Ifalna - 1985
"No!"
Ifalna held Aeris close to her chest. She jerked away from the reaching lab tech, and her back hit the wall. Aeris wailed with all the force her tiny lungs could muster, and the sound was nearly enough to drown out Hojo's exasperated hiss.
He waved back his lab techs. "Stop. We can't have either of them damaged."
Damaged. Like they were objects. She couldn't imagine how Gast had ever worked with this man.
More tears welled in her own eyes at his memory. The way he'd thrown himself at the soldiers in hopes of clearing a path for her to run. But they hadn't cared if he was 'damaged.'
Hojo pushed his glasses up his nose. "You must understand that all these hysterics only delay what's necessary. I need to conduct a proper intake exam. I can't do that while you're holding an infant."
Ifalna held Aeris close. Ever since they had dragged her from the house, past Gast's motionless body, she had scarcely let her go. She hadn't let anyone else touch her. The soldiers guarding her on the ship hadn't cared, and without his equipment, neither had Hojo.
It was a different story here in his lab. She couldn't run. She knew Hojo was right, that it was only a matter of time. They'd sedate her and take Aeris anyway.
They wouldn't take her the way they'd taken Gast from her, but she'd be gone. Their precious daughter, the one he'd wanted to watch grow as though she were any other child. The only arms Ifalna wanted to trust her to were Gast's.
"You'll get her back," Hojo said peevishly, as though she should have known better than to fear otherwise.
Ifalna didn't move. "Not them," she whispered, staring at his lab techs. Anyone who participated in this... She couldn't understand them. She had always known that the world held dangers for someone like her, that there would be people who saw her as a commodity, but it was different to see it in their eyes.
It was only the volume of Aeris's cries that made them uncomfortable.
Hojo was frowning at her. Abruptly, he turned for the door. "Come," he said. "I may have a solution."
Ifalna cautiously peeled herself from the wall of the lab and followed. The lab techs fell in behind her, but it still crossed her mind as they entered the hallway. They weren't soldiers. Could she break past them, grab one of their IDs, and run for the elevator?
Did she know where the elevator was? Wasn't there security all over this building? There were cameras everywhere, did she really think they'd let her ride the elevator all the way to the lobby?
Hojo stopped in front of a door with a red light above it. He punched a number into the keypad, not bothering to hide it from her view. What good would it do her to know the combination to a single door that she would likely never be able to reach unsupervised?
The door slid open to reveal a cell, and a woman leapt to her feet. She was dressed in business attire, a rumpled red blouse and slacks, but she wore no lab coat and no ID badge. Her hair was as long as Ifalna's, and her eyes narrowed at Hojo.
"Maybe you can finally make yourself useful," Hojo said to her. "This woman won't surrender her child to any of the technicians."
"I wonder why," the woman retorted.
"Will you take her for an hour or not?"
The woman looked past Hojo to Ifalna, and her expression softened in sympathy, but Ifalna felt herself tense as though she had glared instead.
"May I?" the woman asked. When Ifalna hesitated, she added, "I think you can see, there aren't any tests I can run on her in here. All I can do is hold her."
Her voice broke a little at that, and that decided her. Ifalna didn't know who this woman was, but she understood that they shared something. Aeris would be safer with her than with any of Hojo's people.
Ifalna passed Aeris carefully, so carefully, into the stranger's arms. The woman took a step back from the doorway, cradling Aeris. She looked up as if to say something, but the door shut between them. Ifalna felt it as though it had severed some part of her.
"Now," said Hojo. "We have work to do."
His 'work' was an indignity, as she'd expected. Her tears were quieter than Aeris's, and as long as she complied, Hojo didn't remark on them. He even bottled some.
The only sounds were Hojo's instruction, the hum of the machines, the quiet clicks and taps of his tools. Even this high above the ground, Ifalna should have heard the Planet. Instead, there was silence. On the journey south from Icicle Inn, she had held onto the Planet's voice as her lifeline, but now she felt it had abandoned her. This was a place outside its embrace.
Hojo had brought her here to study her Cetra blood, but it was a painful irony. How could she be what she was without that connection?
When the ordeal was through, he escorted her back to the woman's room, allowing them only the brief moments required to pass Aeris between them. The cell he brought her to after that was larger, but a cell all the same. The door locked behind her.
The room was grey and sterile like all the rest. There was a tiny bathroom behind a curtain, a hard bed, and a crib. The crib wasn't new, and she tried not to think about that too hard.
