Chapter Six:

Paradise Comes at a Price (That I am Not Prepared to Pay)

"Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven."

― John Milton, Paradise Lost

Or so Helena was once told.

I held the gun close to my chest as I peered down the winding staircase. I could hear my laboured breathing echo through the haze of dim lights, the only lights left in the mansion, and dust gathered through the decades. Hojo was partially blind which became worse under the waning light of his office monitors. He would adjust his spectacles, cursing under his breath, his strong voice booming down the hall: "Get me a lamp!" I would shudder in my corner office, looking at the poor soul who was offered to the altar. Every night. And then every morning, he would command: "Get that thing out of here!" There wasn't enough room on his desk for a lamp. I thought it was stupid to fear a man the way I did and still work for him. Eventually Sephiroth became too tall for him. I always remained an inch shorter than Hojo. I knew Sephiroth judged me with his side glances.

"Helena, this is a stupid idea." Jofrey laid a hand gently on my shoulder, "I'm not coming after you, you know."

"You can hear it though, can't you?" Beyond the faint humming of the emergency lights, I could hear it. Hear him, breathing, like through a tube with an accompaniment of mechanical clicks. He was calling. "I need to see what's down there."

Jofrey called after me along with Kathelyn whose voice became rasp with frustration. As I made my decent, I could not hear either of them; just the call of something beyond me, beckoning me. The door's frame was lit by a dull light. "Get that thing out of here!" I could smell the rot beyond the door. I reached for me eye, throbbing. I could hear the whirls of oxygen pumps and the pained hiss of flesh as a scalpel made a slit two centimetres deep. My hand pressed at the decaying wood panels that made up the door to find it unlocked; light pouring in from the underground laboratory to the damp dirt hallway. There was no one inside. I breathed a sigh... Of relief? Of disappointment?

Kathelyn wasn't too far behind as I walked through the door frame, walking past a point of no return. She was talking what sounded like absolute gibberish and yet words that made so much sense. I nodded in response, humming a tune resonating somewhere in my body, resonating in every part of my body.

Something seemed odd; every book on the top and middle shelves were piled on the ground. He was over six feet, after all, I reassured myself. The books were haphazardly strewn across the brick floors, the occasional pile on the verge of precariously teetering. Kathelyn was following me, a look of wonderment on her face.

"This is it," my hand absentmindedly went for a dog-eared book, "this is what I wanted to come here for."

"Some Shin Ra secrets, eh?" Jofrey snapped.

He had no right; this was the hidden trove I dreamt of as a research assistant, the one I was so certain would save me. I was naive. Kathelyn understood this and began diving through the books congregating in one corner of the room, ignoring the need to go through each book, one-by-one, until her scientific curiosity was satiated. There was a book that was hiding, there was a book that was for me.

"Why don't you tell me what you're looking for and I can help."

"Why are you still here, Jofrey?" I reached for a forgotten book on the middle shelf, just high enough to make me work for it, but not high enough to ask for assistance.

"I'm curious," he laughed. "Or would you rather me just take off?"

I shrugged, "if you want to help, get that book over there for me. The one with the green cover."

"This one?" He held the book in his hands for a moment, a gentle thumb pulling at the grime on its leather cover, "J. E. N. O -."

"JENOVA, the Great Calamity." Kathelyn chimed in.

I opened it's decrepit pages, pages that had been turned on over and over again, left open to the elements of a damp basement and scribbled on its edges. The book could fit easily in two palms without your arms caving in -all the knowledge they could gather and all of it could fit was in what constituted a journal, albeit a slightly longwinded one. I deposited the gun on the edge of the medical table to get a better view of the wording in the dim lighting. Within every line of inky typing was a small edit, here and there and even a retconned line here and there. It was things I had seen before. It was things I worked with before.

"You'll regret this, Helena. It will come and steal you when you least expect it." He was right, Sephiroth was right. My obsession stole me when I least expected it: It was when he left for Nibelheim. I wasn't expecting to feel anything. Another person gone and I knew he wasn't coming back. Sephiroth took with him something I valued and a piece broke off of me, to never be replaced. I found solace in my work. I tried stuffing in the space left vacant with sleepless nights at the office and the typing of grant forms. Suddenly, I felt like nothing made sense. I panicked and threw one hell of a fit, kicking a Turk or two. Nothing made sense and I found answers in the most unsuspecting of places. Hojo and the promise of immortality; authorship in the greatest discovery man had ever and will ever have find. "You'll regret it." Funny enough, I do.

