Archive of Our Own ^beta

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.”

Chapter Text

The other half of Project S went by the name of Scarlet. She was vicious as soon as she could walk, which was much younger than any normal child managed it and only a month behind her brother, and when she was three she took apart one of the scanners she’d been left asleep under and built an electric prod that she used to make Sephiroth move, mostly out of places she wouldn’t have wanted to be if she hadn’t been looking for an excuse to prod him.

When she was seven, she escaped Hojo’s lab and turned up again two labs down, happily deconstructing a robot.

“She takes after me,” Hojo informed the more obedient half of the Project rather smugly, as Scarlet was brought back to the lab under heavy sedation. “You’re more like your mother.” Scarlet had the strength the Project had been intended to create, and she was fast enough, but Gast had enthused about the mental capacities of the Ancients back when he drew up the Project, and it was that aspect of their potential she seemed destined to explore for Shinra.

President Shinra was open to accommodating her application to join Weapons Development, once he’d asked why not Science—‘it would be a conflict of interest’ she lied angelically—and she started work at the age of twelve, just before the Wutai War was declared. By the time the twins were fifteen, she headed her own research team and he was a Commander. “I have this plan, see?” she asked, brandishing a sheaf of papers at him when he came back to Midgar for leave. “The biggest mako cannon ever. Look at the pistons! They’re beautiful, they need to be real, kyaha!”

“What good is the biggest mako canon ever?”

“The point isn’t what it’s good for, the point is showing that it would work!”

Sephiroth rubbed his eyes. It was hard to get much sleep on the front, especially when he had reports to write at night. His sister was somehow more exhausting than any of it. “Maybe ships,” he said. “See if you can convince the President it would be perfect to defend Junon in case the Wutai put together a navy.”

Honestly the President was probably aware that a naval attack on the opposite side of the Planet from the enemy was improbable, but he wasn’t averse to building giant machines to prove they worked, not if they looked cool, especially not if they made the company stronger. By the time the Sister Ray was mostly constructed, the twins were twenty and Sephiroth had been made a General. Scarlet took over her Department with less pomp and far more real accession to power. “Don’t worry,” she told him with a little cackle. “I’ll have a Brother Beam built on the east coast just for you!”

“Please spare the budget,” her brother answered. “My men need human-scale guns.”

“I am making your boring human-sized guns. Go away, there’s something wrong with the reactor in Corel and I am not letting Hojo win this one.”

When they were twenty-five the war had ended and he was a hero, somehow, to all the world but Wutai, and his heart was broken. He went to his sister not because she had ever been kind but because she was clever. “Jenova Project,” he said, stepping out of the shadows of her lab.

She jumped, a very little—he’d learned to hide from war-trained SOLDIERs and ninjas, and for all she had almost his gifts that went only so far without practice—and laughed. “Kyahaha!”

“You know what it is. You’ve probably hacked all the files.”

“Oh, you know me, I’m really more a hard steel and bright energy girl than a computer chick…yes, of course I have.” She reactivated the tiny circular saw in her hand and brought it down on the robot joint.

Sephiroth didn’t raise his voice to be heard over the saw blade, but his tone sharpened. “What is it?”

Scarlet smirked. “It’s us, of course. And your stupid, deteriorating, AWOL friends. Didn’t I tell you they’d only leave? Everybody does.”

He wanted to strike her. But if he started he might never stop, so he saved it for his enemies—whoever those were now—and said only, “You left first.”

“Gast left first,” she corrected smartly, tapping the sharp severed halves of the joint together. “I see what went wrong here,” she announced, and dove into the mechanism with tweezers.

“Scarlet.”

“Sephiroth.” She looked up, shook her head. “Stop trying to pretend,” she told him. “I built my career here for myself. I make weapons, I won’t be one.”

But you are, Sephiroth thought, not sure which of them he was thinking at. That’s all you’ve ever known how to be. “What are you going to do?” he asked wryly. “Marry Rufus, kill him, and take over the company?”

His sister beamed at him, eyes bright as the Junon Cannon, and tapped the tweezers against her lips. “That’s a great idea! But I think Little Prez is too savvy to let me get away with it. Too bad, huh?”

Sephiroth smiled a little because Rufus Shinra hated people using his childhood nickname now that he was twenty-one, and it would always be funny, and the familiarity of Scarlet’s breezy scheming filled in the pit in his chest just a little.

They were twenty-six when he died. She put a hand to her heart for a moment, puzzled, and went back to squabbling with Heidegger about the budget. The next time she saw Hojo he smiled like he had won a victory she could never compete against or overset.

It took her five days to figure out what.

Chapter Text

When Angeal and Genesis had still been new recruits, recently enough arrived in Midgar to still be shocked and appalled by the price of fresh fruit, but after their meteoric rise from SOLDIER Third to SOLDIER Second in a week had drawn attention to them, Angeal had swung his family weapon at Sephiroth with all his newly enhanced strength, and shattered the sword that blocked it.

The broken blade itself had been nothing special, apart from being the single-edged Wutaian style Sephiroth was beginning to feel he liked, and if it hadn’t been for some of the shrapnel burying itself in his chest cavity while he was too surprised to dodge, all he would have taken away from the experience would have been a new respect for the unwieldy Hewley heirloom. And possibly its wielder.

But the steel shards of Sephiroth’s training sword did just that, slicing between and under his ribs, and even with his robust anatomy it would have been unwise to simply Cure the damage with the metal still inside, which meant surgery. It was hardly the first time he’d been opened up but he never liked it; the only surprise was that the anaesthetic worked better than usual and Hojo sewed him up fairly efficiently, not taking time to explore.

A much larger surprise was waking up in the infirmary with two teenagers in purple jumpsuits waiting beside the bed.

“I’m really very sorry,” the dark-haired Second said as soon as they’d established he was fully conscious and not in need of anything.

Sephiroth flicked his fingers lethargically. “Sparring accident. Hardly going to retaliate.”

Hewley looked appalled. “I wasn’t trying to accuse you. Or appease you. I realize you outrank us but you’re also at least a year younger, I…feel terrible about being so careless with a comrade’s safety. So I wanted to apologize.”

The auburn-haired Second—Rhapsodic?—pointed at the back of his friend’s head and mouthed honor freak.

Well, if he meant it, accepting was probably the only way to shut him up. “It’s fine,” Sephiroth said. “Your conduct was not inappropriate.”

His voice rasped a little, and Hewley said, “Are you sure you don’t want some water?”

“Very.” The IV drip would replenish his fluids adequately, he couldn’t swallow safely lying on his back, and he knew from experience that trying to sit up just yet, even with assistance from the hospital bed, would be far more unpleasant than a mere scratchy throat.

“They wouldn’t let me give you a transfusion,” Hewley said unhappily, as if being deprived of the opportunity to bleed for Sephiroth’s benefit was a personal blow.

“They never do,” Sephiroth shrugged. Hojo was slightly obsessed with monitoring his blood chemistry, which he assumed was at least part of the reason, but with healing magic available and his constitution it had never been a serious problem. Hewley looked offended on his behalf anyway.

“We’ll let you rest,” said Rhapsody smoothly, hooking an arm around Hewley’s chest. “Come on,” he muttered very audibly. “You’re just being weird now.”

“See you tomorrow,” Hewley said as his friend pulled him away, leaving Sephiroth in his recovery bed very much baffled.

But see him the next day they did, ducking in on their way to class in the morning and greeting him that afternoon after he’d been released for light duty. He didn’t know what to make of it. It turned out that the slim redhead was called Rhapsodos, though Hewley always called him Genesis. They had been friends since early childhood and Sephiroth found himself thinking of them by their first names rather quickly, simply because those were the only ones he heard.

“You’ve already taken these classes,” Genesis declared on the third day of this pattern, slapping a textbook dramatically on the table in the mess hall before setting down his lunch rather more carefully. Angeal was already settled in across the table from Shinra’s youngest First. “Right?”

“I’m not tutoring you,” Sephiroth told him. People had asked that, occasionally, valuing a chance of improving their rankings enough to approach him, but he didn’t get enough free time to fritter it away on people who wanted to sponge off of him instead of working for themselves.

Genesis sneered. “Of course you aren’t tutoring me, you’re roughly twelve.”

Angeal looked up from his carefully dismembered noodle casserole. “He’s fourteen.” He would be fifteen soon. Angeal had just turned sixteen. It wasn’t much more than a year’s difference, and Sephiroth was just as tall as Genesis.

Maybe slightly shorter—the Second wore his hair short and tousled, which made him look slightly taller than he was, and Sephiroth didn’t care enough to requisition his personnel file for an exact figure, which might not even be accurate if it had been a while since his last physical.

Negligent shrug from Rhapsodos. “Same thing. Anyway I wanted to ask, does Captain Rourke who does advanced tactics prefer his short-essay answers efficient or wordy?”

Sephiroth had done most of his classwork via equivalency exam, but Rourke he had worked with. “…he prefers that you answer the question.”

“Yes, but how? Some instructors penalize making them read too much, whereas others consider using too few words a sign of insufficient effort.”

Sephiroth went back to his sandwich. “Try both and see.”

Genesis looked thoughtfully at him for a moment, bit into his apple, shuddered faintly and set it back down. “Ugh. Mealy. Look, did you get good marks from Rourke?”

“…yes.”

“Wonderful, laconic efficiency it is.” He stuck his fork into the casserole and left it there, standing up, while he sipped his canned coffee. “It’s ridiculous they’re willing to promote us so fast and let us make up the coursework as we go.”

Angeal shrugged. “There’s a war on.”

“Hark at the great patriot.” Genesis finally tried a bite of casserole. “Also terrible,” he pronounced. Took another bite.

“Wait until you get to the front,” said Sephiroth. Not with much venom, because at least the adolescent Captain was still eating it. “There’s nothing that can’t be safely stored for three months, and a lot of it has been stored far longer.”

“Thank you for the warning. My discretionary gear at this point is going to consist entirely of clean socks and food.”

“What was it going to be before?” asked Angeal. “Books?”

“You know me so well.”

Moron. At least he was capable of gathering information and then altering his plans to fit it, thought Sephiroth. That was by no means something he’d found himself able to take for granted from the officer corps stationed in Wutai.

Sephiroth didn’t offer any more advice for the rest of the meal, and Genesis didn’t ask for it. The conversation revolved largely around the other students in their classes and the foods they missed most from home. The friends talked mostly to one another, but often to him.

He had no comment of his own about food. These days he was trusted to maintain a balanced diet on his own, which was a nice change even if it resulted in cafeteria sandwiches. Sitting quietly meant learning that being from Banora meant taking apples very, very seriously, and that Angeal’s mother baked.

Sephiroth finished his lunch and decided this was the best time to ask, or at least that any later would not be an improvement. “Why are you talking to me.”

In response Genesis frowned, huffed, and stood up, lifting his half-full lunch tray. “Well excuse me.” And this was why Sephiroth hated talking to people. Couldn’t anyone answer a question, when he finally abandoned his pride enough to ask it? No, they just reacted instead, leaving him no wiser than before.

“Is it a problem?” asked Angeal from across the table, and he at least didn’t seem angry. Though not best pleased, either.

Sephiroth stacked his empty cup on his empty plate and dropped the plastic cutlery beside it, crisply. In a matching neutral tone he said, “It has no precedent.”

“…we’ve been sitting with you at lunch for three days,” pointed out Angeal.

“Precisely. What do you want?” No one had ever taken this long to make their case. Hewley’s guilt over his injury should have run its course once he was off light duty, at the latest. They were staring at him. Now they both seemed angry, and he narrowed his eyes. Whatever they had been building up to was clearly both demanding and of value to them. “Out with it.”

Genesis set his tray down again hard enough that the empty coffee can tipped sideways and fell over. “That,” he declared without sitting down, “may actually be the saddest thing I have ever heard. Dreams of the morrow hath the shattered soul. Are you insulted, Angeal? I am definitely insulted.”

“I’m trying not to be,” Angeal said in a strangely neutral voice. “Sephiroth,” he said, leaning forward. “I don’t want anything from you.”

Genesis snorted. “My rocks-for-brains partner here wants to be your friend, SOLDIER First Sephiroth. If you only accept friends of comparable rank tell us now and maybe he’ll come back once he’s been promoted—don’t make that face, you know it’s inevitable,” he told Angeal.

“I don’t think rank is the problem,” Angeal replied.

The fewer things he could in theory do for them, the less likely it was that they wanted him to do them, but—no. Rank was not the problem. “And what do you want?” Sephiroth asked Genesis, because it had not escaped his notice that he had spoken only on his friend’s behalf.

Rhapsodos shrugged. “The benefit of your experience with the instructors would be nice,” he said. “And once you’re up to it I’d like a spar.”

Sephiroth looked blankly at the rookie Second. All Hewley had needed to do to get the spar that had gone so drastically wrong was ask. “And?”

“No, I think that’s everything.” Genesis nodded decisively, righted the coffee can, and sat back down to readdress himself to the remains of his lunch. “Some of us have talent and pride, my young friend,” he informed Sephiroth. “I will distinguish myself ably without playing parasite, and Angeal’s honor will hardly let him do less.”

When Sephiroth glanced at Angeal, he was smiling, a wry, warm thing. “Don’t worry, he confuses everyone at first. He’s a good friend, though.”

Sephiroth suspected he might get the opportunity to discover the truth of that assurance for himself. It…wasn’t an unpleasant idea.

Genesis snapped his fingers. “Oh! Hair-care. I want to talk about that at some point. What products do you use?”

Angeal slid his tray to one side so he could bury his head in his hands. “I take it back. I don’t know you.”

-

Several months later, Genesis and Angeal were summoned back to Midgar for the President’s annual Solstice Ball, which Sephiroth’s leave had of course already been scheduled to intersect. Sephiroth was permitted to attend in uniform because this would serve as excellent propaganda for the glamor of SOLDIER First, but the purple jumpsuits of Seconds were declared ‘tacky’ and the new adolescent colonels obliged to acquire formal wear. Genesis of course had already had some. Angeal’s was rented, but (at Genesis’ insistence) from a place that altered the rented clothing for a better fit.

“I can’t wait to make First,” Angeal complained, fidgeting with a button.

“I am reliably informed these occasions are viper-pits. We shall watch each other’s backs,” Genesis proclaimed, settling his shirt-cuffs to precise symmetry before reaching for his gloves.

“Will we?” Sephiroth asked. He knew what that meant in battle; wasn’t sure how it was meant to transfer to this.

“We’ve all saved each other’s lives several times over now, Commander.” Genesis’ smirk was lazy and unconcerned. “Does that mean nothing to you?”

“You’d do the same for any comrade-in-arms, I would expect,” Sephiroth said coolly. Genesis’ smirk flickered toward a frown.

“We’re friends,” interceded Angeal firmly. Gave Sephiroth one of those long measuring looks of his. “Aren’t we?”

The words tried to stick in his throat, but—“Yes,” he admitted. “We are.” Having said it, it was somehow easier to smile. “Did you really doubt it?”

Angeal smiled back, shrugged. “You’re hard to read sometimes.”

“What he means,” Genesis drawled, “is that you’re cold and standoffish and rude, and we would hate to be a nuisance.”

Genesis lived to make a nuisance of himself, and was one to talk about being rude. Sephiroth rolled his eyes. “If you’re a nuisance to me, I will make sure you know. Angeal doesn’t have to worry.”

Blue eyes contemplated him narrowly for several seconds, and then Genesis’ smirk came back, lying on his face more easily, somehow. “So brothers-in-arms to the skirmish shall we hence?”

“If by skirmish you mean ‘confrontation with executives,’ then by all means.”

“I only wish he’d meant there’d been a monster attack on the Plate and we were being dispatched,” Angeal sighed, smoothing hair that was already perfectly smooth. “Rented suit and all. You’re both naturals at this sort of thing.”

Sephiroth wondered what sort of thing he meant. Genesis certainly seemed to have been born to attend parties, but anyone claiming Sephiroth was at his best in social situations deserved to be laughed out of the room. Angeal wasn’t polished like Genesis, but from what Sephiroth had seen people instinctively liked him. Of less use in this kind of environment than others, admittedly, but still advantageous.

“We’re here to be decorative,” he pointed out. It wasn’t as if they were expected to negotiate business deals on Shinra’s behalf or anything complex. “Just be yourself. You have nothing to be ashamed of.”

Genesis grinned. “Just imagine though,” he said, “the three of us leaping into battle in our party clothes….”

Sadly, this was not required. The closest they got to combat was Angeal bravely engaging in conversation an executive who kept touching Sephiroth’s hair, and the bit where Hojo’s latest second-in-command mysteriously fell into a punch bowl.

-

The peace and quiet of the executive levels the morning after one of the President’s parties made a pleasant work environment, and the settled feeling of being an employee of the company, with his space and his salary, kept Sephiroth in a good mood through a stack of personnel reviews, a dreadful muddle of basic requisitions, and his latest attempt to make Form 863-B permute into a valid format for presenting his strategic opinions in a way more concrete than speaking up at meetings.

Toward the end of that, the Banorans knocked on his door.

They stayed in the doorway once it was open, crowding one another slightly but not much more than if they’d tried to fit into the minimal standing room inside, and crowding Sephiroth considerably less.

