no windows and no doors - Caramelized (2024)

Chapter 1: a disquieting metamorphosis

Chapter Text

Olivia unlocked the door and waved at the dark street, signaling to her friends that it was safe to pull away from the curb. They'd been celebrating their graduation from college—a few weeks ago now, but still a great excuse to let loose. In a few days, everything would change. She'd just started a new job, signed her first lease. But she couldn't move in for a few days and her older brother Matt had offered to let her stay with him through the gap. He sprawled on his couch, headphones on and both hands gripping a controller, face blue-lit from the flat-screen opposite.

“New game?” she asked, flopping down beside him.

“New old game,” he answered, nudging his headphones away from his ears. “It’s a remake.”

“Ugh, enough with the remakes.” Olivia groaned. “Why can’t they make something original?”

“Nah, this one’s pretty cool.” He waved at the screen. “I played the original when I was a kid. Real early 3D, super rough, no detail. This, though…”

“Nostalgia is a trap,” Olivia warned.

“You’re not gonna make me feel bad. This is way too cool for that.” Matt returned his attention to the game but left the headphones half-off, so he’d hear if she spoke.

Olivia watched for a while, leaning close so she could catch some of the dialogue. It was late, and she’d had a couple of drinks. “Why are the guys so hot?” she wondered, watching a hot blond and a hot redhead battle stylishly in a church. “They are both weirdly hot.”

Matt shrugged. “I dunno.”

“You must have noticed,” Olivia teased.

“Shut up, it’s just how these games are.” He shoulder-checked her, annoyed. “Besides, it’s got a good story.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the story?”

“Uh. Well. There’s this guy, Cloud…”

“Is he the hot blond or the hot redhead?”

“The blond.” Matt made the character leap up and smash the ground with his oversized sword. "Cloud’s got amnesia, doesn’t really know anything about himself except that he used to be a soldier for this evil company, Shinra. So he gets roped into joining a terrorist organization—”

“You’re playing a video game about being a terrorist?” Olivia interrupted. “Wow. I’m surprised that sort of thing exists.”

“It definitely hits a bit different these days,” Matt acknowledged. “But they’re the good guys, even if they do spend a big chunk of this game blowing up power plants…”

“You’re playing as a terrorist who attacks basic infrastructure?”

“They’re environmentalists!” Matt protested. “It's for the good of the planet.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re such a brat,” Matt complained. “Eventually it gets pretty weird, with an over the top villain and clones and aliens, but a lot of stuff about this corporate dystopia is really on the nose. You’d like it, if you gave it a chance.”

“Maybe,” Olivia acknowledged, relaxing into the sofa. She watched as Matt reset the fight a couple of times until Cloud emerged triumphant. Her eyelids slowly drifted shut as the scene shifted to a conversation with a very sweet girl who’d matched a pink sundress with a short-sleeved red jacket and somehow made it look cool.

The next thing she knew, Matt was roughly shaking her awake.

“Liv!” he snapped. “C’mon Liv. You’ve gotta get up, we’ve got to run—”

Olivia barely heard him through her hangover. A really bad hangover, even though she hadn’t had that much to drink. “Did you push me onto the floor?” she asked, levering herself upright and rubbing at her throbbing temples. “That wasn’t very nice.”

“No!” Matt’s voice broke, which was weird. He was usually pretty even-keeled. “I think—but there’s no time to explain.” He grabbed her arm and tugged. “We’ve really gotta move.”

“Why? Where are we?” Olivia wondered, squinting against the harsh sunlight. They were… in the middle of nowhere? In a sort of desert? With a city not too far in the distance, one she didn’t recognize at all. “Matt?”

“f*ck. Liv.” Matt tried to yank her onto her feet. “Come on.”

Olivia jerked away. “Quit it,” she snapped. “That hurt.”

“Liv! Would you listen?” Mat made a low, frustrated noise. “Look—f*ck—I’ll find you, ok?”

“What are you talking about?”

By the time Olivia had rubbed the sleep from her eyes, Matt was gone. But where? They were in some sort of wasteland. Not many nooks or crannies to disappear into.

While she searched, a lone truck headed right for her. She got her first inkling of what had made Matt so nervous when three soldiers jumped out, one from the front and two from the back, wearing creepy tri-lensed helmets that covered most of their faces.

“We’re going to have to detain you,” said one, coming right at her while the other two spread out to either side.

All of a sudden, Olivia wished she’d run. She didn’t know what Matt had seen, how he’d figured it out, but he’d predicted this. The soldiers had guns. They did not look at all friendly. Olivia glanced around but couldn’t see a way out.

Resigned, she bowed her head and let the soldiers handcuff her. They lifted her into the back of the truck and settled around her, chattering idly as the truck revved into gear and did a U-turn. They followed a highway that took them up to the city, which appeared to sit on a plate high above the ground. Something about the view from the back of the truck looked familiar; an industrial structure of some kind dominated the skyline, leaking green smoke into a smoggy sky.

Eventually, the truck pulled into a massive underground garage. The soldiers lifted her out of the truck and then handed her off to someone new. Slim, with hair a virulent orange that could only come from dye, wearing a beautifully tailored black suit in the most slovenly way possible. Tattoos framed his eyes, and a pair of aviator goggles perched along his hairline. Brilliant aquamarine eyes.

The hot redhead from Matt’s game. Searingly, unnaturally hot. Dressed exactly like he had been during the battle. What the f*ck.

“Any trouble?” asked the hot redhead, with the exact same nasal swagger as in the game.

“One of the targets escaped,” answered one of her captors. “We searched the area but saw no sign of him.”

“Good for him. You, on the other hand…” The hot redhead sighed and took hold of Olivia’s arm. “Might as well get this over with.”

He escorted Olivia into an elevator that climbed and climbed and climbed--Olivia counted forty floors before she lost track. They exited into a sort of… zoo? A zoo hospital? She saw creatures in cages—creatures that shouldn’t exist—and walls of computers, rows of operating tables and staff in white lab coats.

A woman in a lab coat intercepted the hot redhead. “Any trouble?”

“One of the subjects escaped,” came the answer. “I’ll organize a search.”

The woman cast a wary glance over her shoulder. “You’d better hope we don’t find anything interesting in this specimen. If we do, you’ll never hear the end of it.”

“I’ll send a team of soldiers to do the sweep,” the hot redhead assured her. “Top priority.”

Olivia was left with the woman in the lab coat, who beckoned for a helmeted soldier standing guard at one of the large, automatic doors to approach.

“Make sure she's secure, and bring her along,” said the woman.

Olivia was brought. First to a small alcove shielded by a flimsy curtain, where she was stripped—her clothes away with scissors, either to avoid removing the handcuffs or for the sheer pleasure of destroying Olivia’s only possessions while she watched—and made to sit on a cold, steel examination table.

A succession of lab-coated staff appeared to draw blood. Olivia grew faint and wasn’t surprised that no one paused to offer her a glass of sugary juice or a restorative cracker. The staff—were they doctors? scientists?—also took samples of her hair and nails, scraped wads of dead skin into tiny test tubes, swabbed her nose and mouth. They did not speak to her directly, manipulating her bodily rather than giving instructions, and ignored her when she spoke; if she moved, the guard shoved her back into position.

Afterwards, Olivia was locked in a cage. Only one thing held back the rage that threatened to shake her apart: fear. As bafflingly, impossibly awful as her treatment had been, others in the sprawling facility clearly suffered worse. She heard screams, spied operating theaters spattered with blood, caught glimpses of dead-eyed human beings riddled with surgical scars and festering injection sites.

She’d never been so violated. But everywhere she turned, she saw how much worse her situation could get.

Over the following days she was poked and prodded by a succession of scientists. Eventually a greasy-haired doctor named Hojo arrived, crowing about the possibilities presented by a new alien specimen.

“Nothing like our Jenova, but who knows what Jenova was like before she merged with the Cetra? Abilities like mimicry and mind-control are invisible to the naked eye...” The doctor’s eyes lit up. “Bring me thirty ccs of mako. Twenty percent concentration.”

Moments later, the doctor squeezed a shot of glowing green liquid into Olivia’s arm. Her world caught on fire, and she passed out.

Chapter 2: consider this dismaying observation

Chapter Text

She woke in the cage, slumped against the bars with half her muscles cramping and the others numb. Carefully, aching from top to toe, she grabbed the cool metal to lever herself upright. She’d just begun to rub the pins and needles out of her legs when Hojo arrived, trailed closely by a stunningly handsome—and vaguely familiar—man.

The newcomer was tall, wearing pants and a long coat of black leather, with the straps of a matching harness criss-crossing his bare chest. He had bright green, slit-pupiled cat eyes and gorgeous silvery hair that reached well past his waist.

“It would be easier for everyone if you provided us with sperm samples,” Hojo was saying. “I don’t know what’s made you so obstinate—”

“No,” said the other man.

“Well, here she is.” Hojo waved irritably at Olivia. “Attractive enough, if you care about that sort of thing. What matters is that she’s a reservoir of unique genetic traits and—”

The other man bent lightly, peering through the cage. His expression was blank, verging on cool. “The mako took?”

“As you see. Think about the possibilities, Sephiroth! This specimen could unlock the secrets to enhancing human women. Imagine what you could do with female SOLDIERS, eh? All that strength in a compact, flexible package?”

“Female SOLDIERS could prove useful, in certain circ*mstances,” the other man—Sephiroth, apparently—agreed. “You’re not worried about sterility?”

“We’ve kept the dosage low. Well out of the danger zone.” Hojo shot the man a calculating look. “Her fertile window’s just begun. You’re my first choice, for obvious reasons, but there are other options. If I can breed her with ordinary, unenhanced humans—”

“You’ve made your point,” Sephiroth cut in, irritated now. “Release her into my custody. Perhaps the mood will strike me.”

Hojo scowled. “That’s not good enough. I won’t let this opportunity go to waste.”

Sephiroth straightened and shrugged. “You have my offer, take it or leave it. Was that all?”

“Do you make things difficult on purpose? I thought I’d raised you better.” Hojo waved one of the lurking goons over. “Bring her back in three days.”

The goon opened the cage and, in between gesturing imperiously for Olivia to follow and stalking away, Sephiroth grabbed a smock from a pile and tossed it back at her. She shrugged it on and tied the ribbons while chasing after him, scrambling to keep pace with his long-legged stride.

Olivia wasn’t stupid. She’d followed the gist of that conversation, and many similar ones that had preceded it. But her life had devolved into a nightmare punctuated by horrible but very simple choices. In this case, she could choose between being raped inside the lab and being raped outside of it. Since the latter offered her at least a chance of escape, however slim, she’d been quick to follow the newcomer.

Sephiroth. She’d definitely heard that name before.

Olivia followed him into the elevator. He pressed a button and on the way she noticed the shiny red decal affixed above the panel, reading Shinra Electric Power Company. She’d heard of that, too, right? Recently? But… not on an electric bill or anything.

“See something interesting?” asked Sephiroth.

Olivia ignored her assigned rapist. He might not be enthusiastic about his role but he’d accepted it, so screw him. Plus, this elevator had glass walls and she needed to pay attention to the building’s layout.

The elevator slowed, dinged, and released them onto a landing with only four doors. Olivia followed Sephiroth into the living room of a spacious but minimally furnished apartment. A compact sofa set had been shoved into a corner to make room for a gym-sized exercise mat. The mat lined the floor-to-ceiling windows and extended into the hallway. A waist-high granite-topped counter separated the living from from the small kitchen off to the right.

“Most of the building is bugged,” Sephiroth said, once the door was shut. “I’ll leave it to you to decide whether to follow through on Hojo’s plans. Getting pregnant might extend your life, and failing will almost certainly shorten it. Not everyone wants to survive, in the labs, but it’s your choice to make.”

“My choice?” Olivia repeated, startled.

Sephiroth nodded, filled a glass with water from a pitcher, and slid it across the kitchen counter toward her.

“My choice whether we have sex or not,” Olivia clarified.

Sephiroth nodded again, pouring a second glass of water for himself.

“And you have no preference in the matter?”

“I would prefer not to,” Sephiroth said, blunt. “But it is a matter of life and death for you, and little concern to me.”

“You’re not worried about having a half-alien child born in a nightmare lab?”

“Half?” Sephiroth echoed, co*cking one silver eyebrow.

Dick answer, but Olivia held her tongue. First he’d given her a reprieve from the nightmare lab and now he’d offered her a choice. If he wanted to be rude about it, she’d deal.

Olivia crossed to the windows, avoiding the exercise mat, and looked out at the sprawling and utterly unfamiliar city below. She didn’t recognize it, and with a city of this size she ought to at least have a guess. An urban core this dense had to hold a few million people, which would make it a global capital… though the land beyond the city limits appeared to be desolate. How did that work?

And those power plants belching green smoke into the air. They looked like nuclear power plants, but nobody would build multiple nuclear power plants in the middle of a city. So they had to be something else, and… she’d seen something like that recently.

Olivia took a sip of the water. Just the basic courtesy settled her, helped her think of herself as human again. She had been welcomed like a guest, sort of. She lived in a society, more or less.

“What kind of power plants are those?” she asked.

“Mako.” A pause. “You’ve never heard of it?”

Olivia shook her head. "What’s mako?”

“A hybrid substance,” Sephiroth answered. “Both spiritual and physical at once. It is abundant below ground, and wells up occasionally in natural springs. Shinra processes it into fuel.”

Well that made no sense. But the explanations were starting to click, and not in a good way. She’d never read about mako power in a newspaper or magazine, and she’d never gotten any bills from the Shinra Electric Power Company, but… all these things were familiar for a reason.

Matt. Her brother. Explaining the plot of the video game with the hot dudes.

Olivia eyed the ridiculously handsome man who’d just invited her into his apartment.“And you’re… Sephiroth? And you… work here?”

He stared at her, apparently flummoxed.

“At the… power company?” Olivia added.

“Shinra performs most of the functions ordinarily undertaken by a government,” Sephiroth answered. “I lead a branch of the military, known as SOLDIER.”

Well that made escape sound a lot harder. She hadn’t just been captured by an evil corporation. The evil corporation was also the state, in control of a functioning military. And he’d mentioned bugs, so… a surveillance state. An evil corporate surveillance state.

What had Matt told her? That the game was about terrorists? That made more sense now. Yay terrorists.

“Let me guess,” said Olivia. “You spend a lot of time killing terrorists.”

“That is one of our duties,” Sephiroth acknowledged.

Olivia sighed. She’d ended up in a video game—seemed unlikely but ok—and so far, she’d only met the bad guys. The faceless goons, the evil scientists, and now a hot villain.

“Hojo claims you’re not from this planet,” Sephiroth said. “That you traveled here by means he does not understand, though your arrival on Gaia released a colossal amount of energy.”

“Is that how you found us?”

Sephiroth went still. “Us?”

“What, you’re angling for an orgy?“ Olivia snarked, cursing herself. The one comfort she’d had in this hellscape was that Matt remained free.

“I have work,” he said abruptly, heading for the door. “You’ll be safe in my rooms and in grave danger outside of them. Do as you wish.”

“Since I have your permission,” Olivia sing-songed to the empty apartment. She hunted around until she found a small television, tucked into one of the kitchen shelves, and flipped through the channels. A healthy handful, but only one that ran news, and most of it Shinra puff pieces. Still, a useful data point for this world.

Olivia kept a fraction of her attention on the TV with the volume cranked while she raided Sephiroth’s bookshelves. She might have side-eyed his collection in other circ*mstances—all non-fiction, focused on military history or natural science—but at the moment, his books told her what mako was, the various ways it manifested in the world, how Shinra had harnessed mako power and used the resulting riches to take over the world. Literally.

So. She was in a super messed up world where a sprawling, deeply entrenched corporate state had acquired monopoly on power, of several varieties, and as predicted by the popular aphorism, absolute power had corrupted absolutely.

On the one hand: this wasn’t the sort of problem any one person could solve. Let alone a person who had lost their independence and bodily autonomy. She had the opposite of power here—she had negative power, she’d created a power vacuum around herself.

On the other hand: one way or another—it seemed fruitless to speculate about how—she found herself at the center of things, the heart of the beast. Inexplicably, but not randomly.

Maybe Matt was out there saving the world, and she’d come along by accident. That seemed more likely, since he’d played the game and apparently liked it a lot. He’d known what to do when he saw Shinra coming; presumably, he’d think of other ways to put his knowledge to use.

Olivia didn’t have Matt’s advantages. She’d watched about fifteen minutes of his playing while half drunk, late at night. But she was here, and maybe not by accident. Maybe something about this situation constituted an opportunity, if she could identify and leverage it.

The door opened and Sephiroth glided through. For the first time, she appreciated his presence: threatening and ethereal, compelling and… horny? No, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t quite sexual, but had a similar charge to it.

He surveyed the chaos she'd made of his cramped sofa set—books scattered everywhere, half of them open and stacked one on top of the other, an empty coffee cup at her elbow next to a stack of notes, dirty plates in the sink.

She’d even dug through his closet until she found a singlet, which was big enough for her to wear like a dress, with a roll of athletic tape wound around her chest in place of a bra. Not out of modesty; Olivia always thought better when she had a bra on, so she’d fashioned a substitute after she got cracking on the books.

“Not what I expected,” said Sephiroth, crossing to the kitchen and opening the fridge.

“So, Sephiroth.” Olivia hopped up from the sofa and plopped down in one of the stools lining the kitchen counter. “I’m Olivia, by the way. Or Liv, if you like nicknames. Thanks for taking pity on me, I appreciate it.”

He flicked a glance at her, bare acknowledgement, and grabbed a block of tofu. He drained it, placed it neatly on a cutting board, and slid a large knife from a rack.

“Wait,” Olivia called out, before he could cut. “What are you doing?”

“Making dinner,” answered Sephiroth, with a sort of reflexive weariness. “I do eat, you know.”

“I mean to the tofu.” Olivia slid off the stool and circled around into the kitchen, shooing Sephiroth away from the tofu. “You have to press it, and it’s a lot easier before you cut it.”

“Press it?”

“To get the water out?” Olivia grabbed a towel—she’d thoroughly investigated his kitchen—and draped it over the cutting board, then put the tofu on top of the towel. A plate went on top of the tofu, and then she stacked the heaviest items in the immediate vicinity on the plate—mostly books—until she'd added enough weight to press out the moisture.

“This is why people don’t like tofu,” Olivia complained. “They don’t make it right. Tofu is delicious but you really need to press out all the moisture.”

Sephiroth watched curiously. “When did you spend time in Wutai?”

“Wutai?” Olivia closed her eyes and called to mind the map she’d been studying. “That’s… um. That’s the big island in the west, right?”

“Yes.”

“And there was a war there pretty recently?”

“Yes.”

“And you fought in it?”

“Yes.”

Olivia nodded to herself, pleased. She needed to understand how this world worked, and she had to start somewhere. Get the basics down. “I’ve never been, obviously. I just really like tofu. We should do other prep while it drains. What were you going to make?”

Sephiroth hesitated. “A stir fry.”

Olivia rummaged through the fridge, extracting onion, cabbage, bell pepper, and mushrooms. “You want to chop these while I make a sauce?”

Another, longer hesitation. “The sauce is in the refrigerator.”

“Store bought sauces are disgusting,” said Olivia.

Sephiroth reclaimed his knife, which he wielded with truly frightening speed and precision. He kept an eye on her as she sautéed vinegar, oil, soy sauce and garlic. Not great, but better than store-bought.

Half an hour later, they were eating a perfectly decent meal. Not the best Olivia had ever made, but worlds better than the nutritional packets they’d fed her in the lab.

Sephiroth took one bite and his slit eyes dilated with pleasure. His attention flicked from his fork to the bowl and then to Olivia. She expected a compliment but the first words out of his mouth, after he’d swallowed, were, “What are you planning?”

Olivia snorted. “Why would I tell you?”

He lowered his fork to his plate, idly flexing the newly-freed fingers of his left hand. “When I ask a question, I expect an answer. And I get it, by whatever means I find expedient.”

“I’m sure you do. But think about it this way,” countered Olivia. “The second I tell you my plans, they won’t be my plans anymore. So even if I gave you the most honest, most thorough answer possible, the second it leaves my mouth it’s worthless information.”

Sephiroth narrowed her eyes and Olivia met them, as open and agreeable as she knew how to be.

“I want the worthless information,” he said.

“Really? My life isn’t difficult enough?” Olivia sighed. “Ok, I was thinking I’d dismantle one of the sword harnesses in your closet, swallow the magnet that holds the weapon in place, and—after it came out the other end—see if I could use it to short the electronic lock to my cell in the lab. And then… I don’t know, either escape or hack into the company computers and cause some trouble, but I hadn’t really decided.”

Sephiroth nodded, picked up his fork, and resumed eating.

Olivia sighed again—loudly this time—and did the same.

When they’d finished, Sephiroth picked up his plate and reached for hers, but Olivia shifted it out of reach and snatched his up instead. “As long as I’m making myself at home, I might as well actually make myself at home and do some annoying chores.” She carried both plates to the sink and began washing up. “It’s nice to feel busy, you know? Doing the dishes is so normal and sane…”

Sephiroth wiped down the table and leaned against the wall, watching. The second she turned off the faucet, he asked, “You mentioned hacking into the company computers. Is that something you’re capable of?”

“Hard to say,” Olivia answered. “It’s something I was capable of back on my world, and this one is similar in many ways… but also pretty different. I have no idea where computers fall on a scale from ‘tofu’s exactly the same’ to ‘your power infrastructure seems like wacky nonsense.’”

“Would you be interested in making a bargain?”

Olivia dried her hands and propped her elbows on the counter. “Who knows? But I can’t wait to hear your offer.”

“If you prove capable of hacking into the Shinra computer network, I will endeavor to keep you alive and in one piece.”

“Endeavor,” Olivia muttered, underwhelmed. “Not inspiring a lot of confidence, here. What are you after?”

“Information relating to a series of experiments known internally as Project G,” said Sephiroth. “The Science Department guards information relating to this project—and similar ones—very carefully.”

“I’m happy to give it a shot.” A favor for a favor sounded fair. But then the second thoughts arrived. She’d been stuck with the villains, after all. “Wait, is this one of those situations where you’ll kill me for seeing the information you just asked me to dig up?”

Sephiroth didn’t answer.

Olivia would have loved to tell herself that his silence was some sort of joke, but she’d been through too much to seize on wishful thinking.Grimacing to herself, she returned to the books she’d left open, hoping to come up with something better than the magnet idea. The cell doors probably defaulted to a locked state, anyhow.

Take that, Sephiroth, the idea you made me give up was bad anyway, she thought, trying to concentrate on an explanation of how mako occasionally and spontaneously crystallized into magic rocks—which, what the f*ck? Magic rocks?

Sephiroth eeled away and a minute later the shower turned on. She’d used it earlier herself. Dude had excellent taste in toiletries; her hair had never felt softer. She read two more chapters about magic rocks before the water shut off.

A few minutes after that, Sephiroth reappeared. He’d twisted his wet hair into a bun at the base of his neck, which looked amazing. Sort of balletic. And he had on outerwear, baggy black trousers and a black knit tank top.

“Get up,” he said.

“Uh?”

“I’m going to take you to a computer that you can hack.”

“I never accepted your bargain,” Olivia reminded him. “Don’t think I’m interested. Too chancy.”

Sephiroth crossed the room, grabbed her by the upper arms, lifted her off the sofa, and held her upright until she had her feet steady on the ground. Then, standing very close, he brushed a few loose strands of hair out of her face, gentle and menacing.

“Let me explain something, Olivia. You have a choice between my protection, however dubious, and none at all. Only one of those options gives you even the slightest chance at survival. Take it and say thank you.”

“Thanks, I hate it,” said Olivia. “But fine, where are we going?”

In answer, Sephiroth unscrewed the grate on a ceiling vent and made a stirrup with his hands.

“We’re just going to the apartment on the other side of the hall,” he explained, as they slithered through the cramped, dusty duct. “But there’s a camera by the elevator, so this is the easiest way to get there without being seen.”

He told her which way to go when the vents branched and then dropped down first, so he could catch her. They ended up in an apartment whose layout mirrored Sephiroth’s, though the decor could not have been more different. This one was stylish, with sleekly impractical furniture, art on the walls, recessed lighting. Intended to make an impression rather than provide comfort.

“Here.” Sephiroth opened an accordion door to reveal a computer that looked slightly outdated to her eyes, and shelves crammed with files in cardboard boxes. A picture sat on one shelf, showing Sephiroth crossing swords with two other men. He snatched it up when he caught her looking, tucked it in his pocket, and handed her a pair of gloves.

“The resident is a fugitive,” Sephiroth explained. “I’ll make it look like he’s broken in while you work.”

Olivia donned the gloves, flicked on the computer, and began to explore. Despite being a home computer it hooked into the local network, which gave her access to the vast majority of the company’s operations.

She poked around. Learned some things. Made some little tweaks. Felt pretty pleased with herself.

“It’s been two hours,” Sephiroth interrupted, appearing at her side. “How much longer do you need?”

“Oh,” Olivia said. “The Science Department is on a private server, totally cut off from the tower’s main network. Only way to access the info you want is from inside the department.”

Sephiroth inhaled sharply. He did that thing with his left hand again, flexing the fingers. “What exactly have you been doing all this time?”

Olivia answered with a sh*t-eating grin.

Those flexing fingers curled and all of a sudden, faster than she could follow, he’d whipped around and—there was a sword in his hand? A long, thin blade, which sliced through a table big enough to seat six and so cleanly that the divided pieces didn’t begin to slide apart and topple for several seconds, during which he sent a vase crashing into a wall.

“Hey.” Olivia stood and sidled around the edge of the room. Sephiroth had gone still with his back to her, each breath so slow and controlled she could feel the effort it took to restrain himself. “I’m not going to apologize but—don’t give up yet, yeah? You want to hack the science department, we can figure out how.”

He held still but his slit-pupiled eyes, glittering with anger, followed her as she circled around.

“I’m supposed to go back there in a couple of days, remember?” Olivia continued. “If you can get me out again… that’s a window of opportunity.”

Sephiroth took a single step in her direction. Quiet, graceful, and threatening enough to make her flinch. “Have you no sense of self-preservation?”

“Ordinarily, yes, absolute top priority. Unfortunately, I’ve been right on the verge of a hysterics for so long now that it's making me loopy.” Olivia smiled wryly. “But that’s a me problem. What you need to know is that the science department thing is totally doable. Give me access to the right terminal and I’ll get the information you want.”

After a pause that stretched uncomfortably long, Sephiroth nodded sharply. “Very well. We’ll discuss it back in my apartment. We’ve lingered here long enough.”

He did the hand-flexing thing again and this time she saw the sword materialize in his palm. So… that was what that gesture meant. No wonder it had spooked her. Sephiroth whacked at the table a few times, cutting it into pieces, then threw a couple of fireballs at it.

“So it’s not obvious my sword did the damage,” Sephiroth explained, when he caught her curious gaze.

One the fire dwindled to smoke, he boosted her back into the vent and they belly-crawled back across the hall. Once again, Sephiroth dropped down first so he could catch her. Olivia went straight to the kitchen and raided the cabinets for liquor. She hadn’t seen any on her first search but surely, somewhere, there’d be a bottle of something…

“Where do you keep your alcohol?” she asked.

“I don’t have any,” he answered. “Mako-enhanced soldiers can’t get drunk.”

“Great.” Olivia sighed and flopped across the kitchen counter. “Well this conversation is going to be awkward then. You want that science department info, right?”

Sephiroth nodded.

“And that means I need to go back to the science department… escape the cage for long enough to access a computer… and get out again so that I can give it to you,” Olivia continued.

“You needn’t state the obvious.”

“I’m stalling, obviously. Read the room.” Olivia clapped a hand over her eyes and then, telling herself not to be a baby, she made herself remove it and stand straight. “OK. I’m guessing that to make this work, we’re going to… uh… have to have sex.”

Sephiroth co*cked a single, beautifully arched silver eyebrow. “Oh?”

“More than once,” Olivia added. “And probably starting right now. You probably don’t know a ton about vagin*l exams…?”

He blinked. “No.”

“I’m not an expert, either, but from what I understand you can tell if a woman’s had sex—and estimate with some accuracy about how recently, and how frequently—by looking at vagin*l inflammation and abrasions.” Olivia sighed deeply. “So if the goal is to convince Hojo that you’re enthusiastic about getting me pregnant, and maybe it didn’t work this time but he should give you another shot, i.e., release me into your custody again… he does seem like the type to do an exam and make sure he’s getting what he wants out of this.”

“You are correct,” Sephiroth said. “He trusts no one’s word, and he delights in causing discomfort.”

Something about his tone caught her attention. “You don’t like Hojo, do you?”

Sephiroth’s exquisitely cut, full lips thinned to a hard line. “I loathe him.”

