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Most of what he remembered was pain. Life had been pain. The voice in his mind, louder than it was in the minds of his brothers, so loud it hurt, sometimes so loud blood leaked from his ears and nose, had been a constant source of pain. Keeping up with his larger brothers, sparring with their superior strength, pushing to remain dominant over the two of them…those things caused him pain. Fighting with their elder brother hurt even more, and then…..then there was rain, and the very air and water burned him, eating away at all that he was in a glimmer of green flame.
In the heart of the flame, a woman’s voice. Not the painful shrilling he’d grown up with inside his mind, but a softer, gentler voice, warm and sweet. He knew, without question, that it was his mother, knew it in his bones even as those bones faded under the rain. A hand closed around his.
It was time to go home.
—————
Home, as it turned out, was not what he’d expected. It was a field of flowers. He could see Yazoo lying still among the blooms, and Loz laid out beside him. No doubt Loz was asleep or unconscious, because if he was awake, he would be complaining and probably sneezing himself silly. Yazoo might be unconscious, or just taking advantage of the silence to cloud watch….until Kadaj looked up and realized there was no sky. Or rather…it wasn’t ‘sky’, it was something else, something fluid and strange, and watching it move made his stomach tighten. Where was he? Where was Mother? She had called to him….she had taken his hand, but now she was gone and he was alone.
…. alone . So alone. It was silent in his mind, no shrill, demanding voice driving him onward.
“Kadaj?”
He startled, grabbing for the sword no longer strapped at his hip. Souba’s scabbard lay empty against his leg…..oh yes, Big Brother had struck it from his hands before Kadaj had joined with…..with…
Oh .
Now he remembered. He had drowned under the tide of Sephiroth, forced back into a corner of his own mind as his body was broken and reshaped into the perfection he had never been able to achieve on his own.
And Big Brother had destroyed it anyway. So much for perfection.
“Kadaj?” The voice was soft and familiar. Mother.
“Mother?” he whispered, afraid to look. He had briefly seen the face of the shrill voice, and it had been horrible. For all that this new mother sounded better, it might just be a pretty voice on more horror.
“It seems everyone’s been calling me that, lately. Come with me, now.”
He did look, then and found himself facing a slim, pretty young woman with a lot of brown hair and big green eyes. She looked nothing like the pickled thing inside the case that he had called Mother before.
“I…..where?”
“That way,” she murmured, pointing across the flower field, away from his brothers.
“What about my brothers?”
“They aren’t ready to wake up yet,” she explained. “They were hurt badly and the trauma takes time to recover from.”
“They looked fine.”
“The hurts are in their spirits, Kadaj.” She fixed him with a firm look. “You do know that you’d dead, don’t you?”
“Dead?” He supposed he’d have to be, after what Big Brother had done to Sephiroth before Kadaj had been released back into his own form. But…
“Yes, Kadaj. Dead. You died. The damage from OmniSlash was far too great for your body to survive it. I brought you and your brothers here when you died.”
“….where is here?” he asked quietly, getting to his feet.
“This is the LifeStream.”
That brought him up short. He stopped, turning slowly around and trying to make what he knew of the LifeStream mesh with the warm, sunny place with no actual sun, the field of grass and flowers waving gently in a soft breeze.
“No it isn’t.”
She laughed quietly. “It really is. But not all of it looks this way.”
“….the LifeStream is a horrible thing,” he objected. “It hurts us. It…it hurts anyone with Mother’s legacy…”
The woman’s expression went distant and sad. She turned away from him, looking into the distance. “Zack? Zack, I need you.”
“Comin’, babe.”
A man appeared in the grass beside her, tall and broad and wearing a military uniform. The massive sword strapped to his back looked like an even larger version of the one Big Brother had carried, and Kadaj took a step back, prepared to fight or flee if the man attacked him.
“Talk to him about the LifeStream,” the woman sighed. “He thinks it’s a bad thing, and I need to do some work with the older ones before they wake. Were you finished with yours?”
“Yeah, I think we got most of it. He’s sleeping…..it’ll be awhile before he’s ready to wake up…..too fragmented….”
“Good. I’ll meet you at home in a bit?”
“Sure. C’mon, kid, let’s take a walk.”
Kadaj stayed where he was. “Why?”
The man blinked at him. “You want answers, don’t you?”
“I….yes?”
“Then come with me. Gotta leave Aerith to take care of your brothers right now. We’ll meet back up later.”