“Good morning, Angeal.” Sephiroth contemplated Genesis. He wasn’t visibly hung over. “Have you recovered from the fact that the President’s dancers are hired for reasons other than their performance skills?”

“Yes, thank you. Though really, the money and location to arrange any command performance he wishes, and that’s his selection? Dreadful waste.”

“The President is a utilitarian.” Which was not to say he did not indulge himself freely, but he gained far more power over his guests from an erotic dance troupe than he would from an edifying piece of theater, or even just a performance of Loveless.

Genesis waved their employer and his taste in party entertainment away like a bad smell. “Anyway, on to the reason we came here.”

“Which is?” He wasn’t unhappy to see them, precisely, but they were invading his comfortable islet of solitude and he hoped they didn’t intend to stay long.

“Genesis had a drunken idea that he still likes now that he’s sober.” Angeal paused, then admitted, “I like it too.”

Sephiroth was honestly unsure whether Angeal liking an idea balanced out the fact that Genesis had dreamed it up while drunk. “Say on.”

Genesis’ smile was broad and airy as he slouched against the door frame. “To celebrate making it through our first deployment alive, Angeal and I are becoming blood brothers. Since you’re rather our partner in life-saving, we wondered if you wanted to join in?”

Sephiroth…didn’t know what to feel. He only vaguely recognized the term, and it seemed like this should be something important, significant, between two friends who’d known each other so long. But the easy way Genesis invited him to join in suggested it wasn’t important at all, and his inability to tell what mattered and what didn’t outside battle or the lab was one of the reasons Sephiroth had never spent much time around other SOLDIERs.

“…you’re sixteen,” he pointed out at last, setting down his pen. “Isn’t that some kind of children’s game?”

“It’s an ancient warrior tradition,” said Genesis.

“I’m not sure about that,” said Angeal, “but it’s done a lot on the Western Continent, even by adults.”

They weren’t from the Western Continent, but Angeal never lied. “And the duties of a blood brother are…”

“About the same as those of any brother, I guess? Maybe a little more stringent since we’re taking it on voluntarily. Keep an eye on one another, help one another learn from our mistakes, always have each other’s backs against the rest of the world.”

Genesis smirked. “Actually spend time together, attempt to amend one another’s cultural deficiencies…”

“Listen to each other recite the same lines for the thousandth time…”

Sephiroth waited for his friends to stop sharing a smile before saying, “Those seem similar to the duties of a friend?”

Genesis rolled his eyes and muttered something indistinct about duty but Angeal said, “The idea is we’re promising never to stop.” And. Well.

Sephiroth could admit to himself that going back to before this pair had barreled their way into his life sounded…bleak. “Alright,” he said.

Angeal looked as startled as he did delighted.

-

They took over one of the training rooms in the middle of the night. The equipment and power was shut down and the room was lit only by the tiny fire in a metal basin Angeal had carefully lit. Sephiroth had never seen light move like this, not when it wasn’t part of the chaos of battle, and he stared into it so deeply he almost jolted when Genesis whispered, “ready?”

Sephiroth nodded and drew the katana he’d picked up at Shou-Gurren from its sheath, and laid it across his knees. Genesis had his out already, an ornate red-chased glyph-blade he’d named Rapier even though it wasn’t, and Angeal pulled his family sword from his back, pressed it briefly against his forehead, and propped it against the front of his folded legs, blunt side on the floor and keen, polished edge up.

Simultaneously, they each dragged both thumbs along the sharp edges, slicing deep under the skin, and then raised their hands and slotted fingers together, pressing the bleeding pads of their thumbs together hard, blood mingling.

Angeal ran a few degrees hotter than Sephiroth, and Genesis somewhere in between, and the press of their bleeding fingers together drew it to his attention as never before. It stung, the pressure and having someone else’s blood in even such a tiny wound; it was dreadfully unhygienic and the sense of rebellion against Hojo at contaminating his fussed-over blood made Sephiroth want to laugh. He met Angeal’s eyes, then Genesis’, and they seemed to be feeling the same faint, reckless hilarity.

“It’s a promise,” Genesis whispered.

“A promise,” Angeal echoed, Sephiroth half a beat behind.

They let go when the burn of injury started to be replaced by the burn of mako-enhanced healing, and Genesis sprang grandly to his feet. “Alright, I’m the eldest brother, that means I make all the decisions.”

Sephiroth stared up at him, betrayal settling in his chest. Why had he ever considered believing that all of this had been anything but a stratagem to gain control over him? A stupid one, considering that unless their little blood-sharing ceremony had been some kind of unheard-of magical ritual there was nothing forcing him to observe the terms of the agreement—

Angeal was laughing. “Don’t listen to Gen,” he told Sephiroth. “That isn’t even how real brothers work, he just can’t resist a chance to make himself sound more important. Sit down,” he told Genesis, who did.

Sephiroth eyed him distrustfully. “I don’t,” he said firmly, “require anyone else making decisions for me. Also I still outrank you.”

“Give me time,” Genesis sniffed. As though he had even come close to winning a spar since they arrived. Angeal had technically defeated him, but sword-shattering was not exactly a recognized technique, it had been an accident, and it wouldn’t work twice.

-

Hollander reportedly went into hysterics at Angeal’s next physical. Something about genetic markers; Sephiroth got nothing straightforward on the subject. Anyway the professor got Angeal to admit that he might have gotten Sephiroth’s blood in an open wound—between training and campaigning together that wasn’t exactly shocking, even if Sephiroth was so rarely injured he had used his Limit Break all of thrice in his life, one of them under laboratory conditions.

Hojo was probably incapable of hysterics, but he was on the issue like a shark scenting blood. Sephiroth admitted when questioned that he couldn’t swear he hadn’t gotten any of Angeal’s blood in a wound at the same time, and his next tour of duty was pushed back three weeks.

So. Many. Tests. Of course they weren’t told the conclusions, apart from being reminded that blood-borne disease was serious and one of the risk factors increased by their SOLDIER enhancements, and to avoid such contamination in future, and if it occurred to decontaminate the area immediately.

Oddly, Hollander didn’t seem to notice anything at all odd about Genesis’ blood. “My genetics are more robust,” he bragged next time they were alone.

Angeal threw a cracker at him. “If Sephiroth and I are dying and it’s all the fault of your stupid romantic ideas…” he said, seeming curiously unconcerned by the possibility.

“I doubt we’re dying,” Sephiroth shrugged. Leaned over to take one of Angeal’s crackers because if he was throwing them at people he clearly wasn’t very hungry. “Hojo would have been angrier.” He paused, considered. “Or laughed harder.”

“I am so desperately glad not to be you,” said Genesis. And stole one of Angeal’s crackers.

-

Genesis took one of the swordsmen targeting him down early with a lucky blow, but then found himself stymied. Sephiroth spun and blocked and cut and wished intently for a larger weapon—the one he had taken from the ninja woman during the battle in the valley was of good forging, but he could wish it at least half a meter longer to extend his reach.

Angeal was being pressed hard on the far side of the formation, he glimpsed during one turn, not by any single great fighter but by incompetent formation-neighbors and thus a sheer press of numbers. The sword across his back was serving again as armor. He would be better served by a partner fighting at his back, but as he could not have that just now….

Angeal and Sephiroth felt it at the same moment—a fraction of an instant after it happened—a sword that did not exist sliding between their ribs.

It was cold, and the pain was incredible. Sephiroth had rarely felt a blade inside his chest while fully conscious, and never one so large or carelessly placed. He turned, automatically, to find Genesis slipping onto one knee, blood already bubbling onto his lips. A shuriken sliced along Angeal’s temple and he didn’t even flinch, though it seemed to shake him out of his instant of transfixed horror and remind him to start defending himself again, as he carved his way toward Genesis and the ninja-tou that had been thrust through his torso.

The ninja pulled his sword out.

The pain vanished with it, and Genesis hit the ground. The masked fighter raised his weapon for a finishing blow.

Sephiroth saw…not red. He had heard the idiom before, and if it fitted any moment it should have been this one. Red was Genesis’ favored color and the color of his blood, and this was Sephiroth’s brother by a voluntary oath being taken from him and anger was a red emotion.

Not red. The world had turned almost—white. He was used to being faster than those around him, but it felt as though the Wutaians between himself and Genesis were standing still in a line to be cut down. As if, had he not been in such a hurry to reach his destination, he could have taken his time killing them. He didn’t.

The ninja that had felled Genesis had not been taking his time, but Sephiroth severed his arm before the second blow could fall.

Angeal was down on one knee. Sephiroth beheaded the ninja he had already disarmed, and the red-gold light of a Phoenix Down glowed briefly. Genesis must have stopped breathing. Green healing glowed. Angeal swore. That was never a promising thing to hear following medical intervention.

He glanced down, and Genesis was breathing—but he was also bleeding. His wound showed no sign of having been healed. Angeal had to lunge to his feet to deflect a shuriken coming from the direction Sephiroth was not covering, but the Restore was warming green again on his right wrist.

The gaps he and Angeal had left in the line were being felt; no one had broken through to the bridge yet but troopers were falling faster than they should and if either of the eager Thirds that were struggling to fill his place were to fall, the line would break. Well, then. They would simply have to ensure that there was no one left to break it.

Sephiroth lifted his sword in one hand and raised the energy of an Ice materia to fill the other, and spun into battle as though scattering raindrops.

-

Sephiroth somehow forced his way onto the medical transport going back to Midgar. It was probably a form of desertion and definitely dereliction of duty, but unless the Wutai had something truly terrible in reserve he wasn’t actually needed on the ground just now, and that sort of thing wasn’t punished in the upper levels the way it was with enlisted men. He could still feel the cold steel sliding into his chest the way it had not actually done; he was prepared to bluff his way as far as he could.

This turned out to be right to the doors of the Science Department emergency operating theater, where after about twenty minutes Professor Hollander came out and walked over to him and Angeal. “We’ve got Genesis stabilized,” he told Angeal. “For now.”

Sephiroth felt strangely invisible as Angeal said, “What do you mean ‘for now?’”

“The complications aren’t something we can fix just like that.” Hollander shook his head. “With the right combination of Cure and Esuna we should be able to get him fit for duty again,” Hollander said. “But first he’ll need some blood.”

Sephiroth stepped forward to volunteer, but he hadn’t even completed the motion before Hollander was glowering at him. “You’ve done enough.” He looked toward Angeal. “It’s not ideal, but…” He beckoned, and Angeal came with him.

This left Sephiroth alone to haunt the Shinra building as unobtrusively as possible in case someone noticed he should be in Wutai, and work his way through reams of paperwork that actually belonged to one of the Commanders assigned to Midgar.

Angeal was more intelligent than people looking at the bulk of his shoulders tended to expect, and he kept his ears open, and that evening he was able to tell Sephiroth the damning truth: Genesis had developed some rare genetic imbalance that was inhibiting his body’s ability to heal. And it was because of contamination from Sephiroth, the marks of which had been hidden, at first, because instead of the contaminants being incorporated into his cells as they had in Angeal’s his system had locked itself into an intense immunological struggle. One which it was now losing.

Genesis was dying.

The only bright spot was that even Hojo didn’t seem to have realized they had done it on purpose, and that was not very bright at all. Sephiroth was tempted to confess just so someone might punish him.

Angeal didn’t seem inclined to do so. “It was his idea,” his dark-haired friend murmured sometime around midnight, after hours sitting on one of the benches on the SOLDIER floor, drawn and silent. “It was his idea.”

He’d had his sword propped against his shoulder the whole time, one hand folded up to grip the hilt so that his arm wrapped around the blade like a child with a favorite comfort object, and now he swung it up with an easy twist of the wrist to set the base against his forehead, eyes clenched just a little too tight to seem serene. “But I encouraged him.”

“Angeal…” Sephiroth mumbled.

“It’s not your fault,” Angeal told him without opening his eyes. “It’s not your fault, Sephiroth.” He lowered the sword. “You haven’t done anything. It’s not your fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” Sephiroth echoed back. He didn’t think Angeal believed it any more than he had.

-

“I’m so very sorry,” Sephiroth told Genesis the first time he was allowed to see him. The echo of that first day, when he hadn’t even understood that the other SOLDIERs might be trying to be friendly, let alone potential friends, woke the phantom stab wound between his ribs. It was in the other side of his chest from where Angeal’s shrapnel had landed, and despite the fact that that wound had been real and this was not, he felt more injured now than he had then.

Genesis’ gesture of dismissal was much more fluid and flourishing than his own had been. “Nonsense, my brother in arms. It wasn’t your fault.” In case the stress laid on your had not been clear enough, Genesis suggested with his eyebrows that he knew precisely whose fault it was. And he didn’t mean himself, not that Genesis was ever the type to blame himself for anything.

Well, it was first and foremost the Science Department’s for not informing SOLDIER of the possibility of their giving one another bizarre genetic conditions until it was too late. Sephiroth hadn’t actually poisoned Genesis’ blood under combat conditions, but it was easily possible he could have. It was actually somewhat surprising Genesis was the first to fall ill, considering how frequently SOLDIERs bled on each other…

Sephiroth met Genesis’ eyes, and he understood. Looked over at Angeal, to check that he had figured it out as well, but he knew Genesis better and had spent more time eavesdropping on Hollander; of course he had.

“Once I get out of here,” Genesis said easily, “what do you think of all three of us going for lunch somewhere that isn’t the cafeteria? I didn’t think anything but army rations could be worse than that slop, and yet here I have learned differently.”

“I grew up on this food,” Sephiroth said mildly. “I assure you the nutritional balance is calculated to a nicety.”

“Well, if it will help him grow up to be like you,” Angeal said with heavy irony that didn’t seem aimed at anyone in particular.

Genesis knew something about his condition that the Science Department didn’t want him to share.

He was going to tell them anyway.

-

The war was different when they got back to it—Sephiroth thought at first it was a change in his own attitude, but realized before long that there was a new deference in the way his comrades reacted to him, a new terror from his enemies. A new, almost obsequious air from his commanding officer that occasionally flared with resentment.

He and Angeal fought back to back now whenever they could, and Sephiroth could not decide whether he was imagining that they were oddly well synchronized, as if he simply knew where his blood brother was without having to look. A whisper in the bottom of his mind that mirrored the way Genesis’ pain in the instant of taking a mortal wound had been somehow contagious.

Perhaps they had imagined that, too, and this was just the result of familiarity and keen reflexes. He didn’t say anything about it to Angeal.

They were gaining territory again, step by bloody, grueling step. He wondered what it would take to get the Wutai to surrender. He wondered if he could do whatever it was.

Of course, even if the war ended, that didn’t mean his friends would be safe.

They put Genesis back on missions two weeks after his injury. Monster-hunting on the Eastern continent, mostly. At least he hadn’t been sent back to Wutai yet, but it was only a matter of time. “Hollander says if I stay on the casualty lists much longer the department will pull his time and funding for the problem,” the red-haired colonel told Angeal over the phone when they called him from base camp, with Sephiroth listening in beside him. “I’m only a Second, after all, there are hundreds of me; my potential doesn’t count for anything if I’m going to die. But if I stay useful…”

Angeal put his fist through the wall. The other soldiers using the communications room startled and looked around, but when they saw him extricating his fist carefully from the splinters of cheap plyboard clearly realized he’d gotten bad news and returned to their own business. “This company,” Angeal said quietly. It wasn’t a hiss, or a growl—even his facial expression was only a few degrees more thunderous than ‘grim’—but the feelings came through clearly anyway.

“…yes, quite,” said Genesis from the other end of the line. “I swear, some days for five gil I’d pitch every department but SOLDIER into the sea.”

Sephiroth lifted the telephone handset neatly from Angeal’s grasp and put it to his own ear. “Come, the troopers give good service.”

“True,” Genesis agreed. “Very well, all active military may stay clear of the drink.”

“Unlikely,” replied Sephiroth, and Genesis burst out laughing.

He stopped pretty quickly, his left lung still weak, but his mood didn’t turn down too sharply at the reminder. “Did you hear that, Angeal?” he called, loud enough that Angeal probably could hear it, although his grim expression had barely lightened. “He made a joke! We have to go out drinking in celebration next time you two are in Midgar!”

The fact that he could probably do that if he chose was still a new idea, but Sephiroth gave an agreeable hum. “If your condition allows for that sort of thing,” he said.

“Oh, it should,” Genesis said airily. “My wound reopens occasionally, but so long as I keep a Heal and a Restore on me and use them proactively I’m perfectly functional.”

A flesh wound that would not heal would be one thing. This had run through his lung.

“Don’t push yourself,” Sephiroth directed.

Genesis snorted. “I’m assigned to Midgar, SOLDIER Commander Sephiroth, I’m not under your command.” A pause in which he probably rolled his eyes. “I don’t plan to take risks,” he allowed. “Put Angeal back on?”

-

They didn’t get drinks next time Sephiroth and Angeal had leave. Genesis was back in medical when they got to Midgar.

The stack of books beside his bed when they visited stood testament to how accustomed he was getting to being confined. Sephiroth supposed it was better for this to happen to Genesis than Angeal from that perspective; he was worse at stillness but had much more tolerance for lack of physical activity.

