Downstairs revealed a laundry, a kitchen, and a bathroom. There was an empty room of some sort, bright and airy, probably intended to be a drawing room or family room. I decided I probably had enough slack in my allowance to save up to decorate the room as a meditation space, to work on my new psychic powers. My allowance was technically a junior intern's pitiful living stipend, paid out to me since I needed to be included as Shinra personnel and an internship was the only way they could technically employ someone under the age of twelve. As I had no need for food, lodging, clothing or medical expenses, I basically had nothing to spend it on except whatever the fuck I wanted. I knew I ought to save up and get in the regular habit of withdrawing it, so that I could have transactions not monitored by Shinra, but I also couldn't help myself when I started thinking about getting the stinkiest of incenses and the thockiest of wooden fish. My face contorted into a spasm of something. It was possibly dread but I was too proficient at insulating myself from my negative emotions with a layer of bubbly airheadedness, so whatever it was I felt manifested only as a pang of physical feeling. It passed, and I hummed. Well, I was obviously terrified of the telepathy, but I hadn't known I was that terrified. I had to work on that, probably. Shelving my horrifically repressed emotions yet again, I clicked my hair over my shoulder and bounced up the stairs.

Upstairs were two empty bedrooms, each with their own balcony and closets, plus a bathroom and an office. Assistants had set up the office with my books and educational materials, two bookshelves jam-packed with texts old and new, a third half filled and waiting for me to fill it up. There was also a brand new dumpy office computer set up. Standard science department issue. Well, I was technically an intern, and since I didn't one of those cramped storage closets they gave to interns as temporary offices, I supposed they just gave me a workstation instead. I made a face. If it couldn't connect to company intranet, then it wouldn't have a lot of use. I noted with exasperation that no one had provided any stationery, and was at least glad I'd brought my pencilcase from Nibelheim in my suitcase.

Going up yet another flight of stairs revealed the master suite that took up the whole floor. The doors that opened out from the master bedroom were symmetrically placed. Along the eastern wall, a fair distance apart, were the stairs and the door to the massive bathroom, which had a bathtub and a separate double-sized shower and more natural lighting for the two sink counter and the freestanding vanity than most slum dwellers saw in their entire lives. On the east and west walls opened respectively a nursery the size of my room in the Shinra Mansion and a walk in closet big enough to fit in a whole dormitory of trooper cadets. The walk in closet also opened into the bathroom. My clothes had already been hung up and folded and organised neatly, and someone had put away the spare linens in a dedicated linen cupboard that was still mostly empty. My plain and tidy shirts, trousers, and jackets didn't fill up even a hundredth of the hanger space, and the folded underwear, socks, towels, and child sized scrubs similarly didn't even fill half a drawer. I wasn't exactly going barefoot in winter, but I also didn't have a huge amount of clothing. For one thing, I spent most of my time in pyjamas, scrubs, or play clothes, and the rattiest of those had been discarded in the move. For another, it was a certifiable pain in the ass trying to order proper, stylish clothes from Nibelheim, which had a seamstress - far too plebeian for Hojo, for sure - and a mail order catalogue. The company delivery service came more often than the commercial mail, but that just meant more scrubs and more generic and Shinra-logo branded company merch that even Hojo found to be too depressingly ugly and bland. Hojo. Yeah. On top of that, I grew about twice as quickly as a weed. My clothes were usually ordered a size up, so they'd still fit when they arrived. I was already the size of an eight year old, and I still had a few months until my fifth birthday.

The troupe of assistants had set up a king sized bed, which seemed small and lonely in the huge bedroom. The plain white bed linens were made up, hotel-neat. There were a pair of bedside tables each with a white glass globe on serving as lamps. A charging station had been set up for my PHS on one side, so I took the brand new cell phone Veld had given me and sat it in the cradle with a stifled snort of laughter at how clunky and retro it was. It wasn't a literal brick like a 1985 earth phone would be, but it was far from the slim and sleek flip phones that would one day become advent children product placement. It bore more than a passing resemblance to the Motorola microTAC, and I wondered if someone at Shinra just really liked flip phones, since they were standard model for every compilation thing except the original game and the remake. This phone was technically a flip phone, but it wasn't a clamshell. Like the microTAC, the flippy part folded downward with the hinge on the bottom, and the screen - showing one row of digital characters - and the buttons were on the same face. I'd only seen something this old in pictures and soothing before-bed YouTube videos.

Anyway, enough about my cool retro cellphone and my incredibly luxurious bachelor pad that was giving me agoraphobic anxiety from its sheer undecorated emptiness. I took out a set of gray pyjamas, fresh white socks and underwear, plus a towel, and went to take a shower.

