Vincent stumbled out of the elevator and headed to his office. He hated arguing with Lucrecia in the morning. It tended to set the tone for the whole day, to cloud over everything he worked on. He raised his coffee to his lips and tried not to think about it.
“So, Valentine, I hear your son’s a homo,” his second-in-command greeted him as he entered the office. Vincent spit a mouthful of coffee back into his cup.
“What?”
“Oh, not that I’m going to judge him or anything. It’s just a rumor going around. I’m sure no one would wonder if he takes after his totally-faithful, utterly-straight father.”
“Shut up, Dragoon, or I will shoot you.”
“You’ve been promising me that for thirty years, Valentine. I suppose it’s just one more thing you don’t follow through on.”
“Look, I told you, I can’t leave her, okay? Fuck.”
“Fucking always was your problem.”
“Get out!” Vincent shouted in frustration, and Veld shrugged and left, smirking.
After a minute, he reappeared in the doorway. “We still going out after work tonight?”
Vincent sighed. “Sure. Just don’t spread any stupid rumors.”
“Sure thing, chief,” and he was gone again.
The leader of the Turks frowned at his coffee. The coffee pot in the lounge was out of commission again, thanks to Reno’s little game of keepaway with the new girl’s handgun, and he didn’t feel like going back downstairs for another cup. With a sigh, he sipped it anyway.
He’d barely had time to put the argument with Veld out of his mind before his wife stepped in.
“Is Sephiroth back from his mission yet?” Lucrecia asked as she dropped into the chair opposite his desk.
“I don’t know. Nobody from SOLDIER ever tells me anything, you know that,” he snapped. She looked hurt and he apologized. “Sorry, I’m just on edge.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Sephiroth called me in the middle of the night the other day to ask if I was sure you were his father! Have you ever heard anything so ridiculous?” she scoffed. “Of course, you’d know this if you were home when he called. Or at all.”
“You know I’m busy,” he said, spreading his hands on the desk. “It can’t be helped, Lu.”
“You’re not seeing another woman, are you?” she asked suddenly.
“Oh, gods, no!” Vincent answered immediately. “No, no women. Except for you.”
“Good,” she smiled. “If Sephiroth comes by, tell him I’m looking for him?”
“Of course,” he said as she leaned over the desk and pecked him on the cheek.
“Oh, I managed to schedule myself an evening off this week, Vinny. Do you think you can get Thursday night free?”
“Assuming the President doesn’t need anyone blown up on short notice, I think that could be arranged,” he grinned at her. “Thursday it is. Should I dress up, or will this be a quiet evening at home?”
“At home, definitely. Quiet is up to you.” She smiled as she left. The instant she set foot back in her lab (and she’d gotten quite fond of calling it “her” lab in the few years since Gast had retired) someone needed her attention on a project. Before she knew it, most of the day had passed.
“Mother!” she heard Sephiroth call across the lab before she caught sight of him.
“Oh, there you are!” she answered, hurrying over to him. “I thought you would be back today, but I didn’t know when.”
“Sorry if I kept you waiting,” Sephiroth told her, and after a moment he added, “or if I upset you the other night.”
“It’s fine,” she lied, “You just caught me off guard.”
Sephiroth nodded. “Can I talk to you about something important?”
Lucrecia frowned. “If it’s the same subject as the phone call, no amount of talking will change…”
“No, not that at all,” Sephiroth cut her off. “It’s something about me.”
She raised an eyebrow. “What is it?”
“Um, I’d rather not have this discussion in the open lab.”
“Fine, go in my office,” she said, worried and curious. Lucrecia didn’t like the sorts of questions her son had been asking lately.
As it turned out, however, Sephiroth wasn’t there to ask her a question at all. “Mother, I’ve been trying to think how to tell you for a while now, but… well…”
Before he could finish the sentence, Lucrecia’s secretary knocked and stepped inside without waiting for a response. “President’s on line one. He wants you in his office ten minutes ago, Sephiroth.” Sephiroth looked at his mother and sighed.
“You go ahead,” Lucrecia said, rubbing his back. “I’ll be here when you have time.”
“Thank you,” Sephiroth told her, then walked to the elevator. He hated riding all the way up to the president’s office; the city of midgar splayed out below the gass elevator windows. It was as if Shinra wanted to remind all of his visitors, that yes, all this belonged to him. The ride from the lab, however, was a merciful few floors.