“Perfectly reasonable reaction,” Olivia assured him. Weirdly, it worked: his expression softened and one corner of his mouth quirked up. “By the way, if you have a better idea about how to go about this, I am all ears.”

“I came to the same conclusion you did.” Sephiroth rolled his shoulders to loosen them and then took a seat across from her at the counter. “Hojo’s been pressuring me to sire children for years. If he believes I’ve taken an interest, he’ll bend over backwards to facilitate it.”

Olivia screwed up her face with distaste.

“I can teach you how to escape the cage and move freely about the lab at night, which solves the other difficulty.” Sephiroth paused. “But you could use that knowledge to escape.”

“Yeah, that’s kind of where we are now,” Olivia agreed. “This could work, but… only if we trust one another.”

Sephiroth’s expression cooled visibly. Apparently trust was a tall order from him. “I see. Then—”

“So let’s f*ck,” Olivia interrupted.

His eerie gaze, which had slipped away, swung back to her. “Pardon?”

“It’s a good shortcut, right? To find out if you can trust someone or not? Best one I know.”

His expression remained so blank that she could only conclude he had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

“Have you ever dated?” Olivia wondered. “Had a girlfriend… or boyfriend?” A possible complication sprang to mind. “Are you super gay?”

“I have never ‘dated’,” he answered, with obvious reluctance.

Olivia waited.

“I have no preference,” he added.

“And you’re not a virgin, right?” She paused. “I mean, there’s no way, but…?”

Sephiroth began flexing the fingers of his left hand. He looked past her, and around, as far as she could tell at nothing. “You cannot make this information public.”

“Uh, okay…?”

“Many people would… I have a fan club.”

Olivia blinked. “You do?”

Sephiroth nodded. “It is substantial. And enthusiastic.”

“Why would a soldier have a fan club?” Olivia wondered aloud. “That’s kinda messed up.”

Sephiroth made a faint noise of agreement.

“Where I’m from someone got famous for making videos of herself licking a microphone while wearing skimpy clothing,” Olivia mused. “I think I might actually prefer that.”

“I’m not going to waste my time worrying about what the public finds interesting, or why.” Sephiroth sliced his hand through the air, cutting the subject short. “I am not a virgin.”

“Me neither,” Olivia replied. “So… any preferences, things you don’t like, stuff that gets you going…? We don’t need to enjoy any part of this, but you have to be hard and I’d rather not be completely miserable, so…”

“Enough talk,” Sephiroth said flatly. He stood and jerked his chin toward the short hallway that led to his bedroom. “Come.”

His abrupt command should not have been at all appealing but a hot shiver worked its way through her, leaving her wet and deeply unnerved. She’d been more comfortable with the prospect of awkward, unpleasant sex than with the possibility of being turned on.

Olivia told herself to be brave and followed Sephiroth into the bedroom. He’d shed his shirt by the time she arrived and while she let herself stare—she’d never seen such a glorious body up close—he pushed the straps of the stolen singlet off her shoulders and down past her elbows, where it dropped to the floor and left her in nothing but a few scraps of athletic tape. He didn’t give her any time to adjust before snapping the tape loose, too.

Suddenly she was naked, being crowded backward, calves hitting the bed before a light push sent her tumbling onto her back with Sephiroth crouched over her. He slotted one leg between hers and used it to make room for the other, spreading her open.

It all happened so fast. Nothing like Olivia was used to—no negotiation, no wheedling. Definitely no hesitation. He herded her into position and then put his hands on her body like he had every right to, palming her breasts, massaging her shoulders and pressing them back into the mattress, making her arch up and then giving her nipples a sharp twist.

Olivia fought not to panic. She reached out to touch, just to do something. To act instead of being acted upon. But Sephiroth was so lean and steely. He had no soft spots, no love handles or padding. Even his ass, so mouth-watering to look at, was taut and hard with no give at all. His eyes glowed in the dark.

The reality of his body was so unlike anything she knew. And deeply unsettling. When he plunged two fingers inside of her—right up up to the knuckle, no warning—and found her sopping wet, he laughed. Meanly. This obnoxious, Grade A asshole snigg*r that was so goddamn rude and arrogant it finally pulled a reaction out of her. She shoved at him, not that it accomplished anything, twisted and kicked.

He used the momentum to flip her over.

Before she really understood what was happening he’d hooked one hand around her hip and lined himself up. She wheezed at the first thrust, the breath knocked out of her, thought holy sh*t and then lost all access to coherent thought for a while. He was big, sure, but he was also ridiculously flexible and stupid strong. Every stroke hit just right.

She had never come just from penetrative sex before and somehow this asshole was about to f*ck her right over the edge when his rhythm began to stutter, a sure sign that he was close. Desperate, mindless, she reached back to grab a handful of his hair.

“Don’t you dare come,” she wheezed, winding a thick rope of it around and around her fist. “I am so close. If you even think about telling me you can’t last I swear to God I will live to see you regret it.”

He hovered, panting sharp puffs of air on her back, inching exquisitely and minutely in and out with each breath. Even the little micro-movements made her shudder; she was that close. She just needed a little more—she’d never been f*cked like this, practically ground into mincemeat by a perfect dick, and she wasn’t going to let him spoil it.

“Fool,” Sephiroth hissed, and bit her. Hard, on the shoulder, and not for play. The bite drew a whine out of her, cooled the mindless fervor. “Child,” he snarled, punctuating the word with a single brutal thrust. “Reckless, impulsive brat—”

He went on, but the words vanished into white fuzz. An org*sm washed over her and it really was different. Like the throbs of pleasure were coming from underground, muffled but also more powerful. Good. So good.

Sephiroth rode her through it and then kept going, probably out of spite. She didn’t care. She felt bliss down to her bones. He pulled out, finally—squeezed gouts of stinging come all over her breasts and then smeared it in like lotion while she drowsed.

“That was amazing,” Olivia said, completely unbothered. For sex like that, she’d tolerate a few quirks. “Holy sh*t.”

He curled in close but didn’t answer. Olivia yawned, feeling a bit guilty. He’d done all the work and then she’d made demands. Usually, she tried to keep things a bit more equal. Not that he’d left a ton of time for foreplay. Or anything else. He’d basically pounced on her.

But she could do better, surely. And they’d have to have sex tomorrow, at some point, which gave her time to figure out how to approach—

Sephiroth was hard again.

He pressed his erection against her hip, rocking gently to plump it up. She had a bare moment to ask herself how he could possibly be ready again so soon—to be honestly shocked by his eagerness—before he slithered on top of her.

“Again,” he demanded.

“Yeah,” she agreed, making room. “Again.”

Chapter 3: practicing their terror

Chapter Text

Olivia woke late, alone, and sore. She hobbled to the shower and made herself stretch under the hot water, until she had her full range of motion again. She still felt painfully tender between her legs, but oh well. Worth it.

She dressed herself in another one of Sephiroth’s singlets and stripped the bed. Hunted down the spare set so she could remake it but couldn’t find a laundry, so she bundled the soiled sheets and left them by the door. The main living area was just as they’d left it, tidy but for the area around the sofa where piles of books and notes waited for her to pick up where she’d left off.

Olivia made herself a cup of coffee and sat down to read. She felt energized, ready to wrestle some progress out of this nightmare world. Things had been bad for a while, but they were looking up. Some of the stuff she’d set up at that computer across the hall ought to pan out. She’d gotten laid. She'd hold up her end of the bargain with Sephiroth, and he'd give her all the knowledge she needed to escape.

She just had to be careful. And prepared. Which meant, for the moment, hitting the books.

Early in the afternoon, the lock turned and the door opened. Olivia looked up and smiled a greeting as Sephiroth stepped inside, but then someone else came after. The new guy was shorter than Sephiroth but bulkier, with a mane of spiky black hair. He wore a tank and trouser combo very similar to the one Sephiroth had put on for the trip through the vents.

“Hi!” said the new guy, doing a fairly exaggerated double take as he took in the mess of books around the sofa. “I’m Zack!”

“Hi, Zack,” said Olivia.

“I’m a SOLDIER First, like Seph.” He jabbed a thumb at Sephiroth, who’d slunk into the kitchen. “We work together.”

Zack looked at her expectantly.

“Very cool,” said Olivia.

“Yeah, exactly.” He snagged a stool and sat on it. “So, I have this amazing girlfriend in the slums and she knows someone who’s, like, really worried about you.”

Olivia dropped the pen in her hand and snapped straight. The sudden rush of hope came on so strong she almost couldn’t bear it. “Oh my god, I am too, I—” She clapped a hand over her mouth before she said anything stupid and made herself take a deep breath and count to ten. “This person, are they okay?”

“Yeah.” Something in Zack’s expression softened. “He’s fine.”

Sephiroth, who’d been silently eating almonds one by one out of jar, interrupted. “He?”

“How did he look?” Olivia wondered. “How’s he getting by?”

“You told me you’d arrived here with another woman,” said Sephiroth, setting down the jar of almonds. “You lied.”

“No, I didn’t,” Olivia returned. “You jumped to the wrong conclusion without any help from me.”

Sephiroth’s pupils narrowed down to slits. “Ah,” he said. “My mistake.”

Olivia finally caught the odd vibe. “Dude, he’s my brother,” she said, surprised that she had to explain at all. They had a temporary arrangement, not a relationship. “Blood sibling. Really nothing to worry about.”

Sephiroth smiled oddly. Very faint, but very intense. “Why should I believe you?”

“I’m pretty sure it’s her brother,” said Zack. “They look a lot alike.”

Sephiroth turned his still-weirdly-off attention to Zack. “You didn’t mention him before.”

“Didn’t seem fair.” Zack rubbed his eyes, slumping. “He didn’t want to meet with me but I insisted. I wanted to make sure he was genuine, a guy worried about his sister and not… whatever sneaky underhanded thing the anti-Shinra types might be cooking up. Aerith is a good judge of character but he wanted me to go poking around in Science, you know?”

“He’s in danger, too,” said Olivia.

“Yeah,” said Zack. “I didn’t want to believe him about that, but… at least I can tell him you’re okay, right? He’ll be so relieved. I’ll tell him Seph’s looking out for you and he’s got nothing to worry about.”

“He’s got plenty to worry about,” said Olivia. “Tell him to stay safe. Tell him that I’m glad he ran and that knowing he didn’t get picked up is the only thing that kept me sane some days. Tell him the worst thing he could do is put himself at risk for me.”

Sephiroth and Zack glanced at one another, Sephiroth impassive and Zack anguished.

“f*ck,” said Zack.

Sephiroth shrugged. “It’s not the same.”

“Yeah. Guess not.” Zack slapped the counter with his open palm and perked up with obvious effort. “Well. To answer your questions. Your brother looks like he’s doing okay. Sounds like he’s working at a bar in the evenings and tutoring some of the local kids during the day. That’s Aerith’s influence, by the way. She can convince anyone to do anything. He says he’s trying to save up enough to leave Midgar.”

“Thanks.” Olivia bowed her head. “It means a lot to me. To know he’s ok. I really appreciate it.”

“That’s done.” Sephiroth waved Zack toward the door. “Back to work.”

“Eh, I’ve gotta pack for a mission.” Zack waved. “Bye, Olivia. Nice to meet you. Stick close to Seph, okay? No one better to guard your six.”

Sephiroth looked back over his shoulder as he followed Zack out the door. “Are you reassured?”

“I was until you asked,” said Olivia. “I’m craving pesto. If you bring back some fresh basil and pine nuts, I’ll make some.”

Zack’s voice drifted in from the hall. “Did she just send you to fetch groceries?”

“She tried,” said Sephiroth, locking the door behind him.

***

“I’ll go with you to meet the brother,” said Sephiroth, once they’d reached the elevator. Olivia showed no sign of enhanced senses, but she had proven inquisitive and clever. Better safe than sorry.

“He won’t like that,” said Zack.

Sephiroth co*cked a brow. “And?”

“We’d have to leave now,” Zack warned, still reluctant. “He works at night.”

Sephiroth pressed the button for the garage level.

“Guess we’ll go now.” Zack shoved his hands in his pockets, rocking onto his toes and then back onto his heels. “There’s something weird about the guy. Part of the reason why I believed he might have a sister in Science. Seems psychic or something? You’ll be having a normal conversation and then he says something, or gives you a look, like he knows all your private business.”

“Olivia is the opposite. Her ignorance is… comprehensive.” Sephiroth hesitated to give this example, because refusing to acknowledge his fame had proved a reasonably effective defense against its many irritations, but it kept startling him. “She has no idea who I am.”

“Yeah. I have never seen anyone talk to you like that.” Zack laughed. Then, tilting his head to the side, “She didn’t recognize me, either. People don’t freak out when they meet me, but they usually know who I am.”

The elevator dinged. Sephiroth switched out his signature coat for a plain hooded jacket while Zack requisitioned a vehicle. He tossed Sephiroth the keys, which unlocked an unmarked, compact coupe. The sort of car most likely to survive a jaunt to the slums.

“The brother—his name is Matt—he definitely recognized me,” said Zack, once Sephiroth had steered them onto the highway. “Like, he knew me by sight, he knew me by name, he came asking for a favor and knew exactly how to make his case. Which arguments would work, which ones not to try.”

Sephiroth grunted acknowledgement. “Hojo thinks Olivia is an alien. I’m convinced the truth is more complicated. She can cook tofu, knew exactly which step I’d been missing in all my attempts, but appears to have learned of Wutai’s existence for the first time yesterday, from one of my books.”

“That makes no sense,” said Zack. “Tofu is a Wutai food. No one else eats it. Hell, you’re the only person I know who likes it.”

“It’s a nutritious lean protein.” In other words: he ate often and liked it occasionally. He’d liked Olivia’s preparation a great deal. “But you’re right. It makes no sense. And yet, when I pointed this out to her, she didn’t find it odd at all.”

“Ah.” Zack’s voice dropped at least an octave, heavy with understanding. “So she does know what’s going on.”

Sephiroth didn’t mention letting her loose on Genesis’s computer. In retrospect, that had been a mistake. He’d expected her meddling to draw Turk attention quickly, and given the location he’d prepared for a light interrogation from Veld. But Veld hadn’t shown up. Sephiroth had put a light powder on Genesis’ doorknob weeks ago and it hadn’t been disturbed, so no one had gone in or out. When he’d passed through the SOLDIER lounge on the way to the VR training room that morning, everything had been normal.

Perhaps she hadn’t done anything at all during those two full hours she’d spent focused and busy. Perhaps he’d caught her misleading him again. He preferred that to the alternative: that she had skill and strategy enough to be subtle.

Sephiroth parked the car in a small lot by the train station. From there, Zack took the lead. Instead of heading for the church where his girlfriend spent much of her time, they went in the opposite direction. Sephiroth guessed the destination when he caught the cries of children at play in the distance.

He clapped a hand on Zack’s shoulder. “I’m going to make myself scarce. He’ll be more at ease with you. Draw him into the open, where I can observe.”

Sephiroth melted into the shadows, watching as Zack greeted every child by name on his way to the front door of the orphanage, digging wrapped candies from his pockets to distribute into their grabby hands. A moment later, he re-emerged with a young man at his side who did, indeed, strongly resemble Olivia.

“Let’s get away from all these people,” Zack was saying, guiding the brother down a quiet path shaded by thriving greenery, providing plenty of easy camouflage. “This all turned out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it would be. Like, for your own sake and for your sister’s, you should probably keep everything I’m about to tell you to yourself.”

As with Olivia, the mere mention of the sibling had an electric effect. Matt grabbed Zack by the arm. “She’s alive?”

“Alive and in one piece,” answered Zack, hustling him along.

Matt stumbled. After a moment, Sephiroth identified his heaving, irregular breaths as sobs. “Oh God, oh God, I thought she was dead, I thought I’d left her to die…”

“She said she’s glad you ran,” Zack said, to provide comfort or stop the sniveling or both. “She said you did the right thing.”

“Yeah, no. I should have dragged her after me. Kicking and screaming the whole way, but f*ck it. I’d rather be apologizing for the hundredth time than wondering if she’s been dissected.” Matt wiped his forearm across his eyes and sniffled wetly. “How’d you find her? You talked to her?”

They reached an open area, fenced, that looked like it might once have been a paddock of some kind. Zack steered Matt into the enclosure and Sephiroth followed, circling around until he had a clear view of the brother’s face while remaining hidden in his periphery vision.

“Yeah. I think she was in Science for a while and I’m not going to pretend that’s great but she lucked out. Like, seriously, she’s probably the safest person on Gaia right now. Sephiroth has her.”

Sephiroth knew what happened next because he’d seen it happen so often during the war. When he set a family’s home ablaze, when a mother learned her son had fallen, when a proud king lost a war.

Matt's heart broke.

“No.” All the color drained from Matt’s face. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.” He doubled over and then just… collapsed onto the ground, put his head in between his knees. “This can’t be real. This can’t be happening. There’s no way.”

This boy was pathetic.

Zack squatted on the balls of his feat and gave Matt an awkward pat on the shoulder. “C’mon, man. I thought you’d be happy! You’re down here working nights while she’s lounging around Sephiroth’s apartment and raiding his fridge.”

Matt whined like a whipped dog. “She doesn’t understand.” He glared up at Zack. “You don’t understand.”

“Yeah.” Zack’s expression took on that sad, bitter wistfulness that, more and more lately, replaced his sunny optimism. “I’m actually kinda hoping you could explain.”

“Explain what?” Matt picked up a fistful of dirt and threw it to the side. The closest he could come to throwing a tantrum in an empty paddock. “That SOLDIER is a den of monsters?”

Zack recoiled. “How did you—“ He flicked a nervous glance at Sephiroth. “Where did you hear that?”

Sephiroth jumped the fence and approached the pair, tugging the jacket’s hood away from his face as he went. When Matt finally looked up, his eyes went wide with recognition and he promptly pissed his own pants.

“This one knows who I am.” Sephiroth gave the inferior sibling a light kick. “Be prepared to intercept in case he tries to run.”

Matt swallowed a sob.

“You’re lucky your sister was captured instead of you,” Sephiroth observed, wrinkling his nose. “You wouldn’t have lasted a week in the labs.”

“That’s not the insult you think it is,” Matt muttered.

“I thought it was a statement of fact,” said Sephiroth. “Where are you from?”

Matt glanced between them, expression calculating. Preparing to lie, and not hiding it very well.

“Don’t think,” said Sephiroth. “Answer.”

“Earth.”

Unsurprisingly, nowhere Sephiroth had heard of. “How many of you are there? You, your sister, anyone else…?”

“Just us.”

“Who sent you?”

“I don’t know.”

Sephiroth administered another light kick, more to make Matt look up than anything else. “You can do better than that. I’ll even help. Answer my question and I’ll answer one of yours.”

“I don’t know, okay?” Matt scooted away from Sephiroth’s boots. “We didn’t come here on purpose. Whoever, or whatever, brought us here didn’t tell us anything. No instructions, no warning. Nothing. We just appeared.”

“Whoever… or whatever?” Sephiroth prompted. “It sounds like you do know. It sounds like you’re hiding something.”

Matt ducked his head and mumbled, “I think the Planet sent us.”

“The Planet,” Sephiroth repeated, deadpan.

“That’s just what I think,” said Matt. “Just because I have a theory doesn’t mean I know anything.”

“What would the Planet want from you?”

Matt scowled. “What’s Olivia doing in your apartment?”

Sephiroth sighed. What a waste of a question. “Zack already told you. Lounging around and raiding my fridge. Stealing my clothes and using up my shampoo.”

“What the f*ck,” Matt whispered.

Warming my bed, Sephiroth almost added, just for the pleasure of causing a fresh wave of tears. He refrained because he didn’t want to open up that line of conversation with Zack.

Zack spoke up. “Listen, buddy. I know this is rough. I know this isn’t what you wanted. But your sister really is fine. She was so happy to know you’re ok. Lit up like a lightbulb when I told her I saw you.”

Matt shot a dark glance at Sephiroth. “She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with.”

“Which is a puzzle,” Sephiroth pointed out. “How is it possible that you know exactly who I am and she has not the slightest clue?”

Matt’s gaze darted about, once again on a desperate search of a plausible lie.

Sephiroth gave him a kick. “Answer.”

“Because she doesn’t.” Matt squirmed away, rubbing his bruised hip. “Because she’s younger than me, and she’s been living in a dorm for the last few years, and she’s interested in different stuff.”

Sephiroth kicked again. “That was not an answer.”

“Yes it was, asshole.” Matt raised his arms protectively overhead. To what end, Sephiroth could not fathom. “Where I’m from knowing about you is optional. Maybe a little weird.”

“Let me get this straight,” said Zack. “You’re from another planet where you have all kinds of information about a whole other human civilization and… knowing about it is optional?”

“Not quite but…” Matt reached into the knapsack he’d been carrying and rummaged around until he found a thick paperback, which he offered to Zack. “That’s Olivia’s, actually. She keeps trying to get me to read it but I’m never gonna. It’s about this guy from my world who somehow got really powerful by building parks. Sound interesting?”

“Uhhh…” said Zack.

“Yes,” said Sephiroth.

“There you go. Detailed information about human civilization on another planet and one of you is interested and the other isn’t.”

Sephiroth took the book before Matt could reclaim it. “Olivia wanted us to tell you to stay safe. That she’s glad you ran and that knowing you weren’t picked up by Shinra is the only thing that kept her sane in the labs. That the worst thing you could do would be to put yourself at risk for her.” He held Matt’s gaze. “Which is exactly what you did, by contacting Zack. You realize that?”

Matt nodded. “Yeah. Super clear on that one.”

Sephiroth dropped to one knee and laced his voice with threat. “I have something to add. We spoke just now of two planets, each with its own human civilization. But it is already clear that your genetic makeup is unique, perhaps distinct enough to be called alien. You were right to fear for your sister. It is a challenge to keep her alive—but for the moment, it is in my interest to do so. Your bumbling interventions would only tip the scale in the other direction. Do you understand?”

“You want me to stay away.”

“At minimum.” Sephiroth stood and gestured to Zack. “I’ve heard enough.”

They’d reached the gate to the paddock when Matt called out, “Wait!” Zack paused and turned; Sephiroth continued, but his enhanced hearing made it easy to hear what Matt said next. “Would you tell her—tell her that Sephiroth is the boss, and that I’m going to a place that sounds like it belongs in a Marvel movie.”

“I’ll tell her,” Zack promised, quickly catching up to Sephiroth. “He did not like you.”

Sephiroth shrugged. Many people didn’t, and justifiably.

“You have to admit, that was pretty extreme.”

“I never thought I’d be grateful to Shinra propaganda, but if it prevents civilians from pissing their pants every time they see me…”

“Time to send a fruit basket to the fan club?” Zack suggested.

Sephiroth shuddered.

They reached the car, still in one piece. Sephiroth unlocked it and folded himself into the seat. Zack did likewise, yanked the seatbelt across his chest, clicked it into the place, and then stared blankly through the windshield.

“I know he seems kinda soft…”

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“But that thing he said, about SOLDIER being a den of monsters?”

Sephiroth’s hands tightened on the wheel.

“No, no. Seph. I said that.”

Startled, Sephiroth looked over to the passenger seat.

“All this stuff that’s been happening. It’s put some dark thoughts in my head. Most of the time, I’m proud of what we do. Proud to serve with you, and have your back. Not that you ever need it. But sometimes…” Zack trailed off. “The thing is, I didn’t tell some guy I hardly know about all my deepest, darkest fears. I told my friend Cloud. In private. But Matt still knew the exact words.”

“Troubling,” Sephiroth agreed. “What about the rest? Do you think he answered our questions honestly?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’m no Turk but there were a couple of times when it seemed like he wanted to lie, and I don’t think you let him get away with it.”

“But perhaps he still managed to mislead,” Sephiroth concluded. “Which reminds me. Where can I buy fresh basil and pine nuts?”

Chapter 4: I didn't mean to frighten you prematurely

Chapter Text

Olivia gave up on reading sometime around sunset. She could only assimilate so much new information in a day. She’d been staring out the window and thinking for hours by the time Sephiorth returned, well after dark.

Sephiroth handed her a small grocery bag and vanished into the bathroom. Zack made himself comfortable at the kitchen counter, watching with apparent fascination as Olivia unpacked the basil and pine nuts. Perfect. Someone kept Sephiroth's kitchen reasonably well stocked and she didn't think it was Sephiroth himself.

“We saw your brother,” Zack said.

Olivia pulled out a bowl and began grating cheese into it with a fork. “He still doing ok?”

“He was pretty relieved to get your message,” said Zack. “I’m sure he’d rather I didn’t mention it, but… I saw a few tears when I told him you were ok.”

Olivia winced. Matt must have been going crazy. Hopefully now that he had news he’d… do what? Stay away and leave her to her fate? Ugh. What a thing to hope for.

“He sent a message back, too,” Zack added. “He wanted me to tell you that Sephiroth is 'the boss' and that he’s going to a place that 'sounds like it belongs in a Marvel movie'. Does that… mean anything to you?”

Olivia finished grating the cheese and began plucking basil leaves off of their stems. “Yeah, it means he thinks I’m an idiot.”

“It does?”

Olivia gave Zack a knowing look. Did he honestly think he could go from zero to friendly concern in five seconds flat? And that she'd buy it?

Sephiroth emerged from the hallway and eased closer, but stopped just short of actually joining the conversational grouping.

“You can’t blame us for being curious,” Zack wheedled.

“Matt's trying to tell me that Sephiroth is evil.” Olivia poured some olive oil and pine nuts over the basil and cheese and then handed the bowl to Zack, along with a fancy muddler. His cupboards might be bare of alcohol, but Sephiroth did possess a complete and rather high-end bar set. Probably a gift. “Mash this into paste, would you?”

Zack stared down at the bowl and Sephiroth smirked. Zack shot him a look of mock offense, but gamely smashed the muddler into the bowl.

“Evil is a strong word,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia paused in the middle of reaching for a loaf of bread. She’d had a lot of time to think, and she’d spent some of it weighing her opinion of her jailor/savior/co-conspirator. “You choose your words more carefully than most.”

Sephiroth dipped his chin in acknowledgement.

“I don’t.” Olivia grinned and began slicing the bread. “Matt wants me to know that you’re dangerous and you could turn on me at any time and I should be wary. Pretty obvious, right? He thinks I’m an idiot.”

“That’s pretty ungrateful, don’t you think?” Zack objected. “Guy goes out of his way to help you out and you insult him?”

Olivia looked past Zack to Sephiroth. “I think Sephiroth would be disappointed if I did not heed the warnings he has explicitly given.”

Sephiroth smiled, pleased.

Olivia finished slicing the bread, then moved onto the tomato and mozzarella. Nice thick slices.

“What about the movie?” Sephiroth asked.

“Oh, that’s Matt being an idiot.” Olivia took the bowl of pesto from Zack and gave it a few stirs, then slathered it over the bread. “There are like a million Marvel movies and I don’t like them very much. Haven’t been to one in years.”

She’d left out one crucial word there: anymore. She didn’t like them very much anymore. She’d been a fan once, and Matt knew exactly which movies she’d enjoyed. He was way more into the whole expanded universe than her.

She began layering on the mozzarella and tomato. “But if I don’t know where he is, then I can’t tell anyone. So, for once, I won’t complain about my brother.”

Olivia closed the sandwiches, shifted them onto plates, and handed them out. Sephiroth ate silently, though his pupils once again dilated with pleasure. Zack took one bite and moaned at top volume.

“Odin,” he swore, holding the sandwich at arm’s length and staring at it. “I have no idea what this is and it’s the best thing I’ve ever eaten.”

“Basil pesto,” said Olivia, relishing her own. Like a lot of recipes with a fairly simple set of ingredients, the magic came from getting the proportions just right. She'd spent months perfecting a pesto with just the right balance of fresh and fatty, creamy richness and bright flavor.

Zack took another bite, vocally. “Aliens are amazing.”

Olivia washed up afterwards, still glad for busywork that made her feel normal and at least a little useful. By the time she’d finished washing up, Zack had said his goodbyes and Sephiroth had shed his coat and harness. The strangest thing about a body like his, she reflected, was that nudity didn't make him look more vulnerable at all.

His hot villain getup was intimidating, for sure. It made his shoulders broader, emphasized his height. But it also added personality, for lack of a better word. Black leather for that cool bad guy vibe. Voluminous skirt on the coat for a regal flare. The harness was clearly a thirst trap. Remove the getup and he was just as threatening but so much harder to read. Scarier, in a lot of ways.

“Where are you from, Olivia?” Sephiroth asked.

Olivia left the kitchen and settled uneasily on the stool that Zack had occupied so recently. She didn't think he was just making conversation. Not much of a small talk guy, Sephiroth. "Matt probably said ‘Earth.’”

“He did. Is that accurate?”

“Accurate but imprecise. Like if I’d asked you, and you’d said ‘Gaia’ instead of ‘Midgar’.”

“How is it that your brother knows so much about this world, and you so little?”

