Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The morning sun cast long shadows across the Sakura Heights apartment complex, a modest but well-maintained building that housed families who preferred the quiet suburbs over the bustling chaos of inner Musutafu. It was the kind of place where neighbors knew each other's names, where children played in the courtyard without supervision, and where the most exciting thing that usually happened was Mrs. Tanaka's cat getting stuck in a tree again.

Of course, none of the residents knew that apartment 4B housed what could arguably be considered the most overpowered family unit in all of Japan.

"Dark, breakfast is ready!" called Sephiroth Hojo from the kitchen, his voice carrying that peculiar mixture of parental authority and underlying gentleness that had developed over years of domestic life. The man standing at the stove, methodically flipping pancakes with surgical precision, looked like he'd stepped straight out of a fantasy game - which, in a sense, he had. Silver hair cascaded down his back like liquid mercury, and his cyan eyes held depths that spoke of battles fought across worlds. Yet here he was, wearing a "World's Greatest Dad" apron (a gift from Eri) and humming what sounded suspiciously like the Chocobo theme while cooking breakfast.

The irony was not lost on him. Sephiroth - once the terror of Midgar, the One-Winged Angel, the man who had literally tried to destroy a planet - was now more concerned about whether his teenage son was eating enough vegetables and if his seven-year-old daughter was getting adequate sleep for proper growth development.

"Coming, old man!" Dark's voice echoed from down the hallway, followed by the sound of rapid footsteps. The fourteen-year-old burst into the kitchen with the kind of dramatic flair that suggested he'd never quite grown out of certain theatrical tendencies. His wild silver hair defied gravity in ways that would make even the most experienced hair stylists weep, and his cyan eyes sparkled with barely contained mischief. He was already dressed in his UA uniform - the prestigious academy had recently begun accepting younger students into a ‘’preparatory’’ program, much to everyone's surprise.

"I'm not old," Sephiroth replied mildly, sliding a perfectly golden pancake onto Dark's plate. "I'm thirty-six."

"Right, right. Sorry." Dark grabbed the syrup bottle with perhaps unnecessary enthusiasm. "But seriously, these pancakes are divine. Literally. I'm pretty sure you're putting some kind of otherworldly enhancement on them."

"That's called 'cooking with love,' you dramatic child."

"Hey! I'm not dramatic, I'm... theatrically expressive."

Their morning banter was interrupted by the soft patter of small feet, and both males immediately straightened as Eri appeared in the doorway. At seven years old, she was the undisputed queen of the household, with silver-white hair that caught the morning light like spun silk and large red eyes that seemed to see far more than they should. She wore a simple yellow dress - her favorite color - and clutched a well-loved stuffed unicorn that Dark had won for her at a festival months ago.

"Good morning, Papa. Good morning, Dark-nii," she said softly, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

Both Sephiroth and Dark melted instantly. It was a phenomenon that had been scientifically observed (by Dark, who took detailed notes) and confirmed: Eri's morning voice could probably achieve world peace if properly deployed.

"Good morning, little star," Sephiroth said, his voice dropping to that special gentle tone reserved exclusively for her. He lifted her easily into her booster seat at the small dining table. "Did you sleep well?"

Eri nodded, though she seemed a bit troubled. "I had another dream," she said quietly, accepting the plate of pancakes shaped like her favorite cartoon character - a magical girl who fought villains with the power of friendship and very large magical weapons.

Dark and Sephiroth exchanged glances. Eri's "dreams" were something of a delicate topic in the Hojo household. While most parents might dismiss a child's claims about prophetic dreams, the Hojo family had learned to take them quite seriously. Especially after the incident with the convenience store robbery that Eri had "dreamed" about three days before it happened, leading to Sephiroth discretely alerting the authorities.

"What kind of dream?" Sephiroth asked gently, settling into his own chair with a cup of coffee that was probably strong enough to wake the dead.

"There's going to be a new teacher at Dark-nii's school," Eri said, carefully cutting her pancake into precise geometric shapes. "She has very curly hair and she's going to make everyone run around a lot. And she's going to ask Dark-nii a question about... um..." She scrunched up her face in concentration. "About what makes a hero strong."

Dark paused mid-bite. "Huh. That's oddly specific, even for you, Eri-chan."

"And," Eri continued, pointing her fork at him with the serious expression that made her look far older than her years, "you're going to say something embarrassing."

"What?! I don't say embarrassing things!"

Sephiroth snorted. "Yesterday you introduced yourself to the mailman as 'the future Dark Lord of UA' and then immediately apologized and offered to help him carry packages."

"That was... I was being friendly!"

"You also bowed so deeply you nearly fell over."

Eri giggled, the sound like wind chimes in a gentle breeze. "Dark-nii, you're silly."

Dark's indignant expression immediately softened. "Yeah, well, I'm your silly big brother. That's different."

The family fell into comfortable conversation as they finished breakfast, discussing plans for the day. Dark had classes at UA, where he was quickly making a name for himself - though whether that reputation was positive or concerning remained to be seen. 

Eri attended a local elementary school, with UA permission, where she was considered a model student, if somewhat unusually perceptive. Her teachers often commented on her remarkable intuition and her ability to anticipate problems before they occurred. They had no idea how literal that assessment was.

And Sephiroth was a florist in the city, which he honestly doesn’t like talking about.

"Don't forget you have parent-teacher conferences next week," Dark said, collecting the empty plates with the kind of casual efficiency that came from years of shared household duties.

"Both schools?" Sephiroth asked, already mentally preparing for the delicate balance of appearing like a normal, concerned parent while avoiding any questions that might reveal the family's more unusual circumstances.

"Yep. Eri-chan's teacher wants to discuss her 'exceptional intuitive abilities,'" Dark made air quotes with his fingers, "and apparently my homeroom teacher has some concerns about my 'theatrical presentation' and 'unusual vocabulary choices.'"

"You did refer to a pop quiz as 'a trial sent by the gods to test mortal resolve,'" Sephiroth pointed out.

"It was a particularly difficult quiz!"

Eri looked up from where she was carefully arranging her stuffed animals on the couch. "Mrs. Yamamoto is going to ask if you read to me at home, Papa. You should tell her about the bedtime stories."

Sephiroth's expression grew carefully neutral. The bedtime stories were something of a contentious issue. In his efforts to be a good father, Sephiroth had initially tried traditional fairy tales. However, his version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" had somehow evolved into an epic saga involving ancient magic, political intrigue, and a surprisingly detailed explanation of optimal home security measures. Eri loved them, but Sephiroth suspected they might not be entirely age-appropriate.

"Maybe I should stick to reading from actual children's books," he mused.

"But your stories are better," Eri protested. "They're more exciting. And the bears in your version are so much smarter."

"The bears in my version have established a complex feudal system and are engaged in resource management conflicts with the neighboring wolf confederation."

Dark burst into laughter. "Dad, you've turned Goldilocks into Game of Thrones."

"I prefer to think of it as 'educational worldbuilding,'" Sephiroth replied with dignity.

As the morning routine continued, the family moved through their well-practiced dance of preparation. Sephiroth packed lunch for all three of them - elaborate bento boxes that looked like they belonged in a high-end restaurant but were assembled with the kind of precision that came from years of military discipline applied to domestic tasks. Dark gathered his school supplies and double-checked his hero costume case (UA students were required to have their costumes ready at all times), while Eri carefully selected which stuffed animal would accompany her to school that day.

The current winner was Mr. Sparkles, a rainbow-colored unicorn that Dark had initially been embarrassed to be seen purchasing, until the clerk mentioned that it was the last one and there was a little girl who'd been looking for it all week. Dark had immediately bought it, along with matching accessories, because the idea of disappointing any little girl - but especially his little sister - was literally unthinkable.

"Alright, everyone ready?" Sephiroth asked, checking his watch. The commute into the city required precise timing, especially since they had to take Eri to her school first, then Dark to UA, before Sephiroth could continue to his own workplace.

"Ready!" Eri chirped, backpack secured and Mr. Sparkles tucked safely in the front pocket.

"Born ready," Dark declared, striking a pose that would have looked ridiculous on anyone else but somehow suited him perfectly.

As they prepared to leave, Sephiroth paused to look around their small apartment. It wasn't much - a modest two-bedroom space with a tiny kitchen, a living room that doubled as Eri's play area, and a balcony that overlooked the apartment complex's courtyard. But it was theirs, and more importantly, it was home.

The walls were decorated with Eri's artwork - colorful drawings that somehow managed to be both childishly innocent and eerily prophetic. Dark's academic achievements were displayed with pride, including several commendations from UA for "exceptional theoretical understanding" and "creative problem-solving approaches".

Photos covered the refrigerator and various surfaces - pictures of family outings, school events, and quiet moments at home. To any observer, they looked like a perfectly normal single father with his two children. The silver hair was unusual, certainly, but in a world of Quirks and heroes, unusual appearance was hardly noteworthy.

What the photos didn't show was the careful thought that went into every aspect of their lives. The way Sephiroth had researched child development extensively to ensure he was being the best father possible. The way Dark had consciously worked to overcome certain antisocial tendencies, channeling his natural arrogance into confidence and his aggressive instincts into protective devotion to his family. The way Eri had learned to frame her prophetic abilities as "good guessing" to avoid uncomfortable questions.

They had built something beautiful and strange and utterly improbable - a family formed from reincarnated legends and powered by genuine love.

"Papa," Eri said suddenly, tugging on Sephiroth's coat as they waited for the elevator, "someone's going to ask you about our family today."

Sephiroth raised an eyebrow. "Oh? What kind of questions?"

"About mama," Eri said quietly. "And about why we moved here."

The elevator arrived with a soft ding, and the family stepped inside. Sephiroth's expression grew thoughtful. The topic of their mother was always delicate - she had passed away when Eri was very young, and while both children remembered her with love, it remained a source of pain for all of them.

"What should I tell them?" Sephiroth asked gently.

Eri considered this with the seriousness she brought to all important matters. "The truth," she said finally. "Just not all of it."

Dark grinned. "The Hojo family motto: 'Honesty through selective omission.'"

"That's a terrible motto," Sephiroth said, though he was smiling.

"All the best family mottos are terrible," Dark replied cheerfully. "It's like a law of the universe."

As they exited the apartment building and made their way to the train station, the family attracted the usual subtle attention they'd grown accustomed to. Three silver-haired individuals were unusual enough to warrant second glances, and Sephiroth's height and bearing gave him an unconscious authority that made people step aside without quite knowing why.

The train ride into the city was a study in controlled chaos. Eri sat quietly with her coloring book, occasionally making observations that were either remarkably insightful or completely random ("That man in the blue suit is going to spill coffee on himself in about five minutes," followed by "I think clouds look like cotton candy for giants"). Dark alternated between reviewing his hero theory notes and engaging in animated discussions with other UA students who recognized his uniform.

Sephiroth observed it all with the kind of quiet satisfaction that came from watching his carefully constructed normal life function smoothly. Every day that passed without incident, every successful interaction with teachers and neighbors, every moment of ordinary family happiness felt like a small victory against the chaos of their extraordinary circumstances.

They dropped Eri off first at Sakura Elementary, where she was greeted enthusiastically by her teacher and classmates. Watching her skip happily through the school gates, backpack bouncing and Mr. Sparkles peeking out of her pocket, it was hard to believe that she carried the weight of prophetic visions in her small frame.

UA was next, and Dark's goodbye was characteristically dramatic - a sweeping bow to his father and a promise to "bring honor to the Hojo name through academic excellence and heroic determination." Other students had stopped staring at his theatrical displays months ago, having apparently decided that Dark Schneider Hojo was simply Like That and there was no point questioning it.

Finally alone on the train to his own workplace, Sephiroth allowed himself a moment of reflection. Seven years. Seven years since he'd found himself in this world, in this body, with memories of another life slowly filtering through the fog of reincarnation. Seven years since he'd discovered two children who needed him as much as he needed them, forming an unlikely family bound together by love and mutual weirdness.

It hadn't been easy. Learning to be human again - really human, not just wearing humanity like an ill-fitting mask - had been perhaps the greatest challenge he'd ever faced. Harder than any battle, more complex than any scheme, more demanding than any quest for power. Because being human meant being vulnerable, meant caring about things that could be lost, meant choosing love over logic and family over ambition every single day.

But watching Dark grow from a barely controlled force of magical destruction into a young man who helped elderly neighbors with their groceries (while still dramatically declaring his intent to "vanquish the forces of evil through heroic justice") made every moment of difficulty worthwhile. Seeing Eri blossom from a traumatized child who flinched at loud noises into a confident little girl who faced the future with courage despite knowing more about it than she should - that made every sacrifice meaningful.