“I’ve been catching up on culture,” Genesis explained when he saw Sephiroth looking. He was dressed in a magenta buttoned shirt and had his hair styled, but was reclining in his hospital bed propped on pillows, bedclothes pulled over his lap, and hadn’t tried to sit up straight when they came in. “Amazing how much more reading you can get done as an invalid than on active duty.”

“These aren’t even all about Loveless,” Angeal observed, a book in each hand as he studied their spines.

“I do read other things,” Genesis sniffed.

Angeal shuffled through the stack for a few seconds and came up with three different editions of the work itself. Raised his eyebrows.

“Shut up.” Genesis turned away from his oldest friend—as best he could without moving his torso too much—and gave all his attention to Sephiroth instead.

Sephiroth raised his own brows. “He isn’t wrong.” Genesis wrinkled his nose.

“How bad is it, really?” Angeal asked abruptly, grim and blank, and—Angeal didn’t do that; he could be forbidding but Sephiroth had never considered him any better than Genesis at not broadcasting his feelings to the vicinity. Well. Perhaps a bit better than Genesis.

This time the smile was thin as a Wutaian blade. “Hollander says if he hasn’t had a breakthrough in six weeks, my course of treatment will be switched to palliative care. The plus side is that Shinra will cover all the drugs I need for four months. If I take longer than that to die the paperwork to requisition painkillers gets challenging.”

This unfeeling corporate fact lay on the rumbled blanket like the gutted husk of an insectoid monster, obdurately existing despite everyone’s distinct preferences.

Angeal and Sephiroth shared a look across the bed. It was uncomfortable enough that Genesis would probably use the word ‘anguished.’ Say something, Sephiroth thought. He had never wished more to be telepathic, although he could be fairly sure the slight, unsurprised widening of Angeal’s eyes meant something like no, you even without confirmed psychic powers.

“They had a man in here talking about my pension the other day,” Genesis drawled. He was only just seventeen, his pension ought to be a concern as remote to him as the stars. “They’ll pay it out to my designated next of kin for twenty years. It’s a pittance, since I’ve only been in the service a few years, but the circumstances count as dying in action so there’s a bonus for that. I don’t want my parents to get it, Goddess knows they have all the money they need, so I’ve amended my paperwork to designate the two of you the beneficiaries, as adopted siblings. If I don’t make it—”

“You can’t just—” Angeal broke in.

“It’s not charity, Angeal, I’m spiting my father—”

“I don’t care about whether it’s charity,” Angeal snapped. “Stop talking like you’re sure you’re going to die.”

“I’m not sure,” Genesis said after a moment. “But since I don’t have any means, just now, of planning to survive, I’m making plans for the event of my death.” He frowned. “You could be grateful, Angeal, if you can’t manage supportive.”

“Grateful.” The flatness didn’t belong in Angeal’s voice. His fist clenched. “You have a plan,” he said firmly. It wasn’t so much an accusation—it was a demand, this is how the world must be, I cannot accept it otherwise. “To survive. Let me know when you’re ready to share it.”

With that, he left the room, Buster-style sword wide across his stiff back. He was seventeen, now, and had almost grown into his shoulders.

“He’s going to regret that exit if I take a turn for the worst overnight and perish tragically,” Genesis remarked into the silence left behind.

Sephiroth turned to stare at him. “You are resigned,” he said, and this was accusatory.

Genesis looked aside. “Not really.” The corner of his mouth curled, eyes on the door. “One walked away,” he murmured.

That blank silver feeling that had come over Sephiroth on the battlefield when Genesis took his wound teased at the edges of his consciousness, but there was no enemy here to devastate. “I don’t want your pension.”

Genesis flicked his fingers. “Well, give it all to Angeal then—I daresay he needs it more, he’s paid less than you and forever sending his pay home to his mother in her dirt-floored shack. He’d have been even more impossible if I’d tried to give it just to him, though.” He narrowed his eyes sharply. “Not that it will matter, if I survive. Which I fully intend to do, damn you. But what can I be expected to do about it from here?”

Sephiroth looked down at the stack of books. “You could be studying the relevant science, instead of the history of literature.”

“And in a few months of study from my bed crack the problem that several doctorates who created it are stymied by?”

Sephiroth shrugged. A slim chance, but surely better than none.

“I can’t even get access to the data!” Genesis expostulated. “My biology is above my clearance level.”

That, he admitted, was an obstacle, but as it was a practical one it was also something that could be addressed and surmounted. Spiting Hojo sounded at the moment like an excellent side benefit to any efforts to that end, rather than a drawback. Even if it hadn’t been, this was his doing; he could risk more than Hojo for his brother. “I can try to get it for you. How have you been getting your books?”

Genesis looked annoyed for a further moment before lapsing back into exaggerated weary tolerance. “They assigned me a permanent aide during my first convalescence; I’m now on indefinite leave and they’ve stopped sending me paperwork—thank the Goddess, I would throw it in their faces and laugh if they tried it now—but no one’s reassigned the boy.”

“SOLDIER?” Sephiroth asked.

“Cadet. Redhead from Mideel, enthusiastic about sharing a continent of origin. Anyway he’s tolerably adept at fetching things from libraries.”

Sephiroth nodded. “Introduce us.” Someone who was expected to be carrying Genesis books and papers would be less likely to draw suspicion. He wondered how you went about vetting a soldier for trustworthiness in interdepartmental subterfuge.

“That’s your strategist voice,” Genesis observed. “You’re plotting on my behalf. My hero.” The irony dripped.

“Someone has to.” Angeal would help. Genesis would too, presumably. He wasn’t actually self-destructive, Sephiroth didn’t think. Only bitter.

Genesis chuckled, fingers straying over the embossed cover of one of his volumes. “You know, in the old stories…things like ‘The Golden Chocobo’ and ‘Goddess Catches the Moon,’ where there are three brothers that go out to seek their fortunes…the eldest always fails first, and worst, and the youngest is always the hero.” He covered his eyes with one hand. “Perhaps I should have taken it as a warning.”

“I’m no hero,” said Sephiroth, because his idea of a hero might be vague but it certainly didn’t describe a fifteen-year-old who felt most comfortable doing paperwork alone in a cubicle and got everyone around him killed, whatever the trashy puff articles published after the bridging of Shou-Gurren might suggest. “But we’re not going to let you die.”

Chapter Text

The Turks told them where to find Mother. It wasn’t even because they tortured them—the black-suits were kinda tough, Loz would give them that. Hurting them might never have worked. But the yellow-hair girl liked to talk, and when they left her alone with her boss after working them both over for a while, she took less time than it took Loz to get bored waiting for her to reassure him that the President had the item safe with him.

“Elena,” said her partner, but it was too late.

(The red man came and got the Turks out after that, but it didn’t matter anymore, which was probably why Kadaj hadn’t done anything with them already.)

There were only two black-suits protecting the President in his little treehouse, and when Loz pulled him out of his chair and threw him on the ground—there she was. Everything they needed fitted into a little black box. Mother. They left the Shinra people on the floor and turned to go—white-President lunged up from the floor and started shooting at Kadaj, the bigger darker Turk (Loz-Turk, Yazoo’d called him) lurched up and flung a punch, and the red one electrocuted Yazoo’s ankle.

The Shinra didn’t manage to hurt Mother, or take her back. The three brothers got on their bikes and rode, hard and fast and far, with joy filling their chests to bursting, and finally stopped when they got out to the badlands where they could park on a high bluff and see in every direction, so no one could sneak up on them.

Kadaj was smiling all over his face as he turned to the other two, punched the air with the hand not holding onto Mother. “We did it! Yes!”

“Yeah!” said Loz.

Yazoo didn’t say anything, but he was smiling.

“And now it’s almost time for the Reunion,” announced Kadaj. “We’ll meet Sephiroth, and find all the children, and then our whole family can finally be together.”

“Yeah,” said Loz. He was smiling too. Reunion.

“Then, I guess…” Kadaj peeled at the yellow seal, and then carefully eased the box open. His face fell. “Mother?” he asked.

Loz leaned in. It was—just her hand. Lying in mako like a pickle. He wanted to cry, but—not quite. Mother had wanted them to come to her, even if she couldn’t look at them like this, or talk to them in their ears instead of their hearts. What were hands good for, that mothers could do?

“I guess she wants to touch us,” he said, and Kadaj took a sharp little breath and nodded.

“Yes. Yes, of course, you’re right.” Carefully, he reached into the box, picked Mother up by the wrist. Leaned over, across two sets of handlebars, and pressed her palm into Yazoo’s throat, above his coat, just under his chin. A curl of black smoke rose up and Yazoo breathed in too, sharper and hard.

“Mother,” he whispered.

Kadaj turned to Loz, and Loz tipped his chin up but he didn’t have to really, because his coat opened further than Yazoo’s and Mother touched him on the chest, the flat part just below the neck and oh. His little breath might be more like a sob. It hurt, he wasn’t even really surprised that it hurt, like fire drilling into his chest and running out in little lines all the way through him, but it was good hurt, it felt right, it meant everything was going to be alright now, because he was with Mother and she was with him and they were never going to be apart ever again.

Kadaj took Mother’s hand away, and smiled at him. “Just me now.”

Mother reached for Kadaj’s throat, and Loz was about ready to cry from happy which he hadn’t even known was a thing you could feel this much, and there was more smoke this time which was not really weird because Kadaj was the most important, and.

And Mother’s hand disappeared.

And Kadaj bent over, curling up, like maybe more smoke meant more pain.

And he stood up again taller than he’d ever been, and his hair falling longer and not Kadaj at all.

Loz was too surprised to do anything but gape. “Sephiroth,” breathed Yazoo.

And this was—great, it really was, even if Loz had never been as interested in their big brother as Kadaj, but Kadaj wasn’t supposed to be gone. It was supposed to be all of them together.

Sephiroth turned and walked away. Within a few steps, he was rising into the air, and going faster every second.

Loz’s throat closed. “A-Aniki!” he called out through it. “Wait up!” He and Yazoo were on their bikes and riding simultaneously, in seconds, but Sephiroth already had a lead on them. He wasn’t waiting. “Where are you going?” Loz tried, because as long as they could meet up later it would be fine. Kadaj had always liked to go off on his own a lot. He just—usually he told them where to meet him again, or they already knew where he’d be coming back to.

Sephiroth kept flying—he wasn’t even pretending to walk anymore—like he hadn’t heard. Loz gunned the engine. “Aniki!”

Yazoo was right beside him still. Loz groped for his gun, pulled it free and fired it into the air. "Aniki!” he roared, “Sephiroth!” and kept shooting until their oldest brother finally turned.

Just like that, he was in front of them, right in front, and Loz spun out and his bike went over, skidding. He planted his free hand and caught himself and almost tried to catch his bike too, but realized Sephiroth was more important and just relaxed his legs and let it go, pinwheeling out across the dirt on its side until it hit a rock. Yazoo managed to dodge without crashing, and circled back around to where Loz was lying on the ground, Sephiroth hovering just above.

“Where are you going?” Loz asked, now that he had his biggest brother’s attention.

Sephiroth’s eyes looked straight through him even when he was looking at him. “Even if you ask that, it doesn’t matter.”

Yazoo idled to a halt just behind Loz. “As your brothers,” he told Sephiroth, “we want to support you.”

“You’re only a couple of spare remnants.” Greener-than-Kadaj’s eyes slid away from both of them, disinterested. “If Mother has no other purpose for you, wait. Sooner or later you will become a part of me.”

Then he left. Even if Loz hadn’t crashed his bike, he couldn’t have kept up this time. And Sephiroth’d said there was no point anyway.

He went over to right his motorcycle and see if he could fix it up enough to ride again. Which somehow before too long just meant sitting in the dirt fiddling with wires in the starter mechanism while Yazoo came over. He was the quietest of all of them and Loz couldn’t actually hear him, but he knew he was there anyway.

Yazoo sat down next to him, and Loz couldn’t even get his eyes clear enough to see his brother’s expression. “Going to tell me to stop crying?” he sniffled. There didn’t seem to be any point in denying it, anymore.

“…no,” said Yazoo.

Which just proved that everything was awful.

“I miss Kadaj,” Loz said, finally. Their brother hadn’t been gone long enough for that to make sense, except he was never coming back which meant it already felt like he’d been gone forever. It had been so easy, when Kadaj was around—the work had been huge and overwhelming, but they’d had a purpose, they’d had Mother to find, and they’d had jobs to do and….

“I know,” said Yazoo.

After a long time he added quietly, “So do I.”

-

They weren’t there, days later, when the other-brother that Kadaj had liked to call their Black Sheep cut down Sephiroth in the ruins of Midgar, when the skies tore open and rain came down that scoured Mother’s gift from within every human it touched. Yazoo and Loz were on the Northern Continent, in the Sleeping Forest. (It was one of the first places they remembered being. It had always been Kadaj’s favorite.) They weren’t even plotting, because they didn’t know enough to plot. Also only one of them was even a little bit good at it. Loz was throwing nuts as hard as he could, and Yazoo was shooting them out of the air. He only knew something had changed when the gun reports ceased and the latest nuts fell to the ground whole.

“Hey, Yazooo, what’s—” he complained, looking around, and—it was Sephiroth.

He was standing just where Yazoo had been, but Yazoo’s coat and smirk and the long barrels of his guns (they were both really his, even though one was supposed to be Loz’s and he usually carried it) were gone. Sephiroth wore silver on his shoulders and he was as tall as Loz, taller than Yazoo.

Sephiroth looked angry. “If that is how you want it,” he said—not to Loz, though, he wasn’t even looking at Loz. He was staring off through the trees, southeast. His sword appeared in his hand. It was big. “No more games, then. I will consume the life of this Planet, and then all will be one with me. And you will know too late to change it.”

“Sephiroth…” said Loz.

Kadaj used to say I don’t know Sephiroth. They all knew that when they reunited with Mother they’d get to meet him, and Loz thought Kadaj was the one who’d cared the most about that, but he never got the chance. Sephiroth started walking—up the path, toward the dead city. “Aniki!” Yazoo wasn’t there anymore, and Loz thought he knew what that meant, but he—“Aniki, where’s Kadaj? What happened?”

Sephiroth paused. Maybe he remembered what happened last time he ignored Loz and didn’t want the trouble, or maybe he liked the question. “I underestimated Cloud,” he said. “It won’t happen again.”

“So Kadaj is—”

“Dead.” Sephiroth glanced back at him, over his shoulder, and his hair swung so much like Yazoo’s used to but totally different, paler and longer and…it was like it was heavier somehow even though it was sort of floating. “You’re the last spare. Try to keep yourself in good condition.” Then he started walking again.

Loz stood still for a little while, and then he cast Haste and started to run, off away from the path, ran until his legs ached and then turned and started beating up the trees. His knuckles left streaks of blood on the raw wood by the end, and he maybe should have used his gauntlet but it wasn’t like trees were difficult opponents.

Finally he was so tired he just sat down on a log that used to be part of a tree. His insides hurt a little less now that his outsides hurt too. Still a lot, though.

Loz’s hand went to the place on his chest where Mother had touched him. Sephiroth had lost, that was what this meant. Cloud and his friends had beaten him again, and he wanted to be mad at the stupid cheaters but his chest just felt empty, empty, empty. Missing Kadaj had been miserable, but he didn’t even know how to miss Yazoo. It was like…if you stopped being able to see and hear on one side, not so much missing him as him always not being there.

If Sephiroth lost again, he would come and use Loz. If he won, Loz would be swallowed up along with all the other energy on this Planet while they went looking for a different one.

Loz was scared to die, but he didn’t mind it. It was just becoming part of Mother again, or part of Sephiroth, or maybe even part of the Planet, and being Loz was uncomfortable and lonely and sad, but—but Sephiroth hadn’t cared who Kadaj was, or Yazoo. He might not know their names, even. Once everything was part of him, he still wouldn’t care.

Loz had lived all his life for Mother and the Reunion, but he was the last one left who remembered Kadaj and Yazoo. Those memories shouldn’t disappear.

-

He crept into Edge at night like a fox through a warren of mu. Mother’s enemies lived here, and he knew a little bit about them because Kadaj had cared. There was a church in ruined Midgar where he might be able to find one of them alone, but it turned out to be full of really scary water, so he’d backed out in a hurry. Decided to head for the bar, instead—he didn’t know how to find it, but getting directions to a bar wasn’t so hard, not when you knew the name. Even if it did mean talking to humans.

Someone caught up with him before he was halfway there. He’d probably been following him since the church, if Loz thought about it. He should have been paying attention but that had never been his job before.

“Stop.”

Loz stopped, but he also turned around. Flexed his fingers inside the Dual Hound. Just a few days ago, before they’d found Mother, he would have thought the little yellow man looked fun to fight. (Sephiroth thought so.) Now nothing seemed like much fun. “Aniki,” Loz said.

Cloud drew back a little. “I’m not…”

He still felt like part of them. Not the same muted pull from back when Loz had seen him riding his bike from a long way off, on Kadaj’s scouting expeditions, but—something. Mother still had some hold on him, even if he wasn’t dying anymore. He was still a brother. And he might kill him, sure, but that was the only kind of brother Loz had left. “Sephiroth killed Yazoo,” Loz said, and started to cry.

He turned out to have to explain who Yazoo was, but Cloud didn’t tell him to stop crying. He just waited, standing patiently while Loz covered his face with his hand and tried to keep talking even though everything hurt so much.

