Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Nibelheim -  October 1, [ ν ] – εγλ 0002

Sephiroth’s hand looked dark and strange in the sickly mako- and firelight. Two forces melded together, imperfect, tainted with each other. One never pure enough to eradicate the other, the color maimed to a wrong mix.

He tilted his head, barely feeling the distant burn of the oversteeped Fire orb in his hand. He should. It should hurt. White hot flames snaked from the cracks in the disintegrating power focus. It would burn and burn until someone drowned it in mako.

Maybe it did hurt. He wasn’t sure if that mattered now.

matter…come…does not matter…alone

The black tip of the surgical guide for his radius and ulna glinted on his wrist. Sephiroth hated it. How easy to see it was in the wild light. He didn’t usually uncover his skin, didn’t usually see Shinra’s marks unless he was alone.

How wrong he’d been, thinking he was ever anything but alone. He’d never seen it clearly until today.

loathe…alone…only…Mother. Come.

Hatred deep as the mako channels jolted through him. Sephiroth raised the crackling orb over Nibelheim’s fuel line, watching the sparks writhe. Humans, tainting him and Mother. And he’d let them, thinking they would…what? Welcome him? Like he was one of them?

What did he care after what they’d done to the Ancients? To Mother?

yes. pay. take.

alone.

He…he hated them. The certainty covered him like water, complete and perfect. He had always --

Sephiroth dropped the fireball. Let them burn.

There you are, monster!

A voice. Thundering so loud the flames snapped backward. Colors jittered, red suddenly green, the dark sky gouged open with jagged light. Sephiroth’s automatic dodge died in his muscles, cut off by pressure holding him from all directions. He couldn’t move!

The falling flame slowed, slowed, and stopped. Hovering suspended beneath his paralyzed hand.

Failed copy!   A monstrous howl burned the need to flinch in Sephiroth’s immobilized face. He recognized the voice with harsh, blinding certainty. He hadn’t heard it, hadn’t realized it had sound, but it had threaded under his thoughts for days. Invisible. Echoing.

Now it wasn’t his. It wasn’t his!

How dare you! If he could have shuddered it would have rattled to his bones. He is mine -- !

Shut up! Both of you!

Light. Light devoured everything, from flame to sky to the entire world.

🜸   🜸   🜸

Something was very wrong.

The light had heat and weight, crushing him. It smothered the monstrous howling into a faint distant thing, buried behind waves of other senses overtaking him.

Char smell, full and thick in his mouth. And blood, too, fresh. A lazy downswing; his sword in his hand. Someone screamed. Sephiroth tried to look up, but his body didn’t react. It walked calmly up a flame-blanched road, gazing at the blaze, like there was no hurry.

Light devoured that, too.

Shut up. Watch. The voice, dark and close and angry. It echoed where the monstrous howl had been, somewhere inescapable deep inside him.

This is what you did. Look.

Sephiroth saw. Felt. Heard. Flashes of certainty, spinning through him so fast it felt like he split.

----

The town burned. His blade ate into so many bodies it felt impossible. A furious child attacked him with his own sword. He killed her.

A blade through him, pinned into glass. Choking. Cold.

Lifestream roared around him as he sank, clutching a ball of the monstrous howling close to his chest.

----

Stranger’s bodies bent to his will. Jenova spun through him and them. Holding. Laughing. Screaming. He felt them shift and he felt them die around him, aware of each break as they fell apart.

He didn’t avoid motions that hurt them. They didn’t matter.

“I will take this planet back for you, Mother,” he said, in a tone of reverence he didn’t recognize. All the way down in his chest.

--------

Old Shinra fell dead. He…he didn’t care? He didn’t stop to look?

Hatred sang through his every bone, deep and easy like it had always been there. Ready to lunge at every face he saw, every building or road or machine. Stolen. Traitors. Deserving death.

A massive serpent fell dead, bleeding from his cross-strike.

Another body died around him and he shed it like broken gear. It fell, too.

He slid straight into the next. Monsters and corpses and half-human half-creatures. He waited for them to…to come to him? To be his.

To be…?

---------

Someone resisted his hold. He caught their thoughts in his hand and crushed them like ice crystals. Their cry ridged pleasure up his palms. Satisfaction through his chest. The fear in his toy’s eyes. That’s what mattered.

The blade through him was gone, healed. He felt where its scar should be but wasn’t on each body he took as his own. He pondered cutting it into place. Decided not to. Again and again and again --

----------

That’s not important!

Light devoured the scar.

Look!

-----------

White stones tried to stop him. The enemy tried to stop him. But nothing could. His foe died mid-prayer, her blood drowning out the cloying mako fog. He barely felt her fall she was so light.

His fear faded as she did. Nothing would stop him now.

-----------

He held the dark orb overhead. As he poured his magic into it the sky darkened to match, laced with fire. The wrath of the Ancients curved massive and perfect in the sky.

It burned his hand. So he let the body go.

--------

They fought. The enemy fought. Frenetic rhythm raced through him as he defended Mother’s revenge. Single-minded viciousness, just like he’d been trained. Nothing else mattered.

He willed every body they had into his, and he was more. More powerful. More hers. More deadly.

He couldn’t breathe. Too many vertebrae and sinews knotted through his chest.

He didn’t need to.

Mother fought with him. She furled him closed where they cut. She stretched his limbs when they tried to outmaneuver him. He was everything she decided, and he didn’t need to breathe.

-----------

He won.

The enemy died, one by one.

The fire lit the sky blazing. The meteor hit. The earth cracked and split. Lifestream gushed from the wound too late.

And the humans died.

And the creatures died.

Sephiroth took the lifestream and swallowed it. Full and mighty with its power. He beamed out at the empty husk. “Now, Mother, we can cross the cosmos together.” 

-------------

There. Feel this.

-----------

No answer.

The certainty under Sephiroth’s skin reversed. Suddenly, it had blades. Suddenly it hurt.

Now, Gaia-spawn, I take what is mine.

Jenova’s voice echoed out of somewhere deep inside him. Part of him. Nowhere he’d ever been able to reach. But it had never hurt him before.

My new meteor.

He tried to fight. He tried to run. He couldn’t. She held him motionless and ignored his writhing inside the flesh they shared.

My new body.

She shredded him. Pried the Lifestream out of him piece by piece, strand by strand. Green filaments tore bloody from his skin and then blackened in the air. The planet’s dying energy bending into her awful grip.

Sephiroth couldn’t scream. His senses fractured.

The empty crater gaped above him, the stars shuddering into motion at its rim.

The planet’s dying whisper was cold.

No!

🜸   🜸   🜸

“She kills you last.”

Sephiroth writhed against yellow-green tendrils shattering the nothing, panic pounding though him. No, no, he wouldn’t let her. He wasn’t just a tool --- he wasn’t --- !

“I just watched it. You died here alone. While the Lifestream and all of us dissolve.”

He could writhe. He could move. He existed. Sephiroth tried to scream but no sound escaped him. The strange tendrils tightened, pinning him still in the dark. Were…were they Lifestream? They looked wrong.

“Made you smile for it.” A hollow figure swirled out of them. Sephiroth squinted. “That’s the fucking end you win. Happy?” The light surged forward and a blow crashed into his jaw. The force snapped his head sideways, blood sharp on his tongue, starburst pain all up his skull.

Only then was he sure he had a body. He quaked with relief.

“Carnage and destruction until it devours you.” A man stepped back, fists raised as if he might want more.  “And everything and everyone.” The faint twining glow of the strands lit his face in patches, not enough to see clearly. A large weapon glimmered on his back, nothing but an ominous edge.

Sephiroth tugged against the coils but they held firm. He hung upright, too easy for the stranger to reach. The razed nothing of the dead crater. The choking crash of the fire swallowing that nothing town. The bodies dying around him, inside him. Revulsion and rage tangled in a roaring tide. He could still feel the echoes in his skin, in his bones. He’d done everything that monster asked and she’d taken every piece of him until she split him for parts. The moment she pried him to pieces seared into his mind.

And for what?

He could move but he couldn’t get loose. The sick lifestream held him fast.

Why show him this then drag him back captive?

He tried to snap the question, but sharp pressure jabbed his throat where air should be. Suffocating. Empty. The pain had distant jabs, like barbs in his gut, and panic flashed all over again. The bones. The pieces. Were they still in him!?

“Stop thrashing.” The stranger’s lip curled. The tendrils tightened harder. “You get to when I say so. Isn’t that new?”

Sephiroth slumped, forcing himself rigidly still. Without air he couldn’t tell if his vocal chords were cut or if the pain in his throat was just an echo of the death he’d seen. The twist in the stranger’s tone was clearly personal. Try as he might, he couldn’t recognize him. The Lifestream glow twisted fitfully, rapidly fading, barely showing spiked hair and grit teeth. All the same fading yellow-green hue. No clues.

It had been a while now since he looked at an opponent and shuddered.

The stranger’s scowl darkened. “You know me?”

Damn it. He hadn’t hidden it well enough. Sephiroth grit his teeth, jaw aching. No. But after everything he’d just seen, he wasn’t answering anything to anyone.

“You bastard!” This time the punch crashed into his stomach. “You won’t even understand this then!” Sephiroth lurched, body desperate to buckle around the undefended target. His lungs heaved helpless in the nothing, mouth open, no air for him to wheeze. The pressure eclipsed every other need --- Gaia it hurt! Like his diaphragm tore trying to pull. Like the flash of that blade in his back, like the tearing ---

The stranger hit him again, snarling curses. Dizzy anger snapped through Sephiroth. No, he did not understand attacking an unarmed opponent!

But something was very wrong. Something awful lodged deep in his gut, deeper even than whatever held him breathless. Something that made the fury brittle. 

Because he did. He had. He’d felt the blade in his hand. He’d seen fakes and tricks too many times to think that had been either. He’d been ready to do those things, in that moment of the fire. He’d wanted everyone to burn. He’d thrown the Fire orb at Nibelheim’s conduit hoping they would die. It wasn’t far from that to killing them himself.

The stranger howled in frustration, wrenching away. Sephiroth choked and didn’t want to know why. And not wanting felt like being crushed.

The stranger ran ghostly hands over his face, making a hoarse, awful sound. “It…it doesn’t matter.” He drew the weapon off his back. It looked like a heavy sword. “It doesn’t -- I don’t need you to understand.”

He swung his arm sharply. The tendrils shifted, dragging Sephiroth down. Impact jarred dizzy up into his front, a surface he couldn’t see roughly stopping his fall, even though he could only see darkness down and down and down.

Or, no. Far below him, he could see a dark rocky orb. Empty. Dead.

He tried to push against the surface, but the tendrils pinned him there, prone and twisted at the stranger’s feet. Sephiroth fought in earnest now, growling silently and dragging against them until black streaks jagged over his vision. The rage was back, stoked by how many times he’d waited immobilized while someone monologed. Everything he did, every step he took, the one choice he’d thought was really his -- straight back into a cage while someone made him theirs. He’d thought he was choosing for himself this morning, and instead he’d walked right into Jenova’s hands.

He was no better than a damn hound on a chain.

He had to get out of here. Kill her before she could betray him --

But he was weak. Airless. Empty. That was his failing, every time. He was weak. He’d let her take him. All he could do now was tremor against the Lifestream as the stranger crouched over him.

“Listen. All you need to know.” A knee ground into his back, right over the choking pressure. Sephiroth dug his cheek into the hard nothing, straining his neck to look. He only saw a faint flicker of bright, hateful eyes. “You did this. Everyone dead, everything gone. The planet dying right now. I -- we -- are so sick of it.”

SHKHHH.

The sword gouged into the nothing a hairs-width from Sephiroth’s face. 

He twitched, half convinced it cut him, squinting through the glow of his eyes thrown back at him. The tip was visible in the infinite blackness below this invisible ledge. Seeing it made him nauseous. It looked…SOLDIER. It looked like Fair’s.

Had --- had he killed Fair…?

The stranger took a materia from the hilt. It had a haunted, bony color in the sickly, dying light. A rolling flinch snapped through Sephiroth’s core at the harsh trace of gloved fingers down his spine, angling along the crest of his right shoulder blade. Measuring. The stranger was measuring!

“Since all you’re good for is killing, you will fix it. You will stop this.” The stranger pressed the materia to Sephiroth’s cheek, like he wanted him to see it, know its coldness. Something was wrong with it, the dull white slowly greying.

Anything he might say was locked behind the choke. Sephiroth struggled again, desperate. No, he had to get back, stop the fire, find and kill Jenova -- !

“I will make you.”

The off color Lifestream flared, sharp and bright, the stranger snatched the materia away, and agony like a dragon’s bite pierced Sephiroth’s back. Sudden, fast, blinding. Sephiroth snapped against the nothing-ground, body locked rigid, and screamed.

He could -- he could --- !

The pain didn’t let him stop at one ragged cry, the sounds a shock after so long muted. An intrusion reached down through his ribs, frigid deep in his chest. He could cough around it, gasp, twitch, feel the dizzy certainty of fingers in his core but not the blood choking him it should have caused. Something cold pressed hard into each breath he gasped.

The man left it there. He let go, Sephiroth horribly aware of fingers arcing into his left lung. When the stranger pulled his hand back it was like he moved through water, no resistance from Sephiroth’s body. Sephiroth screamed again. Nothing but pain, like every part he touched lit up burning until he passed.

The cold stayed, heavy and still and inside him.

“Keep her alive.” The stranger stood, letting him choke without pressure. He gripped the sword hilt. “It’ll tell you who. Understand?”

Now that he could breathe, hatred consumed everything Sephiroth felt. Days and days of Jenova’s whispers stitching under his skin, unable to hear them, reading the Professor’s awful records of every device and chemical and spell forced through his body. He wanted to kill everyone who’d ever touched him! His voice rattled but obeyed him. “Wh - Why should I follow any mission you set?”

For a wild moment, he called to his sword.

“Shut up.”

He barely flattened his palm when the cold in his chest surged, frigid and stabbing. And the pressure snapped down, suffocating him again. Sephiroth crumpled, clawing faintly against the tendrils, horror barely registering through the pain. Air whistled out of him in desperate sounds, but none came when he tried to inhale. The cold twisted and twisted, gouging into him until he could barely feel anything past it.

Overhead, the mako lights had almost gone out. The little remaining blackened, turing dark and reddish. Or that was his vision failing. Dying? The planet, the stranger said it was nearly dead…

Because of him. Because of him .

“Because I’m sending someone to keep you in line.” The last yellow flicker crossed the man’s eyes. Mako. It…through the glimmers, it looked like he had mako eyes.

Light, blinding, crushing. It swallowed everything, ravenous, and Sephiroth couldn’t fight it. The cold stayed, excruciating and heavy in his chest.

🜸   🜸   🜸

He couldn’t breathe.

Green blurred and blotted everything. Heavy. Pinning him down.

He couldn’t breathe. The pressure was going to rip him open. He couldn’t ---

Now you wait.

He tried to rise. Rough force stopped him at arms and knees. B-bound. Liquid pressed at his mouth, slid into his nose, and air hunger gnawed through his organs. Too big. Too much to keep pressure. To not gasp, overridden by his body’s desperation, and draw it in. Weight dragging at his lungs. 

Drowning. Thrashing.

I have more important things to do.

Burning. Setting his throat on fire as his choked. M-mako. Gagging on it, Sephiroth was sure. He dragged an eye open.

Nothing. Just green, its hungry heat on his skin, stinging against his cornea. But the blinding glow felt like it had attention in it. The stranger wanted to see this. Wanted to watch.

I...what did I…?

Hot shocks of energy burrowed from the mako, breaking everything he knew, and he lost thoughts.

Chapter Text

Zack.

Dying sucked. The pain stopped a long time ago, so why wasn’t he forgetting it? The Lifestream loomed massive all around him; the biggest thing ever! Tugging at his edges.

But Zack couldn’t figure out how to fall into it. He’d never been scared of the ocean or heights or any of that ‘bigger than you’ stuff. Wasn’t Gran supposed to be here, get him to focus on something besides the tense knot buried in his chest?

Zack!

It felt like he was the problem. Like he couldn’t make himself. But how was that his fault? He didn’t want to leave them! He couldn’t feel the rain anymore, but he was still cold. Was he too annoyed by that?

How the hell did his back itch?

Zack, get up! I don’t have much time!

Wait, that voice! Urgency tore the bleary haze and Zack lurched through it, halfway to his feet with fists up before he realized he’d moved. “Cloud!?”

Information slammed into him like a wall, so overwhelming he stumbled and fell. Green lights, green dark. His knees and arms lit up with cold scraping pain. Surface under him. Cold air. Tiny shadows etched vivid and unignorable on everything he saw, and every shift was loud as a helicopter.

Shit -- shit -- what?

Fuck his hair thundered in his ears, and his tongue was so warm his mouth hurt. Zack crumpled, digging his head against the cold floor, fighting to focus on anything past the deafening thump of his heartbeat.

H-heart?

Cold. He was cold. Not wet. He flinched at the thought of water on his skin, and his hands and feet twitched.

Hands? Feet? Moving!?

He was alive!

Zack curled, shuddering. Warmth had never felt this crucial and urgent. Damn he’d give his own name for a heater right now. Only once he’d burrowed his hands behind his knees did the real shakes start, exhaustion and fear and adrenaline all meshed like instant fever.

He was breathing . He was thinking!

He was alive!

Feeling furiously over his torso confirmed it. He had no wounds. The tears and punctures from the bullets gaped open in his uniform, right through his shattered shoulder pads, but under them, nothing. He wasn’t even bloody.

Not even his head. He dug in his fingers so hard it hurt, looking and looking for the dizzy brokenness he’d felt at the end there. It was gone. His head and chest and gut felt achy and tender, but diffuse like he’d sprinted the whole jungle and forgot to stop.

What the heck!?

Wait. The sensory jungle loosened just enough for Zack to machete through it, clamber off the floor. “Cloud! Was that you?”

He didn’t fall this time, though his head swam dangerously until he found his balance. No answer except the dull echo of a metal bracketed tunnel arced overhead. Zack tensed, hair prickling on his arms at the faint lights and wire walks branching out from the landing he crouched on. A -- a lab?

He was not taking another dip in a goddamn mako tube!

Zack dropped into a defensive stance, his muscles twinging and cramping in weird places. Like they expected to hurt so hard they felt it anyway, trying to stop him. His memory was fragmented, scattered by gunshots, but he tried to drag anything out of it as he scanned the narrow staircase. How did he get here? Did someone heal him? How was that even possible after damage like that?

No footsteps, even at the edge of his hearing. Just a bone-deep rumble, far off and rhythmic. An HVAC pump. Maybe a second one for mako. He was underground.

Fear tried to wriggle past the other feelings. None of this made sense. He’d been dying under the sky just now…

A close, soft hiss pulled his attention down, and Zack stumbled back. “Whoa!” A soft green glow twined out of the air near the floor. It was the same color as mako in a reactor, but somehow light, floating. Individual tendrils looped and weaved together, just slow enough he didn’t retreat further.

Its barely audible hum soothed his overloaded senses somehow.

