*Author's Note*
For some reason this chapter was difficult to write. For some odd reason I felt the need to plow through it anyway. Please review it. I'm glad someone added this as a favorite, but I want to know what you think. I realize it's kind of mushy and gushy right now, but Sephy will get tougher. I swear.
BT Dubs-I don't own any of the characters, just OC and fillers. The rest are owned by Square Enix. I'm not gaining anything from this.
Sephiroth watched his legs swing as he sat on the table. Hojo stood with his back to him watching the screen with the results of the latest test. Sephiroth remained silent. He didn't want to do the test again. It hurt and it took a long time. He kept his eyes on his legs and watched as the blue and black spots faded away. Those were easy to get, but they were always gone the next day. That was good.
Those hurt too.
Hojo made a noise and stepped away. Sephiroth looked up. Hojo was calling over one of his assistants. That meant the test was over.
"You can get up now Sephiroth," Hojo said. Sephiroth slid to the floor. The exam room starting filling with people.
"Go find Professor Gast, Sephiroth," Hojo said. He wanted the boy out of the way. Sephiroth was fine with that. Gast always let him rest after a long test day. Except he wasn't in his office.
"What's up, buttercup?" Sephiroth turned around. Cassiopia...Cass, was there. She had stepped out of another room.
"Hojo told me to find Professor Gast," Sephiroth said.
"He wasn't feeling good," Cass said, "he went up to the infirmary. Do you know where that is?" Sephiroth blinked.
"I'm not supposed to leave the laboratory," he said.
"Hmmm," she said, "well...do you want to hang out with me?"
"Hang out?" Sephiroth asked.
"Figure of speech," she said, "it means to spend time with someone. Usually to waste time."
"Should I waste time with you?" Sephiroth asked.
"You don't have to," she said, "only if you want to. Otherwise I can go get Professor Gast for you, you can wait for him, or I might be able to break into his office. Which do you want to do?" He blinked at her again. No one asked him what he wanted. He wasn't really sure himself. He didn't say anything.
She crouched down next to him.
"Sephiroth?" she asked.
"I don't know," he said quietly.
"That's okay," she said, "why don't you wait with me and if Professor Gast isn't here in an hour, I'll go get him." He nodded. She stood back up and offered out her hand. He looked at it.
"It won't bite," she said. He took it very gently and cautiously. She started leading him down the hall. She matched his steps and walked by his side. His grip hardened a little. Her hand was warm. She gave him a squeeze in return. She opened a door close to Professor Gast's office. It was a lot smaller. It only had a desk and a chair inside. Sephiroth really noticed that she had a large window. It didn't have a great view of anything, but she had written all over it. She let go of his hand to pick up a file. He was drawn over to the window.
There were letters and numbers that he recognized, but they made no sense in the order they were in. He saw a bunch of weird shapes too. She had drawn a bunch of arrows and they crisscrossed every which way. It was pure gibberish to him.
"What is this?" he asked.
"That's what the inside of my head looks like," she said. He blinked and turned around. She was looking up at her window too.
"Professor Gast asked me to work with him because I can make order out of that," she said, "It's really easy for me to do it inside my head, but sometimes I draw it out so someone else can make sense of it too. This one is kind of messy right now, so it probably looks like chicken scratch to anyone but me." Sephiroth blinked back up at it.
"What does it mean?" Sephiroth asked.
"It's supposed to show how a line is supposed to look," she said, "but I wrote it out of order so it doesn't make as much sense." She picked up a rag, stood up on her chair and started wiping down the window. Sephiroth watched her write out the numbers and letters again. They didn't make any sense to him still, but it looked nicer. She finished by redrawing the shapes more neatly. She stepped down.
"That's what it should look like," she said. It didn't look all that different. She smiled as he blinked again. "I don't suppose you really care though. This one was kind of boring, but I had a lot of people ask me how it was done. I thought if I had an example that might help." Sephiroth nodded and blinked again.
"Do you want to sit down?" she asked. He looked up at her. There was only one chair. "It's okay," she said, "I like to walk around a lot. I'm ahead of Professor Gast anyway. I don't have anything to do until he gets back." Sephiroth climbed up into the chair. She laid down on the floor and propped her feet up against the wall. She rested her hands behind her head and closed her eyes.
Sephiroth let his feet swing again. The black and blue spots were almost gone. He didn't feel as sore anymore. He didn't want to do another test for a while though. They were getting hard.
"Why you all black and blue?" she asked. She kept her eyes closed. Sephiroth was quiet for a while.
"It happened during the test," he said at last, "Hojo said I shouldn't be getting them."
"The way he goes on about you to Gast, one would think that man would take better care to ensure that you didn't get all bruised up," she said.
"Bruised?" he asked. Is that what it was called?
"Mmm-hmm," she said, "did you not know that?"
"No," he said, "What are they?" She put her legs down and sat up, knees tucked into her chest.
"A bruise is when you break a blood vessel underneath your skin," she said, "the blood gathers there and makes the skin look darker. It's like getting cut, only you don't see the scrape. It's hidden." He looked at his legs again. There was blood under those marks?
"Usually it hurts when you get one," she said, "at least it is for me. I can't speak for everyone else." They did hurt, but not for very long. He poked at one. It hurt, but just a little bit.
"Yours go away a lot faster than mine," she said.
"Is that good?" Sephiroth asked. She shrugged.
"I dunno," she said, "Sometimes I want them to go away, sometimes I like to show them off. It depends on how I got them. I can't make them heal any faster or slower, so I just stick with the pace I have." He looked up at the window again. How could anyone fit that all into their heads? Hojo made him memorize some things in books, but nothing like that. It was impossible.
