the protagonists more badass wrote a story called Twilight Perfection.


Twilight Perfection was another one of those stories where Sephiroth redeems himself as a hero, falls in mutually in love with Aeris, he protects her life, she protects his sanity, Sephiroth finds out Vincent is his father, and grows a pair of feathery wings (one white one black) while defeating Jenova in North Crater. After which Meteor gets blown up by Holy without doing any damage and the two (Aeris and Sephiroth) get married and move into to the house where she was born in Icicle Village.

The main thing that set it apart from most of those fics were its OCs who insured that the few people who actually liked them greatly enjoyed the story since it gave a unique twist.


Midnight Nirvana is the sequel direct sequel to Twilight Perfection (as opposed to "I've got No Beef With You" also posted by thegr8sephiroth) which is really more of a humerous aside, so prepare for more action adventure, and general all around badassery.

Enjoy and make sure to leave reviews so that I can tell those of you who liked Twilight haven't forgotten about it since its way too long since we posted the last chapter to it.

EN: My fault. Life happened. When it wasn't exams, it was computer problems or personal drama. Sometimes, it was all three at once. I offer you all a deal: review, and I'll keep momentum and something resembling an update schedule. Standard disclaimers about copyrights apply: we make no money off this, we're using less than half the cast, and the half we are using, we use with respect and appreciation for the people who created them.

Chapter one: Up every morning just to keep a job. I gotta fight my way through the hustling mob.

Everyone was staring at him, but this was nothing unusual for former General Sephiroth Valentine. The fact that he had only fairly recently had the luck to have a retraction printed to his five years old (and some additional change now) obituary didn't help. Nor did the pair of wings growing from his shoulders (one white one black) impair the very obvious sense of "Holy crap, would you look at that" about him.

He had come from nowhere, been a no one, risen to the rank of general, vanished, come back, saved the world, and discretely vanished a second time. Getting away from the city of Midgar had probably been one of the smartest things he had ever done, and he knew that nothing short of utter insanity could ever bring him back to the damnable city.

Four months, four freaking months he told himself, if he had only been a little bit stronger he might have been able to hold out till she was too far along with their child to feel taking the trip from Icicle Village to Midgar. But he hadn't, Aeris had decided that it was time for her to personally get back in touch with her foster mother, and that was that.

Sephiroth, who had based his life around beating impossible odds by sheer force of will, had been dragged to the city of Midgar by his wife with ease. He had no desire to intrude on whatever Aeris was doing, his own family was complicated enough, he didn't want to even think about what he had married into.

"Hey Seph!" For some odd reason, Sephiroth found the rather high pitched (child like if you looked at it that way) voice reassuring because it proved that no matter what else happened, some things never changed. James Firecat, like always, was dressed in red, though he had traded his red jacket and t-shirt for what looked like a red Shinra major's uniform.

Sephiroth was unaware that major's uniforms came in red, or at least that particular cornea-scorchingly bright shade of red that James liked because it matched his hair and eyes. What in the name of the deities that Sephiroth didn't believe in James Firecat was doing as a Major in Shinra's army was explained quite well by the next greeting he received. "Hello Sephiroth, you'll be happy to know that Vincent won the Seraphim pool for how long it would take you to come back to Midgar. I thought you'd be able to hold out for another month at least."

Mirri Catwarrior wore the white jacket, with white bodysuit underneath and black long pants outfit that she had preferred since Sephiroth met her (though the jacket was a fairly new addition) but her white jacket boasted of a series of various markings, that made the rank she held in the Shinra army quite clear. "I wondered what would make you willing to work for Shinra again… general."

Mirri nodded as she pointed to the small golden plaque that sat across her desk. It read Mirri's view point on an age old maxim, "War is Heaven." She spoke with the confidence of a SOLDIER who had been given enough bad orders from above to feel cheated if she had left the service without the chance to give some herself.

"Yeah, as it turns out, retirement doesn't quite agree with me, not yet anyways. I burned a month in Corel helping with the rebuilding, and getting the mines operational again, then came out here. Besides, Sephiroth, you really had a lot to do with me getting this spot, you seemed to have killed the former holder of this position, along with every other possible candidate for it. As I distinctly remember myself saying after you vanished at Nibelheim 'what kind of outrageous jackass would have the audacity to try and replace Sephiroth' well now we have an answer, don't we?

