onepassingnight | 005 ☄ the sky is low, the clouds are mean

Entry tags:

005 ☄ the sky is low, the clouds are mean

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.]]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Yes." He agrees because it is time to clean away the rust of two years. Time for both him and the sword. It'll take work but it will be worth it, easier for the sword than for him but he's going to try. It's time to fix what he's left to weather on its own. Maybe he's not the only one. Sephiroth - this young version of him that Cloud can accept - seems intent on moving on too. His eyes go back to where Midgar, ghost of itself, eats up the horizon and then move back to the boy in front of him.

"Where to?"

"Good." The sight of the sword upsets him for some reason. He doesn't often display emotion, but for a moment or two, he looks genuinely sad as he considers the weapon, before focusing on Cloud's question instead.

"I don't know where I'm going," he says. If he had a destination in mind, it would be best to keep it a secret, but he really doesn't know. Where can he go? He glances back toward the city, too. "Away from there."

Cloud is vaguely aware of Sephiroth's connection to the great sword and so he can understand the fixation with it to a certain extent but the finer details are missing, mostly through ignorance of all the facts. What little he remembers from Zack's talks with him during his mako haze that involved the previous owner of the sword revolved around Zack's connection to it. Even he can pick up on the young Sephiroth's concern over it though.

"It'll get fixed." He says it even as he wonders why Sephiroth's concern matters to him. In the end, he decides it doesn't matter why. Here and now at least it does. That's enough. He looks inside but can't find any of the pent up aggression or fury toward the small child in front of him, no matter who he may be. His eyes go back to Midgar.

"That's a good idea. There's no future there anymore. It's time to start new."

This added assurance seems to be enough for Sephiroth, but it had better be fixed. He doesn't quite remember why he is so concerned about the sword, but he knows it must be important for him to feel so strongly about it, beyond just his ordinary concern for weapons and the proper treatment thereof. "Thank you," he says.

Midgar is a shadow looming behind him, but also over him. He wonders if he'll be able to break away from it in the end, like he wants to. He's always been part of it, of Shinra. He was raised to be. "I don't know what the future will be like," he admits, "or where I should go." Away isn't a destination. It's only a beginning. It won't be as easy as just leaving. And now, as a child, he feels lost and alone, feelings he won't admit to when he's awake.

"No body knows what the future will be like." Cloud turns and heads over to Fenrir, popping open the side compartment to stow the Buster gently inside. "Especially the people that think they do." The compartment seals over and Cloud swings a leg easily over the giant bike and settles in the seat. He won't need his goggles so they stay resting against his chest. "The important thing is to be who's making the decisions that let you get there, not letting other people make them for you."

Something's changed inside Cloud since that last battle. He's not sure what but Sephiroth isn't the embodiment of all evil, the nightmare waiting in the closet to him anymore. It's not to say the guardedness isn't there and there's no forgiveness but -

"Fort Condor. You should try there." Fenrir starts with a roar and drops swiftly into a thrumming purr. Cloud's eyes glow in the dim surroundings as he turns his head to look at the child. "I'm headed that direction. Hop on if you want a lift."

"You can guess some things. If I stay, I'll be in the army. If I go, I don't know..." But he considers Cloud's words. Did he think he knew the future? Maybe he had once, but not anymore. It's true that he doesn't make his own choices in Midgar. He's still where he always was, in some ways. Property of Shinra, Inc.

Something in Sephiroth has changed, but he's not sure what it is in this moment, only that he feels like he's lost something. Something he can't get back, now or ever.

"Fort Condor?" He knows the name, but he isn't sure why that's where he should go. When Cloud offers him a ride on the motorcycle, he hesitates, but only for a moment or two. The glow of his eyes might be intimidating to others, but Sephiroth finds it reassuring instead, and he hops on as suggested. "I'll come with you."

He tenses a little at having that body so close to his. It's a child - and yet it's Sephiroth as well and his instincts are conflicted. Whatever the reason is that the child's still in his dreams even after he's already defeated the monster, he's not sure but it's hard to both take the child as a threat and to ignore the fact that he could be yet another of Sephiroth's twisted games.