"Are you...smart?" Sephiroth asked. It even felt ridiculous asking it.
"That depends on who you ask," Cass said, "If you ask Hojo, he'll say no. If you ask Gast, he'll say yes. If you ask me...I don't know. I can do this better than anyone else I have ever met. Not even Hojo could solve this in his head. At the same time, I couldn't do Hojo's job even if I wanted to. It just depends." She crossed her legs and rested her head on her hands.
"What do you think?" she asked, "Am I smart?" Sephiroth looked back up at the window.
"Yes," he said.
Gast walked down from the infirmary, feeling only slightly better. The stress was beginning to get to him. Hojo was insufferable, ShinRa was all too willing, and his opinion was falling to the wayside. Cass was the only person he really trusted here anymore. She and Sephiroth, the poor child. Gast knew there was nothing he could really do for the boy, except be there.
But that was becoming increasingly more difficult.
He saw Hojo and a group of other scientists working frantically with their new data as he passed by. He didn't really care to find out. Hojo would brag about it later. Sephiroth wouldn't say a word about it. He was used to it by now.
He returned to his office. Cass had finished her latest assignment, in record time. He wished he had found her earlier. How she slipped by so many people to land in his line of vision had to be a miracle. Nothing seemed to faze her at all. Usually a week in the lab was enough to suck the joy out of anyone, but Cass battled through. And she had found a way to get Sephiroth to behave for her. And she was a genius. Even Hojo could not deny that, though he could argue that she would never reach his level. Gast decided that was debatable. He heard her speaking in her office, if you could call it an office. She was usually pretty quiet, though she could be heard pacing or dragging her chair around. He decided to investigate.
"It's a lot of math, but the important number to remember is 9.8 meters per second squared," Cass said.
"What's that mean?" Sephiroth asked.
"It means that for every second, the falling object, or our raindrop, will speed up about ten more meters until it just can't go any faster. Then it hits the ground," Cass said. Sephiroth was watching her write out the problem with wide eyes. Gast leaned against the door, once again in shock. Sephiroth was happy just to be with someone who wasn't Hojo, or didn't work for Hojo. Getting him to talk was painful, to say the least. He was too conditioned not to ask about anything. He simply accepted what Hojo did to him.
Sephiroth asking Cass about...whatever it was...it was just miraculous. She finished the problem and Sephiroth seemed satisfied, nodding in a more vigorous way than usual.
"What are you to up to?" Gast asked, masking his incredulity.
"Oh, just avoiding my job," Cass said, "as usual." Sephiroth's passive mask came back on.
"Hojo said to find you," Sephiroth said, "Cassiopia said I could wait with her until you got back."
"That was very nice of her," Gast said.
"I'm a nice person, I guess," Cass said. Sephiroth looked over at Professor Gast.
"What were you two talking about?" Gast said.
"Sephiroth wanted to know how fast rain can fall," Cass said, "We were working it out." Gast nodded and stepped forward.
"Would you two mind explaining it again for an old man?"
Cass walked away from the coffee machine empty handed and with a sigh on her lips. It was going to be a very long day. She hated it when Hojo's little minions got first dibs at the coffee pot. They sucked it dry and it took an hour to fill the damn thing back up again. Not a great day after an all nighter. Not a great day at all.
"Intruding on my work again I see," said a sneer to the left. Gods damn it all to hell. It was too early for this.
"For the last time," Cass said, her voice shockingly even, even to herself, "this is the main laboratory. It's open to everyone and it's where most of the extra equipment is kept. I have just as much right to be here as you do." Hojo sent a glare her way. Was his face just stuck like that? It would explain a lot really.
"And where exactly does Sephiroth being in your office play into that factor?" Hojo asked. Was that what this was about? Gods, what an insufferable prick. No wonder Gast talked about leaving.
"You expect me to leave a five-year-old to run around here alone?" she shot back. Hojo didn't reply to that.
"You're spending more time with him than I find comfortable," he said.
"Then tell him that," she said, "Every time Sephiroth and I have come into contact it was under your orders, more or less. You told me to get him off the roof and I did. You told him to go find Gast, and he did. The fact the we came into contact is secondary. I have no interest in Sephiroth outside the fact that he is a very bright five-year-old."
"That concerns me," Hojo said.
"Why?" Cass said, "Afraid I'm gonna teach him calculus?" Hojo didn't reply.
"You're paranoid," Cass said, "Sephiroth and I have had two conversations and both were about rain. He asked I answered, that's it, there isn't any more."
"Rain?" Hojo sneered.
"Rain," Cass confirmed, "Like I said, he's smart for a five-year-old and that's all that really stuck out for me."
"He's more than smart," Hojo started.
"Don't start another stupid schpiel on your grand success story," she said, "It's not that great. I don't really care about your perfect specimen."
"You should," Hojo said.
"But I won't," Cass said, "now unless you have something for me to derive for you, I'd like to find a goddamn cup of coffee before I give one of your minions head trauma." Hojo scoffed as she left. She didn't look back.
From a nearby room, Sephiroth peeked out and watched Cassiopia walk by. She looked tired. She and Gast had worked long after Hojo sent someone to fetch him. He watched her snatch a mug away from a man in a lab coat saying something about being greedy, but he wasn't really paying attention. There was something else on his mind.
She didn't think he was perfect.
She didn't think he was the salvation of the human race.
She thought he was smart.