The next morning, Zack again had no success when he knocked on Sephiroth's door, despite getting up much earlier than usual. He was either still sleeping and ignoring that there was someone at his door (which, considering Sephiroth's personality, was not at all unthinkable), or he had been up even earlier and was already out. Zack proceeded on to the mass hall, where he ran into Kunsel, who was just putting together his breakfast. He sat down with the older SOLDIER, whose company was always welcome and usually was a good start into the day.
Having made up his mind to find and talk to Sephiroth today, he asked Kunsel if he had seen him, and much to his relief, he had spottet Sephiroth on his way to the helipad a short while ago, which meant that Zack had just barely missed him. He suspected that Sephiroth had probably gone to the archives again. In the past, Sephiroth used to go to the corporate archive every once in a while, where most of the original files from back before the company started keeping electronic records were kept. I believed he was looking for information about his parents, but eventually gave up on it when he could not find anything. When he realized that bad things were happening to Genesis and me, he started going back there again, this time looking for information on what was going on with us. Now that Hollander was captured, I was dead and Genesis had disappeared, even I had no idea what he could still be looking for. Perhaps being reminded of Ifalna when he saw Aerith's picture inspired him to take up his quest to find information about his parents again. Or perhaps he was spooked by whatever it was that was going on with his body and wanted to find out what it all meant and what to do about it.
I had the suspicion that he would find nothing yet again. The only one who could help him was Hojo. Could, not would. Although Hollander was a despicable person through and through, I think that he actually tried to help us when our bodies started degrading, and simply lacked the ability to do anything about it. He was the one who made us what we became, not only after we joined SOLDIER, but even before that. But even he told us nothing until it actually started happening. But even back then, we, being among the first ever SOLDIER recruits, were given special attention by Hollander. We did enjoy our time there, although it was very different from what we had expected. Genesis, after recovering from the blow Sephiroth dealt him during their first meeting, was always on the lookout for the silver-haired boy, hoping to challenge him again, but we hardly ever saw him. When he was not deployed or being used as a guinea pig by Hojo (or at least that was what we believed was being done to him back then), he stuck to his own room and ignored us as well as he could. Genesis yelling at him every time they happened to meet also did not help improve his attitude towards us at all. This went on for a few weeks, until I was finally able to convince my friend to apologize to Sephiroth, who had been hit by Hojo as a consequence of the stupid stunt Genesis tried to pull when they first met.
And so, one day, I walked up to Sephiroth, my heart beating hard in my chest with anxiety, not because I thought he would attack me, but rather because I thought he would finally notice me, not just as an attachment to Genesis, but as myself for the first time. Sephiroth looked up in surprise as I approached him. Not that he had to look up very far, seeing as he had already grown as tall as some adults. His age was very hard to guess, but judging by his height, I thought he had to be at least three years my senior. I was surprised to find out later that he was about Genesis' age, which made him only a few months older than me.
When I asked him if he could come sit with us for a moment because Genesis wanted to apologize to him, he folded his arms, looked away and claimed to have no idea what I was talking about. As I struggled for words, I noticed his shining green eyes mustering me, and he finally said dismissively: "I really don't care what he has to say. Keep your nose out of it." Perhaps that was meant as an olive branch, but being told to stay out of it just made it worse for me. There were only the three of us and somehow, just seeing him all alone, and knowing (or at least I believed I did) how badly Hojo treated him made me feel guilty because I was always having fun training with Genesis and to me it felt as if we were shutting him out, although technically, he was shutting himself out. I wondered at the time how it all would have played out if our first interaction had been a positive one, but in retrospective I believe that it may not have made a difference. He would have ignored us one way or another and I do not think anymore that it was necessarily Genesis' fault.
Me telling Genesis later how my "plan" had played out sent him into another fit of rage and he ran off to obnoxiously bang on Sephiroth's door and yell for him to come out. Genesis never though these things through, and while I was trying to calm him down, the door to Sephiroth's room suddenly opened to us, for the very first time. He stood in the doorway, a towel over his shoulders, his long, wet hair falling down to his shoulder blades, and looked down on us. Genesis, his hand still raised, apparently stumped by Sephiroth's sudden state of toplessness, only stammered a few incomprehensible words, his quest for justice apparently forgotten. "What do you want?", Sephiroth asked with more than a hint of annoyance in his voice. Although Genesis was usually good with words, he could not even express exactly what he wanted because he had not expected Sephiroth to actually open the door when he came knocking. Served him right, I suppose, and the embarrassment taught him a lesson he would not forget.
Although the situation made me feel a certain way that put my 13-year-old self into an unsurprising, but long-lasting state of confusion, I managed to regain my composure just enough to nudge Genesis away from the door and spluttered: "You know, we just started our training and we wanted to ask you if you could show us a few moves." This statement was not necessarily false, although I was speaking more for myself than for Genesis, who did not want to learn from Sephiroth, but rather challenge and defeat him. But I had no idea what he liked, and asking him to join us in reading one of Genesis' favorite books appeared silly to me. He mustered me up and down, while I tried not to look at him too closely. His usual attire, covering every inch of his body and leaving only his hands and face exposed, obscured the fact that he had been training probably for years and years to get to where he was. And I am not just referring to his muscles, but his body already had a fair amount of scars in various places, some of which I had no idea how he could have obtained in combat. Compared to him, I, a scrawny teenager, whose physical exercise had consisted of field work and a fair amount of other manual labor, must have appeared as juvenile as a chocobo chick. At least that was how I felt at the time. Obviously, he never commented on anything of the sort.
Perhaps he felt differently, for he finally glanced sideways with pinched eyes at Genesis, who was standing by, watching us, turned back to me and said: "Well, I guess he needs training." As he turned around, he announced: "See you tomorrow", and shut the door. Genesis and I exchanged confused looks. "Was that a 'yes'?", I wondered, but Genesis only crossed his arms behind his neck and responded: "Seems like the two of you get along just fine", and walked off toward his own room. I followed him and asked: "What do you mean?", but he gave no meaningful response, and told me instead: "I'll leave it to you then." I had no idea what he meant then, but that was not unusual because Genesis liked to talk in riddles. I believe he understood the difference between him and Sephiroth a little better than before already, and from then on, he stopped yelling at him for no reason.
It was a fact that Sephiroth was several years of experience ahead of us in certain ways, and Genesis was too smart to deny it now that he had seen it. But he never gave up on his quest to surpass him, and overdid it in the process. But that is a story for another time, for I was about to see Sephiroth again, finally, after several weeks, and the excitement was almost too much for me to bear, although I was dead, and Zack was the one who Sephiroth would see. Zack had just made his way to the Shinra Headquarters and studied the signpost next to the elevator to find out where the archives where located. When he could not locate them in the public area, his finger moved up and up and up past floor 60, until he finally found them on floor 62, just one floor below the helipad where he was just standing. He turned to the staircase, hopped down one floor and entered the lobby of floor 62.
He had been here once before on a job for mayor Domino, but he had no idea that the archives were also located on this floor. He looked around until he found a sign to direct him toward his destination, but much to his surprise, his card was refused at the entrance. True enough, it was not an area where he usually needed to go, but he used to think he had access to pretty much anything between the ground floor and floor 63. He turned away from the door and contemplated for a moment on what to do, but then pulled out his phone to text Tseng: "Hey, can you give me clearance for the archives?" The response in the Turk's usual laconic style read: "What for?" And Zack explained truthfully: "I think Sephiroth's in there and I really need to see how he's doing." I was not surprised to see that bringing up Sephiroth convinced Tseng immediately, whose reaction two minutes later only read: "Good luck".