Day 29 - Prompts: Missing/ "Don't Leave Me"

Sephiroth started awake with a swish of his lower wings. He had slumped on the couch in their house as soon as Zack had got him and Cloud back there, hugging both of his friends close as he had dozed. Now, waking up again, he saw they had both stayed and each was snuggled against his side, nestled under the largest wing that he had lowered over all of them.

Cloud stirred too, blinking in sleepy bewilderment at first the motion and then the wing. He reached out to touch it, fingering it in awe. "You're really here," he whispered.

"It feels unreal to me as well," Sephiroth remarked.

"It went on so long without you," Cloud said. "We kept trying to think maybe you'd got out, but we knew you were hurt even if you did, and we didn't know where you were or if you were safe. . . ."

"I am so sorry," Sephiroth said quietly. "I came as soon as I had the strength to teleport. If I could have got a message out to you and Zack, I would have." He had tried, but he wasn't sure whether to reveal that odd fact. It had been foolish to ever think it might work.

"I know you would have," Cloud said.

Zack stirred now too, blinking sleepily at their miracle. "Seph . . . were you having a bad dream?" he mumbled.

Sephiroth quirked an eyebrow. "What makes you think so?"

"It felt like you jumped there," Zack said with a yawn.

Sephiroth sighed. "Yes, I was," he admitted. "They started while I was away. I don't know what to make of them."

"So what happens in them?" Zack asked.

Cloud didn't expect Sephiroth to actually say, so he was surprised when Sephiroth said, "I'm a small child flying around a laboratory and frustrating a mysterious man who is trying to get me down. Sometimes the dreams shift to him restraining me and tying my wings to my body."

"That's horrible!" Zack cried with indignation, already angry with this scientist even if he was a figment of Seph's imagination.

"What happens?" Cloud asked, seeming oddly subdued and overly concerned with a nightmare world.

"I'm terrified," Sephiroth said. "Then the wings abruptly vanish and I wake up. It's always the lower two wings only. They can retract, so . . ." He sighed. "Part of me can't help wondering if I was born with them instead of creating them as I thought, and if these nightmares might instead be actual memories. Perhaps I retracted them to protect them from that madman and then didn't know how to bring them back at my early age. Maybe I didn't want to as long as he was there, and by the time my birth mother got me away, I'd forgotten about them as I grew older and my memories of those years faded."

"Sounds logical to me," Zack said. "But that'd be awful if the dreams are real and you were really with that creep." His eyes widened in horrified realization. "Your birth father?!"

"Most likely," Sephiroth said darkly.

Cloud's grip tightened. "Why would you suddenly start remembering now?"

"I don't know," Sephiroth said. "Something may have triggered it, but I can't imagine what." He sighed. "I wondered if my parents recorded everything my birth mother told them and if there might be a clue there. When my mother wrote for the newspaper, she was likely to have captured the great majority of the conversation. She wrote in her diary every day and amassed a great number of them." He looked to Zack. "Her diaries are in her bookcase. I never wanted to get into them before, but now . . ."

"I'll go grab the one for that year!" Zack said, and he was up like a shot.

Sephiroth chuckled, touched.

Cloud was silent, still pondering. "How could you have been born with any wings?" he said at last. "What would have caused that?"

Sephiroth shrugged. "The experiments, I suppose—the same ones that gave me fire powers at birth."

"And you're really okay with that?" Cloud wondered.

"I love both my powers and my wings, so yes," Sephiroth said. "That said, I am sickened by the mad scientist himself. And I wonder why my birth mother went along with any of it. Why did it take her so long to get me out of there?"

Cloud frowned. "Maybe she was scared of the creep. But she should have been more worried about you."

"Yes, I agree," Sephiroth said.

Zack returned and plopped on the couch again. "Got it!" He handed it to Seph.

"Thank you," Sephiroth said with a smile, and started looking through it. Zack and Cloud waited until he perked up and announced, "Here it is. She described the entire meeting in great detail, just as I knew she would. She even sketched what my birth mother looked like." He showed the picture of a striking yet sorrowful woman with long hair in a ponytail.

"Never seen her around here," Zack remarked.

"Me either," Cloud said.

"I'm sure she went far away from me to further try to keep me safe," Sephiroth said.

