Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“You look like her.”

Sephiroth is too well-trained to jerk in surprise, but only just. His Fire spell immolates the training dummy’s entire head rather than leaving the pinpoint sear mark he’d been intending—this was a precision exercise—but Hojo isn’t here to judge, and no one’s to know what size the fireball had been supposed to be.

He turns his full body to face the source of the voice with careful coolness. If the mysterious stranger had been planning to attack while his guard was down, they wouldn’t have blown their cover by speaking, so there is nothing to gain by haste.

His uniform announces what he is; no one who matters will let his age fool them.

Once he has eyes on the man, he’s embarrassed he allowed himself to be snuck up upon by someone wearing so much bright red. But then, peripheral vision only works if the eyes keep shuttling, and he’d been entirely focused on his target.

Foolish, here at the edge of the army camp, in the middle of hostile terrain. He’s lucky not to have paid for it in blood.

You look like her, the man said, rather than strike at him.

“Who?” Sephiroth asks. It’s the only reasonable response.

Other than a few wisps of long dark hair blown across his eyes by the breeze, the man does not move. He is crouched on the upper bar of the rough fence that was flung together in place of a stockade, since they’re planning to advance again any day now. (And have been for the last four.) He wears no recognizable crest, device, or uniform, and Sephiroth cannot tell whether he is ethnically Wutaian. It’s easier to tell when someone isn’t.

There’s a gun holstered at his side. Probably Continental, then. Wutai’s longstanding distaste for firearms formed the original antipathy between that nation and the Company, back when Shinra’s main business was weapons.

The man says, “Your mother.”

Sephiroth feels his eyebrows go up without permission. “Jenova?” No one has ever had much to say about her, beyond her name. He wondered for years. He’s long since stopped wanting particularly to have those wonderings supplied with hard data—he’s used to having his expectations disappointed, and would rather retain the illusion of a pleasant possibility.

For the first time the stranger changes expression—a pinch to his mouth and around his eyes. Offense, perhaps? Disgust? “No. Lucrecia.”

Simpler, then. And Sephiroth finds himself paradoxically disappointed at having the threat and promise of revelation withdrawn. “You must have mistaken me for someone else.”

The man shakes his head. “You’re Sephiroth.”

Well, this is true. “My mother’s name was Jenov—”

“Hojo lies.”

Sephiroth allows the interruption to stand, because that is true as well. Even if he has never thought it was true about this. Gast supported it, and he trusted Professor Gast.

“I can’t find her,” the man goes on, red eyes too keen and still. “But I found him. And now, I found you.”

Sephiroth lays his hand on his sword. “And what do you plan to do about me?” he asks.

The man says, “‘Jenova’ was the name of the experiment that used her body. I was afraid it would kill her. So Hojo killed me.” He tilts his head a fraction. “I can’t find her, nor sign of her death, but you live.”

Sephiroth is intrigued, which irritates him. The manipulation of his attention involved in drawing his interest but ignoring his questions is not a common tactic but it is an aggravating one, as it turns his desires against him. (That part is common, in his experience.)

He turns away, starting back toward the mess pavilion, in the hope at this point that showing his back will provoke the man to attack, so he’ll be doing something easy to react to.

The stranger lets him go. That's irritating, too.

The next time he announces himself with a bullet.

It cuts down the ninja that had been carving in toward Sephiroth’s side, while his sword was upraised to deflect a massive shuriken and his off-hand was driving a spell up into another swordsman’s face. The woman hits dirt one eyeball less, having barely drawn blood rather than carved out half his guts, and once Sephiroth has finished off his other close-range opponent he follows the line of the shot back to find the man in crimson standing in a nearby tree, the wind catching the tattered edge of his cloak and again stirring his hair.

To have made that shot he must have been watching the fight all along, and yet no one noticed him. It’s absurd.

“Who are you?” Sephiroth demands at more than half a shout, but then the shuriken fighters are attacking again, and have more backup coming in, and when he has time to look again the stranger is gone.

“You shouldn’t be alone so often,” the man tells him, folding out from behind a tree during a routine patrol.

Sephiroth does startle this time, though only enough that it means his sword is brought sharply toward the man in red. He leaves it there deliberately, hovering in front of that expressionless face.

“SOLDIER operatives are optimized for independent maneuver and long-range assault,” he replies flatly. Hojo has been lecturing him about the fallacy of assuming he’d ever be able to count on backup for as long as he can remember. In the early memories Gast scolded his subordinate for the relentless negativity, but never precisely said that Hojo was wrong.

The man’s ridiculous red gaze is unflinching and unimpressed. “You have colleagues close at hand. You don’t coordinate with them. You should.” He is more than a head taller than Sephiroth, like most of the other SOLDIERs, and clearly looking down on him figuratively (as they have mostly learned not to do) as well as literally. “It is a cold thing for men to be alone, when the world is dark.”

Men, hm. Sephiroth tilts his head, narrow-eyed, a gesture that lets him look up without too obviously tilting his head back and emphasizing the difference between them. He is already tall for thirteen. When he hits his adolescent growth spurt he is sure to catch up to his peers.

“I appreciate the supporting fire last week, but it doesn’t make you my commanding officer.”

The man nods, and since the blade in his face doesn’t seem to be intimidating him and has already made what point it could, Sephiroth lowers it to his side again, and after another second resumes his patrol. Surprisingly, the man matches pace with him. His steps are barely audible, apart from the occasional whisper of metal on metal as the peculiar sabatons flex. Apparently he plans to address the problem of Sephiroth being alone personally.

Annoying. All SOLDIER Firsts do perimeter patrols solo. So do the more senior Seconds. Only Third Class is uniformly expected to patrol by twos, like the common grunts, this close to base camp.

“Valentine,” says the man after they have patrolled in silence for a minute or so.

“What?”

“My name. I neglected to introduce myself. I’m Vincent Valentine.”

“Ah.” It sounds like a pseudonym, but the fact that he waited this long to volunteer it makes it seem a little more real. Or maybe he’s just been brainstorming.

“Hojo may have purged me from the company records after killing me,” Valentine goes on with absurd stentorian calm, “but my father was Grimoire Valentine. He trained your mother when she was young. There may still be documentation of their work.”

Sephiroth frowns. “What is your—”

There is the crack of a monster moving carelessly through the bamboo in front of them, and by the time Sephiroth takes part of his attention away from that again, half a second later, Valentine is gone.

“Really?” he demands of no one.

By the time he is rotated back to Midgar again, he’s become accustomed to having his own personal ghost stalker. Valentine came out to talk a few more times but without sharing any further solid information, although Sephiroth did at one point take the opportunity to smack him with the flat of his sword, just to confirm his physical presence.

Feeling ridiculous for needing to do so, but no one wearing that much red should be able to disappear that thoroughly.

Valentine doesn’t seem to care about the war, and if he’d ever cared about Shinra that had apparently terminated when Hojo, reportedly, killed him. Sephiroth wonders what he’ll do in Wutai now, without Sephiroth to haunt. Hibernate? Focus on obtaining more of the food supplies he probably needs, murder victim or not?

The bones of the man’s face stood out unnaturally. It’s all too easy to believe he really is some sort of revenant corpse. But just as easy to believe the far more probable case that he has not been eating well, as he lurked in the jungle lecturing other people about the perils of solitude, the hypocrite.

Sephiroth finds himself watching Hojo thoughtfully, the evening of his recall, as the man putters about the lab, arranging everything just so for his detailed health checkup. Sephiroth has always received the best medical attention, even before he blew past expectations to outperform SOLDIERs three times his age. Everyone who works in the Shinra labs is qualified to use all medical materia to an above-basic level and perform at least one additional type of medical procedure, after all, and he is valuable to the company.

Their important, expensive little SOLDIER prototype.

Hojo has always been peculiarly disinterested in pursuing the noises other people in the Department made about creating a second-gen round of him, now that he’d proved in field tests that enhancements applied from infancy go further than ones applied in adulthood or even adolescence.

Even if it is more expensive and means having to wait longer for the payoff, the long-term advantages to the company…but then, that’s Hojo. He’s never interested in repeating experiments that worked. Failure is the enemy; success is not the quarry, only a pleasant side benefit of the experiment, to gloat over occasionally.

“I see your rate of injury has improved since your last deployment,” Hojo says, shuffling through his medical records from the field and managing to make this sound like a criticism rather than congratulation—in his opinion, Sephiroth should have no rate of injury at all. He raises his eyes to bore through Sephiroth’s face. “Unless you’ve been under-reporting, and self-healing in the field,” he accuses.

