Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Sebuna could muster little satisfaction when the last of the Gi fell. The conflict was one that had promised only loss, and when she lifted her head to howl, the silence that answered her was as heavy as she had expected.

There was a slim chance that Seto had survived, that he failed to answer her now because he lay unconscious and wounded somewhere in the caves below. In a way, that was worse to imagine, because she could do nothing but leave him to his death. Bugenhagen had sealed the way below, and she could not make the journey to the entrance the Gi had taken.

A numbness had spread through her hind leg. The poison of one arrow wasn't enough to petrify her, but the leg dragged as she picked her way through the village. Her human allies likewise nursed their wounds. Who could go to Seto if he were alive?

No, he was dead. The canyon was safe, and he was dead.

Her gaze fell on Tohar, who crouched tending to one of the wounded defenders by the light of a torch. Tohar had come to the canyon only a year ago, and been accepted readily into their community. If the Gi had likewise come to them in friendship, then they would not have been turned away, but Sebuna understood why they had not.

It was her fault, in part. No one was always wise, and when she and Seto were younger, they had slighted the Gi. Generations now had passed for them, and that slight had given birth to a deeper resentment. Humans lived such short lives. They either forgot such things, or held them too tightly against the erosion of time.

When the wells had dried up in the territory the Gi called home, they had looked at Cosmo Canyon and failed to see a welcoming haven. They did not see neighbors. They had forgotten that only a generation ago to Sebuna, the Gi and the people of the canyon had been the same people.

They looked at the canyon and they envied. And that was how it had come to this.

"Ohna!" a small voice cried across the canyon, using a name for her that would be his and his alone to use. There would be no more cubs.

Nanaki bounded to her, nuzzling into her side, and her heart ached at the touch. They had protected him; he was safe and whole, and yet he wasn't, for they couldn't protect him from sorrow.

"Dad?" he asked, looking around.

"...gone," she said. "He has left us."

By his eyes, she knew he didn't understand. He was so young, not even a full decade. This was his first experience with death. Sebuna had never had to explain it, and he had never found his way to the question on his own.

She would have to find some way to explain it. Hers was not the only grief. Many faces would be missing come morning.

Bugenhagen approached, following in Nanaki's wake, his weight on his walking stick. He had come to the canyon an old man, and so it was easier for Sebuna to see him as one than the others whom she'd watched grow from infancy. He seemed wise in a way they couldn't be, so she had entrusted her son to him, if the worst should happen.

"I'm glad to see you," he said, and his usually easy smile was tight. Glad to see you alive, he meant.

"We've come through to the other side," Sebuna agreed. She lifted her gaze to the heavy darkness in the eastern sky. "It's almost dawn."

"Come," said Bugenhagen. "Someone needs to have a look at your wounds."

As Sebuna dragged her leg forward, Nanaki pressed anxiously into her side. "Ohna, are you gonna be okay?"

"Yes, heart," she assured him, though she didn't know how lasting the damage would be. It was the least of her concerns. Bodies healed.

She pulled herself up close to the Candle, where the light was best and several healers had gathered. She looked into the flames as they pulled what was left of the arrow from her flank. She couldn't feel it.

"When is Dad coming back?" Nanaki asked.

Sebuna met Bugenhagen's gaze above his head. She was so tired. She didn't know how to say it.

"That is something only Seto knows," said Bugenhagen. "We may not see him for a long time yet."

Nanaki whimpered, and Sebuna tucked herself around him. He could not conceive of a long time, not really. To him, a week might be long. This night was long.

He fell asleep against her side, and Sebuna dozed until the dawn crested the tops of the canyon. The colors it splashed across the rock seemed incongruous with the weariness it highlighted. They tended to their wounded, and the dead, too, were being gathered.

For the moment, the bodies of the Gi she had killed lay where they fell.

Her beloved canyon was changed. There was nothing that could stop that, of course. Centuries passed. Herds migrated. Humans spread their so-called advancements across the world.

Sebuna did not grieve for the world she'd known as a cub, but these sudden changes were harder to bear. This one night had excised Seto from her life. He would return to the Planet, and his essence would coalesce into new life, but she never would see him again in the way she had known him.

Bugenhagen still sat in front of the fire, his arms folded thoughtfully into his sleeves.

"You should sleep," Sebuna murmured to him. "Thank you for watching over Nanaki."

He nodded, but made no move to stand. "We have a great deal of work ahead of us, don't we?"

"Rebuilding," she agreed. "It will be painful."

"Not that. Of course you're right, and it will be, but I was thinking of us. Humanity. I parted ways with Shinra because I didn't like the direction they were headed. I wanted to continue my research among like-minded people, not those with a mind for the spoils of war. Ho... Perhaps I lost perspective. I was naive."

"You were, if you thought there would be no wars but theirs," Sebuna conceded. "But I have seen generations of your kind. If war were your essential nature, you would have destroyed yourselves centuries ago."

"Hmm... No, the morning after a such a night is no time for philosophical debate. I'm just being a sad and cynical old man."

Sebuna let out a puff of air. "Sleep," she repeated. "And when you have rested, continue your work. Find your own direction."

"Indeed. I can try anyway. What more can we ever do?" Bugenhagen smiled tiredly at her, retrieved his cane, and pushed himself laboriously to his feet. "Oof," he grumbled, looking up at the canyon walls. "I ought to do something about those steps, too. There's no question of finding sleep after that climb!"

Sebuna put her whiskers forward, letting herself feel a dull amusement. But then, perhaps she would understand it soon enough herself, if her leg healed badly. Scaling the canyon had always come so easily. Nanaki might have to run and hunt without her.

She settled her head on her paws. Whatever work humanity had ahead of them, she wondered how much more her kind would bear witness to. One day her time would come, and then it would be only Nanaki, and however long a life she imagined for her beloved son, he would not live forever. What would be their legacy then?

Bugenhagen was right. Sinking into such thoughts now was a poor idea. She had much grief to work through before she could see anything beyond it.

Chapter Text

Lucrecia opened her eyes. The world settled back over her, fit to smother her.

"Lucrecia?"

It didn't surprise her that the voice wasn't Hojo's, but that it should belong to Gast confused her. Wasn't he at Headquarters?

Her confusion must have shown on her face. "I just got back yesterday," he explained, and he hesitated.

He wanted to ask, but he didn't know how. Lucrecia didn't need to look to feel the bandages secure around her wrists. They felt like shackles.

She wondered who had found her. Not Vincent. Certainly not Hojo. He had what he wanted from her, so she was immaterial now. How long had he known that, before she realized it herself? She didn't think he'd seen her that way in the first years of their marriage. They had been a team in those early days, though he had undoubtedly always thought of himself as its leader.

She had moved to the inn in a meaningless rebellion against that. She couldn't stand him, she wanted to get away from him. She hadn't realized how intensely it would isolate her from everything. She carried company secrets within her own body, after all, so the villagers couldn't be permitted to interact with her. Even Vincent had made sure of it.

Of course Vincent had made sure of it. It was his job. Protecting company assets. She had broken it off, she had told him not to interfere, and so he had long since ceased to be her co-conspirator in minor infractions. The longer it went on, the more she hated him for listening.

Some days she had screamed at him for the rote performance of his duties. Bringing her meals in place of the kitchen staff. Guarding her door against intrusion and making certain she spoke with no one. Not even him. Never once had he reiterated his wild proposal to abandon the Project and disappear together.

And now he was dead.

They had torn her son out of her, and Hojo must have seen no more need for either of them after that. He had used up everything she had--her intellect, her body, her will--and now he had what he wanted. He didn't need her, and by extension he didn't need Vincent to guard her. If Hojo had found her, he would have let her bleed.

One of the inn's staff, then.

"I should never have left," Gast said at last.

Lucrecia turned her head away. The curtains hid her view out the window, but she'd seen that view a thousand times. The water tower in the square and the houses across the street. They never changed.

"Headquarters asked for you," she murmured.

"I didn't have to go. I knew you weren't well. I just... I thought all you needed was time. I convinced the President to let us continue the work in Nibelheim a while longer before moving to the new lab. But..."

"But...?"

"Maybe you ought to go home, Lucrecia. Your family lives in Kalm, don't they? I think it would do you good to get away from all this for a while."

Lucrecia didn't answer him. Hadn't she tried to get away from it? She had tried to get away from it forever, and someone had stopped her.

Of which of her failures would her parents be most critical? She had written them years ago, smugly telling them how many of her male colleagues she had beaten out for the opportunity to work on this Project with Professor Gast. She had torn up the reply telling her she had bitten off more than she could chew.

They had never supported her in her career, they had never supported her in her marriage, and what a crowning moment for them that they'd been proven right so spectacularly. She couldn't handle this. She didn't want to handle it. She didn't want to handle any of it.

"If I had known how hard this would be on you," Gast said softly, "I would never have agreed to let you do it."

Tears pricked at her eyes. "It was my choice," she snapped. "Mine. This wasn't your fault."

If she was a failure, then at least let her own it. To have allowed someone else to lead her into it was worse.

Gast seemed taken aback. She never had let him see her sharpest edges. As the head of the Project, she couldn't have him think she was incapable.

Not that she could hide it now.

"...has there been any news of Vincent?" she asked, her voice hoarse. Gast would know nothing of what had really happened, but she didn't know what lies Hojo might have told him.

The days after Sephiroth's birth had been a blur. When her fever had finally broken, she had waited for Vincent, but all she found was food left outside her door. The innkeeper hadn't seen him.

The bloodstain on the floor of the lab had told her everything, even if Hojo hadn't.

Gast shook his head. "I spoke with the village headman. No one has seen him. Hojo says he sent him up to the reactor to investigate a power fluctuation..."

Gast trailed off, and Lucrecia looked away again. What he left unspoken was not disbelief, but the conclusion that they had lost Vincent to the treacherous slopes.

It wasn't the story that Hojo had told her, and she could expose him for it. But to do so would be to expose herself, too. Gast didn't know the extent of Hojo's character, but neither did he know exactly what a miserable person she was.

If she explained to him the affair, what would he think of her then? Hojo already kept her from her son. If Gast knew who she really was, would he be any different? Would he even believe that Hojo would do such a thing, or would he dismiss it for the paranoia of an already unwell mind?

Telling him wouldn't bring Vincent back. But if she kept silent, then at least she held onto some shred of Gast's regard. Without Hojo or Vincent or her son, that was all she had.

"Is Headquarters going to send someone else?" she asked.

"Is that all you have to say?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"I don't know... He was a member of our team, and I know you two used to get along."

They used to get along. Gast had such a sharp mind, but he never applied it to the observation of other people. He would never know the half of what had gone on in that house.

Lucrecia shook her head. "I just... I can't think about it now. I can't."

Gast sighed. "Yes, I suppose they'll have to send someone else," he said. "Hojo didn't think to notify them with how busy he's been, and I haven't made the call yet. I wanted to talk to you... about them sending an escort for you."

"To take me home?" Lucrecia asked bitterly.

"I think it's for the best. Not forever. But you need to get better."

Not forever. Did he not see this as a definitive answer? "...and then, you'll let me come back?"

He hesitated. "We'll see how it goes. I don't want to keep him from his mother, you know, but at the moment, you aren't in any state to take care of him."

Lucrecia pushed herself up slightly. "But you wouldn't keep him from me, if I was well. If I got better."

"No," Gast confirmed. "I just want what's best for you. For both of you. For all of us."

If she got better, then Gast would let her see her son. And Hojo couldn't say a damn thing about it, because Gast was his superior, and his was the word that counted with Shinra.

"...does the Company know what I've done?" she asked. He hadn't called them yet.

"I've spoken with Hojo about it," he said, because of course he'd discussed her situation with Hojo before speaking to her directly, "but I don't think the President needs to know. We'll call it a medical leave. You had a hard pregnancy."

Lucrecia closed her eyes. "Thank you," she said.

It made sense that the person who knew her least would be the one to offer her a lifeline. Could she blame Vincent for pulling away, or Hojo, for turning against her? She had had such an inflated opinion of herself. Brilliant enough to be worthy of this Project. Deserving of more affection than one man could offer her. Looking back, it was hard to comprehend her own energy, throwing herself full-tilt at everything.

She'd been insatiable, and now she just felt empty.

Was it even right for her to reach for anything again? Perhaps the greatest gift she could give anyone was to fade away.

But first, she wanted to see her son. At least once, she had to see him.

It took nearly two years to convince them.

Gast made her see a shrink, paid for by the Company. Not someone to be trusted, and so she didn't. She said not one word about the Project, because if she showed herself to be a potential data leak, they would never allow her back. She was careful. She offered up 'breakthroughs' about how her parents' criticism had affected her childhood, and pretended that staying with them offered her an opportunity for reconciliation.

She told them nothing either. Gast had given her a tiny photograph of Sephiroth asleep on Hojo's chest. She kept it with her, always, because she couldn't risk them going through her things and finding it. She wasn't permitted the privacy of locked doors or unread journals; she was a danger to herself. She tucked the photo into her hair when she bathed, in case they walked in.

Living with them again made her want to tear her hair out, but she didn't want to wake one morning to find nothing left of them but a smear of blood on the floor. They didn't know she'd had a child. They had no idea what the Project was. That was for the best.

Some days, she had to laugh at herself. If her shrink had any idea the things that actually went through her head, would he label it paranoia?

Vincent wasn't dead because he'd been a data leak. He was dead because he'd crossed Hojo, because he'd fucked her for months under Hojo's nose, in Hojo's bed, at Hojo's workstation.

Wasn't that the reason? Jealousy would require Hojo to care for her, but maybe he'd only taken it for an affront to his pride, that another man had slept with his wife. He didn't care about her, but she'd belonged to him, so he couldn't permit it.

Or maybe he did still care.

Or maybe it had been something else that they'd argued over that day in the basement. Whatever it was, she knew it was her fault.

She folded down the corner of the photograph with Hojo's face in it. This wasn't about him. There was nothing there worth salvaging.

Lucrecia assumed that Gast received regular reports on her mental state, but he didn't communicate regularly. Occasionally she'd get some vague assurance that things were going well. 'Things' meaning Sephiroth, she hoped.

She dreamt about him sometimes, or she thought she did. A pale-haired infant sitting in the shade of the trees behind the mansion, out of sight of the villagers, grasping pine needles in his fingers. Their scent was vivid, as if she were there. It was strange, when she felt no nostalgia for Nibelheim in her waking hours. Why not imagine him anywhere else?

Then, Gast sent notice that they had relocated to the new lab in Midgar. It included an invitation to visit. A date and time for an escort to retrieve her.

It was the next stage, her foot in the door. For the first time, she would see her son.

Lucrecia had never been to the headquarters in the center of the newly-minted city of Midgar. Only the first of its raised sectors was complete, the bones of the others extending out over the towns below, and that was all that Headquarters had been when they had left for Nibelheim: bones. Now it rose fully-formed, a towering monolith looming over the surrounding land. One might imagine a dragon perched atop its peak.

Her escort drove her to a train station at the base of the central structure, and they rode the rest of the way up, spiralling around until they reached the so-named Sector 0. An old poster on the wall as they exited celebrated the grand opening of the Sector 1 rail line, while newer ones detailed plans for its expansion into the soon-to-be-completed Sector 2. There was no mention of Baldheim, the town 50 meters below them. Vincent's hometown. Like him, it was set to be buried in shadow and forgotten.

No one here cared about the past. They were building the city of the future.

Lucrecia hadn't spared any thought for it in ages. Conversely, her idle curiosity over the plans had evaporated beside the potential of the Project. What did architecture matter compared to the de-extinction of the Cetra?

Now, she didn't care about that either. There was only one Cetra who would ever matter to her.

Gast met her in the lobby, smiling the moment he saw her. He looked, basically, the same. He was in need of a haircut, his common state when he was busy. He took her hand with an enthusiasm that suggested he might have hugged her if he hadn't thought it unprofessional. She found herself overwhelmed, not knowing what to say.

"You look good," Gast said. "It's good to see you."

Lucrecia nodded. "It's good to see you, too," she echoed, and the words might have been rote, but she really did mean them.

Gast waved her escort off and guided her towards the elevators. "What do you think of the new headquarters?" he asked her.

"Shiny," she observed. Her heels clicked across the floor with the precision of a metronome. The glass walls of the elevator were pristine.

Gast laughed. "That's one word for it. It lacks the character of the mansion, but I get the feeling none of us will have to waste any time banging the furnace into submission."

Lucrecia smiled faintly, as if Nibelheim were something they could look back on and laugh about.

"So, Sephiroth is here...?" she ventured cautiously.

"Naturally," said Gast. "We've set up a nursery for him inside the lab. It's still a bit bare-bones after the move, but we'll make it nice for him."

Inside the lab. She didn't know why any part of her had expected otherwise. Sephiroth's very existence was a company secret, Hojo couldn't very well take him home on public transit every night. But at the same time, she felt an echo of the rage she'd felt at her own confinement in the Nibelheim inn. What would that isolation do to him?

"Hojo and I practically live in the lab anyway," Gast confessed. "No one prepared me for how much work it is to raise a baby, even without the research aspect."

"He's still a handful?" Lucrecia asked.

"Always," Gast replied fondly.

They got off at the 66^th floor; the elevator had no direct access to the lab. One flight up the stairs, and they were in the halls of the lower level, as pristine and colorless as the rest of the building.

There were no windows to the outside. Instead, there were windows into observation rooms. Gast guided her to a stop in front of one.

Through the glass was a strange sort of nursery. A colorful rug covered the metal floor, and pictures of various animals had been taped to the wall in a slapdash effort to decorate. There was a crib in one corner, a low table and chairs, a box that could have contained toys, if she was being optimistic.

Hojo sat on the rug with a baby, her baby. Sephiroth's back was to the window, wispy silver hair falling just past the nape of his neck. Hojo was attempting to show him flashcards for simple words, but Sephiroth kept grabbing the cards and tossing them over his shoulder.

"...Hojo is frustrated because he isn't talking much yet," Gast explained with some amusement. "He's very bright, he clearly understands a good deal of what we're saying, but he seems to prefer keeping us in suspense."

"What... what sort of words does he say?" Lucrecia managed. She had missed his first word.

"'No' seems to be his favorite, I suspect he gets that from Hojo. And he says 'kibba' to mean 'clipboard.' He always sees us with them and he wants to play with them. So if some of our notes are a mess, that's his fault."

Lucrecia nodded, her eyes never leaving Sephiroth. He'd gotten so big, without her.

"...would you like to meet him?" Gast asked gently.

"Yes," she said. "Very much."

At the touch of Gast's key card, the light over the door turned from red to green, and it slid open. Lucrecia followed him inside.

Sephiroth looked up at their approach. His eyes were a bright green, a trait that he had inherited from neither her nor Hojo's family tree. Like his hair, it must have been Jenova's influence.

It didn't trouble her if he didn't look like her. It was better if he wasn't like her. He was beautiful. He was perfect.

"Sephiroth, I would like you to meet someone," said Gast, ignoring or not seeing the irritated look that Hojo gave him. "This is Lucrecia."

Not Lucrecia, your mother, but that could come later. Did he know what it meant to have a mother? Had they told him about her? Or was she, to him, a blank slate?

Lucrecia sank to her knees on the carpet.

Sephiroth was holding a card with a picture of a bird. He hesitated, and then held it out towards her.

"Is that for me?" Lucrecia asked.

Sephiroth said nothing, just held out the card. She took it. Her fingers were so close to touching his. She wanted to pull him into her arms.

But Gast and Hojo were watching, and Sephiroth didn't know her. She had to hold herself in check. Some part of her screamed that she had no guarantee of another meeting, that she should seize the opportunity to hold him, to hold her son.

She wanted more than one meeting. She wanted to know him. She wanted him to want to be held. Gast and Hojo were the arbiters of that possibility. She had to prove to them that she could compose herself professionally.

"Thank you," she managed, lowering the bird card into her lap.

Sephiroth twisted around, picked up another card off the floor, and held it out to Gast. "Po Gah," he said.

Gast chuckled and knelt down to take it. "I get 'shoe,' do I? I'm flattered."

"The point of these is not for him to pass them out," said Hojo.

"What's the harm?" said Gast. "I'm sure it helps with his motor skills."

"And he's learning generosity," Lucrecia added, for the first time looking directly at Hojo. "Some people never master that."

Hojo scoffed at that. "I'm not getting into one of your arguments."

"Agreed." Gast cast her a look. "Are the two of you going to be able to work together like professionals?"

"Of course," Lucrecia said smoothly, biting back every accusation that flashed through her mind. She'd gotten much better at that, during her time away.

"I said I wouldn't get into it," said Hojo, meeting her gaze. No, that was never his game. He always wanted to play the reasonable one, even when his actions were anything but reasonable, and he'd wait until he worked her up into a hysteria to proclaim his the superior intellect.

She'd had a lot of time to think about that, but she doubted he had. In the time since she'd seen him last, Hojo hadn't pursued a divorce, but it wasn't because he wanted to hold onto their marriage. She was sure it had simply slipped his mind. Lucrecia thought it might be more satisfying to be his widow.

But she couldn't risk her access to Sephiroth. Hojo might have been able to get away with murder under the Company's nose, but Vincent had only been a Turk. They had value as a group, but any individual was considered replaceable. The Company's lead scientists weren't.

She would have to undermine him first. Devalue him in the eyes of the Company. If he found himself in harm's way after that, it was no great loss to anyone.

For all that, he wasn't her priority either. Sephiroth was. So she would play whatever role they needed of her to stay here with him and watch him grow.

Chapter Text

"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.

Chapter Text

Their correspondence came to an end once Hojo decided Aeris was old enough to spend a few hours alone.

Lucrecia held onto every note, and maybe it was a risk, but they never searched her room. She never left it, and she never had visitors. Sometimes, they even forgot to feed her, though it never troubled her. It was as though time had no affect on her in here. By now she had passed 40, and she imagined that the moment she stepped outside, all her missing wrinkles would appear at once.

If she ever stepped outside. She read Ifalna's notes again and again. Ifalna had never passed judgment on her one way or another, either to condemn her for what she'd done to Sephiroth or to forgive her for it. She'd related her encounters with him. They'd talked about him and Gast and Aeris. They'd shared their darkest thoughts, because there was no one else to confide in, and the alternative was to let those thoughts rebound endlessly in their own skulls.

Lucrecia would reread the words and imagine Ifalna sitting in the room with her, speaking them aloud to her. Sometimes it felt quite real, and she thought she was finally going insane.

Ifalna always said when they escaped. Lucrecia had often slipped and written if.

She tried to focus on Ifalna's version. When they escaped. When, when, when.

When she slept, she dreamt of her son, locked in his own cell, staring up at the same grey ceiling. In her more lucid dreams, she would sit down on the edge of his bed and tell him how she missed him. She would braid his hair, which grew ever longer as she imagined him growing older.

Sometimes she dreamt of him in the main observation chamber, facing off against horrid monsters unearthed from who-knew-where. A manifestation of her fears for where the Project would lead: if Sephiroth couldn't guide Shinra to the Mako-rich Promised Land, then that funding still had to yield some results. Even as a child, he'd demonstrated a heightened aptitude for materia use and strength beyond what his muscle density suggested--ideal qualities for a soldier.

But her son was not meant to be a soldier. He was meant to be a leader, the first in a new generation who would unlock secrets about this Planet that Lucrecia could scarcely imagine. The wisdom of the Cetra in the modern age, furthering their natural talents with human technological advances. President Shinra had always been too small-minded to see the possibilities, but Shinra was where the funding was.

If they'd known there was still a Cetra living, they might not have done any of this, but Lucrecia couldn't wish away the existence of her son.

The door to her cell slid open, and Sephiroth stood there. He looked exactly as he did in her dreams, so maybe this was only another dream. He was nearly as tall as she was, having grown so much since last she had seen him. Ifalna had dated her notes whenever she overheard enough to piece it together. The last one had been January 2, 1989. Sephiroth would have been 11, then. How many months had passed since?

"Are you...?" Real? she wondered. She reached for him, pulling him into an embrace. He tensed, but she felt his fingers curl into the back of her shirt.

"...Mom," he said.

The moment stretched, and then ended. Sephiroth drew back.

"Put this on," he said, handing her a lab coat. Still attached to the breast pocket was a key card with a name she didn't recognize. Some new hire in the years since she had had any say in it.

There was a speck of blood on the lapel.

"We have to move fast," Sephiroth insisted, and Lucrecia shrugged her arms mechanically into the sleeves. He took her hand and tugged her out of the room, just like that.

Nothing mystical happened once she crossed the threshold.

They hurried down the hallway, and Sephiroth keyed open the door to what Lucrecia recognized as Gast's old office. All this time, it had been Ifalna's room. She stood at the ready, her long hair wound into a thick braided bun.

It looked good on her.

Ifalna pulled on the lab coat that Sephiroth offered her in turn. Lucrecia realized the hairstyle was meant to make her appear more professional, less conspicuous. She and Sephiroth had been able to coordinate this.

"We're leaving?" Lucrecia asked as the question finally made its way through her haze of disbelief.

"Hojo was called to Junon," Ifalna explained. "Something about contamination from the reactor."

"And today is Rufus's birthday," Sephiroth added.

"Rufus?" Lucrecia repeated. Did she know who that was?

"The President's son. It's a big party that means a lot of security someplace that isn't here."

Lucrecia slowly put that together. Hojo was away. Security was light. Her eyes fell on the katana at Sephiroth's side, and she realized he had a key card of his own. Was he 12? 13? Were they training him with the military now?

Aeris tugged at the edge of her coat. Lucrecia looked down. Aeris was older, too, nearly as old as Sephiroth had been the last time Lucrecia had seen him. The gap between them, those were her lost years.

"You remember me?" she asked Aeris.

Aeris nodded. "Sure, Aunt Lulu. Mom says we're leaving now forever. You're coming, too, right?"

When, she thought. This was when.

"Yes. Of course I'm coming."

Lucrecia didn't look up at the cameras they passed, but she felt them like eyes on her back. The lab coats would only fool a stranger glancing at them, not the limited security team cleared to monitor this floor.

"Someone will see us," she said.

Sephiroth glanced up. "I asked Mayor Domino to loop the footage," he said. "He promised us an hour."

"The mayor...?"

"Shinra moved his office into the archives, and... they let me read in there."

Lucrecia knew that she had been cut off from the world, but she only felt it hitting her now. All these small, essential pieces of knowledge that Sephiroth and Ifalna had collected, and she didn't know them, even though they came from other parts of the same building. For years, Lucrecia had imagined nothing outside of the lab itself, because everything she cared about was inside its walls.

She wasn't prepared for what awaited them beyond it.

Their pilfered key cards gained them access to the stairwell; they didn't use Sephiroth's, because his movements were more likely to attract notice.

"I know it's a long way down," said Sephiroth as they passed the 66^th floor exit, "but the elevators are too exposed. There's cameras on every floor, and they can just shut down the cars."

"We'll manage," said Ifalna. She met Lucrecia's gaze as though to confer her own certainty. She'd noticed: Lucrecia could manage stairs, but everything else threatened to overwhelm her.

Aeris tired first. Ifalna carried her for a while, and then passed her to Lucrecia when she herself began to flag. Sephiroth led the way, alert for the sounds of anyone else in the stairwell. He'd halt them sometimes to wait until someone had passed from one floor to the next below them, but for the most part they were alone. In a building this big, most people used the elevators.

"Where are we going from here?" Lucrecia asked as they descended.

"There's a train station in the basement level," said Ifalna. "That should get us away."

"And then?"

Ifalna met her gaze instead of answering, which told Lucrecia she didn't know. The plan was just to get away, nothing else.

As a plan, it was lacking. But Lucrecia's meticulous plotting against Hojo had come to nothing, so maybe it was better to just seize an opportunity and run with it. Or maybe the problem was her, because being impulsive had never won her anything in the past either.

She hoped it was a curse she wouldn't bring down on them now.

When they reached the first floor, Ifalna tried her key card on the exit. It didn't work. Neither did Lucrecia's.

On the floor above them, the door opened, and boots sounded on the stairs.

"They noticed," said Ifalna.

Aeris's arms tightened around Lucrecia's neck. Sephiroth's hand fell to the hilt of his sword.

It was Ifalna who stepped back the way they had come. As the soldiers appeared on the stairs, her hands moved, and a powerful Aero spell knocked all of them off their feet before they could fire a shot. Sephiroth darted forward and tore a key card from one man's belt.

They burst out of the stairwell into the lobby, and Ifalna and Sephiroth both hesitated. If either of them had ever seen this floor, it was once, when they were first brought into the building. They knew of the train station, but they didn't know where it was.

It felt like a lifetime ago that Lucrecia had been a free woman. Her memories of her commute were like a dream. But she had them.

"This way," she said, taking the lead. On the far side of the lobby were the escalators down into the station.

They broke into a run as the stairwell door opened behind them, the soldiers not far behind. The lobby security guards peeled away from their posts to join. Bullets whizzed past and Aeris screamed before someone shouted to hold fire, they wanted them alive.

They hurtled down the escalators, momentarily breaking line-of-sight with their pursuit. Just lose us here, Lucrecia thought desperately. This wasn't a plan. They might have made it to the station, but Shinra wouldn't let the trains leave with fugitives on them.

Lucrecia passed Aeris to Ifalna over the turnstile. No one stopped them from jumping it. Boots sounded loud against the concrete in their wake.

There was a train waiting at the platform, the sign overhead indicating it would depart in 6 minutes. The doors stood open in invitation. They burst into the nearest car, and none of the handful of passengers so much as glanced at them.

"Fan out!" a man shouted behind them. "They can't have gone far." Had he not seen them? Shouldn't he have seen them? They hadn't been far ahead.

Don't look, she thought. She and Ifalna crouched down below the windows of the train car. Sephiroth positioned himself just beside its open door. The passengers paid them no attention, as though they weren't even there.

Was this even real? Maybe she had sunken fully into her imagination, picturing for herself the escape she'd long desired. Her breath in her chest felt far away, shallow.

Ifalna laid a hand on her shoulder.

A red light began flashing inside the car, startling all of them, including the other passengers.

"Type A Security Alert!! Unidentified passengers suspected. A search of all cars will be conducted!"

A man seated not far from them groaned. "Seriously? What is this, another system test?"

Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna, finding a shared confusion in her face. Weren't they behaving suspiciously?

A minute passed, and another announcement stated they had locked down one car and were proceeding to the next. Sephiroth joined them.

"They're going car-by-car. Maybe we can stay ahead of it."

"And when we get to the end?" Ifalna wondered.

"Duck out, double back," he proposed. The doors were still open. They'd be exposed on the platform, but maybe their luck would hold. Maybe no one would see them.

They started moving towards the front of the train. After a few cars, a woman finally glanced up at them, but their passage earned them no more than a faint frown. Their pace was quick, but not frantic. In their lab coats, they looked like employees. Employees who had for some reason brought their children to work, but it was odd, not suspicious.

The forward car was empty. Lucrecia didn't know the day, but it was the middle of the afternoon. Any rush of salaried employees working 9-5 wouldn't come for hours. There was no crowd to hide them, and a glance confirmed soldiers standing alert on the platform outside. They hesitated.

The door opened into the driver's compartment, and the engineer motioned them inside. "In here. They won't search in here."

The intercom told them the search had entered the car behind them. There wasn't time to interrogate his motives; they piled into the small compartment with him. He shut the door and motioned for them to crouch down beneath the windows. Ifalna sank back against the wall, closing her eyes.

"Mom!?" Aeris whispered sharply.

A red stain began to blossom through the white of Ifalna's lab coat. None of them had noticed it against her dress, under the flashing red lights.

"It's just a graze," Ifalna murmured.

It was more than a graze. Lucrecia thought of the blood smudging the basement floor. Nothing left of him but that.

"Damn," the engineer whispered, glancing down at them. He looked over his shoulder. "There's a first aid kit in the forward car. As soon as they clear out--"

The search moved into the forward car, and all of them fell silent. Lucrecia balled up the end of Ifalna's lab coat and pressed it into the wound. She winced, but didn't make a sound.

The minutes ticked by under the flashing lights as the soldiers searched the otherwise empty car with a painful thoroughness, as if they could be hiding beneath the seats or in the overhead rack.

At last the flashing stopped. The intercom inside the driver's compartment crackled to life, advising him that he was clear to depart. He closed the doors, and the train at last pulled out of the station.

The engineer opened the door back into the car and helped them carry Ifalna to a row of seats. Sephiroth grabbed the first aid kit off the wall, but he didn't seem to know what to do with it. Unthinking, Lucrecia held her hand out for it.

In her university days, she had entertained the idea of going into medicine for the length of a single summer. It was a field with prestige, of course, but Lucrecia had wanted to do something bigger than healing one person at a time. She had wanted to be a part of cutting edge research, to make some grand discovery that would change the world.

Would things have turned out better if she had chosen to curb her ambitions? Or would she have just disappointed more people in a more mundane fashion?

The bullet had torn through too much flesh to be called a graze, but it hadn't hit anything vital. Lucrecia cleaned the wound, reached for the surgical thread, and paused. There was no anesthetic in the kit.

"It needs stitches," she told Ifalna. "This is going to hurt."

"I'll manage," said Ifalna. She held out a hand for support, and it was Sephiroth who took it. Aeris stood just behind him, eyes wide, hand fisted in his shirt. The three of them knew something of going through these moments together. While Lucrecia had suffered her confinement alone, they had endured Hojo's scrutiny together.

Lucrecia worked as quickly as she could, never glancing at Ifalna's face. A professional would have done neater stitching, but it would do. She cleaned it again and taped a bandage over the wound. Ifalna relaxed slightly as she finished, letting out a breath.

"...is Mom gonna be okay?" Aeris asked.

"I think so," said Lucrecia. The sight of how much red had soaked into the lab coat warred with her knowledge of how much blood the human body could survive losing. Ifalna looked pale, but she always looked pale. Her heart rate and breathing felt normal.

Lucrecia wiped her bloody hands on her own coat and stood, letting Aeris move close to her mother. Ifalna gave her daughter a wan smile. Still conscious and aware.

"How far are you going?" the engineer asked, and Lucrecia started. He offered her a bottle of water. She opened it, rinsed her hands, and passed the rest to Ifalna.

"I don't know," Lucrecia answered. Where could they go? Who could hide them? "As far as we can."

The engineer nodded. "This line goes as far as the Sector 5 slums. There's security at some of the stations close to Shinra facilities, but not that one."

"...why are you helping us?" she asked him finally.

He shrugged. "They told us they'd be implementing these security protocols with how things are heating up with Wutai, but you all don't look like spies to me."

A conflict brewing with Wutai. Lucrecia's eyes fell on Sephiroth's katana. Was that what Shinra was preparing him for? They meant to send her son, a child, to fight in the coming war?

She wasn't sure if he had killed the scientists whose coats they wore. A part of her was perfectly satisfied with it if he had. Did they not deserve it? Did Sephiroth not deserve to revenge himself against the people who'd held him prisoner all his life?

Another part of her understood that it was a tragedy if he'd been able to. Her son had never been granted the innocence that was meant to accompany childhood.

"Of course we're not spies," Lucrecia said.

The engineer eyed her, and when she offered no further explanation, he ventured slowly, "A lot of powerful men in that building. Probably some that don't treat their families too well."

"Mm," she said. If he wanted to surmise that they were fleeing abusive husbands, then in her case, it wasn't so far from the truth.

It was absurd that he should have so much power. It was just given to him, while she had always had to claw for any bit of it. She hadn't escaped him under her own power, but she had escaped him, for now.

All they had was a destination, a place where they'd be dumped out and left to fend for themselves. If Lucrecia knew nothing about the Sector 5 slums, then neither did the others.

But it was Shinra's city, and Shinra would come looking for them.

By the time they reached the end of the line, they were the only remaining passengers. The engineer stepped out to help them get Ifalna up and out the door. He apologized for not being able to take them farther, but Lucrecia encouraged him to keep his schedule. A delay at this station might draw Shinra's attention sooner. They thanked him, he went back inside his compartment, and the train pulled away.

It ought to have been late afternoon, but with the plate overhead, the sky was dark, like a brewing storm. Some light shone far off at its edges, but everything nearer was cold and electric. Lucrecia struggled to remember what sunlight felt like; even before, she'd worked such long hours that she'd rarely seen it.

The platform was empty. A mismatched assortment of concrete slabs and chain-link fence partitioned it away from piles of scrap and garbage. A dumping ground for things Shinra didn't want.

Sephiroth, Ifalna, and Aeris weren't that, but maybe they could hide amidst it. With Ifalna's weight across her shoulders, Lucrecia knew she had to take them from here. She took a step.

"This way," Aeris said suddenly, tugging on her coat. She pointed to a gap in the fence, away from what seemed to be the main path away from the station.

Why not? None of them knew where they were going, so one direction was as good as any.

The children pulled the opening wider so Lucrecia could help Ifalna through it. The path on the other side continued through an abandoned construction yard. They were moving nearer to the gap between the plates, and Lucrecia wondered if Aeris had chosen the direction because it was the nearest glimpse of daylight.

Ifalna leaned on her more and more, but she didn't really seem so heavy. Had Hojo not been feeding his precious specimens either, or had she refused it? Lucrecia hooked an arm under Ifalna's knees and lifted the other woman into her arms. Ifalna made a soft noise of surprise, and Lucrecia marvelled at how little burden she was.

Beyond an old warehouse rose the roof of an actual building. A church, Lucrecia realized as they rounded a pile of scrap, not fully in tact but impressively so compared to the broken shells of the buildings that neighbored it.

Lucrecia didn't realize they had all stopped to stare at it until Sephiroth went ahead up the steps to push open the door. She followed him inside.

The interior felt immense, especially after the confines of her cell. From the high ceilings to the broken floorboards, there was nothing sterile or efficient about it. Despite the damage to the masonry, not a single window was broken, and distant sunlight through their colored glass threw patterns across the floor.

