The mansion was the same when he arrived back in Nibelheim. He’d hitched a ride with a mail carrier to get into town, and he figured he’d hitch a ride back to Costa as well. Sephiroth didn’t even bother taking a room at the Inn this time, just left his bag on the floor by the door. He didn’t think he’d be here long. “Are you awake?” Sephiroth called through the heavy door. He didn’t want to interrupt the man’s sleep… assuming he did sleep, and assuming it could be interrupted, both of which he was assuming based on the fact that he seemed to have done both before. There was no answer.
He considered going away and coming back, but curiousity got the better of him and he slipped the key into the lock. He was breaking one of the first rules his father had taught him: never make decisions while angry. He was angry enough not to care.
“I’m sure I’ll regret this in the morning,” he murmured as the key turned in the lock. He slipped the cord around his wrist, hesitating for one nervous minute, then drew his rifle and pushed the door open.
“Professor?” he asked. There was only silence for several minutes. “Professor Hojo?” He advanced into the room. The lid was laying to the side of the coffin and he could see inside it a body. The hair almost entirely covered the body, but he kept the rifle trained on it as he advanced.
“Hmm? What is it, Gast?” came the mumbled voice from the coffin, sounding for all the world like anyone waking up in the morning.
“No, Professor, I’m not Gast,” Sephiroth told him, letting the rifle drop but keeping his distance. “He knows you’re down here now, though.” There was a gasping noise and Hojo shot up, looking around in confusion and making a strangled noise.
“Oh, god,” Sephiroth thought he heard. Hojo whimpered and dropped his head into his hands. Sephiroth shook my head. No. That couldn’t be right, this guy was crazy. He must have misheard him.
“You said you had more to tell me,” Sephiroth said, sitting on another of the coffins. “So I came back.”
Hojo stared at him for a long time. “You came back?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Sephiroth asked.
In an instant, the former scientist’s face changed. All hint of the confusion Sephiroth had seen there was gone. His eyes were narrow and he smiled disarmingly. He tossed his head back, obviously trying to get his hair out of his face, but it was a futile gesture.
“The price of knowledge is high, very high.” Hojo warned, pushing himself up and resting his weight on the edge of his coffin.
“Yes. I can tell,” Sephiroth said, gesturing at the stone walls.
Hojo snerked. “This is the price of lust.”
“What?”
“But really, tell me true, what do you want to know? What question eats away at you at night, keeps you awake, echoes in the statements of everyone around you? What gap of knowledge bothers you enough that you would come here and see me?” Hojo leaned forward toward Sephiroth, who instinctively leaned back and brought the rifle up again.
“So fast, so fast. You grew up fast too, didn’t you, my boy? Your young men called you lieutenant last time, didn’t they? You’re a soldier.”
“I’m a SOLDIER, yes. Commissioned officer.”
“Not a Turk?” he asked, almost giggling.
Sephiroth shrugged. “I’m not cut out for that sort of thing.”
“What sort of cutting do you do, then?”
“I thought I came down here to ask you questions,” Sephiroth snapped.
“Did you? Oh, that’s right, you did. Did I give you the high price of knowledge speech?” he asked, leaning back.
“Er, yes. And I was thinking that doing this to yourself qualified as a very high price for knowledge.” Sephiroth was legging the gun sag again. While Hojo was decidedly creepy, he had a hard time thinking of him as a threat when he was talking and rambling like this.
“To myself? Oh, my boy, my dear boy, is that what they told you? Is that what that harlot and her paramour told everyone?”
“Don’t call my mother names like that,” Sephiroth glared.
“Not even true ones? She’s the one who did this to me, the one who shot me up and shut me up, kept me like a clever pet. Clever pet, oh yes, she was always such a clever pet, playing Vincent and I off each other. Little wordplays, double meanings, entendre and innuendo. But you poke a dog too many times…” Hojo’s voice trailed off and he looked at the floor. Sephiroth waited for him to continue, but he seemed to have lost his train of thought.
“You get bitten?” Sephiroth supplied.
