Sephiroth wound his way through the infirmary.
Nurses and doctors nodded at him as he passed. He nodded back and avoided conversation. He had always had a strained relationship with Shinra's medical staff, even the ones that had nothing to do with SOLDIER. He could feel their eyes on the back of his head.
He reached Angeal's door, where the mumble of quiet talking seeped through the walls. He entered without knocking.
Genesis sat on a chair by the bed, one ankle resting on his knee and the latest issue of a lifestyle magazine in his hands. Angeal looked as though he were only sleeping.
"They've said to use suet pastry," Genesis was saying, "but if you're going to make beef bourguignon only to hide it in a pie, then I say you have no business not making your own puff pastry."
Sephiroth's shoulders relaxed.
Genesis waved and continued his scathing analysis of recipes. Angeal swore by the Midgar Gourmet and if he could hear them then he was probably arguing every point in his head. Sephiroth listened in as he checked the soil of the orchid he had replaced the plastic plant with, and watered it from a drink bottle.
"However, this porchetta recipe may be salvageable," Genesis said. "Their technique leaves much to be desired but we can fix that. What do you think, Sephiroth?"
"It doesn't sound like part of a well balanced diet."
"Perhaps it'll help put some meat on your bones then."
"I'll take a whey protein shake."
Genesis gave him a mock scowl.
Sephiroth smiled and leaned against the wall. Genesis sniffed and turned the page.
"Better save the indulgences for Angeal," Sephiroth said. He was still too skinny and pale, but he did look marginally improved. The dark lines creeping along his chest had slowed their progress. His eyes roamed under his eyelids.
"Then it's decided." Genesis tossed the magazine aside and stood. "When you wake up we shall have a feast."
"That may be sooner than we thought," Sephiroth said.
"Oh?"
"They're planning to wake him up in a week."
Genesis looked down at their friend, his expression clouded. He looked pale too, the faint capillaries on his neck visible.
"Good. That's good," Genesis said quietly.
They said their goodbyes to Angeal and left together. The elevator ride back to the SOLDIER level was silent and thoughtful. Sephiroth had questions about Angeal and Genesis' condition but he wouldn't bring them up out in the open. He wasn't entirely sure he wanted to bring them up even in private.
Genesis walked with his forehead creased. He followed Sephiroth back to his office unasked and sat on the couch, his arms crossed. Sephiroth stood before the floor to ceiling windows. It was a sunny and dry outside, with high winds bringing in the dust of the wastes and painting it across the eastern faces of all the towers.
"Why were the two of you allowed to be raised outside of the company?" he asked.
There was a long pause. He almost hoped Genesis wouldn't answer, he couldn't imagine any kind of answer that didn't leave a bad taste in his mouth.
"Because we're failures," Genesis replied, at long last. It was dull and with none of the usual anger or indignation.
Sephiroth turned, his hands clasped behind his back. "SRD doesn't hand its failures over to loving families in the countryside."
"You don't know the first thing about my family," Genesis snapped.
"I know you have one," he said, and immediately regretted it.
Genesis frowned. "You've got one now too," he offered.
"Where?"
Genesis gave him a dirty look.
"What did they do to you?" Sephiroth asked, trying to shift the focus off himself. "What parameters did you fall short of?"
Genesis leaned back on the couch and adjusted his fringe. "Sorry, that's privileged information. Family members only."
It was Sephiroth's turn to give a dirty look. "I can ask as your CO if you'd prefer."
"You'll have to submit a E47 clearance request form then."
"You're such a pain."
"Sir, yes, sir," Genesis sneered. "You can't have it both ways."
"Neither can you. You've been ignoring me for months."
Genesis looked away. "You're the one asking for personal information."
"Fine." Sephiroth pulled out his chair and sat at his desk. He heaved a resigned breath. "As someone you once called brother-"
"And still do if you'd stop being so superior about it."
"Where did you... come from?"
Genesis looked straight ahead at a blank patch of wall. "Hollander."
"I mean who were your biolog-"
"I know what you meant."
Sephiroth didn't know what to say. The silence stretched out, long and uncomfortable.