Kathelyn approached me, eyes wide, "what are you reading?"

"I need to explain." I snapped the book shut. Jofrey moved towards the door, disinterested. "I need to explain what happened here."

"I know exactly what happened here," voice rasp, "but I want to hear it from you."

"I don't think you want to." I sighed, "I did something terrible, something reprehensible."

She shifted her weight, adjusting herself for a long tale. "I want to hear it."

I told her of the time Sephiroth, behind the two-way mirror, was completely aware of my movements on the other side. We met eyes for a moment, a moment that dragged like a scalpel across the chest, as I injected another rat with mutated S cells. The rats slowly started to move, and then the cages began to rattle. They were reacting and the grad students began to panic. He was staring at the mirror, studying himself and privately smiling at himself, smiling at me.

"The rats reacted?" She seemed entirely surprised by this revelation.

"It's a theory," I opened the book again and showed her a journal entry from the man himself. She read the abstract briefly before scoffing. "It's true," I continued, "you should have been there to have seen it. Something in him was reacting to a strong will."

"You're saying he was controlling him, though. That's...," she placed the book down.

"Digusting? Yes." I explained how I looked at Sephiroth and told him that I didn't care what they did to him. I explained how, somehow, I felt nothing. Not even when Hojo offered me a place in infamy. "Join me. We'll change the face of science forever!" I felt nothing when they injected me with JENOVA cells as a way to test a theory -did implantation work in a non-Mako infused human? I explained how I became my own worst enemy.

"He told me I would regret it."

"Did you?" Her tone that of someone who was judging, someone who has never been in my position before, someone who had a better life.

"I'm not sure. I can sense him, now more than ever. I regret that I never got the chance to apologize for the terrible things I did."

"How quaint," a voice slipped through the door and echoed in the mountain of books, books that told the downfall of a titan and his rebirth into the monstrosity I saw before me. "I'm happy to hear you have a conscience somewhere, Helena."

"I understand it all now, Sephiroth." I approached, leaving the well of knowledge behind to find something greater. He could offer this to me; for that, I was certain.

"Half-truths, Helena, half-truths. You only know what Hojo and Gast know. I understand the entirety of what there is to know. The knowledge of the Cetra is mine."

Kathelyn pulled me to the side and aimed my gun right between his eyes. Kathelyn was teetering on an edge I could not join her. I felt cool, wanting to absorb what he understood -a knowledge beyond all knowing. It excited me to know that I was wrong and, more than anything, Hojo was wrong. Why she hadn't taken the shot was unwise but made out of fear. She never killed someone nor did she imagine herself doing so. He smiled back, approaching the barrel, accepting a very human fear.

"You're not human," I breathed.

"Half-truths."

"Even a Shin Ra dog bleeds!" Jofrey shouted his battle cry before attempting to plunge a short sword between Sephiroth's shoulder blades. The tip of the blade emerged through skin. A puzzled look crept across Sephiroth's face, however, that was very short-lived. The blade that went through flesh and leather deflected and the blade, Jofrey wrestling the blade's movements, went hilt deep into Jofrey's side. A brief thought emerged before Jofrey screamed in terror, the sound of which I had never heard before. Sephiroth pushed the now limp body, a mass on the moist floor, with the tip of his boot and slipped away into the dark tunnel beyond. Something was nagging between synapses; I had no choice, I needed to run after him.

In a flash, I was in Kathelyn's arms, the sound emanating from my mouth tearing through the dark rainy night. I was delirious and I felt hot. Every cell in my body vibrating in a wavelength I imagined those rats operated on. Those rats injected with JENOVA cells, whose end would be met on a dissection table. I didn't know how I got there. I felt as though I was floating, lost amongst the clouds, anchored by Kathelyn's arms. I screamed to be released into the night in hopes of finding him, in hopes of coming to know what he knew. Kathelyn led me into the mansion, occasionally patting my back. She assured me he was gone. He wasn't, I began to explain but Kathelyn snapped at me. "He's fucking gone, okay?!"

I was filled with proverbial stones, sinking into the deep, dark pit of my stomach. I constructed this crumbling mass of mistakes. "I'm sorry, Kathe."

