Chapter 4
Sephiroth woke in the night.
Someone had called his name. Sitting up, he looked across the other two beds. Zack lay sprawled on his back, fast asleep, but the far bed was empty. Vincent had gone.
He swung his bare feet to the floor and left the room.
Vincent was in the hall, gazing out one of the windows into the night. He glanced back as Sephiroth approached, and in the glance, Sephiroth knew it hadn't been his voice.
Just a dream, he decided. The certainty that he had heard anything at all was waning.
"Trouble sleeping?" he asked Vincent.
Vincent shook his head. "I slept for so long... I have no need or want for it now."
Sephiroth followed his gaze out the window, to the pine forest that backed the inn. The uncanny familiarity of this place... Had he spent time here, as a child, before Gast and Hojo had brought him to Midgar? Was this a memory? Had he ever met his mother, before her death?
She must have died, he thought; Gast would not have allowed their separation. He had never spoken of her either, but... Sephiroth could understand in hindsight that Gast hadn't had great skill with people, much less children. He wouldn't have known how best to shield a child from the heartbreak of a mother's death, so he'd chosen silence. Or, at the very least, delay.
"...do you believe Gast would have told me any of this, had he lived?" he found himself asking.
Vincent looked back at him. "I don't know," he admitted. "But... he wasn't a man who enjoyed secrets. He would even share his findings with me, when Lucrecia and Hojo were otherwise occupied."
"But... I was his finding," said Sephiroth.
"Is that how he treated you?"
Sephiroth hesitated. "Not always," he said. "He... talked to me. Read to me. Showed me places outside of the lab."
"You don't still...?"
Sephiroth interrupted the question with a scoff. "Live in the lab? Of course not. I have an apartment in Sector 4."
Vincent's brow furrowed, his expression showing no comprehension.
"In Midgar?" Sephiroth clarified.
"Ah," said Vincent. "I didn't realize they intended to continue using the numbers, once they completed construction."
"...you really have been out of it a long time."
"I suppose they finished the new headquarters. Is it impressive?"
Sephiroth shrugged. "It's tall."
Vincent's fingers slowly closed into fists, claws clicking against his metal palm. "...is it where Hojo does his work now?"
"If you want to call it that."
Vincent drew in a breath, and his eyes seemed to blaze a little brighter, but then he closed them and exhaled softly. "Later," he decided. "My first duty is to you."
Sephiroth shook his head. "You aren't the only one who wants him dead." Now there was a father-son activity, he thought wryly.
"We'll have to discuss it," said Vincent. "But it can wait. You should go back to sleep."
"I slept most of the day."
"After going four days without, as I understand it. There are a few more hours yet to daybreak. Use them. The reactor isn't going anywhere."
Sephiroth couldn't help laughing softly. "Are you telling me this as a father?"
Vincent's expression softened. "Perhaps. I never got to send you to bed when you were young."
'Got to,' like it would have been a privilege, a joy. He thought of how Hojo had been, impatient with his child's body's need for sleep, irritably pushing him off on aides who would escort him back to his room without saying a word to him, without even looking at him. Putting him to bed had been nothing more than a necessary task.
Sephiroth ran a hand through his hair. "Well, I'll listen," he said, "but I don't need a story."
"Probably for the best. You're a little old now for the ones I prepared."
Sephiroth faltered. "You... prepared stories?"
Vincent's face fell, and he looked away, back out the window. "I didn't know any, and I wanted to be ready, just in case... In case after you were born, she changed her mind, and wanted to run away together... the three of us."
Again, Sephiroth didn't know how to respond. Who was this man? How could he speak so sincerely of this peaceful life he'd envisioned, with Sephiroth as his son, as though anything so stupid and normal could have been possible for him?
You were wanted, Sephiroth.
Sleep had cleared the pounding in his head, and it actually sounded true here in the quiet. That someone could have wanted him, with no expectations or ulterior motives... But he couldn't be such a desperate fool as to be convinced by words alone. He wrapped his suspicion back around himself like armor.
"Good night, Vincent," he said stiffly, and turned from the other man to return to the bedroom.
