Chapter 3
More than a year had gone by since their first encounter, and Nanaki invited Sephiroth to the canyon. Not the settlement proper, perhaps out of a lingering caution, or a lingering sense of shame that he grew farther and farther from condemning the man. There was a trading outpost farther south, nearer to Gongaga, that had begun to grow into a little village. With much of its population still transient, Nanaki had arranged for Sephiroth to have a hut on its outskirts.
These weren't the first people Sephiroth had encountered since leaving the island. There had been the ship's crew, and the villagers in the seaside town where they had come in, and the odd traveller along the road. No one had recognized him, though they cast him curious looks. He stood out.
It was the same as they entered the trading outpost, though this time Nanaki introduced him to the man who had held onto the hut's key for him. All three of them went to its door, where the man bid them good day and said to ask if they needed anything.
It was a meagre abode, but almost luxurious compared to Sephiroth's bare-bones shelter on the island. There was a soft pallet piled with blankets against the night's chill, bright rugs covering the earthen floor, and a small solar-powered stove. A few cook pots hung on the wall above it, and pinned on the inside of the door was a handwritten note with helpful instructions.
The ceiling was too low for Sephiroth, who opted to sit on the pallet, regarding his surroundings in bemusement. "Why do I feel like a criminal being rehabilitated?"
"Aren't you?"
"I don't feel any guilt over my actions."
"Would you repeat them? If you, as you are now, could go back in time."
"...some of them, yes."
Nanaki watched him carefully. "Which ones?"
Sephiroth considered the hut's small window, whose curtain was drawn, letting in light but allowing no view. "I would free my mother," he said. "Kill President Shinra and everyone in that lab."
"...I understand," said Nanaki. His only sorrow on seeing the bodies in the lab that night had been that Hojo's was not among them.
"Then you won't revoke my parole," Sephiroth joked, looking back at him.
"No. You would have done those things out of a sense of justice."
"...if your definition of justice is ensuring they could never repeat their crimes, then yes," said Sephiroth. "But I would have erased them from existence if I could."
Nanaki didn't think that troubled him either. He remembered how Barret had wrestled with the distinction between justice and vengeance before finally deciding that actions mattered more than their motivations. It was anger over wrongdoing that drove people to seek to rectify it. The two couldn't be entirely separated, but justice was perhaps vengeance honed and controlled.
Vengeance would disregard that the perpetrators were still people, capable of everything that that entailed.
"You don't have to stay," said Sephiroth. "My sense of justice has nothing against these people."
Nanaki wanted to deny that he was worried for them, but he couldn't. He wondered how long that doubt would be with him.
"That isn't the only reason I wanted to stay."
"Oh?"
"You haven't been around humans in a very long time," said Nanaki. "It might be uncomfortable for you."
Sephiroth looked amused. "You intend to help me adjust?"
Nanaki drew himself up. "I have over a century of experience, you know."
"You are an expert," Sephiroth conceded.
Behind the amusement was something else. Nanaki doubted anyone had ever held his hand, even metaphorically, through anything. Maybe the look was gratitude.
They spent the remaining daylight hours familiarizing themselves with the amenities of the outpost. The nearest water pump, the communal showers, the canteen. They made a few introductions, but Sephiroth let Nanaki carry even the briefest of conversations, his usual confidence absent from his bearing. It was as though he remained unsure of what to say, or what self to present to them.
When they returned to the hut, he ignored the way Nanaki watched him. Nanaki decided not to push it now, and let him settle in for his first night in a human village since Nibelheim.
He knew the moment Sephiroth lapsed into sleep because his illusions failed. His appearance didn't change, but the clothing he'd conjured for himself vanished. He looked vulnerable beneath the blankets, not just a man, but... someone who wasn't, and never would be.
In the morning, Nanaki proposed checking the shops for clothing.
"If you want to know what it is to live like a human, then you might start with dressing like one."
"That's ironic, coming from you," said Sephiroth.
"I have fur," Nanaki sniffed. "You'll have to settle for the next best thing."