I took the opportunity of washing my face and hair to cover my face and cry for a while. It was a well practiced routine by now. Even living in a panoptic surveillance society like earth didn't prepare me for when the surveillance wasn't just all-seeing, but also targeted me personally and specifically. The paranoia made me more than slightly insane, as I tried not to feel things other than pleasant bubbliness and childish antagonism when I didn't have reasonable cause to physically cover my face. Maybe whoever bugged the place was decent and didn't have cameras in the shower. Maybe the house wasn't even bugged. But I hadn't checked, and I wouldn't check until someone, hopefully Veld or another Turk, gave me a plausible excuse to care about bugs, so I had to always act on the assumption I was being watched. It would be bad to get out of practice and let my guard down anyways. Sure, it wasn't unreasonable for a child to have negative emotions sometimes, and a child left alone in a new environment would obviously have some kind of reaction. But the urge to shriek and throw myself on the ground and tear all my hair out while gnashing my teeth and spitting profanities at Hojo and Tachibana and Shinra and Veld and Lucrecia and Jenova and every single other adult in my life would not be productive. I couldn't really show myself to understand the depths of how wrong my upbringing was. Everything else I could explain away with being precocious and strange and brought up by weirdos, but as I never knew any other life, I couldn't let myself show how my environment made me want to tear out my jugular with my own blunt and neatly buffed fingernails.

The yawning pit of anguish and hopelessness opened up, and I stifled a scream into my palms. I did not stop mining the motion of scrubbing at my face. My heart rate skyrocketed and I could feel a faint tingling in my fingertips as my head throbbed. Stars burst behind my closed eyes. I was alternately not breathing and hyperventilating. I bit my lip viciously until the urge to emit another scream passed. It felt like I was a hunk of dry ice, sublimating into the air. It felt like all the weariness and horror and absolute bone deep murderous rage that I suppressed day in and day out had built up like plaque in my arteries, and I could feel them about to sweat out of my pores. A high pitched ringing filled my ears until I realised I had gone for too long without drawing breath. The ringing stopped when I started sobbing and gasping for air instead. After my internal countdown reached zero, I turned my face towards the showerhead, washed alway all the evidence, opened my eyes, and was that weird bubbly kid genius again. Bubbly was maybe a bit too apt - I was shimmery, fragile, and maintained my existence with surface tension and not much else.

After I finished the efficient and extremely abridged three minutes of genuine human despair at my untenable circumstances that I permitted myself to feel a day, I soaped, shampooed, and conditioned. It was a nightmare that made me want to cry again. I exited the shower cursing.

My toothbrush and toothpaste had been unpacked and placed into the bathroom for me, but clearly my jars and bottles of mad science hair concoctions hadn't been clearly identified as such, and by the time I realised I'd spent too long weeping and gotten all the way wet and had to use the watermelon scented """no tears""" kids' shampoo and conditioner some genius had bought for me. I tried conditioning before shampooing, to mitigate the damage, but that amount of SLSes wasn't easily offset even with a thoroughly silicated coating of conditioner beforehand. I thought about that one article of the person who had washed their hair every day with heavily perfumed shampoo and conditioner "like Sephiroth", and of how their hair had basically turned into razor sharp garotte wire. I cursed my thoughtlessness bitterly. I wasn't slated to start mako injections for another two years. I wondered if Hojo would let me test the efficacy of mako fortified shampoo and conditioner on my hair.

I froze in the middle of grumbling and slumped down onto the vanity chair.

I'd gotten so used to being around tanks and tanks of the stuff that I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten that it was the essence of the Lifestream. I was always aware of it on an intellectual level, never bought into Shinra and their bullshit about Mako energy. I turned off the lights whenever I left a room. I took five minute showers. I took a seemingly innocent interest in homebrewing personal-scaled renewable energy alternatives because "I can feel mako and feeling it too much makes me antsy at night" - I could, it did not. Hojo tolerated it because I mainly stuck to reading undergrad-friendly materials and making lemon batteries where he could see it, and he didn't really seem to care when I accessed the internal Shinra databases of banned research with his credentials.

But I hadn't really thought about what Hojo was doing in a long while. I hadn't thought about the glowing green tanks full of mako, each round cylinder about the size of an elevator. I hadn't thought about what they were doing up in that reactor on the mountains, pumping and churning and processing the mako. For electrical consumption, yes, but also so that the Shinra Mansion could get its pick of the choicest selection of mako varieties and byproducts straight from the source. I hadn't thought about the mako in the monstrous once-human specimens that Hojo used to teach me anatomy when he was in a good mood. I hadn't thought about the mako in the twitchy furry critters that Tachibana used to let me cuddle up to. I hadn't thought about why the vapour that poured out of Yuuki's dissolving throat had been emerald green. The mako had become just like any other compound to me. Not innocuous, no, but…neutral. A reagent that enabled the cruel works of cruel people, not much more. Like mustard gas or plutonium. I'd forgotten that to use it at all was a blasphemous violation. That it was not only Yuuki who was being spent, there on the dissecting table, but also the dead souls of cointless others, siphoned up and filtered and diluted into easily measurable doses.

I bit my lip, thinking.