Either way, it's something he's got to face and deal with and he will. Now. People are counting on him and he's not going to let them down this time. Tseng has a theory though... about why they're both dreaming about someone that's dead in their time. If so, the child running away can easily mean something else entirely. Something Tseng is hoping for and Cloud's not yet sure about.

- yet he's still helping, isn't he? He's been thinking about Sephiroth leaving Shinra enough that he's been mentally working out where safe houses would be for a fugitive like that to regroup and get enough breathing room to decide what to do next...

"Fort Condor is more interested in their birds than anything else. They're not so much anti-Shinra as pro-condor so they might be a safe place that would actually let you stop there for a little bit to figure out what you're going to do next without giving you away. Don't know. That's the earliest I remember but you're from earlier. It's a good place to check out though, maybe a good place to start at least until you can get off the continent. If you do get off the continent, don't got to Corel, Nibelheim or Icicle Inn. Maybe try Cosmo Canyon or Gongaga but watch out for reactor explosions."

He kicks off the bike and points it away from the looming darkness of ghost Midgar.

"Tseng thinks if you time it right, you can save SOLDIER. I just want you to save Zack and Aerith." Fenrir lets loose and takes off for the horizon, almost but not quite drowning out Cloud's final: "I couldn't."

He listens to Cloud's words, carefully, taking all of them in, remembering. Names he already knows. He knows most of the names of places. He knows maps, topography, cartography. He's known them since he was a child. He wasn't like the other children. He was different, apart. But then, that had never ended.

"There will be a war," says Sephiroth. "Many people will die, no matter what I do." It's perhaps not what a child would say, that near-certainty of the military future and the most likely outcomes, but his voice sounds like that of a child asked to do too much. Tired. He feels so tired. But he isn't weakened, and he can keep his seat on the motorcycle easily enough.

Seeing the sword in such a worn, rusted condition has half-stirred memories that he'd like to forget, that he's become a child again to pull away from.

"Zack," he says, thoughtfully. He doesn't know the name Aerith. It's not familiar to him, but Zack is, somehow.

"People will die no matter what you do," Cloud agrees. There doesn't seem to be any way to escape that. "That's why you have to make sure they don't die for the wrong thing."

He hasn't got Tseng's faith in a better future if Sephiroth does break from Shinra before he flips his lid. There's been a lot of pain and a lot of sacrifices to get to where Cloud's world currently is but it's finally healing. It's working on getting better. He worries that Sephiroth could change all that if the present, Cloud's present, is more fluid than he'd like to believe. His present isn't perfect - far from it - but it's his. It's all of theirs. Everyone that's alive and working toward a better tomorrow. If he's learned anything in the past few weeks, it's that you can't look back at the past and live there. You have to protect the present. He's still working on that, on thinking that way. But he's trying. They're all trying.

If the Sephiroth from their shared dreams leaves Shinra - will it change everything in their present? Or nothing at all as dream Sephiroth's world diverges from theirs? Cloud wishes he knew what he was gambling when he helped the silver haired boy focus on leaving. He can't not try to help though. No one should be a puppet though - not even a corporation's puppet.

"Zack. He dies if you don't stop him."

"One should choose the path with less casualties." But risk assessment doesn't tell him what that path is. He lets out a deep breath. He's not used to finding things so difficult, being so uncertain. Right now, leaving Shinra and waging war against them seems like it could be an effort doomed to fail. It was what Genesis and Angeal had done. This is different, but will it end for him as it did for them? As if the mention of Zack was a key to open other parts of his mind, his later memories begin to return to him, even though he's still a child in form, still partly a child in spirit.

He watches the world pass by from the motorcycle, wondering when and where it will all end. He's meant to make decisions within moments, but this one is taking him longer to make.

"Zack dies." A thoughtful pause. "If I don't stop who?" Was he meant to stop Zack? Or someone else?

