Forty-Nine: Collide
Hana's gaze made the world around them fade away. There were twenty men surrounding them and holding him at spear-point, afraid to approach but bound by duty to not flee. They were close, a tight-knit ring that eliminated any chance of escape, but she was closer. Sephiroth could feel her breath on his cheek, see her pulse flutter light and fast at her throat. She was so near to him that he could not see anything but her face, her lips, her eyes…
Under different circumstances Sephiroth would have been irate with the close distance that the guards kept to him and how they had forced their way into an intensely personal matter of his, and yet he felt that the only one violating his privacy was her.
She had never held his gaze like this, holding herself as an equal, grounded, without fear or reservation.
No, not never. Just not since…
Hana spoke a single word in Wutaiese that caused a stir among the men around them. When only silence followed, a slight frown tugged at a single corner of her lips, and she repeated herself. At the command that cut through the pall like a hot knife, the men withdrew with only murmured words of obeisance before their submission to their orders.
I have not heard that voice since…
And then they were alone. The moon's light was cold and harsh, casting the room in an eerie glow.
"You're here," she said. Her hand was still pressed to his cheek, and with the gentlest caress she held him captive.
Sephiroth set his jaw. He had nothing to say to that. He still shook, breath coming in steady but slow and laborious draws. More than his physical strength had been sapped.
Shadows passed over her face, and she choked softly even as her lips smiled. Both the pain and the happiness in her were genuine. Slowly, gently, she moved her thumb to stroke his jaw as her fingers and palm curled closer around his face. For a moment, she watched the movement of her hand in disconnected awe, as if she could not believe it was happening herself. She paused, hesitating, before slowly drawing back at last to fold her hands neatly in her lap.
"Are you afraid of me?" Sephiroth asked her, voice dark.
Hana held her gaze steady as she answered, "Yes." He searched her and found her answer to be true. That single word sent a lance of feeling through his chest, but she had not spared him with a lie.
"Hmph. You would be a fool not to be."
At his slightest withdrawal, her hand flew out and seized his forearm, gripping with all her strength. For a mortal woman, it was considerable, or perhaps it only seemed that way given his current weakness.
"Don't you dare go," she seethed with the same intensity with which she had ordered the guards to leave. "Don't you dare."
He was disgusted by his weakness. What was she next to him? He could pry himself from her no matter how hard she held on. It would be nothing to tear her arms from him and throw her across the room. All the strength in her entire body combined would be nothing he could not shatter with a flick of his hand.
But the image, bright and violent, of that burst of her lifeblood and the silent scream on her lips, what he had fully believed to be her final cry, was more powerful a chain than any metal. It kept him still and rooted, dangerously close and unsettlingly defenseless.
He pressed his lips together and held steady. To this, too, he would say nothing.
Though physically they were closer than ever, a dark gorge spanned wide between them.
And Hana was still reaching across it.
"That materia," she said. "Did my mother give it to you?"
Sephiroth had been so wrapped up in his own experience that he hadn't considered that she might have been affected too. She had to have been; there was no other way she could have possibly guessed that her mother had been behind its creation.
"Did you meet her?" she asked.
Sephiroth nodded once.
For all the impossibility of his claim, she did not seem to question it. She was shocked, certainly, and a little breathless, but not doubtful. Quite the opposite, in fact. The eager way she spoke seemed to indicate that she fully believed him. "Did she have anything she wanted to say to me?"
Sephiroth had not anticipated speaking with Hana at all, and so had not planned as to how he would answer the question. Still, he immediately knew the answer that common logic mandated he give.
"No. Nothing."
It had been easy to say, but the lie left a bitter taste in his mouth. The way Hana's face fell only made it worse. He had come to fix things, after all, as a last token before his final departure.
He knew he shouldn't linger, but as if she read his thoughts, she clung harder to his forearms. "Stay," she said, and this time, it was a plea. She reached her fingertips as if to stroke his bangs, but pulled back at the last moment. For the briefest moment before reason returned, he found himself wishing that she hadn't.
"Your wing," Hana said. "Can I see it?"
Sephiroth frowned. He was about to pull away to show just how clearly he objected to her request, until his eyes happened upon the wound on her leg. Even shadowed as it was, the sight still caused a deep and visceral reaction.
He had no right to deny her anything ever again.
He slowly released his wing. Lacking the strength to keep it held upright, he let gracefully arc down into Hana's waiting arms. Her touch was light and timid at first, but with time, when Sephiroth neither encouraged nor discouraged her, confidence returned.
