I was almost five years old before I finally managed to break in to the room with the coffins. The key was not in the safe. Thankfully, neither was the lost number. I did, however, pocket the Odin materia. Maybe Vincent would want it, or he could give it to someone anti Shinra who would make good use of it.
After that disappointment, I remembered that I was in a building full of forgetful scientists who cared enough about security to tape their super secure twenty digit randomised number and letter jumble passwords to the backs of their screens. You know, instead of taping it to the keyboard itself, which I gathered was the norm. I literally just had to flounce into Hojo's office, open up the cupboard with his spare lab coats and old computer parts, and peer at the messily hand scrawled labels on the two neat rows of hooks, each of which held a key ring with anywhere from one to twelve keys on them. I lifted two rings labeled basement and storage respectively, and skipped out of the room.
Sometimes, I was just so grateful that Hojo wasn't all there and didn't really getchildcare, for all that he literally would have burned the world down for my sake. Maybe he didn't realise gods needed supervision. Whatever the case, Tachibana now spent most of her time arguing with Hojo about Yuuki and being pregnant with specimen X.
It seemed that Tachibana wanted to replicate the process that created specimen S, but Hojo was determinedly blocking her proposals. He already had Hollander competing with him, he was hardly about to let Tachibana create yet another potential rival for me. So Tachibana was pregnant again, and that meant she spent less time on me. I had always been a pretty obedient and easy child, and Hojo did not approve the hire of another caretaker or nanny, but rather pulled aside random assistants and other personnel to babysit me and to hopefully get me an early start on both combat and literacy. In the evenings, after the nine to five was officially over, I was left to my own devices. Tachibana and Hojo took turns to deliver my meals - Tachibana because she drew up my nutrition plan, Hojo because he was forever wanting to modify my diet somehow, out of a misguided attempt to prove that I was more than human. When neither could be bothered, the cook or an assistant did it.
On this particular day, Tachibana was busy giving birth, and Hojo was busy preparing the cell solution that would be injected into specimen X upon birth.
I strolled to the basement door, skipping a little, ignoring the hubbub going on below my feet in the labs. I tried all the keys until one of the doors on the "storage" ring opened the door up with a quiet click.
I peered inside. The room was already dusty and gloomy. It couldn't have been more than two years since Vincent's final procedures. I hoped that this meant that Vincent had not been tortured or experienced upon after Lucrecia finished implanting the protomateria. It seemed like he was mostly there voluntarily anyhow - the door locked from the inside, so he could probably have just left. Oh, yeah. He was still doing that whole thing with the. Sleeping to atone for his sins or whatever. I huffed under my breath and rolled my eyes.
I walked up the coffin that I knew to be his, and knocked politely.
"Excuse me," I said, after several long moments without a reply. I knocked again. Silence.
"Hmm," I said. I grasped one edge of the lid and flung it open with all my toddlerly might. As I was, you know, Sephiroth, and full of J cells even if I hadn't been pumped full of Mako yet, I managed it without too much effort.
Vincent was sleeping inside. His face was slack and innocent, though the down-turned angle of his lips suggested that he was not having the best of dreams.
"Vincent,' I called firmly. "Vincent! Wake up!"
The breathing pattern changed. After a few deep breaths, Vincent finally deigned to crack open one glowing red eye. I looked up at him undaunted. My own cat slit eyes(not yet green)were just as cool, and I wasn't afraid of him. He was the old model. The recycled concept art. I was, on all levels except moral, much sexier and cooler than him.
He looked at me with bafflement. "... Sephiroth?" He said finally. His voice wasn't even raspy from disuse.
I drooped. Well. I'd be sexier than him, but only after my balls drop and I grow another meter and a half. "Hello Vincent," I said. "Nice to see you! Here! A present."
He stared down at the Odin materia in my little fist.
"It's an Odin materia," I said helpfully. "I got it from the safe."
Vincent picked it up, probably because he was too responsible to let a toddler handle materia.
"Please leave me to sleep," he said firmly.
"Nuh-uh," I pouted outrageously at him. My hair was now long enough to be waist length on my tiny body, even after it had been pulled into a high ponytail. "I need you to take a message to my mother."
"Your mother...?" Vincent looked at me as if I had asked him to walk me home from daycare.
"Yeah, you know her, right? Doctor Lucrecia Crescent. She's also hibernating like you, except in a cave rather than the basement. Please let her know I'm going to to go visit her as soon as I can get away from Hojo and Tachibana. Here, I have a letter for her."
Vincent ejected himself violently from the coffin and crouched down to stare me in my face.
"Where did you hear that?" He demanded urgently.
"I can feel her Jenova cells."
A look of open devastation swept across him. His startling red eyes seemed to flicker, whether with tears or with the urge to turn yellow.
I held the slightly crumpled envelope up towards him, smile not slipping. On the front was written "Doctor Lucrecia Crescent, Cave, Nibel Mountains"
Vincent took the envelope with the pointy ends of his gauntlet.
"Why is she in...a cave?"