"Him. Yourself. Shinra. Zack's a hero. He'll die for a stupid reason if you give him the chance." Him. Zack will die for him. And that's high on the end of stupid reasons if Cloud's ever thought of one. But Zack doesn't just die for him. He dies to keep from going back to Shinra, to keep from going back to Hojo. He dies because years before that Sephiroth went off his gourd and started the whole mess. He dies because even before that some crazy scientists decided to experiment with human lifes and cells they didn't really understand. Zack dies because a corporation doesn't care about life. Zack dies for a lot of reasons. Cloud's not good at being cryptic. That's more Vincent's area. So he tries again.

"I can't tell you specifics because the second you change the first thing, everything after it will change and whatever I tell you won't be true anymore. I'm worried you'll change my world too. Maybe you already are, rewriting the past I remember and I don't even know it because it's not my past anymore. Whatever you decide will change the world, whether you stay or you go. All I can tell you is that Zack dies in mine. If you're going to change everything else, make sure you change that too."

He's quiet again, mulling over these words about Zack, about time and timelines and possibilities. General though he might be, in a way, he has never truly been responsible for such a momentous choice, for even in his choices, he has fought for Shinra, with their aims and orders in mind. Defying them in small ways, but not in the larger scheme of things.

Zack dies.

He doesn't want that, though as usual, he keeps his emotions close and quiet, his worry and his sorrow. The only ones he used to speak to of such things had betrayed him. He had tried to save them, but he had failed.

"Angeal died," he says calmly, though as a child, he did not know that name, let alone the fact that Angeal would die, so young. He had had no friends as a child. "He said he was too dangerous to live." That information came from Zack himself.

A perfect monster. In Sephiroth's dreams, people seem to see him as a monster. Is that because he is one, or because he fears he might be?

Was Angeal right to choose death, to think that that was the best course for the many? Sephiroth is not Angeal. Perhaps it means he is more selfish, but he does not want to sacrifice himself. Maybe Angeal made the wrong choice. It's hard for him to view his friends' decisions objectively, colored as his impressions are with bitterness and resentment. A general should be impartial. He shouldn't feel bitter or resentful. These doubts that grow within him gnaw at him.

And the anger, no matter how he forces it down, tries to be rid of it. His pupils narrow, and he frowns, both child and man in the same moment in a way, though he remains small in stature.

"I don't want to die."

Cloud listens. It's a lot to put on anyone's shoulders, he gets that. Because he's been there himself with the entire world waiting on his move. But it was never in the way Sephiroth has it. Cloud did so much of what he did because he had to. There wasn't a lot of choice so much as a drive always forward. It made things easier in a way because with so much out of his control, all he had to concentrate on was reacting. Planning ahead of time, going over the options carefully, weighing possibilities... it was never really a choice, or chance. Sephiroth though is confronted with the options and the choices and he's got plenty of time to think of the ramifications.

Cloud doesn't envy him.

"I don't remember Angeal burning down villages." It's less a comparison and more a measure of what he considers 'too dangerous to live'. He doesn't remember much about Angeal in honesty, fragmented Zack memories so tinted with emotion it's hard to tell what was real and even more hazy vague rumors and a terrifying looming shadow he sometimes thinks he probably imagined from his own foggy Shinra days. "Zack didn't think so."

In the end, Zack's opinion is good enough for Cloud.

"We're not monsters. No matter what's been done to us, who we have inside, we're not monsters. We only become monsters once we give in. Once we forget that we're supposed to protect and we start to destroy." His voice drops but it still somehow carries over the wind. "We only lose when we give up."

The bike hasn't traveled nearly far enough but somehow, with the logic of a dream, the mountain that Fort Condor is built on comes into view over the horizon. Cloud's voice isn't hard or angry. He can't feel either for the child - or the man - behind him on the bike. There is a monster he still hates even if that's starting to lose it's intensity now that the monster's gone, again, and Cloud knows it's something he can defeat. As many times as he needs to. But that monster isn't the person behind him. Not yet and perhaps not ever. They're not friends and they never will be. But he can still find he's starting to care what happens to the Sephiroth in his dreams. So his voice is surprisingly gentle as he states:

"Then don't make me have to kill you."

