Chapter Text
Sephiroth had almost corrected the first person who called Aerith his sister, a woman they’d met before they were even out of Midgar’s slums complimenting him on taking such good care of her while their mother shopped. Almost—and then stopped, because if she’d categorized them already she was less likely to remember them as suspicious. It was no good arguing. Awkwardly, he accepted the compliment. Aerith didn’t object.
(This was honestly a surprise. Since she'd learned to talk she never ever shut up.)
He’d been eight when Ifalna came to the labs, tiny Aerith wrapped tight in her arms. She let Hojo do whatever he wanted with her, as long as Aerith was untouched, and Sephiroth—he'd had no intention of speaking to them. But one evening as he passed Ifalna’s cell on the way to his own, he heard her murmur oh, Gast. He’d stopped. Professor Gast had been kinder and cleverer than Hojo, and he had vanished more than two years ago, and Sephiroth missed him like a severed limb. He found himself standing facing the door. “Do you know where he is?”
“…what?”
“Professor Gast. He disappeared. He…was a great scientist,” Sephiroth said, because that was safe to say and made Hojo angry.
“I suppose he was,” Ifalna said after a moment. He heard her get up off the cot and come closer to the door as she spoke. “By the standards of this place.”
“But where is he?”
“Hojo killed him, I’m afraid.” Sephiroth’s teeth and fists and heart clenched, the thoughts no and I knew it clashing in his mind. “He was Aerith’s father, you know,” she said. “He…loved us both very much. I wish….”
So that was where the Professor had gone. Disappeared to this woman and child who he loved. And all it got them in the end was a cell down the hall from Sephiroth’s. He felt a vicious satisfaction in his chest at that, as he turned on his heel and kept going to bed. “I wish he’d taken you with him when he left Shinra,” Ifalna said.
It was so close to something Sephiroth had thought himself over and over that he stood frozen in the hall several more seconds before continuing the rest of the way to his room. The door locked once he was inside, and he went to bed.
He could hear Ifalna two doors down singing a quiet lullaby, and for the first time, he allowed himself to listen. It wasn’t the kind of thing that showed up on the cameras, after all. It was safe.
-
Hojo mocked him for talking to Ifalna anyway, gloated about Professor Gast. Then it turned out Ifalna wanted to see him. Was willing to bargain for the privilege and it made him so angry, that she would offer Hojo more leverage over what he already had, that she would risk letting Hojo use both of them against each other. “Gast talked about you,” she said when they stood face to face in the gymnasium. Aerith was toddling back and forth changing the settings on the weight machines.
What did he say, Sephiroth couldn’t ask.
“Mostly he talked about the science behind you,” she admitted. “But he said you were…a good boy. Very clever.”
Sephiroth shrugged. He didn’t have much basis for comparison. Ifalna smiled slightly. She was the only person he had ever met with so much hair. It came down nearly to her ankles and the bulk of it made her seem larger, though she wasn’t really a very tall woman. “Very levelheaded, too. I thought that was a strange compliment, but now I see. Aerith, sweetheart, don’t touch that!” She broke off their conversation to steer her daughter away from the free weights and got her attempting handstands on the mats, then looked back at Sephiroth. “Maybe you could demonstrate?”
Sephiroth was used to giving demonstrations. Ifalna had no authority to command one, but then again demonstrations of handstand technique weren’t exactly…demanding. Even if the Ancient were any good at them, her skirts would get in the way. “Here,” he told the little girl briskly, and dropped forward.
“Wow,” she said a second later.
A small laugh from Ifalna and Sephiroth righted himself, fuming, how dare she gloat that he’d done what she wanted, unlike Hojo she had no way of ensuring he repeated the performance—but she wasn’t gloating after all, he decided. Her smile was…gentle. “Maybe again a bit slower?” she suggested. “I don’t think my little mu here quite got that.”
By the time he was ten, he had gotten used to visits with Ifalna. Hojo withheld them sometimes as punishment, but Sephiroth had carefully never admitted that he looked forward to them, or minded when they were canceled, so usually the schedule depended on Ifalna’ behavior, not his.
“They’re turning you into a soldier, aren’t they?” she asked, running her fingers through his hair. He closed his eyes whenever she did this, trying to pretend he didn’t know it was happening, as though he was more likely to get away with it that way. The strands had reached past his shoulders by then, and slipped between Ifalna’s fingers more smoothly than Aerith’s ever had.
Sephiroth hadn’t known what to reply. They already had made him a SOLDIER. He trained with the new adult ones sometimes already. He shrugged.
“They’ll send you off to war,” she predicted. “Do you want that?”
Sephiroth shrugged. “At least I won’t be here anymore.”
“…there is that.”
-
Ifalna’s escape plan had been sneaky, and tricky, and very, very precisely timed. Maybe it would have worked perfectly for just her and Aerith, but before they were out of the Tower they found themselves being shot at. Sephiroth would have expected to feel something about killing Shinra’s guards, but he didn’t. No guilt, and no triumph either. It was sort of pointless as well as easy, and he wished they would just…go away. Since they wouldn’t, and he couldn’t let Ifalna die now, they went down in sprays of blood.
Hojo really shouldn’t have allowed him access to weapons without a lot more supervision than just one assistant. Even a knife small enough to hide in his shirt was useful.
They had parted ways with Ifalna in the grasslands. She was going to lead Shinra away east and then seem to cross the ocean to Wutai, hopefully leaving a false trail that the Turks would be trying to chase against Wutai’s national sentiments for a good long time. Sephiroth’s assignment was to head south and keep Aerith safe.
They were to meet up again in Gongaga. After three months if they hadn’t reconnected, the rendezvous point changed to Mideel. He could look after Aerith that long. She might be unpredictable, but he was faster. (The possibility that Ifalna would not appear before them in Gongaga or Mideel or ever again he left unconsidered, even though he knew that if she were certain she could avoid being caught she would not have let Aerith out of her sight.)
The Mythril swamps had been disgusting and full of snakes. Aerith loved them. The brown dye Ifalna had bought him in Kalm meant that the miners barely looked twice at him on the way through the tunnels, and one actually joked that he looked just like his sister, but not as adorable, not to worry. Green eyes and the sharp way their bangs hung, he supposed.
“Brother!” Aerith crowed now on the south side of the mountains, holding up a writhing snake as long as her arm but only as thick as her finger. This enthusiasm for reptiles had better die down soon. Sephiroth checked their supply of Antidotes again. Seven. If it got below five he was going to stop letting her touch things. “It looks like you!”
“It does not.” The snake had vertical pupils and its eyes were a sort of greenish-yellow on black, and the pattern of scales along its back was a sort of diamond-studding of white on brown. “Pupils do not a resemblance make,” he informed her, because there was no one to hear and take notice of his eyes. “Now put the thing down. You don’t like being kidnapped and examined and neither does anybody else.”
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