I looked at him with big gooey eyes and smiled.
"She's there because she has been cursed for her hubris and cannot die. Just like you! So she's hiding away in the place where she feels closest to death."
Vincent made a noise that I didn't even know a hardened Turk and certified brooding edgelord sadboy like him could make. It was the most undignified laugh-sob I had ever heard in my whole life.
"Anyway," I continued loudly over the noises of him being horribly distraught, "I don't have much time. If you wanna go you should go now while Hojo and Tachibana are busy delivering the next project J baby. I can't let them know that I know anything at all. If you go now, please give that to her. If you don't go now, please hold on to it anyway just in case. If you ever hear of me losing my mind or becoming a megalomaniac or something, maybe just throw the letter away and tell her I turned out normal and got adopted out to a nice Shinra middle manager instead or something."
I gave Vincent a firm pat on the bicep, then trotted out the door on my stubby little legs. I had left enough time to return the keys and get back the my room and be halfway into a illustrated encyclopedia of archeology before anyone thought to bring me dinner and check on me.
Subject X took a lot out of Tachibana. She put in a request for a transfer as soon as the baby was born, and was off in a helicopter before poor nameless little subject X was old enough to recognise faces.
"Damnable woman," Hojo muttered darkly, tearing through the list of replacement caregivers available on short notice. Half were people willing to move here on short notice from Midgar or Junon, the others were members of the Shinra staff in the mansion and reactor facilities and Nibelheim locals.
I kicked my feet, finished with the stack of homework that had been my task for the morning. As bizarre as Hojo being annoyed at administrative trivia was, it was infinitely weirder to see him take a break from doing unfathomable things to heavily sedated animals and people in order to give me my first proper introduction to the scientific method. So he did know what it was supposed to be like, when he was lecturing me and marking my quizzes and humming with solicitous cheer at my seemingly natural aptitude, but he didn't know that his methods sucked and that his procedures had shoddy design. Hmm, interesting.
Anyway, I was done with my schoolwork, and yawned as I picked at the fruit salad portion of the nutritionally complete meal the new chef made for me. Hojo, unconcerned with his own physical health, was gnawing furiously on a stale protein bar as he shouted into the phone at Maria, the secretary who oversaw the Nibelheim lab, as she failed to scrounge up any candidates that met Hojo's exacting specifications.
"Sephiroth is not some snivelling little miscreant who has to have his scrapes kissed and be given spanks on the bottom for stealing sweets. He is not the unruly offspring of an administrative manager who needs to be fed with choo choo noises and dropped off to daycare! He is the son of Jenova! He needs competent supervision from qualified personnel with intelligent minds! I don't care how many sector one denizens have found this man satisfactory, I am the head of the Science Department and I will NOT lower myself to trawling the dregs of Admin and Accounting's leavings! Get me a postdoc with at least expertise in two of the areas I outlined or don't bother! I'd rather send him to hear old wives tales and be fed rancid wolf jerky at the knee of the local crone than let him be spoiled and ruined by a... a... a nanny!"
Hojo slammed the phone down and fumed.
Nibbling on a piece of apple, I volunteered helpfully, "Professor, I hardly need a full time caregiver. I can take care of myself and you already supply me with sufficient educational material."
Hojo glowered at me.
"Sephiroth," he reprimanded. "Do not question me. I am responsible for your care and education, and I will mould you into fulfilling your full potential. Do not permit yourself to be satisfied with the lax standards of the masses."
I ate another slice of apple and said nothing.
Later that month, the labs began to bustle as people started packing up and putting papers into boxes. The equipment was mostly untouched, but the assistants scrambles to digitise papers and properly store volatile chemicals and to move or put down specimens that couldn't be left pickling in a mako tank. Tachibana flew in to pick up Subject X and to finally fill out her specimen intake form, and left with the newly named baby Maya cradled to her chest. She smiled at me and told me that she would be seeing me in Midgar.
I took advantage of the hubbub to slip out and see Vincent. He was still in the coffin, and refused to speak to me, but the letter was clutched tight in his hand, and he had, in the interim, found a bit of leather cord that he used to make a sort of cage or net for the Odin materia, and to hang it from his neck like a necklace. I left him a map with an X marked on it, plus some personnel files and another letter, this one with detailed information on Jenova, the Calamity, and Reunion, and a whole bunch of stolen data from Hojo's more recent experiments. I remembered vaguely that Vincent would help Veld and the Turks to deal with something Zirconiade related in before crisis, but shrugged and hoped for the best.
My first ever trip outside the bounds of Shinra Mansion was on a helicopter. It took us to Corel, where it refuelled, then to Costa del Sol. Hojo and I were slated to spend a day on the beach there before a ship would take us to Midgar. I was given a worksheet on tide pools to complete and Hojo somehow attracted hordes of beach babes despite being an absolutely intolerable person. I conveniently ignored how I'd once upon a time had a crush on the man. Gross.