President Andrew Shinra was waiting, sitting behind his large desk and smiling down on Sephiroth like a benevolent god. “So what have you brought me, Lieutenant?”
“There wasn’t much to find, sir. There were no notes belonging to my mother. I brought these for you, though. I couldn’t make much sense of it, but maybe you can.” Sephiroth handed the pair of books he’d brought to the President.
The President flipped through them briefly. “Hmm. Definitely not your mother’s, I agree. I’ll have to give these to her and see what she can make of them.”
“Was that all, sir?” Sephiroth asked, stepping back into an at-ease position in front of the desk.
The blonde man nodded. “I’m glad to know your mother can be trusted… at least in this matter. Good work finding these. Dismissed.” Sephiroth hurried out. Andrew watched him disappear into the left elevator shaft only moments before the right opened and his mother stepped out. Gods, he loved it when the universe saw fit to make things work smoothly around him.
“Good afternoon, Professor Lucrecia,” he stood to greet her, as he’d been taught a gentleman should. He gestured for her to sit, but he remained standing.
“What did you need to see me about, sir?” she asked, looking bored.
“To be frank, your work has been… disappointing lately,” Andrew said seriously. “I haven’t heard a single amazing idea since Gast retired.”
“What? Sir, I know we haven’t done anything groundbreaking, but we’ve been refining everything and–”
“Yes, yes, refining. Lucrecia, underlings can refine. That’s what they’re for. Board members are the backs upon which the glory and budget of Shinra Incorporated rest; I can’t have you sitting around on your laurels.”
“I’m not sitting on anything, sir!” Lucrecia said, her voice getting progressively higher as she became more upset.
Andrew shook his head. “I expect great things from you. Soon. If I don’t see results, I may have to put someone else in charge. That red-haired young man, Pepper? He seems like quite the clever upstart, maybe he has some new ideas.”
“Andrew, that boy is half my age! You can’t put him in charge of the department!” she snapped.
“I can do whatever I like, Professor,” the president said, banging his fist on the desk for emphasis. “Gast wasn’t much older than that when he took the department reigns.”
Lucrecia glared at him. “You want results? I can get you results, sir.” She took the notebooks he’d held out and stormed out of the office. She fumed all the way down to her office in the lab and flung the notebooks on the desk. How dare he? What did the President want? Exciting new things to study didn’t just turn up out of the blue.
She looked at the notebooks. They were Hojo’s, she recognized. She wondered where Shinra had gotten them. Was he sending men out to Nibelheim to snoop now, or had they gotten mislaid when she originally moved back to Midgar? It was impossible to know, but the possibility bothered her.
Lucrecia picked up one of the books and flipped through it. It was the same useless bable Hojo had always filled his notebooks with. This one was on… wait. These were the notes for the Break Limits Project.
Well, if there was one thing that could be said for Hojo, he did have very original ideas. This was the only project of his that she’d never touched, and for good reason. His name was still whispered around the labs as a warning to students who got too caught up in their work or became tempted to go too far in the name of science. Yet Lucrecia knew that Hojo’s work had been very close to correct: the result of his project was a number of the intended improvements in healing and reaction time, as well as the improved fighting ability implied by the monstrous form.
Not to mention the lack of aging. It was this last, disturbing side effect that had finally led her to stop visiting Hojo. “Your hair is going grey so fast, Lu,” he had said to her, apparently unaware that he’d been down there for fifteen years, while he still looked… Well, she couldn’t say that he looked the same as he had when she and Vincent put him in there, but he could definitely still pass for twenty nine, if he kept his mouth and eyes shut.
It would be easy enough, Lucrecia decided as she put aside thoughts of her own mortality and her former lover’s apparent lack thereof, to repeat the materia reclaimation process and create a second prototype shot. This time she would temper it, start with a much weaker elemental spirit than the one Hojo had used.
She sat down at her desk and pulled out the materials catalog, flipping ahead to the list of recovered red materia. Most of the high-rated ones had been requisitioned to field work in Wutai, and a dozen or so were in process for Weapons Development, but there was still a good selection for her to pick from.
