Work Text:
"Sephiroth!" Feet pounded on the gravel behind him. "Sephiroth, where - oh! There you are!" Zack slid to a stop beside him, flailing a little from the abrupt change in speed. The trooper following him was less fortunate, failing to stop his momentum and bouncing off Zack and onto the ground.
"Zack," Sephiroth greeted the other Soldier calmly, not looking away from the burning manor. The smoke was hard to see against the dark of the night sky, but flames had filled the first story and he could catch glimmers of the fire having reached the second. Strictly speaking, only the library in the basement and its patchwork of true-but-old notes from Gast and Hojo's self-serving drivel needed to burn, but Sephiroth liked to be thorough and this would do a much better job of hiding his tracks.
"So," Zack said, drawing the word out. He was eyeing Sephiroth carefully. "How are you feeling?"
He was feeling a great many things. Satisfaction of seeing through one of Hojo's games. Relief that Genesis's poison was nothing more than lies meant to hurt. Pain that Genesis had meant to hurt him, needlessly and cruelly. A sliver of disappointment at losing a possible lead on his mother. The exhaustion of wasting days and missing sleep for nothing.
Too many things. Sephiroth pushed it all away and answered Zack with: "Fine. Once the fire is out, we're leaving." There was nothing left in this town that he cared about. He hoped leaving would also silence the annoying buzz that had started since he arrived - it was currently reminding him of Hojo at his most grating and demanding.
Something crashed inside the manor - one of the floors collapsing, Sephiroth assumed - and several windows shattered, sending whorls of sparks out into the air.
"Should," the trooper started tentatively. "Shouldn't we be doing something about that?"
"No," Sephiroth said.
"It'll be fine, Cloud," Zack said. "The wind's taking it away from town, see? No problem."
"Um, yeah, but-" Cloud tried, then promptly lost his nerve when Sephiroth looked at him.
The peace didn't last long unfortunately. People started shouting in the town square and a man Sephiroth vaguely recalled as being the local mayor ran up, cursing the whole way.
"What are you doing?" The man yelled.
"Shinra business," Sephiroth replied curtly. "None of your concern."
"None of my- the whole damn building is on fire!"
"Hey, man, don't worry," Zack said, stepping in. "You won't get blamed for this."
The man wasn't reassured. Sephiroth added, "There was a monster loose in the building. The mission report will reflect that the loss of the Shinra manor was an unfortunate accident."
"That's all well and good, but we need to get this fire put out. Now!"
Sephiroth turned and glared at the man. He - and the growing crowd behind him - flinched.
"No. Go back to your homes. The blaze is contained."
As if to spite him, it was in that moment the roof finally collapsed with a thunderous crash, sending a massive plume of fire and burning debris into the air. An oppressive wave of heat followed in its wake. Underneath it all, Sephiroth could hear the soft whump of dry wood catching and from the corner of his eye he saw forest just beyond the walls of the manor go up like matchsticks.
Sephiroth stared at the burning trees, vaguely aware of the horrified screams from the townspeople and of Zack grabbing his shoulder and asking for orders. He had plenty of training on how to set fires, both from his formal training and his long exposure to Genesis. He knew of several ways to stoke the flames to greater heights. What he did not have any experience in was in how to stop fires.
He had no idea of what to do. This was not an enemy he knew how to defeat. Sephiroth couldn't kill a forest fire.
A roar rang out from the collapsed manor that was distinctly not from the growing inferno. Fallen timbers heaved up and a mutant behemoth surged up from the wreckage. It roared again, spewing more flames in its rage.
That. That he could kill.
"That would be the monster," Sephiroth lied through his teeth. "Zack, assist with the firefighting efforts," he ordered, then leapt away to engage the behemoth before Zack could protest.
Five days after arriving in Nibelheim, four days after delving into the Shinra manor in search of answers, hours after setting said manor ablaze, and some indeterminate but brief time after finally putting all of the fire out, Sephiroth found himself standing in the Strife home and addressing the exhausted group all seated at the kitchen table.
"We are not staying."
Zack raised a limp hand. He had reportedly been repeat casting Bahamut in order to carve out fire breaks while simultaneously ripping out and throwing the trees the summon had missed. The First was currently more puddle than puppy. "Seph. Buddy. I'm all for leaving but you need a nap first."
