Chapter Twenty-Two
Rebirth and Return
Dusk watched impassively as Rei scooted around the impeccably neat lab, tweaking the several different instruments that lay on gleaming tables. The guard that held her in his firm grasp watched as well, but with a glint of insatiable human curiosity. Finally, Rei opened a one of the many file cabinets that graced the area and pulled out a folder that was about half an inch thick.
"Now, let's see here!" he announced, whistling under his breath as he opened the file on his desk and pawed through the various papers the folder held. "This file is entirely dedicated to you, my dear Dusk," Rei added out loud as he continued his search. "Don't you feel special? You're so important to me that I keep a documentation of every single step you took since you were born."
"Oh my, yes," Dusk replied, letting the sarcasm drip unheeded from her tongue. "Excuse me if I don't leap up and down with joy, but I'm a little tied up at the moment."
Rei paused in his search and glanced up at her, his narrow glasses shining in the lights that shone overhead. "A sense of humor as well. Will the wonders never cease?"
"Oh, I'm full of surprises," Dusk shot back. "You haven't seen anything yet."
Rei clucked his tongue at her. "Don't make promises you can't keep, my dear. Ah, here we go. My ambitious predecessor in the science department kept very accurate notes of your development after undergoing the treatment he gave you. He says here that you responded fairly well to it and healed much quicker than he expected, probably due to the injection. He was going to go visit you a third time, but something unexpected came up and, over the course of the years, your existence was pushed into the back of his mind. And then he died."
"Too bad," Dusk muttered. "I would have loved to strangle him with my bare hands."
"So would have half of the Shinra company, I believe." Rei motioned for the guard to bring Dusk closer, stepping forward himself to meet them. "I have a little present for you that unfortunately might not sit well with your pretty head," he said with a twisted smile. "But I insist that you accept it. Ready to see what it is?"
"I'm dying from anticipation."
"That's the spirit." Rei walked over to a large, covered object that reached up to his waist and was longer than his height. With a dramatic flourish of one hand, he reached out and pulled the sheet off of his "surprise." Instantly, the room was filled with an eerie green light that struck an all-too-familiar note in Dusk's mind.
The revealed object was a long, cylindrical glass tank that lay on its side. It was filled with a liquid that was forever shifting in shades of green, from emerald to the light-pierced color of the surface of an ocean. The glow that it gave off intensified the mysterious beauty of the liquid and colored surrounding objects a quiescent tone of green.
Lifestream…
"I see that you recognize it," Rei chuckled, watching as Dusk's crimson eyes widened in some unidentifiable mix of emotions. "It took me a lot to recover this precious thing from Icicle Inn. We got there right after you had left, as was evidenced by the broken door. Luckily, we were able to repair the broken bits of the glass and ship the entire thing back here."
"Good for you," Dusk mumbled, her voice strained and low-pitched.
"Yes, I know," Rei replied, almost preening in his self-satisfaction. "Well, anyway, back in you go. Brian?"
The guard who had been holding her moved forward, propelling her towards the tank that was the very thing she had slept in for more than thirty years. Dusk unconsciously tried to dig her heels into the slippery tiled floor, and when that didn't work, struggled against the muscled arms of her captor.
"Don't try it, Dusk," Rei said, noticing her endeavors. "You're not going to escape this time, and you're much too important a specimen to let me allow you to get away."
Dusk's mind was instantly filled with all of the nightmares and dreams that had plagued her sleep ever since she had entered that pod so long ago. The shrill cries of agony whose owner she couldn't identify still haunted her and chilled her to the bones with the thought of it. Then the nightmares of never waking up came, and others of waking and finding everyone she knew gone. The latter nightmare had partly come true, for the only person she knew who still lived was Vincent.
And even he will be taken away from me if I go back…
That mere taste of her nightmare recurring—the vision that ghosted about her mind and filled her heart with the cold sense of being alone once more—gave Dusk more strength than she could normally credit herself for. She twisted violently in the guard's—Brian's—grasp, elbowing him in the ribs with both arms so that he gave a gasp of surprise as his breath was knocked from him. With a duck of her upper body, Dusk had the man flipped over her head and pinned down on his back on the floor. Before he could react, she jabbed at all three of his pressure points—groin, solar plexus, and throat—in rapid succession. As he wavered between unconsciousness and wakefulness, she released her grip on his arms and brought both of her fists down on either side of his temples, shattering the weak bone there and cutting off the circulation to his brain.
Dusk rose from her crouch while Brian choked his last on the floor between herself and Rei, lowering her bloody-eyed gaze onto the scientist whose eyes registered a slight sense of surprise. Keeping her eyes locked on Rei's face, she advanced like a cat stalking a mouse, stepping on and over Brian's body without any regard and padding silently on. Rei held perfectly still, save for the one motion he made of slipping a hand into one of his lab coat's pockets—a movement that went past Dusk's eyes without notice, all of her attention focused primarily on only Rei's flickering amethyst eyes.
