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Sephiroth didn’t remember much of the trip back to town.
It would concern him under other circumstances. To be so distracted on a mission was tantamount to suicide, even in a relatively peaceful area as this. Worse, his team was likely to pay the price if his distraction led to mistakes.
And yet, he was helpless against his own thoughts. His own mind, endlessly looping through the reactor visit.
As it was, it took everything he had not to reveal to his men how rattled he was. Zack already had an inkling for how he behaved in the reactor, but the trooper and their guide, they hadn’t seen his shameful loss of composure.
He relied more than he would like to admit on Zack keeping his head. He couldn’t trust himself to function to his usual standards, no matter how much he struggled to drag his mind away from the things they had found.
He needed privacy. A place to think. And most of all, he needed answers.
His entire life he’d wondered. Wondered about his place in Shinra, wondered how he’d come to be there. Wondered about the experiments that went as far back as he could remember.
He hadn’t expected to find a glimpse of an answer in a backwater little town like this.
But here he was, after searching his entire life, he had finally found his mother’s name. He had wished for this, desired it desperately in the few weak moments he had permitted himself.
But not like this. Never like this. He had hoped for a note, a document in an archive, maybe a mention of her by someone who knew her. Not her name proclaimed over a nest of artificial monster eggs. Proudly displayed above a room full of mako pods and abandoned experiments, each more monstrous than the other.
Another one of Hojo’s playgrounds. He had seen a number of them by now, yet this was the most horrifying, at least to him.
His mother’s name.
Why? Why here? He thought, fervently. Why now?
It reeked of a trap. It wasn’t even subtle. He did not know what Hojo had planned, ordering him here. This reactor was R&D’s domain, there was no way that detestable man did not realise Sephiroth might find that lab, might find the experimental mako pods, and his mother’s name engraved over the doorway.
He had been too rattled by the things in the antechamber to trust himself to enter the sanctuary beyond that door. Yet part of him yearned, desperately, to rush back and wrench the wretched thing off its hinges. To find out what was hidden there. Could it be something of his mother? Could the truth of his existence be hidden there? The strength of his own desire frightened him.
Hojo knew what was in there. He would have planned for Sephiroth’s reaction.
But why?
If this was a test, then what was being tested? Why withhold all answers for so long only to send him here?
What was in there?
He couldn’t dwell on it. He was here now. He had found his mother’s name. There was a chance, a small, infinitesimal chance, that he could find some answers too.
It was a risk, walking into a trap. Especially one of Hojo’s making. But he needed to know.
But where to look for them? The Nibel mountains were vast. There were countless nooks and crannies on Mt. Nibel alone, where one might squirrel away an untold number of proverbial and less proverbial skeletons. That had been abundantly clear just from this single trip to the reactor. Hojo could have hidden additional facilities anywhere.
No, no. Sephiroth forced his racing thoughts to calm. No, not anywhere. Any of Hojo’s labs would need infrastructure. A power grid. A supply route. Somewhere where the coming and going of people would not stand out. And Hojo was not overly patient. He wouldn’t have chosen an entirely isolated place, if only so his regular orders for materials would not be delayed.
It was unlikely that Hojo’s main location was the reactor itself. Sephiroth hadn’t spotted anything but the most basic facilities. As far as he had seen there was only a small barrack at the edge of the reactor grounds, the type meant for a maintenance crew to occupy temporarily in case of malfunction. It wasn’t very accessible either, especially not with heavy materials. The reactor had a heli pad, but it hadn’t been maintained, and at this altitude and with the number of winged wildlife around here, deliveries would depend on favourable circumstances.
Yet obviously the experiments at the reactor had to be monitored at times. Given the windows in the pods, Hojo hadn’t wanted to rely on remote sensors alone. Visits had to be a reasonable option, at least when an active experiment was running.
So, somewhere not too far from the reactor. At least somewhat accessible, with a access route to the reactor itself.
Some place like –
As they crested the last ridge, the town came into view. Looking down on the insignificant little place, he mentally ticked off the boxes.
– like Nibelheim.