Some of the latter—there’s a lively black-market warfront trade in locally-sourced Potions that developed as the men caught on to how much better Wutaian ingredients were, good enough that it’s generally considered worth the risk of an amateur barracks apothecary fucking up the compounding process or proportions, and giving you something dominated by Bizarre Bug venom that if consumed would kill you instantly.

Apparently there have also been exciting results with adding fractional amounts of Bizarre Bug venom to alcohol, as it’s a neurotoxin, but no one lets him near even ordinary drinks yet. The supply sergeant says he can have watered beer once he turns fourteen, the usual minimum deployment age for non-prodigies. This sounds distinctly uninspiring, although the youngest green recruits generally seem to like theirs well enough.

But Sephiroth has reported his injuries accurately, even the ones he didn’t need official medical intervention for. He would have liked to say that his improved record could be attributed to his increasing skills, but knows some of it was Valentine. The man’s a fantastic shot, and the Wutaians haven’t mastered finding his surveillance blinds yet.

“No,” is all he says.

Hojo chuckles, at Sephiroth’s blandness or for some private reason, and then is serious again. “Get your shirt off and get up on the table.”

Sephiroth strips out of the top half of his uniform efficiently, then sits still, breathing on command as Hojo makes a detailed study of his torso with stethoscope, magnifying lens, and Sense. Hojo does all his exams; Sephiroth doesn’t think he’s ever examined a single other successful SOLDIER candidate more than once. (He does occasionally do detailed deconstructions of the failures’ corpses, as these are of scientific interest.) The cold metal against the soft place at the base of his sternum makes him want to close his eyes, and he lets himself, just for a moment. Hojo is distracted, and anyway just closing his eyes doesn’t look like flinching. Hojo might poke fun at him for getting bored, but won’t consider it something that needs to be penalized.

Does he believe Hojo would murder a coworker and erase all record of him? Easily. Lie to Sephiroth about his parentage? Of course.

And yet it all feels so bizarrely improbable. It’s the drama Valentine infused it all with, he thinks—the vague approbations he’s heaped on this Lucrecia figure when asked, the dark intimations, the pronouncements laden with ambiguous doom. It made it all seem very fictional.

(Sephiroth’s exposure to fiction has been limited, since he acquires it mainly by picking up books that have been left unattended or thrown away, but it seems to be characterized by outrageous melodrama and the infusion of the subjects’ lives with an improbable amount of importance that is only sometimes at all supported by the substance of the text.

As someone whose daily activities are of life and death importance to a significant number of people, as part of an effort that impacts the political fate of the world, Sephiroth can attest that none of that stops life from being boring and meaningless most of the time. Though he supposes it’s probably nice for people living ordinary lives to imagine it would.)

Also, Valentine is clearly insane.

What he needs is an outside source.

No one in the Science Department who's worked with Hojo directly on a regular basis has lasted even since as early as Sephiroth can remember, let alone before he was born, and he can think of no discrete way to get contact with anyone who currently works in any of the remote sites, even assuming they could be expected to know anything. Some of them might, but he has no way of knowing who. He doesn’t have clearance to access any of the restricted archives.

He could get into the less restricted ones, his access card would open the door to the main records level, but he couldn’t spend long there without anyone noticing, so he’d need an excuse and a clear idea of what he was looking for, to make it quick.

So…who is there in Science who doesn’t work directly with Hojo, but does work out of the Tower, that has been with the company for at least fourteen years? It isn’t a question he’s qualified to answer. He only really saw Hojo’s personal team when he was younger, especially while Gast was still running the Department, and nowadays he’s only there occasionally and sees even less of the Science staff.

So step one would have to be breaking into the personnel database without being caught.

The whole hypothetical plan shivers apart when sharp blows come down simultaneously on his knee and elbow, making the first kick out and the second send a loud, scrambled buzz shivering up and down his arm.

His eyes leap open to the sight of Hojo, a small reflex-testing hammer in each hand, laughing at him. “Don’t let your mind wander!” he remonstrates. “Just because you are not on the battlefield is no excuse to be complacent!”

This is, of course, true—in the general sense and in the sense that he should certainly know better than to let his guard down around Hojo, in particular.

Even before he’d spent time considering how likely he thought the man was to murder a co-worker and concluded the answer was Quite, he knew to stay alert for Hojo’s…idiosyncracies.

Although it’s also true Hojo is less intimidating now that he has some experience being around people who are actively trying to murder him. Hojo can be fairly well relied upon not to try that; he values Sephiroth too much.

Sephiroth presses his lips together and turns his head aside to stare into a bank of sterilized glassware. He does not clench his jaw, or shake out the hand still sparking with phantom nerve-not-quite-pain. “Are my reflexes up to expectations.”

“Well, physically, yes.” Hojo slots the hammers back onto his rolling instrument cart. “Don’t expect congratulations for avoiding nerve damage, though! Hahaha.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sephiroth murmurs, and keeps his eyes on the glass-covered wall as the end of the stethoscope, which has had time to grow chilly again in the cool room, presses in between his shoulder blades.

“Breathe in!” directs Hojo.

He breathes.

Chapter Text

It takes sacrificing training time to spend much of the next two days pacing distractedly around the executive levels until he finds someone busy in the gym whose private office he knows how to locate who, when he gets there, has left their console unlocked.

The database is as stupidly designed as ever, but he gets it to cough up a list fitting his parameters after fifteen minutes of furious typing, memorizes it and at least the general appearance that goes with each of the six names, and erases at least the obvious signs of his intrusion. He doesn’t know enough programming to hide the database access if anyone, such as the Turks, bothers to look, but they shouldn’t have any reason.

And no one bothering to check anything they weren’t given particular reason for is the main way to get around things in the company—they’re always cutting non-frontline personnel to save on costs, which means every department is always slightly shortstaffed.

It takes a further four minutes waiting inside the door for the hall outside to be clear of observers, but then he absconds successfully, intel-gathering operation successful and the next phase of his plan already forming.

Before the list of Science personnel, he entered a single name into the search field.

The face that looked back at him from the resulting entry, sensible hairstyle, sober suit, V. Valentine, Administrative Research, killed on-duty almost fourteen years ago, was perfectly familiar.

Not entirely mad, then.

He runs through his mental list as he walks briskly but calmly up the corridor, behaving exactly as he has for the past two days to continue to allay suspicion. His first target is obvious, because he’s sure he can contrive to encounter the man, whom he has met before in passing: one of the subdirectors who works on the parts of SOLDIER that Hojo can’t be bothered with.

Hollander, as it turns out, has been with the company for seventeen years, and on the SOLDIER project since its inception.

If anyone knows anything….

Sephiroth is not fond of being deployed away from the front. No monsters on the continent other than the largest serpents of the Mythril swamps have been any challenge to him since he was ten, so pest control missions are tiresome, and otherwise Midgar assignment rotations are composed mainly of tedium and being prodded at by Hojo. He has grown grateful over the past two and a half years that such leave is generally short.

At least killing Wutai’s ninjas is occasionally difficult.

Now he is mentally shuffling the days he has left to try to organize a coincidental encounter with Dr. Hollander while he’s still in Midgar. It’s harder than it should be, though still easier than managing a pretext to meet anyone on other, non-SOLDIER projects. You can’t get away with prowling the research levels the way you can admin, where the only restrictions are whether your clearance was sufficient to open the door.

He could get away with haunting Hojo’s workspace, he’s sure, since he lived there as a child and habit can make many things unremarkable, but he doesn’t particularly want to and it is unlikely to help, since Hollander shows the good taste or sense of self-preservation to avoid Hojo as much as he can, and Sephiroth can hardly open this line of discussion under Hojo’s eye anyway, however obliquely.

Part of being a First is a sort of semi-formal leadership role within SOLDIER. Sephiroth did not deal very warmly with the senior who tried to mentor him when he was, briefly, a SOLDIER Second, having no frame of reference for the man’s condescension and little patience for it even in retrospect.

No one expected him to take up any such responsibilities once he was promoted, outside the occasional group combat assignment where he’s taken both point and tactical authority, though he isn’t entirely certain whether this was due to his age—“not finished baking” is the term his peers prefer, for some reason; the youngest of them was promoted at nineteen and is twenty-one now—or his personality.

No one expected it of him. But he is getting older, nearly the ordinary enrollment age, and it wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to begin taking an interest in SOLDIER as a whole. It would be almost obligatory, if he wanted to be considered for a leadership role.

