Ifalna - 1990
The car jounced over the narrow roads of the slums, and Ifalna tried not to tighten her fingers into a death grip around her daughter. Cars were impractical for the heavy snows of the Knowlespole, so Ifalna associated them with Shinra. Close metal boxes transporting her to a more permanent prison.
Mr. Gainsborough had borrowed this one from a friend so he could drive them out of Midgar. The upholstery was torn and the windows dirty, and these things were a comfort compared to Shinra's polished surface. This was just a car used by some honest working person.
Though even the kind Mr. Gainsborough had been thinking of enlisting, with both he and his wife out of work. A simplified version of their story had convinced him otherwise, though Ifalna hated to see the young couple struggling. They'd been so generous with what they had, and Ifalna could offer them nothing in return.
Lucrecia sat in front of her in the passenger seat, the least conspicuous of them now that she had cut her hair. Ifalna had privately mourned it, knowing full well the effort it took to grow it so long, but she also knew that for Lucrecia, it represented a break with who she had been. She wanted to leave her mistakes in the past.
Her heart was in the right place. It hadn't always been.
They hadn't demanded the same sacrifice of Sephiroth. He wore a cheap brown wig, and a pair of plastic sunglasses hid the strange glow in his eyes. It was obviously a disguise, but his age gave him the look of a child playing at being a movie star.
The color also made him look more like his mother, a resemblance that had escaped Ifalna's notice in the two years since she'd last seen the woman. In a normal life, he would have soon become a school heartthrob, the name that girls doodled in the margins of their notebooks.
But he and Aeris would never attend school. It was too dangerous to expose them. Because of Ifalna's injury, they'd already stayed longer in Midgar than she would have liked.
The wound was a scar now, hidden beneath the secondhand dress that Elmyra had given her. Lucrecia, carrier for the Calamity from the Sky, had saved her life.
It was clear from her writing that Gast hadn't told her. She didn't know what she was. Ifalna had told herself that it would be too cruel to reveal it in a smuggled note, but deep down she'd been frightened. What if learning the truth brought out Jenova's buried nature? What if Lucrecia read the note while Aeris was in her care?
Aeris squirmed in her lap, trying to move closer to the window. Ifalna allowed her a few inches.
She couldn't keep them in ignorance forever. During their days at the church, Aeris had tried to teach Sephiroth to hear the Planet, but its voice fell on deaf ears. He would never be able to hear it, because a part of him wasn't of it. Already she could sense his frustration.
Would it be kinder to suggest that the experiment had simply failed to give Sephiroth all the powers of the Cetra? He and Lucrecia wouldn't have to live with the burden of what they were, only what they weren't.
Or was Ifalna still afraid?
The shadow over them lifted of a sudden, and this time Ifalna pressed herself closer to the window along with her daughter. They had finally emerged from beneath the plate.
Growing up in the Knowlespole, Ifalna had lived both with periods of little daylight and stretches where the night never came, but these cycles had been natural to her. The always-on artificial lighting of the lab and Midgar's metal plates blotting out the sky were not things her body understood. These were things that she had endured, and now she leaned towards an overcast but open sky like a flower to the sun.
"Is that the sky?" Aeris asked her, peering through the dirty window glass.
"Yes. Yes, it is."
"I thought it was blue."
"It's cloudy today," Ifalna explained softly, her heart twisting. Aeris had never seen it before, she didn't know, but thank the gods she could see it now. "If the clouds clear later, we might see the blue. But the sky can be all sorts of colors. Orange at sunset, rosy at sunrise."
"I wanna see!"
Ifalna kissed the top of her head. "You will. You'll see all of it."
Mr. Gainsborough glanced back, briefly meeting her gaze. He seemed to want to express some sympathy, but he said nothing. He returned his attention to the road.
The Planet's song grew clearer as they left Midgar behind, but hours passed before any green crept into the wasteland that surrounded it. Weeds struggled through parched cracks in the earth, trying their hardest to hold ground. It was a losing battle which Ifalna well understood. They weren't strong enough to heal the land so others could thrive in their wake. In time, they'd simply be gone.
They drove east until the gas tank read half full, and at last Mr. Gainsborough stopped the car to let them out.
Grass bent beneath her feet. Mountains rose, not too distant, to the south. They had had no more destination for Mr. Gainsborough than as far as he could get them. He took out a map and showed them where they were on it. Southeast of Kalm, a few days' hike from the mouth of a river. They could make something of that.
