Chapter 1
Nanaki first heard the rumors on a visit to Gongaga, though at first he made nothing of them, for Gongaga had always lived with ghosts. Decade by decade, they cleared more of the reactor debris, and the circle of black earth shrank, but a scar would endure for decades yet. And in the islands beyond, the Temple of the Ancients had stood long before the town, warnings as to its nature passed down and obscured through generations.
The Temple was gone now, but Nanaki was one of the few who knew that, for few ventured near enough to see it for themselves. When he heard tell of a black figure haunting its walls, he thought it only an aspect of the legend he'd not heard before-- until someone also described the pit that had once held the Temple's foundations.
"You've actually been there?" he asked the woman.
She shook her head. "My cousin Ennio, he works on a fishing boat. A storm tossed him overboard and washed him up on that island. I've got no idea what possessed him to go inland, but he's always been a bit daft."
"He did survive to tell the tale. You say he saw someone there?"
"Tall figure in black, he said. But pale somehow with the moonlight on it, like a ghost."
"...silver hair?" Nanaki suggested cautiously, but she just shrugged.
"Couldn't say. He had enough sense to light outta there."
"A curious story. Thank you."
It could very well be nothing, he told himself. A dark figure glimpsed at night by a man already shaken by the storm and predisposed to imagine monsters. He might have seen nothing more than a shadow.
But what if he had seen something?
More than 70 years had passed since their final stand against Sephiroth. In the years that followed, there had been rumors here and there of a man in a black cape, and Nanaki and his friends had leapt to investigate, never to find evidence of the man himself. One was simply another 'clone' who had never made it north. Another was a costume ill-chosen by someone who had no idea what Sephiroth had become. Most often they were simply long-haired men who owned black clothes.
As the years passed and the man faded from memory, so too did any rumor of him. The woman he'd spoken to just now had shown no recognition at the suggestion of a man in black with silver hair. He had died long before her birth.
So why invent him now?
Nanaki's tail lashed as he wound his way through the town in search of a quieter place to think. He settled in the empty graveyard, where fresh flowers spoke of recent mourners.
Sephiroth had been thought dead once before, after Cloud had thrown him into the Mako pit of the Nibel reactor. The Jenova cells in his body had enabled him to survive it, though he had perhaps spent the ensuing five years recovering from it. They could only theorize that that was what had delayed his return.
Nanaki had seen his second death with his own eye. After a hard-won battle, they had left that strange corpse at the bottom of the crater. Holy had blasted out after them. Surely the magic meant to counter Meteor was not something one already badly beaten man could survive, whatever ran through his veins.
Or were 70 years at last enough to recover from it?
He knew he couldn't put the question to rest until he had gone to investigate for himself, but he wondered whether it were something to do alone. Vincent was difficult to get a hold of; they met without fail once a year, but outside of that, Nanaki never knew where he might be. Of their other comrades, only Yuffie remained, getting on in years. If he asked her, he was sure that she would send some of Wutai's young warriors to accompany him, but somehow he didn't like the idea.
Sephiroth was not a problem this new generation was ever meant to know.
But it would also be very foolish of him to meet a potential enemy without telling anyone.
Nanaki pawed at his ear to activate the communication device attached to it. They were an improvement over the old phones whose buttons his claws had always punched through, but he had still needed the accommodating young engineers of the canyon to modify this one for him. They were always designed to fit human ears.
He dialed home and left a message that someone in the observatory complex would know to relay to Vincent, who had yet to migrate off antiquated networks. His people would know he had gone to the Temple, and so would Vincent, though he might only learn it months later when he finally decided to charge his phone.
And then Nanaki set about finding someone to ferry him to the island.
There was no dock, and no one would row him ashore. He came up onto the rocky beach shaking seawater from his fur, and almost immediately he was in jungle. He felt less certain of his way than he had expected; the vegetation had grown and shifted, and Aeris had led them, then, with such an uncanny certainty.
In some ways, Nanaki missed her most. He had had decades with the others, but hers was a friendship cut short, and he lamented what it might have grown into. She the last of her kind, and he the last of his. That might not have been his alone to bear, all these years.
He followed a half-remembered course, picking his own path through the jungle. There were no people here, but the place teamed with life. Countless scents assailed his nose, but none gave direction. He came clear of the dense undergrowth and in sight of the Temple walls only as twilight was falling.