Further promotion within the Department is possible after reaching First, though a SOLDIER being promoted outside the ranks and into an executive position is unheard-of. And Shinra likes to see some ambition in their higher-level employees. It shows dedication.

Not, admittedly, the kind Sephiroth is known for. But he could start.

And if he starts hanging around the SOLDIER training floor, he might manage to catch Hollander there. He’s sure he’s seen the man around there before, taking notes on asset performance.

Half the floor is shut down at the moment, while they install what the company has promised will be vastly improved immersive VR training facilities. (“So,” the elderly desk-jockey Head of SOLDIER joked, “you boys can stop cutting so many holes in the walls and bashing each other into them so hard.”) Sephiroth will believe it when he sees it.

The other half is still reinforced training facilities of the more ordinary kind—Sephiroth does like the facilities here, even if the firing range is necessarily more cramped than his improvised workspace in the field, but he tends to avoid them during peak occupancy, or check out a private room if the queue for them isn’t full, which is a First Class privilege.

Eyebrows go up when he enters the large gym space where two bouts are ongoing in the two available rings, while several of his colleagues use the strength-training equipment, and twice that many stand and sit around watching the combatants. A few conversations break off as SOLDIERs nudge one another, pointing him out. One Third actually raises his helmet to see better, as though Sephiroth was a rare bird or a mirage.

He isn’t that reclusive. He manages not to roll his eyes, and stops just out of convenient speaking distance of the nearest clump of SOLDIERs watching the ongoing bout. It’s between two Seconds, one of whom he recognizes as having worked with him before. Sibram, he thinks. Sigram? He should pay more attention. The other has his helmet on. They’re circling, testing, trading blows that are mostly pulled up short to avoid overextending, once the opponent has reacted quickly enough there’s no longer an opening. The men clearly know one another well.

It’s pleasant to watch—not as stimulating as battles at the front, which rarely feature the leisure for this kind of measured calculation, but more intelligent than you often have time to be while staging an assault or repelling an ambush, too. Certainly more interesting than the dramatic clashing of blades happening in the other ring, further away, which is generating considerably more excitement from its audience.

A young Third sidles over to Sephiroth from the nearby clump. He is dark-haired and runs slim for SOLDIER, and has his helmet in his hands which makes him look even younger, and cancels out his slight height advantage even if their difference in rank hadn’t already. “Hey,” he says, almost naturally. “Good to see you stopping by. Fancy a bout once these guys finish up?”

People always ask that. Sephiroth takes his eyes off the interesting fight long enough to size the challenger up. If he’s fifteen it hasn’t been for terribly long, by his estimate. Might not have had his first deployment yet, even.

But being new means being a Third isn’t an indictment of his potential, and that they haven’t clashed before makes him somewhat more interesting an opponent than the ones he’d defeated dozens of times before giving up on the public training rooms, who kept demanding rematches as though they thought those would go differently, or reveal the secrets of his success.

Before he can decide whether to agree, a sandy-haired SOLDIER he might have worked with before objects from the Third’s other side, “No fair, I called winner of this match.”

“SOLDIER First Sephiroth is more exciting than you, Schwartz!” hoots someone out of sight, and someone else says,

“If anyone’s fighting Sephiroth maybe it should be winner of the bout!”

Sephiroth lets them argue it out amongst themselves, and tries to tune out the discussion and pay attention to the match. But the byplay has disrupted the combatants’ concentration, and the smooth exchange of non-touch is disintegrating before his eyes.

Eventually the match concludes at first blood with an entirely avoidable error, and Sephiroth finds the group consensus is that he will fight that winner first, then whoever won the dramatic clashing match still ongoing in the other ring, then possibly the winner of another match proposed in the interim, though there are objections that there is unlikely to be enough time for that, so it seems the debate will continue.

He tunes it out again, and allows himself to be waved into the ring.

The winner was not Sibram (he turns out to have been right the first time) but the one in the helmet, whose name he still hasn’t caught. He’s much older—not a true program veteran, as those had largely been in their late twenties ten years ago when the first successful trials took place, and the few of them left are approaching middle age and beginning to retire, but past thirty almost certainly. Probably from the second wave of survivors. He’s very good. If they’ve fought before, it hasn’t been very often.

Sephiroth might have taken his time and enjoyed the match under other circumstances, but he’s annoyed now and adopts a stronger offense than he usually bothers with when he isn’t aiming for an instant kill.

The man is a fellow veteran though not a First, and outweighs him considerably, so it takes nearly a minute with both hands on the hilt for Sephiroth to land him flat on his back, sword at his throat. “Yield,” the man says immediately, though at least not as though he expects Sephiroth to press the attack further, like a mad dog. That treatment is worse than being a mascot or a target of envy.

He steps back, accepting the surrender. It is common at this juncture to offer a hand up in comradery, but he isn’t feeling much comradery at present and anyway his height has always made the attempt ludicrous.

His defeated opponent does a neat kip-up, and Sephiroth says, “You two were doing very well until you lost focus.”

“Hm? Oh, yeah.” His opponent pulls a grimace. “People get bored with how long me and Seeb take sometimes.”

“You train together often,” Sephiroth says, which he had already surmised from their movements.

The man grins from under his helmet, exposing a missing cuspid and second incisor on the top right side. It must be a recent injury, and one taken on the battlefield since the teeth weren’t recoverable to replace before healing was applied; that is a distinguishing characteristic Sephiroth would have remembered.

“We’re best friends,” he explains, a remark that seems a non sequitur for a moment after the distraction of his teeth, and by the time Sephiroth has sorted that out and had time to consider a response, not-Sibram has yielded to calls from outside the ring to give way to Collins, whom Sephiroth recognizes and dislikes. He defeats him with prejudice and a small amount of blood.

He fights three other SOLDIERs nominated by some social competition process in which he has no interest, then having flung a particularly disappointing Third into the wall (their observers parting hurriedly) he points at the slim Third who’d originally approached him. “You.”

Despite having issued the initial invitation himself, the young man seems possibly the most surprised of anyone present. “Me?”

“I don’t know you,” Sephiroth says, to avoid saying it’s because he’d been the only one to actually ask, and thus positively reinforce that behavior in general. “That makes you interesting. Come.”

Rather anxiously—Sephiroth suspects the boy hadn’t seen him in action before, and is now feeling intimidated in a way third-party rumors of his capabilities had not instilled—his selected opponent sets his helmet aside and steps into the ring. “I’m Harper,” he says, which is a reasonable response to ‘I don’t know you.’

“Sephiroth,” he replies, certain it is not necessary, and raises his sword one-handed, and beckons with the other.

Harper is accommodating. Then again, he’s seen Sephiroth’s offense, and probably concluded he was not likely to gain any advantage by trying to draw him into being the one to attack.

He isn’t entirely boring, though. After bouncing a few wide cuts off Sephiroth’s defense, to get a feel for it, he tries a high feint before going low. It was well thought of—Harper is shorter than most SOLDIERs, and Sephiroth has always been shorter than all of them and is thus not much practiced at defending his legs from an opponent armed with a sword.

Shuriken and plenty of monsters come in that low, however, and the occasional enterprising close-fighting ninja, so it isn’t actually an unaccustomed angle of defense.

It was well thought of, but less well executed; he committed to the feint somewhat too much, which cost him time on the real cut, and even with slower reflexes or if he hadn’t recognized the feint for what it was, Sephiroth might have had time to bat it away. “Hm,” he says, as Harper staggers back. “Too slow.”

Harper pulls a face but does not scowl.

“Again.”

Harper is very accommodating, and does the same thing again—faster this time, and without over-committing, so at least he knows what he did wrong and is able to improve. And now this is a tutoring session, apparently.

Those aren’t entertaining at all. But Sephiroth keeps it going for another ten minutes before whipping the rookie’s broadsword out of his hand. “Keep practicing,” he advises, and then steps out of the ring. He isn’t actually obligated to fight every minute he spends here.

He’s determined enough in his planning to stick around for five hours straight, definitely the longest he has ever spent voluntarily sharing a room with a group of other people. Hollander doesn’t show during that time, which means he’ll have to come back later. Or come up with a different approach.

SOLDIER Third Harper sidles up to him on his way out. “I was wondering…” he says, and Sephiroth tries not to look too murderous since in theory he is taking up a leadership role. “Somers says you traded him a light novel for his copy of the Loveless anthology last year. I kind of spent all my pay this month so I can’t hit the bookstore even down-Plate where it’s cheaper, but I have some good stuff if you’re still up to trade? Everyone else I asked so far only had porn.”

