Midgar was one fucked up city. Sephiroth hated this place, this industrialized prison, with every fiber of his existence. The city was overrun with crime, with monsters, and with disease. It was a city of hopelessness. The people beneath the giant plate were too poor to move. And even if they did by some miracle leave Midgar, the journey to another village was dangerous, especially by foot. Sephiroth was well aware that the average person in Midgar couldn't afford a vehicle to cross the terrain. Hell, they couldn't even afford the chocobo caravan to carry them across to the nearest village.
Sephiroth hated Midgar. It was so damn bleak and depressing, with its steel structures and barren land and polluted sky that caused an eternal darkness to exist over the city. But he couldn't blame the city. The city itself had done nothing wrong. If there was anyone to blame for the shithole Midgar had become, then it was President Shinra himself. Sephiroth was aware of what people said about President Shinra. They called him a fat, lazy bastard. Greedy. Cold. Ruthless. Those things may have been true but one could not help but respect him. The man had plenty of sense when it came down to business.
Originally, President Shinra came from an extremely wealthy family and the whole cycle of things were started with the current President Shinra's grandfather. He and his family used to live in Sector One, back when it had a name. But whatever that name may have been has long since been forgotten. The President, though, had a vision. He had a vision of ultimate power and wealth. And he knew that in order to accomplish his goals, he had to create a need and monopolize on it. So, while all the businessmen were investing in coal and steam powered machines, President Shinra invested in science.
People back then laughed at him. They called him a fool but he never let that stopped him. Shinra took his family's wealth and started up Shinra Research Facility. He hired among them the best and brightest of scientists. And so many scientists flocked to him because their projects were all underfunded. Many scientists back then could only practice it as a hobby because no one believed in it. Nonsense, people said.
But President Shinra believed in it. He believed it could make him the wealthiest man in the world. His scientists labored daily until the greatest discovery in the world had been made by Professor Gast. Electricity.
At first, people were against it. So President Shinra had authorized the construction of a couple hundred mini-generators to power a select few homes, particularly the wealthy homes. Soon, they realized how much more convenient it was to have electricity. So, in Sector One, the first reactor was built. And soon thereafter, the seven remaining reactors were built. These were good times. People were happy. Their electric bills were reasonable. However, the lands slowly started to die. Plants stopped growing causing a shortage of crops. The price of food increased as grocery stores had to import foreign crops. Eventually, the shortage of food caused a famine in Midgar.
On top of that, monsters had started appearing in the land, viciously attacking citizens. This lead to step two and three of President Shinra's plan. First, he developed the Weapons Research Department of his company. This particular department of Shinra developed weapons to help fight off the monsters. Of course, since the monsters at that time were only limited to the Midgar area, Shinra expanded his services by selling them to foreign nations, thus increasing his pockets. He became the number one weapons supplier.
Then developed an Urban Development Research Department in his company, again hiring only the brightest engineers around. His goal was to unify the villages, building a giant steel wall around the eight villages to keep the monsters out. While the Urban Development Research Department worked on the construction of the wall, the Public Safety Maintenance Department was created to police the areas and protect the citizens. Or as some would say to keep the fear of Shinra embedded into the hearts of the people.
Meanwhile, Shinra's Science Department was performing some rather unethical research. It was right around the time that Midgar was being constructed that Shinra's scientists discovered that if high levels of Mako were injected into a human, the subject's strength and magic abilities would increase dramatically compared to those who were not injected with Mako. But not everyone could handle the Mako injections and it baffled the most brilliant of scientists. And Sephiroth had heard in whispered conversations, that there was an experiment spear-headed by Hojo called 'The Jenova Project,' so named in honor of his mother. Sephiroth had tried assessing files in regards to that but with not much sucess - whatever that project was about was apparently so classified that not even President Shinra knew all the details of it.
Eventually, however, other nations turned their eyes to President Shinra as his power and wealth grew. He rose through the ranks politically, building reactors across the world. But he did run into resistance. Not everyone was so willing to open their arms to President Shinra, most notably Fort Condor, Junon, North Corel, Cosmo Canyon, and Wutai. North Corel went down first because of its lack of an organized military force. Scarlet often bragged of her accomplishments in North Corel but any idiot with half a brain could burn down a defenseless town.
But as these reactors were built worldwide, monsters started populating the world. And thus SOLDIER was created to combat these creatures and end the transcontinental war that the world had been locked in since the early stages of Shinra Inc development. Eventually, Shinra had enough money and power to wage war against those who resisted "progress" in an order to "suppress the desires and wishes of people." Propaganda.
Though Fort Condor and Cosmo Canyon resisted vehemently, the more immediate threat was Wutai. But Wutai would not be conquered until Shinra had commandeered control of Junon. After that, he established his navel fleet. The cold war suddenly became a full fledged war. Wutai was a tough opponent and things were not going according to plan - not until the science department discovered Jenova. A few years later, the man known the world over was born.