Five seconds of weird quiet dancing, and the glow flashed. Then, like it had always been there, a buster sword rested on the wire floor. Ache twinged in Zack’s thumbs, automatically trying to keep hold on a hilt that wasn’t there.

It looked a lot like his. Similar make, maybe. But broad dark lines branched over its blade and hilt, like repaired cracks. The sword’s face split with them, like it tried to capture a lightning bolt.

What could split a sword like that?

It felt like a rock sat in his stomach at the thought. Zack didn’t understand the first thing about the Lifestream or the planet or all that stuff. He hadn’t even know if he thought it was real until he met Aerith. But he’d seen enough to know it didn’t try to hurt people. Aerith would say it wasn’t in its nature.

“For me, huh?”

Shivering, he took the hilt.

🜸   🜸   🜸

“Sorry. I didn’t take very good care of it.”

First, Zack knew it was still. So still it felt like a dream. He knew the figure speaking stood next to him, but he only saw a dark, slowly turning sphere far below them. Whatever held them up was invisible.

He could feel his pulse, and the sword hilt was still in his hand. Reassuring.

“Cloud, are you ok!? What happ…” The words caught in his mouth when he saw the faint, barely visible Lifestream filimets twinning through the shape of a person. It looked so dark and unnatural. “You…aren’t Cloud.”

The stance, the look, even the hair and the faint scar on his forehead. All so close, achingly close, but somehow wrong.

The not-Cloud laughed, so breathless Zack’s chest hurt hearing it. “It worked…it’s really…” He clenched his fists, shaking his head. “ No . I’m not. Too much gone.”

Zack didn’t like the sound of that at all. “Did you save me?”

Not-Cloud’s face gnarled. Angry. Miserable. “No. I didn’t save anyone .” He kicked at the dead stone under them. It looked awfully big. Like, space big, with all that dark around them.

Zack might have asked, but not-Cloud pressed his hands to his forehead. “No! Yes. Yes, I did it. Listen.” He took deep, shaking breaths. “I couldn’t save her -- you -- them. Sephiroth destroys all of it. Kills everyone.”

Sephiroth!? Chills scraped up Zack’s shoulders.

Not-Cloud waved his arms violently at the dark. “It can’t end like this. I won’t let it!”

Sephiroth wasn’t done after that blood soaked horror in Nibelheim? Zack blew out a breath and strode up next to the specter. “It won’t.” Someone looking like Cloud sounding so carved open hurt. He didn’t ever want his friend to sound like that. Nd the sickly yellow of the mako-Lifestream made him feel sick.

Trying to feel certain tramped down some of the terror at the nagging feeling he was staring down in the jaws of another war. Sephiroth was…hell, last time Zack tried to cross blades with him, it had gone more than to hell. “So. You need me to step in? Least I can do…”

Damn it. His tone still tremored. He was so tired. So done fighting other people’s battles. He didn’t even sound like he meant it!

“No!” Not-Cloud’s voice switched hard and sure, so different from a second ago Zack stared at him. Cloud had never sounded even a little like that. Not-Cloud reached out like to grab his shoulders and Zack froze. “No. Not again. You are too important.” What!? How was he the one trembling? 

He didn’t find out what those ghostly hands felt like. They passed through him. Not-Cloud grit his teeth. “Only the best killer there is can destroy something so evil.” He grimaced, clear hatred darkening his strange face. “And that isn’t either of us.”

Zack’s skin crawled. That sounded…pretty grim. “So…” The alarm bells were blaring over each other at this point. Everyone was in danger. Cloud. Aerith. His parents!? He couldn’t stay out of it, even if this weird furious Cloud ghost sent someone else. Zack knew too much about the thin line between weapon and carpet bomb, and how hard it was to tell when you were the bomb.

Not-Cloud nodded, staring at Zack like he was something out of a book. “I needed someone I trust. Not like him. ” Hatred ground his voice ugly, completely unfamiliar. “Someone to make sure.”

Zack choked tighter on the sword’s hilt.

Not-Cloud reached for it and his hand met the metal. “The Shattersword will tell you more. Keep it close. Use it to recognize him.” His fingers dug claw-like into the repaired gouges in the blade’s face. “If he won’t, make him. And if he still won’t, kill him.”

Zack shivered. “What happened?” How could this person look so much like his friend?

Not-Cloud shook his head violently, recoiling. “It’s dying.” The light twining in him was dimmer, flickering a disturbing reddish in places. “Zack, listen! The planet is dying, I have to send you. Just, remember!” The flicker feel of mako skidded in Zack’s wrist, the man’s hand passing through him.

“Remember,” not-Cloud gasped. “Sephiroth is coming to kill her first. I -- I couldn’t stop him, but maybe both of us -- just get to her! Keep her safe!”

Vertigo tore through the empty dark, like down wasn’t down . Zack clutched the sword, trying to see. “Who!?”

“Aerith!”

The light went out.

🜸   🜸   🜸

“Cloud!”

Adrenaline burned so hot it made the metal corners of the room feel jittery and close. Zack bounced across the landing, blade raised to defend, until he was sure he was alone.

Only then could his combat instinct unlock enough to take stock. He was shaking -- shock or fatigue or both. The cold air burrowed through the holes in his clothes. Lights felt sharp and bright, making him wince. Just like they would after long minutes in that dark place. The same far off pump drowned him in thick sound and it was clearly louder to his left. His gut ached still.

Whatever that had been, he wasn’t mako-dazed or dreaming right now.

Zack dug his grip tighter on the sword hilt. The twisting marks on the blade blinked in the fitful lights. He hefted it, staring. Solid and real. He tracked the filed-down edges where the pieces had been jagged before repair.

Zack lowered it slowly. Ok. So that…vision? Of the end of the world? He wasn’t the kind of guy to doubt what he saw. No time to start now. LIfestream was never supposed to be yellow, or red, or black, and just seeing a picture wouldn’t make his stomach flip like this.

“Not on my watch, you hear?” He looked up, imagining the planet could hear him through the layers and layers of whatever over his head between here and the sky. He had to get out of here. He had to find Aerith. That, at least, was simple.

Zack automatically hefted Shattersword to his back, but yelped when the weight snapped broken armor into his neck. Shit. He had to get a harness that wasn’t shot to hell. His vest and kit were shedding pieces and one of his belts hung limp, a massive hole torn through the buckle side.

Zack tore them off, taking grit-teethed pleasure in the remnants of his last stand shriveling on the floor. He carried Shattersword on his shoulder as he hit the stairs at a run.

If this was a second chance, he wasn’t going to waste it down here.

Chapter Text

Boom.

Whatever this place had been before, now it was some kind of spiral lab. Stinking of mako, and climbing floor after floor. Cramped, deep with underground pressure. Zack must have climbed enough stairs to kill someone normal by now.

Boom.

That distant sound again. Not the pump. It was irregular, and strong enough to tremor the metal underfoot.

Zack clattered to a stop at yet another empty, green-lit landing, letting the aches and fatigue scream through his limbs until they died down again. He sure felt like he’d just fought an army.

Whatever that was, it was louder the closer he got to the top. He couldn’t stop long. It sounded bad.

Zack rolled his shoulders, trying to pull some semblance of spring back into his stace. “If it’s a fight, I’m gonna be so screwed.” Not nearly enough, but he had nothing to help. He started toward the next flight, trying not to let his back go stiff. 

You’re too important. Not-Cloud’s words bounced around his head, like they had nowhere to land. Zack bristled. It sounded bad out there. He kept tricking himself into thinking he could pick gunshots out of the vague smudge of noise. What was he good at but charging into messes to force them wide open?

He was going to Aerith. That was really important.

Hummmmmmmm

What? Shattersword thrummed into his palm. The lines across the blade lit darting Lifestream green, tendrils snaking from hilt to tip. Zack felt a rush of power like the blade was somehow a materia.

Make sure.

Zack froze. Not-Cloud’s words echoed in his ear, way too close for comfort, but it was hazy, like he heard it through a wall. Angry, harsh, so much like Cloud but so completely different.

Shattersword flickered.

Make him.

Zack swallowed. He moved the blade in a wide arc, watching the light shift. Certainty settled hard and cold in his throat when the light intensified at the tip when he pointed at the lab door.

It would be a Shinra facility. Zack shivered. “They’re in there? His killer?”

Shattersword thrummed again, longer this time.

Shit.

He took a step toward the door before he decided whether he should. Shattersword flashed once, twice. Magic-taste bloomed in the air. “What!?” Zack recoiled, feeling weight and power press into his off hand in a brief, curt push.

He wasn’t stupid enough to drop his only weapon. Instead, he opened his fingers and stared at the green crystal sliver in his hand. That hadn’t been there before. It was a shard, two inches long, small. But he could feel the tingling echo of thunder curling just under his skin.

A piece of a materia…?

Someone had carved an eye loop in one end, and a thin cord threaded through it, looped up around his wrist. Easy to hold. Zack breathed a plume of magic toward it and blinked when the surface warmed, energy stirring back.

Fragmented like this, who knew what would happen if he tried to cast.

He glanced at Shattersword. 

I’m sending someone to keep you in line.

Not-Cloud’s voice. But not words Zack remembered hearing. He shuddered. Shattersword would remember, he’d said. Apparently this voice-mail thing was Shattersword remembering.

Zack ground the shard into his palm. Someone dangerous enough to put Sephiroth on notice? Not-Cloud had sounded desperate and furious. Zack felt for the guy. But that didn’t mean he trusted him. Zack knew more about that kind of power than…well, anyone alive.

If he had to, he’d cut down whatever Shinra monster the guy meant to loose on the world and take Sephiroth out himself.

Or he’d die -- again -- trying.

Zack activated the door and took a two-hand grip on Shattersword. He was tired enough power was top priority. He heard no footsteps on the other side, but he waited  for a full second anyway before moving in. He hadn’t seen anything but fiends and rats so far.

That was worse. Abandoned places were the worst ones to find something. At this point, he’d seen more of Shinra’s ruined underbelly than he wanted to think about.

Inside, tall green mako distilleries flanked an observation deck. Dust caked the desks so thickly it looked plush and smelled softly dead. Zack grimaced, covering his mouth as he moved in. Keeping mako piped in here was also a bad sign.

The tanks he could see were empty, thank Kujata. But he could hear the wet frothing of disturbed mako. Something was moving out of sight. The chambers clearly expected residents. Metal struts with attachment points ringed them at the base, center, and up near the ceiling.

Zack’s breath caught, goosebumps prickling along his back. Too close. The memory of glass against his fists when he woke in one of those bubbled, trying to overtake him. He shoved it down as hard as he could, darting down the narrow aisle to the left. The sooner he got out of here the --- SHIT!

Silver. The thing struggling in the last mako tank was human-shaped, human colored, human skinned. And long, searingly familiar hair twisted over it, snapping taut and metal-harsh in the bubbles.

Sephiroth. Fucking Sephiroth twitched in there!

“What the hell!?” Zack sprang away, sword halfway up, calling on the fractured Thunder materia, risks be damned. “How!?” Fury and fear beat in him like a shock-rod hit.

Luckily, the materia didn’t explode in his hand or anything. It just didn’t bolt, no lightning from his fingers. Shit. The press of magic jolted Zack’s senses hyperaware. Mako fumes felt like a coating on his tongue. Every hiss and glug and scrape from the tank hit like its own entire sensation.

In the tank, Sephiroth stilled, a barely-open eye flashing. Shackles at his ankles held him to the bottom grate, bent in the mako’s upward pressure. His hair arced down like a leash, pinned to the top of the chamber, forcing his head up. Tubes pierced it here and there until they reached lower, wrapping his chest and arm to sprout from too many places. Trying to hide him. But Zack could see too much regardless: the unmarked flesh where Cloud’s blow should have scarred even the most augmented SOLDIER. The unnatural whiteness of his teeth as Sephiroth drifted, mouth open, motionless in mako that should have drowned him. 

Would have drowned a real person. Zack discovered he knew what the awful stuff tasted like, a murky salty thing in the back of his mouth. It must have seeped in past his breathing mask while Hojo had him. Nausea gut-punched him and he nearly slashed the tank and Sephiroth in one swing.

But when he hefted it, Shattersword lit up bright on the blade edge, and tugged suddenly heavy.

If he won’t, make him.

Zack stumbled, his arm dragged down. “Are you crazy?” He snarled at the dark corners, like he could shout all the way to not-Cloud. “ This is your idea!?”

The materia shard dug into his hand. Damn it, where was something stronger? He had to stop this now , before Sephiroth regained consciousness, was more dangerous. Zack didn’t know what it took to kill him, but he couldn’t let him another step closer to Aerith!

Growling, he dragged the blade back up, ignoring its resistant weight.

But he forced himself to pause there. Think. Bad as he wanted to cut him down right now, Sephiroth was barely moving. Heavy SOLDIER-type restraints bound his arms behind him, his legs to the grate. Zack would only get one hit before he found out how much pain woke him up. Zack had no idea. He couldn’t even be submerged without oxygen equipment!

He couldn’t afford to lose force to the tank glass or damage to the mako.

A muscle in his jaw locked. Damn it…face to face, huh?

Each step to the tank controls felt like his boots were solid iron. The mako drained in a gasp and Zack forced himself to wait as the glass wheezed open. He had to get this right.

Sephiroth slumped to the grate as gravity took him back from the mako, stopped short of falling by his hair. He stirred, tugging at his shackles before twitching forward in a wet, retching cough. Chills rushed up Zack’s arms, adrenaline screaming. Now. Strike now, while you have the chance!

But he didn’t. He stepped slowly into the cramped chamber, blade raised and ready. Damn it. He didn’t care what any awful premonition said. But he’d just died. The holes still gaped through his fatigues. He didn’t…he didn’t want to start that again yet…

At his feet, Sephiroth paused his contorted hacking, mako oozing from his mouth. A rough creature-sound bounced around the glass when he tugged at his restraints again, fists clenching. His head half-lifted. “L--Lu---”

His fucking voice! Zack flinched and reacted without thinking, snatching the taut hair and forcing Sephiroth back down against it. “Don’t move!” 

Rage bubbled and cracked in his fingers, unsteady, like it had been stuck there since the army started shooting. How dare Sephiroth be alive! And how dare anyone make him hesitate stabbing him through on sight!?

Sephiroth quivered, mako-bright eyes fixed on the grate. He didn’t struggle. “L-Lungs…occluded…S--” He gurgled, throat moving like he might retch again. ”Sight…two. B-blurred.”

Wait. Wait, wait.

“H-hearing…t-ten. Understood. Do--do not--” A splatter of mako cut him off, gobbing across his nose and then his mouth. Sephiroth tremored, involuntary motion snapping so hard in his chest Zack felt the kick. Aborted coughs.

He was choking, and fighting it.

Zack’s stomach was doing cartwheels.

 “Do not move.” Sephiroth wheezed. “D-delirium…eight. D-dislocation…”

Report. He was freakin’ reporting. Like he’d woken up like this before . And just because the mako didn’t drown him, that didn’t mean he could breathe the stuff. Sephiroth lost another cough, droplets splattering from his mouth.

Good, part of Zack hissed. If he was going to be alive right now he better suffer for what he did. Feeling him choke helped Zack wait again, delay another heartbeat. Think.

No way Sephiroth as he’d fought him would let anyone hold him pinned like this even for a second. He’d said he was done letting “humans” take what they wanted. The memory made Zack twitch, his ribs ache, but he weathered it. How was he like this now?

“Stop,” he tried again. “I don’t want to hear it.”

Sephiroth tensed, a different kind of rigid setting into his pinned limbs. He fell quiet, just his shallow breaths cluttering the claustrophobia. Goosebumps ridged up Zack’s bare sides. Reminder of how unarmored he was.

Sephiroth waited. Still. Quiet. Eyes fixed dazedly on the floor. Attentive .

The mako glow of the puddles bounced around them, just like it had in Nibelheim. At least three of the shots that brought him down today had hit scars left from his fight with Sephiroth down in the reactor. The aches flared like unhealed echoes.

The light betrayed him. It caught on thin dark lines marked meticulously up Sephiroth’s bared back. Like wires, or surgical guides, lines boxing each of his vertebrae.

Zack was going to be sick. What had Shinra planned to make out of him this time?

This was crazy. He was the dumbest SOLDIER left alive…

Sephiroth gasped sharply. “F-Fa -- ! ” He choked again, low and rattling in his chest, still trying to swallow it down.

“Don’t,” Zack snapped, and his arm nearly moved on its own to drive the sword hilt into Sephiroth’s gut. He’d incapacitated hundreds of opponents with the same hit, their armor useless without air in their lungs.

Sephiroth’s body gave and twisted like it should, reflex overriding him forward, hacking violently. Zack had no Esuna or even Cure. Brute force was his only option for someone dry drowning. But he knew what it was for. Feeling Sephiroth struggle in his grip, even involuntarily, steadied some of his spinning fury.

But enough mako gagged out of Sephiroth for him to breathe, and he howled. Sharp, shrill, scrabbling at his fetters trying to regain his balance. Zack flinched in shock. Like it hurt. Like he could hurt, like he’d lied every time Zack had seen him take a blow without a sound. And Sephiroth didn’t bare his teeth or try to tear free. He slumped back, gasping deep, wet breaths, his eyes wide and crystalline in the dark.

What the fuck? No retaliation, no cruelty, hell, no spells? Sephiroth didn’t even try to tug out of his grip. Zack could have screamed. How could he change so completely twice!?

Sephiroth stared between Zack and the sword. “I didn’t…kill you…”

Zack gnashed his teeth. Surprise? Really? Not for lack of trying! That asshole . He had the gall to sound dazed!

He was on his feet in a second, blade poised over Sephiroth’s sword arm, holding the thunder shard between them. Fury bubbled in every breath Zack took. Nibelheim was burned into him. He didn’t think he’d ever be able to smell woodsmoke without retching again.

But -- but not-Cloud said he’d sent someone to stop Sephiroth. If this was his killer, who was he killing!? If Zack swung now, would Aerith still be in danger?

Damn it all!

“Well, am I gonna put you down right here, murderer?” Zack called magic into the shard. Sephiroth wouldn’t know it was a distraction, an empty cast. “Or are you gonna explain yourself?”

It worked. Sephiroth craned his head back, eyes fixed unblinking on Zack’s raised fist. He looked even more dangerous breathing and coiled, like he might just snap the restraints if he moved. Zack’s heart pounded in his hands, aching against his paltry weapons.

He shouldn’t ask. It didn’t matter. He was going to kill him in a second. But Zack was so sick of not understanding anything. “Start talking,” he spat.

Nothing could have been more wrong than Sephiroth glancing at his face and following the order. “He meant you.” Zack had never heard his voice fray before. “The stranger sent you to control me.” His jaw set.

Shattersword hummed again, longer. Agreement. The urge to throw it across the room cluttered up Zack’s battle attention. No, no, that was insane. Thinking anything could force Sephiroth to do anything? Zack had nearly died trying, and still had failed to save the village. Control that?

No! Get it away from everything as quickly as possible.

“I don’t care why I’m here.” Zack barely recognized his own snarl. It was easy to flick Shattersword down, regardless of the weight. “I kill monsters .”

