Disclaimer: Square Enix owns FFVII. Also, the following is a description of Sephiroth's childhood and so contains references to child violence. If you have reason to believe that this will freak you out, skip ahead.

Author's Note:

First of all, thank you, very much, for the 12,600+ hits this story has received. Secondly, sorry about the wait. You guys probably all thought I died. The issues were many: technological, interpersonal, and prior-commitment related. Just know it was hard for me to not-post, too, review junkie that I am.

Speaking of prior commitments, I have an important note. In the unlikely event that any of you are judges for the ACF Literary Contest put on by Daryl Falchion, please do not read this until that contest is complete. Basically, you'll be able to figure out who wrote one of the entries pretty easily. (Yeah, sorry. Only have so many ideas.)

Other than that, I just want to let you know that I am aware of the few incongruities between my Sephiroth's history and the one portrayed in "Vita, Amare, et Cruciamentum."

I am not going to fix them. Sorry to the purists. I was going to write something incredibly compelling that revealed why I felt the need to make Sephiroth aware of his non-Cetra roots. Three full-scale re-writes later, I've come up with this instead.

And just so you know, this chapter ends in kind of an odd place-- I've broken this terribly long chapter in two.

"I used to sit at this window every day. On Thursday afternoons children came to the room across the hall and I watched them playing-- I hated them-- Even then, I knew I wasn't like them, and not just because I wasn't allowed out to play. I always knew-- yes, I always knew-- I wasn't human."

He spoke with studied nonchalance, and he paused now to look down at her. He seemed to be waiting, gauging her reactions.

Pieces fit together in Aeris' mind. A cell in the bowels of Shinra's headquarters. A prison cell now, but once--

"Wait-- then this . . . ?"

"Is my-- home."

Those gashes in the whitewashed wall, the ones that looked so much like little hands clawing into the stone-- his fingers had made them?

"It seems I exhibited 'a tendency to wander' when I was still very young. Meaning, I kept trying to run away. I have to assume, though, that the 'tendency' was exaggerated in Hojo's reports, because it worked out suspiciously well for him. He could keep me locked in here until my 'treatments' were complete, with no questions asked. I saw a lot of these walls, even though I think I could have gotten out if I really wanted to. I preferred my own company, though, so this became my first domain . . . What do you think of it?"

"It's horrible."

He gave a slight, mirthless chuckle. "You always understand so well," he said, "I meant to have this place torn down when I first took power, but the architects were ranting about structural integrity . . ." He shook his head and made a dismissive gesture with one hand. "I just assumed I'd never come down here again."

"Thank you. For coming, I mean."

"I've been here nine hours. The guards must be wondering why I haven't made this a conjugal visit." He kissed the top of her head, and his soft words were spoken into her temple. "But even now I couldn't stand to have that door close behind me. So I suppose you're safe, flower girl." The arm around her tightened a little. "This was the room where they ran experiments on me. Injections. Inhalations. Psych batteries. Starvation . . . Aside from Hojo's more traditional beatings."

As he spoke the last words, a change went over him. The arm holding her gripped her more tightly and his voice seemed colder than she had ever heard it: clinical and distant. She knew this cold was not meant to frighten her-- he was just obviously unused to sharing confidences-- but it did, a little.

She turned in his arms, clutching the black straps across his chest for balance. He avoided her gaze, toying with her hair pensively, then murmured, "That song . . . the one I wrote . . . I wrote it when I was thirteen years old. I had just learned poisons: where to get them, how to use them, how much my body could take-- how they would throw off test results. It was a risk to combine experiments like that, but a calculated risk. I was always somewhat-- objective about death, too. As a child, I assumed that if they killed me I would get to meet my mother, who died in childbirth-- or so I was told. I always hoped she'd be waiting for me just on the other side of death, thankful I had delivered her from this world, glad to see me . . ."