Harper is horribly young for someone older than Sephiroth and he talks too much, but his longsuffering tone near the end endeared him somewhat. Mostly Sephiroth is stuck on the concept he has just casually dropped into conversation: there are bookstores in Midgar.

There are bookstores in Midgar, and Sephiroth has been being paid for a few years now, and no one is monitoring his movements, or at least they aren’t admitting it. His reading selection doesn’t have to be limited to what he can find in the Tower. Hojo might give him grief for it later, if he finds out, but Hojo isn’t actually in charge of him anymore.

“I don’t have anything right now,” he says, after a pause that he knows was slightly too long. Harper wilts. “I like to keep my kit light. But I think I’ll go shopping while I’m in Midgar. Have you visited all the shops? Which is your favorite?”

The Third brightens, and over the next minute Sephiroth gains a high-speed rundown of what seem to be most of the bookshops in Midgar without having to admit he needs the tactical input, or seek it out elsewhere. Two of the ones Harper seems to think well of are described in terms of their addresses on streets Sephiroth recognizes. (Really, he has been wasting his liberty since formally joining SOLDIER, but he always hates how people stare. It got worse after they started using him in recruitment and promotional material.) He makes careful mental note of all the intel, then extracts himself with a promise of a literature exchange before they both deploy to Wutai.

Harper hastily reels off the five titles he has to trade with excessive enthusiasm, to make sure Sephiroth doesn’t needlessly purchase duplicate copies.

He’s almost tempted to do so on purpose.

Chapter Text

Vincent shifts his posture and the angle of the gun in his hand, more out of boredom than discomfort. He used to be able to maintain a position during a stakeout for hours at a time, but that had been a matter of discipline, while now his body seems to accept motionlessness with so little difficulty that he occasionally doubts that time is continuing to pass.

Lucrecia’s son leaves the second bookstore he’s visited with a heavy canvas bag and a sketch map on a scrap of paper. From what Vincent managed to overhear, he found the sequel to a book he’d liked and numbers four and five in the series, but not number three, and as the series is out of print was directed to a secondhand shop in the slums.

It was so like Lucrecia of him that Vincent’s heart threatened to distract him by moving in his chest. It does that unpredictably. Sometimes he doubts that it is still a heart.

Lucrecia, of course, was never a fighter, and took his insistence on accompanying her into dangerous places in much better part. But then, she’d also actually known who he was. And that he’d been assigned to her protection.

Much good he did her.

Lucrecia’s son is making his way toward the nearest train station. Vincent sets about making plans for how to shadow him down under the Plate. He can’t take the same train—they aren’t big enough to avoid being spotted. He could wait for the next train, or he could find a place to climb down, near one of the supports, but either of those options introduce more separation than he is comfortable with.

He hovers outside the station, in the shadow of a doorway, as Lucrecia’s son purchases his ticket and goes onto the platform, and as the train pulls away with his charge inside, he drops onto the roof. His landing is nearly soundless, but he chose the car behind Sephiroth’s anyway, just in case.

It’s easier to follow the boy through the undercity, and harder. Easier because hiding places are everywhere and the riot of unpredictable colors, materials, and shapes break up the vision enough to make it all the easier to go unnoticed even within a line of sight, and because the average passerby is less likely to regard a man in red leaping from a rooftop remarkable enough to exclaim over; harder because the broken sightlines and twisting pathways mean it’s easier for Sephiroth to disappear, too. And if anything does try to happen to him, it will be harder to shoot.

In fact someone who mistook him for an affluent child in SOLDIER costume attempts a mugging that Vincent couldn’t have helped with even if he were needed, not in the timeframe there is to act in before Sephiroth has broken several of the man’s bones and zapped him with a Bolt. Vincent feels something startlingly close to a smile pulling a little at the corners of his mouth. Scamp, was what his mother used to say, when he was very small and falling into mud puddles and she was alive.

Lucrecia’s son isn’t his to be proud of, though. Only to protect.

He vanishes into the narrow, deep space of the book store—an old two-story row house with additions, company housing probably dating from when this area was the outer margins of Schreiner City, before United Midgar was incorporated. It's been amazing to see how much the city has changed since Vincent came here as a child, or even as a young man, applying to Shinra’s elite security and intelligence force twenty years ago.

He circles the block as much as that can be managed with the wobbling streets, then adopts a surveillance position at the foot of a rooftop cistern, that should let him keep an eye on the front of the building and still have a good chance of noticing if anyone leaves through the back.

After all, in spite of his age Sephiroth is a professional; he might know better than to give away that he knows he’s being tailed.

There are more things to keep track of, more things and people likely to attack, though fewer likely to be really dangerous down here, under the spreading steel sky, so it takes longer for him to get bored enough to decide to move. But just as he is about to adjust the angle of his right arm, he hears it: a whisper of fabric and of tendon on bone, as someone on the far side of the same roof adjusts their own still, watching posture.

It was a human person, shifting because their body insisted and they didn’t think this post was under observation enough to necessitate the sacrifices called for by perfection. But definitely it is someone maintaining surveillance on the street below.

The odds are it is someone else who is also watching Sephiroth.

With careful silence, he checks that his gun is loaded and the safety off, and unfolds from his crouch on the edge of the roof, back against the cool tank of rainwater. He listens until he can make out breathing. Only one.

Vincent spin around the cistern, gun barrel fixed on the other watcher without a waver, and freezes.

Fortunately he gauged the range right, and was in a good position to freeze—at a close enough range to give the watcher little time to dodge if he fires, but out of easy lunging distance.

The man takes in this reality in a single glance and lets the hand he had reaching toward his own gun draw back, the palm turning upward in an easy, deceitful no threat here.

He’s aged, of course—grey threads his hair, and the lines around his mouth are cut as though with an engraver’s tools. But nevertheless he is just the same, just as he ever was, and Vincent, who does not look a day older than he had last time he left Midgar…Vincent is the one who is different.

“Veld,” he says, and his voice is as much ash and broken stone as it was on his first words months ago, after rising from his tomb with the knowledge that Lucrecia’s child was in danger and she would want him to do something about it, a better job than he had protecting her.

Veld, mildly surprised at the recognition, which is no easy feat, blinks and squints. Then it is his turn to do the recognizing and he stares outright, consternated. “Vincent?”

There seems no point in trying to hide it now. He inclines his head in a nod, not deep enough to break his eye contact and give Veld an opening.

“Vincent Valentine.” Veld rolls his name around in his mouth like a long-untasted flavor. “You died fourteen years ago.”

I was reported dead, Vincent could say, considering he is sure that report was full of falsification and that Veld must have sniffed that out, master of misleading documentation that he has always been. But it is more honest to reply, “I came back.”

From Veld’s expression, he doesn’t believe Vincent means it literally, or means it about death. That’s fine. It doesn’t need believing. “In order to stalk one of our SOLDIERs?”

SOLDIER is something that came into existence while Vincent was lying in a coffin, and he’s only been able to do a limited amount of data-collection, but Sephiroth’s underage enrollment in the program and Hojo’s implicit but clear central role tells all the story he needs about what the program is. Somehow, it’s connected to the Jenova Project.

He corrects, “To protect Lucrecia’s son.”

Veld stares at him for another few seconds, and then he sighs, and his body language shifts from carefully telegraphed non-confrontational strength to something more open, and probably at least a little more honest. “I don’t know why I thought six months apart would break up that fascination, now that it’s obvious almost a decade and a half hasn’t.”

Vincent says nothing. Veld played a very active role in breaking them apart and sending them, down slightly different paths, into Hojo’s power, but he meddled with good intentions. Whether Vincent has forgiven him or not, he doesn’t hate him for it.

Veld looks him up and down, taking in the reds he woke up dressed in, his new hairstyle, the claws and the boots like knives. Vincent sees him consider and then discard a joke about being out of uniform. “She told me you were dead, you know,” Veld remarks lightly. “I wasn’t sure whether to believe her.”

“You’ve seen her?” Vincent’s hand tightens on the gun still aimed squarely at Veld’s throat. This is the first news he’s had of her after the last time they spoke, beyond the evidence in Sephiroth’s existence that she lived several months more after that day.

Her shadow in his dreams does not count.

“Not recently.” Veld watches him. “Though more recently than anyone else as far as I’m aware. You want to know?”

His tone suggests Vincent would be better off not knowing.

“Only for her sake am I walking this world of ash and tears rather than secure in my grave,” Vincent tells his old partner. “Tell me.”

