Title: Mako Blood
Author: Garnet Eyes
Archived: fanfiction. net, garnetmoon. livejournal. com, y-gallery. net
Summary: A series of unrelated shorts from freehand writing. Each chapter is intended to be based on a different "theme."
Rating: K+
Characters/Pairings: Sephiroth
Author Notes: As a challenge to myself, I am trying to limit these to be between one and three pages of text in Open Office. It may be noted that some of the short fictions involve snippets that are identical to longer pieces. This is due to those particular short fictions originally being written intentionally as part of the longer works but then discarded as unsuitable and later edited and revised to be separate entities.
Disclaimers: Final Fantasy VII is owned by Squaresoft and I in no way, shape, or form profit off of my writing. This is simply for my own pleasure, and may at any time be removed and/or modified as I see fit.
~~ 001 Silent Cat's Paws
The grating sound behind him caused broad shoulders to tense, wary feline eyes scanning the dark, scrap-littered ground. A light blinked between functioning and failing, creating a bizarre strobe-effect that hindered the SOLDIER's enhanced vision drastically. Still, the silver warrior did not move a muscle, carefully taking stock of everything around him from the torn up walls to the blood stains on floors that related no other signs that people had walked on them. The hallway appeared empty of all life, not even boasting a single functioning Shin-Ra machine, and the surveillance cameras were unfortunately broken since the constant low hum that any SOLDIER first could detect from the tiny running motors was not present. A hissing noise, like that of some hydraulic turbine, caused the elite to jerk his attention around and flatten himself to a wall behind some torn up crates should he still be undetected. Games of predator and prey such as this one were vastly more disturbing when one realized how easily the tables could be turned.
After a long, tense pause in which nothing else occurred, the General started forward again at a slow and steady pace. Backup was a luxury he was not afforded now, somewhere in or perhaps below the central pillar of Midgar. This far under the Shin-Ra headquarters, the General was mildly surprised that the monsters from the slums hadn't found some way in to infest the libraries, studies, and laboratories. More importantly, the SOLDIER was concerned with what, precisely, Shin-Ra had been working on in a place so secretive that there were no records of the area or its contents. Supposedly nothing was hidden from the leaders of each branch of the company; that was something that the elite had long been disillusioned of. But to be completely without an inkling of the vast facility buried deep away from public eye, that was entirely unexpected. If nothing else, Sephiroth would have expected that by now he would have been tested at every facility Hojo had access to; apparently the second-rate scientist had not wished to contaminate whatever was down here with any of his other projects.
Smears on the walls turned luminous jade eyes from his forward path for only a moment; it was just long enough to recognize the bloody human hand prints that had scraped along the metal, as if the individuals who made them had been trying to resist being dragged away. With a sinking sensation, the silver warrior turned back and continued down the narrow hall, wary to check rooms as he came across them. Many were in ruins, Mako tanks shattered and notes scattered everywhere. Yet the silver warrior had yet to come across a single body; there was nothing save blood to lend hint that anyone had been using the area. If Hojo had indeed been a part of this, which was almost a surety, then the SOLDIER would prefer not to think of what befell the corpses. Regardless of his own ethical standpoint about whatever had been happening down here, the project was either destroyed or, equally likely, the destroyer.
Sephiroth had to wonder about his own contract to a company that took pleasure in never letting the left hand know what the right had did. While he had never had any real faith in the company, per se, uncovering this much convoluted plotting and deception was beyond the expected. Getting out of this mess intact was looking to be the last thing the SOLDIER would do before retirement, any objections be damned. Perhaps he could buy a home in Nibelheim and live the rest of his life out where it began. Zackary might join him and hadn't that little blonde trooper been from the mountain region as well? The boy had said something about becoming a hunter for the town; that would be a functional occupation and there was likely to be far less in the way of cataclysmic town secrets.