“You get strapped to a table and injected with untested materials,” Hojo corrected. “But that’s all behind us now, and she never comes to see me anymore.”
“Why?”
“I think she grew scared of the past,” Hojo said with that pointed smile. “The years have been kind, but age always shows true. Unless you’re me, of course, but I’m… you called me a ghost last time, didn’t you? Or one of yours? Might as well all be the same, you soldiers, you SOLDIERs, a little colony of ants following the orders of queen bee Shinra.”
“You’re mixing metaphors,” Sephiroth pointed out.
“What?”
“You called us ants, but then you called Shinra a ‘queen bee’. Mixing metaphors.”
“Don’t correct me!” Hojo frowned. “A little mixing of metaphors is good for the soul. Toss lightly, add oil and vinegar.”
“Look, I just want you to explain what you meant when you told me to ask my mother about my father.”
“Are you really so dense you came all the way back here for that? You must not be mine after all.”
“I was afraid that was what you meant.”
“You were afraid, and yet you had to know anyway. Maybe you’d make a good scientist after all.”
Sephiroth shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Vincent’s the man who raised me, and he was a good father.”
“Was he, now? Never lost his temper? Maybe fatherhood tempered him.” Hojo laughed. “But if it doesn’t matter, I’ll ask you again. Why are you here?”
“I had to know.”
“Do you always have to know things that don’t matter? I should hope no son of mine was the sort to go trifling about with movie star magazines.”
“Right,” Sephiroth looked uncomfortable. “I think I should be going now. I’ll see myself out and lock up.”
“No! You are not just going to lock me up and put me away like you’re done playng with me! I tolerate it from Lucrecia because I loved her and because she always carries a lot of tranquilizer on her person, but I am a human being and I will not be treated like a toy!”
“You’re a monster!” Sephiroth yelled, jumping to his feet.
“You’re starting to sound like your mother. She always did like to demonize me. Got a bit carried away, obviously, but oh yes, she liked to remind me of my faults. Tell me, soldier boy, did you earn your commissions and your stars by looking pretty?”
“No,” Sephiroth glared. “I earned them for leadership and heroism.”
“Heroism? Bah, illusions and pretty lies. You’re bloodier than I am, boy! I can smell it on you.”
“I’m surprised you can smell anything, considering the stench down here,” Sephiroth said quietly, but Hojo must have heard it, because he glared.
“Blood stans the skin, stains the soul. It won’t come out. Even bleach won’t get blood out. There’s no penance, not really, no matter what the churches tell you.”
He continued before Sephiroth could get a word in. “Do they still tell you that in church these days? It was sort of dying out back when I used to argue with the religious.”
“I wouldn’t know. I don’t go to church.” Sephiroth was backing slowly toward the door, hoping to be outside before the former scientist noticed what he was doing.
“Good. It’s a disgusting habit.”
“I really can’t care too much what you think.”
“I expect my son to show me some respect.”
“You’re not my father! You’re insane! I’m leaving,” Sephiroth insisted. He was almost at the door, but he was still out of reach. Hojo dove at him, roaring monstrously, and knocked him against the wall. Sephiroth’s head banged hard against the stone wall. The rifle and the key fell from his hands and Hojo grabbed both of them and retreated to the far corner before Sephiroth could clear his head.
“Go.” Hojo spoke clearly.
Sephiroth shook his head, trying to think, but he was still seeing double.
“Go!” Hojo said again, this time aiming the rifle at Sephiroth. A better man, Sephiroth knew, would find some way to disarm him, but Sephiroth considered himself a man who knew his limits all too well.
He fled, hating himself for it at every step. When he reached the top of the staircase and the secret panel slid shut behind him, he waited. There were no footsteps on the stairs. That surprised him. Why wasn’t the man following?
Sephiroth frowned. Whether he was coming at this moment or not, the former scientist would try to leave sooner or later. He had to do something.
Looking around the bedroom, Sephiroth settled on a plan. He pushed all the furniture against the door, hoping to jam it so it would not open. Even when he was finished, it didn’t look terribly impressive, but it would have to do.