His voice trailed off and she slid her arms around him. He tensed a moment before accepting the embrace, and he looked down at her. She could only hope that he saw her true feelings-- that she was listening to him with her whole soul. He relaxed a little, her soft grip seeming to bolster him. He smiled slightly as he looked away and began speaking again:

"When I wrote that song, I'd just had a very particular success-- you see, I wasn't helpless, not even here. I learned what to say and how to say it to survive, which has proved good practice for leadership and politics. I also learned to be impervious to pain . . . And, of course, how to skew Hojo's test results. Hojo had just given me an injection he'd been working on for eight months. I wasn't supposed to know what it did, but the young have big ears, especially when they're bored. It was designed to make me able to learn spells ten times faster than ordinary memory retention-- so, just before he came to administer the shot, I took helderwort-- which dulls the mind, if you don't know. The combination made me feel very giddy and philosophic, and Hojo left a few hours later, grumbling. I knew he hadn't caught me, but I also knew that he would, eventually. Helderwort has some telltale side effects. So I composed a little song about fate. In Latin, no less."

He made a sharp, bitter noise from the back of his throat, which might have been a laugh. Aeris felt like crying.

"Of course, whenever Hojo did catch me, there'd be hell to pay. If I was very lucky he would beat the shit out of me. He'd done something to himself-- to make himself stronger-- I suppose so he could keep me in line. I don't remember how many times he kicked me from one end of this room to the other. . . More often, though, I wasn't lucky, and that meant some new game for him and me to play."

His breath was soft on her ear as he spoke, but his words cut like slivers of obsidian-- blacker than hatred. She had always been aware of this in him-- the gentle cruelty. Now it was magnified. He spoke coolly about unthinkable horror, and all the while one hand trailed up and down her back, petting her. But she saw the pain behind the icy façade, saw that he was using her body to ground himself in the present while looking into the past.

"The punishment that time was a game he called 'mako-antidote.' The end result was dyteria-- that lovely little substance your friend Jonathan gave you. Hojo invented it courtesy of research performed on me . . . The final version he gave me made me bleed from my eyes and ears for two weeks. I pissed blood for over a month. That's why President Shinra had me enter SOLDIER so early. I think he suspected I would die if I stayed here much longer. Fortunately for me, Shinra was no scientist: research was never an end in itself for him, and he had to be sure he got his money's worth out of me."

Sephiroth punctuated this revelation by kissing her neck. Aeris tightened her arms around him, pressing her face into the black leather, blinking back tears.

"The most common game, though, was 'get a haircut,'" he went on. "You'd never know it to look at me now, but they kept my head shaved. So about once a week (not on a specific day-- Hojo liked to have me wait for that axe to fall), I would be strapped to a table, shaved, and injected with mako right--" He tapped the base of her skull, "Here. . . It would have hurt less to be burned alive, I'm sure of it. And I would hallucinate. I thought the patterns in the walls were trying to kill me. I saw my stomach bloat and burst, saw my legs eaten by maggots. Dead faces . . . singing. Laughing at me. . . It's been-- a while-- since I let anyone cut my hair."

"Oh, gods, Sephiroth, I didn't know!" Aeris breathed.

"How could you have known?" His arm relaxed a little, and she realized then that even while one arm caressed her, the other had been pinning her to him with near-bruising force. She had not felt it, because she was clinging to him with equal strength.

He was only silent a short moment before he went on. The words were coming more easily now, surfacing like blood rising from a broken scab. "Hojo's favorite game was 'showtime.' He loved it because it was purely psychological-- hardly any carry-over effects to watch out for, if he was conducting multiple experiments . . . I remember the first time the most vividly: I was taken to a room with a projection screen, which was unusual but not unheard of. I wanted to watch 'Doorcats.' Do you remember that show? Ah . . . too young, maybe. At any rate, Shinra had a collection of films-- evidence left over from murder trials. Whenever a killer went through the trouble of videotaping himself slaughtering people-- the tape went into the library. I was shown one of those videos . . ." His arm tightened again, and Aeris squeezed back reassuringly. "A father killed his own family-- a wife and four children. I never found out why he did it, let alone why he filmed himself doing it . . . He killed each of them in the family bathtub by injecting them with a neural paralyzer. They drowned. One by one. Drowned in water that didn't come up to their knees, because they couldn't make their bodies sit up . . . I was four years old. I had nightmares for weeks, and I refused to bathe, too, which got me in other trouble . . . Eventually though, I got used to it-- even came to enjoy some of what I saw. I learned how people's faces twist when they beg for their lives. Saw children my age forced to dig their own graves. Eyes ripped from sockets. Fingernails torn loose. Flayings. Decapitation. Rape. Lots of rape. . . They used to wake me in the middle of the night to show me the particularly grisly deaths-- so that the images would burn more deeply into my subconscious. After a while, it was hard to tell my nightmares from the videos. But I learned a lot. I suppose I should be grateful."

