Chapter Thirty-Eight: In Motion
Sephiroth grew better with the distance. By the time they crossed the last ocean dividing the isles of Wutai from the Western Continents, he was his normal, composed and dignified self and the full length of his wing had vanished without a trace except for the fallen feathers on the floor. She had no idea how that was even possible.
For Hana, it was the opposite.
She thought she'd done a good job of hiding her anxiety until Sephiroth started to growl. "Enough," he hissed. "Settle down, you're not a child."
She hadn't noticed that she'd been fidgeting enough to actually make noise until he pointed it out. She stilled, blood turned to ice by his reprimand.
But she wouldn't let him think he'd won. "Easy for you to say," she murmured. "You're a foreigner. Everyone will forgive you if you do something stupid in front of the court."
He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You served at court for many years. I would have thought palace protocol would be natural for you by now."
"I'm comfortable with acting like a servant," she replied. "But now I'm the Kazehawa heir. It's different now. I have power and responsibilities, and there will be special rituals and rites. My mother tried to teach me all the things I'm supposed to do when I am presented to the emperor but," she shook her head, "it's been so long, I'm not sure I remember them all."
"Hmm." Her retort stilled his protesting and they returned to their respective silences.
She caught herself fidgeting again later, possibly worse than before, and he had not remarked.
"What's gotten into you?" she asked.
"I couldn't say."
"…Fine."
But he spilled eventually. He did it so smoothly and calmly that she almost might have mistaken it as an attempt at casual conversation. Almost.
"Tell me about your mother."
Hana stared at him. "What? What brought this on?" But he had no intention of speaking, only of listening.
"Father killed her a long time ago," Hana said softly. "So long that I…I can't even remember her face anymore."
"But you must remember something."
All this struck her as very strange and uncharacteristic, and her suspicions were higher than ever, but with a sigh she gave him what he wanted.
"Her name was Aika. It means 'love song'. She was always singing. Brother said her eyes were always bright, no matter what happened to her. And she was a dreamer, apparently more than a little naïve and overly optimistic about the world. More than anything else, she loved fairy tales and fantasies, so much so that some say she actually believed them. Whether that was true or not, she always spoke of the very Continental idea of 'happily ever after'."
Sephiroth hummed quietly. He wasn't looking at her, but she knew he was soaking up every word.
"Which makes no sense to me," Hana continued. "She was abducted by my father, who forced her to produce an heir…me. When I wasn't a boy, he tried again and again, only to end in miscarriage or stillbirth every time. Father was terrible to all of us, and our lives were miserable.
"But she adopted Nii-chan as her own, even though she had no blood ties to him, and loved him like her own son. She always cried when another baby died, and made up stories about all that the baby would have done. She talked about each one all the time, called us a family, spoke as if they were among us, and always talked dreaming about that day when the end came and we would all be together, happily ever after," she whispered reverently, thoughtfully.
"And through it all, she was smiling. Maybe she really thought her life was a fairy tale. She went through more trials and hardships than I've read of in any story. But then the time for the conclusion came, and she was murdered. The happy ending that she so strongly believed in…never came. She was such a fool to think that lives like ours could possibly end in happiness."
The islands came into view below. Hana's eyes stung, but they were not wet. She had no more tears left to shed for her mother, though the loss still ached deeply to her very soul.
Sephiroth respected the silence for more than a due amount of time, letting the air settle. "You don't give your mother enough credit," he then said. "She was not naïve at all."
The quiet words shook Hana to her core. "Wha-?" she stared at him, but he was looking out the window, and his back told her nothing. Anger bubbled to the surface. "You can't…you can't just talk like that because you never even—"
"She was no fool," he said, and he said it with such certainty that anything she might have said was vanquished. "And the proof is in you. Her story has not ended. Not yet."
Hana's mouth opened but no words came out.
Their descent was rapid, and it hurt her ears. Still, after so long in the air, it felt good to have the helicopter alighted on solid ground. Sephiroth rose immediately and unlatched the door. Beyond him, she saw her homeland – the iconic red pagodas and towers, the great carving of Da Chao in the distant mountain face, and the worn stone roads that would take them to the glimmering presence of the imperial palace.
"Are you going to become like my mother now?" Hana asked bitterly. "Are you going to tell me we're going to live happily ever after too?"
"No," Sephiroth said, stepping out of the helicopter. At the edge of the helipad, there were twenty imperial guards standing rank and file at attention, and three palace nobles in full court attire. As Sephiroth's stepped to the earth, the soldiers saluted and then remained with spears heavenward, still as stone. The court officials bowed, first from the waist, but then bending knee to prostrate themselves on the ground, foreheads on the pavement, hands folded in front of them in reverence.