Again, Sephiroth ran.
His father (Vincent, his thoughts appended as if he might be unsure) was going to kill him for losing the rifle. It used to be his and he had made a big deal of passing it on to Sephiroth once upon a time. Back when he spent time with his family as well as his Turks.
His mother was going to kill him for losing the key… once he told her he’d taken it in the first place. He only hoped he would live long enough to demand the satisfactory answers from her that he hadn’t gotten from Hojo. He took a moment to reflect on how pathetic it must sound, that he went first to the crazy man in the basement for answers, and then to his mother as a last resort.
Sephiroth didn’t stop running as he thought all this. Much to his relief, he met with a supply truck from Rocket Town as he followed the road out of town and was able to ride all the way to Costa that afternoon. He boarded the next ship to the eastern continent as soon as he arrived in the resort town, hoping his mother would know how to fix this.
His mother, meanwhile, was hard at work getting Pepper to recreate Hojo’s work on the Break Limits Project. She had to have another department liquify the materia codenamed Fenrir properly; the science department didn’t have the equipment for specialty materia operations.
Soon, Pepper was done and the shots were ready, and all Lucrecia had left to do was find out what she was dealing with. She made an appointment with the young man who’d fought the beast.
“Zachary, wasn’t it? You’re in Sephiroth’s unit,” she said with a smile as she greeted him outside the elevator.
He smiled back, a wide, relaxed grin. “Yes, ma’am, that’s me.”
“Oh, heavens, don’t call me ma’am, call me Lucrecia,” she told him.
“If you insist, Lucy,” he laughed. She hated the nickname, but she continued to smile and leaned on the desk in front of him.
“It says here you fought the summon codenamed ‘Fenrir’ when he emerged near Gongaga,” Lucrecia said, looking up from the report. “What were you doing way out there?”
“That’s my hometown, ma’am,” he answered, then caught himself. “Lucrecia. I was on leave.”
She nodded. “And what was the fight like?”
“It was pretty short, but it was real vicious. He got a couple of nasty bites in on me before I put him down. Wanna see my scars?”
“No, that’s…” Lucrecia paused and looked the young man up and down. Healthy, strong, and since he was in SOLDIER, his system was already prepped for further mako exposure. She was going to have to experiment on someone, after all, and she’d gotten permission for a human specimen.
Lucrecia thought about Sephiroth coming in alongside him, arguing with him. She didn’t know what they had been arguing about; Sephiroth had refused to tell her. But she was a mother. She could tell when Sephiroth was hurt, and he had been hurt badly.
Oh, yes. This boy would not hurt her son again.
“Yes, Zachary, I’d like very much to examine your scars. Would you step into the next room with me, where I can give you a proper examination?” She smiled at him, leaned forward, put her body through all the mechanical motions of putting a man off his guard.
Zack seemed oblivious, which frustrated her, but he was also easy-going enough to follow her suggestions anyway, so she couldn’t be too mad. He didn’t argue about stripping naked (he even seemed shameless, which she hoped would be an improvement over Hojo’s whining) and didn’t think twice about laying back on the exam table.
“Oh, hey, a needle, what’s that for?” he asked as she stuck him, not complaining at all. Before she answered, he had passed out. She hoped that doing the procedure with an already-tranquilized specimen would cause a less violent reaction.
She strapped Zack down and called for Pepper.
“Yes, ma– er, Lucrecia?” Pepper asked, looking to see if the room was empty.
“We’re ready to run the first stage of the project. Get the recorder ready, hun,” she smiled sweetly and Pepper blushed before running off. He returned a few minutes later, rolling in a cart with a tape recorder and a compliment of prepared needles, just as Lucrecia finished strapping the unconscious young man to the table.
“He volunteered?” Pepper asked.
“Something like that,” Lucrecia smiled. “We’ll just give him half the expected prep dose of mako, since he’s a SOLDIER and has so much in his system already.” Pepper nodded in agreement and adjusted the needles.
“Turn on the recorder and let’s get started,” she ordered.
