Chapter 3: Exodus

"You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heavin above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me..." Exodus 20:4~5a

* * * * *

She was burning up.

But it wasn't as bad as before. But then again...before what? What was, "before?" Before today? Last week, last month, last year? As Lucrecia groaned and attempted to brace her arms against the icy, glassy floor of her cavern, her temporarily lucid mind grappled once more with the question of time. Specifically, her time here in this icy haven, prison, shelter, tomb. Her arms were weak and trembling, and the most that she could manage was to drag them underneath her face so that she could rest her flushed cheeks upon the sleeves of her white lab coat. White? No, not quite. What was this color that peeped through the rusty bloodstains? Not white by any stretch of the imagination...but not quite tan or brown or yellow. Let it be called, "grime." She wearily examined the dirt ground into the fibers of her coat for several minutes, her mind seemingly too exhausted with fever-dreams to do any deeper thinking than this. But gradually, Lucrecia noticed something. She was seeing. Her eyes were once again able to make out the shadows and folds of her coat where before, her altered, alien eyes had been wide open windows to whatever light chose to blind her, whether dim morning light beaming into the cave or bright midday sun bouncing across the ice-bound walls. She blinked, vaguely surprised, and struggled with the concept for a while until it finally sank in. A concept was caught at in passing, struggled with, and finally realized. The alien cells within her...were receding?

She tucked down her head, peering into the patch of ice visible to her within the circle of her arms, and gazed down in wonder at her reflection. Brown. Brown eyes. Not those horrible, blank, swirling blue depths that she'd memorized day after jealousy-tainted day of staring up into the greenish-blue fluid of the specimen tank. Brown eyes with black pupils and a faint blue corona around the irises. Her eyes. She glanced upwards again to search the pallid hands. She had a brief memory - from when? - of waking in the cavern and glimpsing swollen purple vines creeping from the sleeves of her coat, slowly covering her hands like ivy over an old mansion. But those too were gone...no, not gone entirely, she saw, as she continued to examine her wrists. There were still faint, puffed lines, almost like the delicate tracery of veins underneath her skin. Rolling laboriously onto one side, Lucrecia clawed at her coat and shirt, pulling the cold, wet cotton away from her stomach with mixed hope and apprehension. Breathing heavily from the exertion these simple actions had wrought, she raised her head slightly and raked her newly-regained human eyes over her stomach to find that even the scar tissue that had so horrified her the day she'd discovered this cave - how long ago? - was gone, leaving only a faintly raised area of mottled bruises.

A faint frown creased her brow before exhaustion forced her to drop her head back down. The lines of worry still marred her forehead as she reviewed the sight of her blue-purple-bruised stomach...that had no traces of thick, black thread on it. Where were the sutures? The stiff surgical thread that had been used to tie her back together - albeit sloppily - had not been the kind that dissolved with time. It stayed put until removed by hand...or until time and the elements broke it down. If accidentally put into the freezer, it grew brittle and broke...but only after a greatly extended time would it crumble entirely. How long? Who knew? No one had been interested in such a detail. But...it was a long time. And she was so weak...how long? How long had she been lying there? The scar tissue and alien flesh were receding, visible counterpart to the fact that her mind was clearer now than in all the - hours? days? how long? - that she had been lying there, her skin and flesh not entirely human...her entire body seething with the alien cells that she and the rest of the scientists had hailed as microscopic miracles of biogenesis and regeneration. Lying there without food or water, for hours or days or however long without suffering from thirst or hunger. Lying there with her body feeding upon itself, cells cannibalizing cells and a fever keeping her warm. Lying there, falling in and out of memories and nightmares in a mind perhaps not as sane and stable as it had been.