Would he shoot, if Veld will not speak? Of course not. Not in the face. It would cost him his lead on Lucrecia as well as his old friend, so there is no need even to begin a debate inside his strange, rhythm-less heart.

But in the leg? Absolutely. At this range the round would punch right through the armor weave of the old Turk uniforms, and he doubts there have been such technical breakthroughs in the last fourteen years to protect Veld enough to matter.

Veld undoubtedly sees some of this in his face. He was always better at reading him than anyone. “I helped her,” he says slowly. “In your memory. Hojo had her barred from the facilities at Nibelheim and was pressuring her to resign from the company. There was somewhere she wanted to go that was difficult to access, and her requisitions through official channels were all being denied. I brought her there. For all I know, she is there still.”

Vincent’s breath catches in his throat. There is a specific location where she might be. It’s more than he honestly ever expected. “Where?”

“Would you like me to take you?”

The twist in his chest is as though the strange hard thing that has replaced his heart has turned itself upside down and upright again, a full rotation. “No,” he gets out. “I have to keep an eye on—”

Suddenly he knows, with a knowing that goes too deep to call information, that while he was distracted Lucrecia’s son finished his business in the bookshop, and left. “Him,” he says, and almost throws himself into pursuit, but he knows his old friend too well to easily show him his back, and he cannot leave this knowledge behind untapped. Sephiroth is strong. He can survive a few more minutes by himself. “Why were you following him,” he asks. His gun still has not moved.

“Can’t it be for the same reason you were?”

“No.”

“…he’s been behaving suspiciously,” Veld admits, and this is not at all because he is being threatened. He has decided Vincent should know. “Networking.”

“I did tell him it’s not good for him to be alone so much,” Vincent says, information for information. He’s pleased.

Veld snorts. “You’re one to talk.” Veld knows better. At least Vincent thinks he does. He should. Vincent has never been a socially inclined personality, but he’s also never voluntarily let himself be alone, the way Lucrecia’s son is always alone. “That’s not all,” he adds. Searching Vincent’s face. “He broke into an office to access the databases. We don’t know what he pulled. It was a very smooth operation. Anyone less memorable or less a subject of ongoing interest would have gotten away with it.”

Again Vincent is proud, even though he still doesn’t have the right.

“So he’s under suspicion.”

“For that and then breaking his usual patterns by networking and going out into the city. It’s nothing serious. Institutional paranoia.”

Vincent remembers institutional paranoia. He saw it kill more than one or two people, and Shinra has very noticeably grown more cutthroat since his day. But a valuable asset with no known ties to dissident groups…he shouldn’t be in too much danger.

Unless Shinra decides that Vincent himself is a dangerous malcontent.

In your memory, Veld said. As though he cared, at least that much. Vincent lets his weapon sink, so it’s pointed at the roof near Veld’s feet instead. He searches his old partner’s face. “Will you tell the President about me?” he asks.

Veld arches both eyebrows. “Is there something to tell?”

Vincent shrugs. “I’m not a threat to the company.”

“Unless we become a threat to that young SOLDIER First, I think,” says Veld. “Which, hm, seems much more likely if he’s considered suspect for consorting with suspicious characters, so clearly it’s in Shinra’s best interests not to report any such thing.”

Vincent feels his expression warm again. That was Veld. He always could make anything be about the job. “I especially don’t want anything getting back to Hojo,” he says. Adds, “He’s the one who killed me.”

Veld’s face does that pinching-together thing that means I knew it, and he says, “I’ll keep that in mind.” He clearly wants to ask what Vincent means by insisting he’s been dead, but Vincent can’t afford to tarry any longer.

“Where is she?” he asks.

“Find me again when you have more time to spare,” says Veld. “And I’ll take you.”

Vincent shoots him a narrow look at this—he never has time to spare, he has a bodyguarding job that eats up every moment, Veld knows how that works, and anyway that’s an outrageous offer. Even if leaving Vincent to choose the approach will make it harder to set a trap than an appointed meeting, getting in a vehicle with Veld to be taken to the place instead of directed to it makes for terrible operational parameters, Veld could take him anywhere.

But he doesn’t have time to argue. With a sharp nod, he’s gone over the roofs, making a beeline to where Sephiroth should have gone if he hasn’t added another errand, gotten lost, or confused his trail to lose his pursuit.

He doesn’t find him. After quartering the area briefly without result, something furious and panicking in his head that feels entirely unlike him begins insisting that Veld kept him talking long enough for the other Turks to do something to Lucrecia’s son even though that’s ridiculous, he lives in the Shinra building, they could take him in his sleep any time they liked. It would be far less troublesome than trying to ambush him in an area he knows contains threats.

Vincent heads up-Plate again eventually. Errand complete, Sephiroth probably caught a train and went home to read his new books. That or he’s still in one of those crooked little shops, or an opportunistic gang of criminals got the drop on him, or some ridiculously venomous monster crawled out of the sewers and bit him on the ankle….

Children are terrifying. Vincent can’t imagine being responsible for one that was actually helpless.

He returns to the surveillance nest he constructed in the lee of a dormer window near the Shinra building. It’s a terrible spot, in a number of ways, but he has to take what he can get; Shinra did not design the area to have many convenient blind spots. What you can’t see from the street you can usually see from a window.

Attempts to catch a quick nap come to nothing. Vincent has always been good at waiting, but he isn’t going to be able to relax until he knows for sure that Sephiroth made it out of the slum and he isn’t guarding what may as well be an empty building.

He waits for night to fall. The building isn’t really empty, and it will be less crowded after dark.

Chapter Text

He takes the emergency stairs. Even if his old clearance still exists, which seems wildly unlikely, the current entrance system involves scanning magnetic key-cards, which was instituted after his time so he never had one, valid or not.

The emergency stairs, though, are embarrassingly easy to break into, and then it’s just walking and walking to the very top of the low-security levels. This building was still under construction when he last saw Midgar, but he did see the blueprints, and his scouting so far hasn’t shown any major deviations from those plans.

It takes more than forty floors for him to become even slightly out of breath, which far exceeds his performance in the best shape of his life. He hasn’t exercised for his health in fourteen years. The way the knee he broke on his second mission doesn’t click no matter how many stairs he climbs on it is disturbing if he lets himself think about it.

It’s almost a relief to meet someone coming down—a young man with his shirtsleeves rolled up, carrying a half-eaten sandwich, apparently unwilling to wait for the elevator when there are perfectly good stairs. Vincent knocks him unconscious with a sharp uppercut followed by a kick that slams him back into the concrete wall—almost certainly unnecessary, but the sequence of motions is so deeply drilled that aborting it halfway through would be more trouble than finishing it. Besides, he’s never minded a little overkill, as long as it’s not too messy.

He hesitates, on the landing. The rational step here would be to cut the kid’s throat to keep him quiet. Veld wouldn’t even consider it being ‘a threat to Shinra’ even if he found out; the boy is young enough he can’t be far above entry level, possibly even an intern, and even if he’s hard-working enough to still be here at eleven o’clock at night, he can’t make a unique enough contribution to rise above ‘disposable.’

It isn’t as if he hasn’t done more despicable things with less reason. It’s not as though Vincent cares.

But he leaves the intern alive. Veld saw him in the undercity already, anyway; there’s not much use trying to keep a low profile.

The emergency stairs give out just below the 60^th floor, if nothing’s changed while he’s been away, but he doesn’t need to go that high—the Army headquarters start on level 41, and he’s fairly sure from what he’s seen in the field that SOLDIER comes under military command enough for that to be all he needs.

He uses Veld’s login to access the first terminal he finds unattended in a dark room, after whimsically trying his own and being denied. As expected, there’s a reference list of personnel and housing easily available without having to call out to a database, because keeping track of who ought to be where and who’s responsible for a given space is a large segment of the responsibilities associated with quartering troops.

A lot of the troops assigned to Midgar are housed outside the tower itself, as it turns out, in the lower semi-detached bulbs of Sector 0 or even in some barracks near the Plate-edge, for faster deployment on perimeter patrols. Efficient. This includes some SOLDIERs.

SOLDIER First Sephiroth, however…private barrack, forty-ninth floor. Room 4918. Quick cross-reference with floor plan. Excellent.

If there are cameras in the private rooms their feed isn’t accessible here, which isn’t surprising even if it would be convenient, so Vincent doubles back to the stairs and heads up to level 49.

He gets into the vents as quickly as he can, to keep out of sight. It’s night, which means there’s less sound to cover any noise he makes, and given much of this floor is composed of bedrooms it is not less crowded than it would be during the day. He wraps his metal boots and single set of claws in his cape and headband, respectively, to muffle the sound of metal on metal, and tries to crawl silently as he can. He's better at it than he probably should be, considering.

