Veld usually began his days by crawling out of bed, slamming down a coffee and his medication, forcing down a smoothie, then lumbering out of his apartment and towards the elevator, which he would then ride up to the Administrative levels. Once there, he would change into a fresh suit, brush his teeth, wash his face, and settle in to weather the endless paperwork, both digital and physical.

Ever since Carmelin had sauntered upstairs two weeks ago for a Board meeting and never come back down, Veld had been forced to take over administrative work of the Director, as well as the title itself. He did not enjoy it much, if at all. He now had ostensibly any number of underlings who he could send to fetch his coffee and pick up his dry cleaning, but he hadn't survived so long as a field agent without a healthy dose of paranoia. He at least was free from the demands of grunt work, though it meant that it was also now his job to speak regularly with other departmental directors, and that was even more unpleasant than wetwork.

"I don't appreciate having my time be wasted like this," Director Hojo said coldly.

Veld resisted the urge to tell him where he could shove it.

"I have no intention of wasting your time, Director Hojo, for all that you seem unable to respect mine. It takes significant amounts of manpower and time to process the amount of surveillance you have requested that we review. Doing it for the third time is frankly a waste of company resources."

Hojo sneered at Veld.

"Nevertheless," Hojo said, "it is within the rights of a departmental Director to order it. Have your Turks look again."

Veld's perpetual frown deepened. "Very well," he agreed, "but the overtime is coming out of the Science Department's budget."

Hojo shrugged, unconcerned. "Fine," he said shortly, and left without further comment, the skirt of his labcoat flaring up as he whirled around and stalked out, still simmering with same irritation that had made him a hazard to be around for the past week and a half.

"Dickhead," Katana muttered under her breath. Veld gave her a sharp look but offered no verbal reprimand.

"Sucks to be you," Knife offered.

Veld shrugged and leaned back in his chair, lighting up a cigarette.

"You heard Director Hojo," Veld said. "Get to it."

Knife snickered and Katana flipped him the bird. "You're all dickheads."

Katana stomped towards the bank of monitors in the corner, still littered with the takeout containers from the last two time she'd gone through the godsforsaken footage.

"Enjoy your nap," Veld called to her. She flipped him off with both hands.

Katana pulled up the footage, let it play, and settled back in her chair to catch up on her beauty sleep.

Veld continued slogging through the harrowing minefields that was interdepartmental mission requests without paying Katana any further notice, for all that she snored. The others in control room A1 with him also placidly continued with their own tasks. He waited until lunch time, when he went out to his favourite coffee shop for a halfway decent cup of the stuff. On his walk over, he took advantage of a surveillance blindspot to reply to a text from his usual babysitter informing Veld he wouldn't be available to babysit Felicia for the next week as he was going on vacation.

"Jack is watching Felicia. Enjoy your trip."

He blind copied his reply to a contact whose name was listed as "3", and hit send.

Then he took his coffee back to the office and prayed for one of the gods to strike him down on the spot so he did not have to go back to his paperwork. Alas, but his prayers went unanswered.


"No," Ifalna said firmly.

"I want," little Aerith objected. She tugged none too gently on Ifalna's hair in order to make her point. Ifalna winced.

"Aerith, darling," Lucrecia cooed, "Come let Auntie Lucrecia cuddle you for a bit."

Aerith protested this, but her resistance proved futile as she was handed to Lucrecia so that Ifalna could take out the bright bauble in her hair and put it in a secure pocket before she redid her hair. Lucrecia entertained little Aerith by playing upsie daisy and making her giggle and shriek.

"Thank you dear," Ifalna said, holding her arms out for Aerith. Lucrecia bounced a beaming Aerith a few more times before handing her over.

"Be good now, young miss," Lucrecia said with mock sternness. Her unnaturally youthful countenance seemed to glow with the force of her unreserved, easy smile.

"Hello dears," called Professor Gast, entering with a small stack of books in his arms, as well as a number of floppy discs. "Lucrecia, here's the reading material I promised. Not quite as up to date as the experimental data you provided, perhaps, but certainly more scientifically rigorous than anything Doctor Hojo has done in the last decade."

Lucrecia huffed out a laugh as she hurried to open up a suitcase for Gast to dump the books into.

"I'm hardly going to have time to read all this on the road!" She said, but started rearranging things in the suitcase so that the books would all fit.

"It wouldn't do for you to get bored in the car, my dear," said Gast, smiling warmly.

"I threw in some copies of my own writings," Ifnalna added, bouncing Aerith, who was already gnawing on her hair again. "We've discussed most of what's in here before, but just in case you need to consult anything."

