Chapter 111 - On the Sixth Day
September, 2002
Sephiroth stands in the living room of the mansion.
His old living room, he corrects himself. The pieces of furniture are still, more like dead bodies covered in white canvas than places to sit. He can't remember the room. No matter if he looks out the window, touches the fireplace or browses the books on the bookshelf, nothing comes back to him. There must be countless hours that he has spent here. A living room can be a central location to a home yet the dissidence echoes in head.
He feels the anger. It stains the edges of him. He feeds it into the emptiness in his chest. He knows that he is holding it back. He knows it will break out eventually. It's a fuse on a bomb, slowly burning its way to an inevitability. The last papers he read did this.
He didn't want to believe it but it focused everything into such clarity. It made morbid sense. Shirna would hurt him so deeply to keep him under control.
They had even put the word "control" in the title of the project.
He had risen out of the basement and found himself here.
Sephiroth reaches into his pocket and pulls out his phone.
Did he have fun in this living room as a child?
The power button clicks and the screen flickers back to life. The air is stale. He breathes it in. After the library downstairs, it does not matter. He can't register any sensations outside the silence and burning in him.
There is a report of one of his first exposures and it was done in this house. It had been noted that he had passed out on a couch and was attended to by Gast.
The phone buzzes with missed calls and messages after it powers on. Sephiroth dismisses them all. The screen clears. It shows a photo of landscape, the default for the phone. He hadn't bothered changing it to anything for years. That used to be Genesis' job. After he left, Sephiroth had switched it to this. It was safer that way.
His thumb has a shake as he navigates the menu to dial. He has never forgotten the number. It has been almost a year and the number remains easy to remember.
There is only one person who would know if this is all true.
Her name graces most of the papers here.
She could no longer lie for Hojo if she escaped Shinra.
Sephiroth clears his throat and presses the button. There is a chance the number no longer works. The phone is unavailable because it is destroyed by Shinra.
The dial tone goes through. It almost surprises him.
She picks up impossibly on the fourth ring.
"Sephiroth?" Her voice stings him in a mixture of anger and relief. She had survived the Turks. She had escaped.
His tongue is frozen. He hasn't spoken in days. He stands on the edge of what he needs to do.
"Is that you?" She asks.
It is simply emotion. It tenses his muscles. It could snap him in half if he dwells in it.
Instead, Sephiroth pushes through it and he does not break, not yet anyways.
"Mariella?"
"What's happening? Why are you calling me?" The questions rush through the speaker.
The curtains are closed. He tries to imagine her opening them. There is no memory of it, just like everything else, even though it must have happened. They must have been in this room together. She taught him classes. It could have been in here. It could have been at the table in the dining room.
It haunts him to not know something so simple.
"Sephiroth?"
He takes a breath and focuses. He needs the truth. He needs her to admit how much of his life had been lies.
"I need help." It takes nothing to put pain in his voice. "The medication, whatever you put in me, it's stopped working. I'm sick again, Mariella."
He can hear the way she sits up. "What? That's-it should be impossible."
She's right.
"The attacks are almost constant. Mariell-" he cuts himself off and breathes out, letting it rattle onto the call.
" Breathe ." It is urgent. "Where are you?"
Sephiroth makes himself count to five to simulate the attack.
"Can you help me?"
Her response is immediate. "Of course. Has Hojo given you anything recently? What are you feeling?"
"Pain in my chest. I've fainted. A few times. Dissociation. Sweating." He lists them out like he read them on the reports. Something sickly sweet is crawling up his throat. It dares him and forces the push. "I thought this thing was supposed to save me."
"I need you to lay down." She's moving now. He can hear her shoes on the floor. "Do you have anyone with you?"
He glances around. The naked woman disappeared after he threw the final book across the room. She had faded as he held his head and fought the urge to scream. The world had narrowed into one pinprick.
The impossibility.
How much he had been tricked.
How different his life could have been.
He needs to know he understands.
"Are you still there?"
"I'm alone."
A zipper is pulled. Things are being moved. Mariella is getting out of breath.
"I'll come to you."
"Okay."
"Where are you?"
He takes a breath.
"I'm in Nibelheim."
The line goes silent. The emotion, the snake that's been curling around his body, almost squeezing him, makes him revile in the quiet. He can see her in his imagination frozen with a bag in her hand as she puts together the pieces. She could be afraid. She could be worried.
One sentence from him has invoked this.
An effect.
He had an effect.
He made a decision on his own and it affected the world.
His heart beats faster.
"I'm in the Nibelheim mansion."
He hears her puff out the air she had been holding onto.
"I'm home, our home, the place you raised me." It comes out of him like he is drawing a sword against her.
He says it to hurt her. All he gets is silence. She says nothing. He can't hear any movement. The phone buzzes quietly still connecting them together. His palm hurts. It takes a moment for him to realize that his nails are digging too hard into the skin.
Her tone is quiet and steady. "You are not sick."
It's a statement, not a question. The game is up. He couldn't trick her here.
"I believe that only you can answer that question, Mariella."
There is another pause. He takes a few steps and catches himself on the verge of pacing. Instead, he moves out of the living room back into the main lobby. The staircase rises to the second floor, the railings as frail as bones now with age. The sun has almost set. The shadows drift across the ceiling as the light gets cut off from the mountain tops.
"I'm looking at the main stairs. Were you there for the first time I climbed them?"
"I'm sorry, Sephiroth. I don't think I can help you."
He hears the edge in him as he responds. "I think you should come here and try regardless."
"Why would I do that?"
"You have the answers I need."
She sighs. It runs a shiver through him. He's heard it a hundred times. That is the sound of her listening to something that she will never say yes to.
"Sephiroth, I am not coming. Ask me over the phone."
Even now, she is refusing him like everyone else did. Mariella, the one who raised him because Shinra asked that won't help him.
"You called me a monster." He curls towards the phone. "I've read it."
"I've never thought of you that way." Her response is quick.
That wording is so careful. She did not deny it. He grits his teeth. The anger grows, straining against his constraints. Mariella is proving him right. He wanted her to do the opposite. He needs her here. He needs to see her face. A disembodied voice isn't enough.
He switches strategies. If she isn't going to come because she wants to, he knows other methods and no longer has a reason to avoid them.
She calls him a monster. He can act it.
"Are you attached to this little town?"
"Sephiroth. Stop. Don't do this."
He keeps going. "I am not. This town is a mar. A smudge on a map. A bad memory that I cannot recall but it sits at the edge of my mind, haunting me."
"Sephiroth, I hoped you might run away into a new life. Please don't get stuck in this past."
Conveniently said for someone whose hands are covered in his blood.
"Come here, Mariella or I will burn it to the ground. I'll kill everyone here. Every one of the people will die to make sure to get the ones that you used to know. Then I will come find you. It will be a pointless loss of life."
"You wouldn't do it."
"Mariella. What do I have left to lose?" He hears the crack in his voice. "There is nothing left. Just this. Just these papers. Tell me they are a lie. Tell me if it is true or not. For everything we have done, come here, look me in the eyes and give me the dignity of an answer."
He stands in the ghost of this mansion and waits for her answer.
"Alright. I'll be there tomorrow night."
"And what if you are not?"
She pauses.
"I'll be there, Sephiroth."
Then the line goes silent and the call disconnects.