From the author of
An Autobiography of Vincent Valentine
Phoenix Down.
Part Gamma
Binah
"o come,terrible anonymity;enfold
phantom me with the murdering minus of cold
-open this ghost with millionary knives of wind-
scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and
gently..." (E.E. Cummings, 'Enter no')
I stayed up all that night. I didn't leave the apartment complex's basement. I didn't go upstairs to shit, (although I needed to, badly. I could've shit my pants.)
I stared at that hallway all night. The thought of simply going upstairs, back to my rented home, back to where it was safe and warm and where I left my TV on, just didn't occur to me. I just stared at that blank hallway.
I had the tape in my hand, too. The one that I recorded with Sephiroth talking. It was filled up on both sides. I labeled it, "The Sephiroth Record: Volume one"
I knew that he was coming back, and deep down inside, I knew it was all real.
At about five o'clock in the morning, the sun started to birth once again.
There are few things in life that you can count on.
I used to think that walls were one of them.
But I just figured that out- that, that wasn't true.
Sometimes hallways appear in walls without reason or rhyme.
But the sun.
You can count on the sun.
I didn't want to go into the office today. I was still feeling the after affects from being fucked up last night. Slightly hangover, that is.
I didn't shave, I didn't bathe. I sure as hell didn't feel like going in and writing some stupid article for Kalm's daily paper.
I will just come in tomorrow and tell them that I'm working on some big story about Sephiroth.
That is almost true: little do they know that I have a real interview with him.
I looked around the basement. People's shit was everywhere. People, I figured out, keep a lot of shit. A lot of baggage. There were boxes of my neighbors old 'Slate' magazines down there. Unused luggage. Linens, baby toys, my own personal record collection (which was what I was moving before.) Shit. Pure shit. I tried avoiding looking at that hallway. But it kept staring at me under the silence of the morning sun sliding through the windows.
I think it was growing.
I think it was breathing.
I think it was watching me.
I think I need to get out of here before it eats me.
So, I did just that. I finally plucked up enough courage, walked up the tiered wooden stairs, and forced open the basement door.
I glanced over my shoulder and looked one more time into that hallway.
It was growing. It took up part of the ceiling that it didn't have before.
Inside it's cold darkness, the shadows were swirling and shifting.
I felt an old hole in my heart as I walked out with Sephiroth's tape in my pocket.
I went home. I didn't want to think about anything right then. It occurred to me to ask the apartment manager who lived on the floor above me, to ask him for the floor plans of the building. It may explain the anomaly downstairs.
Fuckit.
The phone rang.
"Goin' into work today?"
I told him no. I wasn't feeling well. But I am working on a project.
Jamie didn't push it. We talked a little bit, a fellow co-journalist, but he didn't push me into coming in. He would explain things to the editor.
I normally keep my apartment relatively clean. But, hey, it's a young bachelor's, strait-out-of-college apartment. There were just a couple, not too old, mind you, empty pizza boxes, and beer cans. The TV was rarely turned off. Not that I watch it too much, but it's background noise.
No girlfriend.
Just a handful of close buddies.
And my writing.
That's all I got.
I guess you could say that there is a gigantic, hallway-sized hole in my life.
Five years ago, all our lives could have ended. But it didn't. It just keeps going, in a narrow corridor, with maybe a light at the end of a tunnel. All our lives have one direction, and that is our future. Then, you hit the wall, and you can't see where you are going because no one can tell the future.
What if something horrible, terrible, and ugly shoots out into our lives?
Comes out of nowhere, fucks you hard up and down, spits you out until you are cold, alone, and new and crying into the world.
Fuckit.
I'm not going back down there ever again.
I turned off the TV and went up to the manager's apartment upstairs.
I knocked on his door.
I waited alone in that slate gray corridor.
The carpeting in our apartment complex is battered with cigarette stains and mud. However, even with the splashes, dashes, and stains of color everything looks so bland and lonely.
A sour smelling, salty, sweaty man in a stained, striped, bathrobe answered after I nearly turned around and left.
