Disclaimer: I do not own FFVII or anything in it.
A/N: Boy, I wanted to write a love letter from Cloud that he could sneak into Seph's pocket while Sephiroth was talking to Kuhn. But I guess I have no idea how to write a love letter. Somebody else will have to do that one. So we move on.
Cloud Strife whistled a little as he walked down the hallway in his new Second Class purples. He glanced down his own side, catching the dark sheen of the color on one trouser leg. How Zack had smiled at him in this new uniform, saying how many memories he had in Soldier while wearing the purple of Second Class. He, like Cloud, had spent relatively little time in Third Class blues. Cloud would be Second class for at least two years while his mako level and finer skills continued to creep up. He knew he wanted to be First Class some day, to be put in Sephiroth's inner working circle, but he had so much to learn before taking that responsibility that he was in no hurry. Today, strolling down the hallway in the main training area, he couldn't have been happier.
He stopped just outside the door to the main training hall, hearing something strange on the inside. It wasn't the sound of wood-on-wood practice weapons, or of thumping of feet (or other body parts) on the floor, or even the sound of steel hitting steel of live weapons. Sometimes the guys liked to do that, crazy though it was. The General allowed it but disapproved, not so much because of the danger but because it blunted the weapons and tended to drop tiny metal splinters on the wooden floor that dug in and marred the surface.
Currently it was the General and Zack who were in there, and Cloud had come by to watch. But he didn't hear any activity. He heard Zack talking, slow and calming, but with an edge of tension. And something like the cross between a growl and a moan that Cloud identified as Sephiroth.
With anxious heart Cloud slipped into the room, where he saw Zack and Sephrioth huddled in the middle of the big floor. Sephiroth was almost in a ball low to the floor and Zack was on one knee, hand on his General's shoulder.
"Maybe it doesn't mean anything," Zack said, his face constricted, his voice earnest.
Cloud now saw blood on the floor, maybe from some cuts he could see on Zack, but it seemed to be more under Sephiroth. Both Soldiers still had weapons in hands - live steel. The General may have disapproved of live weapons for normal practice but Cloud had noticed he had a tendency to do as he pleased.
"What happened?" Cloud asked, stepping closer.
Both their heads shot up at the sound, surprising Cloud that he had snuck up on them like this. Maybe his stealth skills had really gotten that much better, but he decided it was more likely that they were uncommonly distracted. Plus he had the advantage of the big noisy and scent dispersing fans high above them.
Sephiroth looked at Zack and shook his head, speaking so low that Cloud could barely hear.
"I don't want him here."
This caused Cloud to take another step forward, thinking maybe something was really wrong, maybe Sephiroth was actually hurt, and acting up, like he always did when he was hurt.
"Tough," Zack said. "He's here. This thing may not go away. You gotta show him."
Sephiroth looked up, his eyes full of anguish and bottled fury. Cloud stepped closer, noticing the blood pool was actually dripping off of Sephiroth's right coat sleeve. The black leather was slick with it. Behind him there was more black than his coat could account for. He was leaning against something, a big pillow? The image made no sense.
"I'm sorry, Cloud," Sephiroth said, riveting Cloud's attention with the heartbroken sound of his voice. "I wanted to be strong for you, I'd hoped I wouldn't..."
Behind Sephiroth the black pillow rose and expanded as it reached a dozen feet into the air until delicate tips spread and fanned out. A single feather, shiny, jet black, and graceful, flitted to the floor. Cloud stared, open mouthed in wonder and reached up to touch the plumage. He laughed a little despite the mood as he ran fingers through it. The thing was gloriously beautiful.
"There, see, he likes it," Zack said.
Cloud looked at Sephiroth, who returned his gaze, puzzled. Cloud recognized this wing; it was similar to the one he had seen on the rogue Soldier Genesis, and although Genesis had looked plenty lively to Cloud, Sephiroth believed that he and the other project Soldier had degraded. Cloud knelt down to where Sephiroth still sat hunched on the floor.
"Does it mean you're degrading?" Cloud asked, managing with some struggle to keep his tone brave and even.