“Let’s see, what’s on the low end of the star scale?” she murmured to herself as she flipped to the single star-rated reds. There were the very safe looking ones, small cute animal-spirits like the Chocobo and woman-spirits like Starlet who only healed, but Lucrecia doubted that being able to transform into a half-dressed woman who healed with a kiss would impress the President outside of his bedroom. No, she needed something that was rated low because it was young, not because it was weak.
Her eyes fell on Fenrir, a large wolf-spirit. The materia had been discovered in Gongaga after an accident in the mako reactor there, and was assumed to have been formed at that time. The spirit was very imposing, but in trials had been taken down by a single SOLDIER, one Zachary Kane.
The name sounded familiar, but it took Lucrecia a moment to place it. He was some friend of Sephiroth’s. She made a note to call him in and interview him about the spirit, then began the paperwork to requisition the materia. When she’d finished, she called for Pepper over the intercom.
“Do you need something, ma’am?” He asked, pushing his shaggy red hair out of his eyes as he stepped into her office.
“Not quite, Pepper. And haven’t I told you not to call me ma’am when we’re alone?”
Pepper blushed. “Sorry, Lucrecia. What is it?”
“Well, you know I saw the President today, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Your secretary mentioned something about that when I came by to bring your tea, yes.”
“Pepper, the President…” she looked down and stood up, walking over to the younger man. “He thinks I should let you go.”
“Fire me?” he asked, swallowing hard. “What’s wrong? Did I do something, or–”
“Shh,” Lucrecia said, laying her hand over his lips. “I told him to give you another chance, and he agreed. Are you willing to work hard to keep your job?”
“Of course!” Pepper told her, trying his best not to worry.
She handed him the notebooks. “This is an old, old project. You’ve heard the stories about Professor Hojo?”
Pepper nodded, looking pale at the thought of them. His lab partner in university had loved telling the sorts of stories that made Pepper squirm or feel ill.
“These are some of his last notebooks. He was quite thoroughly insane, and they’re hard to read, but I think in here you can distill the plans for the last project he worked on.”
“Is that,” Pepper hesistated, “the one he killed himself with?”
Lucrecia nodded. “I think you’re smart enough to make it work, Pepper, to take what he did and figure out what went wrong. I told Andrew you could do it. He didn’t believe me.”
She took Pepper’s empty hand in her own small ones. “Can you do it, Pepper?”
“Yes,” he sounded hesitant, but quickly convinced himself to sound sure. “Yes, I can do it. I’ll prove I’m worthy of you, Prof– Lucrecia.” He smiled, letting himself believe her.
Lucrecia smiled, her eyes sparkling at him. “Oh, good, Pepper. You’ll make me proud of you.” She leaned into him and pressed her lips against his, feeling him stiffen in surprise and then relax into it.
He was gasping for air when she let him go. “What… what about your husband?”
“He’s so very busy, Pepper, and this lab is my whole life. Sometimes I get carried away in the passion of an experiment. I shouldn’t have made you uncomfortable.” Lucrecia turned her head away but didn’t let go of Pepper and he was quick to reassure her.
“No! No, it’s okay, I’m not judging you,” he said, holding her hand. “I was just… I didn’t want you to be in trouble.”
“Leave trouble to me, Pepper, and I’ll leave these notes to you,” she said. He nodded.
“And Pepper?” she held him back when he tried to step toward the door. “Do me a favor?”
“Anything,” he said.
“Don’t tell anyone,” Lucrecia ordered him.
“Of course.”
“Take a couple days off if it will help you concentrate,” she suggested, smiling. “I think we can hold things down here without you.”
“Thank you,” he said, “thank you for standing up for me. I appreciate it a lot.” Pepper took the notebooks then and left. He was thoughtful on the ride to the first floor of the building, and on the train home. He disembarked in sector eight and spotted Sephiroth as the lieutenant climbed from the next car.
“Sephiroth!” Pepper called, “What are you up to?”
Sephiroth sighed. He hated when people from the Science Department acted familiar with him. The fact that his mother dragged him after her everywhere didn’t mean he knew or liked the people she introduced him to.
He hurried along the road to Gast’s house, eager to get back to work figuring out what had happened in the basement all those years ago.
“Your mother called,” Gast greeted him. He was seated in an oversized armchair, nearly dwared by the sheer loudness of the pattern.
Sephiroth blinked. “How did she know I was coming here?”
