This is what I've wanted to do all along. This is what I wanted to begin with. The story of the three friends: Sephiroth (Crescent), Genesis Rhapsodos and Angeal Hewley. Whoever may want to laugh or cry or get hurt or comfort each other together with us, welcome on board.

Disclaimer: I own nothing of FF7. Then again, generally speaking 'being' is better than 'owning'. Methinks. And HP belongs to his rightful owner too. Still, Iarba - the one called 'Tonberry' by Genesis - is MY creation and nobody else but my friend Glaurung II is entitled to use her apart from me.

NEVERENDING SONG

Part I – DIVER. 2nd song

"I've been sleeping a thousand years it seems…
without a thought without a voice without a soul…"

Evanescence – „Bring me to life"

Professor Hojo was no stranger to him. He had been there ever since he could remember – a moody man with sudden fits of rage and no mercy for the animals. He too had the habit of talking to the child while he was experimenting on him, but it was as if he were addressing in fact to an audience, presenting his work and scientifical achievements.

Hollow words pouring over him like a wave of meaningless sounds.

Pokes and needles and the blood squeezed from him, filling tube after tube.

Mako tanks. The painful shrieks and cries of the other animals while they were tortured. His own large, void eyes reflected in the walls of the tanks while he was desperately swimming inside them – anything to get his mind off the maddening burning that was eating him alive.

Professor Hojo's creaking voice snarling at him, saying something about his overlong silver hair, then the clapping sound of scissors biting at his mane right next to his skull and his eyes, his mouth wide open in a silent cry of agony as the pain tore his body apart from head to toes just like an electric discharge, even more breaking than the mako torture. He had fallen unconscious on the floor, but when he came around, late at night, his hair was back, seemingly even longer than it had been.

The lab tech that had happened to discover this grumbled something that sounded like: „Oh Gaia, here we have another Gary Potter here!" Or maybe it was Harry Trotter? Or Parry… He couldn't tell for sure; he was still dizzy and shocked.

After that Hojo had cut it again for another few times trying to discover what could cause that strange phenomenon, as each time the hair grew back to at least its usual length over the night. Was it the distress caused to the child? Was it some chemical compound? And how came that such a tremendous growth wouldn't leave the child all drained up from the lack of nutrients that had to be consumed inside his body to achieve such a thing in only a few hours?...

Snarling.

Snarling. Monotonous preaches about tests and results and experiments and more experiments. Snarling again. Pain and tests. Tests and pain.

Woken up in the middle of the night and strapped on the cold metal tables. The shrieking voice snarling.

He had trained himself not to care, not to even notice. He could detach himself from the voices around until they all melted in a muffled mumble that kept fading away. Instead he would concentrate on the computer screens and the data flowing on them. Noone had taught him how, of course, but he could comprehend them easily, they weren't meaningless to him. And a childish curiosity made him wonder every time where the information creeping down the screen went when it reached its lower edge. He had tried to imagine the ways and subways, the halls, the alleys on which the data would keep going. Would they creep along forever? Would there be a place for them too to stop and rest at least at night? Were there, inside the blocks of memory, some cages for them too, to keep them from fleeing and wreaking havoc around the virtual space? Finally, at some point, his mind just kept following the data further on, along the wires. He could perceive their low whirring noise, the intermittent buzz of the cables meandering along the floor, the walls, through them. He just wanted to know where they went. Maybe in another realm beyond the walls of the Lab World?...

This went on for months under the professor's very own oblivious eyes, until the day came when he just found himself projecting his mind into the computers and moving from one to another, from room to room. Ever since he just lay there, wherever he was put, with empty, shiny mako eyes on a moronic face while he kept reading hungrily like a starveling, moving inside the machines, creeping along the wires reduced to an improbable bit of information traveling along with the data sent from here to there – anything just to avoid the sensory deprivation he had to go through day after day.

Shortly after, he came to know every bit of information stocked in the computers, piece by piece. Any data newly entered would reach him within nanoseconds. In time he could even divide his attention, if need arose, to follow the activity in the labs while another part of his mind would flow throughout the data thoroughfares.

He could follow every account and protocol of each and every experiment carried out in the labs and the chilling thing was that at some point they just became more and more comprehensible to him, to the point when he finally could point out with an impersonal, mathematical accuracy the errors that caused them to fail day by day. How ironic!

There was nothing about him there though. Not even the results of the tests carried out on him day after day weren't there. The professor scribbled them on a clipboard and at night he would take it with him when he left. It took some time to notice that, because for a long while it had been of no concern to him. He only acknowledged the fact at some point when, summing up the tons of scientific work recorded in the computers, he was finally hit by the idea that, while every animal in the labs was registered there and everything about it scrupulously noted from birth to death, his file just wasn't there.

He roamed both the real and the virtual space, through the cameras and inside the vast colourless electronic nothingness bit by bit, from room to room, futilely running through the cables and reading everything again and again. He knew them all, the Lab World had no secrets to him anymore. Every single testing room, every storing facility, every cubicle and cage, as long as the silent cameras were watching them all – and he was watching as well through them. They once had creeped him out – now he was their silent master.

But there was nothing to be found. As if he didn't even exist.

A/N: Whew! Seems to go smooth so far. I just hope I'll be able to keep as steady a pace as possible from now on too.

Don't forget: /winks/ to be sure you won't miss the updates, you just have to mark the 'story alert' option and you'll be notified via email. But reviews will be even more appreciated, because I need to know your opinion on this. A nice day to you all.