Doctor Crescent began to fall ill around my third birthday. I heard it from the whispers of adults who never seemed to realise that my acute hearing extended beyond lab environments. Vincent Valentine, her constant shadow, that man who Tachibana would shoo away every so often so that he did not speak to me, disappeared soon after. Hojo was in an exceedingly strange mood for the next few months.

"Blood always shows, you know," he cooed to me one day, bouncing me on his knee as he showed me a video recording of a tentacle monster that I recognised as a makinoid. "You are the son of Jenova, and my... My legacy. And that pseudoscientific quack... Well! Now she's putting her theories to the test. Hmmph. I suppose she will want to open up the Chaos project again. What a waste of her talents."

"What's that, Hojo?" I asked around a bite of mochi ice cream.

"That, my boy, is a stepping stone on the ladder of scientific achievement." Hojo cackled. I wondered if he thought I was too young to remember the things he was muttering, or if original Sephiroth had been developmentally much closer to a real three in his timeline. I couldn't figure out how else he knew absolutely nothing about Hojo and Crescent and Valentine and Jenova. He didn't even recognise Nibelheim, for goodnessake. Perhaps it was trauma. Trauma did weird things to memory.

Nevertheless, the woman was my mother. Despite the glimpses I got of her, working industriously away in her lab - which I definitely was not permitted near - and going for walks on the grounds and visiting the town every so often, I had never spoken to her, and I was always either with someone who ran interference or out snooping with an aptitude that a toddler should not show, so I'd never actually had a conversation with her. Except the time she had been in the break room while Hojo's most recent new assistant fed Yuuki and I sweets and Tachibana and Hojo yelled at each other and someone on the other side of a phone call about embryonic development and J-cell telomeres.

Doctor Crescent had come in, Vincent by her side, and frozen in the doorway. The assistant placed himself physically between Lucrecia and I. Hojo and Tachibana continued shouting furiously, giving no notice. Vincent strongarmed the assistant aside, and Lucrecia said to me, tremulously, "Hello Sephiroth. I am y- I am Doctor Lucrecia Crescent."

I had given her my best smile, mouth and face sticky with sugar, and hugged her leg.

"Hi!" I chirped. "You're my mama! Hi mama!"

At the same moment that she collapsed to her knees and scooped me up tight with a cry of "My baby! My baby! My Sephiroth!", Hojo dropped his stack of papers and whirled around. Tachibana hissed something into the phone that ended the conversation, and Vincent had to let got of the assistant so that he could run interference with Hojo instead. Lucrecia sobbed into my chubby shoulder, clinging to me until she was physically pried away by Tachibana. She'd already begun falling ill by then, and didn't have the strength to resist. I held her, as long and hard as I could, and smiled when she was torn away from me.

"See you later!" I said cheerfully. "I love you, mama!"

She sobbed wetly, struggling as Tachibana shoved her out the door and down the hallway. Vincent gave me a harried glance and ran off after them.

"Now, my boy," Hojo's hand clamped down on my shoulder and he knelt to be face level to me. "Where on earth did you get a silly notion like that? Your mother is Jenova, and she would be sad to see her son disowning her like that. Doctor Crescent is disturbed and delusional. It isn't nice to play a trick like that on the mentally ill, Sephiroth. Stay away from that woman, and don't go indulging the delusions of the insane."

I looked at him with all the naivety that I did not possess.

"You're my papa," I said, "Lucrecia is your Tachi. So shes my mama too."

"Your- your- Doctor Tachibana?" Hojo floundered.

"Tachi is mummy and I'm Hojo," I said. "Yuuki is our Subject! That's how you make a subject. Ansel said. When a boy and a girl love each other very much they married and that's where speciments come from. You love Crecia and I love Tachi and Tachi loves me. So Yuuki is our Subject and I'm going to make him big and strong and give him tests."

Hojo made a noise. It was unclear if he was laughing or howling. I shrugged.

"I wanna go play with Yuuki now," I said.

Hojo gripped my chin firmly with a long fingered hand.

"Sephiroth," he said firmly. "I am not your father. Doctor Tachibana is your caretaker, not your wife. It is her job to see to your growth and well-being, she has no other affection for you. Children come from sexual reproduction, which is a biological process that is unrelated to matrimony or love. You are the son of Jenova, and only Jenova."

I blinked up at him

"Okay," I said, "but you love me. Duh! And so does Tachi. Everyone loves me! Subject S is the greatest scientific achievement of our age."