No...not all memories and nightmares. She'd been lying there, slowly rising from her delirium towards sanity, and the closer she'd gotten to the surface of reality...the more strange dreams - no, visions - there had been. The wrenching, painful, heart-breaking memories and screaming nightmares had been slowly replaced with...visions. There was no other word for them. Lying breathless and weak on the frozen floor, Lucrecia turned her sluggish mind towards her hazy recollections. They had been like...dreaming of watching a movie...no, of having an out-of-body experience. She'd floated slightly above everyone's line of sight, as if the proverbial fly on the wall, and her view had been of the basement laboratory. Always the same place, the same vantage point...and her vision had been cloudy and nebulous, as if she were watching everyone through a sheet of the same rippled, obscuring glass that had paned each window in the mansion. But they had been recognizable...mostly...and the first of them had carried with it the additional shock of realization of the finality of her overwhelming loss.

* * * * *

Her mind's eye opened slowly...not like an eyelid rising or a curtain parting, but like light filtering into a cave, or an idea slowly blossoming in a brain.

/...what.../

She couldn't speak, nor could she even hear her voice in her own mind, but the question had been asked all the same. She tried to turn...actually, she thought of trying to turn, but there was no body to try with. She was just...there.

/...where.../

Again, no sound...not even a memory or echo of sound. Not even the word, really...just...the idea, the concept. What kind of dream was this? Not any of her crisp, clear memories made sharp and terrible with remembered pain and hurt. Not any of her nightmares, either, with horror upon horror magnified and multiplied by the fever burning up her mind and body. This...this was...different. This was hazy and white, milky and rippled, a floating, cloudy vision. There were no eyes to move nor head to dip, but she was looking down at the laboratory all the same. The dark bowels of the Nibelheim mansion where so much had happened. How could one life, one half-life in fact, have contained so much, so much? So much pain and anguish, jealousy and anger...so much blood. Too much.

But what was this place now? She couldn't focus her non-existent eyes on any one feature, and yet it seemed that she could see everything at once without having to try. This had to be a dream, for why else would she be hovering over that familiar basement? Wasn't she...in some cave? Some small, icy cavern where she had collapsed and couldn't rise and could only wait for death or the alien cells to consume her? Was this a dream? Perhaps it was insanity, she noted in a clinically detached manner. If it was, let her stay here forever, she begged no one and everygod. Far better to lose herself in madness and memory than to awaken alone, feverish and dying.

Someone entered the empty lab, bringing her attention around from her inward thoughts. If she'd had shape and form, her body would have jerked in startlement to see her husband walk in. Some part of her mind wished vaguely that if she were to spend her time in insanity-wrought delusions, it would have been nice to have been immersed in dreams of a happier place, or at least a happier time. For the husband that walked in bore the same cold, blank face that she'd last seen looming over her as she'd lain bleeding on the gurney, begging to hold her son. This dream, then...this delusion...this must be a visitation of time past, of her pregnancy, of the end of her marriage.

As if sensing her thoughts, her presence, the dark-haired scientist made a straight line for where Lucrecia hovered and actually looked right up at her - at what? I'm not here; I'm in a vision - and smiled. She might have wished for a voice to cry out to him, or a hand to reach out to him...she might have, if the smile had not filled her mind with a chilling fear and loathing. The smile was utterly mindless. It was the sort of smile that religious fanatics wore when they were caught up in some glorious epiphany revealed only to them...blind worship, unnatural love, mindless devotion. It was utterly vapid, controlled, and heartless. It was the smile painted on wooden marionettes, and she would have cringed back from it if she had been able.

/...no not here not with him don't let me be trapped in this vision forever with him smiling at me like that not like that not.../

The horrified pleading seemed to emanate from her in waves, and here was the curious thing...she felt them being damped down, like embers underneath a booted foot. If she had commanded a voice, it would have rippled out feebly and then faded, as if a tiny whisper in a padded room. What little awareness and conscious thought she was able to command in this hazy vision seemed to be further muted by some outside force at the appearance of her husband. And instead of her own formless thoughts...other thoughts seeped into her mind like an intrusive, unexpected voice on the telephone.