"Yeah?" He asked, in a half drunken daze. He had a horseshoe baldhead, shining with grease. He clutched his warm beer can tightly.
I asked him for the floor plans of the apartment building, especially, if he had, one of the basement.
"What?" He retorted.
I asked him again, politely, and patiently.
"Whadd du you... need that for?" He asked, confused and irritated.
I told him for inspection purposes, I would show him my badge if he needed me to. I didn't want trouble.
I completely lied about whom I was.
"No no, no trouble, here, let me go find your fuckin' floor plans... goddamnit, I was watchin' the game, you know?"
He made me hold his beer can when he went and got it.
He returned after only a half a moment. It took only a glance to tell me THAT THERE WAS NO HALLWAY IN THE BASEMENT.
"Oh, uh, do you mind if ah- you do somethin' for me?"
I said, sure.
"Go in the basement, and get me another uh- well, get me my old red tool box, would ya? Since I got you your fuckin' floor plans, and everythin'. I need to unclog my drain, and I'm not really, you know- dressed. The misses would appreciate it." The sour smelling manager implored and imposed in half a moment of sobriety. He smiled with yellow, sixty year old teeth.
I nearly said no. I did not want to go back down there. Reasons of my own.
But, in a second of flashing stupidity, who knows, maybe it was all the chemicals I fed myself in my younger days coming back to me in a single balled up moment of self-degradation, I agreed.
I handed him back his floor plans. He took them. I left. To go back down into the basement.
I went down the second floor.
I went down to the first floor.
I passed my apartment without stopping,
To say hello to the comfortable walls there.
And I went DOWN...
Down.
Down.
Down.
Into the basement.
Fuckit. It's dark down here.
And there, near the boxes, near the gray slab walls.
Was the hallway waiting for me.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
And I swallowed a hard knot in my throat that only sat and festered in my stomach. In my pocket was the first tape that Sephiroth had made.
I took a deep breath, and looked down that hallway. It grew.
It was now huge and took up half the ceiling and some of the floor.
It was eating everything inside. A few boxes were missing because they were eating by the cold and endless black.
I turned my back, and decided that I was just going to run. I lifted my left leg. I think that it locked. It didn't feel like my leg, I felt like I could not control it.
I looked up to the wooden stairway that led to the door out of the basement. It seemed a mile away, but I was focused on it, and I was going to RUN.
As soon as my left leg had returned feeling, I was about to launch myself.
Here I go.
I'm going to run, now.
A hand was on my shoulder.
The hand was dead and clammy and disgustingly, wretchedly, beautiful.
Like a vomitus, white mass of skin stretched and painted into digits of a inhuman angel.
I didn't run.
On the contrary, I was frozen, fixed in that one spot, between the hallway and the stairs that led to freedom, where everything was warm, safe, and normal.
Sanity.
"Where are you going?" Sephiroth asked.
I lost.
I turned around, and he stood there.
And I stood there.
"We have a lot more to do. Sit. Sit down!"
That tape recorder, that I am not sure where it came from, happened to be sitting next to me. There was a fresh tape inside.
"You are ready? Good."
~
Reeve dangled the stuffed white animal in front of the infant.
"You know what this is?" Reeve cooed to the baby mockingly.
"Dooo you know what this is... little baby Sephiroth? Yes. It's a toy, but not the kind of toy for you. Oh. No it's not. This is my toy. Yes. Yes it is."
The child looked blankly up at Reeve with cold green eyes. It was not a child's stare.
"Hmph." Reeve grunted, dissatisfied and slightly disturbed by the adult look on the child's face.
"Stupid kid. What do you know? Well, you know what? This toy's is going to make me richer than the president of Shin-Ra someday. It's a remote control, see? See, I can look here at this end with this cat toy, NO! keep your grubby hands off of it, there, and then, I can control it with this toy."
Reeve Sith, in charge of the company's managing technology department of the Shin-Ra corporation, showed how to control the both the cat toy and the large white stuffed toy with his remote control and TV screen.