"I suppose I could take on a form like yours."
The remark brought Nanaki up short in his tracks. "What?"
Sephiroth stopped to look at him. "...you do know I can change form," he said.
"It isn't only illusions?"
"No. Though shifting requires quite a bit more time and energy."
Nanaki thought back to his appearance when last they'd fought him. He had taken it for a loss of control, the Jenova cells running rampant through his body as they'd seen with Hojo. Had it instead been a deliberate transformation, that many-winged form the one he intended to carry into godhood? Nanaki looked up at him. When he'd rebuilt himself, he'd chosen to return to his most human form.
"...the idea makes you uncomfortable," said Sephiroth. "It was only an idle thought."
"I don't know what it makes me feel," Nanaki admitted.
He had on occasion hunted with Galian Beast, Vincent having learned a greater control over his monsters in the intervening years. It was the closest he'd come to running with another of his kind since the deaths of his parents so long ago, but Vincent's mind worked differently as the beast, and he couldn't speak. He still spent most of his time as a man. It was something they could share only to a point.
"You certainly wouldn't be seen as ordinary, looking like me," he added.
"No," Sephiroth conceded. "But they do accept you."
"I thought you wanted to be yourself."
Sephiroth shrugged, not quite succeeding in pushing away whatever unease had found him the night before. "As I said, it was an idle thought. But the ability is a part of me. Maybe... it isn't one to set aside."
"Jenova was always said to use her power to deceive," Nanaki said thoughtfully. "I never thought of it being used for anything else."
"...I didn't either."
They stood in the street for a long moment simply looking at each other. He didn't think Sephiroth would let himself be the one to suggest it again. It was an imposition into Nanaki's world, one more intimate than he had yet allowed. Not only to be in Nanaki's home, but to know how it felt to him, its scents and sounds. Knowing it the way no one else knew it.
Sephiroth already knew his world in a way no one else knew it, simply by virtue of what he remembered.
Nanaki turned to continue on. "I might not mind it, in the future," he decided. "But perhaps you should relearn being a man, first."
"Fair enough," said Sephiroth. "And it seems that begins with pants."
"That is what I've observed."
The options turned out to be limited, owing to Sephiroth's height, and he was forced out of his all-black attire into earth tones. The experience exasperated him, and he admitted that with Shinra, all of his clothing had been tailor-made.
"And illusory clothing is always a perfect fit," Nanaki remarked, amused.
"Perhaps I'll return to being privately naked. No one would know."
"I would know." When Sephiroth looked at him askance, he elaborated, "Your illusions don't have an odor."
Sephiroth considered that a moment. "Did you always know? Back then, I mean, that it wasn't me you were chasing."
Nanaki shook his head. "I had never met you before to know your scent, and most of the clones smelled very similar. I only knew something wasn't right with what we were seeing."
"Still, that does mean I would have a very hard time fooling you now."
"Did you consider it?"
"Only when you first came," said Sephiroth. "I might not have let you see me at all. I am glad I did."
"...so am I."
Sephiroth did better around people that day. Those who ran the outpost took him for shy, and didn't push too hard when his answers were vague. He was an acquaintance of Nanaki's who had been living somewhere very remote for a long time. He wasn't used to attention.
Sephiroth did surprise Nanaki by asking questions of the people they met, and his interest seemed genuine. He wanted to know what had brought them here, if they enjoyed the trades they plied, what they thought of the canyon. Nanaki thought he was not only beginning to map the world as it existed now, but trying to understand the trajectory of the average lives he'd never lived.
When they retired for the night, Sephiroth now had to sit to unlace his boots, like anyone else. Almost anyone else.
He glanced up at Nanaki. "I have wondered. Does someone help you with your jewelry?"
"Ah... Yes."
"And you don't mind it?"
Nanaki tossed his mane. "I did when I was young and thought that being an adult meant not depending on anyone. But my people have been connected with those of the canyon for longer than anyone can remember. The things I wear are a sign of that bond. I cannot do without them, they cannot do without me."
"...but they will, in time," Sephiroth pointed out.
