Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Promise of Catastrophe

"Hey…h-hey…are you…are you…

"Stop that! You're scaring me! You said you weren't scary! You said you were nothing like the stories…

"But you…you…

"Why are you…your eyes…?

"Stop! Don't you dare get any closer! I-I mean it! Stay away! I hate you! You lied to me! You're as mean as they all said! I hate you!

"N-n-no! Stop! Stop! Sephiroth, no, no ah-!"


The light was frail. It waved and washed and then waned again, dying as quickly as it was born. Every now and again it would flare with strength, only to retreat faster than it had come.

A torch… She blinked. She saw it now. There, down the stone halls a ways, held in an iron sconce. Split in half by a dark, thick bar.

She blinked again. Her entire world was divided into even sections of gray stone by black bars.

Except for a lone figure, sitting in a corner, head hung, long hair veiling any other features.

And her wrists and ankles were heavy. So was her neck. She tried to move her reluctant body and a soft, rusty jingling accompanied her movement.

"No!"

She shot upright but her fears were only confirmed. She was bound, hand and foot and neck, in iron shackles. The chains reversed her momentum, and pulled her back to the earth, where she laid dazed from the whiplash on a thin cot of straw.

Fire lanced through her shoulder and she screeched from the sudden pain. The figure in the corner sprung at her fast, and her scream was cut off as a hand was clamped over her mouth. "Hush," a voice hissed urgently.

Indignant, even though she understood little of where she was or why she was in so much pain, she bit down on the hand, hard. A man grunted, but the hand was only pushed harder against her face with a strength that made her fear that her jaw would be shattered. "Be quiet Hana!" he seethed.

Then things began to get clearer. With the flickering light, she could see the outline of the body of the man at her side, the cut and form of a shadow that she recognized. Fazed, she let her jaw go slack, releasing the hand, which was hastily withdrawn.

"Sephiroth?" she asked quietly.

"Yes." But his answer was too quick. She guessed that she'd caused him more than a bit of pain to make him this cross.

"What…? Where…?"

"We are safe. For now." He was still much too brisk and curt with her, and she might have protested if pain hadn't stolen her breath again.

"Your shoulder?" he asked.

"Yes," she gasped.

"Shift sideways. Let me see it."

The shackle on her neck stretched taut as she tried. Sephiroth put one arm under her knees and the other under her shoulders, lifted her, and placed her down again closer to the wall so there was slack on the chain. Once this was done, he turned her body himself, rolling her to face the wall.

She didn't know how he could see by the light of the lone torch across the hall, but she was glad for the darkness that hid the flush of blood to her cheeks as he ripped her yukata, down from her collar and along her spine.

"Hey…!" she protested.

"Your clothing is ruined anyway," he said, and then peeled away her yukata to bare her abused skin to the cold, stale air.

He said nothing about his observations, but Hana jerked away and bit her lip so hard she tasted blood when he once tried to ghost his fingers over the wound.

"What happened?" she asked, not liking his silence or how long he was looking at her.

"The grenade," Sephiroth said. "It had a relatively tiny explosion, but released a powerful sedative gas. Our captors clearly want you alive."

"And my shoulder?"

"Your instincts proved true and you rolled so the explosion was at your back, which minimized damages, but your shoulder absorbed the brunt of the hit. You have cuts and abrasions from shrapnel, which, as best I can tell, came from the ceramic casing of the grenade itself."

"If I was only mildly wounded why does it hurt…?"

"Your wounds are infected," he said. "But considering the circumstances, it could have been much worse."

There was the sound of more cloth ripping, and then he took the strips and began to quickly and tightly wrap her shoulder. When he was done, he rolled her onto her back again, taking extra care as he set her wounded shoulder down.

"We were captured." She turned her face to him but could see little else but his outline in the semi-darkness. "How did they manage to get you in chains?"

"They had you," was all he said.

She let the words roll around in her mind. She didn't know what she thought of them, or even if there was anything to think about them.

"Who is 'they'?" she asked, speaking mostly to squelch the dangerous thoughts in her mind.