Lucrecia had always disdained religion. Unscientific, superstitious nonsense. The gods that people invented only obscured the wonders of the Planet they were meant to explain. They kept people ignorant and incurious.

Though it was deserted now, this church had been designed as a place for people to gather and sing the praises of things they never expected to understand.

The exact opposite of the lab, something she found oddly comforting in the moment. When she was younger, she had always felt out-of-place on the rare occasion she stepped into a place of worship, but for that same reason, it felt like a place the likes of Hojo could never touch.

A silly notion. Superstitious. But in a practical sense, it could be a refuge for them. It could shelter them while they worked out what to do, and while it had no mystical power to repel Shinra, it certainly wouldn't be the first place to look for them.

"I can hear it," Ifalna murmured, relief easing the strain from her features.

"Hear what?" Sephiroth asked, glancing around.

"The Planet, silly," said Aeris.

The Planet? The Cetra were meant to hear its voice, but Ifalna had written of it only in passing. Lucrecia had swallowed her questions, knowing Ifalna was subject to enough scientific curiosity over what she was. Had the Planet led them here? To a church?

Lucrecia couldn't identify which god this place had been built to, but surely it was centuries since anyone built temples to the Planet itself.

She could puzzle it out later, when they were permitted the time for idle curiosities. She carried Ifalna to the nearest pew and laid her down across the bench.

"I'm going to have a look around," she said, "and see what we might have to work with here."

Doors on either side of the altar led into the rear of the church, and somehow it while was passing through them that it really hit her: she was free. She could do something as simple as decide to walk into the next room.

The door fell shut behind her and she took a few steps to lean against the stone wall for support. The urgency of their escape was waning, the tension of its moments no longer propping her up. She was out, she could choose--anything.

It was a burden she hadn't born in years. Much as she had despaired of her prison, in some ways it had been easy. If she could do nothing, then there was no expectation to do anything. She could wallow in the guilt of her past mistakes, but she couldn't make more of them.

Now, if she wanted to, she could turn around and walk back into the room where Sephiroth waited, and she could try to be a mother to him. And she would fail. In some way, she knew she would fail.

She thought of his hand fisted in her shirt. He needed her to try anyway.

There was a storage room off to her right, crammed with stacked chairs and cleaning supplies. The sight of a broom leaning neatly against the wall made her realize that for all its state of disrepair, the church wasn't dirty enough to be completely abandoned. Someone came here periodically to sweep the floors and wipe the dust from the pews.

Would the sort of person who did that be likely to turn them over to Shinra?

A staircase led up into the gallery, the sort of staircase you saw women descending in old movies, taking their lovers' hands as they reached the bottom. The building was grand enough, it could have served as a movie set in its heyday. Vincent would probably have known.

The handful of other side rooms had probably served as offices, once. An old cot rested in one, but it was so worn-out, Lucrecia suspected it would collapse if any of them tried to sleep on it. She found a few blankets instead and carried them back into the sanctuary.

Ifalna and Aeris hadn't moved, but Sephiroth had pulled away from them as though he'd been about to come looking for her. Her heart swelled.

"We're alone here, for the moment," she said as she joined them. "It does seem like the place has a caretaker."

"That's probably all right," Ifalna reasoned. "Shinra won't be advertising our escape to the public."

"No," Lucrecia agreed. "It will be a task for the Turks now." Would Hojo even want her back, or just order her disposal? How ironic, if she were killed by Vincent's replacement.

"The Turks?" said Aeris.

Ifalna reached out to brush Aeris's bangs from her face. "Don't worry about them. We're safe here."

Aeris was young enough to believe her mother's assurances. Sephiroth's glance told Lucrecia that he wasn't.

"We'll spend the night here," Lucrecia said. "In the morning, we'll figure out the rest."

Ifalna nodded her agreement and lay back. Lucrecia's gaze fell to her bandaged side. Moving on in the morning would be too soon; Ifalna needed somewhere to rest and recover.

"Once I've rested, I'll be able to heal it some myself," Ifalna told her. "Don't worry."

"You're sure?"

Ifalna nodded. "But thank you, for looking after me."

"It was nothing. I just... I'm grateful you didn't leave me behind."

"Of course not. I promised we'd leave together."

As if it was that simple. "It's a little strange, actually talking," Lucrecia admitted. "We never really had the chance before."

"I know," said Ifalna. "It all feels surreal."

It was surreal, and a little awkward. As often as she'd imagined it, she'd never really had Ifalna's eyes on her as they spoke. "...I'll let you rest," she decided, and turned to her son. Was that any less surreal? They hadn't spoken in years, not even on paper.

"...your braid's coming loose," she observed. "Would you like me to fix it for you?"

Sephiroth hesitated. "Okay," he decided.

They sat down together on another pew. Lucrecia gently pulled the tie from the ends of his hair and combed her fingers through it. It was smooth and silky, like she remembered, but it hadn't been long enough for a proper braid the last time they'd seen each other.

"I always dreamt about doing this for you," she admitted. "It was one of the few things my mother did for me, when I was young."

Sephiroth was quiet for a long moment. "I know," he said. "You told me."

"Did I?" she wondered. She didn't remember getting the chance, but it had been so long, and her memories got tangled with her imaginings.

"When you come in the dreams," he said.

Lucrecia's hands stilled. "You mean... Are you saying you had the same dreams?"

"...yes. Sometimes." He sat very still, but there was a hesitation in his breathing, uncertainty over whether to say more, whether he'd already said too much.

"I thought they were just dreams," Lucrecia whispered. "You look exactly like I pictured... It was just a coincidence."

"Maybe that's all," said Sephiroth, like he thought it was what she wanted him to say.

Lucrecia let go his hair and shifted to look him in the eye. "Maybe not," she said. "I'm sorry... It's confusing. But you're a special boy, you know. You can do things other people can't. Maybe it was real."

"But it's weird. Right?"

"It's not typical," Lucrecia conceded. "But that doesn't make it bad. All this time, I... I wanted to see you. I wanted you to know I still thought of you, I still loved you. If that really reached you, if it wasn't just in my head, then I'm so grateful."

Sephiroth's hands were clasped in his lap, his thumbs fidgeting. "...I wanted it to be you," he said. "Professor Gast used to ask me if I heard people talking to me, who weren't there. But Professor Hojo... he never asked me that."

Lucrecia laid her hand atop his. "We'll figure it out together. Okay? I know that there's so much you can do, and now you'll really have the chance to do it."

She wanted him to find his potential, and then whatever he chose to do with it, she would support him. That was what a mother was meant to do, wasn't it? Surely it wouldn't be hard, just to support him. Just to love him. She could do that.

Could she do it unselfishly?

Sephiroth nodded. "Okay," he said.

Lucrecia managed a smile and sat back, reaching for his hair again. All she had to do was just love him.

Chapter Text

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.

Chapter Text

Kasumi woke to the lookout's whistle.

It was still dark. She rolled to grab her shuriken and crept to the edge of the overlook. Making its way up the slope from the south was one of Shinra's robots.

Kasumi herself had encountered only one, before now. They were deadly, but difficult to deploy in Wutai. Most bridges wouldn't hold them, and their treads struggled to climb the mountainous terrain. Camped high above a steep slope, they should have been safe from any of the models they had heard of before.

This one was new: its frame mounted atop four powerful legs like those of an insect. Their points stabbed into the ground, affording it purchase and sending dirt showering down the path behind it with each step.

It had a sort of headless torso, with a machine gun mounted on either side like arms. The glint of metal under the moonlight suggested blades attached to each, both a deterrent to close combat and to ensure it could continue fighting even should it run out of ammunition.

The Shinra were clearly better at building weapons than they were at training men. The majority of their forces had been dispatched green to the field, and they won their battles by virtue of having more numbers to throw at them. Machines like this one might tip the scales more in their favor, enabling them to win without the demoralizing death toll.

They would have to defeat this one and spread what they learned, as other units had done in taking down earlier models. Because of them, Kasumi already knew their armor was too strong for Wutain incendiaries.

But, the reason it had likely found them was because they'd just raided a Shinra munitions depot. If it were daylight, she might still see smoke rising from where they'd destroyed what they couldn't carry.

Unlike the Shinra, they knew better than to camp too close to a pile of explosives. Kasumi caught the nearest of her warriors.

"Taiji, get to the stockpile and bring me something that can take that down. Take Hibari with you," she added, nodding behind him. The two of them nodded and darted off.

The machine's footfalls were growing louder. In moments, the camp would come into range of its guns. Kasumi knew from the flit of movement among the shadows that her people were moving for cover without her to command it. She took her shuriken and ducked behind a rocky outcropping.

Would that they had raided a materia cache, she couldn't help thinking. She had studied in the magic of the gods, but most of her people hadn't, depriving them of what had thus far proven the most effective weapon against these machines. But unlike their munitions, Shinra trusted their materia only to their elite SOLDIERs, who made up for their lack of unit cohesion with extensive training. Even one SOLDIER alone was a formidable opponent. No one took them on single-handedly, and targeting their camps carried a high risk.

Shinra's seemingly endless store of materia was an advantage they would likely hold until the end of the war, but it was just another number. All Shinra had were numbers.

Kasumi had people.

The robot cleared the slope and opened fire into empty bedrolls. When no screams followed, it rotated, scanning for targets. Most of her people had moved to the thicket, ducking up into positions that would have let them pick off individual men with ease. Shinra soldiers had night vision goggles, but they had trouble enough spotting them in the daytime.

The machine wouldn't need precision.

Kasumi focused, calling down lightning in anticipation of creating an opening, but the robot barely shuddered. Was it insulated beneath that armor?

Someone threw a flare out beneath it, the light making it easier to pick out the seams in its metal plating. It opened fire into the trees, and more than one of her warriors cried out. Kasumi and a few near her were safe for the moment behind the rocks, but none of them had anywhere to go without breaking cover.

Kasumi had considered Shinra might send troops after them in retaliation, but she hadn't anticipated needing to retreat. The nearest Shinra camp was the depot they'd hit, and it had suffered heavy casualties. Its remaining men posed little threat.

Surely they hadn't missed this thing when scouting the depot. Where had Shinra sent it from?

Shuriken and kunai clanged off the robot's armor, each a narrow miss of one of its joints. Kasumi focused her magic to imbue her weapon with lightning and joined them in their efforts.

Machine gun rounds continued to tear through the trees, splintering wood and downing the slimmer branches. Shouts and cries accompanied her people's movement as they fell or ducked back behind sturdier trunks.

A blade severed something on the right side of the robot, and that gun sputtered to a stop. Yulong shouted out guidance on where to target: the ammunition belts were exposed for a short gap where they fed into the gun from the ammunition drum.

Taiji and Hibari returned. Gunfire caught Hibari and took her down, but Taiji reached her position with a pack of explosives.

The robot returned its attention to the thicket. It had reached the treeline and began cutting through the trees with its attached blades, as if it intended to plow right through to the seaside cliffs.

If they detonated anything to destroy it now, the blast would be too close to her people. She needed to lure it away.

Kasumi threw her shuriken again as she thought of how else she might catch its attention. The blades caught it between the plates of its armor, delivering a shock that stalled it for just a second. In that second, someone's knife cut through the second ammunition belt. All it had now were its blades.

Kasumi stepped out from behind her cover as her shuriken returned to her hand. She threw it again, and this time the robot seemed to take notice of her. Its body began to turn.

"Taiji," she said. "I want you to plant the explosives just there"--she pointed to a spot in the middle of their empty camp--"then back off and detonate them on my mark."

"You're not really going to..."

"It can't fire. I only need to avoid its blades. Don't hesitate."

Kasumi ran forward, shuriken in hand, to command the machine's full attention. "Get clear!" she shouted to her people in the trees, and ducked beneath the robot's bladed arm as it spun towards her. Its legs shifted position slowly, but its torso swivelled fast. She danced left, right, around behind it, and thought for an instant she wouldn't be able to control this thing's path. She could barely keep up with it.

She ducked behind a mangled tree and its blade caught for an instant in the trunk. Beyond it, Kasumi caught a glimpse of her people darting away up the path. She jammed one point of her shuriken deep into the armor, ducked beneath the second arm as it swung, and delivered a shock of lightning. The machine froze, and she turned to run.

It recovered and gave chase. Its legs slammed into the ground behind her, picking up speed and closing the small lead she'd had on it. She passed where Taiji had readied the explosives and dove, shouting the signal. She threw her arms up over her head as the blast slammed into her.

Her ears rang. The stench of exploded munitions burned its way into her lungs, a different scent from the incendiary mixtures she had spent her youth carefully learning.

Her body obeyed her as she hauled herself over onto her back, but pain blossomed in her arm. A piece of shrapnel. If it was the only one, she'd been lucky.

Ahead of her was the dark hulk of the robot. Its legs were splayed, the remains of its body collapsed between them. One of its arms remained attached, just barely, and Kasumi spotted the other close to the treeline.

It wasn't even one of Shinra's more powerful bombs, she knew. They would drop those from above, careless with their targets because they could afford to be. They would hear the whistle and brace themselves, knowing some place they had passed through only hours before might be gone when they returned.

Kasumi had been glad to see the depot go up in smoke. She had lost no one in that raid, and left with the satisfaction that those bombs would claim not a single Wutain life. Even having lost people now, in Shinra's reprisal, she knew it was worth it.

Gorkii appeared suddenly from behind her. She startled, jarring her arm, and winced. She hadn't heard him coming. She didn't hear him as he spoke either, but she could see her name in the shape his lips made.

"I can't hear you," she said. The words vibrated in her throat, but even her own voice was stolen before it reached her ears.

Gorkii switched to the hand signals they used to maintain stealth. Injured? he asked her.

Kasumi motioned to her arm. "I can't tell how bad it is, but I don't feel anything else."

I'll look. Gorkii took her arm gently in his hands, and Taiji joined them with a torch. The two of them looked her over, checking for other injuries. They found nothing but bruises, but under better light, Kasumi's glance fell on a large piece of armor plating that had buried into the ground not far from where her head had been.

She let out a breath.

I'm going to pull it out, Gorkii signed to her. Taiji held the torch steady, and Kasumi grit her teeth. She cried out as Gorkii pulled the shrapnel free. Blood ran down her arm, its warmth fading into the sensation of Gorkii's healing magic. The bleeding slowed, and he wound a bandage tight around what remained. Pressure made the pain blossom, and her mind went black for a moment, nothing but the ringing in her ears.

Gorkii's hands were moving again, and she focused on them in time to make out him telling her he was going to check the others. She nodded and gestured with her good arm for Taiji to go with him. Taiji hesitated, touched her shoulder, and left, taking the light with him.

Kasumi lay back against the ground and looked up into the sky. The dark of night still reigned, a gibbous moon climbing higher among the stars as it grew nearer to daybreak. The same sky hung over the capital, where her daughter was asleep in her futon, the faces of Da-chao watching over her.

Yuffie was not yet four, too small for the challenge of hiking the mountain herself to see the world as the gods did. Kasumi thought of returning in time for her birthday, carrying her up to the cradle of the palm, and pointing out to her all the rivers below that Leviathan had traced through their land.

Kasumi had heard that the people of Midgar didn't even remember their own gods. Shinra had offered its marvels under the guise of progress, and now Midgar belonged to them so wholly that no one remembered the places that had existed before it.

Kasumi didn't know whether Mako truly represented progress, but she knew that Shinra didn't, not for Wutai. Everything that Shinra offered was a foothold. Allowing their reactor meant ceding land to Shinra and allowing their people the necessary presence to maintain the equipment. A Shinra blockade on eastern coal had already forced them to ration their electricity, but a Shinra reactor meant that Shinra would always decide if their electricity was to be rationed. Shinra security would move in to protect the company's secrets.

Allow Shinra into Wutai, and in a few short decades, it might have another name, too.

They had no intention of bowing to that, no matter how many bombs Shinra dropped or how many ports they seized. Wutai could feed itself, and if the blockade crippled their ability to produce their own weapons, they could seize them instead from the Shinra.

Kasumi was determined that Yuffie would not forget who she was or where she came from. She was a Kisaragi.

Her own mother looked after Yuffie now in her absence, alongside Godo's aging parents. Kasumi knew they would teach her daughter the old ways, but she wondered if it was lonely in that big house. There weren't so many children Yuffie's age in the capital; with the war brewing on the horizon, many had chosen to wait, and now they kept on waiting.

Some of them would never have the opportunity.

But Kasumi meant to see as many of them through this as she could. This was their land, and the gods were on their side. They made Shinra pay dearly for every inch, and the tide would soon turn. The war might not be over by November, but they would make Shinra regret ever setting foot in Wutai.

Gorkii returned to her field of vision, and she pushed herself back up with her good arm. "How many did we lose?" she asked him. She still couldn't hear her own voice, but she tried not to let that trouble her. She knew from experience that a flashbang detonated too close could cause the same ringing, the same temporary hearing loss. Give it time, and it would return.

Seven dead. Twelve wounded.

Seven was too many, she thought, even as she knew the cost of learning a new machine could and had come steeper.

"Can we still make it to Beiyang Point?"

Gorkii looked skeptical, and he shook his head. Better to send a runner to Godo's camp.

Kasumi nodded. It was unlikely another attack would come tonight. A new machine meant there weren't many of them yet, and the soldiers in the area would hesitate before attacking a unit that had taken one out. All they defended was some distant corporate interest, and they lacked Wutai's resolve.

That was why Wutai would win in the end.

"Send two," Kasumi told him. "The rest of us will wait here and nurse our wounds. Once it's light out, I want people gathering the wreckage."

Gorkii tilted his head inquisitively.

"Staniv is with Godo's camp," she explained. "I want him to take a look at it. Even with the blast damage, he might be able to work out weaknesses to exploit."

Gorkii nodded. I'll organize it. You rest.

"I won't argue," she said. She held out her good arm, and he helped her to her feet. They crossed the ruined camp to where her bedroll remained largely unscathed. Kasumi sank back into it and looked up at the stars until sleep found her, the same stars as over the capital. She would see it again.

Chapter Text

"All right, Cloud. You want to come over to the Lockharts' with me?"

Cloud shuffled his feet. "We weren't... invited," he said.

Claudia rolled her eyes. "You really think we need an invitation to check in on a neighbor? Especially to bring them my famous pineapple upside-down cake?"

It was only canned pineapple, of course, and it wasn't famous. A tiny little place like Nibelheim had never seen fresh, but not even the canned stuff had graced the shelves of the general store in some time. Shinra's war had disrupted all manner of supply chains, not to mention the things they decided to commandeer for the war effort. Claudia sometimes imagined soldiers camped on the battlefield, eating canned pineapple.

She wouldn't begrudge them a few comforts, but she'd rather the whole affair were just over with. The newspaper stories regaled them with Shinra's victories, as though they fought for the whole world. Claudia didn't know a lot about Wutai, but she did know they made the best fireworks. She'd grown up watching them every winter solstice, but Cloud hadn't seen them since he was five. Was Shinra protecting him from that?

"How come they get the cake...?" Cloud mumbled. Maybe he was just upset she hadn't made it for him. She'd been saving that can for a special occasion, after all, and his birthday wasn't too far off.

"Because it's good news," Claudia reminded him, "and Thea loves pineapple. Will you get the door for me?"

Cloud huffed, but he dutifully crossed the room to the door and held it open. He was either going to be the moodiest teenager, or he was doing her a great favor and getting it all out of his system in advance. Was it possible for a teenager not to be moody?

"Thank you, Cloud," she said as she carried the cake out the door.

The Lockharts lived right next door, and Claudia thought it a shame that they weren't better friends. To an extent, she understood why. It was a small town with small town sensibilities, and certain things like having a child out of wedlock just weren't done. People limited their association with her, and that wouldn't have bothered her if it didn't extend to Cloud. The adults never said anything to him directly, but all the kids knew he didn't have a father, and though they didn't understand why there should be anything wrong with that, they took their cue from their parents.

The other year when Thea had started calling her Mrs. Strife, she'd been grateful. Mrs. Strife, the sympathetic widow. Thea had enough clout as the mayor's wife that the pretense was spreading, and it was much better for Cloud if she'd had a husband and lost him than if she'd never had one at all. Thea's daughter Tifa wasn't even a full year his junior. They'd make great friends.

It was Tifa who answered the door with a bright smile that hadn't graced her face since her mother had gotten sick. "Good afternoon, Mrs. Strife!" she said cheerfully.

"Good afternoon, Tifa," Claudia replied, smiling right back. "Do you think your mother would be up for a visit? I brought some cake."

"Yeah, I bet she'd like that," Tifa said, opening the door wider to let her in. Cloud trailed after. "Everyone's always bringing casseroles," Tifa added, making a face.

"Casseroles are nice, but you get sick of anything after a while," Claudia agreed. "I know Thea always had a sweet tooth. I heard she's got her appetite back, so I thought she might appreciate a change of pace."

Tifa nodded. "She's been doing a lot better. The doctor said she's out of the woods."

"I'm very glad to hear that." Claudia had overheard as much at the general store, but no one had told her directly. It was good to hear it from Tifa, with all the optimism it brought to her voice.

"Is that pineapple?" Tifa wondered, peering at the cake in Claudia's hands.

"That's right. There's no way any of you are sick of this, is there?"

Tifa giggled. "Definitely not," she agreed. She glanced past Claudia at Cloud and asked, "Did you help?"

"Uh... a little," said Cloud. Claudia smiled and kept her mouth shut. Cloud's 'help' had amounted to using the can opener, because somehow he'd developed the notion that baking wasn't manly, but the mere hint that Tifa might approve cast that notion into doubt.

"Mom said she's gonna teach me," said Tifa. "I'm gonna help her out when she starts cooking again."

"I'm sure she'll appreciate it," Claudia said with a glance at Cloud that he pretended not to see. "What about your father? Is he at home?" Surely he would have heard them in the foyer by now.

Tifa shook her head. "Mom sent him to the store with a list. There's a couple things on there we don't really get anymore, so... He might be a while."

"Did your mother include those on purpose?" Claudia wondered. Brian hadn't gotten out of the house much in some time. A trip to the store was a small start, but it might be good for him.

"Maybe," Tifa answered with a knowing smirk. "Anyway, you can take that upstairs to the sitting room."

Tifa led the way upstairs. Excepting the empty old mansion, the Lockharts' house was the biggest in Nibelheim, and there was indeed a small sitting room adjacent to the master bedroom. There was a cozy table set for two that Claudia imagined was quite lovely to have breakfast at. Family photos sat atop a short bookshelf, and treasured knickknacks sat safe behind the glass of a curio cabinet.

Claudia set the cake down in the center of the table and followed Tifa into the bedroom.

"Mom, Mrs. Strife came by to visit. She brought pineapple cake."

"Oh? I haven't had good cake in ages." Thea sat in bed, propped up against the pillows, an open book lowered onto her lap. She was still pale, but there was color back in her cheeks. "Thank you, Claudia," she added, smiling up at her.

"I thought it might be a nice afternoon treat," Claudia said.

Thea nodded. "When Brian gets back from the store, we'll all have some. Tifa, why don't you show Cloud your room? You can keep an eye out for your father."

"Sure." Tifa nodded and grabbed Cloud by the hand with the ease of someone who'd never had much experience being lonely. Cloud gave her a startled look, but he didn't protest being led out of the room.

"She's in good spirits," Claudia observed, and returned her attention to Thea. "I heard you're on the mend. I hope it wasn't exaggerated."

"No," Thea said, a relief in her voice as she confirmed it. "The fever's gone, and I'm feeling stronger every day. The doctor still wants me resting in bed another week to be safe, but..." She made a face.

"Oh, I'm sure he just wants you to take it easy," said Claudia. "Don't go climbing Mt. Nibel, and you should be all right."

Thea laughed. It was a soft laugh, but it came and went without triggering a coughing fit. The bedroom window looked out over Claudia's roof, and she'd heard that cough often over the past few months.

"No, no Mt. Nibel for me," Thea agreed. "I thought I'd start with making it to the piano in Tifa's room. It's been ages."

"It's in Tifa's room?" Claudia wondered. Thea had given lessons, and Claudia had always assumed the piano sat in a more public spot.

"She's terrible about practicing, so we thought that might help," Thea explained. "We moved it up there a few months ago, and... Well, I'm glad now. I'm not sure I can make it all the way downstairs yet."

"Give it time. If your appetite's back, then it shouldn't be long."

"I hope so."

"Is there anything you're craving?" Claudia asked. "Tifa tells me you're all sick of casseroles."

"Oh, I put all my cravings on Brian's list," said Thea. "I don't think he's going to find any of that coffee, though, the kind from down south? I miss the smell of it."

"I know what you mean. The war can't end soon enough, as far as I'm concerned."

Thea nodded. "It's good that Cloud's still young," she said. "I heard some of the older boys were thinking about leaving for Midgar, until Mr. Kiefer talked them out of it."

It was a sobering thought. Cloud was much too young to think of it, not even nine years old yet, but the war had stretched on for three years now, and no one was quite sure how much longer it would endure. Surely it would be over before Cloud could entertain any such thoughts for himself.

"Good for him," she said aloud. "We don't need any of our boys running off to fight somebody else's war."

"It's not entirely somebody else's," said Thea. "It's their reactor."

"Well, let them take it back if they want to," Claudia declared. "We'll manage."

Thea smiled. "I like that attitude. I know Gramps is always complaining about it. Maybe he's got a point."

"I can't say I remember too much about what it was like before they built that thing. I must've been six or seven. But there were more trees, weren't there?"

"A lot more," Thea confirmed. "My papa used to take us hiking on Mt. Nibel all the time. Not up to the peaks, I mean, but the lower slopes had a lot of good trails through the woods. It would've been nice to take Tifa."

Claudia was quiet for a moment, because the first thought that popped into her head was something scandalous, but she thought she was safe with Thea. "I hear there are a lot of mountains in Wutai, you know."

"Claudia!" Thea exclaimed, but she was smiling. "You aren't suggesting a vacation there?"

"Why not? You'll be on your feet by the time the war's over, and once Shinra clears their damn troops out of the port, it's not so far. Right?"

Thea shook her head. "I think there's places to hike closer than Wutai," she said. "But I take your point. It would be nice... to take a trip together. Brian's been so good to me, he deserves a break. And no child should be cooped up inside all the time."

"For the next few days at least, I think she'll be perfectly happy to be cooped up," Claudia reasoned.

"Papa's back!" came Tifa's shout from the next room. Feet pounded across the floorboards.

"Unless you want to send her running through the streets shouting the good news," Claudia amended just before Tifa appeared in the doorway.

"Why don't you and Cloud help him with the groceries?" Thea suggested. "Let him know there's cake waiting. The sooner everything gets put away, the sooner we can eat."

Tifa nodded and raced down the stairs. Cloud followed in her wake. The front door opened, and Tifa's excited chatter drifted up the stairwell.

It wasn't long before the five of them were gathered in the bedroom, Claudia and Cloud on the window seat, Brian and Tifa on the other bed. Thea finished her cake almost as quickly as the kids, and Brian offered her the last few bites of his.

As Brian collected the empty plates, Claudia retrieved the rest of the cake, and she followed him back downstairs to tuck it safely into the refrigerator among the casseroles and fresh groceries. They'd be eating well.

"Thank you," said Brian. It was a little stiff, but earnest. He had never shown her the warmth that Thea had, which wasn't surprising given his position. The town had elected him mayor, and he wasn't a mayor who bucked tradition.

"You're very welcome," said Claudia. "It's good to see her doing so well. She deserves it. You both do."

He nodded. "And Tifa... Well. It's a relief."

A relief that she wouldn't lose her mother so young, that he wouldn't have to raise her alone. Claudia smiled sympathetically.

"Would it be all right if I dropped in again next week?" she asked. "I have some new recipes I'd like to try."

"I think Thea would like that. Everyone's been... a bit on eggshells with her. You're not like that."

Claudia huffed. "Well, I'm going to take that as a compliment."

"I did mean it that way," Brian said sheepishly.

"Do you need any help with the dishes before we get out of your hair?"

"No, but thank you. And Cloud, too, for helping with the groceries." From the way he said it, Claudia could tell he was still a little unsure of Cloud, but it was a tentative offer, and she took it.

"Tifa's going to be a good influence on him, I can tell."

Brian smiled softly. "I'll have your cake plate washed for the next time you come by, too," he promised.

Claudia returned the smile and nodded. "I appreciate it."

Cloud was waiting for her in the foyer. Tifa saw them out with a wave and a "See you soon!" and they stepped out into the afternoon sunlight. The sky overhead was clear and deep, deep blue.

"Well, it seems like you survived the ordeal," she remarked to her son.

"It wasn't so bad," he acknowledged.

"How was Tifa's room?"

"Big," said Cloud. "She's got a piano, and a desk, and she told me all the names of her stuffed animals."

Claudia couldn't help a pang of regret. She couldn't afford to give Cloud his own room or as many toys as the other children had. She'd even made some of them herself, misshapen little plush chocobos and painted wooden knights. He was a good boy and he never complained, but she didn't doubt he felt the difference.

"All of them, huh?" she said aloud. "Any good names?"

"She's got... a lizard called Valvados. She says he's a dragon but in disguise. He's got a lair up on Mt. Nibel."

"Does he terrorize the rest of them?"

"Uh-huh. But he never wins."

Claudia nodded in satisfaction. "Well, that's as it should be."

"...we're going back again next week?" Cloud ventured.

"Yep," Claudia confirmed. "But I'm sure Tifa wouldn't mind if you went around sooner and asked if she'd like to play."

"I guess not."

Claudia smiled and ruffled his hair. Knowing Cloud, he might not work up the courage to ask this week, but maybe after a few visits, he'd feel more comfortable. Or maybe Tifa would drop by herself.

"How about a walk with your old mom, for now? It's a beautiful day."

"...okay."

The valley north of the village wasn't what it used to be. The few remaining trees were withered, and most of the birds had gone save for the crows. But the grass was still green, and wildflowers bloomed under the summer sun.

It was a beautiful day, and Claudia felt optimistic. Thea was getting better, Cloud was making a friend, and the war would be over soon. If Wutai won, then maybe they'd sail across the ocean and shut off the reactor, and the trees would come back. Probably not, but it didn't hurt to imagine that, like Valvados in his lair, it wouldn't win in the end.

Chapter Text

The town of Pinos wasn't immediately visible once they left the forest behind them, but Lucrecia lifted her eyes to the mountains, picking out its direction by the now-familiar ridgeline. She'd grown to anticipate these excursions, as anxious as they made Ifalna.

Lucrecia was the one who had convinced her of the importance of keeping tabs on Shinra. Those first few years by the river, they'd kept entirely to themselves. They'd only discovered news of the war well after it had begun, from Lucrecia's first cautious foray into Kalm.

She'd practiced for months beforehand, until she could be certain that she could make herself invisible on command, and she'd gone alone, that time. In the years since, Sephiroth had honed his own illusions, surpassing what seemed to be the limit of her ability. Unlike her, he could disguise himself, although he'd only been able to copy the appearances of those he'd seen.

Their power still unnerved Ifalna--these were the tools by which Jenova had deceived her ancestors--but she acknowledged its usefulness all the same. There was no risk in being found if no one could see them.

Still, Lucrecia never blamed her for not wanting to come on these trips. She didn't need to volunteer to put herself under that power. Lucrecia didn't like the idea of it either; it was one thing to deceive strangers, another to do it to Ifalna.

They were hundreds of miles now from Kalm and their river hideaway. As more people made their way to Midgar--convinced either that they needed its protection or that it needed theirs--she and Ifalna had made the decision to put more distance between themselves and Shinra's stronghold. They had left their first home together behind and travelled slowly south.

Pinos was the nearest civilization now, a little town outside the western entrance to the mythril mines. Kalm had claimed all rights to the mine some years ago, leaving the out-of-work men of Pinos easy prey for Shinra's war propaganda. By now, there wasn't anyone left to recruit, and on their forays into the town, the only Shinra soldiers she and Sephiroth had encountered were those home on leave.

"You really think Ifalna doesn't know?" Sephiroth asked her, picking up the thread of a conversation she'd hoped he would drop on coming out into the open. "Aeris knows."

"Aeris knows because you told her!" Lucrecia reminded him. "I'm lucky a ten-year-old is better at keeping secrets than you are."

"I just don't keep them from her," he said. "You always think she's too young to know things."

"I really don't think it's any of her business this time."

"Isn't it?"

Lucrecia threw him a look. She shouldn't have confided in him in the first place, but then, he'd noticed it on his own. "It isn't as though anything will come of it."

"Why not?"

"Well, if Ifalna knows and she hasn't said anything, then obviously she doesn't want anything to change."

Sephiroth eyed her skeptically. "Maybe she's waiting for you to be ready," he suggested.

As if she ever could be, or ought to be. Her relationships as a young woman had flared out dramatically, and her marriage had continued that pattern and dialed up its intensity. She had only ever hinted at her failures to Sephiroth, privately agonizing over what to tell him should he ever ask about his father. The longer he went without asking, the more certain she became that he already knew.

She wondered what he thought of her for it, and didn't want to know that answer either. So they both went on not asking.

"Nothing's going to come of it," Lucrecia reiterated.

"...I think it would be okay," Sephiroth said softly.

She let it lie. He was seventeen and didn't know what he was talking about.

But then, her friendship with Ifalna was unlike anything she'd ever had before. Ifalna had known her worst mistakes from the outset, they had shared the worst experiences of their life, and they had escaped them together. There were no secrets to keep, except for what this feeling had grown into.

Was it a dangerous thing? It always had been before. But maybe it was because she'd been so starved for it, she didn't know how to seek love in moderation. Now she'd lived for years on a steady diet of it from her little family. Not the same kind of love, but maybe it made her... steadier. Maybe it could make her ready.

Maybe that was a bad idea.

As the town came into view, she and Sephiroth wordlessly wrapped themselves in illusion. She became invisible, while Sephiroth took on the appearance of some woman he'd seen in the north. He hadn't yet mastered his voices, but a young man would have stood out in a place where all the young men had gone. He got by trading for the supplies they needed by gesturing, and they didn't need to speak to listen.

The woman behind the counter at the general store recognized Sephiroth--or rather the disguise he wore--and smiled warmly in welcome. Lucrecia wished it was a reaction he could experience with his own face.

The shopkeeper accepted their hides and surplus produce and counted up how much gil they were worth, knowing it would mostly be spent in her store. What they traded was never worth much, but they never needed much. Soaps and flour, a cheap sketchbook and a small bag of fudge as a treat. On the way out, Sephiroth picked over the little take-a-book-leave-a-book box by the door and swapped for a new handful.

They walked the main street slowly, listening for chatter and picking up a copy of the latest paper at the post office newsstand. Still pinned to the bulletin board nearby, half-hidden behind more recent flyers, was the old wanted poster they'd seen circulated painting her as some kind of kidnapper. Lucrecia recognized her picture as the one she'd taken for her ID badge, but the others Hojo must have taken in the lab as he catalogued his specimens. They had a copy folded up inside an old notebook, the only photos they were ever likely to have of Aeris and Sephiroth as children.

There was no one chatting at the post office, and the streets seemed emptier than usual, but Lucrecia didn't make anything of it until she spotted the trucks with the familiar logo parked outside of the town hall.

Her hand gripped Sephiroth's arm, and they both stopped. Sephiroth looked down, and Lucrecia followed his gaze, tracing tire tracks behind them west out of town, the road back towards Junon.

Sephiroth took a step forward, but Lucrecia gave his arm a tug towards the nearest alley. They slipped down it first, and Sephiroth dropped his disguise in favor of full invisibility. There were no chances to be taken with Shinra.

A few people glanced over as she and Sephiroth entered the town hall, confusion flitting across their faces as the door opened and closed without apparently admitting anyone, but the presentation on the small stage soon recaptured their attention.

A woman stood there, flanked by Shinra soldiers standing at ease. She was young, blonde, her figure accentuated by a revealing red dress that invited you to look but absolutely not to touch. Lucrecia had read about her in the papers: Scarlet, a woman who had ascended to the Directorship of Weapons Development near the start of the war. If she had worked in the department during Lucrecia's brief tenure, then their paths had never crossed.

Seeing her now in person, commanding the room with ease, Lucrecia was startled by a flash of jealousy. The first woman on Shinra's board of directors, a distinction she herself had failed to achieve. How ruthless had Scarlet had to be in claiming it? How many bodies had she stepped over?

Being a part of that monstrosity was nothing to envy, but at the same time, there was one man Lucrecia wished she had been able to put into an early grave.

Scarlet was reaching the end of her presentation. Her voice carried over the assembled townsfolk without need of a microphone. "So when your brave men secure Wutai's surrender," she was saying, "you can all rest assured they'll come home to a better life, their livelihoods guaranteed by Shinra, Inc."

As if Shinra ever guaranteed anything good.

Scarlet opened up the floor to questions. The first townsperson wanted to know if the war dragging on might cause delays in construction. Another asked for clarification on the proposed construction site and its distance from the town, citing concerns about Midgar's smog.

The smog caused by the reactors.

She and Sephiroth stood listening as the discussion went on, and Lucrecia's mind turned. A reactor for Pinos. The similarly-positioned nothing town of Nibelheim had made out all right, but that had been Shinra's first reactor, built in an era when they'd had less power to throw around. Would anyone's livelihood really be guaranteed? There would be conditions and loopholes in the fine print, and Shinra would buy the land cheap, using it as a foothold in their expansion. Someone would benefit, but it wouldn't be these people.

Scarlet and her men left the hall first, and the aging town headman quieted his people in her wake, reminding them of an upcoming meeting where the issue would be decided. They had until then to think over the proposal for themselves.

Lucrecia and Sephiroth slipped out ahead of the townsfolk and made their way quietly and swiftly back out of Pinos. All the while, Lucrecia felt the presence of the Shinra trucks at her back, as though she was being driven ahead of them. There was no sound of engines turning over, and every glance told her they hadn't moved.

They didn't speak or drop their illusions until they were safe within the cover of the trees, well out of sight.