"What?" Aeris sat up so sharply she almost fell off the sill.

"Hm, you wouldn't agree, would you?" The corner of his mouth twitched and he fingered her hair, amber silk sliding over black leather.

"Of course I don't agree! That doesn't even make sense! . . . why would they--?"

"Ah. Well, they thought they'd created a Cetra when they made me. The Cetra are known for their magic-- and their gentleness." He smiled at her. "But Shinra didn't fund the project to get a powerful healer concerned with others' wellbeing: he wanted a SOLDIER who would lead them to the Promised Land-- Planet's will be damned. So they trained my mind away from gentler things . . . I think they-- overcompensated."

This is what would have happened to me, if they had caught me. He suffered it instead.

He lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. "Anyway, those treatments stopped when I was about eleven. They'd finally figured out that Jenova was no Ancient, and besides, I started falling asleep during the showings."

Aeris' mouth fell open.

"The videos were very poorly done, for the most part," he explained, vaguely apologetic. "I should stop. I'm frightening you, aren't I?"

"No, please, I want to know."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes! Completely." He touched her cheek, and a tear spilled from the corner of her eye, darkening a spot on the black leather. She reached up and held the gloved hand against her face.

"There isn't much more to tell, really . . . Was there any more you wanted to know?"

Aeris drew several shuddering breaths, before she could think of a reply. "Was-- wasn't anyone ever kind to you?" she asked.

"Ah . . ." He settled her back against him before answering, and Aeris sniffled into his chest. "Well, there were my tutors. I had a new one every month or so for as long as I can remember, all of them the finest of Shinra's first-class SOLDIERs. But, for any soldier, the best instructors are often cruel. They break you, planning to build you up again. I impressed them, of course-- I handled a sword better than most of them did-- but they also feared me. And their fear made them hate me. One of them wrote in his report on me: 'We are training our own executioner.' Clever man. I would have made him a noble if he hadn't died in Wutai. See, his hatred-- like most of theirs-- was a hatred tempered by respect, and that I could live with. Even welcome . . .

"There was someone else, too," he added after a pause. "One of Hojo's assistants took a special interest in me. I could always tell if a treatment was going to be painful, because she would look away. Once, when Hojo was away travelling, she told me it was my birthday. I didn't know what she meant, although I had noticed the 'age' blank on the 'Test Subject: Sephiroth' reports now read '6' instead of '5.'

"She made me a cake with white frosting and six blue candles. I remember being afraid to like it, because food as I knew it was that nutrient-gruel, and anything with scent or flavor was an experiment-- and therefore suspect." Again, his quiet laugh held no humor. "She sang to me, had me blow out the candles, and gave me a little brown box. I wasn't really sure what the point was, and I kept waiting for something-- more familiar-- to happen. But when I opened that box, I saw the first love of my life . . . It was a rat, obviously taken from some other part of the lab. He had eyes just like mine, and his coat was silver-white . . .

"I named him 'Ratty.' Not very original perhaps, but I was six. He would climb up my arm and sit on my shoulder. I would chase him around the room, trying to mimic the way he darted. Then, after about three months, Hojo found me with him."

Sudden rage broke through his toneless voice-- rage and shame-- and his grip on her became a band of black iron. "I still can't think why I let it happen," he said. "I was so careless. I knew he was coming, I heard him, but I didn't hide the box in time, and he made me-- I--" He broke off, as if his words choked him. When he spoke again, it was in the emotionless monotone.

"Hojo called it an 'anatomy lesson.' Poor little creature. He lived so long." His gloved fingers twisted in her hair. "When it was over, he made me flush the pieces down the toilet one at a time. And Lucrecia-- that was her name-- just stood there, looking at her hands."

Author's Note:

Written to "Mother Dear" by Danny Elfman. An Advent Children AMV is currently here:

http:// www youtube com/ watch?v G8kOnzXy5Ec