Zack slumbered on, a strange constant in all of this. His friend, before it had begun and now, still, even after learning...
Even after learning Sephiroth wasn't human, Zack's attitude towards him was unchanged. As though Sephiroth had simply heard some bad news. As though he, himself, weren't fundamentally altered. Vincent seemed the same way. Vincent had decided, a long time ago, to claim him. That they belonged to each other.
Sephiroth threw himself back onto his bed and stared up at the ceiling. When he'd gone down into that basement, what had he really expected to find? Answers as to his true parentage? Reassurance that he wasn't a monster? He'd found those, perhaps, if what Vincent said was true.
And maybe he resisted it the harder because if it was true, then it still wasn't enough. There wasn't as much meaning in where he'd come from as he wanted there to be. It didn't solve him, and it didn't erase what he'd lived through. It was a salve on an open wound.
Morning came, and Zack insisted the three of them eat breakfast before leaving. Sephiroth agreed to it only because the time it took to prepare gave him a moment to use the inn's telephone. The old innkeeper grumbled about giving him his privacy, but disappeared into the back room without much argument. Sephiroth dialed a number at Headquarters, and waited.
"Tseng speaking," came the prompt answer.
"Tseng. This is Sephiroth. I need you to look into some things for me."
"Sir? Why not ask--"
"I'm asking you," Sephiroth interrupted. They had worked together before, and Sephiroth thought he understood the man's loyalties. Besides, there was a chance that any knowledge of Sephiroth's true origins was above his pay grade.
"Very well," said Tseng. "What do you need?"
"I want you to find out anything you can about a man named Vincent who may have been a member of the Turks some twenty-six or -seven years ago. And... if he ever worked with a scientist named Lucrecia."
"I can check our records. May I ask what this is about?"
"No," said Sephiroth. "And you aren't to mention it to anyone. I require your discretion."
"Understood."
"Don't call this number. I'll contact you again later."
He hung up the phone just as Zack was coming down the stairs to check on the food. He arched an eyebrow, but Sephiroth didn't answer the unspoken question.
The three of them sat around the table in the room, Zack talking animatedly about some ridiculous dream he'd had last night while Vincent ate mechanically, going through the motions. Their demeanors could not have been more different, and yet they both professed to be here for the same reason: to support him.
Sephiroth took up the Masamune as they left, a familiar weight in his hand. In a way, he felt more comfortable with it than he did with his own body right now. He knew the blade and how it would move; it was unchanged.
Zack swung his sword onto his back, and Vincent holstered his gun, and the three of them went downstairs.
"I don't recall checking you in..." the innkeeper observed.
Sephiroth glanced at Vincent and then asked, "Is it a problem?"
The innkeeper shook his head. "No, not really. Just like to meet people before they stay the night..." His voice had slowed and he was squinting now. "Say, have you ever stayed here before? You look familiar."
"I have been to this town before," said Vincent, "though I've never stayed at the inn."
"Hmm... Always thought I was pretty good with faces, but I can't place you. Must be getting old."
"Don't sweat it, Gramps," said Zack. "Happens even to the best of us sometimes, right?"
The old man smiled and shrugged. "Maybe. Take care of yourselves out there."
Cloud waited for them outside the inn, helmet on as it always was when he was out and about in the town. Sephiroth didn't pretend to understand why he didn't want anyone to recognize him, nor why Zack had insisted they go along with it, despite sounding exasperated as he made his case. Returning to one's hometown could be complicated, he supposed.
If he could undo the past few days, hiding instead from what Nibelheim had to show him, would he? It had been a simpler life.
But it had been a lie.
"You're to stay here and keep an eye on the village," he told Cloud.
A quick frown crossed his face--clearly he'd expected to come along--but he knew better than to protest. "Yes, sir," was all he said.
Zack gave him an encouraging pat on the shoulder. "If you find yourself getting jealous, I want you to remember what a pain it was taking the long way back from the reactor. Just relax. And maybe return that casserole dish?"
Cloud scratched the back of his neck. "Maybe."
"Let's get moving," said Sephiroth, not wanting any further banter to delay them.
