Disclaimer: ShinRa Company, its executives, the Turks, Sephiroth, Zack Fair, and all other characters (except Miyuki and Cam; those ladies are mine!) belong to Square Enix. The lyrics and music to the song "One Hundred Years" belongs to Robert Smith and the band The Cure.

Warnings: This songfic includes foul language, descriptions of physical violence, and a few incidents of in-game racism. I'm exploring the psyche of someone who went to war, and regardless of what people might say, those images stay with you. No matter who you are.

A/N: For this songfic, I chose to explore the psychology of everyone's favorite bad guy, Sephiroth! It wasn't easy. In fact, it was tiring, depressing. It made me feel bad, in some parts, but I felt compelled to write it, get it out of my system, so to speak. Funny how a story can take over your life, and instead take a life of its own.

One thing to note, the fic itself doesn't follow a precise timeline, but is rather a jumble of thoughts and images flashing in Sephiroth's mind. There are things we are all familiar with, from the game, but there are also several things I added to give him a bit more dimension, to let the readers see that there is more to him than what little we saw of him in both the original game and the movie. I don't know what Sephiroth's like in Crisis Core, but it was after the Wutai war, which is some of what I described in the fic. I don't really know where this came from, but part of it is that I heard the song, and I just found so much in it that could fit to him. Lastly, it really helps if you hear the song. The whining, screeching guitars at the end really do sound like madness. The way I put it, the song lyrics are the text in italics in the story. So, anyways, here goes!

Read and Review!!


"One Hundred Years"

The book made a hollow thud as it fell to the dusty floor, a thud as hollow and resounding as his body felt, his mind felt, after knowing all he knew now. All that had been kept from him. The filthy, lying fuckers.

"It doesn't matter if we all die," he thought, his mind in a whirl, suddenly focusing on the ShinRas, the father and son team that embodied the new world order. Both men; Ambition in the back of a black car.

His mind flashed to the Tower, that awesome, lonely Tower where he'd spent his entire early life, never knowing the world outside until he could finally fend for himself, and even though that moment came fairly early in his life, it was still many years where all Sephiroth knew was the long hallways and cold corridors of the Company. In a high building there is so much to do and indeed there was. Scientists and doctors, laboratories, classrooms, training rooms, bars, recreational areas, restaurants, government offices, residential areas, thousands of employment positions, all a person needed to survive could be found in the Tower.

And Sephiroth knew of people who spent months at a time never going out into the world, breathing only the canned air, hearing only each other's voices, people like the Turks, who went out often but only to kill, only to spy, and then they came back, sometimes because they were wanting to come back, other times because they were called back. They all pretended they had free time, days off, but it was an illusion, as anyone who worked for the Company had a professional PHS, that they had to answer at any time it rang and respond to it, at the cost of their jobs, or if a SOLDIER or Turk, your life. "Going-home time, a story on the radio. . ."

His tortured mind gave another sickening lurch inside his head as he remembered past times, better times, times spent in the company of someone nobody knew of, "Something small falls out of your mouth, and we laugh," back in a time when he shared with others, when he felt laughter, and compassion, and that laughter, in retrospect, seemed, "A prayer for something betterA prayer for something better," and he sobbed now, only he didn't know he was crying, wouldn't have cared to define what exactly he was crying for. The lies? The cruelty of deception? His life that he knew was lost to him from this day forward? It felt like a gulf of one hundred years separated him from that life, a hundred-year span between the time he;d laughed and loved to the time he'd hated everything and everyone. One hundred years.

He'd never truly felt part of things, never completely included into things, and now, now he knew why. In his mind, the thought reverberated, screamed, begged, insisted, "Please love me!" and right on the heels of that, hatred rose like black bile, hatred to all who lied to him, through effort or through omission, it mattered little, and he hated his absentee family, or what he once thought of as his absentee family, but they weren't quite his family, were they now, and the thought changed to, "Meet my mother," that thing described in these books as near-celestial, as having descended from the heavens only to be put in the reactor here, covered up by the Turks, those sneaky, lying bastards.

