The World That Never Will Be Chapter 15
by the infamous and notorious tocasia
2/17/2019
Important Author's Note: This chapter is kinda rough. The rating has gone up accordingly. Contains increased violence and (let's be honest) mind rape. Stay safe.
CHAPTER 15
And so, Aqua dreamed, thrashing in the grip of nightmare. Prey of the faceless things that chase.
No!
This was her mind!
She took Master's Defender and slashed him open, spilling ichored darkness everywhere! Xehanort screamed, and after the surprise, Aqua liked the sound.
In death, slavering shadow crawled back together fast, launched itself at her mouth and eyes... skittering penetrating mist...
She raised her shield...
Oily sheen splattered, reflected. Behind her, a new and mounting dread, impermeable, the envy of suspicion. She whirled...
"Sephiroth? What are you doing?! I thought you came to help me!"
Grabbed by the throat! and shoved against an insubstantial wall of swords!
Thoughts gasping and bleeding.
Memories flailing.
struggling...
Everything was going the color of oblivion. "Don't...!"
"Be still."
"No! You aren't! You aren't this strong!"
Sephiroth laughed, low and deep, and promising... and teased out thankfulness from her thoughts, spun and wound round his finger; woven strings of love, inviolable. Ever tightening.
"We will live your fantasy," he told her. "Your dreams, your thoughts... your love for me. I will feel it all, use it up, and then... you will merge with my Reality."
Consciousness ruptured into scalding white, violently reformed as other.
He extended his hand, "May I see your keyblade?"
It was not really asking. Aqua watched herself present it to him.
"Teach me to use it."
Her mind was an open book. Sephiroth was not gentle with the pages.
He did not spare a single secret; he ransacked the full chronicle of her technique. Motions instilled for a lifetime laid bare for dissection, obeying him only. In culmination, an unwilling demonstration of all she could do in battle.
...he was impressed, and gifted her pride unthinking, heedless of perversion.
"You'll be my victory over the darkness and the light, as was always meant to be."
She broke the hearts of worlds for him, unlocked every seal of the apocalypse; became it.
She relished her existence as she'd never known to do.
every breath was holy
every jump was flight
every swing and cut and stab an honor in his name.
...she felt his joy at being her. An affection so selfishly pure.
Years unmeasured. And then...
"Do you remember, what I promised you?"
No, she didn't.
"You were unconscious at the time. I promised I'd witness the end of your journey."
Oh. What did that mean?
"Your end has come."
A bloodless instant, a sharp shock. The tip of that ridiculous sword entered her chest. He pushed it further inside.
"You will lift your voice for me. Your soul will bring me closer to perfection. And this will be what you have always wanted."
"Sephiroth..."
and she sees
that he is her angel of death, come to collect her love
his wing wrapped around her light
becoming his... she is a star for him.
in his cage of words.
And finally understands why he wasn't sad that...
...everything that has ever touched his heart is dead.
Standing guard outside the tent, Sephiroth laughed at himself. An absurd divine punishment! Bad Master Aqua! He'd sent her to bed without supper!
Metaphorically. The truth was much more serious. He knew the lash of his will was barbed, made to carve scars.
It was entirely possible that the person who'd come to his aid, who'd run into his arms, who'd survived years of despair almost beyond imagining, who'd graced him with the shy kiss of her favor... no longer existed. Certainly not as she had been. Her breathing was irregular, spasmodic; she fought through fitful sleep he could not soothe.
Lost to him. Discarded.
Of course Aqua did not, and would never, have the same perspective he did! Wasn't that the point of a Second? Not just someone to follow orders, but someone trustworthy, able and willing to give valuable advice...
He could not honestly ask for forgiveness; what he'd done showed he didn't care at all for her opinion.
And to pretend otherwise after that... no. He did not know her dreams, but their subject was surmisable. If she woke as herself...
You must not forgive me.
Never forgive me for taking your voice away. All you would be doing is sacrificing yourself. You've done enough of that, Master Aqua.
...I promised to remember you. If matters between us end as they are, I must remember you as my failure...
...that I sought something more and could not reach it.
Behold the greed of the almighty, who yearns for an equal he will not allow!
Sephiroth heard himself cackling. Sardonic, irrational grief, profane self-pity!
...the things I've thrown away, I want them back.
Zack. The times I was less cruel. When I did not know how truly different I was... no... when I had not acted on it yet. Or perhaps, not those, exactly...
I want to erase my recent lapse of self-control. I want to hear what Master Aqua had to say.
I want the power to change my mind.
...I can have it.
Only a short time has passed.
...how many souls in Radiant Garden?
Sephiroth teleported instead of flew. As much as he liked a grand entrance, stealth was safest. He hadn't tried this before.