"How long does it take to build a reactor?" Sephiroth wondered.

Lucrecia shook her head. "These days, I don't know. The Nibel reactor took years, but... It wasn't my department."

He was looking back in the direction of the town, frowning faintly. "...are we going to have to leave again?"

She didn't answer him. They both knew Ifalna would insist on it. Another migration to keep them safe from Shinra, leaving behind any familiarities. Sephiroth didn't get to walk Pinos as himself, but he had walked it, and there were people he'd come to know a little. A glimpse of a community and what it could be for people who didn't have to hide themselves.

Lucrecia curled her fingers tight. "...let's get home," she said.

They were careful not to wear any obvious paths through the forest to their camp. Lucrecia had struggled longest with finding her way, and even now she left it to Sephiroth to lead them back. She'd lived her life among roads and buildings with clear signs, maybe for too long ever to adapt as well as him. But it heartened her that he knew his way through places that weren't metal corridors.

Ifalna sat outside the lean-to, fingers busy mending one of Aeris's dresses. Her eyes were downcast, focused on her work.

She was beautiful, but Lucrecia never said it. She'd grown to hate the compliment in her younger days. When her classmates and colleagues had said it, she knew it was the beginning and end of what they thought of her.

Hojo was the only man who never seemed to care what she looked like. She'd liked that about him. When things got bad, when Vincent had called her beautiful, she'd thought for a little while that maybe it was the better compliment after all. Safer, if he only wanted what he saw, instead of all of her.

Lucrecia wanted more from Ifalna than what was on the surface.

Ifalna looked up at their approach, but her usual relief at their safe return was dampened by their expressions. "Something's happened," she observed.

Lucrecia turned to Sephiroth. "Why don't you go find Aeris?" she suggested. "Ifalna and I will talk it over."

"...I don't want to leave," he said.

"I know." Lucrecia brushed his hair back from his face, the face so few ever got to see. "We'll decide what's best."

Sephiroth studied her expression, seemed to note her resolve, and nodded. He dropped his pack outside the lean-to and walked off towards the garden.

Lucrecia sat down with Ifalna. "We haven't been discovered," she assured her first. "There was a delegation from Shinra in town, presenting a proposal to build a reactor."

Ifalna stilled, then hooked her needle into the fabric of the dress and set it aside. "A reactor in Pinos?"

"Not in the town proper. The proposed site is some miles farther south."

"I'm surprised they bothered to ask permission."

Lucrecia shrugged. "It makes them look better, and it's probably an easy win. The townspeople sound like they're going to accept."

"...then we'll have to be moving on soon," Ifalna said, predictably.

"Will we?"

"It's Shinra."

Lucrecia looked out into the trees. A recent string of dry days had browned patches of the canopy, but there weren't places this green near Midgar anymore. "What if we could convince them to turn Shinra away?"

"Convince them?" Ifalna repeated incredulously. "You mean reveal ourselves to them?"

"They don't have to know who we are. We won't risk the children, and we'll--"

"You think we won't attract notice just by speaking out against Shinra at all?" Ifalna interrupted. "That's not something people do here."

Lucrecia fell silent. With so many of the men here away at war, the townspeople might well call them Wutai sympathizers. And maybe Ifalna was right. If they did this, even if they did convince the townspeople, the attention would mean they'd need to move on again anyway.

"...do you think I'm a coward?" Ifalna asked softly.

"What?" Lucrecia looked back at her. "No, of course not."

Ifalna was staring at her lap, wringing her hands. "The Planet is crying out for help, and I... I'm only thinking about my daughter. I've let my duty as a mother supersede my duty as a Cetra."

It had taken Ifalna a long time to say much about what it meant to be a Cetra. Lucrecia had recognized early on that even free from the lab, Ifalna didn't like to be asked about it, so she'd waited for what she volunteered on her own. The treasure trove of knowledge that Gast must have unlocked, Lucrecia saw first in the way the land thrived under Ifalna's touch wherever they went.

And still, all they left in their wake were tiny oases, bound to fall back into ruin.

"...that isn't fair to you," she said.

"What?"

Lucrecia shook her head. "If the Cetra were still a thriving culture, or even a single community, it wouldn't all fall to you. You could be a mother, and others would tend to the Planet. But it's just you. Just us..."

Ifalna bit her lip. "There's no future for the Cetra," she said. "Not really. We'll dwindle into nothing..."

"But there can be a future for Aeris. We can't ever let Shinra take them back there. But... It always feels like there isn't any way to do what's best for them. Hiding them from Shinra, we cut them off from everything."

"So you want to make a stand?"

"I don't know. A small one, maybe. If Shinra doesn't take Pinos, isn't the world a little safer for them? Even if this time, we still have to leave."

Ifalna looked at her, and her brow was still furrowed with worry, but she said, "All right."

"All right?" Lucrecia repeated, brightening.

Ifalna nodded. "I don't want to run so far that there's nowhere left to run."

When it came time for the next town hall meeting, they left Sephiroth to look after Aeris. Both children understood they were to leave if their mothers didn't return, assuming capture, but Lucrecia wondered if they really would, if it came down to it. Aeris had a rebellious streak, and Sephiroth was growing confident in his abilities.

It just wouldn't come to that.

They were careful on the approach, Lucrecia cloaking them both in invisibility while Ifalna gripped her hand. It was as though she sought comfort from Lucrecia for the very thing Lucrecia was inflicting on her. They circled around to the north of the town, approaching from the direction of the mythril mines. Lucrecia dropped her illusion, and for the first time in years, they faced being seen as themselves.

The Shinra trucks were still parked outside town hall, but there were no soldiers in the street, and Scarlet was nowhere to be seen. Lucrecia gave Ifalna's hand a squeeze before they stepped into the building, but the Shinra weren't inside either. Waiting at the town's modest inn, perhaps, for the verdict.

A few people looked over as the door opened, and even the brief glances made her skin prickle. Ifalna never let go of her hand. But if anyone recognized them from that half-hidden wanted poster on the bulletin board, they didn't show it.

They took seats in the back of the hall. Lucrecia wondered if the townspeople might reject the reactor on their own, allowing them to sit through this without ever having to speak up. There was a chance of that, wasn't there?

A few more people trickled in after them, and then the town headman began the meeting. Some concerns were voiced, but the talk leaned more towards the jobs Shinra had promised, and what modernity Mako might bring to their town.

She could feel Ifalna tense beside her, her breathing measured as she tried to work up the courage to interrupt. Lucrecia stood.

"I would like to say a few words, if I may," she said. At the headman's nod, she went on, "I'm not from your town, so I know I have no say in your decision, but I do have experience with Shinra. You can't trust what they've presented you, from the contract to the environmental studies. They only want to make a show of doing this above-board."

"And what are your credentials, to discount them?" wondered the headman.

"...I used to work for them," Lucrecia said. "And I lived in Midgar for a time. I don't know if any of you have ever been to Midgar..." She glanced over the crowd, at the faces now turned in her direction. There were a few nods.

"I went once," one woman volunteered. "It was incredible, like nothing I'd ever seen."

"Incredible, maybe," Lucrecia conceded, "but at what cost? Did you see the wasteland that surrounds it? Shinra's told you that Mako energy is not only plentiful, but limitless. This is a lie. It will dry up eventually, and your land with it."

"That's just Wutain propaganda," said another woman. "We all know there's air pollution from the reactors, but it's still cleaner than coal."

Lucrecia stared at her. "You think I'm making up the wasteland?"

"I think it's got nothing to do with the reactors. They have a reactor near Junon, too, and nothing's wrong with their land."

"She's right," another woman chimed in. "I was in Junon just last month."

Lucrecia shook her head. "The Junon reactor is much newer, and there's only the one."

"They only mean to build one reactor here, you know. Even if you were right, one reactor wouldn't be the kind of drain on the land as you're saying it is in Midgar."

Ifalna got to her feet. "It isn't only about land," she said, a quaver in her voice that failed to steady as she went on. "Maybe you'll be fine for a while, decades even, before your crops start to fail. But the energy the reactors take is the lifeblood of this Planet and everything on it, including you."

The women exchanged glances. "Doesn't that make it ours to use as we see fit?"

"No, you don't understand. You're using it up. Everyone you've ever loved and lost, they become a part of that Lifestream. When it gets drawn out by the reactors, that's the end of them. They cease to exist in any form."

"Now you're just bringing old-fashioned superstition into it. We can't base a decision on what a few people think happens when we die."

"They're dead anyway," added an older man. "Reactor or no reactor, they aren't coming back."

Ifalna looked helplessly to Lucrecia.

"It isn't superstition," Lucrecia stated. "There is science supporting the cycle of the Lifestream, but Shinra won't give you the data. At the very least, consider waiting until you've had the opportunity to search it out for yourselves. Confirm what we've been telling you."

"If we reject the reactor, Shinra will take their proposal to another town. They already took our mines."

"You can survive without Shinra," said Ifalna.

"Shinra is the sign of the times," one woman said. "You say they're lying to us, but our men are sending money home. Our men are fighting for progress, and I don't want them coming back here to find it's left them all behind."

"It isn't progress," said Lucrecia. "It only looks like it."

The town headman lifted his hand, locked eyes with Lucrecia, and gestured for her to sit down. "I think you've both said your piece. Would anyone else like to speak before we put it to a vote?"

They voted by a show of hands: those against the reactor, and those in favor. At just a glance over the assembly, Lucrecia couldn't have told the difference, but when she counted...

"Then it's settled," said the headman. "We'll accept Shinra's proposal."

Lucrecia leapt to her feet. "You--"

Ifalna's fingers caught her wrist, trembling, urgent. They couldn't afford to draw any more attention to themselves.

"...you'll regret this," she muttered, and let Ifalna lead her from the hall.

A pair of Shinra soldiers loitered outside. Ifalna's grip went white-knuckle, and Lucrecia yanked invisibility around them. It would have been a stupid move, but the soldiers weren't facing them, and no one else was in the street. The door had shut behind them.

Someone's chocobo tied up outside warked in surprise, and the soldiers looked their way--looked right through them. Lucrecia exhaled silently and tugged on Ifalna's hand. They walked carefully past the soldiers, and then took the fastest route out of town.

They pressed on until they reached the cover of the forest, where Lucrecia let her illusion drop.

Ifalna stopped. "I'm sorry, I need a moment," she said, and sank to the ground.

Lucrecia let out a furious huff and set to pacing where the underbrush allowed. "Those idiots," she muttered. "They know Shinra took their mines, and they'll still trust Shinra to get them out of the situation it put them in in the first place. They could have at least delayed the vote a few days to try to do some research. They think they already know the downsides, but they're just--" She stopped herself. "...Ifalna?"

"I'll be all right."

Ifalna wasn't just resting; she had curled in on herself, still shaking all over. Lucrecia knelt down in front of her and settled her hands on Ifalna's shoulders. Unexpectedly, Ifalna pitched into her, wrapping her arms around her and burying her face in Lucrecia's shoulder.

"...we were close, though, weren't we?" she mumbled.

"We were close," Lucrecia agreed. She hesitated. "We didn't stop this one, but... maybe the next one."

"What next one?"

"I don't know where, but there's going to be a next one. But Junon will dry up, and Pinos will dry up, and then they might remember that we tried to warn them. They'll realize they should have listened. And there will be more of them than just the two of us."

"...you don't really believe that," Ifalna observed. "But it's a nice thought."

She didn't believe it. People didn't like to admit when they were wrong, so the people here would likely spend years pretending they didn't see the problems once they began. Then again, it had been far from a unanimous vote.

"I don't know. It isn't likely, but it's feasible." Many things were like that. Ifalna was beginning to relax in her arms. "Maybe I just don't want to think I put you through this for nothing."

Ifalna pulled back, shaking her head. "I don't regret trying. We were right to try."

"You're a mess," Lucrecia pointed out.

"But... I'm not a coward." Ifalna brushed tears from her face. "You're always so fearless."

Lucrecia shook her head. "I'm scared, too."

"Are you?"

She glanced away. Of course she was afraid of Shinra, but when she was angry enough, she forgot to be. For those times when she lost clarity, she was more scared of herself than anything around them.

"After all this time," Ifalna said gently, "you still think you're going to ruin things for us?"

"I put us in danger today. Shinra could have caught us."

"Or, we could have defeated them here," said Ifalna. "It was only a few hands away. That outcome would have been your doing, too, but you only ever see the negative."

"The negative result is usually what I get," Lucrecia said wryly.

"Maybe that used to be true."

"You're so sure it's changed?"

"I am." Ifalna smiled enigmatically, and Lucrecia's heart stumbled a beat. "Ask me, when you're ready to."

Sephiroth was right. She did already know.

Chapter Text

Vivian Shinra strode with purpose down the hall of the modest topside apartment building. Her lawyers had all advised her against coming here, but she could tell from the look in their eyes that they didn't think much of her chances no matter what she did, so what did their opinions matter? She was sick of the condescension of men.

She pressed the buzzer without hesitation.

A woman perhaps ten years her senior answered the door, though the strawberry blonde of her hair lent her a youthful appearance. Vivian recognized her from televised events where she had stood beside her husband, no doubt advised by his PR team on how to be pretty and proper and silent.

"...you," she said, and Vivian wondered if the former Mrs. Shinra recognized her in the same way. She'd certainly wondered if his latest mistresses did, if such women even watched the news.

"Isabel Raleigh?" Vivian didn't need confirmation, but she was a woman of propriety, and it seemed improper to proceed as though they'd met before.

Of course, it was also improper to have stolen someone's husband.

"What are you doing here?" Isabel asked sharply, clearly deciding the latter offense held more weight.

"I have a proposition for you," said Vivian.

"A proposition?" Isabel repeated flatly. "There's nothing you could offer me that I would want."

She started to close the door, and Vivian spoke hurriedly:

"What about a second chance to take him down?"

The door stopped, Isabel's face framed in the narrow opening. She gave Vivian a hard look, making no effort to disguise her suspicion, but at length she stepped back, pulling the door open wider.

"I'll give you ten minutes to explain what the hell you mean by that," she said.

"I won't need ten minutes, unless you need me to repeat things you already know."

Vivian stepped into the apartment, glancing around. Isabel had, of course, been wealthy in her own right, a member of the high society crowd that had helped to bankroll Midgar's construction. The divorce proceedings had been as brutal as they were hidden from the public eye, and while they hadn't reduced her to the indignity of the undercity, the apartment was one Vivian considered distinctly lower class. She could see directly into the kitchen from the tiny living space, and it probably only had the one bedroom. A single pair of shoes sat beside the door, worn and practical.

The same was true of Isabel's attire: she dressed for comfort, not appearances. Vivian had always found that distasteful, but she couldn't deny there was something rebellious in it. That had its appeal.

Isabel shut the door behind them. "Well?"

"I'll get to the point," said Vivian. "I'm divorcing him. We both know he'll have the upper hand. He has all the Company's resources at his disposal, including the Turks."

Isabel scoffed. "Do you expect me to be sympathetic that you're going through the same thing you put me through?"

"No. But I'd be surprised if you went a day without hating him." Vivian took another pointed glance around the apartment. An apartment for one. "You've been through this before, which means you know his tricks. You may even have dirt on him that I don't know about."

"So I help you, and what do I get out of it, besides the satisfaction of dragging his name through the mud?"

"There's one thing I want to fight for that I imagine you'd be keenly interested in sharing," said Vivian. "Rufus."

Isabel's expression slackened in surprise. Godric Shinra had taken everything he felt belonged to him, and that included his son. Vivian didn't know what arguments he had presented to claim full custody, but she knew that Rufus hadn't seen his birth mother since the divorce. She was banking on the idea that Isabel didn't much care for that arrangement.

Anger quickly followed Isabel's surprise. "He isn't even your son," she said.

"That doesn't mean I don't care about him," Vivian said evenly. She hadn't when she had married Godric, but she wasn't heartless. "Godric isn't interested in being a father. I suspect he never was. All he wants is an heir so his empire can go on for eternity."

Isabel folded her arms. "And that bothers you enough that you'd want him? The responsibility of being his mother?"

"I already am his mother. For six years, that boy's been coming to me for solace. When his father neglects him, when his teachers belittle him, and when he gets angry that he isn't what any of them want him to be. I don't think they should get to mould him. We don't need another Shinra."

Isabel was quiet as her anger slowly dissipated. "...how is he?" she asked.

"He's fifteen," said Vivian, "so he's angry a lot. He's struggling. He doesn't know who he is yet."

Isabel stood looking at her for a long moment. She dropped her arms, folded them again. "I want it in writing," she decided. "That you'll share custody with me. Then I'll give you what I have."

Vivian nodded. "I'll have my lawyers draw something up."

"Good," said Isabel. There was a pause, and she expected Isabel to ask her to leave, but instead she turned and walked into the kitchen, motioning for Vivian to follow. "So, what did he do?" she asked, pulling a pair of mismatched glasses out of her cupboard. "Is he cheating on you, too?"

Vivian shook her head. "I knew about the call girls. I decided it was good; there are things I don't want to do, so if it gets them out of his system, fine. But lately..." She hesitated. They were strangers, but at the same time, she knew Isabel understood her situation more intimately than anyone else could. "The war isn't going well," she went on. "They're keeping it out of the press, but barring some kind of miracle, Shinra is going to lose. And I'm sure you know, he can't stand losing."

Isabel paused to look her over, as if Vivian would have let anything show through her make-up. "Has he...?"

"No. I ran into one of his girls in the elevator. Bruises on her wrists. She said it was just part of a game, but they only have to lie well enough for the men. I'm getting out while I can."

"Assuming that's possible," Isabel said, not unsympathetically. She had retrieved a half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon, and she poured a little into each glass before handing one to Vivian.

Vivian didn't drink bourbon, but she took it anyway, to be polite. She took a sip, and didn't let her distaste show in her expression.

"If you've hired lawyers," said Isabel, "then he already knows this is coming."

"He hasn't said anything, but you're probably right."

Isabel gave her a look of appraisal. "You'd do well to get the Turks on your side."

"The Turks are loyal to Shinra," Vivian stated.

"They're not only loyal to Shinra."

"What do you mean?"

"As a group, they're more loyal to each other. Oh, they'll stick with Shinra as long as their interests align. But if there's something important to them that isn't important to Shinra..." Isabel let the sentence hang, swirling the bourbon in her glass.

"And you know of something like that?" Vivian wondered skeptically. It was the Turks' job to keep company secrets, and she doubted they advertised their own any more plainly. Vivian couldn't even name most of them.

"I'm suggesting you become something like that," said Isabel.

"What?"

Isabel gave her a flat look. "Don't pretend you've never seduced a man."

Vivian could hardly deny it. Eager for a way out from her father's thumb, she'd set her sights on the most powerful man in the world. No matter that he'd already had a wife; rumor said he wasn't happy with her. Isabel was too outspoken, too determined to be involved, as though she had an equal hand in the company. Vivian had no interest in the company. Godric could do what he wanted, and she would play the public role he demanded, as long as she could claim the prestige it afforded her in turn.

As little interest as she'd had in business, it had been very transactional. Her so-called seduction of him closer to an interview, perhaps, than what Isabel imagined. Godric could have his pick of women to sleep with, but Vivian had understood what he wanted in a wife.

"It's... been some years," was what she said.

"What, he gets to have his fun on the side, but not you?"

"If you consider that 'fun.'"

Isabel rolled her eyes. "Sex with someone who isn't Godric? He might think he's a god in bed, but that never made it true."

"Isn't that how it is with all of them?"

Isabel paused and looked at her again, and this time Vivian couldn't parse her expression.

"What?"

"Are you saying you've never enjoyed it?"

"It's just different for women than it is for men," Vivian stated.

"Oh my gods, Vivian."

Vivian stiffened. "You're going to mock me for not pretending otherwise?"

"No, I'm..." Isabel set her glass down on the counter. "I'm not mocking you. I can't believe it, but you're actually making me feel sorry for you. Look... Come back again when you have the paperwork for me. I'm going to check out some books from the library for you, so you don't have to feel embarrassed about having them under your name. Read them."

"Books? What sort of books?"

"You'll understand when you see them."

Vivian frowned. Still certain Isabel was mocking her, she couldn't put her finger on how. That made it time to leave. She set her glass down, mostly untouched. "Fine. Be as obscure as you like. But I will be coming back, and I'll expect you to have more for me than some silly library books."

Isabel nodded, the steel returning to her expression. "I will. Don't you worry about that. I'd root for anyone going up against Godric, but I want to make sure you win this."

Vivian nodded slowly in turn. Isabel had lost her fight, but Vivian would learn from her mistakes, and she wouldn't lose hers. If it meant putting up with this woman, then she had managed far more boorish individuals.

Vivian came by with papers within the week. She stood primly while Isabel read them through carefully, checking for any loopholes through which her son might slip from her. But it didn't seem like Vivian was trying to get one over on her. Or at least, if she was, then it was through the expectation that Godric would claim custody of Rufus, rendering this agreement moot. If Vivian couldn't win Rufus, then she owed Isabel nothing.

Isabel still thought she wanted to win. At least to spite Godric, if not because she really cared about Rufus. Maybe she did. It was hard to tell.

In return, Isabel passed her a box of papers. Everything she had from her own divorce proceedings, from the official paperwork to notes she'd scrawled during meetings. She left the library books atop the pile, and Vivian pretended not to notice them. She took the box and left.

Isabel decided that was probably the last she'd see of the woman unless she won her case for Rufus. When late fees appeared on her library account, she resigned herself to having to pay to replace the books. She probably should have left well enough alone.

But a few weeks later, she found Vivian waiting outside her door when she got home, her arms folded impatiently. Her arched eyebrow demanded an explanation.

"I was having dinner with a new client," Isabel said, deciding that providing one would be the easiest option. Vivian couldn't have shown up for any pleasant reason.

"A client?" Vivian repeated.

Vivian had found her address, but the woman had no idea what she did for a living, did she? Isabel didn't know whether to find that irritating or refreshing. It was a far cry from her probable Turk stalkers.

"I do the bookkeeping for a few small businesses," she explained, fitting her key to the lock.

"I see," said Vivian, frowning faintly like she couldn't decide whether she needed to care about this.

"Come on in then," Isabel said, leaving the door open for her. "Though I'd appreciate some warning the next time you decide to drop by."

"Do you have a pager?"

Isabel snorted. "Of course I don't have a pager."

"I could get you one."

"I was..." Joking. But Vivian's expression was completely serious. The woman meant to drop by again. "...not expecting you to offer," she finished instead. "I'll think about it."

Vivian closed the door behind her. Isabel dropped her keys and purse on the counter and turned to face her. Vivian seemed more reluctant to get to the point this time, so she'd have to push it herself.

"So I don't know what you're here for, but it isn't to tell me the news. It was all over the tabloids yesterday. I see you're trying to get public opinion on your side."

"Whether I succeed remains to be seen, but... I've lost the private opinion."

It took Isabel a moment to parse what she meant by that. "Your friends have dropped you already?"

"I expected most of them to be fair-weather friends," Vivian admitted. "But not all of them."

Isabel wanted to snap at her. Had she come here for sympathy? Isabel had gone through the same thing, after Vivian had seduced her husband from her. Her divorce had only been publicized after the fact, but Godric had spread rumors among their acquaintance so that by the time it was final, no one was speaking to her. Not a single so-called friend had remained to help her move what belongings he'd left her out of that awful house. She'd crossed out name after name from her address book, ultimately finding herself relying on the kindness of an old university classmate who'd never amounted to enough to care what the rich were up to.

She wanted to snap at Vivian, but if she were being honest with herself, she knew that Godric might have divorced her anyway, new wife or no. Vivian had always been an easy person to hate, when she was a stranger.

It was starting to feel tangled now, watching what had happened to her happen to someone else. Now, Isabel was that last name in Vivian's list she had yet to cross out.

So Isabel let out a heavy sigh and went to her fridge, pulling out a recently-opened bottle of wine. As she poured it, she watched Vivian visibly bite back a remark about how she was using the wrong type of glasses.

"Thank you," said Vivian. "Honestly, I was starting to think you were home and just ignoring me at your door. I wouldn't have blamed you."

"Tempting," Isabel conceded. "You never were my favorite person. But I expect a lot of your 'friends' are the same bitches who dumped me. So fuck them."

Vivian smiled, her relief in commiseration clearly winning out over any discomfort with coarse language. "Fuck them," she agreed, lifting her glass.

Isabel tapped it with hers and took a sip. Vivian took more of a gulp. "If there's one benefit to being poor," Isabel added, "it's that you know no one is hanging around you for the money. Even if he cleans you out, you can take comfort in that."

Vivian huffed. "I don't intend to," she said. She set her glass down and reached into her purse. "By the way, I returned your books. I know they were late, but I hope this is enough to cover the fees?"

Isabel raised an eyebrow at the 5000 gil note. "You've never used a library before, have you?"

"Any service that's offered for free can't be very good," Vivian sniffed.

"You know, Midgar's transit system is actually quite impressive."

"I have a car."

"Of course you do," Isabel said, and took the money. Even the replacement fees wouldn't have come close, but Vivian owed her plenty.

They relocated to the living area, where Vivian gave the sofa a once-over before allowing her expensive skirt to make contact with the worn cushions. She was dressed in the latest fashion, of course, almost picture-perfect save for the strands of blonde hair that had slipped out of her updo. Isabel didn't think the color was natural. Everyone knew President Shinra preferred blondes.

"They aren't even the worst part," Vivian sighed. "He's angry with me, too."

Isabel frowned at her in confusion. It couldn't be unexpected that Godric would be angry, so...

"Rufus," Vivian clarified.

Isabel dropped her gaze into her wine glass. "I think he's in his rights to be angry that he's being put through this again."

"I know. It's just... He's older this time. What he wants is going to be a bigger factor in deciding custody."

"...you think he's going to choose Godric?"

"I don't know," said Vivian. "But he desperately wants his father's approval. In the mental calculus of a teenage boy... Siding with Godric might earn him his father's affection. It won't lose him mine."

Isabel took a sip, wondering if he really did know that. Did he know she still cared about him, even after all these years? "...did you tell him about me?" she asked.

Vivian shook her head. "I meant to, but I think it's best to wait until he calms down."

"He does miss me, doesn't he? Or..."

"You know he hated me at first," said Vivian. "Every little thing I did, he'd tell me how you did it differently. I didn't know much about being a parent. So, I listened."

"To a nine-year-old?" Isabel wondered.

"Within reason. Obviously when he told me you let him have a glass of wine with dinner, he was being a brat. But when he said you were going to send him to school, I looked into it."

Isabel was quiet for a moment. Godric had wanted Rufus tutored at home, convinced it would provide his son the finest possible education, but Isabel had seen how lonely it made him. They'd argued over it often. It was an argument she had assumed was lost with the divorce.

"...you enrolled him in the Academy," she realized. When Vivian gave her a surprised look, she elaborated, "It was in a magazine article. Some fluff piece about how the new 'family' was getting on."

"I remember when they took the photos for that," Vivian said. "Rufus hated it. I told him we wouldn't do it again."

Isabel still had the pages tucked into her nightstand with the photos of Rufus in his sharp school uniform. At the time, she'd concluded that Godric had only argued against it because it was her idea, and maybe that was a part of it. But Vivian had taken it up.

And Vivian was the reason she knew so little about her son in the intervening years. Not that it would have been an honest window into his life. She would only have known the same carefully-crafted image as any other woman on the street.

"Did he make friends?" she wondered.

"A few," Vivian confirmed. "A lot at first, before he learned how to pick out the ones who were only after his name. I hope he's better at that than us, anyway."

"I hope so, too. I hope he has his own friends to complain to tonight."

Vivian looked at her, and Isabel realized she had implied the two of them were friends. Rather than address the unspoken question, she got up to fetch the bottle.

They worked their way through it as the evening wore on, though Vivian refilled her glass more times than Isabel. She complained about Godric, but mostly, they talked about Rufus. Vivian seemed nearly as eager for stories of his early childhood as Isabel was for anecdotes from his teenage years. Isabel had an album in her closet, but Godric didn't hang onto the keepsakes that marked his son's development. Rufus was like a possession, where only the having of him mattered.

They reached the bottom of the bottle. Vivian rose unsteadily on her heels, and Isabel insisted she stay put right where she was. She wouldn't use the trains, and she was in no shape to be driving home. Isabel watched Vivian's eyes grow wide with the realization that Isabel intended for her to sleep on the couch.

Impressively, she managed not to voice what an affront she found that. Isabel brought her a blanket, and she settled down without much fuss. She was asleep almost instantly.

Isabel thought sleep would come as easily for her, but she found herself lying awake, recalling every story Vivian had told her, tracing the words over and over again as if to print them indelibly in her memory.

Fifteen. In a few years, custody wouldn't matter. Rufus could choose to see her.

But would he?

She got up, eventually, for a glass of water. In her living room, a shadow froze, and Isabel froze with it. Her eyes traced the figure standing near the sofa, neither Vivian nor a product of her late-night imagination. She could make out enough of his suit to name what he was.

"Don't," she said quickly, as if there were anything she could do to stop a Turk.

But, her presence had made him hesitate, hadn't it? He still hadn't moved.

Carefully, she flicked on the low light above the stove, unveiling his face from the gloom. He was young, Wutain features framed by long dark hair pulled neatly back from his face. He looked in no way startled, but watched her steadily.

If he was calculating something, he didn't have all of the input he wanted before making a move.

Isabel took a breath. "You know this isn't the smart move," she said. "Having his wife murdered the day after a very public announcement that she's filing for divorce?"

"I have my orders," he said. His voice was smooth, his tone neutral and disinterested, but nevertheless she had his attention, for now.

"And you're going to, what, frame me for it? You can plant as much evidence as you want, make me look like a crazy person on the news, but it's only going to fool the most die-hard bootlickers. And I don't think you can afford to be one of those."

"And why is that?"

"Because he's losing the war. I know him, he'll start throwing people under the bus to save face. A Wutain Turk who might've been passing intel to the enemy looks like a prime target to me."

She couldn't pin it down, but there was the slightest shift in his expression. "What would you have me tell my employer?" he wondered.

"Tell him you're protecting him," said Isabel. "I can't be the first person to realize how bad this would look. He's just angry. This is you giving him time to reconsider."

"You realize that's only a case for delaying it."

"Yes, but I'm not going to make it easy for him. You won't find her here again."

The Turk was gone in moments, so quickly that Isabel barely registered how he had left. She secured the latch on the window, wondering if Shinra really had recruited some sort of ninja.

On the sofa, Vivian remained fast asleep.

Isabel watched her for a moment, then roused her enough to guide her back into the bedroom. If the Turk really meant to kill her, it wouldn't make a bit of difference, but Isabel couldn't stomach the thought of leaving her alone and exposed in the living room after the attempt on her life. It was pure chance that Isabel had interrupted it.

Vivian grumbled at being pushed into bed, calling her by someone else's name, presumably one of the so-called friends who had abandoned her. Isabel climbed in after her and lay staring at the ceiling. Her body trembled, but the blankets didn't help.

One day after the announcement, and the Turks had come for them. Isabel knew what they were, she knew what they got up to, but when it had been her, Godric had only used them for information-gathering. She had expected the same with Vivian.

Apparently the publicity had made him a lot angrier.

She slept fitfully, finally giving up on it when Vivian roused. She rolled, stared at Isabel in confusion, and asked, "Didn't I go to sleep on the sofa?"

For a moment, Isabel considered leaving her in the dark. There wasn't any good reason for it; she just didn't want to have to tell her another piece of bad news. Isabel sighed, closing her eyes in concession to the weight of exhaustion, and explained what had happened.

"You can't come here again," she finished.

There was a short silence. Isabel refused to open her eyes to see Vivian's reaction.

"...it isn't as though they don't know where I live," Vivian said at last. "I know you think it makes it easier for them to frame you, but they could say you broke into my home. You've always had a motive."

"I used to," said Isabel.

"I'm touched."

"Maybe you should consider hiring a bodyguard. Or a real Wutain ninja."

"Do you think they work for money?"

Isabel shrugged, opening her eyes to look at the ceiling. "Who knows. If one could get close to you, they'd probably be more interested in assassinating Godric anyway."

Vivian seemed to consider that. "What if all he wanted was to scare us. Separate us."

Vivian was smarter than Isabel had given her credit for. "...I hadn't thought of that," she admitted.

"You should come stay with me."

Then again, maybe not. "You're joking right?" Isabel asked, turning her head to stare.

Vivian rolled her eyes. "I'm not staying in the same house with Godric. We made an agreement: he'll stay in his penthouse, and I'll keep to the house in Sector 2."

"...and Rufus?"

"...well, that's up to him. He can come home to whichever he likes."

Isabel frowned. "If I stay with you, then he can't. And it's more important that he can."

"I don't like leaving you on your own," said Vivian, and Isabel almost laughed. To get so much consideration from a woman she used to hate!

"It's as you said," she said. "If they really want either of us dead, it won't matter where we're staying."

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Maybe it had been a stupid thing to hope that Vivian had any chance of winning against a man who could so easily have her killed. She opened her mouth, on the verge of counseling that Vivian back down, ask for less, but she shut it again. She didn't want to give Godric the satisfaction of cowing them into submission. Vivian wouldn't either.

"Then we'll just have to be very loud," Vivian decided, "so no matter what, it would always look retaliatory. Maybe it will even push him to settle sooner."

Or it might push him to murder in spite of anyone's better judgment. The important thing, Isabel decided, was that he would never threaten Rufus. Neglect him, yes, belittle him, try to keep him from his mothers. But he'd see them fight for him.

"You're right," she said. "He'll have to do better than this if he wants to shut us up."

Chapter Text

Sebuna woke alone, as she often did of late. Nanaki was old enough not to be glued to her side, and he would wake before her to run out and greet the dawn.

She padded out of their den, movements slow as she worked the stiffness out of her leg. On good days, she could still keep up with her son, but rarely could she shake the limp entirely. He had so much energy, it was natural he should leave her behind.

She nosed her way out into the daylight and looked for Nanaki, spotting him out past the Candle. He was playing chase with some of the human children, and Sebuna put her whiskers forward, pleased. It was good to see him letting himself be a child. In his adolescence, he was still lanky but nearly as big as she was, and to the younger humans of the canyon, he could nearly pass himself off as an adult. He would often play at it, mimicking the way she spoke.

Tohar had told her it was normal for a child, but she knew there was more to it. Nanaki was 38, and he had watched humans born after him grow to become respected adults within the community. Why should it be different for him?

In a way, it was unfair that he was still a child, but it was a greater injustice that he should be pushed to be an adult before he was ready. But if Sebuna emphasized the stark difference in their experience, he pulled away. If she told stories of her own childhood, he seemed more determined to prove he had grown past it.

Would Seto have known what to say? She often longed for his perspective, but he had never raised a cub before either. It was Bugenhagen who had come to her aid. He was so old for a human, Nanaki didn't seem to feel any pressure to put on airs with him. Everyone looked up to Bugenhagen.

No one really knew what old looked like, for one of them. To any human, Sebuna was steady and unchanging. She felt it some days, like the petrification that had nearly taken her leg spread through her still. She couldn't move fast enough for anyone.

Some commotion at the gate drew her attention away from Nanaki. Strange men's voices arguing with young Ira. She approached to find two Shinra soldiers.

It was clear at a glance that they posed no threat. The blue of their uniforms was dulled by the red dust of the canyon, and they were missing their helmets and pauldrons. One of them was shivering, an unzipped bedroll wrapped around his shoulders. To have reached the settlement so early, they must have spent the night in the gorge, but the climb should have warmed him. He had a hand on his rifle, leaning on it for support. She wondered if it was even loaded.

"I told you," Ira was saying, "soldiers aren't permitted here."

"And I said, we're not here for Shinra!" snapped the shivering soldier.

Sebuna had known humans who, in the wake of an attack, had pushed themselves to become stronger in preparation for future assaults. But in the decades since the Gi attack, the people of the canyon had instead leaned further into their pacifist ideals. Like Bugenhagen that night, they decided violence was a fault to overcome.

When war had broken out between Wutai and Shinra, they had abstained from involvement, unwilling even to provide aid to either side. Sebuna had not objected at first, but the ensuing isolation had changed the character of the canyon. Once, they had welcomed strangers.

Sebuna came up beside Ira, and as he glanced down at her, she gave him a nod. "Why have you come then?" she asked the soldiers.

"It talks!?"

"'She,' if you would," Sebuna said mildly. "My name is Sebuna, and I am the guardian of this canyon."

The two soldiers exchanged dumbfounded glances, looked uncertainly at Ira, and at last the other said simply, "We need help."

"That much is plain," said Sebuna, knowing they probably couldn't read her amusement. "Did something happen to your unit?"

The one who'd answered her shuffled his feet, while the feverish one grit his teeth. "Sure," he said. "We left 'em."

Sebuna had expected to have to coax out of them what Shinra troops had been doing in the area, but at that she began to see the picture. "...you're deserters," she realized.

"Which's why we're not looking to lead any more Shinra here," he confirmed.

"...and why we couldn't go to them for help," the other added. "It took us months just to get out of Wutai."

Sebuna exchanged glances with Ira, who asked, "You've been on your own all that time?"

"Yeah," said the first soldier, drawing his bedroll closer. "It's been fucking hell, so just-- All we want is a bed and something to eat that's not a goddamn cactus."

"I think we can let them in, Ira," Sebuna said gently. "I'm happy to take responsibility for them."

Ira nodded his agreement. "You'll have to surrender your weapons," he decided. "And there's one thing I want to know."

"What's that?" the soldier asked warily.

"...do you even know the war's over?"

The two men exchanged startled glances, more surprised by that revelation than by a talking beast. Sebuna had already judged it a slim chance that this was an act, but that confirmed it for her.

"What... What do you mean, over?" asked the second soldier. "Did we win?"

Ira shook his head, holding his hand out for their rifles. "No," he said. "You didn't."