When he was done, brother black-sheep gave a sigh.

“I…held Kadaj while he died,” Cloud said.

“You met him?” Loz hadn’t expected that. He guessed he’d thought they’d killed Sephiroth and he’d just—disappeared, to take over Yazoo. “You…you killed him. Didn’t you.”

“I’m not sure,” said Cloud. His eyebrows drew together a little, and he reminded Loz of Kadaj for a second. But he didn’t break out of the thoughtful moment and wave his arms or talk hugely, he just—looked up at Loz and said in the same low voice, “I killed Sephiroth. And then he melted away and it was this kid who must have been Kadaj. He didn’t have any of the wounds I gave Sephiroth, but…he was dying. He dissolved into light,” Cloud added. “Starting from his right hand. He was smiling.”

Loz was crying again, loud messy sobs like never before and he couldn’t stop and Cloud still didn’t tell him to.

He squatted down beside Loz in the end, after he’d cried himself into a sort of puddle. “Why did you come here?” he asked.

“Sephiroth killed Yazoo,” Loz said, back around to the start.

“And?” Cloud waited a second. “You don’t want him to kill you?”

Loz shook his head. Now that he knew Kadaj hadn’t stopped existing it was…he didn’t care so much about staying alive. But if Sephiroth won now and the whole Planet joined the Reunion then Kadaj would be gone again forever, and Yazoo would never exist again, and… “I don’t want my brothers to be all the way gone,” he said.

Cloud put a hand on his back. It felt weird, but not bad. “My friend Aerith is in the Lifestream,” he said. “She was there to meet Kadaj. She’s taking care of him.”

It felt wrong to be relying on anybody but Mother, but Mother…only cared about Sephiroth, and it wasn’t fair. He sniffled. “Will she take care of Yazoo, too?”

“I’m sure. My friend Zack will, too.” Cloud nodded, a sharp little thing that wasn’t quite like Kadaj but made Loz think of him anyway. “Him too.”

“And me?”

Cloud frowned a little. “You’re still alive.”

“Yeah, but if I stay that way I’ll just turn into Sephiroth when…when Yazoo is used up.” He gulped and hiccupped and tried not to start crying again. He wished there was an enemy to punch that wasn’t…well, his brothers. He wished there was an enemy he could punch that was here. He punched the ground, because it was all the Planet’s stupid fault somehow, but he barely put any power into it and there wasn’t a shockwave or anything.

Cloud’s hand on his back patted a few times. “Let’s talk about that later,” he said. “How about you come to the Seventh Heaven now and we get you…something to eat. And a handkerchief.”

Loz had never really eaten anything before, except some candy he got once. He’d tasted a lot of things, like the chestnuts, but most of them were nasty. Kadaj said that was because they weren’t food and stop being stupid. Yazoo thought the faces he made were funny and kept finding him new things to try. He sniffled again. “Okay.”

-

Seventh Heaven belonged to a girl who made food, and she gave Loz some, and it was…really good. Maybe better than candy. “Whoah, slow down,” she said halfway through his second bowl. “You’ll get sick. You’re eating like you never had real food before.”

Loz guessed he could slow down. He stopped eating stew to have some bread. “Haven’t,” he said around the bread.

Her eyebrows went up. She looked at Cloud. Cloud shrugged. “Well that’s not good. What have you been eating?”

“Stuff. Nuts a couple of times. A rock, that was a bad idea.” Yazoo had laughed for forever, though. “Kadaj gave me candy once.”

“Uh…” The girl who made food was making a face that Yazoo probably would have liked almost as much as the ones Loz made. “How old are you?”

Loz thought about it. “How many days are in a week?” he asked.

“Seven,” said Cloud.

“Okay, about…ten, fifteen of those, then.”

Looked like that was a surprise. “You look older,” said the girl after a second.

“Can I have some more?” asked Loz, holding out his bowl.

She gave him some more.

Cloud brought more people while he was eating it, and Loz explained a little better this time about Sephiroth and Kadaj and Yazoo because he didn’t cry so hard this time. “Y’mean we need t’stop him again already?” exclaimed the smaller of the two cats. “Crikey!”

“How surprised are we, really?” asked the Seventh Heaven girl.

“Huh. Maybe some of us besides Cloud can actually fight this time,” grumbled the dark man without a shirt. One of his hands was metal and Loz thought he might be fun to fight against. If he was actually strong.

“Aerith’s water might make a good attack item now,” said Cloud. “I want to bring bottles of it.”

“And all the good materia!” said the smallest girl. “Cloud, I’ll loan you Leviathan again, just this time!”

“We’ll need to move fast,” said the red man, the one who’d rescued the Turks.

Seventh Heaven girl nodded. “If he’s already in the City of the Ancients and planning to take us by surprise, he might have something nasty ready to go. There are a lot of Geostigma cases away from Midgar that he can still use until we cure them, and I guess there isn’t time to get the water to everyone before that.”

“Does anybody know how he did that damn thing with the clouds?” asked the yellow-haired man that wasn’t Cloud. A couple of people looked at Loz, who had no idea what they were talking about let alone how it worked. He spooned up more stew. It really was better than candy.

The larger cat, the red one, was looking at Loz. “Is he coming?” it asked. Its voice reminded him of Yazoo. It hurt.

“Where?” Loz asked, when everybody else looked at him too instead of answering.

“To fight Sephiroth.”

Was he. Going to come. Fight Sephiroth.

Loz dropped his spoon. Oh. His hands never shook before. He stood up.

“Loz?” asked the Seventh Heaven girl.

“My—” The table was shaking too, now. “My head feels funny.”

-

When he woke up, the table was broken. Most of the tables were broken.

“Jenova or Sephiroth noticed,” said Cloud, who had a cut over his eye that hadn’t been there before. “She attacked us.”

“You’re pretty tough,” said the girl who’d fed him, not very angry. “Look at my place now!”

Loz sat down. There wasn’t a chair anymore, but he didn’t care. He put his head in his hands.

“It’s okay,” said Cloud. He was coming closer. “It happened to me before. Nobody got hurt. You’ll be okay.”

“Mother’s mad at me,” said Loz. And of course she was mad, he was going against her plans, he was getting in the way of her plans, he was going against his family. He should have known this already. “Mother’s mad at me and I don’t know how to feel.”

He’d loved Mother more than anything as long as he could remember. Except…it looked like Kadaj and Yazoo were more important, after all.

One of the people made a weird throaty sound—yellow man who wasn’t Cloud, now holding a spear. “Are we gonna start with the goddamn waterworks again?”

Food girl’s fist closed. “Shut up, Cid, he’s three months old. I bet you cried more at his age.”

“I can’t come fight Sephiroth,” Loz said. His head didn’t start shaking again. That was good.

“Now, that’s not—” Food Girl began.

Cloud interrupted her. “Don’t, Tifa. Or you, Barrett.” He folded his arms. “I remember the speeches I got after the Temple of the Ancients. You were right that I couldn’t give up, but that didn’t mean I should go rushing in trying to fight a person who could get inside my head more than anybody else’s.”

“Yeah,” agreed the smallest girl, who liked materia. “Learn from your mistakes, geez!”

“So what are we gonna do with him?” asked Metal Hand. “Lock ‘im up?”

“You have a prison Sephiroth could not escape from?” asked the red man. He didn’t sound like he thought Metal Hand actually did. Loz didn’t think he did, either. There probably wasn’t one.

“What do you think, Loz?” Tifa the food girl asked, bending over. She was nice and it made him want to cry.

He shrugged instead. He’d told them what he knew, and if the Planet was being nice to Kadaj now then that part was okay, and Sephiroth had told him to keep his body in good condition. In case he needed it. “I guess you should kill me,” he said.

Everybody started shouting.

The tiny girl and the spear man thought killing him sounded fine. Tifa and the big cat thought it didn’t. The small cat didn’t make any sense. Metal Hand was arguing…both sides at once?

“We don’t have time to argue about this!” Tifa shouted loudest of all, and stomped a broken table-leg into two pieces with a big crack that made most of everybody shut up. She reminded Loz of Kadaj kind of a lot. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter what any of us think. Loz,” she said, turning to face him and bending down a little, because he was still sitting on the floor. “That’s not right. None of this is your fault. You shouldn’t have to die to stop someone else’s plans.”

Loz guessed it was nice that somebody cared what was fair. “It’s how it is,” he said. Didn’t cry, because Kadaj and Yazoo wouldn’t have wanted him to. They wouldn’t have wanted him to side with Mother’s enemies either, but maybe if they’d been the ones left behind they’d have decided the same thing.

Maybe not. Maybe Loz was just that weak. But they weren’t here so he couldn’t ask them. So there.

Yellow Spear Man rubbed the back of his head. “Aw, hell. Listen, kid…”

“You think there’s anyone in this world that really understands themselves?” asked Metal Hand. “People get depressed because they don’t know what’s up, but that doesn’t mean they lie down and die. You gotta keep gettin’ up. Cuz that’s life. That's living.” Loz looked up at him. It wasn’t like he wanted to die because he was sad or confused or giving up. Except maybe it was like that. So Metal Hand was arguing both sides because he thought Loz should be dead but didn’t like that Loz was going along with it? Humans really didn’t make any sense.

“Barret,” said Cloud, so Loz figured that was Metal Hand’s name. Then he looked down again at Loz. “There’s one thing we can do,” Cloud told him. “It’s risky. But if you survive, then you probably don’t have to worry about Sephiroth. Any more than everybody else does.”

Tifa bit her lip. “Cloud, do you really think…”

“We don’t have time to research his biology, y’know!” said the little cat in the pointy hat. Loz glared at it.

He looked back at Cloud. Who was the only brother he had left, he guessed. He got up off the floor.

-

When they got back to the scary church, the sun was rising. Nobody was there but the two of them. There was a big hole in the roof and a big sword stabbed into the table on the other side of the water. It sort of reminded Loz of that place in the white woods Kadaj liked, with the spiky house. But in a building. Surrounded by broken buildings. And trash.

It was actually sort of like a forest. A burned-down, human forest.

Loz didn’t like the water.

Cloud waded in ahead of him. The water was scary and also shiny, in the rising sun, but Cloud got up to his stomach okay and turned around, looked up. “Come on,” he said, very soft. He was shiny, too. Huh. Yazoo would have made fun of it. Kadaj would have liked it though. Kadaj had always been shiniest.

Loz took a breath. Kadaj was in the Lifestream, and he’d been smiling, and the Planet had taken him and not ripped him apart, and Cloud’s dead friends were taking care of him, and the worst thing that could happen here was that he wound up with Kadaj. So it was fine. He stepped in. Scary-bright water closed over his legs, and he waded out toward Cloud until it came to his waist.

There was something alive in the water. No. The water was part of something alive.

Look at you, it said, and it curled under his skin and-and-and—“It’s tasting me,” Loz said. Maybe sort of squeaked.

“It’s okay,” said Cloud encouragingly. “You’re not melting, that’s a good sign.”

Yeah. Not melting. It…didn’t even exactly hurt. Loz bunched up his shoulders. “It tickles.”

Want to be mine? it asked, and slid a little deeper, into the thick weight of his muscles. There was no space for it and it hurt.

“I want to be mine,” Loz said back without thinking about it. It wasn’t exactly what he meant, because what he wanted to belong to was his brothers, but he was the only one left, so—so—

Green fire curling under his skin said, Alien dead wrong thing, and he saw a picture that he knew somehow was him, what he really was, what Mother had used to make him—a scrap of muscle from the curve of the shoulder, pale, no blood left in it, chips of bone stuck in the bottom and that was all, that was all that was real, just a little piece of Sephiroth and an even smaller piece of Mother—Loz was—

His face was under the water now and he thought maybe he’d fallen down. He tried to get up and he couldn’t. Somewhere, a girl was talking, but he couldn’t hear the words. Tifa? Not Tifa. Definitely not Mother. Monster? the water asked. Here to eat?

Loz was being eaten, and it wasn’t supposed to hurt, he was just supposed to be—melted, and with Kadaj—and Yazoo would come soon too, and they could just be—together—

Ahhhh, said the water, and it hurt so much.

And then there was an arm around his chest, hauling him up, and he was coughing up water and except for that nothing hurt at all.

Cloud dragged him up onto the floor and propped Loz against his tiny shoulder while he finished getting the water out of his lungs. “I think you’re okay now,” Cloud said.

“I got eaten,” said Loz. Sniffled and coughed at the same time, and then coughed harder for a second. Cloud’s hand slapped his back, even smaller than Kadaj’s but also even stronger, and Loz coughed himself out. “Yeah,” he decided. His breath started to come steady again. The sun had gotten even brighter while he was in the water, but the reflections didn’t sting anymore. Through the space where the roof wasn't, the sky was terribly blue. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

-

They caught up to Sephiroth in the second forest, the one in the middle of the city. The water was black and smoking.

They’d given Loz some new materia and it wouldn’t go into his arm like materia used to, so they gave him a bangle to wear it on, too. (The old materia were still in his arm, and he could use them. He couldn’t get them out. The cat in the hat was curious what would happen when they were mastered.)

Loz had Tifa on one side of him and the red man on the other, and altogether there were nine of them lined up on the ground. And one Sephiroth hovering overhead.

“Hey, Aniki!” Loz shouted, crouching down, and jumped. He couldn’t jump like Yazoo could have, or even like Kadaj, let alone how far Yazoo used to be able to get if Loz gave him a boost, but it was enough. Enough to get him high enough to drive his sparking fist into the chest that wasn’t Yazoo’s and probably couldn’t ever be Yazoo’s again. “You suck!”

Chapter Text

Nibelheim cider was one of those local specialties that you can never export because no one else wants it, but all the same, Montana Strife’s was some of the best in town. People would bring her the hard little apples from their trees in the autumn and pay her to press and season and ferment it for them, and give it back rich and sharp and strong enough to knock over a chocobo.

Nibel apples were only technically edible fresh, and there was only so much pie and preserves you could make before it turned into a waste of sugar.

People who didn’t own apple trees would buy her cider outright, as well, and she only had title to the one tree of her own—it was a good one, fruitful, had been in her mother’s family for generations—so come the apple time of year you could find her making expeditions into the hills to bring in wild apples down by the bushel-basket.

One of these expeditions gave her an excellent line of sight one afternoon, early in the autumn after she married, on the day that the mako reactor on top of Mount Nibel exploded in a pillar of green flames, taking much of the mountaintop with it.

The details got her free drinks and dinner at the inn for days, everybody in town cycling through to get the news out of her, and then moving on to anxious or giddy speculation, depending on their individual characters and politics.

Theirs had been the company’s oldest reactor, the one Old Man Shinra had had built back when Shinra was still a weapons manufacturer, as a test case. At the time he had still been thinking in terms of weapons potential, and powering his factories, not selling power to the public, but after the companies running the old coal plants had gotten a grid laid down and showed there was money in it Shinra had jumped in, undersold all competitors out of business with the advantage of not having to pay for fuel, and the Nibelheim reactor had been fueling the utility grid of much of the northern half of the Western Continent for over a decade by the time it blew.

The abrupt loss had the whole district in an uproar—the iconic spikes of Mount Nibel were only half remaining, and nobody had any electricity.

Montana and her husband hadn’t been able to afford it anyway, but the more well-off families in town were having to reinvent the lamp and candle, and it was all because Shinra couldn’t be bothered to do proper maintenance, Odin’s steel sword they had no sense of responsibility. The innkeeper pointed out at least they’d built the reactor far from town, and everyone drained their glasses in acknowledgement. The cracked crown of the Ice King could have been their town blown off the map, instead. At least they’d avoided that.

Privately, Montana wasn’t sorry to see the last of the thing. People who didn’t much leave town or their farms wouldn’t know, but the grey deadness of the upper reaches of Mount Nibel had been creeping downhill for years.

She suspected the reactor. And there wasn’t nearly enough Shinra money coming through to have kept the town alive, if the effect had gotten down to the valley, and farms had started to fail. Most of the Shinra revenue they had gotten was from the Shinra staff lodged at the manor house doing their personal shopping, and there weren’t all that many of them anymore.

None of them particularly good clients to the town tailor, either. There’d been a lady scientist once, in nice heels, who’d given the old tailor plenty of business with her very particular sense of style, though her taste in color combinations had apparently been appalling. But that had been years ago, when Montana hadn’t paid attention; her boyfriend’s father’s business had been none of hers. Nobody who’d worked there recently had wanted custom work done. They tended to wear uniforms—identical drab suits and blue combat fatigues, mostly. Some of the security people were sociable enough, in their off hours, but some of them made no secret of resenting their assignment to the back of beyond and the place for their being trapped in it.

Word trickled down eventually via the one mildly sociable fellow currently assigned to the place that the new Shinra Head of Science, a Professor Hojo, had been in the reactor when it blew—the Shinra people still in the manor said some sort of experiment had gotten loose, and chased him up there, and then probably somehow caused the explosion.

Which left the good people of Nibelheim wondering anew what kind of research exactly the Shinra were doing in their town.

People increasingly avoided passing too near the Manor.

Then, about a month and a half after the Nibel explosion, Shinra Tower far away on the Eastern Continent blew up, too.