“She didn’t. She was calling to ask my advice with the revival of the Break Limits project,” Gast said offhandedly.
“Oh, that’s good… Or wait , is that not good?” Sephiroth asked as he sat down.
“Reviving that project strikes me as a very bad idea,” Gast said with a shrug. “But I’m not in a position to stop your mother, only to tell her what I think.”
“Shinra must have given her the notebooks,” Gast sighed. “Well, we tried.”
“‘We tried’? That’s it?” Sephiroth thought Gast was giving up far too quickly.
Gast frowned at him. “As you’ll recall, the reason you came to me had nothing to do with the project itself.”
Sephiroth frowned, but he couldn’t argue. Instead, he changed the subject.
“Where’s Zack? Did he go back to the barracks?”
“Aeris bullied him into going for ice cream,” Gast said with a grin. “She’s just getting interested in boys and he seemed flattered by the attention, so I thought–” Sephiroth stood up suddenly enough that his chair fell backwards.
“Are you alright?” Gast asked, alarmed.
“Fine. Thank you. I’ll be back,” Sephiroth called over his shoulder as he ran back out of the house and toward the small commercial square at the center of sector eight. There was only one cafe there and Sephiroth could see Zack and Aeris sitting at a table outside of it.
He thought about saying something, but he didn’t know what to say, so he found himself watching them… from behind the bushes next to the cafe. It certainly wasn’t eavesdropping, he told himself.
He just happened to be able to hear everything they said.
“…sounds exciting,” Aeris was saying. “I’d like to see Wutai one day, but not right now. Too many spirits, you know?”
“Spirits?” Zack asked.
“You know, like dead people whose souls can’t find their way back to the planet, elementals whose natural homes have been destroyed, stuff like that. Midgar’s pretty dead, so I don’t see much around here.”
“You see spirits?” Zack sounded incredulous. Good boy, Sephiroth thought at him. Stay rational.
“Sometimes. My mom was way better at it than I am, but she’s dead, so I have to do it now.”
“What do you have to do?” he asked. Sephiroth thought he sounded far more interested than simple politeness warranted. It slowly occurred to him that he might be jealous. Jealous of a teenage girl… his head really was messed up this week.
That did it. He was tired of pussying around, of playing sides, and of standing in those stupid bushes. They were prickly. He pushed them aside and stepped onto the cafe’s patio.
“Oh, hey, Sephiroth,” Zack waved to him. “You never told me you knew such an interesting girl!”
“I guess I didn’t realize she was so fascinating,” Sephiroth shrugged and pulled a chair over to join them. Under the table, Aeris kicked his shin.
“Aeris, you should run on home. We’ll be back later,” Zack told her. She pouted, but ran off.
“Zack, I think we need to talk,” Sephiroth said, but Zack held up a hand.
“I agree, Seph.”
“You do?”
“I don’t think we’re going to work out.”
“That’s — wait, what?” This wasn’t what Sephiroth had been expecting.
Zack leaned back in his chair. “I dunno, man. It just bothers me that you won’t talk about me, you know? Makes me feel like I’m your dirty little secret, not your boyfriend.”
“I’m sorry, Zack, but we talked about this. You said I could take my time.”
“Yeah, I thought you needed a couple months. It’s been a year and a half.”
“It’s not easy for me.”
“Congrats, Seph, welcome to the human race. Relationships aren’t easy.”
Sephiroth glared at him. “And it’s just coincidence that we’re having this conversation after you get done having a cute little date?”
Zack smiled nervously. “She just got me thinking, was all. Yeah, she’s cute, and I think I’ll see her again.”
“So that’s it, then? No second chances, no apologies?” Sephiroth asked, standing up.
“Fuck, Seph, you’re my friend and my superior officer, and I love you, but you have to admit, this just isn’t working.”
“I thought it was working,” he said, in a voice that sounded uncomfortably like a pout to his own ears.
“Which just shows how much it wasn’t.”
“That doesn’t even make sense, Zack.”
“Sure it does,” the dark haired SOLDIER stood. “Now I’m going to go see Aeris. Whether you come back to the house or not is up to you.” He walked away. Sephiroth watched him go until he turned the corner, then put his head down on the cold metal cafe table and wondered if he could wake up and have his life go back to making sense.
When he opened his eyes again, he was still alone.
He stood and started in the direction of the train station.