Olivia leaned into the granite countertop, the polished stone a hard pressure across the small of her back. She understood the point of this now: ask two people who couldn't communicate the same set of questions, compare the answers. Where they didn't match up, someone was lying.

She didn't know how Matt had answered this question, but she doubted he'd opted for honesty.

“You’re asking the wrong question," she said finally.

“Oh?”

Olivia waved at the windows, beyond which the city glittered against a starless sky. “I don’t understand this world very well. But I know mine, and nothing on Earth can explain what happened to Matt and me. The natural laws of my world, the physics, the mechanics… there’s no way any of this started on our side. All the answers to ‘how’—and in consequence ‘why’—are here, and that means you won’t get them from us.”

His narrowed eyes gave way, briefly, to an expression of disgust. “I see. The question should not have been how, but what.”

“Exactly. Matt probably knows a lot of stuff you’d find interesting." Olivia braced herself. "How do you think Matt would feel about another chat?”

Olivia’s stomach sank when, instead of answering, Sephiroth’s left hand stretched and flexed around an absent sword. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had to believe Matt was okay. He’d told her where he was going—given her a clue at least—and while that didn’t prove anything, it was enough to hope.

When she opened her eyes, Sephiroth was right in front of her. Not even inches away. Her jolt of surprise made him smile; he tugged the layers of fabric down from her chest and cupped her breast, just a shade too firm to be pleasant.

“I believe we have business to attend to.” His voice matched his expression: equal parts indifferent and imperious. “A bargain, and a schedule to keep.”

Olivia squirmed but kept her mouth shut. If she protested and he ignored her then it would be worse. Instead, she reminded herself that he’d only spoken the truth. They’d made a bargain. She’d argued for this.

He lifted her onto the counter and removed her underwear with brusque efficiency, slipping the scrap of fabric loose and tossing it aside. Olivia made herself spread her legs through sheer force of will; her every instinct screamed a protest, but… she could do this. She'd be fine.

Sephiroth stepped into the cradle of her hips and took a firm grip on her ass, grinding into her. He was fully erect. Rock hard, actually, revealing an urgency she’d never have suspected if she hadn’t felt it.

“What part of this conversation turned you on?” Olivia blurted. The part where she’d dodged his questions then wheedled information out of him that he hadn’t wanted to give? Or the part where he’d made her sad and scared?

“All of it,” he answered, unfastening his leather pants. He spread her apart with this thumbs, stretching her thighs, and filled her in a single thrust. She was tender from the night before but—to her profound shame—wet enough for an easy glide.

“Having you in my power,” he continued. “Watching you wrest your little victories from me all the same. Knowing you can’t stop me.” He pulled out and thrust, leaned close enough to whisper in her ear. “Knowing you enjoy it.”

She did. She really did. He just had such perfect control over his body. Even now, going fast and hard with no goal beyond getting himself off, he filled her up just right. Made her want more. He pulled out in time, came into his own hand, and then smeared sem*n over her neck and her cheek, shoved his dripping thumb into her mouth. She’d never tasted come so vile: musky and sharp, leaving a painful sting all across her tongue.

“No protests?” Sephiroth asked, mocking. “No complaints?”

Olivia blinked her gaze into focus, struggled to think straight. Sephiroth was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a generous lover. But he had a sense of fairness. “You’ll get me later.”

He searched her expression and then subtly relaxed, shoulders settling and hips easing into a more natural stance. “I will,” he agreed, tossing her over one shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “Now, in fact.”

***

Sephiroth’s day proved moderately soul-withering, as had become standard. He went to a budget meeting where the accountant whose report they'd all gathered to hear discovered while standing at the lectern that the presentation he’d been about to give had vanished from his laptop, apparently deleted. Heidegger made another attempt to seize control of SOLDIER, easily outmaneuvered and all the more galling for it. The man had all the strategic sense of a gnat. To top it all off, Sephiroth had booked an afternoon session in the VR room because only the electronic simulacra of his two best friends, now defected and degenerating, posed challenge enough to constitute 'training'.

On his way out, he heard a handful of Thirds in the lounge laughing uproariously. Freshly reminded of the camaraderie he’d had and lost, he paused to listen.

They were reading to one another from an email that one of them had apparently received in error, a furious screed from one of Scarlet’s underlings about her mismanagement of the Weapons department. The author described negligence, property damage, cover ups, wasteful spending—nothing surprising, except for the fact that it had been written down and distributed for public mockery.

The elevator dinged and Third Class Rippon called, “Hey, Kunsel, have you seen this?” and began to read. “Some guy in the Weapons department claims that—amongst other things—Scarlet ordered a bunch of diamonds for use in precision cutting tools, then wrote them off as defective, took them home and made a necklace out of them…”

“Yeah, I’ve seen it,” answered Second Class Kunsel. “Someone planted a virus in the Shinra system that searches out emails with the word ‘f*ck’ in them. Every time it finds one, it forwards it to a hundred random Shinra employees.”

“Shiva, really?” Third Class Pratt slapped his thigh. “Heads are gonna roll.”

“In that case, literally,” said Kunsel. “Scarlet had him test a new prototype and it blew up while he was operating it.”

“Business as usual for Scarlet,” muttered Rippon.

“Any other good ones?” asked Pratt. “We know you’ve seen them all.”

“I’ve seen a few dozen but I’m having a hard time laughing at them. A lot of people lost their jobs today and that guy down in Weapon Development isn’t the only fatality. Heidegger found the guy who called him limp-dicked blowhard and threw him out a window.” Kunsel sighed. “But someone in Palmer’s department sent out a limerick—apparently he sends one every morning, so everybody on the Aerospace floor is sick of them—but I thought it was funny. ‘There once was a craven boot-licker / whose buttery tea strained his ticker—”

Sephiroth continued on his way, making a mental note to find out when exactly the virus had hit the system. Two days ago, perhaps? While he and Olivia were in Genesis's apartment? He returned to his office and, in between tasks, paged through the book Matt had given him. It was much too long to skim, too full of foreign words and concepts. Endless details about a place called New York City. It made him wonder how much Olivia had absorbed from his own personal library.

When he returned to his apartment, Olivia was sitting on the exercise mat with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring out the window. He’d been hoping to be cajoled into eating more delicious food and wasn’t sure what to do with the silent lump in the corner of his room.

Wait for it to acknowledge him, he supposed. He fell back on his usual routine, rummaging through the refrigerator. Olivia had no comments or commands, which annoyed him. He opened a block of tofu and weighed it down with heavy objects, as instructed. Might as well test the method.

He chopped vegetables while it drained, then cubed the tofu and sautéed the whole mess with the bottled sauce. He used to be indifferent to the sauce, but now he hated it.

He realized, as he forced himself to finish a meal he would have enjoyed a week previous—the improvement to the texture of the tofu was significant—that he wasn’t going to get any sex, either. A switch had flipped in Olivia and if he pushed, she wouldn't open up. She’d retreat further into herself.

Now, twice denied, he was angry. And if he didn't channel his anger in a different direction, he'd lash out at her. Ordinarily, he'd have practiced his katas on the exercise mat. But Olivia was sitting on the exercise mat and his temper had already reached a point where he knew better than to make her move.

But then, maybe he ought to scare her a little. Interrogate her properly. At the very least, he’d teach her a lesson about putting her vulnerability on display. She should know better.

His mood was not improving.

It took too much effort to hold his tongue. To leave his plate in the sink and put his coat and shoes back on. To make himself reach for the door.

“You need to explain how to get in and out of the cages,” she said, before he could slip away. “And if you can tell me anything else about Project G—keywords, names, places, things like that—then I’ll be able to get better results for you.”

Ah. Of course. She was anticipating her return to the lab. Some of his anger subsided. He should have realized.

He crossed to the window and leaned against it. “When a lab supervisor starts a shift, they insert their keycard into a reader which automatically instructs all the electronic locks to open to their code and only their code. Right now, Hojo has four supervisors: Mao, Gunther, Feinstein and Romu…”

He described each one’s appearance, and gave her the corresponding codes. She had him repeat the numbers several times, but recited them perfectly when prompted.

“The second difficulty will be avoiding the surveillance cameras,” Sephiroth added. “The cameras are mounted high, with good visibility, but they’re only as effective as the guard on duty. Hide behind furniture, crawl under beds, whatever you have to do. It’s possible to traverse the entire lab without being seen, if you’re careful.”

“All right.” Olivia poked a hand out from the swaddling blanket. “I promise I’ll do everything in my power to search the Science Department for information about Project G, and I’ll pass everything I find on to you.”

He believed her. How bizarre. Sephiroth clasped her hand with his own. “Then I promise I’ll do everything in my power to get you out in good time, and in one piece.”

She looked him in the eye as they shook, solemn and determined, and all he could think about was f*cking her. He wanted to yank her out of the corner and lay her out on the mat, pin her down and take her. Make her look him in the eye while he pushed inside and pull her hair if she tried to glance away.

He freed his hand and backed away, reining himself in. Reached for a topic that he fully expected to spoil his mood. “Are you responsible for the computer virus that searches out emails containing curse words and forwards them to a random set of Shinra employees?”

She nodded. “That’s me.”

“A juvenile prank,” he said, making his contempt clear.

“No, a sleight of hand.” She searched his expression and then explained. “We don’t have magic on my world, but we do have magicians. They do tricks that look like magic, and everyone knows it’s not, but we’re impressed if they fool us. A lot of magicians rely on sleight of hand—do something flashy with one hand, and the audience will ignore the subtle thing they’re doing in the other.”

So. Not just a prank—a tactic. “Two people have already died because of it,” he told her, viciously satisfied when she went pale. He fled the apartment before he could try anything else.

Most of the training rooms were occupied, so when he saw Zack working with a pint-sized infantryman he decided to join them. The infantryman, who happened to be facing the door, stumbled badly and dropped his sword when Sephiroth entered. Zack barely managed to pull a swing that would have cracked a few of the boy’s ribs.

“Seph!” Zack cried, helping the infantryman to his feet. “Warn a guy, would you? What’s up? Need something? I was just putting in some extra training time with my buddy, Cloud. Cloud, say hello to Sephiroth.”

Cloud. This was the friend Zack had confided to? This baby-faced child? A First Class had told one of Heidegger's infantrymen that SOLDIER was a den of monsters? What was Zack thinking? How could he trust anyone so weak to keep secrets so heavy?

Cloud saluted. “H-h-hello, sir.”

Zack shifted just a bit, stepping between them and blocking Cloud from view. “He’s really talented, Seph.”

Sephiroth did not care if the boy had talent. Talent wouldn’t stop him from spreading rumors among the rank and file, and those rumors could easily reach Heidegger’s ears. Heidegger was an idiot, but that didn’t mean Sephiroth could afford to supply the man with ammunition.

But Sephiroth couldn’t explain any of that in front of Cloud, and perhaps not even if they’d been alone. “Spar with me,” he said instead, calling Masamune into his hand.

Zack shifted automatically into an easy lunge, raising his sword. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“I’ll take a handicap,” Sephiroth said by way of answer. “I won’t move from this spot. The rest of the room is yours.”

“That’s just going to make this more embarrassing,” Zack muttered, but he steeled himself. He dove in, angling the Buster sword for a block and cursing when Sephiroth jumped high enough to plant his foot on the flat of the blade, simultaneously making an opening for himself and kicking off for an aerial attack.

Zack dodged and tried again, with an attack this time. He had all the freedom in the world to position himself, but Sephiroth need only pivot on one foot to track him around the room. Zack had no chance of flanking him, or darting in unseen.

After several clashes, neither had scored a hit. Zack kept slipping out of reach, and Sephiroth couldn’t give chase. The stalemate would go on until he could stop Zack from retreating, and the easiest way to keep him close would be to present an opening. Greater risk, greater reward.

Sephiroth twisted away from Zack’s next lunge, raising Masamune for an overhead strike. Zack took the bait, drawing in for a swing at Sephiroth’s ribs. That gave Sephiroth all the opportunity he’d need to—

“Roll!” shouted Cloud, and Zack immediately rolled clear of Sephiroth’s attack.

Zack hopped to his feet and bounced a few times. “Thanks, Cloud,” he called, raising one hand for a high five.

Cloud apparently saw this as permission because from then on, he called out instructions regularly. Zack obeyed with an alacrity that spoke of real trust, and for good reason. Watching them from afar gave Cloud an advantage, yes, but he used it well. His input made the fight exponentially more difficult for Sephiroth.

Eventually, Zack began to show signs of exhaustion—slower recoveries, heavy panting—and Sephiroth called an end to the spar.

“Well done,” he said, releasing Masamune to the ether, and turned to Cloud. “And you—what’s your surname?”

Cloud snapped to attention. “Strife, sir.”

“First kata,” Sephiroth said. “Show me.”

Cloud’s gaze skittered to Zack, who put down his water bottle for long enough to say, “You’ll be great!”

Thus reassured, Cloud slipped into the familiar pattern. He moved carefully, anxious to get each transition right, so Sephiroth snapped, “Faster,” and then, again, “Faster,” to get a better sense of his abilities. Cloud was nervous, that much was clear, but also quick and nimble.

“Enough,” said Sephiroth. “Have you considered joining SOLDIER?”

Cloud ducked his head. “I tried, sir. I failed the exam.”

“If you’re still interested, you can skip it,” said Sephiroth. “I’ve seen enough to sign a pass.”

Cloud stammered his thanks. Sephiroth ignored Cloud's blubbering in favor of studying Zack’s reaction—a mess of conflicted emotions, resentment clear among them.

“Learn to think past your own nose,” Sephiroth told his lieutenant, unrepentant. “What do you want? Not now, not ten minutes from now. Not what feels good in the moment. What do you want.”

Chapter 5: wall to wall creeps

Chapter Text

Olivia could not believe she walked on her own two feet back into Science. Her every instinct screamed RUN. She hated herself for making a bargain with Sephiroth and she hated Sephiroth for holding her to it. She hated the employees who minded their own business. She hated the guards for standing by and she hated their face-obscuring helmets. She hated the secretaries, the lab assistants, and the so-called scientists. She hated the janitors who cleaned up everyone’s messes.

She hated everyone. She hated her life. She hated this whole stupid nightmare world and for some reason, even though her legs trembled with every step, they refused to do her the small favor of giving out entirely.

By the time they reached Science, she felt both hyper-aware and completely out of it. Someone spoke to her and she didn’t hear a word. A moment later, Hojo appeared and she felt like she could have counted his nose hairs from ten feet away.

“You kept her long enough.” Hojo twitched at Olivia’s smock, revealing a fingerprint-shaped bruise on her inner thigh. “I suppose I won’t complain. Move along, then. You had your fun and I have work to do.”

“You can have her for three days,” said Sephiroth. “Then I want her back.”

“Absolutely not.” Hojo waved one of his underlings close. “Get the specimen in stirrups,” he instructed, before turning back to Sephiroth. “I’m a scientist, not a pimp. If you want a—”

“I want that one,” Sephiroth interrupted. “You worked hard to catch my interest. Congratulations, you succeeded. I’ve taken an interest. You’re lucky I’m returning her to you at all.”

A woman in a lab coat took hold of Olivia’s arm and began to lead her away. But the lab was quiet, and Olivia’s attention fixed.

“This isn’t a debate,” snapped Hojo. “I’ve acquired a highly valuable specimen and you are threatening to steal it. You think I won’t take this to the President?”

“I think you should ask Veld what happened when he tried to recruit a cadet named Kunsel,” answered Sephiroth. “Or track the progress of Heidegger’s many attempts to annex SOLDIER. I don’t start fights I can’t win.”

Something about this answer must have been persuasive, because Hojo immediately switched gears. “Three days isn’t nearly enough. Don’t make me rush, Sephiroth. I’m liable to damage the specimen.”

“Administer another round of mako shots and you can have her for a week,” came the answer, growing fainter now. Or maybe that was just Olivia’s brain, shorting out in protest.

A week. She’d have to survive in here for another week.

The lab-coated underling said, “Into the chair,” while maneuvering the stirrups into place. Olivia obeyed and sank into herself as completely as possible. She imagined herself somewhere else—back at her college graduation. Decorating her cap with her friends, running around campus in their gowns taking group photos, promising to stay friends forever no matter what.

Olivia started to cry and made herself focus on something else. Something more normal. Sitting in the main reading room of her college’s library. Dust motes swirling in the light from the tall windows, yellowing pages scraping as they turned, the tinny rhythm of someone else’s music leaking out through their headphones.

Hojo hooting and crowing, gloved hands touching her—

No. Pretend she was studying for a test. She’d learned to block out distractions, hadn’t she? And she had something to study, too. She recited the supervisors’ names and passcodes. She’d always had a pretty average memory, and people used to get offended because it took her so long to remember their names. So she’d learned a bunch of memory tricks. Some relied on embedding the new memory into an older one, like building memory palaces, others on creating wacky, improbable images.

She had a consistent code for numbers—she associated numbers with colors, and kept the correspondence consistent. Over time, that improved the speed and accuracy of her recall. Since she needed to tie the passcodes to specific individuals, she’d linked the digits with items of clothing. The first number with the item of clothing Olivia herself put on first when she got dressed, the second with the item she put on second, and so on. The wackier the outfit, the easier it would be to remember, so dainty Mao wore an orange safety vest with a black leather miniskirt, a pair of yellow roller skates and a blue turban. Mao: two-eight-three-five.

Her feet were removed from the stirrups, her legs left to dangle. A needle in her arm. Pain. A light shining in her eye, too bright.

No. Focus on the next code. Strapping Gunther in a pink frilly top, with ruffles. Fire engine red hot pants, tall purple boots perfect for clubbing, and a yellow bike helmet. Gunther: nine-one-six-three.

Someone slapped her face until she opened her eyes. She was in the lab. Her thighs were slick with jelly. Several dots of blood on her right bicep marked the entry points for needles. The inside of her left arm stung, but a bandage wrapped around the part that hurt.

One of the evil scientists walked her to a cage and locked her inside.

***

She didn’t even try to escape her cage that first night. She stayed awake for as long as she could, observing. The lab didn’t empty out until after midnight. Even then, the supervisors worked in shifts so one would always be present and responsible. Every room had at least one surveillance camera mounted high, where the wall met the ceiling.

But Sephiroth spoke the truth. The night supervisor had little to do, and Feinstein snored. Olivia’s mnemonic for Feinstein put him in a blue triangle bikini top, with a mismatched orange thong on the bottom. Red high heels and green wizard's hat that flopped over his eyes. Feinstein: five-two-one-four.The door clicked open and Olivia eased out of her cell, her heart already beating horribly fast. It wasn't healthy for hearts to beat so fast. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled behind tables, around bulky machines. She picked a computer with a monitor positioned so that she could use it for cover.

Sephiroth had helped her to fasten a tiny flash drive into her hair. She freed it from the knots that kept it secure with some difficulty and inserted it into the port. The difficulty, she soon realized, would be in picking which files to put on the drive. It held twenty gigs but many of the files relating to project G were gigantic, huge images and lengthy video recordings and scanned documents, absolutely enormous datasets.

She had to look at them, in order to decide, and every file she opened made her sick. Pregnant women rotting alive. Pregnant women with grossly distended bellies. Pregnant women in straitjackets, gibbering. Dead babies. Babies with horrific mutations. Dead babies with horrific mutations.

And then, amidst all these horrors, a surprise: a beautiful baby boy with a shock of red hair and bright blue eyes. Genesis Rhapsodos. Another little boy with dark solemn eyes, sucking his thumb. Angeal Hewley.

These two boys, the fruit of Project G, were frequently compared on various charts and graphs to Sephiroth, who’d apparently been born from Project S. But she hadn't been told to look for Project S, and she could barely fit a tenth of a single percent of all the Project G materials onto her flash drive. She selected for variety, she nabbed as many text files as she could just because they were smaller, she made sure to grab files from different years, written by specialists in different fields. After crawling back across the room, she knotted the drive back into her hair and tried to sleep.

***

Early the next morning, she received a shot of the glowing green liquid she now recognized as mako. If she’d been asked—she hadn’t been—she would have rated that first shot a 10/10 on the pain scale. And yet, somehow, the second was a million times worse.

The fire in her veins didn’t die down. She itched all over, but even the lightest scratch made her nerves scream. Light burned her eyes and the sound of her own heartbeat echoed through her skull like bass reverb cranked up to eleven. Eventually, she developed what felt like a full-body Charlie horse and cried until she passed out.

When she finally woke, the evil scientists administered a whole new set of tests. They sliced her down to the bone with a scalpel and timed how long it took for the cuts to close. They dunked her head underwater and held it under until she sucked water into her lungs. They sat her in a sound-proofed cubicle and blasted noise at her until her ears bled. Then they made her walk across a balance beam, again and again until she didn’t wobble at all.

These new experiments were too active for the detachment she’d cultivated before. She couldn’t numb herself to the pain when each one was awful in its own unique way. She had to be awake and alert, fully present in the moment. That night, when she was taken to her cell, she couldn’t wait to get inside. She threw herself at the thick bars, sank to the bare floor, and sobbed in relief.

The following day was pleasant by comparison. They had her lift weights, stretch, run on a treadmill. Her fitness had markedly improved, but she didn’t quite see the point of measuring her progress when they’d never established a baseline. She gathered, from listening to the scientists chatter with one another, that they’d structured all the tests around making sure that she didn’t have any visible injuries when Sephiroth came to pick her up.

Olivia tried not to fiddle with her hair and tried not to look at the clocks. She couldn't make time move any faster.

Chapter 6: sympathetic vibrations

Chapter Text

Sephiroth arrived late in the afternoon. Hojo trailed after him, wheedling shamelessly. “I need more time as soon as you can spare it. Give her to us while you’re away on missions and we can both get what we want out of this.”

“I’ll consider it,” said Sephiroth.

Hojo grumbled, but he freed Olivia from the cage. Sephiroth raked her with a chill, assessing gaze and handed her a black silk robe. Wide-sleeved and short enough to cut off around mid-thigh, it was the sort of sexy little cover-up that didn’t cover enough.

Grimly, Olivia shrugged her arms through the sleeves and tied the soft belt.

Sephiroth said, “Come,” like was talking to a dog and stalked off, expecting her to trot along at his heels. Olivia wanted out of the labs badly enough to do it. She realized, as Sephiroth ignored her in the elevator, that their bargain was about to reach its conclusion and she had no idea what came after.

Mostly, she wanted to escape. Living in Villain Central came with many cons and few pros. But she had no idea if Sephiroth would help her or hinder her. He’d been an ally while their interests aligned, and their interests had aligned because she hadn’t been thinking beyond survival. In retrospect, she hadn’t made a very savvy bargain: she’d extended her life by about two weeks, and he’d gotten loads and loads of valuable information.

Olivia took a deep breath, released it slowly. Whatever came next, she’d think bigger.

The elevator chimed and the automatic doors slid open. Sephiroth stepped out first, plucking his keys from his pocket and unlocking the door to his apartment. He gestured her inside, brusque and disinterested, but the second the door closed he tugged the knot on her robe loose and began patting her down. Like he was a cop, searching her naked body for hidden contraband.

Olivia gritted her teeth and thought unkind things but she had no trouble holding still. She’d learned.

“They ought to call themselves butchers,” Sephiroth muttered, tugging her robe back into place and tying the belt with a bit too much force. “It’s the only thing they actually understand.”

“Yeah,” Olivia agreed dully. She worked the thumb drive out of her hair and dropped the prize into his palm. “Every byte is full of information about Project G. Don’t plug it into a computer that’s connected to the internet, or to the local network. Buy a cheap laptop and use it just for this.” She hesitated. “Everything on here is… really disturbing.”

He closed his fingers around the drive and Olivia made her way to the sofa. The first time she’d been released from the labs, she’d been so desperate to feel normal that she’d leapt at the chance to fake it.

But she understood so much more about her situation now, and couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for it. She sat on the sofa, then lay down with her legs curled into her chest. She promised herself that she’d stop feeling sorry for herself and get up in a minute, but then the minute would pass and she’d make another promise. In a minute, in a minute, in a minute.

At some point, a glass of water appeared on the table in front of her.

“Drink,” said Sephiroth.

“Okay,” said Olivia, and didn’t move.

He hovered for a bit, then vanished. Olivia thought I’m thirsty and didn’t move.

Sephiroth reappeared. He tossed more clothing at her and said, “Drink or I will make you drink.”

“Don’t be a dick,” said Olivia.

Sephiroth picked up the glass in one hand and cupped the back of her head with the other, tipping it to an angle more conducive to swallowing.

“Ugh, enough.” Olivia grabbed the glass and swatted Sephiroth away. She took a sip, just to make him back off, then emptied the whole thing in a few greedy swallows.

“Good. Now get dressed.”

“Quit telling me what to do,” Olivia complained, taking the now-empty glass to the sink and refilling it.

“You have ten minutes,” said Sephiroth.

“Asshole.” She drained a second glass of water. It helped. Putting on actual clothes for the first time in who knew how long would probably help, too. Ugh.

Stop being a baby, she told herself, and sorted through the garments. A plain black tank top. A plain black sports bra. Plain black underwear. Soft cotton pants with a drawstring waist—black. “Why is everything black?”

“Because I bought them, and I like black,” answered Sephiroth, retreating to the low bench by his door to strap himself into his boots.

Welp. Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer. She stepped into the underwear then reached for the bra, slipping her arms through the straps and lifting it overhead. She was about to slide it down and on when she realized Sephiroth was watching her—not like she’d been watched for the past week, dispassionate and dehumanizing, but with intense heat.

She lowered her arms, still topless. She didn’t want to have sex, but she wanted to want to. And Sephiroth knew how to bridge that gap.“You sure I should get dressed?”

He nodded, and this time she got the bra on. Then the shirt and pants. She even had a pair of slippers waiting for her by the door. The clothes were comfortable, they fit well, it was a huge improvement over her previous situation. But they also made her think that Sephiroth expected her to stick around.

She followed him back to the elevator, and down a few floors to a sort of gym complex. There was a lounge area, where a handful of beefy guys in athletic wear all went silent as she and Sephiroth passed. She saw free weights, weight benches, a track, all of it in use.

Sephiroth ignored all of that in favor of a short hallway lined with sliding doors. Three on each side and a bigger, fancier door at the end. Sephiroth peered through the windows until he found the one he wanted.

Inside lay a fairly simple training room, just a sprung floor with several racks of sword bolted to the walls. Two guys stopped whatever they’d been doing to greet them. One was Zack. The other…

The other was the hot blond from Matt’s game.

Though it didn’t feel right to call him a ‘hot blond’ when he looked like a kid. Round-cheeked and slim-shouldered, with a bog-standard-for-his-age surly expression.

Olivia was vaguely aware of Zack making an introduction, but she ignored everything except for the kid’s name: Cloud. Just like Matt had said.

“You must be, what… fifteen?” Olivia asked.

Cloud glared, for all the good it did him. He looked like an angry kitten. “Sixteen.”

“Sixteen,” Olivia repeated, amazed. She wasn’t even sure why. He just looked so different.

Zack snapped a finger in front of her face. “Staring is rude.”

“So is snapping in people’s faces,” said Olivia, but she looked away. The kid clearly did not like being stared at.

“I’d like for Cloud to train Olivia,” Sephiroth announced, drawing all the glares to himself. “I need more time with a human opponent.” Sephiroth nodded to Zack. “And teaching someone else will help Cloud learn.”

“You want me to learn to use a sword?” Olivia had no particular feelings about swords, or learning to use one, but she sure did mind Sephiroth’s assumption that she’d be hanging around the Shinra tower for long enough to acquire a skill.

“If you wish to move freely about the city, then yes. You’ll learn to defend yourself.”

Olivia raised her eyebrows. “I wasn’t aware that was an option.”

“If you apply yourself properly.”

“I’ve lived in bigger cities than Midgar and getting around safely has nothing to do with being armed,” said Olivia. “Honestly, I reject the premise and the execution.”

Somewhere behind her, Cloud made a faint strangling noise.

Sephiroth glided near, his voice dropping into a low, velvety register. “Can you imagine a scenario in which knowledge of this world’s premiere fighting technique would, in any way, hinder you?”

“No,” Olivia admitted.

He enunciated his next words slowly and clearly, a sting hidden in the purring tone. “Then allow me to do you a favor.”

He was so smug about his answer that she could practically smell it. Case closed, his little smirk said. As though her objection had been a sad, futile little obstacle that he’d whacked away with his superior reasoning.

Olivia narrowed her eyes. Not quite. “It’s not a favor if it consumes huge quantities of a valuable and finite resource, namely time—”

“Stop, stop, you guys.” Zack squeezed himself between them and spread his arms to push them apart. “There are children present, seriously. Is this how you want poor, innocent Cloud to learn about the birds and the bees?”

Olivia turned her glare on Zack. He thought it was cute that Sephiroth had picked up a human pet? He thought it was funny that Sephiroth had brought her down here for, what, doggy day care? Wear what he gave her, trot at his heels, jump when he said how high?