Sephiroth was himself this time. He didn’t flinch when the blade grazed his arm. Zack dragged back before any real damage, watching the cut bleed. It seemed somehow insulting that Sephiroth bled red like everyone else after saying he wasn’t even human. He hoped it stung.

“ Fair.” How did he sound like a disappointed corporal while chained to the floor? Sephiroth spoke softly, rigidly level. “There might be time. The village -- I set it, but the fire -- “

Panic surged in Zack’s veins -- What did he do? Who else? -- until the word ‘fire’ processed. Then he shrieked and punched Sephiroth square in the mouth, casting the materia on reflex.

He thought -- he thought -- !?

“They’re dead!” Shouting echoed off the damn steel all around them, dangerous if anyone was in earshot and Zack didn’t even care. “You slaughtered them! Hamstrung me. Left me there!” He drew back, almost swinging again. But he caught himself. Settled to shove magic at the materia shard again. Sephiroth might not have noticed it cast, might not know it had no threat. “And you were happy! ”

His roar made him shudder. He was so angry. So tired of this. Sephiroth didn’t look up and it made him want to pummel him. What, now he was ashamed? Zack shoved him. “Well? Nothing to say?”

Except Sephiroth toppled against his restraints, only the clamps on his hair keeping him from falling. His hands shook in the shackles while his split lip wrenched, trying and failing to curl in a growl. Quivering, suspended over the wet floor. Unable to collapse and collapsing. Breaths faint and scattered. What!?

There. Just for a second, electricity jagged over Sephiroth’s neck. Bright, gone in an instant. But Zack could pick out more, tiny, darting shocks across his skin. When Zack stood, Sephiroth’s eyes following him but nothing else. He didn’t turn his head or tense.

Zack traced the shard in wonder. It did cast. Somehow even without a bolt, it hit.

Sephiroth was stunned. Paralyzed.

Zack’s pulse thudded in his grip on Shattersword. That changed everything! With a stun he might actually stand a chance. “Guess this thing packs a punch?” He tried to make it a joke and all that came out was hoarse and dangerous. Zack gripped the shard and stood, resting the blade edge against Sephiroth’s shoulder just under the deltoid. He felt his thumbs tremoring, but not badly enough to risk a slip. “Think I’ll keep you from using that sword again. Give me one reason I shouldn’t.”

He wasn’t a monster. He waited. Sephiroth sparked and hung, forced motionless, and Zack watched. He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to see. But he had no choice. And in the pause, there was nothing to do but see.

Some of tubes attached to needles in Sephiroth’s pinned wrists. Most of them slotted into an apparatus embedded in his right arm, the mako tinged red at the connection points. The marks on his spine were tattoos, traced around each vertebra in a rigid square, all the way down to the floor. Worse, low on his left side, script arced in black, regular lines.

Zack couldn’t read it past Sephiroth’s pinned arms, and he didn’t want to know what it said. He hated everything about this. He hadn’t thought to check his back for anything beyond injuries, and the thought of Shinra leaving notes on him made him want to scream. When did they put that on Sephiroth?

Sephiroth gasped sharply and leaned away from the sword. “I don’t think it would stay removed. I’ve regrown fingers.” He shuddered. “And I’d rather not see what Jenova grows it back as…”

Not even threatning him back. Answering like he understood the threat was serious. Zack’s sweat chilled on his back. He wished he hadn’t asked. He hated how he hesitated, all the twisted half-creatures he’d seen tangling in his brain. Everyone changed before he had to kill them.

“Jenova.” The name tasted awful. He couldn’t scrub out the memory of it, Sephiroth bloody and using the softest tone he’d ever heard. “Your dead mother whose head you took off?”

A wild, vivid urge burst through him to shift the blade up. Add enough force, sink it into Sephiroth’s neck. Show him what his strike would have felt like for the dead lab thing if it had been alive.

Sephiroth hissed. “She wants you to.” His slow, level words ridged the hair up Zack’s spine. Blood winked under Shattersword’s edge, and Zack couldn’t tell which one of them flinched. “She wants to make it harder for me to fight her.”

Zack shuddered all the way to his toes, fury twisted out of his chest. Adrenaline burned so hard in his hands they hurt. “ Hey. ” He didn’t wait for the intrusive thought to fade, just ignored it and yanked Sephiroth’s shoulder. It was unsettlingly easy, twisting him against his fetters, forcing his head back until he could hold eye contact. “I do something to you, it’s because I want to.” Zack tapped the sword edge against Sephiroth’s neck. “Got it?”

Never again. He’d had so many things pushed on him. He was never going to let anyone force his sword bloody.

Sephiroth expression flattened. “Yes. My mistake.” Toneless. The vacant calm made Zack want to punch him again. He recognized it now, though he’d been too stupid to miss it in Nibelheim. Dissociated. Blank. He should have fought him out of that damn basement, even if he had to kill him to do it. Then only one person would have had to die.

Zack swallowed down the rage. “You haven’t answered me. Jenova. What was she?” He flipped the sword, pinning Sephiroth with the heavy blunt edge. Twisted and chained, he’d be too slow to block a strike at either his gut or throat. Zack pulled just hard enough for him to twitch. “One of Hojo’s monsters?”

Sephiroth didn’t resist, and that was more alarming every time. He was stronger than a fucking truck. Why be easy? WHen had he ever made anything easy?

“Worse.” Sephiroth stared at the ceiling. “The master he built them for, knowing or not.” He dug his fingers into his shackles until they turned red at the force. “Built…me for.”

Zack hissed. Master wasn’t how a SOLDIER talked. It was how Hojo talked. The harsh green of the light here was too close to his vague half-memories. They bubbled slick and porous under his skin. Words. Destiny. Purpose. What you are for. What I will make out of you.

Monstrous and awful, all of it. “That again. He’s done fucked up things to you. Join the club.” Zack shivered. “Pretty sure the dead ones have it worse than we do.”

Sephiroth breathed a nasty, hitching sound, like a laugh and like a choke, his mouth curved unacceptably at the corners. Zack couldn’t avoid seeing the tubes bonded to his arm and knowing for sure: the port was implanted in his skin. Permanent. The seams flat and smooth, no swelling, no blood. Healed a long time ago.

He didn’t care, he didn’t have time to care, he wasn’t going to care. “I don’t buy it.” He could worry about Hojo’s twisted plan after he got to Aerith, after he protected everyone counting on him. “You don’t care who gives the orders. You’re Sephiroth . You said you’d kill everything and everyone because -- what? Jenova? No.”

He wanted to cast the shard again, watch Sephiroth twitch. Answers be damned. Waiting here felt wrong. Something in him was still bloody, still trapped on those rickety stairs watching Cloud bleed.

“Zack -- “

“No!” All it took was Sephiroth glancing at him, suddenly focused and present and dangerous, and Zack was already moving. He snapped Shattersword into Sephiroth’s solar plexus, crushing the breath out of him. “You chose that massacre!” He snatched a fistful of hair and twisted, forcing him to face the glass. “You weren’t made a monster. You did that yourself!”

Sephiroth reacted like someone who’d drowned recently should, writhing as he chased air. Zack pinned him, blinking through the burn of tears. He was prepared this time, so he didn’t flinch when Sephiroth jerked in his grip and howled. The force of it jolted into Zack’s hands at his nape and through the sword.

What was hurting him?

Why did Zack even wonder?

One more spasm, one more gasping cry, and Sephiroth went unnaturally still, holding position even as his hair twisted and strained. Air-edged rattles laced each breath, a clear effort to regain oxygen without struggling. He tremored hard with it. Tubes dangled and shook from his shoulder, slit on Shattersword in the struggle, oozing bloody liquid down to the mako splatters. 

No. Zack had attacked him this time! He was supposed to turn back into the monster.

BOOM. Another explosion crashed overhead so loud the lab chittered around them.

Zack winced. Way worse. He was out of time. “I’m going to kill you if you don’t say something.”

“Yes!” The word burst from Sephiroth like a gunshot. “What do you want? Yes, I chose monster. ” He shook violently, though he made no other move. “We both know what I wanted to -- What I did -- What I would have done next.” He snarled, and even with no aggressive moves the sound ridged alarm bells up Zack’s spine. “You should eliminate me.”

“Like I’m gonna listen to -- What!?” Zack’s body felt locked, rigid. Like if he tried to move he’d break Sephiroth’s neck by the scruff. “You think I’m bluffing!?”

Sephiroth growled, low enough it rattled in Zack’s knuckles. “You can’t .” He pressed his wrists into his back, the metal scraping the skin red. “She’s out there . Jenova. She’ll have me even if I’m dead.”

Somehow, Zack could hear the fray there again. Fear.

What the fuck was Sephiroth afraid of?

Ignore it. Ignore it, it was a trick. Zack’s hands ached on the sword hilt. Just do it. Just do it now!

Sephiroth gasped finally. His breath wasn’t slowing even as it deepened. “Wait. Please…” Quiet, unnaturally level. The shock froze Zack in place. “Yes. I chose to be a monster. I thought I could choose what I was.”

His wrists twisted until blood winked at the IVs.

“I know better now.” Sephiroth breathed against Shattersword like it was heavy. “People choose. Things don’t.” He shook worse, too. “Like this sword. What it chose doesn’t matter when you kill me…”

Goosebumps prickled up Zack’s arms. Sephiroth wheezed, and this time he was sure his breaths rushed faster, not slower. Ignoring all the blaring alarm bells, Zack loosened his joint lock and turned Sephiroth’s head.

Sephiroth weaved, pliant and shaky, and his pupils were full wedges, blown wide in a wild mako-sear from his irises. He gasped rapidly, not caring how the sword edge dented his collarbones.

Hyperventilating.

Panic attack.

“I won’t stop you…I can’t!” Sephiroth blinked, like he was as dazed saying it as Zack felt trying to understand it. What? “It won’t -- let me -- can’t -- your choice. I --”

Sephiroth winced, and tried to hide behind his bangs that were bound up away from him. He stared at the glass. “I’m -- weapon. Always --” A thick painful growl rattled in him. “Th-that’s all. Only that. She knew -- He knew -- I…”

Shame. That was shame.

“M-make me -- use me! ” Sephiroth bared his teeth but couldn’t keep them there, gasps rattling through, eyes glowing so bright they looked fiendish. He begged without looking up, voice ragged. “I am -- someone’s -- sword. M-make me -- yours .”

Fucking hell!

Disgust kicked like an actual hit. Zack physically jittered with the reflex to lash out again, shove this away. Punch Sephiroth until he dug out the monster, or start a killing blow so the only right thing to do was finish it. “Stop.” He was going to hurl. Unlike Shinra and apparently everyone else on this damn continent, he knew the difference between a tool and fucking person. “Stop talking.”

He wasn’t a confused and he wasn’t fooled and he didn’t make people into anything.

But the close echoing of the glass chamber ridged up Zack’s spine, emphasized by Sephiroth’s wordless gasps for air. He hated it. He hated it, and he still felt the splinter of truth in there.

If he let his instincts win out, cut off this madness here, he could find out about Jenova himself. Damn what Sephiroth said, damn what not-Cloud thought passed as a good idea. Get to Aerith. Get to Nibelheim, find out if any goddamn books survived the blaze.

But even thinking it, Zack knew he was lying to himself. Kill Sephiroth? Feeling like this? At his best, maybe, bt now? Shit, he was so far past able to do that. And if he failed -- when he failed -- someone would try their hand. Shinra finding their favorite asset pretending to be tractable, or Wutai looking for a counterstrike or not-Cloud trying something even more stupid. Someone would be dumb enough to think they could control the greatest SOLDIER who ever fucked someone over.

Shinra made monsters, but everyone wanted one on their chain.

The ruckus outside kept clattering. He had to go. He had to go now

“For the love of -- !” Zack threw his head back, bellowing wordlessly at everything boxing him into this. Then he flipped Shattersword, the easy massive weight just grounding enough.

Sephiroth didn’t try to avoid the sharp edge. His breaths snapped deep and rapid, like a pump with a hole in it. Any decent person would be unconscious by now, but not him. Eyes open, mako-sharp, searching the grate like it cared what happened to anyone. He watched and didn’t flinch.

“I hate you.” Zack couldn’t spit it hard enough to help, but he tried. He tried and he clutched not-Cloud’s blade and slashed up through the slick arc of tubes and hair webbing them in this damn glass crypt.

Mako and fasteners rained angrily down, air hoses hissing and choking as they clogged. The smell rolled Zack’s stomach. Exactly like when he beat his way out of the glass in Nibelheim.

Sephiroth lurched forward when the slice freed his head. It wasn’t enough, but cutting something off him felt briefly exhilarating. Zack snarled as he shoved past the soaking stalactite of shorn hair, finding the connection points for the last tubes and the power banks and everything else he can slash.

He pressed his foot on Sephiroth’s back, shoving him down. Fetal position helped, right?

Sparks rained over them and Zack didn’t even feel them. He wanted to keep hacking and hacking until the urge to scream died out. Cloud was going to hate him. Hell, he hated himself for this. But Cloud didn’t know how damn hard it was to put down a SOLDIER First.

Zack did. Zack knew better than anyone at this point. Goddamn expert.

Chapter Text

The light panels sputtered and died. Zack dropped Shattersword to his side, shuddering in the sudden dark. The red sparks drifted like glowflies, making the mako puddles unbearably green. 

Butchered silver hair spiraled between them in pieces and glass chunks clicked and rang as they grated against each other trying to fall. Sephiroth’s spine was hot underfoot and Zack couldn’t get the bracket tattoos out of his head.

His skin crawled. He had to check his back.

This tube couldn’t take more of his anger without coming down around them. Honestly, neither could he.

So he spun his strike and sliced the shackles off Sephiroth’s ankles, one then the other. And if he nicked skin, he wasn’t going to check or feel guilty. Thick though they were, the shackles on Sephiroth’s wrists had gaps at the veins for easy access. Fucking convenient. Zack wrenched the needles out, hissing and pressing on the wounds to staunch the vein bleed. Dammit, now he had blood all over his freaking fingers.

Zack left the severed tubes dangling at his shoulder. He left the shackles and their second brace above the elbow. Metal encasing Sephiroth’s hands was about the only thing he liked about this. 

Sephiroth coiled, breathing level now. He looked beastly and ruined, wet wisps of hair clinging to his mouth and neck, failing to block the hungry light of his eyes. Sparks landed on his newly stripped back, lighting the marks inked there and the remnants of his monster mane scattered on top of him. In the harsh edges of Zack’s mako-enhanced vision, bruises across Sephiroth’s gut and jaw showed stark and damning.

Dangerous. Like a cornered fiend.

The explosions overhead rang infantry rifles in Zack’s ears. He had to get to Aerith. He had to. He shoved Sephiroth out of the way harder than he needed to, weaving Shattersword out of the tube first and then hopping through. “Get up.”

Even the cramped aisle was a relief after the jittering claustrophobia in there. But not enough. Zack stumbled back on reflex when Sephiroth caught his balance and sprang out. Kujata he was fast! It was like his arms locked behind his back didn’t slow him at all.

Zack braced, sword up, materia raised in his off-hand. “Start something. Do me a fucking favor!”

Sephiroth stopped, crooked and half-crouched. Somehow his uneven shorn hair made him look bigger, more of his knotted muscles visible. Easier to see his arms strain as he tested his shackles, not even trying to hide it. They held. A burst of relief made it through Zack’s fiend-killing-reflexes. Sephiroth blinked. “Your uniform. It’s damaged.”

“Of course it is!” Zack held the sword hilt tighter. The shots were just in his head. He ignored how his core trembled. Another explosion rattled around them.

Sephiroth flinched, shaking his head. He sank lower on his heels, way too much like a coiled sahaugan. “The last stun held for one hundred fifteen seconds.” He used the same inflectionless fast tone, glancing at the ceiling. Report. “Until we know what that is, so much time seems risky.”

We. Zack bared his teeth. “Yeah.” He could have cast the stun just for that. Sephiroth said it so casually, like it was easy. “Not much time. So pray to whoever I don’t use it and leave you here.” He stepped slowly backwards, until the reassuring open space of the landing pressed against his back. “You first. Move.”

The amber emergency lights seared Sephiroth’s side and jaw, like not-Clouds faint lifestream stained him. It slit his eyes. Zack hoped it hurt. Hoped he was bright-blind, even for a second. Hoped it felt as bad as he did right now.

Sephiroth braced, face blank again. The same empty expression Zack saw in the tube. He dropped his shoulders as far as he could and stood, awful and tall. But it didn’t quite catch his usual grace, a shiver low in his gut making it too human. Zack wouldn’t have noticed if he wasn’t ravenously noticing everything.

But that meant he saw everything -- because Sephiroth didn’t have fatigues like Zack had waking up in Hojo hell. A shiny new kind of anger slammed into Zack’s ribs, unprocessed information clicking unpleasantly together all at once.

Hojo stripped him. That coiling in the corner --- if it wasn’t to attack, Sephiroth had been…ashamed of Zack seeing him naked?

Zack thought he might throw up.

Sephiroth stared through, eyes unfocused, as he crossed smoothly to the landing. His bindings didn’t overbalance him. He didn’t blink.

And Zack -- he shouldn’t be able to see anything , he’d never so much as seen Sephiroth’s hands bare -- but he wasn’t stupid enough to drop his guard. He had to pay combat attention. He had to let the information register, couldn’t unsee the bruises on Sephiroth’s ribs from the sword’s blunt edge. A white scar on his chest that looked like a burn, blood dried across it from the scratch at his neck. Black lines between fifth and sixth ribs, on his shins, on his ankles .

This wasn’t -- Zack couldn’t handle it mattering. He hated it. Sephiroth couldn’t care about something this normal after what he’d done. And Zack didn’t want to know anything about what they’d done to him here. He didn’t want to have to look when someone .

Everything was fucking wrong.

Sephiroth stood at attention, head up, only his eyes fixed down on Zack’s boots. “Did…I do that to you?”

Zack’s right temple flared in pain, right where the infantryman shattered his skull. “No.” He meant to growl it, but the word came out dull and brittle. Yikes. He cleared his through roughly. “Always all about you, isn’t it?”

Sephiroth opened his mouth to answer, but Zack strode toward the stairs. The rhythms were too easy. As soon as he moved, Sephiroth cut off and started up two steps at a time. Zack kept the materia shard raised, but he didn’t need it. Sephiroth moved at a regular pace well below his top speed. Still cooperating. Disturbing.

“Who, then?” Sephiroth didn’t even glance back. Damn him and his secret voice-throw materia.

None of his damn business. Zack didn’t answer. He hefted Shattersword so light ricocheted off the wall ahead of them. Sephiroth ducked his head and didn’t ask again.

Which meant they were back to running in silence. Great. Zack had enough trouble with silence by himself. Now it left him with not much to do but keep vigilant attention on the floors they passed and on Sephiroth between them.

