"The full experience of Reunion is, from a human perspective, a violation at the most intimate level."

"—ack! Wake up!"

Zack jolted awake, hard, as though he had hit the ground from an uncontrolled fall. With a gasp, he clutched the seat beneath him and whipped his head around, heart pounding, his breath coming in shallow pants. "What? What?" he burst out, disoriented.

It was dark, with only the weak light from a thin, crescent moon to illuminate his surroundings. Motionless surroundings. Zack realized he was sitting in the passenger's side of the parked truck. Outside his window, he saw shadows, rocky terrain and scrubby vegetation, and remembered they'd pulled off onto an old mining road to park for the night.

He felt the back of his neck itch. He swiveled his head and, abruptly, his gaze met Sephiroth's. The other man sat behind the steering wheel and stared at him intently.

"That was a terrible time to wake up," Zack complained, frustrated at the aborted conversation with Angeal.

Sephiroth's strange eyes bored into his. They seemed to peer into his very soul. "You said to wake you the next time you had a nightmare."

His voice sounded odd. Zack couldn't put a name to the tone or emotion beneath the words. He then noticed with a start that he was hard—like morning wood. Something that normally might just be embarrassing, but now was so horribly shameful. The erection was fading and hadn't leaked, thank Shiva. He remembered how the feeling of joining with his—with Angeal's—cells, tissues, whatever, had felt "almost sexual." Horrifying and yet...good. Beyond good, just...beyond. He wanted it; he wanted to experience those exquisite sensations again.

Reunion.

Natural and fucking blissful, he'd—they'd—thought at the time while also being so appalled and repulsed and shamed.

Had Sephiroth noticed with those amazing enhanced eyes of his? Zack squirmed, the mere idea making him...deflate. Completely. A relief, but he sure hoped Sephiroth hadn't noticed anything. He hoped really hard, but knew it was in vain.

"Oh yeah," Zack said, belatedly remembering how he'd agreed that Sephiroth should wake him from crazy nightmares. It was a good distraction. "I know, I just... It was a bad time to wake up, is all."

"You're crying."

That was what Sephiroth had noticed? Zack touched his face. Sure enough, his fingers met wet tears on his cheeks. He wiped them away roughly. He supposed his dreams of Angeal provided plenty of material to cry over. "Oh, man, what am I going to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"We have to help Angeal, Sephiroth. We have to save him." Zack felt a sob try to wrench free of his chest as he remembered—remembered Hojo's lab and Angeal's safe place. Like his other dreams, this one did not fade with waking. It was burned into his memory forever.

"We are helping him," Sephiroth said patiently.

"No, you don't understand. He's broken, Sephiroth. He's so broken, and I don't know if he can ever be fixed. His mind is..." Zack trailed away.

"Did you have another dream about the lab?"

"Yeah..." Zack said weakly. "A real doozy."

"Worse than the last one you talked about? That one was...extremely unpleasant."

Zack barked out a bitter laugh, remembering the agony, the way his amputated hand had rejoined with his arm, and the descending circular saw. Thank all the Powers of the Planet he'd been ripped away to Angeal's safe place before that nightmare sequence had completed. "Yeah, that's an understatement!"

"Was this one worse?"

"It was bad but—but in a different way. Like, really different. Hojo was experimenting with Reunion."

Sephiroth inhaled sharply, but only said, "Everything Hojo did was ultimately about Reunion, Zack."

"I suppose, but this one— There wasn't any pain at all, and Reunion was normal for Angeal, for his body. He liked it, and hated it. He couldn't accept it, and I don't blame him one bit."

"Tell me."

"Tell you?" How could Zack even talk about it? It was so horribly, intimately personal—to Angeal, and to himself, too! "Tell you what? Sephiroth, it was... I can't even..."

"I need to know everything." Sephiroth was terrifyingly intent, his laser-like gaze cutting through Zack's trepidation. "Do your best, but tell me everything. Consider it an order, if that makes it easier."

"An order." Zack uttered a quavering laugh. "Like we're still in SOLDIER, right? A mission report?"

"Exactly. Just like a mission report." Sephiroth's intensity did not let up.

Just like that. Just like a verbal mission report. Zack could do that. He had extensive training; he could disassociate his personal feelings and report plain facts to a superior. Just like that.