"Angeal wouldn't," says Sephiroth, with his older self's knowledge still, but a child's emphatic faith in his friend. And with that, he sounds a little more like an ordinary child for once, expressing an actual emotion. "He wouldn't do anything like that. So why did he die? It wasn't fair." He might never have sounded so much like a child when he was one.

It makes him feel angry, yet in spite of that anger, he listens to Cloud's words on the subject of monsters. To protect... That's what he'd always wanted to do, in SOLDIER. "I don't want to be a monster. It's all his fault." It's not exactly a rational focusing of anger, since really, it's the fault of many people, but one figure in particular looms in his mind. "He always wants me to be all by myself, and I don't get to have any friends or go anywhere." Opinions he hadn't been able to express as a child, with all his training and conditioning, always careful to be polite, yet all his conditioning couldn't erase his resentment.

He blinks at Cloud's final words. For a moment, he feels angry at them as well, since he doesn't want to be killed. He almost pulls away. He could easily leap off the moving bike and land without being hurt. Then he remembers the things Genesis did and sighs. "SOLDIERs are too dangerous." And that's why Angeal chose to die, isn't it?

"It's not." He agrees. There's nothing more to say and he's not going to try for false comfort. A great deal of life isn't fair but that doesn't mean it hurts any less. Sephiroth's brought up Angeal - a lot. For Sephiroth at least. There was a connection there. Something precious lost when the other SOLDIER died. Zack wasn't the only one hurt when it happened apparently.

It also doesn't take a mind reader to know who he is.

"Hojo." It's in the flat way Cloud says the name. The madman's dead but all the damage he's done still lives on in fits and spurts. His influence is fading - but it's slow. Vincent. Nanaki.

Him.

He pretends he doesn't worry about what extras Hojo might have done to him. He doesn't know if the madman did or not and it's a constant thread in the back of his mind. Watching for it. One day. Maybe. Who knows?

"He's a monster and he doesn't need anything injected into him to make him that way. Killing him several times was too easy for him."

And yet - without him Cloud wouldn't be who he is. He wouldn't be as broken - but he wouldn't have the mako he needs to protect his people. He'd meant it when he'd told Tseng he'd go through those years of torture all over again if it meant he would get the mako and cells he needs to do what he does. "Hojo's good at making monsters. You're not the only one he's tried it with." Come to think of it, in Sephiroth's time, Vincent is still asleep in his coffin. There's a brief moment of wondering if he should tell Sephiroth but he's already probably telling the other man more than he should. "That's why you can't let him. He wins if you turn. He'll try to break you. Not in your body. In your head."

The bike slows. Comes to a stop, its engine a low rumble. Cloud drops a leg to keep it steady and looks back at the child that's not really a child over his shoulder, his own mako eyes speaking for themselves. His voice is soft.

"Is Zack too dangerous?"

Not much about his life was fair. He didn't dwell on it too long. What good would it do to think about the past, and the anger that lay there?

"The professor," he says. He can't remember a time that he liked him, and surely there wasn't one, though as a child, there may have been a time before he openly scorned him--although he can't remember that, either. The professor was always wrong: something he'd learned or else decided early on. "No, he isn't good." His experiments always fail."

Hollander and Hojo: as researchers, they were nothing compared to Professor Gast, the man he still dimly remembers smiling down at him, offering to play a game with him. Taking his hand. So unlike Hojo.

His experiments always fail. He sighs, because he knows, somewhere deep inside, that that means him. That he'll fail. That whatever that man did, it will make him into something that fails--in some sense of the word, in the sense that Sephiroth himself means it. To him, success is what he is now: hero of the people, legendary SOLDIER. That can't be what Hojo wanted. The child and the man both hate him for that. "I don't want to go mad." That's what Cloud means, isn't it? That's what had happened to Genesis. He hadn't always been like that. Angeal had said his own mind descended into a fog at times, in which he lost himself. Sephiroth had read that in the reports, Zack's report, with a cold kind of dread. If that could happen to even Angeal...