In point position, Sephiroth was easy to strike, easy to see, and any fiends they ran into would go at him first. No brainer. But it meant Zack had to stare at those spinal marks as they rippled. Try as he might to ignore them, they telegraphed Sephiroth’s steps so well he kept finding them again, tracking on his neck and under his hands. And he saw more, too, like the lines inked on Sephiroth’s forearms. Like the out of place marks on his ankles.

He hated wondering. Why couldn’t he stop? He’d slashed off the hair that covered this. Had it hidden these, too? He fought it but the thought surfaced anyway -- he’d seen Sephiroth hide behind his bangs nearly every time they had to be near each other.

Sephiroth tossed his head every third step, the uneven ends jagged at his shoulders.

The third landing arched wider and higher above them. Important. Sephiroth sidled, slower but not fully stopped, tilting his head. Zack figured he heard the ruckus overhead at least as clearly. “Gunfire. Infantry carbines.” Sephiroth tried to sound toneless again, but Zack could see the skin prickle on his neck. “And assault machines.”

Trapped feeling burrowed in Zack’s chest. “Just once it couldn’t be all in my damn head.” No. No no, they hadn’t found him again, had they? He couldn’t do that again.

Sephiroth twitched, almost looking at him, and Zack saw a dark mark flash on the back of his neck. Mostly covered by his hair. Something else to ignore. Great. One of them was full of bullet holes and the other one scrawled all over by crazy scientists.

He couldn’t handle guns and this. He wasn’t like all these monsters. “Stop.”

Sephiroth stopped instantly, and this time it didn’t shock Zack quite so painfully. After all, he’d always known Sephiroth wanted to stay alive, it just hadn’t felt like a relevant fact before. A cold gulf opened instead in Zack’s chest. Where was that trick when everything went to hell, huh?

Zack thought about the simulator, how he’d practiced over and over pushing just enough spell force to call the smallest spell, ready as the orb was for something bigger. Too much would overturn the simulation, cost him his bragging rights.

How in the world had he ever cared about that?

Sephiroth swallowed, looking him straight in the eye. “What happened? You are afraid . If it wasn’t me -- “

Zack cast the stun against his chest, as small as he could manage. Sephiroth choked out a gurgle, eyes wide, stumbling as lightning sheened his skin. Zack pushed him against the wall. “I’ll be right back. Sixty seconds”

He was right. This landing had a second smaller door, not a lab. A storeroom. Zack’s mouth rasped paper dry as he cracked the handle in, rifled through the containers. It worked again. He’d felt Sephiroth shudder, motionless where he landed, not falling but not moving. Sort of like Cloud, propped on whatever was nearest. But Sephiroth was aware, pinned but conscious, panting through the shock.

Zack swallowed. If not-Cloud made this tool, he was kinda scary.

But he’d use it. Scary wasn’t the same as a literal village-burning madman. He hoped he hadn’t cast too short. 

Unfortunately, he found barely anything helpful. A couple potions, which he drank immediately, reveling in the dulling of his eight hundred and five aches and pains. A soda of all things, gods knew how old, and an empty one-materia bracer. Zack had never been so frustrated by the existence of civilians. The only score was a labcoat that wasn’t all moth-shredded. So he could at least wear something.

On the way out, a toolbox caught his eye. Locked of course, and he didn’t have room to swing Shattersword in here. But a screwdriver glinted by it, left out. Zack snatched it. Just in case.

Sephiroth pressed rigidly to the wall when he returned. But the materia was cold and dormant, and no lightning flashed on him. Adrenaline burst through Zack’s arms. “Don’t try to fool me!”

He swung Shattersword quarter strength, letting the point screech in the wall plate so the flat crashed into Sephiorth’s back. He collapsed instantly, a dazed growl rattling out, scrabbling to keep from cracking his head on the floor. Not paralyzed.

Zack waited, feeling a deep kick of satisfaction at the angry red welt across Sephiroth’s shoulders. He didn’t even break anything. He was only a killer when he wanted to be. “I can feel it, stupid.”

Half-crumpled, Sephiroth stilled. “I will not move…” Blood smell made Zack wince, dragging his attention to the metal clamp at Sephiroth’s elbows. Scrapes bled at its edges. Sephiroth sucked in a sharp breath. “I can hold very still. I don’t need the shock. I swear.”

Disgust surged in Zack’s mouth, snapping his triumphant feeling in two. He hadn’t thought to account for the metal in his impact force. He had done worse than he meant. And, worse, a vague repulsive recognition wormed up. Hojo. Hojo’s watery voice. You really shouldn’t move. Didn’t you learn the last time? Or are you so weak you need help?

Zack wanted to stab something, so he settled for sinking Shattersword into the lab door, well out of Sephiroth’s reach. He didn’t want to think about how sure Sephiroth sounded of his ability to hold still.

“Ok. Fine. One try. Blink wrong and I’ll cast again.”

His pulse hammered in his stomach every time he heard Sephiroth’s voice, but Zack couldn’t carry him paralyzed into whatever was waiting for them. And he’d be damned if he let him out of his sight. The materia in his hand was hot and ready if he needed it.

He stepped back. Sephiroth didn’t move. He didn’t look alive , every muscle in him inert. Zack shuddered and unbuckled his belt, shimmying out of his fatigues. They were full of holes, but he had his boxers and they had no other options. He wasn’t making anyone run into battle naked.

Tossing on the labcoat, since now the air felt even colder, Zack curled his toes and came back. True to his word, Sephiroth didn’t even glance at him. His eyes focused intently, like someone doing sword forms, and his chest fluttered with shallow, tightly controlled breaths. Like rationing oxygen was a reasonable thing to train.

Anger without a target flashed hot through Zack’s hands. “Get up.”

Sephiroth said ‘the shock.’ It didn’t surprise him. He knew it. And in the tube, barely conscious, choking on mako, the first thing he’d confirmed was understanding that order -- don’t move.

Ignore it.

Ignore the bewilderment when Sephiroth obeyed. Zack dropped the fatigues as Sephiroth stood waiting, watching him fiendishly. “This is all I’ve got. Come on.”

He held his breath and tugged Sephiroth’s elbow. Sephiroth tensed, rigid for a moment, but he followed. Zack could turn him, pull him back. He grabbed the bar of the shackles and shoved, forcing them up. Sephiroth grunted, head forced down as his shoulders locked. One-handed, that was the best Zack could do to keep him still while reachable. “Try anything and I’ll break your arm. Got it?”

Sephiroth breathed through his mouth. The bruises Zack left on his jaw seeped purple now, like a map of where to hit to do proper damage. He nodded. He didn’t look so much like a fiend when Zack didn’t see his eyes.

Bundling up one of the pant legs, Zack fumbled down Sephiroth’s shin to find his foot. “Hey, stop it!” Sephiroth twitched away, like he thought it was a cue to shift. What was his freaking problem!

Sephiroth hissed, so quietly Zack more felt than heard it. “The trigger.” He curled his foot further. “If it touches -- “

“It’s pointy, not sharp -- wait, what the hell?” Zack’s knuckle brushed something hard under the skin. Something in the wrong place to be the bone. He couldn’t really see at this angle, but a ridge of something white looped Sephiroth’s ankle and it felt like a scar. And it had something in it. Something hard and warm.

Fucking hell. “I’m not touching whatever that lunatic did,” Zack hissed, covering the disturbing shape in fabric and threading the other leg. He couldn’t think about it. He didn’t know what he would do, and he kept seeing more and more. The end of another black line traced Sephiroth’s calf, and it might be where the bone was.

Now the dangerous part. Zack had never put pants on someone else, so he had to think for a second. He decided to duck under Sephiroth’s arms and pull at the shackles. That worked ok to wedge him against Sephiroth’s taller frame, elbow-cuff dug into one of his shoulders, the other pressed into Sephiroth’s strained back. It’d be easy to floor him from here. Sephiroth was strong enough to be a threat even at this disadvantage, but he was always a threat. No way to evade it completely. “Don’t move.”

Sephiroth set his feet and cooperated, hands twitching, as Zack wrestled the too-short pants on. He craned his head to the the side and his eye looked like a moon, iris completely free of the edges.

“I…can’t.”

Zack shoved his hip, cinching the belt like it was a noose. “That’s a dumb lie, even for you.” Dimly, he felt the muscles against his shoulder tremor as Sephiroth sucked in a breath. But he didn’t care. “I know more about what you can do than anyone .”

Sephiroth full-body shuddered. “No.” Suddenly his voice was his again, curt and loud. “You don’t.” A ripple of force strung through him, inhumanly fast, like a griffin waking up. He jerked his arms down.

Shit!

Zack caught the belt, bracing to slam his shoulder forward. The shard dangled at his wrist but it would take precious milliseconds to drag it within reach. He had to throw him off!

But he’d barely pulled when Sephiroth screamed, spasming and stopping his attack. Zack balked halfway through throwing him, panic blotting out the rest. Had he crushed so hard he broke a bone? He spun Sephiroth to the ground, hearing his breaths go ragged.

No, no, that didn’t make any sense. Zack had grabbed the belt, not skin; it would break first! And Sephiroth didn’t even curse for broken bones usually. “Hey. Hey, look at me!”

Sephiroth jittered, eyes wide and clear. His skin was cold, bitingly cold. What could eat through SOLDIER metabolism like that? He flattened to the ground, gritting his teeth. “Look.” The grate hissed hungrily under them as he coiled and pushed. Gentle by their standards, barely enough to test Zack’s grip.

This time Zack didn’t even hit adrenaline. Sephiroth barely moved before his body balked, a violent spasm clenching through his neck. His eyes flashed startling white, unnatural and pain-bright as he ground out a stifled sound, a cry that wrestled through his grit teeth. And the cold. It flared under Zack’s hand like a freakin’ materia cast, making his skin feel like refrigerated meat. What the hell!?

Sephiroth recoiled against the floor, breathing unsteadily. “He did something to me.” His eyes returned to green but didn’t dim. That and the drop to his reporting voice sent goosebumps up Zack’s back. “It stops me. If I resist you.” 

Zack couldn’t reconcile Sephiroth’s expression with the man’s face. He looked focused but worse. Attentive like a cornered street dog.

Trapped.

No. No way. Bullshit. Nothing could trap the most powerful man on the damn planet! He was lying .

Zack almost cast the stun then and there. Sephiroth was dangerous enough, but trying to fake his strength meant he couldn’t be trusted to be alive.

But the cold made him pause. That didn’t seem easy to fabricate. Ice materia didn’t spontaneously cast and they didn’t lower body temperature except by trapping you in an ice block. This was something else.

He could play along for ten seconds. “This?” Zack poked the white mark on Sephiroth’s chest. Shiva! He almost pulled back it was so cold. Frigid. And a stir of magic jolted up into his hand, like it was a spell.

The hell? 

Sephiroth paled, twitching away. “You can see it?” His snarl snapped under Zack’s skin, so he nearly reached for a joint lock.

But he didn’t. Zack blinked hard, trying to force all the facts into something coherent. If Sephiroth was lying, he had to kill him. He was too dangerous to let try to manipulate him. But if he was only half lying -- if this really was a curb on him, just not this much of one -- Zack might still be able to use it.

So instead, Zack caught the back of Sephiroth’s neck, pinning him to the grate. Not hard. Just enough to be clear. Out of view, he freed the screwdriver from his pocket, holding it out of Sephiroth’s view.

He had to be fast to do this right.

Sephiroth’s attention flicked toward his hidden hand. Good. He needed to know something might happen. 

Zack tightened his grip, letting his anger out. “Yes I can see it! You’ve got a fucking map all over you. But not a single scar from that night!” The crash of gunshots pressed in on him still and it was so easy to let it overflow, overwhelm him until he shook. “Damn it, all I could do was hurt you, and it didn’t do shit!”

He snarled and jabbed the screwdriver mako-fast at Sephiroth’s neck. Bluff that, asshole!

Mako and training be damned, Sephiroth had the same reflexes buried under everything else. His shoulders wrenched automatically, shackles forgotten, trying to catch the strike as he twisted, dodge instinct-fast.

Or it was until the force dragged on Zack’s hand. Sephiroth’s body froze unnaturally, stopped dead. White blotted out his pupils entirely as unnatural cold snapped into the air. A faint, ragged sound tore out of him.

Zack torqued at the last second, stabbing the screwdriver high into Sephiroth’s shoulder. Painful and superficial. He barely got a gasp for the impact, like Sephiroth’s breathing was still caught. 

The silence caught too. Zack felt frayed, stunned, unwilling to break it. He didn’t move. Sephiroth didn’t move. The smell of fresh blood tangled in Zack’s mouth. He felt sweat on Sephiroth’s neck.

The chest mark didn’t look ink like the others. It was more like a burn healed white. His skin crawled at how crisp its edges were, shaped like a flower or a laser, something bursting out of its base. Intentional. Put here carefully by someone.

They stayed frozen until Sephiroth breathed. Slow. Deliberate. Shifting the flesh around Zack’s weapon.

Zack was too practiced to let his hand tremor, even as he stared. Sephiroth had tried to dodge. No one could do anything else when their brain registered that kind of threat to a jugular vein. But he hadn’t been able to. The cold thing stopped him.

That changed everything. With that and the stun, Zack could physically stop him. He might be able to try overpowering him in a real fight. He hadn’t even thought something like that could be possible.

Sephiroth barely reacted to the dull metal shifting in his shoulder. He stared vacantly at Zack’s boots. “I hear a coolant unit. It should have an Ice inside.” A particularly blunt offer. A distraction and an assurance, showing he wasn’t fighting back even with a spike in him. Zack would have pegged it as a feint automatically until a second ago. Too calculated to get his back turned. But now?

Now he wasn’t sure.

He could maybe cut off an attempt to fight. So the question was would Sephiroth try to run?

The lab floor was bitingly, unbearably cold. He was stupid. Always had been for things like this. Wanting to take them at face value, even if they might blow up in his face. That had got him killed, hadn’t it?

Zack couldn’t decide to do anything different.

He flipped the stun shard into his hand, holding it easy to see, and pulled the screwdriver loose. The resistant thunk of metal on muscle made him grit his teeth.  He shook the blood gobs off before tucking the screwdriver in his pocket to stain and dry. This would look a lot more accurate and horror movie than usual Shinra scientists.

Sephiroth didn’t move. He bled quietly as Zack stood and stepped carefully back, ready to cast at the slightest shift. Sephiroth watched Zack’s feet, expression flat again, odd with his breaths hissing through his teeth. But his hair tangled in the wire grate now, rumped where Zack grabbed him.

And glinting in the sweat under it, clear as on any company machine, blocked the black and red squares of the Shinra Electric Power Company insignia. Inked across. Zack’s caught his breath, his skin crawling. He’d grabbed that, dug his thumb where one of the points must be.

Revulsion tasted murky and thick. Zack’s stomach turned, fighting for attention. Later. He could hurl later. RIght now he had to keep going. He had to not think about ink and needles in the skin, since that must hurt like hell. Not try to guess how old that was, who else knew about it hidden there.

No. No no no.

Damn he needed a mirror ASAP. Had they branded him, too? His neck ached and that was just because he was thinking it and he got shot in the head this morning.

Zack backpedaled until the hiss of the coolant unit rattled in the wall. He sighed -- what he wouldn’t give for a real utility tool -- and jabbed the bloody screwdriver through the panel. It bent but didn’t break, giving just enough leverage to twist the wall plate loose. 

Well, he wouldn’t be able to use that to hurt anyone again unless he wanted to do real damage.

Bingo. Coolant unit.

There was a Ice materia buried in the bowels there! Zack pried it out, wincing at its staticky, rough connection-feel. Gods, had anyone cast it at all before slotting it into the mako lines!?

“Zero level, and that’s generous. Figures.” Zack jumped. Stupid! He hadn’t even thought before he said that! Talking to himself was one thing, but not with a dangerous prisoner. He wouldn’t usually mess that up.

The familiarity in Sephiroth’s silence made him want to scream.

Instead, Zack crossed to the wall and drew Shattersword. The rough metal shriek ate the quiet, and that was better. He slotted the weak Ice orb into the hilt. Once its energy met his fingers, he lowered the shock shard. “Short on time. Come on.”

Sephiroth rolled to his knees. Smooth. Graceful, of all things, which just made Zack roll his eyes. He craned his neck, peering down at the white glyph on his chest. He frowned. Swallowed. “Pain retains utility as a control mechanism well.” Tone low, words fast. Reciting. “Simple to increment, compounds with multiple inputs.”

Unease jolted up Zack’s spine as he walked to the stairs.

Sephiroth watched his boots again, brow furrowed. “After this,” he said softly, “I will teach you to hurt me properly.”

A familiar certainty settled heavy in Zack’s gut. Like when he realized he really did have to fight Angeal. Hating everything about an idea and not sure if he could reject it anymore. Hadn’t he just said he’d have killed him to protect Nibelheim? How could he say he wouldn’t resort to other tools if he couldn’t do that?

He shivered. The next resounding explosion broke above them. Zack gestured with Shattersword. “Let’s go.”

Sephiroth stood, eyes still lit too bright. They fell into step too easily, flying toward the echo of artillery machines. Zack decided to ignore it.

Aerith, please be ok!

Chapter Text

He couldn’t stop checking every time Fair crossed his line of sight. Sephiroth shouldn’t turn his head. He knew that was breaking form. But he did, over and over. 

Waking in mako was always disorienting, but this was worse. The fumes clung to him like lizard skin. Like smoke-stains. He could barely smell anything else, even in a lab that must be full of rust and blood and who knew what else.

No smoke. No flames. Fair had no visible burns, no bloodstains. Sephiroth kept looking for the ashes. And they weren’t there. They weren’t there. When Fair came too close, a gasp of other scents cut the mako -- oxygenated fuel, vaporized brush, deep sword strikes.

Fair carried the stranger’s jagged, fragmented sword.

What happened? Where was the fire?

Every step Sephiroth took, the cold thing in his chest pulsed. Faint. Sharp. Like a heartbeat. He grated his fingers against the cuffs. He wanted to claw at it. Pry it out. Find the place under his skin that echoed with other’s voices and shred it.

He never understood even a sliver of the Professor’s obsession with cutting him open before. It felt dangerous, like the sting of his burnt right hand. Something caged hammered under his sternum no matter how he focused.

Sephiroth forced his eyes back to the floor. Lab. Follow. Obey. That Fair held the insurance trigger didn’t change the rules. The Professor would have him twitching on the deck for speaking so many times out of turn. The brackish mako taste should have made it easy. But the metal on him bit cold. Cold like the gouging pain from his chest when he failed, when he fought.

Cut hair ends jabbed at his neck, clinging to the sweat. Messy. He wasn’t supposed to be messy. It wouldn’t let him ignore it. A sharp reminder; Fair had attacked him. He could have beheaded him, if he thought it prudent.

Fair skidded to a halt at the lab door. “Damn it, sounds like a mess out there…” He moved fast, tense and decisive. More even than usual.

Sephiroth’s mouth stung. Questions tumbled over each other, grating and aching in the bruises. What took Fair and made fear tighten every line in him when a shot sounded? Made him hold the insurance trigger without shouting, use it without flinching?

Where was the screaming voice in his head? He still felt echoes of his flesh tearing, and the shadows held his attention for too long as checked for her.

