Disclaimer: FFVII is owned by Square Enix and I make no money by this writing.

A/N: Do I have writer's block? Yes. Did I run out of ideas for teenage Seph? Yes. Am I coming up with a transition to young adult Seph? Yes. Do I want to do it? No, but I will any way.

This is a Gast centric chapter. This is as complete of a backstory as Cass will get. I don't know exactly where to put this so I'll put it right...here!


Gast Faramis was completely confident. He'd been working a long time on this project, having the most work being to get the ShinRa Electric Power Company to continue his funding, but he felt he had done what he promised. He felt confident that the specimen found in the North Crater was a Cetra.

Hojo and Hollander constantly squabbled over it regardless. It made Gast wonder why he hired them in the first place. They were worse than children. He had no control over the things they were doing and it didn't interest him. He wanted to study a full Cetra, not make a brood of them. It was a pity. Gillian and Lucretia were very smart women.

They were behaving today. Today, Gast would be present all of the cumulative research to the public. One of Gast's associates at the local university had even made it mandatory for one of his classes. Since he was so confident, Gast spent an hour or so shooting the breeze with his old friend.

"I got a dumb bunch this year," Marks said, "None of these kids take this shit seriously, there aren't many good scientists left anymore."

Gast would have agreed, but Hojo and Hollander were within hearing distance. He decided to be prudent.

"Except one," Marks said, "but she's more of a math person, you know how they can be. She's sharp though, asks the right questions, goes beyond my instructions when she feels the need. One of those people who likes to know the answer, and if no one knows she'll do the work needed."

Gast wished silently he worked with people liked that. Hojo and Hollander wanted to be right, not to know the answer.

"Don't talk much though," Marks finished, "not unless she has to. Fucking Ifrit, I've bitched enough. How's life for you?"

Life was pretty good, until he finished the lecture. He hadn't gone into great detail, but had merely shown his steps that got him to conclude that the specimen, nickname Jenova, was a Cetra. As Marks had so informed him, most of the listeners were fairly silent, only the people who wanted to be there had any pertinent questions.

Until he got to the girl three from the front.

"I got a lot," she said, "you might wanna sit down." Gast remained standing.

"Go ahead," he said. This must be Marks shining star. He was expecting someone more studious. Instead, he got a rather lazy pose, feet thrown up on the seat in front of her and arms unrestricted by the desk the other students were taking notes with. He almost expected her to pop some bubble gum, but it was absent.

"Fine," the girl said, "Are you sure this...thing is a Cetra?" she asked.

"The math works out," Gast said. The girl made a noise in her throat, but didn't retort with anything.

"I thought Cetras were supposed to be...kind of humanoid," she said, "this looks like an alien."

"It kind of does," Gast agreed, "but I'm not going to assume to know what a Cetra looks like."

"Neither am I," she said, "but I thought they'd have arms and legs and less tentacles, perhaps less...purple as well." Gast stifled a laugh. Marks had described her well.

"I'm sorry to say that this is only a cadaver," Gast said, "it's been dead for a while."

"That explains the purple, but not the tentacles," she said, "How are you so sure this isn't an alien?"

"We compared it's DNA makeup with a sample of mako," Gast said, "I believe we found a very low percent error."

"How did you get that number?"

"Which number?" Gast asked, there were a lot.

"The final percentage," she said, "a 0.005% error."

"I'd like to say that I did it myself, but I don't have the time," Gast admitted, "we had a team to work on this project. I can't honestly say how it was found."

"I think they did it wrong," she said, "I think it's a 25.70 % error." Gast looked at his notes.

"How did you get that?" he asked.

"Multiply and divide," she said, "It looks like they did it backwards." Gast scribbled quickly and realized with a sinking feeling that her assumption was correct. He had spent weeks working on a base of faulty work. He could feel Hojo and Hollander already blaming each other when in actuality it was probably some nameless faceless person whose only contribution was this bad logic.

"You may be right," he admitted. So while Gast still had jack shit on his Cetra research, they still had results from...whatever the hell Jenova was.

It was only after the relaxed figure who dumped his current life's work on its head stepped across the threshold that Gast realized one astounding detail. The girl had taken no notes, had done no work, and didn't even have all of the numbers required to finish the problem laid out in front of her. Yet, she had completed it, and quite accurately as his notes so showed. It looked like she did it in her head.