Kadaj hesitated, but when the man started striding off into the grass, he trotted to keep up.
In only a few steps, grass faded away into cracked earth and stone, and Kadaj found himself standing on the precipice overlooking Edge and the ruins of Midgar, the very place where he and his brothers had chased Cloud on his return to the city. A few scraggly plants blew in the wind, but Kadaj couldn’t feel it against his skin, nor did he see Zack’s hair move.
Below them in the distance, Kadaj could see the city, the ruined skyline somewhat lower after Bahamut had had a go at it, and even from this distance he could hear the hustle and bustle of life going on. There were faint smudges of green around the edges…plant-life? There had been no such thing when he had entered the city himself.
“Life goes on,” Zack murmured. “It’s been about a month since you passed. The Stigma is gone and the Planet is healing.”
“What do you mean, healing ?” Kadaj demanded. “It….it was destroying us!”
“Not exactly. Do you know what you were? Before you died?”
“I….”
What had he been?
“You were what we call a Remnant. A part of Sephiroth that got separated and developed a life-force of its own. Most of them never became people. You, Loz and Yazoo are the only ones Aerith and I have ever seen do that, which is really something special. But at your heart, you were made of Sephiroth. Not all of him, just parts, which is why you’re all so different, just like regular brothers would be. Cloud, on the other hand, is not your brother. But you and him share one thing.”
“…..mother’s cells…”
“Yeah, those. Only she wasn’t your mother. Jenova came to this world a long time ago. I don’t know much about her back then, I’m no Cetra and Aerith is still learning, but she was almost killed. What was left of her sort of…went dormant. And about thirty years ago, it was found and…. used .” Zack strode off the edge of the cliff so easily that Kadaj followed a few steps before he looked down, took a sharp breath, and scuttled back to the rocks.
Zack stood in midair some ten feet or so beyond the edge and stared at him, hands on hips. “Are you coming or not?”
“I-“
“We’re dead . We’re not going to fall off the cliff. Come on.”
Hesitant, Kadaj took a cautious step, then a few more, until he was standing with some hundred or so feet of empty air between the soles of his boots and the broken stone of the valley floor.
“There ya go. This way.”
Kadaj had to trot to keep up; Zack’s legs were long, his stride purposeful, and he didn’t slow down for short people.
“Long story short, Jenova’s cells got mixed with Mako and used to make SOLDIERs. I was a SOLDIER. Still am, technically, but whatever. Anyway, there were two SOLDIERs who were made with dead cells- I knew them, and we’re not gonna talk about that right now- and Sephiroth was made with living cells. Sephiroth was considered a huge success right off the bat and he was used as a template to make the rest of us, but he was the only one born with Jenova’s cells inside him. Problem is, Jenova wanted to take over and destroy this planet. It’s what her kind do, so far as we know, so she started….eating away at Sephiroth. She drove him insane and used him as a tool to try and kill the Planet. People like Cloud stopped her then, like they stopped you and your brothers this last time. Before that, Cloud and I stopped her, temporarily at least, when she first started trying to ride Sephiroth. Every time he was killed, though, more of her got into the LifeStream.”
“ So ?” Kadaj asked viciously. Under their feet, the city pulsed with life. At this range, Kadaj could see patchy stretches of grass in empty lots and window boxes full of green. Moss grew in cracks, and the ruins of Midgar were showing shoots of dusty green vines. Where had it all come from ?
“You three probably never got an infection…..but have you seen fruit that’s gotten cut, and went bad?”
Kadaj nodded. More than once he had seen Loz start eating a piece of fruit, only to put it aside when something distracted him, and forget to come back to it before it started to smell. Sometimes it went furry or black, or began producing slime.
“So that happens because little bits of bad stuff got into the fruit and started taking it over. In a living thing, the body- a fruit, a plant, a person- fights back. Fighting back can do nasty stuff like heat the body up, or weaken it, or whatever. Jenova’s cells got into the Lifestream like that, and the LifeStream was fighting back. Trying to keep itself clean and healthy. That’s what the Stigma was- the human body trying to clear Jenova out of itself. And since you were full of Jenova’s cells, it hurt you. It wasn’t because of you , Kadaj. It was trying to make you better.”
“I don’t want to be better!” Kadaj snarled. He whirled on Zack, body tense with anger. “There was nothing wrong with me!”
“Kadaj…the Planet was trying to keep you. I know that’s hard to understand, but it wanted you to stay. It just didn’t want you to be full of something that makes you and other people sick.”
