Chapter Forty-Eight: Aika's Spell
The castle was a different place at night. In the day, people pulsed in and out like blood from a beating heart, coming, flowing outward, and returning again in a predictable beat that kept the country alive. Through the castle walls passed far more than treasures and people, it was the source of all laws, gossip, and slander that could build or destroy in one day or thousands. It was a place of danger gilded with ceremony, secrets veiled in vivid silks, daggers hidden behind robes, hell in the guise of paradise.
Under the moonlight, except for the regular march of the guards, all was still. As much as Wutai depended on the chaos in the palace to keep her alive, Sephiroth thought that the true glory of the nation could best be seen as she lay sleeping, exposed and shining in silver.
He took his time in the gardens in the outer ring of the palace. This deep into the winter, there was not much besides the stone fixtures to be seen. Despite the planet's fatal, icy blow, the gardens lived yet. He could feel the life, slumbering, beneath the sheets of white.
Sephiroth looked to the moon and its cold light. He had no right to be here. He had been the one to fell Wutai, nearly singlehandedly. ShinRa had given the orders, but that did not change the fact that Wutai had bled and then died by his hand. To stand at the heart of the fallen nation and admire her beauty was sacrilege at the very best.
But that was not why he was here, and such thoughts were useless.
It was well past midnight, and he had observed the guards long enough to be able to predict their movements. The next change of watch would come in only a few more minutes, and he had postponed his advance long enough. Ever since Aika had given him the strange, colorless materia, Jenova had remained inexplicably absent. He didn't know what to think of it, but didn't want to rely on the effect for very long. He had no way of knowing when it would expire, only that he needed to be long and very far gone before that happened.
He extended his wing, letting it lie loosely at his shoulder blade as he waited. Sephiroth watched the last guard intently, waiting for the exact moment when he would decide to leave. The man yawned and lowered his spear, making for the exit. Sephiroth waited for four deep, steady breaths, until the guard had already opened the door to leave, before he whispered a word lost to the wind.
The materia in his bracer glowed with his will and power as a wind of his own strengthened a gust to just the point where it would knock the guard's cap from his head, strong, but not to the point where it would seem unnatural. Cursing under his breath, he turned from the door to fetch his hat. The execution was seamless. By the time the guard had righted his uniform and left his post, Sephiroth had long ago leapt to the ramparts and flown through the open door, the guard none the wiser that an intruder was already safely hidden in the shadows, headed deeper into the castle entirely unhindered.
Thanks to the missions he had led in Wutai and the lengthy briefings from the Turks, he had a general idea of the layout of the castle. He headed east down several hallways to arrive in the wing reserved for guests. Hiding from the torchlight, he breathed a second incantation and a mastered Sense materia in the bracer on his arm glowed with life.
With the help of his materia, he spread his awareness to probe the rooms. To his surprise, every single one of them was occupied. He frowned as he slowly felt over the area, scanning room after room of nobles. There was an abnormal amount of finery in those rooms, even by the lofty standards of Wutai's nobility. They were all here to stand on ceremony for something, something big.
But he could not sense Hana among the mass of nobility.
Where else would she be, if not the guest wing?
Sephiroth fed more energy to the materia, widening the area he could sense at the cost of acuity. The castle was eerily full, every room occupied to maximum capacity, and even at this hour, the kitchens were ablaze with life. Was there some kind of festival going on? Something didn't sit right with him. Nothing had been abnormal about the city or gardens outside. And security had been lax, especially considering how many nobles were housed here tonight. If it was some kind of event, it had been poorly planned and thrown together last minute, without time even to increase the guard.
Annoyed by the delay, he continued east, leaving the guest wing. He kept his Sense materia active, as he flew quickly but aimlessly through the halls, dark and silent as a shadow.
His unease strengthened as his search of the castle yielded nothing except more nobles and their women. There was only one place he hadn't yet checked, and that was the wing where the royal family was housed.
His Sense materia hit a wall of men. That alone was no surprise, considering he was approaching the emperor's private chambers. What surprised him was that he could sense Godo now, and he was not the figure surrounded by ranks and files of armed guards.
Hana was.
The realization was enough to stop him in his tracks. He searched again, only to find the same results. Godo had a few elites stationed outside and inside his room, but he had stationed the vast bulk of his men around Hana in an adjacent suite.
Were they expecting me? It explained the garrison surrounding his wife, but not the nobles. He would expect the place to be evacuated if they had known that he would be coming, not filled to capacity, especially if word of his latest massacre had spread. And if Godo had kept the elites for himself, then the army surrounding Hana was likely acting more as a display of force or intimidation than actually guarding against any significant threat.
