Zack woke with sunlight in his eyes. He rolled over in bed looking for Sephiroth, but was disconcerted to find himself alone.
“Sephiroth?” he called. On the far side of their small room in the Nihelheim inn, Sephiroth was hunched over the small desk, reading.
“You said you were going to sleep, Sephiroth. You promised you would.”
“I tried,” the lieutenant answered. “I really did, Zack, but I just couldn’t stop thinking. You know how I get.”
Zack sighed as he pushed aside the blanket and stood up. “Yeah, Seph, I do know you. I know you too well. That’s part of the problem.”
“Problem?” Sephiroth asked.
“I knew you wouldn’t do anything as sensible as actually sleep. Why don’t you just ask your mom?” Zack asked as he pulled his uniform on, shivering a little in the morning chill. “You know, ‘Hey, Mom, the crazy guy in the basement was asking me all these weird questions. What’s up with that?’”
“Because I wasn’t supposed to go down there,” Sephiroth answered, his voice strained. “Mother drilled that into my head years ago, just like I’m not supposed to touch anything in the lab or call my father at work. I shouldn’t have even come to Nibelheim without telling her.”
“Seph, you’re twenty five years old and yet you sound like a fresh meat recruit whose mommy is threatening to come take him home because he forgot to call every day and wear fresh underwear. Are you a SOLDIER or a mama’s boy?” Zack crossed his arms. He didn’t often push Sephiroth.
“… Do I have to pick?” There was a minute of awkward silence before Sephiroth began to laugh, and Zack soon joined him. Laughter was good, the dark-haired man thought, even if Sephiroth’s laughter did sound a bit more forced than usual.
“Seriously, thought, you have to do something.”
“I am doing something, Zack. I’m trying to make sense of the guy’s notes, figure out what kind of person he was– is.” Sephiroth picked up the notebook he’d been writing in and handed it to Zack.
“You worked all night on this?” Zack asked.
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t look like you made much headway.”
Sephiroth sighed. “I didn’t. But when we get back to Midgar, I’m going to go see Professor Gast.”
“What about President Shinra?”
“Oh, we’ll give him something. I just want to see Gast first and make sure he gets the least useful notes.”
Zack began emptying the desk, putting all the notes back into the cardboard box. “I’ll go check on the recruits. You should get ready to go.” The shorter man laid his head on Sephiroth’s for a moment, then turned and strode into the hallway.
Sephiroth showered quickly and dressed in more casual clothes for the journey home instead of his uniform. Since this mission was technically off the books, he figured it wouldn’t hurt to take advantage of that. As he was throwing his other clothes into his duffel, he pulled the brass key from his pants pocket and stared at it.
“I should probably put it back in the mansion,” he said to himself, knowing full well he wouldn’t. He didn’t want it out of his reach until he had this sorted out. Instead he went downstairs with the box and the duffel and asked the innkeeper if he had some string or cord. The man handed him a length of leather and Sephiroth threaded it through the end of the key, tying it around his neck and slipping it under the collar of his shirt.
“Ready to go, sir?” Cloud asked behind him, almost causing Sephiroth to jump.
“Yes. Do you have the rest of the boxes, Cloud?”
“Xavier and I took them out to the truck already. Should I get this one?”
“Go ahead.” Cloud grunted as he lifted the box, bowing his legs under the weight as he shuffled outside. Sephiroth settled the bill and thanked the innkeeper, then stepped out into the morning sunlight.
He threw his duffel into the back of the truck and climbed inside where his men were waiting. “Everything ready?”
“Yes, sir,” Xavier nodded. Zack smiled, glad to be getting away from the mansion and the too-quiet town. Nibelheim was even smaller than the place he’d grown up in and run away from years ago.
“If you’re with me, men, we’ll be making a slight detour when we get back to Midgar,” Sephiroth began as the truck pulled away from the entrance to town and began the long drive back to the coast.
“A detour?” Xavier asked. Cloud was wondering the same thing, but he was already motion sick and using all his will to concentrate on what was being said.
“Just a brief one. I want to see Professor Gast about these books before I give them to Shinra.”
Xavier shrugged and smiled. “I’m just following orders, sir.”
“Cloud? You okay with that?” Zack asked, putting his hand on the sick young man’s shoulder. Cloud nodded.
“It’ll be good to see Gast. He was still overseeing the SOLDIER program when I enlisted,” Zack said, sitting on the floor and leaning back against his duffel. “No offense, Seph, but I liked him better than your mom.”
“Your opinion’s your own, Zack. I don’t care who you prefer getting your showers from,” Sephiroth frowned. “You have been a bit touchy about the subject of my mother lately, though.”
“I just wish you’d tell her.”
“Tell her?”
“You know. About us.”
