The dogs wagged their tails, standing side by side while Aerith hitched them together. When she sat on it, Sephiroth stood on the end - and the dogs raced off, toward the steep hill leading down toward the icy forests below. Daylight made each hanging icicle a spot of gleaming light, though they did not see too many since the weather rarely warmed up enough to let the snow melt that much. Sephiroth was alert, each muscle taut and feeling rejuvenated by the crisp wind tugging against his hood. It was... chill, and once again, he felt a kinship with it. How easy it would be to fall into a deep, easy slumber under the snowy pine boughs... or fall into the deep blue beneath the frozen ice of a lake.
He shuddered, staving off that feeling. He cherished the memory of the hot shower, however brief it was, and clenched his gloved fingers around the bar of the sled. "Aerith! If they are logging, then we should look for the tracks that lead off into the woods."
"I agree!" she shouted behind her, pointing out the clear chain tire treads showing up ever in front of them. The dogs were running as fast as they could to stay ahead of the sled, but the steepness of the hill was becoming a challenge.
"WHOA!" shouted Aerith. "Sephiroth, pull on the break to slow us down!"
The silver-haired man looked for the break, and pulled the protruding wooden thing. He felt a grating, jarring sensation that nearly threw him into the snow. The dogs "ka-yiked" as the sled fish-tailed sideways, eventually coming to a stop.
Unruffled, Aerith hopped off the sled with the staff in hand. "Right there!" She walked into the trees, following the tire tracks, where trees had been cut away, leaving nothing but snow-covered stumps that resembled pure white sparkling mushrooms.
Sephiroth sighed as he gripped the wood-cutter's axe and stalked behind her. "Wait. I should go ahead."
"Why?" Aerith said, pulling her hood back to let the sun warm her face. "Do you have a bad feeling?"
"Something like that." He glared through the trees, his smoky green eyes narrowed. "I see the truck."
It was an old Shinra commercial model, he judged, but refitted completely with a gas-powered combustion engine. It was retrofitted as well with chains on the tires to increase traction in the treacherous snow. There was a lot of wood piled in the truck's bed, but there were no tie-downs.
"Hello!" Aerith called plaintively, cupping her mouth with her mittens. "Is anyone here?"
Sephiroth scanned the empty treeline, what was left of hard work also hiding whatever happened. He explored carefully but did not stray far from Aerith as she called into the trees, stepping carefully over footprints in the snow. A struggle here? Or just a slip on the ice beneath it? He gritted his teeth; the way this felt was so wrong, so completely wrong. The emptiness in the air was more disturbing than the certainty that something happened.
And something had. Aerith stopped calling eventually and joined him by his side.
"There was more than one person, right? I see three sets of footprints, and they're all going this way."
A treebranch snapped in front of them. A piece of the forest appeared to simply move in front of them; a mouth gaped open and revealed rows and rows of jagged, broken of teeth. The shifting forest of trees became moving bones; Sephiroth immediately felt the warmth drain from inside his veins, at first filling him with painful chill... and then a certain, deadly calm.
"Sephiroth... We sh-should run away!" Aerith murmured. "This isn't a good place to be right now!"
The bone dragon looked imposing, but at a quick inspection, it was more or less entangled in the trees itself, and was immensely weakened from harrowing attacks from other monsters and a journey from deep inside the crater far beyond these woods. Its scream sounded of rough sandpaper on their ears.
"No, Cloud. It's our job to defeat any monsters we find." Sephiroth seemed ignorant of the words he said. It felt less like a challenge and more like duty to face off with this thing. "I'll do this. Go and find the logging men."
The skeletal dragon reared its head, a black cloud of smoke pouring from its maw. Sephiroth heard Aerith's rapid footsteps as she stumbled away as fast as she could through the snow, darting around the killzone of the smoke. Sephiroth waited until the creature's jaws expanded to release its deadly gaseous breath; then he hurled the axe. It windmilled through the air and made a solid wooden smack as it landed in the roof of its boney mouth. The gaseous air exploded into mid air, the creature unable to close its mouth, and its screech was panicked. Sephiroth darted forward and between its legs. With one solid kick, he broke the fragile knee joint and sent the beast falling onto its side. Sephiroth scampered from underneath it, rolling through the snow. It's whiplash tail caught him under the stomach and sent him reeling even farther, knocking his breath out.