"...yes," he admitted. "It's a choice we make, more than a necessity."
"You could live without them, too. But would it be fulfilling?"
"Precisely."
Sephiroth returned his attention to his bootlaces, working them loose slowly and meticulously. "If it grows uncomfortable......" He did not look at Nanaki. "I am here."
Until they'd departed the island, Nanaki had thought nothing of the fact that Sephiroth had never touched him. He was not an affectionate man, nor would Nanaki have been receptive, so it was moot. But Sephiroth never touched anyone. He returned offered handshakes instead with bows, and the shape of his eyes let them dismiss him as Wutain, a man of different customs.
So he understood it was no small gesture for Sephiroth to offer now. And after Nanaki's explanation, he knew it was not meaningless to Nanaki either.
"I would appreciate... sleeping without my bracelets tonight," Nanaki said carefully.
Sephiroth glanced at him. "Of course."
His fingers were efficient. He found the clasps on each of Nanaki's bracelets, hinged them open, and set them aside. He didn't linger. Maybe that was all he knew, or maybe it was all he thought he could offer. Their last physical contact had been over seven decades ago, as they tried to kill each other.
"What did it feel like to fly?" Nanaki asked abruptly.
"Hm?"
"I don't know if you even needed wings to fly, but you did have so many of them. I wonder if you preferred the feel of them."
Sephiroth collected Nanaki's bracelets and set them out of the way on a small table. "I think I did," he considered. "Flying with magic isn't the same as generating it through the working of your own muscles. I have always liked... the physicality of motion. I liked fighting, but it wasn't the killing that made it worthwhile."
"I think I understand you," Nanaki said, stretching his paws and sitting back. "It's the feeling of running as fast as you can, leaping a gap at the perfect moment, the balance of your tail..." He trailed off. Sephiroth didn't have a tail.
But he smiled. "I understand you."
"Have you ever been hunting?" Nanaki asked him.
Sephiroth shook his head. "Only for monsters. Not to eat."
"I think I should like to take you hunting," Nanaki decided. "You might just keep up."
Months later, when Yuffie learned that he had invited Sephiroth into the canyon proper, she seemed to take it for a personal affront. Nanaki hoped that once enough time had passed, she would learn to keep it to herself, but Yuffie never kept her mouth shut for anyone's sake but her own. After she threatened to come to Cosmo Canyon and kick Sephiroth out herself, he insisted instead that he would come see her in Wutai. The canyon didn't need any floods.
Wutai as a nation was much changed, but the heart of the capital where Yuffie lived remained more or less as Nanaki had first seen it. It was only more lively now, the center of Wutai's spiritual identity if not its commerce or politics.
Yuffie met him as he came into the old city from the direction of the airship hangar, and they walked slowly along the streets, Da-chao catching glimpses of them between rooftops.
"So people know he's Sephiroth?" Yuffie was asking skeptically. Over the communicator, she hadn't asked questions so much as shouted over him. "More than the name," she added.
"I didn't think it was fair for me to make the decision on my own. It's their home as much as mine, and they have a right to know who comes into it. Most of them decided to trust my judgment."
"That's crazy," said Yuffie. "He almost destroyed the Planet! You explained to them that he almost destroyed the Planet, right?"
"They're aware," he said mildly.
"I wouldn't want him here. He's banned from Wutai, all right?"
"Considering the White Materia is here, I think that's wise."
Yuffie let out a triumphant laugh. "See, even you don't trust him 100%."
"I do trust him," he said, "but given his past, I feel I have a responsibility not to rely entirely on my own judgment."
"Can't say I know the feeling." Of course she didn't. Yuffie had only grown more confident in her own opinions with age.
Nanaki sighed. "You won't consider that I'm right, and he's no danger to the Planet anymore?"
"The lot of you were always pretty gullible," she said. "You've never pulled a long con."
"What would his aim be?"
Yuffie gave him a look like he was being very stupid. "Nanaki. You do remember where you live, right? Cosmo Canyon is still the foremost center for planetology research and anthropological study of the Ancients. Maybe he's looking for some last little puzzle piece that he can use in a new godhood plan."