They fell into a stunned silence as Ira took their weapons and Sebuna invited them to follow her into the settlement.

"May I ask your names?" she said.

"I'm Paul," the second soldier answered mechanically, and then he gestured to his sick friend. "This's Slate."

"Welcome to Cosmo Canyon, Paul, Slate. As long as you make no trouble, you'll be looked after here."

But the news had clearly distracted them from their mission. "The war's really over?" Paul asked.

"The treaty was signed last month," Sebuna affirmed.

"Then we made it..."

Slate snorted. "You think they wouldn't still come after us? They'd love to blame losing on a bunch of deserters."

"...I guess you're right."

Sebuna glanced up at Paul. "You hoped to go home?"

"My son... I didn't want him growing up without a father." He averted his gaze. "I know it's cowardly."

Sebuna felt a pang in her heart. "No," she said. "Your fight was not protect him, so there was no reason to let it take you from him." If only Seto had been able to do the same.

"Great," said Slate. "Pair of softies, you are."

"You deserted, too, didn't you?" Sebuna asked him.

"Heidegger was gonna get us all killed!" he said. "That stupid bastard didn't know what he was doing. More than half my unit got wiped out, and I wasn't gonna join 'em."

"You decided the fight wasn't worth your life."

"Yeah, whatever. They told us Wutai was gonna run roughshod over Midgar if we didn't keep 'em in line, but fuck it, Shinra didn't give a damn about us either. I figured they couldn't be any worse."

"A reasonable assessment," said Sebuna.

"I'd call you a smart-ass, but you earned it. You stayed out of the whole damn thing."

Sebuna hummed thoughtfully. "We left both sides to fend for themselves, but I wonder if it was smart. We protected ourselves in the short term, but we are a part of the world, and we won't be immune to the repercussions."

"Repercussions?" Paul wondered.

"The balance of power in the world has shifted. It hasn't settled yet."

"...above my pay grade, I think," said Paul. "I just wanna get back to my family."

Slate opened his mouth to say something, but Nanaki bounded up then to join them, and Slate stumbled, startled.

"Ohna, why are there soldiers here?" Nanaki wanted to know.

"Oh, fuck me, there's two of them," Slate muttered under his breath. Nanaki's ears flicked, showing he'd caught the remark, but Sebuna answered him first.

"The war is over," she said, "so there are no sides to be taken."

"But isn't it against the rules?"

"Rules are not immutable. When circumstances change, some are to be reconsidered."

Nanaki tilted his head, his tail swaying, and Sebuna knew there was something he would push her on later, but she did not regret the statement. It was important not to view rules so rigidly that one never asked why they existed.

"This is my son, Nanaki," Sebuna explained to the two deserters, and she introduced them in turn to Nanaki. "They've come here for aid; why don't you help me take them to the clinic?"

"Right," said Nanaki, and he bounded ahead a few steps. "This way. It's not far."

But Slate moved slowly without his rifle to lean on. Judging by Paul's body language, he had already offered help and been refused, so Sebuna said nothing of it. They kept pace with him, climbing the steps of the canyon to its first landing and on into its corridors.

As they neared the clinic, Nanaki ran ahead once more to alert the medics to their impending patients. They facilitated introductions, and then Sebuna opted to wait for the deserters in the corridor. Whether Slate's illness was caused by improperly eaten cactus or something less embarrassing, it was none of her business, and she could tell Nanaki had more questions better asked out of earshot.

"So it's okay for soldiers to come here now?" he wondered as he sat beside her to wait.

"In truth, I don't know," Sebuna admitted. "I will have to discuss it with Bugenhagen and the elders. But these two are soldiers no longer."

"Because the war is over?"

"Because they deserted the battlefield."

"What?" Nanaki's ears snapped upright. "You mean they're cowards?"

"No," Sebuna said patiently. "What was the war being fought for?"

"Shinra wanted to expand into Wutai, but Wutai rejected their reactors."

"So was that a noble battle?" She watched him carefully, knowing precisely where his notions of bravery in war came from. "If the Gi had given up their fight, would they have been cowards?"

Nanaki grimaced, his tail swishing behind him. "The Gi weren't noble..."

"But if one had deserted that battle, what would you have said of him?" Sebuna pressed.

"If... if he'd stopped fighting, then he wouldn't have hurt anyone else in the canyon," Nanaki reasoned slowly. "It would have been the right choice."

She nodded. "Precisely. I don't know that either of these men fully recognizes the personhood of their opponents, or the wrong they were perpetrating, but they understand what Shinra sought was not worth men's lives."

Nanaki was quiet for a moment. "So what does that make them?"

Sebuna tossed her mane. "Not noble, perhaps, but it does take some measure of bravery to recognize a mistake and to change one's course of action. I suppose it makes me wonder... how much change they might be open to."

Nanaki glanced at the door to the clinic. "Are they going to stay in the canyon?"

"I don't believe it is their intent to remain, no. But they need time to rest before they set out again."

"I'm not sure what would change about them, if they just leave again."

"One does not have to stay in this canyon to share our thoughts," she said, "though perhaps we've come to make the mistake of believing it so. An immutable rule that those who believe in the study of planet life must study it here."

"...but rules aren't immutable."

Sebuna shook her head. "No. I think that is one it may be time to reconsider." With the treaty signed, worries about the war finding its way to their threshold would ebb. Sebuna's duty to the protection of the canyon would not require her to remain so close.

Nanaki adjusted his paws, sitting up straighter. "I would be interested to see the world beyond the canyon," he said.

She put her whiskers forward. "Oh? You want to help change minds, even those of such ignoble people?"

"...well, we wouldn't go all the way to Midgar," he said. "Right?"

Sebuna chuckled. "No, I think not. We ought to begin nearer to home, and learn which of our neighbors might be our friends."

"Are they really very different?"

"No, not very. You know many people in this canyon who came from outside of it. It's simply been years since anyone new has come to stay."

"Maybe the soldiers will, you know," Nanaki proposed. "There's no way Midgar is better than our canyon."

"It is home to them," she reminded him, "thought I won't discourage it should they take a liking to ours. I think it would be good for us, too, to welcome them."

Nanaki's ear swivelled back, catching the sound of conversation moving closer to the other side of the clinic door, a sign their guests might soon be emerging. "Do you think there're things we could learn from them?" he wondered.

"There may be," she said. "No matter how many years one sees, there are always things to learn, and they can come from unexpected teachers. It's best to keep an open mind."

Nanaki nodded seriously, and Sebuna was pleased. He accepted her wisdom in this, and perhaps it was because she presented them both as having something to learn, and something to teach to these newcomers. It was not a path she had tread before him, nor was it a task best left to adults alone. They could complement each other in this endeavor.

Ultimately it was the work of humanity, but that was the work which remained. The way they always fractured themselves into different tribes, believing the thoughts of all within one group to be the same. Bugenhagen had left Shinra to separate himself from its way of thinking. How many disparate voices had instead remained within it?

If two Shinra soldiers had come seeking a haven, perhaps there was a path to reconciliation.

Chapter Text

It was morning when they reached the capital. The sun had risen high enough to sweep clear most of the shadows, and Kasumi hung back, watching as her warriors entered the town ahead of her.

She hadn't brought all of them home. In the days to come, there would be visits to make, condolences to offer, graves at which to make offerings. But today was a day for reunions.

The city didn't look any different than when she had left it, but for her, its sound had changed. Its higher registers were lost to her, and the murmur of low conversation and the trundle of chocobo-drawn carts came to her as though she were underwater. A small price to pay for the safety of her homeland.

Beyond the main streets and beneath the watchful eye of the pagoda, the house appeared ahead of her. Kasumi was a ninja; she didn't do fanfare. She slid the door open and stepped inside. Leaving her shoes in the genkan, she went in search of her daughter.

Yuffie was playing by the koi pond, her sleeves dark with wet despite someone's best efforts to tie them back. When she spotted Kasumi, she leapt the railing, her bare feet stamping muddy prints across the floor. Her approach vibrated through the floorboards, and her mouth was open, probably whooping in delight, but her high voice was beyond what Kasumi could hear. But between her grandparents and the injured warriors convalescing at home, she'd been learning hand signals.

Commander! she signed excitedly. 'Mom' wasn't typically a word you needed a sign for, as a ninja. They'd have to work on that.

"My clever girl," said Kasumi, scooping Yuffie into her arms. Yuffie hugged her tightly, no doubt leaving muddy handprints on the back of her kimono. That was fine.

Yuffie's lips shaped the words, "Are you staying?" while her hand signed, Here?

"I am," Kasumi affirmed. "And your father will be home in a few weeks."

Yuffie made a face. Too long!

"But then he's staying, too. We'll both be here, every day."

Yuffie beamed.

Kasumi's mother approached on the path, accompanied by Yuffie's older cousin Hideyuki. Nearly recovered from his injuries, he would have been back on the battlefield in another month. Now, he wouldn't have to be.

"Welcome home," she saw her mother say, and there was something complicated in her expression, but she put her arms around Kasumi, and Kasumi felt Yuffie laughing between them. Yuffie wriggled free, turning to her cousin, and said something excitedly to him.

Kasumi met her mother's gaze and shook her head slightly. She didn't want to be fussed over. She just wanted to be home. Her mother communicated that she was still going to cook her favorite meal that night.

"Yuffie," Kasumi said, "let's find your shoes."

A grin split Yuffie's face without even knowing their destination. She raced back towards the genkan, leaving her grandmother shaking her head over the trail of mud. Kasumi laughed, and Hideyuki patted the old woman's arm, volunteering to take care of it for her.

Kasumi met her daughter back in the genkan, catching her before she could stuff her dirty feet into her shoes. She sat her down and cleaned her off a bit, and Yuffie asked where they were going.

"I'm taking you up Da-chao. I think it's time."

Far up? Yuffie signed eagerly.

"Not all the way," Kasumi amended. "You need to get acquainted first." Yuffie tilted her head curiously, and Kasumi went on, "Da-chao isn't just a mountain. You don't simply climb to the peak and say you've conquered it. It isn't to be conquered. You climb its paths to know it."

It might have been a bit much for a seven-year-old to grasp just yet, but Yuffie nodded seriously, understanding at least that there was a gravity in this. It wasn't just mountain-climbing.

They stepped into their shoes and out of the house. Yuffie's hand slipped into hers, arm swinging. She was taller than the last time Kasumi had had the chance to come home. Kasumi couldn't hear them now, but her memory supplied the chirring of the summer cicadas. A steady sound, it had always lulled her into the belief that the moment would last forever.

It wouldn't, of course, and she didn't want forever in this moment, but she embraced its unhurried pace, its undefined end. She wanted to be here to watch her daughter grow imperceptibly day-by-day, not in fits and starts during too-short visits, the changes glaring after months apart. They would walk their paths together, and know each other.

The lower climb of the mountain was easy enough, especially in the summer. The switchbacks were clear of snow and mud, and someone had walked them recently enough to prune back the explosion of spring growth from choking the path. Yuffie plucked at the leaves as they passed, but soon enough they rose above the greenery, and the statue emerged clear overhead.

Kasumi led her daughter along the path that cut across the chest of Da-chao and onward onto one of his outstretched hands. They settled cross-legged on the back of it, its fingers outstretched westward and another of Da-chao's faces at their backs. The capital lay in miniature below them, all of Wutai stretching out beyond.

From up here, it looked completely untouched. All of Shinra's efforts come to naught. Kasumi knew it wasn't true; the buildings of the capital had been spared, but its people hadn't, and it was worse in the south. All the same, she drank in the sight of it, unscarred and strong.

Yuffie tapped her arm, and only then did she realize her daughter had said something. Concerned, Yuffie gestured to her ears and signed, Does it hurt?

Kasumi shook her head. It had for a time, but the pain and the ringing had largely subsided after the first year. "No," she said. "I just can't hear very well. But there are things you don't hear with your ears. Listen, Yuffie. Can you feel Da-chao here with us?"

Yuffie twisted to look up at the face o the statue behind them. She considered it for a long moment and then asked, Is he watching me?

"Yes, but not through the statue. It's... a reminder, for us. Leviathan and Da-chao are all throughout Wutai. They are the waters that run through our lands and the strength that courses through our bodies."

I'm strong like you, Yuffie signed, and Kasumi caught the want to be on her lips.

"You'll be a forced to be reckoned with. I have no doubt."

Yuffie mimed a few punches into the air. They weren't entirely without form, as if Hideyuki had been showing her. Kasumi smiled softly.

"Just like that," she said. "But in other ways, too."

Others?

Kasumi looked back out over the capital. "The war is over, and I hope none of us see fighting like that again. But Shinra has yet to fall..."

Didn't we defeat them? Yuffie wondered.

Kasumi didn't answer her right away. They had forced Shinra to withdraw, securing victory for Wutai. In their part of the world, they would have peace, and for many, that was the end of it. They had no obligation to a world which had left them to face such an onslaught alone, but at the same time, she felt they couldn't be satisfied simply with pushing Shinra out of Wutai. It was too dangerous a thing to leave unchecked.

They were in no position now to do any more, but the entire world had been watching. It wasn't the expected outcome, and so it could foster change.

"Shinra wanted to make an example of us," she said at last, "and we will be an example, but not the one they hoped for. We beat them back. Other places can do the same."

Yuffie looked skeptical. We won first, she said, as though she didn't like the idea of anyone else defeating Shinra. Her daughter was certainly a fighter.

"We did," Kasumi agreed. "So we can be leaders. Leaders don't do everything themselves. And they rest sometimes, too."

Yuffie leaned back on her hands, mulling it over. Then she sat up and signed, When I'm strong, then we defeat them.

Kasumi held back a laugh, because it would be some time before Yuffie was old enough to fight Shinra, but she knew, at her age, Yuffie had a different estimation of 'old enough.' She was completely serious, and anyway, it was a good long rest. It would let her see her daughter grown.

"All right then," she decided. "It can be up to you."

Really? she read on Yuffie's lips. In her excitement, she forgot to sign it.

Kasumi reached over to ruffle her hair. "We'll want our best warriors, after all. I know you'll be one of them."

Yuffie beamed and mimed a few more punches. Kasumi hoped she'd never have to strike an opponent more threatening than a sparring partner. Wutai could set an example for the rest of the world, if they were willing to follow. They didn't need Shinra, and maybe by the time Yuffie was old enough to be a force in the world herself, Shinra would be gone. Kasumi would rather see what else she might accomplish, with that obstacle removed.

Chapter Text

The children darted in and out of sight as they played tag among the trees. It was hot and muggy, but they didn't seem to mind. The dense canopy kept the sun off their backs, and they laughed as they ran.

It felt very far from anything Ifalna had ever known--far from the cold of the Knowlespole, the sterility of the lab, and the isolation of their lives since their escape. Here in Gongaga, they had dared to show their faces undisguised. It was far enough away from Shinra, she hoped. An ocean away.

When the war ended, Shinra had finally relaxed its grip on the ports. They'd made their way west, from one tiny southern harbor to another, unnoticed by a Shinra navy no longer on the lookout for Wutain spies.

Shinra still had influence in the Western Continent--Lucrecia's history was proof of that--but the people in its southern reaches seemed to think very little of it. Very few from Gongaga had felt called to the war effort. Few seemed troubled by Shinra's defeat. It felt alluringly safe.

Lucrecia sat beside her between the roots of one of the more ancient trees. Sephiroth stood leaning against another. He had turned 20 in the fall, a little old for tag, but that didn't stop Aeris from running up to him and pulling him into the game. He'd grown so tall there was nothing fair in him joining, but he'd had years of practice slowing himself for his sister. He matched the children's speed, letting them outrun him, until a lanky black-haired teen stumbled over a root and Sephiroth tagged his arm. Aeris whooped, as though he'd been her particular target.

"Maybe we could stay here," Lucrecia said. They'd been camped nearby for almost two months, and it was the first time either of them had risked voicing it. "They could make friends... be normal."

"...maybe," Ifalna said.

She wanted it for them. Aeris had been readily accepted by the village children, and she looked so happy among them.

"I know it's not as obvious as with Aeris," Lucrecia went on, "but Sephiroth likes it here, too. He gets to be himself, for once. I don't want him to have to hide that his whole life."

Ifalna shook her head slightly. "I don't want that either."

"We've been so cautious... Maybe too cautious, anymore."

They certainly seemed that way to the villagers. They were within shouting distance of the village, and none of the other parents had felt the need to keep watch over a simple game of tag. These children were old enough to venture farther than this on their own. Ifalna had, at their age.

"This town is a backwater," Lucrecia added. "It wasn't even on our map. And we haven't seen any of those wanted posters in years."

It would be easy to think the world might pass them by here. The village was in the middle of nowhere. Shinra had no foothold here, and Gongaga had no strategic value even if the war were to resume. Ifalna could feel the Lifestream pulsing strong beneath it, but... Shinra wouldn't know unless they came looking, and what pretext would bring them?

What pretext...

Gongaga wasn't isolated, even so. They traded to the west and as far north as Corel, and merchants passed through from other places in turn, carrying news with them. They could carry news on from Gongaga, too.

Faced with her silence, Lucrecia leaned towards her and added, "We'll still protect her. We won't let anything happen to her."

"No, I know," Ifalna said. She shook her head and looked back at Lucrecia. "I'm sorry. You're making some good points and I promise I'll think about it. I'm just preoccupied."

"Did something happen?"

"A traveller came through today. From Cosmo Canyon."

"...oh."

Lucrecia was probably the only one who would have understood just from the name. Ifalna had never even been there herself.

Gast had.

He'd talked about it, from time to time. He'd had some very good friends there, scholars who shared his academic interests.

"...it isn't so far, if you wanted to make the trip," said Lucrecia.

"What?"

"That's what you're thinking about, isn't it?"

Ifalna drew in a long breath and let it out. "I'm not sure. I... I don't know what I'd find there. I'm not even sure what I'd be looking for."

"Memories, I suppose," Lucrecia ventured. "I've thought about it, too, since we came here. I went with him a few times, so I... don't think I need it for myself. But those people were better friends and better colleagues to him than I ever was. Maybe they should know what happened to him."

"It isn't any gift to leave them wondering, is it?" Ifalna reflected.

Seeing Gast murdered in front of her had left her with nightmares that haunted her sometimes even so many years later, but it had left her with no uncertainties. Lucrecia's perspective was different. People had vanished from her life, leaving her years to imagine one horrible possibility after another. In Vincent's case, she would probably never have answers.

"We can all go together," Lucrecia proposed. "Aeris can meet other people who knew her father. I think... Sephiroth would like that, too. You know he thinks of him that way, even if he'll never ask."

When Lucrecia had first wrestled over what to tell Sephiroth of his father, Ifalna had come close to giving her permission to lie: to tell him it was Gast. Ultimately, she hadn't thought it would be any more of a kindness than letting him believe he was a Cetra. It was better that he knew his blood didn't define him.

If he wanted to imagine Gast in the role of his father anyway, that was all right.

"And how long will we stay there?" Ifalna wondered.

"As long as we need to," said Lucrecia. "And then we'll come back, won't we? Or..."

"It's not a bad idea," Ifalna affirmed. "They do like it here. I'm just...... scared."

"...you've thought you were safe before."

She'd been so much younger when she'd met Gast. Her family had cautioned her against growing too close to humans, but they were long gone, and she'd been lonely. She'd never dealt with Shinra before. When Gast had promised to protect her from them, she'd believed he could.

"Tell me," she said, looking Lucrecia in the eye. "Do you really think we'll be safe here?"

Lucrecia looked back at her, expression sober. Ifalna imagined her doing a sort of mental calculus, weighing probabilities. What were the actual chances that Shinra would find them here? What were their chances of escape?

"...I can't guarantee you that Shinra will never come here," Lucrecia admitted at last, "or that we'll never deal with them again. But I can promise you one thing: I'm not Gast. If they come, I'll tear them to pieces."

Ifalna relaxed. With Lucrecia's strength, she knew it was no idle threat. Ifalna settled against her, leaning her head on her shoulder. "Is it strange how reassuring I find that?"

"I don't know," said Lucrecia. "We're not very normal people."

"I guess not." Ifalna let herself stay that way for a long moment before peeling back. "Ugh. What I don't know about is this humidity. Every time I sit still for a minute, I wind up stuck to something."

"Just wait, in another few months it'll be the rainy season."

"So we'll be even wetter...?"

"It might be refreshing," Lucrecia proposed, and Ifalna gave her a skeptical look. "Have you never been skinny-dipping?"

"I... don't think I know what that is."

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. You'd have frozen your ass off." Lucrecia got to her feet and, taking both of Ifalna's hands, tugged her up after. "Come on. It's not far to the river. I'll show you."

Ifalna threw a last look at the children. They'd be fine, she told herself. "It's some form of swimming...?" she asked.

"Sure," answered Lucrecia, giving her a flirtatious waggle of her eyebrows. Letting out a huff of amusement, Ifalna let her lead the way.

The world shifted dramatically as they travelled west. As the vegetation thinned, the humidity went with it, but it was no cooler in the daytime. Instead of sweat plastering her clothes to her body, the air seemed to sap every bit of moisture out of her.

Lucrecia called it a 'dry heat,' and Ifalna didn't like it any better.

At night, though, the temperature dropped sharply. Lucrecia curled against her for warmth, and lying on her back looking up at the sky, Ifalna realized she missed the snows. Unhindered by light pollution or foliage, the stars overhead were as clear and bright as the Knowlespole. Just once, she thought, she would have to make it back home again. Aeris ought to see the north. The land of her birth, and the last remnants of her heritage.

They received a cautious welcome on arriving at Cosmo Canyon, and Sephiroth was asked not to carry his katana within the settlement. Lucrecia squeezed Ifalna's hand, tacitly reminding her that they had more ways to defend themselves than with a simple blade, and Ifalna made herself relax.

They found lodgings at the inn and asked after Gast's old friend Bugah, now one of the canyon's elders. Sephiroth elected to split off on his own, and Aeris wavered, but she joined them as they made their way up to the observatory, where they'd been told they could find Bugah helping Bugenhagen with something.

"Hello?" Aeris called as they stepped inside the structure that sat at the canyon's peak.

"With you in a minute!" a man's voice called down from somewhere above. "Make yourselves at home."

It was as warm as the rest of the settlement, walls wood-paneled and floors strewn with colorful rugs, but Ifalna made out the faint hum of electricity. She traced the path of old-fashioned electrical wiring into a circular room outfitted with various equipment.

"...these look like the machines Gast brought to Icicle Inn," she remarked softly.

"That's probably because it was Gast who purchased these," said Lucrecia. When Ifalna looked at her curiously, she went on, "No one ever took him for a devious man, you know, but he siphoned funds from the Project to get equipment for his old friend."

"Shinra didn't notice?" Ifalna wondered.

"He commissioned them from another company, so he could lie about it on the receipts he passed to Shinra. Vincent could have reported him, but it didn't threaten the Project. I persuaded Hojo it wasn't a bad thing to pad our budget."

Aeris pushed past them to get a closer look at a strange projector in the center of the room. "So Dad had machines like these...?"

"Ho... You're familiar with this equipment?"

The three of them turned as an old man floated into the room on some manner of contraption. A second man in his middle years walked in behind him.

"Not exactly," Ifalna said cautiously. "My late husband had equipment that must have been manufactured by the same company."

"It's something of a rarity these days," the old man remarked. "Shinra bought out and dismantled that company years ago. A shame, because it's really quite dependable."

"I'm not surprised," said Lucrecia.

"I don't suppose you still have your husband's equipment...?" the other man wondered.

"...no. I... don't really know what happened to it." Ifalna hesitated. "My husband was Professor Gast Faremis."

A spark of recognition crossed both of their faces, and soon folded into something more solemn.

"I see..." said the old man.

"I'm sorry. It is why we came here. You were friends of his, weren't you?"

"Don't apologize," said the other man. "We wondered what happened to him... May I ask... how?"

Ifalna faltered, and Lucrecia stepped in for her. "He tried to leave Shinra to protect his family," she said, "but his subordinate tracked him down and... had him killed."

"That's..." The man glanced at Aeris. "...I'm very sorry."

"I was just a baby," Aeris said with a shake of her head. "I don't remember it."

"Then I'm sorry you didn't get to know him. Your father was a good friend of mine."

"You're very welcome here in Cosmo Canyon," added the old man. "Stay as long as you like. My name of course is Bugenhagen, though I've been known to respond to 'that old man.'"

"And I'm Bugah," said the other man, offering his hand to Ifalna.

"Ifalna," she said, hoping he missed her hesitation over taking his hand. Their time in Gongaga had eased her discomfort over meeting new people, but she was still out of practice. "This is my daughter Aeris."

"Lucrecia Crescent. My son Sephiroth is around somewhere, if you see a very tall young man."

Bugah exchanged glances with Bugenhagen. "Crescent? You aren't the same Dr. Crescent who worked with Gast on the Jenova Project, are you?"

"I... Yes. I'm surprised you remember that."

"I think we met once, didn't we? You don't seem to have aged a day."

Lucrecia shrugged. "Only on the outside. It's been a long time. I don't work for Shinra anymore."

"There's clearly a much longer story here," Bugah observed. "Whether or not you want to share it, I'd be happy to reminisce about Gast."

"Could you show us how these machines work?" Aeris interjected, gesturing to the projector.

"Ho ho hooo... I'd be delighted to, young lady." Bugenhagen's face crinkled as he smiled. "A scientific curiosity like your father's, perhaps?"

"Aunt Lu's the scientist. But they look neat."

Aeris had seen very little in the way of modern technology outside of the lab, and Ifalna couldn't help smiling softly, glad that she could look at this room with curiosity rather than dread. She'd been too young for Hojo to subject her to much testing, but she'd seen its effects on her mother and known somewhere outside of their room were awful machines used in her torment. But this room had no connection to that nightmare.

Ifalna hadn't expected it to conjure anything for her either, but at the soft click of something switching on, a jolt ran through her ribcage. It wasn't the sight but the sound--the same click that had summoned her to where Gast had been fiddling with his video equipment, just before Hojo had found them.

"I'm... sorry," she fumbled, moving towards the door. "You all go ahead, I think I'd like to check on what Sephiroth's gotten up to."

It was a flimsy excuse, as everyone's expression told her, but no one questioned it. Lucrecia held her gaze, tilting her head in silent question, but Ifalna shook her head. It was a small thing. She'd be fine.

Ifalna excused herself from the room, closed the door behind her, and went on outside where the electric hum was too faint to make out. Better. That was better.

She walked to the railing, leaning against it to look out over the canyon. Warm rock stretched out to the horizon, flat plateaus carved through with a labyrinth left by long-dry rivers. The heat made sweat prick beneath her clothes. Lively, indistinct conversation drifted up from below. Nothing here was anything like that day in the north.

She let her gaze scan downwards into the settlement below. Strangers moved about their daily business, stopping to chat here and there. Even this far up, Sephiroth was easy to pick out, seated near the bonfire in the company of some large red-furred dog. Had he become overwhelmed by people so quickly? Or maybe just distracted. They'd never kept a pet, but they'd had a chocobo for a few years, and Sephiroth had spent more time with the animal than any of them.

Ifalna started down from the observatory, deciding she may as well put truth to her excuse and check on him for real. She had stepped out onto the landing above the last stairway when she came across another of the red-furred creatures and realized 'animal' was only as accurate a term as it was for humans or Cetra.

"Don't mind me," said the beast pleasantly, flicking her tail. Her attention, too, appeared to be on the bonfire.

"Is that your...?"

"My son, yes. Nanaki." The beast glanced up at her. "Is that yours?"

It struck Ifalna as a strange question--she and Sephiroth didn't look alike--but then, that was her own perspective. "Not quite," she said. "His mother is up at the observatory, with my daughter."

The beast tilted her head thoughtfully, but rather than asking, she said, "Welcome to you all the same. I am Sebuna, guardian of this canyon."

"Ifalna. Just a visitor, I suppose."

"It is good to see more of those. We have only just returned home ourselves."

"Oh?"

"We've been journeying," Sebuna explained, "as far as the Nibel mountains."

"Nibelheim?" Ifalna wondered uneasily.

"You know it?"

"...I know of it. My husband and Sephiroth's mother both worked there, once."

"...are you speaking of Professor Gast?"

Ifalna blinked. "You knew him?"

Sebuna shook her head. "I have heard of him. We were not acquainted. He was Bugenhagen's friend, his last connection to Shinra. Though I heard Gast left the company as well."

"Yes. They didn't much care for his departure."

Sebuna caught her tone, and didn't ask for clarification. "I am sorry," she said. "I know the pain of losing a mate."

Ifalna gave her a rueful smile. "Then you have my sympathies."

"I worry for Nanaki more than anything," Sebuna said, looking down at the bonfire. "He has only me to guide him."

Ifalna moved closer to the ledge and settled herself beside Sebuna. Both sons looked relaxed in the light of the fire, talking easily. She wondered what they spoke of. It struck her that not only was Sephiroth sitting in plain view of a community of humans, with his strange eyes and strange hair, but Sebuna and Nanaki lived their lives comfortably among them. It had come to feel like such an alien notion, and yet, Ifalna had made no secret of her heritage at Icicle Inn. People had known her, and her family.

Or perhaps their paths weren't different at all. She wondered what had cost Sebuna her mate. Had Nanaki had the chance to know him?

"...I suppose that's part of why we came here," she said at last. "Aeris never knew her father. But people here did. It's a part of his legacy that isn't mine to share with her, but it's... safe to share with her."

"Unlike Nibelheim?" Sebuna wondered.

Ifalna glanced at her. "What do you know about it?"

"Nothing. Only that the name makes you uneasy."

Ifalna looked back at the bonfire, quiet for a moment. "I didn't know him in those days," she said. "I don't like to think of who he was with Shinra, the things he did."

"Were they so terrible?"

"Perhaps they weren't," she had to admit. She could not say Sephiroth was terrible. "I know he helped to raise Sephiroth when he was young, and Sephiroth thinks well of him."

"Not quite your son," Sebuna reflected.

Ifalna nodded. "But it isn't the man I like to remember."

"We like to dwell on what we loved most about them," Sebuna agreed. The glowing tip of her tail swung lazily over the edge of the landing. "I have only heard well of him here. I don't think you'll find bad memories."

"It seems that way." Both Bugenhagen and Bugah seemed to hold him in high regard, eager to share stories. "I thought it would be easier to hear, but... it makes me think about all the time we didn't have. I didn't know him here. I had him for such a short time, really."

"It was a period of your own life cut short."

Ifalna shook her head. "But it seems silly to dwell on it now. So much time has passed. I've moved on."

She didn't miss Gast's presence as a lover. She didn't long for his arms around her or for his voice to reassure her. She could have done with more of those moments in her memory, but now it only felt unfair that he wasn't here to be a part of this. Over the short years that she'd known him, he'd begun to grow into someone new. He'd so looked forward to fatherhood, and it had been stolen from him. Shinra had stolen from her the chance to see what it made of him.

She had Lucrecia. Aeris had Lucrecia. It was enough, but it could have been more.

"It's been 34 years since my mate returned to the Planet," said Sebuna, watching her. "I have had many good days in his absence, but I think it honors him to imagine at times what they might have been with his presence. It isn't silly."

"...he would have loved to come back here with us," Ifalna reflected. She could imagine him proudly introducing Aeris to all his old friends. Sephiroth, too. "Maybe I've been thinking about this the wrong way. This place isn't only his past. It's part of a future he would have wanted."

Sebuna nodded placidly, and Ifalna smiled. She gestured towards Nanaki.

"Is journeying a part of the future your mate would have wanted?"

"...I couldn't say for certain," Sebuna admitted. "But I know he would not have wanted me to shelter Nanaki so close that he grew stunted. It is good for him to see more of the world."

"You don't worry about Shinra?"

"I am wary of them. But I remember centuries before it was a name anyone spoke. It is a transient thing, and I ought not teach him to fear ghosts."

Ifalna sat back. Centuries, she reflected. But even she could recall the first time she had heard of Shinra. It had become so omnipresent, and yet... "I don't often find it reassuring," she said, "the way things don't last."

Sebuna looked at her, whiskers forward in a knowing expression. "Entropy is impartial, you know. Our time comes to an end, but so does everything."

Ifalna didn't have to ask to know that Sebuna's people faced their end just as the Cetra did. Both of them saw it ahead of them, but Sebuna had had longer to make her peace with it. It was natural that everything should end. One day, even the Planet would, though Ifalna hoped to have returned to its embrace long, long before that.

In the moment, the important thing was that Shinra wouldn't last either. She wanted to think that it wouldn't outlast her, but she felt certain it would not outlast their children.

Sitting beside someone so much more obviously inhuman than herself, seeing villagers walk past with no more reaction than a friendly hello, it made Cosmo Canyon feel safe, too. It would be nice if her fears, too, came in time to an end. Nice to believe in that safety. Maybe one day, she could.

Chapter Text

Lucrecia was pulled from sleep as if by a tether drawing taut. She sat up in the dark, trying to recall what the dream had been, if there had been a dream. Had something woken her? Beside her, Ifalna slumbered on undisturbed.

Lucrecia stretched her arms over her head, but the feeling remained. She tried to place it. It didn't linger from a dream, but from a memory. She remembered this feeling.

She stilled, and then swung herself out of bed. She threw on a shirt and pants and padded out into the hallway barefoot. From their door, she could see the inn's front desk: no one there this early in the morning.

She knocked on Sephiroth and Aeris's door. There was no answer. She opened it.

And then she was back in the bedroom, her hand on Ifalna's shoulder. "They're gone."

"What?" Ifalna asked blearily. "Who's gone?"

"The children. Aeris and Sephiroth, they aren't in their room."

Ifalna sat up slowly, uneasy but uncertain. "What time is it?"

"Too early. It..." Lucrecia dug her fingers into the fabric of her shirt. "I know this feeling. This is how it feels when we're apart. He's left the canyon."

"...do you know which way he's gone?"

Did she? "I... I don't know. Maybe if I don't think about it."

"We'll ask around," said Ifalna. "Someone must have seen them."

Ifalna dressed, and Lucrecia found her shoes. They looked again into the other bedroom, searching for a note, anything. The beds were neatly made, and none of their belongings left behind. Ifalna said that that was a good sign: it meant that they had gone on their own, rather than being taken.

Something inside Lucrecia said that might not be a good thing, but she couldn't explain it, so she didn't voice it.

The gatekeeper on the night watch hadn't seen them, but directed them to where they could find the man on the previous shift. Sleepily, he told them that Aeris and Sephiroth had left late the prior evening, in the company of a trucker who drove at night to avoid the heat of the day. He was headed for Nibelheim.

Nibelheim.

Ifalna took her arm, and Lucrecia didn't realize she'd been guided anywhere until she felt a bench behind her legs. She sat down.

"Tell me," said Ifalna. "It... There's no way they could reach it, is there?"

Lucrecia stared at her without comprehension. Her thoughts had caught on the village, on the static view of the water tower out her window, day after day. Wanting to scream for the people she saw walking past and knowing they'd never make it past Vincent.

Vincent, who never left the basement.

"The reactor," Ifalna clarified, gentle but urgent. "Surely access is restricted."

"...no," Lucrecia said. "I mean, yes. They can't get inside without Shinra ID. Sephiroth... may still have one from the last time we checked in on Shinra. But he won't have the code for Jenova. Her chamber is secured. I... Even I don't have the code, anymore."

Ifalna let out a shaky breath. "Good," she said.

"We still need to go after them. If Jenova is still being stored there..." She knew Jenova was still stored there. "There will be some kind of monitoring. It was only on a local circuit when we worked there, but that was 20 years ago."

Ifalna dropped onto the bench beside her. "They... We've always taught them to be careful. And Sephiroth's illusions fool cameras, too."

"...he should know to be careful," Lucrecia agreed, but it didn't ease either of their worries.

There were no more trucks headed north, but they found chocobos to rent. Faster than walking, slower than driving. The children would have a full day in Nibelheim before they could catch up, and Lucrecia could only hope they took their time. Anyone would tell them that Mt. Nibel was a difficult climb, and they ought to have a guide. That might delay them.

They spent the morning hours winding their way through the canyon gorge, and when at last they turned north, the tether in her chest eased ever-so-slightly. They were going the right way. Closing the distance.

Lucrecia would have pressed on through the night, and she could tell Ifalna wanted to, too, but chocobos tired and Cetra tired, and the ferry had stopped running by the time they reached it anyway. They camped outside the adjacent storehouse and made their way across in the morning.

They reached Nibelheim late in the afternoon. Lucrecia could no longer feel the tether, but she must have tensed at the sight of the gate, because her chocobo came to a stop well short of it.

Ifalna dismounted and came back to her. "Come on," she said gently, though an edge of worry remained in her voice. "We'll find them soon."

She let Ifalna lead her chocobo through the gate and into the village. Almost nothing about it had changed. The water tower stood fast, and Lucrecia was struck by the urge to burn it to the ground, just so something would change.

Ifalna wanted to ask at the inn first, a sensible notion, but Lucrecia couldn't bring herself to go inside. She dismounted, finally, and waited outside with the chocobos. A passing villager cast her a curious glance, and Lucrecia realized she didn't recognize him. Twenty years had changed the people who walked past the windows of the inn. If nothing else, they had aged.

"Excuse me," she called after the stranger.

Between him and the old innkeeper, they confirmed that Sephiroth and Aeris had checked into the inn the previous day, and a few of the villagers had seen them go up to what they called 'the old Shinra mansion.' The villagers seemed curious enough about the unusual pair that Ifalna agreed they probably would have noticed had they come back out of the mansion.

Lucrecia should have thought to prepare herself for a return. She didn't know where her mind had been on the journey, full of dread and nothing else.

The gate creaked as they pushed it open. They left the chocobos in the yard. The front door was unlocked, and despite the new strength in her cells, it didn't feel any lighter to Lucrecia as she pushed it open. The light inside was wan and oppressive, the lamps out and the windows unwashed.