"From what I've seen, they are likely agents of your father, probably not under his direct command, but sympathizers or lackeys looking for a quick way up the ranks. You had told me he had obtained a presence in the court of Wutai, but to accomplish something like this, his influence must be deep indeed." He hummed softly. "Though their plan is ultimately futile and idiotic, I suppose I can at least commend them for their boldness."

"You know a way out, then?" She noticed with a jolt that he wasn't chained.

"We will remain here for the time being."

The hope that had dared to bloom was promptly extinguished. "Why?" she asked, her voice small.

"I have told you," Sephiroth said, his cool patience returned as the last of his ire over being bitten faded, "they will not harm us yet."

"I didn't miss the 'yet'," she replied.

All was quiet. In the distance, she heard a leak echo as each drop fell. The silence was deep and consuming and filled her heart with dread.

"What will they do to us?"

Sephiroth offered no answer. She had the distinct feeling that he knew but wasn't telling her.

"Sleep," he said. "Your body is fighting the infection and there is nothing we can do now except wait for the morning."

"But you have this under control, right?"

Sephiroth raised his head. "I suppose you could say that."

She didn't like it, but at the same time, she knew nothing of war. Sephiroth, despite being annoyingly elusive, most likely knew much more about what he was doing than she did.

She lay down and closed her eyes. She heard him move back to his place at the entryway, sitting on the stone floor with his back against the bars.

Only then did she start to notice other details about her situation. Her legs were cold, colder than her torso. She moved them and was mortified to feel the straw against her calves – which meant that they were bare.

And the cloth he had ripped to bind her shoulder…

"Your clothing is ruined anyway," he had said.

My yukata! Though it seemed that some of it was still around her top (though she concluded so only by how he had ripped the back open), the portion over her shoulder would have been shredded by the shrapnel.

She was less concerned about the item itself and more concerned that she had no idea what, if anything, was acting as its replacement.

But something was. From her neck to just above her knees was quite warm, resting under something heavy. Something as dark as the blackness beyond the torch's reach, something like…

Leather.

She moved her fingers to feel the sleeves, rolled up so as not to consume her hands. At her back, she felt two belts crossing over her skin, and its length on her body seemed to match the length of….

The thought made her sit halfway up despite the discomfort her shackles gave her for it. There, she could see the light off his bare skin.

She stared, waiting for an explanation, but none came. Wasn't he cold? To be bare-chested in a place like this? But he was still, head hung in sleep, light dancing off strands of silver veiling his body, chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm.

He had dressed her in his own coat. He'd even taken the thought to put it on backwards, so that the open chest would not violate her modesty.

She pulled the thick, warm, heavy fabric into her.

More than that…

"They had you."

Were there volumes untold in his surrender to join her in this dungeon?


"Oh, Genesis," the woman purred, running a long, ruby painted nail over her desk as she cooed her pleasure. "I thought you'd never come to visit me in my office."

"Have I told you recently," Genesis said, coming in with a flourish and alighting himself on the chair in front of her desk, "how much I abhor you, Scarlet? Because if not, I want to reassure you that I really, truly and deeply do."

The blonde woman smiled but averted her eyes sulkily. "You sure do know how to flatter a woman, Commander."

Genesis had never even stepped one foot on the Weapons Development floor for one reason, and that reason was Scarlet. Only the direst of circumstances had dragged him, unwillingly, to confront the woman in the relative privacy of her office.

From his chair, he reached his foot behind him and kicked the doorstop out from where it was wedged beneath the door, letting the heavy thing slam itself shut.

"If you want it that way," Scarlet said, leaning back in her velvet chair. "It's not like it isn't all around the company anyway. Poor SOLDIER is the only one out of the loop these days."

"And you have kept it that way," Genesis said. "So," here he put his elbows on her desk and made his eyes level with hers, staring, challenging. "Are you going to tell me or do I have to get…creative?"

Scarlet took his challenge, and put his face inches from his. "Am I going to deprive you of precious fun if I tell you everything without a fight, Commander?"

"I can't decide," he responded slowly, "if I would rather make you bleed or get out of here sooner. Either way, you can't disappoint."

But the way he was fingering the hilt of his rune-infused blade told the real story.

Scarlet grinned. "SOLDIER is losing its touch. Without Sephiroth, you're all brainless brawn."