By the way, thanks. Reeve might as well have been a rumpled and stained shirt, because when it came to contract negotiation I took him to the cleaners. Got concessions up one side of this building and down the other, some of which I asked for just to see if he'd agree to them. Granted, right at the top of the list was getting James his job."

Sephiroth was far from impressed. "Point one: I'm not sure if that's the dictionary definition of nepotism but it certainly fits the spirit. Point two: I'm pretty sure I made some rules against people being involved in relationships with anyone in the same chain of command as they were."

Mirri smiled sweetly, allowing her eyes to slide in her husband's direction. "Point one: we don't use chains, handcuffs, or whips, though James can do some impressive stuff with his tail. Point two: I rewrote that rule so that it's okay as long as the relationship could be proven to have existed before you joined up. It's good to be the general, after all.

By the way just because you might be interested in knowing another concession I got was that I can quit as soon as my nine months are up." Unlike Aeris, no matter how closely one looked, you could not find any signs of pregnancy about Mirri, and she was handling the task of being a General as if it was just a normal way to pass the time until her child was born.

Sephiroth prayed that he'd never be so transparent in his desire to discuss his children. "How is your child coming along by the way?"

Mirri sorted through a few papers on her desk before answering. "Oh she's coming along fine, though sometimes I feel that James is spending even more time with her then I do. By the way we've got a name now, Shiva."

The six armed cat goddess of destruction, it doubtlessly seemed a fitting name to Mirri. James seemed equally pleased with it along with his new position, he was taking every effort to try and keep in his new red uniform in order instead of letting it get scruffy like his former outfit.

His desk, of course, was another matter; if Mirri's looked appropriately muddled since she was in charge of Shinra's armies (what was left of them) James' looked simply disheveled. The only thing that stuck out was a golden plaque baring a slogan as appropriate for him as Mirri's was for her. "What is not forbidden is compulsory."

James attempted to shuffle some papers around like Mirri to make it look like he was accomplishing something other than just shoveling papers around. Eventually he gave up, just looked up at Sephiroth and smiled. "Yeah, three months in and I can already see that Shiva is going to have her mother's eyes."

Mirri snickered, her standard response to this line loud enough that anyone who wanted to could have herd. "Yeah, she's also going to have her father's ears and tail."

James Firecat and Mirri Catwarrior (well both of them could use Firecatwarrior for a last name now, he supposed) had been made for each other in spirit, and were thus determined to get over any differences in body. James was a former Shinra lab subject designed for commando work who had escaped, (mainly due to Sephiroth's help) and ended up meeting Mirri, and the two had instantly struck it off.

James was the kind of person who had a tendency to put women on pedestals, and Mirri was the kind of women who wanted to be above everyone else. The one problem was that James was not, when you got right down to it, human.

He was still wearing the wide brimmed red hat Mirri had gotten for him, and for a very good reason. James' ears resembled those of a cat, and he currently had a flaming tail suck down one of the legs of his apparently fireproof pants. To top it off, his hands were covered in a coat of short red fur, and his fingers bore retractable claws rather than fingernails. Because of the sheer amount of mangling that James' DNA had gone through (he joked that it had been created through cut and paste) it didn't line up chromosomally with Mirri's, or any other human beings for that matter. Never one to take "no" for an answer, Mirri had promptly commandeered the Shinra science department that had brought the world immortal super-soldiers and turned it into her private fertility clinic. It didn't hurt that she'd wrangled Melkore Morningstar, the man behind project Patchwork, and therefore the closest thing James had to a father, into overseeing the project.

So, project Keep Our Jobs ran swiftly and smoothly: they took DNA samples from both Mirri and James, then wrestled, pummeled, and occasionally bribed the respective strands until they lined up in a decent approximation of humanity.

Once they had accomplished that, they had taken one of Mirri's modified eggs, fertilized it with some of James' sperm, creating Mirri and James' child in much the same environment as James had been created.