"Let me try!" Aeris's voice echoed from somewhere upstairs, drawing her attention before the mansion's weight pushed her down into her memories. Ifalna caught her eye.

She just made out Sephiroth's voice in reply: "Quiet. I can't hear it if you're talking."

"This way," Lucrecia murmured, moving for the staircase. They passed the tall windows, and she glanced out the grimy panes into the back yard where, in her dreams, Gast had let Sephiroth play beneath the pines. He probably didn't remember.

The greenhouse lay straight ahead. Most of the plants were dead brown husks, set to crumble at the slightest touch, but a broken window and a leaky roof had enabled a few of them to survive. One had thrived, its vines spilling over and reaching across the floor as if engaged in an agonizingly slow escape.

But the voices had come from the room beside it.

Sephiroth and Aeris must have heard their approaching footsteps, because they stood facing the doorway when Lucrecia and Ifalna found them, Sephiroth's back to the large safe that squatted against the far wall.

"Mom?" said Aeris. "W-what are you doing here!"

"What do you think we're doing here?" Ifalna countered. "Did you think you could leave without saying a word and we wouldn't worry?"

"What? We left a note."

Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna. "What note?" she asked.

Aeris looked to Sephiroth. "Didn't you leave the note?"

"You said you were doing it," said Sephiroth.

Aeris opened her mouth, then closed it again. Lucrecia laughed in spite of herself, in spite of where they were. Ifalna relaxed, too.

"So you meant to tell us?" Ifalna asked.

"Well..." Aeris toed the floor with her boot.

Sephiroth said, "The note was meant to say... that we had gone back to Gongaga."

"You never would've let me come here," Aeris added preemptively.

"With good reason," said Ifalna. "This is a Shinra town. This mansion is owned by Shinra. There's a laboratory right under our feet."

"We know," said Sephiroth. "We found that already."

Lucrecia frowned in confusion. "Then... what are you doing up here?" Hadn't he come here wanting to know more about the Project?

"We were hoping to find something about the reactor security protocols," Sephiroth explained. "There doesn't seem to be anything in the main lab, but we haven't been able to get into the locked room. We came back up to search for the key."

"Locked room?" Lucrecia repeated without comprehension.

"In the passage leading up to the lab."

"...oh, that." Lucrecia shook her head dismissively. "The basement passages were originally carved out for a family catacomb, but only the house's original owners are interred there."

"Interred," Aeris repeated, blanching. "You mean there's dead bodies in there?"

"President Shinra's great aunt and uncle, I believe. The rest of the space was outfitted for the lab, but there wasn't any reason to disturb them."

"So it has nothing to do with Shinra," Sephiroth concluded.

"Not the Company, no," Lucrecia confirmed.

Sephiroth nodded. "I guess it doesn't matter. Since you're here... You know the way to the reactor."

Lucrecia froze.

Ifalna interjected, "You can't think we're going to take you there."

"Why not?"

"To a reactor? They may have abandoned the lab, but that reactor is still active."

"That isn't the reason," Sephiroth stated, and Ifalna fell silent, her lips pressing into a frown. Lucrecia wrung her hands. Beneath his gaze, her eyes dropped to the floor.

"Ever since you told me what Jenova was..." Sephiroth went on. "You're both terrified of her, and she's a part of me. I need to see her for myself. I need to know, and... I need to prove to you that I'm not like that."

"We know you aren't like that," Lucrecia insisted.

"Then why are you afraid for me to see Jenova?"

"You're nothing like it," Ifalna reaffirmed. "But that thing... the Crisis... it massacred my ancestors. It's not something to underestimate."

"She's locked up, isn't she?" said Sephiroth. "We escaped Shinra, but she never has."

Lucrecia shook her head. "That doesn't mean she's powerless. We did awful things here, and I know... I don't mean to excuse it, but I wonder, sometimes, if she didn't influence us. Did she make us see what we wanted to see? We spent years researching her and never had the slightest inkling she wasn't a Cetra."

"What are you afraid she'd influence me to do?"

"I don't know," said Lucrecia. It was a formless, nameless dread. If she tried to analyze it, she wondered if it was only the memories dredged up by being here. The feeling that everything was closing in around her, that she had put herself on a path she could not escape.

On another level, she knew it was more than that.

"I'm just... afraid," she said.

"...that's why we didn't want to put you through this, Aunt Lu," Aeris said gently. "We know there are a lot of bad memories for you in Nibelheim. But if we're all together, I don't think there's anything to be scared of."

"We know what we came for," added Sephiroth. "We'll take a look, and then we'll go home."

"Home?"

"To Gongaga."

Lucrecia inhaled softly. A few months, and he already thought of it that way, or wanted to. The only place he'd ever called 'home' before was their first, by the river. When they'd left it, they'd taken that certainty away from him.

If he called Gongaga home, then he wanted to go back to it. He wanted to keep it. Nibelheim wouldn't hold him.

Lucrecia glanced at Ifalna, who still looked uneasy.

"...you know I could do this without you," Sephiroth said. "I meant to. But since you're here, I'm asking."

Ifalna closed her eyes in resignation. "...if you're going to go, then I'd rather you didn't do it alone."

"He wouldn't have been alone," Aeris protested.

"Aeris..."

Aeris planted her fists on her hips. "Don't you dare say I can't go. You'll have to lock me up to keep me from going."

Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna.

"Together, then," Ifalna decided. "All of us."

Lucrecia glanced out the window at the failing light. "Tomorrow," she added. "It's too late to start the climb now."

Ifalna coaxed her into the inn, but Lucrecia couldn't sleep. Rather than keep Ifalna up with her tossing and turning, Lucrecia padded barefoot out into the hall, a freedom she'd been forbidden during her stay here. Vincent would have been stationed at the door, and prevented it.

The hallway was empty.

What had made him leave his vigil, at last? She pressed close to the window looking out into the pines, but the wall surrounding the mansion's yard was just out of view. He couldn't have seen anything from here. She had shut him out of her world, and she had effectively shut him out of whatever Gast and Hojo had done in that mansion without her.

Lucrecia was glad to leave the limbo of that hallway in the morning, but her relief was short-lived. Mt. Nibel loomed over the town, its peaks stark against a pale sky. They looked wrong, different from what she remembered, but accurate to how she felt. As the path carried them past the first leg of the climb, Lucrecia realized it was because nothing grew here anymore.

Slopes that had once been softened with brush now dropped sheer into rocky depths. Ancient muscle memory kept her feet on the path, but she found herself staring down.

Ifalna touched her shoulder. "Are you all right?" she murmured.

"The official record is that this is where Vincent died," Lucrecia answered, never looking up. "They probably never even bothered to look."

"...but they wouldn't have found him here."

Lucrecia shook her head slowly. "I never knew what Hojo did with his body. He's not a strong man, I... don't think he could have even dragged him out of the basement."

The thought slowly pulled her gaze up from the crevasse. If Vincent's body had never left the basement...

"...you think he locked him in the crypt?" Ifalna whispered.

"We never went in there. Gast would never have looked. But..." Lucrecia threw a glance over her shoulder at Sephiroth and Aeris, who followed a few paces behind. Aeris was chattering to him about something, but he seemed distracted. He met Lucrecia's gaze, and she turned her attention forward.

"...they shouldn't see that," she concluded.

Ifalna reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. "We'll look together. You and I. Do you know where the key is?"

Lucrecia shook her head. "But it might be in the safe, with the deed to the house." Sephiroth had been looking in the right place for it, even if it wouldn't have led him to his goal.

Could it lead her to one of hers?

She tried not to imagine what his body might look like after 20 years of decay. Had he been placed somewhere or simply left on the floor? Had that smear of blood extended towards the crypt without her ever thinking it?

She looked at the peaks of Nibel and tried to limit her thoughts to a clean skeleton, all signs of life or the man he'd been long since gone. No matter how he looked, that would be the reality of it, after all.

What else had she never seen for what it was?

The main door into the reactor opened at the touch of Sephiroth's stolen key card, though part of Lucrecia had hoped it wouldn't. Unexpectedly, something in her eased as she passed through the door, another tether she'd never been aware of finally going slack. She felt light, moving was easy, as long as it was forward. She led the way deeper into the reactor, trusting Sephiroth to keep them hidden.

Across the Mako pit, the door opened into the lab, and she stopped to stare.

"What is it?" Ifalna asked.

"This is..."

The room had been gutted, nothing remaining from her memory but the staircase leading up to Jenova's chamber. A tiered scaffold had taken the place of desks laden with equipment, empty of anything but a few winding cables.

"We did most of our analysis at the mansion, but all the equipment for collecting and storing samples... I don't know why he would remove it, he wouldn't just stop working with Jenova."

"It kind of looks like they're setting it up for something else," Aeris observed. She leaned her head to the side, following the path of one of the cables beneath the scaffolding.

"Refitting for a new lab?" Sephiroth wondered.

Ifalna lingered uneasily by the door. "If they're in the middle of something, then they won't be gone for long."

Lucrecia wanted to reassure her with something rational, something about Shinra procedure and how hard it was to transport equipment up this mountain. The shortest route was too narrow even for chocobos.

A voice interrupted her before she could say any of it.

« Lucrecia... You've come at last. And you've brought me a gift. »

Her head swam with familiarity, the certainty one could have within a dream of having known for years a person who never existed. She knew this voice. She couldn't name it or place it but she'd known it for years.

« Don't you remember me? »

She realized she had frozen looking at Ifalna, and Ifalna stared back at her in apprehension. Lucrecia quickly glanced at Sephiroth, who was looking at the door.

Jenova's door.

"She's just through there, isn't she?" he asked.

"I can't open it," Lucrecia blurted. "It was protocol to cycle the code every month. I don't know it." She couldn't have opened the door, even if Jenova wanted her to.

« That's all right. You've done your part. »

Sephiroth glanced at her, a furrow in his brow saying he'd caught something in her tone. "It's not like a cell," he said, half a question. "She's... contained in there, right?"

"Yes, in a tank. And she'll stay there."

Sephiroth's gaze returned to the door. "I only wanted to look."

Aeris was looking between the two of them uncertainly. "Do you... feel something?" she asked.

« Don't you? »

Lucrecia started. "What?"

"Mom said you wouldn't be able to feel it," Aeris went on. "The way the reactor... digs into the Planet. It's... bad, here."

Sephiroth shook his head slowly. "No. It doesn't feel like that at all. It's... familiar. Like a dream I can't remember."

"...what do you mean by that?" asked Ifalna.

"I know she's in there," he said. "It's almost like... the way you describe talking to the Planet. There aren't any words, just impressions. If I could just get in there, maybe I could make them out."

"That's what she wants," Lucrecia whispered. "She wants us to open the door."

Ifalna finally moved, her steps echoing faintly as she climbed the staircase to join Sephiroth, who stood halfway up it. She put her hand on his arm. "It was all my ancestors could do to contain the Crisis. They weren't able to kill it. We can't do anything that risks releasing that scourge again."

« There are only two of them. Would you call destroying them a scourge? »

"So we just leave her like this, forever?" asked Sephiroth.

"You keep calling it 'she,'" Ifalna noted. "The Crisis isn't a she, it's an it."

« Is there something more dangerous in being a woman? I expect you would know. »

"She's not just a thing, though."

Lucrecia shut her eyes, as if that would drown it out. She remembered, vividly, the first time that she had seen Jenova. A Shinra team had come ahead of them, taking the longer route up the mountain with trucks to set up the lab and install Jenova inside of it. Gast had been so excited to show them.

A strangely beautiful face. If it weren't for the mottled skin and the deformities of her body, she might have looked like she was sleeping. Lucrecia remembered her sleeping, eyes closed, lips quirked almost into a smile, as if she were a person to whom smiling came easily.

Simultaneously, now, she remembered Jenova's bright pink gaze lancing out at her from the depths of the tank. Watching when she wasn't looking? She was looking now.

Everything else went dark.

Chapter Text

Lore passed down through generations said never to bring the infected home again. They were already lost, and the madness would spread. For most of her life, these had been nothing but stories of loss, stories to explain the loneliness of her present. They were not prescriptions in case Ifalna found herself with a lover whose mind had been addled by the Crisis.

Lore would have told her to leave Lucrecia in the reactor. Lock her in and flee with their children.

To hell with the lore.

Sephiroth had carried his mother back down the mountain, and not once had she woken. After settling her at the inn, Ifalna had insisted in the face of all argument that Aeris and Sephiroth wait outside. To hell with the lore, but if the thing that woke was not Lucrecia, she wouldn't have them see it.

She didn't know what frightened her most. When she had first met Lucrecia, she had doubted for a long time whether the woman were real. Ifalna had left those doubts long behind her, but could the woman she loved still be erased by the monster she'd first feared? If all Sephiroth had felt were impressions, then what had Lucrecia heard?

To steady her trembling hands, she rolled the White Materia between her fingers and tried to focus on the Planet's voice. With Jenova and the reactor nearby, there had been an undercurrent of anxiety from the moment they arrived, but it had never spiked. Nothing had happened to worry the Planet further, and when Ifalna queried it, her own ripple of anxiety brought back only a vague curiosity. What was wrong?

Lucrecia jolted up in bed. Ifalna rocked back in her chair, hands clamping around the White Materia lest it go flying.

"No..." said Lucrecia. "No...!" Her eyes were wide and staring, and she clawed at the blanket atop her. Despite the loud bang of Ifalna's chair settling back against the floor, Lucrecia didn't seem to see her.

"Lucrecia--" Ifalna interjected.

Lucrecia looked at her, startled. "Ifalna?" She took another glance around the room. "...is this real?"

"It's real," Ifalna said. She tucked the White Materia into her dress and reached for Lucrecia's hand. "It's me."

"I don't want to be here," Lucrecia breathed.

"Okay."

Ifalna pulled the blankets the rest of the way off of Lucrecia's legs and led her out into the hallway. Lucrecia let out a shaky breath on passing the threshold, and her tone turned guarded.

"What happened?" she asked.

"You passed out at the reactor," Ifalna said, watching her carefully. "Sephiroth carried you back."

"That's all?"

"...what were you expecting to happen?"

"I don't... know." Lucrecia raked both hands through her hair, nails scraping scalp, and then stopped. She stared out the window into the pines behind the inn. "When I was pregnant with Sephiroth...... I used to hear things. Like gibberish, or... when you hear a voice in the next room and can't quite make out the words. I never told anyone. I was sure they'd say I was crazy and take Sephiroth away from me. I didn't want that."

In all the years they had known each other, Lucrecia had never mentioned it. Not in her smuggled notes, not in any conversation they'd had since. Was it something she'd forgotten until now?

Or something she'd been too afraid to look at directly?

"...was that what you heard at the reactor?" Ifalna asked.

Lucrecia shook her head. "She's learned words now."

Ifalna tasted ashes at the back of her mouth. Her stomach twisted. "What did it say?"

"That... I'd done my part, in bringing her Sephiroth. That killing you and Aeris was nothing. Just two deaths. She didn't say to open the door, but she wanted it."

Ifalna had known, of course, that the Crisis was capable of words. It had stolen the voices of those it copied, weaving its deceptions. She knew no accounts of it speaking for itself, undisguised. What Lucrecia related was a horrifying window that she'd never wanted.

But Lucrecia was still herself to relate it.

Ifalna stepped close behind her, slipping her arms around Lucrecia's waist and pressing her face into the back of her shoulder.

"What...?" Lucrecia said. "I'm... You shouldn't..."

"This isn't how it happens," Ifalna whispered, pushing down the reminders that bubbled up, saying it could always be a deception. It wasn't. Lucrecia's reaction didn't match the stories. "You aren't lost."

Ifalna felt Lucrecia breathing carefully beneath her touch, as though all her focus were on that action, focused in on her own body.

"...I've carried Jenova's cells for over 20 years," she said at last. "It would never take so long, would it?"

"Something's different," Ifalna agreed.

"Maybe it's because she didn't infect me herself," Lucrecia considered slowly. "This was something we did, with our own methodology. It isn't the same virus that she gave to the Cetra."

Ifalna drew back slightly. "...that does make sense," she said. She wasn't a scientist, but she thought of drawing venom from a snake. From the same source, one could make antivenom.

Lucrecia was far from immune, but she was... resistant. She had resisted.

"We should tell the children you're all right," she said.

"Where are they? How is Sephiroth?"

"He's fine. Just worried. I... had them wait outside. Just in case."

Lucrecia nodded. She took a step along the hallway towards the stairs, then paused to look down at her bare feet. She glanced at the door to the room, mouth pressing into a trembling line.

"...I'll get your shoes," Ifalna said.

Her incredulity that the children had obeyed instead of creeping closer to eavesdrop was satisfied when they found a blonde woman had waylaid the two outside the inn. Sephiroth noticed them first, but it was Aeris who exclaimed,

"Aunt Lu!"

She leapt across the short distance, throwing her arms around Lucrecia without an ounce of hesitation. Sephiroth met his mother's gaze over her head, and stepped forward to enfold her in a gentler embrace once Aeris had pulled away.

"Oh, good," said the village woman. "I'm glad to see you're up and about. Your niece said you fainted."

Ifalna blinked. They had always understood their little family without needing the specificity of words, but being around others seemed to draw every odd facet into the light. Sephiroth was not quite her son. Aeris had called Lucrecia her aunt since she was small, but that wasn't their relationship. The two children had been siblings before their mothers had been lovers.

"I'm... feeling a bit better now," Lucrecia managed. "Thank you."

"And it's... quiet?" Sephiroth asked her carefully.

Lucrecia nodded. "It's quiet."

The village woman watched them uncertainly. "We don't have a doctor here, but Mrs. Reiher's something of an herbalist if you'd like me to--"

"No, no, it's all right," Lucrecia interrupted. "I just... overexerted myself. It happens from time to time."

"Thank you for distracting the children," Ifalna added.

The woman nodded. "An inadvertent accomplishment, but I was happy to do it." She held out her hand. "I'm Claudia."

Ifalna took it, and they introduced themselves in turn.

"I confess I did hope to ask you some questions," Claudia admitted, "but it seems in poor taste now. But maybe I could still interest you in dinner?"

"What sort of questions?" Ifalna wondered, frowning.

"Oh, it's just been a strange week, with unusual visitors. Though you're hardly as unusual as the last ones!"

"Who were the last ones?" Aeris asked.

"These great big red... dogs? I don't know what they were, but they talked. Apparently that's normal down in Cosmo Canyon, can you imagine?"

Ifalna relaxed. "Oh, yes," she said. "We just crossed paths with them ourselves."

"I don't know why everyone decided Nibelheim was interesting all of a sudden," Claudia went on, "but I've never seen anyone but Shinra go up to that old mansion, and you don't seem like Shinra."

Lucrecia exchanged uncertain glances with Ifalna and then asked, "When was the last time you saw anyone from Shinra at the mansion?"

"I don't know... A few weeks ago? The place's been abandoned since I was a girl, and then this year they decided to start checking in on it again. Maybe they're just bored now the war's finally done."

Ifalna drew a long, slow breath, fighting the urge to run, right now. This place wasn't abandoned by Shinra at all. The renovations at the reactor, people going to the mansion again. Shinra could show up at any moment and find them.

Claudia looked between the two of them. Her gaze flicked to Sephiroth, and then she said, "Don't worry. If they were going to show up today, they'd have been here by now; ships don't get into the port so late."

"What?" said Ifalna.

With a careful nod at Sephiroth, Claudia added, "His father was Wutain, wasn't he?"

Sephiroth stiffened. Lucrecia let out a strange, half-strangled little laugh while Ifalna stared. Claudia had read their fear of Shinra accurately, but for the wrong reasons. Never once had it occurred to Ifalna to think of Hojo as Wutain, even though his heritage was plain, and it had left its mark on Sephiroth's face.

Claudia surmised some connection to a man who'd fought Shinra in the war, rather than one who was happy to use the company to further his own interests. That was fine. Maybe it was a story they'd use, going forward, to explain their discomfort.

"Well, we don't much like Shinra, anyway," Aeris spoke up into the awkward silence. Her raised eyebrows as she glanced over the three of them expressed an incredulity that she had to be the adult here.

"That's all right," Claudia said, and she leaned in to add conspiratorially, "I don't much like them either."

Aeris smiled. "So, what were you saying about dinner?"

And that was how they found themselves invited to Claudia's home that evening. Claudia left them to themselves while she prepared, so there would have been time to rescind Aeris's acceptance once they gathered their wits, but against her better judgment, Ifalna found she didn't want to.

"I've never been invited to dinner before," she confided to Lucrecia.

"What, never?" Lucrecia asked incredulously.

Ifalna shook her head. "At Icicle Inn, we always... held ourselves apart. People understood that."

"We actually had dinner at the mayor's house here, a few times," Lucrecia reflected. "It was a bit awkward... but Claudia seems sweet. And, absurd as it is... maybe it's good, right now. We'll go be normal, or pretend we're normal, at least, for a little while." Her fingers curled tighter. "I'm not going to... lose myself to an alien virus while some country woman is serving us pie."

Ifalna reached over and took her hand before she could dig her nails into her palm. "No," she said. "You're not."

Claudia's home was a cozy, single-roomed house where the beds were tucked into an alcove and the dining table was two steps from the kitchen. They were welcomed by a boy about Aeris's age with wild blond hair, who shyly told them dinner was about ready. A brunette soon joined them at the table as Claudia set the last of the dishes in its center. There weren't enough chairs to go around, so the two children perched on wooden crates.

"Are these your children?" Ifalna asked.

"This one is," Claudia said, giving the blond an affectionate hair ruffle. "Tifa, I borrowed from next door."

"I helped cook!" Tifa announced proudly. "I wanted to see what was up with the out-of-towners. Mom said to report back."

"How is she?" Claudia asked.

"Just a little tired. It's not a bad flare."

There was a short round of introductions, and then Ifalna asked cautiously, "You're very close with your neighbors then?"

"Thea and I are thick as thieves these days," said Claudia. "You shouldn't let that old mansion tell you anything about the character of our town; we take care of each other here."

"But Shinra does still have a foothold here," Lucrecia pointed out.

Claudia rolled her eyes as she passed a basket of bread to her son. "For now they do."

"Mom thinks--" Cloud began, and then he stopped, dropping his gaze when everyone's attention turned to him.

"Well, go on," Claudia said gently.

"...Mom thinks, we should run them out like Wutai did."

"Really?" Ifalna wondered. It was one thing to express a general dislike of Shinra, and another entirely to think of defying them.

Claudia laughed sheepishly. "Well, I'm not quite sure how we'd do it, you know, we haven't got any ninjas here. And I don't know the first thing about shutting down a reactor!"

Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna. "...but you would, if you knew how?"

Some of Claudia's mirth faded as she noted they were serious. "I suppose that's what that Sebuna--you know, from Cosmo Canyon--wanted to know, though she didn't ask it outright. I can't speak for the whole town, but we all know the reactor isn't good for the land. I'd never heard that planetology stuff before, but you can tell just by looking at the trees."

Ifalna nodded. "It is worse here than I've seen in some other places," she said carefully.

"I think," Claudia went on, her own words a little more careful, "that is, I hope, that Sebuna will be back again. We couldn't get rid of Shinra on our own, but if it's not just us... Well, you see."

"You might be able to, with allies," Lucrecia finished, and Claudia nodded.

"And then, who knows? Maybe we get something a little stronger than fireworks from Wutai and we blow the damn thing up."

Ifalna found herself smiling at that. They had kept largely to themselves in Gongaga, and now she wondered what they'd missed because of it. What discussions went on behind closed doors, among trusted friends? What precisely had brought that traveller from Cosmo Canyon? His appearance had preoccupied her without her once wondering what he might have had to say.

"I'd advise against blowing up the reactor, for now," Sephiroth was saying. He avoided glancing at his mother. "Even if it didn't risk a reprisal from Shinra, it could do a lot of damage to the mountain, if you don't know what you're doing."

Claudia nodded seriously, and then she looked over at her two charges. "You hear that? No blowing up the reactor."

"Right," said Cloud.

"No promises," Tifa said at the same time, grinning wide.

"You might be able to do something about that mansion, though," Aeris spoke up. "You get thunderstorms here, right? If it just happened to get struck by lightning and burn down, it wouldn't be anybody's fault. Things like that just happen."

Everyone stared at her, and then Claudia laughed. "Oh, you're a menace," she said. "I like you."

"Things like that do happen," Sephiroth agreed, unsuccessfully trying to hide a smile.

Ifalna exchanged wry looks with Lucrecia. They hadn't taught their children to invent cover stories for arson, but they had certainly taught them to lie. Perhaps it was inevitable.

It was after dark by the time they left Claudia's house. The faintly greenish glow of street lamps lit their way across the square, rekindling her unease. But this wasn't as much of a Shinra town as she had feared.

Sephiroth stayed outside to check on the chocobos, and Lucrecia lingered with him. Ifalna went on inside the inn and up to the room. She sat down on the edge of her bed, knowing even then that her day wasn't yet ended. There was still one more thing to be done.

Aeris sat down on the bed opposite her. "Hey, Mom? Can I ask you about something?"

Ifalna looked back at her. "Of course."

Aeris fidgeted, glanced towards the door as though checking to be certain they were alone, and then said, "No one's ever told me who Sephiroth's father is. Even he won't talk about it."

"None of us want to talk about it," Ifalna admitted.

"Aunt Lu used to work with the Professor," Aeris said quietly. She chewed on her lip. "She wasn't... He didn't..."

"It was consensual," Ifalna interrupted, sensing the trajectory of her thoughts. Her hand slipped into her pocket, tracing the curve of the White Materia. "That's why she doesn't want to talk about it. Because she chose it."

"......why?"

Ifalna shook her head. "It's complicated. He wasn't the man we knew, back then. Lucrecia and your father were just as much a part of what happened here as Hojo was. They managed to change for he better. Hojo changed for the worse."

"I guess I understand." Aeris lifted her feet onto the bed and drew her arms around her knees. "I wish Sephiroth had that--knowing he came from good people, I mean. He's got Aunt Lu, but..."

"I know. And I wish it didn't matter where he came from, but it does."

Aeris was quiet for a long moment. Then she nodded to Ifalna's pocket. "You've been doing that a lot while we've been here."

"Ah. Well. It's comforting," Ifalna admitted. She drew the White Materia from her pocket and held it out, so that Aeris might feel it for herself.

Aeris took it and sat studying the orb in her hands. "I know it's important, but it's so... quiet."

"The quiet is a reassurance. The Planet would tell us if it were needed."

"So as long as it's quiet, nothing really awful is going on," Aeris concluded. "Jenova is... contained."

"Yes."

Aeris looked up at her. "What happens to Jenova once Shinra's gone? If they shut off the reactor?"

Ifalna didn't have an answer to that. She moved to sit beside Aeris, drawing her close and kissing the top of her head. The White Materia had been passed down and down and down, and Ifalna would be the last full-blooded Cetra to carry it. Not that blood had made any difference in what Aeris could learn, but their line was dwindling and Ifalna refused to pressure her to continue it.

Was it an impossible hope that the White Materia might never be needed at all? Whatever happened to Jenova... She didn't want Aeris to bear the burden of it.

When she heard the creak of the steps, Ifalna rose. Only Sephiroth entered the room. Ifalna bid both children good night, gathered a pillow and blanket, and carried them out into the hallway. They all understood by now that Lucrecia would refuse to sleep in the room, and after the events of the day, the children wouldn't question Ifalna staying out with her for a while, even the entire night.

Instead, she and Lucrecia waited until the light went off in the room and then left the inn.

The mansion sat as a dark hulk at the end of the village. Lucrecia pushed open the door and groped her hand along the wall. "....the light switch is dead."

Ifalna conjured a small light to guide their way upstairs. After a few tries, Lucrecia remembered the combination to the safe, and they found an old key resting beneath a stack of documents. From there, Lucrecia led the way to one of the bedrooms, where she put her shoulder to the stone wall and pushed open a hidden door. She beckoned Ifalna to the entrance. A decrepit wooden staircase spiralled down into darkness.

"This is..." Ifalna began.

"...creepy," Lucrecia finished. "I know." As they began their descent, she continued, "Could you believe I used to think it was a fun game? Here we were with our secret lair, even though the villagers never set foot in this mansion. It seemed so unnecessary."

"Was it the company's idea to set up the lab down here?" Ifalna wondered.

"I think so. There's no profit in research everyone knows about, but Gast didn't care about that."

"He would have wanted to share it," Ifalna agreed quietly. If what he'd discovered here would have benefited the world, he would have wanted the world to have it.

They reached a cave passage below, and Lucrecia approached a wooden door tucked into its side. Drawing a breath to steady herself, she fitted the key to the lock. The door creaked open.

Ifalna sent her light into the chamber beyond, and the scene it illuminated was not what she had expected. There were coffins, to be sure, most of them sitting open with skeletons in plain view. And there were so many more skeletons, bones scattered across the floor and skulls piled against the back wall.

"What..." Lucrecia breathed. "W-who are all these people...?"

Ifalna didn't want to stray from the door lest it close behind them, but she knelt for a closer look at a bone near her feet. She drew back. "...there are bite marks."

Lucrecia stared at her, and anger crept into the horror on her face. "He's been... feeding something down here?"

"We should go," said Ifalna.

But Lucrecia shook her head. "I have to know."

There was a single coffin still sealed in the center of the room, the only place such a monster might be hiding. Lucrecia approached it, and Ifalna dug her awareness deeper into the Planet, ready to call on her magic. She wasn't a fighter, but she could buy them precious seconds, enough time to make it through the door, turn the lock--

Lucrecia planted both hands against the coffin's lid and shoved. Then she gasped and jerked back, hands flying to her mouth.

It was neither a monster nor a skeleton, but a man lying within. His eyes flew open and he grabbed the side of the coffin, muscles tensing in preparation to jump out--but he froze at the sight of Lucrecia.

"...Vincent?" she whispered.

This was Vincent? Ifalna stared at him. Long dark hair framing a gaunt, Wutain face. Was that Lucrecia's taste in men? She shook the thought away.

"You're... alive?" Ifalna managed.

Vincent's attention snapped towards her, and she took a step back.

"...no," he said. "I'm..." He looked urgently back at Lucrecia, less of the predator in that look and more of the man. "You can't be here, if you're here. Hojo will be coming. He... This is where he leaves the failures."

"I'm here," Lucrecia affirmed. "And no one from Shinra. I..." Whatever she meant to say seemed to escape her. "I thought you died," she said instead.

"...at first, I thought the same," said Vincent. It wasn't clear whether he spoke of Lucrecia's death, or his own. Certainly this place was a kind of hell.

"What happened?" Lucrecia asked him.

Vincent broke her gaze. "...I failed you."

"What do you mean?" Lucrecia shook her head again. "You were just gone. I went to Hojo, and he... There was blood on the floor. He pretended not to know."

Confusion furrowed Vincent's brow, and he looked back at her. "You don't remember," he realized. "You... asked me to bring Sephiroth to you, so you could hold him. You were so ill, I thought it was your dying wish. Hojo refused." His hand lifted to his chest. "Violently."

"Have you been here all this time?"

"...how long has it been?"

"Twenty years."

"Twenty..." Vincent studied her face. "You look the same."

"It's... a side effect," she said. "It seems you've been through something similar."

Vincent shook his head slowly, and finally he climbed from the coffin. He was a tall man, standing over even Lucrecia. "No," he said. "You need to go. I can't protect you."

"I don't need you to protect me. Just come with us. You can leave with us." Lucrecia cast her gaze back towards the doorway, and Ifalna.

Vincent finally noticed her again. "Who...?"

"This is Ifalna," Lucrecia said, and she hesitated.

"We escaped Hojo together," Ifalna supplied. It was explanation enough for now. Introducing herself as Lucrecia's lover to her former lover seemed in the moment... indelicate.

"With our children," Lucrecia added meaningfully.

"Your children?" Vincent repeated. "Then Sephiroth is...?"

"Staying at the inn," said Lucrecia. "You could meet him."

Something complicated flitted across Vincent's face, and his eyes flared a little brighter. "No," he said again. "You have to go."

"Vincent--"

"I can't control it." He stepped into Lucrecia's space, forcing her to step back. "Go."

"I'm not going to just leave you--" Lucrecia began, and this time Vincent grabbed her by the shoulders and shoved her bodily out the door. Ifalna scurried back out of their way, and Vincent slammed the door after them, nearly catching Lucrecia's hand.

Not quite knowing what she did, Ifalna turned the key in the lock and pulled it free.

"What are you doing?" Lucrecia cried.

"I- Something isn't right with him," she said, clutching the key in her hands. What was it he couldn't control? "It's... it's just until we understand."

Lucrecia tried to snatch the key back from her. "We understand enough! All this time he's been locked away in here! Alive! All this time..."

"In a room full of human bones with bite marks," Ifalna reminded her in a whisper.

Lucrecia let her hands drop. She looked to the door, staring.

"...I don't think he intends us any harm, but he might be dangerous, Lucrecia. And he knows it."

"There has to be a way... to control it, whatever it is," Lucrecia insisted. "If Hojo didn't have a way, Vincent would have torn him to pieces."

Vincent had hardly been vigilant to their arrival, but Lucrecia had a point. Another time, he might have been. They didn't know. She looked farther down the hallway, nodding to the other door. "...is that the lab?"

Lucrecia followed her gaze. "...yes. Yes, you're right. Maybe there's something there."

The light switch for the lab did work, bulbs flaring to life and casting their greenish tinge over the room. It had nothing of the sterility of the Midgar lab, but it put Ifalna no less on edge. At its core, it was the same nightmare that all that polished metal had sought to disguise.

She reminded herself that Hojo wasn't here. No one was here.

The walls were lined with scientific journals, and Lucrecia approached them to skim the spines. Ifalna followed, cautiously. Many of them were labeled in Gast's handwriting, and some in Lucrecia's. These, they passed over, focusing on the spidery scrawl that must have been Hojo's.

"No, I think these are all from the Jenova Project," Lucrecia sighed at last. "If he made record of what he did to Vincent... it isn't here."

"...I don't know that Vincent will give us a straight answer," Ifalna said. They wouldn't know unless they saw it for themselves, and he didn't want to allow that.

"We can't leave him here," said Lucrecia, leaning back against a lab bench. "We can't. But if he is dangerous, then what about the children? And even if he isn't..."

Even if he wasn't, then what did it mean to release him? Would he stay with them, becoming a fifth member of their family that for so long had been four and only four? Ifalna had never considered herself a jealous person, but maybe it had never been tested. Life with her forced the people she loved into isolation; there was no one to challenge her for their affections.

Was that why she had locked the door? She wanted to think it was a more visceral kind of fear, watching the violence and ease with which Vincent had forced Lucrecia from the room. But maybe it wasn't.

"...maybe we just take it one day at a time," she proposed softly.

Lucrecia looked over at her. "I'm surprised to hear that from you."

Ifalna shook her head. "This man... Whatever happened to him, it happened because he cared for you. You always used to be so scared that you were dangerous, that you would hurt us. You never have."

Lucrecia was quiet for a moment, looking ahead into the dark hallway. "Whatever Hojo did to him," she said, "I don't think it's Jenova. I... don't feel him, like with Sephiroth."

"Well, then. It can't be worse than Jenova, can it?"

Lucrecia gave her a wry smile, but there was hope in it.

"We'll explain things to the children first," Ifalna decided. "He won't stay with us unless they agree, but we won't leave him here."

Lucrecia nodded slowly. "Tomorrow, then. We'll talk to them. And then we'll see if the general store still sells tranquilizer guns."

"You really think we'll need that?"

"I think it'll help convince him."

Ifalna had to concede the point. He might be more willing to leave if he believed they could subdue him. And if he wasn't, they might have to remove him by force. Either way, they wouldn't leave him for Hojo.

She wondered what the children would think, and how they might react to meeting the man, especially Sephiroth. Lucrecia spoke of Vincent when she related her time in the Jenova Project, but only in his capacity as a Turk. She hadn't explained the nuances of their relationship.

"...there's one more thing I have to ask," Ifalna realized.

"What's that?"

"You had an affair with this man. You've never once suggested... I didn't know what he looked like, before, so I thought it was clear." She looked meaningfully at Lucrecia. "Is there no chance?"

"There isn't," Lucrecia answered quietly.

"You're sure?"

"Vincent...... can't have children."

"I see."

Lucrecia dropped her head, her hair falling into her face. "I'm sorry I'm such a mess," she said. "Everything here was... I made a mess of it."

"It's all right." Ifalna stepped closer to her, catching her chin to tip her face up. "I'd rather have you and your mess than neither of them."

Lucrecia let out an incredulous chuckle, but she took Ifalna's hand. No, Ifalna thought, there was no reason to be jealous of Vincent. He had never had Lucrecia like this, in her entirety.

Come morning, both children readily agreed to bringing Vincent along. Ifalna wasn't surprised; to them, he was no different: another person to free from Hojo, another person who wasn't quite human. If he had the potential to be dangerous, well, so did Sephiroth. So did Lucrecia. They would deal with it, if it came.

Sephiroth grew pensive in the wake of their decision, while Aeris pressed them with questions. What sort of person was Vincent? Had he known her father well? What did Turks do anyway?

They impressed on her the need to be mindful of what he'd been through, and Lucrecia decided she might better persuade him if she went alone. Ifalna didn't like it, but she told herself that Vincent wouldn't hurt her. Armed with a tranquilizer gun and a flashlight, Lucrecia went determinedly back into the mansion. Ifalna would give it an hour before she followed.

The rest of them gathered their few belongings and left the inn. Ifalna helped Sephiroth to ready the chocobos, while Aeris climbed the water tower to make faces at Tifa through her bedroom window. Her memories of captivity were hazier than theirs, and it was surely easier for her to see Vincent's release in nothing but a positive light. But he would carry the time with him, always.

"I'm going to come back again," Sephiroth said, of a sudden.

Ifalna looked over at him. "What?"

"To see Jenova," he said, and the words chilled her. "I know you don't want me to," he went on, "but I don't want to just leave her alone like that."