Nanaki sat at the edge of the moat, looking across. He had arrived from a different direction, and could see the bridge from a distance. He remembered how Aeris had rushed to its center, pressing herself to the wooden boards as a person presses closer to a wall to hear those in the next room. This place had offered her a connection to her ancestors that at last she had been eager to reach for.
Across the bridge, within the walls, there was only the immense pit. All evidence of the Cetra's magical prowess, gone.
No, there wasn't only the pit. In the deepening shadow thrown by the crumbling walls stood a man. Tall, clad in black, with long silver hair. Just the same, exactly the same.
Nanaki felt his hackles rise as Sephiroth glanced at him. He gave only a slow blink, surprised but disinterested.
"Why are you here?" The question emerged as a growl.
"This is the only place on the island where one can watch the stars come out," Sephiroth said, looking skyward. "The foliage is too dense."
Nanaki waited. His muscles coiled, ready to pounce. He remembered the taste of the man's blood.
"...but that isn't what you mean," Sephiroth added. He returned his gaze to Nanaki. "You want to know why I'm not dead."
"We killed you. I was there."
"I suppose you could try again. I doubt it will be any more lasting."
Nanaki eyed him, trying to work out what it was that seemed different about him. His manner was no less arrogant, and his body language likewise unconcerned by any threat Nanaki might pose. But in all their encounters with Sephiroth, he had always moved with some purpose. He was not a man who stood still.
"...and Jenova?" Nanaki ventured.
Sephiroth shrugged, though the motion wasn't quite casual. "Gone. Her body was too much in the path of Holy. Mine wasn't."
"Then you can be killed."
"I could have been. But you've lost the means to summon it now, haven't you?"
Nanaki lurched forward, and then caught himself, standing his ground and snarling. Was it a taunt? A threat? No one could now summon Holy because Sephiroth had killed her. She was dead because of him, her life cut short because of him, and because of that, he went on undying?
There was no justice in that.
"I know," Sephiroth chuckled, as though it were some cosmic joke. "It's unfair, isn't it? And I can't even properly enjoy it."
"...what do you mean by that?"
"There is no place for me in a world that remembers me. I had meant to wait, but I suppose your memory will endure the longest, won't it? I hadn't thought of that."
"You're waiting to be forgotten?" Nanaki wondered. "What would you do with a world that doesn't know you?"
Sephiroth didn't answer him immediately. He gazed at the stars. "For the first time, I might be just a man."
Nanaki huffed. "That's all you would seek? To be like anyone else?"
"In all your years, even for a fleeting moment, have you never once wanted to be human?"
Nanaki opened his mouth, and then closed it. As a cub, he might have denied it. He might have barked out a lie to reject the commonality that Sephiroth spun between them. Sephiroth had passed for human, once, but in some ways they were both just as alone.
Of course he had thought of it, as a creature raised by humans. When he was small, he had watched them outpace him into adulthood and envied the respect they commanded. Now, as those he loved outpaced him into old age and death, a heavier loneliness settled on him each time. If he were human, he would have shared the years with them, held their hands in their passing, and known he would not be far behind them.
"...I thought you despised humans," he said at last.
"They never did me much good," Sephiroth admitted. "But I always wondered......" He trailed off, shrugged again, and looked to Nanaki. "You really came here alone?"
"What did you expect?"
"I suppose the rest are dead now. And perhaps this world doesn't need to produce such warriors now as it did then."
"Without threats like you, no."
Sephiroth shook his head. "I know my words won't convince you, but I have no designs on this world. Entropy itself will do what I once hoped to, changing it into something unrecognizable."
"You once wanted to control that," Nanaki pointed out. "To create the future."
"And what would I have created? What I wanted was to erase the past. I had no idea what I wanted from the future."
Nanaki's tail swished thoughtfully, the light throwing his own shadow out ahead of him, back and forth. How long had it taken Sephiroth to recover from Holy, and how much longer had he spent simply waiting? It represented a great deal of time to think and reflect. Time enough to change even Sephiroth?
He thought back now to the Sephiroth whom Cloud had first described, the man who had entered Nibelheim. Aloof but honorable, a man who held himself apart. A man at first dismayed by the discovery that he wasn't human.
For Nanaki and Aeris, beyond the denial there had yet been pride to be taken in their heritage. But Sephiroth was not only the last of his kind but the only one there had ever been. His only heritage was destruction.