The city beneath them became jungle, which opened onto a burned out wreck that had once been a Mako reactor. Further on, they came to a village, new buildings spilling out from burned out ruins slowly being consumed by the jungle.
“This is Gongaga,” Zack said quietly. “I was born here. I grew up here. Avalanche blew the reactor and…most of the village was destroyed. My parents survived, but…” He sighed. “Mako is from the Planet. It’s raw, concentrated LifeStream energy, and it’s so destructive. So much power in one place and nothing to direct it. They put that stuff in me , Kadaj. Mixed Jenova cells up in it and pumped my body full. Every SOLDIER was made that way, and all the benefits it lead to, all the enhancements, were just our bodies using the Mako to try and fight off Jenova. You didn’t have any Mako put in you, just whatever you got from Sephiroth, so the Lifestream hurt you a lot more than it did me. But it didn’t mean to.”
Looking down, Kadaj could see melted, burned-looking places in the earth that looked harder than the rest. They were shaped like puddles, like a flood of something had poured through, and he realized with a start that this was the remains of the Mako Zack spoke of, marks of destruction etched into the very Planet by a substance that had come from the Planet in the first place.
“…..this was inside you?”
“In me, and in Sephiroth and Cloud and all the SOLDIERs. And it hurt us. It killed some of us. Only reason it didn’t kill us all was because sometimes you can absorb it and put it to work. But that’s just luck. It’s like putting too much power into a lightbulb- eventually, it’s going to break. You and your brothers? You broke.”
Kadaj nodded slowly, staring down. “…and now?”
“And now what?”
“What am I now? If I was Sephiroth, and he was made of Jenova….and I have none of those cells inside me, and I’m dead now…. what am I ?”
Zack shrugged easily and put his hands in his pockets. “Fuck if I know. You’re a Kadaj. It’s up to you to figure out what that means.”
“……that’s not an answer.”
“It’s all I’ve got. Come on, this way.”
Zack lead him off towards the mountains, then straight into a cliff. Kadaj bit his lip and followed even though they were clearly walking into a solid rock face, and sank into the stone with no difficulty.
They moved deeper, though earth and stone to a great pool of Mako burning beneath the surface, and then into that, into the blindingly bright glow and beyond, though darkness and bright, white light to a place that was…
Empty. They stood in nothing, on nothing, but around them…..Kadaj saw faces and shapes slide past him in a hazy, fluid sort of glide, and beyond them, an endless stretch of more, the haze deepening into a softer, healthier version of the chemical green burn of Mako as distance condensed the color.
“Welcome to the Lifestream,” Zack deadpanned, gesturing. “This is the public part, shall we say. Everything that lived comes here when that life is over. They take a bit of a rest, let the edges on ‘em get smoothed out some, and go back out into the world to become something new. But this isn’t the right place for you.”
Kadaj stared at the thousands upon thousands of lives moving past. There weren’t only people among the hazy shapes. He saw animals, fish and chocobo and something that looked like a dragon. Plants had the softest outlines, bleeding gently into the things around them, but they were there too.
….. everything that had lived. People he had killed must be here. Every beast he and his brothers had hunted for food. Every tick and mosquito they had ever squashed. Every plant Loz had overturned, hunting for roots, and every blade of grass they had torn up or crushed beneath boot and bike. Every life except his own.
Hot tears welled up, unbidden, in his eyes, blurring the great river of energy until he couldn’t see anything but wavering blue-green.
“Hey.” Zack’s voice was soft, his hand warm and unexpected on Kadaj’s shoulder. “I’m going to take you home now. Okay?”
He nodded wordlessly, tears spilling onto his cheeks, and allowed Zack to pick him up.
“Some lives are too damaged to go back as is,” Zack explained, striding away through the haze. “Most of them just….slowly come apart in the LifeStream, and their energy combines with everything else. But some of them can be fixed. Some of them should be fixed. Usually, they’re people. And the LifeStream has a special place for them again. It was gone for a long time, because the Cetra were the ones who worked it and the Cetra were destroyed by Jenova, but Aerith’s the last one, and that’s what she does, these days. She takes in the spirits that need cared for, and she fixes them.”
Kadaj made a wet sound of confusion into Zack’s neck. Zack certainly didn’t seem to be broken.