But the fear takes hold, and Sephiroth felt paranoid, anxious. They wanted this information under wraps, right? That was why it was hidden in this moldy mansion. But why then had they sent him? Did someone intend for him to find the truth of his heritage? Or was it as he suspected, and it was just a random accident? He wasn't very much a fan of the random, of the arbitrary accidents people often blamed their faults on. No, Sephiroth considered himself a cause-and-effect man. You did A, then B would follow. None of this chance-encounter bullshit.

But still . . . but still . . .

He felt watched, nervous, feeling as if the collective eyes of the world were upon him, judging, criticizing, Creeping up the stairs in the dark, he was, he was just

Waiting for the death blow

Waiting for the death blow

Waiting for the death blow

But he was upstairs already, and no deaths had occurred. But so much death had indeed occurred, so many years ago, and he'd been the one dealing it, more often than not. Again, that flash of one he'd loved when younger, years and years and years ago, when the war with Wutai was going on strong, but before he'd been sent to it, "Stroking your hair as the patriots are shot, fighting for freedom on television" He'd muttered, "Sharing the world with slaughtered pigs" and he'd looked at her, looked at her and asked, "Have we got everything?"and he remembered, it was life a knife through him, his own Masamune blade, how she'd looked at him then, how she reacted."She struggles to get away . . ."

And then, the war. The butchered villagers, ignorant people who fought not for political tendencies, but for their ideology, their sense that their freedoms were being squandered away, and for what, for those shiny orbs that enabled the user to cast elements at one another, hurl spells to manipulate, to summon world monsters to do your bidding, and that was the reason the war was fought, he thought, but if he'd been doing the right thing, then why, why did he keep seeing the people he'd killed? He didn't see them individually, but saw them represented in one victim.

His first true victim,

The pain, in his soul, in his body, and the creeping feeling he initially had when he first walked into that house, a house who'd been supposedly harboring those goddamned guerrillas that wiped out dozens of MPs. And a man had run at him, a short sword and a battle-yell in the dark hut, and after he'd been killed, Sephiroth had turned around, adrenaline sharpening his already keen senses so that he knew there was someone behind him, and he turned and saw

A little black haired girl, a girl who could have been just waiting for Saturday but he'd killed her father, he'd killed him, and the girl begins to scream, loud shrieks, screeching, the death of her father pushing her, just as he pushed her when she ran at him, taking the sword from her dead father's hand, like a black-haired girl from Nibelheim did, once he tried to set his mother free and got rid of the first of the traitors, that goddamn village of Nibelheim where the basic truths of his existence had lain hidden in shadows and cobwebs, and Zack, goddamn Zack, the man he'd thought of as the closest thing to a friend he might have had (a hundred years ago, it seemed today), but in the end, it didn't matter.

Back to the memory of the girl in Wutai, but his memory was unfocused, her face superimposing itself over the face of the girl he'd slashed at in the reactor until he didn't know which was which, where was Wutai and where was the mountain village. What he did know was that he hadn't wanted to hurt the girl, not really, he only deflected the attack, pushed her away from himself, Pushing her white face into the mirror, but it hadn't been enough, and the girl, still screaming, still cursing at him in a foreign, alien language, had taken a broken shard of glass and stabbed herself in the neck, tearing skin and flesh, and for just one brief second, Sephiroth could see the tendons in there, but then there was the hot arterial spray slapping against his face.

Aching inside me

And turn me round

Just like the old days when he'd laughed. Just like the old days when he'd shared with others. Just like the old days when he still knew how to smile and mean it, Just like the old days

One hundred years and counting.