Vincent crept into the room with another stack of books in his arms.

"I'll miss you," Lucrecia said earnestly, a hand on Ifnalna's wrist and another on Gast's forearm.

"Miss you," Aerith repeated, giggling, not really fully understanding what she was repeating.

Lucrecia smiled back at her helplessly. "I'll miss you too, sweetheart."

Vincent set his pile of books and came over to offer Aerith a solemn smile of his own. He bent down and ruffled her soft hair.

He had not taken to Gast and Ifalna as easily as he might once have, but he was helpless against Aerith's bright, innocent smiles.

"We will see you again before you know it," Vincent promised solemnly.

Aerith looked at him for a long moment, then planted a big sticky kiss on his cheek, and shrieked with laughter.

Vincent touched the patch of baby spit, bewildered, and Lucrecia decided to take Aerith's benediction as a good sign of how their journey would go.

"Ifalna," she said, putting a hand on Ifalna's shoulder. "Thank you, truly. Not just for all the knowledge and materials or for agreeing to go to the City of the Ancients, but for everything else too. I owe you so much. I… I don't know if I could have kept myself together without your support."

Ifalna's smiling lips and bright eyes became unreadable.

"Lucrecia," she said. "You and Vincent have helped keep Gast and Aerith safe. That is everything to me. There is no need to speak of debts, especially not before a parting."

She kissed Lucrecia on the forehead.

"We will meet again," she said, in the low and insistent cadence of prophecy.

A shiver shot up Lucrecia's spine.

"We will," she agreed, though anything could happen.


"He's competent enough," said Daniel Towers, SOLDIER Second Class.

"I'm not worried about his competence in physical combat," answered SOLDIER First Class Mutsuro Reed. He gestured at the chair in front of his desk.

Towers pulled it out and took a seat, relaxed enough to prop his elbow on the arm rests but not relaxed enough to sit any further back than perching on the very edge of the seat. He'd been tense for the past two weeks, ever since Reed had revealed to him that he was being considered for a promotion.

Reed took out a heavily redacted copy of Sephiroth's file in the Shinra Assets Catalogue, as well as a more moderately censored copy of Sephiroth's entry in the Shinra Employee Directory. The file from the internal Science Department records weren't redacted or censored at all, but only because no one had the time to censor almost every line in a hip high stack of papers, and so some peon had just scribbled out a handful of loose tidbits on a loose sheet from a notepad and faxed the palm sized scrap of data over to Reed's office directly instead.

"Only the Goddess knows what they've been doing to him in the labs," Reed said, pushing the files over to Towers, "but they've been making sure he's got all the relevant training for SOLDIER. Not just as a SOLDIER, either. From what I can tell, he's got more Turk training than half of internal affairs, and that's just what hasn't been redacted. The list is longer than my arm."

"So he can fight," Towers said. "Like I said, he's competent enough."

"But is he going to be a good SOLDIER? He's a child. He isn't even old enough for entry into the cadet selection program yet, and I've been told to instate him as a Third and to fast track him for all possible promotions."

Towers looked down at the stack of papers, flipping through the pages, though it wasn't clear that he was actually reading through them. His lowered gaze veiled the mako glow of his eyes. He seemed to be lost in thought.

Reed waited patiently.

"I haven't seen him in two years," Towers said at last. "But even when he was a younger - and I mean really young, he couldn't have been more than six or seven when I first met him, he was never really a kid. He seemed like a kid at first, cheerful and a bit annoying, and he says the darnedest things sometimes, but... Eventually you get this sneaking suspicion that it's all an act he's putting on, and he's laughing at you for believing in it."

"Oh?" Reed prompted. "So you'd characterise him as.. Smug? Arrogant?"

Towers frowned, his eyebrows screwed together right. "He won't disobey direct orders," Towers said, though that wasn't really answering the question. "His outbursts tend to be about getting a reaction out of you. Sometimes it wasn't so much him acting out as him... calling you out. He didn't aim it at me much, but I've see him needle Director Veld, back when Veld was just a regular Turk. But he doesn't complain about being assigned difficult tasks, and he's capable enough of being responsible for his own actions, so I think he deserves the benefit of doubt at the very least. He's been living on his own and basically taking care of himself since before I first met him."

Reed's eyebrows flew upwards despite himself.

"He's listed in his files as living with Doctor Hojo," Reed pointed out, trying to match up the limited data on the files to this revelation.

"I supposed the house might be under Hojo's name, but Hojo sure as hell doesn't live there."