This one was terrorists, apparently, not rogue experiments or maintenance problems, but it destroyed a large section of the half-built city and killed the President, and his family, and all but two of the highest-level company executives, not to mention (presumably these were separate explosions?) five out of eight reactors. Shinra was crippled.

The staff remaining in the Manor started to vanish, after that, in ones and twos, and at first there was a panic in town that more experiments must have gotten loose, and when they were done devouring the scientists and soldiers they would come for the town. But then a trio of labcoats were caught absconding onto the grasslands with bundles of materia and scientific equipment. They said what was left of Shinra central had shut down the Science Division and voided their contracts, and admitted to looting. They lacked the sense to be polite.

The Mayor and Mr. Lockhart took away most of the materia, then let them go.

The gossip mill was running high, and everyone was scrimping and worrying as the order of the world seemed to slowly decay out of existence, but it was doing so at a safe distance. Daily life barely altered, for now. The tailoring business was a little slow, but it had shaped up into a good harvest year, snares cropping up full and the beasts in them sleek, and Montana and Howe could get by on far less than they had. Life carried on.

Apple season was just about over now, even on the highest parts of the mountains that still supported life, where things ripened late because of the cold, but Montana had filled two bushel-baskets today and thought that one more gathering trip would be enough to start her last pressing of the year.

As she was tramping down the smooth grassy slope that was the very foot of the path up Mount Nibel, the town itself well within sight over the roof of the abandoned manor house, Montana caught a flash of silver in the corner of her vision.

She spun, hand going to her Fire materia, thinking of bandits and the brightness of swordblades. Saw instead a tiny, slim humanoid figure.

After another second, she realized it was not just humanoid, it was a child. The silver was hair, flowing gorgeously over narrow shoulders covered otherwise only by the thin folds of a white wrap dress without any sleeves.

The child was standing barefoot on the raised bank beside the road, fists clenched in what seemed to be more anxiety than any attempt to be threatening.

“Oh!” Montana put her hand over her heart, feeling a little silly as the light in her materia faded. “I thought you were a monster.”

The tiniest Snow, perhaps. She was a beautiful child, with huge green eyes and evenly proportioned features, and couldn’t be more than six. Montana had never laid eyes on her before. What was she doing in such a place alone?

The little girl shook her head. “Just a human,” she disagreed. Her voice was sweet and low, for her age, but the reverberations were human enough and made her seem less like a Snow, although the monsters had occasionally been known to talk.

She was most certainly not a Nibelheimer. “Are your parents anywhere around?”

“My mother died shortly after I was born,” the child said, with a cadence that suggested she was repeating the words of an adult. “And my father…” she shook her head. Apparently the man wasn’t worth considering. “I was living in the big house, but all the researchers left. Then I ran out of food,” she admitted.

Or…was she a boy? The more she (or he) talked the more Montana thought that might be the case, something in the delivery. Either way, her heart cracked in her chest.

She and Howe had not yet been married two years, and there was nothing odd about not having a child of their own yet. A tailor’s income was a little unstable in such a small town even at the best of times, and supporting children was always tricky. And yet. They’d started trying months ago. She couldn’t help feeling especially sentimental about children, lately, waiting for her own.

Montana climbed up the bank, then sank onto one knee, putting her face back on level with the child’s. “What’s your name?” she asked.

The child considered the question gravely. “Sephiroth,” she admitted at length.

“What a pretty name,” she praised. “I’m Montana. Would you like to come home with me?” It didn’t have to be forever. Maybe Sephiroth’s father would come back after all, or…maybe anything. But someone had to give the poor thing a meal and a bed for the night, and…

Sephiroth seemed hesitant. “Why?”

It was healthy for children not to go off with just any stranger, Montana reminded herself. “Because you ran out of food, and I have food at my house, and any grown-up worth anything would make sure a hungry child had something to eat.”

Sephiroth considered her. “Would you give me food…to take back into the big house?”

“I…suppose so.” There was an instinctive pull against it, but obviously if Sephiroth had come out of the Manor it couldn’t be too dangerous to go back in. “You’d probably be safer visiting me.”

The child considered this, then said, “No. Thank you.”

In the end Montana gave Sephiroth a slightly squashed pork pie and some cider—the fresh kind—and let her, or possibly him, go.

The next day, shortly before noon, she left her house, walked a short way to a gate and another short distance past it, and knocked on the door of the Manor. When there was no answer, she let herself in. “Hello?” she called softly.

Told herself not to be silly, there was no reason for there to be ghosts here—the Head of Science had been blown up at the top of the mountain—and pushed forward through the dusty entrance hall. It was all dark, varnished wood, already feeling profoundly abandoned, and it was curious how far she felt from everything she knew, as the door swung shut behind her.

The little girl in her wanted to whirl around at once, and test the latch to make sure she could get out again. But of course there were so many glassed windows in this place that even if the door stuck, she would hardly be trapped.

You could lean against the wall of the house she shared with her husband and pitch stones over the fence at the Shinra Manor, they were such near neighbors—the Manor had lost a windowpane that way, actually, when she was in her teens, to the strong arm of young Guy Lockhart. In terms of distance, the Manor ought properly to have been part of the town; there were houses much further away from the central square that certainly were.

But it had been a long time since any Nibelheimers had been allowed inside. The science team hadn’t hired local domestics, even, citing the risk of industrial espionage, which had offended everybody.

She wasn’t old enough to remember when people had lived here, rather than worked, but her mother said that the family used to hold parties four times a year, on the cardinal days, glittering affairs that drew the finest sorts from both sides of the Nibel Pass, and of course the Mayor of the town itself and other notables—nearly everyone, at the really large parties for the solstices.

Then the family’s only daughter had married the head of Shinra Weapons, Inc., and when her parents passed away the family home dwindled to the status of vacation house, visited for nostalgia or access to the clear mountain air. By the time the current President installed his science team, when Montana was a girl, the place had lain empty but for one old caretaker for a full ten years.

She peered through big double doors to find not a ballroom but only a wide, airy hall—larger than her whole house but not quite square enough to call a room, lined with some of those bright flashing windows you could see on the back of the house as you descended the pass, especially at sunset in winter. The glass was filthy.

There was a piano standing in a wide, bright room with gorgeous stained-glass windows at one end, that ached with emptiness, as if someone had once loved it very much, and in their absence it found itself desolate.

The kitchen had indeed been picked clean, partially by mice. The plants in the glass-room, once she gave up on the first floor and climbed the stairs, were surprisingly still alive, and Montana made a note to come back and water them. Assuming the mansion continued to contain nothing remarkable in terms of ghosts or monsters.

By this time she had found two beds and an office, all empty, and was very much wondering where all the science had been conducted. You could probably do some kinds of science at a desk but you needn’t go all the way to special facilities in Nibelheim, or be surrounded by assistants in neat grey suits, for that, surely. Perhaps there had been equipment in the piano room that some of the scientists had managed to slip out with, unseen.

Perhaps it had all been up at the reactor, and the Manor only served as housing—though considering how rarely anyone had come out of the place for years, if so they were extremely lazy.

Perhaps this had never been a scientific installation at all, and Shinra’s science people had actually come here for very long vacations on the company gil. Though that begged the question of what had chased the Department Head up to the reactor and triggered its explosion.

Delirium tremens, maybe.

The secret door to the basement opened on its own when she came near, which seemed like an absurd thing to design a secret door to do, and Montana stood very still with a fist raised and her Fire materia halfway to attack power for several long, loud heartbeats until she was sure nothing was lunging out of the dark. She peered down the rickety spiral stair and decided to investigate it only if Sephiroth appeared nowhere else.

She found the silver-haired child at last in a box-room at the end of that hall, which looked like it had once been somebody’s office. Curled up in a blanket nest that must have been made by stripping half the beds in the building, and looking all the smaller for it.

Half the pork pie had been carefully wrapped in a plastic bag and lay just inside the nest, presumably so its owner could fend off any venturesome vermin.

It wasn’t a large pastry—it had been meant to be a light dinner if she stayed out on the mountain a little too late. A hungry six-year-old had saved half for later. And not eaten it yet, even though her own breakfast had been hours ago, and the pastry given before dinner-time last night.

They should have done a lot more to those fleeing scientists than just take most of their materia.

Green eyes popped open when she stepped over the threshold, and Sephiroth raised a knife that had obviously been stolen from the kitchen. Lowered it again on recognizing Montana. “What?”

“I was worried about you.” Also nosy. It ran in her family.

“I…ah. Am alright.” The child sat up in the nest. Her lovely hair was beginning to look stringy—Montana wondered if the Shinra people who’d abandoned her had left her any means of washing up that a child could use. She hadn’t run across any of the fabulous washrooms she would have expected in a luxurious residence like this, but even if she had, she didn’t know if there was still running water, with the power gone.

She certainly wouldn’t expect a starving seven-year-old to fetch and heat water at the stove by the potful until she had enough to fill a washbasin, the way most Nibelheimers did for bathing, even if Sephiroth had been venturing out publicly enough to access the well in the town square, which she hadn’t. There must be some source of water in here.

“I’m glad,” Montana said. Bit her lip. “Listen, sweetheart. You’re a little bit young to be in such a big empty place alone. You should come have lunch at my house at least. Okay?”

Sephiroth blinked, and looked down at the half-pie. “Lunch?”

“Well, if you’d rather have that now you can come over for dinner instead—but you’re welcome at our place for both.”

“I…will come now,” Sephiroth said. Hesitated a second, then dug into one of the cardboard boxes to pull out a wooden one, tipped out a collection of empty glass vials, and stowed the pork pasty away inside. It would hardly keep mice out forever, let alone rats, but it was better than leaving the food out in the open.

Montana wished she could wring some scrawny scientist necks.

“Hi, honey,” she said, when Howe looked up from his workbench to greet her, his mouth bristling with pins. “Sephiroth came over for lunch.”

Judging by the things he was doing with his eyebrows, Howe had not entirely believed her about the child that looked like a miniature Snow. Really, she hardly ever played that kind of joke! They were adults now.

Her husband slid the pin in his hand carefully into place along his current seam, and then took the rest out from between his lips so he could talk. “So I see. What are we having?”

Lunch was usually a light meal. Montana suppressed the urge to declare she was going to cook something heavy and filling, like a game pie. That would mean a wait, and be harder on the digestion besides. “Sandwiches,” she said. The nice thing about those was you could keep making them until you ran out of either bread, or foods you could put between bread. “What’s your favorite sandwich, honey?”

Sephiroth shook her head. She'd tucked the knife inside her dress before coming with Montana, but didn't seem to feel the need to reach for it. “Not honey, no. Can I have…bird and cheese?”

There were leftovers from a slab of chocobo breast in the coldbox. “Absolutely. How does bird and cheese sound, Howe?”

“I’ll take egg,” he said, going back to pinning, “if the bird runs out.”

Sephiroth did in fact turn out to be a boy, when Howe asked, and seemed not at all offended by the question.

Six years old—tall for his age. Had all his shots, he volunteered for some reason. He was charming, in an artless, nervous sort of way that made him seem more his age than his overall self-possession and the occasional piece of oddly adult vocabulary tended to, overall.

He must not have gone to sleep this morning very long before Montana woke him, because he began blinking sleepily over the remains of lunch as soon as his stomach was full, which only took a sandwich and a half. He’d been on short rations a long time.

“‘He followed me home, can I keep him?’” Howe murmured against her lips later that afternoon, pressing her into the corner beside the furnace, and Montana tried not to giggle because Sephiroth had finally succumbed to his obvious exhaustion, and she didn’t want to wake him. Having a child was supposed to interfere with being giddy newlyweds, since two years of marriage hadn’t done it yet.

She kissed her husband quickly. “Someone had to step in,” she said.

“Someone,” Howe agreed. Glanced over at the puddle of little boy in the middle of their bed. Clearing away all the things they’d been storing on top of the second bed in the corner was one of a long list of chores that had suddenly piled up, but for now this was fine. “Alright, I guess that’s us. At the very least, he can’t run around in a hospital gown forever." A grimace. "Do you know what the Shinra were…?”

He didn’t have to finish the question for Montana to shake her head.

The child himself, when gently felt out on the subject once he’d woken from his nap, either didn’t want to talk about the research he’d been kept for, or didn’t know about it. The Strifes decided not to press.

Sephiroth accepted help washing his hair after dinner, and Montana confirmed a lack of visible scars. As soon as he’d dried off after the bath and slipped his little white robe back on, knife tucked neatly inside, he bent over to pick up the copper washtub—still full and weighing more than he did—and asked quite politely what he should do with it. Montana promptly had some idea what interest scientists might have had in him.

It didn’t matter. He was already her little boy.

To her relief, when she and Howe sat the boy down and asked if he would like to stay with them from now on, instead of going back to the Shinra house, he seemed in favor of the idea. Though he had reservations.

“I…somebody might come back for me,” he said.

“Your father?” asked Howe.

Montana was sitting close enough against the boy to feel a shudder run up his back. “No. Just…somebody. But I’ve…been waiting a long time.”

“Couldn’t you wait here instead?” she asked. “If you wanted? You could leave a letter to tell them where you went.”

“A…a letter.” He seemed to calm and settle, which made her realize just how tense he had been a moment before. “Yes. A letter would work, wouldn’t it?”

His handwriting was large and childish but more practiced and much less crooked than it really should have been, at that age, and he didn’t misspell any words. The note was made out to Dear Professor.

They gave him one of Howe’s shirts to wear that day, while Montana laundered the hospital gown to use for nightwear, and the day after that Howe presented him with a neat little shirt and pair of shorts, like all the other children wore at this time of year. The shorts were deftly altered down from a pair of pants whose knees had worn through and the shirt was cheap, undyed cotton, but with them on he was respectably dressed. There was nowhere in these clothes to hide his carving knife, but he seemed willing to be parted from it.

Montana tied his now-clean hair back in a tail with a scrap of blue ribbon, and in spite of his dramatic coloring he could almost have been any Nibel-born child.

A second set of clothes shouldn’t be too dear, Howe being a tailor and Sephiroth being quite small, but shoes might take a little while. Children, Montana remembered her mother bewailing in her own childhood, were forever needing shoes.

She wished her mother were here, more than she had on any day since her wedding. Neither she nor Howe had anybody left—nothing closer than cousins. His people had lived in this little house for generations, but that was all he had left of them.

His mother had died bearing him, and his father had married late. Montana remembered him as a tiny, shriveled figure even when they were children, tucked behind his sewing bench on the raised portion of floor beside the furnace where Howe still kept it, fingers flashing on a silver needle.

His eyes had been nearly as bright as his son’s, and he had laughed easily, though he had never entirely stopped seeming sad. His heart had given up on him in the spring before last, and she and Howe had married six months later.

Her own childhood home, high on the western hillside looking toward dawn, had been washed away by a flood four years ago, taking her mother with it, and her father had been killed and eaten by monsters when she was Sephiroth’s age. These were old enough hurts, by now. Put aside in favor of the future. And yet now she missed her mother again.

This new, hasty step into the future wasn’t supposed to make the past hurt more.

On the second full day, Montana left Sephiroth solemnly helping Howe choose what shade of thread would best vanish into the magenta chintz and pink silk edging Ramona Hendra had picked out for her new dress, and took her snare-mending across town to visit with Amaryl Simple. Amaryl was a few years younger and still lived with her own mother, so Montana could get her friend’s support and the older woman’s advice in one trip.

“Are you sure?” asked Amaryl, which wasn’t very supportive. “I mean, are you really sure, Tana?”

“I…” Montana set her teeth and failed twice to feed the end of waxed twine through the eye waiting for it. “Of course I’m sure,” she said, not sounding as certain as she liked. Got the twine through, though, and pulled it snug.

“I know you and Howe have been having some trouble, in this economy…”

Montana looked up sharply. “Isn’t everyone?”

Amaryl flinched, but Montana knew it wasn’t from the anger. It was guilt.

“I know the richest boy in town is courting you,” she said, somewhat impatiently. “I’m not jealous. And I know perfectly well Guy would never agree to adopt a weird Shinra orphan. So who do you think would? Who should I give him up to?”

Amaryl bit her lip, and looked down at her needle. She was embroidering roses. It was a very nice counterpane. Her hope chest was almost full. “There’s Mistress Burbank.”

“Faugh!” Mistress Burbank was a comfortably-off widow, owner of two rented farms and also drawing her husband’s pension benefits from the mining company he’d worked for. She had never had children. She’d offered to take in the results of two pregnancies out of wedlock in the last five years, but the first prospective mother had defaulted on the agreement after seeing her with her dogs, and the second had miscarried.

She’d take a lad like Sephiroth in, certainly. She’d keep him fed and clothed without difficulty. But she wouldn’t be kind. The popular opinion was that she did not know how.

No, if Sephiroth went to her he’d be made her heir, and expected to cater to her whims and care for her in her old age and never, ever want anything for himself, or speak out of turn, or make a mistake.

Montana was not sure she could pass the sweet, cruelly unloved child she had taken in over to that sort of life at all, but she knew she could not do it and have to face what she’d done in the market square, day in and day out for the rest of her life.

“Alright, perhaps not,” Amaryl relented.

“So we’re keeping him,” Montana said. This wasn’t support, exactly, but at least it had helped her clarify things in her own mind.

“People will talk,” Mistress Simple pointed out. Her crochet hook flashed like a rapier in a pirate play.