"You all need sleep," Cloud's mother interjected. She had her arm around her son, helping him keep upright on the bench. Cloud had spent hours icing down roofs and building up walls with Zack's blizzard materia until his mother had dragged him away and taken his place. "The sun is barely up and you boys have been running around all night. Besides, you won't find anyone driving out until mid-morning at best."
"Sephiroth has been awake for three days straight, actually," Cloud corrected. Extreme mana deprivation made the little trooper bold apparently, because he stared flatly back as Sephiroth leveled a glare at him.
"I am a Soldier First,” Sephiroth said stiffly, “I can handle no sleep for up to a full week."
"It's still unwise," the man who had introduced himself as Vincent Valentine said. The rasp in his voice was so painful, Mrs. Strife nudged a glass of water closer to him. Valentine ignored it. "At least half your party is too tired to safely travel on foot and you can't get transportation for hours. Rest while you can."
Sephiroth wasn't sure what to make of Valentine. He claimed to have been killed and then experimented on by Hojo over twenty years ago and that he had only awoken because the burning manor had fallen in on his head. He was in surprisingly good shape for those supposed events – specimens Hojo left to rot usually looked more like the ones left in the reactor, locked into their mutated forms instead of reverting on the edge of death. Sephiroth was still suspicious of how Valentine had gasped out his claim of knowing Sephiroth’s mother just as Sephiroth had moved to finish him off.
Sephiroth could however believe that Valentine had been a Turk. He was making frustratingly good points.
They were all making good points, if he was being honest. Except listening to them would require staying, and staying meant dealing with the increasingly sharp buzz demanding him to climb up the mountain. Come back to the shrine. Jenova is here don't you want to see your mother-
"Fine," Sephiroth said. "Sleep if you want. I need to get a start on the official report."
Zack frowned but didn't press him about sleeping again. "What are we saying about all this anyways?" Zack asked, then looking at the other - non-Soldier - people in the room tacked on, "officially."
Sephiroth was aware enough of how Shinra operated that he knew there was going to be a cover up. *Officially* Shinra was likely to spin some story about a dragon attack that Sephiroth had heroically stopped before the town could burn. Shinra's willingness to lie was why he felt no shame in fabricating his own reports when he needed to. "Genesis did it."
Zack nodded, as did Cloud after a moment. Mrs. Strife was confused but didn't ask. Valentine was also confused but was not so agreeable.
"The town very clearly blames you for the fire. If you want their silence they will need to be paid off, at minimum. And that still won't stop the Turks from finding out, if that's your goal."
"I'm not worried about the Turks," Sephiroth snapped. He was getting tired of being nagged at. "They have bigger concerns than an old building and a few trees." And Sephiroth himself had bigger concerns than the Turks. The buzz turned voice had become even more demanding, like getting a call from the President that there’s a threat, come quickly, that’s an order-
Zack was explaining to Valentine about Genesis. " -so it's actually really easy to believe that Genesis got mad and decided to torch some of Shinra's stuff-"
Sephiroth's headache turned splitting. My son my son I need you get up here right NOW-
Valentine twitched, a full body spasm that caught everyone's attention. His head turned, looking away from Sephiroth to instead stare at the wall - as if he was trying to look at the mountains beyond it. His fingers were digging into his chest."Something just-"
The lights cut out. Through the window, the early dawn light turned a sickly, ominous green. Sephiroth recognized it as the same glow that came from the mako reactors just as the earth shattering boom hit the town and sent the ground rolling.
That last part might have been just Sephiroth. As he staggered and fell to his knees, clutching his head, the others shot to their feet and started shouting.
"What was that!"
"Shockwave. From an explosion."
"From the reactor?"
"How? It can't have been from the fire!"
It was all meaningless noise, as the screaming in his head became a wordless wail accompanied by the sensation of burning heat worse than any fire Sephiroth had ever experienced, searing him down to the bones, down to the cells, the world was agony-
Until suddenly it wasn't.
It was very quiet. The ground beneath him was blessedly cool.
Maybe I can sleep here actually, Sephiroth thought before he passed out on the floor.