"My birth was Shinra's greatest victory," Sephiroth whispered, staring down at the streets from his balcony, "I was born. Or was I created?"
Sephiroth's life from birth on had been nothing but endless laboratory tests. Injection after goddamned injection. Rigorous military training. In his world, there was no time for him to be a child. He was born as an adult. Treated as an adult. He was expected not to cry, not to whine, not to complain, and most definitely, not to play. Sephiroth was meant only to obey his orders. And that he did with a deadly tenacity. Sephiroth always did as he ordered; nothing more or less. His free will had been stripped from him the day he uttered his first, lonely cry into the world.
He was completely and utterly alone in the world, an alien being amongst humans, beaten and trained to do their bidding. No matter how hard he tried, Sephiroth had the hardest time relating to people and thus Shinra had intentionally forced him into isolation, perhaps as a way to keep him under control. It wouldn't do if there was someone else to fill his head with ideas, ideas of hating Shinra, like the little flower girl with desperate eyes. Sephiroth tugged the corners of his lips up in a dark smile. There was no way to deny the truth: he was different. The steel cage that contained him was proof that he was something less than human.
Sephiroth never dated. He never wanted to be touched. He hated being touched. As a child, people were constantly touching him, violating him, watching him. So once he'd escaped those damnable laboratory experiments, he tended to shy away from human contact. And because very few people actually gave a damn about his thoughts, he rarely shared them which only served to distance him even further from others. Sephiroth was a cold person; not necessarily cruel, though he could be when he wanted to because he knew all about cruelty from his childhood. No, he was just frigid. There was always an air of seriousness surrounding him mixed in with his arrogance because Sephiroth knew he was the best. And yes, Sephiroth had his pride and his vanity. And yes, he was overconfident and rightly so. No one matched skills intellectually or physically though Hojo, the one whose care he had been left in, still had the ability to strike a small amount of fear in him. Only Hojo could really make him feel worthless and dirty and ugly.
Sephiroth was organized, methodical, and calculating. People feared him. Even the higher ups were cautious in dealing with him because the things he did on the battlefield became stories of legend. More so than ever, because of his inhuman strength, people isolated themselves from Sephiroth. Because human beings were not capable of his strength, of his intelligence… hell, they weren't even capable of his hair color. If it doesn't really look like a human and act like a human, it must not be a human.
Was he really the only one? Was there no one else on the Planet like him? The thought made him bitter because he wanted to be like everyone else. Sephiroth had no idea of his true origins. No one would ever tell him anything so he eventually stopped asking. Only Hojo, in his rare moments of kindness (or perhaps sanity), would make mention of his mother. A wave of sadness hit Sephiroth hard, so hard it left him breathless. He lied to himself on many occasions, telling himself that he didn't care if his mother was dead; her life meant nothing. It was stupid to have a desire for a woman he'd never seen or more stupid to have a desire for a woman that left him in the care of Hojo. What kind of decent human being leaves a child in the hands of someone like Hojo?
Sephiroth told himself that he didn't really give a damn about his mother.
It was a comforting lie.
Sephiroth sighed and walked back inside to his bedroom, where he plopped down on the bed, hoping that he could fall asleep. Some nights, or rather most nights, he couldn't sleep. He was afraid to sleep; afraid of what might haunt his dreams. But tonight and he didn't know why, but tonight – he believed his dreams would be filled with images of falling flower petals because that peculiar girl from the slums in that annoyingly pink dress was somehow ingrained in his subconscious. He didn't actively think about her but she was there, just teetering on the outer edges and Sephiroth wondered if she affected everyone she met like that. "And if you, little flower girl, were free to roam the world… where would you go?" he whispered to himself, before closing his eyes and drifting off to sleep.
Sephiroth sympathized with the flower girl because he was cold not cruel, indifferent not uncaring. And because he too was a prisoner of Midgar... a prisoner of Shinra.
A/N: Many thanks to my kind reviewers. I am glad that there are others who enjoy this fic as much as I am enjoying writing it and experimenting with different sides of Aeris and Sephiroth.
Well, this underwent some major editing. It's nothing like I originally wrote it. Well, it is a tad bit but still... I provided background info on Shinra's history and yes, I took creative liberties with that. It started with me wondering... 'What would Sephiroth think about alone on his balcony?' And why not Shinra? It is after all a major part of his life and more than likely, the only thing he has ever known. I did not want to focus on Sephiroth thinking completely about Aeris; I wanted him to think of her in fleeting moments, mostly because I view Sephiroth as being too narcissistic to think about someone he doesn't really know (or like/respect) for an extended period of time unless said person has some major impact directly upon his life. Also, I was trying to show how Aeris' and Sephiroth's thoughts somewhat parallel. I don't know if I did a good job on that or not.