His phone buzzed with a text message from Dark: "Eri was right. New teacher, curly hair, lots of running. Also I may have accidentally challenged a upperclassman to single combat during lunch. In my defense, he insulted your cooking."

Sephiroth sighed and typed back: "No actual combat. Settle it with words like a civilized person."

The response was immediate: "But words are so much less satisfying than glorious battle!"

"Dark."

"Fine, fine. Words it is. You never let me have any fun."

"I let you have plenty of fun. I just prefer it when your fun doesn't require me to explain to your teachers why their student is challenging people to duels."

"Valid point. Love you, old man."

"Love you too, Shez. Try not to dramatically declare anything for the rest of the day."

"No promises."

Sephiroth smiled, tucking his phone away as the train pulled into his station. Another ordinary day in their extraordinary life was beginning, full of the usual challenges, surprises, and small joys that made up the fabric of family existence.

And if sometimes, late at night when both children were asleep, he stood on the balcony and wondered at the strange path that had led him here - from planetary destroyer to pancake-making father - well, that was a small price to pay for the privilege of being part of something beautiful.

After all, some of the greatest victories were won not through strength or cunning, but through the simple act of showing up, day after day, for the people who mattered most.

But you're probably wondering how they all got here in the first place, aren't you? Don't worry - that explanation comes eventually. For now, just know that the universe has a sense of humor, reincarnation is more complicated than most people think, and sometimes the most unlikely families are exactly the ones that work best.

Chapter Text

The thing about reincarnation, Sephiroth had come to understand over the past five months, was that it was remarkably similar to waking up in someone else's dream. Everything was familiar yet wrong, like a song played in the wrong key or a painting viewed through colored glass. The body felt like his own – tall, silver-haired, with those distinctive cyan eyes that seemed to pierce through people's souls – but the memories that came with it belonged to someone else entirely.

Someone who had loved a woman named Akira Hojo.

Someone who had been genuinely, completely, devastatingly happy.

Sephiroth – the original Sephiroth, the one who had tried to become a god and nearly destroyed a planet in the process – had never understood that kind of happiness. He'd understood power, control, the intoxicating rush of absolute dominance. He'd understood rage and betrayal and the cold satisfaction of revenge. But this warm, settled contentment that came from watching his wife hum while she cooked dinner? The way his chest tightened when she laughed at something their son said? The protective fury that rose in him at the thought of anything threatening his family?

This was entirely new territory.

And if he was being honest with himself – which he was trying to be more often these days, as part of his ongoing experiment in being human – it terrified him more than any battle he'd ever fought.

The apartment was modest by any standard, a two-bedroom unit in a middle-class complex on the outskirts of Musutafu. The original Sephiroth Hojo had been a mid-level office worker for a hero support company, the kind of man who took the train to work every morning and came home to dinner every evening and worried about mundane things like mortgage payments and whether his son was eating enough vegetables. The kind of life that the legendary SOLDIER would have once dismissed as beneath notice.

Now, as he sat on the small couch with five-month-old Eri sleeping in his arms while seven-year-old Dark practiced his reading at the kitchen table, Sephiroth found himself thinking that maybe this other version of himself had been the wiser one after all.

"Papa," Dark said suddenly, looking up from his picture book with those startlingly familiar cyan eyes, "why do the heroes in these stories always win?"

It was a loaded question, coming from a child who Sephiroth had quickly realized was far more than he appeared. Dark had the vocabulary of someone much older, the kind of casual confidence that came from genuine power, and a way of looking at the world that suggested he'd seen far more of it than any seven-year-old should have. More importantly, there were moments – fleeting instances when Dark thought no one was looking – where his expression became ancient, weary in a way that no child's face should ever be.

Sephiroth recognized that look. He'd seen it in mirrors for most of his adult life.

"Because," Sephiroth said carefully, shifting Eri to a more comfortable position as she made soft baby noises in her sleep, "the stories are written by the winners."

Dark blinked, clearly not expecting that answer. "But... what about the people who lose? Don't they have stories too?"

"They do. But those stories are harder to tell, and harder for people to hear."

"Why?"

Sephiroth considered this, watching his son's face with the kind of attention he'd once reserved for studying enemy weaknesses. Dark wasn't just curious – he was testing, probing for something. The way he held himself, the careful modulation of his voice, the fact that he'd been nothing but a perfect, polite child for the entire five months since Sephiroth had awakened in this life... it all pointed to someone who was very deliberately playing a role.

"Because," Sephiroth said finally, "most people prefer to believe that the world is simple. That good always defeats evil, that heroes always save the day, that everything happens for a reason. It's comforting."

"But it's not true, is it?"

The question hung in the air between them, weighted with implications that no seven-year-old should understand. In her sleep, Eri stirred slightly, one tiny hand curling into a fist against Sephiroth's chest.

"No," Sephiroth admitted quietly. "It's not."

Dark nodded, as if this confirmed something he'd already suspected. "Mama says the world is more complicated than stories make it seem. She says that sometimes good people do bad things, and sometimes bad people do good things, and that the trick is figuring out which is which."

Akira. Even after five months, thinking about his wife made something complicated twist in Sephiroth's chest. She was... remarkable, in ways that the memories he'd inherited couldn't quite capture. Beautiful, yes, but more than that. Sharp-minded and quick-witted, with a dry sense of humor and an absolutely ruthless approach to anything that threatened her family. She'd taken one look at the way Sephiroth had been fumbling through basic parenting tasks in those first few days and had launched into what could only be described as a comprehensive domestic training program.

"You hold her like she's made of glass," she'd said, adjusting his grip on baby Eri with practiced efficiency. "She's small, not fragile. Support her head, keep her secure, but don't be afraid of her. She can sense your nervousness."

And she could, somehow. Eri was unlike any baby Sephiroth had ever encountered – not that he'd encountered many, but still. She was remarkably alert, her red eyes tracking movement and focusing on faces with an intensity that was almost unsettling. When she looked at him, he got the distinct impression that she was taking his measure and finding him... adequate, but requiring improvement.

It should have been ridiculous. She was five months old. But Sephiroth had learned to trust his instincts about people, and his instincts told him that Eri was paying attention to everything in ways that went far beyond normal infant development.

The sound of keys in the front door interrupted his thoughts, and both Dark and Sephiroth looked up as Akira entered, shaking rain from her dark hair. She worked for a hero agency in the city – something administrative, though she was notably vague about the details. What mattered was that she was home, and the apartment immediately felt more complete with her presence.

"How are my boys?" she called out, hanging up her coat and moving to kiss the top of Dark's head before settling beside Sephiroth on the couch. "And my little princess?"

"We're fine," Dark said, closing his book and moving to help her with her things. "Papa was explaining why heroes always win in stories."

Akira raised an eyebrow, glancing between her husband and son with the kind of look that suggested she was reading subtext that wasn't immediately apparent. "Oh? And what conclusion did you reach?"

"That stories aren't the same as real life," Dark said solemnly. "And that the world is more complicated than most people want to admit."

"Wise boy," Akira said, though her tone was slightly amused. "Your father always was too philosophical for his own good."

Sephiroth felt that familiar twist of discomfort at being credited with thoughts and opinions that weren't entirely his own. The original Sephiroth Hojo had apparently been something of a deep thinker, prone to long discussions about morality and justice and the nature of heroism. It was... not entirely unlike his own thought processes, but filtered through a perspective that was fundamentally more optimistic about human nature.

"Dinner in twenty minutes," Akira announced, gently taking Eri from Sephiroth's arms and settling the baby against her shoulder. "Dark, homework finished?"

"Yes, Mama."

"Good. Go wash up." She watched him trot off toward the bathroom before turning her attention to Sephiroth. "You've been quiet today. Everything alright?"

The question was casual, but Sephiroth had learned to read the subtle signs of his wife's concern. The way she held Eri just a little closer, the slight tightness around her eyes, the way she was studying his face for tells he didn't know he was giving.

"Just thinking," he said, which was true enough.

"About?"

How to explain that he was still figuring out how to be a person, let alone a husband and father? How to articulate the strange sense of displacement that came from living in someone else's life, even when that life was better than anything he'd ever dared to imagine for himself?

"About how different this is from what I expected," he said finally.

Akira's expression softened. "Being a father?"

"Being... this." He gestured vaguely at the apartment, at her, at the domestic scene they'd created. "Happy."

She was quiet for a long moment, her hand moving in gentle circles on Eri's back. When she spoke again, her voice was softer than usual.

"You know, when I first met you, I thought you were the loneliest person I'd ever seen. You had this way of standing apart from everyone else, like you were watching life happen from behind glass. I used to wonder if you'd ever let anyone close enough to really know you."

Sephiroth felt something cold settle in his stomach. "And now?"

"Now I think you're still learning how to be known. But you're trying, and that's what matters." She shifted Eri to her other arm, reaching out to touch his cheek with her free hand. "You're a good man, Sephiroth Hojo. You're a good husband, and you're going to be a wonderful father. Stop overthinking everything."

The words hit him with unexpected force, partly because of their kindness and partly because of how wrong they were. He wasn't good – he'd spent lifetimes proving exactly the opposite. He was a killer, a destroyer, someone who'd chosen power over people so many times that the choice had become instinctive. The fact that he was sitting here now, in this small apartment with this woman who trusted him completely and these children who depended on him, felt like the cruelest kind of cosmic joke.

But Akira was looking at him with such genuine affection, such complete faith in the man she thought he was, that he couldn't bring himself to shatter that illusion. Not when it was the foundation that their entire life was built on.

"I love you," he said instead, because it was true and because it was the only response that mattered.

Her smile was radiant. "I love you too. Now come help me with dinner before our son decides to demonstrate his 'quirk' again."

Dark's quirk was... complicated. Officially, it was registered as "Belief Manifestation" – the ability to create temporary physical effects through focused mental concentration. Unofficially, Sephiroth suspected it was something far more dangerous. The boy could create force fields, small illusions, even minor telekinetic effects, but only when he believed absolutely in his ability to do so. And given some of the things Dark had let slip in unguarded moments, Sephiroth was beginning to suspect that his son's "belief" was backed by knowledge and experience that no seven-year-old should possess.

Not that he was in any position to judge.

Dinner was a peaceful affair, the four of them gathered around their small table while rain pattered against the windows. Eri dozed in her bouncer seat, occasionally making soft baby noises that never failed to make both parents smile. Dark chattered about his day at school, his teachers, the other children in his class who were just starting to manifest their own quirks.

"Tanaka-kun can make his hair change colors," Dark reported seriously, as if this was intelligence of the highest importance. "And Suzuki-chan can make flowers grow really fast, but only if she's holding the seeds. Sensei says my quirk is unusual because it's so... what was the word? Conceptual?"

"Abstract," Akira corrected gently. "Most quirks have very concrete, predictable effects. Yours requires more mental discipline."

"Because I have to believe it will work, right? Not just hope or wish, but really, truly believe."

"Exactly." She reached over to ruffle his silver hair. "It's a very powerful quirk, Dark. But power like that comes with responsibility."

Dark's expression grew thoughtful, and for a moment that ancient weariness flickered across his features again. "Mama? What happens if someone has a really powerful quirk but they don't know how to control it?"

The question seemed innocent enough, the kind of thing any child might wonder about. But something in Dark's tone made both parents pay closer attention.

"Well," Akira said carefully, "that's why we have hero schools, and support programs, and teachers who specialize in quirk development. No one expects children to master their abilities immediately."

"But what if they hurt someone by accident?"

Sephiroth set down his chopsticks, studying his son's face. "Dark, did something happen at school?"

"No, no," Dark said quickly, waving his hands dismissively. "I was just wondering. Because sometimes I think about what it would be like if I believed I could do something really big, and then it worked, and then... and then maybe it would be too big to stop."

The words hung in the air, heavy with implications. In her bouncer, Eri stirred, making a small sound that might have been distress.

"That's why we practice," Sephiroth said finally. "Small things first. Building control gradually. And why we never use our quirks when we're angry or scared or upset."

"Because emotions make it harder to think clearly," Dark nodded sagely. "And if I can't think clearly, I can't believe the right things."

"Exactly."

But even as he spoke, Sephiroth felt a chill of foreboding. There was something about the way Dark had asked the question, something that suggested it wasn't entirely hypothetical. And Eri's reaction, the way she'd seemed to respond to her brother's distress even in sleep...

"Papa?" Dark's voice was smaller now, more genuinely childlike. "You won't let me hurt anyone, will you? Even by accident?"