Sephiroth at first seemed to be bored with it.
Then, the child broke his serious expression with a shattering of laughter and clapping.
Reeve smiled, proud of himself in making the new born laugh.
"ENOUGH, Reeve! Get out of here! That child is an experiment, NOT HERE TO AMUSE YOU!"
"Shut-up, Hojo, I'm showin' the kid a good time!"
Hojo stormed into the lab in a flurry of paper, a white lab coat, and a foul mood.
"HE is not just A KID! He is my SCIENCE EXPERIMENT! And you... and you... you may taint him! Get away, shoo shoo! I- unlike you- take my job SERIOUSLY! And I do not want my work RUINED by some pesky TOY MAKER! Get OUT!~"
"Fine. Fine. I just think that stick up your ass has a stick up it's ass..." Reeve mumbled under his breath as he took his electronic toys and headed for the door.
"What was THAT?" Hojo snapped bitterly.
Reeve said nothing as he slammed the door behind himself.
Hojo paused for a moment, then turned to the child, Sephiroth.
"Hm. Perfectly healthy, normal boy. Unusual growth... side effect of mako infusions. Possibly the Jenova cells." He muttered to himself and scribbled something down on his official looking papers.
"Now, what of it, boy? Can you remember what I taught you?"
Sephiroth giggled, and spat up.
"Now, what is THIS, boy?" Hojo flipped through his papers, and held up his clip board. On the paper was a large picture of a cat.
"Aaat." Sephiroth yelled, clapped his hands, and tried grabbing the clipboard.
"Good! And this?"
Hojo flipped the page, and held up another picture- it was that of a tree.
"Beeee!"
"No." Hojo snapped. He hated children.
"Keeey!"
"No. Dam- It's a TREE!"
"Three!" Sephiroth held up three chubby fingers.
"Close enough."
Weeks passed. Lucrecia passed. Sephiroth was still exhibiting unusual growth and developmental rates. Sephiroth was six months old, and looked, acted, and for all tense and purposes was at the normal five year old level. He threw fits when he could not have his way.
He was socialized and interacted with other five year olds.
But he was not five. He was six months old.
"For all I can tell, doc, he's five. Shit, I got a six year old sister at home myself-" Tseng asked.
"He's not five!" Gast sputtered.
Hojo was silent, and gave a long thin grin.
"It's not natural..." Gast sighed. "But he is what he is. We can treat him at his level. He is human. I'm just worried about the death rate- what will he be like in five YEARS? Will he even be alive then? If the growth rate won't slow down-"
"The mako injections help that. I tested it myself with normal human DNA. The SOLDIERS. It slows their aging process, and helps keeps the healthy cells young. It's quite astounding, really." Hojo uttered.
"And what of Jenova? Did he speak of Jenova, yet? Has he any of its memories? Was the project a complete failure?"
"No. For all we know the project and the test was a failure. Memory is something that conclusively cannot be passed down via genes. Sephiroth is an example of that so far. I suppose Jenova will always be a mystery to us, since, obviously we can not ask it itself, and Sephiroth obviously inherited no memories from the injected cells. I THOUGHT, honestly, with 95% of my being that this test would be a success, but, obviously, everything was a failure. We shouldn't have done this. We lost Lucrecia-it was all in vain." Gast said sadly to Tseng.
Hojo was silent, and stared out the small window into the room where Sephiroth was interacting with other children.
"Perhaps not a complete failure. There still are the clones." He said.
"I will have nothing to do with those, Hojo." Gast barked.
"What about Jenova? What happened to it?" Tseng asked.
"We moved it. We can't get rid of it, and we have technically done all we can with it, so we moved it. Top secret lab." Gast answered.
Tseng coiled his hands behind his back, and sighed.
Hojo stared at Sephiroth.
Sephiroth was laughing.
"I suppose I shall move onto other studies." Gast said absently.
"Oh, like what?" Tseng asked.
"Well, the Centra, through all my research, still fascinate me."
"And, what's this?" Hojo asked.
