Chapter Twenty-Seven: Seeking Penance
Sephiroth blinked once, twice, three times. His eyes went wide as he took it in. "My mother's name is…Jenova."
The boy had been yearning for this knowledge for all his life—a name, a face, anything—and his eyes filled with a light entirely different from the glow of the mako.
Seeing Sephiroth so happy brought no solace to Gast. A lie, after all, was a lie, even if it was only meant to soothe the boy's troubled spirit.
"What…what was she like?" Sephiroth spoke breathlessly, and he was suddenly on his knees, bouncing with energy. "What did she look like? Where is she?"
"Sephiroth," Gast said slowly, putting a hand on his shoulder to still the boy. "She is dead."
Gast watched as a great sadness welled up in the boy. He knew that Sephiroth had dreamed of a day that he would be reunited with his mother—he sometimes even cried for her in the worst of his pain. "Oh," was all he said. Then, later, "How…?"
"When she was pregnant with you, she became very sick. It was all she could do to bring you into this world. She passed on soon after." Gast sighed, then chuckled sadly, ruffling the boy's silver hair with one hand. "Your stubborn bangs," he fingered the silver peaks, "are most certainly from her."
"Really?"
"Does that make you happy to know it?"
"Yes," he said. "What about…my dad?"
Gast was taken aback. He had fully expected Sephiroth to be satisfied with what little he said about his mother. He had not planned this far.
"He was not a good man, Sephiroth. I should hope you will learn to be more like your mother than like him."
"Why?"
Gast thought for a moment. He had told enough lies, he decided. He would give the boy the truth about his father.
"He hurt your mother badly, Sephiroth. He did terrible things to her; things that no man should ever think of doing to his wife. He used her to further his own career and when she was no longer of any help to him, he abandoned her."
"Why would he do something as terrible as that?"
Gast wasn't sure how to answer the broken-hearted boy's question. "I don't know, Sephiroth."
"Why didn't my mother leave him, if he hurt her so badly?"
"I don't know that either, Sephiroth. People do funny things sometimes, things that don't make any sense."
Sephiroth slid his legs off the side of the table again. "I wish mother was here. I'd make her feel better. I'd make her happy. I'd do anything to make her happy!"
"I know you would, Sephiroth."
Sephiroth drew his knees to his chest and was still for a moment. "So she won't ever come back?"
Gast didn't have the heart to lie about it, even if he had lied already. It would be beyond cruel to let him keep that hope. "I'm afraid not, Sephiroth."
"You can't…tell me anything else?"
"Maybe when you're old enough to understand." Gast put his hand on the boy's shoulder. "If Hojo asks, you got all of your mako today. All right?"
He nodded, still distracted.
"Do you want some time on your own to think this through?" Gast offered.
"Yeah," Sephiroth said. "I'd like that."
"All right. I'll leave you in here. Joyce will come in to finish up your examination in a little bit, all right?"
Gast shut the door on a very different Sephiroth than the one he had seen upon his entrance. The boy had moved to lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, thinking about all he had heard – the truth he had sought all of his short life.
Gast only regretted that his beloved truth was a lie.
"You seem much better today, Sephiroth. Was there some reason you acted so strangely yesterday?"
Sephiroth had handled Joyce's questions with as few words as possible. To this last one, he only shrugged. Joyce shook her head and scribbled something on the clipboard. "Let me get your weight and height, Sephiroth."
The boy went to the scales and began to adjust the weights before Joyce even got there. "Hey, Joyce, can I ask you something?"
"Sure." She scribbled down his weight and started to get his height as he pressed his back to the wall.
"Remember when you got in that really big fight with that guy you were always with?"
She had been marking his height on the wall next to the long vertical ruler, but the question jarred her, and she ended up drawing a slanted, sloppy line. Frustrated, she rubbed at the wall with the eraser. "How did you know about that?"
"I heard some of the nurses talking."
"Huh. Well…that was…erm…my boyfriend and I…we had a fight about…the cat."
"No, not that one! This one lasted for weeks. You cried for a long time. I remember because Hojo got really angry with you and called you a sniveling wench. Oh! Nurse Beth called it a 'breakup'."
"Oh for the love of Shiva-Sephiroth-!"
Sephiroth frowned deeply. Joyce felt bad; the boy really didn't know what he was talking about.
"What did you want to know about it, Seph?"
"I was just wondering," he said, "you went on to marry him, even after he made you so sad for so long."
"I forgave him, Sephiroth. Everyone makes mistakes; you have to learn to let them go."
"How do you get someone to forgive you?"
Joyce wasn't sure how to answer the question. Sephiroth watched as she made faces in thought.
"How did that guy make you forgive him?" he prodded.
Joyce laughed. "It's easier for guys. Girls love flowers and diamonds. I fell for it like a big sap."
"Girls fall for flowers and diamonds?"
Joyce saw how deeply Sephiroth was thinking about it and decided to add a little. "Those things help, Sephiroth, but the most important thing was that he apologized, and he really meant it."
"But if you didn't want to apologize, you could use flowers and diamonds instead?"
Joyce shook her head. She doubted it was worth the effort to make him understand. "I guess it would be hard to go wrong."
It wasn't until the examination was over and Joyce had left the room that she put the pieces together about what was going on. She stopped in the middle of the hallway as it hit her what Sephiroth was scheming, and she wondered if she should tell someone.
She eventually decided against it. Where was Sephiroth going to get flowers and diamonds, anyway? Surely it wouldn't be a cause of any real trouble.