The plea in those cyan eyes was heartbreaking. Whatever else Dark might be hiding, whatever secrets he was keeping about his true nature, in this moment he was just a seven-year-old boy who was scared of his own power.

"Never," Sephiroth promised, reaching across the table to take his son's hand. "Whatever happens, we'll figure it out together. That's what families do."

Dark's smile was brilliant, relieved, and for a moment he looked exactly like the child he was supposed to be. "Okay. I believe you."

The rest of the evening passed in comfortable routine. Dark helped clear the dishes while Akira got Eri ready for bed, and then they all settled in the living room for what had become their nightly ritual. Sephiroth would read to Dark while Akira fed Eri, and they'd discuss the day's events and tomorrow's plans. It was domestic and peaceful and everything Sephiroth had never known he wanted.

Which, of course, was when everything went horribly, catastrophically wrong.

It started with Eri fussing during her feeding, squirming in Akira's arms and making small sounds of distress. Nothing unusual – babies fussed. But as the minutes passed, her agitation grew worse, and a strange shimmer seemed to dance around her tiny hands.

"Seph," Akira said quietly, and there was something in her voice that made both he and Dark look up immediately. "Something's not right."

Eri was glowing. Faintly, but unmistakably, a soft blue-white light emanating from her skin. Her red eyes were wide and unfocused, staring at something none of them could see, and the air around her was beginning to ripple like heat waves.

"Her quirk," Dark whispered, his face going pale. "It's manifesting."

Sephiroth was on his feet instantly, every instinct screaming danger. He'd seen quirk manifestations before – they were usually harmless, if sometimes startling. But this felt different. This felt wrong.

"Akira, put her down. Carefully."

"I can't," Akira's voice was tight with panic. "Something's wrong with my hands. I can't feel them properly."

And that's when Sephiroth saw it – Akira's hands, where they touched Eri, were beginning to fade. Not disappear, not vanish, but fade, becoming translucent as if she was slowly becoming a ghost.

"No," he breathed, understanding hitting him like a hell in one blow. "No, no, no—"

"Seph, what's happening to me?" Akira's voice was strained now, fear creeping in as she looked down at her increasingly transparent arms. "What's wrong with Eri?"

"Dark, get back," Sephiroth commanded, moving toward his wife and daughter. "Get as far back as you can."

But it was too late. Eri's glow intensified, and the strange rippling effect spread outward from her small form. Where it touched Akira, she continued to fade, her solid form becoming more and more insubstantial.

"Sephiroth," she gasped, and her voice sounded like it was coming from very far away. "The children. Take care of the children."

"Akira, no!" He reached for her, but his hands passed through her form like she was made of mist. 

Her eyes, still solid enough to focus on him, were filled with desperate love. "I love you. I love you so much. Take care of our babies."

"MAMA!" Dark's scream cut through the air as Akira's form became completely translucent. The boy lunged forward, his own quirk activating instinctively as he tried to create a barrier, tried to stop whatever was happening, but the force field shimmered and collapsed as his belief shattered in the face of his terror.

And then, between one heartbeat and the next, Akira was gone. Not dead, not transformed, not transported somewhere else. Gone. As if she had never existed at all, except for the baby she'd been holding, who fell the few inches to the couch cushions with a soft thump.

The apartment was silent except for the sound of rain against the windows and two children crying.

Eri's glow faded instantly, her quirk apparently exhausted, and she began wailing with the kind of desperate, heartbroken sound that babies made when they were in distress and couldn't understand why. Her tiny hands reached out, searching for the warmth and comfort that had just vanished from her world.

Dark was sobbing, great heaving gasps that shook his small frame as he stared at the empty space where his mother had been. "She's gone," he whispered through his tears. "She's really gone. I couldn't stop it. I couldn't save her."

And Sephiroth – legendary SOLDIER, planetary destroyer, the man who had once believed himself capable of becoming a god – stood frozen in the middle of his living room, looking at his crying children and the empty space where his wife had been, and felt more lost than he ever had in any of his lifetimes.

The memories of the original Sephiroth Hojo crashed over him like a tidal wave. Five years of marriage. The nervous excitement of Dark's birth. The overwhelming joy when Eri came along. The quiet happiness of building a life together, of planning for the future, of believing that tomorrow would be better than today.

All of it gone. All of it destroyed in the space of a few heartbeats by a quirk that no one had anticipated, no one had prepared for, no one could have prevented.

He moved on autopilot, scooping up Eri from the couch and holding her close while she continued to cry. Her small body was warm and solid against his chest, real in a way that nothing else felt real anymore. Dark was still sobbing, and Sephiroth reached out with his free arm to pull the boy close as well, gathering both children against him in a desperate attempt to hold onto what remained of his family.

"It's going to be okay," he heard himself saying, though he had no idea how that could possibly be true. "We're going to be okay. We're still together. We're still a family."

But even as he spoke the words, he knew that nothing would ever be the same. Eri's quirk – whatever it was, however it worked – had taken Akira away so completely that Sephiroth couldn't even sense her presence in the lifestream. She was simply... not. As if the universe had reached into their lives and carefully excised her from existence, leaving only the hole where she used to be.

Dark's sobs eventually quieted to hiccups, though he remained pressed against Sephiroth's side. "Papa," he whispered finally, his voice hoarse from crying. "What's going to happen to us now?"

It was a good question. Sephiroth looked around the apartment that suddenly felt too big and too empty, at the photos on the walls that showed a family that no longer existed, at the life they'd built that had just crumbled to dust in the span of minutes.

"I don't know," he admitted quietly. "But we'll figure it out. Together."

Because that's what families did, even broken ones. Even families held together by love and desperation and the terrible knowledge that sometimes the world took away the things you treasured most.

Eri had finally stopped crying, exhausted from her quirk manifestation and the emotional upheaval that had followed. She'd fallen asleep against his chest, her tiny fist curled around his shirt as if she could anchor herself to him through sheer determination. Dark had dozed off as well, worn out by grief and terror and the crushing weight of helplessness.

But Sephiroth remained awake, holding his children and staring at the space where Akira had been, and trying to figure out how to be enough for both of them when he'd barely figured out how to be enough for himself.

Outside, the rain continued to fall, washing the world clean for whatever came next.

In the distance, a clock chimed midnight, marking the end of one day and the beginning of another. The first day of their new reality, where it was just the three of them against whatever the world might throw their way.

Sephiroth closed his eyes and held his children closer, and tried not to think about how utterly unprepared he was for the road ahead.

After all, being a single father couldn't be harder than destroying a planet, right?

Right?

Chapter Text

The funeral had been a small affair.

Not because Akira hadn't been loved—she had been, fiercely and completely by the three people who mattered most—but because there was no body to bury, no remains to inter, no physical proof that she had ever existed beyond the photographs on their walls and the children she'd left behind. The ceremony had been more memorial than funeral, more acknowledgment than goodbye, and Sephiroth had sat through it feeling like he was attending someone else's grief.

Two months later, he still felt that way.

The knock came at seven-thirty on a Thursday evening, while Dark was helping Eri with her bottle and Sephiroth was staring at the dinner he'd forgotten to eat. Three sharp raps against wood, measured and deliberate, the kind of knock that suggested the person on the other side wasn't going away.

Sephiroth opened the door to find two men in expensive suits standing in the hallway. The older one—sixty-something, with silver hair and the kind of face that had seen too much of the world's darkness—looked at him with eyes that held a familiar weight of grief. The younger man, maybe twenty, wore white surgical gloves and had the unsettling habit of not quite meeting anyone's gaze directly.

"Sephiroth Hojo," the older man said. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"I am Kazuo Yoshida. Akira was my daughter." He paused, something complicated flickering across his features. "This is Kai Chisaki, my... associate. We need to talk."

Sephiroth had heard about Akira's father, though she'd rarely spoken of him directly. Yakuza boss. Head of the Shie Hassaikai. A man who dealt in violence and control and the kind of power that came from making other people afraid. The kind of man that the original Sephiroth might have recognized as kindred, and that the current Sephiroth found himself instinctively wary of.

But looking at him now, standing in the fluorescent hallway lighting with his shoulders set in a way that spoke of barely contained anguish, all Sephiroth could see was a father who had lost his child.

"Come in," he said, stepping aside.

The apartment felt smaller with them in it. Kazuo moved like a man accustomed to owning whatever space he occupied, but there was something diminished about him, as if grief had worn away at his edges. Chisaki remained near the door, his gloved hands clasped behind his back, watching everything with clinical detachment.

Dark looked up from where he was sitting on the floor with Eri, his cyan eyes taking in the strangers with that too-old awareness that never seemed to leave him completely. "Papa? Who are they?"

"Family," Sephiroth said simply, because it was true and because it was easier than explaining the complexities of yakuza hierarchies to a seven-year-old. "Dark, take Eri to your room for a little while, okay? The grown-ups need to talk."

Dark nodded solemnly, gathering his baby sister with the kind of careful competence that still broke Sephiroth's heart. Five months old, and Eri had already learned to curl into her brother's arms like he was her anchor to the world. Which, Sephiroth supposed, he was. They both were, in their own broken ways.

When the children were gone, Kazuo settled heavily onto the couch where Akira used to sit for their evening routine. The sight of another person in that space made something twist uncomfortably in Sephiroth's chest, a sensation he couldn't quite name.

"She spoke of you often," Kazuo said finally, his voice rougher than it had been at the door. "My daughter. In the early days of your marriage, she would call me and tell me about the man she'd chosen. How you made her laugh. How you listened when she talked about her work. How you looked at her like she was the most precious thing in the world."

Sephiroth said nothing. What was there to say? That those memories felt like they belonged to someone else? That he sometimes caught himself reaching for emotions that weren't entirely his own?

"I didn't approve," Kazuo continued. "A mid-level office worker, no connections, no power, no way to protect her from the kind of life I'd built around our family. But she was happy, and that... that mattered more than my approval."

"You came to the memorial," Sephiroth observed.

"I came to say goodbye to my daughter. And to see the man who loved her." Kazuo's eyes, when they met Sephiroth's, were sharp despite the grief weighing on them. "You look terrible."

It was true. Sephiroth had been avoiding mirrors for weeks now, but he knew what he would see if he looked: hollow cheeks, shadows under his eyes, the kind of weight loss that came from forgetting to eat more often than not. The clothes that had fit perfectly two months ago now hung loose on his frame, and his silver hair had grown longer than the original Sephiroth Hojo had ever worn it.

"I'm managing," he said.

"Are you?" This from Chisaki, who had remained silent until now. His voice was oddly inflected, clinical in a way that made the question sound like a diagnosis. "Because from where I stand, you look like a man who's coming apart at the seams."

Sephiroth felt that uncomfortable twist in his chest intensify, spreading outward like ripples in still water. "I'm fine."

"No," Kazuo said quietly. "You're not. And neither are those children. Which is why we're here."

The conversation that followed was... complicated. Offers of financial support, which Sephiroth politely declined. Suggestions about moving closer to family—Kazuo's kind of family—which Sephiroth firmly refused. Questions about Eri's quirk and whether there had been any sign of it manifesting again, which Sephiroth answered with careful honesty.

"It was an accident," he said when Chisaki asked about the specifics of Akira's disappearance. "She was feeding Eri, and the baby's quirk just... activated. There was no warning, no way to prevent it."

"And no way to reverse it," Chisaki observed. It wasn't quite a question.

"No."

Something passed between the two visitors, a look that Sephiroth couldn't quite interpret. Kazuo leaned forward slightly, his hands clasped in front of him.

"My daughter loved you," he said. "More than that, she trusted you. With her life, with her children, with the future she was trying to build. I want you to know that I respect that choice, even if I don't understand it."

"But?" Sephiroth could hear the unspoken reservation.

"But trust is earned, not inherited. And grief... grief can change a man in ways he doesn't expect." Kazuo stood, straightening his suit jacket with movements that were probably unconscious. "If you ever need anything—anything at all—you call me. Those children are my grandchildren, and I don't abandon family."

They left their contact information and a standing invitation to visit, which Sephiroth filed away under 'things to think about later.' Chisaki paused at the door, turning back with that clinical expression still firmly in place.

"Take care of yourself," he said, and something in his tone made it sound less like advice and more like a warning. "Children need stability. Consistency. They need to know that the adults in their lives aren't going to... change unexpectedly."

And then they were gone, leaving Sephiroth alone with the lingering scent of expensive cologne and the uncomfortable feeling that he'd just been evaluated for something he hadn't known he was being tested for.

Dark emerged from his room a few minutes later, Eri dozing in his arms. "Papa? Are you okay? You look..."

