Summary: Sometimes acting on that homicidal impulse is the right thing to do. Pre-crazy Sephiroth.
Disclaimer: I waive whatever rights I'm supposed to be waiving here.
A/N: I know virtually nothing about how genes are sequenced and had to resort to internet research, so if I've written something ridiculous regarding that I apologize.
Tessa tapped one small foot at the top of the stairs, considering just going down and telling Zack Fair she'd had her fill of all this chivalrous crap. Then she remembered the giant claw reaching for her. Cloud had abandoned the others temporarily to help her. She sat down on the top step and listened. She heard a noise that might have been the door opening, but there was no growling or howling or gunfire.
"Looks like the lab, alright," she heard Zack say, and then Rude, "Is that a coffin?"
Tessa bounded down the stairs. Off to her right she could see the lab. In the small room they stood in, however, was what indeed looked like a coffin.
"I hate Hojo," Rude said. "What is in that thing? Do we have to open it?"
"Well I sure aint turning my back on it, yo," Reno said. He looked all around the coffin's lid, shining the small UV light he carried all around the seam. "Nuthin' on the outside," he declared. "Get ready to jump, though."
Reno slowly pried the lid open, and found the coffin did in fact hold a corpse. A fantastically well preserved, odorless corpse. Then in a flash the corpse reached up, grabbed the lid, and slammed it shut.
With a common yell of surprise all four men jumped away from the coffin.
"Fuck, this is just the kind of nightmare shit Hojo would keep in his basement," Reno said.
But Tessa had already darted forward and was opening the lid again. 'Beware the meddlesome Turk', Hojo's note had said. When she hoisted the lid she got a better view of the familiar looking face. The body inside moved to close the lid again, but she spoke.
"Please don't."
Slowly, the man lying there opened his eyes. But these were not the eyes she had seen in the Turk's photograph. These glowed red, and they vaguely terrified her as the idea of eyes burning from the fires of Hell jumped into her mind. Of course that was just Dajouan folklore, nobody enlightened believed in Hell. She reasoned it must be some sort of mako glow, although no soldier, no matter what shade of brown he started with, went to red. They all tended towards amber.
"Vincent Valentine?" she said.
The coffin occupant seemed at first not to hear her.
"Who are you?" he finally whispered.
Tessa had to lean her head in close to hear him. He was wrapped in an unlikely bright red shroud, some sort of bandage of the same material wound around his head. Her first thought was that he was soaked in blood, but of course that was ridiculous, old blood was brown, not red. Long black hair flowed around the head dressing, and she had a strange urge to touch it. It had been short in the photo, and she supposed it had been growing while in this hibernative state for twenty-five years.
"I think I'm your daughter-in-law," she said softly.
He paused, maybe struggling to process her words. "I have no children," he said.
"I know you probably think that, given your circumstances. But Lucrecia Cresent's son was yours." She thought she saw him wince slightly.
"Impossible."
"Not impossible. Life, death, and the timing of both may be altered in this environment. You yourself are proof of that." Vincent Valentine was silent. Tessa hoped he understood. He should find that believable, given his current state. But of course she wasn't sure what state that was, or more to the point what state his mind was in.
"What in Shiva's name is she doing?" Rude said, keeping his voice low
"Talking to the stiff," Reno said, "I can't hear, what are they saying, Zacky?"
"Shhh," Zack said, he was straining to hear himself.
The man in the coffin finally moved his eyes, taking in as much of Tessa as he could without moving his head.
"He's grown then. He has no need of me," he said.
And with that he slammed the lid shut again with violent force. If Tessa hadn't been training with Zack to move with some speed he would have struck her with it.
"Well, that's one crabby corpse," Reno said.
"Did I hear right?" Zack asked, "That's Vincent Valentine?"
Tessa nodded.
"Who's Vincent Valentine?" Rude asked.
"Seph's father," Zack said.
Reno let out a low whistle. "Well, that makes all kinds of sense... sort of. Least we know where the General gets his manners from. What do we do with him Tess?"
She considered. "Let's leave him for now. We've disturbed him, maybe for the first time in twenty-five years. Maybe he'll wake up a little more. Try again tomorrow."
"I'm still not turning my back on it," Reno said.
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They spent the rest of the day in the lab, looking for documentation, rummaging through cabinets, poking at old, long forgotten equipment. Reno was bored to find no more locks or booby traps, and Cloud was falling asleep leaning up against a corner. Tessa looked at the young blonde sweetly. At least he and Zack had been able to clean up some in the lab sinks, since plumbing (and lights) gratefully still worked in this area.
"Can't we just grab everything and head back, Tessa?" Reno whined. "Do you have to read it all while we sit here?"
