Chapter 2: And though they tell you I am lost, and their words report my death is come, the fates have left me breathing still, very much alive.

/My name is General Sephiroth, I am a human being. I am not a monster.\ The silver haired man thought to himself.

He'd been thinking those words a lot recently.

He would have shouted them from the top of his lungs, but his mouth would have been filled with Lifestream before he was able to make a single sound.

His body flowed through the Lifestream and it allowed him to feel the "sound" of countless voices calling out to him. He could hear the curses of those who he had slain, and the plaintive begging of those who had died in his service, asking if their deaths had accomplished anything worthwhile.

He ignored both; the dead should be able to attend to their own affairs. Right now, all that mattered to him was his quest.

/Out of my way, I'm going to see my mother.\ Sephiroth thought "loudly" and pushed on past those spectral cries.

The Lifestream contained the essence of every human who had ever lived. He was human, he was sure of it… so somewhere in this endless green ocean, he could find his mother. The fact that he still didn't know her name (whatever it was, it damn sure wasn't "Jenova") didn't matter, such was the power of the Lifestream.

All Sephiroth had to do to was reach out and find the one essence flowing through it that truly cared about him, that truly loved him. She had to be out there somewhere. Was not a mother's love the gift bestowed upon every child?

Did she hate him? Was that why her mind refused to reach out and touch his own no matter how hard he tried?

If she did hate him, he could hardly blame her...

Sephiroth had killed his own mother before he'd even drawn his first breath, before he'd ever opened his eyes.

The reports had been incredibly clear on that point, once he'd realized what facts someone as untrustworthy as Simon Hojo had decided to omit rather than include.

The Jenova project's "creation phase" had only lasted six months. Sephiroth's body was far more efficient than that of any other human being, it had probably been so even in his mother's womb. Every human child was a parasite upon their mother's body, consuming energy and giving nothing in return.

Sephiroth's body, in its remorseless drive to ensure his survival, would have simply taken the process to the next level … absorbing so much of his mother's energy that she dropped dead the moment he was born.

Still, here in the Lifestream where all of humanity was blended together into one glorious gestalt, there had to be a chance for a reunion. There had to be.

He was going to find her… he was going to apologize… he was going to know what it actually meant to be loved. That was what he had to do, and General Sephiroth always succeeded no matter how impossible the task.

He would use the Lifestream to travel from one side of the planet to the other, he would "sail" this green ocean for however long it took. He would prove to himself that he was an actual human being, no matter what. Hojo had broken Sephiroth's soul into a million different pieces but he was going to piece himself back together… he just needed a little help to get the process started.

/My name is General Sephiroth, I am a human being. I am not a monster.\ He repeated the mantra once more.

/You don't belong here...\ A voice called out to him.

This one was different than any that had come before. In the ocean of the Lifestream, every other voice he'd encountered had been like a rock, completely stuck in place, easy for him to avoid.

If Sephiroth's body was a ship in the Lifestream, this voice was a current, wrapping around him and trying to direct his path.

/Leave me alone!\ Sephiroth thought back at the voice, refusing to have his course changed, refusing to abandon his quest.

/Only you could spend five years on your own, and then still be upset at the idea of having to talk to someone, Boss...\ The voice replied.

Sephiroth could feel the current generate minor wave, almost like a hand made of Lifestream gently brushing up against his own. That was when he realized that this "current" had a face, a name, and a personality that Sephiroth all knew by heart.

But if they were down here that meant they weren't alive anymore… and that was one more cursed bit of knowledge that Sephiroth would have been happier not knowing.

/Zack... It hasn't been five years… has it?\Sephiroth thought back, finally "speaking with" rather than just "talking to" a Lifestream essence.

Keeping exact track of time in the Lifestream was difficult, there was no day or night in the green ocean, and while he was enfolded in the very essence of existence itself he did not need to eat, drink or even sleep. It had been… a very long time indeed since Sephiroth had even actually bothered to open his eyes, instead navigating the Lifestream by intuition alone.

/Would I lie to you?\ Zack countered.

/Yes. As a Second, you asked me to sign a leave slip so you could visit your parents. Instead, you took said slip with you into the slums to prove to a certain young lady that you actually know me.\ For a man moving through a fluid medium, the tone of his mental voice was positively arid.

/Did not realize you knew that.\ Zack Fair's essence admitted somehow managing to perfectly convey shock and embarrassment without any sort of physical body.

/I know lots of things you don't, that's why I'm the General.\ Sephiroth calmly reminded his favorite subordinate.