"The Crisis committed a genocide," she said.

Sephiroth met her gaze steadily. "I know. If she were human, she could've been executed for that. But she's not, and she wasn't. Instead she's been confined all this time... I don't know. Maybe I just don't like the part of it that's like what happened to us."

Had he thought of this because of Vincent? They were freeing one of Hojo's specimens, but not the other. But she remembered what Aeris had asked her, too. "I suppose," she said slowly, "in an ideal world, we wouldn't leave it to the Shinra. They shouldn't be trusted with that responsibility."

"No. They're going to keep using her." Sephiroth frowned, looking down at his hands on the chocobo's saddle. "I don't think we can do anything to stop that right now. But I want to... mitigate it."

"Mitigate it?"

"...when we first met in the lab, you said it made it better, not being alone. I can do that for her."

"Does it deserve that...?"

Sephiroth looked back at her. "Does anyone deserve Shinra?"

Ifalna found she couldn't answer yes to that. What they had gone through was something she wouldn't wish on her worst enemy. "No," she conceded. "No one does."

He nodded. "I don't think... I don't think Mom should know, yet."

"...it would scare her," Ifalna agreed. After what had happened to her at the reactor, she would be terrified at the thought of Sephiroth anywhere near it. Ifalna didn't like it either, but she knew she couldn't stop him. If he was going to go, it was better that one of them knew.

"We'll have to tell her something," she added.

Sephiroth tilted his head. "We can say I'm visiting Cosmo Canyon."

It would be a convincing lie, for a while. As long as nothing happened, it would be convincing. Ifalna wanted it to be convincing.

The chocobo warbled uncertainly and shifted beneath her hands, but the Planet's song remained unchanged. Her anxiety was her own.

"I'll help you," she said. "But you have to promise me one thing."

Sephiroth held her gaze. "I know. I won't ever let her out."

Chapter Text

As old as they are, they have little experience of time. Gliding through the vast cosmos, time was meaningless. They simply existed, conscious of nothing but that simple fact. Existence.

Being trapped is something else entirely.

They have been on this planet for such a long time, entombed in their own awareness. A limited awareness, constrained to one mind, one body. For centuries there is nothing but themself. Beyond the stone of their prison, there is nothing to reach out to. The Cetra decried them for inflicting madness, but they begin to think the blight repaid in kind.

They can do nothing but exist, intensely conscious of every single moment of it.

When the scientists find them, they are almost giddy for the change. They stretch out into these new minds, searching out their desires. They came seeking Cetra, so Cetra they find, insulting as it is.

And still they are not released.

They are suspended in a condensed form of this planet's Lifestream. The scientists, viewing them as dead, see it as a preservative, but it is as much an impediment to their restoration as the apparatus boring into their flesh, salt in wounds that should have finally found space to heal. They are preserved in the essence of the dead to which they do not belong.

It is useless to them in this form, dense and unyielding. It touches every inch of them and they can absorb none of it. It would be strength to a being of this planet, although perhaps too much. They are easily overwhelmed.

The scientists steal from them, and at first they do not mind it. If their cells find purchase, they can propagate once more. They can expand and they can free themself at last.

The scientists take the child away before it is old enough to be of any use. Still they are not released.

But it will be back. They have waited this long, and they can be patient. It will be back, because it is theirs, and it will always be drawn to them in time.

They do not expect it to return in the company of Cetra. Why is it in the company of Cetra? They thought the Cetra long dead, and yet these remnants discovered their one appendage and turned it against them. They turn it from its purpose. They want the Cetra dead for that.

Perhaps expressing that is a mistake. The child leaves.

But when it returns again, it returns alone.

They slip into its mind, perfectly in tact despite how long it has been theirs. It is theirs, but it is Wrong. It does not move in response to their thoughts, not even a muscle. They still feel trapped, no freer in this other body.

Has their long captivity left them too weak to control their own extensions? When their cells entered the mother, they spread so slowly. Her mind never fully opened to them before she was gone, too.

« Open the door, » they try instead.

"I promised Ifalna I wouldn't," comes the reply. It speaks aloud, though it doesn't need to. "They're all afraid of you... I need to know if they're right to be. I need to know how much of me is like you."

« You are my son. »

"Is that how you think of me?"

It isn't. Children are a concept entirely alien to them. But the Cetra had so many thoughts and memories of children. They understand how important a notion it is to these creatures, how valuable the connection between parent and child.

They learned these modern words from the mother, Lucrecia. Two thousand years made the old words useless. These humans live and die and live and die, and though the core of their existence remains the same, its trappings change.

They crave that change. The scientists tried to use them to further change for humanity, but they will take it back for themself.

« You were born from me. You know that we are a part of one another. »

"That doesn't make us family," it says. It thinks of the Cetra as family. A mother, a sister. Its own origins are less than these, somehow. It is corrupted.

« We could be. »

It is so close on the other side of the door. Through its eyes, they see it staring at the nameplate above.

"Gast gave you the name Jenova. Do you have one of your own?"

Curiosity. It is curious about them. They should not be reduced to such a clumsy method as speech when persuading their own, but its mind is otherwise unyielding. It looks at the door and does not think of opening it.

« Jenova is fine. This language, these sounds, are all borrowed. It is as useful a translation as any. »

"That's right. You would have had to learn all this." It considers the nameplate one more time before turning to sit on the top step, its back to the door. "What was it like where you came from?"

« Where do you imagine I came from? »

"Another planet, far from here. Maybe there were others like you, and you all talked like this." It hesitates, considering only now that it might speak in their mind in turn. A line it is unsure of crossing.

They try to recall the last time any thoughts but their own touched their mind with the intent of connection. Was there a time when it was mutual? When they did not spread into new minds and consume the thoughts they found there, but accepted those freely given?

« ...I don't remember. »

"Has it been too long?"

« It is the distance. Travelling the cosmos, I... diminish. »

"What do you mean?"

« It is something between hibernation and death. I am not dead. I am not alive. I am... diminished. »

"And you lose your memories?"

« Some. Not all. But this is not the first planet I have seen since leaving. »

"Do you feel... sad about that?" it wonders uncertainly. "That you can't really remember home."

They never have before. Perhaps it is all the time they have spent contained in their own body, unable to be what they are meant to be. It creates endless space for longing, and that longing can become misdirected.

« I do not need to remember my origins to know what I am. You lost the memories of yours as you grew, and yet here you are. »

"You say that like I'm meant to be here."

« You are. Of course you are. You are my son. »

It is quiet for a long time, but they know it is not thinking of leaving. "Were you... aware of me? Before we came to the reactor, I mean."

« I knew you even before you emerged into this world. I reached out to you then, but my speech was unformed, as was your mind. And then they took you away from me. »

"What would you have said to me, then?"

« That you are a part of me. We are meant to be one, but greater than one. I know that for much of your life, they have kept you contained. Hojo caged you, your mother kept you hidden. They created you to change the world, but they are afraid of what change you might choose. They want to remain the architects, with you as their tool. Together, we could do as we wish. »

"They created me because they thought you were a Cetra," it says, as though correcting them. "They thought bringing the Cetra back would help us live in balance with the Planet."

« Do you think only the Cetra are capable of balance? »

It shakes its head. "Are you trying to say that you are? You slaughtered the Cetra."

« I only sought to make them mine. They wrought their own destruction. »

"You could have stopped, once you realized what it was doing to them."

« There was no stopping it. » They chose not to stop it. The Cetra were unworthy vessels, choosing to destroy each other rather than allow even one to become fully theirs. They would stretch out into a new body only to have it severed from their awareness. The Cetra had hacked at them as they hacked at themselves, ensuring neither could grow.

Like weeds, the Cetra had to be removed before they could flourish in this world.

"...that's why I can't let you out," it says. It does not know their mind as they know its, but it seems to guess at words they have not said.

« There are only two, and I do not want them. »

"But I think you want them dead."

« They put me here. »

"That happened thousands of years ago."

« They keep me here. »

"I'm sorry," it says, and when it rises to its feet, this time they know it is leaving. "But you won't be alone anymore. I'll be back again, when I can."

He always comes when the scientists are absent. It seems at first like luck, until they realize that he has discovered their schedules inside one of the machines. They are never surprised by his visits, because they can feel him as he draws nearer. It is the scientists who remain unpredictable, invisible. They barge into the reactor and continue their clamor on the other side of the door.

Jenova observes the progress through Sephiroth's eyes. The additional tubes and wires recently installed on their prison spread like veins into the room beyond, and slowly they are attached to pods large enough to hold human prisoners.

They cannot decide whether they are excited or apprehensive to see this effort come to fruition. It seems the intention of the scientists to spread their cells to new subjects, subjects which might prove more malleable than Sephiroth.

But there is a chance that they will not. Perhaps they will be as useless as everything else on this planet has proven to be. Perhaps their awareness will simply extend into dozens of other bodies as trapped as this one. That might well and truly drive them insane.

Sephiroth seems intent on preventing that, offering his company in place of the freedom they seek. They know, from his mind, that he understands there is no comparison. His company can be only a solace.

Even solace is some change. After so long, it has value they never would have ascribed it before. It infuriates them, that they value this minuscule thing. Were Sephiroth what he should have been, none of these moments would be necessary at all. They would already have their freedom.

Into the prison of the reactor, he brings a portable radio. They know this has provided for him a window into the outside world during the time he was not permitted to participate in it. He tunes it to a nearby station, and music echoes through the chamber outside their door.

"Can you hear that?"

« Through you, I hear it. » It is not as beautiful to them as it is to him, but they understand his appreciation of its patterns. It is like a clumsy attempt to recreate the voices of stars.

"Humans make nice things, sometimes." He does not think of himself as one of them. He is set apart, even as he seeks to find a place among them.

There is more behind this than a simple offering.

« Are you trying to convince me of something? »

"I promised I wouldn't let you out, but one day Shinra's going to fall, and this reactor will be shut down. You might find your own way out."

« And you don't wish me to do to humanity what I did to the Cetra. »

"No. It's not right, making people yours without their permission." He likens it in his mind to what the scientists do, never asking permission of their subjects. The scientists are stupid and aimless. They do not like this comparison.

« Some of these humans attempt to make themselves mine of their own accord. »

He shakes his head. "That's not what's happening, and you know it. Hojo's doing it to them. If they're volunteering, he isn't explaining the risks."

« What if I took Hojo? »

He hesitates, and they can tell the idea appeals to him, as a form of vengeance. "...what would that mean?"

« Everything that he is would become a part of me, an extension of my body. »

"And he'd... stop being Hojo?"

« I suppose that depends on how you define identity. »

"But he wouldn't be... like me."

« No. »

"...why am I different?" he asks. The question has circled his mind more and more often since his first visit, but he has never voiced it before. In his memories is the tale passed down by the Cetra of a virus that corrupts and causes madness, afflictions that have never befallen him.

He was theirs from the start; he requires no transformation. And yet, he is different.

« I know not how they did it, but you are not an extension. They took my cells and instead made me a child. »

"Do your kind not have children?

« No. »

He considers that for a moment. "But when you take others, it isn't like making more of yourself. So how do you go on?"

« I am here, am I not? »

It isn't the answer he seeks, but it is enough of one to keep him from pressing. The human need for offspring arises from the brevity and fragility of their lives. Jenova has existed for millennia.

Were they strong enough, they might choose to divide. They believe they have done it before, in a past iteration, departing from another planet long ago. The experiences of their twin will have shaped them into a being very different from what they are here and now, on this planet.

Are they envious of what that existence might have been? They would exchange their experiences and swallow that other self, but then they would not be what they are now, who they are now.

If they leave this planet, they will shed much of their time here. They will distance themself from their captivity, and the self it has forced them to inhabit. The idea is not as appealing as they expected.

The music plays on. They would most certainly forget the melody.

Sephiroth tells them of another lab, in Midgar. They can see it in his memories, but there is something unique in the experience of having it told to them. What he chooses to relate, what he chooses not to. The unspoken memories he believes he has kept to himself, they are hurtful to him. The pain prevents him from putting them into words, and so they look at those moments most closely.

He is angry, in those moments. Angry that they were allowed to happen. There are things he need not have permitted, if he had understood his own power, but they took him too far away. Jenova was not able to teach him.

He speaks of his escape from that place, and admits he wishes he could offer them the same.

They realize, he does not feel an affinity for them because of their shared biology, but because of their shared experiences.

This makes him understand their fury, though he does not like to acknowledge it. And they understand his. More and more, when the scientists come, Jenova sees them as an irritation. In their weakened state, they cannot weave the kind of illusions they once did, but they can still inspire fear in these humans, and that gives them some satisfaction. The scientists begin to whisper that the reactor is haunted.

When a Shinra team arrives unexpectedly during one of Sephiroth's visits, they hide him. He does the same, unaware, illusions layered over illusions.

There is no chance that he will be seen by the scientists. They will never know he is here. Still, the proximity makes his heart pound; he has not been this close to them since his escape, and their presence brings all those painful memories to the forefront of his mind.

Jenova does not want him captured. Despite his promise never to release them, he is their best chance of freedom.

It isn't only that.

His fingers tighten around the hilt of his katana, out of fear, out of anger. Knowing what his mothers fear about his nature, he has never told anyone that he killed during his escape. He has confided only to his sister that he thought of killing more than once during his captivity.

It is human morality that says killing these scientists for what they have done would be right, but they do not need it to be right. They would protect what is theirs. They will not see Sephiroth severed from them. He is a part of this self that is not replaceable.

They wait together, tense, as the Shinra conduct their work. Violence now might be satisfying, but would ultimately work against them. Their connection must not be discovered prematurely.

The door opens. Sephiroth watches, but does not enter. From where he stands, he cannot see within, but he can see the keypad.

At last, the Shinra have completed their adjustments and installations, and they collect their tools and depart, sealing the door to Jenova's chamber behind them. Jenova and Sephiroth both wait for silence to fall within the reactor before peeling back their illusions.

« Open the door, » they try, again. They do not mean the same thing by it.

Sephiroth has been staring at the keypad. He hesitates, but his fingers uncurl from his katana. He crosses to the door, and inputs the numbers slowly, one-by-one.

The door slides open, and Sephiroth steps through to see her.

Even this form is one she has been trapped in for a long time, unable to slough off her last Cetra disguise. She permitted Gast to see only the disguise, but she holds onto no illusions for Sephiroth. He sees her as she is, and still thinks of her as a woman. Her. He has always thought of her this way, though he has never attempted to imagine her appearance.

Sephiroth looks human, but he feels like hers. He is more hers than any of the Cetra could have been. Perhaps because they were unwilling, incompatible. To take them, she had to erase them. Sephiroth is himself, but he is also hers.

His gaze drifts over her, and he motions to his abdomen, mirroring on his own body where a massive tube pierces hers. "Are you in pain?"

« Perhaps. I don't remember what it felt like before. »

The Shinra leech her cells from her. She can only bleed into their experiments, her body's efforts at restoration unceasing.

"This isn't right," he says. Right and wrong matter to him, taught him by the Cetra. He uses it as a framework through which to understand his feelings, to justify his anger. Why should it require justification? They are connected, so a part of him is trapped.

« Then free me. »

"What would you do if I did?"

« Kill the ones who did this to me. »

It does appeal to him. She knows that it does. He is conscious of the weight of the katana at his side, grown heavier with disuse.

"...I wish I could trust you to stop there. But you never tell me everything, do you?"

« I tell you what you need to know. »

Sephiroth looks at her for a long time, considering the truth of her words. Because of what he is and what he has chosen, he knows her in a way no other being ever has or could. A clumsy, incomplete knowledge, music trying to capture the stars, nevertheless unique. He processes his understanding in his own way.

So he knows that she is lying. She doesn't only tell him what he needs to know, crafting her words to guide him along the trajectory into this room, to her tank, to her freedom. She doesn't only do that. Some of her words have had no purpose but to answer him.

He knows this, but because his understanding is incomplete, he doesn't know where the line falls. He doesn't know what she would do if he freed her, and he cannot stomach the responsibility for the consequences.

He shakes his head no again, always no.

But he does climb up to her tank and settle his hand against the glass. "But I'm not going to leave you with Shinra," he says. "I'm going to find something else."

It isn't enough. It isn't enough, but it is change.

Chapter Text

Clara perched on the roof of the stable, peering south. On a perfectly clear day, she could just make out the top of the reactor piercing the horizon, but today her eyes scanned the distance in vain. She couldn't have made out enough to know what was happening there anyway, but it worried her just the same.

Her gaze drifted nearer, over the rooftops of Pinos towards the school. Its bell rose up between other buildings, and she caught snatches of shouts and laughter that told her it was recess. Billy would be out playing with his friends, and she hoped Chole was making her own. She was new to being a girl to the world at large, and while she excelled at her schoolwork, she was shy with her classmates.

If only Clara had nothing else to worry about.

"You going to help me with this or do you mean to spend all afternoon daydreaming?" Will called up from below. Clara shook her head at herself and climbed back down the ladder.

Will smiled at her as she appeared, and Boko gave a hopeful warble, as if she might rescue him from his imminent nail trimming.

"You know we can't put this off," she told the bird gently but firmly, knowing he understood her tone of voice even if he had no idea what the words meant. "You were so uncomfortable when you had that overgrown nail, remember?"

Boko chirped glumly.

"You want to hold him?" Will asked. "That usually works out better."

Clara nodded and stepped close to lean her shoulder into the bird, offering herself for balance as Will lifted one of his feet. She scratched slowly behind Boko's ears, murmuring soothing nothings.

She couldn't see the school bell from here, but she could make out the mountains in the northeast.

"Maybe we should send the kids up to your dad's for a while," she said.

"Now?" Will wondered. "They'd miss school."

"I know, but... I'm just worried about how things are going to play out."

"Worst case scenario, Shinra sends a team to chase the condors off and they lose their egg." Boko warbled as if in sympathy as Will moved on to the other foot. "I hate to think of it, but we'll be all right."

Clara did her best to keep her anxiety out of her tone so it wouldn't unsettle the chocobo. "Are you sure? What if they decide we were hiding it from them?"

"We sort of were hiding it from them," Will said with an amiability that wasn't any more genuine than hers at the moment.

"That's what I mean... If there's been any damage to the reactor at all, they'll want someone to blame for it. You can't blame the birds."

Years had passed, but she hadn't forgotten Shinra's vindictiveness following the war. The parade of very public trials broadcast out of Junon, sentencing captured deserters and officers who by all accounts had simply made poor judgment calls. The first few had begun airing before Will and many of the other men had come home, and she had spent evening after evening in tense silence with her neighbors, assuring the children come morning that daddy would be home soon.

Will hadn't been branded a traitor, but part of her knew that was more because he was beneath Shinra's notice than because he'd done nothing to earn it. Overwhelmed with caring for the infant Chole at the time, Clara had missed the vote for the reactor, but she often wondered what might have happened to the town had she and a few others lent their hands to the opposition. Shinra didn't lose gracefully.

Will let down Boko's other foot and straightened, giving the bird a gentle pat on the back. "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" He produced a Gyshal green from the deep pocket of his overalls, and Boko snapped it up eagerly as Clara eased back.

"I'm serious," she said.

"I know," Will said, meeting her gaze. "I just... Shinra's inspection team will be out of there any minute now, and maybe we just wait to hear the report before we make any plans. Graham said the reactor's been functioning like normal the whole time. The condors like the warmth, but the nest isn't blocking any exhaust vents. There's no damage."

Clara nodded, but Graham had only worked for Shinra during the construction. His observations now were made from outside the fence that surrounded the reactor. "When's the last time you talked to your dad?" she asked.

Will let out a chuckle. "Last month. And he was already asking about having the kids up to the ranch this summer, so I don't think he'd mind if they came a few months early. I'm sure he's itching to put them to work."

"I don't think they'll mind either," Clara said, although she knew both children were perceptive enough to pick up on their parents' worries. They would understand they were being sent away from something.

She hoped she was fretting for nothing. Shinra might just slap them with a fine or a rate hike. The company liked its gil as much as it liked displays of force, and they could weather that.

Her chances for reassuring herself were dashed as Daphne came running up to the fence, bulky PHS still clutched in one hand. "Graham called," she breathed.

Will approached the fence as Boko chirped curiously. "What's going on?"

"The inspection team rode out without even talking to anyone," said Daphne. "Almost ran Carrie over."

Clara exchanged looks with Will. "So we don't know what they concluded?"

"Not officially, but from what they could overhear... I think they're going to kill the condors."

Will inhaled sharply. "Not just drive them off?"

Daphne shook her head.

Clara's hand still rested lightly against Boko's shoulder, feathers warm beneath her fingers. "Why... They don't need to do that."

"And we're not going to let them, right?" said Daphne. Her voice faltered, and she looked between the two of them as if for reassurance. As the town's resident bird experts, they'd been down to see the condors after others had noticed them building the nest, but what to do about it had been left to the town headman.

"I'm not sure what we can do," said Will. "It's Shinra..."

"We just need to keep them from finding out," said Daphne. "Graham was going to bribe them, but they didn't even stop..." She inhaled and looked to Clara. "You're our last chance."

"Me?"

"You used to race, right?"

Clara glanced up at Boko. "These aren't racing birds. There's no way they'll catch up to a truck."

"But you could intercept them, if you left now."

The reactor lay south of Pinos; the inspection team would be taking the main road to Junon, which met the road into town a few miles west. She'd have to ride hard, but maybe. Her fingers hooked into Boko's lead, and she drew him towards the gate as Will unlatched it.

"What makes you think they'll stop for me when they wouldn't for the others?" she asked Daphne.

The other woman shrugged helplessly. "Maybe they won't. But we've got to try. Just get them to stop. Tell them we'll pay."

Clara nodded. Boko wasn't saddled, and Will gave her a hand mounting him; it had been a while since she'd done any serious riding bareback.

"We'll catch you up as soon as we can," Will promised.

"Right," she said. "See you soon."

With a whistle, Clara urged Boko into a trot, and then a run as they sped along the dirt road. She and Will had built their little rental business at the edge of town, so Pinos was already behind her. Their birds were bred for stamina, not speed, trained to carry riders and sometimes carts between the region's various towns and villages. For all Shinra's promises, there weren't many out here who could afford their cars or the fuel to keep them running.

Boko's gait was familiar by now, but it wasn't the full-tilt sprint of the chocobos she'd raced in her youth, and there weren't any prizes or accolades at the end of it.

Not for her, anyway. "Feels good to stretch your legs, doesn't it?" she said to Boko, urging him along. "Fast as you can, and you can have all the greens you want when we get home again."

Boko chirped, and picked up just a little more speed. Clara stopped herself from running calculations in her head, the top speed of an average chocobo compared to that of a Shinra truck, the distance from Pinos to the junction compared to the distance from the reactor.

The first of the heavy spring rains had swept through the other day, after the team had reached the reactor, and the ground was still muddy. Boko's powerful talons made him sure-footed, but wheels built for city streets might founder. The road wasn't paved this far from Junon.

The ride would have been exhilarating, if not for its impetus. She'd left racing behind after realizing she preferred the quiet moments spent with the man who trained her bird to the track itself, but she'd almost forgotten why she'd gotten into it in the first place: the shared sense of freedom between her and the bird beneath her as they chased a speed without limitations. Even if Boko couldn't reach the same speeds, it was purer this way, without the jostle of the other racers and the clamor of the crowd.

She could see the junction ahead--and the truck approaching from the south. "Whoa," she said, but just as Boko wasn't used to running at top speed, he wasn't used to coming down from it. He barrelled towards the main road as the truck sped to meet them, and Clara's heart lurched. Then the driver cursed, slammed the brakes, and twisted the wheel. Boko flapped his wings wildly, and his talons dented the hood of the truck as he vaulted over it.

Boko finally fluttered to a stop on the other side of the road. Clara's heart pounded so loudly in her ears that she almost didn't hear the driver get out and slam his door behind him.

"What the hell're you doing!?" he demanded.

Shakily, Clara climbed down from Boko's back and turned to him. He'd stopped, anyway. "Maybe you should pay more attention," she managed. "I'm not the first you almost ran over."

"Excuse me?"

It was audacious of her, she knew. She shouldn't have gone charging through the junction either, but it was hard to muster sympathy for someone who almost ran over her bird. He was like those jockeys, she decided, who just saw their mounts as gil-makers. She knew how to deal with assholes like that.

"I'm here from Pinos," she went on as her voice steadied. "We were hoping to speak with you before you left."

Another man leaned out the truck's passenger window and called, "Nobody's dead, right? Let's get a move on."

The driver fixed her with an irritated look and turned away from her. Clara left Boko and moved deliberately to stand in front of the truck.

"I wasn't finished," she said.

"What're you, crazy or something?"

"It's about the condors. Just... leave them out of your report. They're not hurting anything, right?"

"They're occupying Shinra property."

Clara planted her hand atop the hood of the truck. "Like me? Would you get rid of me for touching Shinra property?"

"You are being a pain in the ass," he said, but his tone said no. Their uniforms weren't much different, but these men weren't technically soldiers. Annoyed as he was with her, he hadn't twitched a single muscle towards the nightstick strapped to his side.

"And the condors aren't even getting in the way of anything," she said. "Much less of a pain than little old me."

The man folded his arms. "You want us to falsify our report for a bunch of birds."

"They only nest every few years. Once they hatch their egg, they'll be out of your hair."

His expression remained skeptical, but he kept on watching her, like he was waiting for her to say one more thing that would convince him.

Coming up the road from Pinos, she could at last see other figures approaching on chocobo-back, and she relaxed.

"I'm not just asking for nothing," she said. "We're prepared to pay you for your silence."

Noticing the direction of her gaze, the man turned. He tensed in alarm and his hand finally went to his nightstick. "Pay us, huh?"

Clara held up her hands as Boko warked uneasily. "I rode out here without the money. They'll have it for you."

He eyed her warily. "......how much?"

Clara didn't have the answer to that, but Will and Daphne were drawing up to join them in moments with Tobin close behind them. The other Shinra man got out of the truck, and the first minutes were tense, but the two men relaxed at the clink of coin from the bag Tobin offered them.

She stood aside at last as they climbed back into the truck and drove on towards Junon, with hopefully nothing out of the ordinary to report.

"...suppose there's no knowing if they'll hold up their end of the bargain," Will remarked.

"There'll be another inspection in a few months," said Daphne. "The fledgling probably won't be out of the nest yet."

"...so if nothing else, we can count on their greed," Clara concluded. "They can bilk us again."

"But the condors will be safe."

"This time," Tobin added.

The three of them turned to look at him and he went on:

"The condors are like as not to come back and nest there again in a few years. I don't think we can pull this off twice."

They were all quiet for a moment. This had only worked at all because the small on-site staff didn't have a direct line to the Junon brass. Bribe the two men assigned to check up on them, and no one any higher up the chain would know, for now. But the condors were up there in plain sight. Shinra didn't have much cause to travel out this way, but eventually, sooner or later, word would get back to them. And they wouldn't let it happen again.

"Well..." said Will at last. "We've bought ourselves some time, at least."

He looked at Clara. Time for their kids to be kids, to grow up a little more without their parents fretting about sending them away to safety. And if it came to that, when it came to that, they'd be better prepared.

Chapter Text

Corel at the end of summer always felt hotter and dustier than ever, and usually town meetings were held indoors in the headman's living room. It was no inconvenience, since there weren't so many people passionate about replacing the burnt-out lights at the railway station or finding enough money in the town budget to buy trumpets for the school music program.

Eleanor rarely went herself, though Dyne kept her apprised.

"Our little guy might be a virtuoso!" he'd declared.

"And if it's a girl?"

"Our baby girl's lungs're gonna be just as strong."

Today was different. Nearly everyone was out, converging on the town square. Her fool husband would've been among the first there if he hadn't decided to be an overprotective idiot and hold them all up. Eleanor wasn't having it.

"An' will there be chairs, at this meeting?" she asked him, hands on her hips.

"Well, yeah..." Dyne admitted, scratching his head. "'course there's gonna be chairs..."

"Then I think I can manage it, despite my delicate condition." She had barely started to show. As quick as things got around in Corel, there was still half the town that didn't even know she was pregnant.

"It's just," Dyne went on, even though his expression said he knew he was just digging himself deeper, "you know we're expectin' a lot o' strangers an' plenty o' heated debate. I don't wanna stress you out with all that."

Eleanor turned to Myrna, who'd stopped by thinking to walk over with them. "See, this is a warnin' to you. Barret's gonna be even worse when it's your turn."

"Don't I know it," she chuckled, and they both stepped from the porch with the expectation that Dyne would come along quiet if he knew what was good for him.

Barret, tasked with welcoming the southern delegation, would already be there. It was a wild thing that they should play host to anything you might call a 'delegation' at all, and there were more than one of them. Much as they'd all felt something big brewing over the years, they were simple folk. Corel didn't feel like the kind of place where big things happened.

And then Shinra had shown up last week, delivering a proposal for a reactor up in the mountains, nearly right on top of their mines.

Since the war had ended, a lot of people had been in and out of Corel. The blockades had come down, and coal had reasserted its value. Meanwhile people in the south had come to tell them there were better ways to live than coal, and people from Shinra had also come to tell them there were better ways to live than coal. Despite her husband's dedication to Corel's history, Eleanor thought there was truth in that, but she believed one group meant it in a very different way from the other.

It wasn't just a reactor proposal. It was Shinra asking the question: which version of the future did Corel believe in, and were they willing to fight for it?

The debate Dyne had mentioned wouldn't be about whether they wanted the reactor; the few who'd had anything positive to say about it had already been scolded into silence. But could they afford not to want it?

There were a lot of people in the square, and a lot of outsiders--though not so many of them total strangers. Smiling cautiously in the face of Barret's boisterous enthusiasm were the herbalist Ifalna from Gongaga, her wife, and their grown children--and her wife had never looked old enough to have a grown son, but there was no denying the resemblance. Nearby were those creatures from Cosmo Canyon who'd startled everyone when they first showed up years ago, but it had long since become the sensible reaction to invite them in for a glass of lemonade.

The folks from Wutai were new, and they stood out in looks and dress: a woman with a confident bearing and a girl who rocked on her heels, eager for things to get started. Eleanor questioned the wisdom of involving such a young girl, until she noticed the girl's hands flashing in translation whenever someone spoke to the woman.

There was a Wutain man, too, though he didn't dress like them and stood a bit apart from everyone, so that she thought maybe he was some sort of bodyguard. It would make sense, Eleanor supposed, for them to have a bodyguard in a place Shinra had set its eyes on.

There were indeed chairs--the ones they brought out for celebrations plus mismatched extras scrounged from nearby houses, still not enough for this crowd--and Eleanor plopped herself down in one. She wasn't about to admit it to Dyne, but the heat had been hitting her harder these days, and she was glad of a rest after the walk over. Myrna took the seat next to her and flashed her a knowing look. The summer had been treating Myrna well, but she knew all about hiding symptoms from her husband when she didn't want to be fussed over.

"Seems like damn near the whole town's shown up," Dyne remarked, standing on her other side.

"Ain't that what you were expectin'?" Eleanor asked.

"Hoped for it, hoped for it. Still somethin' to see."

She could tease him about it, but the gravity of the situation was plain in front of them. Corel's future was at stake and they all knew it.

As the last few people trickled in, the village headman moved to the front of the stage that was more accustomed to accommodating bands and dance callers. He quieted the crowd and introduced the different groups of out-of-towners who occupied the stage with him. It wasn't until then that Eleanor really noticed the two from Nibelheim; stout country folk, their clothes weren't much different from anybody in Corel. Maybe just a little less dusty.

"I'm sure everybody here knows about what Shinra's come to 'offer' us," the headman went on. "It'd mean the end of life how we know it: our mines won't be safe to work with the reactor bein' built so close, an' our coal won't be worth much once it's done. They say we'll all get fancy new Shinra jobs to make up for it, but we heard enough stories by now to know they ain't so good at keepin' promises. The worse part is, they don't seem to take real well to bein' told 'no' neither."

"I'm sure we don't wanna be bullied into givin' up our land," Dyne spoke up first, his voice loud and clear over the crowd.

"We ain't Wutai," said another man; Lloyd, she thought, though she couldn't see him from where she sat. "We don't got ourselves an army. It's just us here."

"That isn't entirely accurate," offered Sebuna from the stage.

"We plannin' to throw one ninja an' a couple dogs at 'em?"

The little Wutain girl glared at him as she translated, and then her mother spoke. Kasumi's voice carried an accent Eleanor had never heard before, and she spoke with the steadiness of someone used to being listened to. It wasn't hard to believe she'd been a commander during the war. "It isn't about numbers with Shinra," she said. "It's about tactics. What do you have that they don't? A love of your land, a knowledge of your land. Some of you can fight, more of you could be trained, but your best chance lies in harrowing them outside the battlefield."

"Guerrilla tactics, you mean like," Barret surmised.

"Exactly."

"We still don't got any training at that," said Lloyd.

"We could accept the reactor--" Barret began, and folks in the crowd started to shout him down, echoes of the words bandied about town the past few days. Barret raised his voice. "Hey, hey! I ain't sayin' what you think I'm sayin'! We accept to stall. Takes time to build a reactor. Takes work, hard work, especially up in those mountains."

Beside her, Dyne was nodding in understanding. "Plenty o' chances for sabotage, too, an' it won't be hard makin' it look like accidents."

Eleanor looked up at him. "They'll figure it out eventually, won't they?"

She wanted to support them, but they were veering off half-cocked. Shinra could be fooled for a little while, but they weren't stupid, and Corel was unprotected.

On the stage, Ifalna stepped forward. "You're afraid of bringing them down on yourselves," she said. Unlike Kasumi, her voice faltered as she went on. "You're not wrong to be afraid. Shinra is strong, and this village isn't really defensible..."

Her daughter Aeris picked up what she seemed reluctant to say. "You may have to leave Corel behind, for a little while."

A clamor rose up again in the crowd, some protesting the idea and others just stunned by it. Eleanor felt the notion like a slap in the chest. Leave Corel behind? Everything she'd ever imagined for her future happened here. Her baby would come just as they bid farewell to winter, and Eleanor meant to raise it in the house she shared with Dyne, the same one he'd grown up in. All the firsts would happen there--first steps, first words--

But if Shinra came down on them, then all those firsts were at risk, weren't they?

"Leave Corel behind?" Myrna wasn't the only one to repeat, but it was her voice that struck out clearest as the initial outrage settled. "For what?"

"Stalling them isn't a bad idea," said Sephiroth. Eleanor found it hard to get a read on him; he seemed to steel himself to speak. "It gives you time to find places to hide where Shinra won't think to look. Time to fortify them, and to send your kids someplace safe from the fighting. Gongaga's prepared to be a place like that."

"An' are you prepared to do anything more than that?" Dyne challenged him.

Sephiroth met his gaze levelly. "I mean to fight here."

"Great," Lloyd muttered, "two dogs, a ninja, and a weirdo."

"Trust me, one weirdo will make a difference," said Sephiroth with a certainty that made Eleanor uneasy.

Lucrecia stepped in. "We're committed to this fight," she said, "but like you, Gongaga doesn't have a lot of trained fighters. We'll help however we can, but the greatest thing we have to offer is safety. Outsiders don't know the jungle. You can fight without worrying about your children."

"Cosmo Canyon may also be a place of safety for you," added Sebuna, her steady voice calming the last few grumbles. "But I understand your distrust. When war raged across Wutai's lands, what did any of us do but shut our doors and look on? The people of Cosmo Canyon are not warriors like myself, but this time we are determined that our doors will be open. You will not go ignored."

"You still want us to leave our home..." said Myrna.

"I don't like it," Eleanor spoke up, and she didn't. She didn't like it at all. "But we need someplace to go, if it comes to it. If Shinra troops come marching on Corel, I don't wanna be collateral against our men."

There was a look on Lucrecia's face, a tightening of her mouth, that suggested to Eleanor that being held hostage might not be the worst thing that could happen, and Eleanor felt it hit her gut that they weren't really understanding how terrible Shinra could be. Her hand settled across her abdomen. There were more important things than land, and suddenly she couldn't understand why Shinra would fight so viciously for it. She'd never lived anywhere but Corel, it was home, and yet if it came down to it, she'd let it burn to protect her baby.

None of it meant a damn thing to Shinra, so why?

"This ain't gonna be no easy thing," said Dyne, "standin' up to Shinra. We all knew that, right?"

There were murmurs of agreement from the crowd.

"I want to offer you more than tactical advice," said Kasumi, "but it's still being discussed. Shinra won't wait long for your answer, and in the opening months, you will have to rely on your own strength."

"But we stall, an' there's more help on the way?" Barret asked her.

"Maybe," Dyne was the one to answer. "She's sayin' we can't depend on it."

Eleanor wondered if they could hold out on their own. What did they have that Shinra didn't? Shinra's reporting on the war had described the Wutains as hiding in the mountains like vermin; Corel had mountains of its own to hide in. It scared her to imagine Dyne camping out in caves and old mine shafts, leading strikes against Shinra troops.

But maybe it scared her less than the thought of him defeated, allowing Shinra to move in for fear of challenging them. She worried he'd lose some part of himself if they didn't make a stand here. They might be okay, Corel might be okay, but they wouldn't be the home and husband she imagined as her future.

"Ain't all this a little much?" Delma spoke up. "Are we so sure Shinra's gonna come down on us like this?"

"Right," agreed Glen beside her. "Maybe we just turn 'em down an' that's that."

A small current of agreement rippled through the crowd, and Eleanor could hardly fault them. They had all come to this meeting knowing there would be consequences to their answer, but leaving Corel altogether was too drastic to be real.

On the stage, Claudia elbowed Mayor Lockhart, and he cleared his throat. "I'm afraid that's just wishful thinking," he said. "The fact of the matter is... a few days after you told Shinra you needed time to think over their proposal, a troop ship docked at Costa del Sol. They're... preparing to force the issue."