"No one," she growled as she converged upon Rei, "is going to take my life away from me again. I walked that path once a long time ago, and that path was my mistake. I will never return on that path willingly." Dusk slowly raised her arms into a fighting pose, watching with silent glee as Rei froze.
"You know that you're not going to get away with this," Rei said, still keeping his cocky, taunting tone of voice.
"Oh, really?" Dusk smiled bitterly. "I can still try." She lunged barely after her statement was finished, swinging her fist around towards Rei's head, her mind clouded with anger, resentment, and the promise of revenge.
Rei ducked, parried her arm with one arm, whipped his other hand out of his pocket, and lunged beneath her, bringing his clenched hand up into Dusk's stomach.
Dusk saw how easily she had been defeated and cursed herself for her blinded mind. The next instant, her world was filled with a stabbing pain that spread from her stomach and outwards to her limbs, numbing them beyond movement. She sagged forward, losing all control of her body and unable to do anything but watch as the tiled floor of the laboratory came up to meet her.
Rei caught her at the last instant, the needle he had punched her with still held tightly in one hand. Dusk's head fell at an angle such that she could clearly see the needle in front of her nose, a single, tenacious droplet still clinging to the needle's slender point. One droplet that glowed with a familiar, ocean-blue shine that remained before letting go of its hold and falling to the unforgiving floor below.
"How…?" she whispered, desperately working her paralyzing throat in an attempt to speak.
Rei smiled. "When I revisited Icicle Inn, I found vials of this still in that room where your tank was. The Jenova cells are dead, but they left a residue behind that only affects those carrying Jenova cells inside of them already. The results are what you are feeling right now." He gathered Dusk into both arms, letting the needle follow the droplet to the ground and moving towards the tank whose door was waiting, gaping wide open like a hungry mouth.
Dusk feebly tried to fight with Rei as she watched her former prison approach, but the injection had spread too quickly and inhibited every muscle of her body. Rei carefully lifted Dusk over the lip of the door and lowered her into the waiting liquid, grinning when her eyes changed into panicked tones as her back met with the tepid Lifestream waters.
"Goodbye, Aya." Rei released Dusk completely and watched as her eyes closed involuntarily before the Lifestream completely encompassed her form. She sank midway into the tank before stopping and hung, suspended like a puppet with invisible strings, hair flowing about her elegant face in an unseen current. Rei smiled again as her chest stopped moving, touching the side of the glass tank with one finger before turning and picking up the discarded needle.
He tossed it into a nearby trashcan and moved back to his desk where Dusk's portfolio lay, the notes within scattered across each other with pictures liberally strewn between sheets. He sat down and laughed quietly to himself, ignoring the body inside of the Lifestream-filled tank and the corpse sprawled across the floor, reveling in the accomplishment he had waited years to achieve.
* * *
Reeve sighed as he stared down at a picture taken a long time ago, resting between his elbows on the wide desk in front of him. A young Soldier from the Shinra reign stood next to two other Soldiers, head turned towards the camera in a gesture that said that the picture taken had been unexpected to him. In fact, he had been caught in the picture by pure chance, for the focus of the snapshot was the pair of other Soldiers who both stood facing the camera. The taller one had a serious, slight frown on his slender face while the shorter man wore a huge, carefree come-what-will grin. His hair would have simply been an unremarkable black if it weren't for the amazing spikes the hair made up that jutted out and down all over his head. The eyes of the Soldier bordered between purple and blue and sparkled with their own inner light.
The Soldier beside him had a tall, lanky form that he half-hid with a black trench coat he kept tied at the waist and open at the chest and legs and a pair of broad, slightly rusted silver shoulder guards. His skin was so pale it looked as if it should belong to a dead corpse. The hair that cascaded over his back and hung in bangs in front of his eyes, although a startling molten silver shade, did nothing to compliment his morbid complexion. It was his eyes that held and kept a person's attention—eyes that, even within the stillness of the photograph, retained their piercing bird-of-prey gaze. They were a brilliant emerald green that, unlike the previous Soldier's eyes, glowed of no will of his own. He had the bearing of someone who was destined for greatness someday—but that greatness had led to his later downfall, as Reeve knew only too well.
It was the Soldier who had been caught in the picture by accident that was the pure focus of Reeve's attention. He was young, even younger than the shorter Soldier of the pair in the foreground, barely reaching what most considered manhood in Reeve's judgement. His face was slightly flushed and held the slightest hints of the proud, arrogant appearing man he would grow into someday. The boy's slightly sun-bleached blonde hair was barely as spiked at the top as the black-haired man's was and was drawn back into a small ponytail. His eyes were a more definite shade of dark blue and were the only part that he kept throughout his growth into adulthood. They were as stunning a dark blue as the very heart of a sapphire ocean and held an innocent air of childlike naivete within them, but could still hold observers within them almost as well as the silver-haired Soldier's eyes could.