"...I really don't think he is," Nanaki said, his ears twitching. It was true, he hadn't even thought of it.
"But he's been reading, hasn't he?" Yuffie pressed.
"He's a curious man, Yuffie. He appreciates scholarly research." Unlike some people.
"Yeah, well," she said, "I might feel better about it if we knew what he'd done with the Black Materia."
"I'll ask him," Nanaki promised.
She shook her head. "I bet Vincent's thrilled, anyhow."
"As much as Vincent can be thrilled," he agreed, and that got a smile from her. "I know it's a relief to him that Lucrecia's legacy won't be wholly negative."
"He's such a sap."
Nanaki tilted his head up at her. "Does it ever trouble you that you won't leave a legacy?"
"What're you talking about? I've done so much for Wutai I'm in half a dozen books now. Even your nerd scholars came and interviewed me."
"But you never had any children," he said.
"Oh, you mean that kind of legacy," Yuffie snorted. "You're just sad there aren't any Yuffie Juniors around to pull your tail and terrorize you."
"...maybe," he admitted.
Without asking, Yuffie stopped at a street vendor and bought dango. She was always complaining about the number of vendors that popped up along the path to Da-chao, like it was some kind of tourist attraction, but she never complained about the food.
She sat down on a bench nearby, holding one skewer low for him while she ate her own. The sky was clear and blue overhead, and Nanaki could pick out airships in the distance. They weren't permitted to fly over the heart of the capital, and he wondered where they were headed. South to other Wutain towns, east across the sea, the way he'd come.
Yuffie's expression was thoughtful as she chewed, and at last she asked, "So, is that the appeal? He isn't going to die."
"Vincent won't either."
"Yeah, but Vinny can't be your only friend."
"I have friends besides Vincent."
She fixed him with another look. "I know I'm amazing, but I still only count as one." Her expression softening, she added more gently, "You haven't really gotten close to anybody since Cloud died. Don't think I haven't noticed."
Cloud had been the first of them to go. He'd had a good couple of decades after Meteorfall, but the physical traumas he'd so narrowly survived in his youth caught up to him, and chronic ailment set in. Barret and Tifa and their children had been there to care for him, and when he could no longer travel, Nanaki had made the trip north to Corel to stay with them.
He hadn't made it to 70. Nanaki loved all of his friends, but Cloud had understood him best. It had been the first blow, and the heaviest.
"I get it," Yuffie went on. "Everyone your age is covered in wrinkles, and kids can be a pain in the ass. They're so stupid. But aren't they better than Sephiroth?"
"We get on," he said. "I... don't think that I can explain it without making you angry." Even to himself, he didn't want to say it aloud. That in some respects, the friendship he had with Sephiroth was the one he might have had with Aeris. The man who'd killed her had usurped it.
"Hmm... Probably not," Yuffie conceded. She let out a sigh. "I just worry about you. That maybe this is something stupid you're doing because you're lonely."
"Maybe it is," he said.
She swallowed the last of her dango and tucked the empty skewers into a pocket to dispose of later. As a younger person, she would have flicked them aside for someone else to clean up.
"I guess it's been almost two years," she said. "And we don't even know how long he was skulking around before you found him. I just... Ugh, of all the people you could've taken a liking to."
"I know. I really didn't want to."
She wrinkled her nose. "Is he really weird? I bet he's weirder than Vincent."
"I've seen him sleep with his eyes open," Nanaki offered.
"Oh, gods. That's horrifying."
"Yes, it's quite unsettling."
Then her eyes narrowed. "What're you doing watching him sleep?"
"He is staying with me," Nanaki reminded her.
"In your room? Get him a bed, I thought he was at least trying to be normal."
When Nanaki said nothing, Yuffie's mouth tightened, but from her voice, she was trying to keep an open mind. "Red. Do we need to have a talk? I mean a talk. I don't know if I'm equipped for that. I didn't have kids for a reason."