All of that—and more—sat on the tip of Olivia’s tongue, but she said none of it. She knew what happened when an angry woman started ranting at a nice guy who’d just been making a joke. C’mon, just a joke. He didn’t mean anything by it. He hadn’t put that much thought into it. He just wanted to put everyone at ease, so let’s all calm down.

She’d learned that lesson. Sort of.

A little.

“You can go f*ck yourself,” Olivia said, quite calmly, then raised her palm in a silencing gesture before anyone could hop on their high horse about it. “I’m going to wait outside.”

She strode out of the training room and back into the gym. The meatheads fell silent at her reappearance, then slowly resumed their chatter. Olivia could hear every word. Mostly gossip, mostly incomprehensible. Missions to places she’d never heard of, fights with monsters she couldn’t picture, complaints about superior officers she’d never met.

More than anything, she wanted to escape. Leave this place and these people in the dust. But Shinra was an evil corporate-surveillance state, and they had photographs of her from every possible angle. They had her fingerprints and her blood type, they had brain scans and x-rays, they had everything they’d need to track her through a world she understood very poorly.

Escape was impossible. Trying would be idiotic. So she’d try for the next best thing, which seemed equally as suicidal—she’d burn this place to the f*cking ground.

She’d try, anyhow. And, hey, she could get started immediately. Someone had left a duffel on a bench by the window and through the open zipper she spotted something that looked an awful lot like a cell phone. She inched closer, stretching her newly enhanced senses to the limit, but no one was coming, no one was looking. The phone vanished into the roomy pockets of her new pants and she slipped into an empty training room for long enough to pop out the battery.

Ta-da. She had a goal and a tool.

***

Eventually, Sephiroth took her back to his apartment. She was starting to get hungry, which was nice. Reassuring proof that her body still anchored her to the world. That it still remembered how to send signals that weren’t just pain.

She drifted toward the kitchen and thought about eating. Cooking, if she had the energy. Nourishing herself, which was a kind of self-love she didn’t know if she could muster. But then Sephiroth started opening up little takeout boxes, stuck a clear plastic tub of soup in his microwave, poured her another glass of water.

“What are you up to?” she asked, baffled.

“I’m feeding you.” He removed the tub from the microwave, stirred it, and then pushed it across the counter at her. “Eat.”

Olivia shook her head. “That’s not what I asked.”

He stared at her, impassive.

“Oh my God.” Olivia rolled her eyes and took a bite of soup… no, of stew. Thick and chunky and rich. “Why do you have to be like this about everything? How do you have the energy?”

“Mako is energizing, as you’ll discover.”

“Speaking of which: you know what kind of person volunteers another person for a painful medical procedure without their consent?” Olivia took another bite of stew. It was really good. “The sh*tty kind.”

Sephiroth shrugged. “I have—and will—do what I can to ensure your survival. The mako will make you resistant to injury and, should harm befall you, will speed healing.”

“Still should have asked.”

“I would not have respected a refusal,” he said, completely unrepentant. “So I did not ask.”

Olivia had nothing to say to that. She ate, and she thought about burning this whole place to the f*cking ground.

Sephiroth grabbed her by the chin and tilted her chin up, so she had to meet his eerie green gaze. “I advise against escape. If you flee my supervision, and Hojo recaptures you, I won’t be able to step in.”

Yeah, she’d figured. Olivia batted his hand away with more force than necessary and gave the man across from her a long, level look. He was definitely an asshole. She had no trouble picturing him as a (very) hot villain. But he didn’t give off loyal soldier vibes, at all. “Why do you work here?”

The corner of his mouth quirked up. “I’m glad you asked. Shinra compels obedience through the liberal application of both carrots and sticks. In my current position, the benefits are excessive and the costs bearable. If I tried to leave, the reverse would be true. Shinra would spare nothing to make me regret it.”

Olivia nodded. Self-interest was a powerful motivator, no doubt.

“When I most wanted to leave, I knew I would not survive the attempt.” His gaze grew distant. “And now… perhaps. But I have seen others try, and they did not survive the attempt.”

Olivia took another bite of soup. She kind of hated that she could see where he was coming from. Made it hard to stay angry. “Is there anything you like about Shinra?”

“SOLDIER,” he answered.

“You don’t like Shinra, but you do like doing Shinra’s dirty work?” Olivia wondered. That made no sense at all.

“The Turks do Shinra’s dirty work,” Sephiroth answered. “Separate department. One of them must have picked you up—they’re often tasked with collecting specimens for Hojo. You can recognize them by their sharply tailored dark suits.”

“Oh, yeah.” Olivia nodded. “The hot redhead.”

The temperature in the room chilled by several degrees.

“What are you worried about?” Olivia wondered, circling into the kitchen—and invading Sephiroth’s personal space—to toss the now-empty plastic tub into his trash can. She rooted around in the other takeaway containers until she found a fruit tart. Perfect. “I’m stuck. I can’t escape. Is he going to kidnap me because I called him hot? Is that standard procedure around here?”

Sephiroth grabbed her wrist before she could snatch the tart. He tipped his head to the side, silky pale hair cascading with the movement, and a smile crept onto his lips. “I believe you are sufficiently recovered,” he murmured, before scooping her into a bridal carry.

Olivia yelped, then squealed when Sephiroth nuzzled into her neck and then bit. “What is wrong with you?” she exclaimed, but then she realized he was carrying her toward his bedroom. Anticipation sizzled through her and she relaxed into his hold.

Chapter 7: kindly watch your step

Chapter Text

The next morning, Sephiroth handed Olivia a wad of cash and sent her out to buy a laptop. Apparently someone—or several someones—screened his mail, and so any electronics he ordered would likely be tampered with before they reached his hands.

He gave her a rough idea of where she’d be most likely to find an electronics store, a keycard so that she could return after she’d completed her errand, then told her if she decided to run off she’d be on her own, and not to expect any help. But so long she bought a laptop, she could spend the extra as she liked.

Olivia did consider escape. The temptation was too strong to ignore. But if she’d been allowed out of the tower once, she’d probably have another chance. Better to be smart, pick her moment. In the meanwhile, she got her first glimpse of Midgar from ground level. Instead of heading straight for the electronics store she bought a matinee ticket to a play called Loveless—the posters were everywhere—and stopped at a cart for a lunch of spicy Wutai noodles.

After buying a laptop and a few cheap burner phones, Olivia pocketed the rest. Keeping the cash bought her some peace of mind, the perfect gift to herself, so she figured that counted as doing what she’d been told.

When she delivered the prize to Sephiroth that evening, he cast a quick glance at her stack of phones before turning his attention to the laptop. He settled down on his couch, plugged in the machine, and booted it up. Within minutes, he’d inserted the flash drive and begun to read.

Olivia went to bed alone. The next day, when Sephiroth remain glued to the laptop, she decided to do a bit more exploring. She had access to his floor and a handful of public areas. She’d seen enough of Shinra, and the tower, to notice all the cameras. She’d have to be careful; anything that could be traced back to a specific device, anything that could be located, could be matched to the face and then identity of the person using it.

Luckily, a moderate interest in internet privacy had exposed her to a community of people who had a missionary zeal for it. She didn’t have access to the operating systems she knew, couldn’t quickly download a handful of programs that streamlined the process, but many of the old tricks adapted fairly well to this new world. She could exploit weaknesses in security to build herself backdoors into other machines and hide herself behind a chain of such links.

She took her time learning her way around, a different kind of education than the one she’d gotten from Sephiroth’s books. People hid so many dirty secrets inside their computers. Their catty emails and their p*rn, yeah, but also their financials, their spreadsheets, their risk assessments.

And, hoo-boy, Shinra had some risks to asses.

Shinra had a monopoly on an essential resource which basically opened a gigantic money spigot right into the company bank accounts. Huge advantage. But they spent money almost as fast as they earned it. Between their tens of thousands of employees, ballooning budgets, staggering misappropriations, construction costs, repair costs, equipment costs, production costs… they ran a nation spanning multiple continents and while they didn’t do it well, running a whole-ass government was expensive.

And that wasn’t all. Staff turned over at a ridiculous rate. They hemorrhaged employees, but not to retirement, or competitors with better offers. To death. f*cking villains, man. They really committed to the dystopia.

Members of the military died in combat. That part made sense. But the Weapons Development department lost dozens of people every year to explosions. Like. Their top-notch, best-in-the-business engineers somehow kept blowing themselves up. Every time Hojo got mad at one of his lackeys and converted them into a specimen, he cost the company thousands and thousands of gil. Hiring a qualified scientist and training them to function in a highly specialized lab was a huge resource sink.

Sephiroth had been the head of SOLDIER for less than a year. His predecessor, a guy named Lazard Deusericus, had quit under murky circ*mstances and—just like Sephiroth had said—Shinra’s ‘Public Safety’ department had hunted him down and killed him. And, ew, brought his mutated corpse back to headquarters so Hojo could dissect it.

They had a Space Program with a yearly budget the size of a small nation’s GDP… and absolutely no mission. They weren’t even trying to go to space.

This company was a complete mess. Proper testament to the danger of monopolies: eliminating the competition really could secure power just as well as, if not better than, competence, efficiency, expertise… Shinra didn’t need any of that, and as a result it didn’t have much, either.

A company in this much trouble ought to be vulnerable to collapse. It really ought to. But it worried Olivia that people—multiple people! Executives, even!—who understood the business better than she ever would, had tried and failed.

Olivia returned to Sephiroth’s apartment mulling over what she’d learned and found him on the sofa, exactly where he’d been when she left. He didn’t look up when she entered and did not answer to her cheery, “Honey, I’m home.”

Well, he’d immersed himself in some pretty disturbing stuff. She wouldn’t blame him. She made a spicy lentil curry, left a bowl of it on the table next to the laptop where Sephiroth would see it, and went to bed.

The next morning, when she woke up, the half of the bed Sephiroth occupied remained conspicuously undisturbed. She ambled out into the main room and there he was, glued to his laptop.

“You’re going to start smelling if you don’t get up and take a shower soon,” Olivia warned him, making her way to the kitchen to start a pot of coffee. He gave no sign that he had heard. Even worse, he hadn’t even touched the bowl of lentil curry she’d left for him.

Lame, but some people did neglect basic needs when really immersed in something. Olivia collected the bowl, started the coffee, then dumped the spoiled curry in the trash and did the dishes. When the coffee finished percolating, she poured Sephiroth a cup and put it on the table. Then, knowing it for an optimistic gesture and doing it anyhow, she put a slice of buttered toast and a few pieces of fruit on a plate and left those for him, too.

“Eat,” she told him, and received no acknowledgement. “You’re not listening to me at all, are you?” Still nothing. “I should totally steal some of your stuff and sell it.”

Nothing.

“Or tell your… what is it? Your fan club about your weird come fetish.”

Nothing.

“One day that little blond kid will be like, almost as hot as you.”

Olivia waited. Nothing.

“You really ought to have felt threatened by that one,” Olivia mused, but she had her own pet projects to worry about so she finished her own toast and her own fruit before grabbing a book from Sephiroth’s shelves, cracking open a new burner phone, and wandering down to the café in the vast lobby. She bought a cream puff—she was always hungry lately—and picked a table.

A plan had begun to take shape in her mind. Something not too wildly dissimilar from what she’d started during that brief stint at the fugitive’s computer, when she’d set the spyware to forward emails containing curse words to random Shinra employees and—more subtle but more deadly—created a program that would delete a single document off the system, chosen at random, roughly every hour. Basically: Operation Sabotage.

But Shinra was already so weak, in so many ways. If they’d survived in this state, weakening it further wouldn’t be enough. She had to make Shinra’s weakness obvious. She had to make everyone inside the company believe the ship had started to sink. She had to make everyone on the outside believe that Shinra was falling apart.

Thoughtfully, Olivia programmed in a series of minor salary raises. Each one tiny, bumping hourly rates by two or three gil. She didn’t need to do more; Shinra had so many employees that minute differences would hit the bottom line hard and fast.

“May I join you?”

Olivia looked up at a handsome man in a blue suit, with longish dark hair and a beard that looked like it took a lot of effort to maintain. Hot, naturally. Not smoking hot like so many of the guys here. This guy belonged to a different and perhaps rarer breed: bring this guy home to mom hot.

“Not looking for company,” Olivia said.

The man sat down anyhow, crossing his legs and sipping green tea from a paper cup. “I won’t take much of your time.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. Like it was up to him. She looked back at her phone and, not trusting herself to focus on anything complicated, switched to a news website. Oh look, a robbery in the slums. Public Safety had taken a suspect into custody. Was he guilty? Olivia had her doubts, but he’d definitely be punished.

“My name is Reeve Tuesti,” said the pushy suit beard guy.

Next article. A new genetically engineered species of wheat that flourished inhospitable soil. Grain harvests sure to be improved by at least twenty percent. Shinra had developed it, of course, and they’d also patented it. Exactly the sort of move that would bankrupt any farmers desperate enough to buy.

“I’m the Director of City Planning here at Shinra,” continued Tuesti.

Olivia tried not to react to that one. City Planning, along with its parent division Urban Development, had excellent network security. She hadn’t expected it when she started nosing around and had a bad feeling about how she’d caught Tuesti’s attention.

Olivia looked up from her phone, as though curious. “City Planning? Then maybe you can tell me: how does a city like Midgar function without suburbs?”

“Suburbs?” Tuesti asked.

“Yeah, you know. Communities of people who work in the city but can’t afford to live in it, or who prefer to raise their families in a less hectic environment?”

“Ah.” Tuesti made a strange face, half-apologetic and half-baffled. “I believe the slums serve that function in Midgar.”

“The slums?” Olivia glanced out the massive windowed entryway. Not that they’d be right in front of her, but… “What slums?”

“Underneath the plate,” Tuesti explained. “The slums underneath the plate.”

“Underneath the plate?” Olivia repeated, horrified. “How is that possible?”

“The bottom of the plate stands five hundred meters above ground, and a system of advanced lamps along the underside compensates for lost sunlight…”

“But you must have…” Olivia considered the view from Sephiroth’s window, the size of the commercial and entertainment districts she’d browsed when shopping for his laptop. “I don’t know, the population on the plate must double every day during working hours. At least. So… seventy percent of the city’s whole population lives underneath this plate?”

Tuesti winced. “Closer to eighty.”

“Where are you getting your water from?”

“We, ah…” Tuesti scratched along the edge of his beard. “We pump groundwater.”

Olivia’s jaw dropped. “No. What about land subsidence? Won't that affect the Plate's support pillars?"

Tuesti grimaced.

"You're all going to be living on the Leaning Tower of Pizza in a few years," Olivia said. "What happens to all your power plants when they're off plumb?"

“We also siphon from a river that flows from a watershed in the mountains to the west,” Tuesti said. “Via a buried pipeline, very efficient, less than five percent loss due to evaporation and leakage combined…”

“What’s the average rainfall in the region? Where the river forms?”

Test’s expression shifted from strained to actively pained.

“Is it less than sixty inches a year?” Olivia pressed.

“Closer to thirty,” Tuesti admitted. “On a good year.”

“This place is so f*cked,” Olivia marveled.

“You're strangely unfamiliar with Midgar,” Tuesti observed, apparently remembering that he’d showed up to interrogate her, and not the reverse.

“I’m new here.”

“And what brings you to Shinra Tower? Am I speaking to our first female SOLDIER?”

“Nope.”

“But…” Tuesti touched his eyes. “The mako?”

Olivia waited until Tuesti was taking a sip of his tea to answer, “I was subjected to multiple life-altering medical procedures without my consent.”

Tuesti spat tea all over the table.

“Nice to know someone is shocked.” Olivia handed him the napkin that she’d wrapped around her cream puff. “So far you’re the first. Thanks, man.”

“But that’s…” Tuesti mopped at the tea spatter. “That’s not right.”

“Neither is building power plants in close proximity to residential neighborhoods, but I’m guessing you’re on board with that.”

Tuesti shot back, “The reactors are completely safe.”

Olivia raised her eyebrows. “It’s a pretty new technology.”

He tipped his chin up, proud and defensive. “Progress is never without risk.”

“Charming.” Olivia tapped the paperback she’d taken from Sephiroth’s apartment, a guide to Midgar’s flora and fauna. “If you wouldn’t mind…?”

“Of course.” Tuesti crumpled the napkin, collected his tea, and stood. “It was a pleasure meeting you, Miss…?”

“Olivia,” Olivia answered. “Come back if you feel like talking about sewage. I can’t wait to find out what disastrous disposal methods you’ve come up with.”

“Ah, yes, I’ll… take you up on that very soon…” Tuesti agreed, backing away.

“You probably dump it where it can leak into the groundwater, huh?” Olivia called as he hurried his retreat. “Aren’t you worried about cholera?”

“This place is ridiculous,” Olivia muttered, idly browsing the paperback. Eventually, she relocated to the corporate archives on the sixty-second floor and spent the afternoon rewriting all the company auto-replies that automatically rejected requests for repairs or supplies to authorize them instead.

Not a bad day’s work, she figured, and returned to Sephiroth’s apartment feeling pretty content with herself. When she opened the door, though, Sephiroth still hadn’t moved from the sofa. Like, the cup of coffee she’d left him was still full to the brim. He hadn’t taken a sip. He hadn’t touched the toast, or the fruit. Somehow he didn’t look greasy, not even his hair, but he didn’t look good, either.

Hmm. Time for an intervention.

“I guess I’ll just clean up after you,” Olivia complained, reaching across the table to collect the mug and plate. Subtly, as she went, she unplugged the power cord from the back of the laptop. A waste of effort, probably: his eyes never wavered from the screen. She kicked the cord away from Sephiroth as she circled around to the kitchen and set about scraping the uneaten toast into the trash and washing the dishes.

Once that was done, she unplugged the other end of the cord from its power outlet and looped it into a little bundle, which she stored in one of the kitchen drawers.

Hopefully this plan wouldn’t backfire too badly.

Humming cheerfully to herself, Olivia began making dinner. She went all out, too: a cheese soufflé, roasted beet and apricot salad with citrus vinaigrette, roasted broccoli with a bagna cauda, chocolate-hazelnut mousse.

The broccoli had just about finished roasting when the cheap laptop ran out of battery.

The fan went quiet as the laptop powered down. Sephiroth reached for the spot where the cord ought to have connected to the laptop and grabbed at thin air. He looked over the screen, looked at the empty outlet, and looked at Olivia with a slitted gaze of such concentrated fury that her bowels turned to water.

“You have to eat,” she said, annoyed by the squeak in her voice.

Sephiroth rose to his feet, leather creaking. “You took the cord?”

“And I’ll give it back after you eat.”

He approached at a glacial pace, his left hand flexing once, twice, and then the oversized sword appeared. Ack. “You will give it back now.”

“If you get to have that travesty of a scientist shoot me full of mako for my own safety, I get to make you eat after you skip ten meals in a row.” Olivia shoved a spoon into the soufflé and pushed it in Sephiroth’s direction. “Eat.”

“I believe you have misunderstood—”

“The fastest way to get the cord back is to take a f*cking bite,” Olivia snapped. “Why fight about it? What’s the point? You need food. There’s food right in front of you. Eat the food.”

Sephiroth glared at her, but Olivia held her ground. It helped that the kitchen was fairly small and she couldn’t have backed out of the sword’s range. She’d made a thoroughly reasonable request and maybe Sephiroth would escalate dramatically but surely, after going to so much trouble to keep her alive—

The sword vanished into black smoke. Sephiroth picked up the spoon and brought a nugget of butter-yellow soufflé to his mouth. Olivia made a good soufflé: light until it melted on the tongue, rich and tangy with aged cheese grated ultra fine. Sephiroth held that first bite in his mouth, savoring the flavor, before swallowing. He looked at the empty spoon, and he looked at her.

“I’m not trying to get in your way,” said Olivia, still squeaky. “You need food to think clearly. You need to take breaks to process information. If this is important, give it your best.”

Sephiroth slid into one of the stools tucked under the counter and dragged the soufflé close. While he ate, Olivia set out a little bowl of salad, a plate with bagna cauda drizzled over perfectly-roasted broccoli, a dish of mousse. He ate it all, very slowly.

Olivia poured a glass of water. He emptied it in one long sip, so she refilled it.

“Thank you,” Sephiroth said quietly.

Olivia let loose a puff of breath she hadn’t been aware of holding. She fetched the bundled cord and set it down beside the empty plates. Bargain fulfilled.

“You have reviewed the files?” Sephiroth picked up the cord, shook it loose, and rewound it around his own palm. “You said you found them disturbing.”

“I could only fit a tiny percentage of the data about Project G onto the flash drive,” Olivia said. “So I had to read enough to pick out what was important.”

“Genesis and Angeal…” Sephiroth stared at the door, the blank wall. “They were comrades.”

God, how awful. She couldn't imagine what it must be like, to read all those clinical words describing so many obvious atrocities and connect them to people she knew. “You have every right to be angry.”

“Angry?” A faint, cold smile touched his lips. “I was angry when I thought they’d defected for selfish reasons. Angry when they lashed out at Shinra, even though Shinra”—here his voice took on an Arctic bite—“made them what they were.”

Olivia knew enough to wince at that.

“Yes,” he agreed, catching it. “I blamed them. And all along…” He threw the cord at the sofa. “I am going to kill every single person who knew. I am going to kill everyone who participated in the experiments, and everyone who approved the orders to terminate. I will impale the President on his own desk—“

“This is a terrible idea,” interrupted Olivia.

Sephiroth sneered. “Do not try to talk me out of it. Shinra has no mercy and I learned their lessons well. They will pay, in full, in blood—”

“I mean that if you intend to make them pay, you’re going about it all wrong,” said Olivia. “Like, listen to yourself. You can hardly make a list of all the baddies responsible for what happened to your friends, and you know why? Because the problem is the company.”

Sephiroth squeezed his gloved hand into a fist. “Shinra.”

“Yeah. Shinra. The whole point of a company is that it’s bigger than the individuals who work in it. Nobody’s responsible for anything because everyone’s doing what they’re told. But the people in charge aren’t responsible because they’re just delegating. A company is designed to outlive the employees, to self-perpetuate. You can go kill—I don’t know, whoever, the President I guess—and a few days later they’ll find a new one, and nothing will change.”

“Rufus.” Sephiroth slammed his fist into the counter, shattering the stone. “I’ll kill him, too.”

“Great, and the next one in line? And after that? How many before you realize that you’re wasting your time?”

Sephiroth fixed his cold green gaze on Olivia. His voice dripped with contempt. “You have a better solution?”

“Destroy the company,” Olivia said. “Worry about the individuals later.”

“You want me to turn terrorist?” Sephiroth scoffed. “I don’t think so. I’ve seen enough of those cowards, every one of them too blind with fury to see when they’re being used.”

“No, you should stay exactly where you are,” said Olivia. “That’s where you can do the most harm. Attack the bottom line. Undermine the human capital. Destroy the company.”

Sephiroth went momentarily quiet. “Perhaps you are right. I am a soldier, and have been from a very early age. I can acknowledge that I’ve been trained to solve problems in… a fairly specific way.” He tapped his nails on the shattered counter. “But I have also fought a war, and earned a certain reputation as a strategist. Let us combine our strengths, and see what happens.”

Chapter 8: rest in peace, the haunting's free

Chapter Text

Sephiroth eyed each member of the Board of Directors in turn. He was used to treating Veld and Hojo, ostensible civilians, as dangerous adversaries. Perhaps because both frequently employed violence to achieve their goals, and Sephiroth understood violence. He did not need a thorough education in administrative research, or in bio-chemistry, to precisely measure their ruthlessness.

The only thing Heidegger really understood was violence. He submitted to the President’s dominance and, otherwise, spoke primarily in threats. Even these frustrated his limited intelligence. He’d rather communicate with his fists, or with his booted foot.

And Scarlett. Sephiroth tried to see her with fresh eyes. She had some genius. She had some cunning. She’d transformed her natural gifts into weapons and, for those gifts she lacked, she’d constructed mechs. She’d dedicated her life to designing machines that could battle and win against the strongest and most capable SOLDIER. The reality fell somewhat short of that… but she aimed, in her way, to level the playing field. To speak violence as eloquently and forcefully as any man.

Palmer… perhaps Sephiroth would come back to that question. He had a very hard time taking Palmer seriously.

Aki, the head of Urban Development, had a sly, calculating air. Like Palmer (and in glaring contrast to Hojo, Heidegger, Scarlett and Sephiroth himself), Aki lacked the expertise to work in his own department. He gave the architects, engineers, and scientists he oversaw credit for their accomplishments while keeping them well out of the way; safe. Aki devoted himself to expanding—or at least defending—his department’s budget.

Aki had never been a threat. To anyone, as far as Sephiroth could tell. But he had been successful, year after year, through any number of impractical projects. That… deserved more attention than Sephiroth had ever spared for the man. He wondered what the Turks thought about Aki.

Sephiroth examined President Shinra last of all. Until recently—until he took over SOLDIER in the wake of Lazard’s defection—Sephiroth had given very little thought to the President. It had not been his place. Soldiers executed orders, they didn’t set the agenda. He’d been trained to think critically about battle plans, meal plans, supply chains, and swordsmanship. Never his superiors.

Since becoming Director of SOLDIER, Sephiroth had come to know President Shinra a little and he had not been impressed. The President had limited patience, would rather a solve problem quickly than well, and rarely considered the consequences before issuing sweeping commands. He seemed incapable of self-critique.

Sephiroth had spent a long time describing the Board to Olivia the night before. Person by person, strengths and weaknesses. President Shinra had so many weaknesses and so few strengths. He did not excel at anything. But he’d kept an iron grip on the company for thirty years.

“He doesn’t have to be the strongest, or the smartest, or the meanest, so long as he can find the person who is strongest, or smartest, or meanest, and give them what they want,” Olivia had said, as though it were obvious. “You almost always gain power by giving people things. An opportunity, an idea, unlimited cheap energy…”

Sephiroth had gained power by giving President Shinra the country of Wutai.

President Shinra surrounded himself with people fluent in the language of violence. The Directors acted on his behalf, carefully or brutally, surgically or explosively. Unlike them, the President kept his hands clean. Sephiroth had always considered this a sign of weakness, of cowardice. He was a swordsman by training and by nature. He considered riflemen cowardly.

“No, man,” Olivia had said, a hint of pity in her eyes. “That’s not cowardice. That’s flexing. That’s showing off. If you met a guy with a pet tiger, which would impress you more? If the guy wouldn’t go near the tiger without a gun pointed at its head, or if the guy just sat back and told the tiger what to do, completely confident that he’d be obeyed, and then… it did?”

She hadn’t needed to say: in this analogy you are the tiger.

In retrospect, Sephiroth wondered how he’d failed to see it himself. But, having asked himself the question, he found the answer equally as obvious. He’d been raised as a SOLDIER. He’d been trained in combat. He’d been trained not to think critically about his superiors, not to question their agenda.

President Shinra’s medium was power, and violence only one of his tools. Sephiroth had been blind to most of the others. Kept blind, and let himself remain so.

“To stop the guy, you need to destroy the real source of his power. You need to stop people from believing he can give them what they want,” Olivia had said. “So what do they want?”

Sephiroth hadn’t been able to answer. He’d never wondered what most of these cretins wanted. He’d prefer not to be thinking about it right now. He’d rather kill them all and be done with it.

But then he remembered Hojo’s careful, thorough documentation of Angeal’s dissection. His friend’s body, already mutated beyond recognition, slowly separated into its component parts, catalogued and sampled and preserved for further experimentation.

Death would not be enough.

So. Who would be first, and how?

His gaze settled on Heidegger. Heidegger was very stupid and very powerful. What’s more, he and Sephiroth were known rivals. Heidegger had repeatedly and overtly tried to seize control of SOLDIER. Sephiroth could counter-attack and no one would suspect that he had any grander plans.

He could even try to seize control of Public Safety himself. Not that he relished the prospect of more paperwork. Plus, Olivia had explained that her primarily angle of attack would be financial. If Sephiroth took the infantry troops under his own care, he’d be responsible for them when the money ran out.

“I have a matter for discussion,” Sephiroth said, during a brief pause in the agenda. “Many missions require cooperation between SOLDIER and Public Safety, but at present our training programs are completely separate. My SOLDIERs do not learn how to make the most of infantry support, and the troopers frequently do more harm than good when trying to aid SOLDIERs engaged in close quarters combat. I’d like to remedy that. If Heidegger would transfer one of his companies to my command, SOLDIER would undertake to train and equip them for specialized duties.”

Hojo glowered, no doubt remembering Sephiroth’s recent threats. Scarlett smirked, Palmer slurped his oily tea, signaling his intent—as ever—to stay out of it. Aki looked on, cooly curious.

“Out of the question, Sephiroth,” Heidegger blustered. “You can’t go stealing my men—”

“I am asking,” Sephiroth interrupted. Heidegger did not respond well to interruptions.

