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: Sabith asked after the last chapter, 'where is Cloud?' Good point, thanks. Of course I know in my head where everyone is all the time, but since I assume y'all are not mind readers it's my job to remember to write that down. Cloud, unsure of what he'd gotten himself into, is making himself scarce. I attempt to clarify a bit here, after the fact, which is not nearly as good as doing it at the correct time but that's what I get stuck with sometimes.
The door to the armored materia room was three inches thick and closed with a low thump that echoed through the now eerily empty reactor. Reno had pulled the thing shut, seeing as how the other three in his party looked utterly incapable of the task. Tessa had gone completely silent, a pained and oddly twitchy look on her face as they loaded the General to his temporary sleeping room. Cloud had made himself almost invisible from the moment they brought Sephiroth inside, skulking around the corners looking both nervous and guilty, and Zack had argued with him regarding the cuffs. Gaia, as if they should leave that guy unbound in nothing but a lightly armored room. Reno had succeeded in convincing him in the end, but only if the wrist cuffs were in front of his body. Not nearly as secure as in the back, in fact Reno had wanted to loop the wrist cuffs through the ankle manacles behind him effectively tying his hands and feet together. This suggestion almost got him killed. Then Zack had pestered him about air, and was only pacified when Reno found for him the venting that he knew existed, because you had to vent stored materia. Because it outgassed or some such thing.
Then they had to pull Tessa away from Sephiroth's unconscious form as she took a sudden notion not to leave him and wrapped her arms around his freaky silver head. She let go reluctantly only after both he and Zack argued they needed her to kill Jenova. Then Zack went down in a heap, his head close to Sephiroth's, his hand on his marble white face, looking like he wasn't going to be able to tear himself away either. Reno had actually jerked the Soldier by his mass of black hair in a fit of frustration. Fuck, he hoped someday someone cared about him that much.
Reno's resentful musings were disturbed by a weight of an arm falling across his shoulders. He looked over into Zack's unnaturally bright eyes.
"Sorry," Zack said. "I've just never seen him like that. Helpless. I'm OK now."
"Well thank the Planet," Reno said, still annoyed with the whole drippy scene. Zack kissed him on the side of the head and took the lead on the way back to the reactor core. Reno sighed, unable to stay peeved at the affectionate Soldier. Zack was Zack, after all.
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"Rude and Valentine are already inside," Reno said as the four of them stepped down onto the catwalk inside the reactor core. They could hear Vincent and Rude before they saw them, both struggling with what looked like a large silver colored statue of a woman with wings. The eyes were oddly black and dead looking, and Tessa's skin crawled with the feeling that it could see them.
"What part of 'lift up' do you not understand?" Vincent was accosting the other man.
"What part of 'too fucking heavy' do you not understand?" Rude retorted.
Both men stared at each other, arms crossed over their chests in stalemate.
"Well, nice to see we're making so much progress in here," Reno said, dropping the environmental suits he had collected onto a console. They were so far above the processing pool that the suits weren't needed, but they might want one for the sample collection. At least the gloves.
Tessa tore her eyes away from the mesmerizing glowing liquid in the pool below and pushed the environmental suits aside to examine the console. It was a healing tube control, still under power. No heartbeat or breathing to speak of, but there was a low level of cellular respiration being monitored. The units were total picograms per hour. Of what? she wondered. Mako maybe, the tube appeared to be filled with a 12 solution that was on slow positive flow, a percentage much too high for a healing tube for a human.
They were on some sort of platform no more than 30 feet on a side and at the far end sat the bizarre statue the men were arguing over. Tessa looked above them, and saw what she was looking for, several large pipes heading upward, but they turned at a right angle away from her and she couldn't tell where they were going. There was a small service platform near the bend, about fifteen feet up. Fifteen feet, she could do fifteen feet. She placed herself under and close to the platform, jumped and landed, one foot cleanly on the platform, the other, well, close enough. She couldn't see anything behind the statue, it was completely enclosed, but the pipes were definitely coming out of the top of that enclosure.
"Tessa, what are you doing?" Zack asked, a hint of alarm threading through his voice.
"I think there's a healing tube behind there with Jenova in it," she said, even as she began to creep along the pipes, studying their paths and looking at valves, "it's on a slow flow, so it must be producing waste mako to be flushed out to waste collection. It might be possible pull corrupted mako in through the waste pipe and flood the tube if it turns out to be a viable way to destroy her. Do any of you guys know anything about reactor plumbing?"
Her shoe slipped a bit on a pipe and Zack made to jump up to her, but Vincent had already landed next to her and stabilized her with a less than gentle grab under her upper arm.
"Thanks," she said wincing, remembering her scraped up wrist of earlier. Now she would have a lovely bruise to match on the inside of her arm. The guy was a definite beauty hazard.
"Green is good, red is wrecked." he said, "Pure mako flows in green coded pipes, the waste in red. Red is always the color code for corrupt mako."
He pointed out a large red striped pipe running along the wall. "That's one of the main waste pipes from materia processing. Most of the waste blows out of the towers, but waste from materia processing comes out the middle. It's very concentrated, and under pressure. The input pressure on your tank must be higher to maintain positive flow."
"So all I have to do is cut off the input flow and release the dump for the tank and the waste should flow right in there, right?"
Vincent shook his head. "There'll be a check valve to stop accidental backflow of waste. About here." He ran his hand along a section of pipe just upstream of the valve. "We need some tools."
Tessa checked her watch. One hour down.
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During the next hour they made better progress. Rude and Reno went out to find pipe repair tools, and Vincent and Zack managed to brute force the statue aside. As the base slid with high pitched scraping noises along the metal floor Jenova came into view for the first time. They stared at the motionless body, wondering how a thing so dead looking could be alive. The creature was quite human in appearance, face, torso, breasts. Female, if human standards were to be applied. A boxy apparatus was attached to her head bearing the word 'Jenova'.
