A/N: Yep, heres an actual chapter, in addition to the omake i just posted. Two updates in one day, please call me Stephen King because i am obviously an absolute unstoppable writing machine. Jkjk, the omake was actually written and posted to AO3 a little while ago, I'm as slow a writer as ever lmao :(

Edit: actually I thought about it and decided to change the categories to gen and drama instead, maybe that might be more accurate? I hate how limited FFN's category system is.

Consciousness descended upon me all at once. There was no moment of sleepy confusion, no split second between sleep and wakefulness where I was warm and safe and happy. I was warm, certainly, but I opened my eyes with total clarity and immediately knew where I was and what was going on. The pain did not descend on me like a wave, but rather continued as a steady fact of life, unaffected by sleeping or waking.

I looked around the room. It was monitoring room 1A, as I had expected. A standard issue surveillance camera protruded in a corner of the ceiling. A heart monitor beeped. I smiled at the camera in greeting to whoever was on surveillance duty. Veld would never tell me how exactly these things were done, but I at least knew it was a Turk who went through all the camera feeds.

I was hooked up to an IV line with a couple of bags hanging from it. There was an oxygen mask dangling near the head of the bed. I touched my bare face. I was recovered enough to breathe on my own again. The driness of my mouth and throat warred with the roiling nausea of my empty stomach. I didn't know if I wanted to guzzle a galleon of water or to hurl my guts out. I was catheterised still, a night bag hanging from the frame of the hospital bed.

I wriggled my toes. Then I rotated my ankles. As I worked up my body, testing it and waking up the muscles little by little, the slow steady beeping of my heart monitor picked up speed marginally. I was confident enough in my mobility that I struggled into a sitting position.

I looked at the catheter and at the IV pole. Then I considered the distance between myself and the bathroom. I sighed sadly and reached for the landline phone on the bedside table. The computing power required for an infusion pump with a digital screen and a full face of little buttons for sure had to be more expensive and complex than a nurse call button, but I guess even Science had budget limits, since I was relegated to squinting at the smudged numbers taped above the numbers display of the phone and punching them in so I could dial the CCTV monitoring room where an on-call employee who monitored sensitive experiments overnight usually

"Hey," I said hoarsely when the number picked up. "It's Sephiroth. Can you come help me pee?"

It was Miele who answered. "You've got a catheter," he mumbled sleepily, clearly typing at a keyboard.

"Well, come take out my catheter so I can piss properly, then," I snapped.

"It's there for a reason," Miele muttered. "I need to monitor your postoperative-"

"I'll piss into a cup if I have to," I interrupted. "I don't care about my urine output. It's annoying and it's unnecessary and I want it out."

Miele made a couple of vague noises as he finished typing, then clicked on whatever it was, probably to save. "Okay," he said eventually, "I'll ask Doctor Hojo once it stops being 4am."

I emitted a groan of frustration, but didn't push it anymore. "Fine," I bit out. "Can you come get me some water at least? And I want a snack."

My stomach roiled in protest at the very idea. But I was also hungry. And in a war between hunger and nausea, I preferred to eat and then hurl rather than suffer nausea on an empty stomach.

"I'll get you a shake and some juice," Miele said, hanging up. A few seconds later, he arrived with water, a bottle of premixed meal replacement shake, and a bottle of the juice I always stocked my corner of the break room fridge with.

"Hey Sephiroth, you're up," Miele said sleepily. He was a middle aged man, probably a little older than Hojo, but not by much. His watery blue eyes were red and tired, and his weak chin seemed to wibble with nervousness even when he was smiling down at me. There was something boyish about him. Even Hojo seemed more paternal than this round faced schlub. The pathetic gentleness of his presence was offset by his scientific competence and his marginally less corrupt than average sense of ethics.

"Yeah," I grumbled. "Wish I had never been cursed with consciousness, but whatever. Thanks for the juice."

He cracked the lids on the bottles then closed them up loosely and placed them on the bedside table within arm's reach of me.

"You want a straw?" he asked amicably.

"No thanks," I said. Miele gave me the finger guns in response. He changed the bag for my catheter, made a few notes on my chart, fussed with the retro-chic infusion pump's settings, then wandered off yawning back towards his office.

I cracked open the bottle of juice, which was an orange and mango blend that was my favourite. I was still a little unsteady, but my hands were strong enough to grip a juice bottle. I drank a few mouthfuls until my mouth stopped feeling like the Sahara and tasting like old socks.