"I-" Hojo seemed to at least be convinced that I didn't actually know Lucrecia was my biological mother, though I suspected someone would soon be dunked into a specimen cell for the sin of letting me know Hojo was married to Lucrecia. I hoped it was Ansel. Ansel was a creep. Most of the people here didn't care about ethics, Ansel actively sought to violate them.

I kissed Hojo on the cheek and squirmed out of his grip. Yuuki was delighted when I returned and we resumed our sticky game of knocking down blocks. This Yuuki was not the same Yuuki, but somehow Tachibana thought having a replacement toddler for me to hang out with was better than teaching me about the permanence of death, so someone had produced a clone from somewhere. This Yuuki didn't really seem that different from the previous version, but this Yuuki also seemed more like a puppet than a child. I didn't say anything. I had begun to wonder if all the playdates before the time I saw old Yuuki explode had been even with the same kid.

After that first dramatic impression, I was even more carefully segregated from Lucrecia. But, well. She had J cells. I had J cells.

New Yuuki's J cells probably seemed stable to Hojo and Tachibana, but he flickered in my sixth sense. Sometimes he was too strong, and would begin wailing about Reunion. Sometimes he was too weak, and would be sullen and quiet. Only Lucrecia and Jenova had the steady, maternal call of Reunion in the back of my mind. So when Lucrecia broke from her usual pattern and crept into my room in the dead of night, I was already sitting up, fully awake.

"Are you leaving?" I kicked my legs, perched on a child sized chair.

"Baby," Lucrecia sobbed. She flew into the room and crushed me to her chest again.

"I- I can't stay. I can't keep going like this. I need to. I shouldn't have. Oh, oh, my poor baby. What has he done to you?"

She stroked my hair, still tied up in a high ponytail with a yellow ribbon.

"I never deserved to be a mother," she said in a low voice. "I am a terrible mother. Everything I touch dies. I can't. I shouldn't have let Hojo- I shouldn't have had you in the first place. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Sephiroth. I have to go. It's the only way. I ruin every thing I touch."

I patted her on the arm. She was definitely not the mother of the year.

"You don't ruin everything thing you touch, but maybe you should take a vacation," I said. "A change of scenery might help you feel better."

"So clever," she said, choked. "Three years old, and you're already so clever.'

"You don't need to save me, it's okay," I said patiently. "Hojo is department head now. Project S is the jewel of the science department. He's not nice, but he values me. He won't subject me to anything that might ruin me, at least not yet. I'll be fine until I am developmentally an adult, maybe even into my early twenties. That's when my natural growth will slow and he will want to enhance it. Get yourself out. I can feel your Reunion call, you know. When Vincent wakes up, I'll send him to you."

"You..." She looked outright unsettled now.

"I try not to let Hojo know how irregular I actually am. And I forgive you."

I squeezed her and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She buried her face in my hair.

"Tachibana had a strict schedule. Jannssen is supposed to check on me in six minutes." I didn't disentangle myself, but I did give her a warning.

"I hardly know... You don't sound like a child, Sephiroth,' she said. "But then, what did I expect?"

"I'm your child," I said. "Biologically and genetically. Hojo's nonsense about Jenova bring my mother is patently untrue, as a glance at our genomes will show. I'm not a normal child, but that's pretty much what everyone had been hoping for, wasn't it. Go. Take care of yourself. Take all the time you need. I'll be here. And when you're ready and only when you want me, you can be my mother. I'll always be your son and I'll always love you."

Lucrecia stood and studied me. Her face was covered in tears.

I reached up and undid my hair ribbon.

"I always wear this because it reminds me of you. Maybe you can take this, and be reminded of me sometimes."

My hair settled into a slightly frazzled version of that iconic silver waterfall. Lucrecia took the ribbon, gave me one drawn, conflicted look of longing and horror, and hurried out the door.

I let out a mournful sigh. I wanted just one other person who understood how horrible all this Jenova shit was. Just. One. Oh well.

A/N:

Look, the DoC timelines DO NOT work out, and the before crisis ones are on extremely thin ice too. This is my best attempt at reconciling them - either the timeline makes my head explode or I rearrange stuff a bit so that Vincent and Lucrecia are still around Nibelheim while Sephiroth is still a toddler. Hojo is there and I don't think he'd ship Sephiroth off elsewhere just to get him away from Lucrecia if he's still the shiny new successful specimen of their most important project.