"Then why are you getting rid of Sephiroth?"

Scarlet laughed, a gratingly high kya-ha-ha that was only a hair shy of what it would take to turn Genesis into a berserker. Genesis sneered his ire away, glowering at the woman.

"You've seen through me, then."

"If you have an issue with him, you should take it up with him yourself instead of disgracefully stirring up trouble under the skirts of politics. He would so enjoy it."

"Such loyalty. Charming. You two make an odd pair, with your fire and his ice. You would think that by now one would have extinguished the other." She pulled her hands back and examined her long, sharp nails. Company rumor had it that they were for far more than just show. "But you've got me all wrong. I don't hold anything in particular against him. I do wish he would have told me all the juicy details about his bride, but it's hardly reasonable grounds to stage a coup."

"Then why do this?" Genesis pressed, leaning forward in his seat to put the pressure on.

Scarlet shook her head, blonde hair waving in the well-practiced gesture. "It's all intensely impersonal. Shame…he's still in his prime too. Maybe Hojo can find another use for him yet if he can sort through the Turks' leftovers."

Genesis's face flushed crimson and his teeth were bared.

"No, nothing against him. But you see, he has something that I want."

"Power," Genesis answered for her. "Your petty desires and the lengths you'd go to get them are disgusting."

"But it's wasted on him," Scarlet said, throwing up her hands and dressing her lips in a pout. "He was the golden child of ShinRa, the hero that won the war, and never once did he want any of it. The center of the heart of ShinRa should be held by one who is willing to claw and bleed for it with a passion he could never possess, don't you agree?"

Genesis pulled back in his seat. His fingers were curled, and the corner of his lip was twitching.

"SOLDIER Firsts are afforded too many luxuries, in my opinion. Throwing in the towel whenever they want, defying direct orders, and so on, just because they have the brawn to hack things apart. While officially there is no limit to these little presents from the company, you know that implicitly, they do not come cheaply, and Sephiroth has been spending far too frequently since he brought that little flower home.

"You know as well as I do that even the top management was starting to question his loyalty. I simply took advantage of the opportunity. Fortunately for me, being a SOLDIER also has its costs."

Genesis's face went blank. It was something you had to look closely between the lines to see, but the higher you got in SOLDIER, the more you realized it. Shedding so much blood for ShinRa made a man realize that the company would go to any lengths to protect their secrets. From that point, it only took the realization that SOLDIERs were little more than living, breathing tools that ShinRa produced with secret procedures and technology to do their dirty work. Over time, every First-Classman would put two and two together and understand why all the greatest SOLDIERs, or ones who talked about a life outside of the company, just disappeared or were unexplainably killed in action.

No SOLDIER ever left ShinRa.

Not alive.

Scarlet smiled.

"Does it hurt?" she asked. "Knowing the same fate will await you once ShinRa's done toying with you, too?"

Genesis chuckled. "You know, after surviving talking with you, it doesn't sound like so bad of an option."

"Well I'm glad I could help you come to terms with the realities of your happy little mako boy battalion."

"Oh, you've done so much more than that."

Genesis reached forward and grabbed Scarlet by the throat, pulling her across her own desk so she was draped across it and held up with her face a hair's width from his. She was startled, eyes wide, but did not cry out, and even had the composure to glare at him from where she dangled in his grip.

"You've helped me make up my mind." Genesis grinned, and, chuckling darkly he put his mouth next to her ear and mockingly purred his vow.

"I'm going to kill you. Not now. Maybe not even soon. But I am going to beat you at this grotesque game of yours, and then, after you have seen the demise of your dreams, I am going to show you exactly how much we little mako boys are capable of."

He opened his hand and let her drop, her head hitting the chair. She was reeling as she tried to pull herself together and straighten her spine.

"You picked the wrong opponents, Scarlet," Genesis said as he opened the door to leave. "Sephiroth and SOLDIER are not going to be felled by the whims of the company or a few rumors about who is loyal and who is not." He flashed one bright grin back at her before he took his grand exit.

"And I do so look forward to you seeing it for yourself."


A/N: Yeah, I'm gonna write, I'm gonna do it...

I am freakishly excited for the next few chapters. Things are going to EXPLODE!