/...YOU ARE COME.../

/...I HAVE BEEN.../

/...HERE.../

It was...acknowledgement and acceptance and a strange eagerness almost like hunger. It was simple phrases and complex layers of thought and feeling and strange emotions. There was no sound, no voice in her mind, but the words formed themselves of their own accord, putting words to an idea and defining it, labeling it, forming it. Lucrecia waited out the strange vision, now thinking of her fevered sleep with something akin to longing. Nightmares and painful memories seemed comforting when compared to this confusing vision.

And onto the stage came a miniscule new player, a young child - barely out of infancy - with bright silver hair flying over the collar of his shirt. Through the door, over to a messy desk to peer uninterestedly at a stack of books, and then closer, into Lucrecia's immediate field of vision. The shining head tilted upwards to follow her husband's gaze, giving Lucrecia a fine view of the neatly molded face, fine boned and with a promise of great grace even while yet so young. And when she finally realized who the toddler must be, Lucrecia's own thoughts overrode the outside presence with a wordless scream of longing, loss, and horror at the mako-green eyes and needle marks riddling his delicate neck and arms.

* * * * *

Rising out of the painful memory, Lucrecia sobbed out a few hitching breaths before finding something pathetic about the sound of her weak, mewling whimpers. Still curled on her side on the frigid floor, she gritted her teeth with the last stores of energy in her reserves and concentrated on making her breaths come more evenly.

Come on, 'Crecia, breathe...breathe. You had plenty of practice controlling your breaths. All those nights, all those days, trying not to disturb the others with your screams of pain and trying not to wake him as you cried, come on...breathe. Oh, but it was easier before, it was easier despite everything that was going on because I was still me, I was still human...and I still had someone, no, two someones to live for.

And what did she have now? Her past was as distant and disconnected from her present as if she had been reborn into an entirely different person's body. And wasn't that nearly the truth? This scarred, unnatural body was as alien to her past as that hated specimen was to this planet. Lucrecia...daughter, student, lover, biologist, wife, assistant, mother. None of those titles could apply to her anymore, not really. Not to this broken body lying hidden in some nameless cavern. Her parents were dead, her studies over...the arms in which she'd slept were closed to her forever in one way or the other. And her son...her son...

* * * * *

She had lost track of how many times that the haze had brightened and broadened in her mind to reveal the dark basement. Vision had followed vision, a never-ending string of pearls that filled her now-dreamless sleep. But it was not a matched string...rather each new jewel followed a strangely natural progression, as if she were living the life that had been taken from her in her mind. In this detailed world that her mind had created, her husband changed clothes, cut his hair, even broke his glasses once and spent a few days stumbling about and cursing until replacements could be gotten. Lights were turned on and off, garbage bins were filled and emptied, and spiders spun their webs in dark and darkening corners.

And the child grew.

For the child, Lucrecia had pushed aside her misgivings and morals, letting her husband perform dangerous and experimental procedures within her very body. She had been exposed to more mako radiation than an entire battallion of Soldiers and been injected with more serums and solutions than any guinea pig in the history of science. For the child, Lucrecia had endured months of nausea and pain, fear and anxiety. She had choked down food she didn't want, rested even when she couldn't sleep, and exercised when even standing up made her break out into a cold sweat. She had even learned countless relaxation techniques to try and control her emotions, for too much stress might have harmed the fetus. For the child, Lucrecia had sacrificed all that she had to give, and all that she could ever be.

And now it was for the sake of the child, or the hallucination of what the child might be like, that Lucrecia embraced her visions. There was nothing for her in reality, in the present, in the world outside her mind. But inside the darkness of her mind, there was the child. Bright green eyes and silver-white hair that grew wild and tangled with neglect. Pale skin riddled with bruises and needle marks. Chubby knees and curious, questing fingers that were constantly being slapped for their impertinence. For the sake of the child that ran about and looked around and grew taller and stronger, Lucrecia loved her visions and turned her back to the world around her, for to question too minutely the madness that had blessed her with a glimpse of her son might be to drive it away, as well. The scientist declared logic and reason her enemies, and would not think too closely upon the ridiculousness of living only to dream. It was like falling asleep in a blizzard, but it was all Lucrecia wanted.