/By the way, if it makes you feel better, it didn't work; seems that somewhere out there in Sector Five there's at least one girl who isn't mooning over you. Anyway, there are two things you need to know. I'll make it quick, since I'm sure you want this conversation, just like every other conversation you've ever had to be a part of, over and done without delay.\ Zack insisted.

Sephiroth wasn't bothered by Zack's flippant comments. As far as he was concerned, the point of a conversation was to pass along information after all; the more quickly it could be done. the more efficient the conversation had been.

/I'm here, you're here… but did you ever check that he was here?\ Zack's spirit inquired.

The words struck Sephiroth like a physical blow.

/No. No. He's here… he has to be. He managed to drag me down, but only because he fell first.\ Sephiroth insisted, for the first time in wondering if he'd actually made the best use possible of the last five years.

/He isn't, trust me.\ Zack insisted.

/What is the other thing I need to know?\ Sephiroth demanded, refusing to spend all the time that he'd need in order to fully process Zack's first revelation.

/Reach your left arm about two feet and clench your fist.\ Zack advised.

Sephiroth did… and for the first time since he'd fallen into the Lifestream he felt something solid.

His right hand reached out in the same direction and met with similar success.

Sephiroth wasn't sure of what it was he'd actually grabbed hold of, but he was sure of one thing: finding his mother would have to wait. General Sephiroth had a new mission, or at least an old one that he hadn't managed to finish the first time around.

XXX XXX XXX

Lights flashed, alarm bells sounded, and Kadaj tried (without success) to doze on his bed. He wondered what all the noise was about and why it had to be so loud. If it was anything really important, somebody would tell him what to do.

That was how it worked after all, being a hero. It meant that people would come to you when they had problems that they couldn't solve themselves, and then you helped themsolve those problems.

Since nobody had come to Kadaj for help at the moment that must mean whatever was going on wasn't all that bad. Maybe they had just triggeredall those alarm systems simultaneously to make sure that they were all still working properly?

He wished that they could have warned him about it ahead of time. Granted, there wouldn't actually be much Kadaj could do about the irritatingly ear piercing sounds even if he'd known to expect them. Still, normally the doctors were nice enough to let him know in advance if something out of the ordinary was going to happen.

They looked after him, because he wasn't as strong or as smart as Sephiroth, yet. As he laid there on his bed Kadaj couldn't help but think to himself that if nothing else, he was sure that he was already every bit as brave as General Sephiroth. If he was given a chance, he'd help people no matter how risky it was, no matter what kind of danger he had to face.

Knowing that there was no way he'd be able to nap successfully with so many loud sounds ceaselessly assaulting his ears, Kadaj slid off his bed and stood up. He turned his attention to the two pieces of ornamentation in the otherwise bare room he called his own.

The first was a mirror, and the second was a picture of a man with long silver hair. The man in the picture had his hair neatly parted to either side of his face so that there was no risk of his vision being obscured by it, unlike Kadaj's own messy mop of silver strands. Kadaj had attempted to style his hair like the man in the picture's more than once. Alas, no matter how hard he tried (and when the doctors didn't need him he had nothing but free time on his hands with which to try) it always seemed to just drift apart.

Hair was weird.

Brushing some of said hair out of his eyes so he could see clearly he gazed deeply into the one picture he'd been given of his older brother, General Sephiroth.

"Are you coming back today?" He asked the picture and rested a black gloved hand on top of it… though the picture (as pictures tended to do) remained unresponsive.

Kadaj tried to listen whenever the doctors talked to him and tried to learn as much as they could teach him. Sadly, some of the things they said just didn't make sense no matter how long he spent thinking about them. Those thoughts and ideas (much like his hair) refused to be molded into a cohesive shape that could support its own weight.

General Sephiroth was a hero. That was self evident and undeniable. Sephiroth was the reason that the Shinra Electric Power Company had won its war with Wutai. He was the reason that mako power could be safely implemented across the entire Planet. Mako power was the thing that illuminated the light bulbs in his room, and light was better than darkness, especially since most people apparently had trouble seeing in the dark.

General Sephiroth was dead. That was… a painful idea, but not necessarily an impossible one. People were called heroes because they were willing to risk their lives when no one else would, and if you kept risking it again and again and again, eventually.. well the odds insisted that you couldn't possibly win every time.

General Sephiroth was dead… and no one was sure why?

That idea was a squiggly bent thing; it was entirely the wrong shape to let Kadaj form a coherent triangle with the two proceeding ones.

Heroes might die… but they would die doing something glorious and worthy of talking about, facing down some great and dangerous foe, trying to avert some horrific disaster, or rescuing some beautiful princess. Heroes didn't simply vanish, they didn't simply decide to stop being heroes without telling anyone. They also didn't die in ways so mysterious that even the doctors couldn't tell him anything about them.