How long was he captured? The lab was warm; Fair talked like the fire was over. They weren’t on the mountain. 

He accepted the consequences for another word. “Where?”

Fair scowled, not even glancing at him. “No idea. Well, besides Shinra hell-basement, but what’s new?” The facial expression was…disturbingly familiar and unfamiliar at once. Had he seen it flash by in the stranger’s awful vision?

The thought made him queasy.

Sephiroth couldn’t pull the pieces apart. At the end there, everything was dead. So he must have killed Fair. But not…not yet? Not in Nibelheim? Fair was sentimental, but he wouldn’t spare someone who tried to wipe out the world. The townspeople might be the only casualties…so far.

“One way to find out!” Fair bolted forward, a jagged anomaly in lab stillness. He snarled, slashing clean through the massive hinges. Sephiroth stepped aside, tracking the sparks from the pneumatic system, until a realization stopped him dead.

His hair. It was gone. It wasn’t near the sparks. It wouldn’t burn if he was careless. He shuddered. Not like innocent people, apparently.

Fair kicked the door free and rushed through. Sephiroth followed quickly, hands open, eyes down. Desire to look tingled over his face, but he couldn’t be stunned again. He had to follow the rules, prove he still could. This would only be the first of the Directors’ punishments.

Fair’s gasps rattled ragged, desperate, more than the exertion accounted for. Crumbled road bit hot underfoot, edged in dim daylight. Smoke, tinged just slightly with the smell of --

“Train fuel? MIDGAR!?” Fair choked an awful sound and scrabbled two bounding steps forward, only to pivot violently. “Kujata help me, bastard, if you try to run -- !“

“You will stop me and make it permanent.” Panic made Sephiroth stupid, made him growl. Gunshots, but too far to triangulate. Too far to drown out slick burning crackles, shouts and screams. No! “You have the shard. Running is pointless and --”

Nibelheim was a continent away. He couldn’t have done this! He looked up, despite the rules, and stared. “--the slums are on fire. Why are the slums on fire? ”

Overhead, one of Director Scarlett’s assault bots whined and loosed an explosion near the plate support column. What?

Fair ducked violently at the sound, like he thought it could hit him at this distance. He had marks on his back and arms Sephiroth didn’t recognize, and he tremored , eyes panic-glowed just for the second. It didn’t make sense. Nothing made sense!

Oh?

Something distant and slippery uncurled in Sephiroth’s mind. He froze, the cold beat in his chest painful and clear. Fair blurted something. Sephiroth saw his mouth move, and heard nothing.

Midgar burning? Interesting.

Not the shrieking. A low, dark voice that sounded nothing like it. But it had the same close loudness, coiled into his bones. Slid between one breath and the next, soft, slivered certainties. See…find…burn…

Jenova!

Sephiroth’s panic flattened, crushed like smoke. Calm rolled over it, and curiosity. Like he hadn’t looked up and he needed to know where he was! He wanted it, didn’t he?

Aware of it now, revulsion snapped so deep it felt like another embedded object. Sephiroth locked his body rigid, braced. His fear was dulled and smothered, unable to wriggle free, but it didn’t have to.

Let’s see now.

The deep voice wrapped down around him. Sephiroth gasped and slammed his eyes shut as They tingled, a unfamiliar ache burrowing in his forehead. He’d never felt hate like this until Nibelheim, and this time the devouring pit in his stomach was his . He could speak. 

“Get. Out.”  Sephiroth didn’t know how to strike inside his mind, but he focused on the first awful memory he found --- a mission that buried him in half a mountain. The harsh uncaring snow eating all around him, pressing and suffocating and freezing. Waiting, unable to move, to breathe.

Get out!

The tingling stopped short with a burst of discomfort. Sephiroth grit his teeth, savoring the tiny victory. Sound thudded muffled near him, partially audible. Fair.

Cloud. You know you --- Oh…No.

A black feather wheeled between them. Sephiroth lurched back, every hair on end. It smelled electric. Murky. Mako!

“Now, what do we have here?”

Dark tendrils gnarled from the feather, knotting into a tall shape, arm raised to cast. Sephiroth dodged along the wall, the mako static across his tongue finally shattering the false-calm. Magic! So much magic! He was shackled, hemmed by the lab door. He couldn’t dodge spells at this distance!

“What the fuck!?” Fair roared.

Stop slammed into Sephiroth point blank. Silver rings spun like hooks through him, cutting off all motion. Even falling, even gasping. He couldn’t make a sound, so he didn’t find out what he sounded like when the impossible leaned down to touch his face. 

Him. It was him.

Sephiroth stared at a better double of himself. The man dragged leather fingertips along his cheek, up toward his eye. Perfect and calm, long hair twisting in the fiery wind. Expression fixed and sharp. “Did the professor stitch you together, pathetic thing?”

Him in the publicity photos, in videos of his combat tests. Who could make a monster turn tail afraid just by looking at it.

His double chuckled, light and easy. “How unlike him not to fail.”

The caged pressure in Sephiroth’s gut writhed and kicked. He was a monster. He was afraid. Trapped. He couldn’t blink.

“Hey!” Fair’s sword flashed, raised. “Rematch time, bastard!”

His double ignored the threat, breaking into a chilling grin. Sephiroth’s face hurt seeing it. “You’re fighting us.” He dropped his hand, fingertips indenting Sephiroth’s windpipe hard enough the cartilage creaked. “Mother doesn’t like that. I won’t let you disappoint her.”

Fair swore. Sephiroth barely heard it. Pain stung out of his double’s fingertips, rooting and twisting into him. A hot roar pierced with it, clawing at his thoughts. You are mine!

J-Jenova…s-she was in…in the look-alike’s skin…!

You are mine! You belong to the reunion! You are a vessel for ---

No! He was half-in-the dark, a taste like blood but more bitter on his tongue. Sephiroth’s vision blurred as he fought the Stop spell, the gears hissing and steaming. She sounded like she had in Nibelheim! Louder than anything, impossible to think through.

You are for the reunion, you are not ---

You…

The pause hurt. It hurt like thorns under his skin. Sephiroth clung to the bruises, their aches in his jaw. Where Fair had struck him for his mistake. Something that wasn’t her. That wasn’t hers.

…my son.

Recognition felt like being swallowed. The roots twisted further under his skin. 

My son! You do not fight! You belong to us!

Damn it, he couldn’t shout! Couldn’t turn, Zack, stop hesitating! Cut through both of them! Stop her before before he lost hold of his thoughts again!

Double-Sephiroth narrowed his eyes and his smile sharpened. “You think you can oppose me, sham? I am the son of ---”

Cold.

Sephiroth couldn’t scream when frigid pain crashed out of the hard weight in his chest. His double gasped, eyes wide. And the wave of cold met the tearing at the base of his throat and the rooting tendrils flinched . 

Gods it hurt!

A second, deeper pulse, like ice swallowing his ribs. And Jenova’s tendrils flashed hot, writhing and dragging out of his skin. Blood-smell dampened her shrieks. His double grunted, pain a ridge in his face.

“Get the fuck off him!” A sword carved clean through his double’s ribs. Sephiroth barely felt the tip graze him, didn’t care. No blood and no impact sound, and Zack stumbled forward.

Nothing but smoke streamed behind the strike.

“Get the hell back here!” Fair’s voice broke with fury.

Stop finally shattered, spitting mako across the new cut. Sephiroth’s momentum dragged him sideways, a bottled howl twisting in his mouth. Too similar to an attack! He pivoted, slamming into the wall instead. The impact jarred stinging from the needles in his arm, enough to jab his thoughts clear. He coughed, shuffling into Fair’s blade reach, checking.

Good. Fair wasn’t bleeding. But rage darkened his face like Sephiroth had never seen. He stared at Sephiroth, blade ready, pale and faintly green like a trooper seeing a fiend for the first time.

A monster that offended nature.

Sephiroth began to feel non-combat sensations. The fresh wounds in his throat tugged, raw and superficial. His pulse throbbed in his wrists. He was in no state to accept blows quietly like he was supposed to from a handler. He had to calm Fair down.

He swallowed. “Thank you…” That was the third time in an hour Fair chose not to cut him half. Despite the safer option. Gratitude made Sephiroth shudder. Before today, he wouldn’t have felt undeserving. Now? 

 Now he thought it might be the wrong choice. Now that mad smile ached in his teeth, like if he moved it might catch him. “Thank you.” He said it again, so he felt something else in his mouth.

Fair shuddered, hand dug into his temple. “That --- that thing --- the screaming!” He compensated automatically, holding the sword between them. “You heard that, right!? And -- and --- him!”

Shock stopped Sephiroth short. Screaming? Fair heard her?

Magic snarled in Fair’s fingers, his eyes mako-bright. “That was him! You!” The sparks arced dangerously close to the trigger at his wrist. Focus. Sephiroth set his feet so he wouldn’t fall if stunned. “Just like he was in the fire, like it was yesterday! ‘Mother’ and acting like I don’t exist!”

Like it was --- it wasn’t?

Another explosion rocked the ground. Fair shuddered, and his stance switched sharply from attack to defense. “Aerith! And you’re not -- he’s -- Shit, shit, we gotta move.” His eyes were still lit and wide --- frightened of something terrible. “Come on!”

Sephiroth bent when Fair yanked him forward, feeling the wounds in his neck sting. “He wasn’t hurt by that swing.”

“I know .” Fair ran, a full flat sprint. “I’m coming, babe, I’m coming!”

🜸   🜸   🜸

Sephiroth kept pace, twisting through smoke-choked slum alleyways he hadn’t even known existed. Shouts and fear rattled around them in the fire, the battle sounds at the support pillar ricocheting deafeningly off the underside of the plate.

Up ahead, Fair swore, stumbling near a blocked junction. “No, no, the road’s busted! Uh, this way!” He hissed as he shoved debris aside, like he barely felt his damaged boots hiss from the coals. “Come on! ”

Sephiroth forced his lungs to stop protesting the smoke. He heard Fair’s fingers searing, and he couldn’t stand it. Something in him snapped, strange and raw and tied to the fear he smelled. No. Not again.

Sephiroth slammed side-on into Fair’s obstacle. Wood screamed and split, smoldering shards whipped across him like vengeful little blades. Fair yelped, jumping back as the scaffold collapsed, clearing the way. Sephiroth grit his teeth, trying and failing to lower his eyes. Burn-heat dragged over his shoulder.

Fair stood tense, the glittering blade raised over Sephiroth’s head. Ready to strike.

But he didn’t. He hadn’t. He frowned, and he turned his back. Ran through the open path.

Sephiroth shuddered and ran after him, the crumbling edges trying to claw them back. The fire swallowed everything he thought, like it was supposed to sting. Fair heard the voice. There was another him carrying Jenova under his skin. The stranger said he was to stop the destruction. If that were true, then Fair and everyone who’d survived Nibelheim could still die. Even if he kept his monstrous mother from using him for it! She had someone else!

An arch tried to collapse on them. They reacted in easy, trained unison. Fair snarled and split it with his blade, while Sephiroth ducked, skidding past the sparking edges. The heat bit at his pinned hands.

The familiarity, maybe. Something. Made him stupid. Made him ask. “How long? Since I --?” He didn’t know what to call it. The words locked, and his chest went cold in a way he couldn’t blame on the stranger’s curse.

Fair flashed a scowl at him and charged up the next street. No answer. Sephiroth ducked his head. He’d pushed too far. He’d pay for that.

They ran until a flickering square opened around them. Until Fair skidded to a sudden, rigid stop. Sephiroth froze a step past him, clearly in view, waiting. Asking out of turn had a higher price that just not getting the answer.

That’s when he heard the curt, rhythmic slice of helicopter blades under the ruckus like a hidden knife.

Shinra.

Fair tilted his head, face grim. Triangulating. Had…had he known how to do that before? Fire-orange seemed to suffuse him, so he looked twitchy and ready to fight the entire city. Sephiroth held very still. He couldn’t remember seeing Fair in fire-colors. He knew it must have happened. But the stranger ripped him away first, and left none of it in the visions.

He didn’t know which scars were the ones he cut.

“Four years.” Fair chuckled, like Sephiroth’s stare was the best thing he’d seen all day, and the sound still had jagged edges. “Four fucking years. And based on your face right now? I bet Golden Saucer tickets it was that smoky bastard, not even you.” He grit his teeth, leveling the sword at Sephiroth, tip so close he could have breathed into it. 

“You’re a…copy? Clone? Hallucination to help me murder the science department?”

Four years!?

Fair shrugged. The motion pulled Sephiroth’s attention to parallel columns of small scars climbing his stomach and ribs. “I don’t care. Had my own reasons to do that anyway.”

Needle marks. Surgical darts. New questions: why was Fair half-naked in a Shinra lab with bullet holes through his clothes? Normal SOLDIER, even exceptional ones, weren’t cleared for that kind of weapon testing. And they didn’t joke about attacking the scientists.

Four years, four years, four years! What happened!?

“I’ll kill you regardless. Gotta get the other guy either way, might as well practice.” Fair didn’t even smile, threat calm and serious. He searched Sephiroth’s face. “But a friend needs me right now . Don’t run, don’t do anything I don’t tell you to, and I won’t have to.”

The helicopter grew steadily louder. Within the sector. Fair’s stony frown crumpled at the edges. “Prove you didn’t. Prove you aren’t him.”

Fear. He was afraid of the helicopter.

The certainty braced Sephiroth down into the concrete. Prismatic, reorienting every shred of information. Fair was --- he was running. He wasn’t on a mission. However he had Sephiroth’s insurance trigger, however the stranger sent him, he was as tense as Sephiroth hearing the company’s machines.

That meant Sephiroth had to be even more careful. Fair wouldn’t know what theDirector who gave him the shard was trying to use him for.

Sephiroth forced his face calm. He was much, much worse than a dying copy. The thought curled disgust tighter. If Fair wanted proof otherwise, he might as well strike now. “The last thing I know is setting the fire.” It was easy to speak quietly and quickly enough to keep his rhythm through Fair’s burst of furious sound. “The stranger took me then as his weapon against Jenova, and now I’m yours. That’s what I am.”

Saying the words calmly pierced them into his mouth, made them real. Like the performance pledge before a combat trial. You had to show you understood the consequences of what came next.

The cold weight in his chest pulsed.

Sephiroth set his feet. “I won’t run; the shock will stop me easily and once you catch me my disadvantages are too many. I will follow all commands unless…”

He shuddered. But he had to know Fair’s reaction, so he accepted the consequences for stipulations. “...Unless you try to return me to Shinra.” Each slice of the helicopter blade felt like a cut against him. “Then I’ll run, and fight, and die, if necessary.”

There. He said it. He really said it. He still had that. That hadn’t been Jenova’s work.

He was never going back.

Sephiroth’s pulse thudded in the bruises Fair left on him. He could only find patches of memory from the past week in Nibelheim’s basement. But he knew for sure: Jenova’s maternity hadn’t been natural. The Science Department did this to him, and to all those pathetic dead villagers, too.

Fair’s grip shuddered on his sword. “Eh. They have to kill me on sight anyway.” His wince tugged asymmetrical and high on his forehead, while his smile cracked into a wide false-grin-grimace. “Nothing to worry about. Can’t sell you out even if I wanted to.”

Relief tangled with something much darker. Sephiroth risked eye contact. He almost asked. Zack Fair, of all people, in Shinra’s sights? How!?

Before he could, though, Fair tensed, the blade edge bumping Sephiroth’s skin. “What about ‘Mother?’”

The way he said it echoed the other Sephiroth’s smooth tone, and it made Sephiroth want to scrape his own vocal chords. His neck still stung from those two monsters rooting inside him. The word had echoed over and over in his thoughts for days, but he’d never said it aloud. Now, he never wanted to. “Jenova.”

“Whatever the fuck you call her!”

Just this morning, Sephiroth would have felt rage hearing someone insult her. Hers, mistaken for his. He’d have roared at whoever dared say that about his mother, the only thing about him Shinra hadn’t ruined. Hurt them. Killed them, probably.

None of that happened. Fair’s shout was downright calming , because Sephiroth knew they had something in common. They both hated that thing. He shifted, pressing Fair’s blade to his sword-side shoulder. “I hope to kill her before you kill me. Or warn you, if not.”

Fair wasn’t going to kill him right now. Sephiroth was sure. And, even more, as soon as he said it he felt the sharp urgency. Fair was in danger. He needed to know about Jenova. He heard her scream before. That was very bad news.

It should feel like it, but Sephiroth couldn’t make it. Something wild thrummed under his skin, nothing like the sharp barbs of Jenova’s influence. Someone else could hear it. Someone else might know what his thoughts sounded like next time someone tried to take them from him.

He had to make sure Fair wanted to do something about it by then!

Fair hissed, breaking the staring contest first. “Ok.” He lowered the sword, not letting it cut. “Ok, later then. And don’t think I’m bluffing.”

Sephiroth grit his teeth. He should shake his head, agree, show he knew. But the insurance trigger glinted on Fair’s wrist, and it wouldn’t let him. No one bluffed in the labs. Lies were forbidden. When someone did lie, mentioning it was asking for punishment.

He settled to stare fixedly at the trigger, as President Shinra preferred. He let the pressure from his cuffs dip his head forward, his spine aching from the long period with his limbs torqued. Easy to stop fighting it for a moment. Breathe.

Time felt vast and dizzy. Four years. Four years? Impossible. Unreachable. Sephiroth fell back on what he knew inside out. Fair had a trigger. They hadn’t given anyone new this control over him in some time, but he knew what it meant. It didn’t matter who granted it to Fair, or why they let him think he acted on his own and not as their punishment. What mattered was he had it.

Obey or suffer the consequences. That was always the simple rule with the Directors.

The helicopter kept coming toward them.

Fair hissed. “Damn it. No time to let it pass.” He whirled, giving Sephiroth his back for the second time. “We’ll have to beat it through the square. Come on!”

Fair sprinted. Sephiroth followed, forcing himself to breathe smooth in the smoke. But they’d given him a handler who was running from them. Maybe that could be their first mistake. Maybe that meant he could run with him.

Chapter Text

“Sector Five is this way! Keep up!”

The flames made it hard to focus. Sephiroth stared at Fair’s back, but a mirage of himself, grinning, flickered in the smoke edges. The battle above clashed louder and louder as they covered ground. Gunfire in both directions so not a fiend. Residual Wutai cells? How would they possibly infiltrate the city?

Why were they going to Sector Five? Shouldn’t they be fighting here?

But as rapid as the questions surfaced, Sephiroth forced them down. He focused on the pulsing, deep ache from his burnt palm. Pain helped in a gauntlet. Kept him focused, listening for what he had to do next.

You know this. Don’t think. Don’t ask. Follow, and fight.

Director Hiediggar did have a way with words.

In Nibelheim, he’d tried to think. To disobey, to choose. Look what that got him.

Sephiroth pushed faster, drawing even with Fair. “The chopper is the Turks. They’re almost here.” He’d know those flight patterns anywhere.