"A... uh, broad sword."
"Good!" Hojo seemed pleased. The boy was catching on quickly.
"And this?" Hojo asked sweetly.
"Uh. Fuck. You know? I'm getting sick of this. Can't I get like a different teacher, a CLASSROOM!? I'm not a kid anymore."
"Don't use that tone of voice with ME! I am your TEACHER I am your FATHER! I raised you!"
"You haven't raised me, I raised myself, old bat. I'm just saying that I'd rather be taught in a classroom with my peers, you know. I'm fourteen years old, I can take care of myself." Sephiroth snapped.
But he was not fourteen.
He was three years old.
But he didn't know that. In his mind, he was a perfectly ordinary fourteen year old.
Hojo's eye was twitching with irritation. He started to get gray hairs two years ago on the side of his head.
"DON'T use that kind of language in my presence, boy! You need to know this stuff if you are going to be any member of SOLDIER!!"
"I don't want to join SOLDIER." Sephiroth turned his head, muttered, and folded his arms.
"Then what DO you want to DO?!"
Sephiroth sighed, and looked out the window. He wanted to sing. He loved classical music, but he would admit to nothing.
"I donno."
"GEAH! That's IT I'm finished! I'm going to hire you a counselor, a MENTAL counselor! You are impossible! And I'm hiring a TUTOR! MAYBE you need a physiatrist and some PROZAC!" Hojo flew out in frenzy, yelling down the hall about something with hating teenagers.
Sephiroth picked at a reddening pimple, and stared into his reflection on the glass window.
It was a sunny day.
He thought it was funny when the old bat got really pissed off. Hojo reminded him of those stereotypical mad scientists with crazy hair, a lab coat, and a triangular vile of something green and bubbly and if you drank it you would turn into a hairy beast.
Hojo also pissed him off.
Everyone pissed him off and no one understood him.
Where was a mother when you needed her?
Sephiroth dropped his head into his folded arms on the desk.
He smoothed back his short, black, strait hair.
Sephiroth wished he had a mom.
An Autobiography of Vincent Valentine
Phoenix Down.
Part Gamma
Binah
"o come,terrible anonymity;enfold
phantom me with the murdering minus of cold
-open this ghost with millionary knives of wind-
scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and
gently..." (E.E. Cummings, 'Enter no')
I stayed up all that night. I didn't leave the apartment complex's basement. I didn't go upstairs to shit, (although I needed to, badly. I could've shit my pants.)
I stared at that hallway all night. The thought of simply going upstairs, back to my rented home, back to where it was safe and warm and where I left my TV on, just didn't occur to me. I just stared at that blank hallway.
I had the tape in my hand, too. The one that I recorded with Sephiroth talking. It was filled up on both sides. I labeled it, "The Sephiroth Record: Volume one"
I knew that he was coming back, and deep down inside, I knew it was all real.
At about five o'clock in the morning, the sun started to birth once again.
There are few things in life that you can count on.
I used to think that walls were one of them.
But I just figured that out- that, that wasn't true.
Sometimes hallways appear in walls without reason or rhyme.
But the sun.
You can count on the sun.
I didn't want to go into the office today. I was still feeling the after affects from being fucked up last night. Slightly hangover, that is.
I didn't shave, I didn't bathe. I sure as hell didn't feel like going in and writing some stupid article for Kalm's daily paper.
I will just come in tomorrow and tell them that I'm working on some big story about Sephiroth.
That is almost true: little do they know that I have a real interview with him.
I looked around the basement. People's shit was everywhere. People, I figured out, keep a lot of shit. A lot of baggage. There were boxes of my neighbors old 'Slate' magazines down there. Unused luggage. Linens, baby toys, my own personal record collection (which was what I was moving before.) Shit. Pure shit. I tried avoiding looking at that hallway. But it kept staring at me under the silence of the morning sun sliding through the windows.
I think it was growing.
I think it was breathing.
I think it was watching me.
I think I need to get out of here before it eats me.