He passes several people asleep in double rooms, and one up late studying who looks up toward the grate as though he’s heard something, or senses that he’s being watched. He passes a large bunkroom where several teenagers are throwing balled-up paper back and forth across the room at one another to stifled giggles while their roommates groan and hiss at them to shut up, except for one who’s audibly snoring.

Finally, after having to retrace his route backward after a wrong turn, he finds the correct room.

Sephiroth is there, sprawled on his bed in full uniform besides the pauldrons and his bare feet, reading.

The relief guts him.

It’s a strange feeling—he isn’t very used to positive emotions anymore, frankly, but being this deeply invested in someone else’s wellbeing is…he hardly knows the boy, even after a month and a half of dedicated stalking. It seems unnatural, to care this much.

He must have made a sound, or simply stared enough to set off Sephiroth’s intuition, because he looks up from his book then, tense. “Who’s there?” he asks.

He rises, oddly menacing for a nervous thirteen-year-old boy. Vincent holds his breath.

Sephiroth steps toward the grate anyway, eyes narrowed, and then jumps up onto his chest of drawers to get a closer look. They stare at each other for a second through the grating; Sephiroth blinks. “…Vincent Valentine?”

Vincent isn’t sure why his identity would be more bewildering than the presence of anyone else in the air vents. Judging from the amount of dust he’s stirred up, no one comes through here routinely. “Yes,” he says.

“Why are you…” Sephiroth makes a broad, circular gesture toward roughly the space in the ceiling Vincent occupies, as if this conveys the depth of his question more thoroughly than the actual words ‘watching me from the vents.’

“Same as always,” Vincent said. “It’s important to make sure you’re safe.”

“In my bedroom? Are you expecting a stealth assault by ninjas? Here?”

“I got in this way,” Vincent says, and not you can’t assume you’re safe just because you’re inside Shinra. “And I didn’t know whether you’d gotten home safely.”

“Home from…” His eyes widen in realization, then narrow. “You were shadowing me during my shopping trip!”

“Me, and at least one active Turk.” Here is something he can share and be helpful, and not merely counseling paranoia. “You were marked extracting information from someone’s work terminal due to your distinctive appearance. They don’t know what you took, but it’s made your deviations from routine suspect.”

Sephiroth looks mutinous. “I was only looking to confirm some of the things you said,” he replies, which is logical. It isn’t however likely to make the Turks feel any better. He’s sure Shinra made sure not to tell the boy these things for a reason. “I found your record,” he adds. “It wasn’t erased. Who…” And then he stops. The pause draws on.

“Should I come down?” Vincent asks. It may expose him to electronic surveillance and will make disappearing if anyone bursts in difficult, but Sephiroth whispering into his vent is already suspicious enough and if anyone comes in in response to seeing that on cameras specifically to target the man in the ceiling, the confined space of the vent will become problematic, so it’s a fair trade-off.

Sephiroth seems to consider the situation that is his standing on his furniture to whisper into the ceiling, and nods. “That seems best.” He reaches up to take out the screws, then steps down, taking the vent cover with him. Considerate.

Vincent crawls forward a little while he does that, to be able to come out feet-first. Headfirst would be manageable but definitely not desirable. He stays on top of the chest of drawers where he lands for now, while Sephiroth after hovering briefly in the middle of the floor returns to his bed. He sits up facing Vincent now, rather than sprawling against his pillow.

“What did you mean by saying Hojo killed you?” Sephiroth demands.

Vincent’s hand goes to his chest, where Hojo shot him through the heart and then made sure that it took him a long time to die, and then dragged him back, only for Lucrecia to be lost by the time he woke. “I disapproved of one of his experiments,” he says. “I was foolish enough to approach him in his lab, alone, to remonstrate…and foolish enough not to be prepared for the barrel of a gun against my ribs.” At such close range, the Turks’ armorweave might as well be onionskin.

He glosses over the confused agony that followed, says, “I woke up like this.” He raises his left hand in demonstration, realizes it still has his headband wrapped around it, and pulls it loose.

“In those clothes?” Sephiroth asks, watching him wrap the headband back in place, doing at least a little to contain his hair. “Why are you still wearing them?”

Vincent shrugs. He could say a lot of things—that the cape feels right, enough so that he seems to have taken it away from its job as muffling and put it back on already, without noticing himself doing it; that he can’t take the prosthetic glove armor thing off his arm and suspects the boots are similarly non-negotiable but hasn’t checked. That he doesn’t want to undress and find out what he looks like underneath.

It was bad enough finding out what’s happened to his Limit Break.

None of those things seem appropriate to say to such a sharp-eyed, experienced child.

Sephiroth accepts the shrug, sparing him having to figure something out. “You followed me here from Wutai?” he asks instead. “That’s halfway around the world. Did you stow away?”

“Yes.”

It was surprisingly easy—unless they’ve recently taken a town or city with particularly little destruction and are engaged in heavy looting, Shinra brings a great deal more to Wutai than away, since they don’t ship corpses home, so there was plenty of empty space in a returning supply helicopter.

Arched eyebrows. “Just to keep an eye on me.”

“It’s the only thing that matters,” Vincent says, even though Veld has dangled a possibility before him that threatens to make that untrue. But it’s Sephiroth he woke up knowing Lucrecia wanted him to help, not her, and if he abandoned the boy now only to discover no more than her final resting place…no. He has sins enough to his credit to repent.

He catches Sephiroth staring at this declaration. “I managed to corner Doctor Hollander,” the boy says, a little abruptly, as though to get away from what Vincent has just said. “This afternoon, before I went out.”

He seems expectant, so Vincent says, “I don’t recognize the name.”

“No, he didn’t recognize yours, either. But he did react to…Lucrecia Crescent’s. And became very agitated when I hinted toward some of the things you said about experimental material and…Jenova.” The boy has pursed his lips, and now he tilts his head slightly. “I tricked him into confirming part of it, and then he pressed me to promise not to tell Hojo he’d told me.”

“Hm,” says Vincent. He really should have expected this.

“Yes,” agrees Sephiroth, somewhat mysteriously. What does he think he and Vincent agree on about this Hollander? He leans forward. “Did they say anything to you about Ancients?”

“No.” Lucrecia did bring them up once or twice, but that had been too close to mentioning Grimoire, the presence of whose memory had always stood between them like an iron gate, threatening to swing closed upon too much provocation. So it was only ever in passing. “That was my father’s area of expertise.”

He adds, “I did hear that Jenova had been confirmed as an Ancient, but I don’t know how.”

“I don’t either,” says Sephiroth, sitting back again. “And I’d dearly like to, because Hollander let slip that Hojo’s said since that it’s turned out she wasn’t. That was the part he was so concerned about my repeating.”

“…ominous,” Vincent concludes. If the Jenova samples had merely been from a normal dead woman, then Sephiroth would probably not have been such a success…or maybe it was some other part of the procedure that gave him his prodigy status, and that was what they replicated with SOLDIER.

Anyway, if they never really knew what they were working with, no wonder it went so wrong for Lucrecia. “I wonder if she would know anything,” he murmurs.

“Probably not, if she left the Project while I was an infant,” Sephiroth says.

Vincent sighs. It’s probably true.

Sephiroth leans forward again. “I believe you,” he says. “About my mother. You told me in Wutai you haven’t been able to confirm her location or vital status. And you’ve made it clear you thought highly of her, but you’ve otherwise been vague.

“What can you tell me?”

Vincent has always hated open-ended questions, and perhaps the boy figures this out because he prompts,

“What was her situation last you knew of her, personally?”

“She was…carrying you,” Vincent says. “It was hard on her body. The…experiments were invasive and…causing complications. I…tried to interfere. When I woke up, she was gone. I couldn’t save her.” He glances down at his hands, one just as it ever was and one sheathed in golden metal that is not quite brass. Should he mention his new lead? What if it comes to nothing?

“Were you…together?” Sephiroth’s question comes out even more awkward than Vincent's own inability to say the word ‘pregnant’ and Vincent is mercifully distracted by that from the full bite of the question itself.

“…no,” he says. “We had…quarreled. I put my duty as a Turk over staying by her side, and I regret it now with every breath.”

“So, it wasn’t…” Sephiroth has always seemed terribly small, but there’s something childlike in the way he fidgets with the lower edge of his knit shirt that Vincent doesn’t recall ever seeing before. A vulnerability he has never before allowed. “There’s no chance it might…you weren’t interfering on the grounds of…”

Finally, Vincent understands.