Was it so incomprehensible that he had embraced it anyway?
If he could comprehend that, then Sephiroth was a person, and people could change. In many ways, he didn't like the idea. He wanted Sephiroth to be no more than a figure in the past, a villain whose crimes he had avenged. Anything else was unjust, his heart insisted, and yet there was nothing he could do to right it.
Sephiroth was alive, and if he was different, then that, too, was a fact that he would have to accept.
"The future... will never belong to you," he said.
"Would you deny me any place in it at all?" Sephiroth asked him, almost as though Nanaki's judgment mattered.
But Nanaki shook his head. "I don't think I could, much as I might want to. But whatever path you take in it, it won't go unobserved. You haven't been forgotten."
"Unfortunate," Sephiroth remarked. "I'll wait a while longer."
Nanaki remained in the ruins all night, keeping vigil. Sephiroth said nothing of the futility of the gesture; surely he understood Nanaki already knew. It was one night. One night with a man who might well live forever.
In the morning he contacted the captain who had brought him, and made his way back to shore.
Nanaki spent the next few weeks restless. Others of the canyon volunteered to monitor news broadcasts in an effort to ease his burden, but he listened constantly anyway, waiting for some sign. A fire, a string of murders, a suspicious figure leaving the scene.
But the small tragedies from day to day sounded nothing like Sephiroth's work. He was not the cause of vehicle collisions or bad weather. Friends in Gongaga reported no unsettling strangers passing through. Everything seemed to go on as though Sephiroth remained dead.
At last Nanaki felt he could only return again to the island. He found his way more quickly this time, reaching the ruins of the Temple with the afternoon sun still clear overhead.
No one was there.
Nanaki paced the walls inside and out. He had not imagined it any more than poor Ennio, but perhaps Sephiroth had moved on. That he had done so quietly gave Nanaki no peace.
The sight of the pit in daylight was worse, somehow. They had emerged from the Temple in daylight, and it had given them a clear view of the events below. It had been hard to look at Aeris afterwards, to acknowledge what had happened, much less process it. Nanaki wished he had found the courage; he might have noted a resolve in her expression that foretold her quiet departure.
He wondered what she might have counselled him now. Would she have chided him for attempting to deal with Sephiroth on his own, as she had? Nanaki didn't even have the power to stop him, as she had.
But he wasn't certain of the threat, either. Staring at the empty pit, he wondered what had ever become of the Black Materia. Sephiroth would know best the answer to that; he shouldn't have needed to come here searching for any trace of it. Maybe he had come here only to wait.
"I had hoped you would return."
Nanaki looked up sharply. Sephiroth had approached silently from downwind, giving no warning.
"Why?" Nanaki asked.
"You're the only person I've spoken to in a very long time." Sephiroth came to a stop several paces away. He looked more real in the daylight, the black of his coat a crisp silhouette without the shadows to blend into.
"Strange to seek company from someone who helped to kill you," Nanaki remarked.
"You had your reasons. I don't hold it against you."
"...I'm afraid the feeling isn't mutual." He had killed Aeris, and no reason could ever change how he felt about that.
Sephiroth shrugged. "That's fine. I'm not looking for forgiveness."
"Only a conversation?"
"You can say anything you like to me."
Nanaki huffed. "What could I have to say?"
"I mean that to its fullest extent," said Sephiroth. "As long as you remember me, I cannot remake myself. What a dead man hears may as well not have been spoken."
It occurred to Nanaki that Sephiroth didn't know about Vincent. He seemed to think him dead, a human like the others, with a human lifespan. He thought the preservation of his memory hinged solely on Nanaki.
"...I don't understand why it hasn't crossed your mind to kill me," Nanaki said plainly.
"I already ended the last of one race."
"Don't tell me you regret it," he growled.
"But it was regrettable," Sephiroth answered calmly. "I killed her too late to stop her, so she died for no reason. I was wrong about the power of the Cetra, and now, we'll never know what more she might have become."
Nanaki sat back on his haunches. "......you admire her," he realized, stunned.
"It was not Holy, but her will that saved this Planet. My own was nothing, compared to that."
"Another man would be angry."
"Perhaps I should be," Sephiroth said, tilting his head thoughtfully. After a pause, he went on, "Have you ever had an anger you failed to understand or even recognize? You live with it for so long, you know nothing else."
