Chapter Text
Chapter 1 (Sephiroth's narrative)
I could see them watching me from above as I fell, but I made no movement to extend a hand. I had gone to so much trouble to find my death in this place. It had been all I could do to hold myself still and not attempt to parry that final attack as his sword cut into me. His sword, Zack's sword, Angeal's sword. Fitting that I should end on its blade.
If I had fought back, I . . . well, who can say? Omnislash is not an undefeatable technique, although my little nemesis had executed it to perfection. I thought I could have won, but at the heart of any battle there is always that one moment when the world can spin on its axis and everything can change, when misfortune can defeat even the most skilled.
I might have won that fight, but not the one that came after. I could not win against Her, against the being whose will moved within me even now, telling me to fight, to flee, to fly . . . but I should be too weak now. That was why I had forced myself to battle them over and over again, that young man and his friends. During the few moments of lucidity I had snatched from that overwhelming will that distorted my mind, I had set myself up for death.
I will not be a puppet. Not for Hojo; not for Her. And this was the only way I could cut the strings: by breaking myself to the point where I was no longer of any use to Her. Thank you, Cloud. Thank you for becoming as strong as I hoped you would; thank you for coming after me; thank you for putting me to rest.
I knew from experience that falling into mako wasn't like falling into water. The vapour pressure is too high, making the transition less sudden. Even falling from such a height, I sank into it without having the breath knocked out of me—was I still breathing? Still conscious, certainly, but my lungs should be filling with blood. Drowning that way was an ignominious end, but it was an end, one that would take me before even the largest amount of mako could regenerate my flesh, and that made it acceptable.
The Lifestream roiled around me, burning against my skin. Even submerged in it, my vision filled with green, I heard no voices. That which lay here would not speak to me. The only voice I had ever heard in this place came from within.
«My son, come, come! Leave that dying shell behind and impose your will here, on this world's very substance . . .»
It tugged at me, and I did my best to pull back, floating in empty glowing green. Get out of my head! Futile to attempt to speak to her, though. She would never listen. The communication between us was only one way.
The tug was becoming a steady pull, and I realized with horror that it was drawing me away, pulling me out of my body intact. It appeared I would not be permitted to diffuse into the Lifestream until my soul had been cleansed of all memories of this incarnation, as happened to every other being born of this Planet. Not while She still had a use for me.
I refuse!
No response. No indication of Her having heard. The part of me that wasn't frantically trying to hold onto my dying body knew better anyway.
No!
I was like a fish thrashing against the hook . . . hook . . . Her grip was localized. I could feel it. I gathered myself for one final effort, letting myself still, giving Her a few seconds to become complacent before I threw myself away from Her with all the force I could muster. I felt myself tear and tumble away both from Her and from my body. Leaving a piece of myself behind, and who knew what She could do with that? But going back and trying to reclaim it was out of the question; it would be an invitation to recapture.
I darted away into green, although my soul remained stubbornly one instead of falling apart into motes of light. I couldn't tell what direction I was moving in, if there were in fact directions here—I was a neophyte in this realm of the mind, with no one to teach me—but I felt I could vaguely sense Her, and I did my best to move away from that feeling.
It was quite some time before I dared to slow a bit and take in more of my surroundings. The green wasn't uniform. Bright to dim, thick to thin, chartreuse to turquoise . . . upon close examination, it varied along all of those dimensions. I was a small fish who needed to find a place in the endless green to hide from a shark, but there was nothing that spoke of concealment or welcome.
A mote of darker green bumped up against me, rubbing along my side like a friendly animal. It moved away a bit, then came back and circled me. Away again. Closer again. When in moved away a third time, I followed it. Maybe this remnant of a soul knew where it was going. At least it was something to focus on that had nothing to do with Her.
It brought me to a thin, dark spot in the torrent that . . . felt somehow familiar. And rubbed up against me again.
«I'm sorry, Seph, but this is the best I can do. They won't let you stay, and Aerith won't help me persuade them. They wouldn't even let me create a metaphor here to help orient you.»
Zack?
«I'm sorry,» the voice repeated, and the world tore.
Green lightning danced as everything went dark for a moment. There was something solid under my back—solid, smooth, and cold. I had a back. I had a body. One that wasn't, as far as I could tell, drowning in its own blood because of taking repeated slashes to the chest. Faint and far away, I could hear the noise of some kind of alarm, and a cautious inhalation gave me the scents of mako, disinfectant, and ozone. A lab. One of Hojo's, or at least a kindred spirit—I would know that reek anywhere.
And for the first time in years, I couldn't hear Her voice. No matter where I was, that was a reason to rejoice.
There didn't seem to be anyone in the room with me, so I opened my eyes, and was greeted with dull, yellowish emergency lighting. I was lying on my back on a steel table of familiar type, although my feet were sticking off the end. My arms and legs rested on top of ruptured straps. My coat and gloves were missing, but I still had my trousers, belt, and boots—much the same state as I had been in when I had fallen away from Cloud into the Lifestream.
My body seemed to be undamaged, so I pushed myself into a sitting position, and then, when nothing twinged, slid off the table and did a few stretches to test my muscles. Everything was fine, as far as I could tell. Well, then.
Before I could consider my next course of action, I heard footsteps outside in the hall. I curled my hands loosely, and immediately there was a weight in them. Since the long-ago day I had first taken Masamune into my hands, there had been a bond between us. If I called, she came. Always.
I drew her, raising an eyebrow as I noted she had appeared wearing her original scabbard of intricately carved monster bone and not the simpler lacquered wood one I had commissioned all those years ago. And her materia slots were empty. No matter. Unless Cloud Strife and his friends were waiting for me outside, steel alone would be enough. Masamune hummed in my hand, ready to fulfill her duty.
