Chapter Forty: To Break, To Bind
The guards had kept a wide berth from their captives for the entirety of their imprisonment, which was wise. No one wanted to mess with Sephiroth, even if he was behind bars. On the first day, the lackey assigned to give them their rations came back with a horror story about how the General's catlike, mako eyes glowed in the dark, slits of pupils flaring, his searing venom glare cutting through the darkness as he lingered in the shadows where his wife rested. The story was enough to scare any ideas out of even the bravest of the guards, and Sephiroth and Hana had enjoyed solitude in their cell for it.
The guards came for him on the fifth day, as Sephiroth had calculated that they soon would, and by the looks on their faces, slurred orders to get up, and unsteady grips on their guns, they had relied heavily on liquid courage to get the task done. Sephiroth rose and acquiesced, walking through the stone halls on his own while the guards stayed well behind.
No one was under any delusions about who was really in charge here.
He came to a large cell, empty but for a single chair in the center. The door was slammed behind him, the guards entirely too eager to be rid of him, but he was not locked in. He hummed in thought and took a seat in the chair. "Quite a crew you keep, Blackwell," he said to the stone walls, his voice thick with irony. "Incapable even of bringing a prisoner in for interrogation. I had thought it impossible for my opinion on the planning of this abduction to fall any lower."
A dark murmur followed his words, seeping in to fill the room and ricochet against the stone. Sephiroth sat tall and resolute against its dark waves. "I assure you, Sephiroth," Blackwell said, "that these imbeciles have been distanced from me for a very good reason."
"Every empire needs its grunts, I suppose," Sephiroth said, crossing his arms and leaning back in the chair.
"Ha," Blackwell's voice came again. "Perhaps, except for when their stupidity reaches this level. They have proved themselves liabilities instead of assets. They got a reward quite different from what they were expecting for their so called 'proactive initiative'."
Sephiroth located the speaker in the corner, and saw a small blinking red light above it that he assumed was a camera as well. "You didn't even give me the honor of a personal visit, Reuben?"
"As much as I wish I could, General, I find myself quite occupied in Midgar these days."
"Indeed. I can imagine. Cleaning up a blunder this big can't have streamlined your schedule any."
"At least you are gracious enough not to pin this on me," Blackwell said, and Sephiroth smirked. "And at least one of us is enjoying this," the man remarked over the speaker.
"I knew from the start that you were not stupid enough to chain yourself to an angry bear, so to speak."
"Hmph. Those fools deserve every bit of the terror you gave them." Blackwell hummed. "All the same, I intend to make the best of it. We are long overdue for a talk, son."
Sephiroth did not as much as wince at that, and did not comment upon it further. "So, talk," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."
"You could," Blackwell said. "I never intended to imprison you. Not once. If you had impaled every one of those guards on the bars of your cell and rained bloody terror down on that fort as you made your escape, you would have saved me a lot of trouble."
"A lot of trouble," Sephiroth agreed. "Godo will have known we had gone missing within an hour after the ambush, and your men took no pains to hide whom they served. I knew that the longer the investigation went on, the more would be revealed, and the more damage I would do to your cause. I am patient, and have endured much worse, so I played along. Every hour you let me sit in here was one more hour to fuel the court's rage."
"I can't fault you for taking advantage of such a terrible blunder, but you are entirely wrong to assume that I let such a defeat happen by my turning a blind eye to the situation." Blackwell's voice changed. The malevolent laugh was back, the snide, untouchable pride and the cold, calculating ire. "Why do you think I did not give the order to immediately release you?"
The corner of Sephiroth's lips turned downward. "I knew your game," Sephiroth said. "And I weighed the factors and decided to play."
"You are most gracious to engage, my son," Blackwell said. "I admit, I believed that the peril your wife was in would dissuade you. I am glad to see that you are not so easily swayed by the call of your heart."
Sephiroth frowned.
"I am curious," the man continued over the speaker. "Would you have actually let her die?"
"No," Sephiroth said. "I would not have allowed it."
"Then your opinion of her strength is very high, indeed. You have let her suffer until she now lingers at the very door of death. Your cold-blooded patience is indeed…impressive. Dare I say…nearly inhuman."
Sephiroth's eyes flicked away from the camera for a spilt-second before he continued to assault the machine with his glare. As much as he hated to admit it, everything the man had said was true.
At first, Hana's condition had indeed grown worse by the hour, but he trusted her to survive it. Surely she would understand that it was to deal a severe blow to her father. He had believed that she would have agreed if she could have. But even Sephiroth had been unprepared for how bad the infection would become.
Her fever was out of control, face always flushed with the heat, eyes glassy, shivering in her sweat as she slipped in and out of delirium. The infection took its burning vengeance as it ran its fiery course through her body. Without medicine or even anything more than stale, lukewarm water to cleanse the wound and strips of her old, filthy yukata to bind it, there was little he could do for her. The only mercy had been that for the majority of the five days and nights they spent in prison, she was fast asleep, her body too exhausted to scrape enough energy together to keep her awake.
Sephiroth saw to it that she swallowed every last drop of water they were allowed from their daily rations. This was made exceptionally more difficult as she began to hallucinate and actively fight against his efforts. What she was seeing, he hadn't the faintest clue, but from her half-coherent shouts it seemed to him that she was under the impression that he was forcing ash down her throat. Sometimes she could be pacified with slow words, other times he had to resort to brute force.