"I'm fine," Sephiroth said automatically, then stopped. Dark's expression was too knowing, too concerned, the look of a child who had learned to read adult distress with uncomfortable accuracy. "Just tired."

It wasn't entirely a lie. He was tired, bone-deep and soul-weary in ways that sleep couldn't touch. But it was more than that, something he couldn't quite articulate even to himself. A sense of displacement that went beyond normal grief, as if the world had shifted slightly off its axis and nothing fit quite the way it was supposed to.

The feeling followed him into sleep that night, manifesting as dreams where he was walking through their apartment but the walls kept moving, the rooms rearranging themselves when he wasn't looking. He would reach for a door handle and find his hand passing through empty air, or turn a corner and find himself back where he started, trapped in a loop of familiar spaces that had somehow become foreign.

He woke with the taste of copper in his mouth and the strange conviction that something had been watching him sleep.

The next morning brought small routines and smaller mercies. Eri's morning feeding, during which she stared at him with those unsettling red eyes and made soft cooing sounds that almost sounded like words. Dark's careful recitation of his homework assignments over breakfast, each subject reported with the kind of thoroughness that suggested he was trying to fill the silence that Akira's absence had left behind.

"Papa," Dark said as Sephiroth was washing the dishes, "do you ever feel like... like you're not quite yourself anymore?"

The question made Sephiroth's hands still in the soapy water. "What do you mean?"

"Like..." Dark struggled for words, his seven-year-old vocabulary straining to capture something complex. "Like you're wearing clothes that don't fit right, but they're clothes you've been wearing for a long time so you think they should fit, but they don't, and you can't figure out why."

It was such an oddly specific metaphor that Sephiroth found himself looking at his son with new attention. "Why do you ask?"

"Because sometimes I look at you and you look like Papa, but you also look like someone else. Someone sad and far away." Dark's eyes were too old again, weighted with understanding that no child should possess. "And I was wondering if maybe you feel that way too."

Sephiroth dried his hands on the dish towel, buying himself time to think. How much of his internal struggle was visible to a child who was already too perceptive for his own good? How much of his uncertainty about his own identity was bleeding through into his interactions with his family?

"Grief changes people," he said finally. "It makes everything feel... different. Unfamiliar, even when it should be familiar."

Dark nodded as if this confirmed something he'd suspected. "Mama used to say that sometimes people need time to grow into new shapes. Like how I grew out of my clothes last year, and we had to buy new ones that fit better."

"Your mother was very wise."

"She was." Dark's expression grew wistful. "Do you think she would be proud of us? Of how we're managing?"

The question hit like a splash of cold water, partly because of its innocence and partly because Sephiroth genuinely didn't know the answer. The original Sephiroth Hojo would have been struggling too, but perhaps not in the same ways. Perhaps not with the same sense of fundamental displacement that came from living in someone else's memories of love.

"I think," he said carefully, "that she would be proud of how brave you've been. How you've taken care of Eri, how you've been patient with me while I figure things out."

"And what about you? Would she be proud of you?"

Sephiroth met his son's gaze, seeing himself reflected in those cyan eyes that were so much like his own. "I don't know," he admitted. "I hope so."

It seemed to be enough for Dark, who nodded and went back to his homework with the kind of focused concentration that suggested the conversation was over. But Sephiroth found himself returning to the exchange throughout the day, picking at it like a healing wound.

The sensation that had been building under his skin for weeks seemed to intensify as the hours passed. It started as a subtle wrongness, the kind of thing that could be dismissed as stress or fatigue or the physical manifestation of grief. But by afternoon, it had become impossible to ignore.

It felt like his clothes were too tight, but when he looked down at himself, they hung as loose as they had that morning. It felt like his skin was too small, as if something underneath was trying to push its way out. When he ran his hands through his hair, the strands felt too coarse, too thick, almost bristling against his palms in a way that made him want to wash his hands immediately afterward.

He found himself in the bathroom, staring at his reflection in the mirror above the sink. The face that looked back at him was familiar—the same sharp cheekbones, the same angular jaw, the same pale skin that had always marked him as different from the people around him. But something was wrong with the proportions, subtle enough that he couldn't pinpoint exactly what it was but noticeable enough to make his stomach clench with unease.

His eyes seemed larger than they should be, or maybe his face was thinner. His hair looked darker in the artificial light, silver tarnishing toward something that might have been black if he stared at it long enough. When he opened his mouth to check his teeth—for what, he wasn't sure—he could have sworn that his canines looked sharper than they had that morning.

But when he blinked and looked again, everything appeared normal. Tired, yes. Worn down by grief and responsibility and the weight of holding a family together when he wasn't sure he knew how to hold himself together, but normal.

The relief lasted exactly as long as it took him to notice that the reflection's smile didn't quite match his own.

He left the bathroom quickly, closing the door behind him with more force than necessary. There were children to take care of, dinner to prepare, the evening routine that had become their anchor in the chaos of their new reality. He didn't have time for paranoid delusions or stress-induced hallucinations or whatever psychological symptom this was supposed to represent.

But the feeling followed him. It lived in the space between his skin and his clothes, in the gap between his thoughts and his words, in the moments when he caught himself moving in ways that felt unfamiliar. His stride was different—longer, more predatory, as if he was unconsciously stalking through his own home. His hands, when he wasn't paying attention to them, would curl into positions that looked more like claws than fingers.

And underneath it all, constant and growing, was the sense that something was watching him from inside his own body. Something patient and hungry and entirely too interested in the life he was trying to build.

"Papa?" Dark's voice cut through his spiraling thoughts like a knife through fabric. "Eri's crying, and I can't get her to stop."

Sephiroth was moving before he'd fully processed the words, crossing the living room to where Dark was standing beside Eri's crib with worry written across his young features. The baby was indeed crying, but it wasn't the normal fussing of hunger or discomfort. This was the same desperate, heartbroken sound she'd made the night Akira disappeared, the sound of a child who knew that something essential was missing from her world.

"Let me," Sephiroth said, lifting Eri from the crib with practiced movements. She was warm and solid against his chest, her small fists tangling in his shirt as she continued to sob. "Shh, little one. It's alright. Papa's here."

The words seemed to calm her slightly, her cries diminishing to hiccups and sniffles. But her red eyes, when she looked up at him, were wide with an almost adult awareness that made his breath catch. For a moment, he could have sworn she was looking through him rather than at him, seeing something that he himself couldn't perceive.

"She's been doing that a lot lately," Dark observed, settling beside them on the couch. "Crying like she's scared of something. But I can't figure out what."

Sephiroth adjusted his hold on Eri, supporting her head as she gradually relaxed against him. The physical contact seemed to ground him somehow, pulling him back from whatever edge he'd been walking along. The wrongness under his skin receded to a manageable level, and when he looked down at his hands, they appeared completely normal.

"Maybe she misses Mama," Dark continued quietly. "I know I do. Sometimes I wake up and forget that she's not coming back, and then I remember and it's like... like falling all over again."

"I know," Sephiroth said, and the words came easier than they had in weeks. "I miss her too."

"Do you think she's okay? Wherever she is?"

It was an impossible question, made more complicated by the fact that Sephiroth genuinely didn't know what had happened to Akira. The original Sephiroth's memories suggested that she had simply... ceased, her existence erased so completely that even the universe seemed to have forgotten her. But that kind of absolute obliteration went against everything he understood about the nature of life and death and the spaces in between.

"I think," he said carefully, "that wherever she is, she knows we love her. And she knows we're taking care of each other."

Dark nodded solemnly, seemingly satisfied with this answer. Eri had fallen asleep in Sephiroth's arms, her breathing deep and even, her small body completely relaxed for the first time in hours. Looking down at her peaceful face, Sephiroth felt something settle in his chest, a warmth that pushed back against the wrongness that had been growing under his skin.

This. This was what mattered. Not his own psychological unraveling or the way his reflection seemed to be playing tricks on him or the growing sense that something fundamental about his existence was changing in ways he couldn't control. What mattered was the children who depended on him, who looked to him for stability and safety and the promise that tomorrow would be manageable even when today felt impossible.

He could hold it together for them. He would hold it together for them.

But later that night, after Dark was asleep and Eri was settled in her crib, after the dishes were done and the apartment was quiet except for the hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic, Sephiroth found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror again.

This time, he forced himself to look carefully. Really look, cataloging every detail of his appearance with the kind of systematic attention he'd once applied to studying enemy weaknesses.

His hair was definitely darker than it had been that morning. Not dramatically so, but enough to be noticeable if someone was paying attention. The silver strands still caught the light the same way, but there were threads of black running through them now, subtle as shadows but undeniably present.

His eyes, when he focused on them, seemed to shift between colors. Cyan to green to something that might have been gold in the right light. The pupils dilated and contracted independently of the lighting conditions, responding to some internal stimulus that had nothing to do with his conscious thoughts.

And his teeth... when he opened his mouth and examined them closely, his canines were definitely sharper than they should be. Not dramatically so, not enough for anyone else to notice unless they were specifically looking, but sharp enough that when he ran his tongue across them, he could taste the faint metallic tang of his own blood.

The changes were small, subtle, the kind of thing that could be dismissed as stress or sleep deprivation or the tricks that grief could play on the mind. But they were there, undeniably real, and they were accelerating.

Whatever was happening to him—whatever he was becoming—it wasn't stopping. If anything, it was getting stronger, more confident, as if it had been testing the boundaries of what it could accomplish and had decided that those boundaries were more flexible than originally anticipated.

The thought should have terrified him. In his previous life, transformation had meant losing himself to something larger and more terrible, becoming a monster in service to power that ultimately consumed everything he'd once claimed to value. But this felt different, more intimate, as if the change was coming from within rather than being imposed from without.

It felt, in a way that he couldn't quite articulate, like coming home.

The realization made him step back from the mirror so quickly that he nearly stumbled. That was the wrong thought, the dangerous thought, the kind of thinking that led to the complete abandonment of everything that made him human. He'd walked that path before, in another life, and it had ended with him trying to destroy a world because he'd convinced himself that godhood was preferable to mortality.

But even as he tried to push the thought away, he couldn't deny the way his body had felt more comfortable in its own skin during those moments when he'd stopped fighting whatever was happening to him. The way his movements had felt more natural, more right, when he'd allowed himself to move with that predatory grace. The way his reflection had looked more like him—the real him, not the borrowed identity he was wearing—when he'd stopped trying to force it into familiar shapes.

He left the bathroom again, but this time he couldn't shake the feeling that something was following him. Not physically—when he turned around, there was nothing there—but the sense of a presence just outside the range of his peripheral vision, watching him with interest and approval and a patience that suggested it was willing to wait as long as necessary for him to stop running from what he was becoming.

The next few days passed in a haze of small moments and smaller revelations. Dark, with the intuitive understanding that seemed to be his superpower, stopped asking direct questions about Sephiroth's well-being but began hovering closer during their daily routines. Not obviously, not in a way that suggested anxiety, but near enough to intervene if something went wrong.

Eri, meanwhile, seemed to have developed an uncanny ability to sense when the wrongness under Sephiroth's skin was becoming too much to bear. She would fuss or cry or make soft cooing sounds at precisely the moments when his perception of reality was starting to slip sideways, pulling his attention back to the immediate and concrete needs of a five-month-old baby who required diaper changes and feedings and the kind of basic care that left no room for existential uncertainty.

It was during one such intervention—Eri demanding a bottle at two in the morning while Sephiroth was standing in the kitchen and trying to convince himself that his hands looked normal despite the way shadows seemed to pool in his palms—that he realized what was happening.

The children were anchoring him. Not intentionally, probably not even consciously, but their needs were keeping him tethered to the identity of Sephiroth Hojo, devoted father and widower, the man who made breakfast every morning and helped with homework and read bedtime stories about heroes who always saved the day.

As long as he was needed in that role, he could maintain it. As long as there were bottles to warm and diapers to change and small crises that required immediate attention, he could push back against whatever was trying to emerge from beneath his borrowed skin.

But what happened when they didn't need him anymore? What happened when Dark was older and more independent, when Eri had grown past the stage where she required constant care? What happened when the anchor that was keeping him human finally slipped?

The thought followed him through the rest of that sleepless night and into the next day. It colored every interaction with his children, every routine domestic task, every moment of quiet domesticity that had once felt like peace but now felt like borrowed time.

Because underneath it all, growing stronger with each passing hour, was the certainty that something was waiting for him to let his guard down. Something that wore his face but wasn't him, something that wanted what he'd built but had very different ideas about how to keep it.