“You think I don’t know how to equip and train my own troops?” Heidegger scoffed. “This, from a man who sends his so-called elite troops out to fight in sleeveless shirts?”

“If you’re willing to equip and train the company to my specifications, I’d be glad to see you spearhead the program. I could cycle my own SOLDIERs through the training program, once you've got it running. Of course, I’d insist on regular reviews of the company’s progress. Performance, financials, and the like.”

“What do you mean, your specifications?” Heidegger snorted. “What do you know about—”

“I have specific goals,” Sephiroth interrupted. “Of course I would ensure that they are met.”

“Heidegger, you won’t even notice that they’re gone,” President Shinra said, bored. “Sephiroth, pick a company and it’s yours. No increase to your budget.”

Sephiroth murmured his thanks and subsided. After the meeting adjourned, he sent a quick message on his PHS asking Zack to meet him in his office and, after some thought, the same to Kunsel.

Kunsel reached Sephiroth’s office before Sephiroth himself, stationing himself outside the door with his helmet on. Sephiroth gestured him inside and said, “Thank you for arriving promptly. Unfortunately, it’s best we wait for Zack.”

The sound of booted feet running on carpet preceded Zack’s arrival some five minutes later. He careened into the room, looking out of breath. “Hey, Seph. And… Kunsel? This is going to be interesting.”

“Shut the door,” Sephiroth told Zack. “I’ve just received permission from the President to poach one of Heidegger’s companies. My stated goal is to train up infantry specialized in SOLDIER support. My actual goal is to thoroughly humiliate Heidegger. I need troops that will, in short order, outshine his in every way. The difference needs to be measurable and significant.”

Zack had a look on his face—hopeful, fierce. He’d already guessed what Sephiroth would say next.

“Zack, I don’t know which company Strife belongs to but we’ll take his. Get them out of the infantry barracks immediately. By tonight. Don’t ask me how; make it happen. Instruct them to leave behind all of their standard issue equipment. SOLDIER will outfit them from the ground up. Which means we’ll need new kit, quickly. Anyone should be able to tell at a glance that this company is special. Again, do not ask me how. Figure it out.”

Zack nodded sharply. “Yes, Sir.”

“The support company needs to be better than Public Safety—and cheaper, too. Based on what I know of Heidegger, this should be a highly achievable goal. But we need to be certain. Kunsel, conduct a discreet review of the Public Safety budget. Where’s the money going, where are corners being cut, how much is wasted. Do not get caught.”

Kunsel tipped his head. “Sir.”

“We want our best instructors designing a curriculum and leading the classes,” Sephiroth continued. “I pay close attention to performance reviews within SOLDIER, but the program should be collaborative from the ground up. Work together to select a half-dozen of the infantry officers to put on the teaching team.”

After receiving their acknowledgement, Sephiroth concluded, “That’s all for now. It should go without saying”—Sephiroth eyed Zack here; he never could predict what Zack would skillfully intuit and what he’d completely fail to comprehend—“that you should not breathe a word about humiliating Heidegger to anyone outside this room. You are, however, encouraged to discuss the goal of training infantry support for SOLDIER. I’ll make sure there’s an official channel for SOLDIERs and troopers alike to submit suggestions to the instruction team.”

Kunsel made his exit but Zack lingered. “Why are you gunning for Heidegger all of a sudden? I always thought you hated this stuff. The desk work and the company politics.”

“I do,” said Sephiroth.

Zack tipped his head to the side and frowned, very much like a puppy, and Sephiroth once again ached at the loss of Angeal.

“Tell me when you figure it out,” said Sephiroth. “And we’ll have something to talk about.”

“Who taught you to act like this?” Zack complained, throwing up his hands. “Genesis? Was it Genesis? The guy was a sad*st.”

Sephiroth tapped on his keyboard to wake his office computer from sleep. “You think Genesis was the only sad*st at Shinra?”

“That’s not funny,” Zack muttered, but he left.

That evening, when Sephiroth returned to his apartment after a long session in the VR room, he found Olivia perched on his sofa with her legs folded crosswise, the Project G laptop balanced between her knees. She’d left a few dishes on the counter and he went to them automatically, his appetite waking. He ate a few roasted nuts, salted and tossed with fresh herbs, while eyeing the rest. Stuffed mushrooms. Little toasts daubed with smashed avocado and soft cheese. Everything delicious, flavors balanced and harmonious even to an enhanced palate.

He eyed Olivia, who’d looked up and smiled at his arrival before returning to her reading. Was she dangerous? His every instinct said no. She acted like prey: accommodating, appeasing, submitting. For every brief flash of aggression he’d seen her eat ten losses. If she had a taste for violence, she’d hidden it well.

You gain power by giving people things, she’d said. Ideas. He abandoned the food offerings and circled around to the sofa, set the laptop aside and pushed her flat on the cushions, pinned her with his knees. She went without protest; within seconds, he could smell her arousal.

She couldn’t have planned all of this. He’d played the sequence of events over in his head, looking for inconsistencies. The energy anomaly that signaled her arrival on Gaia had been recorded on multiple instruments, explained by none. Hojo had run dozens of tests to verify her origins, each one more convincing than the last.

But her brother knew him, knew Zack. She’d known Strife. And she’d been actively sabotaging the company since that evening in Genesis’s apartment. She’d tried to hide it, but not very hard.

If you met a guy with a pet tiger, which would impress you more?

Had she roped him into her scheme, or had she given him exactly what he wanted? He honestly didn’t know. Could it really be both? Had he acquired a lover, or had she acquired a bodyguard?

He slid a hand up her thigh, to the heated juncture, and worked her cl*t with his fingers. He hadn’t slept with very many women in the past—more men than women, if only because opportunities were more plentiful—but none of them had org*smed. He’d stopped expecting it. One woman had explained that she couldn’t relax around him, and that women needed to relax in order to come. It hadn’t made much sense to him. Nobody relaxed on the cusp of an org*sm.

But he wondered, now, if she’d been right. If Olivia came so readily because she simply did not fear him properly. She didn’t, couldn’t. And he enjoyed the novelty. Was enjoying it right that very moment, as she gasped and heaved and came all over his hand. But she would see, eventually. If Olivia thought she’d spared the world a bloodbath, she was wrong.

When the time came, when all was said and done, he’d come back to her and find out if anything had changed.

He penetrated her before she could recover, because he liked her limp acquiescence. She’d let him move and bend her like a doll in the wake of an org*sm, and with mako in her system he didn’t have to hold back. He could f*ck her hard enough to shatter the pelvis of an unenhanced, and she’d just get hazy and f*ck-drunk and urge him on.

She was dangerous, he decided. Less than many, but more than most. And, perhaps, dangerous to him in particular. Realizing it made him like her more.

Chapter 9: now, as they say, "look alive"

Chapter Text

Matt banged on the coffin lid with both fists, wild with panic. He’d entered the Shinra mansion with five healing potions, a nail bat, and a few handfuls of loco weed. He’d figured that if he could avoid enough fights, he could make it to Vincent and then Vincent could get them both out.

And it had worked! A few monsters had hit him before he’d smacked them with the loco weed, but he’d guzzled his potions. He’d had to search three separate bedrooms but he’d found the secret passage pretty easily. He’d reached the coffin.

The problem? He was now in the basem*nt of the Shinra mansion with two healing potions and zero loco weed, all the monsters upstairs were furious, and if Vincent didn’t wake the f*ck up he’d die down here.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” Matt begged. “Don’t you want to know about Sephiroth? I’ll tell you all about Sephiroth. Sometime soon he’s gonna snap and go batsh*t and honestly I never believed any of the fan theories about keeping him sane by killing Jenova but he’s got my baby sister so we’re gonna f*cking try it, okay?”

The heavy coffin lid slid to the side and Matt swallowed a yelp as Vincent sat up, wax-pale and red-eyed, ink-black hair tumbling artfully around his narrow, patrician face. The man did not look right and he definitely did not feel right. Matt knew why, and he’d expected it, but he’d also expected to feel kind of reassured. Vincent was a really good guy, really strong, really smart. He’d join the team and make everything better.

But… Vincent was also a Turk. A Turk possessed by several demons. His blank expression and general air of menace were the opposite of comforting.

“All about Sephiroth,” Vincent quoted, and he did not sound mysterious yet subtly desperate. He sounded mocking and angry.

“Yeah, yeah… uh… Lucrecia ran off when he was a baby so Hojo raised him and now he works for Shinra. He’s the biggest, baddest SOLDIER around but he’s on the verge of a mental breakdown and if he gets anywhere near Nibelheim—and he should be coming here soon, like, I don’t know the exact dates but way too soon—he’s going to crack like an egg. So, uh… if you care about him, or his mom, then you should help me destroy Jenova. She’s in the reactor but the doors are all locked and they’re pretty impressive doors.”

Vincent leaned. He hadn’t left the coffin, but he was a tall man and even in an underground basem*nt with no air flow to speak of, the tatters of his cloak shifted and dissolved into an invisible breeze while stray tendrils of his hair floated as if in water.

“Who… are… you?” Vincent asked.

Matt had some serious Alice in Wonderland flashbacks. He didn’t even like Alice in Wonderland. But he had a little sister so of course he’d watched it a few too many times.

“Nobody,” Matt answered, scratching at his scalp. “Just a guy.”

Vincent gripped the edge of the coffin with his gauntleted hand and vaulted out in one smooth motion, landing right in front of Matt. Inches away. Much too close. “I’ll need a bit more than that, if you want my help.”

“Well, uh…” It occurred to Matt that Chaos could probably tell that he wasn’t from Gaia. Chaos was linked to the planet somehow, and apparently Hojo was convinced that Liv was an alien, so something about them had to be different.

But he had a strong suspicion that asking Vincent to check with Chaos directly would not go over well, which left him to try the exact thing he’d been avoiding since he showed up in the Midgar Wastes: telling the truth like a crazy person.

“I’m from another world.” He kept imagining how he would have reacted if someone had tried this on him, back home. The embarrassment really was so intense that he felt like his soul was trying to flee his body. Not a metaphor. Actual physical pain. “And I know things about the future because… uh… I got these messages… kind of like, um, messages in a bottle… and I… read… them…”

Jesus he was screwing this up and it might still be the hardest thing he’d ever done.

Vincent did not look impressed.

“C’mon, man.” Matt clasped his hands and dropped to his knees. He’d beg, he’d plead, anything so long as he could stop talking about being a time traveling alien. “You know Jenova is bad. She’s so close. I can’t get to her without your help. You know destroying her is the right thing to do.”

Vincent swished past, his creepy cloak snapping contemptuously.

Matt followed as closely as he dared. “I don’t mean to trip on your feet, but I don’t think I can get out of this mansion on my own.”

“How did you get inside?” Vincent asked.

“Loco weed and rocks for brains,” Matt answered.

Vincent prowled around the underground library for a bit, flipping through notebooks and then angrily tossing them away. Matt figured he’d burn the place after Jenova was taken care of, but no need to tell Vincent that.

“You have been to the reactor?” Vincent asked, not looking up.

Matt shuddered. On the one hand, he’d asked around about a guide and he’d met Tifa. He’d been pretty tongue tied, because Tifa, but she’d agreed to guide him up the mountain, which should have been a dream come true, except that the Nibel mountains were f*cking steep and he’d refused to cross the death bridge so the hike had taken forever.

He was in much better shape than he’d been in back on Earth, but the climb had flattened him. Tifa laughed when he started to huff and puff, which was bad enough. Then they’d finally reached the reactor and the doors were big steel things that he’d never be able to open. She'd watched him bang on them the same way he’d watch monkeys banging the bars of their cages at a zoo.He was starting to think he’d embarrass himself in front of the entire canon cast before this was all over.

“I couldn’t get in,” Matt said. “But Jenova should definitely be there right now.”

Vincent fixed him with a single gleaming red eye, the other shadowed behind a curtain of hair. “Why don’t we put your foreknowledge to the test? There is a secret passage from the mansion to the reactor. I’ll lead the way.”

***

Cloud Strife was honestly not sure how to feel about his life right now. On the one hand: being moved to the SOLDIER division didn’t make him a SOLDIER, and he still wanted to be a SOLDIER. He knew he shouldn’t, he’d seen what became of Commanders Hewley and Rhapsodos, and the mako treatments scared him in a way they hadn’t before. But… he wanted to be strong. He wanted to beat Zack in a spar, fair and square. He wanted people to look at him and see mako eyes instead of a shrimp who’d be easy to bully.

His new position ought to have been the perfect solution. The best of both worlds. He trained with SOLDIERs every day. He had access to advanced swordsmanship classes, and he’d been taking them. A few infantry officers had been pulled out of the ranks to teach and so Cloud had been promoted to corporal. He had more responsibility than ever before, better pay, and soon he’d be ready to take on even more challenging missions.

Shouldn’t he be happy?

But he wasn’t, quite, and he could tell that Zack wasn’t, either. Zack seemed pretty worried lately. He wouldn’t talk about it, but considering everything that had already happened… How much worse could it get?

And that brought him to today. Apparently Sephiroth’s… girlfriend?… Cloud wasn’t sure if that was right, but he’d go with girlfriend… needed to do something outside the city, though nobody had explained what. Sephiroth wanted to combine his girlfriend’s whatever with some monster hunting, and he’d invited Cloud and Zack along.

Cloud had a feeling he’d be stuck baby-sitting the girlfriend.

Sephiroth and the girlfriend—Olivia—were already waiting by the truck when he arrived. Zack was late, of course.Sephiroth stood with one arm flung over the hood of the truck, his body angled protectively around hers. Cloud had been trained to guard VIPs, so the tactical positioning was pretty obvious to him, but he doubted she even noticed.

“This wouldn’t be necessary if you’d learn a martial art, as I’ve asked,” Sephiroth was saying. Even talking to his girlfriend, he was Sephiroth. Imposing, impassive, a hint of threat in every word.

Olivia leaned her back against the window of the truck, casual. She was pretty—striking—but mostly Cloud noticed how easily she met Sephiroth’s eyes, the teasing smile on her lips as she said, “You mean give up all my own interests and hobbies and adopt yours instead? No, thanks.”

Sephiroth pressed, because of course he did. He was the Silver General, the Demon of Wutai. He set his sights on a goal and fought until he won. “You should make the most of your new abilities.”

Olivia smirked. “I think I already do.”

Sephiroth tensed. The hand that had been lying flat and loose on the truck’s hood curled into a fist. But he didn’t seem angry… oh.

Cloud scuffed his feet before anything got weird.

Sephiroth shifted, silently inviting Cloud to take the complimentary position. So they were both guarding his girlfriend. Great.

“Strife,” Sephiroth greeted.

Cloud saluted. “Sir.”

Sephiroth flicked an appraising glance from his top to toe and then said, “Olivia, you said something about Strife recently. While I was busy reading. What was it?”

Olivia turned her grin on Cloud. She had one of those smiles like she’d just heard a really funny joke and wasn’t going to share it. It was awful. “Really? Right in front of the poor guy?”

“I want to make sure I’m not misremembering,” said Sephiroth.

“I said that he was going to be really hot—“ She cut herself off with a start and looked away from Cloud, who blushed so hard his ears burned with it, to meet Sephiroth’s waiting gaze. “In a few years,” she finished, breathless. “I said he was going to be really hot in a few years.”

“How many?” Sephiroth asked.

“Five? Something like that?” Olivia turned back to Cloud, speculative now, which made him want to die. “He looked like he was my age. Early twenties.”

“And what else?” Sephiroth pressed.

“I don’t know. I didn’t watch for long. It was Matt’s thing, you know that.” Olivia gave it some thought. “He got into a fight with that hot redhead.”

Sephiroth hissed and Cloud wished he were absolutely anywhere else.

“The Turk?” Sephiroth asked.

“Yeah, the hot redhead.”

Now Sephiroth was looking speculatively at Cloud, they both were, and… he hated his life, actually.

“Oh,” exclaimed Olivia, brightening. “And he had mako eyes.”

Mako eyes? Did that mean…?

Zack jogged up right then, calling out, “Sorry, sorry, sorry, I ran into like ten people between here and the elevator. It’s hard to be everyone’s favorite person, you all should thank the gods that nobody likes…” He drew up short and asked, “Did I miss something?”

***

Reeve Tuesti had been contemplating a visit to the Turks for days. He gotten as far as the elevator, once, stopping on the Turks' floor before turning back. He knew too much of their true function to run tattling to them with a minor concern.

But was it a minor concern?

Maybe. Maybe not. He worried enough that when he saw Tseng at a little café table in the sixty-third floor lounge, dropping a bag of tea into a cup of hot water and then setting a timer on his PHS to make sure it steeped perfectly, Reeve slid into the empty seat opposite.

The timer beeped and Tseng removed the bag from his cup, wrapping the string around the bag to squeeze out a few drops of concentrated tea before setting it on his saucer. “Mr. Tuesti?” Tseng took a careful sip, nodding his approval. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Unofficially, perhaps?” Reeve asked. “It’s a very minor concern. I’d hate to assuage my own worries at someone else’s expense.”

“There is no such thing, with the Turks.” Tseng smiled blandly. “But we endeavor never to act thoughtlessly.”

Reeve fiddled with his necktie. He didn’t have to tell Tseng everything he knew. “Do you know the girl with the mako eyes?”

“Of course,” Tseng answered.

Reeve looked at Tseng a little desperately.

“She is Sephiroth’s, ah. Special friend.”

Reeve sucked in a breath. Shiva, he did not want to cross Sephiroth. On the other hand… nobody wanted to cross Sephiroth. Which meant the girl had enough protection within the company that he could ask a few questions without getting her in trouble.

“I don’t mean to gossip, but how… er… how did that come about?”

Tseng looked amused. “I believe Professor Hojo introduced them.”

Reeve winced. So she hadn’t been joking about the life-altering medical procedures.

“What’s your impression of her?” Tseng asked. “Sephiroth’s kept her well away from Administrative Research, so we haven’t been able to learn much.”

“It’s—” Reeve hesitated. He ought to tell Tseng that the girl was a hacker, but he couldn’t. Even with Sephiroth’s protection, that could be a death warrant. “I think—“ Reeve screwed up his courage and blurted, “She’s an environmentalist.”

Tseng blinked, slow. “Are you saying she’s a terrorist?”

“No, no.” Reeve hurried to clarify. “I designed the reactors, I follow Avalanche very carefully. I’d recognize their rhetoric, and I wouldn’t call it a minor concern.”

“Then what sort of environmentalist…?”

“She seemed more concerned with water and sewage,” Reeve answered. And then, just as defensive with Tseng as he’d been with the girl, “She raised valid points.”

“About sewage,” Tseng said.

“Though our water filtration systems are more than advanced enough to filter out cholera,” Reeve continued. “Along with other waterborne diseases, and most contaminants. Midgar tap water is potable. We test it regularly.”

“I am reassured.”

Reeve sighed. No point in debating the issue with a Turk. “Her views are rare enough at Shinra that I wondered what she was doing in the building. Thank you for setting my mind at ease.”

“A delightful interdepartmental exchange,” Tseng agreed, sipping leisurely at his tea while Reeve stopped at the cafeteria counter, ordering a salad to eat at his desk before continuing on his way.

Tseng had, of course, planned the encounter. He’d arrived ten minutes before Reeve’s usual lunchtime visit. He’d set his tea to steeping while Reeve wrestled with himself, as he’d been doing for days, confident that Reeve would approach before the timer beeped. Turks logged all visits to their floor. Reeve hadn’t needed to cross the threshold to catch their attention.

And, as Turks generally preferred to do, Tseng had answered Reeve’s questions honestly. Both Hojo and Sephiroth guarded their privacy fanatically. The Turks knew very little about Olivia, surname unknown, and were eager to learn more.

But Reeve himself was an open book—Aki’s excellent protection left members of his department vulnerable to such things—and the man had not unburdened himself. Something about Olivia worried him deeply, but he’d walked away with the weight still on his shoulders.

That bore further investigation.

***

Cloud had been right. He was stuck babysitting the girlfriend. She sat in the truck, tapping furiously on a PHS—not Shinra issued, Cloud noted—while Cloud stood guard and Sephiroth and Zack had wandered off to kill monsters.

Which left him with plenty of time to think about what she’d said. Really hot—okay, not that part. He’d pretend he hadn’t heard that part. In a few years. Like… in the future.

“You’ve seen the future?” he ventured, during a brief pause in the tapping.

Olivia smiled apologetically. “Sorry, Cloud. You’ve now heard the sum total of what I know about the future. Kind of useless.”

“But… why me?” Cloud wondered.

Olivia gave him a Look.

“I mean aside from that!” Cloud sputtered. “There has to be something.”

“Well…” Olivia actually put her phone down and propped her cheek on her palm, mood turning serious. “At a guess, something really bad happens here in five years. And you’re in a position to help.”

That’s it? Cloud wondered. A sham fortune teller on the street could do better. And then quieter, timid even in the privacy of his mind, Me? Really?

“But I wouldn’t worry about it,” Olivia continued. “Reading too much into a little fragment of information will do more harm than good. The only really important things I know ought to be obvious to anyone here, and if they’re not, my saying them won’t change any minds.”

“What do you mean, important things?”

“Like, Shinra is evil,” said Olivia. “If you can’t figure that out yourself, then you’re probably part of the problem.”

“Shinra does good things,” Cloud protested. Even after everything he’d seen, he still believed that.

Olivia shrugged and looked back at her PHS.

“Shouldn’t that matter?” Cloud demanded. “We kill monsters, we keep people safe, fewer people die from cold in the winter and heat in the summer, people from little nowhere towns like me can travel freely, across continents even…”

“Cool,” Olivia said, not looking up. Not taking him seriously at all. “Seems like a lot of people agree with you.”

“You like Sephiroth,” accused Cloud. “He’s Shinra.”

Something subtle changed. All of a sudden, Olivia looked so hard and cynical that it was like she’d turned into a whole different person. “It is very much in my interest to like Sephiroth.”

Cloud felt a little queasy. “So you don’t? Like Sephiroth?”

The teasing lightness returned, just like that. In a snap, like there’d never been any change at all. She grinned. “It’s hard to tell, honestly. Do you like him?”

Cloud hesitated.

“It’s almost irrelevant where he’s concerned, right? Like telling a hurricane that you want to be friends. I spent a summer in a place that got these amazing lightning storms. The whole sky would light up, bright as day, just from lightning bolts striking one after another. Even years later, remembering those storms makes me feel”—she took a deep breath, stretched and rolled her shoulders back—“awe. I try to think of Sephiroth like that. Appreciate what he is, try not to get burned.”

That was… nice, actually. And made Cloud realize that if she’d tried telling him that Sephiroth was the sweetest, bestest, most caring boyfriend ever he would have thought she was crazy.

***

Meanwhile, all across Midgar, the power began to go out. It flickered, held, flickered again. Then the whole city seemed to throb as the reactors powered down. The sunlamps bolted to the base of the plate winked off, plunging the slums into an early twilight. The audience at the Loveless matinée murmured uneasily to one another but waited, patiently, expecting the performance to continue any minute. ATMs stopped working, cash registers automatically locked themselves, gas stopped flowing through station pumps.

Backup generators whirred to life in hospitals across the city, in the water treatment plants, and in Hojo’s laboratories. Elevators in Shinra tower froze, their trapped occupants watching through reinforced glass as the whole city went dark. Scarlett, reclining on a deep maroon armchair, cushioning her tender heels on a trooper’s back, barely had time to cover her eyes before the materia tank she’d been observing shattered.

Zack and Sephiroth's PHSs screeched simultaneously. Zack woke his screen to see a simple text notification about the outage, calling all SOLDIERs back to the tower in case of riots.

"We should return to the truck," said Sephiroth. And Seph never let his worry show, he never panicked. He kept his cool in every situation. But Zack couldn't help thinking he seemed a little too calm this time.

Chapter 10: no turning back now

Chapter Text

The not-so-coincidentally timed power outage served several purposes. The public at large had to doubt Shinra, and Olivia knew from experience on Earth that people remembered a severe power outage for years after the fact.

Figuring out how to bring the grid down had been a challenge, though. She’d hacked into the sensors that monitored temperature, volume, and pressure as raw mako was processed into fuel. The science was leagues beyond her, but the safety measures were clear and comprehensive. When a reactor’s readings entered the danger zone, it shut off and triggered a whole host of emergency measures.

If a single reactor shut down, it wouldn’t be a disaster for Midgar. Two or three and the city would have to ration power, which the grid was sophisticated enough to handle. Four or more, though, and everyone in the city would feel the crunch.

Hardly any of the equipment inside the reactors had any kind of network connection. But the sensors were designed to send information to monitoring stations, both local and city-wide. The same sophisticated measures that made it possible for Midgar to ration power also opened up the loophole that Olivia had exploited.

The trick had been to attack all the sensors in all the reactors simultaneously, to bring all the reactors down at once. It had taken her weeks to prep, but it worked. She brought the grid down and it stayed down for twenty hours.

At the start of the power outage, Heidegger saturated the plate with his troopers. He left the slums to Sephiroth, expecting that his rival would struggle to control a much greater population with only a fraction of the manpower. Sephiroth, unsurprised, deployed his new combined units, each SOLDIER supported by a half-dozen freshly-trained support troops. Television stations couldn’t broadcast, but news crews had vans with generators to keep their equipment running on the move, and went out in search of footage.

By the time the blackout ended, the news crews had plenty of footage.

Some of that footage showed troopers thronging the streets and boulevards of the plate, impassive and unapproachable in their face-obscuring helmets. When citizens asked for help, the troopers pretended not to hear. They were stern, focused. And yet wherever real trouble emerged, they were easily overwhelmed.

Meanwhile, Sephiroth’s squads dispersed into small teams, several to each sector. The support troopers wore modified kit, including a distinctive helmet with a transparent visor that protected the eyes without obscuring them. These teams patrolled freely, pausing to answer questions or break up fights. When things went seriously wrong, SOLDIERs secure in their backup waded through angry crowds to drag out the ringleaders.

By the time the television stations started broadcasting again, the two strategies had led to vastly different results. Extensive property damage had been done on the plate… most of it by Heidegger’s troopers. They’d built unnecessary blockades and fired warning shots that broke windows and chipped facades. Meanwhile, paddywagons full to bursting carted frightened plate dwellers off to be fined for minor infractions, like breaking curfew or disrespecting an officer.

The slums, by contrast, made it through intact. The residents were used to fending for themselves. They built bonfires to pierce the gloom, gathering round the flames in anxious clusters, and organized neighborhood watches to check in on the sick and infirm. The SOLDIER teams let them be, and some—spurred on by Zack Fair—actively coordinated with the watches.

Midgar’s newscasters were well-trained in the art of normalizing Shinra’s brutality, and they obediently trotted out all the usual excuses. The safety of the public came first, acting swiftly and decisively nipped trouble in the bud, nobody would get hurt if they’d just follow orders and respect the law. But the contrast between the two groups was so stark that even the slickest spinmasters couldn’t avoid the sin of uneven praise. Sephiroth’s combined teams proved more personable and more effective.

Heidegger, who usually couldn’t wait to sit down for an interview, vanished from sight. Scarlett, always impatient but ready with a quip, remained in the hospital in critical condition. Which meant one station after another ran segments where Zack Fair, with his bare bulging biceps and glowing eyes and infectious smile, earnestly explained how proud he was to live in a city where citizens took care of one another during a crisis.

Olivia felt more than a tad villainous but, eh, when in Rome. Project: Destabilize Shinra was really coming along. And she couldn't look away from the proof. She didn't really understand military things, so even though she'd heard all about Sephiroth's new training program it hadn't made much sense to her. But she did understand optics, and these were devastating.

Sephiroth turned off the television when he finally returned.

“Hey.” Olivia waved. “Come here, I need you to do something for me.”

Sephiroth gave her a sharp look. “Is that so?”

“Yeah, it’s important.” Olivia patted the cushion of the couch. “Very, very important.”

With a grim sigh, Sephiroth discarded his leather duster and sat. “Well?”

Quickly, Olivia flopped onto her back and put her head in his lap. “Massage my temples. I feel a headache coming on.”

Sephiroth didn’t move.

“Like this.” Olivia quickly demonstrated by rubbing gentle circles over her temples. “Only you do it.”

Still nothing.

“Just for a few minutes,” Olivia wheedled. “I promise I’ll return the favor. Anytime! I’m good for it!”

After a brief pause, Sephiroth asked, “This is your very important task?”

“Vital importance,” Olivia insisted.

He brought his fingertips to her temples and, at first, perfectly replicated the gentle circular movement she’d demonstrated. Olivia closed her eyes and relaxed and before long, Sephiroth branched out. He ran his thumbs across her forehead, massaged her scalp, the base of her skull.

Olivia hummed her appreciation. “I knew you’d be amazing at this. You pick up anything physical so fast. I bet in my world you’d have ended up in sports. Basketball, hockey… maybe you’d have been an Olympic swimmer. I can picture that.”

