It took weeks before Lu opened her eyes again. Hojo breathed a sigh of relief so deep that the rest of the lab felt it. As well they might. He'd been metaphorically holding that breath for almost a month. Her treatment had been unorthodox, desperate, but she was alive and that was all that mattered. Seeing her smile as he placed Sephiroth in her arms made it all worth it.
He let mother and baby rest in bed, content to let Lu handle the most immediate needs of the child. The techs did things like changing diapers, bathing, and dressing the baby. That was what they were there for. Lu got to do the fun parts, it was only fair since she still had to get up at odd hours to feed Sephiroth. Although she seemed fine in most respects, and doted on the baby as only a new mother could, there were a few issues that concerned him.
For one, she had yet to speak. Although her lips moved as if she were trying to talk and noises like whispers escaped her throat, they sounded nothing like actual words. Also, she wouldn't eat. Rather, she tried a few times, but wound up being horribly sick afterward, vomiting everything back up. Not knowing what else to do, he kept her on the IV drip even after she was able to leave her bed. She was dragging around one bag already. Because of Sephiroth she'd been receiving high levels of mako, and trying to quit cold turkey would only end in disaster, and so she'd have to be weaned off of it. So far, attempting to step her down even a little bit had resulted in fainting spells, disorientation, and a near catatonic-state if she was left too long. Since she was nursing, Hojo decided it was as well she stay on it. It would save him having to try to find a vein in a creature that was only just over twelve pounds.
She spent almost a month in bed, another two weeks recovering in the lab. During that time, Hojo confirmed several things: Lu probably wasn't going to get her voice back, and for the moment she was going to need to maintain her current mako levels. The mako saturation wasn't a huge deal, all things considered. Sephiroth was going to need more and more as he got older. Lu's bare minimum honestly wasn't terrible for an adult woman of her stature. She'd taken the switch from IV to hypodermic well enough. Her diet, however, continued to be an issue. About the only thing she had any luck with- oddly- was sashimi. They got to be on first-name terms with the sushi place up the street.
He sent her into the supply room for a specimen. It took him twenty minutes to realize she hadn't come back. When he went to see what had become of her, he found her on the floor, two empty containers next to her, the contents of a third in her hands. Ever the lady, she was tearing off pieces of the mako-soaked brain with one hand and putting them into her mouth. Evidently, she'd already eaten the first two and had drunk the mako preserving them. For a moment he just stood there, unsure what to think or feel, before kneeling down in front of her. At that she looked up, jaw pausing in mid-chew. She seemed to realize what she was doing for she looked around at the empty jars, at the two-thirds of brain in her hand, and swallowed the mouthful without chewing it further. Her mouth worked as if she would like to explain, but no words came. Tears had begun to well up in her eyes, and she held out what was left of the brain to him.
He had done this to her. This was his fault. But she was alive, and if she wanted brains and mako to eat, did it really matter? There were vegetarians, vegans, people who ate insects for godsake. If Lu wanted sweetbread ala mako, then sweetbread ala mako she would have.
"It's okay," he told her, gently pushing the half-eaten brain back toward her. "We can get more. If you're hungry, you eat it. Just don't eat any others, okay?"
She smiled brilliantly, tears spilling over, and threw her arms around him. He had brain running down his back, staining through his lab coat and his shirt, but Lu was happy. She was alive. That was the important part.
It wasn't the only time he caught her snacking on the laboratory supplies. He'd thought she'd had a piece of hard candy tucked in her cheek until something smoldered and sparked and burst into flames on the table. This wasn't unusual in the lab, and Pepper very unconcernedly reached for the fire extinguisher and put it out. Lu stared at the charred spot on the lab table and then turned to look at him guiltily.
"...what have you got in your mouth?" he asked her. Like a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar, she spit the object into her hand and held it up: a level-one fire materia.
"Lu," he told her patiently, "this is not a fireball."
Her expression said she was sorry and that she didn't know what had come over her.
"Well, okay, it is," he had to admit, "but materia don't make good lollipops. You know that."
She looked at her shoes. Gently, he reached and put a finger under her chin, lifting her face to look at him.
