Chapter 2 - Anti-Ansem

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The sky cleared even more. Strangely enough, the rain had ceased to exist. The land seemed brighter, but no less gray. What had been blurry before was now seen clearly. From the slope of the mountain, Ansem discerned the craggy, pock-marked faces of others around him, stretching tall into the sky. The hills clawed at the sky as though to escape. Sleepy animals awakened, and for the first time Ansem thought perhaps this place wasn't as 'dead' as it seemed.

Moisture seeped into the soil, quenching the dry earth beneath. Impassable, swelling rapids had dwindled to crossable rivers. Creaky, broken bridges spanned their breadth once in awhile as they squeezed in between the gargantuan gneiss rocks.

Having nothing to follow but the Seeker relic as his guide, he chose his direction and trekked, stopping once in awhile to eat. As it was, Ansem was tireless and wasn't known to be easily exhausted after having gotten some real, true rest. His rest with Sydney had given him the respite he needed to regain enough strength to reach the other lost, dwindling spirit.

In this strange place, the sky was the color of blue. Its hue reminded him vaguely of that island, from whence the Keyblade master Sora had come to rescue his friends. But the island *had* been beautiful... as beautiful as its people. In particular one boy. A bold, out-going child named Riku, whose desire to discover other worlds had attracted the Darkness and poisoned his heart.

He had proven to be a charming child to use, while it lasted, to speak through him, move through him, and utilize his marvelous sword skills. But Sora had won out in the end....

Ansem wondered as he climbed if Sora and Riku and the final Princess of Heart, Kairi, had ever returned to their world to live in peace.

The thought made his stomach turn and his chest ache. He gritted his teeth and sprang to another rock, landing awkwardly as he slid down the opposite side of it, hitting a flat plane and staggering. He caught himself on another boulder, leaning against it for a moment as he caught his breath.

"I definitely need to stop doing that, get my head out of my arse, and bloody concentrate," he grumbled softly. He checked Seeker once more, and to his astonishment the spirit wasn't very far from here. But it was telling him something else, too. It was in the middle of the mountain he was climbing, and he had circled half-way around it. He had seen no such cave or entrance.

He looked around, turning instead to examine the boulder that had saved him from tumbling downhill. It was flat, smoothed down from time. Ordinarily, all of the stones and boulders he had encountered were jagged and darker. This was not.

But there was nothing in the way of a secret passageway. He frowned at it, knowing this *had* to be it. He tried everything, exploring every odd-shaped crack or knob, and found absolutely nothing.

At last, Ansem growled, turning and pressing, digging his toes into the stone. He shoved against the stone with all of his might. It shuddered suddenly and the motion made him stagger as it gave back a foot. It slid to the side with an unholy, ancient grating noise. Dust and dirt fell away from the cracks, made him cough, and clouded up the dark corridor beyond.

"Well," he said to himself with mock cheerfulness. "What a surprise! If all else fails... Push." He swept his hand through the air, brushing dust out of the way. "Nobody's been in here for an age, it seems..."

He stepped inside nervously, reaching into his pack. A torch was in his possession, luckily, though it was a chore to keep it from getting wet in the rain. He lit it, and resumed, treading down into the darkness.

It smelled of dampness within. Beyond, he heard the echo of running water through the caves. The corridor widened into a room with a single door in the corner, cracked open to a spiralling stairway. He paused in the center of the room, turning around and around, peering into the shadows to see a heavy chest, scrolls, a number of miscellaneous items. Perhaps some sort of study, he thought. And poorly looked after.

But the door was what drew him. It seemed to have been left open in a hurry. This impression wandered through to him, suddenly and without warning. That something used this door regularly, but what he could not tell.

He walked to the door, sliding it open with the toe of his boot before he descended the spiral stairway. There were more torches lining the walls toward the bottom, their eerie sick light casting the damp walls a sickly green sheen.

At the bottom, he heard the noise of water growing louder as he pressed his hand against another door. For a moment, it resisted before it slipped open, the noise a shrieking banshee in the darkness.

Stepping into the room, he squinted slightly, flinching when the door behind him shut itself loudly. He saw on the other side was a mirror, gleaming in the light of the torch he now raised to penetrate the shadows. It was then, at this moment, that something abrubtly caught his attention. A flash of metal. A lot of metal, in the corner of the room. He stepped toward it slowly, and his heart lunged into his throat at what he saw.