Nanaki looked away so that she disappeared into his blind side. He wanted to say, other people lived with someone. Yuffie never had, but Yuffie was Yuffie. Why should he be denied the comfort of sharing his day with someone from the moment it began? Of going to sleep in the certainty that he wasn't alone?
He knew, in this instance, that it wasn't because it was Sephiroth, but because Sephiroth walked on two legs, and humans were insufferable about anything resembling their courtship rituals.
"It isn't like that," he huffed. "But he is...... a companion. Perhaps that's the word for it."
"...I've heard of arrangements like that," Yuffie said thoughtfully. "You're friends, but you're committed to each other. It kinda makes more sense to me anyway."
Nanaki risked looking back at her. "Does it?"
She waved a hand. "You know I never went in for any of that romance crap. That's one thing we always had in common. So the idea of keeping somebody around, but that's all it is... It's still not for me, but it doesn't sound miserable."
"I don't know if he sees it that way," Nanaki admitted.
"The guy's sleeping on a bunch of old floor cushions to hang out with you. I think your chances are good."
As much as she didn't understand that it was Sephiroth, she'd come around to supporting him anyway. Nanaki laid his head in her lap. "I am going to miss you," he said.
"Don't get mushy on me now," said Yuffie, even as she stroked her fingers through his mane. "You know full well I plan to beat Bugenhagen's record. I'm not going anywhere for a while."
"Do you promise me?"
"Oh, it's a promise. You need me around for my wise counsel."
"I do indeed," he said, without irony. She didn't see the world the way he did, which meant she could see into his blind spots. Frustrating as it could be, he needed that.
Sephiroth had not exaggerated when he said his transformations took time. He also intimated the process was quite grotesque, and, remembering it at work in Hojo, Nanaki didn't protest when he asked to go through it alone. He shut himself up in a disused room in the observatory, and Nanaki waited.
Days passed, and then a week, and then longer than a week. Nanaki checked on him regularly, but the response through the closed door remained that he wasn't ready, until at last it was something a bit more cagey.
"You aren't stuck, are you?" Nanaki asked him.
"...in a sense," came the reply. There followed a long pause, and then, "I can't open the door."
Nanaki nearly fell over laughing as he realized Sephiroth had locked himself in the one room Bugenhagen had designed specifically to keep Nanaki out of as a cub. It was the only door in the entire settlement with a round knob.
"I'll fetch Sahar," he said, chuckling.
When they released Sephiroth from his unintentional prison, he didn't look quite as Nanaki had anticipated. In form and proportion, he mimicked Nanaki almost exactly, but his fur was grey and his mane silver. The end of his tail glowed a Mako green that matched his eyes.
It wasn't only his coloring that made for a strange experience. His body was pristine and unadorned, without scars or piercings or tattoos. Of course, he wasn't of Nanaki's people and didn't have his bond with the canyon, but it was disconcerting to see him so bare.
"Are you allergic to color?" was what Nanaki asked.
He recognized the shift in Sephiroth's muscles as an attempt at a shrug. "I didn't want to simply copy you. I kept my own coloring."
"...how does it feel?" Nanaki ventured.
"I'm unused to seeing the world from this perspective," he said, and Nanaki chuckled at his upward glance. "But I feel I could be very fast in this form."
"Let's see if you can make it down from the observatory without tripping, first. You aren't used to four legs either."
"It isn't so hard," Sephiroth insisted, a distant echo of Nanaki's own assessment of walking on two.
He'd been lying, of course. Walking on two legs for any length of time was strenuous. But then, he wasn't built for it.
Sephiroth was deliberate in the way he placed his paws as they wound their way down the canyon's many stairs, but he didn't trip. They drew curious looks and greetings from the villagers, but Nanaki had explained to them that Sephiroth was a kind of shapeshifter, not unlike Vincent.
Ironic, perhaps, that there should be two among his close acquaintance.
They went down into the gorge, and when Sephiroth seemed comfortable with walking, Nanaki broke into a run. They sped through the canyon's winding valleys, paws glancing off the earth, sky deep blue above the cliffs. Sephiroth's pelt flashed white through stretches of sunlight.