And the most terrifying part was that sometimes, in the quiet moments between sleeping and waking, he could almost hear it whispering his name.

Not Sephiroth Hojo, the name he'd worn for the past five months like an ill-fitting costume.

His real name. The name that had once struck fear into the hearts of armies and made the very planet tremble in recognition of power that had grown too large for any mortal frame to contain.

The name that he'd tried so hard to leave behind, but which seemed to be calling him home whether he wanted to go or not.

In those moments, when the whispers were loudest and the sensation under his skin was most insistent, Sephiroth would reach for Eri or call out to Dark, using their presence to pull himself back from whatever precipice he was standing on. And it would work, temporarily, the way a tourniquet could stop bleeding without addressing the underlying wound.

But tourniquets weren't permanent solutions. And whatever was growing beneath the surface of his carefully maintained existence was patient enough to wait for the moment when even his children's love wouldn't be enough to keep him from falling into what he was truly meant to become.

The question wasn't whether it would happen.

The question was whether he would be able to protect them from what he became when it did.

End of Chapter 3

Chapter Text

The photograph on the mantelpiece showed four people who no longer existed.

Sephiroth stared at it from across the living room, his coffee growing cold in hands that felt too large for the mug. The family in the frame looked happy—genuinely, unselfconsciously happy in the way that only came from believing the world was fundamentally safe. Akira's laugh was caught mid-burst, her head tilted back and eyes crinkled with joy. Dark, barely seven in the photo, was grinning with chocolate smeared across his cheek. Baby Eri, perhaps two months old, slept peacefully in her mother's arms.

And there was him. Sephiroth Hojo, devoted husband and father, his arm around his wife's shoulders and his expression soft with contentment. The man in the photograph looked like him—same silver hair, same angular features, same pale eyes. But the person looking back felt like a stranger wearing a familiar face.

Three months. Three months since Akira had faded from existence like morning mist touched by sunlight, and still Sephiroth caught himself reaching for memories that belonged to someone else. The way she hummed off-key while making breakfast. How she'd curl against him during movies, her feet always cold despite the apartment's warmth. The particular way she'd say his name when she was worried about something, drawing out the syllables like they were a prayer.

The original Sephiroth Hojo had loved her with the kind of desperate, overwhelming devotion that made losing her feel like losing gravity itself. And now that love lived inside him like a ghost, haunting spaces in his psyche that had never been meant for such tender emotions.

The mug slipped from his fingers.

He watched it fall—time stretching like taffy as his reflexes kicked in—and caught it inches from the floor. Coffee sloshed over the rim, dark droplets spattering across his wrist. The liquid was still hot enough to sting, but the sensation felt distant, filtered through layers of wrongness that had been building under his skin for weeks.

"Papa?" Dark's voice drifted from the kitchen, where he was methodically working through his morning routine. Seven years old and already more responsible than most adults, organizing his school supplies with the kind of precision that suggested military training rather than childhood habit. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," Sephiroth called back, though the word tasted like copper in his mouth. Everything tasted like copper lately, as if his body was slowly poisoning itself from the inside out.

He set the mug on the coffee table with more care than necessary, watching his reflection fragment across its dark surface. For just a moment, the face looking back seemed unfamiliar—sharper somehow, with shadows pooling in places where they shouldn't exist. But when he blinked, it was just him again. Tired, grief-worn, but recognizably human.

The wrongness had started small. A persistent itch beneath his skin that no amount of scratching could reach. The sensation that his clothes never quite fit properly, as if his body was changing shape when he wasn't paying attention. Moments when his reflection seemed to lag a split second behind his movements, like an actor struggling to remember their blocking.

Now, three months after losing Akira, the wrongness had grown teeth.

It lived in the space between his thoughts and his actions, turning simple tasks into exercises in conscious effort. Making breakfast required him to remember how many eggs Dark preferred, how much milk Eri needed in her bottle, what temperature was safe for an eight-month-old's formula. Information that should have been instinctive felt foreign, as if he was accessing someone else's muscle memory through a damaged interface.

"Papa, Eri's awake," Dark announced, appearing in the living room doorway with the baby carrier in his small hands. Even at seven, he handled his sister with the kind of careful competence that broke Sephiroth's heart on a daily basis. No child should have to grow up that fast.

Eri looked up at him from her carrier with those unsettling red eyes, and Sephiroth felt that familiar twist of unease in his chest. She was beautiful—objectively, undeniably beautiful in the way that all healthy babies were—but there was something about her gaze that made him feel exposed. As if she could see through whatever mask he was wearing to the thing underneath.

"Good morning, little one," he murmured, lifting her from the carrier. She was solid and warm in his arms, her small body fitting perfectly against his chest. For a moment, the wrongness receded, pushed back by the simple reality of caring for someone who needed him.

But then Eri reached up with one tiny hand and touched his cheek, and her expression grew... concerned. Not the kind of vague baby distress that came from hunger or discomfort, but actual worry. As if she could sense that something about him wasn't right.

"She's been doing that more," Dark observed, settling cross-legged on the couch to watch them. "Looking at people like she's trying to figure something out."

Sephiroth adjusted his hold on Eri, supporting her head as she continued to study his face with that unnervingly adult focus. "All babies do that. She's just learning to recognize faces."

"Maybe." Dark didn't sound convinced. "But she looks at you differently than she looks at other people. Like... like she's worried about you."

The words hit closer to truth than Sephiroth was comfortable acknowledging. Because the thing was, he was worried about himself too. Had been, increasingly, as the small wrongnesses accumulated into something that felt less like grief and more like dissolution.

The apartment felt smaller every day, as if the walls were slowly contracting around him. Colors seemed too bright, sounds too sharp, textures too intense against his skin. Even the simple act of getting dressed had become an ordeal, his clothes feeling simultaneously too loose and too tight, fabric rubbing against nerve endings that seemed newly exposed.

And the mirrors. God, the mirrors had become his enemies.

It wasn't that his reflection looked different, exactly. The changes were too subtle for that, too carefully graduated to be immediately noticeable. But there were moments—fleeting instances when the light hit just right or when he caught his own eyes unexpectedly—where he looked like someone else entirely. Someone whose face he should recognize but couldn't quite place.

"I'm going to make breakfast," he said, passing Eri back to her brother. "Can you keep an eye on her?"

Dark nodded solemnly, accepting the responsibility with the kind of gravity that no seven-year-old should possess. "Papa? Are you sure you're feeling okay? You've been... different lately."

Different. Such a small word for such a vast wrongness. "How so?"

"You move differently. Like you're not sure how tall you are anymore. And sometimes when you talk, you sound like someone else."

The observation was far too perceptive, delivered with the kind of clinical accuracy that suggested Dark was paying much closer attention than any child should need to. Sephiroth felt something cold settle in his stomach—not fear, exactly, but a recognition that his careful performance of normalcy was beginning to crack at the edges.

"Grief changes people remember," he said finally, though the explanation felt inadequate even to his own ears.

"Maybe." Dark's cyan eyes—so much like his own, yet somehow older—held his gaze steadily. "But this feels different from just being sad."

Before Sephiroth could formulate a response that wouldn't sound like a lie, Dark had already turned his attention back to Eri, making soft cooing sounds that made the baby giggle. The sound was pure and sweet and utterly normal, a reminder that despite everything else that was falling apart, there were still good things in the world worth protecting.

The kitchen had become a minefield of sensory traps. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed with a frequency that seemed to resonate in his bones, making his teeth ache in sympathy. The refrigerator's hum felt too loud, the coffee maker's gurgling too sharp, the sizzle of eggs in the pan too reminiscent of sounds that belonged to battlefields rather than breakfast preparations.

He found himself gripping the spatula too tightly, his knuckles white with tension that had nowhere to go. The metal handle felt warm under his palm—not just warm from the cooking, but warm in a way that suggested his body temperature was running higher than it should. When he released his grip, the spatula retained the perfect impression of his fingers, as if the steel had briefly become malleable.

That wasn't normal. That definitely wasn't normal.

But when he looked again, the spatula appeared unchanged. Just a ordinary kitchen utensil, slightly warm from use but showing no signs of having been reshaped by supernatural grip strength.

The wrongness was getting worse. More insistent, more creative in its manifestations. It lived in the spaces between seconds, in the gap between thought and action, in the uncomfortable pause between who he had been and who he was becoming.

"Papa, your eggs are burning," Dark called from the living room, his tone carefully neutral in the way that suggested he'd been watching the kitchen with growing concern.

Sephiroth looked down at the pan to find the eggs had indeed gone from golden to brown to something approaching charcoal while he'd been lost in thought. The acrid smell of burned protein filled the air, sharp enough to make his eyes water.

Or maybe that wasn't from the smoke.

He scraped the ruined eggs into the garbage and started over, forcing himself to focus on the simple mechanics of cooking. Crack shells, dispose of fragments, heat oil, pour mixture into pan. Basic tasks that should have been automatic but now required conscious effort, as if he was piloting his body from a distance.

The second attempt went better, though he found himself checking the pan obsessively to make sure the eggs weren't spontaneously combusting. When they were done—properly golden, not burned—he plated them alongside toast and juice and carried the tray to the living room like an offering to gods he wasn't sure existed.

"Thank you, Papa," Dark said politely, accepting his plate with the kind of formal gratitude that no child should need to employ with their parent. As if he was being careful not to upset someone whose emotional stability was questionable.

The thought stung more than it should have.

They ate in companionable silence, Dark occasionally making faces at Eri to keep her entertained while Sephiroth struggled with the simple act of consuming food. Everything tasted wrong—too salty or too bland or too much like nothing at all. His jaw ached with each bite, as if his teeth were too large for his mouth, and swallowing had become a conscious effort rather than an automatic reflex.

When breakfast was over, Dark gathered the dishes without being asked and carried them to the kitchen with the kind of helpful efficiency that felt more like damage control than childish eagerness to help. Sephiroth watched him go, noting the careful way his son moved around him, as if he was a piece of unstable furniture that might topple at any moment.

"Dark," he called softly.

"Yes, Papa?"

"Are you... are you afraid of me?"

The question hung in the air between them, heavy with implications that neither of them was prepared to address directly. Dark paused in his dishwashing, his small hands still submerged in soapy water, and considered the question with the kind of seriousness it deserved.

"Not afraid," he said finally. "But... worried. You seem like you're fighting something, and I don't know how to help."

Fighting something. Yes, that was exactly what it felt like. But the enemy was inside him, growing stronger each day, and he wasn't sure how to battle an opponent that wore his own face.

The afternoon brought small mercies and smaller defeats. Eri napped peacefully in her crib, her tiny chest rising and falling with the steady rhythm of healthy sleep. Dark worked quietly on his homework, occasionally asking for help with problems that seemed far too advanced for a seven-year-old but which he approached with methodical precision.

And Sephiroth sat on the couch, staring at his hands and trying to understand why they looked increasingly foreign to him.

The changes were subtle but persistent. His fingers seemed longer than they should be, more elegantly tapered, with nails that grew faster than seemed natural and required trimming every few days instead of every few weeks. His palms felt different too—softer in some places, harder in others, as if calluses were forming and disappearing according to some logic he couldn't fathom.

When he flexed his fingers, the joints moved with a fluid grace that felt both natural and utterly wrong. As if his hands had been designed for tasks more complex than changing diapers and tying shoelaces, purposes that lived in the shadowy spaces of memory he couldn't quite access.

"Papa?"

He looked up to find Dark watching him with that too-old expression of concern. "Yes?"

"You're staring at your hands again."

Again. Which implied it was becoming a habit, a visible tic that his seven-year-old son was tracking with uncomfortable accuracy.

"Just thinking," Sephiroth said, though he wasn't sure that was entirely true. Thinking implied conscious processing, logical progression from one idea to the next. What he was doing felt more like falling—a long, slow tumble through thoughts and sensations that didn't belong to him.

"What about?"

How to explain the growing conviction that his body was changing in ways that defied rational explanation? How to articulate the sense that something was growing beneath his skin, patient and hungry and utterly alien to everything he thought he understood about himself?

"About your mother," he said instead, because it was partially true and because it was easier than admitting the full scope of his unraveling.

Dark's expression softened. "I miss her too."

"Do you?" The question came out harsher than he'd intended, tinged with something that might have been desperation. "Do you actually miss her, or do you just remember that you're supposed to?"

It was a terrible question to ask a child, unfair and loaded with implications that no seven-year-old should have to navigate. But Sephiroth found himself leaning forward, waiting for the answer with an intensity that surprised him.

