Chapter Forty-Four: Redemption

It seemed to her that Sephiroth was actually slowing down so she could catch up to him. She gulped down her fear – there was no time for it – and continued on. She must have been a sight, still bruised with a few open wounds, but she would not stop. She couldn't.

She tripped on the way up, falling on her face, her ribs hitting a rock on her way down. She let out a sharp cry and all her limbs failed her. "No," she moaned, struggling to contain the pain so she could manage it. It would not be tamed, ravaging her freely, stealing her breath and her vision. Her spirit was strong enough, it could take the abuse, but her body had surrendered to the siege upon it.

"Sephiroth!" she screamed. Could he hear her? Had she even gotten close enough for her haggard cry to make it?

She sucked in a breath and threw her head up. There, on the crest of the hill, Sephiroth stood only a short ways away, looking straight at her.

It was his burning eyes that gave her the strength to continue. If it killed her so be it, but she had to mend the damage that had been kept secret and silent for so many years.

She drew herself to her feet and slowly, step by step, breath after breath, continued toward the malevolent god on the hill.

When she at last stood before him, shaking with exhaustion, breathing hard from exertion, her mouth and throat were too dry for words. She coughed after she tried in vain to speak.

One silver eyebrow rose. He was amused. His eyes danced with mirth at her suffering, his lips curled in a smirk. With one blow, he could finish her, and they both knew it.

Those were not the eyes she knew.

She wanted to return the light she had seen in them as a child.

"Do you remember me?" she asked, a breathy whisper.

"Remember you?" the idea that a god such as he could ever associate with such a pathetic creature made him laugh. "I suppose at some point in the last few hours you met my blade. That is all I remember."

"I know you remember," she said again, her voice a little stronger now. "I know you could never, ever forget."

"Succumb to your fate, human. It is over for you."

"Not yet it isn't!" she cried. "I'm still alive! I've survived…I've survived everything for this moment! I survived so I could save you!"

"Save me?" Sephiroth grinned, but it was strangely lopsided. A hollow laugh came from his lips. "From what?"

The woman stared up at him, taking a moment to gather enough scant breath to respond.

Sephiroth's eyes narrowed and for the first time, he really looked at her, examining her closely. "I have met you before. You were that fangirl that Yukihana encountered in the shopping mall. Milda, was it?"

She paused, pressed her lips together. "Yes. I took on the name Milda. But…you called me…Faye."

"Faye…?" the general repeated in a whisper. He looked at her, all malice dammed by confusion. His lips mouthed the words once more in silence.

Milda reached into her pocket and pulled out a length of faded yellow cloth, printed with tiny white daisies and flourishes of vines in green. It was ripped cleanly in the middle, the edges of the gap stained with shadows of the brown of dried blood despite being washed and aged until the print was almost indistinguishable.

Sephiroth drew back, eyes wide in shock. "Where did you get that?" he hissed.

"It's mine," Milda said. "It was my dress when I was a young girl. The dress I wore the day you called me Faye. I know you remember. You could never forget."

"It's impossible," he seethed, now in anger. With a savage backhand, Milda was thrown to the ground. "Faye is dead. I killed her."

Milda couldn't rise again, but from the ground, blood trickling from the corner of her lips, she smiled. "No, Sephiroth," she said. "You didn't kill me. You saved my life."


"Explain yourself."

It took Milda a while to even realize that she had blacked out. It was night now, and she was lying next to a fire under the stars. She turned her head. Through the flickering flames, she could see Sephiroth.

Slowly, hissing softly as her whole body protested, she pulled herself into a sitting position. "How am I alive?" Some of her more grievous wounds had even been healed.

"I will not let you die until I have what I want from you," Sephiroth said, tossing another small log onto the fire and giving the fire a jump start with another flare from a materia in his bracer. "In return for your story, I will make your death very swift. How do you know about…Faye?"

Milda hummed softly. She probably should have been afraid, but was oddly calm about the threat. She had known this mission was suicide anyway.

At the same time, she really doubted that he would kill her. Despite seeing what he had done in Wutai and to his own wife, she could not imagine him finishing her off.

He had already spared her life once before.

"Will you talk or must I coerce you?" her asked her. He was facing away from her now, looking out to the dark horizon. A small breeze played with the ends of his hair.

"No, I'll talk. It's what I came here to do."

"Then begin, before I decide that you have outlived your usefulness."

She began earnestly. "I didn't really understand what had happened until I was much older. Pieces came slowly as I followed you in the shadows over the years. My only regret is not telling you sooner…"

"Save your pity, girl. I seek only the facts, and none of their sentiments."

Milda paused. "Fine then, the facts, from the beginning. We were thrown in a cell together for days, just the two of us."

"Two weeks," Sephiroth corrected quietly.

She was taken aback. "That long?"

"Time passes unheeded in the science labs." The fingers of one hand clenched slightly. "Except as a tool to measure. They would use an eternity to observe what they want to see."

Milda nodded softly. "You would know all too well…wouldn't you?"

"I told you I don't need your pity. Human feelings mean nothing to me."

"I figured out that we were a test," she continued.

"I seem to recall telling you as much very early in the experiment," Sephiroth said.

"I know. But I didn't understand why."

"Hmph. You were naive. You were young."

"You were the same age I was."

He turned to look back at her, one gleaming eye visible through the veil of his hair. "…And?"

