I’d climbed into the helicopter with trepidation. The SOLDIER serving under Sephiroth had taken it upon himself to contact his superiors, worried about Sephiroth’s sanity. What else can you do when your commanding officer has locked himself in a library for days? When they called to ask my advice, my hands went cold. They’d sent him there? Sephiroth in Nibelheim? Didn’t they know better?
But of course they didn’t. I was the one who had ordered all such information destroyed or classified far above Sephiroth’s classification. Many parents have hurt their children by trying to protect them; I think I might hold the dubious honor of having the most far-reaching consequences of such an action.
I’d been on a helicopter as soon as they could get one, headed for the town. Maybe I could talk to him.
Junon was still visible on the glassy ocean horizon when we got the radio report that Nibelheim was on fire. I thought about crying, but there were no tears. Probably for the best. I had to keep up appearances, after all.
After the panicked report of the fire, there was nothing else from Nibelheim. After an hour of tense static, the SOLDIER flying with me turned it off. He’d already called back to Midgar for a clean-up crew to follow us and called ahead to Rockettown, telling them to send anyone they could spare to Nibelheim. There was little to do. Heidegger had insisted that one of his Turks come as well, and the young Wutaian man in his crisp navy suit looked even more awkward than the SOLDIER. My PHS rang twice during the flight, both from the president. He didn’t have anything important to say, but he was one of the few people remaining at Shinra who knew anything about Sephiroth’s parentage.
When we reached Nibelheim, we circled over the smouldering ruins and the untouched mansion. I hadn’t been back to Nibelheim in years, and seeing it was harder than I’d anticipated. There was no sign of Sephiroth, however, so I followed a gut instinct and told the pilot to head for the reactor. I ordered the SOLDIER and the Turk not to engage Sephiroth unless it was necessary. If Sephiroth was still alive but insane, they would almost certainly be no match for him.
I felt as though he were still alive, even as I cursed myself for the emotion and instinct I was allowing myself to wallow in. The only thing that would help now was calm, rational thought. Calm, rational –
As we circled the reactor, I heard an alarm screaming over the noise of the rotors. I’d never given a damn about the mutants in there. Only one alarm section was still functional – Jenova’s. The helicopter was still a foot off the ground when I dropped to the ground and ran for the reactor. I didn’t bother to say a word to the others. All my concerns for calm, rational thought were forgotten.
The old foreman’s office, where I kept my files, was a mess. Outside of that room, the only sign of recent activity was footprints in the dust. I followed them, trying to stop my hands from shaking as I climbed down ladders and across narrow catwalks. Someone had gone, unquestionably, to Jenova.
As I came to the pod storage room where I’d stored my specimens, I saw the first signs of trouble. A young man in a SOLDIER uniform lay on the floor in a position that indicated he’d fallen an unpleasant distance. Out of the way, a girl was bleeding heavily. A trail of blood dripped up the stairs. I climbed slowly, ignoring the moans of the injured. On the catwalk to Jenova’s room lay another boy, this one in the uniform of an army private. His blue uniform was purple and brown with blood. The railing next to him was broken and he was murmuring softly.
I caught “Sephiroth…” as I bent over him. Below me, I heard the SOLDIER shout “Zak!”, evidently recognizing his compatriot.
“What about Sephiroth? Where is he?” I leaned over the boy, resisting the urge to shake him.
“Over the side…” murmured the young man. I looked below. The lifestream bubbled and flowed, showing us no sign of having stolen my son, no remorse.
“And Jenova?” I prodded. “What about Jenova?”
“He said he was… answering his mother.” I stood slowly, looking at the door to Jenova’s room. It had slid automatically shut, but there were small puddles of purple liquid huddled against it.
“It burns… help…” said the boy behind me.
I waved a hand at him curtly, “There will be a medical unit shortly.” I stepped forward and the door slid open. The angel I had sculpted was torn away; when I moved inside I saw it thrown into a corner, broken and empty. The tank was shattered. Less than a foot of makou stood in the bottom, and Jenova’s flesh lay in it, twitching limply.