Aeris needed changing. Beside a desk against the wall was a stack of supplies. Ifalna laid Aeris down on the desk, but she paused as she began to undo her swaddling. There was something tucked inside: a piece of paper folded around a stubby pencil.
Ifalna set it aside until she'd taken care of Aeris, and then she sat down on the hard bed with her daughter in the crook of her arm, and she unfurled the note.
I am so sorry that you've found yourself here. This is a miserable place.
Your daughter is beautiful. I promise you I will do my best to care for her, and fight like hell should they ask me to give her up to anyone but you.
In return, please let me know if you see my son, Sephiroth. He must be 7 or 8 by now. Silver hair. Hojo took him from me.
I hope one day we can meet under better circumstances.
Lucrecia
A chill went through her. Ifalna recognized the names. Gast hadn't been forthright when first they had met, but in time he'd confessed his work on the Jenova Project to her. What he had intended to be his greatest triumph had become his greatest shame.
Because of the experiment, Lucrecia carried Jenova's cells within her. Ifalna had entrusted her daughter to someone with the virus.
Ifalna brushed her fingers over Aeris's tiny face, felt her heartbeat beneath her chest, held her close. Never again. That was her first thought.
Her eyes fell on the note. I promise you, it read. Ifalna knew the stories of the Crisis from the Sky. It approached first as a friend. Was that all this was? Were the words on the paper, pencil smudged by a left-handed scrawl, nothing more than the pretense of a monster?
Gast had spoken of Lucrecia and Sephiroth both with regret. He hadn't wanted to leave them behind, but Shinra's security was so tight that neither of them could think of a way to get Sephiroth past it. Lucrecia had refused to leave without her son. Gast had chosen Ifalna, hoping somehow he could keep her from this place. She didn't know if he had told Lucrecia what she and her son carried within them, why he had felt it so urgent to break ties with Shinra. Maybe he hadn't needed to tell her.
Lucrecia hadn't been a prisoner when Gast had left. Maybe she had tried escape after all, to take her son and flee. Was that something the Crisis would have done? Could a monster care about its offspring?
If it could, then could Ifalna still call it worse than the men who kept them here?
Ifalna reached for the stubby pencil and wrote simply:
Why are you locked away?
The ordeal repeated a few days later, with a different barrage of tests. Ifalna was strapped to a table for some manner of scan when the door opened, and a young boy entered the room, escorted by another lab technician.
His eyes flicked towards her in curiosity, slit pupils that made her freeze against the chill of the table. He looked ahead, following instruction, but Ifalna never took her eyes off of him.
Did he feel wrong, or was it only because she knew what he was? He was just a child. Tall for his age, baby fat in his cheeks. Straight silver hair fell to his shoulders, slightly uneven as though he'd cut it himself. He answered a question from the lab tech, and Ifalna caught a glimpse of a missing tooth.
I did a terrible thing to that boy, Gast had told her. She remembered the horror on his face during the conversation where he'd first realized what he had done. She hadn't understood it until his later confession. But he hadn't recoiled from the truth. He had kept asking her about the Crisis from the Sky. About Jenova.
In a way, now, she wondered if he had been asking about Sephiroth. What had he cursed this child with, and was there any way to fix it?
She doubted that was what concerned Hojo. In fact, it could be no coincidence that he had his underlings running tests on them in the same room. Ifalna remembered his delight on discovering Gast's research at the house. He had had time since to peruse it. If he hadn't realized what Jenova was--what Sephiroth was--then he knew now.
He wanted to see how they reacted to each other. He wanted to see if there was some genetic enmity between them, if they recognized each other for what they were.
But Sephiroth was just a child.
Ifalna drew a slow breath. "...hello," she said.
The technicians did not quiet her. Sephiroth glanced at her, and then at them. He wasn't sure if he was allowed to reply.
"My name is Ifalna," she went on. "What's yours?"
"...it's Sephiroth," he answered with a faint incredulity. His life was so regimented that there was no possibility of a chance encounter. Every single person permitted to interact with him would have been vetted and briefed and already knew his name. Would anyone have done him the courtesy of pretending otherwise?
This place had once been under Gast's charge. She wanted to think that things had been different then, but though Gast would have spoken to Sephiroth like a person, common courtesy had never been one of his strengths.