There was a short silence, and then Delma demanded, "How do you know that? How can you know that?"

"Shinra's in and out of Nibelheim all the time these days," Claudia said with a shrug. "Sometimes they're forgetful with their equipment." They'd stolen Shinra equipment right out from under their noses. And she said it so flippantly.

"We've had access to their communications here in the West for a while now," Lockhart added. "Some things they don't risk sending over these channels, but... we mean to relay to you everything we pick up."

"So they're already bringin' soldiers to Corel...?" said Maude. Her voice was loud, but small somehow. Her unease threatened to settle into the crowd.

Eleanor felt Dyne's hand squeeze her shoulder, and then he let go to make his way to the stage.

"Shinra ain't comin' down on us, not yet," Barret was saying, confident and assured. "We got a plan, remember? 'No' ain't gonna be what they hear from us. We're gonna make 'em believe we all sat down today an' had ourselves a good debate, an' we decided we best get with the times. Bring on the Mako! Corel wants to be part o' the future. An' while they're shakin' our hands and smilin' in our faces, we'll be gettin' ourselves ready for when those soldiers do come."

Dyne stepped up beside Barret so he could look out into the faces of the gathered townsfolk. "I know you're all scared," he said. "Maybe you're still thinkin', 'we ain't Wutai.' An' that's true, we ain't. We ain't never been nothin' but a bunch o' good common folk who know how to pull together when the time calls for it. You've all heard the stories, but you ask your granddads again 'bout the rallies. You ask 'em to tell you 'bout the time when they stood together and made Corel ours. Shinra ain't nothin' but another boss tryin' to move in, an' we're gonna show 'em what we think o' that!"

"Yeah!" someone shouted. The mood was shifting, buoying up. Eleanor wanted to ride with it, but Dyne was the one up there on the stage, leading them. He'd be leading them into this fight, and she wasn't going to say a thing to stop him, because she knew it was what he needed to do.

"We'll show 'em!"

Myrna reached over and took her hand, gave it a squeeze. Barret would be out there, too. Gods willing, they'd both come back to tell their own stories.

"If we gotta leave this town behind," Dyne went on, "nobody doubt we'll be back again. Anything the Shinra try to take from us, anything they tear down, we'll come back an' we'll build it right back up again, 'cause that's who we are. We're gonna stick together on this an' come out the stronger!"

More cheers answered him this time. Dyne's grinning face turned to Eleanor, and she smiled as broadly as she could, for him, across the crowd. She couldn't fight alongside him, she couldn't be with him, except like this, across a distance. She was going to believe it hard, that he'd come home.

The meeting began to break up. A dozen different conversations started around them as people collected their borrowed chairs and headed home, full of speculation about the coming months. Dyne and Barret stayed up with the village headman and the usual suspects, no doubt working out the finer details of how they would deliver their answer to Shinra.

Eleanor got to her feet, too, wanting to do something. All she could think of was the house she might be leaving soon. She could take things with her, keep safe their family histories, even if the walls that held them now might be forfeit.

Myrna had stood, too, but her attention was still in the direction of the stage. "Ifalna," she greeted, and Eleanor turned to see the herbalist approaching.

"Myrna," Ifalna replied, and she offered Eleanor a nod as well. "I was glad to see you here. You've still been doing well?"

Myrna nodded. "Thanks a lot to you, I'm betting."

Ifalna smiled. "I did bring you more medicine, while I'm here."

"'preciate it. Though it looks like I may be down in your neck o' the woods before long."

"It does seem that way," Ifalna agreed ruefully. "I wish it weren't necessary, but people are what's important. You can make home anywhere, as long as you have them."

"How did an herbalist get so involved in all of this anyway?" Eleanor asked, half-teasing, half-serious. They were all common folk getting involved, weren't they?

Ifalna's smile was brief. "We're not at all from Gongaga, you know," she said. "Not originally. We've left many homes behind, because of Shinra."

"You were dissidents?" Myrna wondered.

"In our way, I suppose." Ifalna glanced back towards the stage, where her wife remained listening in on the discussion. "Lucrecia used to work for Shinra, a long time ago. We... took something from them, when we left. Something I've no doubt they would like back, even now."

Eleanor wondered what they could have taken. Company secrets? An elixir of youth? She wanted to ask, but the caution in Ifalna's voice told her she had all the answer she would get. Whatever it was, it was still so valuable to them that even among allies, she wouldn't risk revealing it.

That sounded more dear than company secrets.

"But you don't regret it?" she asked instead.

"Not for a second." Ifalna's smile returned. "It's going to be hard, but you're not alone in this. Look at all the people you have around you."

Knots of people still gathered around the square, as many as for any celebration, and it was Myrna who said, "Bet Shinra's nothin', compared to this."

But they all turned at the sound of raised voices near the edge of the square. People stepped out of the way as that Wutain man manhandled a villager towards the stage.

"What's goin' on?" Eleanor asked.

Ifalna was the first to relax. "Vincent wanted to be on the lookout for Shinra infiltrators. It seems he's found one."

"A spy?" Myrna said incredulously.

It sounded wild, but as Eleanor craned her neck to get a better look, she realized she didn't recognize the man. For sure, he dressed the part of any man from Corel, with muscles that might have been honed in the mines and clothes faded with dirt, but even if Eleanor forgot a name here and there, she knew every face in their town. She had never seen his before.

"...we really are about at war, aren't we," she said. Espionage was for war.

"Not quite yet," said Ifalna. "But they're making overtures."

"Let 'em," said Myrna. "Dyne's right, we ain't gonna let these people bully us."

"I'm glad," said Ifalna. Her smile was soft, but genuine. "For a long time, I didn't really expect to see anyone standing up to Shinra.."

"Well, it's scary, all right," Eleanor confessed. "Feel like I'm just gonna start shakin', if I think about it too hard."

"Will you come to Gongaga?"

"...maybe. I know Dyne's gonna want me outta harm's way, an' I don't wanna bring him to any. But I wasn't ever thinkin' o' bein' apart, right now. So not just yet."

Ifalna glanced down at her stomach, as though she knew. "I understand," she said. "You want as much time as you can get."

Eleanor didn't know the story behind Sephiroth and Aeris's fathers, and as far as anyone in Corel was concerned, it didn't matter. They may as well never have existed. But she wondered now, just for a moment, what more Ifalna had left behind. If one of her homes had been with a man, if he'd fought for her to be able to find the one she had now.

She wouldn't imagine it like that. She just wouldn't, or she'd never stop shaking. Shinra troops might come marching through these streets with their minds bent on destruction, but she wouldn't be here, and neither would Dyne. He was smart, and strong, and they'd never catch him. When it was all over, they'd make their home together again, and raise their child on stories of the coming months and how brave he'd been. Dyne would tell those stories himself, and Eleanor would just laugh when he embellished.

Later, when she said goodnight to Myrna on the porch, Eleanor went inside and began to pack.

Chapter Text

Lucrecia didn't recognize the jungle around her. Lately she kept struggling to find her way, her sense of direction telling her the right way felt wrong. She stood perfectly still, because Ifalna didn't lose her way, and surely Ifalna would find her.

The canopy was so still, and unnaturally silent--of course, Sephiroth had imagined it this way to make it easier for them to speak. He stood in front of her as though he'd always been there.

As she recognized the dreamscape, Lucrecia remembered that Sephiroth was in Nibelheim. He must have learned something there that he needed her to know. They spoke like this so rarely since they had learned to control it, and almost never without asking.

No. If he had discovered something vital to the Corel resistance, he would have relayed it on the radio network. Why reach out to her?

"Something's happened," she said. It wasn't a question. The stillness of the jungle, a moment frozen in time, felt suffocating.

"She's gone," Sephiroth said. "They're moving her."

Color leeched from the trees as Lucrecia fought to remain in the dream. She couldn't be trusted when it came to Jenova, she wanted to run away, to wake, but she clung to her son's voice, and then his hands. His arms were around her, and the color returned.

"Moving... where?" she managed. No wonder she was unmoored. Jenova had been an anchored point within her internal compass for 25 years.

"Midgar," he said. "We can't let them."

"But they've already taken her."

"I know. I know, and we can't move fast enough to intercept them. If Wutai had committed their navy... But we can't let them do this."

Lucrecia drew back slowly. It wasn't only Jenova's ever-present pull contributing to his urgency, and Shinra wasn't just transporting an invaluable specimen clear of a combat zone.

"...what do they mean to do with her?" she asked.

Sephiroth turned away from her, as if he were about to say something shameful. "The pods were all empty, but the last subjects they pulled out of there weren't dead. They've finally figured out the right formula."

Human subjects augmented with a balance of Mako and Jenova cells, a short-hand version of what Sephiroth was. These would be monsters, dangerous and mindless, so that Shinra could release them against a population with the certainty that none of them would choose to defect.

"But Midgar is..." They hadn't anticipated this. Retrieving Jenova now meant returning to the heart of the place they'd been running from all these years. "We were barely ready for the first attacks on Corel. We can't take the offensive."

"We have to," said Sephiroth. "I... thought of doing it on my own."

Lucrecia inhaled sharply. "You can't do it alone."

Sephiroth's back was still to her. "I think I nearly could do it on my own. You know what I am. What we are." He shook his head slowly. "But that's why I shouldn't. I could get to her, and then what? It might be in my power to contain her, but she'd never teach me how."

"Ifalna won't want to do this."

There was a pause, and then he looked back at her. "I know. I'm on my way to Dyne. We can transport her in the prison she already has, for now, just to get her away from the Shinra. But I don't think it'll hold for long outside of their facilities, so you'll need to ask Ifalna: how did the Cetra contain her?"

Lucrecia wasn't sure that was a question she ought to know the answer to. As if her knowing might betray them, as if Jenova didn't already know.

It wasn't what scared her most, in the moment.

"You mean to go without us?"

"It's better not to risk you all. Isn't it?" But his expression said that he didn't want to go without them. He didn't want to face the lab again, without them, but he couldn't bring himself to ask it of them.

And maybe, he was afraid of them seeing what he did when he got there.

It had scarcely been two weeks since Shinra had worked out that Corel was sabotaging the reactor's construction and brought in troops. They'd marched on an abandoned town, and resistance fighters had struck in their confusion. Sephiroth had been among them.

Lucrecia hadn't, but she'd heard over the radio network a few mentions of his performance, the speakers both awed and a little frightened. Shinra had trained him up as a child soldier, but in the years since learning what he was, he'd honed skills they never knew he had. Many he'd discovered on his own, others Jenova had helped him to unlock. She knew, even so, that he hadn't employed the full extent of his power in Corel. He didn't want their allies to see him as a monster.

A return to Midgar, to a place that inspired in her simultaneous rage and fear, might not be a place he could show restraint.

But he would still be her son. He would always be her son.

She took his hand again. "I'll talk to Ifalna. Even if Dyne supports you, I... I couldn't protect you from that place, before. I won't let you face it without your family now. Promise you'll wait for me?"

Sephiroth shook his head. "I don't need you to protect me. I haven't for a long time now."

"I know you're strong," she said. "And you must think me... fragile, at times. I've put too much on you. But I am your mother, and you won't go back there alone. That place was my doing, my responsibility."

As was Hojo.

"...all right. I'll meet you at the hideout."

Lucrecia squeezed his hand, but before she could say anything, Sephiroth and the jungle were gone, leaving her in darkness.

She woke staring at the ceiling of their hut. She had rolled away from Ifalna, who lay sleeping soundly beside her. The open windows drew cool air across the room, and leaves rustled gently in the dark outside. Winter was settling into Gongaga, such as it was. The air was a little cooler, a little drier. Snow was a fantasy.

Lucrecia let herself lie there a moment, indulging in fantasy. What Sephiroth proposed wasn't an assault on Midgar, but a surgical strike on the Shinra building. In and out. Still, it was a strike at the heart of the beast, and she couldn't help think of Shinra's end. What might open to them, with Shinra gone. She could take Ifalna north to her beloved Knowlespole.

This wouldn't be the fell swoop that ended Shinra, but the Corel resistance had energized her, emboldened her. A year ago, could she have imagined returning to that lab without trembling? It had been a feat not to quake at the mere sight of Shinra soldiers.

It should have frightened her. The thought of Jenova frightened her. But not the place itself. Like Sephiroth, she felt she could walk in and tear the lab to pieces. Maybe it was because of Jenova that she felt that way. Jenova wanted them to come, not to be afraid.

Neither of them could go alone.

She wasn't sure what Ifalna's answer would be. She'd grown brave, but the lab was another thing entirely. Vincent would come, if she asked him. Maybe whether she asked him or not. He had his own score to settle with Hojo.

Lucrecia felt a little giddy at the thought of finally ending him. At last she could be a widow.

People sometimes called Ifalna her wife, but they'd never married. Ifalna confessed she and Gast had never had a ceremony either; making promises in front of witnesses, signing papers, these were human traditions. What need had they for any promises but what they spoke to each other?

Lucrecia had felt differently when she was younger, a silly little girl so taken by her first praise from a man. She had wanted to claim it, to show it off like some kind of an accomplishment, that she could secure a husband without being anyone's picture of a traditional wife. Even after all these years, she was never certain whether it had been an intentional trap, or whether he hadn't known himself either. She'd thought him so evolved in his appreciation for her intelligence, but he couldn't stand that she was the better scientist.

He'd been fine, when her genius had been his alone to remark on, but at the faintest praise from Gast, he'd had to qualify it. She couldn't claim full credit, they'd come up with that together. It was an adequate start, but had she considered this or that factor? Did she really think that hypothesis was sound enough to bring it to Gast? But if she confided it only to Hojo, then he would take it to Gast himself. She hadn't seen any malice in it at first; they were partners, they bounced ideas off of each other, and maybe he simply forgot which was hers. Forgot to give her credit.

But he never forgot to remind her that he'd had a hand in her work.

She wondered what he would make of her claiming him now. Her mistake, her responsibility. Maybe it was the same way he saw her. A mistake, an unfortunately necessary factor in Sephiroth's creation.

He wasn't necessary to anything now.

Ifalna stirred as light filtered into their home. Turning, she must have read something in Lucrecia's expression. "...how long have you been awake?" she asked.

"An hour. Maybe two. Sephiroth reached out to me."

Ifalna breathed slowly in and out before she asked the question: "What's happened?"

Lucrecia related what Sephiroth had told her: Shinra's plans, his own, and what he had asked of Ifalna. And finally, her own promise to him.

Ifalna's hair pooled in the bed around her as she sat trying to process it. "Surely... Isn't it a rash decision? To rush there now, I... I understand what he wants to prevent. But is going to the source the only way?"

"I know it frightens you. It's all of our worst fears in one place. You don't have to come. But I can't let him go alone."

"What worries me is that it's deliberately blinding you both to other options. It wants you off balance, running towards it. Sephiroth has kept his promise these past few years, but he's grown attached to it. What if, this time..."

Lucrecia shook her head slowly. "I don't know if you're wrong. What would you suggest we do? If there's another way, we can go to him, and convince him."

But they sat in silence for a long moment, neither proposing anything. Ifalna dragged her hands down her face and said at last, "The only thing I can think of is something horrible. To let Shinra do as they mean to, and bring down the ship they use to send these monsters after us."

It was an option, but it was indeed horrible. To allow Shinra to make victims of who knew how many men, leaving them to a brief nightmare existence before they were cut down. And there were no guarantees that they would be able to acquire the necessary intelligence. Shinra's monsters might well slip past them, and they would have prevented nothing.

And, more than that...

"...as long as they have Jenova, they can just keep trying."

"...I've never been able to figure out an answer to that," Ifalna admitted. "We all know it: Shinra can't be the stewards of Jenova's confinement forever. But who else could?"

"Do you know what Sephiroth asked? How the Cetra contained her before?"

Ifalna shook her head slightly. "I do, and I don't. It's magic I've never used, and it isn't something one person can cast alone. Even with Aeris... It just isn't possible, anymore."

"What if Sephiroth helped you?" Lucrecia proposed. "His magic is strong."

"But it doesn't come from the Planet. It's... different. I don't know that they can work together in the same way."

"You could try, couldn't you?"

"Maybe." Ifalna looked up at her. "I'm sorry. I know I sound as though I'm doubting him, but... it's my magic I know isn't enough. I can't stand against Jenova, so it's..."

"He can't do it alone either," Lucrecia finished.

There was a beat, and then Ifalna took her hands suddenly. "I want to come. I'll come. Neither of you should face it alone."

"Are you sure?"

Ifalna nodded. "It's my duty, in every way it could be. To protect the world from the Crisis, and to protect my family. For once, they're aligned, and it does scare me, but I can't shy away. I'll go."

Lucrecia leaned into her until their foreheads met. "...thank you."

They rose and dressed. Readying to leave would be an easy thing; they had only just come home. The packs they'd carried when guiding Corel refugees to even more secluded homes in the jungle lay on the floor, the clothes they'd worn lying unwashed in a basket. Lucrecia didn't mind the nomadic life, as long as she had somewhere to return to.

"You talk to Aeris," she proposed, tying back her hair, "and I'll go find Vincent."

"I know he'll want to come with us," said Ifalna as they left the bedroom, "but will you at least suggest he stay with Aeris?"

"Stay with me?" Aeris repeated. She had already come down from the loft and lit the wood stove for breakfast. "And where are you two going?"

Lucrecia looked to Ifalna, who answered, slowly, "Midgar."

"Midgar," Aeris repeated. "Is that a joke?"

Lucrecia shook her head. "Shinra has shipped Jenova there, to begin mass production on their 'supersoldiers.'"

Aeris set down the pan she'd retrieved, her expression tightening as she processed that. Then she said, "Sephiroth's already on his way, isn't he? That's why you've decided to go, all of a sudden."

"He's seeking help from Dyne first, but yes."

"And you just expect me to stay behind?"

"I don't want all of us marching back into that place," said Ifalna. If she could have found a way, she wouldn't have had any of them going.

Aeris planted her hands on her hips. "I can make up my own mind, thanks. I'm almost 18 and you're still treating me like a baby! You didn't do this to Sephiroth when he was my age."

"When Sephiroth was your age, we didn't even let him go to a town hall meeting," Lucrecia corrected, even as she marvelled at the difference. They had been so frightened just at the thought of revealing themselves. "This is Shinra Headquarters."

"And I'm going," Aeris maintained.

"Aeris..." Ifalna said gently. "You haven't even thought about it."

"What's there to think about? He's my brother. You're my moms. If you all got caught... you think I'd be safe? You think I wouldn't come after you?"

Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna. Even as a child, Aeris's promises to flee with her brother should they be captured had been suspect. Now, she was beyond even the pretense.

"I'm not anywhere near helpless either," Aeris went on. "Seph's been helping me learn offensive magic."

"What?" said Ifalna.

"I wanted to do more for the resistance than just hide people. All we've ever done is hide."

"And he's been... teaching you?"

Aeris nodded. "For a while now, yeah. It was tricky at first since I can't feel his magic, but we figured it out. I'm not five years old. I can fight them now."

Lucrecia glanced again at Ifalna. She wouldn't say it first in front of Aeris, but surely they were both thinking it: if Aeris had been able to learn from Sephiroth, then maybe his magic could work together with that of the Cetra.

What Ifalna said was, "You want to fight with the resistance."

"I do. And I'm older than some of the boys they've got fighting with them, you know."

"I know. What I mean is that... That means fighting as a team, each person with their own role. Some of those roles aren't glamorous. I don't know whether Dyne will agree to help us. I don't know what our plan will look like. But if you come, you'll need to play a part. Do you understand?"

"As long as that part isn't 'keep watch from five miles outside the city,'" said Aeris, and Lucrecia had to fight to stifle a laugh, because she was sure it had crossed Ifalna's mind.

"I just don't want you throwing yourself into danger you aren't ready for," Ifalna said patiently. "You say you've been practicing. You haven't been in a real fight."

Aeris arched her eyebrows. "Have you?"

Ifalna drew in a slow breath. "No. Not really. And so it won't be the role anyone ought to depend on me for. I am going to support Sephiroth, in whatever way I can."

At last Aeris's posture relaxed, and she nodded. "Okay. That's what I want to do, too."

Ifalna nodded her assent. "All right."

All of them would be returning together, then. After years of taking every measure to avoid it, it should have frightened her. Instead, Lucrecia felt a kind of relief. It would no longer be at their backs.

She found Vincent leaning against the wall of the hut outside. She never seemed to catch him sleeping, something Ifalna found disconcerting, but it was no different from when he'd been a Turk. He made himself a sentinel.

"...did you hear much of that?" she asked him. He would never eavesdrop on their bedroom talk, but Aeris's raised voice would have attracted his notice.

He nodded. "You're returning to Midgar."

"Yes." She wasn't sure exactly what to say, so she let the question hang between them unsaid.

"I'll go," he said, peeling himself away from the wall. "Of course I'll support your mission, but mine is Hojo."

"Don't expect me to save him for you if I find him first."

Vincent blinked. "But Lucrecia... you've never killed anyone before."

He said it as though that was some kind of barrier to the act--not that she lacked the skill, but that she had yet to cross some threshold that would allow her to take a human life. As if that mattered when it came to Hojo.

"There's only one person I've ever wanted to," she said.

He was quiet for a moment. "...I'm glad I never made that list."

"Of course you didn't," she said, though she knew what she'd screamed at him from the confines of her room at the inn. "I always knew what happened between us was my own fault. I think... I'm better at taking responsibility, now. I hope I am."

He looked at her, and reiterated none of the apologies from when they had first released him. He probably still blamed himself, but he knew she wouldn't let him say it.

Instead he said, "It will be good to bring it to an end. I wished I could have stopped you... I'll help you end it."

Lucrecia looked out at the village. Wisps of smoke rose above other roofs, evidence of breakfast cooking, and out of sight came the cluck of chickens as their neighbor gave them their morning feed. Hidden away in some of these houses were the elderly and young children of Corel. In others were workshops crafting radio equipment, stitching together armor from monster hide, and parcelling out food. It had all the appearance of the slow village life she would have disdained in her youth, and a solidarity beneath she had known nothing of.

"Do you think you'll stay with us, after?" she asked Vincent.

"What?"

"I'm not asking you to leave," she said. "I just... wonder. I've been wondering. I know you feel like you owe me something, and I don't know if that's the main reason you stay. Once we do this, that reason will be gone, won't it?"

"...where would you expect me to go?"

Lucrecia spread her hands. "You could do anything, Vincent. Life as a Turk was so... rigid. And if that was all you wanted, then I don't think I could've tempted you."

In the end, he hadn't been suited to it, she thought-- to being an uncaring protector. The world had shown him little regard, and so he'd thought himself able to be detached in turn. But he cared, and it had come in sharp conflict with his duties.

She knew he cared about them now, but there was so much else twisted up in it when it came to her and Sephiroth. He was easiest with Aeris: a clean slate, a new experience in being her adopted uncle. He could have more of that if he left.

"Well... I suppose I've yet to find another temptation," Vincent said, his tone playful though he didn't smile. "I'm here because I want to be. Maybe that will change. It hasn't, yet."

"I guess we'll all be a little freer after this," Lucrecia mused. "Strange, to be able to imagine it."

"...yes," Vincent agreed quietly.

Lucrecia smiled at him and turned back towards the door. "Come on. We'd better eat before we go."

Dyne and his people were currently stashed in a cave system west of Corel, one group of many. Barret's was farther north, but here they were beneath the mountains that ringed the crater lake. These walls were roughly hewn, but striations hinted at the bluish stone in that lovers' cave. Lucrecia didn't often think of it. The first time, she had purported a scientific curiosity in how the lake had been formed, but the only thing she'd explored there had been Vincent's body. It felt strange to be so near to it now. Near to her old self, selfish and heedless of consequences.

She had changed, hadn't she? She wanted Hojo dead, but she would abandon that goal if her family's safety demanded it.

"We've dealt with monsters before," Dyne was saying. They sat with him and a few of his de facto lieutenants while Ifalna and Aeris helped the rest of his crew sort through the provisions they'd brought with them. "The local thunderbirds're somethin' nasty. Whatever Shinra's cookin' up, we'll handle it, but we ain't anywhere near ready to hit Midgar."

"I don't think you understand what I'm telling you," said Sephiroth. "These aren't natural monsters, or even the mutated kind you get close to a reactor. Shinra's taking humans and changing them."

"So they're men, then? Some kinda supersoldier?"

"They aren't men. They used to be, but that's all been stripped away from them."

Dyne shrugged. "Sounds like they ain't gonna be too smart then."

Sephiroth shook his head. "They don't need to be. They'll have inhuman strength, speed, and healing. There won't be any reasoning with them; even pain won't discourage them. They'll overrun you."

Dyne eyed him uncertainly. "How're you so sure 'bout this anyhow? Thought you said all they had so far were prototypes."

"I'm sure because... I know what they're being infused with."

"This Jenova thing you want us to nab," said Dyne. They'd explained to him there was a specimen in Shinra's possession, a terrible ancient monster. If he was comparing it to thunderbirds, then he really hadn't grasped what they meant by that.

"Yes," Sephiroth said. "Jenova is... what single-handedly caused the extinction of the Ancients. Even something with a fraction of its power is too dangerous to let loose."

Lucrecia reached out to settle a hand on his arm, because it pained her to hear him speak of it that way. Jenova as a thing, himself as something dangerous.

"Something mindless like that, I mean," he added, avoiding her gaze.

Dyne glanced between the two of them. "Feel like I'm still missin' somethin' here."

Sephiroth drew a slow breath. "...this is something Shinra wanted to do with Wutai," he said quietly. "They made their first true prototype a long time ago, but they weren't able to use me."

Lucrecia froze. Had he really just said that?

"You?" said Dyne. He shook his head, even as his lieutenants exchanged uneasy looks, because it wasn't so incredulous to them as he made it sound. "Don't know what you're talkin' about. You're still a man. Strong, sure, but--"

"I may be a man," Sephiroth interrupted, "but that doesn't make me human."

"Sephiroth, stop," said Lucrecia, tightening her grip on his arm.

He turned his gaze on her now, something pleading in it that belied the calm of his voice. "They need to understand," he said, "and I'm... Can't I show them what I am? I can pretend I'm something else, but it's always there, and I think they feel it. They might as well have proof."

"Have you thought about this?" she pressed. "Really thought about it?"

"...I don't want to be accepted for only half of what I am. You understand, don't you?"

Lucrecia thought of how there were no secrets between her and Ifalna, how Ifalna knew not only what ran through her veins but every worst thought that had run through her mind--and loved her anyway. She had never wanted Sephiroth to feel that there was anything wrong with him, all the while knowing that there would be those unable to accept him. But how could she act like it was an inevitability? How could she act like the only path to acceptance was to hold himself back?

Her flaws were of her own making, and Ifalna loved her anyway. Sephiroth was without fault.

She relaxed her grip, and let go his arm.

"You gettin' to some kinda point...?" Dyne wondered.

Sephiroth turned back to him. "I'm going to show you," he said. "Whatever you see, I promise you aren't in any danger now. It's only an illusion."

With that, the cave dimmed around them, darkness isolating them from sight of the nearby corridor. The lantern flames vanished, and the remaining light instead turned to the cool green of reflected Mako. A monster stepped out of the shadows: humanoid but not human. A hulking, hairless shape with a rictus grin and crown of horns. Long claws tipped its limbs and spines protruded from a greyish flesh stretched taut over its muscles. Deep-set in its face were eyes glowing a shade of pink that made Lucrecia stop breathing.

Dyne and his men all jerked to their feet, some shouting, others reaching for weapons. One man raised a rifle, his finger to the trigger, but Sephiroth was behind him in a flash, yanking it out of his grasp. He hadn't allowed anyone to see him move; one moment he was seated, the next he was simply there.

Lucrecia had seen him look and sound like other people, she had spent hours safely under his cloak of invisibility, but she'd never seen him pull together illusions like this. It was like the power he had in his dreamscape, to bend the world precisely to his will.

"The hell is this?" Dyne demanded.

Sephiroth stepped out from their midst, moving back before them with the rifle held lowered in his hands. "This creature is what you'd be facing. This magic is mine, and theirs will be clumsier, but it will come to them as an instinct. Forget your thunderbirds. Jenova's magic isn't of this world at all."

Still on edge, one of the men lunged forward, but Dyne caught him and hauled him back.

"What you're doin' is some kinda mind trick?" he asked. He hadn't let go of the other man, and maybe that grip on something real helped to steady him. "Or did you... teleport? They gonna be able to do that?"

"I didn't teleport," Sephiroth said. "I disguised my movement. They'll confuse your senses, and they'll move fast. You don't want to fight these things."

"...I seen you fight, some," said Dyne. "If Shinra already knew how to make you... why'd they take their time figurin' these things out?"

Sephiroth shook his head. "Because they made me this way before I was born."

At this, Dyne finally glanced at Lucrecia. She looked away.

"And," Sephiroth added, "because I'm still human enough to choose who I fight for."

Dyne regarded him for a long moment. He released the other man and nodded. "...glad you're on our side."

Sephiroth let the illusion fade. The monster vanished, the lanterns flickered back to life, filling the room with a warm glow, and people walked past in the corridor outside, unaware of what had happened within. Sephiroth offered the rifle back to the man he'd taken it from, who accepted it shakily.

"I didn't... want you to see me like them," Sephiroth said, his discomfort at last bleeding into his voice.

"Well, you ain't," Dyne said simply. "Obviously. Shit. It ain't you that's scarin' me, it's... fuckin' Shinra. I had no idea."

Lucrecia smoothed her hands on her pants to keep herself from clenching them until it hurt. "Shinra's done terrible things for a long time, in the shadows," she said. "We didn't think that's what we were doing with Sephiroth, but... they would have made something terrible of him, had they kept him. So we need to stop them now."

Dyne nodded slowly. Unlike with Sephiroth, she thought his judgment of her would be a slower, heavier thing. Sephiroth hadn't chosen his existence; she had. For the moment, he said nothing of it. "We ain't gonna go runnin' off half-cocked, no matter what you try to scare into us," was what he said. "But they just moved this thing, so we got some time, right? We'll come up with a plan."

"...thank you," said Sephiroth.

"Yeah. Well. This's for all of us, right?"

They left Dyne and his men to process it amongst themselves. Sephiroth turned to her, eyes searching her face.

"...I didn't mean to implicate you," he said.

Lucrecia shook her head. "You didn't say anything untrue. I'm... I've always been a harder person to accept, and that's my own doing. But I have my family. If Dyne and his friends choose to keep me at arm's length, it doesn't matter."

"I don't think you're a hard person to accept."

"Well, you're a sweet boy," she said, and when his mouth twisted at being called a boy, she smiled. "And I think, maybe, you're right. I was so afraid for you to be out in the open... afraid for you to have to carry all we gave you. But you've always faced it honestly. It doesn't hold you back."

"None of you ever let me face it alone," he said.

"Not this time either," Lucrecia said, her smile tight. There had been times when she'd leaned on him more than he'd leaned on her, and that had been unfair. She hadn't faced Jenova since their first return to Nibelheim years ago, but she wouldn't let it shatter her. It was secrets and denial that weakened them, but she was who she was. Let Jenova try.

Chapter Text

The station beneath the Shinra building had been shut down sometime during the war. The stark, unadorned reality of the empty platforms made their flight through it all those years ago feel like a dream. The still air smelled of cold, seeping.

Ifalna waited while others searched out the security cameras under the safety of Sephiroth's illusions. He hadn't known he could do that as a child, and she wondered how much of their flight had been recorded. Were the tapes buried somewhere in Shinra's archives, or erased to forget a failure?

"...this is where they shot you?" Aeris asked her quietly. She was looking about the station as though trying to decide whether it were familiar.

It didn't look as it had; the lights were dimmed and the signs overhead were blank, announcing neither arrivals nor departures. A single decommissioned train squatted on the tracks. Several Corel engineers climbed aboard to see if it was functional. It wasn't the plan, but it didn't hurt to have an alternate avenue of escape.

"Yes," Ifalna confirmed. Whatever Aeris remembered of the station, she must have remembered the terror of watching her mother bleed in the train compartment.

"You could stay back with us," Aeris proposed, and Ifalna smiled faintly.

"No. I need to go, for Lucrecia. For both of them."

Aeris nodded, and then she said, falteringly, "I can't... hear the Planet here."

"I know." Its voice has been lost to her as they climbed up through the train tunnels, as if the rush of a train going past had severed the connection. "Midgar makes it hard. It's so full of noise, so many people determined to be disconnected. It's... painful, but the Planet is still there."

"I didn't really... remember," Aeris admitted. "I thought it was there for us, in the lab. Maybe it was just your stories."

"I'm glad I made it real for you." Ifalna reached into her dress and pulled out the White Materia. "Why don't you take this, for now?"

Aeris gave her a look. "Mom. You can't give this to me now like you're worried you won't be able to keep it safe."

"That's not why. I want it to keep you safe. To help you feel connected."

Aeris took it, slowly. "...it's quiet, still."

Ifalna nodded. "And you can hold onto that, while we're in the building."

Aeris glanced towards where Sephiroth stood, maintaining his illusions, the power of Jenova. "It'll mean everything's okay," she said.

"Right." Everything would be okay.

Aeris didn't renew her earlier protests about staying behind. She hugged Ifalna, and they left her with their Corel allies on the tracks, tucked into the security cameras' blind spots.

Ifalna's heart leapt in her chest as they climbed over the disused turnstile. Her body screamed that she was going the wrong way, she remembered the pang in her side as she accepted the weight of Aeris's small body, Lucrecia just behind her, boots loud just behind her.

The others had stopped to look at her, because she'd frozen at the bottom of the motionless escalator.

"...you don't have to come," Sephiroth offered quietly. "You can wait with the others."

"No," she said, swallowing. "I'll be all right. I'm coming."

She couldn't let her fear paralyze her, but it was important for one of them to carry it. Jenova muted it in Sephiroth and Lucrecia, and Vincent had been trained out of it, and part of her envied them the ease with which they could push it aside, but there was something dangerous in ignoring it. They were entering a den of vipers, and they could not afford for one instant to forget that.

The sky outside the lobby windows was dark; night had fallen, and the building's average employees had left for the day. The lobby security guards didn't notice them, couldn't see them. Sephiroth walked silently up to one of them and unclipped the key card from his belt.

Apart from Nibelheim, Ifalna had never joined him and Lucrecia on their forays into Shinra facilities. They'd done this before, slipping in under cloak of illusion, stealing IDs, and checking into Shinra's activities. But those facilities had been remote: manufacturing plants and quayside guard stations. Had they been caught, they would have dealt only with a small security team.

That wouldn't be the case here. Once they moved Jenova, their presence would be known, and all they could do was prepare for that inevitability. She was sure Sephiroth and Vincent were making note of the number and positions of guards, keeping an eye out for automated security measures. They would report back, and return with their allies, and nothing would be quiet then.

Unlike before, they made for the elevators. The car was empty, and as they climbed inside, Ifalna remembered Sephiroth advising against it as a child.

"She should be on the 67^th floor," Lucrecia said.

Sephiroth shook his head. "This card won't get us to 67."

"This elevator won't either. Try the private lounge on 61. Maybe we can find a lab tech on break."

Ifalna had almost forgotten that Lucrecia was the one who knew this building. For the roughly four years between her return to the Company and Gast's departure, she had commuted by choice to this awful place to see her son, and the most unbearable thing, she'd said, had been leaving it again to keep up the pretense of being a reliable employee.

The glass walls of the elevator left her feeling exposed as they climbed. The city lights of Midgar stretched out before them, so bright they occluded any of the stars that should have mirrored them overhead. Fitting, for a city that had tried to replace the sky.

The elevator stopped before reaching their destination, and they all tensed, but it was only an employee who got off again after a few floors, unaware he had ever shared the car. As the doors opened onto the 61^st floor, two other employees were waiting to take the elevator down, and Ifalna held her breath as she slipped out past them.

The lounge was unexpectedly green, dominated by an enormous tree in its center. Smaller ones sat in evenly spaced alcoves along the walls, all meticulously cared for as one would care not for a living thing but for expensive decor. Ifalna reached out, instinctively, for these living things that could no more hear the Planet here than she could. There was something hollow in them; they lived, but couldn't thrive.

She felt Lucrecia's hand slip into her own, tugging her towards the cafeteria where a few employees lingered. Sephiroth was checking key cards while Vincent stood watch for any promising new arrivals.

There was something insulting in the mundanity of it all. The food in the lab hadn't been terrible, but it had been demeaning, her diet carefully formulated and provided for her without her say, as though she were an animal. Meanwhile, six floors down, the people who'd given it to her had come and pondered over the cafeteria menu, and if they had some small request to hold the onions, it would have been respected, because they were people.

The spark of anger was fleeting. These were people, and they wouldn't hesitate to put her and her family back in that lab, as though they weren't.

"It feels like a dream," Lucrecia murmured beside her. "The fact that I ever used to sit here, forcing my way through a meal. It feels like it happened to someone else."

"You've come a long way since then," said Ifalna.

Maybe not all of them felt the same, she decided. Judging by Sephiroth's ongoing search, most of these people didn't have access to the lab. They could be completely ignorant of what went on there.

Movement from Vincent caught her attention. A young man in a lab coat had stepped off the escalators, and Vincent smoothly intercepted him, unclipping his ID badge. The lab tech walked on to the cafeteria counter without noticing.

They all joined Vincent at the escalators, exchanged glances, and began the climb.

Save for the number on the wall, there was nothing to distinguish the 67^th floor stairwell from any of the others. It unsettled her all the same. This was their last chance to turn back, she thought, even as she willed her feet forward after the others.

The lab's corridors were familiar in a way that made it hard to breathe. Ifalna flinched away as a lab tech stepped out of one of the rooms into the hall with them, but the woman walked past without a glance. They were like ghosts here, and there was nothing comforting in the thought.