Sephiroth dropped his voice and whispered angrilly at Zack. “I thought we weren’t discussing that in public.”
“This is public now?” Zack asked, gesturing at Cloud, who was leaning out the back of the truck, and Xavier, who was deeply immersed in reading a comic book. “You just told these kids that you’re lying to the president and pretty much asked them to assist you in insubordination, and they said sure, because the men always say sure. They fucking worship you. They’re not going to care.”
“You don’t know that. You’ve seen how rumors get.”
“Rumors are always about people nobody likes. Hell, I bet if you came out, half the army would decide they were fags so they could be like you.”
“For Bahamut’s sake, Zack, don’t call me that!”
“What, fag?”
“Yes,” Sephiroth hissed.
“Why not?” Zack asked with a hint of laughter in his voice, which only pissed Sephiroth off more.
“Because it’s an insult. Would you go around calling me a Wute?”
Zack shrugged. “I thought you weren’t a Wute.”
Sephiroth choked a little when he realized what he’d said. He didn’t really believe the crazy ghost in the basement of the old mansion, did he?
No, no, of course not. And he certainly hadn’t believed him enough to wake his mother up in the middle of the night to ask her stupid questions.
Sephiroth shook his head. “I don’t want to have this argument with you right now. I’m going to take a nap.”
“You do that. A nice, straight nap.”
“Stop it.” Sephiroth resolved to ignore anything else Zack said short of “holy shit, we’re under attack” and laid along one of the truck’s benches, closing his eyes and falling asleep much more easily than he had expected.
When they arrived in Midgar the next day, Sephiroth made sure that the men had unloaded the boxes before the driver from Shinra arrived.
“Need a ride?” the MP asked.
Sephiroth shook his head. “No need, we didn’t find much. I’ll go see the President myself later. You can give the boys a ride back to headquarters, though.” Cloud and Xavier looked surprised, but Sephiroth shooed them into the transport truck.
“So how are we getting all this stuff to Gast’s place without our bagboys?”
“We’re going to carry it,” Sephiroth announced.
“Oh, wonderful.”
Sephiroth stacked two boxes of books in Zack’s arms and then lifted both of their duffles over his shoulders and took the third box himself.
“He’s not far from here, right, Sephiroth? Please?” Zack asked from behind the boxes.
“No, not far. Only about half an hour’s walk.” Zack groaned and Sephiroth smiled.
When they arrived at Gast’s small house in Sector Eight, a teenaged girl in the garden spotted them coming and ran out to meet them. “Sephiroth! Hey! Dad said you were coming by.”
“Hi, Aeris,” Sephiroth smiled. “He’s waiting for us inside, then?”
She nodded as she walked backwards in front of them. “He told me I’m not supposed to bother you or get in your way. Who’s your friend?”
“This is Zachary. He’s a first class SOLDIER.”
“Nice to meet you, Zachary.”
“Call me Zack, please. Everybody does,” he told her, and Sephiroth could have sworn that he was blushing. Sephiroth hurried inside as much as his burden would allow and Zack followed with Aeris orbiting him.
“Ah, Sephiroth! How have you been? How’s your mother?” Gast greeted him, leaving his tea on the table to hug him. Sephiroth set the box on the table and dropped the bags on the floor before allowing the man to put his arms around him.
“My mother is fine, as usual,” Sephiroth said with a smile. Something about the Faremiss home always put him at ease. He assumed it was just the warm personality of the family themselves, which hadn’t changed even after Ifalna’s unfortunate death last year.
“What have you brought me? You sounded so worried on the phone,” the older scientist asked, opening the first box as Zack set two more down beside it.
“We found these in a secret lab in the basement of the Nibelheim mansion,” Sephiroth said as Gast pulled a few volumes out and flipped through them. “They’re not my mother’s handwriting.”
Gast nodded. “These must have been Hojo’s notebooks. I recognize his style, using Wutai as a shortcut when he thought writing an entire word would take too long.”
“‘Too long?’” Zack asked.
“The man was brilliant but, ah… not all there,” Gast said, shaking his head sadly. “He used to complain that his thoughts went faster than he could write, that he lost some of his best ideas because by the time he’d written the first half of a sentence, he’d forgotten the second half and moved onto a different problem. Such a shame that he killed himself, but I wasn’t terribly surprised.”
Sephiroth looked at the floor. “That’s, ah, part of what had me so upset, Gast. In the basement with the notebooks we also found… I think it was Hojo’s ghost.”
“Ghost? Pah, there’s no such thing as ghosts, Sephiroth. Souls return to the Planet when they die, what would remain to haunt something?” Gast answered without looking up from the notebook.
“Well, we saw something in the basement. Was your Hojo a Wutaian guy, about so tall,” Zack gestured with his hand a space slightly above Sephiroth’s head, “skinny as all heck, with long black hair and red eyes?”