So in a subdued, quiet manner, Zack haltingly explained everything he could about his latest nightmare in Hojo's lab. He did his best to leave nothing out, not even the horror of enjoying the experience of merging with the cell cultures. There were a number of things that defied rational description, such as the specific sensations and feelings, the way he—Angeal—could sense what was happening from multiple perspectives at the same time. Zack didn't have the words—he doubted the full experience could truly be expressed in human language—but he did his best.

Sephiroth only nodded, maintaining a calm, nonjudgmental expression. Sometimes he'd wince a little, but he always encouraged Zack to continue.

It was all very professional. Very professional. Zack clung to that idea.

"I think the other times his parts rejoined with him it was probably like that, too, just masked because the amputations were fresh and he was in so much pain. I remember when his hand reattached to his arm, in the other dream—the pain faded and he thought the process of joining felt really good. This time there wasn't any pain at all to distract him and—it came across as sexual, Sephiroth, or something very much like it," Zack confessed, staring down at his hands. It was so hard to admit, but he forced himself. "I've never felt—lived through—anything like that before. It was just so intense. Overwhelming."

"Rapturous," Sephiroth said with a knowing expression.

"Yeah, exactly. It took over, and my body wanted it like nothing I've ever experienced. But at the same time I felt such shame and revulsion and...I hated myself for it."

"Angeal hated himself," Sephiroth said, again knowingly.

"Well, yes, but in the dream everything was happening to me. Angeal was just a voice in my head and mostly he kept quiet."

"He wasn't quiet; he was you and you were him. Just like those cultured cells were also him, and he was them."

"That's too weird."

"The full experience of Reunion is, from a human perspective, a violation at the most intimate level." Sephiroth placed his hand on Angeal's container. "But it is natural and instinctive for what he has become. The cultures were grown from his own cells and belonged to him. Even separated, he and they were one. The mental and emotional dissonance was devastating for him."

"You really do have a way with understatement," Zack said, hating the way his voice shook.

Sephiroth remained silent.

"It's so hard to believe that stuff really happened," Zack said. "I just, I can't. How can Hojo do those things?"

"I don't just believe it, Zack, I know it all really happened. We both know what state Angeal was in when we found him."

Zack could never forget. Angeal was lucky, or perhaps unlucky, to be alive at all. Cissnei had believed that he'd be better off dead, and Zack sometimes thought she was right. He shook his head.

Sephiroth's gaze turned bleak. "I am intimately familiar with Hojo's labs and his research methods."

Zack winced; he should have remembered that Sephiroth was also one of Hojo's victims.

Sephiroth's voice went ice cold. "Hojo may not have dismembered or vivisected me, but that was only because he and Shin-Ra wanted me alive and in perfect physical condition. This was especially true once they started using me for PR work. There were always hard limits to his experimentation on me. Other specimens in his grasp did not have the same safeguards." His arm circled Angeal's container protectively. "It seems Hojo finally found—or created—a victim his experiments couldn't kill, and no constraints were put on him or his work. Angeal was officially a traitor, after all."

A sadist's dream. Zack shuddered. "And now he's legally dead. Executed by Shin-Ra." He swallowed hard, thinking of that lie's potential consequences. Hojo had had carte blanche even when Angeal was officially alive and in custody, and had used his power ruthlessly. What extremes would be permitted should that monster ever get his hands on any of them again? Legally they'd all be dead. Shin-Ra's propaganda was efficient and purposeful. Sephiroth's public image was still of some use to the company, but ultimately even he was expendable. Shin-Ra could always claim he'd been killed during the apprehension of "the notorious and dangerous escaped traitor, Zack Fair."

That was probably their plan all along, Zack thought.

"Yes," Sephiroth said flatly. He didn't need to elaborate.

"You said you've had dreams, too. The dreams about medical torture."

"Yes." Sephiroth went quiet for a moment, and then added very softly, "Yes, I told you a little about the nightmares. Not all. I've had them since the very beginning, from the very first day after I took Angeal's head from Hojo's lab. I scarcely close my eyes and they rise up in my mind. My nightmares always run through to their conclusions, unlike yours."

Angeal never mentored Sephiroth, Zack realized. They had had a completely different relationship, and it had been so damaged that they were both still angry the last time they'd met before...before Modeoheim.

It seemed Sephiroth didn't have the key to Angeal's safe place with Zack. He had never been there. Even in Sephiroth's dreams there was no escape hatch.

Sephiroth continued, "He started talking to me during that early period, too. I mostly enjoy the conversations, but I never want repeats of those dreams. Yet they keep returning to haunt me. It never ends. I always understood that Hojo was a creative genius. In my youth I experienced much of that creativity for myself, but I never suffered the full depths of the hell he could produce, nor did I want to know of its details. That hell was always reserved for the expendable specimens."