"Marks!" Gast called out. It had been a few days since the fateful lecture. Hojo and Hollander were throwing theories out. Lucretia was in her second trimester and Gillian had pulled out after delivering two seemingly healthy boys. Poor Miss Crescent was terrified as hell, but was holding out until the end. Gast had a feeling Hojo was behind it. He was not interested in the drama and relationships in his lab, but he had a feeling a divorce was not far on the horizon for those two. Gods let the kid stay with Lucy.

What Gast couldn't get out of his brain was the girl in the third row. He had run the entire day over in his head and had not seen her take a single note or even have any of his material in front of her. She had to have done it in her head. But how?

Marks winced in sympathy as Gast caught up with him.

"I prolly shoulda warned you she was kinda a bitch too," Marks said.

"It's fine," Gast said, "I'd rather lose face in a small time lecture than a big one in front of the bosses. In a way she kind of saved my ass."

"That is one way of putting it," Marks said, "but she's kind of...blunt to put it nicely. I like her for it, but it's hard with group interactions. Conversation turns a bit personal when one person calls another an idiot."

"She didn't call me an idiot," Gast said.

"Wasn't talkin' about you," Marks said, "It's funny in retrospect, but man was that boy pissed at her."

"Does she have a name?" Gast asked. Marks stopped.

"I have to ask why you want to know," Marks said seriously, "I like this kid, she's smart and she gets shit done. If you want her for one of those-"

"No," Gast said, "I don't fiddle with that nonsense. I'm an observer, not an experimenter." Marks relaxed.

"I'm glad you haven't changed one bit," Marks said, "You were always rather decent for being surrounded by assholes. Why is this particular asshole so interesting?"

"She didn't strike me as an asshole," Gast said.

"She's a total bitch and I love her for it," Marks said, "Why she got you so hung up?"

"She did that problem in her head," Gast said, "multiple steps, order of operations, the whole bit, in her head." Marks grinned.

"She usually hides it, but sometimes it just nags at her," Marks said, "the rest of her class is slow enough that they don't notice."

"Marks that girl is a genius," Gast said.

"I know," he replied, "A very hard one, but she's smart as hell. I love it."

"Just a name," Gast said. Marks bit his lip, then shook his head.

"You want her name, ask her yourself," Marks said, "I got on her good side and I'm not giving it up just because she gave you shit."

"And you called her an asshole," Gast muttered.

"Lemme buy you lunch," Marks said, "make up some karma for it."


Gast didn't hunt her down. He got distracted. Complications with Lucretia caught his attention. She had really bad Braxton-Hicks contractions, bad enough to make her think the baby was coming early. For a while it looked like she might not be able to finish her term. Gast was prepared to induce labor (against Hojo's wishes), but Lucy said to wait. Like magic she got better, more color, she seemed almost a little happier. She shared her list of names with Gast and he admired her usual flair of imagination.

Boys: Blaise, Legend, Sephiroth, or Vincent.

Girls: Ambrosia, Lispeth, Maeve, or Ofelia.

She seemed back to her old self after the scare, and upon her insistence Gast went back to work. This time seeing the effects of certain dosages of mako upon humans. The animal testing had gone well.

It was in this course of action that Gast found his genius.

"You sonofabitch, you're cheating!" a voice said. The volunteers for testing were being held for overnight observation. Most were severely ill, one was comatose, but one hadn't been given enough to cause any harm. He was playing blackjack with a nurse.

"You're counting cards," the nurse said, "that's cheating."

"If I am, I'm doing a shitty job," he said, "I've lost count."

"Hit and you get twenty-one," the nurse said.

"...Hey," the man said, "who's cheating now?"

"I can't help it," she said, "I do it subconsciously, besides I'm the dealer so stop whining or we play go fish."

"Go fish sounds like more fun anyway," the man said. She rolled her eyes and started re-shuffling. Gast ran through the last few lines through his head. I can't help it, I do it subconsciously. It couldn't be...could it?

"He's gonna wake up right?" the man asked. The nurse turned around to see the comatose volunteer Gast was looking over. She looked familiar.

"I hope so," she said, "I got money that says he wakes up tomorrow morning."

"Seriously," the man said, "Is he gonna be okay?"

"Yeah," she said, "We get a lot of workers from the reactor constructions. They look worse than he does and most of them recover."

"Most of them?" the man asked.

"Some don't take to the mako well," she said, "others all too well." He nodded and started playing.

