Chapter 97 - A Scientist and a SOLDIER
August, 2002
Sephiroth has stopped talking.
He realizes it, bitter and acidic on his tongue. There is nothing in him to be expressed. He starts skipping meals. It is a thrill to be hungry. There is control in it which the rest of it has been torn away from him. He is surrounded by eyes. Any trust that Shinra has in him is gone. They trapped him, leashed him, handcuffed him to a desk. While from the outside, they continue to present him as the golden boy, the pedestal he is put on is as much a cage as it is a showcase.
The apartment empties slowly as he fills his time with cleaning it out.
He throws away nearly everything. He finds items stashed away from years of life. Pens from conferences disappear. He keeps three for practical purposes. The two winter coats he has are reduced to one. An abandoned pair of earbuds are tossed. He continues to work through his life and removes himself from it. Papers, receipts, postcards sent by Angeal from far away places, he takes them and removes them.
It cleans away his life.
It passes the time.
A small drawer in his dresser stops him. The few things he has kept from his younger years are neatly left here. An old printed graphic t-shirt that Rafi gave to him is around a journal, the leather cover worn and crackled. It almost crumbles in his fingers. Sephiroth rolls back on his heels.
This.
He remembers this.
The first time he had looked at this, it had triggered his first autoimmune attack. He has to smile. Everyone thought that Sephiroth had the first strike on Wutai. It was quite the opposite. They had hurt him first, irreparably forcing him on this path. They had made their own devil in their aborted attempts at science.
Slowly, he settles on the floor and flips the pages, not reading the careful print. Leaves have shuddered into dust, leaving themselves on his lap. Scraps of paper are taped to pages. His fingers press on a candy wrapper. It crinkles. The printed letters are tucked to the back.
What must it have been like to be a child?
Genesis had said he was a monster but he remembered growing up. Then again, he had killed his parents, hadn't he?
Sephiroth closes the book. His fingers spread on the back and front cover and he presses, feeling the weight and the pages compact together.
His parents were both dead before he had a chance to meet them. Orlin's words have not healed inside him. They are engraved instead. He has no family. His father is unknown. His mother, Jenova, died shortly after he was born. Who was he to them? How would they have defined him differently? Would they have loved him?
Who had stood in their place? He sets the journal on the top of the dresser. A SOLDIER and a scientist raised him. A corporation oversaw everything, training him until he became profitable then used his name, his hair, his body until this is what is left.
A reality of his life that will be changing.
It's humorous. He will be handed his freedom. The surgery is almost set. He will be able to escape this but it almost doesn't matter. The damage is done.
He almost doesn't want it now but it is too late. Mariella has risked too much.
Where will he go? His face is recognizable. Even if he cuts his hair, dyes it a normal color, nothing can change his eyes or the muscles that persist across his body. He hasn't made plans. Even without the cripple of the medication, leaving Shinra will require knowledge he doesn't have. President Shinra would not let him go. Even if something were to happen to the old man, the VP's eyes have never lost their possessiveness over him.
He had hoped Angeal and Genesis might help him find and set this into motion.
Now that they were gone, he had not truly touched his ideas since.
What is a life when it could not be shared?
Once the implant is in place, he will start throwing away his pills instead of taking them. He would buy himself time. Now all he could handle is one mission at a time. He knows that if he puts too much in front of himself, he'll turn away. His mind stutters with too much to do. The apartment cleaning is simple. He can break it down from a room, to a section, to a drawer to an item by item.
When he is off the medication, he will confront the future the same way: one step at a time.
He realizes that he is no longer the man that he used to be. The Sephiroth before, he could have made these plans. He would have stretched them out before him, his eyes reaching as far as the horizon line. Now it hurts for him to look beyond one day, a week at most. His strides are smooth and confident but he is hiding a limp.
It's like someone broke his leg and no one bothered to reset it. The edges of the bones grind against each other every time he moves forward, the pain spiking strong and hard against his mind. It drops his chin. It dulls his eyes. It is unending and consistent.
He is no longer Angeal's and Genesis' Sephiroth.
The last exposure and examination pass like a dream. Hojo isn't even present. Most of his attention is to other projects. Sephiroth's actions have shown poorly on the professor. This is something that Sephiroth doesn't mind. Still, it means that he has to plan even more. If he escapes successfully, the blowback will be irreversible on Hojo.
The final sink into the mako tank overwhelms him. He sighs into it, swept up in the current. It sings in his ears and he lets it take him. It is the briefest period of eternity as his muscles finally lose the fight he carries with him. He almost wants to drag it out like he used to do with his first glass of wine in the evening when the flavor was good and the alcohol made a difference.