“I’m not your father.” I wish I were, he cannot quite say, because it is too much and because he isn’t sure it would be quite honest. He never wanted children. He never wanted children. The last thing he’d wanted was to find himself repeating his father’s mistakes. Unless it was to make his own, and find them worse.

Sephiroth sighs. It seems more resigned than anything. Vincent can’t say it’s much of an achievement to rank above Hojo as a potential father figure, especially on the basis of such little acquaintance, but he appreciates it anyway.

“Did Hojo,” Vincent begins. Cannot determine how to continue. He has only the vaguest idea what the sequence of events that have made Lucrecia's son a war veteran at thirteen have been.

“He’s hinted he is,” says Sephiroth, which is an answer to another question altogether than Vincent meant to ask. “I hoped he wasn’t, if only to shut him up about the idea that I take after him.”

“Not a compliment,” Vincent says, drily because Hojo undoubtedly means it as one. To himself, chiefly.

“Hojo has never been as good as he wants people to think.” Sephiroth’s upper lip displays a hint of a curl. “His experimental model is shoddy and he’s always rushing to the next exciting thing. He always knew he couldn’t measure up to a scientist like Professor Gast. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was jealous of my mother, too.”

This seems to Vincent very probable, and he nods.

More softly, the boy asks: “…how do I look like her?”

Vincent hesitates. It’s not that he’s unable to describe Lucrecia, or to wax poetic over her beauty, but it took him a while to be able to say any of it to her face, and in this context precise wording becomes even more essential. “…in many ways,” he says. “The…curve of your cheek, and the way it drops to your jaw. Some of the chin. The top of your nose, and part of its slope, and the curve of your eyelids.”

The resemblance will fade somewhat, he suspects, with adolescence. He wonders if more of Hojo will come through, or Lucrecia’s father, whatever he looked like, or even genes from whatever the Jenova samples were.

He brushes his unmodified hand across his mouth, thinking. There’s something of her there, too, but it’s subtle, in the muscles at the corners mainly—Sephiroth’s lips are bright against his skin, and Lucrecia’s never were, unless she wore lipstick, which she usually didn't bother to do.

He’s paler than either of his parents, too, but that’s hardly a surprise considering the hair. All his coloring is mysterious, and probably attributable to Science.

Sephiroth sighs, and leans all the way back, his shoulders and skull against the wall over his bed. It’s a complicated sigh—a weight removed, a wait ended, not satisfaction but not quite disappointment either. Vincent lets the silence hang between them; it is not quite comfortable, but neither is it strained, and Sephiroth seems to need these minutes contemplating his own ceiling.

He rouses, sentiment once more put away, and brushes his distraction from his face like an errant cobweb. He asks Vincent, “How did you get in, anyway?”

“Emergency stairs. They’re easy to break into, if you know what you’re doing.”

Sephiroth considers this, then grabs his boots. “Show me.”

Vincent can’t think of any reason to refuse. “Very well.”

Chapter Text

The plan is to slip through the halls, Sephiroth staying barefooted for now for the sake of silence, trying not to be spotted together if they must be spotted at all, take all 48 flights of stairs down, explore the vulnerabilities of the locks at the bottom, and part ways.

They don’t make it as far as the stairwell.

The direct route takes them past the bank of elevators, a narrow space no more inviting than the rest of the floor, which is largely bare metal. One of the call-buttons is lit up, as though someone tried to summon an elevator and then walked away when it failed to arrive quickly enough.

Possibly a sign to be alert for yet another person in the emergency stairwell, Vincent thinks, although at least whoever it was was evidently heading up.

And then he pauses, because Sephiroth has.

A moment later, he hears the same thing:

The trudge of two oncoming security guards, converging on the space in front of the elevator banks from both the direction they came from and the direction they were going. Those are the only two directions. They’re going to be seen. Nowhere to retreat.

They exchange a glance. There’s a tension here that was never present in Wutai, when anything that threatened them was simply to be killed. They can’t kill Shinra security. The fallout would be far worse than merely being spotted together, and besides Sephiroth is unlikely to allow it. He’s still loyal to the company.

Vincent is about to suggest Sephiroth make a show of driving off the intruder, although he isn’t carrying a weapon so unless he has any suitable spells in his bangle he may have to try to convincingly menace Vincent with a boot in each hand.

Beside them, the elevator dings, and the doors open.

It’s empty.

In instant accord, they step inside. Sephiroth punches the door-close button, and they are gone before either guard can round a corner and spot them.

The elevator is, unfortunately, going up. He’ll have to wait until it’s done with that to get it to go down again, so he can leave.

Vincent realizes several seconds late that he should have punched in any intervening floor number to stop the elevator and let them or at least Sephiroth get out, rather than let the elevator get all the way to its destination. Because of the very high odds that whoever had summoned it would still be waiting.

By the time he’s realized it, though, they’re out of intervening floors, and the doors are sliding open.

Hojo is there.

There’s time to see him utterly taken aback. This wasn’t even a trap; he had no idea they were in this elevator, he was just trying to go down to his apartment and sleep, like an ordinary human being.

Then a blend of emotions curdle across his face, amusement masking everything else into ambiguity except a clear edge of malice, and he says, “What is a failed experiment like you doing in a place like this?”

Vincent doesn’t answer. It’s his normal response to Hojo. He thinks it’s a lot of people’s normal response to Hojo.

Sephiroth, he realizes, is behind him. Hojo hasn’t seen him yet.

“Now, I can’t have you running around,” Hojo begins, and puts out an arm to keep the elevator doors from closing, either to keep Vincent (and incidentally Sephiroth) in place while he talks, or in preparation to join them.

Vincent’s reaction is reflexive. The grinding rage and knotting worry in his head both see Hojo reaching toward Sephiroth and say no, even though touching him is the least of the harm someone like Hojo can do, even though he’s undoubtedly touched him dozens if not hundreds of times in thirteen years. And so he slams the button for the 49^th floor and slams Hojo back with his full weight in the middle of the man’s chest, before he can trip the pressure sensor.

The doors close behind him, just failing to catch the trailing edge of his cloak.

Not ideal, but getting Sephiroth away while he engaged the threat seemed to make sense. Still makes sense. If Sephiroth can get back to bed without being connected to his presence, he can get out of this without having done any further harm. It is so difficult to exist in the world without making mistakes; he doesn't deserve more chances; he almost stayed in the coffin where Hojo left him forever for a reason.

But he got up for a reason, too.

Hojo is laughing. Vincent should have grabbed him by the throat.

“Did you get tired of being neglected in that old laboratory?” Hojo asks. “I’m afraid I’ve learned everything I can from you!”

Vincent feels his lips tighten, but still says nothing. The room they’re in now is a single vast and strangely organized lounge. The ceilings are higher and the lighting gentler than it was on level 49, and there are artificial plants and warm colored upholstery to soften the space. Other than the two of them it seems to be empty, and the silence swallows Hojo’s words a little, makes them seem less sharp than they did in the confines of the underground lab, as Vincent lay dying and being cut apart.

“Why are you here?” Hojo’s eyes are as always more intent the more he sounds like he does not care, and he’s narrowing them now, obviously noticing how Vincent has neither continued attacking nor tried to escape, and growing speculative.

Shooting Hojo would improve his life immeasurably, and he suspects it would benefit the rest of the world as well. But would it improve or worsen his chances of escape?

Then, too, Veld is much less likely to follow through on his promise of information about Lucrecia, if Vincent almost immediately recants on his own promise not to be a threat to Shinra by killing a board member.

So he should just go.

He reaches back without taking his eyes of Hojo, and presses the summon button for the next elevator over from the one he arrived in.

“I know,” says Hojo. “You came to check up on Sephiroth.”

The unexpected insight cuts too deep. Vincent does not quite flinch, but Hojo catches it anyway. “You did!” He laughs, heartily, from the gut. “Now,” he leans forward, back into Vincent's easy reach as though he has nothing at all to fear, “why ever would you want to do that?”

“He’s Lucrecia’s son,” Vincent says. Is immediately annoyed with himself. Hojo knew that.

“And not yours,” Hojo fires back. Flashes one of his smiles, that Vincent never liked and that now make his skin crawl. “Mine. He’s mine and Lucrecia’s boy. Does that eat you up inside still, Vincent? Even now? That she chose me?”

Vincent hardens himself. It used to be easier. He could make himself indifferent stone and let nothing whatsoever through, and soften only when he chose to.