“Sports?” Sephiroth echoed. “You mean games.”

“Yeah, but for some people it’s their job. It’s the sort of thing a lot of people dream about but hardly anyone gets to actually experience, and the perks are amazing. I don’t know, maybe you prefer the military? Making life-and-death decisions, being part of history? People care about sports—they care a lot—but it’s not the same.”

“I… can’t imagine it.”

“Fair. Trying to explain professional sports to someone unfamiliar with the concept is making me realize how truly bizarre they are. People who’ve never played the sport in their lives will paint their faces or get tattoos or throw parties…” Olivia trailed off. “But you’d be one of the players. You’d be on a team, you’d win or you’d lose, and you’d have to be tough… but at the same time, it’s a game. Everyone shakes hands at the end.”

“As a gesture of respect?” Sephiroth asked.

“Yeah. After the game, while everyone’s still watching. It’s called being a good sport.” Olivia sighed. Thanks to Sephiroth’s magic fingers, her headache had mostly gone away. “I should get up. I don’t want to be greedy—”

“No.” Sephiroth held her in place. “You’re not being greedy.”

“I am, but I’m also not going to stop you.” Olivia laughed and wriggled, making a show of settling in for the long haul. “Stop when you get bored. It’s really nice though. I’ll show you.”

Olivia drifted a bit, feeling truly indulged.

“What else?” Sephiroth asked.

“Hmm?”

“What else could you imagine me doing?”

“It’s a fun question, I guess. Well. Something physical, something where you’re cool under pressure… I bet you’d be a good rescue diver. Like, there was this thing a while back where a bunch of kids on a school trip got trapped in a cave. The entrance collapsed and the only way out was through the water but, like, a completely grueling trip. They had to send in these whiz rescue divers. They dived through narrow crevices, underwater, with no light, for… at least a mile. All of the kids had to be sedated on the way out, because if you’re not trained to dive like that you’d panic, no question. And if you panic, you use up all your air and then you drown. A good diver has to be calm, has to breathe slowly, to make the air last. It’s so important. I bet you could do that.”

“And the rescue?”

“All the kids made it out,” said Olivia. “I think one of the rescue divers died. I remember reading a minute by minute account of the whole thing… okay, what else? There are these elite firefighters called hotshots… no, that’s too obvious. Oh, I know. You could be an astronaut.”

“You have a successful space program on your world?”

“Yeah. I think most of our astronauts started out in the military, but they have to have a strong background in science, too, and the lucky ones get to spend a year in space. It’s risky, no getting around that, one of those jobs that’s physically and mentally demanding over a long haul. Lonely, too, because astronauts are so isolated. But living in space for a year would be amazing.”

“Thank you,” said Sephiroth.

“For what?” Olivia wondered.

The silence stretched until, instead of answering, Sephiroth changed the subject. “Should I order takeout?”

“I made a pasta salad, it’s in the fridge.” Olivia made herself get up. “And there’s some soup leftover from yesterday.”

Olivia quickly dished up a portion of the salad, and put the last of the soup on the stove to heat. Sephiroth trailed after her, too close and too intense. She figured he must be horny, but when she slid the bowl of pasta across the counter he obediently sat down to eat it, staring intently at her all the while.

She remembered thinking, when she first met Sephiroth, that there was something not quite sexual about his energy. She thought it again now. Similar, but not quite the same. Even when he did want sex there was always that hint of something else.

“How was your day?” she asked.

Sephiroth made a face—what passed for one on him, in any case: his upper lip twitched in the hint of a sneer and his nostrils pinched with a slow, controlled breath. “Heidegger’s attempts to save face are exhausting.”

Olivia winced in sympathy.

“He is embarrassing himself, and he knows it,” Sephiroth continued. “But he can’t help himself. He’s fixated on me, constantly looking for ways to pit his troopers against mine. I let him wear me down, I give in, my troopers handily win the contests Heidegger sets them, and the whole cycle starts all over again.”

Olivia grinned and poached a curl of pasta from Sephiroth’s bowl. “Now that’s what I call a doom spiral.”

“You were right,” Sephiroth said. “A new head of Public Safety might calm the troubled waters, bring back the status quo or—without much difficulty even—improve upon it. But Heidegger will self-destruct and he’ll take the whole department down with him.”

Olivia lifted the soup off the burner, poured it into a bowl, and offered that to Sephiroth as well. “What about Urban Development?”

“The Turks are sure now that a malicious attack on the sensors caused the outage,” said Sephiroth. “Naturally, the President is pressuring Aki to disable the safety measures that caused the problem.”

“Going over well?”

Sephiroth shrugged. “Aki is stalling.”

“Which leaves the Turks and Hojo.” Olivia propped her hip against the counter, watching Sephiroth eat. She'd had enough at lunch. “You know Hojo best. What will set him off?”

“Something already has,” said Sephiroth. “He left Midgar this morning in a panic.”

“Any idea why?”

“No, but I want to make another foray into the labs while he’s gone.” Sephiroth carried his bowl to the sink and washed it, perhaps just for the opportunity to turn his back to her without being rude. “There’s something in the Project G files… you read them.”

“Yeah.”

“And you noticed that the cells at the center of Hollander’s experiments belonged to a specimen named Jenova?”

“I did.”

Sephiroth washed the pot, too, then stacked the plates neatly in the drying rack and dragged a towel over his hands, slowly. “Jenova was my mother.”

“Wait… what?”

“I know almost nothing about her.” Sephiroth turned, first glancing sidewise at Olivia and then turning his whole body to face her. His voice firmed. “Her name. That she died in childbirth. I had no idea she’d been one of Hojo’s specimens.”

“That doesn’t add up. It can’t,” Olivia protested. “The main difference between Project G and Project S—”

“Project S?”

“Yeah, the one that made you.”

“Project S," Sephiroth repeated. His voice was so soft, so thoughtful, and yet a drop of cold sweat trickled down the small of her back.

“You told me to get Project G files,” Olivia reminded him. “I could only grab a small percentage of those. And your orders were so specific—but there was a Project S, and the big difference between the two is that the mothers in project G were injected with Jenova cells and the mother in yours wasn’t.”

Sephiroth followed the logic to its simple, inescapable conclusion. “But a mother could not fail to carry her own cells.”

“Exactly. The one person your mother cannot be is Jenova.”

Sephiroth took a deep breath. “It is like him…”

Olivia bit her tongue. She wanted to prompt him: go on, explain, what’s like who. But she waited. It would take Sephiroth years to fully process revelations this profound. He could take a minute to gather his thoughts.

“Hojo lies. Sometimes for convenience, others out of spite. But I am sure he also believes that the experiment is more important than the vessel.”

God, Olivia hated it when people called pregnant women vessels. A complaint for another time. “Can I, um… can I give you a hug?”

“I would rather lie down and close my eyes.” Sephiroth ran a gentle finger along her hairline. “And you will massage my temples.”

Chapter 11: serpents and spiders, tail of a rat

Chapter Text

Olivia sat in the lobby cafe, sucking melted ice from what had once been an iced latte through a straw. The Space Program had been officially mothballed and its entire staff—including the head of the department—let go. Olivia had spent the morning watching them slowly trickle out of the building, cardboard boxes in hand.

She felt… not great. Space Programs in general were neat, and the Shinra Space Program in particular had been mostly benign. Of all the employees at the company, the ones who’d just been fired first had (probably) done the least harm. They didn’t deserve to be victims of her nefarious plan. But they were, and she knew from Sephiroth that her nefarious plan had indeed caused these cuts—all her nickel and diming tricks had started to snowball—so she made herself watch. She was responsible for all those slumped shoulders, all those brave smiles.

“Enjoying the show?”

Olivia startled. The hot redhead had not only approached but he’d sat down right next to her at her little cafe table. In an aluminum chair. Even with her enhanced hearing, she hadn’t heard a thing.

Olivia could honestly answer, “No.”

“So you’re Sephiroth’s, uh…” The hot redhead made a sort of scrolling gesture with his hand, as though beckoning the right word to appear. Finally he grimaced and said, “Ladyfriend. That’s not offensive. Two nice words that sound nicer together. Yeah?”

“Sure,” said Olivia.

“That probably makes you feel real safe,” the hot redhead continued.

“Huh?” said Olivia, baffled. Being around Sephiroth generally made her feel like someone had handed her a grenade with the pin removed. Why would that make her feel safe?

This must not have been the answer the hot redhead expected, because he blinked a couple of times, visibly rewinding the conversation in his mind. “You know. Big strong guy protecting you. I bet that feels great.”

Olivia stared at the guy. He was, as had been previously established, hot. Eye-searingly red hair, brilliant blue eyes, face tattoos that shouldn’t have worked but did. He looked like some sort of sleek, vicious rodent. A mink or a mongoose. Slim and sinuous and a surprisingly effective predator.

As far as she understood, Turks were a cadre of James Bonds. Spies with flashy martial skills and license to kill. Covert ops and dirty deeds. And this guy, this Turk, was the only one she’d recognize, because she’d met him under highly traumatic circ*mstances. Sending him was a message all on its own.

“Are you here to threaten me?” Olivia asked.

The redhead groaned and flopped back into his chair theatrically. “C’mon, now. Why you gotta skip all the foreplay? Is this what Sephiroth goes for? No fun, no romance, just straight to the main event?”

Olivia swallowed a snippy reply—Is demeaning me part of the job or just a perk?—because she recognized a situation where anything she said could and would be used against her.

“What’s the threat?”

The hot redhead scowled. “At the moment, the threat is that you have a little chat like a normal f*cking person and then maybe we don’t kill you.”

Olivia blinked. “Nice weather we’re having?”

“More like… what do you do all day?” The hot redhead grabbed her empty coffee cup, shook it to make the last of the ice rattle, and then tossed it into a nearby trashcan. It went in without hitting the rim. “Must get pretty boring shacking up with a workaholic.”

“I don’t mind keeping myself company,” said Olivia.

“Yeah? Got any tips?” The hot redhead lay his forearms flat on the table and leaned over them, sliding closer. He fluttered his absurdly lush lashes. “I can’t sit still for five f*cking minutes. People keep telling me it’s a problem.”

“What’s your name?” Olivia asked. She’d have to tell Sephiroth about this conversation and every time she said ‘hot redhead’ she could practically see the violent fantasies playing out in a thought bubble over his head.

“Me?” The hot redhead jerked his thumb at the vee of pale skin exposed by his mostly-unbuttoned shirt. “Reno.”

Olivia pointed to the aviator goggles balanced along his hairline. “Are you a pilot?”

“Yeah. I can fly anything.” Reno smiled breezily. “Planes, helicopters, blimps. I’ve got excellent spatial orientation.”

“And what about—”

Reno interrupted. “What does Sephiroth see in you, anyhow? Half the population of Gaia pants after the guy and he couldn’t care less. Then you come along and lock him down in like a day? You gotta know what it looks like.”

“Like he enjoys an extreme imbalance of power?” Olivia guessed brightly. Then, without the false cheer, “That’s the only unique thing about me.”

“I should have figured Sephiroth would go for this doom-and-gloom crap.” Reno rolled his eyes and levered himself upright. “One last thing. You got any opinion on the Lifestream?”

“The what?” Olivia asked.

“You know,”—Reno made some scare quotes and pitched his voice a bit deeper—“the Lifestream.”

“What’s a Lifestream?”

“It’s—f*ck’s sake, lady. It’s what the religious fanatics call mako. Green stuff in the ground?”

“Why do they call it Lifestream?” Olivia wondered.

“I’ve heard enough.” Reno stood and dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Just remember that we’ve got our eyes on you and if you’ve done anything to disparage Shinra we’re gonna find out sooner or later and then you’ll be dead in a ditch whether Sephiroth likes it or not, okay?”

“You couldn’t have said that to begin with?”

Reno swung his arms wide in exasperation. “No. I couldn’t have. Sorry to interrupt your long hours of moping around Shinra tower with a little conversation. Shiva’s tit*, man.”

He kept muttering to himself as he ambled away, joining a tall, dark-skinned man in sunglasses who’d been standing nearby—watching, which Olivia hadn’t noticed at all.

Had that been a fishing expedition? Did the Turks know, or only suspect? Olivia shivered. At the very least, they suspected. And if not her, then Sephiroth.

***

Today, Sephiroth reflected, was a beautiful day.

First, he’d arrived at the biweekly board meeting to find two of his least favorite people absent: Palmer, because he’d been fired, and Hojo, because he’d run off to a lab in the mountains somewhere. Nibelheim.

Scarlett had attended for the first time since the explosion, testing out a new guise. She’d hidden her scarred face behind a porcelain mask, styled her hair in loose curls, and exchanged her usual revealing gown for a high-necked red catsuit decked with gold buttons and jeweled chains. Still aggressively erotic but the effect was less 'office p*rn' and more 'erotic horror'.

She tried to play her usual game, interspersing barbed commentary with mocking laughter, but couldn’t hit the right notes. Her interjections were too cruel, her laughter too harsh. She was obviously, incandescently angry. Fury rose off of her in waves, like heat.

Even Sephiroth could read her like this, she was so obvious. Scarlet wanted revenge. She wanted to find the person who’d hurt her and pay them back in kind, but worse. Sephiroth found he couldn’t look at her for too long without fixating obsessively on killing her before she could get her hands on Olivia.

Aki and Veld remained neutral, defensive. Happy to deflect any heat elsewhere, with easy targets in every direction.

And Heidegger. Ah, Heidegger. The President had slashed Public Safety’s budget—he’d actually cut it to match, on a per capita basis, Sephiroth’s spending on his support troopers. About half of what Heidegger had been spending previously. Sacrifices had to be made and Heidegger had proven, with all his inane challenges, that more could be done with less.

Heidegger had not taken the news well. He’d blustered, shouted, pounded his fists, and finally threatened to quit. To no effect. Eventually, he'd stormed out of the meeting early and begun furiously tearing down his own department. He’d ordered outposts closed, bases drawn down to skeleton crews, recruitment programs cut. He’d apparently spent a significant portion of the afternoon trying to raid his department’s retirement funds, exhausting what little support he had left in Public Safety.

Sephiroth had been getting updates all afternoon from Kunsel. Beautiful, truly.

Zack burst in just before Sephiroth put his computer to sleep and headed for the VR room. He slammed the door shut, locked it, and stalked over to Sephiroth’s desk.

“You’re trying to destroy the company,” he declared.

“Took you long enough,” Sephiroth said, flicking the screen.

“But—“ Zack put his hands on his hips, feet spread ever so slightly. Gearing up for a fight. “No. No, Seph, you can’t.”

Somewhat to his own surprise, Sephiroth absolutely could. But Zack had dedicated his life to SOLDIER, loved it to his core, and he’d understand Sephiroth’s mixed emotions in a way that Olivia never would. SOLDIER was the closest thing Sephiroth had ever had to a family, or a home.

“Why not?” asked Sephiroth. And then, “I ask the question in all sincerity. The rot starts at the top. It sinks to the roots.”

“Yeah.” Zack lost his bravado and began to pace. “Once I knew what to look for, I noticed so many things… they were right in front of my face all along, I just didn’t see it. The way troopers disappear. Heck, anyone who doesn't fall in line just… vanishes. My girlfriend told me something recently… in private, it just… It’s so wrong.”

“Yes,” Sephiroth agreed.

“But this isn’t you,” Zack insisted, whirling on Sephiroth. “You hate these games, all the infighting and the backstabbing. And I just can’t help but think that maybe… I mean, whose idea was all this?”

“I find I enjoy the strategy,” Sephiroth noted, because the ‘infighting’ he’d always viewed with such contempt bore more similarities to war than he’d expected. “But you’re right. Olivia pushed me down this path. Though I suggest you ask yourself what I would have done, if left to my own devices. I don’t think you would have liked that very much, either.”

“It’s not that I don’t like it.” Zack swiped a palm across his brow, wiping away non-existent sweat. Then his hands were back on his hips. “I grew up in a reactor town. You probably don’t know what that means, but my whole childhood I heard stories about life before the reactor and life after the reactor. We didn’t have refrigerators before the reactor. The whole town shared one car.”

“Is that your concern? You want to preserve the reactors?” Sephiroth waited for Zack to nod. “Then that will be your job. Figure out how. Draw up a plan.”

Zack squinted. “Really?”

“Really.” As far as Sephiroth knew, he had no plans to kill anyone currently working in Urban Development. “But be quick about it. Things are moving quickly now.”

Zack still seemed torn.

“Or turn on me,” Sephiroth added. “That’s your other option. One way or another, you’d surely end up in charge of SOLDIER. Not for long, mind you, but if that’s what you feel is right…”

“Quit it, Seph, seriously. We’re talking. All the”—Zack gestured vaguely—“doesn’t help.”

“Ah,” said Sephiroth, unenlightened.

“Posturing.” Zack snapped his fingers. “All the posturing. Quit it.”

“I’m sitting down,” said Sephiroth. “I think, between the two of us, you’ve been posturing.”

Zack made a face. “Ha ha.”

“If you’re uncertain, come with me to my apartment. There’s something I’d like you to see.” Sephiroth finally rose from his desk and led the way out. Zack trailed behind, both of them automatically falling silent. The halls had ears.

When they reached Sephiroth’s apartment, he used his keycard to open the door and stepped inside, automatically looking for Olivia. Lately, just being near her eased something raw and hungry inside of him. She didn’t have to do anything, didn’t have to feed him or f*ck him. He’d see her and a pain he’d hardly been aware of vanished, replaced by... pleasure?

She was at the sofa, the Project G laptop that he’d been planning to show Zack on the table in front of her. But her posture was all wrong, stiff and closed. Sephiroth had Masamune in hand before he’d quite figured out why.

“The Turks have been in your apartment.” Olivia nodded at the Project G laptop. “They know what’s on here.”

Chapter 12: for better or for... worse

Chapter Text

The strangest thing had happened. After Reno sauntered off, Olivia had felt… not fine, but normal. Like she was taking the threat seriously but hadn’t lost her head. And then the fear arrived, like a delayed reaction, and kept getting worse. She retreated to Sephiroth’s apartment, jumping at shadows the whole way, and started shaking once the door shut behind her.

The apartment looked exactly like it should. The Project G laptop hadn’t been moved or anything. But she’d been nervous enough to check for tampering and she’d found it pretty quickly—a brief spike in battery usage. Subtle, not something she’d have noticed if she hadn’t gone looking.

She’d been on Gaia for months now. A whole bunch of stuff had happened, some of it pretty unpleasant. After everything she’d been through, a guy throwing a few threats her way should not faze her.

But it had, and when Sephiroth walked through the door she’d never been so glad to see anyone in her life. The relief was staggering, actually. Whatever else she could say about him—and she had mentally catalogued quite a lengthy list of complaints—he had been a superb ally. He gave good advice, he did more than his fair share, he was clever and devastatingly effective. He put everything she could offer to good use, which made all her own efforts feel more worthwhile, and he never let optimism or fear cloud his assessments.

God, she’d been lucky, hadn’t she? If she’d ended up with anyone else she’d be dead.

Sephiroth had his sword out before she said a word and all she could think was yes, thank you, you’re the best. There were so many things she still didn’t understand about him, but when he paid attention he paid attention. And she… trusted him? How did that happen?

But… yeah. She trusted him. Not, like, to respect her boundaries. He definitely didn’t do that. But to have her back? To believe her when she told him someone had been in his apartment, even though she didn’t have any proof?

Sephiroth tipped his chin up, nostrils pinching as he sampled the air, and he vanished briefly into the bedroom. “Tseng,” he said, reemerging. “He uses a hand lotion he believes to be scentless.”

“Shiva,” Zack muttered. “You can smell that? After how long?”

“Less than two hours.” Sephiroth picked up the laptop and handed it to Zack. “This is what I wanted to show you. Take a look, get yourself up to speed.”

Zack grabbed the laptop and plopped down on Sephiroth’s exercise mat. “Am I looking for anything in particular?”

“The only thing on it are Project G files that Olivia smuggled out of Science.”

Zack snapped his hands away from the keyboard, as though he’d been burned. “I’m not sure I want to know.”

“You prefer willful blindness?” Sephiroth returned, sharp.

“They say ignorance is bliss.” Zack squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. “I wish I didn’t understand why.”

“It will also get you killed,” Sephiroth said, without the tiniest hint of sympathy, then knelt on his heels in front of of Olivia, putting them at eye level. Olivia—feeling a little pathetic even as she did it—nudged the toes of one foot up against Sephiroth’s knee, hungry for the reassurance of touch.

“Tell me what happened.”

Olivia glanced at Zack. She hadn’t seen him at first, following behind Sephiroth, but now it seemed wiser to postpone the conversation. “Maybe in a bit?”

“You can speak freely,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia still hesitated.

“He figured it out on his own, which I have been expecting for some time now. He may aid us, if only because he wants to keep the reactors running.”

Zack, probably glad for the distraction, nodded along. "We've got a lot to talk about but... yeah. It's been a long time coming."

“I was worried because the Turk, Reno, found me down in the café,” Olivia explained. “He wanted to talk.”

“Describe the conversation. Everything you can remember, no matter how irrelevant,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia started at the beginning, with ladyfriend, and managed to recall almost the whole conversation word for word.

“A fishing expedition,” Sephiroth concluded. “I’d wager that Reno walked away convinced that you are, at best, an accessory to a plot of my devising.”

“But they know there’s a plot,” said Olivia. “You said the Turks are smart and dangerous—and there are more of them than of us, with a lot more freedom to act.”

“It is entirely within the Turks’ abilities to foil our plot,” said Sephiroth, cool and calm and unbothered. “But if they do, I will kill them all. If they know me—they do, it’s their job—then they understand the danger of direct action.”

Olivia shivered, rubbing away a ripple of goosebumps as they sprang up on her arms. “If they know you’d kill them, why wouldn’t they just… kill you first?”

Zack, from his spot on the exercise mat, snorted.

“Because they would fail,” said Sephiroth. “And because they would not survive the attempt.”

“How can you be sure—”

“Believe him,” interrupted Zack. “You’ve never seen Seph in action, but speaking as someone who has…” Zack shrugged. “If he were easy to kill, he’d be dead.”

Olivia sighed. “So what do we do?”

“Your guess would be better than mine,” said Sephiroth. “They’ll be thinking along your lines.”

“Okay. Yeah. I’ll make dinner then. Cooking helps me think.” Impulsively, she hooked an arm around Sephiroth’s neck and pulled him in for a hug. He might not find hugs comforting, but she did. And even though he didn’t respond in kind—he patted her back once, awkwardly—it still made her feel better.

“Thanks,” she said, squeezing tight before letting go. “I'm glad you're here.”

She decided it might be a good time to tackle a dish that would take a while to make, like… satay sauce. Not long after she’d finished pulling out ingredients, Zack said, in a half-broken voice, “Tell me this isn’t real.”

Sephiroth went to sit with him. Olivia could have eavesdropped, if she’d stretched her enhanced senses, but gave them some privacy instead. She chopped and sautéed and while her hands were busy, her brain turned over the problem of the Turks. They wouldn’t attack directly. They’d have to find some other way to stop Sephiroth. Not a threat—they couldn’t risk anything that would make him lash out.

She knew from personal experience that Sephiroth could be reasoned with. Talked around, bargained with, persuaded. So… start by putting herself in their position. She didn’t want to die, she didn’t want her whole world to be torn apart, so what would she do? What could she offer?

Olivia served up three bowls and called out, just quiet enough to politely ignore if they were really absorbed in their conversation, “Hungry?”

Zack was the first on his feet. “Hells yes,” he exclaimed, scrambling for one of the stools. “I’ve been drooling for like an hour. What is this?”

“Gado gado,” Olivia answered. “A cooked salad with a rich peanut sauce.”

Sephiroth took the other seat and Olivia ate standing up, hip propped against the stove. Zack dug in and they both watched in mild amusem*nt as he groaned happily. “I can’t believe aliens eat so well. It’s like, the last thing I would have guessed about aliens.”

Olivia spent a few seconds imagining little green men debating sous vide temperatures and had to acknowledge, if grudgingly, “Fair assumption, actually.”

Sephiroth took his first bite—silently, as usual. But he ate very slowly, which meant he liked it.

Olivia gave everyone a few minutes to enjoy before she said, “If I were the Turks, I might offer you Hojo.”

“Explain," prompted Sephiroth

“If the laptop is their biggest clue—big if—they’ll know you’re gunning for him. So accept the inevitable and make a production out of giving you the thing you were going to take anyway. Turn lemons into lemonade.”

Sephiroth nodded. “Hojo is out of town. What else?”

“Well.” Olivia took a bite to give herself time to put her thoughts into words. “Part of the reason I’d offer you Hojo would be to see if you’d bite. Like, maybe you take the bait and they achieve a new normal. That’s a win. But if you don’t, then I’d know you were after something else. Something bigger. At that point, I’d have to think bigger, too.”

“So I allay their suspicions by taking their initial offer,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia nodded. “Might work.”

“And if you had to think bigger?”

“I’d probably try to hold SOLDIER hostage somehow,” said Olivia. “Not in so many words, obviously. But, like, maybe Heidegger finally flames out and they try to pressure you into taking over Public Safety. Of course SOLDIER would remain separate—you’ve fought so hard for SOLDIER’s independence, they’re just respecting your wishes—and then all of a sudden, you’re on the defensive, you need something, you’re coming to them.”

Zack was staring, his spoon in the air. “Seph, she and Kunsel can never, ever meet.”

Sephiroth chuckled dryly. “That, or we should introduce—”

An explosion rocked the building. Olivia ran to the window, visions of toppling towers in her mind, but Sephiroth said, “Three miles southwest. Reactor two.”

Zack already had his boots on. “Did you do this?”

“No. But anyone could see that Shinra is vulnerable right now. I’ll organize a response team—you head to the reactor, to direct them on the ground.”

“He should go to Urban Development,” countered Olivia. “If he’s interested in the reactors, this is an amazing opportunity. If he can make himself indispensable at a moment like this—listen to their concerns, mediate between the department and the response teams...”

Sephiroth co*cked an eyebrow at her.

“Just a suggestion,” Olivia added hastily.

“Zack, go to Urban Development,” said Sephiroth. “I’ll head to the reactor myself.”

They were out the door in seconds, the elevator dinging in the hall as it answered their call. Olivia turned on the television, where every channel had cameras panning over the wreckage of Sector 2. Toppled buildings, sirens, fires, and the smoking hulk of the reactor looming over it all. After about half an hour, Sephiroth appeared on the screen, leading twenty or thirty of his SOLDIERs. She wasn’t sure what they were actually doing. Clearing debris, performing safety checks, maybe just optics? How dangerous was it, to be wandering around in an exploded mako reactor? She had no clue.

She watched until she fell asleep, and barely woke when Sephiroth returned. He flipped the screen off before picking her up, and she wriggled until she could wrap all four limbs around him. It was like a switch had flipped inside her, when he’d come back and she’d been so glad to see him. Before, she would have held herself apart. Maintained the distance that made it possible to be lovers when they were barely acquaintances, let alone friends.

They were friends now, weren’t they?

“Olivia?” Sephiroth asked.

“You’re okay?” Olivia asked.

He didn’t answer, because he never answered stupid questions. Which meant… that she was being stupid. Ugh.

He peeled her loose and she let him, crawling under the sheets while the shower hissed on. Sephiroth did not want a clingy girlfriend. He didn’t want a girlfriend at all. He wanted, like, a girlfriend experience. Some of the trappings but none of the emotional investment.

Get a grip, she told herself. And go to sleep.

Then he was back, clean and damp. She held still as he climbed into bed, but when Sephiroth reached for her she practically leapt on him. “Sorry,” she said, clinging again. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Sephiroth ran a hand down her flank, hitched her thigh up around his waist and rolled her onto her back. That was fine, because it gave her an excuse to wrap her arms around his neck and hold on. To indulge her neediness for a little while longer. He planted one big palm on her ass and rolled his hips, holding her in place while he ground his hard co*ck along her pubic bone. Feeling deliciously pinned, she stretched and pulled against his iron grip. He tipped his chin down to watch, which brought his lips so close and she—kissed him.

Not that she’d never kissed Sephiroth before. She had, but in the sense of licking along the sensitive tendons of his neck, suckling his nipple, nibbling his earlobe. She’d used her mouth to give pleasure, not to express affection. This, though. This was pure emotion. Seeking comfort, expressing gratitude, maybe a confession.

And… nothing happened. What else had she expected? Sephiroth pulled back, dipped just a bit, and penetrated her. Smooth and deep, glorious. She was lucky to have this much. Lucky to be alive, lucky to have found an ally. Hell, she’d be ruined for all other lovers; no one else would ever compare.

And then, before pulling out again, Sephiroth kissed her. But, like, exactly the same way she’d kissed him. He pressed his lips to the same spot on her lips where she’d touched his; he held them together for just a bit too long, exactly like she had. He was… copying her?

Did he… not know how to kiss? Had he never… could it be possible… that he’d never kissed anyone?