–
It was easy to leave his team at the edge of the town. Only Zack questioned his order to go rest, and the puppy was too disquieted to protest much.
Sephiroth’s mind was already on his new mission. He had to find answers. This might be his only chance. No matter how disturbing, the presence of his mother’s name a the reactor had to mean something.
He feared and desired to uncover that meaning.
Where to start looking? No any place the townspeople frequented. So not any of the inhabited dwellings, nor the townshall or the woods directly surrounding the village.
No. No, the answer was more obvious than that.
The Shinra mansion.
He had thought it odd that it was still under lease, after what the major made sound like decades of abandonment. Almost thirty years, in fact.
A mirthless chuckle escaped him. So obvious. His entire life he had searched for clues, and now they were tumbling into his lap as if the dam holding them back had finally broken.
With renewed urgency, he hastened to the mansion. He doubted the town had been granted a spare key, but there were few locks that could truly bar his way if he did not allow himself to be stopped.
–
Gaining access to the mansion turned out to be even easier than expected. The ill-kept wood of the door was weakened enough by years of neglect that a firm push was all that was needed to break through the lock. The damage wasn’t even overly noticeable.
Inside was dark and cool. The place had been closed off properly, limiting the amount of dust. The building must have once been the highest quality in town. Even decades of abandonment had done little harm to the interior. No overwhelming scent of decay greeted him. The number of vermin he could hear and smell was limited, for the size of the building. Except for the outer fittings like the doors and window frames, the mansion had not been overly affected by the passage of time.
He looked around the once-grand foyer. The mansion was a large place to search for answers. But compared to the entirety of Gaia, it was hardly daunting.
Best to get on with it. He only had so long before his team would start to wonder about his absence.
–
Sephiroth was meticulous in his search. He had made a mental grid, ensuring that not an inch of the place would pass him by without a thorough assessment.
His plan fell apart when he spotted a familiar face up in the gloom.
In a blink he had jumped up to the next floor and over the balustrade, feeling breathless from more than his own haste.
His eyes hadn’t fooled him. He reached out slowly, and noticed with numb detachment that his fingers were trembling. With reverence, they brushed across a two-dimensional cheek.
“Mother,” he breathed out shakily. Her face was familiar even after all these years. Never, since the loss of his locket, had he seen her face. Until now.
He did not know how long he stood there. Drinking in the sight of her face, her eyes, the graceful fall of her hair, so much like his own, like a dying man in the desert. He felt starved, half mad with fear and elation, the sight of her soothing his ragged edges all on its own.
She was here. Here in this forsaken place.
She was here.
“Mother,” he said, and now he sounded steadier. Felt steadier, at the comforting sight of her.
Finally he noticed the hand resting on her shoulder.
His entire being went cold as ice.
He knew that person. Knew him all too well.
The feeling of seeing this man, here, with his hand on his mother’s shoulder, was worse than the plunge into Nibel’s treacherous meltwater river. Worse than the dizzying swoop of falling down towards a rocky riverbed he could not see, hidden by freezing, foaming waters, with more vulnerable lives above and about to follow.
This was the cold burn of cooled mako injected into a major vein. The painful, exposed feeling of those hungry eyes, that clinically amused smile, as that man watched him writhe on his exam table, in a padded cell, watched him scream and cry as the first real monsters he faced gravely injured him-
His hand on his mother’s shoulder felt almost as violating. He knew that pose, that expression on his face. He recognized the look on his mother’s face from his own experience.
Possessive. Proprietorial. Restricting.
Sad. Submissive. Resigned.
Here he stood, like he had later stood before the president with Sephiroth himself, forever immortalised with Sephiroth’s mother as if he was showing off a pet. Property. His creation.
Posing with her, like he would later pose with Sephiroth. Showing off his great work.
Displaying the same pattern with the mother as he would later with her child. Sadistic satisfaction in his eyes. Claiming credit for their very existence.
The sight was unmitigatedly sickening. Sephiroth turned his gaze away, momentarily overcome.