After I felt better, I stretched gently. I was feeling pretty good, all things considered. There was pain, sure, but it was a simple, surface kind of pain that was easier to weather than the throb of mako in my veins or the fiery burn of mako in my lungs. It was almost like pressing on a bruise or stretching a sore muscle. I felt pleasantly wrung out, tired but not sleepy. By the warm low glow of the bedside lamp, I fumbled for the clipboard with my charts and flipped through them. They were not quite medical - I was, after all, a specimen rather than a patient. The data was meticulous and multitudinous. I waded through it all, looking for the key indicators of success. My heart was already beating a little slower, my MP capacity was increasing slowly but steadily with every hour, and the levels of pituitary hormones and catecholamines in my body were lower than what was to be expected after the procedures I'd underwent, even though my cytokine levels had briefly spiked off the charts.

Materia cured a lot, but it didn't erase the stress response the body gave to surgery. Mako, it seemed, very much could. Even in the early stages of modification, my body was becoming better able to deal with stress - it was not that my body had not acknowledged the stress of the surgery, but that the mako made the materia heal me better, and my own healing factor was beginning to kick in, and therefore I was well healed almost before my body finished acknowledging my wounds in the first place.

After I finished flipping through the pages on the clipboard and scrutinising the latest blood test results, I chugged the remnant of the juice bottle and struggled to my feet. I felt like I was going to hurl, but having something sugary in my stomach also revived me. The liquid sloshed around in my belly as I picked up my catheter bag - a big one for night time use, not one of the smaller ones you can strap to your hip - and gripped the IV pole for support as I stood, walked two steps to a wheelchair, and collapsed into it. My lungs burned and a mouthful of juice very nearly escaped back up, but I gripped the metal of the IV pole with white knuckled fingers until my body's protests subsided into a layer of cold sweat and the baseline discomfort, then wheeled myself the further meter and a half to the computer.

Using Hojo's credentials to log in, I corroborated the data on the hard copy of my charts and noted down the locations of a few videos that I wanted access to once I was more sentient. Then I sent an email to Veld telling him I was alright at that he was a creep for watching me while I slept. I hoped he did, anyway, and even if my guess was wrong he would still take the jab as the reassurance that it was meant as. And he's bad too. Win-win-win for Sephiroth.

I wheeled myself over to the corner of the room where my chocobo backpack had been abandoned, set it in my lap, then wheeled myself back to the computer. I took out something that made me snicker every time I saw it. It was an old school 3.5 inch floppy disk. Sure, it held a whopping 60 MBs of data, and was, if compared to earth of the 1980's and even the 90's, astonishingly advanced tech, but it was a floppy disk and I was a late-generation millennial. I giggled quietly to myself.

I copied as much of the information pertaining to the procedure and to project S as I could access and fit into the disk. Then I did it again two more times, this time with strange little boxes that looked like a modern portable hard drive, only it used a port that wasn't a USB of any kind, and had only about 120MBs worth of storage each. For these drives, I managed to fit in all the non-media files, plus a respectable number of photos and even a few short blurry videos.

I was grateful, in a way, that the tech in this world was slightly futuristic, relative to the timeline. If I had to deal with 80's earth computers, I might have just ended it all. Instead, the level of tech was more or less mid 90's ish, with fluctuations here and there that were more or less advanced than earth. Here on the very cutting edge of technology, I was still constantly frustrated though.

I found the pen I always kept in my bag and scrawled out "Sephy's First Mako Treatment XOXO" onto the floppy disk's label, then surrounded the limp, messy writing with little hearts and stars and asterisks that looked more like the work of a five year old. Hey, I was still in a lot of pain, alright? Give me a break.

I left the two hard drives untouched though. Having done all that, I logged out of Hojo's account and gave the camera in the corner of the room a thumbs up. Then I returned my ill gotten data to my backpack and returned to bed, where I proceeded to snore away until midday, when I was woken for a check up, to remove my catheter, and another MRI scan. After another day of nausea and liquids, my appetite eventually returned, and I was scarfing down chicken noodle soup from the cafeteria before Hojo could so much as roll his eyes about sodium intake. I was an active lad constantly sweating from pain, I could use the sodium. I trundled home to my big empty house the day after that, and was back on my training schedule that same day. For all the pain and the invasive surgery, the recovery was amazingly quick. I was once again nauseated and unsettled by the endless potential of magic and materia. It unsettled me even worse than the pain and the body modification. The way that you could just heal someone with what was essentially a magic rock and some mental energy was absolutely disgusting. The lack of a physical recovery period left me feeling and confused, at loose ends because I was absolutely nowhere near mentally recovered, but I had no physical suffering to reflect the mental anguish. Oh well, it was better than having to worry about antirejection medication for organ transplants or post surgical pain management. If I was in pain, it was from mako, and nothing could be done. Otherwise, nothing was beyond the power of a Cure spell or two.

