Chapter Text
There is a man, with hair like sunlight and eyes with the acid glow of Mako, leaning casually on the desk. He’s sipping wine out of President ShinRa’s favorite cup like he owns it. And he is covered, toe to tip, in a scarlet smattering of blood.
A sword that looks so much like Angeal’s is lodged into the floor in front of him, a booted foot braced on the hilt. It is covered, tip to hilt, in a scarlet smattering of blood, and the rapidly congealing dripping of viscera.
The man takes a hardy gulp of the wine. He’s dressed in a mockery of a SOLDIER’s uniform; a vest zipped to his neck, pants tucked into tall boots. There’s a decal of a wolf on his one singular sleeve that’s carved— haphazardly— in a mirror image on the sword’s hilt.
The sword is so much like Angeal’s that if it weren’t for that singular modification, he would say it is Angeal’s. It has the same hilt, the same blade, the same lethal thickness and the same violent promises lodged into it. Unlike Angeal’s however, it is clearly used. Scratches and dents marr its surface. A patch of rust is crawling up the flat side, harshly red against the steely gray of the blade.
And the president…
Sephiroth has never actually seen Angeal use his impossibly large sword on an individual person. There has, simply, never been any need to. Stopping altercations between Sephiroth and Genesis merely requires blocking. When dealing with crowds of enemy combatants, Angeal tends to use the blunt side. He only ever uses the sharp side against monsters. The SOLDIER Firsts are cannons. You do not send canons to stop people, small and insignificant as they are.
ShinRa is nearly in half. Quite literally. His corpse is seated in his desk chair, jaw lolling. A gash goes from his side to the center of his torso, just under his ribs, that nearly bisects him. There’s another gash, from his shoulder down his chest, like his assailant had been trying to carve out his heart. It looks like he’s been half-eaten by an animal, the connective tissue of his body so severed that it’s all his corpse can do to lie there haphazardly, limbs drooping, as if they are going to fall off.
This is the carnage one can wreak, with a sword like that. Sephiroth is suddenly very grateful for Angeal’s grace. And now there is this.
This man, whom none of them have ever heard of, clearly enhanced, clearly very enhanced, with a sword twice his size that he clearly knows how to use. He takes another sip of ShinRa’s wine. He is backlit by the afternoon sun, spilling in through ShinRa’s floor-to-ceiling windows. Beyond them, Midgar’s skyline is as it always is. Heedless of the rapidly brewing chaos inside of ShinRa tower.
“Who are you?” Angeal asks.
The man pins Angeal beneath his stare, acid-cerulean. His eyes don’t glow like Angeal’s and Genesis’ do, like the sea. They don’t even glow like Zack’s, slightly dimmer from his second-class enhancements. No, this man’s eyes glow like Sephiroth’s do—
So bright and so acid that they bathe the surrounding skin green.
The man’s gaze swivels to Sephiroth, and Sephiroth feels fear for the first time in his life.
He stares like a hunter watching his game; like a predator sizing up its prey; his eyes are like a pin, and Sephiroth is a butterfly, stuck to the corkish pinboard, wings still desperately fluttering. Fluttering the way his pulse has rapidly begun to flutter in his throat.
“No one of consequence,” the stranger says. His voice has a high timbre, scratchy and hoarse in such a way that it betrays its disuse. He bears a slight accent, one that Sephiroth has difficulty placing; something rural, vowels round and long in the stranger’s mouth. He is answering Angeal’s question, but his gaze is still locked onto Sephiroth’s, searing in its hateful intensity.
“Excuse me?” Angeal hisses, hands tightening on the hilt of his sword. “You just killed the president, and you say that?”
The man continues to not move his gaze. He does, however, tap the tip of his finger against the glass in his hand. Once, twice, thrice. The tinny sound bounces off the high ceilings of the President’s office. The stranger’s hands are ungloved and unblemished. They are small, delicate where they hold the wine glass to his lips. Like a panther, Sephiroth thinks. Graceful and terrifying.
The only good piece of advice Hojo ever gave him was: to understand someone, look at their hands.
Angeal’s hands are calloused from a lifetime of labor, and then of hefting that formidable sword of his. Genesis’ hands and arms are covered in thin, pale hairline scars from his youth, put there by his reckless exploration of the woods around his hometown. Zackary Fair’s hands have knuckle scars. From tussling as a kid, he’d said, smiling sheepishly at Sephiroth’s question. Hojo’s hands are always covered by surgical gloves, always smelling of antiseptic. Always.