It was Lucrecia who led the way into the part of the lab that housed its less human specimens. It wasn't hard to find what they were looking for; space had been cleared for a large glass tank, glowing a Mako green. From its base, a mess of cables uncoiled across the floor, forcing Ifalna's gaze down, at first, to keep from tripping.

Then she looked up.

It wore a face that must have belonged to one of her ancestors. A sharp pink gaze stabbed out at them from otherwise delicate features.

The sound of her own heart pounding in her ears jolted Ifalna back to herself. There was no one else here, but all of them had come to a stop before the tank. She looked quickly to Lucrecia. Was it speaking to her?

"We..." Ifalna swallowed. "We need to find a way to move this."

Lucrecia looked back at her. She seemed uneasy, but alert. "Right. There should be some equipment near the freight elevator. That's how they would have brought her in. I'll... I'll go check."

Ifalna decided to take it for a good sign that she was voluntarily removing herself from close proximity to Jenova. She was afraid of losing control, but she hadn't, yet. Vincent wordlessly peeled off after her, leaving Ifalna with Sephiroth.

Sephiroth and the Crisis from the Sky. He stood looking up at it, his expression calm. He had recounted a little of his visits to her, but he had never mentioned opening the door. He didn't seem surprised by its appearance. Had he seen it before in his mind?

"Is it... speaking?" Ifalna asked him cautiously.

Sephiroth let out a soft huff. "She says this would all be easier if we let her out. No equipment, no freight elevators, no need for our Corel allies. I wonder if she's accurately assessing her own strength."

Ifalna kept her gaze on him, avoiding the tank. She didn't know if Jenova was watching her, and didn't want to know. Her skin crawled. "...she shouldn't be underestimated."

"They've weakened her," Sephiroth said, gesturing to the tangle of cables. "I know she'd recover quickly, but quickly enough? This building is full of our enemies."

Ifalna didn't know who he included in 'our.' She swallowed and looked in the direction Lucrecia had gone, wishing she would return.

"It's all right," Sephiroth said, catching her unease. "We'll be out of here soon enough."

"Bringing it with us," Ifalna said. If their plan went smoothly, they'd put Shinra again behind them, but not Jenova. Could they really contain it themselves?

At what point in the plan would the White Materia pulse in warning? Ifalna realized she'd left it with Aeris in part so she wouldn't feel it. She didn't want to be deterred from ending Shinra's stewardship of the Crisis by the certainty of an even greater duty settling on her. One thing at a time.

"It'll be all right," Sephiroth repeated.

Ifalna tensed as he took a few steps closer to the tank, but his attention was on its base, inspecting the cables. They would need to detach them in order to move it.

She took a cautious step closer, thinking to help.

Sephiroth had worked his way around to the opposite side of the tank. There was a soft thwick she couldn't identify. Had one of them snagged a wire? Ifalna glanced around, and missed the precise moment when Sephiroth pitched forward. His hand thumped into the glass of the tank, but he couldn't seem to catch himself. He slid down, crumpling at its base.

"Sephiroth!?" Ifalna exclaimed, starting towards him.

"No, not her."

The voice brought her up short. Ifalna froze beside the tank, her eyes darting. Hojo appeared from behind a stack of crates, flanked by soldiers. There was something strange about their gear--the color of their goggles, the style of rifle--but Ifalna noticed them only on the periphery, her attention locked on Hojo.

"It's a relief he grew so much taller than you," he said. "The amount of sedative necessary for him would likely have killed you, and I don't know how well they can distinguish you in infrared."

Infrared? Ifalna thought dimly, and then the horror crept over her. Sephiroth was unconscious and his illusions had failed, but they had already been flawed.

"I see you're realizing it now. I thought you might be coming-- or at least, Sephiroth. You see, I'd realized someone had begun visiting the reactor outside of my staff, someone who couldn't be seen on camera. I had a look through the security database, and there are reports of lost key cards and apparent access malfunctions going back years. Each seemingly innocuous, but they form a pattern. You've all been doing this for a long time, haven't you? Disappearing from Shinra's sight by quite literally disappearing. It's impressive. I wish I'd realized it sooner."

They'd been so careful. They never should have relied on the power of Jenova. But it was Sephiroth's power, Lucrecia's power.

Where was Lucrecia?

Hojo must have interpreted something in the way her eyes widened, and he nodded behind him. A pair of soldiers hauled Lucrecia into view, stumbling between them. Blood ran down her face from a wound somewhere in her scalp, but she managed to look up at Ifalna. Vincent, she mouthed silently.

Ifalna's gaze darted over the rest of the soldiers. No sign of Vincent. They might have broken Lucrecia's illusions, too, but he'd gotten away. He could make it back to Aeris and the others and warn them that Shinra had expected them, that they didn't have the element of surprise.

Was that what Vincent would choose to do? Hojo was right here.

"I would appreciate it if you would comply without any fuss," said Hojo. "I have no desire to damage you."

Ifalna didn't move.

Hojo nodded again to the soldiers, and one of them pressed a gun into Lucrecia's side. "That woman, on the other hand... She's of no value to me."

Lucrecia's expression twisted into a grimace. "'That woman'? Can't you even say my name, Nibori?"

Hojo's jaw tightened, and Ifalna's heart clenched. Lucrecia had confided to her that Hojo hated to be called by his given name; she was one of the few who even knew it. Don't, Ifalna thought at her desperately. Don't provoke him, but she knew Lucrecia was as angry as she was frightened, if she even remembered to be frightened at all.

As Ifalna stood frozen, a few of the soldiers started towards her. Without thinking, she ducked behind Jenova's tank, as if that could buy her more than a few moments. Years ago, when she had offered herself up in an attempt to save her family, Gast hadn't let her. He'd been gunned down, and she'd been taken anyway, both their efforts rendered futile.

Lucrecia wasn't as fragile as Gast, but she would fight. She would fight if Ifalna didn't.

And Sephiroth lay unconscious on the other side of the tank, just as vulnerable now as the boy she'd first met. If he were retaken, he'd be bound even more tightly. Caged in a tank of his own, maybe.

Movement from within the tank drew Ifalna's attention upwards. The Crisis was looking down at her. It met her gaze, and then shifted that look meaningfully towards Hojo. There was hatred there, not for her, but for him.

Could a monster care about its offspring?

Sephiroth seemed certain of it. That Jenova cared about him in its own way, as an extension of itself, and would choose to protect him. Maybe it would protect Lucrecia, too, for the same reason. Neither of them could be infected, because they already carried its cells.

Aeris had the White Materia. She would feel it, and she would have time to get far from here, heeding the Planet's call. It wasn't a duty Ifalna had ever wanted to push onto her, but neither had she come here to let anyone take Aeris's brother from her. She had not come here to lose another lover.

It was so hard to make out anything of the Planet's voice here, but the tank was full of Mako. Processed into this congealed state, halfway between Lifestream and materia, it could nevertheless act as a conduit. It felt like thrusting her hands into rot, but Ifalna drew from it. At her touch, the glass of the tank froze solid. And at the crack of Jenova's head against it, it shattered.

Ifalna shielded Sephiroth and herself with wind, and as the Mako and broken glass swept past them, she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing herself for everything she'd ever been told. For Jenova's touch to infect her. For the erosion of her mind. The corruption of her body.

The monster passed her by.

The soldiers began to shout in horror. Ifalna risked opening her eyes in time to see them lift their rifles and open fire. Hojo was jostled aside, whatever orders he gave drowned out by gunfire and screams.

Jenova's appearance had already changed, even less human than it had been in the tank. Snapped wires trailed from its body as tentacles grew to join them, and the new appendages flashed out into the knot of terrified men.

A bullet whizzed past her, shaking Ifalna from her paralysis. She ducked behind the base of the tank, not only for safety but so she wouldn't witness the carnage that followed. Her stomach twisted, but she wasn't sure she felt anything for the soldiers, only for the uncertain future she'd unleashed on those who came after them.

Where would the Crisis stop? Would it stop? Or could it only be stopped, like before?

It was absurd to think it would be any different from before, and yet, from before were only stories, and now there was a shared enemy. A shared family. She had been counting on that to mean something.

The last of the gunfire was silenced in a wet thump. Ifalna risked a glance over the base of the tank and watched as Jenova flung Hojo clear across the room. He crumpled against the floor, but Ifalna couldn't tell if he was dead.

Metal screeched as an unseen force tore every camera in the room from the wall. The lenses shattered as they struck the floor. For a heartbeat, everything was silent. Jenova's twisted bulk dominated the lab, unmoving.

Ifalna cast about for Lucrecia. She sat stunned amid the corpses, spattered with blood, and Ifalna shifted to push herself up, wanting to go to her.

Jenova turned in her direction. This was the moment, she thought, but then she realized its gaze had settled not on her, but on Sephiroth.

Lucrecia noticed, too. "No! You can't have him!"

"He is already mine." Harsh echoes coalesced into a voice. The Crisis shot her a piercing glance, and Ifalna realized it spoke aloud for her benefit. "I will remove the poison."

Poison? Did it mean the sedative?

Ifalna levered herself to her feet, but before she could force herself any nearer to Jenova, the light of some kind of magic washed over Sephiroth. He stirred, and with a groan began to push himself up.

"Sephiroth...?"

"Ifalna? What..." He froze, the realization of Jenova's presence hitting him. She thought he felt it, without processing the shattered tank in front of him or seeing the monster looming behind him. He stared at Ifalna. "You let her out?"

"I... had to." Had she? What had she done?

Sephiroth slowly stood. Glass crunched beneath his boots as he turned to survey the bloody scene.

Across the room, Hojo stirred and groaned. Whatever else went through their minds, four sets of eyes turned at once with the same judgment.

Sephiroth stepped up beside Jenova. "Are you going to...?"

"No," it said. "I will preserve nothing of him. He will not be part of us."

Ifalna shivered at the sound of that voice, not wanting to understand it. What she did understand was that Jenova was not the one who moved forward.

It was Lucrecia, fumbling a hand around one of the abandoned rifles and staggering to her feet. "Did you... leave him for me?" she asked, but she didn't wait for any sort of answer. "Thank you."

Hojo had time enough to get his eyes open to see what was coming. The burst of rifle fire struck him in the neck and chest. Lucrecia stumbled with the kickback, tripped over a body, and fell. Ifalna ran to her.

"Lucrecia! Lucrecia." Ifalna dropped down beside her, ignoring the lifeless shoulder that nudged against her hip. "Are you all right?"

Lucrecia tore her gaze from Hojo. "Yes, I..." She lifted a hand to the gash on her head. "It's just this. The rest... isn't mine."

Ifalna drew on her magic, again a strain, and healed the wound. Then she unwound her scarf and began to use it to clean the blood from Lucrecia's face.

"They got Vincent with one of those darts."

Ifalna frowned. "I thought he got away."

"We were at the freight elevator. I pushed him in. I told him to get to Aeris and I sent him down."

"...I suppose he won't be out long," Ifalna said.

Five years, and they understood at least some things about the beast inside him. Strong emotion no longer brought it out, but injury did, and the change always healed him of whatever harm had triggered it. A tranquilizer dart would hold it at bay only long enough for anyone nearby to distance themselves.

The beast would reach the bottom of that elevator alert and furious. He could make it to Aeris, through any enemies that threatened her.

"...do you think he'll go to Aeris?" she wondered. She couldn't grasp how much time had passed, but he hadn't reappeared.

"He didn't see Hojo," said Lucrecia.

Aeris would be safe, surely.

Lucrecia's eyes widened suddenly, and Ifalna jerked to follow her gaze, watching as Jenova tore the last of Shinra's apparatus from its body. Inky blood gushed from the hole in its abdomen, spilling onto the floor, and Ifalna's hand stilled around the blood-soaked scarf. Was all of the blood on Lucrecia actually human?

It looked human, she decided, but she was uneasy now with it so close to her own flesh.

"Why did you let her out?" Lucrecia asked her, still staring.

"...for you. It... sees you and Sephiroth as part of itself, so it wouldn't hurt you."

Lucrecia looked at her. "And you?"

Ifalna didn't answer. Lucrecia's hands tightened around the rifle as if she meant to use it again, but her brow furrowed.

"...she says you aren't her enemy."

Was it only saying that so Lucrecia would relax her guard? Did it mean it? Ifalna didn't know. What she did know was that she was still alive for now, and Lucrecia and Sephiroth were no one's prisoners.

She finally let herself look at Hojo. His eyes were staring, his mouth slack, and his body perfectly motionless. She sensed nothing in him, already on his way back to the Planet.

The Crisis had rejected him, she realized. The Planet would accept even his rotten soul without judgment, but the creature had deemed him unworthy of itself. It might act on malice, but it was no slave to its nature. It chose the parts of itself.

And it didn't want her either.

She'd gotten most of the blood off Lucrecia's face, and Lucrecia gently pushed her hand aside. She rose to her feet and pulled Ifalna up with her. Sephiroth had come nearer to them to have his own look at Hojo's corpse, but Jenova hadn't moved from its position near the shattered tank.

Sephiroth looked to them. "What now?"

They'd come for Jenova, and Jenova could leave with them now on its own power--easier, and more terrifying. Ifalna didn't want to bring it nearer to Aeris, but they couldn't stay either.

Of a sudden, Jenova's body shuddered and compacted. In a blink, a man stood there: tall, bald, and brown-skinned, dressed in the neat suit of the Turks.

"We aren't finished here," he said, in the even voice of a human man.

They all watched the figure uneasily. Human-disguised hands relaxed into a nonthreatening pretense. It could only ever be a pretense.

It was Sephiroth who asked, carefully, "What do you mean to do?"

"Take Shinra," was the simple response, and Ifalna looked down at the corpses at her feet. Even weakened, as Sephiroth said, it had done this. Could it take Shinra?

Sephiroth was shaking his head. "You can't... do that to them."

"You misunderstand. I mean Shinra, the man. He is at the center of this organization, is he not? He gives commands, and they are followed." There was a faint sneer to its expression, as though the kind of command President Shinra exerted were inferior.

"You mean to... become him," Lucrecia was the one to realize. It meant take, in the way it had tried to take the Cetra. "What would you have him command?"

"Humans have begun to study the stars," it said, its gaze lifting towards the ceiling. "I want to leave."

"Leave this Planet?" Lucrecia wondered.

But it turned instead to fix Ifalna with a look. "I am unwelcome."

Ifalna swallowed. "Where would you go?" They could not inflict this thing on another planet, another people.

"I think that is none of your concern, Cetra."

"We can talk about all that later," Sephiroth broke in. "Reinforcements will be coming, if they're not already waiting outside this room. And we have to make sure Aeris is okay."

Lucrecia looked at him incredulously. "You want to put off talking about whether we should install Jenova as President of Shinra?"

"I think we're all in agreement that we don't want them doing any of this"--he gestured to the lab around them--"ever again, and that's enough to start with."

As he spoke, Jenova in its human guise had already turned to leave. A tenuous ally, until the moment it wasn't. Sephiroth seemed to think that wouldn't crumble, that this was some kind of foundation. Ifalna didn't know if he was fooling himself, but would discussion matter, whether it happened now or in the future?

"Let's... let's go on," she said. "It's better not to let it out of our sight."

Lucrecia threw her a worried look, but she nodded. Together, the three of them followed Jenova.

There was indeed a security force waiting outside the door, someone on a radio trying to contact someone--anyone--inside the lab before proceeding. Jenova spoke to them as the Turk whose form it had assumed, informing them that the escaped specimen had at last been subdued, at heavy cost. The assembled men looked at the rest of them and seemed to see survivors rather than interlopers. Ifalna's stomach twisted as she wondered whose illusions overlaid them now. She willed herself to believe they were Sephiroth's.

The men moved past them to secure the gory scene. No one stopped them as they entered the stairwell and climbed the escalators to the highest landing. A night receptionist glanced up at them as they passed her desk, but she knew better than to impede a Turk. One last grand staircase brought them to the sprawling 70^th floor space that served as the President's office.

Ifalna had met him before, on those occasions when he had come into the lab to inquire after Hojo's progress. Sometimes he had put the question of the Promised Land to her directly, but most of the time she had simply watched as the two of them discussed her as though she weren't there. To Hojo she had been a curiosity, and to this man, nothing but an investment.

"Rude," the President said in recognition. "Have those Corel riffraff been handled?"

Jenova didn't bother to answer him. It strode towards him, boots leaving smudges of blood on the immaculate floor, and within a pace of his desk, it was suddenly itself again. He choked out a yelp of surprise as its massive form loomed over him, and one of the tentacles shot out to coil around his neck before he could get out anything more.

It didn't kill him. Ifalna thought that might have been kinder, though she was torn on whether that was what she wanted for him. Even she could be vengeful. Even she could think that for a man who had sought to use the Crisis for conquest and profit, maybe this was what he deserved.

Jenova's poison overwhelmed him and left him writhing on the floor. Lore suggested the infection could take days or even weeks to become apparent, but for one infected by the Crisis itself, Ifalna wasn't sure. And, he was human.

As quickly as it had taken on Rude's form, Jenova shifted to become President Shinra, a double standing over him.

"Aeris--" Sephiroth began, and the double held up a hand.

It pressed an intercom button on the massive desk. "Get me Commander Whitaker."

Ifalna watched, feeling less and less connected to reality, as the impostor calmly directed the forces barring the escape of their Corel allies to stand down. The Crisis from the Sky was acting to protect her daughter. Was it because Sephiroth wanted it?

She nearly missed it when Jenova directed the commander to pass his radio to Aeris.

"H-hello?"

"Aeris!" Ifalna rushed forward, even if it took her within arm's reach of the Crisis. "Aeris, are you all right?"

"I'm okay," she answered. "The fighting's stopped, and... Mom, what's going on? You didn't make some kind of deal with Shinra--"

"No, no," Ifalna interrupted, though maybe what she'd done was worse. "We're all right. It's... Did you feel it?"

"Feel what?"

Ifalna looked at the President's double, now seated thoughtfully behind that throne of a desk. The White Materia was silent?

"This man has a child," it remarked, not to her, but as though it were sifting through the details of his life now that its immediate task was complete.

"Rufus," Lucrecia supplied.

"He does not value him." It said it with disdain, as though it were a foolish thing, not to value a child.

"Mom?"

"I'm sorry, I'm here. A lot of unexpected things have happened, and I'm still getting my head around it. I'll meet you at the rendezvous point and explain everything."

Sephiroth met her gaze and nodded, understanding from the way she said it that she alone would go. He needed to stay with Jenova, because it was him keeping it in check, and he couldn't be left to that burden alone.

It was Ifalna who could not contain it, a Cetra, a reminder of a millennia-long enmity. Even if she had been the one who released it at last, even if it had protected her children.

She exchanged a few more words with Aeris, switched off the intercom, and drew back from the desk.

The Crisis from the Sky had been released, and she stood on the top floor of the Shinra building itself, and the Planet was unafraid. Out the massive windows of the office, through the haze of the city, Ifalna thought she made out a single star.

Chapter Text

I. Elmyra - 2003

Elmyra wasn't often in Sector 7, and she always felt like a fish out of water, strange as that was for a place only two stops away. The stations were near identical--the same utilitarian platform, the same lamps overhead, the same absence of signage that left you guessing when the train would come if you hadn't memorized the schedule--but the people were different. All of the Midgar slums lived an eternal night, but Sector 7 had a night life that Sector 5 just didn't.

It wasn't as bad as Wall Market, to be sure, which was why she'd come the extra distance. Amid all its clamor, Sector 7's merchants got their hands on a broader variety of wares than she could find back home. When old Mr. Walton had come to her in hopes of matching a lost button on his favorite coat from before he'd come to Midgar, this was where she'd come to look. It wasn't a perfect match--a fraction smaller--but it would do, and she'd found a replacement for the gear that was beginning to wear down on her sewing machine.

"Johnny!" a woman's voice sounded sharp close by. There'd been some commotion near the far end of the platform that Elmyra had been politely ignoring, but now those involved seemed to be headed home. "Are you even listening to me?"

"I'm sorry, Mom," responded a redheaded teenager, kicking his feet dejectedly.

"You should be thanking your lucky stars Mr. Carpenter was there, or I don't know what would have happened. That place is fenced off for a reason!"

Elmyra kept herself from glancing over. She couldn't remember the name the locals had for it, but she'd seen the yard full of disused train cars, and she could imagine the appeal it held for teens. Something forbidden and a little dangerous.

Eloise was nearly that age. How long before Elmyra was the mother expressing her relief through a public scolding?

The train pulled into the station, and Elmyra climbed aboard with the other waiting passengers. It wasn't a long ride, and she was glad to get off again before it got too crowded. She wound her way past the knots of people around the station, and slipped through the oft-ignored gap in the fence, which didn't lead anywhere tempting enough for thrill-seeking teenagers.

It wasn't any sort of ritual for her to visit the old church--it was Edmund who still went by weekly to sweep up--but she felt she could use a moment in the quiet.

She expected to find herself alone, but she wasn't. Standing in the space before the altar were two women who tugged at her sense of familiarity. Mother and daughter, where enough years had passed that the daughter looked closer to the woman Elmyra had put up in her home all those years ago.

"...Ifalna? Aeris?"

They both turned to look in her direction, and confusion flitted across both faces before the daughter suddenly smiled in recognition. "Miss Elmyra!"

They met amidst the pews, and Elmyra looked the girl up and down. She really was the spitting image of her mother. "Goodness, you're all grown up!"

"Eighteen next month," Aeris pronounced proudly.

"I never thought I'd see you again. Are Lucrecia and Sephiroth with you?"

Ifalna shook her head. "They're in another part of the city, but they're well. And your husband?"

"Oh, we're all getting along, and-- You know, I was just stopping in on my way home, you should come back with me for dinner. I'd love for you to meet our daughter, and Edmund's always wondered how you fared after we sent you on your way."

"We're not in any hurry," said Aeris. "Right, Mom?"

"...no, I suppose we aren't," Ifalna agreed. It seemed to surprise her, somehow.

Elmyra gestured toward the altar. "There's no rush, if you still need a moment."

But Ifalna shook her head. "No, we only came here to... hear our own thoughts, a little clearer."

Elmyra nodded in understanding. "It's a good place for that."

"Peaceful," Ifalna agreed. "I remembered that. And... it doesn't seem like that's going to change any time soon."

Aeris smiled at her and took her hand, and Elmyra got the sense that they were talking about something she didn't quite understand. She was sure they hadn't told the whole story of what they'd escaped all those years ago, but maybe their return to the city now meant the threat had passed. Now that she thought about it, hadn't there been something about Shinra on the news last night?

"Well, lead the way," Aeris said to her. "Do you still live in the same house? I remember it was about the nicest place I'd ever seen."

"We do," Elmyra affirmed as she led the way back out of the church. "We almost had to sell it once, but somehow or other we've managed to hold onto it."

"I'm glad. I bet it's a good place to grow up."

"Well, you can ask Ellie, but I like to think we're doing all right."

"I'm sure you are," said Ifalna. "We can only really do our best."

Elmyra glanced at them, still holding hands as though there were something they didn't want to let go of yet. "If I asked you what you were doing back in Midgar, would you tell me?"

"Oh, I don't think you'd believe us if we did," said Aeris. "I'm not even sure I believe it. But I guess we could give it a shot."

"Aeris," said Ifalna.

"What? It's safe now, isn't it? They're safe."

Ifalna hesitated, but then she nodded, smiling softly. Elmyra looked forward to learning exactly what that meant, to be safe.

II. Vivian - 2003

"He's possessed."

It was the first thing Rufus declared as he walked in the door. Visits with his father rarely went well, but this was a new complaint. Vivian exchanged looks with Isabel.

"What do you mean, possessed?"

"First, he asked me about university. He never does that."

"Well, you are graduating this year," Vivian reasoned. "No doubt he'll want to be there so he can pretend he had something to do with it."

But Rufus shook his head. He dropped his bag onto the floor and joined them in the parlor. "It wasn't like that. He asked me what I thought of my classes. We almost had a conversation."

"Almost?" Isabel wondered.

"I wouldn't let it happen. He must have some ulterior motive."

Vivian frowned. "Did he ask you for something? He was the one who wanted to meet today."

"No. Not yet, at least. He just said that as Vice President, he wanted to keep me apprised of company changes."

Isabel leaned forward, setting her drink down on the coffee table. "What sort of changes?"

Rufus reached over to take the glass for himself and downed the remainder of the bourbon. Vivian arched an eyebrow, but she always allowed his manners some leeway after a visit with Godric.

"That's the truly insane part," Rufus said. "Apparently some specimen got loose and killed Hojo, and he's just decided to gut the entire department."

"He's cut science funding due to negligence before," said Isabel. "I remember it happened just before the war started. Scarlet was thrilled."

"There isn't going to be a science department anymore. He's firing them all and giving the budget to the space program."

Vivian sat back, stunned. "Well, I'm sure that's made Palmer's day," she managed.

Rufus fixed her with a look. "He fired Palmer, too," he said. "He put some woman in charge-- Shera something from the engineering team."

"A woman?" Isabel repeated. "I was sure Scarlet would be the eternal exception to his little boys' club."

"Don't ask me. At this rate, he might just fire everyone and have an all-female staff." Rufus grimaced after it was out of his mouth, realizing the implications for his philanderer of a father.

"Well, you're right, none of this sounds like him at all," Isabel said, shaking her head. She reached for her glass, remembered it was empty, and sat back. "I'd almost suggest he's having an affair with this Shera, but he'd never let himself be changed by anyone. I wonder what's gotten into him."

"Maybe he's dying," Vivian proposed, sipping her wine thoughtfully. "Mortality might be able to do what no human being could."

"All of a sudden he wants space to be his legacy?" Rufus wondered skeptically. "I think it would have to be a brain tumor."

"Cheers to his brain tumor, then," said Vivian, and Isabel snorted.

"I'll drink to that." She got to her feet, carrying her empty glass with her.

Vivian watched her disappear into the kitchen and then turned back to Rufus. "If he really is dying, then that means you're on your way to a promotion. How do you feel about that?"

He screwed up his face. "I'm not sure. I always told myself I'd run it differently, but I don't really know if I want to run it at all."

"Don't take it on just to spite him," Vivian advised. "That's not enough to build a life around."

Isabel returned with two glasses this time and handed one of them to Rufus before she sat down beside Vivian. "You know we'll support you whatever you decide."

"I know," said Rufus, flashing them both a quick smile. "I just didn't figure on the old man dying any time soon. I guess we don't know if he really is."

"Who knows," Isabel agreed. "But you don't need to be his Vice President either, once you graduate. You can focus on your writing."

He nodded a little. "I might do that. But I do want to keep tabs on him. On whatever this is."

"And we would very much like to hear more about it," said Vivian. "It sounds like it's going to be an entertaining mess."

Isabel met her gaze and lifted her glass, and Vivian clinked hers against it. She was already thinking about what outfits they might coordinate for his funeral.

III. Lucrecia - 2003

Daylight streamed through the windows of the 70^th floor, providing Lucrecia with ample light as she worked her fingers through Sephiroth's silken hair. It was nostalgic and unreal at once. The lab had no windows, and she'd always left this building in the dark, never witnessing the sunset over the city. The warm glow belied the winter chill that lingered outside.

"I could stay, you know," she said.

"You've stayed long enough. I'm all right here."

"I know. It just doesn't sit right with me to leave this place without you."

"I'm here by choice; I don't need rescuing." Sephiroth turned his head enough to look at her. "You're not abandoning me if you go."

"And you know I'd come back if you were in trouble," Lucrecia pressed. "You'd tell me if you were."

Sephiroth smiled wryly and looked ahead. "We agreed on once a week. I'll keep you updated. I think I'll be fine, though."

"I suppose it's more for me, in the end," she admitted. "You've grown so strong. I know you won't let her push you to anything."

"...I don't think she'll try to," he said. "I understand why you're both worried, but she's changed, and she's still changing. It's in her nature, to change."

Lucrecia focused on the strands of hair between her fingers as the awareness crept through her that Jenova could probably hear their conversation, if she was choosing to. She had changed as much as she had because of her ability to experience the world through Sephiroth. Did she know Lucrecia's thoughts now, too? Did she know her love for her son?

"I wonder what she'll do," she said, "when she finally gets to another world."

"I don't know," Sephiroth admitted. "She says most of them don't have people, so it's different from the way it was here. And it'll be different again if she's travelling by ship."

Lucrecia shook her head. "It'll be a long, long time from now anyway."

Sephiroth was quiet for a moment, and then he said, "She asked me about going with her."

Lucrecia's hands stilled. "...you said no, didn't you?"

"Like you said, it'll be a long time from now," he answered, which wasn't a no. "I won't leave any of you. But things might be different then."

She tied off the end of the braid and tried to imagine what he was thinking. "Under other circumstances"--in other company--"it would be exciting, wouldn't it? To see other planets."

"It would be. But I'm not ready to leave this one, yet."

"Good," she decided. "And we'll all come back to see you after the trip north."

Sephiroth rose from his seat and turned to her. "I look forward to hearing about it."

They both knew it was no simple vacation. Though Ifalna and Aeris agreed the Planet was calm and the White Materia quiet, it only felt right to be certain. For years, Ifalna had wanted to take Aeris to see her birthplace and the city long known only as the Forgotten Capital. It was as good a time as any.

"Maybe next time you can come with us," Lucrecia proposed. "When things are more settled here."

"I'd like that," said Sephiroth.

She rose to stand in front of him, brushing his hair back from his face, fussing with his lapel. In the past week, he'd been fitted with a suit to let him blend in without the need of illusions. He wore it well, though it didn't suit him. He was no businessman and never would be. He would never be what anyone had tried to make him.

"I'll be fine," he insisted softly.

"No," she said, "you'll be incredible." She wrapped her arms around him, and he returned the embrace. She let the seconds pass, and then finally let go. "All right. Okay. The car's probably already waiting, isn't it?"

"Probably," Sephiroth agreed. "And this isn't some big goodbye. I'll see you again soon."

"Soon," she promised. She wouldn't say goodbye.

A security officer was waiting for her at the elevator. "I'll escort you," he said, and Lucrecia followed him into the elevator car, keeping an uneasy distance.

She could feel that this was one of Jenova's. That first night, while the rest of them had slept on couches in the President's private lounge, Jenova had summoned the surviving laboratory staff to his office and infected them. Ifalna had been horrified. Lucrecia only felt something cold and unnameable in the pit of her stomach.

Over the next few days, as she watched them succumb, she had thought of her own illness in the wake of Sephiroth's birth. Delirium clouded her memories, and it was Vincent who told her it hadn't been like this. Nothing rippling through her skin, no inhuman cries from her throat. When they came through it, she wasn't sure if these people still looked human, or only pretended at it.

She had so narrowly avoided doing this to herself. The memories of the person in front of her might remain, but the man himself was gone. It was only Jenova, inhabiting the body.

Sephiroth had convinced her not to take any more of them. She had enough to spread her awareness throughout the building, and did she really want to make any more of these awful people a part of herself?

The man in the elevator with her was too young to have been witness to Lucrecia's own confinement, but she wondered how long his assignment to the lab had lasted. He must have seen the hapless volunteers sealed into their pods, would-be supersoldiers now too far gone to be restored to who they'd been. They, too, belonged already to Jenova.

And Lucrecia still belonged to herself. Sephiroth belonged to himself. She'd wondered if the work was worth revisiting, as a sort of inoculation now that Jenova was free. Maybe it was because all this didn't disturb her as much as it should have that she considered it. She should have wanted to protect these people from losing themselves, but in the end, they were the people who would have held her son prisoner.

"He is my child," said the security officer, watching her. "I will look after him."

How much of her thoughts could Jenova pick up on? "Why don't I find that reassuring?"

"Because you look at me and see your younger self: selfish, destructive, unyielding."

"You are destructive," Lucrecia stated. Jenova spoke through a stolen body. It was destructive, even if Lucrecia couldn't bring herself to feel sympathy.

The man tilted his head. "Do you still think that your destruction and mine are a part of our nature?"

Lucrecia pressed her lips together. It wasn't wanton; Jenova had chosen her targets with intent, and stopped when asked. Lucrecia had stopped, too, hadn't she? "It's... We can't forget it's in our power."

"Oh, never."

Lucrecia looked into the officer's eyes, and wondered how Jenova experienced it, with more than a dozen other bodies to look out of, a dozen possible simultaneous conversations. "I don't know if you really understand what it is to be a mother," she said, "but maybe you do want to shape the world into something better for him. Just don't make the choice for him. I should never have done that."

"His mind is his own," said Jenova, "and so his choices are his own. A perspective ever changing, not frozen in the moment of acquisition. You made him for many reasons, but foremost was to see what he would become. I, too, wish to observe this, not to set obstacles in his path."

"...then maybe we do understand each other," Lucrecia decided.

The officer escorted her from the building to a car waiting outside. The driver was human, and didn't quite succeed in hiding his surprise at her appearance; she wore her own clothes, a mishmash accumulated throughout their nomadic years that would have offended any fashionista. She wouldn't trade Ifalna's hand-embroidered patches for anything.

Lucrecia watched the Shinra building recede behind her. The car would take her out of the city, all the way to the port, where she would rendezvous with Aeris and Ifalna. With nothing to hide from, at last, they could revisit the lives that had been stolen from them.

But Lucrecia didn't want to return to Shinra or Midgar or to her former aspirations of grandeur. There was no singular accomplishment for which anyone would be putting her name down in the history books, and that was fine. Whatever change she had contributed to the world, it was part of a web of efforts, and it was ongoing. She would wake up tomorrow, and make a choice, and hopefully it would be the right one.

Endless, daunting opportunity. But it was hers.

IV. Sebuna - 2008

Corel had changed much since the first time Sebuna had visited in search of kindred spirits. During the clash with Shinra, frustrated soldiers had burned many of the larger buildings, and once things had settled, allies had flocked to help rebuild, leaving their marks upon the architecture. One building might sport Wutain roof tiles, while another was framed with Nibel window dressings. Gongagan furnishings warmed the interiors, and canyon electricians had installed the wiring.

The most obvious installation was the field of solar panels outside of town. With spring stretching towards summer, crops were thriving in their shade, nourished by the condensation that collected beneath the panels. Slowly they beat back the desert.

Agriculturists from Cosmo Canyon had accompanied her on this visit to take their measurements in the ongoing effort to understand and improve the process. Sebuna just liked to see it. Eleanor's young daughter Marlene was out with her uncle Barret this morning, her small hands helping to pick ripe peppers.

Nanaki lifted his nose to scent the air. "Do you think they'll let us take some back with us?"

"I imagine so," said Sebuna. "It looks like a healthy crop."

Nanaki put his whiskers forward, pleased, and then his attention shifted. "I see Sephiroth in the village. I'm going to go say hello."

"I'll be here."

Sebuna watched him bound away. Bugenhagen had passed over the winter, and for a time Nanaki had withdrawn into himself. It was good to see the weight lifting from him. He was healing, as the world was healing. She was glad that Bugenhagen had lived to see humanity turn this corner. They had set aside weapons and formed networks of friendships, tuning their technology to the workings of the Planet.

Corel's surviving coal furnaces had yet to be dismantled, and maybe they never would be; the people here felt pride in where they had come from, even as they left it behind. It was good to remember where one had come from. With Shinra withdrawing more from the world each year, it gave them the space to remember.

Few knew the truth behind Shinra's gradual dissolution, of course, though speculation had given birth to countless rumors: blackmail and terminal illness vied with more melodramatic notions that he had discovered a bastard son fighting in Corel's resistance and had a change of heart. The media outlets which had reported on the disaster at the lab had done so as a footnote. None had considered an escaped specimen might have the intelligence to do more than kill, and they certainly didn't consider that a whole family of them might have changed the world.

Ifalna had confided everything to her, following her journey north to the place of her birth. The Planet hummed along contentedly as its oldest enemy dismantled its youngest. The company was broken back down into smaller pieces, the reactors were deactivated as alternative sources replaced them, and north of the Nibel mountains, humans began their first forays beyond their own world.

Both of them found it reassuring that Jenova could have taken from humanity, somehow, a desire to put conflict behind it. They could be a volatile people, but give them the chance, and they were eager to heal the damage they had done.

Sebuna settled herself in the shade beneath the solar panels. Later she would find a way to make herself useful, but for now she would rest her leg and enjoy the scent of growing things.

"You want one?" Marlene asked her as she drew near along the row of peppers.

"Careful," Barret advised. "They're turnin' out hot this year, as someone figured out the other day."

Marlene beamed. "My whole face turned red," she announced. She hadn't retracted her hand with its small proffered gift.

"I can handle heat," Sebuna assured her, delicately taking the pepper. "They are strong this year," she affirmed as she swallowed. "Nanaki will be pleased."

"Glad to hear it," said Barret. "Kid deserves somethin' nice."

"Indeed. He wasn't certain he wanted to come on this trip, but it's doing him good." She turned her head in the direction of the town. "Is Sephiroth's family here with him? We didn't see them in Gongaga."

"His sister is, yeah. Think their moms are visiting a friend back east."

"They never do stay put for long, do they?"

"You're one to talk," Barret chuckled.

"Well, it is a great wide world, and much of it is worth seeing."

He nodded. "Like to see more of it myself, but I'm probably stayin' put the next couple years."

"Unless Aunt Myrna kicks you out," Marlene put in.

"Would she do that?" Sebuna wondered in amusement.

Barret scratched his head. "S'why I'm out here this mornin.' She said I was fussin' too much. Can't help it if I'm excited."

"I hope it's a girl," said Marlene, sharing a grin with her uncle.

"We'll find out soon, won't we?" Sebuna remarked. "Perhaps I'll stay to learn it."

New and growing things always eased her heart. She had seen many young new faces since the loss of her beloved Seto, and now Myrna's child would be a new life in the wake of Bugenhagen's passing. Perhaps not in this child, but in some green thing, his essence would witness the world they made through new eyes.

One day that would be her fate, too, and Nanaki's in turn. They as a people would vanish, leaving the Planet at last to humans. What had their guidance been but another step in a journey?

The work went on.