Things moved quickly after that. I didn't get more surgery, but the mako infusion hit me hard and fast. Yuuki and I spent a little bit more time together when our infusion schedules coincided, whiling away the time hooked up to bags and bags of glowing mako. I learned to ignore the constant agony of my days, and soon I could attend my training and lessons the day after a mako infusion, though sparring on the same day was a big ask. I couldn't feel anything through the pain of the mako in my body, and so often misjudged my strikes and ignored bruises and sprains I shouldn't have ignored. I took to reading and writing with my free hand during my interminable sessions, bursts of eight to ten hours hooked up to a needle with each session spaced three or four days apart so I'd get enough time to recovery and maintain my physical conditioning in-between. Eventually, I got so used to it that I would just grab my IV pole and wander around Science Department or skip off to do whatever I wanted. I started seeing less of the house in sector eight and spent half my nights in that monitoring room. My weekly routines collapsed and I now rarely ever left the Shinra Building. I saw the sun more in the extremely rudimentary VR training room than I did in actuality. Veld came by to walk me home sometimes the day after an infusion, when I was sufficiently recovered to be let go but not recovered enough to be trusted to defend myself or call for help if some hypothetical enemy of Shinra decided to kidnap me.

The every three to four day cycle of IV infusion was supplemented with a twelve hour to twenty four hour dip into mako once every three cycles. Yuuki hated these, and allegedly would hurt himself bashing against the glass trying to escape if he wasn't sedated, but I tolerated them by dragging in the biggest TV I could find and playing the movie channel with subtitles on. It passed the time, especially since Lucrecia was no longer around for astral projection cuddles, probably because she had left the cave. Sure, I was in pain all the time, but you get used to anything, and after that, the monotony of the pain gets worse than the intensity, and a distraction could get me through basically anything. Which was why I spent a lot of time listening in on Angeal and Genesis, who were grappling with long division and spelling tests and art projects whenever I checked in on them. Ah, the innocence of childhood. I was jealous of them, not on my own behalf, but for Yuuki's sake, as well as Maya and Nero and Weiss and all the other children being raised in a lab by Shinra scientists.

Jenova was the same as ever, that monotonous call of Reunion.

The worst experience throughout all of this was being in the same room as Yuuki when we both went for our mako dips. Yuuki kept screaming and crying and banging his fists futilely on the glass, even though he'd let himself be lowered in as docilely as a well trained lamb. He bled from his fingernails after scratching too hard - it was futile, the glass was designed to hold mutants and makonoid monsters. Then he had remembered that I was there, and tried to tell things at me, though obviously I couldn't make out what he was saying. He passed out eventually, but woke soon enough to start thrashing again. He was removed when the sensors monitoring his tank showed his brainwaves going funny and his psychic presence threaten to leave his body. I shrugged at Hojo when he glanced at me and used the etch 'n' sketch I took into the tank with me to ask someone to change the channel on my TV. I felt really weird for a good two weeks after that, and I was quietly grateful Hojo decided that Yuuki's heightened reactions to having me in the room was worth too much trouble, and kept us apart even when we were slated to be tanked at the same time. I didn't really like to think about it. To feel the pain and anguish and helplessness like that, well. I guess Tachibana must have been a pretty good mother to him outside of the lab, if his instincts told him expressing his distress so dramatically would produce any kind of result. If I let myself feel things that acutely, I'd probably go the way of the real Sephiroth and crack like an egg.

Things continued like that for two long gruelling months. I lost track of the days and weeks and only knew how long it was until my next shot. I stopped meditating because I was being watched and measured even more relentlessly than usual, and I was afraid someone would spot something irregular in my J cell activity. I stopped being able to get my silly little philosophy books from the library. I learned how to play the scales and basic tunes on the trombone. Someone vacuumed out the specimen holding cell Hojo used to dunk me into when I got too loud with instrument practice, and I often shut myself inside, with the lights turned off as to avoid aggravating the light sensitive migraines the infusions often gave me. Sometimes my ears were too sensitive and I just lied very still in the dark room, but most of the time I was determined to distract myself.

By the faint glow of the bags of mako and the unnatural, unsettling glow of my own eyes, I would sometimes practice playing each individual part of the complex orchestral piece I had been arranging for the past few years. Look, I didn't have a perfect memory of my last life, and it took me time to figure out what sounded right. One way or another though, I was going to put together a recording of myself playing One Winged Angel, and I was going to figure out how to blast it from the speakers every time I entered a room. Maybe, if things all went to plan, I could play it when I someday demolished Shinra Tower.

Little frivolous distractions were the way I had managed to remain sane until now, and it would be how I continued on in the future. I had no intention of having a mental breakdown and descending into megalomania, so I exercised my frivolity often.

A/N: Hmm I feel like I want to change the title... When I first started this fic I had intended to making Sephiroth snark a lot more about how many mental breakdowns could have been averted by knowing what posthumanism is or just having watched a couple of sci-fi cyberpunk movies meditating on the nature of humanity, but I feel like I've gone off the rails the title doesn't really fit anymore. What do you guys think? I'm pretty conflicted.