". . . So what does she say about you?" Cloud wondered.

"According to my mother, my birth mother described my fire powers and had me demonstrate making fireballs. She wanted to be sure my parents would take me in regardless. They just wanted a child and were thrilled to see what I could do. They promised to further teach me how to control my abilities. Which they did." Sephiroth frowned at the page. "I don't see any mention of her describing wings. But if I retracted them and they fully looked gone, maybe she wouldn't have."

"What does it look like when they retract?" Cloud asked, awkwardly adding, "I mean . . . isn't there a skin flap or something?"

"No," Sephiroth said. "When they retract, there is no outward indication that anything is there."

"That's . . . weird," Cloud said in surprise.

Sephiroth shrugged. "It's useful for the element of surprise, at least. And I'm prideful enough to be glad my skin isn't marred by odd flaps." He turned the page. "Wait . . ." An envelope fell out on his lap.

Zack picked it up. "What's this?" There was no writing on it. He handed it back to Seph without opening it.

Sephiroth took it, scanning over the current page before replying. "My birth mother handed this to my mother and said it was an X-Ray taken right before she fled with me. She said what it depicted was one of the main reasons she finally got me out of there. She was terrified of what my birth father would do to me if he saw it."

"And what did your mother say?" Cloud asked.

"She accepted it, looked at it, and it didn't change her mind at all," Sephiroth said. "She still wanted me." He lifted the X-Ray out and held it up to the light. As he had half-expected by this point, he could clearly see that the X-Ray of him as a small child showed the two lower wings folded inside his body.

Zack gasped in surprise. "You were right, Seph!"

Sephiroth leaned back. "What I don't understand now is why she never told me I was born with wings," he said. "She and my father just allowed me to believe I created all three of them from the strength of my heart."

"She probably didn't think telling you 'No, you got these two from your crazy birth father's experiments' was a good idea when you were a kid," Cloud grunted. "And maybe even when you were older, she saw no reason to say that."

"Perhaps," Sephiroth mused.

"I'll go get the diary from when you were five!" Zack volunteered, and rushed back upstairs again. In moments he was back and handing it over, eager to learn any new information.

Sephiroth smiled a bit and then sobered as he looked through the entries. "Here it is," he announced presently. "She expresses her surprise and amazement at the appearance of all the wings, calling them beautiful and . . . cute." He flushed a bit. "Then she goes on to comment that my birth mother told her the lower two wings were dormant in my body and she wasn't sure if they would ever come out again. She feared her husband experimenting or even doing surgery on me to make them come out, and that, along with the fact that he wanted to start experiments on the strength of my heart, prompted her to escape with me."

"Man, he's a piece of work and then some," Zack said in disgust. "And he's still running loose somewhere?!"

"Unless his experiments eventually backfired on him, such as with Ansem's crew," Sephiroth grunted. He looked back to the book. "My mother decided not to tell me the truth about those wings because she feared it would crush me to learn I didn't create them. She also didn't want me to know how horrible my birth father actually was. But as far as she could tell, I did indeed create the top wing."

"And she just planned to stick to that forever?" Cloud frowned.

"Unless for some reason she felt I needed to know," Sephiroth said. "She said she wrote everything down so I would have that if the time came that I did need it."

"She was always good about planning like that," Zack said with a sad smile.

"She was," Sephiroth agreed. He sighed and shut the diary. He wished his parents were still there. But they had all lost their parents thanks to the Heartless, so he said nothing on the subject.

Zack hugged him close. "I'm really glad you're home, Seph," he whispered.

Cloud hugged him too. "Yeah." It was awkward for him to know how to put it into words, but he felt it just as deeply.

And Sephiroth knew it. He held them both equally close. "So am I."

Coda

A shadowy figure in a darkened room was watching footage of the fights with the strange dragons. Watch, rewind, repeat, again and again. After a time he zoomed in on the part of the screen showing Sephiroth's movements. The recording had even caught the split-second creation of the portal and Sephiroth falling into it right before the explosion.

"Yes," the man sneered in the darkness. "You have grown up well, Sephiroth. Your heart is far stronger than I could have ever dreamed of. Much stronger than the hearts I used to create these beasts. What else can you do? Is there any limit? Show me everything!"

The screen reflected off his glasses as he gave a mad sneer.