Her head was gone.
I stepped back numbly, and reached for the keypad to lock the door down. It was a tangle of wires and plastic. Sephiroth must not have liked it when the security system locked him in. I stepped forward again, far enough to let the door slide shut behind me. I slowly counted to ten to make sure the others hadn’t followed me. Then I screamed.
It took me nearly three minutes to compose myself. Unheard of. But once I started thinking again, I checked the body.
She was still alive. Jenova was still alive. Of course, it fit with my theories, but I hadn’t expected to actually have the chance to test the effects of severe trauma on the specimen. And what had the boy said? Sephiroth was answering her. She had called him. Why? Hadn’t I done everything she asked? Given her everything?
Where he and I are going, you cannot follow, came the answer, and then my mind was quiet. Entirely, wholely quiet. I couldn’t remember the last time I could hear myself think. She was gone. She had left me. And she had taken my son.
“You talked to him! You used him!” I heard the words being shouted, but barely recognized them as my own. There was no answer from the headless body.
“You said you’d make him a god,” I continued quietly as I turned from the broken chamber. The door slid open again, and I watched the Turk directing in the emergency response unit from Rockettown. I was aware that the body from the catwalk was gone, and watched without focus as the bodies were evacuated. They came back with ropes and nets, the Turk still directing directing them, and to my surprise they began trying to dregde the river of makou where Sephiroth had fallen. I wondered if any of them understood that it was truly bottomless, a vicious gash inflicted on the planet by her abusive husband, humanity.
“Sir?” I became aware that the young lady in the uniform was speaking to me. “The others here, sir. A local girl and two men from Sephiroth’s unit. What should I do with them?”
“Are they still alive?”
“Yes, but it looks questionable for both of our men.”
“Take them to the mansion on the medical helicopter. I’ll see to them.” She nodded and hurried off through the maze of the reactor.
I stepped out of the doorway, onto the bridge. Below, the makou pulsed. I would have almost sworn it was moving in time with my heartbeat, rising and sinking. It felt familiar, like an old dream. Perhaps it was calling me home.
Ifalna always talked about the Cetran belief that when you died, your spirit went back to the lifestream. The bodies of great Cetran leaders and heroes were released into the lifestream as well. For a long minute, I thought about jumping, letting the planet have her way with me. Jenova may have deserted me, but I thought I remembered the planet calling me as well, once upon a lifetime ago.
I leaned my weight against the thin bars. They creaked, but did not give. It was decided, then. I would walk back out of the reactor, and return to the mansion, and continue.
“If Jenova could not make him immortal, I will have to do it myself. Of course, it will be harder now…” As the sun was setting, I watched the dark-haired SOLDIER and the blonde private loaded into the helicopter. “Still, I have plenty of raw materials to work from.”
I rode on the second trip, with the badly injured girl, once I told them it was okay to move her. Jenova — her body was in a makeshift tank until a proper storage facility could be determined. Maybe something in the mansion, so I could keep her close this time. Was she actually alive? So many things to find out.
The Turk watched me during the short flight. He wanted to say something, I could tell. Not comfort. If I got that, it would come from Shinra or Pepper, the few left who knew Sephiroth’s parentage. Reassurance, maybe?
Damn. I never could read Turks.
The helicopter landed on the edge of the overgrown rose bed, crushing some of the blossoms. The plants had spread vigorously since I’d left. I thought of Lucrecia, and the last time I felt so alone, and I tamped the feelings down like gunpowder. No time for this.
The back door was open, hanging broken. The air in the mansion smelled just a little too much like a barbecue. Dust and ash coated every surface flat surface, broken only by combat-boot shaped footprints. There was no electricity, and the water in the pipes was sluggish and rust-colored.
The mansion was, however, in much better condition than the rest of Nibelheim.