She knew better than anyone that he had not had a childhood – the body of a child, perhaps, but never the soul of one. She might have been the only one outside the labs who had seen the kind of life he had lived, because for two weeks, she had lived it with him.

"I was a test of my obedience," Sephiroth spoke before she had the chance to again, looking out into the dark distance. "I suspected as much from the beginning, but as the days went on and nothing happened, I allowed myself to believe otherwise."

"That's why you were so cold toward me at first. You didn't want to play into their hand."

"Indeed. But in the end, I succumbed to my weakness. I was blinded by the thought that I could live the kind of life that you and the other children in the orphanage did. I began to believe that something other than the scientists brought us together – that my time as a lab rat was done. That I could have…"

He stopped abruptly. Whatever had begun to creep back into his voice was quickly extinguished. But Milda knew it was working. She had just seen not only the absence of the monster possessing him as he burned the mansion, but traces of the wounded child that had never been allowed to move on.

"I was a fool," Sephiroth said. "I suppose even I could not escape the taint of you filthy traitors after being raised among you. But no longer. I have transcended such useless desires."

Milda looked into the heart of the fire. "What did they do to you?" she asked quietly, fearfully. "After you refused to kill me like they ordered you to…you were suddenly in so much pain…but I couldn't see what was hurting you."

Sephiroth let out a bitter, hollow laugh. "Do you really want to know?"

Milda bit her lip. "It was my fault."

"Don't fool yourself. The purpose of the experiment was to see if I would follow their orders over my own desires. If I had continued to ignore you, the experiment would have been meaningless and you would have walked free."

"I knew you would blame yourself," Milda said, "And only yourself. Not even the terrible men that did this to you."

"Enough!" Sephiroth roared, and the fire flared high. Milda leapt back in surprise. "No more of this. Tell me how you survived and we will be done with it."

Milda set her jaw and continued. "You don't remember the actually killing me, do you? That's because you fought so hard and long that you blacked out from the pain."

"There is a cut in that cloth, and remains of blood. I hit you with my blade."

"On accident! I rushed forward to try to help you, which was my own choice. Your sword grazed me as you fell. The wound was minor. You never hurt me. After you woke up, they told you that you had killed me, right? It was a lie! You never gave in, you fought it with everything you had until you had exhausted yourself and couldn't hurt me anymore. You saved me, Sephiroth. If it wasn't for your strength of spirit, I really would have died that day.

"I never dreamed that you had been told that you had killed me. You had been carrying around the guilt of it for years while I was ignorantly living my dream. It wasn't fair. You'd been told you were a monster who murdered your own friend in cold blood when you really saved my life! I owe you everything I've ever had."

The air was still, heavy with the pause. Sephiroth had gone white, and was not breathing.

"You gave me everything," Milda continued quietly. "When I was thrown in that cell, I was an orphan with no future. After you blacked out, Professor Gast rushed in and stopped the experiment. He helped me fake my death so I could escape ShinRa. He found a family for me. I had parents again, who worked hard to give me everything I needed. I went to college to become a writer, and got a degree in literature. Every dream I ever had since my birth parents died finally came true.

"I came back to ShinRa as a journalist so I could follow you. I wrote stories to sway the public opinion to achieve what…well, what I thought would make you happiest.

"I wrote about your heroism in the war to get you fame and prestige. I even researched your mother with the intent to bring you the truth you'd always wanted, never dreaming that Blackwell would misuse my work against you. And I wrote those awful stories about you and your wife…and I joined Blackwell to get her away from you. I had a picture in my mind of you being loved by everyone as a hero and Hana just didn't fit in my vision, because she saw you differently. I admit I may have been…jealous. The truth is, she was right."

Sephiroth said nothing, still staring out into the distance.

"I know why you married Hana," Milda said softly, "and you have to go back to her."

"Why would that human concern me?" his voice was soft and childlike.

"Because she loves you. And because with her, you were not a hero or an idol or a god – you were a human. Just like you've always wanted to be. And I wonder if you lo—"

Without prelude, before she could finish the word, Sephiroth spread his single wing and was gone.

Milda could not even see him leave, as dark a figure as he was against the inky sky. But as she stared, a few feathers fell and caressed her face. She cradled one in the palm of her hand.

She sat until the dawn began to break over the horizon. The sky was cloudless and clear.

Nothing could erase what she had done, but perhaps now that he knew some of the truth, he could begin to see who he really was for the first time in his life.

She was still alive. And she would spend the rest of her life working to mend the damage she had caused Sephiroth and his wife.

"You're not a monster," she whispered as she stroked the plumage. "You were called that as a child, and then again by Blackwell. I suppose that's why you let yourself believe you were one today. But you never were, not from the very beginning. You're still not.

"You're a hero, Sephiroth."


A/N: Now, I know there are some strong feelings out there about Milda...let me know what you think of this. I really have been building this from almost the very beginning, but I still feel like this was a little abrupt. She's supposed to be a highly complicated character, and we haven't seen the last of her yet.

I have begun the revision of this work (even though it's not over yet). As of today, the first four chapters have been reposted and labeled as version 2.0, with more coming quickly. Nothing major has been added, I have only revised the tone and characterizations, tweaked some details for consistency, and fixed grammar and typos and other awkward writing moments. In other words, don't feel obligated to read it again, you're not missing anything except for a smoother read (hopefully). :)