Ifalna does not get enough love in fandom. And Hojo, well, he's usually a casual and easy excuse to toture whomever you're trying to use for a pairing fic of some kind. But I think both can be very interesting charactes. Particularly because there's experimentation involved. What better way to bring people together than to put them in a scientist and specimen type enviroment?
Toshiro is the name I use for Hojo. Like his first name. Ifalna is just too casual of a person to call him Hojo, I think.
Some allusions are made to the movie Gladiator. And the first line is a direct quote.
---
Am I not merciful?
He was explaining to her while her eyelids were heavy something that she would never understand. This was what too much intelligence did to a person, and she knew that she'd heard that before somewhere. She could see in the smudge of his labcoat a man that she had once coaxed into playing cards, and she could see in his side glances the type of injokes that Lu used to share with her.
Toshiro was lonely.
But he was too intelligent to acknowledge it. Instead of raising that son--that scary sort of anti-image of Lu, with the bangs and the eyes, but not quite--he clinically put him in a jar like the rest of them. Pinned butterflys.
Wife, mother, daughter. A twisted trilogy. It was a good thing that Sephiroth had no memory of Lu, or else he would feel the short of the role on him. She was the mother, because she had the daughter. Aeris...
She didn't want to think about her right now. That was selfish, but when Toshiro was paying attention to her and not to Aeris; things were as they should be. Far be it for her to call herself a selfless mother.
"It's in your blood, you know."
She snapped out of her own thoughts of pink wings. And immediately had to wonder why she was thinking that in the first place.
"What is?"
"What makes you special."
She didn't like it when he used the word special. It was the same tone he used for his son and the same tone that he'd used when talking to Brennon...
You know he won't be able to defend you. He's... he's a smart man, but what will happen when...
She hated that voice. Because what she'd chalked up to paranoia now sounded reasonable and that just wouldn't do. In fact, this sort of civility wouldn't do.
"I don't want to be special, Toshiro."
He seemed amused that she still called him by his first name. Which was ridiculous. Hadn't she listened to him when he admitted, that one rare time, that maybe his wife hated him? That maybe, maybe all of it was--
"But you are. Isn't that what he told you?"
--his fault.
If she had blinked, she would have missed it. She wasn't strong enough anymore to leave a mark, or even to hurt him when she did it, but she was sure all the malice, all the intent was in her face. He raised a hand to his cheek where the back of her hand had been and for a moment looked as if he would return the favor.
She took that hand and kissed it lightly. She remembered a time when people did that out of respect instead of apology. And Toshiro would never hit her. Scientists weren't brutal.
Scientists weren't brutal.
"For science," she whispered and then was silent.