“I know that. We won’t be here -- what!?” Fair spun with a strangled sound, sniffing the air. Sephiroth dodged the edge of his sword on reflex, only freezing in place when he landed. “Wait, wait, Aerith!? Here?”

Sephiroth braced. He wasn’t supposed to resist, even by accident. Fair had always been a combat companion, not a handler. He’d missed the reflex. Stupid!

“Aerith!” Fair didn’t even look at him, tumbling toward a tall building at the top of the hill. If anything, he hurled himself faster.

Sephiroth was just frozen enough not to follow immediately. For facts to process. Information. Fair was feet away, dragging at the door under a smoky angel sculpture. He held the trigger but loosely. Fire and explosion sounds blotted so much of what Sephiroth could hear; Fair must be blunted at least somewhat.

The trigger’s range was near one hundred yards. Sephiroth had never been able to pin it down better.

The part of him that made him read in Nibelheim, grasping at his own body, his own history, reared up just as desperate and jarring.

Run. He could run. He could break the chain, escape the shock, the stranger, the cage around him he’d only just had his first real glimpse of. The cold in his chest couldn’t stop him if Fair couldn’t grab him.

He wanted out! He wanted --- It was like a fire caught under his skin.

Fair cracked the door, snapping it the wrong way in his desperation. “Aerith!” He clung to the frame like he was drowning. “It’s --- are you --- I --- !”

Sephiroth shuddered. He wanted ---

Too loud. Too much. The realization hit sharp as a scalpel. Something burning in his chest trying to make him move. Like if he didn’t he couldn’t breathe. He…he couldn’t tell if it was his! Nibelheim had felt like this. This desperate. Like if he didn’t set the fire, he’d snap.

That had been Jenova.

He couldn’t --- !

“Z-Zack!?” The unfamiliar voice split the looming helicopter sounds.

Fair bit back a sob. “Are you ok?”

Cold broke Sephiroth’s paralysis. A prickling pulse spread from the weight in his chest. It crossed the wounds in his neck before settling on his tongue with a faint, strange tug. Like a string in his jaw snapped taut, drawing the briefest burst of pain.

“Zack!? How --- Get in here!”

Adrenaline burned out the desperate need to run. Sephiroth took a ragged step forward. Did it know ? If he tried to leave, would that thing stop him?

He didn’t have time to panic. Lights flashed amid the whirling smoke. The chopper was landing. Sephiroth sprinted into the building, nudging the flimsy door closed behind them. Hardly any protection against Turks but he didn’t care.

Inside, Fair gasped. “I’m sorry! I’m late. What kind of prick shows up years late?” Shrill, pain all over his tone. Sephiroth glared at him. He knew that would make him a target, didn’t he?

The ordered bar around them was large and smelled wrong, clear after smoke choking everywhere else, and faintly plant-like. Sweet. Flowers? In Midgar? Across a toppled stool, Fair clung to a small shock-pale woman’s hands. He looked shaky and crushed. What happened to him!? “And --- and while everything’s on f-fire!”

The woman held Fair’s arm, touching his wrist, his knuckles, like she couldn’t understand them. “Zack, h-how are you here?” Her grip was stronger than her narrow fingers pretended. “I -- I was sure! So sure that you…”

Another cold burst tugged at Sephiroth, in his chest this time. Like a stinging afterecho. What? Why did it point at her!?

The woman froze midword. Her green eyes shimmered with tears and looked electric --- greener than anything that could grow in this steel city as she looked up at him. She pulled Fair toward her. “You!” she hissed.

Magic slammed down in flood, the air thick with it. Sephiroth backpedaled, a fear he didn’t understand worming under his spine. Get out, get out!

But Fair had tears on his face. Had she hurt him?

Glowing fractals ribboned under his feet as the woman pivoted a caster’s staff past Fair’s head. Fair stumbled, squawking, and Sephiroth forgot careful. He lunged. She had Fair flanked!

That was his first mistake. The Professor would drug him, dampen him, and beat him bloody with fiends for reacting without thinking. For how the thought of Zack bloody, Zack trapped on rusty stairs, kicked him forward before he gauged the spell.

His second mistake was expecting a spell.

“Stop! I won’t let you!” The woman’s shout pierced the air, like it parted for her. Sephiroth dodged past a booth, away from where an elemental flare would need to build between them. But what lashed out at him didn’t even pause to coalesce. Bolts of elementless intent lit the room, cracking windows, throwing chairs.

Sephiroth dodged the first two, but the third caught his bloody shoulder, clipping the IV port. Damn it! He usually didn’t have it visible for someone to target. An impact there should hardly matter on the surface, but it dragged deep in him, subdermal connectors grating painfully in his blood vessels. Sephiroth dodged, his body suddenly sluggish, magic-heat flaring in the metal. The spark dug, trying to catch his magic, light it.

There! Taking a guess, Sephiroth launched across the glowing sigil, hearing the caster’s staff hum. She shouldn’t be able to cast barrier fast enough, and if he was careful he could knock her down without ---

A frigid spear lanced through his chest. Sephiroth stumbled, trying to keep his balance, vision blurred. He pawed at the pain, feeling for a wound, but there was nothing there. And even so something cracked and tore under his ribs, cold, jabbing a hard edge into his breathing.

Cold. The stranger’s spell! No! Just like with Fair! Sephiroth staggered, willing each step so he wouldn’t fall. The harder he pushed the sharper and bigger the pain dug.

The caster. She wasn’t in front of him. Magic slid serrated along his back. She could ghost step!?

“Aerith!” Fair. “Wait! He’s not --!”

No time. The cold hampered him and if he dodged, it might hit Fair. Sephiroth stopped moving.

A blast of magic crashed into his unguarded stomach. The force flung him back like a truck hit. Sephiroth flipped, but not fast enough. He slammed into the window, glass shards crunching all around him as he clattered to the floor.

He winced, trying to tell if any embedded in his hands. Somehow, the frigid screaming in his chest was gone.

Boots ground into the shards near his head. “Early.” The woman stepped closer, her stave raised. Foolish, really, coming so near him. “He’s early,” she hissed. Sephiroth found the wall with his back, watching her small fierce face. “Doesn’t matter. I won’t let you hurt anyone else!”

She looked familiar. Why did she look familiar? Sephiroth didn’t recognize anything about her. Not her face or voice or the pressure of her magic. But at the same time, that unease he didn’t understand pricked at the back of his mind and he knew she was dangerous .  It didn’t surprise him she risked too much, came too close. Why?

Sephiroth braced. The taste of her spell lingered in his mouth. He knew he didn’t want to fight it down again. His shoulder pulsed around the port, warning against another hit, and she had a straight shot at it. Too many targets. He had to bait her, move fast once he knew her strike point. He grit his teeth. “If I were trying to harm you ---”

Pain. Cold and sharp, and a clear, rough tug on the string-feeling in his mouth, all the way down into his chest. Sephiroth choked.

Above him, the woman flinched, stave dipping. Her knuckles strained out of the skin and she stared down at him. Not at his eyes or at his core waiting for a tell. No, at his ribs. At the mark covering the cold pain in his right side.

Footsteps rattled the glass. “Then I’d kill you, bastard.” Fair’s knee dug into Sephiroth’s back, hand pinning the back of his head. Holding him down. Over him. Between him and the caster’s next hit. Panic clenched in Sephiroth’s core, bracing him to buck, forcing him to catch the impulse. He…he couldn’t! If he moved, he’d only trigger the cold again.

“But he isn’t, Aerith! You’ve got the wrong one.” Fair’s heart pounded so loud Sephiroth could hear it from the floor.

The glass. Pinned completely, Sephiroth strained for something to focus on besides the burning need to move. Fair’s boots had holes. Had he cut himself?

Blood.

Blood in a white city, overtaking the thick sharp scent of mako. Of magic . As the enemy he killed for his mother sank into nothingness. This magic, still pressed thick against his skin, stifling.

A retch rolled up Sephiroth’s throat, filling his mouth with mako. Her! It was her! He’d seen this caster die! He’d killed her!

Keep her alive . That’s what the stranger said. It’ll tell you who.

Sephiroth froze. The phantom string down his throat. The bursts of cold he’d felt since they got close to her. He’d worn enough correction bands to recognize the rest. He’d tried to attack his mission goal! No wonder the stranger’s spell punished him!

“We have to get out of here,” Fair blurted.

He’d tried to go against the mission, and the cold hurt him for it. Fair was his handler. And she was the mission. Until he knew what the cold would do to him if he failed, he had to keep her alive. Simple.

Sephiroth clawed the horror aside, swallowed the acid down. His breaths rushed too fast, but he couldn’t slow them. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t escape. He hadn’t killed Fair, he hadn’t killed this caster yet, and to convince himself he looked up at the woman’s green, green eyes.

Aerith --- Fair called her Aerith --- hesitated as her power curdled in the air, a massive hunched thing over the room behind her. Fair tremored, obviously still compromised, the motion digging Sephiroth into the floor.

Wait. Behind her…?

“Zack…” Aerith’s jaw shuddered. “He’s not a fake…I know …” Tendrils of power slid over Sephiroth’s back, prodding at some deep thing in him.

He forced himself to allow them, even as he ached to push back. The magic. The room. She was protecting something. Sephiroth relaxed against the broken glass. He pulled his magic small, compressed around the intrusion in his chest. Maybe if he made his presence small enough she could sense what she needed to about it. He took a deep breath. “The Turks hunt you. They’re outside now.”

Aerith hissed and Fair tensed, so he guessed right. Someone with this kind of magical power in Midgar? No way Shinra wasn’t interested. Sephiroth kept his voice as even and nonthreatening as he could manage after today. “Either we go now or they find us.”

Gaskets whirred and feet hit the concrete at the edge of his hearing. One squad, at least, with enforcer drones. Sephiroth’s wrists ached against their confines. Many opponents for how weighed down he felt.

Fair and Aerith shared a look. Aerith glanced at the door, her face hardening. “They already know I’m here. Zack…I can talk to them.”

Fair shuddered, breaths skipping. Salty taste meant he was still dripping tears. “No! No, they aren’t talking to me anymore.” He flinched, fingers dug into Sephiroth’s hair, but more like he was clinging than holding him down. “Trust me, whatever you think, it’s worse! It’s…”

Hot air twined through the bullet holes in Sephiroth’s borrowed fatigues, biting at his skin. Hate slowly coiled through him again. The company did this to Fair?

Footsteps stopped outside. A digitized voice blared through the wall. “Aerith. Come out.” It echoed so loud Fair and Sephiroth flinched in unison, even with the tone level, unconcerned. Turk. “Time to come back.”

Fair caught her hand, ignoring Sephiroth to stand in her way. “Don’t go with them!” he whispered, staring at her in terror. “It’s not safe! I was wrong!”

Sephiroth rolled to his knees. What in Shiva’s name happened after Nibelheim?

No one swung at him. Aerith grit her teeth, stepping out of view of the broken window. Sephiroth kept his head out of sniping range and watched her narrowly. So she did know they might be surrounded by now.

No footsteps. They really thought she would obey their commands? This woman didn’t seem a simple civilian.

“Marlene?” Aerith swapped hands on her stave, reaching toward the back corner of the bar. And, like nothing was wrong, a small child darted out to her, half-hiding behind Aerith to peer out with bright, suspicious eyes.

Sephiroth stared. The little one wasn’t even as tall as Aerith’s knee. Had they been here the whole time?

Aerith held the child’s hand as she glared at Fair. “They aren’t going to take you. I’m not going to let that happen.”Calm, sure. Just like when she’d acted like she could beat Sephiroth away with a stave.

Fair looked from her to the child in open shock. He wouldn’t be in any state to fight while he was this overwhelmed. Sephiroth tested his feet, found them glass free. Good. He had to be ready.

“Ok, Marlene.” Aerith crouched next to the child. “I know this is a lot, but this if my friend Zack.” She guided Zack a step closer by the hand. “He’s the strongest, best guy there is. Well, besides your daddy. He’s going to take you around back while I talk to the Turks.”

“So…we’re helping you?” The child sounded suspicious. Sephiroth agreed with them, unlike most of his limited experience with children.

“What!?” Fair glanced like he might run out instead right now. “You can’t -- “

“Why can’t you take me?” the child asked, so shrill Sephiroth almost didn’t understand them.

“The helicopter.” Aerith cut them both off with impressive ease. “Sneak around while Tseng talks to me. I’ll make sure he doesn’t notice.”

“I won’t leave you by yourself,” Fair snapped. Sephiroth froze at his tone. Hard, fierce, and frightened. “When he does notice ---”

“I’m more dangerous than he thinks.” Aerith raised her stave as if to demonstrate. “He won’t attack me. He thinks I’ll return the favor.” She pulled three materia from her belt, hands so small it took both to offer them to Fair. “Barrier. Wind. Binding. Besides, I won’t be alone.”

Chills prickled in Sephiroth’s chest through the sharp assessing look Aerith leveled at him. He knew no one here trusted him near a civilian, let alone a child. With the bloody echoes in his head, he didn’t either. But for someone who tried to blast him through the window a minute ago, Aerith seemed to change her mind unnaturally fast.

Fair lifted his sword, holding the blade just close enough to Sephiroth to be a threat. “I said he wasn’t trying to fight. Not that he isn’t dangerous.”

They all stiffened at another call from the megaphone outside. Time. Running out.

“Exactly.” Aerith smiled without any happiness. Just sharp and pretty.“What better distraction if I’m not good enough?”

 Sephiroth’s jaw twinged seeing it. He knew how to force that expression, too. Her tactic wasn’t automatically disastrous. Reckless, yes, but their options were limited. He dropped his eyes, aware his agreement didn’t matter, but giving it regardless.

Aerith knew much more about Shinra’s workings than a simple caster should.

Fair twitched. “But if he --”

Stop wasting time. Shinra switched to airstrikes when they lost patience. Sephiroth nudged the blade to divert Fair’s attention. “I can’t hurt her.”

“He can’t hurt me,” Aerith said at the same time, then laughed brightly. “Can you?” She looked down at him, exhausted and adrenaline-spiked instead of furious now, the kind of back-to-the-wall glow that made people loose cannons.

Made people surprising even to Turks. Unnerving. Potentially exactly what they needed.

Sephiroth shook his head, meeting Fair’s glare impassively. “No. I believe I can’t.” Ignoring how jarring the words were, how they made something flinch down into his bones, he forced himself to report. “The…limitations we found prevent me. As with you earlier.”

He shuddered. Two. Two people he couldn’t fight against. The thought scraped something until it was raw and aching. Strange, how it mattered. He shook his head harder. “Punishment, if I try. Simple.”

The tense silence lasted too long. Like Fair might argue back again. He looked ragged and wild, tears still glistening across his face.

“I’ll distract them better, Aerith!” The child stomped their weak legs, like it bothered them when stronger fighters ignored them. Sephiroth frowned at them. Not like they were part of this plan except as a parameter. The child glared defiantly at Aerith. “Daddy says I’m too good at it!”

And just like that, something pivoted. Aerith shot Fair a pleading look that hit like a spell. He sniffled messily and dropped to a knee, grinning half-convincingly at the child. “I bet you are --- Marlene, right? Yeah. But I need your help first.” He offered his hands. “I’m Zack and you’ve got to hold onto me real tight. I’m kinda sleepy and I need to be quiet while the bad guys talk to Aerith. I need you to pinch me if I make to much noise.”

The child apparently missed the absurdity of surprise pain helping with silence. They nodded and Fair gathered them up, positioning them opposite his sword and helping them wrap thin arms around his neck. Sephiroth grimaced. Between the sword and a passenger, Fair’s mobility was compromised, maybe worse than his in these restraints.

“Oh! This!” Zack held out the insurance trigger. Sephiroth stared at it. He rarely saw them change hands.

“Oh, you found one, too?” Sephiroth’s pulse beat thunder-loud in his ears. Aerith pulled a second trigger from her coat pocket. It gleamed smugly on its black loop, dangling from her fingers. “I didn’t think it could cast.”

She had one. Somehow, she had one. Anticipation-ache dug into his ankle, the implant hot and heavy. He fought the bubble of panic down. How did a civilian have one? The Directors would never give someone like Aerith that kind of clearance. Would they…?

Fair’s eyes widened, but he had a handle on himself now. “Cast it if he tries anything.” He scowled at Sephiroth, finally stepping back. “I’m not unchaining you.”

“Clearly.” Sephiroth suppressed a scowl. Hardly the first time a handler denied him his hands. It wasn’t that he expected otherwise. His double was out there right now, working with his mother to destroy everything. He’d been ready to do those things himself.

It just stung. Maybe it always had. Maybe it was just seeing it in Fair, someone who had been something else before. Sephiroth dropped into waiting expression, eyes unfocused and looking straight ahead. “Deploy me.”

Fair made a frustrated sound, but footsteps on the concrete cut him off. “Aerith!” an unenhanced voice barked. “I’ve been patient. Come out.”

Fair ducked toward the back door. “I won’t be far.” His whisper shook. “I love you!”

Aerith stared after him a beat longer than normal vision patterns. Then, pulling her posture rigidly straight, she marched the door, clanking her boots louder than necessary. She gestured to Sephiroth, but with some non-regulation code he didn’t understand.

Aerith leaned against the door. “Tseng. My buffer in full or I’m not coming.”

Outside the Turk sighed and exaggeratedly retraced twenty paces back.

Aerith waited, mouthing silently. Tracking? Could she hear the steps? Sephiroth watched her closely. At this point, he couldn’t remember what a mako-less civilian could know through a wall.

Behind them, a very faint thump signalled Fair going to work. Time to command everyone’s eyes. Sephiroth ignored the aching in his port and stood. They could probably see his shape through the window shards.

They didn’t shoot. They must really want their target.

Sephiroth met Aerith’s eyes as he came to her side, head high, falling easily into parade form despite the tight knot in his ribs.

She nodded. She opened the door for him.

Sephiroth strode out first.

Chapter Text

So Marlene was a disturbingly stealth-trained child. She held on tight and leaned up to Zack’s ear on the way out, whispering, “I always wanted to go on a mission!”

Zack was too tired to do anything but blink. “Ok, here we go. Quiet as we can!”

It felt like every cell in his body screamed against moving farther from Aerith. The door felt like a gulf he couldn’t cross. Getting back to her was all he had left -- muscles and bones aching at the thought of anything else.

Zack took a deep breath. Heartbeats cut through the smoke ahead. Two nearby, at least two more around toward the chopper. Not counting any mechs out there. 

Near zone first. They might register him on infrared scopes, but SOLDIER body temp ran higher than mako-less humans. He’d ping as a fiend for the first minute at least. Better make use of it!

Zack kicked into a sprint, angling left of the nearest heartbeat. He had an impressionable passenger, so he had to stick to bloodless, and fast as he could.

Panic wormed under his fingernails. Was -- was this kid Aerith’s? He couldn’t get blood on her if --- oh god he’d said --- !

Stop thinking about that!

Apparently holding off stabbing Sephiroth wound him extra tight. He didn’t even have to wait for the materia to flare power in his hand, ready to go. Score. He cast Silence, drawing Shattersword back.