Sephiroth shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them Cloud found them as bright and vibrant as usual, and he couldn't believe Sephiroth could be sick in any way.
"Angeal and Genesis each sprouted a wing before they did so, before they degraded. Before they went mad."
"Angeal wasn't mad," Zack countered.
Sephiroth rolled his eyes. This was an old argument.
"And it's not clear that he would have degraded, if he hadn't..." Zack stood and turned abruptly away, pulling at some of the hair on the back of his head. Then he turned back, his face sad and tired.
"Please don't do that, Seph. Don't give up on me. I need you. Cloud needs you."
Sephiroth looked at Cloud for a moment before reaching up to touch one delicately colored cheek. He wasn't sure that Cloud needed him, but the young man was looking at him with such utter hope and trust. And he had made Cloud a promise. Sephiroth sighed.
"Well Genesis seems to have overcome his degradation at least, although I still think he really is mad." He shot Zack a look. Zack shrugged.
"Actually Genesis always was nuts," Sephiroth admitted. "I'll have to show it to Hojo."
All three grimaced.
"Can you move it?" Cloud asked, "I mean can you fly with it? Because if you can you could catch Genesis next time."
Sephiroth smiled a little. That was true if he could get the thing under his control. So far he had lived his life with two arms and two legs and suddenly he found himself with an extra appendage. With some experimentation he managed to get the thing to lift away from him by imagining stretching his shoulder out and away. He tried a tentative 'flap', what he expected would be a sharp motion downward. The wing shuddered, he got a cramp in his back, and it came down and hit Cloud in the face, rolling him over. Zack laughed, and held a hand out to Cloud.
Cloud accepted the hand and pulled himself up, smiling. He'd never been knocked over by feathers before. Sephiroth also stood and gave the wing a few more tries. Zack and Cloud backed off to a safe distance as the great black wing rose and fell, swept in sideways arcs, and moved spasmodically, creating quite a bit of wind that ruffled the hair of all three men but not doing anything like flight. Sephiroth frowned with concentration, trying to sort out which nerve pathways were controlling what. Finally he found one movement that pulled him upward at his shoulder. Not enough to lift him off the ground, but it was a start. He looked up and smiled. Zack and Cloud decided it was safe to approach.
"Not so bad, huh?" Zack said, reaching up to touch some of the feathers himself.
Cloud put both hands back on the black feathers. Some areas were spotted with blood. Especially near the attachment.
"Is it going to bleed every time it comes out?" Cloud asked.
Sephiroth looked to Zack; he'd seen the other two deploy their wings far more than Sephiroth ever had.
"I don't think so," Zack said. "Angeal's was white and I never saw a spot of blood on it. I think that blood is from the slice I gave you. Maybe the trauma brought it out."
Cloud's eyes widened. "He got you?"
Zack grinned proudly and Sephiroth smiled. "Yes," Sephiroth said, looking down at his shoulder and puling at the cut in his coat so the skin could be seen underneath. The wound had stopped bleeding and already had a thin scab on it. In Soldier standards it was just a scratch, and Zack was right; it wasn't quite where the wing had come out. As Cloud studied the wound Sephiroth caused the new wing to come forward and wrap clumsily around Cloud and pull him close to his body. That was rather nice, and it made Cloud smile again. But he'd have to learn to put the thing away; he couldn't go walking around ShinRa like this. If nothing else it was definite hazard to office work. Sephiroth imagined papers and potted plants and fax machines being unceremoniously dumped onto the floor wherever he went as though he were some unruly chocobo set loose indoors.
Sephiroth brought the wing out behind him and then tried to think about pulling it forward back into his body. It hit him rather hard in the back of his head instead. He tried again, this time thinking about sucking down with his diaphragm. The wing abruptly disappeared. He slung his arm around Cloud.
"How about you help me get cleaned up?" Sephiroth asked.