As they began their work, Sephiroth’s train was leaving Junon bound for Midgar. In his mind, he kept going over the fight in the basement, everything he’d done wrong, everything his father had berated him for a hundred times. Stupid. Stupid. And now that ghoul, that broken man, had the key. He would have to tell his mother. There was no way around it, no other option. Eventually it would come to her attention, and there was no telling how long his makeshift barricade would hold.
When he disembarked, Sephiroth ran to the Shinra building and into the elevator. He dashed into the lab as soon as the elevator door slid open, looking for his mother. A red-haired young man smiled and pointed him in the direction of one of the rear labs.
“This is an emergency, Mother, I just came from Nibelheim and –” Sephiroth ran into the room and stopped dead. Lucrecia was there, looking up from her notes to see what he wanted, but it was what was behind her that froze his blood. He hadn’t seen the full-scale mako tanks in use since he was a child, but this one was, the liquid inside bubbling but clear enough for him to make out the person inside.
“Mother! What in the name of Alexander are you doing to Zack?” Sephiroth demanded, unable to tear his eyes away from Zack’s prone form in the mako tank.
“He attacked me,” she told him, careful to keep her voice distraught. “I reacted without thinking, shooting like your father taught me.” If there was extra emphasis on the phrase “your father,” Sephiroth was too upset to notice it.
“You can’t just put my boyfriend in a tank!” he shouted.
Lucrecia stared at him.
“I said that out loud, didn’t I?” Sephiroth asked quietly.
She nodded.
“Can we… discuss that part later?”
Lucrecia looked uncomfortable as she nodded again. “We’ll stay with him attacking me for the time being.”
“Zack attacking you makes no sense, Mother, you must have misunderstood. Zack is the most laid-back, down-to-earth SOLDIER I’ve ever worked with.”
Lucrecia frowned. “It’s not like you to talk back to me, Sephiroth. Go ahead and look in the next room. That’s where it happened. I haven’t had a chance to clean up in there yet.”
Sephiroth looked inside and, sure enough, the room was a mess. Something seemed out of place, however: he noticed that the straps on the overturned table were broken. It occured to him to wonder why anything would be strapped to a table that could be flipped so easily.
The answer was obvious when he looked closer. The table had once been bolted to the floor. There were needles on the floor as well, recently used.
“What did you give him, Mother?” Sephiroth asked, his voice hard and so low that Lucrecia could barely hear him.
“Just a standard–”
“I’m not stupid, Mother,” he spun on her, glaring down with a voice full of disdain and dark hair falling in his eyes, and Lucrecia was suddenly reminded of Hojo’s rages.
And of the phone call Sephiroth had made to her in the middle of the night.
“Get out! Just get out!” she screamed at him.
“Not without Zack!”
“I have the authority to keep him here if I want! You get out of here or so help me I will call your father and I will have you escorted out of here by Turks, do you hear me?” When he ignored her and began studying the control panel for the tank, Lucrecia hit the security button. Instantly, the overhead lights dimmed and red emergency lights shrouded the lab in shadows.
Veld’s voice spoke from the intercom. “Problem, Mrs. Valentine?”
“My son is attempting to damage Shinra property. I need him removed from the premesis by security,” she ordered.
“Ma’am, I don’t know what your husband does when he’s here, but Turks are security, not babysitting.”
“This is a security matter! He’s going to ruin an experiment in progress and my safety has been threatened! Now get your men down here at once or I’ll make sure you don’t have any men to order around tomorrow,” Lucrecia yelled, then snapped the intercom off.
“I can’t see any of the buttons in this half-light,” Sephiroth complained.
“That’s good,” Lucrecia assured him. “Sephiroth, you don’t know what you’re doing. You could hurt him further if you corrupt his environment.”
“What the hell did you do to him?” the SOLDIER demanded again.
“I told you, he attacked me and I shot him.”
“I don’t believe you,” Sephiroth said quietly.
“I know,” she answered.
“Get him out.”
“No.”
Just then the stairwell doors burst open and three young adults in navy suits burst in, weapons drawn.