The dragon moved painstakingly toward him on what was left of three legs, hissing and biting around the ax. It was only a matter of seconds before it would simply step on Sephiroth and decide to crush him. For a moment, the silver-haired man was frozen... but at the last moment, he used a nearby tree stump to hide near as the dragon's foot came careening down. He was consumed in the dragon's shadow, but the claws scrabbled at the stump and not Sephiroth's body. He clambered on top of the boney claw, then jumped from there to the dragon's shoulder. He scaled the neck and clung to the defensive horns at its neck just as soon as it began to swing it wildly about, screaming once again. He could just see the axe coming loose, hanging from the corner of its mouth. If he could retrieve it... then he would have a weapon and a way to finish off this thing at last.
With a charring shake, the dragon twisted its head, trying to bite at the obtrusive human gnat hanging from its body. Sephiroth fell - half on purpose - onto its face and reached boldly between its teeth to snatch it free. The axe nearly fell out of his hand, as it was pretty unwieldy for anything but cutting wood...
Sephiroth switched the grip to both hands and swung down at the bone dragon's spinal column with all his strength. The axe was good craftsmanship, but he felt it breaking even as it cleaved through bone and severed the dark Lifestream coursing through its battered frame.
With a crash, the dragon fell to the ground after its head had struck the snow, the light fading from its eyesockets.
Sephiroth landed in the snow some distance away, tossing the broken axe aside.
Aerith, from somewhere far away, screamed. Sephiroth spun around to find out where it had come from, but wolves appeared from between the trees, attracted by the smell of blood and the sounds of battle. They were huge gray slavening lupines, bristling with hunger and blind rage.
What was causing all these monsters to attack him?
"Help me!" Aerith shrieked again. Sephiroth was unarmed now, and without a weapon... he couldn't get to her.
"I'm coming!" Sephiroth shouted, but he wasn't sure if he was telling the truth. He grit his teeth, a furious feeling pounding under his temples. His skin tingled from the heat of battle, before a new sound assaulted his eardrums. A rapid succession of cracking thunder shook freshly fallen snow from the trees around him, causing him to jerk forward as if he meant to rush past the wolves.
The animals fell one by one, a fine mist of vermillion puffing out silently from their bodies; when they were naught but steaming corpses in the snow, a red winged man descended from the treetops and stood in front of Sephiroth in the midst of the dead wolves.
Aerith ran out from the trees at last, apparently freed from the wolves, thankfully with an injured man who was Anita's husband. He limped and she had lent him her staff to lean on, which was why she had no weapon to defend herself with before.
The figure stiffened at the sight of the new figures, but swung the lethal firearm at Sephiroth. Deadly but silent, this figure unhaltingly glared down the darkened barrel of the gun and put his better foot forward. "Don't move."
Sephiroth didn't.
"What's going on here? Who the hell are you?" Anita's husband interceded as he stumbled forward. "Put down your weapon! That man is harmless!"
"I'm afraid that I must disagree with you. Don't you know who this man is?"
"I don't, I admit. But he just tried to save my life and possibly the lives of all the people at Icicle Inn!"
The man in the red, tattered cloak that had been mistaken for blood-stained wings lifted a metallic golden clawed hand and lowered his scarf. His lips were an unhealthy shade of blue, and his skin almost porcelaine white. Most disturbing were the red eyes.
"This man is more dangerous to everyone in the entire world. He may have killed that dragon because it was simply in his way." His eyes narrowed at Sephiroth. "This is the one who summoned Meteor with Black Materia and almost destroyed everything."
Anita's husband halted in place. Aerith caught hold of his arm so he wouldn't fall, but she could not see the focus in his face become almost a laser-focused on the intense eyes the color of the Lifestream. They seemed almost to be glowing.
"Why would you bother with these people?" Vincent wondered out loud, as if the thought puzzled him.
"Please don't shoot!" Aerith cried.
The shooter didn't bat an eyelash.