"You need more mako than you're getting, don't you?"
She nodded.
"Okay. We'll figure it out. Just tell me next time, okay?"
She could still write, but generally didn't need to. They understood each other well enough. They'd figure this out. They were scientists. It was what they did.
Sephiroth learning to walk meant baby-proofing an entire wing of the lab. The nursery was now not simply a bedroom, but a play and school area as well. Lu spent much of her time there, playing with him. Hojo often joined them, taking advantage of the fact that fussing over his son counted as work. It was he who read the picture books, Sephiroth on his lap, and Lu leaning against one side, both of them listening intently. A few times a month, Sephiroth had to be conveyed to the lab proper for testing and to receive his mako and Jenova boosters. Although the nursery was toddler-friendly, the lab was decidedly not. It did not take long for Sephiroth to discover a sharp corner, or to knock his head against it. At once he screamed, blood cascading down his face. Lu- who hadn't been more than a step away- scooped him up and covered him with kisses. The wound looked far worse than it was. Even the smallest cut to the scalp yielded disproportionately large volumes of blood. When he noticed she'd begun licking Sephiroth's face, however, Hojo chose to intervene.
"I'll get it, Lu," he told her, gently removing the now laughing baby from her arms. She blinked and shook herself, again seeming to only just realize what she was doing. It took a bit of maneuvering to wash the blood off Sephiroth's face- he kept trying to grab the washcloth. Rinsing and wringing it out, he gave it to his son to play with. Sephiroth promptly stuck the wet cloth in his mouth. Scooping him up, Hojo turned his attention back to Lu. There was a small smear of blood at the corner of her mouth, as if she'd been eating something involving an excess of ketchup. Licking his own thumb, Hojo wiped it away.
"Did you know you needed blood?" he asked her quietly. An expression of horror lingered on her face and she shook her head so hard he feared she'd make herself lightheaded.
"Lu," he said gently, laying a hand on her shoulder. "It's alright. We can fix it."
Blinking back tears, she hugged them both close.
This was not the first time Hojo had had to consult what most people would deem fiction. The Cetra, however, had been real- were real, his son was proof of that- so why not zombies or vampires? Or zombie-vampires? Lu's present condition seemed to borrow from both traditions, and while nothing pointed to a single diagnosis- supernatural or otherwise- he did have science to back it up. Except science wasn't being too helpful in treating the problem. Brains and mako he could come by easy enough. Blood...less so. Oh he could get all the blood he wanted without a fuss, that was not the issue. The problem was that it also needed to be laced with mako, and just mixing the two like a cocktail was not good enough. The upshot was that she didn't seem to need much of it, not much more than a tablespoon a week, so he took that duty upon himself.
Lu did not have fangs like a vampire, and while he'd drawn his own blood before, it was more practical to simply prick his thumb or nick his wrist for her. She was always such a lady about it, hardly getting his skin wet as she sucked daintily at the cut he'd made. It should have been creepy, or even revolting, but her tongue running over the pad of his thumb, the inside of his wrist, was somehow the very opposite of unattractive. Once she'd finished, they frequently wound up sharing a bit more than blood. Perhaps it shouldn't have been, but Lu's second pregnancy was as much of a surprise as her first.
Sephiroth was nearly three by this time, and Hojo had managed to organize things so that no one thought much about Lu's taste for sweetmeats or that she drank raw mako. Far stranger things happened in the lab. One such instance included one of the adult subjects in the SOLDIER program. They were still having problems with females and Jenova, but the males seemed to have adapted well enough to the regimen of Cetra and mako injections. However, as Gast often said, one could not fix stupid. Apparently, one could not fix ass-hattery either. Most of the young men in the program were pleasant enough; brutish, uneducated, but possessed a sort of rustic gentility that compelled them to refer to Lu as "Ma'am" and to hold the door open for her. There were one or two, however, who could have benefited from feeling the business end of one of the Turks' mag-rods. Lu was petite, had a bit of a baby face, and did not speak. There might have been other motives, but a few of the less couth SOLDIERs had made eyes and rather crude remarks at her. Lu, of course, said nothing and acted as if she had not heard. Having not been in the room at the time, Hojo had not witnessed this himself, but he overheard the locker room banter being tossed back and forth as the subjects exited the lab.