Once she'd posed the question, the answer seemed blindingly obvious. Not only was it possible, it was likely. He’d never been in a relationship, she knew that. And he was scary. She wouldn’t have dared to kiss him that first time, or the second or third. And then she’d just assumed he must not like it.

Olivia wanted to cry. Instead, she kissed him again. And again. Every way she could think of. With her mouth closed and with it open, with her teeth and her tongue, peppered on his lips and his cheeks and his nose. Sephiroth mimicked her, turned each gesture around, until all of a sudden he was better than her. More agile, more rhythmic, more intense.

Obviously it felt good. Everything Sephiroth did in bed felt amazing. But also, it was… nice? It was so nice. Sex had never been so easy or so comforting, so exactly what she needed. Not with anyone.

Afterwards, when she was sated and sleepy, Sephiroth smeared his come across her lips and kissed her, which mostly smeared it around some more. Of course he can’t wait to bring come into it, she thought, annoyed and indulgent. Some things never changed.

Chapter 13: come out to socialize

Chapter Text

The Turks offered him Hojo the very next day. Sephiroth was so boggled by Olivia’s powers of prediction that he almost missed the implications of Veld’s characteristically fishy phrasing.

“When you say I’ll never have to see Hojo again…”

“We mean just that,” Veld assured him, comfortably seated in Sephiroth’s office. He tugged at his cuffs, impatient. “He’ll disappear.”

“Hojo has six labs that I know of, and probably equally as many that I don’t,” Sephiroth returned. “Forgive me for being blunt, Veld, but I don’t want him alive and working elsewhere. I want him dead.”

“You can trust us to take care of a lone scientist,” said Veld.

Sephiroth would trust a Turk when the sun reversed course and rose in the west. Veld was weaseling around something, that much was clear, and Sephiroth wanted to know what. Hojo was the one man on all Gaia who would not, under any circ*mstances, be spared. Nor would he die cleanly. Sephiroth planned to take him apart inch by literal inch. If Hojo thought he could escape…

It took a supreme effort of will to remind himself that Veld had come because he did not care if Hojo lived or died. He wouldn’t care if Sephiroth lived or died, either, and that was why both of their futures were up for debate.

Veld had come to offer him Hojo—however dishonestly—because he wanted power over Sephiroth.

Veld wanted something.

And Sephiroth could give it, or seem to. He could lie, as Veld just had.

But Turks were not easy to deceive, and Veld would sniff out a scheme if Sephiroth weren’t careful. “It’s not their competence I doubt,” said Sephiroth. “If you want trust, give Olivia free access to all of Hojo’s labs. Escort her through them, one by one, and let her report back.”

“Olivia? Your…”

Go ahead, Veld. Anticipation prickled along Sephiroth’s nerves. Give me an excuse.

“That’s not a small request,” Veld said instead. “What are you hoping to achieve with this search?”

Sephiroth tapped his index finger on his desk. He hoped that the Turks would view Olivia as a lever they could pull to manipulate him. That they would, in the process, show their own hand and he’d bring himself one step closer to disabling the greatest obstacle in the way of permanently and completely toppling Shinra Electric Power Company.

“In this company, as you know, we must look out for ourselves,” Sephiroth said. “Recent events have demonstrated that in order to do so, I must understand the experiments that created me.”

“And to do that you must send an envoy to every one of Hojo’s labs?”

“Surely a Turk understands the value of a thorough investigation.”

“I’ll arrange it.” Veld sighed and stood, wiping a palm down one weary cheek. “Most of my people are out in the field, tracking down Avalanche, but I’ve got a couple who are still recovering from injuries and could use a bit of light work.”

“I’ll be ready when they have something,” said Sephiroth. “And Veld—I know this goes without saying—but if Olivia suffers any deliberate harm, no one in your department will survive it.”

Veld waved his acknowledgement on the way out.

Later that evening, Sephiroth recounted the conversation to Olivia. He explained that he’d send his own escort with her—that he’d rotate a different set of his SOLDIERs through for every visit, to expose as many of them as possible to the horrors perpetrated in the labs and prepare the corps for a schism.

Only when she smiled and shook her head and said, “Amazing. You are killing like ten birds with one stone,” did he feel any satisfaction with himself.

But why? He received frequent praise, from a wide variety of sources, and mostly found it irritating. Olivia’s ought to have irritated him. Instead, he craved it. Where once he’d fantasized about shattering her illusions, now he fantasized about preserving them. About keeping her ignorant and pleased with him for as long as possible.

He darted in for a kiss, stealing a second when she startled and laughed. Really, he just wanted to keep her.

Olivia was initially sent to a lab in Modeoheim, where Hollander had been conducting a wide variety of unethical experiments. A half-dozen of SOLDIERs patrolled the facility while she searched for computers that hadn’t been destroyed and hunted down backup drives in dusty closets.

Her Turk escort turned out to be a woman—Cissnei—young, very pretty, with an appealing earnestness about her. Clearly they were taking a new tack, cozying up to Olivia instead of trying to terrorize her. Cissnei very subtly managed to pull Olivia aside during that first excursion to say, with apparent seriousness, “If Sephiroth is keeping you against your will, I can help you escape.”

Olivia couldn’t stifle a snort of awful, horrified laughter. Not funny laughing—stress laughing, disbelief laughing. “It was a Turk who delivered me to Hojo,” said Olivia. “Why the change of heart?”

Cissnei looked uneasy. “Maybe I’m speaking on my own behalf.”

“Hard to believe, but on the off chance that you’re serious: thank you. So long as Hojo’s alive, though, I don’t think escape would do me much good.“

Cissnei didn’t make a face, exactly. She was just very obviously not making a face. Neutral instead of concerned or reassuring.

“Wait…” Olivia tipped her head to the side. “Hojo’s already dead?”

“How did you…?” Cissnei huffed and took a step back, folding her arms across her chest. “We’re not sure. No witnesses and no body.”

“Well that explains a few things,” said Olivia, half to herself. And it opened up some possibilities. Maybe. To Hojo, she’d been a precious specimen, a reservoir of unique genetic traits. He’d have had no trouble justifying the use of company resources to track her down. Sephiroth, though… well, Shinra didn’t have strict policies about ethics or expenses or much of anything. He could probably send people after her, if he cared to. But why would he bother?

“Anyway, Sephiroth’s been pretty good to me,” said Olivia. “If I wanted to leave, I wouldn’t sneak away. He deserves better than that.”

Cissnei seemed dubious. “When you say ‘good’ you mean…?”

“Normal stuff,” Olivia assured her. “He’s a good listener. If he says he’ll do something, he will. If there’s something on his mind, he says it. If I disagree, he doesn’t get upset. He does his share of the dishes.”

“He does his share of the dishes,” Cissnei repeated, apparently boggled.

“Is that weird?”

“Yes,” said Cissnei.

“Ok, well. Good chat.” Olivia waved awkwardly and returned to her search of the lab.

She wanted to tell Sephiroth about Hojo but the Turks dug up some leads on Avalanche. At first he came home every day or two but then he showed up one morning looking utterly pristine except for a crust of gore on his boots, clots and chunks glued to the leather with dried blood. Like he’d just been wading through a slaughterhouse floor. He caught her staring and she didn’t see him again for a week.

In the meanwhile, Cissnei escorted Olivia and a new set of SOLDIERs to a lab in Costa del Sol. This was where she started to notice the difference between what she discovered in the records and what the SOLDIERs assumed from poking around.

They assumed—like she had, initially—that Sephiroth had been brought up similarly to Rhapsodos and Hewley. Between the experiments that created them and enlistment, they’d had relatively normal childhoods. Rhapsodos, who’d been delivered prematurely to a dying mother, had been placed with a foster family.

The nightmares in the labs only cemented their assumptions. The worse they were, the more certain they became that Sephiroth had always been special. He was nothing like these poor people Hojo had used as lab rats, despondent in their cages, pickled in mako tubes, so he couldn’t be lumped in with them. Obviously, he’d been on an elite track from the beginning.

But Olivia had to sort through all the data, make sense of it, and it became increasingly clear that they’d all assumed wrong. Sephiroth had been raised in the labs. His first crib had been a repurposed guinea pig cage bolted to a rolling cart. His first bed a hospital cot.

He’d been treated exactly like the other specimens until Hojo began to understand how special he was, at which point things had gotten much, much worse. He’d been conditioned in a way that reminded her, more than anything, of circus elephants. Whipped and beaten and terrorized until basic facts about the world—like who was bigger and scarier—had been utterly scrambled. All presented as science in Sephiroth’s case, as tests and routine checkups and scheduled enhancements, but Olivia recognized conditioning when she saw it.

Costa del Sol was a resort town, and everyone had a free hour around lunch to soak up some sun and sand. Olivia ended up eating at a patio restaurant with Cissnei, who ordered a lemonade concoction sweetened with a fruit, apparently common to the region, that Olivia found wildly exotic—small and pitted with a spiny purple skin protecting soft flesh shading from pink to white, that tasted a bit like a peach.

“This isn’t what I’m supposed to be asking,” said Cissnei, sipping at her lemonade. “But… aren’t you afraid of him?”

“Of Sephiroth?” Olivia asked.

Cissnei nodded.

“I won’t pretend he’s not scary,” said Olivia. “But like—I guess this isn’t true anymore, but until quite recently I was pretty easy to kill, you know? Like, if Joe Schmo off the street wanted to kill me, he could have done it. Really easily! People are pretty fragile. So on that count Sephiroth isn’t special.

“The real question isn’t what can he do, it’s what will he do. The day Hojo gave me to him Sephiroth asked me to do something and I was not inclined to cooperate. So I did the exact opposite, and he was mad. In retrospect, really mad. It takes a lot to make him lose his temper. But”—Olivia gestured at her whole, unmaimed self—“I’m still alive, right? He doesn’t lash out thoughtlessly, he’s pretty deliberate. In a way, I’m lucky I got an answer early.”

“You made Sephiroth mad,” Cissnei said, deadpan.

Olivia scrunched up her face. “Why do you seem so surprised? Does he have murderous temper tantrums when I’m not looking?”

“No, never,” Cissnei acknowledged. “One of our Firsts—Genesis Rhapsodos—he could fly off the handle, but not Sephiroth.”

“So why are you so freaked out?” Olivia asked.

Cissnei didn’t have an answer to the question. She seemed a bit irritated by it.

“It’s common sense to be wary around someone who can steamroll right over you, I get that,” Olivia continued. “And Sephiroth is a steamroller, no question. But when violence isn’t on the table, dealing with him isn’t much different than dealing with your average pushy guy. Except that he’s really smart, which is intimidating in its own way.”

“I’m… having a hard time with this,” said Cissnei.

“Okay, well.” Olivia took a sip from her straw. “At least this lemonade is amazing.”

She crossed paths with Sephiroth briefly after her return from Costa del Sol, but he actively ignored everything she said in favor of f*cking her over and over. She couldn’t even ask what had sparked the fever—she lost her words and most of her processing power fairly early in the marathon.

Eventually, she was so tired and sore and wrung out that she said, “No.” She was, by that point, too tired and sore and wrung out to worry about what would happen if she said No and he chose not to listen, which had always stopped her in the past. Better not to find out, she’d figured.

But he did stop. Immediately. She couldn’t process it in the moment—she fell right asleep, vaguely aware that she was alone in the bed and the shower had turned on—then woke up the next morning alone and sore and pleasantly surprised.

She’d been holding onto that fear for a long time.

She was also very nearly late for her plane to Junon. She barely had time to bathe and dress before sprinting for the tarmac.

The Science facilities in Junon were almost as large as the ones in Midgar’s Shinra Tower, and like the Shinra Tower labs large portions were public-facing. Cages full of captured monsters sporting tentacles because they’d been injected with Jenova cells weren’t pleasant, but neither were they unusual.

The most interesting thing Olivia found in Junon were records of Sephiroth’s early military training. He’d spent a year there before being dispatched to Wutai, as his handlers eased him into the new environment. As far as she could tell, he’d been eleven years old when he arrived—which only became slightly less absurd when she realized that the minimum age of enlistment was fourteen.

Shinra was f*cked up and it could not implode fast enough. Whatever guilt she’d been carrying since the mothballing of the Space Program evaporated in Junon. The company trained child soldiers and she wasn’t even sure that would make the top ten list of Worst Things They’d Ever Done.

She found herself staring into space, wondering if she ought to let these discoveries color her opinion of Sephiroth, or change the way she treated him. He probably needed someone to talk to. But even if she believed he’d be glad in the end, she knew he’d hate it now. Somewhere in between his nightmare childhood and his present, he’d fought hard for his autonomy. Fought to be seen as autonomous, erasing all traces of his past along the way.

He probably was a bit of a control freak by nature, and more of it must have been drilled into him in the highly-controlled environment of the labs—but she was beginning to suspect that control was also his most precious possession.

“Why do you think Sephiroth put you in charge of these searches?” Cissnei asked.

Olivia startled. The Turk had snuck up on her while she was lost in her thoughts. Not great. “Because I’m good with computers?”

“I can name a half-dozen SOLDIERs who are just as skilled.”

“Really? Then your guess is as good as mine.”

Cissnei smiled just a little too warmly. “It seems like he really trusts you.”

“That’s probably not it,” said Olivia.

“Why not? At this point you probably know Sephiroth as well as anyone alive.”

“And you think that very unfortunate situation would make someone trusting?” Olivia snorted. “You can’t really believe that.”

“Maybe not,” Cissnei admitted. “But I bet you have a theory.”

“I’m alone, fairly isolated, and highly dependent on him?” Olivia guessed.

“Oh,” said Cissnei. “And… you’re okay with that?”

“Beats the alternatives.”

Cissnei narrowed her eyes. “But you do know Sephiroth as well as anyone alive,” she repeated, meditatively.

Olivia finally crossed paths with Sephiroth a couple days later, when he came home at an almost-normal hour looking almost-normal. Not, as he had been more typical recently, with his killing intent dialed up to 11.

“Hey,” Olivia greeted, looking up from the laptop where she’d been writing a quick report on her findings in the Junon lab. “You have time to eat?”

He gave her an inscrutable look. “A little.”

“Something quick, then.” Olivia hopped to her feet and, as casually as possible, planted a kiss on Sephiroth’s cheek on her way to the kitchen. She couldn’t do much about what she’d learned but if he’d accept affection, she’d give it.

They had some fresh pasta that wouldn’t take long to cook, so she set some water to boil and made a quick salad while it heated. A bit of butter and salt on the pasta, plus a ten second vinaigrette, and she had dinner ready. Not her best effort, but it fit the criteria.

“I have important news,” she said, starting with the pasta because it was hot. “How are you?”

“What news?”

“Hojo might already be dead.”

Sephiroth froze and the killing intent flared.

“I’m not sure if Cissnei was leading me by the nose, if she was lying or telling the truth…” Olivia shrugged. “I try to assume they’re two steps ahead about everything, so who knows.”

“Hojo’s last confirmed location was Nibelheim,” said Sephiroth. “A small reactor town in the mountains. I’ll go… no, we’ll go. I can track him, and you can ask around. If we want to know what happened, we’ll need to do both.”

Chapter 14: make final arrangements now

Chapter Text

Olivia looked forward to the trip to Nibelheim just for the uninterrupted time with Sephiroth. On the one hand, the guy was intense and for the most part his workaholic tendencies had been a blessing. A little Sephiroth went a long way. But it would be fun to work together, and… she liked him. He was an asshole but he was her asshole, or something.

“Hey Sephiroth,” she said, dropping her freshly-packed luggage by the door. “This is going to be fun, right?”

He gave her a truly incredulous look.

“C’mon, it’ll be like a little vacation!” Olivia insisted. “Leisurely romantic helicopter ride, quaint mountain town… do you think they have a cute little inn with exposed beams on the ceiling and a fireplace in every room?”

“Romantic?” Sephiroth’s lip curled. “I am going to find whatever’s left of the walking mess of complexes who’s squatted over the Science Department since my childhood and if I have to revive his corpse to make it suffer, I will find a way.”

“I know, I know, but why not both?” Olivia cajoled. “Get some overdue revenge, have a nice cuddle by the fire…”

Sephiroth hesitated and Olivia whooped. If he was hesitating now, she’d already won. Maybe they’d have dinner out. Or, like, a picnic. Oh man, she loved a picnic. Get some wine, get some cheese, find a nice view, always a good time.

Sephiroth’s PHS rang. He snagged it from the kitchen counter and tapped the answer call button as he brought it to his ear. “Yes?”

In the pause, Olivia’s enhanced ears picked up the caller’s side of the conversation. A man with a thick, gravelly voice—middle-aged or older—explained that they’d located some sort of secret lab and needed Sephiroth to lead the raid.

Immediately.

Instead of answering, Sephiroth crushed the phone in his fist and then slowly, carefully set it back down on the counter, where it immediately disintegrated.

“The phone didn’t do anything to you,” Olivia chided. “You have to go?”

Sephiroth nodded.

Olivia considered. “I’m still on my way to Nibelheim, though. I won’t let you down.”

Sephiroth poked at the remains of his PHS until he’d found his SIM chip. He pocketed it as he swished past her to the door, still crackling with frustration. But he glanced back on his way out. “What does it mean,” he asked, his low and silky voice laced with anger, “if I want to give you what you want? If you mention an inn, and I want to take you there? If you speak of mountains, and I would move them to you?”

“Oh.” The half-psychotic sweetness of the question hit Olivia so hard that she had to cover her heart with her palms, to protect it. “Oh. It means…” She took a deep breath. “That’s a kind of power, yeah. It’s safest when it goes both ways. But it does, okay?”

“Safe,” Sephiroth scoffed.

“Relatively.”

He fixed her with a piercing, slitted glare. “I believe you are capable of deceiving me, Olivia. But you could never escape me. Remember that.”

And then Sephiroth was gone, and Olivia was alone in his apartment. She ought to be terrified—that last bit had been more than half psychotic—but… but… she flopped onto the sofa and squeaked into her hands.

That had been the most dramatic, memorable, emphatic declaration of affection she’d ever heard! It had been so weirdly, subtly adorable! And so fierce! And… and… she was delighted. Over the moon, actually.

Olivia squeaked again. I would move them to you. She slid halfway down the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Had she just peaked? Was this it? Hottest man in existence makes devastating declaration and and it was all downhill from here?

Argh. What was her life, even.

Olivia remained in a state of distracted euphoria until the helicopter was crossing the ocean, at which point two things occurred to her at once.

1. Nibelheim sure sounded like it belonged in a Marvel movie. Thor 100: Journey to the Hidden Tenth Realm. Coming out in fall, 2050.

2. Sephiroth could fly a helicopter and had planned for them to travel alone. So why had Cissnei been ready and waiting when Olivia arrived at the tarmac? Her departure hadn’t been delayed by even an hour.

Olivia hadn’t spent much time beating her head against the brick wall of ‘How did she end up inside a video game?’ but she had, and Matt knew the game. He’d played it as a kid, he said, and he’d been thrilled to pick up the remake whole decades later. He wouldn’t go to some random nowhere town for no reason.

She’d thought Modeoheim had a Marvel ring to it, and she’d poked around for some sign of Matt’s presence. But the town had been abandoned, so there hadn’t been anyone to ask, and she hadn’t seen any signs. No helpful ‘Matt was here’ scrawled on the rotting walls.

But Nibelheim was a lot closer to a Marvel name. Only a few letters off from Niflheim. And if it was the first place Matt had gone after he’d made sure she was okay, and Hojo had disappeared from there, and somehow the Turks were involved…?

A cold chill prickled down Olivia’s back, making her shiver. It was time for her to be very, very careful.

They had to stop twice to refuel but eventually the helicopter touched down in an excruciatingly quaint little village. Ancient cottages clustered haphazardly around a central square, half of them teetering, windows glazed in ice and roofs iced in snow. Sharp-peaked mountains loomed all around, like a crown of thorns, and the freezing air bit her throat with every breath.

Matt, she thought, tightening the hood of her winter coat around her face. What brought you here? Did you get here first, or did Hojo? And then another piece slotted into place: Did you make him disappear?

What if he had?

Hojo’s last known location was a mansion not far from town, stately but suffering from neglect. Apparently the Shinra family—as distinct from the corporation, somehow—owned it, but never visited. Cissnei pointed out that while dust lay thick over furniture, it had been disturbed around the front door and the main stairwell.

“Someone’s been here recently,” she explained.

“Hojo, right?” Olivia asked, not really understanding the problem.

“Hojo would have had the whole place cleaned,” Cissnei answered. “He was a germaphobe.”

Matt. Could it have been Matt?

Olivia eagerly followed Cissnei up the stairs, through the halls, into a bedroom where a secret passage stood open. Just… a break in the wall, right there. Cissnei found the catch and when the door shut it blended perfectly with the wall. She opened it again, and they descended the ladder.

Whatever had once lurked in the basem*nt of the mansion had been thoroughly torched. Anything flammable had burned away, and metal reduced to unidentifiable lumps.

“Well, Hojo definitely didn’t do this,” said Cissnei.

“No,” Olivia agreed, thinking that Matt wouldn’t have been able to, either. A fire this hot, in an enclosed space? It would kill any unenhanced human who tried. “I think I’m going to go look around the village. Ask around, see if anyone noticed anything unusual happening.”

Cissnei waved Olivia away, and Olivia did ask around—for a post office, or any other place where someone might leave a letter or message to be picked up later. A very pretty teenager directed her to the general store, where Olivia began, “I’m wondering if maybe a guy, a few years older than me, left—“ and the shopkeep didn’t let her finish before handing her an envelope with her name on it.

“You look alike,” he said.

Olivia ended up climbing the water tower near the center of town to read the letter. She’d be visible, but no one would look over her shoulder. Once settled, she took a deep breath and tore open the flap.

Liv,

If you’re reading this then you must have escaped Shinra. I don’t know how you did it, but I’m impressed. Good job, baby sis!

Unfortunately, I’m on my way back to Midgar. I’m sorry I made you travel so far just to (probably) turn around and go right back to where you started from. I’m writing this letter because I believe in you, but I’m going back to Midgar because I’m worried about you. I had something really important to do here in Nibelheim, something that could save the whole world, but it’s done and I’ve got a friend now, and he’s agreed to help me rescue you.

So if you’re free, please call me on my new PHS before we do anything stupid!!!

Love

Matt

He listed his PHS number below his name.

Olivia tucked the letter into the inside pocket of her jacket. What would be a good place to make a phone call? Somewhere she could speak freely, without being overheard? The water tower gave her a great view so she looked around, considering. Inside the Shinra Mansion would perfect, but Cissnei would be there. So second best might be…

Hmm. She decided to head in the opposite direction of the mansion until she found a promising spot. That decided, Olivia climbed down from the tower and wound her way through the crooked, looping streets until the paved road gave way to a dirt trail leading into the mountains. Just as she was about to step off the cement, Olivia heard a familiar voice.

Cissnei. Shewas on the phone and Olivia could just barely make out the voice on the other end. A man, definitely. Olivia crept a bit closer.

“Who’s sending her letters in Nibelheim?” Cissnei hissed. “Someone’s being played, Veld. Is it us? Is it Sephiroth?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to find out,” came the voice on the other end. Thick. Gravelly. Familiar. The same man who’d called Sephiroth away from the trip to Nibelheim for an urgent raid.

“I’m trying,” Cissnei answered, more than a little exasperated. “But it takes time to build trust with someone so wary. Especially after we’ve gone out of our way to terrorize her.”

“Don’t call us with your complaints,” said someone new. Younger, also male. Also familiar, though she couldn’t place this new voice as easily. “We want results, not excuses.”

“And we’re running out of time,” added the other older man. Veld. “We won’t be able to distract Sephiroth for much longer.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Cissnei asked. “Because I’m running out of ideas.”

“She’s attached to Sephiroth because he saved her from Hojo,” said Veld. “So maybe we speed things along by making her think you’ve saved her from something.”

“Save her from a mugging or something,” Cissnei agreed. “It’s worth a try. Can you set that up?”

“Isn’t she enhanced?” asked the third speaker. The younger man.

“She is, but she hasn’t done anything with it,” Cissnei answered dismissively. “Why would she, when she’s got Sephiroth protecting her?”

Wrong, Olivia thought. She was using her enhancements to eavesdrop on both sides of a telephone conversation from a hundred feet away. That had to count as something.

“I’ll set up the mugging,” said Veld. “Now that Avalanche is taken care of, I can put a few people on it. We’ll make you look good.”

“I’ll invite her out to dinner when we get back to Midgar,” said Cissnei. “Is that enough time?”

“Plenty,” said Veld. “I’ll text with a reservation.”

“If this doesn’t work, I think it’s time we take the kid gloves off,” said the third voice. “I can’t put my own plans on hold forever.”

That last comment was finally enough, in tone and content, for Olivia to identify the third speaker. She'd only heard it on the news, but she'd found the speaker quite memorable.

Rufus Shinra.

A thrill of excitement shot through her. Instead of tempting fate, Olivia retreated. She waited for Cissnei to end the phone call and make her way back toward the center of town.And then Olivia called Sephiroth.

He answered on the first ring. “Olivia?”

“I’m pretty sure I know what happened here in Nibelheim,” she told him. “But something else, too. Remember why you had me searching the labs to begin with? Remember what you wanted to learn?”

“I do.”

“Rufus,” said Olivia.

***

“Understood,” Sephiroth answered, absurdly pleased. Olivia had come through, exactly as he’d hoped. She’d called, she hadn’t let him down.

“You’re okay?” she asked, a worried lilt to her voice. “Is the raid over?”

“Worry about yourself,” he answered, and hung up.

He certainly worried about her, out of his reach and surrounded by Turks. But the only way he could help would be to carry out the plans they’d made. She’d done her part; the time had come for him to do his.

He hit the speed dial.

Zack answered with a cheery, “Hey boss, what can I do you for?”

“You have one hour to evacuate Urban Development,” said Sephiroth. “Quietly.”

“One hour to—“ Zack’s voice dropped a register. “Are you serious?”

Not exactly. Sephiroth planned to give him two hours, but Zack didn’t need to know that.

After a beat, Zack exclaimed, “One hour it is!”

He made his next call to Kunsel, with a request to meet him at his apartment in an hour and a half. The SOLDIER was as punctual as ever, and Sephiroth handed him a large, reinforced duffel bag stuffed with all materials that Olivia had been gathering from Hojo’s various labs.

“Keep this close and keep it safe,” he instructed. “I’m about to bring down the building. Wait until Scarlett activates her war machines and then get SOLDIER out. They can help evacuate the rest if they like, but it’s not required. The Space Program is gone, Zack is taking care of Urban Development, and I doubt anyone else is worth saving. Encourage SOLDIER to stand down until I can make a statement.”

Kunsel shouldered the duffel bag. “Sir,” he acknowledged.

Sephiroth took the elevator up to Rufus’s office. He told the secretary manning the desk that he’d returned from the raid on Fuhito’s lab with important information for the Vice President’s ears only, and was immediately let in.

Rufus smirked and said, “I can guess what you’re about to say,” and did not expect it at all when Sephiroth manifested Masamune and lopped his head off.

Instead of exiting the way he’d come in, Sephiroth bought himself a bit of time by leaving via the office’s secret emergency evacuation route. It emptied out at a helipad on the sixtieth floor. From the helipad he scaled the walls to the President’s floor, circling the spacious outdoor entertainment area to enter from the side.

“President Shinra,” he greeted, calm and respectful as always.

“Sephiroth?” The President swiveled in his chair, which prevented him from reaching for his gun. Not that it would have made a difference, but Sephiroth took pride in a job well done.

“Forgive my unorthodox entry,” Sephiroth continued. “I’ve made an important discovery about the explosion in Weapons Development and I wanted you to know first. Scarlett should hear this as well. Would you put her on the line?”

President Shinra relaxed. “Of course. Well done. Just a moment.” He tapped a few buttons on his desk phone, turning the speaker on and asking his secretary to connect Scarlett.

“To what do I owe the honor, Mr. President?” Scarlett asked.

“I’m with Sephiroth,” said President Shinra. “He says he’s discovered something important about the explosion triggered by the power outage.”

“I’ll be right there—”

“Stay where you are,” Sephiroth instructed. “You’ll understand why in a moment.”

“Very intriguing, Sephiroth,” murmured Scarlett. “You have my attention.”

“I arranged the materia explosion.” Actually Olivia had, but this wasn’t actually a confession. “I wanted you injured, distracted, and self-absorbed.”

The line went silent.

“I’m in the President’s office,” he reminded her. “Send your best.”

And then, before the President could call for help, Sephiroth wrapped a hand around the man’s throat and squeezed until the bones cracked. “Good riddance,” he muttered, lopping off the President’s head and carrying it to the outdoor patio while he waited for Scarlett’s war machines to power up. He tossed the head over the side, aiming for the broad plaza leading up to the Tower’s front entrance.