"...I don't think so," Nanaki said. He didn't know where Sephiroth was going with this, but he wasn't going to bring up his old misplaced anger towards his father.
"That was what I carried into Nibelheim," said Sephiroth, "and being there only amplified it."
"Because of what you discovered."
Sephiroth shook his head. "Because of Jenova. We became one then, do you understand? All of her anger, and all of mine, compounded. After she died... everything felt less."
Nanaki watched him skeptically. "Surely you're still capable of feeling."
"I don't know if I can adequately explain it," he said. "To separate myself from her again... I didn't know where I ended and she began. Maybe the anger went with her. I don't know."
"Maybe you've lost sight of it again," Nanaki proposed. Maybe beneath that calm exterior, it awaited only the right trigger to make it burst through the surface again.
Sephiroth regarded him steadily. "Like you?" he asked.
"What?"
"I am a convenient target for your anger, but I am not its cause."
Nanaki's tail lashed. "Then what am I angry at?"
"Death," Sephiroth said simply. "That it should come for your friends, and not either of us."
"I don't want to die."
"But did you want to outlive them?"
Nanaki said nothing. He didn't like that his grief lay so plain to his enemy, a man who had in fact caused only a fraction of it. He thought about leaving. It was Sephiroth who wanted this conversation, not him.
Sephiroth looked away from him, as if granting him a reprieve. "It's an interesting exercise to imagine it from your perspective," he said. "Most of those I knew well were men I would have gladly seen to the grave. I invited death to take them. But you... People care for you. You have that, and you're still powerless to keep it from being stripped from you."
"It's the way of things," said Nanaki.
"The most lasting anger is against the things you cannot change."
Nanaki wondered what it was that Sephiroth would have changed. He had spoken of erasing his past, but he hadn't said it with the regret of one who had made mistakes. Would he have made himself human, a child born no different from any other? Or only one who had been treated no differently? He would have reshaped the world into one that saw him precisely as he wished, without a thought he didn't want them to have.
It wouldn't have been real.
"...you thought the power of a god would let you change those things."
"Yes," Sephiroth affirmed.
Nanaki shook his head. "You would have destroyed so much for that."
"None of it mattered to me."
"And it does now?"
This time when Sephiroth turned away, Nanaki thought it was to hide his own expression. "...I spent a long time putting myself back together," he said. "You haven't asked, but I think you've speculated. The body was nothing compared to the mind. I scrutinized each of my memories, my thoughts... my feelings. I didn't understand my anger when it guided me. I understand it now."
"And that makes a difference?"
"What was stolen from me can never be replaced. Had I revenged myself against the entire world, the hole would remain."
Nanaki didn't know what hole he meant, but he thought of Aeris. If he could find a way to kill Sephiroth, it wouldn't bring her back. She was gone, and always would be. Would he always carry that anger?
"...there is vengeance, and there is justice," he said. "We hated you for what you took from us, but when we killed you, it wasn't only to avenge her. It was to ensure you would never take anything from anyone again."
Sephiroth slowly turned back to him, looking thoughtful. "Shinra is long gone, now," he said. "So in that, I am satisfied."
"Do you have such faith in humanity?"
Confusion furrowed his brow. At last, Sephiroth had no ready answer.
"I do love them," Nanaki went on, "but I am under no delusion that there could never be another Shinra. Another Hojo."
It was a guess, but Sephiroth's expression smoothed into a careful neutrality at the name. Hojo had claimed to be his father; if he knew, then maybe that was something he had wanted erased.
"So you consider it your duty to prevent them?" was what Sephiroth asked.
"In part, I suppose," Nanaki said. "The world is already forgetting. It will be harder for anyone else to recognize it if they start down the same path."
"You can't carry that stewardship forever."
"Not forever. But I've never stopped believing this Planet is worth fighting for."
Sephiroth's expression remained guarded as he considered it. "...to take so much from you," he said at last, "the Planet first had to give it."
"Do you envy that?" Nanaki wondered. "That I've had things worth grieving?"
Sephiroth smiled faintly at that. "Always," he said.
Not an anger towards death, but towards life. Giving to everyone but him, leaving a hole he grew to resent.
Did he think he could fill it if he were forgotten? If he had the chance to start anew?
Nanaki didn't ask. If that was his plan, then it was flawed, and Nanaki wasn't ready to point that out. Sephiroth was wrong that his memory would die with Nanaki.
Sephiroth himself would always remember what he had lacked.