Cloud beamed at him.
ccccccccccccccccccccccc
"Well, General. How nice to see you." Hojo turned to Sephiroth and leaned one hand on a lab bench, his voice thick with false politeness. "Since it's not time for your monthly appointment I presume you have come to harass me over something. I'm not hoarding any of your men down here. Maybe you've thought up some new demand regarding the scheduled enhancements?"
Hojo turned and walked between two benches, motioning with a curt wave of his hand that Sephiroth should follow and talk as they walked. Sephiroth gritted his teeth. Hojo had always been this way, making it clear that his business was more important than whoever he was talking to. They stopped at a laboratory oven where Hojo opened the glass door and methodically checked some sort of indicator strip on each of several petri dishes.
"I came to see you," Sephiroth said. "For you to see me."
Hojo actually stopped what he was doing, shut the oven door and looked at Sephiroth.
"Voluntarily? Put yourself in my care? How extraordinary. There must be something wrong with you."
Sephiroth narrowed his eyes, fantasizing how much he would like to hit Hojo in the head. He could actually feel the blow in the back of his knuckles, including the distinctive sudden yielding of breaking bone. But Hojo wouldn't provide any answers unconscious. Or dead. So instead he calmed himself, took off his big leather coat, and laid it neatly on a bench. He had no worry about soiling it; Hojo's benches were always spotless. Then, standing bare chested under the cold fluorescent lights, he commanded the wing out, carefully despite his desire to send it out in a destructive flourish and break as many things as he could. He always wanted to break things in the lab.
"Ah," Hojo said, adjusting his glasses on his narrow, angular nose. "I was beginning to think you were defective. It appears you are just a late bloomer. Of course you are younger by a few years than the other two, but you were ahead in development of everything else."
"Are you telling me you expected this? This THING?" Sephiroth gave the wing a disdainful shake, forgetting his recent enjoyment of it.
Hojo walked over to another bench and started picking test tubes out of a rack and scrutinizing them. "The treatments to which you were subjected without fail spurred wing or wing nub development in all lesser subjects. When Hollander's two sprouted wings on one side, I expected the same from you. I had hoped for two." Hojo scrutinized his favorite project. The project he alone knew was his only son. "Maybe another one will develop in time."
Sephiroth frowned. He wasn't sure he wanted two. Though surely two would be better than one for flight; with only one he was worried he would only fly in circles. So far in his practice he had barely gotten off the ground, nothing like the graceful lofting he had seen from Genesis. In fact he was feeling quite a bit like the slow child.
"Are you feeling normal otherwise?" Hojo asked, giving one of the testubes a practiced shake.
"Yes."
"Well I suspect you're worrying unnecessarily. You always were one for fretting. But let's just give you a blood and cell check to be sure. Over to the test area, please."
The black wing collapsed next to Sephiroth's torso as if seeking protection, belying its owner's anxiety even though the practiced face and body showed nothing. Hojo noticed and smirked. Resenting Hojo and his superior antics Sephiroth turned and walked directly over to the attached room, the one with the operating tables and equipment for dealing with specimens. He sat on one of the tables and stuck out his arm, deliberately not looking at the selection of tools and instruments all around him. All were sharp, metallic, and evil looking. Traits he loved on weapons wielded by warriors in the honorable heat of battle. Something about the patient's helplessness imposed by the medical usage of such things disturbed him deeply.
Hojo opened an iodine pack and held it aloft, and when Sephiroth put his out hand Hojo dropped it in for the General to swab the area inside his elbow himself. With practiced quickness Hojo wrapped the rubber tie around Sephiroth's bicep and opened a blood draw needle from a plastic package and slid it into the swollen vein.
"Squeeze," Hojo said, sounding bored.
Sephiroth slowly opened and closed his fist until Hojo had four of the releasable vials filled. Then Sephiroth pulled the needle free of his arm himself and pitched it with unnatural accuracy through the slotted opening in the sharps container. Hojo peered into his eyes with an instrument and a bright light, and then poked something into one ear. Sephiroth felt the thing Zack called an 'earflap' close around it. Then there was a sharp pain as a bit of it was ripped out. Sephiroth squinted in annoyance.