Zack nodded, and he and Vincent fell in behind as Sephiroth made for the village's northern exit. Different men were on watch this morning, and they acknowledged his passage with only a nod. He caught a wariness in their eyes. They had trusted him when he'd arrived; now, they were unsure.
The mountains ahead looked no different from before, their shapes jutting strangely against the sky. They were like none anywhere in the world; was it the high concentration of Mako that had resulted in this stone bramble? It seemed unnatural, not something the Planet should have formed on its own.
Should the Cetra in him have known, whether this was the Planet's design or not?
He had never felt any strong connection to the earth. He'd spent most of his life in Midgar, high above the ground, surrounded by Shinra's technological hubris. He wondered if it had damaged him somehow, cut him off from something he was meant to know? The rock beneath his boots felt like rock, and that was all.
Climbing up the path beside him, Vincent was staring.
"What is it?" Sephiroth asked.
"This all looks... different now."
"Different how?"
"There used to be trees," said Vincent. "Not this bare rock. The view was obscured until you climbed higher."
"Must've made it harder to look out for monsters," Zack remarked from behind them, but Vincent shook his head.
"There were no monsters. Only wild animals."
"It's the reactor," Sephiroth explained. "You see this kind of change within a few years, wherever they're built."
"...I suppose they're too lucrative for Shinra to care," Vincent surmised.
"Exactly," said Sephiroth, and he frowned at the thought. He should have cared, but he'd never even bothered to reflect on it. Humans were damaging the Planet, poisoning it for the sake of their own convenience.
Shinra had used him to uphold that way of life, when as a Cetra it was surely something he should have condemned. They'd blinded him to that, and he'd allowed them to. He'd fought an entire war to enable... this. If Jenova were alive, what would she make of that?
"I've been wondering," Vincent went on, "about your mission. About who it was that ordered you to Nibelheim."
"The orders came through Heidegger, like always," Sephiroth said, and then he grasped what Vincent was getting at. "You think he set me up."
"I reported to Heidegger. He knew about the Project. He must have known there was a chance you would discover Gast's work."
Sephiroth frowned. "But why would he want me to? He risks turning me against him, along with all of Shinra."
"Now that the war is over, are you as useful to him?" Vincent asked. "Or, he may only be complicit in someone else's scheme."
Maybe his usefulness to Shinra was waning. A war hero in peacetime. If he had had any ambitions within the company, his popularity made him a threat. But, to risk making an enemy of him... Had the conspirators expected a different outcome?
"Do you have to feed his paranoia?" said Zack, sounding exasperated.
Sephiroth glanced back at him. "It's not paranoia if there really is a plot. But I can't root it out without returning to Headquarters. There's no point speculating now."
"Yeah, go with that," said Zack. "You already suspect everybody anyhow."
"I doubt the entire company is against you," Vincent offered. "Too many would balk at the idea of human experimentation of that magnitude."
"I wonder," said Sephiroth. Those in SOLDIER received their Mako 'treatments' as a matter of course, and anyone who interacted with Hojo had to recognize what kind of man he was. What he was doing at the reactor would have come as no surprise to Sephiroth, if not for Jenova's involvement.
"Have things changed that much?" said Vincent. "The monsters at the reactor... They weren't human, were they?"
"They used to be."
"But you still intend to kill them?"
Sephiroth glanced at him. "You'll understand when you see them," he said. "They aren't like you or me."
"Perhaps," Vincent acknowledged, "but all the same, I don't yet understand this body. I hope... it doesn't prove a danger to you."
Sephiroth couldn't help a short laugh. "If nothing else in your story proves true, I'll believe you've been living under a rock. The last thing anyone worries about is bringing harm to 'the Great Sephiroth.'"
"Are you invincible?"
"No--"
"Then I'll worry."
Sephiroth fixed him with a wry look, but Vincent was, again, sincere. He didn't look at Sephiroth and see a super soldier, but just a man. A normal man with needs and wants. In some ways it was annoying, but in others it was fascinating. He had always wondered what it was like to be seen as normal.
For his part, Vincent didn't demonstrate any inhuman capabilities when they encountered the mountain's native monsters. He kept his distance and used his firearm, and while he was an able marksman, that was all.