Evidently the SOLDIERs had come to the conclusion that Lu was deaf, and would say all sorts of outrageous things in her presence. In the next exam room, Hojo only dimly heard the off-color narration being delivered to his wife. On the point of excusing himself and leaving his current subject to march down the hall and give the SOLDIER a piece of his mind, there was a shout and a crash and then silence. Not bothering with excuses, Hojo dropped the instruments and raced out the door.
He was getting used to seeing Lu covered in blood, yet completely unhurt. The same could not be said of the recruit. Lu did not have fangs, nor was she unusually strong, yet the young man lay on the floor, his head twisted at an odd angle, Lu's mouth pressed against his throat. Carefully, Hojo shut the door behind him. After a moment she lifted her head and offered a sheepish expression.
"I heard what he said to you," Hojo told her. "I was coming over to do the exact same thing. It's alright. There's a perfectly logical explanation for this."
The young man's cause of death was listed as 'adverse reaction'. Hojo would have liked to put down 'chronic stupidity', but that would have resulted in unnecessary attention. The SOLDIER, mercifully, had no family and had made no arrangements concerning his own demise, and so his body would be donated to science. In this case, he would be donated to Lu, who now was eating for two. For a brief moment the fact that he was butchering a human corpse for his pregnant wife to eat struck him as surreal and deeply unsettling, but he shoved the thought aside. This was his fault. Lu was like this because of him. Besides, the idiot would be of much more use this way.
To everyone's surprise and delight, Lu delivered a second son with barely more than the bat of an eye. Despite her diet of mako, brains, blood, and raw flesh, the baby seemed fine; perfectly normal in every way. Well, normal by the standard Sephiroth had set, at any rate. Although Sephiroth was going through a picky phase, he did not seem interested in blood or brains, which was just as well. He spent about a week refusing to eat anything but peanut butter and jelly, but the following week would not touch it, and only wanted spaghetti. Ah, the whims of childhood.
She gave him four sons in all, each a little over two years apart, each of which grew up into strong, healthy young men. All of them spoke, and none of them seemed to take after their mother in her eating habits, though he did catch Sephiroth finishing a glass of mako that had been left for Lu. There were worse things than drinking raw mako, and Hojo let the matter go, and instead pondered the merits of bottling mako the way one bottled soft drinks. The marketing department was sure to love the idea.
Then the war broke out, and the boys each left to fight, one-by-one. For days, Lu would not eat for worrying. The boys themselves sent back many assurances that they were fine, and the news also broadcast their victories. It was the rumors and corporate reports, however, that made Hojo nervous. There was a story making the rounds about Captain Sephiroth who had cut down hundreds of Wutaians single-handedly, and then feasted upon their flesh and drunk their blood. Hojo didn't think such nonsense could be true, but it did make one wonder.
They all came back, however, still smiling and in one piece. Lu kissed and cried over them as a group and again individually, and though they were grown men now, they let her. Only Sephiroth seemed any worse for wear, admitting to nightmares and a feeling of restlessness. Indeed, they must have been more troubled than they let on, for none of them returned to the barracks right away. They were big boys now, and no longer spent much time at home. Yet once they'd returned to Midgar, all four of them took up residence in their old rooms despite being barely able to fit on the narrow twin beds they'd grown up on: Sephiroth and Yorozuya in one room, Yasuragi and Katagi in another. It was nice having them so close again, even if it did make things slightly cramped. Although there was an undercurrent of...something...going on beneath their perhaps too-pleasant behavior, Hojo could not put his finger on it. He would leave it to Lu. She would know. She was much better at that sort of thing than he was.
Sephiroth could not sleep. He tried, sometimes he managed to drop off, but would wake after only a few minutes even more tired than before. Only when he was truly exhausted could he manage to stay asleep, but his dreams had turned to nightmares. Fields of corpses and rivers of blood haunted his dreams. More disturbing still, as the blood flowed, was the desire to drink it. He should not feel hungry at the sight of so much death. Unable to toss and turn any longer, he cast an envious look at his brother, who was out for the count, and slid out of bed.