The advanced trooper didn’t stand a chance. Before he could even stumble, Zack crashed the blunt edge down on his legs, toppling him forward. A quick elbow to the back of the neck and he was down. Zack braced the girl and rolled, dragging the next gunner down with a wind cast. Shattersword was heavy enough to hit him hard for a one-blow knockout. Zack cast Silence on him too, so he could groan without disrupting things.

Two down.

He could hear two more plus Tseng out there. Zack darted around the bar, ducking low, trying to keep his panting muffled. Chocobo teeth he was definitely running on empty. His legs felt watery, like if they bent too far they’d just stay that way.

No time. He had a job to do. Zack inched forward along the hot curbstones.

Until he caught sight of that unholy smudgeless suit, posture impatient and frustrated. Tseng.

A vice crushed down on Zack’s chest. He couldn’t breathe, limbs recoiling as if on their own. He pressed closer to the wall before the certainty caught up. The Turk couldn’t see him. The smoke was too thick and he was facing the wrong way.

Zack had never felt afraid of a Turk. Just like gunshots hadn’t made him flinch until today.

He tremored, too many memories battling for attention. Every rationalization he’d hammered out --- they would keep Aerith safe. She didn’t seem to mind them. They couldn’t be doing anything too awful if that was true, right?

Fuck he’d been glad Tseng was there when he left. Someone he trusted to look after her if he got delayed. It had made him calmer walking into Nibelheim. Now he’d been tracked. Hunted. He knew he was labeled ‘asset’ in Turk files. He knew what it sounded like when Cissnei said “specimen” even though she winced.

And here was Tseng, mid-crisis, demanding Aerith walk into Shinra’s hands. Like it wasn’t a threat.

If he hadn’t been carrying a kid, Zack would have shouted and launched right at Tseng.

But he was too well trained for that. He skittered back just before Tseng glanced at where he’d been. Shit too close. He must be wondering where Aerith was.

Crack.

The door snapped open, sending a rolling wave of magic across the square. Enough to raise Zack’s hair on end. Tseng unbalanced slightly, while the infantry escorts fell back a step.

Zack winked at Marlene. Wasn’t about to let her think he was scared. She didn’t look anything like Aerith. But Zack didn’t think he looked a ton like his dad all the time. But was a kid this old even --- ?

Stop thinking! Start sneaking!

Luckily, he didn’t even have to keep his head down. Not when Sephiroth walked slowly into the street, eyes so bright they fought with the fire.

Zack shuddered. That battlefield walk was familiar down to his bones. He’d seen it and felt the rush of conflict reorienting to it in Wutai. Sephiroth stood quiet and tall, calm, demanding. Eating up everything loose in the enemy’s attention.

But this time the inhumanity of it struck Zack painfully. Moving through destruction like that, smooth and unconcerned. Bare and bruised, hair jagged and severed at his neck, Sephiorth stood upright even with his shoulders pinned back, showing his awful strength. He looked like one of the murdered ghosts the Wutaians whispered about. Back for blood.

Zack recognized the stomach-dropped-out-of-him feeling. New. Familiar. He’d felt it when he stared out at the army on Kalm’s plains. Afraid of what it might mean.

Thank Kujata he put Sephiroth in pants. This would be incalculably worse without them, just on principle.

Zack forced himself to dart carefully wide, tracking the infantry heartbeats. Everything felt even more awful and real when Aerith stepped out. She held her staff at fighting width, even with her fingers loose.

Wait, had she known that before and he forgot? Had he done all that talk about protecting her and she could fight!?

Zack forced the panic down. No. No, Aerith wouldn’t have let him be that stupid. Remember, it had been a long time. Maybe she learned.

“Aerith.” Tseng straightened stiffly. Zack might have thought he looked concerned if he wasn’t a sharp, frustrated Turk. Dangerous. “A new friend?”

Sephiroth took a small step forward, forcing Tseng to shift and compensate. Even the faint curl of a scowl on him made Zack shudder and duck his head in relief. Between Tseng and Aerith. The only place he could do any good.

“Oh, no, he’s my prisoner.” Aerith smiled crookedly. The closest infantry trooper gasped -- or laughed maybe -- giving her position away. Zack braced Marlene and cast Silence. He could perfectly imagine Aerith’s faux bow as she continued. “Impressive, don’t you think? I beat up the great Sephiroth and cut his hair. Still want to have this conversation?”

Was she trying to get attacked?

Zack crashed flat into the trooper’s back, and Silence meant she made no sound going down. The woman twitched, a shout that didn’t get farther. Zack knocked her out as fast as possible. One more.

Tseng chuckled. “And you put it in laboratory restraints. Convincing.”

‘It’ hit like a slap in the face. Tseng knew . Of course he knew lab cuffs. Asset recovery. He probably knew all about how Shinra recycled their MIA operatives. Had he known where Zack was all this time?

Tseng shrugged. “Another failed clone. That isn’t important.”

Zack saw green -- mako spike. Anger or calm felt too similar right now. He set Marlene on the sheltered side of the helicopter, signalling for her to wait. Zack wished he could pause, find out if like Aerith the kid couldn’t be trusted at all like that. But he had no time.

Crouched out of sight, he could make out two drones, but they usually went in batches of at least four. Where were the rest? The last infantry trooper shifted uneasily, watching the standoff.

Across the concrete, Sephiroth tilted his head, clearly tracking the bots, too. He crouched now, though that didn’t make him any less imposing. Aerith frowned, feet set a bit too wide. She looked unbelievably tiny as the hot buzz of her magic blared deafening in the air.

Zack didn’t know how to be this worried and awestruck at once.

“It’s time, Aerith.” Tseng was too far ahead for Zack to get a swipe without revealing himself. It didn’t make him hate his calm tone any less, how easily it cut through the explosions up at the plate. “Sector Seven is no longer safe. You must come in.”

Aerith’s face hardened. “A lift home is fine.”

“No.” Tseng stepped forward. “It is not. You can even bring your specimen if you like. R&D will want it back, no doubt.”

Apparently even with someone who’d murdered a whole town, that ‘it’ made Zack’s blood boil. Like in the lab. Sephiroth choking in his hands. A weapon. Only that. A thing, a monster, an asset .

The trooper raised their gun for backup and Zack had an opening. He cast Silence again, the repeat stinging in his fingers.

Aerith tightened her grip on the staff. A kind of angry Zack had never seen darkened her face.

Tseng tightened his fist. “Come quietly. Now.”

Zack stuck his target and barrelled them down out of sight, reveling in having both arms for sleeper holds. But his landing wasn’t magically silent like the trooper’s. He froze, heart in his throat as Tseng paused.

“Quiet. Always quiet, when you mean obedient.” Sephiroth scowled. “I refuse to be captured twice today.”

It worked. Tseng focused completely on the closer threat with that same light, cruel laugh. “Then stay. Die. You’re welcome to it.” He freed his pistol carefully, like he couldn’t draw it in under a second. “I’d love to put you back in the cage you crawled out of. But you’re not my priority.”

The barrel lit with slow flashes. Zack shuddered as Sephiroth tensed. Mag-bullet issue. Could shoot spells or concentrated mag-rounds. Harmless beyond the magic or lethal to a civilian. No warning which.

Zack picked a propeller sound out of the haze. He was at least two leaps away, though. Tseng wouldn’t shoot Aerith with mag rounds, would he!?

“I’m not going back in my cage either!” Aerith snapped, power spiraling at the ends of her staff. “Not ever, you understand?”

“It’s not a ---” Tseng cursed. “This argument is wasting time!”

Metal flashed overhead, streaking straight down at Aerith. One of the missing sentries! And Tseng’s gun glowed with a cast shot.

Damn it, Zack couldn’t shout a warning without giving himself away. He hated stealth missions! He launched at the sentry near him before it could give Tseng backup.

All hell broke loose.

Aerith’s magic rippled, denser and heavier as she swung into her own cast. And Sephiroth vanished in a glinting streak to slam into the dropping drone in a hungry ring of sparks.

Zack’s sentry clattered to the ground, but he didn’t even have to worry about the noise. Tseng’s Sleep cast crashed into the building, missing Aerith with space to spare. Her movements shimmered, her dodge somehow faster, longer than it should be. Glinting marks flashed under her feet.

The ward from the bar! She must still be in range.

Sephiroth kicked the sparking husk of the sentry so hard it whistled down. Using his feet barely seemed to hamper him, just making his extra flips look like flourishes. His shorn hair made the motion rough and fast, missing the long tail to give the illusion of grace.

The sparking carcass streaked between Tseng and Aerith, forcing the Turk to break off a second cast and backpedal.

Zack let the battle rhythm be too easy. Sephiroth arced in one direction, so he spun in the other, sighting a glint rounding the edge of the building. Tseng moved like a goddamn breeze, so light on his feet it looked like a trick, but he wasn’t looking in Zack’s direction at all. Aerith unleashed another blast of energy, this one twisting in a corkscrew.

Not fast enough for a Turk!

Zack’s sentry screeched metallically under his sword, but Sephiroth slammed down on another one, drowning out the sound. Zack hated that it might have been on purpose to cover him.

“Turk!” Sephiroth barked, dodging Tseng’s next shot. His battle-yell was the same, rattling loud even though he showed no sign of exertion.

Tseng ignored him, launching a flying kick at Aerith’s head. She tried to put space between them, but she was only as fast as a civilian. But then Aerith set her back foot and blocked.

CRASH. Tseng bounced off, stumbling past her.

Zack lunged for the last bot. Six sentries? For Aerith. When had she learned that? How was she this strong? It wasn’t being a mom, was it!?

Sephiroth snapped across the field, a familiar blur with wrong colors. He was so much closer. Zack had to assume he’d keep Aerith clear. He focused on the bot, catching it crosswise so hard it fell in two halves.

That was more or less how he was feeling about Shinra at this point.

Tseng grunted in surprise, magic surging again. Zack took a deep breath. That was the last one. No more hiding for him.

A kick hit flesh as he spun, but Aerith didn’t make a sound. Sephiroth, then. Zack saw a furious burst of Tseng striking and Sephiroth dodging, so fast it was hard to follow. Zack darted forward, ready to give Aerith some extra buffer.

Except Sephiroth moved wrong in the corner of his eye. And then he howled in pain. Zack knew that sound now.

What!? He changed direction.

“Tseng, stop!” Aerith clattered forward but too slow.

Scowling, disheveled, Tseng stomped down into Sephiroth’s hip, pinning him as he fell. He had his fingers dug into the half-closed stab from Zack’s screwdriver, forcing Sephiroth down by the shoulder. But that shouldn’t have been nearly enough to drop the most dangerous SOLDIER on the planet!

No. Even from here, Zack saw it. Sephiroth struggled at Tseng’s feet, fighting the grip, but his motions were balked and jagged. Each buck or twist stopped instantly as white seared across Sephiroth’s eyes, snapping his mouth open in a soundless cry.

Just like before. The spell! Sephiroth couldn’t -- he couldn’t escape!

Sephiroth scrabbled in the asphalt, a stifled roar torn out of him, feral and desperate. Zack had never seen him so clearly afraid .

Adrenaline lurched in Zack’s hands. He ran. No. He might kill him, but Shinra? No! Shinra didn’t get to kill anyone after what they did! Goosebumps ridged painfully on his back from Aerith’s charging spell, but it would be too slow. Turks never let someone get that close without finishing the mission!

A burst of power brimmed in Zack’s chest. Limit. Octaslash. Ironic. Tseng pressed his pistol to the back of Sephiroth’s head. “A crippled clone. I’ll teach R&D to waste my time!”

“Get off him!” Zack kicked the attack loose and let its heat carry him into a spin.

SOLDIER were fast. Deadly fast. But so were Turks. Tseng jumped without even looking, the first swing skimming bare hairs off his bangs. But he had to let go of Sephiroth. To keep his aim.

BANG

Sephiroth barked a cutoff scream. Zack winced and snarled, the sounds agonizingly loud so close. The gunshot dredged everything watery and terrifying, like the noise dug under his skin and tried to pull him down. But Octaslash was bright and furious and it carried him through, kept him slashing.

The blood-smell spattered across Zack’s senses wasn’t wet enough to be lethal. He’d been in time. Sephiroth dodged once he was free. The bullet hadn’t gone through his throat.

Thank everything!

Tseng dodged or deflected Zack’s strikes, using the goddamn pistol to knock the swipes back. It was like fighting a freaking shadow, hitting nothing even as he swung at the sound of Tseng’s harsh breathing. 

At least it didn’t sound easy . Gosh how weak was his swing right now? He really was running on empty! Even just one limit burned in his arms like a blast fuse, elbows twitching trying to manage Shattersword.

Zack stumbled on his recoil, baring his teeth. He felt like a Nibel wolf, just as starving and cornered. “Touch anyone again and you’re dead, Tseng!”

“Zack!?” Tseng landed rigidly straight, eyes wider than Zack had ever seen on a Turk. And still, he trained his gun between Zack’s eyes, like that was a reasonable routine precaution. “Is that you?”

“Who the fuck else?” Zack dragged the sword up, ready to block a shot. Behind him, a Cure cast rang softly, smooth edges against his frayed nerves. Sephiroth gasped, sounding grounded at least, and maybe not moving. Aerith swung closer, muttering. So he wouldn’t hemorrhage but it might be bad.

Shit. Zack blinked tear-blur out of his eyes. Having her helping almost wiped him out right there. It had been weeks, and also years, and also maybe a fucking lifetime since he wasn’t in this alone.

Hate bubbled in his stomach. Zack raised his sword. “You asking so you can decide if I’m ‘it’?” Everything Shinra had done in all that time crumpled into a wild, pounding force down in his bones. “Out of my way.”

“You, at least, will see sense.” Tseng straightened, all official angles and splatter-blue edges, an eerie, ominous hardness in his face. “This is a cleanup zone . T minus four minutes until we destroy insurgent cells. You really want to die here after everything, Zack?”

Cleanup. Like Banora! They were going to bomb the slums!?

Tseng stepped back carefully. “Come on. I can ---”

“In Midgar!?” Fury dragged Zack after him, like he could destroy the plan by attacking the Turk. “Are you insane!?”

Tseng retreated another step. “You’ll understand. You always do. The plate , Zack. Just ---”

Turks didn’t retreat. They faced the strongest and angriest of Shinra’s opponents without even blinking. Why was he --- ?

A faint footstep registered farther back. Aerith gasped. “Run!” Tseng broke into a sprint, left instead of toward the chopper door.

Marlene! He wasn’t trying to escape, he wanted a hostage!

Zack hit a dead sprint before he felt any effort. “Blizz the chopper,” he shouted to Aerith and cast a low ice from the cooling unit materia with his last dregs of mana. It was so jagged and rough he could barely aim it, but it still caught Tseng’s foot just enough to twist him off course.

Just enough. Zack popped the barrier materia loose, the move Angeal never stopped haranguing him for practicing, and threw it hard as he could at Sephiroth’s panting breaths behind him. “SOLDIER! Civ shield, now!”

With so many bursts of that white spell in a row, Zack had to bet Sephiroth could still hear him and could still cast. Sephiroth was the only one fast enough.

Tseng snarled when Zack crashed shoulder-first into his arm, knocking the pistol loose before slicing Shattersword at his chest. Mana-less, Zack was still one of the most dangerous fighters Shinra was stupid enough to make. Tseng had to drop into a roll to keep his head. Then Zack couldn’t pay attention to anything outside the clash and flare of the duel, lunging, dodging, springing over Tseng’s head to force him to alter course or take a SOLDIER kick to the skull.

Tseng dove. So fast!

Magic screamed around them, clashing energies snapping the air in two. High level spell! Resisting the instinct to dodge, Zack swung again, forcing Tseng to strafe toward the chopper.

CRASH. Ice spikes split from chopper’s center, metal shrieking and contorting from the force of Aerith’s anger. Yelps sounded from multiple directions and Tseng fell back, shielding his head from scattered ice shards. The cast grew like a demented glacier tree, splitting the doors clear off the chassis, wrenching the entire craft off the ground.

Holy chocobo feathers Aerith could cast!

Zack barely felt the ice chips bite into him as he landed, cornering Tseng against the ruined craft. After bullets? Nothing. They’d melt themselves out. “The plate!? ” he snarled. “You can’t!” Staggered, disarmed, Tseng fell back, an easier target. Horror made Zack’s voice fail. The plate used for cleanup? That would kill hundreds of people!

“Marlene?”

Zack shouldn’t. He should keep his eyes on his enemy. But he was too fried, too exhausted.

“Miss Aerith!”

He looked.

Marlene was ok. Two feet outside the radius of the ice explosion, Sephiroth crouched, head bowed, small ice wounds bleeding in his chest. And behind him, shielded from the brunt, Marlene sat swathed in Manwall’s purple glow. She reached out for Aerith with wide eyes but she looked unhurt. Sephiroth got to her.

They had to get out of here.

“Selfish fool!” Zack dodged, scowling at Tseng, only to see the kick had been a feint. “You’d rather kill her too?” Tseng spat, diving for his pistol. Zack swung but his leg chose right then to buckle. Shit!

“Look who’s talking!” Aerith. Aerith kicked the gun clear across the street. Before Tseng could recover she caught him with a two-handed staff swing right in the chest. He went down faster than a rock.

Zack beamed, suddenly giddy. Gods she was so strong now!

“You said --- you said Shinra is attacking all these people.” Aerith grit her teeth, tears making her eyes look mako-glowing. “And you’re just -- I’m the only one you care about!?”

“Come with me or you’ll die !” Tseng stumbled to his feet clutching his side. “Aerith!”

“I’m not dying here!” Aerith raised her staff, face red. “But everyone else can and you’re helping them do it!”

No time! Do what’s in front of you. Keep people you can see safe. Zack ran to Aerith, heart thudding. “We gotta go! Crawl into your bunker, Turk, unless you want a mercy killing now!”

Tseng actually showed his teeth, the fury on his face hitting like a punch. He didn’t care about anything except Aerith here. How had Zack been so wrong about him?

Sure fingers caught Zack’s hand. Aerith squeezed, straightening next to him even though she trembled. “Yes. Go . Take your conscience with you.”

Tseng looked from one of them to the other, desperately searching for something he didn’t find. Finally his face darkened. “Enjoy your suicide,” he choked, not even paying attention to Zack now. “I’ll tell your mother you were too stubborn to survive.”

And he ran.

Zack almost attacked him again, feeling how Aerith flinched. Nothing was happening to anyone! He had three minutes. They had to run.

Aerith let him steer her toward Sephiroth and Marlene, her hand still tight in his. Zack couldn’t even be overwhelmed by how warm her skin was. “I got it, Aerith. We can…” He balked at promises. Gods he’d promised Cloud so many things. “I got it.”

He’d get her out. He’d come all this way because not-Cloud wanted his help keeping her safe. This was why he was still alive.

“Um, Aerith, Mr. Zack…something’s wrong.” Marlene scurried to Aerith’s side, pale even under the Manawall glow. She seemed unusually calm under a status effect for a kid. “He’s not moving…”

The air felt suddenly thin. Zack dropped to Sephiroth’s side, hearing his thick breathing. “Dude, not the time!” Dread dug under his skin. Had Tseng got another cast in? If Sephiroth couldn’t move, Zack would have to leave him here .