Kathelyn seemed to be holding back before muttering, "I need to get Jofrey."

"He's still down there! We need to go get him!" My feet, nimble, ran across the entrance hall.

Kathelyn quickly caught up. "I'll get him, just... stay here." It was a weighty instruction, one that I felt she wanted me to promise. I watched her skip along the stairs in hopes of getting to Jofrey before the night beyond got to him first.

I listened to the empty halls that made up the Shinra Mansion; the secrets being spoken and echoed into every room. It was clear I had made a grave mistake. It was only until I saw Kathelyn try so hard to save a wretch like me that I began to realize a life beyond Shin Ra. I have made a mistake, I repeated to myself. Now what? I had never felt so fearful than I did in that moment, my world shrinking and expanding at the onslaught of thoughts. Jofrey laying in bed, a clear stab wound exposing meaty flesh, calmed me suddenly. His breath was locked in his chest, shallow and frantic. Kathelyn instructed me to stay with him as she rummaged through the mansion for any remaining healing items.

I felt his forehead. "You better not die on me."

Kathelyn came back finding some iodine in a cupboard, possibly expired. I laughed at the lofty thought: a little bit of iodine for a near fatal gash. Kathelyn snapped at my cool demeanour, frantically unsure of what to do. I decided to look through Jofrey's pack, knowing he was fairly prepared. I found a Cure Materia glittering in the soft light above, asking to be coddled in my soft, tainted palms. A gentle glow took hold of Jofrey as I instructed the Materia to cure his wounds. Slowly, they were repaired but still red and puffy to the touch. Infection taking hold already? My fear ran deeper.

"We'll have to take turns on watch," Kathelyn took out her gun and placed it on the nightstand. "We'll watch over him too."

I nodded, holding the gun and brushing my wet bangs with the back of my hand. "Go ahead, I got this."

Kathelyn took a pause, a sinking sense of mistrust taking hold. She knew now what I was. I disarmed her with a simple smile, reminiscent of a time when things were simple -before mom, before dad, before Shin Ra... before I felt compelled to fall into every mistake. "Go ahead. I got this." Kathelyn was exhausted and needed rest. She nodded and then left the room, using the walls to guide her to the hall.

Jofrey let out a pained sigh, his hand instinctively massaging the wound. His eyes opened slightly as a reflex. I reached for him, hands craddling hands. "You're okay," I reassured, hands tightening around his roughened palms, "you'll be okay." At ease finally, his eyes drooped close, hands sneaking to his sides. I watched as his body continued to ease, his breathing becoming deeper and more settled. I watched someone die once. My mother - she laid on her bed, voice hoarse from the smoke inhalation. I felt pain like no other. I was to blame. Was I to blame for this? For that I was certain of my part to play. I wasn't prepared to watch Jofrey die. I wasn't prepared to watch someone taken away from me, again.

It didn't take long before my eyes drooped down and snapped shut, brain shutting down. I was exhausted from days of sleep deprivation, nightmares filling days and nights offering little reprieve. I remember I was still holding onto the gun, sleep vaguely brushing away at the sulci of my brain. I remember his voice gently following me: "You will regret this." I did very much. I wanted to hold him and explain how the tides of a forbidden knowledge had taken hold of me and washed me up on another shore I wanted nothing to do with. I wanted to hold his face, jawline perfectly fitting in my palms and assure him that I would never try to hurt him. How those false words seemed to tumble from me; I wanted to be in his good graces again.

I felt a touch on my arm, guiding my hand to drop the gun. "There's no need for this," he whispered.

I tried to nestle in the crook of his neck, a gentle reminder of a childhood of loneliness and oftentimes heartbreak. "Sephiroth?" I called out to the touch, eyes still closed, a vivid image of him in my mind's eye. He smiled as my head rested on the bed. We were once children and I felt so small in his line of sight. "Don't worry," he said, sweet nothings, "this will all be over soon." I nodded, accepting a fate I had been running away from for so long.

I woke with a jolt, my body reacting to a short rest as if falling into the great unknown. Kathelyn was sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting. "I don't know why we're carrying guns. Neither of us shoot. And I've heard the stories." Yes, the folklore of a grand silver demon deflecting bullets, at times cutting them in half. But she was right: neither of us were really killers.