Turning on the television would be sure to wake up someone; either his brothers or his parents. Perhaps a snack or a glass of water would steady his nerves a bit. Creeping into the kitchen, he clicked on the dim oven light and filled a glass with water. Soft footsteps scuffed across the carpet and he turned to see who it was, though he already knew. His mother stood in the doorway, wrapped in a long dressing gown.
"Sorry," he whispered, sheepish. "I didn't mean to wake you."
Smiling, she waved him off. Although there was nothing wrong with her hearing, his mother's vocal cords had been damaged during one of the many operations she'd had to undergo after giving birth to him. Consequently, Sephiroth and his brothers had learned to sign at the same time they'd learned to speak. She gestured at the kitchen table and obediently, he sat down.
"I couldn't sleep," he muttered, still afraid to speak too loudly and thereby wake someone else. "I keep having these dreams…"
Reaching across the table, she took his hand in both of hers. She was less than half his size, the whole of her hand barely as long as his palm, but her touch was still comforting. It didn't matter if it was truly beyond her power to right all the wrongs in the world; some part of him still believed that she could.
"I told the army shrink about them. Well, parts of them."
His mother tilted her head to one side, curious, and he went on.
"I keep dreaming about this one battle… It was ugly. Worst casualties of the whole war. We filled an entire canyon with corpses, not just Wutai dead, either. Shinra took some heavy losses too. I took a few hits, but nothing serious; just some nicks and cuts, all superficial. But everyone was bleeding. Everyone. Even me, although I had so much blood on me it was hard to tell what was mine and what belonged to someone else…" He swallowed hard, tried unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder. "It wasn't even that I killed so many people, although that was bad too… I just… I remember being so thirsty… In my dreams…"
He couldn't help the ripple of muscle that forced his upper body forward as he gagged. He hadn't planned on admitting that he'd woken up more than once dry-heaving. Rising, his mother came over and put her arms around him and he leaned his head against her shoulder gladly. Seated, he was just short of eye-level with her. Feeling as if he might choke, he tried to swallow back a double-knot of bile and tears. He balled his shaking hands into fists, rubbed one against his eyes. He was a military officer, he shouldn't be going to pieces like this. Apparently his mother did not feel the same way, for she kissed his forehead and stroked his hair as she had done so often when he was little. That undid him and a few tears escaped before he could master himself again.
"I'm sorry," he apologized, still fighting back the impulse to start bawling like a two-year-old. "I don't know what's the matter with me."
His mother patted his shoulder and then stepped back, going over to dig around inside the refrigerator. After a moment she produced a bottle made of dark-colored glass. Stretching, she pulled two mugs down from the cupboard. Sephiroth watched as she filled the mugs and then added a few extra ingredients from the spice rack: a generous scratch of cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg, and a hint of cloves. One at a time, she put the mugs in the microwave and then brought them over to the table. She set one before him, and kept the other for herself. Sephiroth smiled. At one time, the hot drink of choice had been cocoa. Evidently he had earned a place as one of the adults for his mother to share her red wine with him.
Holding the mug up, he let the fragrant steam bathe his face. The scent was familiar, pleasant, comforting; the spices reminding him of Solstice, and family dinners, and presents, and all the crazy, fun, ridiculous things he and his brothers had done together. The taste was a bit different, though perhaps that was because it was still too hot to comfortably drink. Beneath the spices, the wine tasted less of alcohol and more of metal, possessing an almost coppery tang. That wasn't a bad thing necessarily, he just hadn't been expecting it. Carefully sipping it again, he decided it was good.
"Thanks, mom," he said, and meant it. Alcohol didn't do much to a SOLDIER's sobriety, but he could already feel his stomach unclenching, his neck and shoulders beginning to relax. His mother smiled back, and Sephiroth remembered that the world wasn't all bad. Even still…
"You know the rumors, right?" he asked, deciding to throw caution to the wind and just plow ahead. "The ones about me turning vampire?"
She nodded.