But nothing good lasts anymore.
The attendants congratulate him on finishing his therapy as they hand back his items. He nods through it.
The final examination is skipped. Hojo cancels it and disappears to Junon to interrogate Hollander. Sephiroth smiles at that email. At least Hojo is not pretending to care.
It is a day later that Mariella comes to his office.
She has stopped trusting phones for their conversations. Her face is pale and she straightens as she comes into his office. Still, she closes the door and leans against the frame, crossing her arms. The overtime she has been putting in is starting to break her. He has no way to pay her for the extra hours. He doubts that she would accept it.
Still he has been slowly withdrawing money from his account. It lays in a drawer that he has emptied out in his kitchen.
Sephiroth turns away from his computer and watches something unreadable come across her face. He wonders if she is here to talk to him about Orlin. No. There isn't enough grief in her eyes for that. After Orlin's call, Mariella had taken a week off work, claiming to be sick. The exposure lab had backlogged enough that SOLDIER was notified.
That was enough of an answer for him.
The SOLDIER was gone.
It sat next to Sephiroth, unaddressed.
Her fingers knit into her arms and she takes a breath before letting the words out in a sigh. "It's done. We're ready."
That twists up something in him.
He has to swallow. "When do you want to do it?
"The day after tomorrow." She's not happy. She doesn't even look relieved.
She shifts against the doorframe and continues. "I'll put in the order to have your medication changed tonight. You'll get an email. Come pick up the medication yourself. Don't eat tomorrow night, don't take a pill and call Alvar to schedule the emergency appointment in the morning."
"I'll claim I am having a bad reaction to the adjustment." He continues for her. "You'll write me a note and tell everyone that I need a few days to recover."
They have staged this. These lies have already been discussed. It is believable. His body has changed with the exposures. How it handles the preventative drug is plausible. He would insist on seeing Mariella and then she would shepherd him to operation. The implant itself would take an hour at most. There will be recovery time from the surgery but it will be done in Sephiroth's apartment. Mariella will have his key. The new scar on Sephiroth's body will disappear. It will be washed away quickly with the fresh exposure still coursing through his veins.
Everything has been planned.
Sephiroth nods.
Concern comes across her face. "Are you really ready for this? You could be out for a while. This implant, the medication, your body might take a few days to adjust to it."
"I understand."
"You will have to hide this from R&D until you leave. Try to take as few appointments as possible. It won't be easy." Her voice raises slightly at the end. He watches her face turn and then she looks away.
"Nothing about my life has been easy."
"Neither one of us has had an easy life," she sighs and rubs her face. "I keep thinking when I was studying, when I first took this job, how everything is so different now."
There is a truth in those words. It's heavy with it. He doesn't know how to respond. The last time he had felt this sort of honesty, Genesis left.
He stands from his desk and tries to sort out if an apology or understanding might be best. Neither seem adequate. He could apologize but this would be for the actions of Shinra. While he might be the face of the company, they both knew that he had no control.
The moment passes him like all of the others. Another failure to put in his books.
Him moving breaks Mariella out of her thoughts. "I've got an anesthesiologist and a proper surgeon. They work for general medical. You'll be bribing both of them. They're trustworthy otherwise. Old work colleagues."
"Tell me the amount and I'll bring it," he says.
"Okay."
"Hojo is still in Junon so he won't try to examine you. He won't fly back for something this minor. The timing is about as perfect as we can make it."
"Yes." He walks around the table to stand in front of her. She does look tired. Her eyes are bloodshot. Color is gone from her face. Her hair is drawn back tight against her skull. There is still determination in her but it is dim with something much cloudier. She stares at him but she doesn't see him. She sees something inches in front of him.
"Are you alright?" He asks.
Mariella's eyes jump to meet his. "Perfectly."
She lies almost as well as he does. She holds his gaze and a smile comes across her face. The phone outside Sephiroth's office rings and Alvar answers it. Mariella pushes off the frame and shakes out her arms.
"I pulled an overnight to get this done. I know I won't be holding the knife but you probably want everyone on your team in the best shape possible," she says and then strength comes back into her voice. "Be ready to be free."
An emotion hovers around her. He can almost feel it, the thing that is drowning her. The emotion has soaked through her like blood on a sleeve. It ghosts her smile, souring the edges of it, and follows her out the door.
Sephiroth watches her nod as his secretary writes something on a pad of paper.
He watches her go and tries to place it.
Finally he settles on regret.
Mariella Haynes is soaked in regret.