“We had a thing before I died,” Zack murmured. “But I went to war when I was just a kid. I had to kill my mentor. I was experimented on for years, dragged my best friend across the world just to get killed on the outskirts of my destination…I was all fucked up inside. Aerith brought me to her to rest and once I was better, I started helping her. I didn’t need as much as some people do.”
The LifeStream faded into the flower field, then into grassland, and then into a forest full of fruit smells. Kadaj heard running water.
“So this place is ours. Aerith and I made it out of the LifeStream, and sometimes we bring people here to get better.”
Boots thudded on stone, then on wood as a door creaked open. Zack thumped across a floor of some kind and into a place that smelled of food. Kadaj kept his face hidden, too overwhelmed to look any longer.
“Oh there you are.” It was the woman again. Mother. Aerith, Zack had called her.
“M-mother?” he croaked.
“I suppose I am now, yes.” A small, soft hand brushed against his wet cheeks. “Poor thing. Put him down here, Zack.”
Kadaj was lowered onto something soft. He tried to curl into it, finding his leathers pinching in all the wrong places.
“Let me take care of that,” Aerith sighed. Something around him tingled, and the pinching vanished. Kadaj scrubbed at his eyes with a hand, finding his gloves gone. So had the rest of his leathers, leaving him in unfamiliar clothing made of softer material, albeit still solid black. “Leather isn’t the best for lounging in, I’m afraid. But you can keep wearing it if you’d prefer?”
Kadaj didn’t know what he preferred. They had always worn leathers, which were durable, protective and could be repaired with a Heal spell because it had been living skin once. He’d never worn clothing for comfort, and the very realization of that made the tears well up again.
Aerith made a soft cooing noise and sank down beside him, a small, warm weight that smelled of flowers. “You poor, poor dear. Come here.”
He leaned into her hand, her arm, and finally into her shoulder as his chest tightened, body tucking in close as the first sob tore from him. More followed and he let her pull him in, bawling into the soft pink fabric of her dress. Dimly, he felt her arms around him and a much larger, warmer presence behind him, a big hand rubbing gentle circles on his back until he had no tears left in him.
When the crying stopped, he felt Zack stand, heard the big man’s shoulder harness creak as he stretched.
“I’m gonna go see about adding onto the house, babe,” he murmured. “Since we’re parents, now.”
“I suppose we are,” Aerith chuckled. “Go on. I’ve got this.”
Zack clomped away and the air stilled, save for Aerith’s soft breaths against Kadaj’s hair. Slowly, he sat up, finding his face felt hot and tender, his eyes sore and his body…..much, much lighter. A little empty, but it wasn’t the frightening emptiness of a nearly used up gas tank and miles to go before the next fuel station. It was like a new saddlebag, an empty pocket that might be filled with anything he wanted.
Aerith sat where she was, watching him, a small smile curling her lips up. She looked the way a mother should, he thought. Clean and warm, soft around the edges but strong, so strong he had felt it in her arms around him. And safe . There was no malice in those green eyes, only something deep and sure that he didn’t have a name for.
Slowly, Aerith unfolded herself and got up, sliding easily off the couch they had been sitting on. She offered Kadaj her hand. It was small, like the rest of her, with white bracelets hanging around the wrist, but when Kadaj put his hand in it and the fingers folded around his own, he felt the steel beneath the softness, and he smiled a little bit himself.
“Come on. Let me show you around. You’ll need to know things before your brothers wake up, so you can help them adjust.” She tapped the end of his nose with a fingertip. “It’s your turn to be the big brother now.”
“ Me ?”
“Yes, you.”
“But I’m….. Mother , I’m the smallest .”
“Being a big brother has nothing to do with your size,” she laughed. “You’re older. Didn’t you know? You only look younger.”
“....I am ?”
“You are. I’ve known you since the moment you came into being, Kadaj. You came first, before Loz and Yazoo.”
“But….”
“Sephiroth is older. And someday, maybe, you’ll be able to meet him. But for now, you’re the eldest. And as the big brother, it’s your job to help your little brothers understand.”
“.....I don’t know if I can do that. I didn’t do a good job of leading them before.”
“It isn’t leading , silly. It’s teaching . Zack and I will show you how. We’ll teach you .”
Kadaj hesitated, then nodded, which widened Aerith’s smile. He decided right then that he would do a lot to keep her making that face at him; it warmed up something in his chest and made him feel less empty than before, like having a few gil in the bottom of his pocket and nothing to spend it on but himself. “Okay…..I’ll be their big brother.”
“ Wonderful ! Now come along, there’s a lot to learn.”