"I guess this is her alright," Zack said, dreamily. All six of them stood mesmerized. Tubes and wires ran out from her in every direction, and the lower half of her body had extra appendages that resembled large intestines. The arms appeared to be missing and she had stunted, or maybe damaged, red wings. Tessa thought about Sephiroth's single wing, huge, midnight black and covered in shiny feathers. Perhaps the creature had been beautiful once.
Tessa broke out of her trance and stepped forward, looking for the sample collection apparatus she had seen on many of Hojo's other tubes in the Midgar lab. This one seemed more primitive; the user had to actually guide the biopsy probe manually via a small swiveling handle. She experimented with the control, watching the result of the snakelike tube on the inside of the cylindrical glass. It looked like she would have to pick a spot herself. Tessa squinted at Jenova's skin, and found an area above her left hip that looked sort of... chewed on. The divots were only partially healed, and Tessa was surprised she could even see them after so many years in the tube, but on the other hand the creatures life signs were so low her healing was probably very slow. She maneuvered the snake head close to the site and then made it approach the skin, but missed and laid the head along side the front of Jenova's pelvis.
"Back more," Zack said.
"Move the stick more right," Cloud offered.
"No, I think more up."
"Shut up, you two!" Tessa said, grateful for once for Vincent's reticence.
After several more awkward attempts she finally managed to set the head of the probe perpendicular to a spot of flesh, and pushed what must be the collection button. There was an audible snap and all of them jumped. The probe had bounced backwards, leaving a small explosion of matter to float in the tube around it. It reminded Tessa of films she'd seen about flesh eating fish in the south rivers. She hadn't expected something so... violent. She retracted the snake and pushed the unload button that sucked the contents down the snake and deposited a jelly like gray mass into a sample vial.
"Yuck," Reno said, having returned from his tool hunt and now looking over their shoulders. Tessa looked up at him.
"I still need a bit of tainted mako," she said. "Can you get some, the concentrated stuff form the materia distillation? You'll have to be careful," she dug in her kit and held up a swab, a second vial, and pair of gloves.
"I'll do it," Vincent said. "It can't hurt me now."
Tessa looked at him and wondered what he meant by that. Surely Hojo hadn't exposed him to bad mako? She wanted to ask him but something about the guy really discouraged questions. He accepted the vial and the swab and headed back to the stairway. Apparently he knew where to go.
Tessa checked her watch. An hour and twenty minutes since they had put Sephiroth down. She hadn't heard from the voice since she had returned, maybe because the thing had given up on her. That in itself was unnerving for the degree of awareness or intelligence demonstrated; realizing the fetus inside of her was not a useful target. Maybe it was focusing all its attention on Sephiroth now.
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Twenty minutes of reviewing the monitor readings, making random comments on the oddities of Jenova, and poking around the platform, and Vincent returned with the vial full of tainted mako. It had streaks of red that appeared and disappeared in it, and it looked like it was boiling and spitting. Tessa slipped on a pair of gloves before accepting it, looking at Vincent cautiously. If he had gotten some exposure he certainly didn't show any ill effects. He gave her that stand-offish, don't question me look again.
"Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies," she said softly to herself.
"What?" Vincent asked.
Tessa was sure he had heard what she said; he seemed to have enhanced hearing along with his other skills.
"It's a line from a very old children's story," she said, dumping the Jenova sample into a testing container. She had to give it a good shake as the stuff wanted to stick to the glass inside the collection tube.
"I know what it's from," Vincent said, "But not why you should choose to direct such a statement at me."
"It's a morality story, like all children's stories." Tessa laid a test probe onto the lump of Jenova material. Same low cellular, barely alive readings. "The boy Patro compulsively tells exaggerated lies about himself because he feels he cannot say anything truthful that will be good enough for the people around him." She added the tainted mako and sealed the test container quickly to cap in the roiling, spitting contents. "So he resorts to silence, and as a result he is isolated. But in the end he discovers not only does he need other people, but that they were far more accepting of him than he imagined."
Tessa adjusted something on the probe, and pretended to ignore Vincent.
"It's not the speaking of lies that I fear. It's the truths." Vincent turned away to stand at the very edge of the platform, gazing at the mako below.
Tessa sighed. He was going to be a tough one for sure.
"Hey, I think this is working," she said excitedly. After ten minutes the cellular activity was definitely lower, just a little, but it was measurable. And the sample was changing color, becoming bluer and more transparent. "I'll need to let it sit for awhile longer to be sure."
"The General's been out two hours," Reno said. Tessa was not the only one watching the time nervously. "I want to get that valve ready."
Reno eyed the platform, jumped for it and with a one hand assist fluidly set himself on top. Tessa watched him, realizing that Reno didn't actually have a fifteen foot vertical jump and didn't need it. Zack hadn't trained with her on these techniques, pushing off, climbing, and scrambling to get extra height. It was something she got the impression Reno would be really good at. Rude tossed the large, heavy tools up to Reno, then looked at Zack.
"I aint proud," he said, and Zack laced his fingers to gave him an extra boost up, where he landed neatly beside Reno.
The two Turks closed the valves for both inflow and outflow, and began to open the waste pipe to get at the check valve. A low hum started surrounded them.
"What is that?" Cloud asked.
"I don't know," Tessa said, "Maybe the pipes are reverberating or something. We've changed the pressure conditions by shutting the valves."
"It's her," Vincent said, now rejoining them, "It's the Jenova creature." Tessa felt a cold hand squeeze her stomach.
"Hey guys," Zack called up to the two Turks, "Sooner is better than later with that."