"I remember that night," Hana said, fingers stroking the inky surface of his plumage, sadness and wonder in her motions in equal parts. "I was so scared, and you were in so much pain. That was the night that I finally learned about how you grew up. And now, even as a man, you still haven't escaped it. Hojo, ShinRa, they still use you, like you're just a plaything.
"And there's something terrible inside you. Something that tried to-" Her wounded leg quivered as if under the phantom of pain now past, and the motion was a fresh lance of pain to Sephiroth's heart as well.
Sephiroth slowly drew in a breath through his lips and lowered his eyes, head hanging limp and his hair pooling over Hana's legs. Perhaps afraid that he would pull away again, Hana's hands buried themselves into his wing, nestling so deep into the dense feathers that her hands and wrists were consumed. She held on firmly, latched securely so that to pull away would cause him considerable pain. Sephiroth had no energy to respond either way to such impassioned fervor. It washed over him, and he felt its presence, but he was far too numb to even begin to feel its heat.
"How can something so terrible be so…beautiful?"
Sephiroth clenched his fists, knuckles white. A hard and heavy lump was lodged in his throat. He could not stay. This had gone on already. Soon, he would succumb to the warmth and rest her arms pleadingly offered him.
He had to go. He had already harmed her once. He would not allow a second chance.
"I love you."
Sephiroth's eyes shot open and his body went rigid. Time stopped, and he waited for something, anything, to undo what had just been done.
"I love you, Sephiroth," she whispered a second time.
Those words could never, ever be called back. Now, out in the air, they were real, tangible, undeniable.
Sephiroth raised his eyes to meet hers. There, in the dark depths of her eyes, the light of a living fire flooded him with understanding.
Nothing would be the same between them ever again.
"I know," he said softly. He knew full well it was not the response she wanted, but it was the only one he dared to give.
He watched pain fill her eyes as his words slowly broke her heart. Never in a thousand lifetimes would he have expected that her response to his quiet rejection would be to embrace him.
She leapt and overwhelmed him in his weakness, the force so great as to throw him back. Her hands were wrapped around his neck, holding him desperately close. And in the second of vulnerability that her lunge created, using momentum that had been silently building for far too long, she leapt a second time, this time to press her lips to his.
The motion burst the dam holding back a lifetime of emotion.
He did not resist her – he could not under such an assault. His body and mind were flooded with things he had never felt before, ecstasy and agony, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. For once, he fell back, allowing himself to be overpowered. As horrifyingly stupid as he knew it was, he couldn't bring himself to pull away either.
It felt…
Conscious thought left, and only instinct remained to take its place. Later, when language and logic returned, he could say that guilt over what he had done had caused him to submit, that it was his last gift before he left, that he was just giving her what he wanted and nothing more.
He could say that all he wanted later, but in that moment, consumed by the full force of the powerful, terrible, wonderful fire in Hana's eyes, he had had no intention except to meet the heat of her passion with his own.
Their lips danced until both were breathless, gasping and spent. She was the first to pull away, probably more from exhaustion than anything else. Still, she did not let go, both arms firmly encircling his chest, head resting on his heart as she shuddered with the aftershock of what had just happened. He put one arm around her to still her quaking, and she sighed with pleasure. Too late to turn back, he left his arm where it lay across her as he tried to reconstruct some semblance of normalcy with each breath in and out.
Rattled to his core, the thought would not leave him that this could not ever be forgotten.
He could not hold back a quiet moan of agony at the notion.
I should never have let it happen.
"Will you stay with me…one last night?"
Hana's soft request brought him back to reality, where she lay embracing him, looking up at him with immeasurable sorrow in her eyes. She knew he would go, perhaps she had even known from the beginning. If she had known him so well as to thwart his plans to subdue her with a sleep materia, she likely would have been able to guess his next intentions as well.
"It is not wise," Sephiroth said.
"I know," she said. And the way she said it told him that she fully understood. However, she did not take back her request.
"Sleep, then," Sephiroth said, closing his eyes. "I will not leave until dawn." Truthfully, he needed to rest as well. It would be easier to part in the morning when his strength had returned and the passage of time had lessened the influence of what had happened that night.
But she did not return to her futon. Instead, she closed her eyes where she lay on his chest, and slowly her breathing became deeper in sleep.
Sephiroth waited until she was completely asleep before he gently laid her back on her futon, retrieving the heavy comforter. She woke, alarmed, as he laid its warm weight over her body. "I'm not leaving," he promised, and his word was enough to still her again.