"Right, a creative genius," Zack muttered, trying and failing to fully process what Sephiroth was saying. What a horrid yet accurate description. His horror grew as Sephiroth's meaning dawned on him more fully. "Not just Angeal or monsters, but you, too. You and...other people? Were they expendable?" Cissnei had admitted the Turks kidnapped innocent people for Hojo.

Sephiroth was silent.

Zack took that as confirmation. His brain alternated between spinning and trying to lock itself down. He didn't want to know more. He already knew too much. He stammered out, "Have you... Have you had this particular dream? About Reunion? Experienced it as though it was happening to you personally?"

Sephiroth looked out the windshield into the darkness of the night. A tiny smile ghosted on his lips, gone so quickly that Zack wondered if he had imagined it. Sephiroth said quietly, "Oh, yes. I've had many dreams of Reunion with Angeal. Your dream..."

"Yes?"

"You dreamed of his first full experience with it in all its glory, completely untainted by pain or other unpleasant sensations—just pure Reunion."

"You..." Zack stopped. "It's like that for you, too, isn't it? You understand."

"I understand everything. Reunion is indeed a horrifying and ecstatic experience and one that I find myself craving after every such dream." He kept looking outside, his gaze focused on a spot beyond the crescent moon.

That was more of an answer than Zack had expected. Sephiroth had admitted to wanting Reunion again, just as Zack felt. Zack said hesitantly, "Yeah, I want to feel that again, too. It's perverse, but now that I've felt it once...I think it's like a drug. You want—you need to have more." His body still yearned for it, but the sexual excitement was gone, at least. "Like an addiction."

"The desire will fade in a while," Sephiroth said, the voice of experience. "The sexual ecstasy is a result of the human brain attempting to process fundamentally alien phenomena and selecting native ones it finds most comparable at an instinctive level. It is not an accurate match, but that is irrelevant because that is simply how our brains interpret the sensations."

Zack's eyebrows knitted. How did Sephiroth know all that? He sounded so certain. Analytical and absolutely certain.

How did he know?

Sephiroth continued his lecture. "Nonetheless, the experience is a problem for us. You are correct that what you felt is addictive, but it truly is nothing more than a natural bodily function for Angeal. Do not allow the craving for Reunion to influence you," he warned. "Do not seek it out if you can avoid it. It is not for humans like you."

Zack bristled at the implication that Angeal wasn't human. "It shouldn't be for Angeal, either," he said stubbornly.

"Reunion is now part of his fundamental biology."

"Hojo said the same thing in my dream. Something about Angeal's biology being his destiny and how he should accept his new body." Zack laughed again, this time bitter. "You sound exactly like Hojo."

Sephiroth flinched, like the comparison to Hojo hit hard. And so it should, Zack thought. Considering that Sephiroth had also suffered at Hojo's hands, he should know better.

Zack stared down at Angeal's container, at Angeal's head floating peacefully within. He noted Sephiroth still kept his arm around it. "Sephiroth, are you sure Angeal isn't awake, like, on some low level? Maybe like in a light doze or an altered state of awareness?"

"What?"

"I know you once said the extra-strong Sleepels kept him from dreaming, but there's been a lot of weird shit revolving around him. We've been having dreams and nightmares with him, right? Like, literally with him, like me and him, and you and him. We both hear him talking, even when we're awake. You have entire conversations with him. I don't hear him as often as you, but I still hear him sometimes."

"He is utterly unconscious," Sephiroth said flatly.

Maybe Sephiroth just didn't want to think about the alternative? Zack found the idea horrible beyond words, but it had to be considered. A living head, trapped in a jar of fluid, awake and aware of its plight...

Maybe Angeal wasn't fully aware. Maybe he was in some weird twilight state and didn't realize the horror of his current predicament. Like the dreams—but those were also horrible. Zack hoped desperately that Angeal's mind wasn't trapped in those dreams, rerunning them endlessly.

Sephiroth pressed his lips together in thought. "In one of your dreams, he told you he wasn't really there."

Zack nodded. "He claimed he was just a construction of mine using his memories and spirit, or something like that. He said you constructed him, too, but your image of him was different than mine. Honestly, though, how is it possible he could even talk independently like that? Wasn't it just my mind forcing him to be what I expected?"