“He had brown eyes, actually, very dark– wait, you both saw him?” Gast asked in surprise.
“Not just saw but nearly got eaten by. That was one scary motherfucker,” Zack said.
“Please watch your language in front of my daughter,” Gast admonished automatically, but Aeris was smiling.
“I hear language like that all the time, Daddy,” she told him.
Gast shook his head as what Sephiroth and Zack had told him sank in. “You mean the Break Limits Project succeeded?”
“Is that the experiment he tried on himself?” Sephiroth asked.
“Break Limits? Yes. It was theoretically quite brilliant, I was disappointed it didn’t work out. Last year your mother actually picked up some of the threads he dropped in that line of research. He was attempting to apply specialized, colored materia to the body in the same way we’d already succeeded in doing with normal mako for the SOLDIER program. When he died, we assumed that regressed materia was simply too toxic for the body.”
“Except that he didn’t die,” Sephiroth said slowly. “He’s just been down there for… since I was born. That’s a long time.”
“Why would your mom lie about that?” Zack asked quietly.
“Maybe she didn’t realize he was alive?” Gast offered.
Sephiroth shook his head. “He said she visited him. Hell, I remember her taking me out there, and how long she spent in that secret passage when we were there. She must have known.”
“Maybe she decided he was too dangerous to be let out?” Zack said.
Gast frowned. “That shouldn’t have been her decision to make. You don’t lock someone up like that without at least getting a second consultation.”
“He was really crazy,” Zack said. “You don’t need a second opinion to see that.”
“Twenty five years in a stone room eating rats would drive anyone crazy, Zack,” Sephiroth shook his head. “He might not have been as bad when he went in as he is now.”
Zack shrugged. “Well, it’s a moot point now.”
“But you said he spoke to you? What else did he tell you?” Gast asked.
“He mostly rambled. It was hard to follow. He kept asking me if my mother was sure about me. He laughed a lot,” Sephiroth frowned, trying to recall the conversation in his head. Something else was bothering him. “Professor, what was Break Limits supposed to do to a person?”
“Hojo was using regressed summoning materia — red materia forced back into a liquid state — to introduce the elemental intelligences from the materia into a human host, hoping to create a bond between the two.”
“Why would somebody want to do that?” Aeris spoke up. “The spirits go into the materia willingly so they can help anybody that needs them. If you put them in a body they’d be all… limited.”
“I’d just met your mother then, Aeris. We didn’t know a lot of the things that we know now.”
“So why was he doing that?” she asked.
“He theorized that it would give a human the ability to use the power of the summon whenever he wanted. To do magic without materia.”
“I didn’t see him use any magic,” Zack said.
“He didn’t seem any older than me, but he’s definitely not human anymore,” Sephiroth continued. “Zack mentioned the red eyes, but his hands were formed like claws, the left one in particular. His skin was white, almost translucent. And…” He hesitated.
“What is it?” Gast asked.
“I shot him before we fled. Twice, point blank, with my rifle. Once in the chest and once in the face.”
“So he’s dead,” Gast said sadly.
Sephiroth shook his head. “He was still shouting and roaring when we ran out. Nobody should still be breathing after a rifle shot between the eyes, let alone talking. And the way he was screaming? Didn’t sound human.”
“Are you sure?”
“Gast, I spent enough time in Wutai to know all the noises a man makes as he dies. That wasn’t one of them.”
Gast looked at Zack, who simply nodded, and he turned away. “Fair enough.”
“Now what, though? I need to take President Shinra something from the mansion so he’ll back off from my mother,” Sephiroth said.
Gast frowned and pulled another book out of the stack. “He won’t be able to make heads or tails of any of these.”
“I don’t care if he can read them. I just need to give him something.”
“Then take something. It will take me weeks to make sense of these, there’s no way I can tell you what’s valuable and what isn’t.”
“None of its valuable, Daddy. It’s all tainted,” Aeris said, wrinkling her nose.
“That’s just mildew, Aeris.”
“No, it’s not. I like mildew. He was doing wrong things, Daddy, like Mama had to tell you not to do.”
Gast shook his head. “Whatever he was working on is already done. Maybe, if we study it, we can learn how to fix what he did to himself.”
“You’re not listening!” Aeris shouted and ran outside.
Sephiroth started to go after her, but Gast stopped him. “I need to talk to you more about this.”
“Can I go after her?” Zack asked. Gast considered this for a moment and looked at Sephiroth.
“He’s good with people,” Sephiroth said. Gast nodded and Zack disappeared outside.
Sephiroth looked at Gast. “None of this makes any sense. It’s like a ghost story.”
“Hardly,” Gast shook his head. “It only appears nonsensical because we don’t have all the information yet. Now tell me again everything you remember him saying to you…”