Only Sephiroth’s hands bear no markings; he had been born perfect, after all. Perfect specimens do not get scars or calluses. He heals too quickly for them to form. He covers his hands’ smoothness with gloves, masquerading as a practical uniform choice. The stranger’s hands are ungloved and unblemished.
“Does it matter who I am?” He replies. “You’re all going to come to your own conclusions either way.”
“Why do you look like Zackary Fair’s favorite trooper?” Sephiroth finally summons his voice.
Because he does. He has the same slim face and delicate features and hair like pointed, deadly sunlight. Except Zackary Fair’s favorite trooper is a boy of just barely fourteen, cheeks round and eyes bright with youth. He has a pitchy voice that he rarely raises and a stutter whenever he sees Sephiroth.
A muscle twitches in the man’s cheek. Instead of answering, he sips his wine again.
“You’re right,” Angeal murmurs, to Sephiroth. Then, louder, with a harsh authority that Angeal only ever uses in the field, he says, “Why do you look like Trooper Cloud Strife?”
The man barks a laugh. Short, brittle, brisk and viciously unkind. He lets the wine glass in his hand fall, and it collides with the floor in a crash and a scattering of glass. Wine drips across the sleek tile floor of the room, mingling with the blood pooling at their feet.
Flatly, the stranger says, “Distant relation.”
He hops from his perch on the desk with all the lithe grace of the panther Sephiroth had earlier compared him too. But when he sets his stance and grips the hilt of the sword, it is with the deadly, harsh movements of someone who has only ever fought with such a sword. He yanks it from its place lodged in the ground with a loud, metallic screech.
Sephiroth falls into a fighting stance on instinct, his own hand wrapping around the handle of the Masamune. The stranger sets the flat side of his sword over his shoulder, staring at Sephiroth with newfound imperiousness. He says, with a voice full of hot disdain, “You have no idea, do you.”
Sephiroth simply stares, nonplussed by his words.
Heedless, the stranger huffs in irritation. “Of course he doesn’t. Why would he? Gaia help me.”
“What do I not know?” Sephiroth replies.
The stranger tilts his head. He does it with all the humanity of an animal, movement sharp and controlled, and yet clearly instinctual. One of the spikes in his hair falls into his eyes, and his Mako eyes dye it green.
The stranger says, “The things you’re capable of.” And then he launches himself at Sephiroth.
Sephiroth has to dodge back to avoid the swing of the blade. Unlike Angeal, the stranger isn’t even hesitating to use the sharp edge. And even more unlike Angeal, he does not keep the blade close to his chest. The stranger swings the sword in wild, wide arcs. Anyone else would be thrown by the centrifugal force of the sword, but, somehow, the man stays his ground.
Sephiroth blocks, and he attempts to parry, but the stranger anticipates this. He swings his body, raising his left leg to kick Sephiroth in the side. Sephiroth blocks with his hand, but then the stranger, one hand braced on the flat side of his own sword, slams the hilt into Sephiroth’s head.
Sephiroth staggers back, ears ringing. He watches with blurry vision as the stranger is occupied by Angeal, but Sephiroth cannot allow that to continue; Angeal is precious to him, and he is no match for this Mako-eyed panther. So Sephiroth steps in front of the stranger’s next swing, blocking and dodging.
The stranger has no emotion in his eyes as he drops his sword to the ground, grips Sephiroth around the middle, and throws him at the windows. Sephiroth’s back collides with the glass and he goes careening into the open, watching as ShinRa tower gets smaller and smaller in his vision. Silently, he curses ShinRa senior’s love for windows, of all things. Awfully inconvenient in a fight.
The stranger is launching himself at him, sword balanced on one shoulder, its deadly tip pointed right at him. He swings his arms out wide, regaining his balance, and tips himself towards the stranger.
Their swords meet in a deadly clash of metal. The stranger’s eyes spark with sodden, blaring rage, lips pulled back into a snarl.
He pushes against their mutual block. Sephiroth pushes back, but he isn’t strong enough; the stranger overcomes his leverage with sheer, inhuman force. He spins them around and presses a boot to Sephiroth’s chest, sending him rocketing downwards.