What is this…?
Puzzling and annoying though it was, they were sorely mistaken if any amount of rank and file guards were going to keep Sephiroth from his goal.
He hadn't been planning to employ his Sleep materia so early, but the men placed that thick around Hana's chambers left him with little choice unless he wanted to cause much more of a commotion. Strangely, the guard was thinnest outdoors, further confirming his suspicion that the guards were not there to protect her from a threat, but to send a message to those inside the palace. Godo was putting on some kind of front, though Sephiroth had no idea as to why.
Putting aside the matter for the moment, he cast a SleepAll strong enough to knock every one of the guards out instantly before he entered through an unlocked window. Thankfully, the outdoor guards were relatively isolated from the rest, so until they were found, no commotion would be raised. Sephiroth knew full well that this maneuver, however necessary, drastically cut the time he had.
Before his feet even touched the tatami mat he directed a second Sleep spell to envelop the room. Hana had already been sleeping, if fitfully, and she let out a little whimper and tossed as the spell collided with her. Sephiroth watched in confusion; it was not the reaction he was used to seeing.
The spell was taking a long time to take effect. She was still restless several long seconds after he had cast. Refusing to consider anything but the task at hand, he cast again. With a slight shudder, Hana's body stilled, and her breathing became deeper, if still not even.
Sephiroth waited much longer than he should have to approach her, and he refused to acknowledge why.
He dropped to her side and pulled the comforter off her body. Strangely, she twitched as the cold night air hit her, and Sephiroth froze. She should not have been able to respond to that. Though from a distance she might have appeared to be sound asleep, Sephiroth knew from the tiny details that she was not nearly as deeply asleep as he needed her to be. Her eyes were dancing behind closed lids, and her breathing, though deep, was irregular and rather quick. Was she dreaming? What kind of dream could be powerful enough to overcome the complete calm of a Sleep spell?
She, like the gardens of Wutai, glowed in the moonlight, and the sight of her face – open and defenseless - transfixed him for more than several heartbeats.
Shaking himself out of the daze, he let his hand hover a hair's breadth above her forehead before he cast again, summoning all of his own magical prowess and fusing it with the full power in the mastered materia. The effect would have knocked a Zolom out cold. Hit point-blank like that with such a powerful blow, there would be no way for her to retain any level of consciousness.
He did not feel remorse for the harsh spell.
She absolutely could not be allowed to wake.
Though it took seconds longer than anticipated, all but her eyes fell limp and motionless. Perhaps she still dreamed, though paralyzed in sleep.
In a way, he was grateful for these delays. The haste they necessitated allowed him to block out everything but the task at hand. The full strength of his mental composure had not yet returned, and the right kind of distraction, he knew full well, would fell him.
With the lightest touch, as if afraid she would wake even though nothing had yet indicated that she would, he brushed her yukata away just enough to reveal the dark, deep scar marring the smooth curve of her knee. He used his Sense materia again, probing the damage as methodically as he could. The tendon had been entirely severed, and then healed incorrectly. The kneecap was in the wrong place, having fallen after its support had been cut. There was a hollow in her skin where the muscle had healed over the gaping absence of the tendon. He pressed his lips together tightly – the damage was extensive, and made even worse by her body trying but failing to restore itself.
Slowly, he pulled Aika's materia, the moonlight colored pearl, from his cloak. Its wan, fey light illuminated the damage, making the line of red all the more stark against Hana's skin, and he frowned, refocusing. Slowly, tentatively, he threaded his own strength into the sphere and explored the power housed in its crystal casing. He breathed out and closed his eyes as the materia answered his summons, and then the man and the magic fused. As one, they reached out to the wound, touching it with fingers of light, and a thousand images filled his mind.
The materia was not reacting how he expected it would. Normally, once he and the materia joined it would read his will and direct itself accordingly. This orb was different. The magic was surrounding him instead of her, and he started to see things – memories, thoughts, of things not so very far passed. Infuriated, he tried to reign in the magic around his hand, bend it to his will. In the physical world, he was vaguely aware that he had Hana's knee in a vice-like grip, demanding the magic to go there. But it would not. Like a mist, it clung to him, and then, slowly, to her, everywhere but where the wound stretched.
He saw things that he had come here knowing that he must soon banish out of his life forever. The more he thought this, the more he thought, the more vivid the memories became.
Hana's face as she looked up at him, dark eyes wide and wet under the bridal cap she wore—
-her stone silence as they entered his apartment for the first time—
"He loves to read. He reads a lot about geography. I think he really likes to travel. He gets souvenirs from every place he goes."