Cloud certainly doesn't look as confident then as he does now, Reeve thought as he shifted his elbows on his desk. I'll bet he was so shy back then that he couldn't even speak to his best friends without stammering.
From what Reeve knew of Cloud's childhood, Cloud-the-boy had been alone and basically an outcast. He dreamed of one day becoming like the platinum-haired man in the picture—Sephiroth—surely just as how the dark-haired young man did at one point.
Probably just as how most of us as little kids did.
Reeve had been one of those children, too, except he had been one of those dreamers when he was in his mid-twenties and already well under way as a member of the Shinra workforce. Sephiroth had emerged from seemingly nowhere, rising from the ranks of a low guard member to the famous—or infamous—leader of the Shinra Soldiers and top ranker of the First Class Soldiers. His fearless exploits made him the hero children looked up to or longed to become someday, and in the back of his mind, Reeve, too, had wished to fight just as courageously and flawlessly as Sephiroth did.
He had grown out of it, perhaps when he had finally met Sephiroth face-to-face. His errand for the then-leader of his department had taken him into the Soldier training level, where he had been explicitly been ordered to wait for someone to approach him. Reeve had not been warned beforehand as to who that person would be, so when he finally met the person he was supposed to wait for, it took everything to keep him from fainting dead away.
He remembered Sephiroth as if that day he had first seen him personally was yesterday. At first, awe was all that Reeve could feel for the man that was quite his junior—probably just barely out of his teens. Yet, he still was forced to tilt his head backward to meet the legend's gaze—and it was that gaze that chilled his heart to the bone.
Reeve often had wondered, just as often as he had dreamed of being like Sephiroth, how that Soldier was able to kill as many men as he was acclaimed to have done and live with himself. With one look into Sephiroth's eyes, Reeve realized that those acts were simple for the man—because there was absolutely no emotion, no pain, no humor or resignation or anything of the sort in those light devouring green eyes. His face was a simple mask of impassiveness, the exact same face that stared at Reeve out of the photo in front of him. When he spoke, his voice was calm but harsh in quality and, although smooth in tone, grated against Reeve's raw nerves.
Reeve had taken Sephiroth's reply back to his boss, shaken by his encounter and barely able to blurt his message out before he stumbled back to his assigned room. He had simply collapsed on his narrow cot, stunned and shivering from fear that he was sure Sephiroth never felt before in his life.
That was when he knew that Sephiroth, despite all his prowess and accomplishments in battle, was no better than any other human. Others were gifted with emotions and the capabilities to feel for people, but Sephiroth, while having the awing gift of both physical and mental strength, could not or chose not to feel anything in the slightest. His flaw was his lack of emotions, and in that moment, Reeve felt pity for the younger man, for the boy would never feel what it was like to love or to grieve.
He returned to his path in life and cast all thoughts of becoming like Sephiroth away. To his amazement, none of the younger, newly recruited Soldiers he met ever lost their image of Sephiroth, even when they met the man under the same circumstances Reeve had. Reeve rose in his own ranks in his branch of the Shinra department and ascended to leadership the year that Sephiroth disappeared, never to return to Shinra again.
And here Yuffie was babbling about how Sephiroth has come back, Reeve thought disgustedly. Even if he did, my troops are more than enough to take care of him. Sephiroth was trained under Shinra, and my Soldiers are different. They were taught to take care of situations like this, should they ever arise.
"There's nothing to worry about, those fools," he muttered out loud, playing with the edge of the picture and sighing.
The hiss of steel being drawn sounded behind him.
Reeve began to rise instantly and whirl around to see who was behind him, but the furthest he got was halfway off of his chair. Cold steel plunged directly through his heart from his back and through his chest, continuing onward into the photo on his desk. He watched in foggy comprehension as the image of Sephiroth was sliced neatly through his stomach, the edge of the blade nicking the short Soldier's arm. Blood—my blood, he realized—dripped along the edge of the blade and fell onto Cloud's wide eyes, obscuring his face in a bright red smear. Reeve felt his mind begin to shut down as he struggled to breath, his eyesight clouding in front of him as he painfully lifted his head to call for help.
Light devouring eyes that glowed from the light that they held within them and colored the darkest shade of emerald stared back at him. Reeve took in those eyes, the silver hair that provided a slight veil for one glowing eye, and the corpse-like pale skin that covered a proud, delicately narrow face with each last gasp for renewal of his rapidly diminishing air supply.
The thin mouth that curved in a slight frown abruptly reversed direction, turning into a maniacal smile of glee.
"Sephiroth…" Reeve breathed before the ghostly image that danced tauntingly before him, grinning derisively while the cold steel in his chest grew warm from his living blood, faded out of existence and fled his darkening mind. He closed his eyes and let go of his consciousness, falling into the open arms of the darkness that had birthed his life unto the Planet.