"Perhaps. But it's impossible to know for certain." Sephiroth moved his arm to again rest his hand on top of the container. He tapped it lightly with his fingers. "He's told me something similar. I'm convinced we are dreaming of his real memories, and we do hear his voice."

"In one of my dreams, he said he needs us, our minds and our dreams, to provide scaffolding. Like a framework to hold him together, but it's incomplete and it always starts out terrible."

"He's not actively trying to communicate like he's fully awake and aware," Sephiroth said slowly. "This is nothing but a subconscious function of Reunion and its low-level telepathy between individual components."

"Yeah, okay," Zack said, gnawing his lip and remembering their previous conversations about Reunion and telepathy. "Telepathy isn't a totally alien ability, either. You know, some monsters seem to communicate that way to call for reinforcements. Kind of like how Summons communicate, too. You just sort of wish for what you want them to do. I don't think I've ever seen anyone actually speak with a Summon."

"In this case, it is a function of Reunion, which is alien, though."

He sounded so completely, totally certain, like he had some special, inside knowledge. Zack wasn't sure, but it wasn't worth an argument. "It's like how you were using Angeal and Reunion as a homing beacon to find Genesis." Zack remembered how Sephiroth had claimed that Angeal would find the way. Zack had thought Sephiroth himself was using Reunion superpowers to find Genesis, but now he found himself reassessing everything he'd assumed.

Maybe it really had been Angeal all along.

"That and the reports of the red monsters," Sephiroth said. "Angeal's modified biology is more...telepathically dynamic...for lack of better descriptions. He's more alien now. Reunion is natural for him and happens automatically, without his conscious input. Large concentrations of his cells generate a kind of low-level field."

"Cells. You mean his head."

Sephiroth nodded. "Yes. Even unconscious, his Reunion instincts and functions do not cease. We have been living inside this telepathic field now for a long time. It was inevitable that it would affect us."

"You've been talking to him like he's awake, though. So do I in my dreams."

"That would be our constructions of him from the memories we pick up from him, or rather, from the telepathic field he generates. I imagine it is like talking to a ghost, or a memory from the Lifestream. Like Summons, as you pointed out. I was once told that the Lifestream holds the memories of all who ever lived. Angeal may not be in the Lifestream, but something similar is occurring and we are communing with his spirit. We just interpret it as talking to him."

"Great," Zack muttered. "This is getting religious, now." He remembered how he had originally believed he was talking to Angeal's spirit, until he'd decided he was simply talking to his own overactive imagination. Now he was back to Angeal's spirit, again.

Though really, deep down he'd always believed he was talking to Angeal's spirit. He just didn't like admitting it.

"Some of this is guesswork," Sephiroth said, a bit of defensiveness creeping into his voice, "based on my current understanding of how the Lifestream works and my interactions with Angeal. I may not be correct. Maybe someday science will be able to explain it, like materia and mako."

"Yeah, right." Those theories sounded like overly complicated rationalizations to Zack. Sephiroth really wasn't letting himself think about the horrible idea that Angeal might be aware on some level, despite all the evidence they'd experienced.

"You have been less sensitive to these effects until recently. I suspect the incidents—our dreams and conversations with Angeal—may increase with even longer exposures. We are growing more attuned to his telepathic field, and we are adding our own essences to it. Our shared communion with him is becoming easier. The incidents may also increase as we get closer to Genesis and his copies."

"What? Why?"

"G-cells," Sephiroth stated flatly. "Angeal's cells may have been forced into a more generalized state, but he started out with a naturally high concentration of G-cells. Genesis will almost certainly be at least as attuned to Angeal as I am. He and his copies will join and expand the telepathic field. In the end, we will all be part of it."

"When you say 'we,' who exactly do you mean? Just people with Jenova cells?"

"Jenova cells facilitate the process, so yes."

"And the more cells in it, the more it expands? Is it like a critical mass?"

"Precisely. Calling the Reunion of large amounts of Jenova cells a critical mass is an excellent way to describe and understand it. Jenova cells want to join with each other, and apparently facilitate methods to encourage their hosts to come together. Hojo believed—"

"Hojo?!" Zack exclaimed. "How do you know what he thought about this?"

"From his documents and from..." Sephiroth hesitated briefly and swallowed. "From my dreams of his experiments on Angeal. Hojo has never been shy about pontificating, especially to a captive, helpless audience. I've been caught up in Angeal's memories and spirit for much longer than you. When I said I understood everything, I meant it."