Gast waited until the game was over before trying to talk to her. She brought homework to work with her and was scribbling out problems neatly in her notebook. He noticed the lack of a calculator.

"Why do you write it down if you can just do it in your head?" Gast asked. She stopped and looked up.

"It's harder to grade if it's not written down," she said. Gast stood there for a few seconds.

"Look if you're upset about the percent error thing I'm sorry," she said, "It was screaming at me."

"I'm not upset," Gast said, "If you had said nothing then I would still be doing research on faulty logic. I'm more impressed actually." She said nothing.

"How long have you been able to do that," Gast asked.

"Dunno," she said. Silence fell again. Gast could feel that she wanted him to go away and leave her alone.

"How long have you worked here?" he asked. She should have been snatched up by think tanks or firms long, long ago.

"Too long," she said. She started writing again. Gast decided to grant her wishes.

"Have a good night," he said. She didn't respond, just kept working.


Gast kept coming up after he was no longer needed. He kept doing it long after the case study was done and they had pinpointed the amount of mako a person could handle before side effects came into play. She noticed and pointed it out to him, but he just shook it off.

"You really don't understand," Gast said.

"Understand what?" she said, "You stay in the infirmary to talk to a nurse. That's the part I understand."

"No," Gast said, "I'm talking to you. You don't seem to understand why though."

"Lonely?" she said. He could feel the sarcasm seeping through.

"I've never seen anybody who can do what you can do," Gast said, "you're doing...Calculus in your head. You're working out things like sine and cosine with barely a blink. That's amazing." She was shutting down again, he could see it.

"I just wanted to talk to you," Gast said, "just a friendly chat between two people because one of them happens to be extraordinary." She paused again.

"If that's not what you want, just say so," Gast said, "I'll leave you alone, but you have to know you're one of the most intelligent people that has ever criticized me." She gave a small smile.

Then she held out her hand.

"Cass," she said simply. Finally a name.

"Gast Faramis," he replied.

"I know," she said, "It's on your shirt." Gast laughed.


Gast held another extraordinary person in his arms with great sadness. He hadn't been here, but apparently Lucretia had gone into labor two weeks early. It shouldn't have been a problem, but Lucretia was still gone. She had narrowed down her list and her last wish was granted.

Her son was named Sephiroth.

Hojo took over as soon as Lucretia's desk was cleared. The boy was tested, prodded, and injected on a nearly daily basis. To Hojo's frustration, the child was not responding. He ate and drank, but was still wasting away. Hojo made rash comments on how Lucretia's weaknesses were passed on to her offspring and labeled Sephiroth failure to thrive. Gast hoped to every god that would listen that it was grief making the man talk that way.

Gast knew what the problem was. Sephiroth was a failure to thrive because he wasn't being treated as a baby. Despite all of the Jenova cells and mako put into him, Sephiroth was still human. He had human needs and instincts.

He wanted to be held. So that's was Gast did even as Hojo was too blind to see it. Sephiroth's condition was so terrible that Gast couldn't hold him and feed him at the same time. Sephiroth craved the contact more than the food.

"I know," Gast said, "I know what you want. It's okay." Sephiroth made not a sound. It was almost as if Hojo was already conditioning him to be silent.

"You look like your mother," Gast said, "She was a beautiful thing too."

Gast's mood seemed embedded onto his new acquaintance. Cass seemed down trodden, a little listless. Gast didn't inquire. He knew she was a private creature. She would say what she wanted and nothing else.

"My mother died," she said, "She was old and it was her time, but I don't want her to be gone."

"I understand that," Gast said, "she loved you."

"She was my mother, of course she did," Cass said, "left me everything she had in the world so I would keep going to school."

"A wise woman as well," Gast said. Like Lucretia, except she fell for empty promises.

"She'd hate me moping around so much," Cass said, "Fuck it, time for differential equations."


Sephiroth very unique eyes followed him around the room. Gast thought it was rather endearing. Sephiroth couldn't move while the scanned him, they strapped him down to make sure, but his eyes moved avidly, memorizing every detail because this place was different from the room where they kept him.

He was beyond the age of holding, but he liked Gast best because he still remembered it faintly. Gast did the equivalent of spoiling Sephiroth rotten in Hojo's eyes. Because of that, they didn't meet too often anymore. Sephiroth still watched him more hopefully than he did with anyone else.

"Do you want kids Cass?" Gast asked, out of the blue in her opinion.