And so she never thought it through...never wondered about it...never realized that madness could not produce this orderly, logical procession of visions.

...of her son.

* * * * *

The light, the awareness, the room...it brightened and bloomed in her mind once more, and Lucrecia yearned and searched and would have strained her neck looking around if she had a body. Where was he? Her child, her son, her baby boy...

...but of course, he wasn't a baby any longer.

Growing tall for his age, leaving behind baby dimples and rounded knees for a slender, reed-like body too long and limber for someone only six years old. Clever fingers and an ever more clever mind, that kept him out of more trouble than it got him in to. Books were read that should never have opened to his young hands and eyes, specimens were examined and rearranged on their shelves, needles and ampoules and even two scalpels had made their way into his pockets when his father's back had been turned. Every moment that Lucrecia dreamed was spent fixated on the boy, or yearning for him when he did not appear. She couldn't control how the scenes played out before her, but when her child did appear, more often than not she could draw him to her with her longing.

She would cry out with no voice, stretch out arms that didn't exist, and somehow he would hear her. The bright silver head would stop its curious twisting and turning, and the gangling legs that somehow escaped childhood's clumsiness would bring him to her, the green eyes that seemed to burn brighter every year staring straight into her soul.

/...my child, my son, my baby.../

And he would turn to look at her as if he could hear her cries.

/...oh my son, my son, how I wanted to hold you all these years.../

Sometimes a pale hand would be raised, as if he were trying to touch her as well.

/...I love you, I love you, I love you.../

And the demanding, desperate declaration would not drive him away...only once in a while he would look...confused.

And sometimes his father was there.

He had aged as had his son, but the cold blank eyes were the same, and as purely as Lucrecia yearned for her son, so did she hate her husband. Lying unconscious in her icy cave, revenge burned within her once more as she looked upon the face of her betrayer, but what could she do to him in her dreaming mind? If looks could kill, he would have fallen long ago, a weaponless wound gaping in his back. And if hearts could truly break, perhaps she would have never gotten the chance to do even that. Oh, and if telekinesis existed, truly Hojo was fortunate that it had not been granted to his long lost wife.

But this time, neither Hojo nor his prodigy were apparent in the dim and dusty basement laboratory. This happened occasionally, where Lucrecia's dreams were no more than still pictures of a remnant of her old life, and she had learned to simply watch and wait, for surely struggling against one's madness was madness in and of itself. And so she watched through her somehow wavering vision.

She watched the dust fall and gather in microscopic layers over the desk and the floor, the tops of bookshelves and the edges of the tomes lying within. She watched a spider spin its web, endless loops and whorls patiently cast, from one anchoring line to the next until a beautiful spiral had been woven. And then she watched the dust settle upon the web and the waiting spider. A fly staggered by, lazy with hunger in this dark, un-nourishing grotto, and she remembered the droning sound of its wings from another day long past, even though she could not hear it now. It stumbled and bumbled around the room, and came to rest at long last on the dusty edge of a beaker, while the spider watched with eight sparkling, ravenous eyes. But the little insect tottered, slipped, and then fell into the beaker with a tiny plink that Lucrecia could not hear, and lay still. One strand of dust wafted down after it and came to rest over one of its curled and crumpled legs. Lucrecia watched, and continued to watch, and then grew uneasy for the first time in countless dreams.

Where were they?

She looked at the room before her with new eyes, new interest, new feelings of unrest. While living - for she could hardly call herself alive now - she had looked about her with excitement, apathy, and then loathing. In her bloody last days there, she had viewed the walls with an adrenaline high of fear. And now, with this room her only link to her son, she found herself somehow afraid for the basement. The dust lay thick, and no footprints marred its surface. And the books upon books that had been constantly taken down and read and then hastily cast aside for another were all lined up carefully within their shelves, orderly as SOLDIERs. It looked...abandoned.