“They always talk.”

“What happens when you do have your own children?” Amaryl ventured—a kindly meant question, rather than a barb, but still it stung.

“Sephiroth will become a big brother,” Montana said, making a careful knot. “I believe that’s the usual way of things.”

Amaryl had probably been thinking more of finances than accusing Montana of not wanting her adopted child anymore once she bore one, but it was still offensive.

“People know I’m your friend,” Amaryl said, after a little while had passed, subdued. “If anyone asks about him, what should I say?”

“You can tell people how I found him.” There was no point, they had decided, trying to lie about his origins, although she hoped to give the general impression to the town that some Shinra person had dumped his child like unwanted luggage and fled, rather than that her boy was something left behind in a lab. People could be so easily spooked.

“Just…try to make them think well of him? I’ll bring him over for a visit once he’s a bit more settled in. He’s a very sweet child, I’m sure you’ll both like him.”

Amaryl smiled, setting another careful stitch into the outline of a rose, relieved her skepticism wasn’t threatening their friendship. “I’ll look forward to it.”

Sephiroth both fit in, and didn’t. Montana had to tell him to go play with the other children, but he did it willingly enough.

He didn’t know any of the clapping or counting games, was masterful at tag and surprisingly poor at hide-and-go-seek, and had apparently had basic combat training with Shinra, because Mrs. Reck found him instructing the other boys on how better to grip their wooden sticks and toy swords, and how to hold their shoulders when they struck.

Luckily, Nibelheimers appreciated that sort of thing.

When she asked, sitting beside Sephiroth on his bed while Howe worked quietly across the room, it became clear that nine-year-old Jeremiah Balehardt had challenged the newcomer to a duel in hopes of putting him in his place, been summarily disarmed, and then subjected to a brisk lecture on how he’d been holding his weapon wrong which had befuddled him so badly he hadn’t gotten around to being offended. It also became clear that Sephiroth had completely failed to notice anyone had been trying to bully him in the first place.

They more or less gave up trying, soon enough. He didn’t quite make friends, but he managed to avoid making enemies, and Montana knew too well that was sometimes all you could hope for.

Autumn was drawing on to winter and the cider bottled up fermenting, by the time Sephiroth had learnt to skip rope properly. This meant they needed to solve the shoe issue, since the hard callus of running around barefoot wouldn’t stand up to real chill, but it meant another thing too.

One of the advantages of living in Nibelheim itself, rather than one of the outlying farms, or even more nearby the town, on the upper slopes like the one where Montana had grown up, was that many of the traveling teachers wintered over in the township. This meant that town children had ready access to them for at least three months a year, precisely at the time when there was less work to keep little hands busy.

Even the poorest child in Nibelheim could afford the low fees charged to sit in on a group lesson, and thus become reasonably competent in anything for which there was a broad interest, while only the better-off plains farmers could afford to host a teacher on their property long enough to get their children much past the bare essentials of reading and reckoning.

The Strifes were poor, and had no certain prospect of growing richer, but they agreed it would be a shame to neglect their sudden foundling’s education when he clearly had a knack. When the usual three teachers trickled into town in November, Montana took Sephiroth over to the inn the first chance she got.

The traveling teachers were always popular in the first days, even weeks, after they arrived—Nibelheim got few visitors at all, and fewer still who had spent the last few months visiting with all the neighbors and had all the news from across the Nibel Plain clear south to the River Ripple. Young students tended to be enthusiastic at this time of year, too: the ones fond of learning not yet bored with it, and the lazy ones often happy to see book-learning replace the back-breaking business of harvest in their schedules.

Miz Haufner had been traveling the Nibel route since before Montana could remember, and had taught her more or less all she knew of history, literature, and geography beyond the bounds of Nibelheim. These days she was beginning to look frail, and it was somewhat amazing she was still following her annual route, but then she was an accomplished caster. She could handle a few monsters yet.

Mister Larner was getting on in years, too, but Mister Thunderhand was the latest instructor on the route, only five years into a profession that was, like so many others, in decline.

He’d taken over a lot of the instruction of the youngest children in recent years, though Montana wasn’t sure if that was because of his friendly manner and focus on the basics, or because it gave their mothers an excuse to talk to the handsome young traveler. He was a great gossip and storyteller, too, so everyone liked him.

Sephiroth was six, and maybe it would have made more sense to approach Thunderhand, but he was mobbed, while Miz Haufner was seated at a corner table making her way through a bowl of soup and a series of quiet personal chats, and when she looked over at Montana to signal it was her turn they had only been waiting long enough to finish one beer and one hot cocoa respectively.

Besides, Sephiroth was a quiet child. Mister Thunderhand’s gregarious energy would probably make him uncomfortable.

Montana ordered Sephiroth a second cocoa—refills were half price, she could splurge a little, and it was worth it to see his smile at the treat—and asked him to wait there for a little bit. She looked over her shoulder to see him sipping solemnly at his mug, then slid into the seat facing her old teacher. Miz Haufner looked from the child to Montana and raised her eyebrows, the old familiar gesture making her feel like she’d slipped back into old habits and left several answers blank on a test because she wasn’t sure, rather than filling in her best guess.

“He’s mine,” Montana said. Of course Miz Haufner knew very well she hadn’t had a silver-haired little boy last year, or any year before that, but she was answering the important question—no, Sephiroth was not a temporary ward she had brought here on behalf of someone else. She glanced over. Green eyes were fixed unwaveringly on her over the edge of the oversized cocoa mug. “We can’t afford much,” she continued, because especially this early in the season the teachers’ time was at a premium, “but I was hoping you could at least help me get a sense of what he knows and what he needs to learn. He can read and write already. He’s six.”

“Hm,” said Miz Haufner. Intrigued, as Montana had counted on. “All right. Let me meet the boy, and if he’s not unbearable I’ll give him the placement battery at dawn tomorrow for ten gil.”

Dawn was a slot she could afford to sell cheap, since most of the town boys and girls who were free from harvest work this early in the season, due to having parents in professions who could afford to leave them idle, were unlikely to be up so early, while having been on the road Miz Haufner was in the habit of it. But having that hour to herself would have been worth rather a lot more than ten gil, so Montana appreciated the favor being offered.

“Thank you,” was all she said, but she said it sincerely.

The only answer was, “Pish,” which was about what she’d expected. Montana had only ever been a moderately good student, but she and Miz Haufner had always gotten on much better than she ever had with Mister Larner. And not only because she had no head for maths.

The money discussion done for the moment, she beckoned Sephiroth over. He gathered the mug carefully in both hands even though he didn’t need to, with his strength, and made his way over. Montana tugged him onto the bench beside her. “This is Sephiroth,” she said. “Sephiroth, Mistress Matilde Haufner. She’s agreed to help me find out where you’re up to in your studies, so we can plan ahead.”

Penmanship practice and reading assignments she could set herself, at least until she ran out of vaguely age-appropriate books to borrow off neighbors, and there were a lot of things she and Howe could teach him just by telling. But there were some things she would have to pay a teacher for, if she wanted him to learn them properly—everything she’d forgotten or never learned or didn’t have the materials to teach well, or simply didn’t know how to teach at all.

“Hello, Sephiroth.” Miz Haufner pronounced the unfamiliar name with some care but no stumbling, more used than most Nibelheimers to adapting to unexpected words. And ideas, for that matter.

“Pleased to meet you.” It was an empty platitude, delivered in the calm and level manner he always seemed to use with strangers—the shyness only came out in private.

Which was odd, but in a child who’d hoarded half a meat pasty to last two days rather than ask anyone for more food, she suspected it meant the bouts of shyness were the hesitation he felt when trying to trust adults, and the calm meant he had a guard up. Eventually, she hoped, he wouldn’t feel the need for either.

Miz Haufner peered down at him, her mouth pursed along the contemplative lines habit had creased it into permanently. Her reading glasses remained nested in her carefully pinned-up grey hair. “How are you at tests, young man?”

“Very good, Doctor,” he answered. “I can sit still as long as necessary.”

“…hm.” Miz Haufner glanced at Montana. “It’s Mistress, not Doctor, child. Miz Haufner will do. Your mother tells me you read.”

“Yes Miz Haufner.”

He was behaving like he was already taking a test. Montana slipped her arm gently around his shoulders—it was hard to predict when he’d accept being touched, but he should know she was on his side. Sephiroth didn’t lean into her, but he didn’t tense away from the embrace, either, and after a second a little of his slight weight pressed back against her arm. “Drink your cocoa, honey,” she prompted, since it was still sitting more than half full on the table.

He drank. His eyes stayed on Miz Haufner the whole time. Oh dear. “Don’t worry, you won’t be in trouble no matter how the tests go,” Montana assured him. “They’re just to find out what you need next.”

Sephiroth nodded. He didn’t seem reassured. She wasn’t sure he seemed in need of reassurance, either, but still. He drank more cocoa.

“Sephiroth,” said the old traveling teacher, the patience in her voice that she used when a student was struggling but really trying their best. “If what your mother says is true, you’re already ahead of your age group. There’s no hurry if you would rather not bother with my sort of study for a while.”

Sephiroth shook his head. “Now is fine.” He drank more cocoa.

Miz Haufner looked unsatisfied. “I’ll see you first thing tomorrow morning for exams, then,” she said. “Now shoo, both of you. That Cabret girl always forgets everything over the summer.” Sure enough, the Cabrets were lingering beside the fire waiting to talk to Miz Haufner, so Montana got up and swapped places with them, to give Sephiroth time to finish his drink.

He wasn’t enjoying it as much as the first one. Maybe the novelty was wearing off, but more likely he was nervous about school. Damn it. She was so new at this parenting thing. She should have asked him before coming here if he was ready yet. After all, his last teacher had probably been one of the people who disappeared and abandoned him.

Maybe he was worried about a lack of loyalty to the Professor he’d left that note for.

She hoped he wouldn’t be too upset, when Miz Haufner moved on after the thaw.

It wasn’t yet time for bed when they got home. Howe was still up on his little workshop floor, mouth bristling with pins as usual, in clear defiance of the several pincushions scattered about the space. There were all sorts of little projects she could move forward with in times like this, if Howe couldn’t use help, but she decided instead to make a batch of scones. It was something Sephiroth could help (or at least ‘help’) with, and meant she’d have something nice to give him for breakfast tomorrow, before his early exam.

Those bilberries she’d dried over the summer would be a nice addition. She rummaged in the cupboard for them, while Sephiroth carefully retrieved two lesser-eggs from the ice-chest. “Do you want me to sit in with you for the tests?” Montana asked, as they converged on the table.

Her own mother had come into town to sit beside her once or twice, when she was starting lessons and nervous, and several other more well-off mothers did so far more often. The teachers hated it, but the mothers were the ones paying them, so it had to be tolerated.

It was sometimes useful to have them there in the larger classes, though, since groups of children were always difficult to control. And since a slot in a group lesson cost much less than a private one, sufficiently disruptive parents or children could be asked to leave those sessions without too much financial loss.

(Guy Lockheart’s mother had helped him cheat on tests until he was twelve, when he’d asked her to stop. It was a good thing he had, because his father hadn’t had the patience to teach him advanced maths, and if he’d inherited the family business with holes in his ability to calculate, either he’d have had to hire someone else to check his plans or eventually built a house that fell down on someone.)

Sephiroth shook his head, cracking an egg carefully into the mixing bowl. “I can do it,” he said. Looked up into her face, and produced a deliberate, adorable smile. “I’ll be fine.”

Montana stood in the doorway of her house the next morning and watched her little boy cross the square by himself to the door of the inn. It was ridiculous to feel like he was striking out without her protection. It was thirty feet of town square with nothing worse than a written exam from a sensible old woman on the other side, and less than a month ago he’d been scrounging for food in an abandoned building. She felt that way anyway.

He came back looking tired and somewhat frazzled, his hair escaping its tie, but not angry or in tears. Montana felt her nerves steady out as she poured a heavy ceramic cup of watered sweet cider, with a touch of honey. He was fine.

“How was it?”

Sephiroth dragged a chair backward and clambered up to sit down. “…I couldn’t answer all of her questions.”

Montana passed him the cider. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry, I should have been more clear. It was a placement exam, the point is to keep asking things until you hit your limit. To find out what you still need to learn.”

“Oh.” He looked somewhat more comfortable, and sipped his drink. “That’s what Mistress Haufner studies, then? Learning?”

Montana laughed. What a charming way to put it. “Yes, I suppose she...does…” Sephiroth used to live in a lab. Sephiroth had the hair of a Snow and the strength of a dragon.

She abandoned the dishes. “Sephiroth. Nobody is studying you.”

He set his cup down a little sharply and gazed at her, that blank nearly-inhuman look he’d been learning to avoid turning on people. “…oh.”

Montana was so bad at this. Up in his workspace, Howe had set down the sleeve he’d been adjusting and was deliberately sticking pins into a pincushion where they belonged, his eyes on the two of them.

“Sweetheart.” She dropped onto her knees. The impulse was to draw him into a hug, but she wasn’t sure it would be welcome. She cupped a hand around his face, instead, smoothing back some of the escaped hair where it vanished behind his ear. “Mistress Haufner is a teacher. She taught me when I was little. I’m going to give her gil in exchange for you getting knowledge, because it’s important. That’s all. Okay?”

He nodded. It was a little stiff motion that bobbed awkwardly against her palm, and she decided he didn’t want to be touched right now and withdrew.

“I’m going over this evening to talk with her about how you did, and decide what it’s most important for her or one of the other teachers to teach you this winter. You can come along if you like.”

If he was as clever as she suspected, he was going to be badly held back by how little teaching they could afford, so she’d wanted to start as soon as possible, but even in the modern economy, book-learning was hardly everything. Especially now that the big city had blown up, and no one knew what direction anything was going in anymore.

“Like Miz Haufner told you, you don’t have to study anything…” Belatedly, she hit on the right question. “Is there anything you really want to learn about?”

Sephiroth shrugged. He was turning the cider cup in his hands, a careful one-quarter turn to the right each time. “Mistress Haufner has some nice books?”

And she’d been known to lend those nearly free. Maybe Howe and Montana could do a bit of mending for her in exchange, excellent. “Alright, that’s good.” Montana hesitated. “Do you want lessons?”

“What would I do instead, if I didn’t?”

Montana shrugged. “The same things you have been doing. Howe can start teaching you his work in a few years, or we can try to find you an apprenticeship at something else if you don’t care for sewing. That would be fine.” It would be a bit of a waste of a talent, which was always sad, but if the Shinra had turned Sephiroth off book-learning by being absolute beasts that waste was already accomplished.

But he nodded. “I’d like to, then.”

“And do you want to come to the meeting?”

He searched her face for long seconds, trying almost certainly to discern what answer she wanted. Gave up and glanced at Howe, who gave an encouraging smile unencumbered by any pins, since they were all where they belonged now. Sephiroth looked back at Montana. “Yes.”

It turned out Sephiroth was so brilliant for his age that Mistress Haufner was willing to continue offering Montana steep discounts, since leaving him untaught would be a crime against her profession.

Or something like that; using such strong language when not reading it directly from a book would have been antithetical to her character, but she made a point of noting as they reviewed his work that even where there were enormous gaps in his knowledge—such as his very uneven grasp of science, which in some places was absurdly advanced but which also, sometimes in the same places, lacked a great deal of foundation, or his knowledge of literature which was nearly nonexistent—he showed natural ability.

“As you already have the basics,” she informed him, having intuited at some point through her long experience of children that his was not the sort of shyness alleviated by talking over his head, “I will be able to save myself time and your mother money by loaning you texts and discussing them on their return. Does that seem agreeable?”

He frowned, that small troubled expression that came when he didn’t trust his understanding of a situation enough to question it.

“Can you study with only me around to help,” Montana prompted. “That’s all she’s asking, there isn’t a secret question.”

“Oh. Yes.”

Seasons passed. Sephiroth turned seven, eight, and nine. He came with Montana into the nearer hills some days, in the warmth of summer and in spring and fall, and once she took him along on a longer trip, to empty the snares she set for winter furs—squirrel they kept for the meat, because they were poor, but fox they did not, because they weren’t that poor.

But they were set upon by a Zuu on that trip, great feathered wings and jagged teeth, and Montana ran herself to the edge of her strength with the amount of conjured fire required to see it off, so he wasn't allowed out that far for the rest of the year, much to his annoyance.

Winter was a lean season all around, and made the meat-eaters mean. And while the slopes of Mount Nibel had stopped greying, there were no signs of recovery yet. Perhaps there never would be. She didn’t know what the reactor had done to the land, only that it must have done something.

Sephiroth seemed fond of being helpful, and would often follow one or the other of his new parents around helping with tasks if not shooed off. Some of the younger children were beginning to look up to him. He still had no particular friends, but seemed welcome enough to run with the children two and three years older than himself.

Amaryl married Guy Lockheart that spring, and moved in next door to Montana and Howe, a proximity that was not quite as convenient as it should have been.

Guy had never liked Montana and, while he seemed to be utterly indifferent to Howe now that they were adults, had bullied him somewhat for being poor when they were children, so Montana found herself with a need to balance a somewhat spiteful enjoyment of being an invited guest in the spacious and comfortable Lockheart home with not putting too much strain on her friend’s marriage.