"I see."
He had never noticed any of the scientist's features in Genesis face, not in his build or colouring. Perhaps in the set of his eyes, or the sweep of his brow. Genesis scowled at the wall, refusing to look at him.
"What about your mother?"
He shrugged. "Unnamed. The good doctor purchased the eggs from a donor, but he wasn't about to waste funds on a resource he could provide for free."
Sephiroth made a face in distaste. "Unprofessional. It risks compromising the objectivity of the experiment."
Genesis finally looked at him. "You wanted to know why the failures weren't terminated and their tissue used as samples in other projects. 'Compromised objectivity.'" He barked a bitter laugh and looked up, anger flashing in his eyes. "If I ever write a memoir that will be the title."
"What about the incubator?" Sephiroth asked, uncomfortable with the emotional display.
"Gillian Hewley. Don't call her that."
He paused. "So you and Angeal really are brothers. Does he know?"
Genesis shook his head. "She lied. The closest thing I have to a loving parent and she did nothing but lie to my face."
"It's my understanding that families are like that."
Genesis sighed and looked to the heavens again. Sephiroth picked up a pen and rifled through his inbox. There was nothing that required urgent attention but he needed something else to focus on.
"Do you have any clue where you come from?" Genesis asked.
"Don't you?" Sephiroth found a safe and routine requisition order to look at. "Hollander gave you access to everything else."
"Even he didn't have access to your files."
"It's Hojo," he said, his eyes following the lines and not picking up on a single word.
Genesis nodded. "Yes, he is very protective of his research."
"That's not what I meant."
The pause that followed was terrible. He didn't look up from the paper.
"I am truly sorry."
"He thinks I don't know. Like it's some kind of joke he has over me."
"And your mother?"
He breathed out slowly. He didn't know why he was telling him this. He had never told anyone.
"Her name was Jenova." The name felt strange on his tongue. He had never said it outloud before. "It's all I know about her, other than she died in childbirth."
"I'm sorry," Genesis said again.
"What makes you think I want pity any more than you do?"
Genesis stood and faced him from the other side of the desk. "It isn't pity. I'm sympathising."
"I didn't ask for your sympathy."
He scowled. "Well I'm sorry I'm not enough, but Angeal isn't here to be graceful about it. I'm trying."
Sephiroth looked up and gave him a flat expression.
Genesis made a sound of frustration and spun away. He marched to the door.
"Genesis."
He halted, his hand on the door knob.
Sephiroth wasn't sure what he wanted to say. 'Thank you'? 'You're not a disappointment'? 'You don't have to be sorry'? He couldn't honestly say any of those things.
He settled for, "I know you're trying."
Genesis looked back at him. His frown said that he would have preferred to have simply been stabbed.
He left without another word.
Sephiroth's grim mood followed him through the day and into the dreamscape.
He roamed the shifting islands of the Lifestream. He wanted to find more memories of the woman who had turned into a dragon, but there was no trail. Faint, incomprehensible memories sprung up from the fabric of the dream, only to fall apart into smudges of colour. He concentrated, his eyes closed.
On the edge of hearing, a dragon roared. He opened his eyes. The unformed clay of the Lifestream still surrounded him, but the shadow of a winged beast flew across the ground. He followed, climbing a hill.
More shadows joined it, flying in formation. He crested the hill, and bombs fell from shinra airships, carving up the soil of the Da Chao valley.
He gritted his teeth in frustration.
Dust and the smell of burning bodies filled the air. A familiar voice cried out.
He had dreamed of the massacre so many times the horror had worn off, but it had never been so vivid, not so alive. In his dreams the valley had always been empty.
He followed the voice. Through the fallen groves of birch trees, the overturned tanks, and the scores of bodies. The light dimmed to a bloody sunset. A teenage Genesis stumbled through the wreckage.
He looked so young.
Sephiroth slowed to a stop.
Genesis searched the destruction, clutching his sword too tightly. His torn Second Class uniform hung ragged and stained off of him. Sephiroth had forgotten how hurt and scared he looked. He hadn't learned how to hide it yet.