"Zack?" The question distracts him from his thoughts. "No." He blinks, then shakes his head, childlike again. "Zack's nice."

"Hn. Zack's good. And Zack's SOLDIER." Cloud circles the argument back around on itself. "So SOLDIER can't all be monsters or only too dangerous to live. Angeal was wrong. And he was wrong to leave when people still needed him."

Pot, kettle, of course. Cloud had tried to do the same thing recently. Luckily he'd had people to pull him back before it went too far. He couldn't claim he'd been stronger. Just luckier. With an exhale, he rested his arms across Fenrir's hood and looked forward.

"One of my best friends should be a monster. But he's not. He's not because he refuses to let what Hojo did to him take his humanity away from him." And because he was busy sleeping off sins and hanging around in crystal caves but that wasn't really the lesson he was trying to impart at the moment. Rubbing the back of his head, Cloud let his hand drop and looked back at the child behind him.

"I'm one of Hojo's experiments too. He called me a disappointment and a failure." Blue mako eyes were finally, finally, free of doubt. "And I am. He failed what he was trying to turn me into." It's the child and not the man, he reaches out and gently touches on the chest. "So maybe all his experiments are failures - to him. And maybe that's not such a bad thing to be."

"Zack is good. I like him." There are few people indeed he would say that about. Sephiroth, the child, nods, but there is still uncertainty in his eyes, and he turns away, taking a step back. He asks a question.

"Do you really think Angeal was wrong?" Suddenly, the child isn't a child any longer, and suddenly, he is standing farther away, a taller, more distant figure, brought back to himself by a grief the child can't understand or contain. That child had never had a friend. But then, Sephiroth hasn't truly been a child for a long time.

"Things aren't necessarily that simple, that easy to classify. Whatever he was, he wasn't an ordinary SOLDIER. He wasn't even like Genesis or myself. They would have taken him prisoner, because he deserted. They would have given him to those who would have used his genetic material in ways we cannot imagine. He made sure it was destroyed. At times I do believe he was wrong, but at times, I think that was the bravest act I've ever known. Or it could be that both are true. He gave up all his honor, for us." Right or wrong, it hadn't been an honorable way to die, and honor had mattered so much to Angeal. He's angry at Angeal, but as always, it's hard to dislike him. Even when he was making one of his speeches about honor and dreams, it had been difficult to be annoyed with him (not that he hadn't managed it).

He wishes he could hear one of those speeches again.

He shifts the conversation to Hojo without mentioning his name. "By failure, I mean those things he deems successes."

He watches the physical shift, eyes narrow and wary. It's one thing to deal with the child with the adult's mind. It's another entirely to see his enemy in the form he's familiar with. The conversation doesn't shift to madness and taunts though. Cloud forces himself to stay still and not react.

Tseng thinks that Sephiroth, if pushed right, may kill Hojo. Cloud should want that. But Hojo was the only one that saw potential in him, even if it was twisted and ultimately wrong. Without Hojo he would never get the injections. Without the injections, he wouldn't be SOLDIER level. And he wouldn't be able to protect the people he cares about. He may still be broken and fractured inside, might never be whole again - but he'd take it all, all over again, to gain the SOLDIER abilities he had now. If Hojo was killed early -

so was his only chance to finally be strong enough and fast enough to make a difference. His friends, Tifa, wouldn't care. But he would.

"Don't know about Angeal." He'll admit it. "I know that it hurt Zack and it hurt you. That you both still needed him. I left the people that needed me, thinking I was doing what was best for them and it almost cost us everything." He's not about to take his eyes off his enemy, or what will one day become his enemy - maybe - but he shakes his head briefly. By this point whether Angeal was right or wrong is mote. It's done and everyone's left trying to pick up the pieces. Or at least Sephiroth and Zack were. Are. Death, Cloud's noticed, doesn't seem to bring a lot of closure with it most of the time. It certainly never has for him. "It really comes down to what his choice does to you now - and what decisions you make because of it."