It was a bit of a shame it was Guy that Amaryl had married, even though it had been a settled thing for years that she would—they lived practically on top of one another now and were in the same phase of life, as young wives, doing away with two of the biggest barriers to their friendship, but the Lockheart pride was inconvenient in the extreme.

Some of the young men who had left town to seek their fortunes in the cities of the east came trickling back, over these three years—not many, between the number dead in the destruction and the chaos that followed, and how hard it was to find the gil or provision for passage over so much land and sea, now that the web of money that had fed Midgar and provided work for so many hands had been rent across the middle.

Some of the people who came weren’t Nibelheimers at all, and never had been, nor had their kin—they were merely people lucky or clever enough to be able to marshal some resources, who had gotten themselves out of Midgar and kept going.

Some of them took up farms on the Nibel Plain that had lain fallow so long no one was left who could be said to have legal title—Guy lived up to his position as a leading citizen, at least, by getting together parties of Nibelheimers to help these newcomers raise simple, habitable homes for themselves, so that they had a better chance of making a go of their new steadings.

(Further east, the word said, on the Sol and Corel coasts, some towns were choked with refugees fleeing the collapse, who built shanties along the town’s edge out of whatever they could find, and in their desperation and misery multiplied crime and danger for everyone.

Not enough people had the strength or wealth to make it as far as Nibelheim for them to face the same problem, the scale of the influx being the main threat, but it still served as an act of self-defense to encourage proper homes to be established, and not risk too many outsiders falling upon the public charge.)

A handful of newcomers arrived with bags of gil, perhaps all they had salvaged of their former fortunes or perhaps ill-gotten in the collapse—almost no one asked, but speculation in the inn of an evening was endless, the more so the more excitingly mysterious the newcomer—and bought or commissioned from Guy much more comfortable houses, usually within or on the margins of the town itself.

Some of them had trades or professions, and some of these elected to rent rooms in town on the basis of earnings they expected to make, rather than try to establish themselves as farmers. None, thankfully, dealt in needlework.

By the time Montana found herself pregnant, Sephiroth was nearly ten, and Shinra was most of the way through the process of shaking itself to pieces. Away on the Eastern Continent, according to report, a teenager claiming to be the President’s illegitimate son had cobbled together control of Junon and the remains of Midgar, though word was the pay was inconsistent so he was either going to need to find a new source of money or downsize his forces again, or find himself overthrown.

The Shinra strongholds in the West were mostly held by the former Head of Public Safety in the name of the President’s legitimate son. The baby—child, by now—in question was reportedly about the right age, but Heidegger’s account of his survival via having been kidnapped by the terrorists who’d blown up most of Midgar’s reactors, including the one directly under the big building in the middle where his family had lived, and then heroically rescued by a crack team of Shinra soldiers, all but one of whom died in the process, was generally regarded as suspicious.

Rufus Shinra had been a month old at the time of the attack; you could have replaced him with practically any male infant.

They were well out of it, here, sheltered by the hills, with both the local Shinra installations abandoned early.

Trade overall was down, and the mail-order catalogue business had collapsed entirely, but what there was of it was more overland than it had been, so their economy wasn’t quite as badly hit as most. The caravans that passed from Corel into the West and the barges up and down the River Ripple had never quite died out in the era of mass shipping, and in the absence of Shinra they mattered more than they had in a long time.

Nibelheim straddled the only pass north between the Nibel plains and the Western Wide, and long ago they had been a major strategic location, but these days armies were moved mostly by boat, and sometimes by air. Though probably not the latter, anymore, with industry collapsing the way it was.

Still, no one presently had any reason to move armies through the pass, and no one had for a long time. So they were not strategic, except for the caravaneers.

The Strife family’s chief concerns were that with fewer gil all around, the increased tailoring business due to the disappearance of pre-made catalogue clothing barely kept up with the growing price of cloth, that fabrics from the Eastern continent had stopped being available entirely, and that they were soon to add another member to the household.

Sephiroth seemed afraid to touch her stomach at first, when it had grown enough that Howe and all her friends had started asking to press their palms to the curve and wait for kicking. (Their enthusiasm for this event was, quite honestly, a minor tonic for Montana’s frustration with it—she wondered if all little ones had quite this much energy.) “Don’t worry,” she told him, “you can’t hurt it.”

Well, considering the casual way her little foundling could chop up whole trees for firewood with a hatchet, he certainly could, but she’d never seen him use too much strength with something delicate. If control was something he’d needed to learn, he’d learned it young.

His fingers curled into fists, but the way he tucked them behind him said they weren’t angry ones. “It’s really alright?”

“Of course.”

He stepped forward, and slowly stretched out a hand.

Her second son was born with a single tuft of hair that dried a pale yellow, a red face, and astonishingly healthy lungs. The lungs gave Sephiroth his first impression, since they were still going when he was let back into the house, after the baby had been bundled up tight and the worst of the mess cleared away. He lurked on the far side of the room from the noise, looking spooked. It was sort of adorable.

Eventually the little one gave up yelling to latch on for his first meal, and after gazing besottedly for a few more minutes Howe let himself be tugged away to the inn for proper congratulations, and the midwife finished packing up and giving her long lists of orders, most of which Montana already knew and the rest of which she was probably going to forget.

Not that it mattered if she did; Shana had the habit of buttonholing every new mother she’d assisted in delivery every time they saw each other in public for the next month, making sure they were following her advice, or at least willing to lie about having done so.

And then it was just her and the warm sleepy bundle in her arms. And her adopted son, continuing to lurk. It was beginning to be one of those adorable things of his that shaded into sad, because he looked almost as though he thought if he drew any attention to himself he’d be asked to leave.

“Come see your brother,” Montana directed. Sephiroth perked up, at that, smiled, and she wasn’t sure whether it was the word brother or the invitation but either way he had thought he wasn’t welcome, and she twitched the blanket back from the little one’s face and tried to think of how to show her baby-Snow child that he wasn’t being replaced.

“I’m glad he’ll have a big brother,” she said, as Sephiroth crossed the room. “Little ones always need someone looking out for them.”

Sephiroth nodded, and bent forward, and peered at the squashed little pink thing until it stirred, objecting probably to cool air on its face. “What’s his name?” he asked. They’d discussed several, but in the end you had to wait and see what sort of impression the baby gave.

“Cloud,” said Montana, and as if responding to the name he couldn’t possibly know yet, the baby opened his eyes.

“So blue,” Sephiroth murmured.

They were, an acute blue like the eastern sky at the beginning of sunset, on a half-clear day in early spring, brighter than Montana’s and darker than Howe’s, far beyond the usual unsettled infant color. “It may fade as he grows,” she warned anyway.

It might not. Montana thought she might be overly susceptible to the belief that her baby was special, considering the boy she already had most certainly was, but he was. She could feel it. Cloud was something special. He was going to do amazing things. “He can’t smile yet,” she warned, because Sephiroth was smiling at the baby and she didn’t want his feelings hurt when it wasn’t returned.

“That’s alright,” he said, not looking away from his new brother. “I can wait.”

Chapter Text

“Almost the first thing I did was kill Rufus Shinra.”

This confession spreads across the smooth water and is swallowed by silence. Petrified trees do not listen. Abandoned houses cannot hear.

“You know that already, of course. I almost hope it was your plan, since it certainly wasn’t mine. He was there when I woke up, and…”

Did he take out his anger on the young President, or try to neutralize the very real threat? Was it panic? Was it reflex? Only months ago he returned from death for the first time, and killed President Shinra then, too. “Maybe you were counting on it, but it seems like a bad omen.  I’m sorry.”

Stone is unspeakably solid against his knees.

“I wish I knew why you’d sent me back.”

Waiting, not by now expecting any answer. The pool at the heart of the forest at the heart of the city at the heart of the forest is silent as any other grave.

He did not hate the son as he had the father—knew Rufus only as an odious child several years his junior, encountered mostly in passing at the President’s parties, and later under Turk custody an even more annoying teenager. The only good he ever knew of the young Shinra was that he was never once a coward, and now he is dead.

(Hojo and Scarlet got away—he wishes Hojo had been standing nearest when the mako chrysalis broke and dropped him into the crystal grotto within the Crater, and been the one to feel the first wild stroke of his sword. The Shinra scion might have deserved death, but not like that man does.

At least Hojo wasn’t laughing, in those moments. He got away because he ran. Did Jenova warn him? That their attack hound was off its leash?

Hah. Jenova never had him on a leash, and Hojo’s snapped years ago.

Scarlet paused, for just an instant as she fled, looking back at him kneeling over a second President’s cooling corpse, and the look on her face was strange and he found himself thinking she knows, though he did not know what she might know, or what it would matter, or why he would wish to be understood by such a person.)

He dips his hand into the pool, and it closes around his fingers cool, but not cold. The exact temperature that makes it easy to fool oneself into believing one’s hand is not wet at all, without confusing one’s nerves as to the existence of the water. “Is there a mission? Or is it just harder for Her to reach me again, here among the living?”

Like a restraining order filed against a scheming noncustodial parent. Like a weapon locked in a cupboard out of a child’s reach. A smile rises unexpectedly to his lips. “You’re the only one who ever tried to protect me, you know,” he tells her. “And it was never your place.” Seven years his junior—he should have been protecting her.

He has never protected anyone.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. Not forgive me, though he thinks that is what he means. He has no right. And there is no need. And she will not answer.

He stands, and the feeling is strange, still, the lack of anything flowing about him as he does so. His every motion was followed by streams of black and silver for so long that now he is like one of those decorative fish some of the executives used to keep in bowls, with its long streaming fins excised.

Are those fins good for anything, he wondered when he first saw one, or just a gratuitous mutation encouraged by breeders for its decorative potential? He never encountered an answer. But it doesn’t matter. The metaphor is flawed. The fins are part of the fishes’ own flesh, no matter why they have them. He has lost nothing that matters.

He turns his back on the water.

He walks.

AVALANCHE have set up a camp in the Sleeping Forest, this time, rather than sleep once more in beds abandoned two thousand years ago by the Ancients. He suspects it’s because they brought him with them, because letting him enter the city again was bad enough, and they will not invite him to lie down in the homes of Aerith’s people.

But perhaps it is only that all of them are here, now, instead of the three that came at first, and there are not enough beds inside the abandoned seashell for everyone. It seems like them, somehow, to carry wood for a shared fire into an enchanted wood, and all sleep there alike in camping-rolls like a long-range scouting party, rather than give beds to only three.

His guard got ahead of him as they went through the trees, after tailing him out of the seashell-city and along the path, and is sitting at the fireside again. He thinks it was the Turk—the Guardian and the ninja wouldn’t be trusted to watch him alone, being too young, and the others wouldn’t have been able to so thoroughly avoid his line of sight, even though he wasn’t looking.

He supposes it could have been the robot cat, if it left its lumbering steed behind, but it would have been hard for that to move faster than his walking pace. He thinks.

He hesitates amid the screening trees, just out of range of the firelight.

Cloud turns to look at him anyway, flatly expressionless. SOLDIER vision shouldn’t be able to make him out in this gloom, especially not adjusted for staring into fire. Maybe Cloud senses his presence with something that is nothing like sight.

He breathes out.

Makes his way into the light, and now everyone looks. He pauses again, this time out of courtesy, to let them settle. Discomfort niggling at the edges of his mind, he scrapes a hand up the back of his own head, the cropped roughness against his palm still a surprise, even as the lightness of every motion is a constant reminder of the change.

Until he put the edge of his sword to it, ten hours ago in the crater at the heart of the Whirlwind Maze, his hair hadn’t been cut since Hojo decided to let it grow when he was ten.

But then, was what he cut even his hair, really? Is this truly his own body, preserved for him somehow in materia crystal in spite of having dissolved in the searing mako of a reactor core five years ago, or is it an undead patchwork thing of stolen flesh, synthesized from Jenova and some of the many rocking, moaning clones? He can remember wearing some of the clones. The spark of remaining life burned out of them at his touch, and they became just bodies containing nothing but a fragment of himself. This body doesn’t feel like those did, but that could be because all of him he can touch now is packed inside it, or because it was made differently, or—

It doesn’t matter. Even in the best case, Jenova’s head that fell into the mako with him became part of this body before it rose again. The man he was is dead, and it would be in poor taste to mourn him, even if he could.

The staring has ended; he can move again.

He sits down beside the gunman. He usually does, if he can. Valentine was a Turk, of course, and must have some skill at deception, but his usual mask is simply—blankness. Even Tseng would smile, in the old days, pressed and precise, and some of the time probably meant it.

But Valentine is the only one not actively displeased by his existence, so he sits beside him when he can.

“Satisfied?” Cloud asks. Still looking like he wants to kill him, which he can’t actually begrudge.

He nods.

“I don’t see why we hadta humor your weird belated mourning crap in the first place,” says Highwind. The man is remarkably good at pretending not to be afraid.

No one has used the word hypocrite yet, or said he had no right to this. Generous, or just waiting?

“You didn’t,” he answers. They didn’t have to. He’s very clear on that.

“But we did anyway,” Tifa concludes. Then falls silent and simply looks at him, eyes wide and solemn and unafraid.

Never has she feared him, this woman, even as he burned her world, and that perhaps was why he remembered her after he died, when he had forgotten so much else—a brief, recent acquaintance, whose eventual attack was easily brushed aside, she yet lingered. She has never feared him. She has never admired him.

He knows all her weaknesses. They are relatively few—she is a fairly straightforward entity—but they run deep, if one can just reach into them. She cripples herself, with kindness, with the need to be approved of, with the fear of being left alone; she wounds herself when she lets those needs go and instead lives for anger. She should not have allowed herself to need Cloud.

“Yes,” he says, because they did, in fact, humor him. “What now?”

“Now you explain,” says Cloud. He stares even more constantly than Tifa—he is not really much more afraid than she, totaling all the fear in each, but much more of that fear is of him. He could use that. He should not. “What changed your mind?”

Very well. He has been indulged this far. He owes far more than has been asked of him. “I told you,” he repeats. “It was Aerith.” He pauses. “Do you remember,” he says carefully, “when I killed her, I said…that she would join the Lifestream and become part of…me?”

Shut up, Cloud said. Cutting him off, cradling her body. It would be completely unsurprising if he hadn’t listened to a word.

“Yes,” says the four-footed Guardian, who was there at the time, across the water, too far back to do any good. His voice is even and almost dangerous, although he is so young. As young as Cloud was when he killed Sephiroth. Yet older, technically, than Sephiroth was when he died. “I remember.”

Good enough. “Jenova and I had not…actually absorbed all the Lifestream.” Obviously. “Just infiltrated it. But I was there. Among the dead. Harvesting their knowledge and strength. And for all the things only Aerith could do, before, as the only living Cetra…her determination is very strong, and...afterward she had as much access to me, in the Lifestream, as I did to her.”

He pauses again. “She is…”

Not stronger, precisely, that makes it a matter of sheer power, and although the Planet is her ally the other Cetra ghosts are two-thousand-year-old wisps, and Jenova has been husbanding strength more cleverly than the Planet knows how to prevent. He does not know which side had more force to bring to bear. He does not even know if his absence has done anything to that balance.

“…impressive.” She always was. He has never understood how, even with a mother’s protection to shelter under, she could have retained such self-conviction, in the face of Hojo’s pure scorn.

And yet, he knew her. That in her which they each had learned young, that which being the greatest mage or strongest swordsman in the world had never diminished in them: the instinct of evasion, of never committing to an opinion or admitting to an attachment if there was some reasonable method of avoiding it. The willingness to wait and wait until the perfect moment or your own breaking point, whichever came first, before you took action.

Professor Hojo was a terrible teacher for the graduate students that served as his assistants, scrambling about in their matte-grey suits too dominated to absorb much science, but a few lessons he taught very well.

“Yeah?” grates the terrorist with the mechanical hand, who hates him more for being something made by Shinra than for any thing that he himself has done, even Aerith’s death. Not because Wallace truly believes that those crimes are less than terrible, but simply because his first hate runs so deep in him that nothing can displace it. “Impressive. Still nothin’ we don’t know.”

He shrugs. Cut to the end, then. “She won.”

((“Then you can kill me again, I suppose,” he said just hours ago in the Crater, when Cloud demanded to know why they should believe him, what if he turned again, wasn’t this just another trick?

And Cloud only looked baffled at that invitation, startled, fingers flexing on the hilt of his weapon—not Angeal’s sword, he had noticed, not anymore, but rather something smaller and keener and probably stronger.

Bewildered not by the thought of killing but by again.

“Cloud,” he said, his fingers tightening on nothing because he had cast his own sword down, atop the coiled piles of his hair,“do you not remember?”

It might have been funny, to someone else. To Genesis or Angeal, definitely to Tseng. To Aerith, probably. To himself, even, before Aerith had broken his madness into slivers of despair. That he had been tormenting this youth to carry out the vengeance in his heart, for the ridiculous ironic death he had died in the first hours of a rampage he had meant to consume the world. And all the while the boy’s scrambled mind had forgotten entirely what he had done.

“Cloud,” he said, kneeling, “you are…not…a…puppet.”))

“She won?” the ninja repeats now. “What’s that s’posedta mean? She wasn’t that tough!”

Cloud is squinting. “Aerith…fought you? Or Jenova?”