So, I did just that. I finally plucked up enough courage, walked up the tiered wooden stairs, and forced open the basement door.
I glanced over my shoulder and looked one more time into that hallway.
It was growing. It took up part of the ceiling that it didn't have before.
Inside it's cold darkness, the shadows were swirling and shifting.
I felt an old hole in my heart as I walked out with Sephiroth's tape in my pocket.
I went home. I didn't want to think about anything right then. It occurred to me to ask the apartment manager who lived on the floor above me, to ask him for the floor plans of the building. It may explain the anomaly downstairs.
Fuckit.
The phone rang.
"Goin' into work today?"
I told him no. I wasn't feeling well. But I am working on a project.
Jamie didn't push it. We talked a little bit, a fellow co-journalist, but he didn't push me into coming in. He would explain things to the editor.
I normally keep my apartment relatively clean. But, hey, it's a young bachelor's, strait-out-of-college apartment. There were just a couple, not too old, mind you, empty pizza boxes, and beer cans. The TV was rarely turned off. Not that I watch it too much, but it's background noise.
No girlfriend.
Just a handful of close buddies.
And my writing.
That's all I got.
I guess you could say that there is a gigantic, hallway-sized hole in my life.
Five years ago, all our lives could have ended. But it didn't. It just keeps going, in a narrow corridor, with maybe a light at the end of a tunnel. All our lives have one direction, and that is our future. Then, you hit the wall, and you can't see where you are going because no one can tell the future.
What if something horrible, terrible, and ugly shoots out into our lives?
Comes out of nowhere, fucks you hard up and down, spits you out until you are cold, alone, and new and crying into the world.
Fuckit.
I'm not going back down there ever again.
I turned off the TV and went up to the manager's apartment upstairs.
I knocked on his door.
I waited alone in that slate gray corridor.
The carpeting in our apartment complex is battered with cigarette stains and mud. However, even with the splashes, dashes, and stains of color everything looks so bland and lonely.
A sour smelling, salty, sweaty man in a stained, striped, bathrobe answered after I nearly turned around and left.
"Yeah?" He asked, in a half drunken daze. He had a horseshoe baldhead, shining with grease. He clutched his warm beer can tightly.
I asked him for the floor plans of the apartment building, especially, if he had, one of the basement.
"What?" He retorted.
I asked him again, politely, and patiently.
"Whadd du you... need that for?" He asked, confused and irritated.
I told him for inspection purposes, I would show him my badge if he needed me to. I didn't want trouble.
I completely lied about whom I was.
"No no, no trouble, here, let me go find your fuckin' floor plans... goddamnit, I was watchin' the game, you know?"
He made me hold his beer can when he went and got it.
He returned after only a half a moment. It took only a glance to tell me THAT THERE WAS NO HALLWAY IN THE BASEMENT.
"Oh, uh, do you mind if ah- you do somethin' for me?"
I said, sure.
"Go in the basement, and get me another uh- well, get me my old red tool box, would ya? Since I got you your fuckin' floor plans, and everythin'. I need to unclog my drain, and I'm not really, you know- dressed. The misses would appreciate it." The sour smelling manager implored and imposed in half a moment of sobriety. He smiled with yellow, sixty year old teeth.
I nearly said no. I did not want to go back down there. Reasons of my own.
But, in a second of flashing stupidity, who knows, maybe it was all the chemicals I fed myself in my younger days coming back to me in a single balled up moment of self-degradation, I agreed.
I handed him back his floor plans. He took them. I left. To go back down into the basement.
I went down the second floor.
I went down to the first floor.
I passed my apartment without stopping,
To say hello to the comfortable walls there.
And I went DOWN...
Down.
Down.
Down.
Into the basement.
Fuckit. It's dark down here.
And there, near the boxes, near the gray slab walls.
Was the hallway waiting for me.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
And I swallowed a hard knot in my throat that only sat and festered in my stomach. In my pocket was the first tape that Sephiroth had made.
I took a deep breath, and looked down that hallway. It grew.
It was now huge and took up half the ceiling and some of the floor.