There was a click from the door, the sound of a Shinra-issue keycard lock disengaging. The door swung open.
"Come, boy, we must—" A stooped figure went silent in mid-sentence, freezing in the doorway, and my body moved on its own, bringing Masamune down in a powerful cut that sheared through the man's torso and struck sparks from the floor. He died with an expression of shock on his face.
It wasn't until he lay on the ground in parts that I realized something was very wrong.
I remembered Hojo with extreme clarity, and there were so many small things about him that were different here. His hair had started turning grey at the temples around the end of the Wutai War, but that of the corpse in front of me was night-black, even if it was a greasy mess as always. And the glasses were wrong—not in the last style I remembered him wearing, but one he'd abandoned years earlier.
The logical assumption was that he had finally given into vanity and dyed his hair, changed the style of his glasses. But his face also looked subtly younger, the lines less deeply engraved, the flesh not yet sagging away from the edge of his jaw.
I cleaned the blood off Masamune and resheathed her, then went through Hojo's pockets as quickly and thoroughly as I could, wiping my fingerprints off anything I discarded with a rag torn from his lab coat. A clunky old PHS that couldn't do anything but make phone calls, although I remembered him carrying a far more modern model. Wallet—I took the gil and keycards, left credit cards and ID behind. Latex gloves, three pair, too small to fit me. The breast pocket yielded a pen, a mechanical pencil, and a pocket day planner. A paper one. For the year 1992.
Riffling through it, I discovered that Hojo had systematically drawn a line through the page for every day up to and including April 3. Which should have made today April 4, 1992. Except that that made no sense whatsoever. Still, the oddest sensation was settling in the back of my mind.
Masamune's scabbard. Hojo's youth. The planner and the old PHS and the ruptured straps.
Had the good doctor opened that door expecting to find an eleven-year-old Sephiroth on the other side?
There should be other telltales, if so. I stepped out into the hallway beyond the door. The emergency lighting was on in here too, casting deep shadows. At least that meant the surveillance equipment should be down.
The keycard reader was an older type. Not positive proof, since they tended to get updated piecemeal except in the most security-critical areas, but it was consistent with the hypothesis that I was somehow nearly two decades in the past.
I went back and checked the expiry dates on Hojo's credit cards. Also consistent: July 1992 and February 1993.
If this wasn't 1992, then someone was playing an elaborate practical joke on me. One that involved Hojo clones and a large number of period props. It seemed ridiculous. Who would bother? Or . . . was I in the Lifestream even now, living an illusion?
Regardless, the only thing to do was play along. If this was a joke, I needed to poke and prod it more until the seams started showing. If this was the Lifestream, nothing I did would matter anyway, regardless of what it was. And if this was real, some sort of second chance Zack had somehow created for me, treating it other than seriously could turn out to be deadly.
So. The first thing to do was get out of this laboratory. Getting clear should be enough to disprove the "practical joke" hypothesis, and I wasn't about to stay in Hojo's territory. After that, I could think more carefully about what to do and where to go.
There was a large 36 painted on the wall at the end of the corridor. Was I in the Shinra building, on a lower floor that had been used as a lab before the sixty-seventh and sixty-eighth had been finished? My memories of the year in which I apparently found myself were diminished by time and by the fact that I had never wanted to remember most of what had happened to me as a powerless child under Hojo's care, so I wasn't sure this was the floor we'd actually been on, and my chances of recalling its geometry in any but the most general terms were slim.
I moved forward in silence. A stopped analog clock on the wall read 11:38. At night, presumably, or there would have been more light in here. At least that reduced my chances of running into anyone.
Restive sounds of beasts, and musky smells. I had to be near where they kept the specimens. But that other sound, so tiny it was almost lost . . . muffled sobs? Was someone crying?
"Aerith." A woman's voice, hushed. "Aerith, please don't cry."
"So scared . . . help me, Mommy."
"I can't, sweetie. Even if I reach out my arm as far as you can, and you reach yours out as far as you can . . ."
I rounded a corner. Specimen cages, yes—the big ones that could double as prison cells. Several held medium-sized animals, Kalm fangs and the like. But there was also one that held a woman. And another that held a little girl, perhaps five years of age. They both wore light green scrubs and brown slippers, the same sort of clothing I'd been provided with when I had lived in the labs.
It would have been sensible to ignore them. Fleeing would only be made more difficult if I had a civilian and a child in tow. But the purpose of SOLDIER was to protect people like these. And I wouldn't have left a malboro to the tender mercies of the Shinra Science Department.
And . . . well. More than two hundred innocent people had died in Nibelheim, because I had been unable to throw off Jenova. I'd learned how to tiptoe around that knowledge to avoid making myself ill, but that didn't change the fact that I had a lot to make up for. And I owed this little girl specifically, and knew it.
I could still remember the feeling of Masamune sliding between her ribs.
The woman grew very quiet as she looked up and saw me approaching. I ignored her stare and went to the door of her cage instead. The lock clicked when I swiped one of Hojo's keycards, and I pulled the door open. I turned to the girl's cage and repeated my actions.
"Mommy!" The girl shot across the floor and into the woman's arms the moment she was free to do so. The woman hugged her tightly to her chest.
"Thank you," the woman said, looking up at me from where she knelt on the floor. "My name is Ifalna Faremis, and this is my daughter, Aerith."
Faremis?
"You're Dr. Gast's wife?"
"Yes—you knew my husband? Just who are you?"
Well, why not? "Sephiroth."
"You can't—" She stopped in mid-sentence. Began again. "The only 'Sephiroth' I know of is an eleven-year-old boy."
"I'm somewhat confused by the present situation myself, but now isn't the time to discuss it. We need to get out of the building before the power comes back on. Can you run?"
Ifalna squared her shoulders. "If it gets us out of here, we can fly."