"I'm sure that'll heal," Hojo said, peering down his nose at the sample he had collected at the end of his device. "I need the sample for the work on the new ear mods."
Sephiroth sat still while small chunks of himself were removed from various other places, including the new wing. These were nothing, insect bites, mere annoyances. As long as Hojo didn't want to...
"I'd like a bigger sample of the wing for analysis," Hojo said.
"No."
"Why do you object? You don't even like the thing."
"If it's going to be following me around I prefer it not be all chewed up and mangy looking."
"I swear, you are the vainest of all creatures." A hostile silence ensued as Hojo kneaded and prodded at the opposite shoulder.
"Was the wing's emergence precipitated by anything, an event or activity?" Hojo asked
"I had a tip graze close to, but not exactly coincidental to the emergence point."
Hojo scowled. Sephiroth's language was still scientifically precise, but to Hojo's annoyance he had absorbed language specific to Soldier since he had been released from the lab. "Tip graze? You mean an injury?"
"Yes, a non-serious slice from a blade, approximately three inches in length and three quarters of an inch deep at it's maximum. It was here." With two fingers Sephiroth denoted the ends of where the slice had been on the front side of his shoulder. Not a mark remained.
"Hmm, it's possible when the mako flowed to that area for healing it activated the latent cell structure. Shall we try the other side?"
Sephiroth cut his eyes at Hojo.
"Don't you want to know if the other one is lurking there? Prefer to be surprised by it some day, do you?"
Sephiroth shut his eyes, certain that the scientist enjoyed this part. "Go ahead."
Hojo scanned through an assortment surgical tools, rejecting small scalpels and cutting instruments. He selected a large blade with a robust handle, double edged just for this type of thing. He removed the protective sheath and pulled his thumb perpendicular across the edge, testing its sharpness. Like every tool used on Sephiroth it had to have superior razor-type edges on it or it wouldn't even go through Sephriroth's skin.
"Are you relaxed?" Hojo asked, giving the naked, non-winged shoulder a poke. It was distinctly non-pliable. "Either you relax or you'll have to do it yourself."
Sephiroth considered that option, if for no other reason than to deprive the madman of his joy. But he had to admit that the scientist was more precise in his aim. When Sephiroth took a blade to himself he sometimes hit things he wished he hadn't simply because his angle was poor. He shut his eyes and made his body relax until Hojo's finger poking was satisfied. Then Hojo stabbed the blade forward with as much speed and force as he had. Sephiroth responded with no more than an annoyed tic at the side of his eye as Hojo rubbed his hand and looked at the imbedded knife. He had sunk it in a good four inches, and that wasn't too bad considering what he was stabbing. If Sephiroth hadn't consciously relaxed he might have only made half an inch before running into what felt like iron as the density of flesh defensively increased at the impact point. Hojo pulled at the blade but found it stuck fast.
"Relax, please."
Sephiroth did so and Hojo was able to yank the blade free. It came out with a sucking sound and a free flow of blood. Within a few seconds the wound began to clot and scab over.
"How long did it take last time?" Hojo asked
"Less than thirty seconds."
They waited. Nothing happened.
"Maybe a slice would be better. Relax."
Sephiroth did so and Hojo swung the knife, cutting a gash in Sephiroth's shoulder with remarkable accuracy. It was a bit longer than Zack's, maybe not quite as deep, but the location was dead on, a mirror to the wound that had been on the other side. They waited while it too began to heal but induced no wing.
"Maybe I should open up your shoulder and take a look."
Sephiroth stood up abruptly and grabbed his coat. "You're done." He strode out of the lab without bothering to clean up.
"You still have your monthly adjustment in two weeks!" Hojo hollered after him. "Don't you be thinking you can skip that!"
ccccccccccccc
Hojo set three of the blood vials in the 'to be processed' rack in the refrigerator where they would receive standard Soldier analysis from his techs. The fourth he set in his personal 'do not touch' rack to look at later. The ear sample he put in a tube with special epoxy which, when set, would stabilize the sample so it could be sliced extra thin by the microtome for the electron microscope. There were some tiny structures inside the cells he wanted to get a better look at. The wing sample he considered a moment longer. Unconsciously he ground his teeth, wondering why Sephiroth couldn't be more cooperative. Hojo was doing all of this for him, after all. Everything Sephiroth had, his physical power, his sharp mind, his position with the company, Hojo had given to him. Made for him.