Two scientists had come to the forefront of that project, it was another great victory for Melkore Morningstar, and the other person one of many reasons why Sephiroth had struggled to stay as far away from Midgar as possible. "You know Seph it's really cool how much your mom knows about genetics!" Mention of Sephiroth's mother was one of the few things he still dreaded, even in his new life.

It had all seemed so simple when his mother had been some unnamed dead scientist, and his father had been a man sadistic enough to experiment on his own child with the goal of making him into a living weapon. Sadly for Sephiroth, life was rarely simple, and having won the war to save the world from the evil alien entity Jenova, he discovered that the (uphill) fight against his natural response to flee whenever he and his parents were in the same room was probably going to be the thing that did kill him.

Vincent Valentine had been one of Shinra's best Turks up to the point that he had acquired, what he dubbed in his own words "A bad case of terminal anemia," or, in layman's terms, become a vampire.

He had also spent the first 30 years of Sephiroth's life lying in a coffin dealing with his own problems, which in all fairness were at the time close to being on par with Sephiroth's. Then Sephiroth had found him due to pure random chance (and James' unquenchable thirst for knowledge of the most impractical sort) and reintroduced him to the world.

At the time, Vincent also had some amnesia regarding the fact that he had been anything more then Lucrecia's partner in some consensual extramarital sex. Sephiroth of course had no idea that Vincent was his father, and the two had for a very short (and in retrospect very blissful) simply worked together rather than been family.

But as many times before, the planet had no particular concern for what Sephiroth cared to consider reality. Sephiroth had been forced to have that particular conversation with Vincent at a distance of several miles, and things had only gotten worse after that. Vincent, showing the traditional disregard for the rules that practically defined the Turks, decided that his particular brand of the afterlife was too enjoyable not to pass around.

On his way to helping Sephiroth destroy Jenova, Vincent had realized that he could bring Lucresia Levri, Sephiroth's mother, back to life. That had been a wonderful reason for Sephiroth not to go back to Midgar, nothing in his mind was worse then the possibility of a direct confrontation with his mother. He held onto this point of view like a drowning man did to a life preserver, despite the fact that everyone else seemed to be in agreement that his mother was a wonderful person.

It wasn't that Sephiroth was afraid of having a disagreement or something similar, just that he knew it would be painful for him one way or another. Thus he decided it was time to change the subject with a vengeance before James could warm into his ability to do more damage by accident than a battalion of First Class SOLDIERS could do on purpose. "So Mirri, how do you feel about finally having my job?" Mirri shrugged again as she looked through a few more pieces of papers.

"We're the problem Sephiroth, we're the solution. We made going to war against Shinra so popular that everyone wanted to get in on the show, and most of those jackasses didn't stop when we did. They weren't ideological or military based like us, they're mostly just idiots who think they can get ahead in life by cheating. We hit reactors, they hit banks, and some of them are still trying to. Of course it's thanks to your father and the Turks that we've bagged and tagged a number of them."

Sephiroth's face darkened into a suspicious scowl. The Turks were probably the most broken part of the broken system that Shinra had set up for itself. The fact that it was a power company rather than a government had done nothing to dissuade it from acting like it owned the world, and creating its own private army. The Turks had been created to clean up the messes that Shinra didn't want to give official attention to.

The only good thing about them was that as they had come to realize just how above the system they were, they had stopped really caring what the system had to say to them. Vincent had not been the most warped creation of that system, even after becoming a vampire, that honor rested solely on the near constantly shrugging shoulders of the man known (primarily) as Reno. He was slovenly, nearly always drunk, and possessed an almost freakish aptitude for violent improvisation and drunken ingenuity. Only his near-total lack of a work ethic kept him from being a serious danger to society.

Mirri, who had served as Sephiroth's left hand woman during the Wutai War and second in command during the Seraphim Rebellion, happened to be one of the few people on the Planet who had acquired enough time with Sephiroth to be able to understand his well concealed body language and saw his shock at her words. "Don't worry Sephiroth, Reeve has done a couple of things to limit the power of the Turks.

For one thing they're no longer super spies, just super cops. Unless they're invited, their power does not extend one foot outside of Midgar. Inside whose boarders it is still quite substantial of course. Also, Reeve increased the amount of paperwork that needs to be filled out every time they kill someone.