"Well…" This was going to be harder than he thought. "I don't… I don't have a clear memory of that day," he stammered. "Like I said, I just remember being thirsty, so thirsty and…" All he could offer her was a helpless shrug. "I don't actually remember what happened, just...sort of returning to earth hours later, after we'd all gone back to camp."
He shuddered in his seat, and took another sip of mulled wine, which did much to steady his nerves. Reaching across the table, his mother laid a hand on his arm, grounding him further. Even if everyone else was appalled, she would not think worse of him.
"I remember being covered in blood," he went on. "I remember standing in the showers for almost an hour because it just took that long to wash it all off. We'd been fighting all night and all day. I should have been hungry, I should have been starving except...I wasn't. Gen and Angi found me later, and I had to ask them how things had gone because I honestly had no clue. They just kind of looked at me. They said...they said they'd found me by myself, advanced far into Wutai territory, a trail of corpses behind me. Except...they weren't just dead guys. The flesh had been stripped from some of them. They said they found me with my mouth against some dead guy's throat…" His gorge rose and he tried to swallow it back, chasing it with the last of the wine. Standing, his mother came over and hugged him close.
"I don't think they would lie to me," he mumbled into the shoulder of her dressing gown. "They have no reason to make up something like that but I just can't believe…"
"Shhh…" she whispered, stroking his hair. It was the only verbal noise she could make, and hearing it silenced his fears. He was being ridiculous. Genesis and Angeal could have scars of their own, might be misremembering things or even imagining them. War was hell, and people often did crazy things that they wouldn't do otherwise. It was all right. The war was over. All that was left were the phantoms of imagined sins that only existed in his own head. Taking a deep breath, Sephiroth sighed, feeling as if it were the first true breath he'd drawn in months.
"I love you, mom."
Kissing his head, his mother smiled and took his mug to refill it. Both of them jumped and squinted as the kitchen light clicked on.
"What the heck, dad?!" Sephiroth demanded, squinting against the sudden glare of the overhead light.
"Sorry," his father apologized, turning the light off and thumbing the oven light button on the stove, increasing its brightness a few degrees. "Is everything alright?"
"Yeah, it's fine, I just couldn't sleep," Sephiroth assured him. "Too used to sleeping on the ground."
"A hard surface is very good for the back," his father observed.
"Then my back should be awesome," Sephiroth replied, "though it sure doesn't feel like it."
"Well, there is a world of difference between tatami and bare earth."
Sephiroth smiled a bit at that. "Seriously."
His father returned the smile, and glanced over at his mother who was taking a mug out of the microwave. His eyes went from the mug, to the wine bottle, and then to Sephiroth as she placed it in his hands.
"Lu…" his father began rather awkwardly. "Is that wise? Are you sure he's...old enough?"
Sephiroth rolled his eyes. "Oh c'mon dad, I'm legal age. I wasn't going to tell you about all the sake in Wutai, but now I might. Besides, it's not like a SOLDIER can get drunk, anyway."
"It's not your sobriety I'm worried about," his father muttered more to himself than anyone else. His mother smiled sweetly and waved her husband's worries away with one hand. Thus shooed, his father shuffled back toward the doorway that led into the living room.
"Well, if that's all. Carry on."
"Night, Dad."
"Goodnight."
Hojo went back to bed, but he did not sleep. The implications were far too unsettling. Lu had given Sephiroth blood, of that he was certain. It was all well and good for her, what with her delicate constitution and specific dietary needs, but all four of the boys were strong and healthy. They should not need supplements in the form of blood and brains. Then again, perhaps they did? What if the rumors were true, and Sephiroth had consumed the bodies of the enemies? Was that so different from Lu and the dead idiot all those years ago? Perhaps they would all need this at some point? It was a disquieting thought to say the least.
He looked up as the door creaked, and Lu entered, closing it softly behind her. Shedding her dressing gown, she slid under the sheets to cuddle up next to him. Automatically, he put an arm around her.
"Oh Lu," he sighed, "what are we going to do with them?"
In answer she patted his chest and stretched to kiss his cheek, as if to say "don't worry". But he did worry. He was the husband, the father. Worrying was his job.