It was eating everything inside. A few boxes were missing because they were eating by the cold and endless black.
I turned my back, and decided that I was just going to run. I lifted my left leg. I think that it locked. It didn't feel like my leg, I felt like I could not control it.
I looked up to the wooden stairway that led to the door out of the basement. It seemed a mile away, but I was focused on it, and I was going to RUN.
As soon as my left leg had returned feeling, I was about to launch myself.
Here I go.
I'm going to run, now.
A hand was on my shoulder.
The hand was dead and clammy and disgustingly, wretchedly, beautiful.
Like a vomitus, white mass of skin stretched and painted into digits of a inhuman angel.
I didn't run.
On the contrary, I was frozen, fixed in that one spot, between the hallway and the stairs that led to freedom, where everything was warm, safe, and normal.
Sanity.
"Where are you going?" Sephiroth asked.
I lost.
I turned around, and he stood there.
And I stood there.
"We have a lot more to do. Sit. Sit down!"
That tape recorder, that I am not sure where it came from, happened to be sitting next to me. There was a fresh tape inside.
"You are ready? Good."
~
Reeve dangled the stuffed white animal in front of the infant.
"You know what this is?" Reeve cooed to the baby mockingly.
"Dooo you know what this is... little baby Sephiroth? Yes. It's a toy, but not the kind of toy for you. Oh. No it's not. This is my toy. Yes. Yes it is."
The child looked blankly up at Reeve with cold green eyes. It was not a child's stare.
"Hmph." Reeve grunted, dissatisfied and slightly disturbed by the adult look on the child's face.
"Stupid kid. What do you know? Well, you know what? This toy's is going to make me richer than the president of Shin-Ra someday. It's a remote control, see? See, I can look here at this end with this cat toy, NO! keep your grubby hands off of it, there, and then, I can control it with this toy."
Reeve Sith, in charge of the company's managing technology department of the Shin-Ra corporation, showed how to control the both the cat toy and the large white stuffed toy with his remote control and TV screen.
Sephiroth at first seemed to be bored with it.
Then, the child broke his serious expression with a shattering of laughter and clapping.
Reeve smiled, proud of himself in making the new born laugh.
"ENOUGH, Reeve! Get out of here! That child is an experiment, NOT HERE TO AMUSE YOU!"
"Shut-up, Hojo, I'm showin' the kid a good time!"
Hojo stormed into the lab in a flurry of paper, a white lab coat, and a foul mood.
"HE is not just A KID! He is my SCIENCE EXPERIMENT! And you... and you... you may taint him! Get away, shoo shoo! I- unlike you- take my job SERIOUSLY! And I do not want my work RUINED by some pesky TOY MAKER! Get OUT!~"
"Fine. Fine. I just think that stick up your ass has a stick up it's ass..." Reeve mumbled under his breath as he took his electronic toys and headed for the door.
"What was THAT?" Hojo snapped bitterly.
Reeve said nothing as he slammed the door behind himself.
Hojo paused for a moment, then turned to the child, Sephiroth.
"Hm. Perfectly healthy, normal boy. Unusual growth... side effect of mako infusions. Possibly the Jenova cells." He muttered to himself and scribbled something down on his official looking papers.
"Now, what of it, boy? Can you remember what I taught you?"
Sephiroth giggled, and spat up.
"Now, what is THIS, boy?" Hojo flipped through his papers, and held up his clip board. On the paper was a large picture of a cat.
"Aaat." Sephiroth yelled, clapped his hands, and tried grabbing the clipboard.
"Good! And this?"
Hojo flipped the page, and held up another picture- it was that of a tree.
"Beeee!"
"No." Hojo snapped. He hated children.
"Keeey!"
"No. Dam- It's a TREE!"
"Three!" Sephiroth held up three chubby fingers.
"Close enough."
Weeks passed. Lucrecia passed. Sephiroth was still exhibiting unusual growth and developmental rates. Sephiroth was six months old, and looked, acted, and for all tense and purposes was at the normal five year old level. He threw fits when he could not have his way.