"Goddess, your leg, Sephiroth!" Genesis cried.
Sephiroth looked down. His leg was that mangled ruin Hojo got so furious about. One of Shinra's bombs had landed directly on top of him. Genesis stumbled over to him and started casting cure, his reserves so drained it barely did anything. He kept on trying, determined to the point of unreasonable, as he always was when overtired.
He knew it wasn't real, but he let the memory sweep him away. It wasn't complete, he vaguely recalled that more had happened that night, but the details were patchy.
He did remember the awkward height difference as they hobbled away, leaning on each other. He remembered the stench of the fires followed them the whole walk back, the way one of his suspenders had been sliced through, leaving his pauldrons sliding back to weigh against his spine.
"We're going to make it," Genesis rasped. "Just you wait and see. We're… we're going to survive. We'll show them."
Genesis had been poisoned. It came back to him slowly, how he had shivered against Sephiroth's side, despite overheating with a fever. The inclines of the small rolling hills were hellish with his wounded leg, pain shooting up his spine with every step.
"We're going to make it," Genesis said again.
With his experience now he could list a dozen things they had done wrong, but in the moment those thoughts drifted away, and he was left only with Genesis' litany of reassurances.
He hadn't needed reassurance. He focused on moving his legs and remaining upright.
"They're going to give us so many medals for this. They might even let you drink champagne at the party afterwards. Nobody will care you're only seventeen."
It had become background noise the first time, vaguely irritating. Sephiroth wasn't concerned over whether or not they would survive, and the promise of more attention if they did was grating. Either he would survive and be reprimanded for the injury, or he didn't survive and it would cease to be his problem.
"It can't be much further. Just… just keep going. We're almost there."
How had his younger self had missed that Genesis' reassurances were for himself? He had been so afraid. On the verge of tears with terror and fever.
Had he said anything in reply? He couldn't remember. The dream supplied nothing, so silence met Genesis' words. In time, he stopped talking.
Sephiroth shook the memory off, and the whole thing staggered.
He stepped back. He didn't want to dream of this. The green and burning hills blurred. He took hold of the imagery and twisted it back into empty clay. He had entered the Lifestream with a goal, this was a distraction.
Frowning, he turned away. He was trained to show no weakness and require no support, and he always excelled at his training. Genesis always demanded so much.
He hadn't walked home on his own strength, though.
He had always valued Genesis' friendship, even when the man cut him out and hid things from him. Genesis was such a grudge holder.
He lowered his head and walked away. His vindication didn't feel as strong as it had. The dream island faded away, and he walked across dusty plains.
He kept digging for memories of the dragon woman, looking for another life to distract him from his own. There was no dragon cry, no roar or crack of heavy leather wings.
Without sound or visible change, the woman walked alongside him. She moved silently, a long silver braid swaying down her back.
He didn't look directly at her, lest the memory crumble. She looked up at the sun, dark eyes roaming the bleak horizon. She had a bow on her back and a hunting knife strapped to her side. Was that what she was, a monster hunter?
She crossed the plains alone and slipped into a small port city he didn't recognise. He thought it had to be Cetran. It glowed with magic and the people carried materia unlike any he knew. The hunter's ears lost their points, her hair changed to shiny black and her skin lost its golden hues, matching the pale inhabitants. She walked through the thronging crowds unnoticed.
He followed, ducking and weaving and almost losing her in the hazy, churning memory. His curiosity grew with every step. She wove through the lower levels, up through tiered streets and lofty gardens, into a stained glass filled palace that glowed under a golden sunset.
She entered through wide open doors of mother of pearl, drew her bow, and slaughtered the city's rulers.
Sephiroth watched from the doorway, rays of beautiful light shining through him.
The Cetra, for it was undeniable now that she was not one of them, fought well. She spilled their blood upon glowing white thrones. Screams reached him from below, enemies within the walls taking the city.
The memories flowed through him. The hunter celebrated her victory with others who looked like her, family, friends, a wife. Despicable though she was among her own she was loved. He saw years race past, taking ground, losing it, retaking it, moments of soaring triumph and crushing defeat.