"Shouldn't I get like a job, at least a marriage proposal, before you give me children?" Cass asked.

"Not now," Gast amended, "I mean later." Cass thought for a long time.

"No," she said.

"Why not?" Gast asked. He expected to hear either kids are a burden or I'm not ready.

"Because I am a selfish person," Cass said, "I know one day I'm going to snap and hurt them, or I'll be lazy and neglect them, or I just won't be enough for them. I'm okay for an hour or so here an there, but every day, every hour? One day I will do something I'll regret and both of us will wish I'd never..."

"You know it's people who follow that line of thinking that make the best parents," Gast said after a long bout of silence.

"It's a self-fulfilling prophecy," Cass said, "It's better to be alone then to make another me."

"One day you'll meet someone who loves you unconditionally," Gast said, "You'll be the best part of somebody's life and you'll get addicted and you'll have kids so you can feel it again and again."

"Maybe you're right," Cass said, "but today, I will be me."


"No good?" Gast asked. Sephiroth swallowed and shook his head.

"No," he said. He passed the chocolate bar back up. His voice was quiet and subdued despite it's fluency, Hojo made sure Sephiroth spoke before his age range just like he made sure Sephiroth stood up and walked.

"That's too bad," Gast said, "That's all I got for you this time."

"Can we go outside again?" Sephrioth asked. Gast looked around, Hojo wasn't too far off.

"I'm afraid not," Gast said, "Hojo will be mad." Sephiroth nodded and watched Gast work again.

A few weeks later Gast would feel guilt when Sephiroth was quarantined after locking himself out in a rainstorm. Only later would he find out the boy had done it on purpose. The guilt turned to pride.

"How old are you?" Gast asked.

"Not very," Cass replied, "Nineteen." Gast looked at her work.

"That's incredible," he said, "I swear you have the mind of an old man."

"Sometimes I feel like it too," Cass said.

"How long did this take you to figure out?" Gast asked.

"Couple days," Cass said, "Work and school got in the way. Hopefully I'll graduate next year."

"What will you do?" Gast asked.

"Whatever I want," Cass said, "I want to make stuff. Buildings, rockets, cities, everything."

"Big dreams for a little girl," Gast noted.

"Hey, are you going to eat that?" Cass asked. Gast looked at his pocket.

"I took a bite out of it," Gast said.

"I didn't ask that I asked if you were going to finish it," Cass said.

"No," Gast said.

"Can I have it?"


Marks felt overwhelming pity. Life wasn't fair, not even for the intellectually blessed. He knew Cassiopia Durmont had not plagiarized anything. Her work was original and all her own.

The university board had not seen it that way. She was to leave the premises.

After she finished sobbing.

"I believe you," he said, "whatever it's worth, I believe you."

"What am I supposed to do?" she said, "no one will hire me, no school will take me." Marks had an idea.

"I know a guy," Marks said, "Old school bud, we go way back. You met him once, he gave a lecture and I made you go. He's been shorthanded for awhile, could use another body and a good brain. You'd like him actually. Goes by Gast Faramis." Cass looked up in shock.

"What?" she said.


Gast placed his hand on Cass's back as he showed her around. It was a supportive and protective gesture that was should have been alien to him. With Cass it felt only natural.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"Not like you had anything to do with it," Cass said, "thanks for this by the way."

"Trust me, it's my pleasure," Gast said, "now whatever happens, don't let people boss you around without explicitly stating that you are my assistant."

"Got it," Cass said with a nod.

"Technically you'll be doing grunt work, but there's a project that I'm working on that's right up your alley," Gast said, "just lay low for now and you'll rise up the ranks."

"Do I want that?" Cass asked.

"Yes," Gast said, "If all works out I'll make sure you'll be making everything before you reach thirty."

"I'm not sure I want that anymore," Cass said. Gast felt a pang of sympathy.

"Don't worry," Gast said, "You have a beautiful mind, that's something rare in here. You'll get the respect you deserve."

"I doubt it," Cass said, "but...you said you had a project?"

"Mostly Math that looks god awful to me," Gast said.

"That sounds nice," Cass said.

"Then I'll show you," Gast said, "oh, another thing. There's a young boy who lives down here, Sephiroth."

"What? A kid?" Cass said.

"Yes, he's only around five, but he's supposed to be here. You shouldn't have to worry about him too much. It's not like anyone would ask you to babysit him or anything."