"Oh," Zack said weakly. He could believe it. Oh, yes, he could. In his own dreams, Hojo had certainly loved to hear himself talk and had discussed his expectations of his research. Sephiroth had been having even more dreams than Zack—practically from when they'd taken Angeal's head from the lab, if he could be believed.

No wonder he had so much insight into what was going on with Angeal. Sephiroth hadn't just been speculating. He had been talking about Hojo's theories and experimental results. "It was Hojo," Zack said. "You got all this information from Angeal's memories of Hojo. That's why you know how it works."

"Hojo wanted us together," Sephiroth continued, not bothering to answer the implied question. "He didn't just want to improve my biology or make me, as he once put it, a living god, though that was certainly part of his plan. He wanted to activate my own latent Jenova genetics, and to see Reunion interactions between two different Jenova-based organisms. All for his own research and edification." He exhaled slowly. "He wants Genesis, too, for similar reasons."

"And what then? What'll happen when the three of you are all close together?" Zack had never considered this possibility before. "You and Genesis and Angeal—between the three of you, you all have a lot of Jenova cells. How will you and the cells react? How will this...this telepathic field behave? What's the endgame? What did Hojo expect?"

"The critical mass of Jenova cells is the endgame, at least for the cells. As for what's beyond that for us? I don't know. It was never a problem before Hojo altered Angeal. I don't think Hojo knows what will happen, either. That's why he wanted to experiment. I suspect, though, that we'll at least have a much easier time talking to Angeal. Perhaps we'll see him. Maybe it will be like he's standing in the room with us."

Zack could imagine it. He hated it, but he believed it. "But you don't know?"

"I don't know," Sephiroth repeated. "But as our connections to him strengthen, so do our encounters with his spirit. The increasing activity of your own experiences shows this must be occurring."

"What would happen if we turned around and went the other direction? Went away from Genesis?"

"Why would we do that?" Sephiroth gave him a strange, baffled look.

Zack huffed out a little laugh and tried to make light of his sudden panic. "It's just for argument's sake. I mean, would we feel some kind of compulsion to turn back around? Or would Angeal yell at us to go the right way, or grow weird crab legs or something and try to scuttle towards Genesis?" He wasn't serious about that last suggestion, but the appalled look Sephiroth flashed him jolted him. "Wait, you think that's a real possibility?"

They both hurriedly inspected the base of Angeal's neck. Sure enough, the rounded lump of tissue had sprouted a handful of little nubs. Zack squinted, counting them. Six, evenly distributed in a circle.

"Angeal, you promised me you wouldn't grow a new body," Sephiroth immediately scolded the decapitated head.

"Sephiroth, he probably can't stop all growth from happening. At least they're only little buds right now. Maybe he's repressing it somehow, even unconsciously. Remember how fast that Ahriman body grew once it got started."

"The Ahriman..." Sephiroth murmured. "Yes. Yes, I remember. I do not want a repeat of that experience."

Zack didn't want a repeat, either. Sephiroth had beheaded Angeal to remove him from the Ahriman body, and then had to burn it all to ashes. Otherwise, Angeal's Reunion instincts and biology would have merged the pieces back together again. Zack swallowed. "Yeah."

Sephiroth started the truck and put it in gear.

"Sephiroth, what are you doing?"

"We might as well get moving again. Neither of us is going to get back to sleep tonight."

Well, Zack thought, that much was true. He certainly didn't plan to sleep more, not now.

Sephiroth said, "The sooner we find Genesis and Hollander, the better." It sounded like a mantra, something Sephiroth might chant repetitively to keep his mind focused.

It was the reason for living for them both, Zack knew, and for moving forward. But now he found himself dreading their inevitable encounter with Genesis, whenever it might occur. His mind spun, unable to even imagine what a "critical mass" of Jenova cells in the form of Sephiroth, Angeal, and Genesis might mean.

In his last nightmare, Angeal had gone over the edge. Zack had always known him to be benevolent, to want to help people, but in that dream Angeal had wanted to destroy the whole world if that was what it took to end his suffering.

Sephiroth was one of Hojo's favorite, longtime victims, and had been communing with Angeal all this time, falling deeper and deeper into Angeal's traumas and his own rage.

Genesis was degrading as a result of the experiments performed on him. He was dying, and he hated Shin-Ra and its scientists. He didn't care about collateral damage.

Zack wrapped his arms around his middle. What would that "critical mass" mean? How would it take shape?

Calmly, Sephiroth pulled out onto the mining road and headed for the highway.