They followed the winding mountain trails through the mists of low-hanging clouds, until at last the reactor revealed itself ahead of them. An exceedingly crude design compared to Midgar's reactors, there was nevertheless something... powerful about it. Sephiroth felt drawn to it.
Inside, the Mako stench intensified, and the air grew close and warm, stifling after the open chill of the mountains. The hum of machinery surrounded them, reverberating in the stone walls. The exposed gears and pipes had the look of something jury-rigged, as though the engineers who had built it had had no blueprint to work from, and instead cobbled together parts until they found a configuration that worked.
Likewise little thought had been given to ease of access for maintenance work. Sephiroth climbed down to reach the narrow walkway suspended over the Mako pit. Steam wafted up from beneath him, and his boots echoed.
Almost there.
As he passed into the next chamber, his eyes were already lifted to the door he knew would be there. The door marked Jenova. The rows of pods and the tangle of piping through the room didn't matter.
His feet carried him up the staircase. His gloved hand pressed against the locked door. I'm here.
Vincent was beside him, and that annoyed him when he realized it. He was intruding--but Vincent input a code into the keypad beside the door, trying to open it for him. The light remained red.
"It's as I thought," said Vincent, shaking his head. "It's been too long."
"I could break it open," Sephiroth considered, leaning his weight into the metal door, feeling its strength. "Would it risk hurting her?"
Vincent and Zack exchanged glances, thinking he didn't notice them. They thought he was behaving strangely.
But through that door was the final piece of what he was, who he was. Standing here, he felt even more certain that Vincent was wrong; Jenova was more than just a collection of cells. There was a presence there, waiting for him. She had been waiting for this a long time, just as he had.
Vincent was pulling the cover off of the keypad. "Let me see if I can do this another way," he said.
"You okay, Seph?" Zack asked him.
"I will be," he said, "soon."
"...you're weirding me out a little."
"Why?"
"All of a sudden it's like you're... mesmerized."
Sephiroth shook his head and glanced up at the name above the door. "I can... feel her. I think she's calling to me."
"Is that something Ancients can do?"
"I don't know. Maybe it is."
If he could only speak with her, then she could tell him. She could explain to him this part of his heritage, and maybe it would make more sense to him than the human existence he'd been struggling to comprehend ever since he'd been allowed to participate. Maybe Cetra ways would come more naturally, more easily than trying to fit himself into the wrong mould.
The light went green. The door slid open.
Sephiroth stepped into the chamber beyond. It was dimly lit, and that light glinted off some sort of decorative, mechanical torso in front of a large glass tank, tubes splaying out from its shoulders in the semblance of wings. One large tube snaked its way up from the floor and into the base of the tank, and Sephiroth climbed it to the mechanical angel.
It was in the way.
He gripped it and yanked, and he could feel tubes and wires snapping, giving--
"Seph?" Zack's anxious voice from behind him.
He tore it free, exposing the tank behind. More lights switched on in alarm, and with a flicker revealed the figure within. Not just some collection of cells, but a woman, living, breathing. She looked at him.
"Holy shit," said Zack.
"I'm going to get you out," Sephiroth told her, and he took a step back, raising the Masamune.
"Sephiroth--" Vincent began.
Sephiroth ignored him. The Masamune scored through the tank, starting a web of cracks through the glass. Another strike shattered it, and the Mako within burst out. It surged over and past him, shards of glass scraping against his pauldrons, his coat, showering down onto the floor of the chamber behind him.
The figure inside the tank had curled in on herself, but she remained tethered upright by some apparatus on her head, and supported by the tube protruding from her abdomen. Sephiroth stepped inside, quickly severed the last of the cables, and caught her as she fell.
"Are you... Jenova?" he said.
She shook her head weakly, not a no, but an indication she needed more time to speak. He waited, holding her awkwardly. Out of the blue-green cast of the Mako, her skin was colorless and grey, pitted with scars, and her hair fell silver across her chest and down her back. Silver, like his own.
The crunch of glass alerted him to the others approaching. Jenova's hand gripped his arm, and he felt a flash of anger.
"Stay back, humans," he barked.