A beat.

"And Hojo's probably the last thing I'd rely on for a measuring stick of what's a success and what's not."

He doesn't step any closer, conscious of Cloud's wariness of him. He has no intention of agitating him further, but he's curious about him. He stands still and calm, makes no move, hostile or otherwise. He doesn't speak of his grief. He doesn't talk of such things even with those who are close to him. He keeps it to himself. "Angeal was a great man," he says instead, soberly. "It is a shame you didn't know him." For him, this is practically gushing.

"Of course not." He smiles at Cloud's obvious statement concerning Hojo. It's a bitter smile. "He's an ignorant, irrational, failure of a scientist. That's why I'm sorry to be his experiment." He wouldn't speak those words aloud when awake, but they come out here, sharp and quick. He knows there's some spark of--would you call it genius?--in the man, but it's dimmed by his neuroses, his complexes. He'd even go so far as to call him mad. "There are few who know him better than I do." He'd grown up with him. He'd studied him. Yet the thought of killing Hojo doesn't occur to him, not even now.

He'd grown up with him, and he'd been conditioned by him. Whether because of that conditioning or the fact that he wouldn't deign to do so, he has no intention of killing Hojo, not directly. Hojo isn't worth the effort. What he's done has been done, as far as Sephiroth is concerned. Sephiroth's plan is quite different.

"What I will do now..." He pauses. Being backed into a corner is far from an ideal position, but that's where he finds himself. He must make his own way out. "I have few options. Angeal and Genesis were right in one respect." He looks up at the sky thoughtfully. It's gray now. There's a storm coming. "I want to leave ShinRa." He's been considering that possibility, if only faintly, since before Modeoheim. Modeoheim had changed things. He knows he can't simply leave. ShinRa won't allow that. He's their property. He turns back to Cloud. "I'll take SOLDIER with me, and as much of the army as will come. And they will come. They'll come for me." It wouldn't be uncalled for to say he's arrogant; enough people do, and it doesn't bother him. But what he speaks is the truth in his time. He's their hero. They depend on him.

"I'll have to start a war."

Cloud's not sure what Sephiroth having an army will do. It could save quite a few of the soldiers. Or it could just be giving a madman an army to control as well. Every little thing they change, that Sephiroth changes, changes everything. He can't guess at this Sephiroth's future anymore.

"Don't go to Nibelheim. It's a trap."

Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was all coincidence. But Cloud had had plenty of time to think about it in the ensuing years and it had always seemed suspicious that the pieces had all been brought together so conveniently at a time like that. He doubted anyone would have imagined the outcome but he could wonder if it hadn't been set up to test some kind of outcome.

"Take Zack with you. Convince him to go. And bring Aerith. Zack will know where to find her. She's - special. She might be able to help you when the time comes."

Or he might be selling her off to an earlier death. But he thought not. Hoped not. Not if Zack was with her. She'd be safer with Zack than anywhere.

Right?

Pale eyebrows coming down, he had to frown.

"I don't know what else to tell you. I can't even tell you how things turn out if you change things. I - trust Zack. And Aerith. Take care of them. If you can. They're important." To me. He doesn't add it because he can't fathom the right way to ask the man that killed one of them to guard them instead but it's on his face. He and Sephiroth aren't friends. They're not even, as far as he's concerned, allies. But they both care about Zack and that's enough. He dredges his mind for any last minute advice he can give, still not sure how he feels about helping the man that tried, several times, to take his entire world away from him but - if he can think of the right help, the right moments to warn about -

maybe he can save some of those worlds...

"Shinra already started the war. You're just finally giving the other side a fighting chance. I - wish I could help more."

And the strange thing is, he realizes, that he means it. It's funny, in a way that doesn't involve any laughing. The Sephiroth he knows has wanted to change the world. This one actually might. He can only hope it's for the better. One last thing.

"If you meet a cat riding a moogle, don't trust him. But if you can win him over, you couldn't have a more useful ally."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

005 ☄ the sky is low, the clouds are mean

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject