Silver Demons
by SkyFire

Warnings: Eventual Sess/Seph (shonen-ai or yaoi, I haven't decided. We'll see when we get there. ^_^)
Disclaimer: I don't own FFVII or InuYasha and no money is being made.

Chapter 2

He didn't know how long he'd been unconscious, but it was full night when he awoke. For a long time he didn't move, the residual pain from his last battle and Mako-bath still working its way through his system with spasm-inducing twinges.

He hurt. There wasn't a spot on his body - or in it - that didn't ache somehow or other. The cool night air felt like sandpaper against his sensitized skin, and it felt like there were sharp-edged boulders lining the insides of his eyelids. Despite the ache and pain, though, he could tell that his body was already working to heal him; the minor scratches and bruising already a thing of the past. He could feel the edges of the stab wound in his torso drawing together, feel the itch as tissue knit and healed.

His head was silent. Mother was gone.

Lying there on the ground, for the most part unable to move, he wasn't entirely sure what to think about that.

Now that the sense of disillusioned fear had lost its immediacy in the place of cold logic, he could only wonder at himself. He'd been a part of Shinra his whole life, first in the labs, then in SOLDIER. He knew how both Hojo and Shinra could spin whatever lies suited them in an attempt to get what they wanted. So why had he taken what he'd read in the basement library at face value? Was it simply because it confirmed what he'd begun to fear was true? Had he been that afraid that just seeing it written there had been enough to break him? He, who prided himself on his ability to remain unshaken no matter what he faced? To have it tested a single time, only to shatter?

It was not like him.

He supposed it could have been some combination of stress from his only friends' defections and deaths - or not, since Genesis had turned up to mock him yet again. And perhaps Mother had already begun influencing him by then? It would explain the headache he'd had since they had arrived at the little town.

Mother.

She wasn't like he'd expected. Like he'd hoped for on those rare times he'd allowed himself to hope, to dream. He'd always imagined her as someone soft, but firm, someone who loved him for him, someone who would bake him cookies and tuck him in at night and hug him and never let anyone hurt him ever again. Funny, before he met Zack it had only been a vague wish for someone warm who would keep the pain and needles and tests away.

Instead, he got Her.

She wasn't warm. She wasn't soft. She would never do anything like cook for him or soothe him or give even the slightest comfort. She only screamed at him, made his head hurt and his nose bleed and nothing he had done at Her direction had ever been good enough.

He didn't want a mother like that.

But how did he know that she was? Shinra lies. Hojo lies. Why not Her - why not Jenova? He had only Hojo's notes and Her insistence that he was born of Her.

Wait.

The notes said that She was his mother, that he had been born from Her. But they also said that the fetus - that he - had begun being injected with Jenova Cells in the womb. If he truly was Her son, he should have had half of her genetics in him already, and there would have been no need to be injected with more. Then, or ever. So that meant... he wasn't Her son? That she was no more a related to him than, say, a kidney donor is related to whoever got it? That he had a real, living woman for a mother? Or had, at any rate. Knowing Hojo, it wouldn't surprise him if he'd gotten rid of her the moment Sephiroth slid out of her body. And, for that matter, for the first time, he was also realizing that he must also have a father because no matter who the woman was, she could not have made a baby all on her own.

He'd had parents? Somehow, the realization calmed him, soothed him.

He could not move, though he had no doubt the worst of the extreme sensitivity would be gone by morning, but somehow, he didn't mind. He would rest, and then he would see what he could find out about the woman who was his mother.

The real one.

As he drifted off to sleep, he was barely aware enough to wonder how he had gotten from the bottom of a Mako reactor to the outside.

Sleep claimed him.

-
TBC...

Please review!