Sephiroth didn’t react. The shot oozed in his shoulder, but it hadn’t shattered the bone. Messy, painful, but nothing they hadn’t faced before. Icemelt glistened on his chest. But no deep slices.

No, the scary part was his unfocused stare. Sephiroth watched distant nothing, shivering, his expression fighting to be blank. The barrier materia sat beneath his hands in the gouged street. Like hitting the ground broke his grip and everything else, too. He breathed shallow, blood drying in his hair, fear buried in the shaking corners of his jaw.

When he shook Sephiroth he felt no telltale magic jolt from a spell. Shit. Zack had seen this stillness before, back in the lab. “Come on! You heard him!”

Sephiroth grunted, blinking faster. His gaze jittered, almost focused before blanking again as Zack dragged his head up. But holding him, Zack felt his pulse. It raced .

Sephiroth’s expression was flat and empty. But his eyes were wide, and his irises blazed, and he barely breathed. Rationing oxygen again. Holding so still in Zack’s grip he shook.

Fear. Fear, like he knew the danger they were in.

Panic snapped Zack’s voice loud and rough. “You don’t get to make me kill you when I need your help!” He didn’t know what happened! He didn’t know what could lock up someone like this! “Get up!”

One moment Sephiroth sagged, unresponsive at his feet. The next he stood, stance square, head low. The rush of motion felt like a fiend, Zack’s senses so frazzled he had to catch a sword swing before he finished it.

Sephiroth didn’t move away from the strike. He still watched vacantly, eyes on Zack’s boots. His hands hung open in their shackles, but Zack could see them shake with the effort of not clenching. And his eyes glinted brighter. Bright and wet.

Nausea punched Zack in the gut. Whatever made Sephiroth like this, he hated it all the way into his bones. Like a robot, waiting for him to order to move, to breathe right.

But he didn’t have time. They had to go!

Zack cut Sephiroth’s cuffs, Shattersword screeching through the metal. He flung the brace clear and crushed the casings off Sephiroth’s palms manually. The sheets jeered, snapping caked blood off with them.

Sephiroth only breathed deep to gasp when Zack shoved his fingers, flashing white light out of him. He didn’t move a muscle without force. His palms had black ink on them.

None of it pierced Zack’s terror. “We run!” he barked. “Aerith, here! Sephiroth, take Marlene!”

Aerith held on as Zack scooped her up. Good thing, too, because Shattersword meant he basically had one hand to carry her. In another time --- another world, it felt like now --- Sephiroth should have carried her, the bigger passenger, since he was stronger and had two hands free. But Zack would be dead before he let that happen. It was already awful to risk Marlene near him, but he wasn’t letting the kid die!

He wasn’t letting anyone die!

Sephiroth lifted Marlene easily, eerily smooth like he didn’t have a bloody wound in one arm. The only sound he made was the clank of the fetter bands.

Zack couldn’t take it. He adjusted Aerith and dropped his voice to lower than a whisper. A hiss. SOLDIER hearing only. “Look at me.”

Sephiroth shuddered and did, eyes focused so fast it looked painful. Instant. Responsive. His pupils were black needles, so thin they barely showed. Crumpled edges at his mouth and forehead threatened his flat expression.

He could hear. He knew the danger they were in.

Zack willed his legs to stop aching. To carry this. “That way. Sector Five.” He swallowed. “I lose sight, I stun you. Take the girl, leave you.”

Aerith narrowed her eyes, but kept her thoughts to herself.

Carrying two civs might kill him. Sephiroth on the loose definitely would.

“Yes, sir.” Sephiroth spoke in the same empty register, almost too faint to hear. Tone ragged and flat. Gods, they were traumatizing Aerith’s kid.

Zack ran.

Chapter Text

They really did it. Shinra really dropped the damn plate.

One second, Zack ran full-sprint, flying through the dirt-blur slum, limbs screaming each step from the impact.

Then, the loudest sound he’d ever heard turned everything upside down. It had real, physical force, the ground bucking like a behemoth. Zack swore, air underfoot, sky flashing in front of him. Sky!? In the slums!?

Aerith yelped, and Zack clutched her, wrenching Shattersword up to counterbalance their momentum. Still, he barely landed on his feet, another wave throwing him forward. Pavement cracked with a snarl. Walls groaned and bowed.

Zack crashed down and had to jump again to keep from falling. He stumbled four long leaps up the path before the momentum finally let up enough to land. Aerith pressed close, shaking, and Zack bent over her, heart clawing out of his chest.

The bastards. How could they!? How many people had they just killed?

Just ahead, Sephiroth skidded down as the path formed a new incline. Zack let the glint of him distract from how empty and carved out he felt. Sephiroth leapt easily, rolling to a stop in the flowers of Aerith’s home garden. Stable there, he froze again, eerily still.

“It’s…” Zack choked on trying to say ‘ok,’ like the word was completely stripped out of him. Useless. He skipped it. “Aerith, we got out. It didn’t get us. We -- Marlene is --

Aerith nodded, gasping into his ruined shirt. “I -- I know, but ---” When she pulled back she looked pale and nauseous. “The planet -- they went back to it --- too many at once!”

They died. That’s what that meant. Zack wanted to cry or scream, he wasn’t sure which. But he had a mission. He focused on that. He let Shattersword rest flat-edge on the path so he could free both hands, steady Aerith on her feet. She summoned her staff, her face streaked with tears.

Up ahead, Marlene pushed Sephiroth’s arm and he instantly released her. So Zack wouldn’t have to order it and he could see for himself the kid wasn’t hurt. Zack’s pulse thudded painfully in his skull. For the entire sprint, Sephiroth stayed two steps ahead of him. Good thing, too, because Zack wouldn’t have had a second to lash out at him. Frankly he was baffled how he’d kept up at all. He’d never broken tier three speed.

None of it made him feel any safer with Sephiroth right there. In Aerith’s yard. Near her house .

“Aerith, are you ok!?” Marlene sprinted toward them.

Aerith shot Zack a haunted look as she pulled on a shaky smile. Wiped. Exhausted. Suddenly, fiercely, Zack needed to know who she’d seen die. He knew why he was trembling, thinking about all those people and seeing Angeal’s stiffening body under his sword. Why was she?

But not in front of the kid. Zack nodded sharply and let Aerith hold onto him as they hurried up the path. “Good job, kid!” Damn it he sounded like he’d swallowed gravel.

“Marlene, I’m here! I’m ok.” Aerith squeezed Zack’s hand and gave Sephiroth a wide berth as she checked the kid over.

His turn, then. Zack tried to get his breathing under control enough to gauge his prisoner. Sephiorth crouched eerily still, but closer his gasps rasped choppy. A hard run? Were things hard for him? He tremored faintly, down to his long fingers twitching open in front of him.

Sephiroth looked down, unfocused. Blank in that rigid, forced way from before.  Braced. Motionless. Blood oozed slowly from the wound Tseng left in his shoulder. It looked painful, but the shoulder blade had escaped major damage. Zack’s stomach clenched. What was wrong with him?

What was he waiting for?

“Daddy and Tifa?” Marlene asked breathlessly, clinging to Aerith’s sleeve. Aerith tried to steer her up the path. “Do you think…”

“I’m not sure. This way, I’ll see what we can find out, ok?”

Some space, at least. Zack shivered. He couldn’t make any of that better. He had to take care of this freakin time bomb.

He tried to catch Sephiroth’s eye as he crouched, but no dice. Zack frowned. “Look at me.”

Sephiroth’s fingers curled. His neck twitched. But halfway up he froze completely, eyes low and searing. Sephiroth curled instead, shoulders braced, teeth grit. And he held his breath.

Goosebumps ridged Zack’s neck. He wasn’t going to do it. He refused . And he looked furious. Dangerous.

Like he had in the Nibelheim library.

“Hey.” Zack forced his head up next, Sephiroth’s racing pulse hot against his fingers. Sephiroth made a low strained sound, complying instantly. His pupils drilled into Zack creature-thin still, more beastly than human. Sweat melded from Zack’s clammy hands to Sephiroth’s throat.

He didn’t look concussed. He didn’t feel cold from blood-loss.

No, he looked impossible. Because Sephiroth looked trapped now, like the strange panicked expression Zack saw in the lab but much worse. Eyes wide, grimace deep, his teeth dug into his lower lip like if he didn’t bruise it any semblance of calm would tear away from him.

Shit shit what did Tseng do!? Was the shot drugged?

“Breathe,” Zack barked. Relief burned in his fingers when Sephiroth did.

Relief and shame. He should be happy to see this now. Better late than never, right? Zack hadn’t been able to even make Sephiroth frown trying to stop him from killing an entire town. He was practically owed some dread at this point…

But all it felt was frightening. Zack had only ever seen Sephiroth worried in Nibelheim’s reactor, staring at the monstrous body from the mako tank. Right before everything went bloody.

Footsteps approached carefully. The smell of soil, water, and cut leaves. Aerith. Zack teared up. She was here. She was really here. He waved her back urgently, chest clenching. She was here. He had to keep her safe.

“I brought Marlene to my mom.” Aerith didn’t listen. She paused only two steps back, hands clenched on her staff. “She’s safe. We’ve got a minute.”

Gods, Elmyra? She was here? Zack almost panicked all over again. But he forced himself to focus. He shook Sephiroth sharply. “Report. Is it happening again?” He hated how his hands trembled. “Like Nibelheim?”

For the first time in ages, Sephiroth’s blank expression broke. He scowled , eyes flashing mako-bright. “As if she’d bother,” he hissed, and he wrenched against Zack’s grip.

Zack felt the stop, saw the white light swallow Sephiroth’s irises, the burst of cold snarling between them. Sephiroth’s stifled howl dug into his damn fingers, and the fury on his face made Zack see red.

“Are you stupid!?” He swung so fast he barely knew where he struck. Sephiroth snapped sideways, lip bleeding from the force. “I don’t want to kill you as a precaution! Answer me!”

Sephiroth ground his fingers into the dirt. “Even ---” He barked a low, ragged sound. “Even if she did -- even if she tried ---” His wild hair barely covered half his face even as he tried to duck behind it. “I am useless for her purposes! Look!”

Reflex had Zack dodging, fists up, before Sephiroth even lunged. He felt more than saw the hook-claw fingers moving toward him and tried to charge a spell.

No mana! Stupid!

No need. Sephiroth screamed, sharp and shattered, as he collapsed to the ground, clawing at his chest. He snarled, pushed again, swiped again. Fell even faster, eyes pale-bright, teeth grinding.

The memory of Genesis copies trying to attack him even as their bodies morphed and reformed pierced Zack’s initial adrenaline. “Wait!” He retreated, horror thick and sour on his tongue. “Stop it!”

But Sephiroth followed. He sprang up, cat-slit eyes flashing, magic sparking in his hand. Zack saw it just in time to watch it die, crushed in on itself in splinters and bursts. Sephiroth howled, cradling the hand to his chest as he buckled. The white burst glinted sickly on his face.

“That,” he choked, “is my report.” Barely a moment and he lunged again. Falling. Screaming . The flash of the spell lasted longer this time, as if it punished him. “I --- AAAAGH! ---- he ruined me! It’s not just you or her, it’s everyone. ”

Fury burst through Zack’s exhaustion. Ruined? Ruined!?

He’d killed those Genesis copies. Because they were trying to destroy him. And because if he’d didn’t they’d maul themselves until they bled out. He had hated every second of it.

“Him? He ruined you?” Zack didn’t wait for the spell. No, he caught Sephiroth’s next aborted strike and threw him down. Zack could barely feel his fingers they shook so hard. “Because you can take out four sentries with your damn feet but you can’t kill us anymore!?”

Something panicked and searing pounded in his chest. 

Zack twisted Sephiroth’s arm until the leverage brought him up short. “Because you can’t hurt people just because you decide to!?”

But instead of stilling, Sephiroth pushed. Snarled. Howled, eyes lit white with the blowback. Again, and again, twitching in Zack’s grip and punished every time. No matter how tight Zack held on he couldn’t stop him, just activate the spell faster.

The rage mixed with panic. “Sephiroth, enough!”

Sephiroth gouged the flowers. Fighting again. Moaning like a gutted dragon. He couldn’t keep doing this! 

Green glinted at Zack’s wrist. The stun! He cast it without thinking.

The sudden, gaping silence felt like a gasp. Sephiroth tremored, strung up by the shock, but it was better than watching him mag-jolt himself over and over. Zack felt locked in place, too. He was still so angry his skin seared with it. He had to keep reminding himself --- Marlene was alive, and Sephiroth had done that. Didn’t matter if the fighting, the killing, was what he cared about, Zack could force him into more.

And if he attacked him now Sephiroth couldn’t stop him, and much as Zack wanted to be prepared for that it made him dizzy and sick.

“Zack, wait.”

Aerith caught his shoulder. Zack jumped, hating her so close to Sephiroth and violently relieved she was here. That he wasn’t alone with just comatose Cloud.

Gods, Aerith’s eyes were so green and she squeezed his arm, trying to reassure him. Even as her jaw tightened. Even as she pulled her shard out of her pocket, clutching it in tight fingers. Even as she stepped closer. Sephiroth seemed mammoth even crumpled at her feet. 

Aerith swallowed and crouched. “Seth?” She glanced at the marks on his back. “It is you, isn’t it?”

What!?

Sephiroth couldn’t move, but he felt surprised. Like somehow his gasps went even more ragged. Unless that was just Zack projecting. He barely had the presence of mind to keep hold on Sephiroth so he didn't fall.

“I wasn’t sure. But then I saw this.” Aerith bit her lip and took off her right boot. Her foot looked unbearably tiny outside of it. Uh -- wait -- should he not look? Zack hadn’t really thought about being actually, like, near her. If she had a kid he shouldn't --- or maybe just not too much? Or maybe?

Aerith scrunched down her sock, and then all of that didn’t matter. Because a dark mark jarred with her pale skin just above the ankle.

A tattoo. Black. A glyph over two lines of text. Letters and numbers mixed.

Zack’s stomach dropped into the freaking ground. What? What happened!?

But Aerith didn’t look at him. She shuffled, holding her ankle clearly visible, eyes fixed on Sephiroth. Like she was afraid to see Zack’s reaction.

Damn it. Zack bit his tongue. Damn it, he could wait. He could wait and find out later if Tseng had let this happen. And if he had, he could kill him. Later.

Aerith smiled nervously, curling her toes. “You remember Moogle, don’t you?”

The magic from the stun cut out.

Zack tensed, ready to pull Sephiroth back, but he didn’t have to. Sephiroth barely breathed. “Im-Impossible.” His voice grated tinny and faint, like it was on the other end of a broken radio signal. “Moogle was…a hallucination…”

Relief clawed into the mess of all Zack’s other confusion and anger. Sephiroth was talking again. Not just thrashing like a snared animal.

Aerith smiled sadly, fingers white and tense. “Right. Sorry for lying about that. I didn’t want us to get in trouble. Er, more trouble.” She scrunched her eyes shut, like it took all her energy to push through the next sentence. “Um…I don’t know what they --- what the Professor told you. But I…”

And she glanced at Zack. He froze, a new kind of panic cluttering the air. What was he supposed to do? What did she need? He gave a weak, completely unconvincing smile.

Aerith nodded, like that helped somehow, and nudged her ankle a little closer to Sephiroth. “I’ve failed every test. Every single one.” She shrugged, wilting into her jacket. “I can’t do anything he wants.”

Sephiroth turned his head slowly, staring at Aerith’s tattoo. He didn’t move his shoulders at all, compliant and still in Zack’s grip finally.

Zack wanted to stare at it too, but he forced himself to look back at Aerith’s face as soon as he knew he didn’t have to restrain his prisoner. He had to be there if she needed him. He had to not fall apart over this.

Aerith spoke faster, like she was worried she’d run out of words. “And I’m alive. Zack and Mom aren’t going to terminate me or anything. He might want to sometimes, but I’m not there anymore. And even he decides not to in the end.”

Terminate!?

“It…we aren’t in the lab. Zack isn’t going to decommission either of us.” Aerith winced. “Even if you can’t take on an army. Or a Turk.”

Decommission. How did Aerith know that kind of messed-up asset lingo? The Turks? Please say it was the Turks…

Sephiroth choked a low, rough sound. “Can’t take ---?” He cut off, hissing, his bloody arm buckling as the other twitched in Zack’s grip. Shit, he probably was numb from the armlock. Zack let go, not sure how long that would go before real damage. He let himself steady Sephiroth on the way down, keeping him from falling closer to Aerith.

It let him check. Sephiroth sat up, dirt a startling imperfect stain on his bare feet. Zack couldn’t make it out fully, but he saw enough. Sephiroth had a black tattoo on his right ankle. And it looked a lot like Aerith’s.

The lab. She said the lab. She had met Sephiroth in --- !

Shit.

Sephiroth stared at Aerith. Searching her face in a strafing grid, paling the longer he looked. “It…it can’t be you…” Disgust twisted the corner of his mouth. “It isn’t….Moogle isn’t…”

Aerith shuddered. “Funny.” She shrugged exaggeratedly. “How many times I've said that to myself. ‘No way. General Sephiroth is too… deadly.’ ” She lingered on the word, something hard and pained in her face.

Sephiroth flinched. He looked clammy. Zack saw the roll of his stomach, how his head snapped down. Oh crap! 

He just barely dragged Aerith’s boot out of the way as Sephiroth twisted and vomited into the flowerbed. Aerith jumped back, eyes wide, and Zack instinctively stepped in front of her.

Sephiroth choked, covering his face, nails dug in so hard the skin bled. He shuffled away, hoarse and gasping. “She --- she ---!” Tears spattered on the leaves, leeching his eye-glow over everything.

Zack had never imagined him sobbing. The sound raised every hair on his arms.

“She made me -- she deployed me against you!?” Sephiroth roared, punching the dirt. Something clattered off the porch. “She made me kill --- wanted me to kill --- I didn’t know --- !” The words disintegrated, torn into a ragged scream. Sephiroth hit again, the wound in his shoulder bright and red as it reopened. He kept going, like he didn’t feel it. Howling. Sobbing.

Aerith retreated a full three steps, eyes rapt on the gouges Sephiroth’s strikes left in the soil. Zack stumbled after her. He knew that wasn’t what a threat looked like, but she might not. Aerith looked pale, paler than he’d ever seen her. Zack held his confusion and fear low in his chest.

He would ask. He had to.

But not now. Now, he held his arms open, sniffling. He couldn’t make any of this ok.

Aerith ran right into the hug. Zack clung to her, pressing with the edge of SOLDIER strength she used to say made her feel surrounded and safe. She burrowed in, wrapping her arms around his back and gods she was so strong.

Gods, he needed to know. But right now, he needed her to know first. That whatever she told him, he wouldn’t want to let go.

Sephiroth heaved and wept next to them, muffling his cries with his hands. But he’d stopped hurting himself. That had to be something.

Zack needed it to be something.