"I am only going to say," Sephiroth said watching the men with a face blank and passive, "that it is far, far too soon to speak of any kind of ending."
"If I had twenty people I could murder, any way I wished," Genesis said, "I would kill Scarlet, and then trade all the remainders to kill Scarlet nineteen more times. Creatively."
"Let's keep homicide as our last resort, Genesis," Angeal said.
"As long as it's still on the list," Genesis said. "I do insist. In big letters, please. And in red, too. That would be a nice touch."
Angeal slid the stack of papers on his desk away from Genesis, who had somehow procured a red pen. "Let me at least read it before you deface it."
"You know what it says as well as I do."
"Yes, but I need to know everyone who is in on this," Angeal said. "If for no other reason to more prudently use the other nineteen slots on your kill list."
Genesis seated himself and twirled the pen in his fingers. "Do you think nineteen is enough?" he asked, sober and thoughtful.
Angeal sighed. They had gone to their board meeting this morning to find a nightmare had been brewing under their feet and had spread unchecked for far too long.
Now the two men sat in Angeal's office with a fifty-page proposal that could destroy their lives as they knew them. The innocuous title of "Post-War Reassignment of Duties and Responsibilities" didn't fool either of them for a second.
The careful reader would find that SOLDIER was being stripped of its power, but the careful readers who knew the whispers around the office and the ambitions of the proposal's authors knew even more.
It was a personal attack on Sephiroth.
"How far could this go?" Genesis asked. "Stripping him of his rank and title is one thing, but could they actually do more?"
Angeal looked at Genesis through lowered brows. The temperature of the room seemed to plunge.
"Don't you look at me like that, you know it's true. If he moves out of the public eye, he could disappear like hundreds of other ShinRa legends, and no one would dare ask questions. Think about it! ShinRa always moves the heroes to the sidelines and out of the limelight before they're never seen again."
"No ShinRa legend has held a candle to Sephiroth," Angeal said.
"But he's not immortal, and he has a weakness now. Hana's much more susceptible than he is and they would use that shamelessly. She's likely in as much peril or more than he is."
"Genesis, this is bad, but there's no reason to think that it's that bad."
"Yet," Genesis added.
And they both knew that was the truth.
"How much of a hand do you think Blackwell had in this?" Genesis asked.
Angeal thumbed through the pages. "Any amount of influence he had," Angeal said, "would be entirely too much."
It was terrifying what the man had managed to do in the short time he'd been at ShinRa. Everyone was talking about the return of the first SOLDIER, and he had even made several public appearances alongside the president. Today at the meeting they had discussed holding a celebration to welcome his return, and Scarlet and Heidegger had both offered to make a position for him in their departments, though the president had said that he already had something in mind, which was equally or even more alarming.
In many ways, Blackwell was seeping into the place that Sephiroth once held at ShinRa.
Genesis and Angeal stared at the proposal, at an utter loss as to what they could possibly do about it.
The palanquin was far too fancy for her tastes. She would have given nearly anything to trade all the gold and splendor of the box for two more square feet of room.
The carriage was ideally meant for one. Admittedly, room was allowed in its length for copious amount of robes that a royal would be wearing, and to fit two Wutaiese nobles just might have worked, but the construction's height and width did not allow for the proper seating of one very, very tall Continental General and his wife.
The way Sephiroth was crammed in his end took away any dignity from the ride. It wasn't just that his torso was too tall, or his legs were too long; he was unfortunate enough to have to suffer with both problems. At least the silken curtains were drawn so he could suffer the indignity of being folded in such a graceless way in solitude.
Hana didn't like being put in this small of a box with her husband. It left no room for either of them. They were inextricably in each other's space, breathing each other's air, humid and cold from the climate, heavy and stale from their discomfort. Their knees knocked against each other as the carriage rattled on the stone road, and their eyes frantically, desperately looked anywhere but at each other – even if that somewhere was at the unadorned wooden interior.
Or at least, that's the way it felt to her.
Sephiroth's face showed only righteous indignation at the accommodations. Apparently, his unnatural posture weighed far heavier on his mind than their forced proximity.
The pale, tinted light filtering through the curtains danced across his face. She allowed herself the thought that she would have liked to watch the light and shadows play.
…If it had not been for the forbidden canvas it played upon.
Her heartbeat was erratic and it was irking her.
"How long to the capital?" Sephiroth asked. If she looked past the obvious ire, she could almost imagine him as a whiny little child asking now that his glory and pride were stripped by the extremities of his situation.
"Several hours," Hana said quietly, and she could have sworn that the quick whisper that left Sephiroth's lips was a curse.
"You could lie with your back on the seat," Hana offered, "and put your feet up against the wall with your knees bent." But she honestly didn't think that would work either. He was just too tall – no two ways about it.