“I’d better not see any a’ your asses moving, yo!” shouted the leader at the frightened lab technicians. He looked for his target. “Seph, you gonna come quiet or do I have ta shoot your pretty face?”
Sephiroth knew Reno. Vincent had introduced them when Reno first enrolled in the Turks at sixteen, and they’d gone out partying or clubbing plenty of times. But Sephiroth knew Reno well enough not to argue with him when he was on duty.
“There’s no need to be so forward, I know how handy you are with your rod,” Sephiroth said, smirking and joking to cover his distress. His mother was going to win this battle, but Sephiroth would figure something out. Gast might know what to do. He was ragingly mad, more than he could remember being before in his life.
He wanted to hurt her, but he knew Reno and the Turks wouldn’t let him touch her, not now.
Not physically.
“I thought you should know, Mother,” he called over his shoulder as Reno led him out. “I had an accident when I was on vacation last week. I lost your key. You might want to check up on that.”
“What?” she called after him.
“You know, last week, when I took some leave and went to Nibelheim?” He smiled, then, and her jaw had just begun to drop as one of the Turks pulled the door shut behind them.
“Sorry about all this, man,” Reno said as he left the other Turks in the lobby and walked with Sephiroth outside the glass doors of the Shinra building.
Sephiroth shrugged. “You’re just doing your job. I’m not going to hold that against you. You didn’t even shoot me this time.”
“You’re never going to let me forget that, are ya?” Reno asked, laughing, but his voice quickly turned serious. “You better take a couple days off, yo. Go hang out in Kalm or Junon or something, let your parents and Heidegger sort this one out. I know a sweet girl down in Junon, I’ll give ya her number.”
“I wish I could,” Sephiroth said, shaking his head. “The guy in the tank up there? He’s a friend of mine. Good friend. I don’t know what my mother thinks she’s doing, but I’m not okay with it.”
“Just cause I like ya so much, Imma pretend you didn’t just tell me that,” Reno told him. “Now get outta here, at least for the time being, kay?”
“Sure thing, Reno. And thanks.”
Reno watched the lieutenant walk away toward the subway station, then pulled out his PHS and dialed. “Hey, Veld. He’s off, yo. I told him ta cool off and wait for someone to call, he’s headin down Junon or something.”
“Good. Nice work, Reno. Now get your ass back upstairs and finish your paperwork,” Veld ordered, snapping his phone shut. He turned to Lucrecia, who was busy surveying the damage to the lab. She was ordering half a dozen lab techs around as well as a few janitors and while he was on the phone she had apparently shanghaied his assistant into helping too.
“Tseng! You’re here to take notes, not rearrange furniture,” Veld snapped. The Turk dropped the broken chair he was holding and stepped back into place beside him, notebook and pencil appearing.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I was just trying to get everything cleaned up,” Lucrecia told Veld. “I want to get back to normalcy in here as soon as possible.”
“I’m sure you do, ma’am–”
“You’ve known me for years, Veld! Call me Lu.”
“Ma’am, but this is an investigation, and we need to inspect the damage. Now you said Sephiroth did all this?”
“I don’t know what came over him! He was arguing with,” she dropped her voice and leaned forward conspiratorily, pointing to the tank, “his boyfriend and they just started shouting, and Sephiroth went crazy! He shot the poor boy, that’s why he’s in the tank. I think I can heal him.”
Veld reached down and picked up a snapped leather cuff that was laying on the floor. “They were just arguing, hmm?”
“Oh, please, don’t embarass me like that,” Lucrecia said, turning away as if she were blushing and vaguely horrified. “Sephiroth isn’t… like that.”
“Mm. He must be quite a strong lad,” Veld noted as he snapped pictures of the broken table legs with his camera. “These bolts are actually snapped clean through. Usually they’d be rocked loose and shear off the edges of whatever was holding them.”
Lucrecia frowned. “Veld, I’m not sure what you’re implying, but I don’t appreciate your tone of voice.”
“I don’t appreciate being lied to, ma’am, and I’m not going to fold into an origami crane in front of you just because you’re my boss’s wife.”