"You're sure," said Mr. Gainsborough, "that this is really what you want? Being left out here in the middle of nowhere?"
"Yes," said Ifalna. "It's exactly what we want."
He left them with the map, a hug for Aeris, and a nod for Sephiroth, who couldn't warm so quickly to strangers. Ifalna watched the car turn on the dusty road and head back for Midgar. Another ride to the end of the line.
Lucrecia looked over at her, meeting her gaze. She had agreed to this, but not without reservations. She was a woman of technology, not nature, and she didn't know how to survive apart from civilization.
Ifalna knew setting traps and tanning hides, and in her pocket she carried precious seeds salvaged from the Gainsboroughs' groceries. She didn't know this land, but the Planet hummed beneath her feet, and she knew it would guide her. It wouldn't be an easy life, but it would be a safer one than they might have among humans.
"We should get off the road," Sephiroth was the first to propose. There had been precious little traffic out this far, but Ifalna readily agreed. They didn't need to happen across some farmer on his way into Kalm.
Aeris was staring up at the clouds. Ifalna gently took her hand and led them all north, in the direction of the river.
They walked until close to sunset, when they came upon a jutting stone outcropping that would provide a good windbreak. They settled what little gear they had in its shadow and passed around the old canteens whose water still tasted of Midgar. Ifalna was grateful to have it, but she would be more grateful to leave all mementos of that city behind her.
They ate a dinner of sorts, bread and jerky and dried fruit, things Elmyra had packed for them, fretting that it wouldn't be enough to carry them through. Her concern alone was a treasure. Ifalna hadn't known the simple kindness of average people in years. It reminded her of her days in Icicle Inn. She had kept herself apart, there, but its people had been good to her.
It was almost enough to make her want to risk it, staying. But even good people could make mistakes that would lead Shinra right to them.
The two children had more energy left in them than Ifalna. Sephiroth took off his shoes to feel the grass beneath his bare feet, and Aeris followed suit, her eyes wide with wonder. The two of them wandered from the meagre campsite into the open plains, and Ifalna watched them stretch out of the confines the lab had imposed on them until they were running, spinning, chasing each other.
Ifalna quietly dropped her hands to the ground and threaded her fingers through blades of grass. Green growing things beneath her, sky above. She had wanted this for so long, it didn't feel real.
"He's almost like her big brother, isn't he?" Lucrecia observed.
Ifalna glanced at her. She didn't know, couldn't know, based on the way they were acting. "They barely saw each other in the lab," she confessed. "Just in passing, in the hall. They'd ask me about each other, and pass each other things."
"What sort of things?"
"What they had. Crayons and paper flowers. Scales, feathers, metal washers... I think they were from the things they made him fight. I didn't ask."
Lucrecia was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, "You saw him?"
Ifalna nodded. "Hojo brought me to the observation deck, sometimes. He's talented... No boy should have to be talented, like that."
Lucrecia's attention was fixed on Sephiroth, walking barefoot through the grass like a child ought to. The clouds overhead had begun to clear, taking with them any promise of rain and instead letting through the deep oranges of sunset. Sephiroth smiled softly as Aeris exclaimed over it.
"...I used to dream about it, sometimes. I've always dreamt about Sephiroth, from the day he was born. I used to think they were just dreams. Then he told me... he has them, too."
"...the same dreams?"
"Yes. Since we've been out... We tell each other things, in the dreams, and then again when we wake. They're the same."
Ifalna couldn't have said what her expression showed. Dream-sharing was an ability of the Cetra, but not one which had appeared in any of the lore Gast had meticulously collected before he met her. It wouldn't be known to Lucrecia, but the unspoken question was there just the same.
And she knew that she would have to be very careful with her next words. If she answered simply yes, Cetra can share dreams, then she would confirm for Lucrecia something that wasn't true. She would give Lucrecia something that she would have to tear away from her. Did she lie, leaving Lucrecia in continued uncertainty over the Project's success, or did she finally tell the truth?
"He is special," Lucrecia fairly whispered as Ifalna's silence stretched, as though to reassure herself of something. "Hojo didn't explain it to him, but he should know, shouldn't he? Is it too soon? Will he... Will he hate me, if he knows?"
Lucrecia had spoken of her fears in her notes, and Ifalna had never quite known what to say. Sephiroth's experience of people was so limited; would he forgive his mother anything, because she was one of the few people who had shown him love? Or would he be unable, because he'd had no experience forgiving even minor slights?
