005 ☄ the sky is low, the clouds are mean

[nohometown]

It's quiet and cold, and there's snow on the ground, blanketing bare, blackened earth that nonetheless shows through here and there: soil where nothing grows, not even in winter. In the distance, a city looms darkly: vast and industrial, walled and tiered and towered; its lights beneath the gray sky shine like pinprick eyes of red, green, and gold, some blinking and some unblinking.

There are few moving shapes on the barren terrain stretching away from the great city. Here and there an animal, or monster, stirs, raises its head, but it's an empty place overall, as there is little here to sustain either predators or prey. At first, there don't seem to be any humans present in this desolate area, but there is one. It's difficult to see him at first because he's small and pale, his silver hair and gray clothes difficult to pick out against the snowy backdrop. Yet he is there, moving from place to place with an almost unnerving quickness, in a direction definitively away from the city, carrying supplies on his back, and with a small sword at his side.

He's only a child, but he's alone out here.


[[ooc: another gratuitous child Sephiroth post. He's considering leaving his current employ with the Shinra Company, and so he's dreaming of himself leaving Shinra as a child. Replies will come from pinnaculum.]]

Comments

[pinnaculum]

"That's right," he says with a nod, matter-of-fact. Who would help him? "Now I must find a place where I can hide."

[waterfell]

There's a woman next to him. Maybe that's someone.

"You could do it another way," she offers. "Keep moving." A moving target is much harder than narrowing in on a stationary one. She should know, after her time researching Sailor V for the senshi - and later, gathering information for the Dark Kingdom.

[pinnaculum]

"Should I always keep moving and never stop?"

It sounds lonely, doesn't it? Always having to move, never being able to stop or stay anywhere.

He turns to her, his hair moving in the cold wind. "I will, if I have to."

[waterfell]

"That's right," Mercury says, with little respect for what Sephiroth might be feeling. "If you want to escape, you won't be able to rest."

Her lips quirk sideways, briefly. "Thinking you can't do it?"

[pinnaculum]

"I can," he says, turning away again, a mountain range rising in the distance now as the city dwindles behind them.

"Look," he says, then disappears, reappearing again several yards ahead. He requires little rest, and he's fast, resourceful, trained for survival.

Behind is the lab, ahead is endless journeying. Is that all there is for him?

[waterfell]

It is. That's what escape means: Always looking over your shoulder. It's better, she's discovered, to make the life she wants within the life she doesn't.

But she won't argue with Sephiroth's choice, either. It's a valid one, and one that's crossed her mind more than once.

"You're clever," she concedes. "What you should consider next, are the abilities of the ones they'll send after you."

[pinnaculum]

"I will have to kill them when they come," he says calmly, a very unchildlike sentiment, though even as a child, he was being trained to kill, conditioned not to react emotionally. "No one's abilities are like mine. I'm different. I always have been."

He knows that something is very wrong. In his current state, he's not quite sure what it is, but there's something...

"I don't know why."

[waterfell]

It's not unlike that frustrating sense of something missing she often has. She's learned to associate it with the senshi, with the memories of before she learned the truth - and thus, to disregard it, or at least tell herself she has.

"That's something else you won't find back there," she says. It may be the place with the answers, but no one is going to give them to him there.

[pinnaculum]

He closes his eyes for a moment. "I know that already. He doesn't tell me anything."

He opens his eyes again. They look even brighter in the black and white landscape, which makes the faint glow in them appear stronger.

"I'll find out myself."

[waterfell]

It's familiar. Maybe, in some unfathomable way, that's why she's helping this child. Or maybe it's much more practical than that and, already knowing where this ends in so many worlds, it's better to encourage any step away from that.

Maybe it doesn't matter which, as much as she used to think it always did.

"Finding out for yourself is best," she agrees. "There's no one else to give you a true answer." For all that she complains of the deceit of the sailor senshi, she knows the Dark Kingdom hadn't told all the truth, either.

[pinnaculum]

"Yes," says Sephiroth, unaware that in the ordinary course of events, finding out for himself would end disastrously.

One can find a lie for oneself as easily as one can find the truth.

"There's no one I can trust," he says. All those he trusted turned against him... Although as a child, what he feels is a lack of faith in the company, in his keepers. In the professor.

[waterfell]

She doesn't tell him he's wrong. She doesn't tell him he's wrong, that people care about him, that he should trust them. Those are no longer concepts she believes in. The uncomfortable feeling that Cloud is there, that she still has Mama, that she might be able to trust the shitennou (sometimes) takes a backseat to that lack of trust.

Instead, she simply walks with him. No words about being his friend, no words about staying by his side, no words about always being there. But right now, she is.

"Why do you say so?" It's not an argument, far from it. It's... curiosity.

[pinnaculum]

"Who would I trust?" Sephiroth asks in return. Some of the bitterness of the older Sephiroth seeps into the dream, but his words are true of his younger self as well. "I have no friends, no family. I am the property of the company."

He closes his eyes. "I always have been."

[waterfell]

They're words she knows well. I have neither friends nor family. I am alone in the world. They aren't her words, but the words of Black Lady; but she could have so easily echoed them, not long ago. She still understands them.

"Not any longer," she says simply, and maybe this is the important thing: "You're your own."