The sun was warm, the water was cool, and after I finished the educational activities I lounged back on a miniature beach chair, sharing an umbrella with Hojo. Hot women in bikinis cooed over me and how adorable I was, and bought me fruity soft drinks. I put on the tiny sunglasses that Hojo's assistant had acquired for me and settled back with a sigh. Ah, this was the life.
The umbrella shaded my upper body whilst my skinny little legs burned. I held my drink with one hand and let the other dangled down to the sand, a dead weight. The sand was toasty warm. I burrowed my fingers into it, noting the drop in temperature as I wormed my way deeper.
"Huuuuuuuuuurgh," I groaned, blissful.
"Close your mouth, boy," Hojo reprimanded lazily. His new friend Cameron giggled and tried harder to suffocate him in her cleavage.
The thing about Hojo was that he was, somehow, always stealing your girl. Vincent knew this first hand, of course, and Cloud witnessed him at work on pretty much this exact beach when he'd been much older and more decrepit. Now, as a reasonably well kept middle aged father of one, he was. Well. He was a dilf. Acknowledging the fact disgusted me on every possible level, but it was the objective truth. I'd been his simp once.
Maybe it would be easier for me if I started trying to convince myself that Vincent was my biodad. It was probably not true, but it would make me feel a lot better about Hojo being a babe magnet. But then, Vincent was, in a ways, technically also ME. And Vincent was a hot anime bishie AND a sexy old man. My life was full of suffering, and I wasn't referring to the medical, scientific, and emotional abuse.
I thought about Vincent pulling in thirsty fangirls on a beach, his pasty white body blinding in the Costa Del Sol sun, pointy gold clown shoes and crane machine claw glittering bright enough to leave sunspots. I winced.
"Professor Hojo," I said cheerfully, "may I try your cocktail? It can be an experiment in how fast I metabolise alcohol."
He frowned forbiddingly at me. "I will not have you stunting your neurological development like that, Sephiroth. Drink your sugar water then go run off and work off the empty calories."
I pouted, but lied back and gave up. Eventually, an attendant came and replaced both our drinks. I lied there until the sun dipped low in the sky and Hojo had moved on from sunbathing to splashing around the shallows with his gaggle of chesty admirers. My head was totally empty. Everything was warm and slow, and the wash of the waves against the sand lulled me into a trance. I was too relaxed to even sleep. I felt like I was at total peace.
The skies warmed over into orange. For all that I was lying there on the sand instead of in the water, I still felt like I was floating. I was almost too out of it to care when my vision became tinted green and the sounds around me faded.
"Sephiroth..." said a feminine voice. "Sephiroth... Vincent... Sephiroth..."
"Reunion..." Whispered another. "Reunion... Reunion..."
Weaker than either women, a boy's voice cried "Angeal is a stupid dummy!"
And another, just as pouty, "Genesis, you're the worst!"
I sat bolt upright.
I'd expected Jenova to be related to any kind of telepathic or hallucinatory experience I had, and I'd pretty much written off Lucrecia's voice as Jenova hedging her bets. But Angeal and Genesis... Well now! I was making absolutely sure that Hojo never fucking found out about this.
I supposed that it made a certain amount of sense. Sephiroth had to have controlled Cloud somehow, and long distance telepathy was clearly an ability of Jenova.
I had jerked out of my trance before I heard anything from any other Jenova infested subject, whether SOLDIERs who had the inert version in their bodies or the various test subjects, human and nonhuman, that Shinra had created.
I tugged on a strand of my loose hair thoughtfully and studied Hojo. He was doing his mad scientist cackle, but he wasn't doing science. No, he and three women and one astonishingly pretty man were splashing each other and giggling. I supposed that the hangers on all wished Hojo wanted to do them instead. They probably weren't even doing it for the sake of his position as a Shinra department head... I squinted at the twink who Hojo was groping. The slow, sinking suspicion about Vincent's not entirely heterosexual role in my parents' relationship erased the icy fear of discovering my telepathic powers, instead leaving me exasperated and horrified in a completely different way. Vincent being Sephiroth's biological father was a fun fan theory that nodded at the history of Sephiroth's character design and the origins of Vincent as a character, but. The once compelling idea had been soured by my new identity.
I began to wonder what Hojo might think about getting me some guided meditation tapes, or one of those venerable old Wutai priests who taught people to meditate by hitting them with a stick. I already had teachers, Wutainese and otherwise, who hit me with sticks in the name of combat training and hockey, the edifying team sport that my personal board of educational directors had decided was acceptable for me to engage in. It wasn't much of a team sport though. I played it with hapless assistants and gophers and random scruffy village children. I gathered from the introduction package to Midgar's most elite private school that I'd been given to read during the cruise ship ride over to Midgar that I'd soon be playing it with snobby little rich boys instead. Perhaps Tachibana and her minions Cavett and Shrove would take pity on me and let me stick to singles badminton and table tennis. Beating an opponent into the ground was kind of like having a team mate. Maybe. Maybe I'd take up boxing and become the world's most heavily doped boxer.