I agree with him on that notion, an appeal to their laziness is far more likely to succeeded then one to their morals." Sephiroth would lose a little less sleep now, not that he wanted to consider all of the various obvious comparisons between the New Shinra organization and the old one.

"What progress are you making concerning mako power?" For a couple of decades mako power had been the only power available, because it was cheap to produce, efficient, and dispensed by a company that had cornered the market. The only fly in the ointment was that under closer inspection it also involved sucking the essence of life itself right out of the planet. However, because of the fact that it had been in place for so long, even if Reeve "Shinra" wanted to get rid of it (and he did) if he did it straight away it would plunge humanity headlong into a new dark age.

Humanity had to be weaned off of mako power as other alternatives were found; doing anything else risked global collapse. The Shinra company was the exact same way, it was too large to be completely dismantled without doing irreparable damage to countless lives. So Reeve was only in charge on the Shinra organization in much the sense that you might be considered in charge if you were riding a tiger.

By the way Mirri smiled at him, Sephiroth could guess what the answer would be. "I'm sorry Sephiroth, but that information is classified. I can't exactly be giving it to every civilian who walks through the door to my office can I?" Part of Sephiroth was annoyed because it was the right answer, if you went by the book at least. The other part was that Mirri probably had taken classes in smirking, and acting like you cared about rules more than you really did.

In response Sephiroth held up the small black card he still had on his him, it was his Shinra ID and it still activated the elevators taking him to any floor he wanted to be. "If I'm just any civilian, how come I can walk in here without an appointment any time I please?" "Because you're a civilian who happens to be my friend." Sephiroth did not roll up his sleeves, he just looked Mirri right in the eyes spoke slowly and clearly. "Mirri if you don't tell me, I'll tell Reeve I'm ready to be a general again and after he gives me back my job, the first thing I'll do is bust you down to private so fast the sonic boom will shatter every window in this building. How does that sound, White Paws?"

"White Paws" was a nickname that had intrinsically gravitated towards Mirri, even though it had never truly caught on. It had been an offshoot of Mirri's other nickname, thanks to the fact that she had decided to start calling herself "Catwarrior" and the fact that she wore white gloves and white shoes. She had apparently ended up reminding someone of a cat whose fur broke into pure white just at the edges of its paws (she had worn a blue SOLDIER uniform at the time) and thus for a few months after newly becoming Seraphim she had occasionally been called by that alias. Sephiroth dragged out the name to remind Mirri that he wasn't the only one with skeletons in their closet.

Mirri raised both her hands into the air in surrender. "Jeez you civvies fight dirty when you're angry, must be because you've got no proper sense of military discipline. No need to bust out the middle name on me, you want the info, take it." Mirri opened a drawer on her desk to reveal well sorted files, (Sephiroth didn't want to think about what might be in a similar drawer unlucky enough to be part of James' desk) flipped to the letter "M" and removed a file handing it over to Sephiroth.

Sephiroth flipped through the file so quickly that someone who didn't know him better would think he was just gazing at it. In reality Sephiroth's brain had been designed to let it comprehend information much faster then normal, a skill as important in reading as on the battle. "I'd bet on wind power."

Mirri took the folder back and put it away before miming washing her hands. "Now remember that whatever happens, I didn't give you that information, even James isn't really supposed to know about it. Which naturally means that everybody who is anybody could have found out about it by buying Reno a couple of semi-ingestable beers. However, the conversation that we're having never happened, just like whatever didn't happen after we walked into the Temple of the Ancients.

All that said, I agree with you, wind power does have a lot going for it. It's simple, it can be used anywhere, and it's got minimal environmental impact. The down side is that it's chancy stuff, and we'll probably have to build a lot of them to provide the necessary power, which is more a matter of the space they'll take up than cost.

Still, I think they have more going for them than, say, solar. Of course I think Rocket Town and Junon are likely to be pushing for hydroelectric, since both are fairly near good sources of water. Corel is gonna be using coal of course, one way or another massive amounts of non-mako generated power is going to take its sweet time about coming around." Sephiroth nodded, it was going to be slow, but he didn't truly care; military campaigns took time, it was the result that really mattered.

