Chapter Text
Sephiroth had time. With the research team dead and him having ensured no one would be alerted to their deaths, Sephiroth had not needed to rush. He had been impatient to claim Cloud though and had left the labs with nothing but a borrowed broadsword and his blood and mako stained scrubs.
The early spring chill barely touched him even as he climbed the mountain in the dead of night, and once he had claimed the last of Mother's power it ceased to matter at all.
If he had had his wing, Sephiroth would have flown down the mountain. As it was, he had wasted no time returning to the village and breaking into the Strife home. His enemy, his eternal rival, was waiting and Sephiroth was eager to return him to his former glory and beyond.
In his haste, he had failed to consider that Cloud still had his mother.
(For one embarrassing moment he thought it had been Cloud himself. That Sephiroth had made some grave error in his travel through time. Then the small details had set in. Minor things, like the fact that this was a woman.)
Sephiroth found her sitting in a rocking chair by the fire, the only source of light in the room. Cloud was in her lap, little more than a tuft of downy hair beneath a swaddle of blankets.
Sephiroth hadn't paid much attention to her before. Their meeting had been as brief and unmemorable as the deaths of the other Nibelheim residents. He had dimly recognized her as the mother of Zack's trooper friend but hadn't had reason to care beyond that, not yet knowing how important Cloud would be.
Sephiroth crept closer, ghosting across the floorboards with ease.
The light of the fire danced across the woman's face, deepening the shadows under her eyes and the glassy edge to her gaze. She was clearly exhausted.
It was part of the plan that no one would see Sephiroth until the time was right and he had intended to steal Cloud out of his crib when no one was looking. It would be smarter to wait until Cloud's mother fell asleep, but Sephiroth wondered, with dark amusement, if he could simply slip her son from her grasp with her none the wiser.
When he stepped into the edge of the firelight though, she startled. It sent her unkempt hair swaying, the spikes flaring like the feathers of a spooked chocobo. Cloud started sniffling, jostled by his mother's sudden movement, and the woman hastily soothed him back down before looking up at Sephiroth again.
She was staring at Sephiroth in familiar bewilderment, questions lurking in her eyes and on the tip of her tongue. It only made her resemblance to Cloud stronger, and filled Sephiroth with nostalgia. It reminded him how much he missed Cloud stumbling after him, grasping for the morsels of knowledge Sephiroth dropped as he lead his rival across the planet.
Sephiroth couldn't help but lean in in anticipation. What answers would the mother seek? What would she dare ask of the god that had stolen into her home in the dead of night?
"Would you like a bath?" She blurted out.
...that was not a question Sephiroth was expecting to be asked. He blinked at her.
The woman was rambling. "You can't be comfortable like that. All that blood and...mako? Is that mako?"
Sephiroth had been bathed in blood countless times and simple mako exposure ceased to register after spending time in the lifestream itself. He was long past being bothered by either.
It was starting to itch though.
"...and not even sleeves in this weather-"
"I will accept a bath," Sephiroth stated, cutting the woman off.
She blinked owlishly at him. "O-oh. Okay. Just let me...."
She looked around the room blankly, before shaking her head and climbing stiffly to her feet. Cloud started fussing again but his mother ignored it this time, shuffling the bundle to one arm as she held out a hand.
Sephiroth looked at it in surprise, then up again to Cloud's mother. The mother who looked so much like her son. The son who had been the only man to ever best him.
He'd taken all he could from Jenova. How much could he gain from the mother of his only equal?
Sephiroth smiled and took her hand.