But then, it was done. He'd found himself in Midgar, in the Tower, and while he was confused at first, now he knew what to do, the sweet voice of his mother offering advice and comfort, and finally it was done, he'd stabbed his sword through the old man's back, pinning him to his desk,

Caressing an old man

And painting a lifeless face

Just a piece of new meat in a clean room

The sparkling-clean office, the polished desk from which had issued war, famine, martial law meted out with an iron fist, harsh discipline to all the subordinates, no less his own son as well, and at least there'd be one person glad for the old man's demise, right? Everyone knew Rufus ShinRa hated his father. And again the war, the accursed war that still haunted him, that he couldn't get away from, even in the ShinRa stronghold, because two of the Turks were from that accursed country. They had the same dark, slanted eyes, the same cunning language nobody understood, the foreign, foul-smelling foods, the unmistakable yellowish tinge on their skins, yellow like the sickly moon over Midgar, and hadn't one of those Turks been in a guerrilla? Those mountain savages that were at first merely annoying, but later on became actually alarming? Hadn't that yellow-skinned, slanty-eyed whore killed several of his men? And where was she now? Was she moldering in a shallow grave, her bones picked apart by the wild animals? NO! She was a Turk! A goddamn TURK, and oh, how that rankled him, how it made him feel the injustices of the world thrown up in dark relief, much more so when he knew what was in those books, those books that said so much about everything, about nothing at all.

But it didn't matter now. He still remembered the war. In fact, it was always going on; it had never truly stopped for him. "The soldiers close in under a yellow moon" it frightened him, it haunted him, the war, despite his cold demeanor, his quiet attitude, and wasn't that what he was about to erase from the world? His objective was clear. Find the Black Materia, wherever it was, and use it to deliver the world from the wandering, whining maggots who thought they had the run of things, but in reality all they did was scratch and bite and tear at each other, never fixing things, only making them worse. "All shadows and deliverance under a black flag . . ."

A hundred years of blood, that was what the Wutaians called the war, because even though it only lasted a few short years to the rest of the world, to them and to ShinRa Company who'd been involved, it felt like a century-long conflict, as the effects were long-lasting. Crimson the blood from his victims, from the monsters he was sent after, from the human monsters he'd contended with, and he hated this life he led, hated it all the more for what was revealed in those books, saw all the years he'd spent humoring the lying sons of bitches, and his vision was red as well, in his fury of his humiliation, his rage at the world who'd never let him be a part of it, that had essentially shunned him aside as a freak, as an exception to what was normal and acceptable.

The ribbon tightens round my throat

I open my mouth

And my head bursts open

A sound like a tiger thrashing in the water, thrashing in the water, and Oh God this was madness, this was what madness sounded like! The insane shrieking in his mind, the steady drone he heard in the back of his head. He'd thought he'd surely die, falling into the Mako like he did, back in Nibelheim, but then he'd been here, he'd just been in Midgar, and saw that many years had gone by, although he had no idea what had happened to him those years, they were missing in his mind, in his life, but he had a purpose, didn't he? A voice, a noise in his head, telling him the next step, the step after that, never giving him the whole picture, which normally would've angered him, but this was the voice of his mother, and one always had to listen to Mother, did they not?

"Over and over, we die one after the other", because it seemed an endless cycle of death and rebirth, only to die again."Over and over, we die one after the other, the girl in Wutai. "One after the other", the girl in Nibelheim. "One after the other", SOLDIER First Class, Zack Fair. "One after the other", Nibelheim villagers who'd kept the truth from him. "One after the other", the carcass of Old Man ShinRa, and let them all rot in Hell.

It feels like a hundred years

A hundred years of lies

A hundred yearsof deceit

A hundred years of injustice

A hundred years, but it was about to end.

One hundred years, and he'd be the one to see the bastards in their graves.


A/N : Sephiroth is a weird little man . . .

Some inspiration from this is just my being fed up with the big agenda some of us are expected to follow, regardless of our individual wishes, and part of it is just how I sympathized with Sephiroth, on some level. The alienation, the feeling that truths, basic truths are being hidden from us, we've all felt something like this. And finally, I just really wanted to explore a deep, dark psyche I've never explored before. I liked how it came out, but you be the judges of that. Like I said above, it's funny how a story can take over your life, and instead take a life of its own. Moving in directions you didn't really intend, directions that might anger and hurt the one writing it. Hint: Something awful is about to happen in DCiS soon, maybe three or four chapters after where I'm stuck in right now, and I'm procrastinating on getting those hatemails.

Gimme reviews. Anything will do, except flames!