Tessa shook her head. "There's quite a bit here regarding the project, but something's missing. Seems like all the samples came in from the reactor, there must be some facility there. We may not be looking in the right place."
"Whoa, wait a minute, yo," Reno said. "I thought we were just cleaning out all data here so it could be logged and organized, that kind of shit. Are you telling me we're looking for something special? Zacky, you wouldn't keep me in the dark, now would you?"
"Maybe," Zack said. Then he reconsidered. They were a team, and they should be informed. Or at least mostly.
"We are specifically looking for everything on a particular project," he said, "And were not leaving until we're sure we've gotten it all. The project is coded "J"."
"I think 'J' is for Jenova," Tessa said. "That mean anything to any of you?"
They all shook their heads.
"It looks like Jenova is a person, or maybe more correctly some sort of entity. There's quite a lot of data on her cells, how they communicate when separated. How indestructible they are..."
"Her cells?"
"Yeah, Jenova is referred to as a 'she'".
"Reno's been referred to as a 'she'," Rude said. Reno gave a middle finger reply.
"Then there's this whole other section full of Cetra poetry." she wrinkled her nose in distaste. "I guess because the Cetra found her first. Looks like the ShinRa team originally thought Jenova was a Cetra, but later figured out the Cetra had buried her because they thought her some sort of threat to the Planet." Tessa moved some papers around. "Gaia, two thousand years ago. ShinRa dug her up in the... Northern Crater."
Zack, Reno, and Rude looked at each other.
"What?" She said.
"'Spose that's why we guard that place all the time?" Reno asked.
"You mean you Turks don't know what's up there?" Zack asked.
Both shook their heads. "Even Tseng doesn't know," Reno said.
"How would you know what Tseng does and doesn't know?" Rude asked.
"I put spyware on his computer, yo. He often is hacking around in the system looking for info on the crater."
"Tseng is going to disappear you some day," Rude said. Reno shrugged, unconcerned.
"So if she wasn't a Cetra, what was she?"
"Calamity that fell from the sky..." Tessa said. "Space alien?"
"Seph's got space alien genes in his body?" Zack sounded alarmed.
"It looks like Hojo injected him as a fetus with cells from this thing. I don't see any actual genetic code from Jenova that could match with – Oh wait, here it is."
She unfolded a table sized printout and laid it on a lab bench, a dense array of what must be codons filling the page. They all had five letter sequences. Tessa swore appreciatively. She suddenly knew why Hojo's sequencing data of Sephiroth always ran all the frames together instead of breaking them into the standard groups of three nucleotides that dictated all life on their planet. It was so he could look at it and free float in his mind which might be triples and which might be these... quintuplets. She bit back an involuntary admiration for the bastard. But in focusing so hard to see the non-human expression in the code he had missed the obvious, which she had seen right away for not knowing any better. That Sephiroth's code was flexible enough to fit the three-nucleotide model. Hojo never checked, assuming it would not. No wonder he thought Sephiroth couldn't breed. But there was probably some real benefit to analyzing the code as a mixture of threes and fives. It was a cognitive rat's nest, but she would figure this out too. It's what she was good at; the Lifestream had made her so. And she had a hell of a lot more at stake than Hojo, she'd pry all of his secrets free even if he was a brilliant, obsessive maniac. She just needed time. Problem was something in her gut was nagging at her, that they were somehow running out of time.
Zack watched Tessa running a finger among the inscrutable mass of letters. She looked up and saw something akin to worry on his face. She probably resembled an obsessed maniac.
"Let's call it a day," Tessa said, a growl from her stomach reminding her that none of them had eaten lunch. And she had skipped breakfast. "We can call the reactor tomorrow and see if they have anything over there of interest."
Zack made a clucking noise with his tongue. "We'll have to go up there personally," he said, "Reactor people aren't exactly cooperative to the Midgar units."
"Well, fine, we'll go up there then. How do we get there?"
"You can walk," Cloud said, apparently not as asleep as he looked, "Takes about twenty minutes from here. Or you can catch this shuttle that takes people up and down three or four times a day, that takes about five minutes."
They all stared at him.
"What?" he asked.
"How do you know that Spike?" Zack asked.
"I told you I'm from Nibelheim."
Zack looked up towards the ceiling, clearly trying to jog his memory. "Well, I remember it was some little town..."
"You're hopeless, Zacko," Reno said. "We got a guy on our team familiar with the town and we aren't even taking advantage of him. How come you didn't say anything before, kid?"
"I'm not exactly happy to be back here," Cloud said.
"Well, tonight you're picking the dinner spot."