He thought he hated her.
He watched her sit in choking grief at the side of a fallen comrade, on a battlefield walked by only scavenger birds.
He watched her slaughter prisoners of war, their blood staining her hands.
He had never ordered such a thing himself. He followed orders but such things were never his idea. She followed nobody's orders, and relished carrying out her own. She was free and unstoppable, bound to no command but her own.
The thought haunted him as he watched her argue with what looked like a brother, silver haired rulers both in magnificent armour. She had no idea what it was to be subject to the will of another.
She walked the killing fields again, shaking off the afterimage of her dragon form. Death rattles carried on the air. The voice of a bereft mother calling for her son rose over them all. Another victim.
She wasn't a hunter of monsters, she was the monster.
He hated her. He followed her until his alarm went off, and he opened his eyes to an apartment bought with Shinra's money.
Aerith stood in-her flower filled corner of the Fade and looked into her repaired version of the Eluvian mirror. It towered over her, impressive in its sheer size, with an eye-catching, rippling glass surface, that didn't do anything at all.
She scrunched her face up in a frown. It didn't even reflect people, so it was failing at being a mirror too.
"Did you believe escape would be so easy?" Rebellion said from behind her. Tseng's face reflected through the mirror, right through where she should have been.
"Shh," Innovation said, a pesky little kid of about 12 with sticky fingers and a couple of missing teeth. "She's still thinking."
She hummed and rubbed her chin. She was thinking, thinking that she was all out of ideas.
The Sephiroth spirit had lost interest in the project after the physical construction was done and she couldn't articulate the rest of her goals. She had spent many nights with Innovation and Rebellion ever since, trying to figure out the rest.
Rebellion kept sneakily changing the surroundings to the Shinra labs, just to be an ass. She saw a glass observation deck rise up from the over of her eyes.
She had picked up a great deal of Fade shaping from the Sephiroth spirit. She flicked a hand, and creeping vines crawled up the glass walls and dragged it back down. It joined all the broken mounds scattered around them, reduced to incomprehensible lumps reclaimed by nature and hundreds of years of erosion. The area felt like a peaceful monument to a lost civilization now.
The only thing that sprung, untouched, from the foliage was the Eluvian.
"How do I make it connect?" she muttered. "Do I have to make two of them?"
"That would get you no closer to the Thedas network," said Rebellion.
"Well, maybe it could help me figure out how the connections work. What kind of magic makes it run."
Innovation cocked their head in thought. "How were the first Eluvians connected?"
"I don't know."
"Maybe you need some mechanism for detecting them. You need to reach out for them." They walked around the mirror, their short legs drifting unhindered through the thick mat of plant life. "Or maybe you need to be there in the flesh. Or maybe the mirror needs to be in the physical world."
"Or perhaps all the mirrors in a network were made in unison, already connected," Rebellion said, his arms crossed. "A closed network."
She shook her head. "That can't be it." If it was, then she was wasting her time. "No."
Rebellion raised an eyebrow at her in the mirror.
"Are you sure you're not a spirit of Contradiction?" she groused.
She studied the mirror again, its framework. As difficult as replicating the glass had been, fencing it in had been nearly impossible. The slippery substance ran where it wanted, fickle and liable to being destroyed with the faintest brush of the wrong magical control. It was sealed in and stable now, but maybe that was the problem, was it meant to be sealed in before it was linked in to the network?
She had no idea. She let out an exhausted sigh.
"I'm copying a broken model. If I had a working mirror to copy from it would probably be easy."
"But you don't," Innovation said, popping up at her side. Their reflection showed a hungry gleam in their eyes. "You have to solve the problem yourself."
"Sorry. I can't think of anything tonight."
Innovation's shoulders slumped, and even Rebellion looked a little disappointed in her. Uncalled for.
"I'm going to try asking Aega," she decided. "She must have seen them when they were up and running. But not tonight." She spun away from the mirror, waving the thought away with a hand. She shook her hands out and stretched her fingers. She strode away from that area to a fresh and empty patch of flowers. The spirits followed.