Alighting on the castle's tallest spire, he took in the mosaic of colorful roofs, blurred by dusk. All the little lights, flickering in night's vastness. The sleeping view that would never wake up.
Fire would kill them fastest, but it had to be hotter. A temperature for instantaneous ignition and ionization of any material. The corona of a white sun... the mindless darkness could supply. He'd call upon it, draw deep from its toxic well, saving his own reserves for the rest. If the Realm of Darkness could create a serviceable illusion of his past... so could he.
This would not be efficient, or pleasant (for him either). His spoils would be meager; he'd learn nothing from these souls; the darkness would corrupt what raw potential there was. But that wasn't going to matter; if successful, he wouldn't remember the loss.
The radius would be... Sephiroth squinted to gauge the city limits. The population... adequate, although the heartless could sometimes interfere with his readings.
There was one significant limitation he had to work with. He needed close proximity to their deaths, or the energy would be wasted. Unless...
He'd observed an exotic happening on his travels. How the demon of the mountain had yanked even the penitent dead from their hallowed graves to cavort until dawn; a spectral procession horrifying and beautiful... and what the pull of the demon's will had felt like. He could incorporate that here! As a substitute for the laws of Gaea that gathered souls together into Lifestream... a feature he'd unfortunately not encountered anywhere else. His current favorite Firaga variant already had a gravity component; he could persuade it to affect the spiritual rather than the physical!
Major magic thrived on charisma, drama, style. Less effort would be required if he made the casting spectacular. Sephiroth threw the first runes into the air, set to twinkle near the stars! Sigils ablaze in black flame, darkness-tainted green, proof of the worldly power he commanded! Its use coaxed from him maddened, euphoric laughter.
How many souls for your pyre and rebirth, Master Aqua? Shall I count them?
...Hades would accuse him of theft. Ha! Wouldn't that be a heated argument! But if all went well, he was only borrowing.
Slow, and Stop, and Haste spells. He had seen a clocktower somewhere. Four-faced, luminous within, cruel, foreboding; macabre sentinel of a wet and foggy town. A monument possessed. What had the bell toll sounded like?
Sorcerous hymns sparkled, phased through intricate gyres, saturating spiritual scaffolding of many orbits. Infused with his glory, the allure of finality. Checked, free from errors.
It began.
Sephiroth directed the mana of his millions into the conflagration he desired. Solar winds wheeled around him, tore Radiant Garden's sky to shreds, a rapturous mutilation! He felt his ears and eyes start to bleed, fresh-glazed blood eroded, his wing burned to incandescence! But this was the pain of progress, the execution of his will, and for that he could endure anything. The brilliant shine in his eyes drained away as he poured every last solvent drop of Mako into the ritual. And so he was blind when the fiery torrent of souls struck him all at once. Their deaths had been instant, painless, so as not to magnify the pain he felt at their absorption. It was still unspeakable agony. It was... a tiny fraction of what he'd prepared for on Gaea.
Sephiroth entertained a vision of the form he'd conceived, the halos to stabilize, hubristic wings replacing the parts of himself he'd excised, entrusted to Mother's care, for he'd thought he'd never have to touch the ground again. He'd been consumed in the transformation and yet he was never gone, his was the indivisible essence of change. With that as his holy vessel... the process would have been ecstasy! But Cloud had destroyed it.
...he could not say what he looked like as he took the city.
There was surely a moment of dissolution; the physical form he wore could not hold. And then the souls nucleated around him, the only thing left of their identity being the need to belong, to not be alone. Congregated lives distilled to ambrosia, begging for purpose. A pitiful harvest. Damaged, deformed, so much knowledge ablated, imperfect translation...
He decided he had a body, and rearranged it to appear as he usually did. With the coat, and a single wing to fan the darkness, because Cloud had remarked that the black ones at his waist resembled a poorly tucked-in shirt. His senses resumed their ordinary supernatural sharpness.
And now whole, more-than-whole, surging with newly-won power (240,518 lives' worth), Sephiroth told time when it was.
Far away in his tower, Yen Sid swore... and hoped no one was listening. Hades in panic let go of Panic, whom he'd been dangling over the Styx, a river suddenly in flames, and with great mercy snapped his fingers to stop the little demon's fall. Good minions were hard to find.
"I'm not sure I should have helped you," Master Aqua said.
"Why?" Incredulity escaped his control.
"There are some things that are just wrong. Things no one should do to anyone else. We can justify anything to ourselves, but that doesn't make it right. I... want to discuss it. What to do with Cloud."
The insolence! Sephiroth was momentarily rendered speechless. "I thought we already did?" He'd been confident she'd recognized the practicality of his actions...
"I have more to say."
Feeling extraordinarily magnanimous, without comprehending why, Sephiroth chose to listen. "Very well, speak."