The lab was nearly empty and shadows hung deeply over softly humming equipment. A single figure moved under the light of a single hanging bulb. Sometimes the security agents wondered if Hojo ever slept or even left the lab. He’d told them never to bother him in the lab, that he’d call if there was trouble, and they were more than happy to leave him alone.
Tonight he was hunched in front of a small bank of monitors in the back of the lab. At first glance, all of them showed empty rooms. After a few minutes, however, a sleeping boy threw his blanket off his bed as he thrashed in his sleep. Hojo watched with rapt attention as the boy twisted, obviously in the throws of a nightmare.
“I should calm him,” Hojo thought carefully. “He might damage himself.” Hojo was careful always to have a logical reason for everything he did to the boy. If anyone accused him of affection toward his son — no, don’t even think that, toward Sephiroth, toward the specimen — he would laugh. Not that anyone even knew that Sephiroth was his son. They didn’t care and they didn’t ask; for as much detail was in the reports, he may have well been dropped on the doorstep of the Shinra mansion.
The halls were empty as Hojo’s dress shoes clacked against the linoleum. He could hear the scuffle of security agents getting out of his way and laughed. To think that fully-grown men with guns were afraid of a scientist. He scoffed quietly as he swiped his keycard and slipped into Sephiroth’s room.
Sephiroth was still twisting, but Hojo realized his dream probably wasn’t a nightmare. The boy’s penis was semi-erect and glistening slightly at the tip.
“Ah, pubescence,” Hojo said, and started to leave. He stopped at the door and turned back, inspecting the boy. He was perfect, everything Hojo could have hoped for in the project. Pale porcelain skin, fine features, taut muscles: he was going to be beautiful when he was older. Hell, he was beautiful right then.
He would make love to Science if he could, but she is a chaste mistress, and Jenova is a body in a tank. Sephiroth, though… Sephiroth was the beauty of science incarnate.
And he was right there, in arm’s reach.
Hojo reached for the boy, stroking the soft skin of his chest and marvelling that this affection was somehow less forbidden to him than a father’s concern. Somehow teasing the boy’s cock was scientific and detached in a way that a hug could never be. And it was as he thought this that Sephiroth cried out and came, leaving a small, sticky white mess on the professor’s hand and labcoat and on the bedsheets. Hojo reached for his handkerchief and busied himself with wiping his hands.
“Professor?” the boy asked, confused by an unfamiliar situation and the haze of sleep.
“Just… confirming a hypothesis, Sephiroth. Go back to sleep.”
“Yes, sir.”
Hojo stood and walked out into the dead laboratory without another word.