"Where's Jofrey?" I asked in a panic, noticing the bed in front of me was empty.

"He's downstairs. He had it being in this room laying down." She looked to the gun on the nightstand, fiddling with the barrel. We weren't killers. Jofrey tried and nearly died.

"How long was I asleep for?" I sat up, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"About five or six hours. Glad you were able to rest though. Clearly there was need." Kathelyn was distracted, generally offering me her words of conciliation without any focus on me. I remember our father was similar - always distracted, always somewhere else. I couldn't help noticing the similarities. I wondered if Kathelyn thought about the similarities I possessed. I liked to drink. I liked being drunk. I liked being somewhere else.

"I'm so sorry Kathelyn. I was so awful towards you, knowing full well you wouldn't - shouldn't trust me. Such a fucking hypocrite." I collapsed into my hands, ashamed.

Kathelyn's attention languidly shifted to me. "You may very well be a hypocrite but we're in this. I knew something was wrong. I just needed confirmation. And well, here we are."

Yes, here we were. "He's looking for the tattoo and I'm not prepared to give it to him. I know what it means. I know that it would very well be the end. He's so filled with a rage I'm not prepared to be burned by. Trust me. I've got this."

Kathelyn face betrayed her as she responded, "I know. I know you've got this."

I lifted myself from the bed, adjusting my balance as I walked to the door. "I'm going to have a chat with Jofrey."

"Sounds good. I'll try to rest up. We'll need to plan our next move."

I stumbled through the carpeted halls, landing on the stairs. I could hear a record, sounds compressed and snapping, from the seating room below. There was some candle light leaking through the crack through the door, warm and jovial. I walked into something intimate, Jofrey, sitting on the chaise, legs up, nursing an old bottle of bourbon.

"You look better, at least," I called out, approaching him with respect and shame.

"I feel better, funny enough. The fucker definitely got me." A swig and an offer; I was so tempted but something told me to be sober.

"He's good at doing that, I heard."

"You knew him," Jofrey stated more than asked. It was clear that our relationship ran deeper than simply me knowing of him from Shin Ra.

"I did. We grew up together. My mother died when I was young. My father and Kathelyn were left caring for me. When my father left one night, Kathelyn tried to keep things together but eventually lost control. She was offered a place in Shin Ra, I was left with Sephiroth in the labs."

"Sounds like a big jump from living with your sister to living in a lab."

I chuckled. "They found out I may have had some lineage that was of interest to their goals. My mother was the last of some nomads roaming the Junon area. I am something like twelfth removed from the Cetra."

"So you're an Ancient."

"Long time removed," I corrected. "I have this tattoo that was always of interest but head of R & D decided it wasn't worth his time after some time. So I just drifted out of the labs, lost favour, did my own thing."

"You were close to him?"

"Sephiroth? I was. Very. I cared about him deeply."

"You loved him," Jofrey slurred suggestively, shaking the bottle, enticing me to take a sip with him.

"I think I did," I answered honestly, knowing he wouldn't remember, knowing I was speaking to the void. "I wanted to be close to him. But then, he changed."

"I can imagine. War is no place for a kid." Jofrey's attention was unwavering; drunk but kind and curious.

"Yes, you're right. I just didn't know how to handle it and eventually, we stopped talking. And then, I hurt him."

"What did you do?" Jofrey's eyes narrowed on me as I kneeled before him, offering myself to the slaughter.

"I chose my work over him, much like he did. But I don't think that hurt him the most. I think what hurt him was that I chose Jenova, abandoning him. I'm an absolute fucking monster."

"Yes, you are." I could hear him in the cracks of the walls and windows, wafting between the notes playing on the record. I could hear the piano playing. I could hear our song - a gift.

"We make mistakes; some worse than others. But we make 'em and we need to atone."

I smiled. "True wisdom."

I adjusted myself on the floor, sitting with my back to Jofrey, watching as the fire flickered against the wood he found around the mansion. Jofrey patted my head, a reminder of a time that was simpler. "I hope you don't leave me," I spoke mostly to myself, holding his hand in turn.

"I will never leave you. You will never be rid of me." Thank you.

A/N: I'm back on the grind. Would love to hear from y'all that are still around, lol~

Working on the Helena AU and having a blast. I hope it's just as enjoyable to read!

Song: Megalomania, Muse