He had kept up well enough as a man, but for the first time in his life, Nanaki had the sense of sharing this with someone like himself. Sephiroth was not a man deigning to act the beast for a time, even as Nanaki knew he would likely change back eventually. For now, he simply was.
After he had had a few days to acclimate to his new form, Nanaki led him to the sealed door that barred access to the canyon's depths. While the spirits of the Gi had one-by-one returned at last to the Planet, the paths remained treacherous. A misstep could spell tragedy, and they kept the children out.
"This was closed off because of those invaders you spoke of, wasn't it?" Sephiroth asked as they picked their way along the path.
"Yes," Nanaki confirmed. Sephiroth was a curious man, and he would have asked someone about the strange door. "How much of the story did they tell you?"
"A people called the Gi attacked the canyon. You had few defenders, and had they been able to enter through these caves, you would have been overwhelmed."
"My grandfather was only able to seal this passage after the attack," Nanaki elaborated. "My mother fought alongside the other defenders, while my father fought alone through these caves. They saved the canyon, at the expense of their lives."
"...a proud legacy," said Sephiroth, but his words lacked conviction. He understood it was more complicated than that.
Their way was lit by the faintly fluorescent rock and the glow of their tails. The water below glinted darkly, but it ran clear. The cave smelled only of damp. Without ghosts to hinder them, they made good time through to the exit, where the sky opened up above.
Silhouetted against it was Seto, forever watching over the canyon, teeth forever bared in a snarl.
Sephiroth sat back on his haunches. "...this is your father?"
"Yes. The Gi's arrows turned his body to stone."
"Have you brought me here for his approval?" Sephiroth wondered doubtfully. "I don't think he'll find me very noble."
Nanaki shook his head. "His spirit did linger for a time, but when the last of the Gi went, he, too, returned to the Planet. This place is only a grave now."
Sephiroth turned to look at him, studying him carefully. "I doubt you've chosen to share this with many," he observed.
"No," Nanaki agreed. He had obliged some from the canyon who had heard the story of the warrior Seto and wanted to pay their respects. He thought it right that Seto's memory should carry on, but he had not brought them here for himself.
"I brought you here..." he said, "because this is the source of my anger. For many years, I believed that my father had run off and left us. When I learned the truth, I thought I let go my anger. After all, he was no coward. He was every bit as brave as my mother."
His father's supposed cowardice had been a convenient target, but had he known the truth from the beginning, he would only have carried an anger he couldn't recognize.
"It didn't change the fact that they both died," he went on, "and left me the last of my kind before I'd seen even my first decade. They must have known the pain of outliving many friends, but they weren't there to see me through any of my own losses. They were the first of them."
Sephiroth regarded him steadily. At length he asked, "In understanding it, do you know what to do with it?"
Nanaki turned towards him, putting Seto's statue behind him. "Our solutions align, I think," he said. "What I want from you isn't nobility. It isn't sacrifice or valor. I want you to be ordinary, so that you'll stay."
"...for how long?"
"Until you outlive me."
Sephiroth ducked his head, laughing softly. "In a way, that's the worst punishment you could visit on me."
"I know," said Nanaki. "I don't do it out of vengeance."
Sephiroth looked back up at him. "I know. You would give me something worth grieving." His tail swayed slowly behind him, the green of the Lifestream, the dead he would never join. "I accept your proposal," he said.
As the years passed, Sephiroth never remained in one form. Some months he was a beast, others a man, at times a bird or a creature of his own invention. He was never ordinary in that anyone would mistake him for human, but he was ordinary in what he took, and what he gave. He spoke of godhood only as a joke, and inflicted nothing worse on the Planet than a particular talent for killing plants, despite his best efforts.
When Yuffie passed decades later, Sephiroth honored her wishes and did not accompany Nanaki to Wutai, but he was there when he returned. In the aftermath of every passing, he was always there, and Nanaki faced no more of them alone.