"Now that I think of it," Reed murmured, "I suppose it must be Director Hojo's company issued housing. All the senior management staff are assigned housing across the road from company HQ, which matches up the location of the recorded address, and Director Hojo certainly doesn't leave the building often enough to be living even that far offsite, which would mean the kid would be left to his own devices."

"I heard that Hojo sleeps in a spare specimen containment cell to save time," Towers said, faux-conspiratorial.

Reed repressed a smile. "There are spacious apartments for each of the directors on the floor below the presidential quarters, and directorial offices come with a suite of rooms attached, any one of which could easily be converted into a bedroom."

"I should have known better than to believe gossip anyway," Towers said, disappointed. "I know for sure Sephiroth used to sneak off for naps in a containment cell sometimes, so I thought it might have been true."

"Hmm," said Reed, who didn't know how to feel about this revelation. "Well, his permanent address aside, I cannot go against Director Hojo's wishes that Sephiroth is instated as a Third Class right off the bat. Furthermore, there is another individual Hojo is foisting off on us, and this time without any personal information except a specimen catalogue entry with an acquisition date and a serial code. Have you ever met or heard of this Specimen Y?"

"Oh," said Towers. "You mean Yuuki? He's Sephiroth's creepier twin, you know, with the red eyes."

Reed opened his mouth, closed it, and gritted his teeth.

"There's more of them?" One little kid was bad enough. To have to babysit two, and just when the Wutai campaign was about to take off in earnest. Reed wanted to strangle Hojo with his bare hands.

"Sure," said Towers. "I didn't see him much though. I think that one does sleep in a specimen cell full time. You can ask Sephiroth's more recent trainers, Mikey Corell told me he's been training them together since they got their mako shots. If he's anything like Sephiroth, then he's probably a fast learner with a lot of natural talent.

"That's what Corell has been doing on his so-called classified missions?" Reed demanded. He made a noise of annoyance, not caring that his subordinate was here to witness his agitation. "Shiva fucking damn it, Hojo could have just informed me upfront. I thought he'd been running classified experiments on one of my SOLDIERs. Again."

Towers shrugged helplessly.

"Anyway," Reed collected himself and returned to the topic at hand. "You haven't got an apprentice picked out yet, right?"

Towers looked at Reed in puzzlement, then brightened and sat up taller in his seat. After all, only First Classes could take on official apprentices. "No sir!"

"Since you hardly picked them yourself, I won't make you actually train them, though they will be officially registered as your apprentices. No need to teach them all your secret techniques, but I want you to keep an eye on them and show them the ropes for the first few weeks. Get them up to speed on anything they should have gotten in cadet training. See if they need to be babysat, or if they can actually be trusted to be out in the field. The president is personally interested in whatever experiments Hojo is running on Sephiroth and Specimen Y, so I'm relying on you to make sure they don't lose any important body parts. Treat them like nepotism hires if you have to."

"Yes sir!" Towers agreed.

"Congratulations on your promotion, SOLDIER First Class Daniels," Reed said. "See the Director's secretary for your paperwork packet. And the first round of drinks is on me."

Reed flicked a piece of plastic at Towers. Towers caught it, and grinned even wider when he saw that it was a thousand gil gift card for Kenny's, a favourite venue for SOLDIER celebrations. Reed kept a stack of these in his drawer, and handed them out liberally upon promotions and holidays and other celebratory occasions. As the highest ranked member of the SOLDIER programme and their de facto leader, he couldn't really crash the celebrations of his subordinates without making things awkward, so he preferred to contribute in this way.

The thing was, however, that Towers had not really worked hard enough, and the promotion had arrived two or three months before schedule, thanks to an offhand remark from Director Hojo. Reed would have liked to have Towers lead a few more regular missions before foisting the duty of being a war-time military officer on a man whose career thus far had consisted mainly of monster extermination, skirmishes with bandits and underfunded terrorist cells, and guarding science experiments. For all that the programme was named SOLDIER, they didn't really truly do military work - that was foisted off on the regular troops under Heidegger. No, they were used to doing what used to be considered mercenary and adventurer's work, in the times before Shinra. They worked best in small groups or alone, and had little experience with the numbers and cohesion necessary for traditional warfare. Still, they were each a walking weapon of mass destruction, and their efficiency in battle outweighed their inexperience in the eyes of the Shinra board.

"Maybe you could stop by for a round," Towers offered hopefully.

"I'll sit this one out," Reed said kindly. "No one wants to let loose with their CO hovering over their shoulder. Go have fun. You worked hard for this, you deserve a celebration."