Because the truth was, he wasn't entirely sure which category his own grief fell into anymore. The love he felt for Akira—had felt for Akira—was real and devastating and overwhelming. But it was also borrowed, inherited from a man who had died the moment Sephiroth had awakened in his body. Was mourning someone else's loss still genuine grief, or was it just emotional plagiarism?

Dark considered the question with typical seriousness, his small face scrunched in concentration. "Both, I think," he said finally. "I remember loving her, and I remember that she's gone, and both of those things hurt. But sometimes I can't tell if the hurting is because I miss her, or because I know I'm supposed to miss her, or because everything is just... wrong now."

The honesty in his son's voice was like a knife between the ribs. Here was a seven-year-old child articulating the same existential uncertainty that had been eating at Sephiroth for months, the terrible question of whether their emotions were genuine or simply echoes of what they thought they should feel.

"I'm sorry," Sephiroth said quietly. "I shouldn't have asked you that."

"It's okay. I think about it too sometimes." Dark set down his pencil and turned to face him more directly. "Papa, are we still the same people we were before Mama disappeared?"

The question hit like a physical blow, partly because of its directness and partly because Sephiroth had no idea how to answer it. Was he the same person? Was he even a person at all, or just a collection of memories and reflexes wearing someone else's skin?

"I don't know," he admitted.

"Me neither," Dark said simply. "But maybe that's okay. Maybe people are supposed to change when bad things happen to them."

Maybe. Or maybe change was just another word for dissolution, for the slow erosion of everything that had once seemed solid and permanent. Maybe what he was experiencing wasn't growth or adaptation, but the careful dismantling of an identity that had never truly belonged to him.

The evening brought new horrors disguised as mundane routines.

Dinner was a quiet affair—pasta with store-bought sauce, the kind of simple meal that required minimal effort and produced minimal cleanup. Eri dozed in her high chair, occasionally stirring to make soft baby sounds that had both Dark and Sephiroth smiling despite themselves. For brief moments, they managed to approximate the kind of normal family scene that graced television commercials and greeting cards.

But underneath the performance of domesticity, wrongness continued to spread like ink through water.

Sephiroth's clothes felt wrong against his skin, fabric scratching at nerve endings that seemed newly exposed. His shirt collar was too tight around his neck, making him want to tug at it constantly, while his pants felt loose around the waist but tight across the thighs, as if his body was redistributing mass according to some alien geometry.

When he reached for his water glass, his arm moved with a fluid grace that felt foreign, joints bending in ways that seemed too elegant for human anatomy. The glass itself felt different in his hand—not fragile, exactly, but insubstantial, as if it might shatter from the simple pressure of his grip.

"Papa, you're doing it again," Dark observed quietly.

"Doing what?"

"Staring. And holding your fork weird."

Sephiroth looked down at his hand to find that he was indeed gripping his fork in an unusual manner—not the casual, comfortable way he'd been holding utensils for months, but with a kind of formal precision that suggested different cultural training. As if someone else's muscle memory was bleeding through.

He adjusted his grip, forcing his fingers into more familiar positions, but the fork continued to feel foreign in his hand. Too light, too small, designed for purposes more delicate than the simple consumption of food.

"Sorry," he murmured. "Just tired."

But tired didn't explain the way shadows seemed to pool around him even under direct lighting, or how his reflection in the kitchen window appeared to be standing slightly to the left of where he actually was. Tired didn't account for the growing conviction that something was watching him from inside his own body, patient and hungry and increasingly bold in its manifestations.

After dinner, they settled into their evening routine with the kind of determined normalcy that felt more like ritual than comfort. Dark curled up on one end of the couch with a picture book, reading aloud in soft tones that made Eri giggle and reach for the colorful illustrations. Sephiroth sat at the other end, ostensibly watching television but actually studying his reflection in the blank screen.

The face looking back was his own—same sharp cheekbones, same pale eyes, same silver hair that had grown longer in recent weeks and now brushed his shoulders with each movement. But there was something about the proportions that felt wrong, as if someone had taken a photograph of him and adjusted the contrast until familiar features became subtly alien.

His eyes seemed larger than they should be, pupils dilated despite the room's bright lighting. When he blinked, the motion felt too smooth, too controlled, lacking the unconscious irregularity that characterized normal human reflexes. And there was something about the way light caught in his irises that made them appear almost luminous, as if some inner fire was beginning to show through.

"Papa?" Dark's voice seemed to come from very far away. "Are you okay? You look..."

"What?"

"Different. Like you're not all here."

Not all here. That was precisely how it felt—as if parts of himself were elsewhere, scattered across dimensions he couldn't name or access. The man sitting on the couch was Sephiroth Hojo, devoted father and widower. But increasing portions of his consciousness felt like they belonged to someone else entirely, someone whose memories lived in shadows and whose purposes were vast and terrible and utterly incompatible with domestic tranquility.

"Just thinking," he said automatically.

"About what?"

How to explain that he was losing himself one piece at a time? How to tell a seven-year-old that the person he called Papa was slowly dissolving, being replaced by something that wore the same face but harbored entirely different intentions?

"About whether we should move," he heard himself saying, the words emerging from some part of his mind that had been planning without conscious direction.

Dark looked up from his book, suddenly alert. "Move? Move where?"

"Somewhere quieter. Away from the city." The idea had been building in the back of his thoughts for weeks, gaining substance and urgency as the wrongness under his skin intensified. "Somewhere with more space. Mountain air might be good for Eri."

It was a reasonable explanation, the kind of practical consideration that any concerned parent might make. But the truth was more complex and more urgent. The city felt increasingly oppressive, full of too many people with too many eyes, all of them potential witnesses to whatever he was becoming. And there was something about urban spaces—all that concrete and steel and electromagnetic interference—that made the wrongness worse, more insistent.

Mountains, though. Mountains felt different. Clean. Isolated. The kind of place where a man could disappear entirely if he needed to, where changes could happen without scrutiny and transformation could unfold according to its own logic.

"I like it here," Dark said carefully, though his tone suggested he was more concerned about Sephiroth's motivations than about the prospect of moving itself. "This is where Mama lived. Where our memories are."

Memories. Such fragile things, so easily distorted by time and grief and the terrible weight of borrowed emotions. What good were memories when they belonged to someone else, when they played like movies in a theater where he was the only audience member?

"Sometimes," Sephiroth said quietly, "it's easier to heal somewhere new. Somewhere that doesn't carry so much... history."

Dark studied his face with that unsettling adult perception, as if he could read the subtext that Sephiroth himself didn't fully understand. "Are you sure that's what this is about? Healing?"

The question hung in the air between them, heavy with implications that neither of them was prepared to address directly. Because the truth was, Sephiroth wasn't sure of anything anymore. He wasn't sure who he was, what he was becoming, or whether the changes happening beneath his skin were healing or dissolution or something else entirely.

What he was sure of was that staying in the city felt increasingly dangerous—not for him, but for the children who depended on him. Whatever was growing inside him, whatever he was transforming into, it needed space and isolation and the kind of privacy that only came from being far away from civilization.

"I think," he said slowly, "that we all need a fresh start."

They talked about it for another hour, discussing practical considerations like schools and medical care and the logistics of relocating two children to a completely different environment. Dark asked intelligent questions and offered thoughtful observations, but underneath his seven-year-old reasoning, Sephiroth could sense a deeper concern.

His son was worried about him. Not just the normal kind of worry that children felt when their parents seemed stressed or unhappy, but genuine fear about what he was becoming. And if a seven-year-old could sense that something fundamental was wrong, how long before other people started noticing?

How long before whatever was growing inside him became too obvious to hide?

That night, after Dark and Eri were both asleep, Sephiroth found himself standing in the bathroom again, studying his reflection with the kind of systematic attention he'd once reserved for analyzing enemy weaknesses.

The changes were accelerating.

His hair, which had been growing longer over the past few weeks, now reached past his shoulders in a cascade of silver that seemed to move independently of air currents. When he ran his fingers through it, the strands felt different—thicker, more substantial, with a texture that was simultaneously softer and stronger than human hair should be.

His skin had taken on a luminous quality that had nothing to do with the bathroom's harsh fluorescent lighting. Not glowing, exactly, but possessed of an inner radiance that made ordinary shadows seem deeper by comparison. When he pressed his palm against the mirror, the reflection of his hand appeared to emit its own faint light.

But it was his eyes that had changed most dramatically.

They were still cyan, still recognizably his own, but they'd taken on a quality that seemed almost predatory. The pupils dilated and contracted according to some rhythm that had nothing to do with light levels, and there were moments when they appeared to reflect illumination that had no visible source. When he stared at himself for too long, he got the uncomfortable sensation that something was staring back—something that knew him far better than he knew himself.

He opened his mouth to examine his teeth and found them exactly as sharp as he'd feared they would be. Not dramatically so, not enough for casual observation to notice, but undeniably different from the blunt human dentition he remembered. His canines had elongated slightly, tapering to points that were efficient rather than decorative.

The wrongness under his skin had intensified to the point where he could no longer ignore it. It felt like something was moving beneath his flesh, rearranging muscle and bone according to some blueprint that existed outside normal human anatomy. Not painful, exactly, but deeply unsettling, like insects crawling just below the surface of his consciousness.

When he flexed his fingers, they moved with an impossible grace, joints bending in ways that seemed to defy the normal limitations of human anatomy. His hands had grown more elegant, the fingers longer and more tapered, with nails that gleamed like polished stone despite having been trimmed just days ago.

And underneath it all, constant and growing, was the sense that he was becoming something else entirely. Something that had been waiting patiently for the right moment to emerge, something that found the domestic life of Sephiroth Hojo as confining as a chrysalis.

The thought should have terrified him. In his previous life, transformation had meant losing everything that made him human, becoming a monster in service to power that ultimately consumed worlds. But standing in the bathroom, studying his changing reflection, he felt something that might have been relief.

Because the wrongness wasn't arbitrary. It had purpose, direction, an internal logic that suggested he was becoming something specific rather than simply dissolving into chaos. And for the first time in months, his body felt like it might actually belong to him rather than being borrowed from someone else.

He was still lost in that thought when he heard Eri crying.

The sound cut through his contemplation like a knife through silk, sharp and desperate and utterly heartbreaking. Not the normal fussing of a baby who was hungry or needed changing, but the kind of distressed wailing that suggested genuine fear.

Sephiroth was moving before he'd consciously decided to leave the bathroom, his body flowing through the apartment with that new, predatory grace. He found Eri in her crib, small fists waving in the air as she sobbed with the kind of desperate abandon that made his chest tighten with sympathetic distress.

"Shh, little one," he murmured, lifting her with movements that felt impossibly smooth. "Papa's here."

But instead of calming down, Eri's cries intensified when she saw him. Her red eyes were wide with what looked like recognition rather than simple baby distress, and her small body tensed in his arms as if she was trying to pull away from him.

She was afraid. His eight-month-old daughter was afraid of him.

"Eri, what's wrong?" He tried to shift her to a more comfortable position, but she continued to fuss, her tiny hands pushing against his chest with surprising strength. "It's Papa. It's okay."

But it wasn't okay, because Eri could see what others couldn't yet perceive. Whatever he was becoming, whatever changes were manifesting beneath his skin, they were obvious enough to frighten an infant whose only experience with the world had been safety and love.

"Papa?" Dark appeared in the doorway, rubbing sleep from his eyes. "Is Eri okay?"

"She's just having a difficult night," Sephiroth said, though his voice sounded strained even to his own ears. "Sometimes babies get fussy for no reason."

But even as he spoke, he could see Dark taking in the scene—his transformed posture, Eri's distressed crying, the way shadows seemed to pool around him despite the room's gentle nightlight. His son's expression grew increasingly concerned, that too-old awareness flickering behind his cyan eyes.

"Papa," Dark said slowly, "you look different."

"Different how?"

"Taller. And..." Dark struggled for words, his seven-year-old vocabulary inadequate for what he was trying to express. "Like you're more yourself than you were before. But also like you're someone else entirely."

The observation was far too perceptive, delivered with the kind of accuracy that suggested Dark could see through whatever illusion of normalcy Sephiroth had been maintaining. And if his own children could sense the changes, how long before others started noticing?

How long before someone called social services, or hero agencies, or whatever authorities dealt with situations involving powered individuals who posed potential threats to public safety?

The thought sent cold terror through him, not for his own sake but for Dark and Eri. Whatever he was becoming, wherever this transformation led, it couldn't be allowed to endanger the children who depended on him. They needed stability, safety, the kind of protected environment where they could grow up without fear.

"We're moving," he said suddenly, the decision crystallizing with perfect clarity. "Tomorrow. We're packing up and moving to the mountains."