“I’m not asking you to fold anything, I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Of course you are. Now, to review: Sephiroth and this young man in the tank came in arguing. They got violent, though you’re not sure why, and when you tried to break it up, Sephiroth threatened you.”
Lucrecia nodded.
“You called for help. You mentioned something about him threatening an experiment in progress. Was any damage done to it?”
She blinked, but recovered quickly. “Nothing that can’t be done over again, just some prepared materials that were destroyed.”
Veld nodded. “Sephiroth shot the young man after you turned off the intercom, correct? And you immediately put him into the tank for possble medical attention.”
“Yes. I did the good and decent thing.”
“Of course you did.”
“You should try that some time, Veld, it’s great for stress relief,” she snapped.
“I’m sure it is. Since he was already in the tank when we arrived, I think that will be all for now.” Veld turned to go and Tseng snapped his notebook shut, ready to follow him. “I’ll send Vincent down as soon as he gets back so you can give him five new reasons to fire me. Have a good evening, ma’am.
When they left, Lucrecia realized that there was a piece of paper on her desk folded to resemble a small crane. That Wutaian must have left it, she thought, trying to remember the name of Veld’s assistant. She picked it up and almost threw it away, but she paused and unfolded it instead. Inside, in a very precise, small hand, was written:
Time elapsed between emergency call and arrival of peace preservation personnel: four minutes
Time required to fill an R-series mako tank to stability level: twelve minutes
Lucrecia tore the sheet up and let the pieces fall around the trash can. She needed to make herself invaluable, and quickly. She looked up at Zack. Would he do? She needed to find some way to bring him under control, or she needed to find something even more impressive.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door frame. “Lu?”
She recognized Pepper’s voice and put on her best worried look before turning to face him. “Oh, Pepper, thank god those awful Turks are gone. They were asking so many questions.”
“Questions?” he asked, his voice leaping up an octave.
“They kept asking who shot the SOLDIER. I deflected them every time, I told them you were totally innocent, but Pepper, I don’t know if I can keep them away forever.”
“But– but– he was a wolf! And he was attacking you!”
“They’re lackeys, Pepper. They don’t know what to make of things like that, so they ignore them and blame the innocent and the brave.”
Pepper swallowed hard. “I, ah, I’ll have to do something about that. But first, I finished the second notebook you gave me. It’s about a different project altogether, something called Jenova.”
“Oh, Gast buried that project years ago, not long after Hojo died,” Lucrecia said, brushing the idea aside.
“I don’t know what Gast worked on,” Pepper pressed, “but the logic and theory here looks solid. I’d need a sample to see if the formula carried over, but in theory this would create soldiers like ants, whose will would be subject to the ‘queen’. This is what he was working on while he waited for approval on his… other project, so he never got to finish or test it.” Pepper shivered at the thought of why Hojo had never finished this work.
“Hmm,” Lucrecia considered. “Do you think it will work?”
“If this specimen is everything he says it is, then yes, I do.”
“Gast had it buried where he originally found it, but when we moved out of the mansion I found some samples Hojo must have put aside. I still have them in the cold storage unit. I want you to work on this for me, Pepper, so that if they do their worst to you, I can prove to Shinra that you’re useful.”
Pepper nodded. “Thank you, Lu.”
She stroked his cheek and leaned in to kiss him. “I think we… work well together. It would be a shame to lose you.”
“I won’t let you lose me,” Pepper said, smiling.
“Now you go get to work on that. The samples are filed under Project J. I need to check on our other project.”
Pepper started to leave, but turned back. “There’s something else I’d like to talk to you about. Can we discuss it over dinner tonight?”
Lucrecia didn’t even look up, the young man already forgotten. “Not tonight, but another time. Hurry.”
He frowned a little, but did as he was told, hurrying down to cold storage. When he typed the specimen retrival code into the computer, it asked what project he was working on. He thought a moment, then simply labelled it JENOVA PROJECT.
The computer beeped and he stepped inside to retrieve his samples.
