The room was dark, cold, and filled with the stench of processed Mako. He would have thought that the conditioning, which included Mako showers, would have made such things unnoticeable, he had been immersed in the foul stuff for hours, but, life being what it is, it was not so.
He flicked his bangs out of his eyes. Now that wasn't a product of the horrific treatments they underwent. As far as he could remember, his hair had always been long, silver, and rising in two impossibly high bangs above his eyes. He puffed at them, hoping that they would stay out of his vision, but it was to no avail.
He looked around, uneasily. This place felt wrong, somehow. The pods that lined the catwalk shook a bit, and an unhealthy green glow came out of the viewports in the front.
The viewports. He stepped up to one of the pods and wrinkled his nose. The scent of slowly decaying Mako and...something else...rotting flesh? ...was particularly strong here. Grabbing the lower rim of the circular window with hands encased in black gloves, he hauled himself up to the glass.
His reflection stared back at him, faint against a background of gently coruscating green and blue Mako. He studied the pale, ghostly image for a moment. Silver hair in two perfectly arched bangs that had never known a comb or brush, narrow face, mouth in a faint sardonic smile. Eyes like the Mako itself. Strange, those eyes. They were almost cat-like. In fact, they were like a cat's eyes. The exact shape, and slitted pupils, surrounded by a wide iris of jewel-like color, green, turquoise, blue, turquoise, green. They were always changing, his eyes. Just like the damnable Mako.
Something drifted against the glass. It was quite literally a creature out of nightmare. Its head was a mass of bony spikes and horns, colored as though by an insane artist's palette, smeared with blue, violet, green, red, pink...it was curled up like a fetus, and appeared to have been a human being at some distant time in the past.
A-ha. The whole thing stank of Hojo's work. It was quite plain what was happening. The plague of monsters that had terrorized the village of Nibelheim had obviously been engineered by that wretched man. These...things, there was no better word for them, really, were Hojo's experiments, his toys, what he did in his spare time. The man was insane, but this insane? To actually transform a human into something totally different? It was violently unethical, and the legal mess was something a garbageman wouldn't want to touch with a ten-foot stick. He felt a sudden urge to take the scrawny scientist and wring him by his pencil-neck, not for what had been done to him, but for what had been done to these people.
He gestured to his lieutenant to seal the valve that was causing the problem. The other man peered into a capsule, and fell back with a cry of disgust.
Suddenly, he was struck with an unpleasant thought. He knew his birth had been planned, and he knew that he had been genetically tinkered with, had undergone infusions of Mako and strange injections that made his blood burn in his veins.
Had he been created this way, too? Was he...human?
He wandered up the catwalk, lost in thought, when a word on a conduit caught his eye. His gaze was dragged along to the door at the end of the walkway, and he saw the name engraved on the arch that formed the top of the portal.
His mother's name. Jenova. She had died just after he was born, he knew. The files were there in the computer system for anyone to see.
What lay beyond the door? What had Hojo hidden there?
He sat down on the edge of the walkway, puzzling.
A renegade thought flittered though his mind. Find the books. Gast had left books. They must be somewhere close by.
*****
He sat in the book-lined corridor, glowing eyes feasting on the knowledge before him.
The story of the discovery, the tale of his dark nativity, Hojo's scheming, all of it was laid bare to his probing intellect. It was all so simple. They had found his mother in the ice. An Ancient, the perfect race that had started it all. The blood that went through his veins was the purest on the Planet. And, if he understood correctly, his mother was still alive, behind that door.
He picked up Masamune, the sword, the beautiful sword. Light gleamed off its long edge, perfect, delightful, begging to be dimmed with the inferior blood those traitors to his race carried in them.
His mind shattered into a thousand shards of shining black glass. Her will told him exactly what he had to do. Ignoring the pitiful ape that stood jabbering at him about something that would only matter to those worthless creatures that had betrayed his mother, he set about to his new task.
Deep inside his soul, a small fragment of himself watched all that he did with horror.
He was Lucifer, the light-bringer. He chanted the words that summoned the flames, and grinned as the first house was consumed with the purifying blaze. He was the dark angel, treading the paths of the doomed.
The town burst into flames. Blood drenched the tiny streets. He walked through sheets of flame, willing them aside. Turning, he smiled at the same creature that had gabbled at him in the library. It was saying something else, demanding that he give it all back.
Whatever could it mean by that?
Turning his back on the traitors, he began the long walk to the mountain, the location of his mother's resting-place, and the place where their new reign would begin.
*****
He went up the catwalk, and stood before the portal. He whispered the words that would reveal her to him at last, a son waiting for the long-desired reunion with his mother.
"Mother, I'm here to see you. Please, open this door."
'Yes, my darling Sephiroth, my dearest child.'
He kicked aside the creature that railed at him about some meaningless thing or another. He had something more important to do.
He was going to see his mother.
~fin~