He’s filled with cracks, now, ever since he was killed and woke up again. Since Hojo— “Don’t make me laugh,” he makes himself say, toneless. “She only chose you by default.”

He doesn’t know if he believes it, can’t even bear to think about the question, but he knows it will drive Hojo mad. “The same way you got the Directorship,” he adds, a shot in the dark based on Sephiroth’s remark earlier, because if there was one trait that exemplified Hojo it was always ambition. “Getting everyone better than you out of the way, starting with her.”

Hojo’s face twists horribly, as though for an instant that shot went home, and then smooths out into another smirk. “Is that what you think? Oh no, I had no need to harm little Lucrecia. I took her off the Jenova Project when her services were no longer required, and she took care of herself.”

Vincent’s hand clenches on his weapon. If he didn’t have the slim thread of Veld’s assurance that he was the last person to see her and she was still alive then, nothing in the world could stop him from lashing out at that.

It would be so easy. His gun is ready in his hand. Even if Hojo’s carrying this time, too, he can’t draw faster than Vincent could put a bullet in his head.

The elevator goes ding and opens, and he throws himself into it even as he notes absently that it’s the wrong one, not the one he summoned, and then he’s collided with the very short figure already there and they’ve gone down together. Vincent tears himself free to lunge at the button panel and slam the doors shut before he can be followed, but he suspects Hojo saw past him, in that moil, to the very distinctive small figure with shoulder-length pale hair and a tiny black SOLDIER uniform.

Vincent punches the button for the ground floor and turns.

Sephiroth seems to have used the time the elevator was going down and then up again to put his boots on. Vincent both cannot see why, and sympathizes entirely. To be barefoot in uncertain circumstances is never reassuring, even if there’s no obvious way having shoes on would help in confronting Hojo.

He realizes he’s annoyed.

“Why did you come back?” he demands.

“You needed backup!” Sephiroth snaps. “You’ve been looming over my shoulder droning about teamwork enough these past few months, what do you think you’re doing sending me away like some child when…”

“I’m not used to having backup anymore,” Vincent admits. Especially not when it comes to Hojo. It’s easier than arguing about whether Sephiroth is a child. “But the situation was under control. He wasn’t going to surprise me the same way twice.”

“And if he had a different way?”

Uncomfortable possibility. Unlikely, considering Hojo’s surprise at seeing him, but still. “I got you away without his seeing us together the first time,” Vincent says. “Your return made a waste of that. Hojo saw you.”

“I’m not afraid of him,” grumbles Sephiroth, slouching rebelliously against the side of the elevator, a stark contrast to his treating Hojo as some sort of ogre Vincent needed protection against. “He’s never hurt me,” he adds, when he sees Vincent looking askance. “Not really. He wouldn’t, I’m too valuable. He already killed you once.”

Oh. He was worried about Vincent.

“…I was fine,” he says. “But will you be?” After all, the kind of not hurting someone that goes with their value isn’t a protection against every suffering.

“Of course,” says Sephiroth.

The elevator continues down. It passed the 49^th floor while they were talking; Sephiroth may have simply missed his opportunity to push the button and be waiting, as Vincent foolishly did earlier, for it to finish its trip down to the lobby and turn around.

When the elevator doors open on the ground-floor lobby, Veld is waiting, and he is very clearly not there by coincidence.

For a second, silence reigns between the three of them. It’s past midnight, and the room is empty aside from the leader of the Turks.

Then Vincent deliberately steps out of the elevator before the doors can close on them again, and Sephiroth follows, and while Veld does not retreat from their advance neither does he make ready to halt it, and so Vincent stops again, several feet away. He sees Veld’s body language soften slightly, though he must know Vincent’s gun is in his hand under the folds of his cloak.

“You logged in as me,” he tells Vincent, quirking an eyebrow. “How is it the thirteen-year-old with no counter-intelligence training is still better at this than you?”

“I’ve had training,” Sephiroth objects.

“I didn’t care if you knew,” Vincent shrugs. It almost seemed polite to let him know.

Also, Sephiroth knew the building much better than Vincent did, so he had advantages.

Veld looks pained. “Why.”

Vincent did ask him for deniability which he then took less than a day to burn. That must be frustrating. “I lost track of him when you delayed me, and needed to run reconnaissance on his position to make sure he was secure.”

“I suppose it didn’t occur to you to ask me whether he’d made it back safely.”

Vincent shrugs. It’s not as though they had an open line of communication. And besides, that is presuming more trust than they have between them—even in the old days, Veld would have lied to him if Shinra ordered it.

Veld looks over at Sephiroth. “I see my old colleague has made contact. Where are you two headed?”

Sephiroth looks away from Veld and shrugs, though whether that means he had no plan for what to do after getting off the elevator or only that he has no desire to tell an active-duty Turk, Vincent cannot guess.

To fill the void he says, “Sephiroth wanted to know more about getting around security.”

“And then?”

“Hojo.”

“Ah.” Veld looks even more humorless than usual, but also for a moment deeply earnest. “I can’t have him as my enemy, Vincent.”

Vincent inclines his head. He’s familiar with how much of a threat that status can be to the life, let alone the livelihood and liberty.

“SOLDIER First Sephiroth,” Veld continues crisply. “I think you’ll find there’s a pest control mission scheduled on the Western continent that’s suitable to your talents, as it’s marked with potential dragons. I recommend you pick it up now and that both of you follow me immediately.”

He turns and goes, and since they do want to be out of this room before Hojo (who after all had the elevator Vincent had summoned conveniently on its way when they left) or anyone he sends can arrive, they both follow.

“I don’t have any of my gear,” Sephiroth protests, somewhat half-heartedly, as they follow Veld into the service corridor where things like janitorial supplies hide, and out a discrete side entrance into a shadowed street.

Vincent wonders if the boy thinks he could fight a dragon with his bare hands, if necessary.

Veld has flipped open the funny clamshell device that Vincent has learned is called a PHS; they were released while he was in his coffin. He seems to be thumbing a series of buttons. “My aide should meet us at the helicopter with either your things or adequate substitutes. Is that acceptable?”

“Potentially.” Sephiroth has his own clamshell device out. Vincent redoubles his peripheral awareness since both his companions are distracted by tiny screens. “Are we actually headed for the Western continent?”

“…yes.”

“What’s there?”

“This afternoon,” Veld says, “I promised to help Vincent investigate the last known location of Lucrecia Crescent.” Veld snaps closed his PHS and glances over his shoulder, about to lead them around a corner and either toward the helicopter or into an ambush. “Interested?”

Sephiroth’s mouth firms into a line. “Yes.”

Lucrecia’s son is coming to follow her trail. Vincent…doesn’t have to choose. And neither of them has to go alone.

“You’ve got deniability, I assume,” Vincent says, as they follow Tseng up the side-street and continue not to be waylaid by armed agents.

“Mm. Officially I am in Junon. You understand the moment I get properly authorized orders on this subject I will no longer be able to help you.”

Vincent nods. He understands entirely. Veld mentored him in the service; Vincent learned his own foolish uncompromising attitude toward a Turk’s duty from a deeply entrenched source. For Veld, nothing can come above the mission—it was his way of carving out a life and sense of self that lay just outside the bounds of the mission’s remit that Vincent once hoped to imitate.

Sephiroth understands as well. “If it turns out I can’t go back, there’s nothing I left in my room I can’t live without,” he decides, a little fiercely in the way of children. “Though I will miss some of my materia, and I hadn’t finished my new books.”

“I’ll have them mailed to you, if it comes to that,” says Veld, and then they have reached the courtyard where an unmarked black helicopter has been set down, and waiting by it with a bulging shoulder satchel and a sheathed sword too big for him is a boy even younger than Sephiroth, in a perfect miniature Turk’s uniform.

“Well done, Tseng,” Veld tells the child, who can’t be much more than ten. “As a reward, you’re flying copilot.”

The child Turk seems quietly pleased, and hands both sword and bag off to Sephiroth before ducking into the vehicle ahead of the rest of them.

Arming Sephiroth is not at all bad, as good-faith gestures go. Vincent boards the helicopter ahead of his charge anyway, to inspect it for hidden traps or further Turks; Sephiroth waits patiently outside until he gives the nod.

He smiles a little, and that too looks like Lucrecia, the not quite natural way the expression always fit onto her face, and then he looks toward Tseng. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?”

The old naval protocol did not apply to helicopters last Vincent knew. It’s possible that’s changed while he was away, but he thinks this is a joke.

Veld firmly flicks a series of switches, and the helicopter growls to life. “Permission granted.”