Dark blinked in surprise. "Tomorrow? But Papa, we haven't found a place yet, and my school—"

"I'll handle the details." The words came out with more authority than he'd intended, tinged with something that might have been command presence. "Trust me, Dark. This is what's best for all of us."

It was a terrible thing to ask of a seven-year-old—blind trust in a decision that would uproot his entire life. But Dark looked at him for a long moment, taking in his transformed posture and the way Eri had finally begun to calm in his arms, and then nodded with that characteristic solemnity.

"Okay, Papa. If you think that's what we need to do."

The simple acceptance nearly broke him. Here was his son, offering complete faith in his judgment even when that judgment might be compromised by changes he couldn't control or fully understand. The weight of that trust was staggering, a responsibility that felt heavier than anything he'd ever carried.

But it also pulled him back from whatever edge he'd been walking along. The wrongness under his skin receded slightly, pushed back by the immediate necessity of being the kind of father his children deserved. Whatever he was becoming could wait. Right now, there were children to protect and a life to rebuild in a place where transformation could happen safely.

"Go pack your important things," he said gently. "We'll leave after breakfast."

Dark nodded and disappeared back into his room, moving with the kind of quiet efficiency that suggested he'd been expecting this moment for weeks. And maybe he had. Maybe his too-perceptive son had seen the writing on the wall before Sephiroth himself had been willing to acknowledge it.

Alone with Eri, who had finally stopped crying and was now studying his face with those unsettling red eyes, Sephiroth felt the full weight of what he was asking of them. Leaving everything familiar, traveling to an isolated mountain location where he could transform in privacy—it sounded reasonable when framed as concern for their wellbeing, but he knew it was equally about his own needs.

He needed space. Distance. The kind of isolation that would allow whatever was happening to him to unfold without endangering anyone else. And if that meant uprooting his children's lives, disrupting their routines, taking them away from everything they'd ever known...

Well. Sometimes good parents had to make difficult choices.

Even when they weren't entirely sure they were still good people.

The rest of the night passed in a blur of packing and planning and the kind of methodical preparation that felt more like an evacuation than a simple relocation. By dawn, they had reduced their entire life to a few suitcases and boxes, the detritus of domestic happiness condensed into manageable portions.

Sephiroth found himself standing in the empty living room as morning light streamed through the windows, looking at the spaces where their furniture had been. The apartment felt hollow now, echoing with memories that belonged to people who no longer existed. The photograph of their family still sat on the mantelpiece, but even that seemed like an artifact from someone else's life.

"Ready, Papa?" Dark asked from the doorway, Eri in his arms and her diaper bag slung over his shoulder. Seven years old and already handling responsibilities that should have been handled by adults.

"Ready," Sephiroth confirmed, though he wasn't sure that was entirely true.

They left the apartment without looking back, walking into a morning that held the promise of transformation and the threat of becoming something unrecognizable. The city felt different as they drove through it—smaller, more confined, full of too many people living too close together.

The mountains, when they finally came into view hours later, looked like salvation.

Clean air. Open spaces. The kind of isolation where a man could change without witnesses, where children could grow up safe from the kind of scrutiny that dissected difference until nothing human remained.

It felt like coming home to a place he'd never been before.

And if that home was built on the foundation of his own disintegration, if the safety he was providing his children came at the cost of his own humanity...

Well. Some prices were worth paying.

Even when you weren't entirely sure what you were buying.

End of Chapter 4

Chapter Text

The mountain air tasted like freedom, even when freedom came with a side of existential paranoia.

Sephiroth stood on the cabin's wraparound porch, watching Dark practice his quirk in the clearing below while Eri dozed in her bouncer beside him. The morning sun filtered through pine needles, casting dancing shadows that reminded him of better times—or perhaps worse ones, depending on how nostalgic one felt about planetary destruction. The distinction had grown remarkably blurry over the past six months.

Their new home perched on the mountainside like a wooden fortress against the world below, isolated enough to discourage casual visitors but accessible enough that Grandfather Kazuo could make his monthly pilgrimages without requiring helicopter transport. Sephiroth had chosen the location with the same methodical paranoia that had once served him well in planning the systematic annihilation of his enemies, except now he was protecting rather than destroying.

The irony wasn't lost on him.

"Papa, watch this!" Dark called from the clearing, his voice bright with excitement that had been absent during their final months in the city.

Sephiroth turned his attention to his son, who stood in the center of their makeshift training area with the kind of focused concentration that made him look far older than his now eight years. The boy's cyan eyes held that familiar inner light that appeared whenever he accessed his quirk, and the air around him began to shimmer with barely visible energy.

Belief-Magic was a deceptively simple name for something that defied most conventional understanding of how quirks functioned. Where other abilities drew on physical mutations or environmental manipulation, Dark's power operated on the fundamental principle that reality was negotiable—as long as you could convince yourself, absolutely and completely, that what you wanted was possible.

The force field that materialized around Dark was translucent blue, crackling with the kind of energy that suggested it could stop a freight train if necessary. Not because of any inherent physical properties, but because Dark believed it could. The limitations were as much philosophical as practical: his stamina, his imagination, and most crucially, his ability to maintain absolute faith in what he was attempting.

It was, Sephiroth reflected, possibly the most dangerous quirk in existence when wielded by someone with sufficient conviction. The fact that it belonged to a eight-year-old who still believed in the fundamental goodness of the world was either reassuring or terrifying, depending on one's perspective.

"Very good," Sephiroth called back, making sure his voice carried the appropriate level of parental pride. "How long can you maintain it?"

"Maybe ten minutes if I really focus," Dark replied, the force field flickering slightly as he divided his attention between conversation and concentration. "It's getting easier since we moved up here. All the quiet helps me think better."

The quiet. Yes, that had been one of the unexpected benefits of their self-imposed exile. The constant background noise of city life—traffic, sirens, the electromagnetic hum of countless electronic devices—had been slowly driving him insane without his realizing it. Up here, the only sounds were wind through pine trees, the distant call of mountain birds, and the occasional rumble of Kazuo's convoy making its way up the winding access road.

Eri stirred in her bouncer, making soft baby sounds that drew Sephiroth's attention. At fourteen months old, she was beginning to show signs of personality beyond her unsettling red eyes and apocalyptic potential. She babbled constantly now, reaching for everything within range with chubby fingers that still occasionally made things cease to exist when she was particularly excited or distressed.

"Good morning, little destroyer," he murmured, unbuckling her from the bouncer and lifting her into his arms. The materia embedded in his cellular structure hummed with gentle energy, creating a barrier between Eri's quirk and the rest of reality. It was a precaution that had become as automatic as breathing—the only thing standing between his daughter's innocent enthusiasm and the complete unraveling of local spacetime.

Eri giggled and grabbed a handful of his silver hair, tugging with the kind of determined strength that suggested she'd inherited more than just her mother's eyes. Her grip was surprisingly strong for someone so small, and there were moments when Sephiroth wondered if she was developing some kind of enhanced physical capabilities to complement her reality-deletion abilities.

"Papa, Grandfather's coming," Dark announced, his force field dissipating as he turned toward the access road. "I can hear the cars."

Sephiroth's enhanced senses had already detected the approaching convoy—three black sedans moving in formation up the mountain path, their engines synchronized in a way that suggested professional drivers rather than casual visitors. Kazuo never traveled alone anymore, not since taking over active leadership of the Shie Hassaikai following several unfortunate incidents involving rival organizations and government oversight.

The vehicles came to a stop in the graveled area that served as their parking space, and Sephiroth found himself automatically cataloging potential threats and escape routes. It was an old habit, leftover from a lifetime of expecting ambushes, but six months of mountain living had taught him the value of maintaining such instincts even in supposedly safe environments.

Kazuo emerged from the lead vehicle with the measured dignity of a man accustomed to commanding respect through presence rather than volume. At sixty-five, Akira's father carried himself with the kind of understated authority that came from decades of making life-and-death decisions without the luxury of hesitation. His silver hair was perfectly styled despite the mountain wind, and his expensive suit looked incongruously formal against the rustic backdrop of pine trees and wooden architecture.

But it was the young man who stepped out of the second vehicle that held Sephiroth's attention.

Kai Chisaki moved with clinical precision, his white surgical gloves pristine despite the dusty mountain road. Everything about him radiated controlled obsession—from his perfectly aligned posture to the way his golden eyes tracked every detail of their surroundings with scientific intensity. 

Sephiroth was increasingly certain, planning something that would end badly for everyone involved.

"Grandfather!" Dark abandoned his training area and ran toward the arriving convoy, his earlier reserve dissolving into genuine excitement. Despite everything that had happened, despite the circumstances that had brought them to this isolated mountain refuge, the boy still lit up whenever Kazuo visited.

Kazuo's stern expression softened as Dark threw himself into a hug that nearly knocked the older man off balance. For all his reputation and ruthless efficiency, Akira's father had always been weak to his grandchildren's affection. It was, Sephiroth reflected, probably the only reason any of them were still alive.

"You've grown," Kazuo observed, ruffling Dark's hair with uncharacteristic gentleness. "Mountain air must be agreeing with you."

"It is! I can practice my quirk without worrying about breaking anything important, and Papa says I'm getting stronger every day." Dark's enthusiasm was infectious, and even Kai's clinical expression seemed to soften slightly around the edges.

"Indeed. Speaking of quirks, that's partly why we're here today." Kazuo's attention shifted to Sephiroth, who had descended from the porch with Eri still cradled in his arms. "How are they progressing?"

It was a loaded question, wrapped in grandfatherly concern but carrying undertones of professional interest. Kazuo's organization had invested considerable resources in understanding quirks that fell outside normal parameters, and both Dark and Eri qualified as exceptional cases worthy of long-term study.

"Dark's control has improved significantly," Sephiroth replied carefully. "The isolation allows him to push his limits without worrying about collateral damage. And Eri..." He paused, looking down at his daughter who was studying the newcomers with her unsettling red-eyed gaze. "She's been stable. No incidents since we arrived."

"Good. Kai has been developing new analysis techniques that might help us understand the underlying mechanisms better." Kazuo gestured toward his protégé, who stepped forward with the kind of measured approach that suggested he was cataloging everything he observed. "With your permission, he'd like to conduct some updated readings."

Permission. As if Sephiroth had any real choice in the matter, given their current situation. Kazuo had been remarkably understanding about their need for isolation and protection, but that understanding came with implicit obligations. The children's quirks represented valuable assets, and assets required periodic evaluation.

"Of course," Sephiroth said, because refusing would raise questions he wasn't prepared to answer. "What kind of readings?"

"Nothing invasive," Kai assured him, his voice carrying the kind of professional calm that was supposed to be reassuring but somehow achieved the opposite effect. "Simple blood samples, quirk factor analysis, cellular structure examination. Standard procedures for monitoring unusual manifestations."

Standard procedures. Right. Because there was nothing standard about any of their circumstances, from Eri's reality-deletion abilities to Dark's faith-based reality manipulation to Sephiroth's own increasingly obvious inhuman characteristics.

They moved inside the cabin, which Sephiroth had furnished with deliberate simplicity. Comfortable without being luxurious, functional without betraying the extent of Kazuo's financial support. The main room served multiple purposes—living area, dining space, and impromptu medical facility when necessary. Large windows provided excellent sight lines to all approaches while letting in enough natural light to make the space feel welcoming rather than defensive.

Kai set up his equipment with practiced efficiency, transforming one corner of the room into a makeshift laboratory. The instruments were compact but sophisticated, the kind of gear that suggested access to cutting-edge research facilities and unlimited funding. He worked in silence, his movements precise and economical, every gesture serving a specific purpose.

"Let's start with Dark," he said, gesturing toward a chair positioned near his analysis station. "Just a small blood sample and some basic quirk factor readings."

Dark climbed into the chair with the kind of trust that made Sephiroth's chest tighten with protective anxiety. His son had inherited Akira's fundamental faith in the goodness of people, a belief that adults generally had children's best interests at heart. It was a beautiful quality that could prove tragically naive in the wrong circumstances.

"Will it hurt?" Dark asked, watching Kai prepare the blood collection apparatus with clinical detachment.

"Just a small pinch," Kai replied, his tone warming slightly when addressing the child. "Much less than stubbing your toe or getting a paper cut."

The blood draw proceeded without incident, Dark barely flinching as the needle found his vein. Kai worked with the efficiency of someone who had performed the procedure countless times, his gloved hands steady and sure. The collected sample went into a specialized analyzer that hummed with quiet electronic activity.

"Now, if you could demonstrate your quirk for a few minutes," Kai requested, adjusting his monitoring equipment. "Something simple, just so I can record the energy patterns."