"Why don't we all just calm down and get back to the truck?" Anita's husband said calmly and rationally. He dragged his feet through the snow using Aerith's sturdy staff.
Instinct boiling under his pale white skin, the shooter whipped the gun toward the woman and the man, distrusting her very existence and his supposed injury.
Sephiroth disappeared.
The red-coated shooter caught the movement, only barely able to redirect the blow from Sephiroth's fist to the shoulder, which still jarred his aim. Sephiroth's other hand grabbed the old worn muzzle skyward. It still felt hot to the touch even through his glove. Vincent hissed but that was all and Sephiroth simply stared with that same glowing silent rage that above all else proved that he was indeed the man in black who had haunted the shores of this world for far too long.
But instead of the pain of a sudden injury, all he heard was a stiff, barely veiled disgust: "You will not threaten Aerith or that man again, nor anyone else I know, ever again. Is that clear?" He stole a little breath. "I don't know who you are... or who you believe me to be."
"You're Sephiroth. You were concieved by a man named Hojo and a woman... named Lucrecia Crescent." Vincent spoke quietly and concisely. "You honestly don't remember?"
"I didn't even know my own name until today." Almost a whisper.
Vincent visibly relaxed slowly. Sephiroth, if he was the same, relaxed a similar fraction, and Aerith rushed over, pulling them apart like two sticky branches, for the two men still seemed tense when faced with each other.
The unfamiliar rhythmic 'wuff' filled the air and grew louder and closer. There were voices shouting through the trees; Vincent pulled back a little, holstering the weapon without speaking another word on the subject. Aerith clung to Sephiroth's arm, drawing her hood up over her face to shield it from the snow cutting against her cheeks. A helicopter with the letters WRO emblazoned clearly on its side swung into view above the trees, and soldiers in WRO uniforms approached with their weapons trained now on both Sephiroth and Aerith, although at the moment it was not clear who had called these men. They were dressed in white and gray uniforms, winter insulated, and wore orange-red berets on their heads, bearing automatic weapons.
Sephiroth simply placed his hands at his sides and closed his eyes, calming his breathing. His chest felt hollow, even though his heart was racing inside it. Then an important looking fellow took off his helmet and tugged down his scarf to speak clearly.
"You two. Please don't put up a fight. You're in our custody now."
"Who are you?" the silver-haired man asked with icy calm.
"I'm a lieutenant with the World Regenesis Organization. It's our duty to prevent threats against the Planet, which you have been deemed as a high priority. We were tipped off by Vincent Valentine that two strangers had come into Icicle Inn... and that one of you looked like a suspect, lately filed away Deceased. You're both under arrest." Though he spoke clearly and bravely, he stared at Sephiroth as if he was truly seeing the ghost of a demonic madman.
With bristling weapons leveled at Sephiroth, and with no real weapon and materia to defend himself, the pair really had no other choice. So, without breaking the stiff and icy layer that had somehow sealed over his vacant expression, Sephiroth tightly held onto Aerith's hand until they had to be cuffed to the inside of the helicopter and flown away to another location.
Aerith hollowly wept a little when she believed Sephiroth wasn't paying attention. "It isn't true, right? They'll have to let us go. We've done nothing wrong... they'll have to believe us, like Anita and her husband did!"
It was hard to hear her, but he in fact was trained on her every movement. It was the only thing that hadn't changed in the darkness. Maybe he deserved this. He wanted so badly to go to sleep again. "I think we don't have a choice. If I've done... something terrible, then it would be best that I understand before I act."
Aerith bit her tongue to keep herself from hysteria. After all, Sephiroth was purely being the brave one. It was hard to understand anything... especially since she could barely remember what had gone on before waking up out in the snowfields.
"Where do you think they'll be taking us?"
Then, finally, like a sunbeam through the ice, he smiled. He took her hand in his gloved one. "I hope somewhere warmer than here. Then maybe we can finally get some sun!" He knew enough now, remembered enough, that though it was cold here, it couldn't be frozen all over the Planet. So he was looking forward to at least shedding some of these heavy clothes. So did Aerith - and that smile and his light happy tone made her feel that much better.