He unfastened the buckles that held his coat together and slipped it off, then removed his shoes. He knew far too well from his overzealous youth that it was terribly uncomfortable to sleep in pauldrons and combat boots. Content that Hana was soundly asleep, he stretched himself out on the tatami mat beside her, and once he was down, he knew he couldn't get up if he wanted to. Exhaustion pressed him down and kept him there, and he looked forward to the oblivion of sleep where all this could be left behind.
But he did not sleep one wink the entire night, held in the world of wakefulness by the presence of the woman lying beside him and the sight of her face bathed in the fey light of the moon.
He rose as the first rays of dawn peeked over the mountains. Hana had not woken yet, and it was better this way. Once on his feet, he looked down at his sleeping wife for several long moments, before he turned his face away and resolved to never look back.
He slipped on his coat and shoes with little more than a whisper of leather. The touch of his battle uniform was a familiar and welcome sensation after the strange events of last night. Looking out the window to the mountains of Wutai, he imagined that he was returning to Midgar after a mission. There would be paperwork there, and lots of it. Things to do that were boring and routine. He could not wait to return to the life he had always known.
There, in the gray city, on his own, he knew who and what he was. All the uncertainty and tumult here would soon be forgotten in the bleak life that awaited him.
He crossed the room to retrieve Aika's materia, sitting innocently where it had fallen the previous night. As much as he despised the thing and how its spell had escalated into far more than he had ever bargained for, it kept Jenova out of his mind, and so he kept it for utility's sake. His mind was his own now, and he intended to keep it that way.
With his brief preparations complete, there was no further reason to stay.
He headed for the door without the slightest glance back, sliding it open and breathing in the crisp morning air.
"It's my fault, you know."
Hana's words stopped him in the doorway. Sephiroth held his composure, eyes steeled on the mountains ahead, back straight and head high. He was a SOLDIER, and he held himself as one, strictly at attention, never wavering in his path.
"It is," Hana continued. He heard the rustle of fabric as she rose to sit. He did not react. Her wound would prohibit her from following him. "I'm the one who fell in love, and brought my family's curse down on us. I didn't believe it, or maybe I just didn't want to. But it's as I told you – true happiness is followed by tragedy, and it has been since my bloodline split from the Kisiragi's."
The notion was somewhat amusing, morbidly humorous. "All this happened because of the Kazehawa curse? Because you fell in love with me?" It was just such an easy way to explain it all away, so convenient that he was slightly disappointed in her for believing it. Still, for whatever reason, she spoke genuinely. Maybe, for whatever reason, she had convinced herself it was true.
"Yes," she confirmed. "It's all my fault."
And he began to entertain the idea. He knew nothing of Wutai except how to destroy it. Here, in this land very different from his own, they had been brought together despite the improbability, and then been brought to marriage, a destiny very short of being an impossibility. What did he know of the forces that had brought them together and then, in a brief turn, torn them apart? Why not a curse? What other explanation was there for all that had happened?
He hummed softly. He would think about it more, later, when he was very far away from this place, but in removing all the blame from him, she had displaced it squarely on her own shoulders.
"I'm sorry," she repeated. "It's all my fault."
"Because you fell in love with me?"
"Yes."
A flash of understanding almost made him look back. His head turned and then froze as his eyes passed the threshold of the castle. He took a moment to ground himself again. Still, plain as day, he knew the insinuation, and he understood why she was letting him go.
She thought the burden was squarely on her, because she had loved him, and her feelings had been unrequited. This conveniently exonerated him from having any part in this curse of hers. It was convoluted and extreme thinking, by all accounts. Clearly, pain had driven her beyond logic and reason.
But…wasn't it true?
The thought echoed in his mind for several long moments.
His hand wrapped around the doorframe. He didn't know what he was reaching out for; he only knew that the wood under his hand was solid and reassuring.
"Perhaps not entirely," he said softly, and then spread his wing and leapt into the sky.
A/N: Because falling to one knee and gushing confessions isn't really Sephiroth's style.
But yes, in his own strange way, essentially, he just did that.
Also, they TOTALLY kissed. And I didn't go into details, but it wasn't an innocent little peck on the lips. Nuh uh. Not at all.
I KNOW HE'S LEAVING BUT DON'T PANIC THIS IS NOT THE END.
Has it really been a month since I've updated? I'm so sorry! D: I have been working on this the whole time. This is version 6.0, by the way. It underwent a LOT of rewrites (five, if you want specifics. hence the 6.0). And probably still has more to come.
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