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.]]

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[findmyownreason]

"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?"

[pinnaculum]

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."

[findmyownreason]

"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."

[nohometown]

"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."

[findmyownreason]

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."

[nohometown]

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."

[findmyownreason]

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."