Hojo went to a station at a laminar flow clean bench and cut his barely adequate sample of wing into four pieces. He dumped each in a vial of processed mako to help preserve it. Normally that wasn't necessary, but the wing wasn't actually flesh in the same way as the rest of its owner. Sephiroth didn't carry the bulk of it tucked away in his body cavity somewhere. It was largely constructed by free life force in the air, much the same way the planet constructed monsters. Within a few hours, without the continued support from its host, the sample would dissipate into small, useless, dusty bits.
Hojo watched the fluid in the vials swirl as strands of two slightly different shades of green moved past each other on their own. He frowned upon seeing this, and dropped some of the swirling liquid onto a slide and put it under the microscope. The two greens were separated like oil and water, but moving, sliding past one another, mingling until they finally mixed, their discrete colored patches becoming smaller and smaller until they were indistinguishable. He looked up at the sample vials; they were finishing their mixing as well. With a dropper he put one drop from the wing sample vial onto a white filter paper, then next to it a drop of clean, processed mako. The two drops were definitely different color. The one form the vial with the wing sample in it was slightly brighter, slightly more bluish. He'd have never noticed if he hadn't put them side by side, his color discrimination just wasn't that good. That was the kind of thing Lucrecia had been good at. .
Hojo stared at the samples, wondering about this difference. He knew what it had to be from. The wing would be loaded with mako from Sephiroth, and now that he thought about it was probably the intended use of the extra mako Sephiroth kept accumulating in his body. Mako that had been part of a Soldier was altered somewhat, softened, less caustic, with better affinity to living cells. It's why the organic method worked. He had studied hundreds of samples of mako laden blood, semen, saliva, even snot, trying to make some use of the stuff but the new characteristics were just too fragile. Mako harvested from a Soldier immediately reverted back to the same signature of the pure, processed, reactor mako. It reverted back to its source.
Sephiroth's did as well; it reverted back to a 'non-organic' state. He had tested mako from Sephiroth, including the effluent from the wringing process, and the signature looked the same as all the rest- clean, processed mako. But there must be something they were missing in their mako characterization because clearly the mako coming off the wing sample wasn't the same. The color was different.
Hojo twittered the scalpel between two fingers, thinking as the side of the thin blade tapped rapidly against the bench top. He hadn't done a color analysis on Sephiroth's organic mako because they abandoned that method long ago, when they developed more precise methods to categorize the mako parameters. But they used to do a lot of colorimetry on natural mako, and unlike the processed reactor mako, natural sources were all different. Sephiroth had been brought up on natural mako from a source in the Nibelheim mountains. Hojo shut his eyes and let his mind cast back in time. Though his brain was often overfilled lately in the service of ShinRa, he never truly forgot a piece of data. Everything was in there if he just dug hard enough. Eventually he could see in his mind the absorption and reflectivity spectra of the mount Nibel mako. Sephiroth's original source had been a bit bluish. It might be true that Sephiroth's harvested organic mako reverted back to its source, but Sephiroth's source wasn't reactor mako. It was this bluish stuff from the mountain.
Hojo stood up so suddenly that his chair fell over behind him. This was the thing that was different about Sephiroth. Maybe if he wanted a good host for Jenova cells he needed to start with this mako. The original source was gone, dried up, but maybe...
Hojo went to his computer and called up Soldier test results, smiling excitedly at what he saw. Cloud Strife's last six mako level tests had generated some spurious, erratic readings, resulting in multiple test runs until getting a solid, correct value. He even showed the same, anomalous 920 that kept popping up when trying to read Sephiroth's mid three-hundred range. Sephiroth's mako level had always been a twitchy read, and now Cloud was showing the same behavior. Cloud Strife was full of Sephiroth's unique mako.