"I don't know," Ifalna admitted. "But... If you tell him, then you must be sure you tell him the truth."
"But does that mean telling him all of the truth?" Lucrecia wondered, not grasping her meaning.
Ifalna felt something heavy settle over her chest. It wasn't hard to breathe, but the world seemed to slow, or maybe only she slowed, within the world. She watched her daughter collecting dandelions, Sephiroth trailing behind her, and she wondered if she could reach her in time. If something happened.
What would happen? Was Lucrecia not her friend? Could a deception really span so many years?
Lucrecia knew her better than anyone, better even than Gast, but they'd had so few moments face-to-face over the years. Their correspondence had kept them at a distance. A safe distance?
"Lucrecia..." she began. Her voice felt thick in her throat. "Did Gast ever tell you why he left the Project?"
Lucrecia glanced at her, confused. "For you," she said. "He wanted to continue his research into the Cetra, without Shinra getting its hands on any of it."
Ifalna closed her eyes. "And why did he want so badly to break with Shinra, after working for them for so many years?"
"...I suppose things were different, once we came back to Midgar," Lucrecia reasoned cautiously. "He didn't have as much freedom to run things the way he wanted to. Corporate interests became more important than what he wanted to achieve with his research. He realized it would be the same with you as it was with Sephiroth."
She wasn't wrong. All of those were reasons, but there was one Gast had never confided in her. Maybe, he'd been afraid that she would hate him, too, for what he had done to her.
"...after Gast and I had had several interviews," Ifalna began, "he told me about Jenova. He wasn't sure if I would find it... disrespectful, that he had excavated it. He wanted to know about Cetra burial practices. But when he told me where he had found it...... Lucrecia, Jenova wasn't a Cetra."
Lucrecia stared at her, body still, expression frozen. Ifalna couldn't quite meet her gaze.
"What do you mean?" Lucrecia asked.
"You know that... 2000 years ago, a catastrophe brought about the sudden decline of the Cetra. Something fell from the sky, wounding the Planet. That something was... a being. It approached the Cetra, deceived them... infected them." Ifalna dug her fingers into the ground beside her, a small motion to prove that she could. Could she get up? Could she run?
Why should she have to?
"You aren't saying what I think you're saying," Lucrecia said, an edge of hysteria in her voice. The tension in her body coiled, like an animal ready to bolt.
"I'm sorry," Ifalna whispered, "but what Gast found was a monster. My ancestors... sealed it there, in their last stand. It was never meant to be found."
"But Sephiroth is...! He's special," Lucrecia insisted, desperately. "There's nothing wrong with him. He... The most awful thing he came from was us, and he was supposed to be better than us! He's..."
Ifalna turned to look at her, fully look her in the eye. There was nothing there of a monster waking, and everything of the horror that she had seen in Gast's face. A horror over what they had done to Sephiroth.
Ifalna curled her fingers closed, felt the grit of dirt between them--and then she reached for Lucrecia's hand.
Lucrecia recoiled from her, pulling to her feet. "No! Why now? Why are you telling me this now, when everything is finally..."
Ifalna rose to follow. The pressure around her had gone; it was only Lucrecia. "Sephiroth is different from us," she said, "and he's already realizing it. He needs answers."
"How am I to tell him this? You're saying, what we made him into..." She threw an anguished look in Sephiroth's direction. Her fingers dug into the fabric of her blouse, as though seeking to rip free something beneath her chest. "Ifalna, he's my son."
Lucrecia was a woman of science, and so Ifalna reached for something scientific to calm her. "Maybe it's only cells, after all."
Lucrecia looked back at her, uncomprehending. "What?"
"If... If you were to receive blood from a murderer, it wouldn't make you a murderer, would it? The Crisis from the Sky... Jenova... It was one being. If it was malicious, then maybe that was its choice, and not its nature."
It went against the stories her parents had told her when she was young, the history her uncle had passed down to her. The Crisis was nothing but malevolence and deception down to its very core--but Lucrecia wasn't. Sephiroth wasn't.
Lucrecia choked down a sob. "Am I not malicious? Look what I've done... What did I do?"
Ifalna took a step closer, and this time Lucrecia didn't pull away. Carefully, Ifalna worked her fingers free of her blouse and took them in her own. "You made a mistake. That's human, you're human. You didn't intend to do him any harm."