"So what brought you here, Sephiroth?" Air raid sirens went of in Sephiroth's head, Mirri had a habit of prying, and had unfortunately grown quite good at it. He needed to take time to carefully plan his response. Unfortunately, Mirri didn't seem to be in the mood to give him that time. "Because you and I both know that you wouldn't have come back because you wanted to." Artillery started pounding away, Mirri already knew too much, he had to act now!

"This and that Mirri. Aeris is visiting her family." Mirri kicked her smirk into high gear. "Oh, so she dragged you here by the ear, or I suppose by the wing might be a more appropriate phrase." Rather than focus on the fact that Sephiroth Valentine, a man who had killed countless people basically did what his wife told him to do (Mirri might (but then that was a low chance sadly) have a heart attack and die from too much joy) Sephiroth chose something else to talk about.

"So what's with the little brass plaques? Yours and James' have been the only ones I've stopped to read, but I saw one on even the secretary's desk as I walked by." Mirri stood up, walked around and leaned back, her hands resting near the plaque. "They started springing up about a month ago. When Reno got his old position back, he walked in and slammed down a plaque on his desk saying 'I may come to work drunk, but you're the company that refuses to fire me!' After that, well, it spread through the company faster then a bad cold, Reeve approves because it helps new employees learn the ropes, or at least learn any persons' personality from a quick glance at their desk."

This explanation was followed by the five most dangerous words that Sephiroth could have heard Mirri say in this situation. "But getting back to you, Sephiroth correct me if I'm wrong, you're letting Aeris visit her parents, alone. So that alone, she can tell them: she's a lycanthrope, she got married, she's pregnant, and that her husband has wings. How exactly do you plan to survive the part where they chase you down with a shotgun?"

A few months ago Sephiroth would have simply ignored the question. However, he was willing to admit that overall spending time with Aeris had been good for him mentally, which was why he responded with a joke of his own. "Well Mirri, I plan to get a running start on the roof of the Shinra building, then leap off and use my wings to glide all the way to Kalm." Mirri flashed Sephiroth a smile that managed to combine her temporary surrender and her congratulations to him.

Sephiroth pressed for more since he had a temporary advantage, just like he would do in any battle. "You can smirk all you want Mirri, I just hope you get down on your knees and thank whatever particular deity you believe in that your parents are dead or else the universe might bring them back to life just to spite you. Or you might find out that Shinra stole James from an ordinary pair of parents to experiment on him the same way they did with me. Then you would be in the exact same boat as I am, and since I'm apparently the captain of the S.N.S. Parental Issues believe me when I say we're currently attempting to make more holes to let out the water coming in through the ones we already have."

In retrospect there were all sorts of wrong things with what Sephiroth had just done, one big one being suggesting within earshot (granted that was a pretty big area) of James that he might have parents because Sephiroth knew he would have torn Midgar apart a brick at a time looking for them. Thankfully before Sephiroth could spend any more time to ponder his mistakes, Mirri broke into a round of applause.

Sephiroth was struck as still as a statue while Mirri finally finished clapping and like an announcer at a sporting mach explained her reasons. "Wasn't that just lovely ladies and gentlemen? We have Sephiroth Valentine actually getting into contact with his emotions, and making a joke! That's the kind emotional release that good relationships are built on! Let's give him another big hand, he's been wonderful folks!"

James joined in with Mirri as she began her second round of applause. Sephiroth's traditional glare did nothing to silence Mirri, she had hit her stride and was now thoroughly enjoying herself. "You know Mirri it's traditional to have both the bride and the groom wearing the same kind of stone on their rings, and wear them on the same hands."

That managed to at least get Mirri to stop applauding and shot Sephiroth a nasty glare of her own. On the ring finger of Mirri's right hand she wore a fancy ring supporting a large white gemstone. James on the other hand wore his ring on the ring finger of his left hand with a red gemstone on his. James, eager to participate in the conversation, quickly explained.

"You have to wear materia bracers on your dominant hand for them to work correctly, don't you know that Sephiroth? Because it's one of the first things I remember ever learning about materia from the scientists. So you being, well the great Sephiroth, I would figure that you would have to..." Sephiroth momentarily tuned out James' voice as he took another look at his and Mirri's "rings". Upon closer examination, they proved to be just what James had said they were.