I instructed the medical techs to leave the bodies in the beds upstairs. It was typical of Shinra to leave so much here to moulder, and normally it would have annoyed me, but at the moment it was a lifesaver — perhaps literally. I left them with instructions to stitch wounds and set up IVs, fairly simple procedures, and went downstairs to the lab.
At the bottom of the spiral stairs, I followed the footsteps to the lab, noting with relief that they showed no interest in the other door down here. That was one more problem that I didn’t need.
The lab itself was nearly untouched. One rack of bottles lay broken next to a volume of notes, probably the victim of Sephiroth’s frustration. Other than that, the only sign of existance was in the library. The desk and the floor were covered in books, bound copies of lab reports, and folders that had spilled their contents like blood.
And people say books don’t kill.
There were Jenova samples, as I’d expected. Experiments in Midgar told me they’d still be good. I had fresh makou upstairs, prepared when I hoped I would be seeing Sephiroth and worried I’d be medicating him. I hurried back upstairs.
The Rockettown medical team was hurrying between rooms. I was about to see to the first of the victims, the blond boy from Sephiroth’s unit, when one of the medics told me I was needed in the front room. The Turk was having an argument with someone about the victims.
Walking down the main stairs, I studied the interloper. He was not as tall as the Turk, but he was broad and thickly-muscled.
“I need to know about the survivors!” he was shouting, his voice accented. The Turk was trying to calm him, but it was of no use.
“Officially, there are no survivors,” I told him, interrupting the Shinra agent.
He looked at me and at the Turk, considering, and apparently decided I looked more helpful. “My name is Zangan. I’m looking for a girl, my student. I saw her leave town after the fire began. She said she was going after Sephiroth.”
I nodded. “About five foot four? Long black hair?” I described the girl we’d found in the reactor.
“Yes!”
“She’s near death. She needs proper medical care. I will have to keep her here.” I wasn’t going to let go of her until I know whether she’d be of any use.
“Then I will wait here,” he said. And wait he did, for a week, long enough for me to decide I needed a male to be my new Sephiroth, and long enough for the stitches to help the girl’s skin knit back together. She was still unconscious, but she would be safe to move. The man left grateful, far more grateful than he should have been. It was always prudent to nip conspiracy theories about Shinra in the bud. That was the day before Phineas announced his master plan, of course.
“We’ll rebuild the town,” the president told me over the phone. He made it sound like he was pitching the idea to me, but we both knew I’d called him when the workers showed up.
“And you don’t think anyone will notice?”
“Of course not. We’re trucking people out there from the slums. They’re thrilled at the idea of having homes, and we made it clear that if any of them breathes a word, it won’t be pretty.”
I sighed.
“See?” he told me, “Money really can fix everything.”
And he meant it, too. He was throwing millions of gil at the Science Department, certain it would somehow fix Sephiroth. It bought cleaners for the mansion, and new equipment, and a small, carefully-chosen cadre of techs out of Midgar. It bought custom-designed cages for the specimens, a new tank for Jenova. It didn’t buy my son, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part.
Officially, there were no survivors of Nibelheim. There was nothing to survive. I watched the peasants being bussed in, briefed, assigned homes. The whole farce disgusted me, but there was one advantage.
Sephiroth was never declared dead. He was missing. He disappeared. It was a mystery. People wrote books about it. Conspiracy theorists whispered about makou reactors and Wutaian spies over coffee. I stayed in the basement, more in the company of two former Shinra soldiers than of the technicians and assistants. The blond one spent most of his time shaking, whispering to his comrade when he thought I wasn’t looking. His wounds had healed quickly, showing excellent signs of the Jenova cells taking hold.
The dark haired one, Zakari, liked to make scenes. I found him amusing. His body rejected the treatments, not unusual for someone who’d already had the basic SOLDIER exposure. Very well. I had a control and a working sample. It would be enough. Sephiroth would be born again in this room.