Suspended on the wall, by an assortment of chains and thick, heavily barbed wire, was a man. This man's clothing was stripped off from the waist up, and the pants that remained were torn with jagged, blood-stained slashes from the wires that entwined around his limbs. His body was covered in fresh, slick crimson blood, each wire positions over his arms and veins and one, final wire wrapped particularly around his throat. Scars, scars such that no man could survive covered the entirity of his body wherever the wires' bite had reached.

By will alone the prisoner's chest moved with each strained, forced breath of air. His eyes were closed and reddened from torture, or straining to see in the darkness for other than Ansem's torch there had been no light in here before he came. His faded silver-white hair clung to his blood-sticky face, fell across his shoulders and into the wires.

He lunged forward, resisting the urge to drop the torch and he set it into a torch sconce on the wall beside him.

"Good God!" he cried hoarsely in the darkness, reaching to touch him but fearing to. He slept. It was good that the prisoner slept. He didn't want to wake him, and make him struggle and injure himself even more. He looked around, quietly, hissing fervently about a switch - anything! - to release the ragged body that hung on the wall.

Finally he found what seemed to be an odd-shaped crystal, set in platinum, jutting out from the wall. It had a thin layer of dust covering it, like the dust covered everything. He reached up to touch it, and at once the crystal shrank back into the wall, and a metallic clanking echoed beyond the stone walls. At once, every wire and chain slackened or fell free, and the man's body fell with it, crashing against the floor where he was at once awake.

Ansem fell upon him, and immediately found himself fighting a thrashing, rampaging demon of madness, screaming as he was as his fingers tried to claw and scratch and tear at him. Indeed! Ansem found this very man striving to sink his teeth into his leg did he not have the strength to knock him back.

"Stop this at ONCE!!" he roared, half in terror and half in rage. He struggled to his feet, nursing a scratch on his cheek before his attention fell to the prisoner. His eyes softened while he watched him, and he sat before him.

"No more fight left in you? That's good. I'm not going to hurt you... now, hold still..." Ansem stilled his shaking hands as much as he could, reaching to take the corner of his now-gray jacket and dab the blood from his body. This was going to take more than simple healing. When the sound of water suddenly broke into his attention, he turned and saw the source of the wound. It was a fresh spring, falling through a crack in the ceiling and into a neat pool carved into the flagstones.

He left him there for a moment with his jacket, moving toward the spring, and testing the water himself before bringing a handful of it toward the survivor. He splashed it on his face, wiping the grime from his face with a piece of cloth he'd fished from his bag used to store some of the food he'd taken with him. He slowed down, going to the pool again to rince out the cloth and come back once more.

What emerged from beneath the dirt and gore was a handsome man, pale of face, a strong jaw and an expressive face. The eyes gleamed like gems from his face, and watched his every move like a drugged serpent, experiencing the desire to strike but having not the strength nor means to.

"There you are," Ansem whispered, hands working shakily as he cleansed his face, squeezing the water out on his shoulder. When the water touched the long reddened scar around his throat the man hissed, reaching to stop his hands. "Easy, stranger! It must be cleansed, or it will not heal."

The stranger's mouth formed the word 'why' silently, his throat bobbing slightly as he swallowed. Inch by inch, the grime slowly was scrubbed from his neck and shoulders, and Ansem answered softly, "Because you cannot stay here and suffer. Because it is not right to be tortured like this, and because *I* would not want to see it happen to you any longer."

He felt pressure on his arm, where the man grasped his sleeve. "Why?" came the question again.

"I am alone," Ansem told him after a moment of cold hesitation. He reached under his shoulders, hefting him up slightly and pulled him across the flagstone toward the natural spring. There, he rested him against his pack long enough to feed him water with his hands. "And there is another man living in the village in the valley who needs us both, because he's been alone for a long time. He needs us. Shh, don't ask me any more questions now. You just sit and drink, friend."

After he'd drank enough water, Ansem sat and suspended his head above the water and rinsed his hair, squeezing it out, rinsing it again. He marveled when the dirt had been washed away, how soft and shiny it was, how so like his, though perhaps his own was tinged more gray than white or silver. He sighed, running his fingers through the damp locks before he continued washing him.