"But I did."
"You did," Ifalna agreed. "But we can help him to cope with that, together."
Lucrecia relaxed a fraction, but then her eyes fell on their joined hands and she tensed, panicked. "The infection... What was the infection? I shouldn't--"
"It's all right. You haven't. You won't. Think: if you could spread it so easily, then everyone who ever worked with you or Sephiroth would have gotten sick."
"But maybe humans are immune. It wiped out the Cetra; there were human populations at the same time."
Ifalna shook her head. "I remember you told me, you got very sick during your pregnancy, didn't you? You nearly died."
"...yes."
"I don't know... if it was the virus itself that killed the Cetra," Ifalna admitted. "The stories say they went mad, and transformed into monsters."
Had they killed each other then? Ifalna had always wondered. No one had wanted to say more, to describe how the Cetra civilization might have torn itself apart, in the end.
"Monsters..." Lucrecia repeated softly.
"You aren't a monster, Lucrecia."
Lucrecia looked up to meet her gaze. She was calming, beginning to process more of the implications. "You knew from the start, didn't you?" she realized.
"From the moment I learned your name," Ifalna confirmed.
"How could you ever trust me with Aeris?"
"I've been afraid for a long time," Ifalna confessed. "What if everything you said to me was an act? Every shared confidence, just calculated words to gain my trust. But there was one thing I always believed, and that was that you cared about Sephiroth."
Lucrecia looked out over the field, towards her son, and Aeris. Sephiroth glanced back briefly, curious, oblivious.
"...I don't want him to hate himself," said Lucrecia. "I don't want him to think there's anything wrong with him. It isn't his fault, none of it."
"I know," said Ifalna. "That's why I wanted to tell you first, so we could work out how to tell him together."
Lucrecia let out a shaky breath and let go Ifalna's hand. She returned to her seat, and Ifalna joined her.
"So we're sharing dreams because of...?"
"I suppose you must be. And there are other things, too."
Lucrecia looked at her with a frown of confusion. "What other things?"
"It made Sephiroth strong, and I think it made you stronger, too. You carried me to that church like I weighed nothing. Could you have done that before?"
Lucrecia didn't answer. How many things had she noticed, but dismissed? How many had gone unnoticed entirely?
"And, when we left the Shinra building..." Ifalna went on. "At the station, they were right behind us, and they didn't even see us. They looked right through us."
"What are you saying?"
"They say the Crisis had the power to make people see what it wanted them to see."
"Illusions?" Lucrecia wondered. "You think I made us disappear?"
"You, or Sephiroth. I don't think you did it consciously."
"What do I do with that?"
Ifalna hesitated. "...I'm not sure," she admitted. "There's no guide to exactly what he is, or what he can do. To an extent... Aeris is the same way. She's only half-Cetra."
A wry smile found its way to Lucrecia's face. "It's a variable, isn't it? Being human."
"There's nothing so terrible about that."
"After everything we've put you through, you'd still say that?"
Ifalna's gaze fell to the rolled-up blankets given to them by the Gainsboroughs, the slightly uneven stitching on one where Elmyra had hurriedly patched a tear on her sewing machine. She wondered if Mr. Gainsborough had made it back into the city by now. She thought of his friend, who had lent him the car without asking why.
"...I think there was one mistake that Gast kept making, over and over. The fault at the core of the Jenova Project. He was convinced, absolutely, that the Cetra were superior beings. Better people. Even knowing me, he never quite got over that."
"...aren't you?" Lucrecia asked quietly.
Ifalna shook her head. "I'm not a paragon. I don't want you to think of me as one. It's dying and being forgotten that's smoothed away all our faults. We've always had them."
Lucrecia was quiet for a moment. "I thought..." she began, "I would follow your example. If I just let you take the lead, then maybe things would turn out all right."
"Is that why you agreed to come out here?" Ifalna wondered, glancing at her.
Lucrecia shrugged helplessly. "It isn't the decision I would have made."
"I don't know if it's the right one, you know."
"It isn't mine," Lucrecia said, "so it must be."
Ifalna didn't say anything more to that, but she reached for Lucrecia's hand and gave it a squeeze. They looked out together at their children, standing now beneath a twilight sky with fistfuls of dandelions. She supposed it was always something that people had hoped for, that their children would be better than them, no matter who or what they were.
Right now, in this moment, all that mattered was that they were free to find out.