They froze, and Zack held up his hands. "Just wanted to check if you were okay. Uh, both of you. Maybe we should've brought a coat or something..."
A coat! Sephiroth thought stupidly. He set the Masamune down and reached for the fastenings of his pauldrons, but he stopped just as abruptly.
There's no need, he was sure she said, though he didn't hear her voice aloud. My magic will do.
"Are you sure you're strong enough...?"
Yes. Now that I am free, I will be all right.
Cautiously, Sephiroth took hold of the Masamune again, and helped Jenova to her feet. As she stood, her appearance changed entirely, from her somewhat alien beauty to the image of a human woman with a fair complexion, green eyes, and soft brown hair cascading down her back. She wore, or appeared to wear, a long red dress.
"I think this will serve me well enough as a disguise among humans," she said as they all stared.
She looked familiar, Sephiroth realized. Had she come into his dreams in this form...?
Jenova looked up at him and then shook her head slightly. "It's been too long... I don't remember now, how I once looked, what my name was. This woman, I found her in your memories."
"In my memories?" he repeated.
"Yes. We are connected, you and I. I can see into your heart."
"Should you not ask permission before searching someone else's memories?" asked Vincent.
Jenova turned her attention on him, her lips tightening into a frown and her eyes narrowing. "A hypocritical question, coming from you," she said. "I don't recall your team asking my permission before confining me here."
"...I did not think you were alive," said Vincent.
"And now?"
"Obviously I was wrong. But you can think of me what you will; I only care how you treat Sephiroth."
"I don't mind," Sephiroth told her. "I want you to know me. Then, maybe... you can tell me all about you."
Jenova nodded. "But first, I want to leave this place."
"Right. Of course."
Sephiroth helped her out and down from the tank. The broken glass crunched beneath her shoes, and he wondered, had she changed her form, or only how it appeared? He cringed at the thought that in reality, she walked across that floor with bare feet.
I am not so fragile as that, she said to him.
Zack was still staring at her.
"How long are you going to keep that up?" Sephiroth asked him sharply.
Zack gave a start and ran a hand through his hair. "Sorry. It's just... You look an awful lot like someone I know," he explained.
"Perhaps it's a good face I've chosen then," said Jenova. "Commonplace."
"Uh... maybe," said Zack uncertainly.
Sephiroth escorted Jenova out of the chamber and into the room with all the pods. She paused there, looking down at them.
"I think... they were meant to be like me," Sephiroth explained, "but Hojo is an incompetent scientist. We should put them out of their misery."
"No," said Jenova. "They may be far inferior to you, but they are still my children. Let them out."
"Uh, no offense," Zack broke in from behind them, "but that sounds like a really bad idea. The whole reason we came here is because some of them got loose and attacked the village."
"Now that I am free, I can calm their minds," Jenova assured him. "There's no danger."
"All right," said Sephiroth. He let go her arm and approached the nearest of the pods.
"Hang on a second!" said Zack, hurrying after him. "You're not really going to just do it, are you?"
"Why not?"
"Because..." Zack gestured, unable to find his words.
"I think it would be wiser to wait," said Vincent. "Jenova has only been free a matter of minutes. She may not be accurately assessing her strength, after her ordeal."
Sephiroth hesitated, looking back at Jenova. Everything he sensed from her told him it was all right. She knew her strength, and she knew her children; they'd been connected for years.
But...
If he let them loose, then how much of her attention would they take? Would she feel an obligation to stay with them, to care for them? They were pitiable creatures, and they would suffer without her.
Don't worry, my son. I will not abandon you.
"Perhaps you should rest for a time," Sephiroth decided, even so. "Before you take on such a responsibility... you should savor your freedom."
Jenova was quiet for a long moment, but then she smiled. "Maybe you're right. It has been two thousand years since I last tasted the open air. Since I saw the world beyond the glass. Why don't you show me what it's like now?"
"I would be glad to," said Sephiroth.
"And... I know it was a human woman who gave birth to you, but I would like it very much if you would call me 'Mother.' It has more meaning to me than the name 'Jenova.'"
Sephiroth smiled. "Of course... Mother."