But at some point he had to admit that he had overestimated her strength. In the end, she had been too exhausted to fight him anymore, submitting with a whimper every time he pressed the tin cup to her lips, and then, eventually, not at all. She had fought so hard for too long, and her life was fading.
He had taken a dangerous gamble, and now, the fear that he had lost was gnawing at his heart. He had thought medicine would come any day, because Blackwell could not allow her to die. He needed her…didn't he? The thought that she would be healed if she could only hang on for a few more hours kept him going. He thought he could go further, win more, deal more damage without reaping any losses himself.
He had been agonizingly wrong.
And though he would never admit it to another living soul, he could not convince himself that her pain had not affected him.
At the very least, it should have been me to pay the price of my arrogance.
But the thoughts were useless. What's done was done. He shook himself, painfully aware that he had been silent for too long. He steeled himself to reengage in this verbal battle with Blackwell, but his soft, velvet voice came before Sephiroth could retort, in sympathy as tender as it was fake and mocking.
"My poor little girl. What a pitiful way to die. At least she was not conscious to see that the cold-hearted monster letting her slowly waste away was none other than her beloved."
It shouldn't have hurt. Sephiroth and Hana had not married for love, or anything more than mere personal benefit. It had been—was—as emotionless a transaction as picking out the best man to guard one in battle. It had not been anything…it simply was.
But Blackwell was playing on the assumption that there had been more to it than that.
He was counting on that—whatever more he thought there was—to cause him pain.
Despite Sephiroth understanding the tactic on an academic level, it was working.
The comment was like a lance through his heart.
"And that was my plan, son," Blackwell continued, just as softly, his voice the darkest, deadliest caress. "To make you pliant."
"Pliant?" Sephiroth asked. "Is that what you think has happened?"
"I'm not a monster, boy," Blackwell said. "You were correct in that I will not allow my daughter to die. I need her still. As we speak, she is being treated, though I do admit that I cannot guarantee her recovery at this point."
Sephiroth's eyes were wide, pupils the thinnest slits of blackness. "Then why?" His voice was sharp and icy, quiet as a whisper but as deadly as the winds of the arctic. "Why wait so long?"
"I could ask you the same question, my son."
It was one of the few times in his life that Sephiroth found himself entirely speechless.
"In any case, I have given you my answer. I need you now, perhaps even more than I need my daughter. But I knew you were too stubborn to see that it was for your own good as well as mine."
"I will never aid you."
"Come now, son. Submit to reason, at least. I have done no small amount of research on what it would take to break you. I would rather not, if at all possible."
"You are mad," Sephiroth hissed.
"I do not deny it. Sane men do not change the world. I hope you'll forgive me for this little experiment, but it was so fascinating to see your will against my own. You truly are a formidable opponent. I can only imagine the good we could do for each other if we were allies."
"Good?" Sephiroth asked. "As of yet, all you have brought to us is pain and death."
"Allow me to prove my goodwill to you, then. Through much effort on my part, I have obtained something that you want. Something you have yearned for above all from the time you were very small."
"There's nothing you can give me that would make me…"
The noise was so small and ordinary that he stood a moment, confused. Paper? But as he reviewed the sound in his mind he knew that's what it was: papers being slid under the door.
What kind of paper would be so powerful as to change his mind? Did he dare even to touch it?
"You are raw, hurt," Blackwell said. "I have pushed you so hard. Rest now, knowing that Hana is recovering, and look at what I have discovered."
"I won't fall for this. I am not a fool," Sephiroth said.
"Indeed, I know you are not. If you distrust me, then look only at the name on the file. That alone will convince you that if you pass up this opportunity, you will carry a gaping hole in your soul for the rest of your life.
"You will never be complete," Blackwell said. "Not while you do not even know the basic truth of who you are."
The speaker shut off, but the light on the camera did not.
He turned to face the door and the simple green file. He knew that Blackwell would not do this out of kindness. It had to be a trap. It had to be something that would push him further into this web of insanity when he was already battle-weary and confused.
But as he left, he could not stop his eyes from wandering to the label on the folder at his feet.
His heart stopped.
He stared at it, mind wiped blank in shock.
"H-How?" he gasped aloud, voice weak and strained. "I-Impossible!"
But the words did not change, did not retract their influence that pierced him to his core.
The Jenova Project.
A voice foreign and yet familiar, a woman's voice, was whispering in the back of his mind.
He recognized it. He had heard it as he had flown over the mountains of the Western Continent on his way to Wutai. But it was deeper than that. He knew that voice because it had been with him from his earliest memory, a caress as tender and ephemeral as it was terrifying. As little as he understood it, he also knew he needed it. It was a part of him…no, it was him. The whole of him. The part he was missing since birth, the sealant to take the shambles of his directionless, meaningless life and unite them into a soul – whole, complete at long last. It was the purpose he never knew he had, his past, his history, his heritage, his mother…!
Come, my son, the woman whispered. Come to me.
He clasped his hands to his ears and fell to his knees, crumpling like a puppet with severed strings.
Trembling, weak as a child, and bidden by a will not entirely his own, he tenderly picked up the file before him and opened the cover.
A/N: So I did give fair warning that things were going to explode. At this point, you probably have at least an inkling of what's coming...
So, honest question, do we have time to explore Zack's adventures in Nibelheim or is that just more agony while we wait to let this cat out of the bag? You'll get both either way but still...I know it's bad, bad, bad of me to leave you here.