Dark nodded and closed his eyes, settling into the focused concentration that accessing his quirk required. The air around him began to shimmer with that familiar translucent energy, and within seconds, a force field materialized in the space between his hands. It pulsed with gentle blue light, surface rippling like water despite its obvious solidity.

Kai's equipment responded immediately, sensors detecting energy patterns that defied conventional physics. The readings appeared on multiple displays, complex waveforms and numerical values that meant nothing to Sephiroth but clearly fascinated their analyst.

"Remarkable," Kai murmured, his golden eyes fixed on the data streams. "The energy signature is unlike anything in the standard quirk classification system. It's as if reality itself is being... negotiated... rather than manipulated through conventional means."

He was too close to the truth. Sephiroth felt his protective instincts sharpen, ancient paranoia rising to the surface like oil on water. Kai's analysis was penetrating deeper than anyone else had managed, identifying principles that could prove dangerous if fully understood.

"Is that unusual?" Sephiroth asked carefully.

"Extraordinarily so. Most quirks work within established physical laws, even when they appear to violate them. This is something else entirely." Kai made notes on a tablet, his fingers moving quickly across the screen. "Dark, can you tell me what you're thinking about while you maintain the field?"

"I'm thinking about how nothing can hurt me while it's there," Dark replied, his voice slightly strained from the effort of divided attention. "Like there's this wall between me and anything bad, and nothing can get through because I won't let it."

"And you believe that completely?"

"I have to. Papa taught me that if I don't believe it all the way, it doesn't work right. Sometimes it breaks, or gets weak, or starts doing things I didn't want."

Kai's expression grew more intense, as if Dark had confirmed something significant. "What happens when you doubt yourself?"

"The field gets shaky. One time I was thinking about Mama being gone, and I started feeling sad, and the whole thing just... fell apart. Like it knew I wasn't paying attention anymore."

Sephiroth watched Kai process this information, noting the way his analytical calm gave way to something that looked suspiciously like excitement. This was more than academic interest. This was the reaction of someone who had found exactly what they were looking for.

"Thank you, Dark. You can let the field dissipate now." Kai turned to his equipment, making final adjustments to his readings. "Eri's turn next, if that's acceptable."

The transition from Dark to Eri required more preparation. Sephiroth held his daughter while Kai conducted the blood draw, his materia-enhanced physiology creating a protective barrier that prevented any accidental activation of her quirk. Eri was remarkably well-behaved during the procedure, more interested in grabbing at Kai's surgical gloves than fussing about the needle.

"Her cellular structure is fascinating," Kai observed, studying the blood sample through his analyzer. "The quirk factor concentration is off the charts, but it's distributed in patterns I've never seen before. Almost like her entire genetic makeup has been... optimized... for reality manipulation."

"What does that mean?" Dark asked from his position on the couch, where he was recovering from his demonstration with a juice box and animal crackers.

"It means your sister is very special," Kai replied diplomatically. "Her quirk operates on principles that most scientists can only theorize about."

Eri chose that moment to giggle and clap her hands together, and for a split second, the space between her palms seemed to fold in on itself before snapping back to normal. Kai's equipment registered the fluctuation immediately, sensors spiking with readings that made his eyes widen behind his clinical mask.

"Extraordinary," he breathed. "Even at rest, her quirk is constantly active at microscopic levels. She's unconsciously editing reality on a continuous basis, making tiny adjustments that keep her environment stable."

The implications of that observation sent cold fear through Sephiroth's veins. If Eri was constantly using her quirk without conscious control, if her power was integrated into her biology at such a fundamental level, then any attempt to suppress or redirect it could prove catastrophic.

"Is that dangerous?" he asked.

"Potentially. But also potentially revolutionary." Kai's excitement was becoming harder to conceal. "If we could understand the mechanism, learn to replicate it, the applications would be..."

He stopped himself, perhaps realizing that his enthusiasm was straying into territory that might raise uncomfortable questions. But Sephiroth had heard enough to confirm his suspicions. Kai wasn't just studying the children's quirks—he was planning to exploit them.

"And what about me?" Sephiroth asked, deciding to push the situation toward its inevitable conclusion. "Don't you want samples from the father as well?"

Kai hesitated, and in that hesitation, Sephiroth read volumes. "If you're comfortable with it. Your quirk factor readings might provide useful baseline data for understanding the children's abilities."

It was a reasonable request, delivered with professional courtesy and scientific justification. It was also a trap, because Kai almost certainly suspected that Sephiroth's biology was as unusual as his children's. The blood sample would reveal the extent of his inhuman modifications, the cellular restructuring that had been progressing steadily since their move to the mountains.

But refusing would be suspicious, and suspicion could lead to questions that would endanger everything he'd built.

"Of course," Sephiroth agreed, settling into the chair Dark had vacated. "For scientific completeness."

Kai approached the blood draw with the same clinical efficiency he'd shown with the children, but Sephiroth could sense his heightened attention. This sample mattered more than the others, for reasons that probably had nothing to do with parental genetics and everything to do with whatever theories Kai was developing about their family's unusual circumstances.

The needle found his vein easily, and Sephiroth watched his blood flow into the collection vial. It looked normal—dark red, appropriately viscous, showing no obvious signs of the changes he could feel occurring at the cellular level. But appearances could be deceiving, and he suspected Kai's analysis would reveal far more than anyone was prepared to acknowledge.

"Thank you," Kai said, sealing the sample and placing it in his analyzer. "This should provide the final piece of the puzzle."

The puzzle. As if their lives were an intellectual exercise rather than a daily struggle to maintain some semblance of normalcy while navigating the complexities of superhuman abilities and criminal organization politics.

While Kai processed the samples, Kazuo engaged Dark in conversation about his schooling and social development. The boy was remarkably articulate for his age, answering questions about his remote learning program and his feelings about mountain life with the kind of thoughtful precision that suggested he'd inherited more than just his mother's appearance.

Sephiroth listened with half his attention while keeping the other half focused on Kai's equipment. The analysis was taking longer than it had for either of the children, complex processes running in parallel as the machines attempted to catalog something that defied conventional classification.

When the results finally appeared on Kai's displays, his carefully maintained professional composure cracked slightly around the edges.

"Fascinating," he murmured, studying the data with unconcealed fascination. "Your cellular structure shows signs of systematic enhancement—not just quirk factor concentration, but fundamental improvements to strength, speed, sensory acuity, and healing capacity. It's as if your entire biology has been... upgraded."

Upgraded. The word carried implications that Sephiroth wasn't ready to address directly. Because the truth was that his body was systematically replacing every human cell with something more efficient, more durable, more suited to the kind of existence that someone of his background might require.

"Is that unusual?" he asked, keeping his tone carefully neutral.

"Unprecedented, in my experience. Most adults show relatively stable quirk factor distributions, but your readings suggest ongoing transformation at the genetic level. Almost like you're evolving in real time."

Evolving. Another loaded term, carrying suggestions of directed change rather than random mutation. Kai was getting dangerously close to understanding the true nature of what was happening, and that understanding could prove fatal for everyone involved.

"Perhaps it's a delayed manifestation," Sephiroth suggested. "Some quirks don't fully develop until later in life."

Kai nodded thoughtfully, but his expression suggested he wasn't entirely convinced by that explanation. "Perhaps. Though the pattern is remarkably systematic for a natural development. Almost as if it's following some kind of predetermined template."

A predetermined template. If only he knew how accurate that assessment was.

Kazuo chose that moment to intervene, his political instincts apparently recognizing that the conversation was heading toward dangerous territory. "Kai, I think we have enough data for today. Perhaps we should discuss the preliminary findings privately before drawing any conclusions."

It was a polite dismissal wrapped in professional courtesy, but Kai took the hint immediately. He began packing up his equipment with the same methodical efficiency he'd shown during setup, each instrument returning to its designated case with practiced precision.

"Of course. Thank you for your cooperation," he said to Sephiroth, though his golden eyes lingered with the kind of intensity that suggested their interaction was far from over. "The data will require extensive analysis, but I should have preliminary results within a few weeks."

Within a few weeks. Enough time to run comprehensive tests, cross-reference the findings with existing databases, and potentially identify patterns that would reveal far more than anyone was prepared to acknowledge.

Sephiroth felt his paranoia crystallize into certainty. Whatever Kai was planning, whatever theories he was developing based on their biological samples, it would not end well for any of them. The young man's professional interest had crossed the line into personal obsession, and obsessed people made dangerously unpredictable decisions.

The remainder of the visit proceeded with careful normalcy. Kazuo spent time with both children, asking about their daily routines and listening to Dark's excited descriptions of his quirk training progress. Eri charmed her grandfather by successfully stacking wooden blocks without accidentally deleting any of them, a minor miracle that suggested her control was improving gradually.

But underneath the domestic pleasantries, tension hummed like a live wire. Kai watched everything with clinical attention, taking notes on behavior patterns and interaction dynamics. He was building a comprehensive profile of their family unit, documenting information that could be used for purposes that had nothing to do with grandfather's concern for his grandchildren's wellbeing.

When the convoy finally departed, leaving tire tracks in the gravel and the lingering scent of expensive cologne, Sephiroth found himself standing on the porch again, watching the vehicles disappear around the mountain's curve. Dark waved enthusiastically until they were completely out of sight, while Eri babbled commentary that probably contained profound observations about the nature of family relationships if anyone could understand baby logic.

"Papa," Dark said as they headed back inside, "Kai seemed different this time."

Different. Trust a seven-year-old to identify what adults might miss or dismiss. "Different how?"

"More... interested. Like he was collecting things instead of just looking at them." Dark paused in the doorway, his expression thoughtful in the way that suggested he was processing concepts beyond his vocabulary. "Do you think he's planning something?"

The question hit with uncomfortable accuracy. Because yes, Kai was definitely planning something, and that something almost certainly involved their family in ways that would not serve their best interests.

"I think," Sephiroth said carefully, "that we need to be extra careful about who we trust and what information we share."

It was a diplomatic way of confirming Dark's suspicions without triggering the kind of anxiety that might destabilize his quirk control. The boy was perceptive enough to understand the implications without requiring explicit explanation.

That evening, after Dark was settled with his schoolwork and Eri was napping in her crib, Sephiroth found himself on the porch again, studying the mountain landscape with new appreciation for its defensive advantages. The isolated location that had initially felt like sanctuary was beginning to feel more like a strategic position—high ground with excellent visibility and multiple escape routes.

His phone buzzed with an encrypted message from a number he didn't recognize, but the content made his blood run cold: "We need to talk. The samples revealed more than you might think. - K.C."

Kai. Somehow, the young man had obtained Sephiroth's private contact information and was reaching out directly, bypassing the organizational hierarchy that should have governed such communications. The implications were staggering—either Kai was operating with Kazuo's explicit authorization, or he was conducting unauthorized research that could prove fatal for everyone involved.

Sephiroth deleted the message without responding, but the damage was already done. Their peaceful mountain existence had just shifted from sanctuary to siege, and he had no idea how much time they had before the situation escalated beyond his ability to protect his children.

Inside the cabin, Dark looked up from his homework with that unsettling perception that seemed to be his secondary quirk. "Papa? Is everything okay?"

"Everything's fine," Sephiroth replied automatically, though they both knew it wasn't true. "Just thinking about dinner plans."

Dark nodded but didn't return to his studies immediately. Instead, he watched his father with the kind of careful attention that suggested he was cataloging behavioral changes for future reference. Seven years old and already developing the survival instincts that would serve him well in whatever chaos was approaching.

Because chaos was approaching. Sephiroth could feel it in his bones, in the way the mountain air seemed to carry whispers of threat and opportunity in equal measure. Whatever game Kai was playing, whatever research he was conducting, whatever theories he was developing—it all pointed toward a confrontation that would determine whether their family could continue existing in the shadows or whether they would be forced into the light, with all the dangers that exposure entailed.

The mountains had given them six months of peace. Six months of healing, growth, and the careful reconstruction of something that resembled normal family life. But peace was a temporary condition, and the world below was still full of people who would view his children as assets to be exploited rather than individuals to be protected.

Sephiroth stood in his doorway, looking out at the pine trees that surrounded their home, and began planning for war.

Because if six months of domestic tranquility had taught him anything, it was that some things were worth fighting for. And if protecting his children required him to become the monster that everyone expected him to be, then so be it.

The mountains would run red before he let anyone harm his family.

Even if that family was built on lies, sustained by paranoia, and defended by someone who was no longer entirely human.

Some prices, after all, were worth paying.

End of Chapter 5