Sleep claimed his new companion, thus ending further opportunities for conversation for a few hours. Ansem shivered slightly, and left him there by the pool, wrapped in his coat as he went to light the other torches around the room and cast a bit more light in the room.

He was tired, and ate what was left of the stale, tasteless bread from his sack until he curled up beside the stranger to keep him warm, his body shivering from more than just cold. The night was setting on. Heat did not penetrate this deep into the mountain, and it would soon grow chillier.

Simple bliss.

Instead of nightmares, he found darkness and warmth in his sleep. Sleep that rested him and embraced him, caressed his feverish mind. He struggled to remember the voice of kindness, the sight of the stranger's clean, dark face burned into his vision while he slept.

Had he *ever* known peace before this? At all? Though his body still ached, he was warm. Though he was hungry, he was no longer thirsty. He suffered - but he was no longer alone.

His mind fumbled crazily to make sense out of all of this. Probing thoughts lingered on the edges of dreams, but they were reluctant to visit. That was just as well; he'd rather be fully asleep, without dreams, than have the dreams. He wanted nothing to bother him, and give him peace to ponder over these strange events.

Yes.

He would learn more when he was awake. Oh, yes, most definately.

Ansem slowly uncurled himself from beside his sleeping charge. The torches still blazed dutifully from their wall sconces... however, something was different in the room. He staggered to his feet, cracking a twinge of pain out of his neck and back. Flagstone could be most uncomfortable, he noted bitterly. He approached the door he'd come in from before, and stopped short.

The mirror on this side of the door was different. He didn't know exactly *how*, and as he approached, he gasped and jumped back again.

There was no reflection. Of *anything* in this room. Simply bare walls, an empty dead-end corridor beyond the mirror. "Beyond the looking glass," he whispered hoarsely, eyeing the glass suspiciously. Good God, this was unnerving. He moved from one side to the other, desperately searching for the reflection that wasn't there.

Was there... some kind of trick?

He opened the door, and saw to his relief the familiar twining stairway going up. He glanced toward the silver-haired man and smiled grimly. If he wasn't strong enough to make it up these stairs, what a task it will be to drag him! As he turned away from the door, it shut once more behind him. And once again he found himself beside the angel - yes, he thought. He's an angel, that's exactly what he is - brushing his fingers through his drying hair. He still slept, for which he was glad. He looked so peaceful... and just how long had it been since he'd *ever* gotten a good amount of sleep?

Creak.

The sound fingered through his thoughts until he realized he'd heard it. He turned his head around sharply, stiffening slightly as he sought the source of the noise. The door hadn't moved or opened. But he stared at it, his gaze very much bound to that unnerving visage of the empty corridor.

What started as an inky blot of blackness suddenly began to crawl across the glass, almost as part of this mysterious 'non-reflection'. It *writhed*, and soon the blackness became many formless beings, crawling toward the edges of the mirror and congregating as their density and number simply multiplied.

Ansem could only stare in horror.

What *were* these things?

Surprises seemed to be in abundance in this awful place.......

Suddenly the blackness lunged from the mirror itself, spilling onto the floor, gliding up through the air the darkness pooled itself into a grotesque shape. He remembered the twisted, jagged forms of the Heartless that he had once controlled so easily. They were nothing beside this thing, which writhed and rippled on ungainly ooze-like limbs. It crawled toward them slowly, what seemed to be a head bent low to the ground, "sniffing" around for them.

The sleeping man behind him stirred, groaned, before it was cut off short by an unusually low, dark growl of such deep, fathomless hatred that Ansem took a step back from *both* of them. The second it took him to do so then he saw the flash of white hair, furious green eyes and a strangled roar of rage so inhuman he thought it may have come from the blob than the man. But what insued was a battle he would later recall and still not understand, for it happened so quickly and ended so abrubtly he had no time to think.

Sephiroth awoke to the familiar stomach-twisting sensation that those soul-sucking abominations induced upon their victims. And when he awoke, found himself unbound and full of energy, he turned his rage loose immediately on the creature which he could now see. And the hatred that swelled at the sight of it murdered his reason and left it behind as he launched himself from beneath the grayed jacket and collided with the thing of darkness head-on. Oblivious to the life-stealing cold that began to numb his body once more, he snarled as he tore at the flesh.