Faced with those "stupid" and "wrong" facts that made no sense, Kadaj had decided that he'd just have to make his own; it was the only way for him to create a proper triangle and paint a picture of the world that made sense.

So General Sephiroth wasn't dead… he was just… waiting. After all, since the Wutain War had ended there hadn't been any grand earth shaking threats to Shinra that he needed to fight. If a hero stopped heroing all of a sudden and vanished… it was obviously only so that they could dramatically return and save the day when people needed them most!

That was a "smart" and "right" fact which made sense and Kadaj had been quite proud of himself when he'd come up with it.

General Sephiroth was still out there… and if anything so horrible that even Kadaj couldn't handle it showed up, Sephiroth would be there to save him. To look after his little brother. Because that was what families did: they cared for each other, and older brothers looked after little brothers when they got in trouble.

"I wish you could be here with me, Sephiroth….. I'm…. lonely..." Kadaj sighed as he withdrew his hand from the picture.

Talking to the doctors was all well and good, but Kadaj somehow instinctively knew that there was something special about himself, something that made him different from nearly everyone else.

The fact that he'd needed to spend an entire day learning how to drink water from anything that wasn't made of plastic without irrevocably crushing it had also been something of a clue.

Still, there was a great big wonderful world full of people out there just waiting for Kadaj to meet them; he just wasn't ready yet. If you tried to use a sword the moment you pulled it out of the forge, all you ended up with was lumps of molten metal dribbling down on your hands, after all.

Kadaj languidly returned to his bed, promising that he would let himself cool, let himself be tempered by time….

"Kadaj, we need you! Now!" One of the doctors insisted as the door to Kadaj's room slid open all of a sudden.

Time moved a lot more quickly for heroes than it did for most people.

"What can I do to help?" Kadaj offered; his legs might as well have springs for how quickly he was off of his bed and across the room.

"Take this and help these men!" The doctor ordered, passing Kadaj a familiar sheath.

Despite the fact that he could tell by weight alone what it was, Kadaj still took a moment to pull a foot or so of Souba (his personal sword) out of its sheath just to make sure. He'd feel pretty silly (and he wouldn't be able to protect people properly) if he only discovered that he'd been given the wrong weapon after a fight had already started! Once he'd done that, he turned his attention to the person dressed in the standard blue and black full body Shinra guard outfit with a brown cloth obscuring their face.

"Are you sure he'll be able to help us?" The guard asked the doctor, his voice rough and masculine.

Kadaj tilted his head to the side quizzically, unsure why the guard was even asking that question, Kadaj was a hero, helping people was what he did!

"Kadaj, there's some kind of monster that's climbing up the mako reactor's drilling shaft. Honestly, none of us have ever seen anything like this before, but we need to make sure that whatever happens, it doesn't start damaging the reactor!" The Doctor explained.

"Because if it damages the reactor then people are in danger! Don't worry, you can count on me to stop it!" Kadaj vowed.

"Just make sure to follow the Sergeant and do exactly what he says." The doctor insisted, drawing forth another eager nod of agreement from Kadaj.

So Kadaj followed the Sergeant who was soon joined by eleven other people in Shinra guard uniforms, all of them with rifles drawn and at the ready.

"This better not just be some kind of weird drill."

"They wouldn't have let the Silver Freak out of its cage if this was just a test."

"I still say something like this doesn't just happen by accident. Who ever heard of a mako reactor being attacked from the inside?"

"Why would Shinra sabotage one of their own reactors?"

"Maybe they want to give the Silver Freak a real test, instead of robots armed with rubber bullets?"

"Without a care about whatever happens to us if we get caught in the middle?"

"Which is why we won't get caught in the middle. Whatever happens, make sure the Freak is between us and this monster."

The guards were talking to each other in whispers, and it would have been rude for Kadaj to point out that he could hear them just fine. It wasn't nice to eavesdrop after all, though there was nothing Kadaj could do to stop his ears from picking up sounds that were too quiet for most humans to hear.

Besides, what the guards had said didn't bother him, so he saw no reason to comment on it. Okay, in all honesty, it did bother him a little that they couldn't make the effort to call him by his name. The fact that he had only one name should have made it twice as easy to remember after all!

Still, Shinra wouldn't try to trick him into fighting a monster for them, why would they waste so much time and energy creating some sort ofconvoluted scheme when all they really needed to was just ask him for help?

So Kadaj followed the guards and allowed himself to be lead deeper into the small mako reactor which had had provided the substances that had been used to help him grow.