Yet he could not bear to look away too long. Instead his eyes returned to his mother, to her sad eyes and unsmiling face. He recognized his own trained blankness in her. It ached to see their similarities so starkly displayed.
“Oh mother. What did he do to you?” Sephiroth whispered. He closed his eyes, and carefully lifted his hand away from her before he could damage her image. He clenched his hands so tight his gloves creaked.
“I will find out,” he promised her.
With an aching heart and a last glance at her face, he returned to his search.
He silently vowed he would not rest until he uncovered what Hojo had done to the both of them.
–
Days later, Sephiroth had his answers.
His heart laid long shattered in the abandoned corners of the library.
He knew now who Jenova was. Who he was.
What he was.
Not human. Inhuman. Abnormal. Ancient. Something the world had not seen in millennia.
His breath shuddered. Who was he, knowing all this? What was left of the illusions he had built himself?
His mother. Jenova. Not human, but a being from ages past, terrible and unknowable. The like the world hadn’t seen so long she had almost been forgotten.
Who then, he asked himself, was the woman in the picture? Whose visage had he been clinging to so desperately? Not his real mother’s. She couldn’t be. Not when Hojo and Gast clearly stated that Jenova had been a fossil. A fossil with viable cells, but decidedly not a human woman.
‘cultivating the cells required an organic incubator’
A passage in the notes that he had only skimmed over, hardly interested in the finer details of Hojo’s hand-crafted horrors. But now a terrible realisation dawned on him.
Hojo had never called the woman in the picture his mother. ‘The one who carried you’ he had said, when Sephiroth had happened to find the locket in an old forgotten box. Sephiroth had been young, he’d made assumptions.
Carried.
A surrogate.
An incubator.
His real mother was a cetra. The woman in the picture was an ordinary human. Only someone who had been compatible enough not to reject his real mother’s genetic material. Hojo’s notes were so clear.
No wonder Hojo told him his mother was dead. His mother had been dead for two thousand years. The closest thing he’d ever had to a living mother was this… this surrogate.
The surrogate who had disappeared from his life as soon as she had played her part. Vanished from the records without a single sign that she had put any value to the experimental abomination she had brought into the world. Who had left him to Hojo, without any sign of remorse.
Not even Gast’s notes mentioned her name. Truly just a nameless, unimportant woman, brought in for her womb, to aid Hojo’s magnificent Project S.
Likely she had only cared about whatever payment had been offered her. Had likely been all too eager to leave and not look back the moment she was done.
Or maybe she ended up on Hojo’s dissection table, and never got the payment she had been promised. It would fit Hojo, to lure someone in and not let go, to make someone’s body into a Shinra company secret without informing them. Her face in the painting did not suggest a happy working relationship. Possibly he had already sprung his trap by then.
But that hardly mattered anymore, did it.
Sephiroth laughed deliriously, his chuckles trailing off in a sob. So here he had his precious answers. All those years, clinging to a false mother’s face. Seeing similarities that meant nothing.
The woman in the picture wasn’t his mother. She wasn’t Jenova.
Just another experiment of Hojo’s.
Just another lie.
There was nothing left.
“I know the truth now,” he said to the silent room. He laughed again.
It was, he thought hysterically, a truth fitting for his existence.
A truth fitting for his blood and his blade.
He knew the truth he had so desired. The gift of knowing was as bitter as his entire existence.
His entire life was nothing but a macabre experiment.
Misbegotten. Abhorrent. Monstrous.
He had never been human.
What he was, was a revenant of a dead race.
A creature build to satisfy a scientist’s sick curiosity.
A child with a heritage humanity would prefer he never claimed.
A child made into a servant, a slave, a weapon, for the very race that had murdered his people.
Hojo had made him.
Gast had helped Hojo make him.
Shinra had happily funded everything. Had encouraged it.
The entire world had watched Hojo’s creation, had watched the abomination he had made him into, and praised it.
Praised.
As if his entire existence was not unnatural. As if it hadn’t ruined him.
Praised. Approved. Cheered, louder and louder, for a monster.
The world approved of everything that had made him.
Now, in him kindled the desire to teach the world his wrath.