Sephiroth made a fearsome face and Hana offered no more commentary.
Hana pulled out a fan and waved mechanically as something to do for the journey. Despite it being the dead of winter, this area of Wutai usually did not get as cold as the Continents, though the humidity did add a heaviness to the cold that often took foreigners off guard. But the sun was out, and it was reasonably warm outside, so it wasn't long before their palanquin began to get stuffy. She once offered her fan to Sephiroth, and he took it from her, wordlessly examined the thing, and promptly handed it back. She though his dignity could hardly be damaged any more by a few waves of a flowered fan, but she let him keep his pride. Wounded animals bit the hardest. She did send a few occasional strokes his way and she imagined that maybe he actually appreciated the gesture.
After a timeless span, the carriage lurched, and the men outside were shouting. Hana could think of few times where Sephiroth appeared happier, especially by the manifestation of chaos.
Or at least, as close to happy as he got. He leapt out of the carriage so fast that she hadn't had much time to judge either. She sighed and closed her fan, tucking it into her obi.
"Stay," Sephiroth commanded as soon as she moved to get out, pulling the door closed right in her face so quickly that she only got a glimpse of shining steel bared in his hands. "Something's coming."
"Should I be worried?" she asked.
"Looks like your father's thugs. So no."
Oh that's all, is it? "Trying to get us before we get the capital?" she asked, but he didn't answer. He was probably busy, and that was fine by her.
Outside she could hear the skirmish begin. It sounded close. Too close – maybe not even ten yards away. How had they gotten so close without being spotted?
Unless the guards—
Her thoughts were interrupted as an axe cleaved through the wood just above her shoulder.
The surprised leap forward saved her from a second assault on the carriage by a heavy spear. Now on the opposite side of the carriage, she fumbled for the gun tucked in her obi, but she was too slow. She had just steadied the weapon in her hand and fired one blind shot through the hole the axe had left when a strong arm shot through the window at her side and seized her by the neck, pulling her back against the wall fast enough to knock the breath from her and keep it out by the pressure on her throat. Her gun was dropped out of reach in the attack.
"Ngh…!"
In desperation, she bit, hard. She heard a man's yelp and the arm slammed her against the carriage wall two more times to try to get her to stop, but she was locked onto him even as her vision began to swim. She channeled the pain from her screaming, starving lungs into her mouth, not caring that the wet taste of rust was filling her mouth.
Eventually, she won. She was released to gasp in a breath and fall between the seats in relief.
It was a short lived respite.
From the window, she saw the man who had grabbed her nursing his wound.
It was one of the courtiers who had received them.
"You!" she screamed. It was mutiny, then. That's why the battle was so close – it had been surrounding them the whole time. How many more of the men escorting them were actually against them?
A more immediate problem landed immediately on her lap.
A grenade.
And outside, an ear-shattering explosion.
Zack was dressed in his swim trunks and a baggy t-shirt, only because shirts were required at the train station. He'd had quite the day stocking up for this trip. He wore a new pair of sunglasses and wielded a blue and white umbrella instead of his sword. His flip-flop sandals were still stiff and awkward to walk in, but he liked watching people stare as he walked in his beach clothes in the dead of winter.
He was pretty sure he'd gotten it all. He had sunscreen and aloe, and had even bought tanning lotion – after all, he had a reputation to uphold. If it was known that Zack Fair took a vacation without advertising his SOLDIER sculpted, sun-kissed-self to the ladies of the tropics, he would have ceased to be Zack Fair.
He winked at one of the girls at the station, who blushed furiously and tried to find a way to hold her head so she could still look at him but not have him know she was looking.
He grinned and gave her a thumbs-up. He could work with that. It was cute.
But the train whistled, and he was reminded that he had a mission.
His spirits were higher than they had been for a long time as he stepped aboard the ShinRa Express. At first it hadn't been easy to get clearance to leave, but a few words to Genesis about how he would be out of his hair for a week changed that faster than even Zack would have dreamed possible. In a matter of hours, he was geared up and ready to go for some serious R&R.
In truth, that wasn't why he was so happy. The vacation time was nice, the paid leave as a First was even better, and to get out of the building was more than welcome. But over all that, it was because after hours of pouring through books at the ShinRa library, he had found the one word he needed to connect all his piecemeal memories of the mysterious vanishing folder.
His papers of leave said Costa del Sol, as did his train ticket and every tracking record ShinRa had on him.
But in his pocket, folded small and held securely in his grip, was a ticket to Nibelheim.
A/N: Has it really been that long since I updated? I'm so sorry. I'm having problems being an adult. I hate adult-ing. It's hard. :(
Let's see some action!