My eyes would be green one day. Sephiroth hadn't been born with green eyes, though he'd been born with silver hair. The slit pupils already existed, but my eyes were an off-putting icy white-blue that manifested from a lack of colouring in the iris, like regular blue eyes, interacting with a strange property of my Jenova genetics, which created a layer of cells between the layers of the iris that lightened my eyes further and caused it to glow very slightly. Combining these factors with the tapetum lucidum, I had the eyes of an edgelord anime boy even before they got any greenness or the mako glow. It was almost a plausibly natural colour. I wondered how much mako it would take to turn them green. SOLDIER eyes were supposed to be glowing blue. I wonder how mine differed. Maybe it would be a direct injection. My first eyeball dissection had been just a few months ago, at the direction of a bored assistant who gave me a scalpel and some glowing disembodied eyeballs that had been about to be discarded. I hadn't really questioned why he'd had so many unattached eyeballs floating about - it seemed suitably creepy and Hojo-ish. But it would make sense, if Hojo was conducting trials in more expendable subjects before he gave me a potential enhancement. A lot of his stress lately had been the ongoing trials to determine the procedure for my SOLDIER enhancements. I tried not to think about the body count or the death toll. Maybe those eyeballs had just been cloned from my cells or something.

I resisted the sudden wild impulse to rip out my own eyes. Some of the eyeballs had been brown, some green, some even glowing red. I hoped that hadn't had anything to do with Vincent. Some had been my exact shade of icy washed out blue.

I sat in front of the vanity for a good while, just staring at myself. I tried to make myself finish drying off. My hair was dripping all over the floor. I needed to change and go to sleep. I needed to brush my teeth. I needed to start planning my next steps, now that I finally had room for rebellions beyond being petty and unsettling. I couldn't do it though. I just sat there, staring at myself in the vanity mirror like a middle aged housewife having a crisis about her aging looks.

I thunked my forehead down on the vanity table. I wanted nothing more than to say fuck it all and suicide bomb Shinra tower. I wanted to run away and never come back. I wanted to escape to somewhere where no one knew who I was and where people would treat me like a person. I wanted to lie down on the floor and never get back up.

But I knew what I needed to do. I needed to destroy Jenova, and I needed to wreck Shinra's shit. Being left alone in the house had given me a false sense of security. There were probably s hundred cameras watching me from every angle. I had to get it together. I had to get it together. I had to get it together. I was Sephiroth. I was motherfucking Sephiroth. I was going to be Sephiroth.

I was going to let myself be turned into a monster and a weapon. That was what I was going to do. I didn't have a choice anyways, but I needed the utility of the enhancements. Violence was sometimes the answer, if the megacorp killing the world spent the majority of their budget on military personnel and weapons research. I just needed to make sure I wouldn't be puppeted around by Jenova.

The interpretation of whether post-Nibelheim psychotic break Sephiroth was independently insane, being influenced by Jenova, or just completely mind controlled hadn't exactly been a life or death literary question in my previous life. The Japanese version showed changed speech patterns which the remake hinted would be a key plot point, but the English version made it less obvious. I was speaking English and not Japanese, though we called it Midgardian. What that said about my chances of not having a psychotic break in the Nibelheim reactor wasn't clear. Especially since Sephiroth wanted violence and revenge on Shinra, but I actually wanted to return to my home world. This deepest of all my desires would leave me vulnerable.

But then again, I knew who and what Jenova was. I knew that the cost of leaving this planet was too high. I knew that there was basically zero chance that my version of earth would even exist. I'd need to invent dimension travel.

I froze.

Oh.

Oh.

I was Sephiroth. Assuming speculation about Remake wasn't completely off, I probably was capable of dimension travel. That is, if I'd gotten to the point of ascension.

Some psychosomatic twinge of pain lanced through my right shoulder blade. Softly, I began to laugh.

That false hope was no hope at all.

I would just have to make the best of it here. I would have to do what I could, and no more. Hubris had been Sephiroth's sin, once upon a time. Hubris and arrogance. I was no Cetra, no inheritor of the planet. I was not Jenova's child, not the planet's enemy. I was just a science experiment. I was just a kid. For now. One day, I would be a man. That was all. A great man, perhaps, a deadly one. I was already besting children twice my age when Hojo thought to test my martial progress. But unlike other Sephiroths who were transhuman and perhaps post-human without really understanding what those concepts were, I had spent too much of a previous life writing essays about cyborgs and AIs and also being you know, not white, not straight, not cis, and not male enough to dive face first into "I am a monster" or "I am a God" at the slightest procovation. If I ever became a monster, it would be through complicity in Shinra's exploitation or turning to ecofascism, not because I had cool pupils.

It did help that mostly, I used to see Sephiroth as hot villainous pin-up eye candy with the chest strap titty lingerie situation and a big sword and sexy, sexy hair. I was not proud to admit that I used to also have a...monster fucking thing. The wings and the haloes of the safer form did it for me almost as much as the long silky hair and low silky voice and big sexy odachi. Well. That was before, obviously. I was now prepubescent and incapable of feeling real attraction. I was also not that kind of narcissist.

Also, you'd never know that majestically animated hair had wetted a hundred thousand pairs panties from the sad tangled state of it now. Laughing hysterically, I began the most important part of my daily routine. Hair maintenance.