“Both. But not…alone. She sought out…others of the dead I could not ignore.”

Angeal. It shocked him into a different sort of awareness than he had had in ages, the brush of Angeal’s mind on his. In all his years among the dead, he had not sensed Angeal’s presence at all, until the moment Zack died, and even then it was a mere ripple. He had thought him dissolved, subsumed but for an echo—possibly already living again as scraps of life fed into an apple tree, a newborn griffin, a squalling toddler.

Inasmuch as he had thought of him at all, which was…very little. He’d been trying to forget the man had ever mattered at all, even before the time of his own incomplete passing, since Sephiroth obviously had never mattered to him.

But no, Angeal (anchoring his continued existence through Zack no doubt) had been avoiding him, in their shared death, all this time. Five years of the world. An eternity of the mind.

And the first thing he felt after that recognition was hate, because no one had ever betrayed him like Angeal, no one ever promised so broadly that they would be fair and honest and faithful and his and liedliedlied.

There was no forgiveness in him for any of the living or the dead, and least of all for one who had hurt his living self so deeply, and so hate was his third thought, too, and the fourth that he had enough power in the Lifestream to easily tear apart one little ghost into his component motes of spirit energy.

But in his rage he was more himself—more his individual self—than at any other time.

Just as whenever he took the time to help or mock or torment Cloud; as in the moment, while removing Jenova’s primary body from Shinra custody, that he’d turned aside and paused first to open the locks on Hojo’s cells and then to slaughter the squat evil human who had owned him through every day of his life—his hate had been the last part of him that stood a step removed from Jenova, and cared about things that did not matter to her, that were not the fate of planets or the vengeance of millennia entombed. His personal hatreds had been the most of him that survived.

(Perhaps his personal hatreds had always been the truest part of him, all the more for being buried behind the bridle and the bit lying always on his tongue.)

And into that space opened by his private rage, that smallest gap separating him from her, they swarmed: Aerith wry and fierce and warm like sun on earth, I forgive you, you know. For me. It’s not okay, but I do forgive you; Zack irritated and jocular and warm like materia cupped in your palm, like his finger pointing across sun-soaked concrete and steel to underline a promise, Come on, the Sephiroth I knew wasn’t this lame, give it one more try, just cuz we’re dead doesn’t mean we’ve had all our chances.

Angeal guilty and patient and warm like fire trapped in a hearth, We weren’t monsters until we started to believe it. I was wrong, Genesis was even more wrong, please come back. Sephiroth. Sephiroth.

It was words they spoke in but words were never simply spoken within the Lifestream, and every time they used that name it reflected back a picture of himself, ideas of who he was all violently different from the self perceiving them.

There was nothing left in him, by then, that wished to protect. He’d believed, at first, when Jenova first contacted him deep in his fugue of research and despair, that that was his true mission: to save the world from its inhabitants.

But by the time Aerith brought her forces against him in the light beyond death nothing remained of that—his mother had not needed his protection, he had come to understand; the Planet did not deserve it; there was nothing left but vengeance and conquest.

But Zack remembered his sword as a thin line against fire across which no threat could pass, and Angeal’s memories of him in Wutai said that he had never cared about conquering, before this, not for its own sake, and when Aerith murmured Sephiroth it was shaped nothing like the silver nightmare that had killed her and only like a slim boy with no mother of his own to protect him, who taught her how to push her tears away and endure.

That person never existed, he told them.

I don’t think he’s even really dead, Aerith retorted tartly. (Dead when she spoke it there meant something different than when the living did, resounded of broken-shattered-voiceless-gone rather than blood-spill-breath-still-cold-cold-cold.)

And then she nipped across the place where he shaded into everything else, a connection drawn narrow with their tugging, with their demanding of his attention apart from the Calamity’s great schemes, and severed it.

Cut him, cut them, self from self.

Dying had never hurt a fraction as much. Nothing he ever survived even compared.

The hours Cloud and his party must have spent, finding their way across the snowfields and up over cliffs to the heart of the crater, he does not remember. He was writhing in agony, tearing apart within the Lifestream where he had so recently presided like a god, and plucked fragments of knowledge from the flowing souls like a gourmand at a banquet.

Suddenly so small. So weak. So vulnerable to the tumult and the sorrow of the dead.

It had been…so very long since he had felt weak, much longer than it had been since he had felt helpless. He hated both feelings.

((Aerith’s vengeance, was one of his first coherent thoughts after the pain began, but she was there cool and gentle as rain telling him no. Not that. This was not done in anger.

(Don’t get angry, they said in the Midgar slums, get even.)

Not that either.

In Wutai during monsoon season, rain had slashed at him like knives. He had seen men drowned. Water was no more gentle by nature than it was harsh. It simply sought its level and did not care what it dragged along.

Recollection struck him like a stone as he shrieked naked in the dark that this woman, as he had understood her, was usually ruthless, and occasionally vicious, but never deliberately cruel. You used to be the same way, silly. Perhaps, but he’d been willing to make exceptions, even before the war. Why shouldn’t she make an exception for him, who had killed her?

He had thought, once she was dead, she could never be a threat to him again.

He had thought, when she vanished from the lab, she would never mean anything to him again.

Nothing he lost had ever come back.

Hojo had said the escaped specimens were dead. That was what always happened, to things that escaped, except the few that were brought back to their cages. He’d helped put some down himself, once he officially joined SOLDIER, ravening monsters threatening the order of Midgar.

…were you angry with me? the flow of Aerith’s voice asked, as he shuddered and writhed and reached out across the shining barrier of their wills for the rest of himself, for his mother. For escaping? For dying?

For leaving me behind, he snarled, and lashed out, and almost broke past Zack’s guard.

Angeal caught him, broad coarse hands wholly present for a moment, warm as the living were warm against the tendril of cold rage. I’m sorry, he repeated. Sephiroth, I’m sorry. I didn’t understand. I was too wrapped up in my own doubt and fear to, to realize you needed us.

I need no one, he spat, as if he was not even in that moment straining and writhing at the absence of his Mother, as if this sudden solitude was not as terrifying as it was painful.

I’m sorry we left you alone, Angeal said, stubbornly.

I’m sorry I didn’t find another way, man, said Zack, wrestling another fragment back toward the isolated core of him as it tried to reach out to the roiling dark. I should have said something, at Nibelheim. I should’ve made this old man come home, whatever he says.

I’m sorry you were alone, said Aerith, drawing circles in the middle of him where the cut had been made, as though she could seal the wound up with the same touch that had inflicted it.

I’m sorry, they told him, who did not deserve it, who had failed one and betrayed another and murdered the third, I’m sorry until he found himself in tears.

Tears, in the flesh, had a biological purpose—an outlet for an overload of neurochemicals that would otherwise place an impractical burden on the brain. (Hojo had always been scornful of this discovery, and scorned those who wept all the more for it, not less. A brain that could not handle its own products was not worth much to him.)

Tears in the Lifestream were oddly similar, pouring out bile slick and black, and the ghosts holding him in place shied back from the stuff.

He could have escaped them then, if he could have mustered the will.

I’m sorry, he gasped, because they should be alive, they should all be alive, he should have spat in Shinra’s face instead of turning his back on Angeal for fear of being forced to hurt him, he should have been there to guard Zack’s back—the whole army could not have killed them both—he should have. He should have protected Aerith.

I hate everything, he sobbed, and was surprised somehow when they did not draw back further, were not angry, even though it could not possibly be news by this point. I hate everything. I hate Shinra. I hate the world. I hate you. I hate Mother. I hate Sephiroth.

He made the name mean something entirely different than they had, trying to tame him. An image in fragments, bright silver yes and speed, the fit of uniform boots. The sound of people saying it, year in and year out—cold disdain and breathless admiration and writhing jealousy, and every repetition a new burden to carry. The crackle of flame and the stink of mako, laughter like Hojo’s laughter in his own throat, the taste of blood in your mouth. Jenova’s long-dead eyes staring with too much awareness for a corpse.

All the things the word Sephiroth meant that he felt consumed by, but also the mere thick, fungus-spreading concept of self.

He had failed so many times in so many ways. They told him he was perfect and yes everything was easy except anything that actually mattered, and he just wanted to do something right.

Aerith picked her way forward amidst the mess of his tears, finding the clean places, while Zack forged ahead through them carelessly—they tried and failed to cling, rolling like water on wax, but he knew somehow that Aerith was right to be careful, that the cracks in their hearts were too similar to risk. I know, said Aerith. I know, silly. But most of that wasn’t even your fault.

Angeal pressed against his back, avoiding the blackness even more assiduously than Aerith but there all the same, We weren’t yours to save. Not if we wouldn’t let you.

But that was very little comfort because he hadn’t even tried.

Learn from Angeal’s fail, man! said Zack, clapping the idea of a hand slightly beaded with black hate onto the concept of a bare shoulder. The worst decisions always happen after you give up.))

“Others?” echoes Tifa, leadingly, in the present.

He shakes his head. “People I once knew,” he says. She met Zack, didn’t she? The same time she met him. But Angeal’s name would mean nothing to her. “Old…friends.”

“People who wanted to help you?” pipes up the Kisaragi heiress, sounding incredulous at the very idea. “Why even? Why would Aerith want you alive again? If she could do that she should’ve fixed herself!”

“I suspect I’m a special case,” he says flatly. Most people don’t have spare bodies lying around, still whole and functional somehow, and tied to them still, to be put inside. Most of the dead definitively died. “As for why, I have no idea. I suspect it was easier than obliterating my consciousness.”

“Ah,” says the princess, nodding, and amusingly everyone else around the fire seems to concur, that this sounds like Aerith’s style of problem-solving, to hobble his capacity for destruction by trapping him in his body purely because it was more efficient than destroying him. It seems they did know her.

“Is that the only reason?” Cloud’s eyes are narrow on him, again. This boy always sees either too much or too little.

Angeal has been dead five and a half years, Zack five and a half weeks. Aerith had not been dead five and a half hours before she was taking action.

“Aerith…also…” he says slowly. He cannot remember clearly the speech Cloud gave, holding her body; wishes he could ask for it again, now that he has it in him to listen.

But he remembers the smooth slide of his weapon through her abdomen, the spite and triumph that bent his stolen lips into a smile: his own, at Cloud’s astonished horror, at vengeance on the girl Gast had chosen over him; Jenova’s at striking down the last of the race that foiled all her aims for this world so long ago; a shared pleasure in thwarting attempts to halt their plans again.

He remembers too those years near the top of Shinra Tower, before Ifalna made her move and left him behind, when they had occupied adjacent cells. Talking in low voices after curfew, whenever the guard on duty at the corridor-corner was one who wouldn’t report on them, so long as they weren’t too disruptive. She was less than half his age, and he knew her voice better than her face, and until today he doubted she remembered that time at all.

But he always had. Aerith was never someone you could forget.

He looks up at the expectant stares of AVALANCHE.

“Once upon a time, she was like a sister to me.”

The rage in all of them sharpens, and he lets his eyes fall, because they are quite correct.

He was never a man of principles. Not like Angeal. Nor of passions. Not like Genesis.

He had his pride, though. As SOLDIER. As an officer. As a man.

No more.

Now that is something thrown away, or torn off and left behind in the polluted Lifestream. Jenova has it yet, perhaps.

She’s welcome to it. He begins to suspect it was a weakness.

((Genesis was always a force like fire in his life, leaping and demanding and seeming sometimes to ache with the will to devour and destroy him, but at the right distance his presence was so warm, made him feel so very human and alive. Angeal had been more like air, present and usually mild and Sephiroth had never noticed him being precious or vital until he was gone gone gone and then gone forever .

I know, Angeal’s whisper in the Lifestream said, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Aerith of course is water, has always been water, as were her people. Changeful and sometimes fierce or cruel but ever and always her good self. Even the memory of her soothed, in the cold of the lab after she and her mother had gone. It does now, in this half-welcome prison of flesh.

He is always too cold, now.))

“In Hojo’s lab,” says the Guardian, naming the time and place when he had the chance to come to know Aerith, and no one is surprised, and he doesn’t ask how they know.

Maybe Aerith told them. Maybe she talked about those days that he had tried to forget, that he’d half-imagined she’d forgotten. She was so small, then. Five years old to his thirteen, the last time he saw her alive before his own death. He remembers the shape of her hand against his, palm to palm, I don’t really know what Ancients are, she said, the tips of her fingers barely covering the bases of his. I think we look the same, me and you. Right?

When he read that Jenova had been an Ancient, just like Ifalna, that they had been the same because he was an artificial recreation of what Aerith had been by nature…

It was a petty, spiteful, irrational thing, to think that burning Nibelheim would avenge her, or anyone. Even if he had meant it merely as the first step in wiping out everyone who had the audacity to be alive, when everything that mattered to him was dead.

It was a pathetic, crawling, needy thing, to believe a single promise Jenova had made him.

“…yes,” he says.

He glances at Cloud. There is no sign of understanding there—he hardly expected sympathy, but that they had that in common, the labs, the crackle of Hojo’s laugh…he had thought that understanding would receive some fragment of acknowledgement. There is nothing. Only cold calculation, laid over conflict.

Cloud believes him. Wishes he did not. He is familiar with the sensation.

“An’ that’s why you’re sorry?” asks the miner, Wallace. He is calculating, too, and outraged. “Because ya knew her? That’s it?”

“I…” he hesitates. The correct answer to the question is yes, but it is more complicated than that, as well. “Am sorry because....” He does not have the vocabulary for this. Has never had it. “Aerith…cut me loose from my reasons not to be.”

This interrogation is necessary, he knows. Probably necessary. Aerith probably wants him under their eyes. He could walk away now and they might not stop him, and he might not remain lost in this forest forever, without the harp they carry—he could skim over it easily when he was puppeteering alien flesh, and might have been immune to its effects even down among the trees, then, because no matter where he stood his consciousness would never have been entirely contained within the Sleeping Forest’s branches. It would be, now. This is all he is.

But on the other hand, more likely he is their prisoner, and the prisoner of the forest beyond that, and if he wanted to leave their supervision he would have to fight them for it. If nothing else, without them he will have no route off this continent short of swimming. Or running the risk of reconnecting himself to the Calamity by trying to fly.

He gave them his parole, of course, but his pride is as dead as any honor he might have pretended to, so that hardly matters.

Much of him was left behind, he knows, too interwoven with Jenova and the whole of the Lifestream to reclaim. He truly is not and cannot be the person he was once.

This would doubtless be more distressing if he had ever liked that person very much, if he had not broken apart precisely because that self had grown hollow enough that the promise of being anything else, anything that he could believe meaningful, seemed salvation.

But Jenova’s promises were hollow, too. And now that he’s been forced to look his delusions in the face, there is no comfort in them. There hadn’t been in a long time, really. Not since the lie about being Cetra fell away. He’d gloried in his own power and regretted nothing, but the all-consuming hatred had never been comforting.

There is no going back. There never has been. Only forward.

But he never expected forward to be a physical shell and the living world. Living again.

In a way, Aerith and Zack and Angeal were the same as Jenova—striking at him, tearing him apart, isolating him, and then, when he was at his weakest, reaching out to catch him as he fell, and remaking him to their preferences.

In a way, they were worse than Jenova, because after they reached out—after he said yes—they left him alone.

They pushed him out into the world, into this small strange constricting body, and left him.

((They gave him a shirt, on the long trek back across the glacier, when he could not stop shivering. He knows that is when they truly accepted his surrender. When the cat observed that he seemed cold, when that prompted Tifa asking, sharp staccato demand, if it was true, and Highwind grumbling and digging into his bag to drag out his spare.

It didn’t fit, of course. The pilot is barrel-chested enough that it could nearly close in front, and the high-belted waist of the SOLDIER uniform trousers was useful for once, but the shirt was so ludicrously tight across the shoulders that stitches had popped every time he moved, until Highwind ripped the sleeves off entirely, around the time they got south of Icicle.

He would have been happy to keep the sleeves, and just cut out the armpits for freedom of motion, no matter how ridiculous it would have looked, for the additional warmth, but he was hardly going to complain about the terms on which the man decided to mutilate his own possessions for his sake.

It was a thin protection against the coldness radiating from the Planet’s ancient wound, but it was something.

He is always too cold, even now, but at least he has a shirt on his back, to help him miss the layered weight of long hair a little less.))

“I am sorry,” he resolves, “because I cannot take any of it back.”

The small not-Copy, who struck him down on a bloodied night five years ago with nothing but heart and will and Angeal’s discarded legacy, raises mako eyes to his.

They are a dreadfully blue color, even for a SOLDIER, and the part of Sephiroth that was buried in Cloud calls back to him now so loudly for a moment he almost reaches out (without his hands) to touch, before he realizes what he’s doing. Draws back, the backlash of dragging himself back inside his skin at the last moment striking behind the eyes and almost making him shake.

He blinks, hard, instead, turns his face away.

“You wish you could…take it back,” says Cloud, chewing at the concept. Suspicion, well earned, is there. But no recognition of what he just almost did—it was stopped in time, then.

No one noticed.

“Of course,” he agrees. The feeling inside his gut is oddly distant, though less so than it used to be. An empty gnawing, like hunger that rejects food. “After all…”

After all, what did it gain him, that is worth keeping.

What, that he had left when it all began, did he not lose?