-her small, content smile as she had prepared tea from the pot Angeal had given her—
-her wistful longing as she had looked at those cherry blossom dishes in the department store—
-standing at the helicopter door in Junon, hair whipping in the wind, as she beckoned them to take her back to Midgar—
"He loves to stretch out in the sunlight and lose himself in a book. Sometimes he'll fall asleep there."
-the shimmering dress she had worn to the company ball, and how beautiful—
-the polite little bow she gave to everyone she met—
"For all that he's known as a silent man, he really gets quite irritable if it's too quiet for too long. He has a small noisemaker that plays the sound of the ocean waves as he sleeps."
-how she jumped at the sound of every gunshot she fired—
-the taste and warmth of her tea—
"He's much more particular about his toothpaste than his shampoo. He has an obsession with clean socks."
-the agonized scream they had shared as his wing had torn from his back, and then her soft hands easing the wound—
"He whispers when he sleeps. He hates the color yellow. He has a soft spot for white chocolate, fudge, and cakes."
-the look in her eyes as she had laid his secrets bare to the world, and her last words—
"I'm not so sure I understand him better than anyone else. But I want to. And I will never stop trying to. Because in the end, against everything I ever thought could happen…I-"
"Enough!" Sephiroth roared aloud, and seized control of the milky power surrounding him and his wife. With all the physical and mental power he possessed, he forced the flow of power down his hand and thrust it into the wound.
The world was lost in light, and Sephiroth staggered as the flow of magic exploded, expending every last ounce of both his physical and mental strength. And then, as quickly as the light had come, it vanished, sparkles like stardust falling to the earth the only sign that the materia had been activated at all. In its wake was only darkness and all-consuming silence.
The materia fell from his hand, its light gone, rolling across the floor and away from him with a hollow whisper.
For a moment, all he heard was the roar of his own heartbeat and ragged breaths.
When his eyes adjusted to the darkness again, he saw that the traitorous wound still stretched dark and red across Hana's flesh.
"No…" he choked, the truth washing over his spent form in crippling waves. He knew the feel of healing materia, and whatever it was that Aika had given him had no such resemblance. Whatever that woman had intended, it had never, not from the very beginning, been to heal her daughter's wound.
He had failed.
He fell forward, overcome with fatigue, only just catching himself with his hands to rest on all fours. He could not fix what he had done. It was permanent, an immortal testament of his ultimate betrayal.
"Hana…" The word rose unbidden from his heaving chest.
His time was up. The guards had seen the light from the materia at the very least, and who knows what else. He heard them thunder in and surround him at spear point, but he did not care. He was spent, exhausted, defeated. He did not attempt to rise from where he was bent on all fours, his own body positioned suspiciously over his wife's. The guards would surely get the wrong idea, finding him in such a position with Hana lying prone beneath him and her yukata pulled up to bare her leg. He closed his eyes and let his head fall. He didn't care what they would think. Let them take him, do what they would with him, he simply no longer cared.
Until a hand, soft and warm, was pressed to his cheek.
The sensation sent fire through his frame. Shocked, he opened his eyes, and there, not even a breath away, was Hana, closer by far than he had ever allowed her to come. Her touch, tender and pleading, held him captive, helpless but to stare into her face.
Her hair was tied with a ribbon that he recognized. His eyes widened with realization. She had expected him to come, and predicted how he would try to subdue her, and so had chosen the accessory to make herself immune to his sleep spell. That's why she had been fidgeting; she had been putting on an act, and had most likely been conscious to experience the entire thing!
He stared into her sad, dark eyes, knowing now that she knew everything, and waited for his final judgment to fall.
A/N: I think it's about time that Hana and Sephiroth had a little talk, what do you think?
The next chapter will be the one that you've most likely been waiting for since the beginning. With some surprise exceptions to keep life interesting and stuff. I still think (hope!) you will find it extremely satisfying.
I worked SO HARD on this chapter and might have overdone it (*snort*). Sephiroth in the garden brooding about Wutai, for one, is a feeble and ill-fated attempt at a TRIPLE entendre, which I will never ever ever attempt ever again ever. I mostly wanted to see if it could even be done, and it was fun for two seconds and then just annoying. And then there is my extremely liberal and unusual use of punctuation when Seph's having all those flashbacks. Anyway, I guess the point is PRETTY PLEASE WITH A CHERRY ON TOP let me know if something didn't work or was distracting or just not cool. Big or small, I don't care, I want to hear about it. This is the climax of the book, and I want it to flow seamlessly as much as I want it to pack a powerful punch.