Deeper and deeper and deeper into the reactor until they finally reached its core. There, they took up positions along a catwalk above a huge pool of ominously bubbling glowing green liquid. Kadaj recognized it at once as the unprocessed mako that fed the reactor. He'd been told the stuff was extremely toxic, so he'd make sure not to end up accidentally splashing the stuff on the guards.

"Where is the monster you want me to fight?" Kadaj asked as he looked around; he'd never been this far down in the reactor before, but at the same time he couldn't see anything that looked overtly dangerous.

The guards didn't respond, so he simply unsheathed Souba, letting its hilt rest gently in his left hand, tips pointed down to the floor.

All of a sudden Kadaj felt it. It wasn't something he could touch, see, hear, smell, or taste… but he could "feel" it all the same. Something big was coming!

One of the glowing green bubbles popped and a vaguely humanoid figured soared upwards, somehow managing to cross the entire distance from the pools of mako below to the catwalk in one jump, a feat not even Kadaj was sure he'd be able to pull off, at least on his first try.

Nonetheless, Souba was up in an instant, both blades pointed straight at the green figure.

"If you're going to hurt any of them, you have to go through me first!"

Instead of attacking, the dripping green figure began to shake itself about wildly. Small droplets of glowing green were cast in all directions, and the guards fell back to avoid them. Kadaj didn't bother to move though;why should he be afraid of the substance that had helped give him the power to be a hero?

As the glowing green liquid fell away Kadaj could see that beneath it was black fabric, an extremely long sword sheath, bright silver hair… and for the first time in his life he could see another set ofgreen eyes with vertically slit pupils somewhere other than his mirror!

Souba dropped from suddenly limp fingers.

"Don't fire, it's General Sephiroth!" Kadaj called out.

There was a horrific "click" of firearms having their safeties disabled.

"DON'T FIRE, IT'S GENERAL SEPHIROTH!" Kadaj screamed wondering why he was the only one who could see the obvious.

The crack of a rifle being fired was so loud that it didn't hurt Kadaj's ears, it hurt his soul.

Then that single crack suddenly became a shameful symphony as all of the other guards started firing.

Bullets flew through the air, moving paradoxically impossibly fast and yet impossibly slow at the same time.

"IT'S GENERAL SEPHIROTH!" Kadaj howled like a wounded animal, and then somehow acting on pure instinct his hands moved with complete certainty.

Arcs of bright blue lightning leaped from his finger and shot forward, the magical manifestation of Kadaj's refusal to allow this tragedy to continue unfolding.

The bullets were fast, but Kadaj's lightning was faster. Each every single round was struck by a bolt of crackling electricity and sent spinning off course to slam harmlessly into the reactor's walls.

Silence suddenly filled the room, but Kadaj knew that it couldn't last, it wouldn't last, unless he did something.

He spun around and faced the guards who had accompanied him.

"NOBODY HURTS MY BROTHER!" Kadaj roared.

The lighting didn't leap from his fingers this time, it seemed to erupt from every part of his body. He could feel strands of electrical energy tearing free from his back, and then looping around in midair to lash out at the guards.

One by one, just like how he'd managed to deal with each of the bullets, Kadaj's electrical dischargestruck home against the ones who'd fired those shots in the first place.

There was a series of almost festive pops as unspent ammunition cooked off inside magazines.

As was always the way with lighting, the bolts Kadaj had summoned departed as quickly as they'd arrived. A moment later a dozen Shinra guards collapsed, their bodies smelling of ozone and cooked meat.

A thirteenth body joined them as Kadaj fell to his knees. He felt bile and revulsion rise up in his chest, and forced himself not to surrender to despair. Heroes kept going no matter how bad the situation, no matter what mistakes they made. Not quite standing back up, but not quite shuffling forward on his knees either, Kadaj shambled over to the fallen guards.

Every Shinra guard carried at least one healing potion, it was company policy. Company policy, because Shinra cared about people and wanted to keep them safe.

One by one Kadaj gently forced each guard who he had shocked into submission to drink their healing potion.

He did whatever he could to make the situation better, that was what a hero did.

After he'd done that though instinct and training ran out, leaving behind only pain and guilt.

"I'm sorry Sephiroth.. if… if… if I'd been as good at leading troops as you are I could have convinced them not to fire! I could have made it work! I could have saved the day! I'm… I'm a failure of a little brother..." Kadaj moaned in anguish, turning about once more to face Shinra's true hero.

XXX XXX XXX

General Sephiroth wasn't sure what he'd expected to be waiting for him upon escaping the Lifestream… but it damn sure wasn't this.

End Chapter