He was socialized and interacted with other five year olds.
But he was not five. He was six months old.
"For all I can tell, doc, he's five. Shit, I got a six year old sister at home myself-" Tseng asked.
"He's not five!" Gast sputtered.
Hojo was silent, and gave a long thin grin.
"It's not natural..." Gast sighed. "But he is what he is. We can treat him at his level. He is human. I'm just worried about the death rate- what will he be like in five YEARS? Will he even be alive then? If the growth rate won't slow down-"
"The mako injections help that. I tested it myself with normal human DNA. The SOLDIERS. It slows their aging process, and helps keeps the healthy cells young. It's quite astounding, really." Hojo uttered.
"And what of Jenova? Did he speak of Jenova, yet? Has he any of its memories? Was the project a complete failure?"
"No. For all we know the project and the test was a failure. Memory is something that conclusively cannot be passed down via genes. Sephiroth is an example of that so far. I suppose Jenova will always be a mystery to us, since, obviously we can not ask it itself, and Sephiroth obviously inherited no memories from the injected cells. I THOUGHT, honestly, with 95% of my being that this test would be a success, but, obviously, everything was a failure. We shouldn't have done this. We lost Lucrecia-it was all in vain." Gast said sadly to Tseng.
Hojo was silent, and stared out the small window into the room where Sephiroth was interacting with other children.
"Perhaps not a complete failure. There still are the clones." He said.
"I will have nothing to do with those, Hojo." Gast barked.
"What about Jenova? What happened to it?" Tseng asked.
"We moved it. We can't get rid of it, and we have technically done all we can with it, so we moved it. Top secret lab." Gast answered.
Tseng coiled his hands behind his back, and sighed.
Hojo stared at Sephiroth.
Sephiroth was laughing.
"I suppose I shall move onto other studies." Gast said absently.
"Oh, like what?" Tseng asked.
"Well, the Centra, through all my research, still fascinate me."
"And, what's this?" Hojo asked.
"A... uh, broad sword."
"Good!" Hojo seemed pleased. The boy was catching on quickly.
"And this?" Hojo asked sweetly.
"Uh. Fuck. You know? I'm getting sick of this. Can't I get like a different teacher, a CLASSROOM!? I'm not a kid anymore."
"Don't use that tone of voice with ME! I am your TEACHER I am your FATHER! I raised you!"
"You haven't raised me, I raised myself, old bat. I'm just saying that I'd rather be taught in a classroom with my peers, you know. I'm fourteen years old, I can take care of myself." Sephiroth snapped.
But he was not fourteen.
He was three years old.
But he didn't know that. In his mind, he was a perfectly ordinary fourteen year old.
Hojo's eye was twitching with irritation. He started to get gray hairs two years ago on the side of his head.
"DON'T use that kind of language in my presence, boy! You need to know this stuff if you are going to be any member of SOLDIER!!"
"I don't want to join SOLDIER." Sephiroth turned his head, muttered, and folded his arms.
"Then what DO you want to DO?!"
Sephiroth sighed, and looked out the window. He wanted to sing. He loved classical music, but he would admit to nothing.
"I donno."
"GEAH! That's IT I'm finished! I'm going to hire you a counselor, a MENTAL counselor! You are impossible! And I'm hiring a TUTOR! MAYBE you need a physiatrist and some PROZAC!" Hojo flew out in frenzy, yelling down the hall about something with hating teenagers.
Sephiroth picked at a reddening pimple, and stared into his reflection on the glass window.
It was a sunny day.
He thought it was funny when the old bat got really pissed off. Hojo reminded him of those stereotypical mad scientists with crazy hair, a lab coat, and a triangular vile of something green and bubbly and if you drank it you would turn into a hairy beast.
Hojo also pissed him off.
Everyone pissed him off and no one understood him.
Where was a mother when you needed her?
Sephiroth dropped his head into his folded arms on the desk.
He smoothed back his short, black, strait hair.
Sephiroth wished he had a mom.