"Sephiroth," Ifalna repeated, fighting the lump in her throat. "It's nice to meet you."
He didn't reply, again looking skeptical.
"Well," she amended, "none of this is nice." She was strapped to a table, her body passing by degrees through some kind of machine. Sephiroth by now had a variety of nodes affixed to his skin. "It's a little better, not to be alone in it," she proposed.
He was a distraction for her. Could she be something for him?
She wondered if Lucrecia had held his hand through these tests. If she had fought like hell to keep him from the more invasive ones. Did he know where his mother was? Ifalna wanted to say something, but Hojo hadn't told her who Lucrecia was. She didn't want him to discover their clandestine correspondence, brief though it had been so far.
"Are you special, too?" Sephiroth asked her shyly.
Special. So many children were told they were special, but it was a burden to be unique. Ifalna had felt the weight of it her entire life: the last of her line, the only one who could preserve the legacy of the Cetra and the one who would inevitably be its death. There was a certain irony in the last of the Cetra commiserating with the first child born of the Crisis that had destroyed them.
"Some people think so," Ifalna answered at last. "But this isn't what that's supposed to mean."
Sephiroth pondered that for a moment. "You came from outside," he ventured. "Professor Gast and my mother wanted me to go there, too, one day."
"...is your mother here?" she asked him.
He looked uncertain. "Professor Hojo said that she died."
Ifalna didn't know whether he had reason to doubt that, or just hope, but she could give him a little more. "I think it's very smart to question what Professor Hojo says."
There was a flicker of a smile on his face before he schooled his expression. Someone had taught him he needed to do that. They would try to do the same to Aeris.
They let her retrieve her daughter and took her back to her room. This time Ifalna knew to look for the note, although she waited to read it until Aeris was settled at her breast.
I used to be a scientist here. I know that may make you revile me. I made terrible mistakes.
I stayed for my son.
Hojo was not always in charge here; he was my peer. When the previous head researcher left the Company, we were both under consideration to replace him, but Hojo discovered my attempts to undermine him.
The outside world believes that I killed myself. I think about it sometimes.
Please tell me if you see my son.
Gast had broken with Shinra two years ago. If Lucrecia had been locked up in the wake of his departure, had it been nearly as long since she had seen her son?
Of course she understood Ifalna's fears. She had lived them.
Ifalna balked at the idea of befriending the woman. She had experimented on her own child. She carried Jenova's cells within her own body.
Had Ifalna been able to forgive Gast's involvement with the Project, only because she had come to know him before he had told her? It was the first thing she knew about Lucrecia, and part of her didn't want to know more.
But if nothing else, Lucrecia was the enemy of her enemy, and they both wanted the same thing.
There wasn't much space left on Lucrecia's scrap of paper. Tucking Aeris close, Ifalna searched the room. The desk drawers were empty, but there was a rustling sound as she pushed one of them closed. She opened it again and reached far into the back. Contorting her hand behind the back of the drawer, her fingers brushed a piece of paper. There was a small cardboard box back there, too, and she drew them both out.
Crayons, and a torn child's drawing. It was difficult to say what the drawing was. Its artist, presumably Sephiroth, must have been quite young at the time, scribbling a riot of unintelligible shapes. The box was missing a few crayons, but the wear on those remaining told her he'd favored the green one quite heavily. He saw all of these colors so rarely, and his favorite was the rarest of them. There were no plants here, nothing of nature at all. The light over her door was red.
Ifalna smoothed the drawing out and turned it over.
I saw your son. He seems well.
They're watching us, but I will try to find a way to tell him you're still here. They told him you died, but I don't think he believes it.
I found this drawing in my room. One of his, I imagine. Please keep it. I will find some other paper for next time.
My daughter's name is Aeris. Gast was her father, so I imagine you can tell her a bit about him. He told me a bit about you. I know what you did together, and I know how much he regretted it.
We will find a way out of here, and we will take our children with us.
Ifalna
As an afterthought, she added the date. She suspected she would lose track, too, in time, but for now it was one grounding fact that she could offer. Lucrecia could know with certainty whether her son were seven, or eight.
Ifalna didn't want Aeris to be here that long. She wanted her daughter to know more green than a crayon, to know that windows were meant to look out on the sky, not at testing chambers. She'd play in the snow on her birthdays and she'd laugh without checking for permission.
Ifalna tucked the folded drawing and its message carefully into Aeris's swaddling. They would find a way out of here.