"...Tonight, we cure the Blight."
Rebellion scoffed. "You do not lack ambition."
"Are you going to help or not?" she asked sharply.
"I'll help!" Innovation chimed in.
"Show me what you're going to do first," Rebellion said.
She pulled her staff from her back and twirled it in her hands, thinking over how to explain it. She lifted the staff and raised a flat earthen platform three feet above the flowers. It was a large circle with the same patterns carved into it she had seen both in the Pearl City and the Sleeping Forest. She leapt up onto it and looked down at the two spirits.
"Aega showed me the memory of an Ancient Cetra twisting a piece of the lifestream into someone."
Rebellion frowned.
Innovation's eyes widened and their brows rose. "Was it in the dreaming or the waking?"
"In the waking, I thought." Actually, how did that work? To draw the physical substance of the Lifestream into the physical world? Matriarch Coerla must have been incalculably powerful.
"I think…" she started, "that the Blight is corrupted life energy."
"Like stagnant Mako?" Rebellion asked.
"Worse. Much worse. But if I can overwhelm it with healthy life energy…"
"What is to stop the corruption from eating away at that just as easily?"
"Well, that's why the braid has got to be strong and stable," she replied, trying to sound sure of herself. She scowled at Rebellion, who didn't look any more convinced. "Stop nay-saying, I'm doing my best."
The spirit frowned at her, the similarity to Tseng faltering. She forgot sometimes how alien the glowing creatures really were.
"I want you to break the yoke of the Blight, the blanket command of its control," the spirit said. "This is not that."
Innovation shook their head and scrambled up onto the platform. "No, try it. You don't know until you try."
"Thank you, Innovation."
She pushed her braid off her shoulder and spun to face the platform, giving Rebellion her back. Innovation looked to her for instructions.
"So, we're going to pull on the substance of the Fade and twist it into a basic healing spell from the creation school, you know this one?" She opened her palm and let the barebones framework of the spell glow in her hand. "Once we've figured out how to make that work, we'll try again with a more powerful spell, and work our way up."
Innovation nodded and stood opposite her, hands raised, ready to help.
She reached out to take hold of the Lifestream, the Planet, the Mother herself.
She felt a little blasphemous. Technically all magic was using the power of the planet, and the ability to access it a gift born of Gaia's love of her children. Even so, it felt profoundly wrong. It was easier said than done too.
Innovation tutted and took her hands, changing her technique. She took hold of the fabric of the Fade and yanked it. It was thin and slippery, difficult to grasp, and even harder to shape how she wanted it to. Innovation helped, lending her control she lacked. The viscous quality of the air changed, the flow shuddering.
It was spell crafting completely unlike anything she had ever encountered. Sweat beaded at her forehead and her arms shook with the strain. Her mana was rapidly draining. She forced it into wonky shape, then twisted that into a glowing attempt of a braid. The air was completely silent of all sound but her panting, and even that sounded muffled. The glow leaked blindingly out of her hands, making it impossible to see what she was working on. She worked by feel alone.
It slipped and the spell released with a sigh.
The light evaporated and it began to rain. She blinked in the comparative dark. She looked up with sore eyes, trying to cover her face from the water with an aching, shaking hand. The water was falling exclusively over the circular platform.
It dribbled down her arm and her exhaustion ebbed away. Innovation's eyes were gleaming.
She woke up with a start, spluttering through water in her mouth. She sat up. Her sheets and pillow were sopping wet and her hair plastered to her face. She stumbled out of bed and down the hall to the bathroom. She buried her face in a towel, and laughed, more confused than anything else. So much for attempt number one.
She pulled the towel down and examined in the mirror the frizzy disaster her fringe had become.
She slowed to a stop. Her face looked odd. It took her a moment to realise what was different. Her old acne scars had disappeared. She looked down at her hands. All the nicks and grazes to her knuckles, even that ugly one that kept reopening on the back of her thumb, were gone without a trace.
A/N: Sorry for missing last week, I needed a break. Thanks for sticking with me, all reviews are appreciated.
Next Time: The Cure Questions Mark?