A low wave of panic surged quietly up and out of her heart, and washed over and through her surroundings. But even more than ever before, her thoughts and feelings were damped down and muted. The suppression served only to upset her more, and Lucrecia's mind grew active once again, shaken out of its drowsy, uncaring watchfulness by the thought of having lost this strange link to her child.

/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, where are you?.../

She cried out and out in her mind, sending out waves and pulses of panicked need. Twice before, and only twice, she'd managed something precious, something strange. Twice before, after he'd reached his long-limbed stage and left babyhood behind, she'd touched his mind with hers. Not just a vague reaction to her longing, but something even more, something further, something deeper.

The lights had been off, but the basement area closest to her field of vision had been lit with an eerie greenish glow, and with it she'd looked upon the dark and deserted lab and felt desolate and alone. She'd cried out then, too, and after a moment, seen something in her mind's eye, a dream within her mad dream. It was like a ghost of her imagination hesitantly treading in her consciousness.

Sephiroth, her darling boy, her silver-haired angel...grown from the infant she'd yearned to cuddle to a stern and serious preschooler with eyes far too aged and angry for so few years. It was just his form, or at least, a vision of it, and his expression was one of open curiosity such as she'd not seen recently.

/...Sephiroth!.../

...?...

/...Sephiroth, it's me, it's your mother, oh my child, my baby.../

...mother?...

/...Yes, yes, your mother. Oh, I've missed you and love you, oh Sephiroth, how I want to hold you.../

And with that brief exchange, the flickering doppelganger had disappeared. She reached out once more, but nothing came. Yet there was no time to mourn, for shortly after, the child himself had appeared before her, blinking sleepily in the harsh lights that his father had turned on after herding him into the room for his morning series of injections. And Sephiroth, once having rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, had stared up at her, and not stopped staring until dragged bodily away.

But there was nothing now, either in Lucrecia's mind, or in the dusty, desolate room of her vision, and she cried all the louder for it.

* * * * *

The pitch black of unconsciousness hazed and grew brighter until she found herself once more caught up in one of the visions that had replaced her nightmares and remembrances. Lucrecia attempted to place herself, but with little success. This vision was not of the familiar basement where she'd watched the bright-haired toddler grow steadily taller, stronger, and more strange. Familiar...she had grown accustomed to the visions as their frequency increased, leaving her little time - time? How long? - to do anything but watch these strange movies play out in her mind and blank out in between them. In memory, she caught glimpses of times she had awoken into her ice-bound cave, but these were fleeting images snatched at and soon lost. A brief remembrance of waking and returning to the endless and futile questioning of how long she had lain there...she struggled to recapture the curiosity, the wondering, but nothing would stay with her for very long. Her moments of clarity were now reserved for these visions alone, but they were not complete. Clear-minded, yes...but only to a certain extent. Never in these visions did she have a body or a voice, nor was she in complete control of her thoughts. It was as if her mind had separated into two portions, with her original mind the submissive voyeur to its strange new counterpart.

And now...now, what strange turn had her madness taken, that she had opened her mind to this confusion? Replacing the familiar and by now comforting basement laboratory was a cylindrical space no larger than...well, no larger than the specimen tank that it had been enclosed in. And beyond the space, there was nothing but a shadowy metallic form, clinging to the outside of the curved, clear wall as if it were some parasite or fungus. Cables and tubes, horribly familiar, snaked upwards from the lower boundary of her field of vision and exited the glass wall to disappear beyond.

/...oh God oh God oh God.../

She couldn't recall beginning this pitiful, horrified chant, but once started, she could not stop. And what was she pleading to God for? Who knew? She was only aware of a thought barely realized, a theory just beginning to take shape, and although still so nebulous that she hadn't put words to it, she knew it would be something terrible to behold.

/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, where are you?!.../

Pushing away the idea that was slowly but surely taking form, she screamed out in her mind for her son, desperate to be returned to her one joy, her one comfort, her one remaining idol. She longed for the shadowed basement with the same anguish and longing with which she'd cried out to hold her newborn son in her arms the hour he'd been born. And just as he had not been given to her then, neither were the visions of him returned to her now. So Lucrecia screamed silently in her glass prison, in her mad world, until all went dark once more.