Those markings which in Mirri's favor did do a perfect job of passing for just the standard designs you might see on any wedding ring were actually the marks you needed to focus the power of a materia. Of course like Sephiroth both James and Mirri had bought rings big enough to wear on top of gloves (as they wore their gloves for reasons arguably more important than Sephiroth wore his) which also took care of the important need of not having a socketed materia holder touch your bare skin.

That was the second lesson Sephiroth had learned about Materia, if the socketed materia holding item touched your bare skin then the materia might cast any spell you used it for directly on you, not a problem for healing materia but with summon and other attack materia it was a big deal indeed. Of course there were ways around it, you wore long sleeves to clip your bracelets over, and if your materia was socketed in your blade (as Sephiroth's was) it was safe to use as long as you held the sword by the hilt.

Mirri had just found another way to do it, sacrilegious though it may have seemed to some. Mirri looked at James reproachfully and then shrugged. "Well thanks to my husband, that cat is rather out of the bag. That thing on James' hand is a new Knights of Round materia, James isn't very good with magic so he can only use it once a day, but that thing has enough power to blast apart a city block."

Sephiroth shuddered, there were only a few Knights of Round materia out there in the world, and Shinra was keeping close tabs on them all. Most of the materia were locked away in Shinra vaults, both the mastered orbs and the new ones they generated. This was a good thing, because Knights of Round wasn't so much one summon as it was 13, and he could think of no worse person to be wearing that particular materia for mock jewelry than James Firecat.

Which left of the question open of where exactly Mirri had found a materia that could pass for a white gemsto- oh, shit... "Don't tell me that Aeris..." Mirri's smile was so smug that it was painful to be in the same room as. "What? When she summoned Holy she mastered the White Materia, and what to do with the offshoot it created was up to her. Seeing as I gave her the white Materia, she gave this one to me."

Sephiroth had already had one argument with Aeris over how chancy using the White Materia had been, he did not want to have another one with Mirri. "Please tell me you can't use that thing." She shouldn't have been able to, the White Materia was a powerful Cetra creation, that required Cetra hands to use. "If you mean I can't summon Holy, yes." Sephiroth felt his spirits slowly start to rise.

"But I've found that I can do all sorts of neat tricks with it, would you like to see?" And then instantly felt his sprits plummet, and it had a long way to fall. "All sorts of neat tricks" coming out of the mouth of Mirri Catwarrior could only mean that the materia she wore could do at least as much damage as James'.

"Dare I ask how you can even use it when you're a human?" Mirri crossed her arms indignantly at Sephiroth, letting him get a good look at the White Materia she was wearing. "Sephiroth, you've never gotten over the trauma of your own birth. You can't help but think that the entire world revolves around who your parents were. The White Materia is a rock, it can't tell who the parents of the person holding it are any more than it knows the name of the person using it.

The reason only a Cetra can use it is because it requires a lot of magic, more than any normal human has, more than even Alex has at least if you consider our magic and his Gnosis different things, which they look to be. Aeris was able to use it to summon Holy since she had a lot of magic in her because she was half Cetra from a bloodline which apparently had a lot of magical power in it, your getting cause and effect mixed up. I don't have that much power, but Holy isn't the only spell this materia can cast."

Sephiroth looked Mirri straight in the eye and spoke slowly. "You're using it just so that you can see the look on peoples faces now that everyone knows you have blades up your gloves." Mirri's reply was instantaneous. "Guilty as charged." Mirri went back to sorting a few more papers on her desk, and then looked at the clock on the wall, before looking back at Sephiroth.

"As enlightening as this conversation is Sephiroth, me and James have places to be and things to do fairly soon. Unless you would like to join us?" Sephiroth cast his own look at the clock, it was only 4:00, and if he was back at the hotel he and Aeris were staying in when she got back, she would probably drag him outside to meet her family. Which meant that he needed to kill time, and do so with a vengeance.

"If you're offering, I'll accept."

"Wonderful! Of course since it's a military operation you'll have to hold some sort of rank. But we can sort the paperwork dealing with that later, Private Sephiroth." Sephiroth idly wondered how hard it would be to keep Aeris from finding out if he set Mirri's desk on fire and threw it at her.

End Chapter