His back collides with the roof of an office building. He lets out a scream as pain bites into existence along his skin, only growing worse as he skids across concrete. The stranger slams onto the roof in front of him.
Backlit by the sun, holding a weapon of grotesque, deadly force. He is shadowed by the glittering afternoon light, casting him in the golden glow of something holy. But his eyes betray his monstrousness, just the same as Sephiroth’s do. Acrid green. Slit pupils. The eyes of a beast staring out of the face of a man.
Sephiroth is going to lose this fight. Sephiroth has never lost a fight.
Spars, sure. He made a few tactical retreats during his time in Wutai; and he’s lost more than his fair share of games, card games and board games and video games shared with his fellow SOLDIER Firsts. But Sephiroth has never lost a fight.
Sephiroth scrambles up, palms biting on the concrete. As the stranger walks towards him, he skitters backwards. No time to stand, so he slides his rear against concrete, farther and farther from the stranger as he comes closer and closer, until Sephiroth’s back hits the lip of the roof.
His options are die by sword or fall. While he may survive the fall, it would surely injure him enough to make him nothing more than a sitting duck for this man to slaughter.
Heart hammering in his ears, Sephiroth bites out, “Your disdain is with me, correct?”
The stranger stops. Tilts his head again, in that strangely inhuman way.
“You kept your eyes trained on me even when replying to Angeal. You mentioned me, specifically. Your rage,” he swallows, throat painfully tight, “it is with me. Am I correct?”
In a voice that is far too high to come from such a deadly force, he says, “You are correct.”
Sephiroth nods, swallowing past his dry throat a second time. His breaths are coming fast and short through his nose, heart in his mouth. It reminds him a little of how it feels just before he has an appointment with Hojo.
Not during; those are categorized by a yawning feeling of utter and complete apathy and emptiness. No, but this is very much like right before. As he steps down the metal stairs into the labs, trying and failing to steady his racing heart, staring into the green strip lights of Science.
It is not the first time Sephiroth has had enemies. The stranger does not look Wutaian, but Sephiroth isn’t exactly popular with Midgar’s people, either. He is not any SOLDIER that Sephiroth recognizes, and he knows no one from Science would give any SOLDIER the amount of Mako that is clearly running through this man’s veins. Is it secret experimentation? An accident with a Mako spring? It’s impossible to tell.
“Then keep this between us,” Sephiroth croaks. “I beg you.”
The stranger blinks at him. His expression opens, eyes wide, lips apart. It is that of someone who’s genuinely been thrown for a loop.
“I am your only match in combat. So leave the other SOLDIERs out of whatever grudge you have with me. Do as you will; I will meet you in battle. But…”
Words fail him. Sephiroth has never been good with words, anyway. Experiments didn’t need them and weapons need them even less.
“You… want me to spare the other SOLDIERs,” the stranger says, something edged dawning in his voice. Something harsh, something barbed.
“The other First Class SOLDIERs are my… friends.” Sephiroth says, ignoring the way the words send pangs of wriggling regret into his chest. Is he going to die here? Will he never see them again? “And the lower classes… respect me. I… I do not want to fail them. So, please, settle this with me,” settle this with my death.
“Friends,” the stranger repeats, a manic tinge to his voice. “Friends? You don’t have friends.”
“I am sorry,” Sephiroth says, sensing the impending danger. He pulls himself to his feet. “But I do.”
“You have friends,” he whispers. “It’s your eyes. They’re… different.”
Wary, Sephiroth probes, “Different how?”
“She’s not here,” the stranger says, eyes going wild. Like an animal, he stands there, stock still and yet still thrumming with energy. “She’s not here.”
“Who do you speak of?”
“She’s not here yet. It’s before. Before.”
“I—”
The stranger launches himself before Sephiroth can even form his thought; he attempts to block, but his hand is batted away. And then there is hot, searing pain. Pain unlike anything he’s ever felt before, electric and burning, coursing through his torso with the sheer force of it.
Then, his entire body goes cold. He looks down to see that horrible, deadly sword lodged into his stomach. It’s spilling his blood all over his legs and shoes, stinking the air with iron.
The last thing he sees before everything goes dark is his assailant’s eyes. The last thing he thinks before everything goes dark is, is this what it's like to be felled by me?