* * * * *

The light of her visions burst upon her mind's eye like a fireworks display, and the effect upon her was not unlike that of being suddenly hurled into a freezing lake. Startled and dazed, Lucrecia did not even notice at first the other voice that pulsed and thrummed around her.

/...COME TO ME.../

/...FIND ME HERE.../

/...HEAR MY CALL.../

No voice, but there were phrases echoing through her mind all the same. There were no words, but the meanings were clear. Like a throbbing heartbeat, the summoning - for there was no other word to describe it - filled her mind like an enormous church bell being rung insistently, its reverberating call echoing through the countryside to call its worshippers together.

And faintly, in between the overwhelming, demanding pulses, she glimpsed something she'd only felt twice before, but recognized immediately.

/...Sephiroth!.../

Her cry of joy was immediate, and her longing came alive in an instant, blotting out even the unceasing summons in its intensity. The feeling of reaching with arms she didn't have, and calling out with a voice she didn't have flowed out from her with all the love she still held in her heart, and this time, there was no muting, no suppression. Instead, she could almost feel her yearning go flowing out and out, beyond the glass wall that she hardly registered, beyond what rooms and corridors that her chamber rested within, and beyond what hills and valleys might stand between her and her son.

She kept up her own weak, urgent summons amidst the louder not-voice, hoping above all that she could somehow call to her the vision of her son. Irrational, even mad, and yet based on a truth that she wouldn't give herself the time to acknowledge. Her son was near, she could feel it. How she could feel it did not matter. All she knew or wanted was her son.

/...Sephiroth! Sephiroth, oh my baby, my boy, my son!.../

If she'd been able, she would have laughed aloud. He was coming closer! She could feel it, she could sense his mind, she could nearly touch his thoughts. Oh, but he was confused...she would reassure him, she would keep him safe, she would hold him in her arms and all would be made right.

She was closer to madness now than ever before, and cared not at all.

/...Sephiroth! It's me, it's your mother. Come to me, my son. Let me hold you! Oh, how I've missed you.../

Suddenly, the twisted metal that hugged the crystal cylinder before her shook violently, and then seemed to fall away in a shower of sparks from the wires holding it fast. Tears of oil and grease came dripping down the glass, and Lucrecia herself would have wept at the sight if she'd had eyes.

It was him.

There was no mistaking it, although it was a shock to see him so tall and strong. So tall! No longer a baby, no longer a boy...the figure standing before her was a man in his prime, with rippling muscles and chiseled features. Oh, but the bright shining eyes, the long silver hair, the scent-touch-taste of his mind was still the same. He raised a fist, and was the perfect picture of a young, avenging god, and his mother cried out to him once more as he struck a blow to the glass separating him from her.

/...My son!.../

But he did not reach for her with upraised arms that begged for the long-awaited embrace. Instead, he raised a sword. And oh, it all happened so fast...

The pulsing, thrumming summons stopped with one last triumphant shout that nearly crushed Lucrecia's mind, and then the blade came whistling towards her. A quick spray of some bluish ichor fanned up in front of her, and then all was black for the split second that it took for Lucrecia to open her eyes and jerk herself up in shock from the frozen floor of her cavern.

* * * * *

Outside the cave, the waterfall disguising the entrance roared loudly down into the mountain lake that it fed just as it had the day Lucrecia had first stumbled near. Across the river that flowed from the lake, a shining city in the air towered over a searing desert. Miles and miles away, children were born, taxes were paid, loved ones died. The specimen taken from the broken glass jar was raised and trained and used and killed and cloned and reborn. The last full-blooded Ancient returned to the Planet, and decades later her daughter followed in her self-sacrificing steps. Time passed outside, but within the icy cavern, Lucrecia opened her eyes and began to shudder with only the barest beginnings of the realization that she'd been lying on her icy floor for nearly thirty years.