Like savage wolves they tumbled around the floor together, his fists pummeling against unyielding, wet mushy flesh, and felt no bones give underneath his punches. When that did not work, panic surged up through him, and his voice worked as he screamed, his voice grating on the walls of his prison.

"FIRAGA!!!"

Immediately he pulled free and rolled back against the wall, the back of his head cracking against it audibly and at once his world was black and white, spinning as flames of hellish power burst upon the abomination. In his nearly blacked-out state his lips pulled back in a sneer of satisfaction as the thing's dying howl raised above the roar of fire.

When it was through, and the dizziness cleared, he swept his hand tiredly through the smoke and focused on the man whose face had echoed through his calm, quiet dreams. He saw him almost draw back slightly in fear and Sephiroth tensed, readying another spell just in case.

But the other stranger didn't move, and simply gazed with golden-red eyes like fire, so bright compared to the rest of his drab, soaked appareance. He crouched, clutching at the edge of the white jacket, while Sephiroth looked on.

"Who are you?" Sephiroth hissed through clenched teeth. When the words passed from his lips, a throbbing fire exploded through his head, and everywhere as he moved to stand. He rose to his feet precariously standing on his legs like a newborn calf, his long thighs straining against the flimsy material of his torn pants.

He looked like the devil of himself, rather like the dead risen. His ragged appearance portrayed much struggle but at the same time determined life. His eyes burned like fire from beyond a curtain of damp silver hair, spattered with caked blood here and there.

"I-I..." Ansem fumbled for words, having no such conception of what he just saw. He saw magic, yes, powerful magic. But how could this man possibly horde such power all to himself? How could he, and yet be such a prisoner here? He realized that the "prisoner" was still waiting for his answer.

"Ansem," he replied at last, quickly.

"What?" The man's eyes narrowed dangerously. He must not have caught it.

"Ansem. I saved you. I came down here and saved you, I mean, I followed you here using this relic, you see, and I came down here and saved you from--" Ansem trailed off and coughed from the smoke, trembling slightly. "I, uh, saved you."

The prisoner walked forward, limping faintly, oblivious to the small trickle of blood that was coming from his right thigh. Ansem's eyes traveled over him, flickering quickly, admiring and simultaneously fearing the strong frame, the wretched appearance, the menacing, almost insane glare.

"Saved me... just how in the world did you manage to even find me, ...Ansem?" His lips quirked into that maddening smirk again and Ansem stood up slowly, holding the jacket as though it were a ward against evil.

Darkness permeated from within this man. Yes, deep intense darkness. And evil, strong evil, so much so that Darkness was *his* servant. Not the other way around. Which was odd. Darkness *always* won, always.

"I told you," he said more quietly, measuring his words and trying to sound as calm. "I used the Seeker relic to search out a spirit in this world, and when I found you here, I felt rather inclined to save your ass from certain doom or an eternity of agony." His voice hardened at the end, and for a minute he thought he sounded particularly intimidating. "Now... who in God's name are you?"

Sephiroth blinked, certainly surprised at the sudden recovery. What a bold man, he marveled. To come and rescue me like that...brazen and foolish. (And... handsome... wherever did he come from?) "Sephiroth," he answered, eyebrow twitching upward a bit. "So... now that I'm up and about... can you show me the door?"

"There's only one. And you're not going alone, my friend Sephiroth, I assure you that."

"Is that so?" Sephiroth took another long step toward him, so that a mere few inches stood between them. He reached out suddenly with one slightly bloodied hand and seized his throat slightly, yanking him nearly from his feet entirely to bring him closer. What he saw as he sneered down into that face gave him cause to be speechless, for with fear came a gleam of nameless emotion in his eyes as well.

Nameless, but not unfamiliar, he thought. Confusion, want. Simple desire. How appropriate... I'm seducing him without really trying to.

He let him go slowly, if only to give the man some room, and he backed away. "Don't touch me," Sephiroth warned softly. "I'll go with you then... I'm not helpless now... don't infuriate me, Ansem, or may whatever Gods show you more mercy than I..."