Proof, for anyone who required it.

A few minutes later, he heard the whirr and crunch of robotic legs. A few taps on his new phone set off the bombs that his SOLDIERs had planted in the labs while touring them with Olivia. Lastly, he made a quick call to Veld.

The head of the Turks answered with a terse, “Veld speaking.”

“Rufus and the President are both dead,” said Sephiroth. “Send your Turks against me if you must, but there’s nothing to fight for and nothing to defend. Shinra is no more.”

He cut the call short before Veld could reply and settled into a fighting stance. The grand finale ought to be rather fun.

***

“This is not good,” Matt moaned, disembarking from the train that had finally climbed to the top of the plate and squeezing past the terrified crowd of people fighting with one another for space on the cars. The top of Shinra Tower had just exploded and that was not supposed to happen. “This is not good.”

Too many things had been veering off track. They’d been in Costa del Sol when the reactor blew up and that had been his first clue. Yeah, he and Vincent had destroyed Jenova and yeah, they’d killed Hojo, so they’d changed some things. But nothing they’d done could have snowballed like this. Hardly anyone knew about Jenova. Hardly anyone cared about Hojo.

He ran through the streets, aiming for the Tower. He should never have left Olivia. He’d thought she’d be safe for a while but he should have known—no one was ever safe at Shinra.

He reached the plaza in front of the Tower and paused to catch his breath. People were evacuating, but not as many as he would have expected. Hardly anyone, really. Another explosion rocked the building, creating a cloud of dust and concrete and shattered glass to rain down on the streets. A few civilians screamed, but SOLDIERs were keeping the area clear.

A lot of SOLDIERs. A few hundred of them? How many SOLDIERs were there? It seemed possible he was looking at... all of them?

Matt saw Zack in the middle of the crowd and ran to him. He was aware, peripherally, that Vincent had melted away at some point but that was to be expected. Vincent would be around somewhere, watching and listening.

“Is my sister in there?” Matt demanded.

Zack gave him a dark look. “Not you again.”

“My sister, Olivia.” Matt grabbed Zack’s arm and tried to shake, which was just demoralizing. He swayed and Zack didn’t budge. “You helped me find her, remember? Hojo had her.”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Zack. “I especially remember how you failed to mention that your sister is an evil genius.”

A what?

“Liv is just a kid,” Matt retorted, furious. Admittedly, he'd often joked that if he had to call anyone from his family to help him bury a body, he’d have called Liv. But a good brother wouldn't mention that just now. “A sweet, smart kid who spends most of her free time cooking.”

An incredulous scoffing noise drew Matt’s attention to a trooper who’d eased up to Zack’s side. A short, spiky-haired trooper. With big blue eyes and a surly expression. “Oh my god,” Matt whispered. “Cloud Strife.”

Cloud’s expression got even surlier.

“Don’t worry, buddy.” Zack clapped a hand on Cloud’s shoulder. “If he tells you how hot you’re going to be, I’ll break his nose.”

“No way,” Matt protested. “She doesn’t even—and she’s been hanging out with—” How was this fair? He got stuck slogging across two continents and pratfalling in front of every single cool character in the game while his baby sister chilled with Sephiroth and teased Cloud Strife?

Cloud crossed his arms over his chest and glanced away, his lower lip jutting out ever so slightly. “Hanging out? I had to babysit her.”

“For Sephiroth,” Zack added. “Because she’s an evil genius. I swear, none of this”—Zack flung an arm toward the Shinra Tower, the top third of which had been reduced to a terrifying sandwich of support struts and electrical fires—“would have happened if Sephiroth hadn’t met her.”

“You’re blaming all of that on my sister?” Matt repeated incredulously. “What the hell? Sephiroth is a delusional nutcase and my sister is a victim.”

The head of every SOLDIER in the plaza simultaneously swiveled toward Matt. Which… yeah. SOLDIER hearing. He’d forgotten.

“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, my guy,” said Zack. “But as it turns out, you’re the delusional one.”

Right at that moment, two flying robots that had been firing lasers into Shinra Tower crashed headlong into one another. The shockwave from the resulting explosion broke windows in every direction. Sephiroth appeared briefly once the smoke had cleared, balancing with apparent ease on a charred and exposed steel beam, his leather duster flapping in the wind.

“Holy sh*t,” Matt whispered. Sephiroth was bringing down the building? Had killing Jenova driven him around the bend? Had Matt’s attempt to save everyone just made the guy go mad in a gigantic, densely populated city instead of a small mountain town?

Soon a hulking, armored beast of a war machine appeared behind Sephiroth. He nimbly jumped through a hole in the floor and the robot blasted its way through, to follow. The trail of destruction circled the building before dropping down another floor.

“He’s not fighting them,” Matt realized. “He’s just leading them around in circles.”

“He’s using them to systematically demolish Shinra Tower,” said a stranger in a suit. Older, with steel gray hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Another man, handsome and bearded and also wearing a suit, hovered at his side. “And you have chosen not to intervene.”

“Yeah, well.” Zack’s expression firmed. “Shinra started out as an electric power company and it’s going to go back to being a power company.”

“Actually, that’s bad, too,” said Matt. “Mako power is killing Gaia and if you don’t switch to alternative energy sources soon you will literally render the entire planet uninhabitable.”

Zack took a slow, controlled breath. “Is there any way I can convince you not to mention this to your sister?”

Chapter 15: foolish mortals

Chapter Text

Olivia knew Sephiroth was on the move when Cissnei went very quiet. She was probably getting phone or radio updates that Olivia didn’t have access to. Without any access to news, Olivia pressed her worries aside and tried to enjoy the view as the helicopter winged its way out of the mountains.

She’d called Matt five or six times. He hadn’t answered, but that didn’t mean anything. He hadn’t been the best about returning calls back on Earth, and she doubted he fielded tons of important phone calls here in Gaia. He’d probably let his PHS sink to the bottom of whatever luggage he’d acquired, where it would gather dust until she actually found him.

And then he’d yell at her about not keeping in touch. Big brothers, ugh.

While they exchanged the helicopter for a jet in Corel, Cissnei got halfway through a cigarette before demanding, “Did you know about this?”

“Know about what?” Olivia wondered.

Cissnei narrowed her eyes. And then, with a frustrated groan, she dragged Olivia to the nearest hangar and turned on a radio. After fiddling with the controls, a familiarly low and rich voice emerged from the speakers.

“This is General Sephiroth speaking. The Shinra Electric Power Company is no more. Both President Shinra and his son, Vice-President Rufus Shinra, are dead and leave behind no heirs. Weapons Development, Scientific Research, and Public Safety have all been disbanded. Urban Development remains intact and in good order. SOLDIER will work with Urban Development to ensure the uninterrupted delivery of power across the continents. Local governments are encouraged to contact the Mayor of Midgar; she will organize a constitutional convention in the near future.” A pause. “This is General Sephiroth speaking. The Shinra Electric Power Company—”

Olivia listened carefully. It sounded like everything had gone off without a hitch.

“That,” said Cissnei, flipping the power button off. “Did you know about that.”

“I know now.”

Cissnei gave her a hard, furious look. Then she punched Olivia in the face.

“Ow!” Olivia cradled her hands over her face as she doubled over. “That hurt!”

“It hurt me more than it hurt you,” Cissnei snapped. “You’ve been playing dumb this whole time and I cannot believe I bought it.”

“If you think I’ve been playing dumb you’re setting your standards way too high,” Olivia whined. She patted at her face without standing, trying to locate the worst of the hurt. Upper left cheek, orbital area. Was she about to get her first black eye?

When Olivia finally stood, one hand clapped over her injured eye, Cissnei leaned in very, very close.

“If I find out that Sephiroth killed my Turks, I am going to throw you out of the helicopter and then I will land it and if you didn’t die during the fall, I’ll drag you back on board and do it again.”

Ah. One of the possibilities Olivia should perhaps have paid more attention to: what would happen if the Turks had nothing left to lose. But she’d been threatened with death an awful lot since she arrived on Gaia. So she said, “Keep me posted,” and headed for the jet.

They had to refuel in Costa del Sol, in the wee hours of the morning, but no one suggested stopping for the night. The pilot poured himself a thermos of coffee and flew straight to Kalm, where they exchanged the jet for a helicopter and Cissnei took over.

Sephiroth finally called around dawn. Olivia answered eagerly, holding the phone away from her ear so Cissnei could eavesdrop.

“Are you okay?” she asked. “Cissnei won’t tell me anything.”

“I picked up a few scratches,” Sephiroth answered. “Nothing to worry about. Where are you?”

“A couple of hours away, I think?”

“I’ll keep an eye out.” A pause. “Your brother is here.”

“Matt?” Olivia exclaimed. “He’s okay?”

“He is a pest,” said Sephiroth, and then hung up.

Olivia made a face at the phone. If Matt was making a pest of himself, he was probably okay.

Cissnei glared at her, silently judging. She’d spoken to the number two Turk—a guy named Tseng—and because Veld had ordered them to stand down, the small cadre of elite spies had made it through without any losses. So Olivia had been spared a fatal fall, but the atmosphere remained frosty.

***

Sephiroth saw the helicopter arrive, but he was caught up in a conversation with a corporal in Junon about the remaining Public Safety corps. He had to watch as Olivia tumbled out of the cabin and into her brother’s arms, the pair of them squawking loudly enough that he could hear it from a quarter mile away.

Matt dragged Olivia away from the plaza in front of the ruins of Shinra Tower, which had been converted into a makeshift operations hub. He pulled her into a side street and Sephiroth ended his phone call a little sooner than he would have liked. Whatever privileges Matt’s relation to Olivia gained him, he could not be trusted with her safety.

“I am so sorry I left you alone,” Matt was saying, “I was completely in the wrong and I’m going to make it up to you, I’m gonna get you out of here—”

Sephiroth would have liked to see him try. Which he would happily have said to the boy’s face, except that Olivia answered in a quick, sharp tone that he didn’t hear from her very often.

“I need you to tell me what happens in that game.”

Hmm. Better to wait, and hear an honest answer. Matt would not readily share whatever secret knowledge he possessed, and Olivia might feel honor-bound to keep her brother’s confidences.

“What happens is that Sephiroth tries to destroy the whole world!” Matt hissed. “He is teetering on the edge of a complete mental breakdown and when it hits, he’s an unstoppable maniac.”

He did what?

“I was worried it would be something like that,” said Olivia.

Sephiroth froze. Right down to his bones.

“We need to stop him right now, before it’s too late,” Matt continued urgently. “Maybe you can kill him in his sleep or—”

“Jesus, Matt,” Olivia cut in. “And I thought I was the one who’d spent too much time hanging out with villains.”

“Well if you have a better idea—”

“Here’s one. My better idea is that you tell me what happens in the game.”

“Well, there are a bunch of them and they don’t really form a proper timeline but basically, not long before we showed up these two other SOLDIERs, Genesis Rhapsodos and Angeal Hewley, they got sick and—”

“Yeah, Project G, I know,” Olivia interrupted.

“How could you possibly—”

“Because Sephiroth’s had me looking into this stuff since I arrived at the Tower,” Olivia answered.

Matt’s voice climbed a full octave. “And you told him?”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because that’s what drives him insane!” Matt shouted. Really shouted. He had no situational awareness at all. “He thinks this thing—Jenova—is his mom, but actually—”

“She’s not, yeah, we know.”

“How did you figure out…?”

“Why would Sephiroth need to be injected with his own mother’s DNA?” Olivia asked. “If Jenova were his mother, he’d inherit it naturally.”

“That’s… yeah. Huh. His mom is another scientist. Lucrecia or something. Not that he ever figures that out. Hojo was keeping Jenova in Nibelheim—”

Quickly, silently, Sephiroth climbed to the roof where he could listen undisturbed. His mother was a scientist. His mother had a name. He had a mother. A woman had conceived him, borne him... Abandoned him. But even the cruelty of abandonment was human, mundane even. A pain common to many.

“Is that why you went there?” Olivia interjected.

“Yeah, to destroy her. Burned her to dust, mixed the dust with sand and turned it into glass, buried it, it was a whole thing,” said Matt. “But in the games, yeah. After everything went wrong with Genesis and Angeal, Sephiroth wasn’t happy with Shinra anymore. So Hojo decides to turn lemons into lemonade and sends him to Nibelheim. Once Sephiroth is close enough, Jenova can talk to him inside his mind—“

“Jenova is alive?”

“I guess so? She convinces Sephiroth to join her in some sort of interplanetary journey of conquest—it’s completely nuts—”

“Don’t jump ahead,” Olivia interrupted. “This is the part I need to understand.”

“There’s nothing to understand. He has a breakdown. He snaps. The super soldier turns into a super villain.”

“Walk me through it anyhow,” Olivia insisted. “Sephiroth is in Nibelheim. Jenova is talking inside his mind. That’s the breaking point?”

“Yeah, that plus Hojo planted all this nonsense in his own lab, total lies, because he wanted Sephiroth to believe that Jenova was his mom, and that they were both part of this ancient race that was destined to rule the planet when actually she’s a cosmic space monster—“

“Like an alien?” said Olivia.

“Yeah.”

“I mean, why not. We’re aliens.”

“We’re not aliens,” Matt volleyed back.

“When we’re not on Earth, we’re aliens.”

“Whatever, Liv. The point is, she convinces him that he’s like her. You know, he’s different from everyone else because he was always meant to be a cosmic space monster, doing cosmic space monster things. Like devouring planets.”

“Don’t be glib. She promised him connection and family and freedom. That’s pretty powerful to someone who’s short on all three.” Olivia paused. “Crap. I can see how that might work.”

“Yeah, it works like a charm. Sephiroth joins Team Cosmic Space Monster and sets the whole town of Nibelheim on fire, then busts Jenova out of her tank.”

“He is a bit of a drama queen,” Olivia acknowledged. “But you said Sephiroth is the villain, right? Not Jenova?”

“Yeah, he absorbs her or joins with her or something. It’s not super clear. But the devs have said that Sephiroth is never under her control, he’s responsible for his own actions, so even though I destroyed Jenova—”

“He could still go insane,” Olivia finished. And if Sephiroth had wondered how seriously she took any of this conversation, her grim tone put an end to it.

“In the game, he tries to destroy the planet,” said Matt. “But he’s also just… really cruel. He’s obsessive and arrogant and manipulative. Like you could put a picture of him next to ‘hate boner’ in the dictionary.”

“Yeah, I can see that,” said Olivia, quite casually, and the anger that had been building up inside of Sephiroth dwindled to an echoing blankness. The one person who’d seemed to look at him and see something different. The one person. The one—

“Finally.” Matt groaned. “So we’re going to take care of him, right?”

“Matt, I’m in a relationship with Sephiroth. I’m pretty sure it’s serious.”

“Listen, Liv, I know he’s hot but—”

“This world is bursting at the seams with ridiculously hot men,” Olivia countered dismissively. “If that was all I cared about, I’d pick a different one. I really like Sephiroth.”

One kind word, after so many cruel ones. Sephiroth clung to it, and hated himself for it.

“Nobody likes Sephiroth,” Matt scoffed.

Olivia laughed. “I do. He’s been pretty great, actually. He’s really supportive and strong but also like, curious and open to suggestion. It’s such a cool—”

Matt made a retching noise.

“Which one of us is older again?” Olivia asked.

“Would you just think about how bad this could get?”

“No, actually.” Olivia’s tone, which had warmed, hardened again. “Maybe Sephiroth has a breaking point but you know what? So does everyone. The only thing that’s different about Sephiroth is that—”

“When he snaps he’ll literally kill hundreds of thousands of—”

“People are scared of him,” Olivia barreled on. “So they shut him down.”

“Yeah, it’s sad. Tragic, actually, because it’s going to end badly for him. And everyone else. Liv—”

“And because he’s been so throughly shut down, Sephiroth doesn’t understand his own emotions very well,” Olivia explained. “I think he’s been repressing for so long that he doesn’t really feel anything until he finds an outlet for it. But once he has the outlet, once he’s got the outward expression, he can match it to something happening internally and start making sense of it.”

Sephiroth closed his eyes. It had been a long time—years—since he’d felt so much like a specimen. Observed, measured, judged.

Found wanting.

Matt began, “You’re just making excuses—”

“It’s exciting for him. No, more than that. Important,” Olivia continued. “But he needs help to make that initial connection. He really can’t do it on his own.”

“Are you listening to me at all?”

“I think what we’ve been calling insanity… might just be wires getting crossed,” Olivia finished. “Jenova convincing him that love is some sort of parasitic relationship, or that freedom means annihilation. She set up those initial connections for him, and got it all wrong.”

For a moment, both siblings remained silent. Sephiroth felt a brief but sincere desire to slaughter them. Matt for every thought that had ever spawned inside his idiot brain, and Olivia—Olivia for having those words inside of her, all this time, but even more for speaking them aloud.

“sh*t,” said Matt.

“That’s it, right?” asked Olivia.

“That might be it,” Matt admitted. “But that doesn’t mean he can be saved.”

“He doesn’t need to be saved,” Olivia said, suddenly cheerful. “He’s doing just fine saving himself. He needs time. Time to figure out who he is and who he wants to be. And that’s what destroying Jenova and killing Hojo bought for him.”

“C’mon, Liv.” Matt groaned. “Why won’t you just—it’s a stupid risk.”

“Because too many people fall back on that exact excuse where he’s concerned.”

“At least, like. You shouldn’t be dating Sephiroth,” Matt added. “Seriously. Please. There’s no way he’s a good boyfriend.”

“Oh yeah? What are you going to do about it? Tell Mom?”

“Don’t be a jerk.”

“Sorry,” Olivia acknowledged. “Can we hit the plaza? I should see how everyone’s doing.”

“Nah, give me a minute. I need to think.”

Olivia gave her brother another hug (“If we made it this far, we can handle anything, you’ll see”) and left. Sephiroth summoned Masamune, fully intending to drive it through Matt’s heart, when someone right behind him said, “A fascinating conversation.”

Sephiroth whipped around, Masamune leading the way, but the speaker leapt nimbly out of the sword’s long reach. The intruder was tall, with tumbling black hair and sharp red eyes a few shades brighter than his tattered cloak.

“My name is Vincent Valentine,” he said, low enough that Matt couldn’t hear. “I’ve been looking after the boy, this last while.”

“Why bother?” Sephiroth wondered.

“For all the fascinating conversations,” Valentine answered, a faint smile appearing and then vanishing from pale lips. “I knew your mother.”

Sephiroth glanced toward the alley where Matt still lingered.

“If I’d told the boy, I would have given him her full name and made him remember it,” said Valentine. “It was Lucrecia Crescent. Dr. Lucrecia Crescent.”

And why should I care? he wanted to say, but after the conversation they’d just mutually overheard, he couldn’t.

“Tell me about her,” he said instead.

***

Olivia returned to the plaza, hoping to find Sephiroth. She’d seen him out of the corner of her eye before Matt dragged her off. But he’d vanished, which wasn’t all that surprising. He had to be busy. So she wandered around asking everyone she crossed paths with if they needed help until someone said yes, and then she pitched in with whatever task or errand they had for her.

Which quickly turned into a long, exhausting day that ended with Olivia setting up a makeshift kitchen in the middle of the plaza and roping a handful of the people she’d been helping earlier into service as sous-chefs, everyone frying potatoes and chopping salads and grating cheese while she rolled dough and mixed together dressings.

She’d long since discovered that food made in huge quantities, meant to feed as many people as possible and displease as few as possible, had a fairly low flavor ceiling. At weddings and other ceremonies, this could be maddening. As part of an emergency clean up effort, no one minded. They took their plates and sprawled around in little clusters as the sun set, happy to fill their bellies.

Eventually Sephiroth showed up again. She waved and got a strange, piercing look in reply. Discretion being the better part of valor, Olivia gave him some space. Eventually, after the knives had been put away and the chafing dishes scrubbed, Olivia braved the strange mood.

He sat at a round, sunshade-topped table with Zack, an older man she didn’t recognize, and the hot bearded guy she’d met at the café that one time, from Urban Development. Sephiroth snagged her around the waist as he slid along his section of bench, tugging her down beside him.

“Aki Hakaru,” said the older man, offering his hand. “Formerly Director of Urban Development.”

“Nice to meet you.” Olivia shook the offered hand. “Olivia.”

“And I understand that you’ve already met my right-hand man, Reeve Tuesti?” Aki gestured to the hot bearded guy.

“We had a memorable conversation,” replied Olivia, stifling a laugh when Sephiroth turned a vicious glare on Tuesti. “It would have tipped my hand to ask at the time—but did you do IT for Urban Development?”

“I did,” answered Tuesti, fussing with the rolled cuffs of his collared shirt. He, like everyone who’d spent the day at the plaza, was looking somewhat worse for wear. “Though I was primarily responsible for the design and maintenance of the reactors.”

“I’m still iffy on surrounding a densely populated urban area with volatile power plants,” said Olivia. “But the security really was top notch.”

Tuesti shot her a mild glare.

The conversation shifted to a discussion of finances. While some of Shinra’s assets—like stock shares—had been destroyed with the company, many had been put in limbo. The company’s full-to-bursting bank accounts, extensive landholdings, fleet of vehicles and the like comprised a very, very valuable pie that had to be divided carefully.

Olivia tried to listen but it had been thirty-plus hours since she slept, and the conversation was way more technical than anything she could follow at the moment. So instead she wriggled her way under Sephiroth’s arm and drowsed against his side. His heart beat very slowly at rest—usually around thirty beats a minute—and he breathed slowly, too, which she used to find unnerving. Now it meant she could recognize him with her eyes closed, and made her feel safe and relaxed.

Eventually, the conversation died down and the group drifted apart. Olivia stood and stretched, eyeing Sephiroth for signs of wear and tear.

“Where are we staying?” Sephiroth’s apartment had vanished with the Tower… and, come to think of it, with Shinra gone and Hojo dead, she didn’t have to stay with Sephiroth anymore. “Am I staying with you?”

“A hotel nearby.” He tipped his head to the east. “Walking distance.”

He headed in the right direction and Olivia kept pace. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, because she’d been playing her conversation with Matt over and over in her mind. If her theory was correct, she herself had taken on some of the role Jenova had played in the games. She’d been Sephiroth’s model and feedback for so many emotions that—she was realizing now, too late—were truly new to him.

And she’d been so guarded for so long. Appropriately, mind. She’d been something between a prisoner and a kept woman. Caution had been warranted. But, looking back, had Sephiroth destroyed Shinra for her? It had been her idea. She hadn’t thought he cared much about her at the time, but she’d definitely missed some cues… what if she’d been the one to make him associate destruction with devotion? What if she’d doomed him, and with him the world?

“That I should have given you more credit,” Olivia said aloud. “If I’d trusted you a little more, I’d have known where I stood a lot earlier. It’s not like you wouldn’t tell me. We could have talked about so many things… it might have been better.”

“Known where you stood?” Sephiroth echoed.

“For the longest time, I didn’t think you cared about me—”

“You think I care about you?” Sephiroth interrupted, sharp.

“Well.” Olivia took a deep breath. “I guess I should ask, huh? Do you?”

His left hand flexed, and then as fast as she could blink he had her back against a wall, pinned by the throat. “I’d rather hear about how much you care, Olivia.”

Olivia squirmed. Sephiroth was not playing around—he did not, in general, play around—but somehow that did not stop her from getting turned on. And his nostrils twitched, which meant he noticed. Ugh.

“A lot,” Olivia admitted. It wasn’t hard to talk; the hand on her throat held her firmly in place but hadn’t squeezed even a little. “I really like you and I can imagine staying together for a long time. Years. Longer. I don’t know. If you were interested, I’d be pretty happy about that.”

His hair fell in a curtain around her as he loomed, silvered by the streetlights overhead, the acid green of his irises casting an eerie green light across his high cheekbones. He released her just as suddenly as he’d seized her, resuming his progress toward the hotel.

“Really?” Olivia asked, trotting to keep up. “That’s it?”

Sephiroth didn’t answer.

“You are so frustrating sometimes,” she complained, expressing her discontent with a pointless shoulder-check.

He did not budge. He did, however, start to laugh. Not loudly, but a deep chuckle rumbled up from his chest and brought a rare smile to his face.

“And now you’re laughing?” Olivia made room as he reached for the brassy handle on a glass door that led into a spacious hotel lobby. She hurried through and waited for Sephiroth to join her, head ducked ever so slightly to hide the smile. “This is what tickles your funny bone? Tormenting me?”

He pressed the button for the elevator and herded her—as he habitually did—into the shelter of his body, like she was a VIP he was protecting from snipers.

“Don’t change,” he said, still warm. “I wouldn’t give up my weapon for anyone; you shouldn’t give up yours.”

Chapter 16: find a way out

Chapter Text

Matt called, “Aerith? Are you here?” as he pushed open the doors of the church. He hadn’t been back since his return to Midgar, mostly because he’d been waiting for a time when he knew Zack wouldn’t show up.

Aerith looked up from where she knelt by the bed of blooming lilies that glowed in the light let through by the ragged hole in the roof. “Matt? You’re back? What’s wrong? Something's… really wrong.”

“Yeah. Uh. I’ve got something to show you and you’re not going to like it but… please don’t panic?”

Aerith stood, slapping the dirt from her palms. “Show me?”

“It’s in my pocket.” Matt reached into the pocket of his jeans very slowly, pulling out a small glass jam jar, the kind that came with hotel breakfasts, within which a chunk of pale purple flesh wriggled. “It’s sealed and I’m not going to open it. I don’t know how close you need to be to recognize it, but you can keep your distance if you want to.”

Aerith recoiled, clutching at her head.

“Sorry,” Matt said. “If you or… the planet… has a better idea about how to go about this, I’m open to suggestion!”

“What is that?” Aerith demanded.

“It’s a piece of Jenova,” Matt answered. “The Calamity from the Sky? The thing that, uh. Wiped out the Ancients.”

“Why?” Aerith recoiled further, bombarded by the voices in her head. She snatched up a rake and shifted into a fighting stance, which would have been silly if he’d been Cloud or Reno but would absolutely work on Matt. “Why would you bring that here?”

“So… I know you don’t know how to do this yet, but you’re capable of casting a spell that will cleanse Jenova’s taint from living beings,” said Matt. “I’ve destroyed most of Jenova, but there are a few bits and pieces stashed around, so I figure we’ll need your holy water eventually. I kept this piece to test your attempts on.”

“What do you mean, I don’t know how yet?” Aerith demanded.

“Zack actually knows the whole story, if you wanted to ask him, but I didn’t know if you would. Because the reason you can cast this spell is because of your, uh, ancestry. And I didn’t know if you’d told him about that.”

“How do you—“ Aerith flinched, then rubbed her forehead. “All right, all right. I’m listening.”

***

They waited for the constitutional convention to end to look for a new apartment. It didn’t take long for Olivia to realize that a slew of new problems had rushed to fill in the space left by solving the old ones.

Sephiroth was loaded. Which she ought to have figured out, really, except that he lived like a (very sexually active) monk and wasn’t particularly materialistic so she hadn’t realized until he said, “I need a convenient location, space for a private dojo, and the best kitchen in the city,” and then the real estate agent went out and found all of those things.

The reality started to sink in at the first open house, as Olivia watched the real estate agent show off a sleek faucet positioned beside a state-of-the-art stove to make filling pots easier.

“I need to get a job,” she said, dazed.

“Why?” Sephiroth asked.

Olivia just stared the the pot faucet. It had a narrow spigot attached to a long, jointed neck so that it could reach every corner of the stove before being folded out of the way. This must be a good idea for someone—the elderly? people with disabilities?—but she could just fill pots at the sink and then carry them two whole feet to the stove. All the mako in her veins ought to be good for something.

“I wasn’t going to have a crisis of conscience when I had no choice about being dependent. This though…” Could really be a problem. “I need a job.”

“You’re not going to find a job that would afford you an apartment like this,” Sephiroth pointed out. “No decent work would.”

“When you see a big problem, break it down into manageable pieces and solve what you can,” said Olivia.

They settled on a place with an airy ‘conservatory’ that Sephiroth could adapt into a dojo and the kitchen of Olivia’s dreams. The sort of thing that ought to have been ten or twenty or never years in her future. It was utterly surreal, but in a very different way than arriving in Gaia had been.

She sent out a bunch of resumes, careful to avoid potential conflicts of interest, and accepted the first offer that sounded at all interesting. It was at a below-plate municipal water treatment plant. She had a lot to learn but relished the prospect of work that combined worthwhile problem-solving and physical activity.

Within her first few weeks on the job, stories about her started appearing in the Silver Elite, Sephiroth’s largest fan club. Her name, what she looked like, where she worked, alongside a lot of highly unflattering commentary. Which sucked. So she made a list of annoying things she could do with only one witness around—pick her nose, clip her nails without a waste receptacle nearby, track dirt on a carpet, that sort of thing—and waited to see which one actually showed up in the Silver Elite. Within a couple of weeks, she knew that one of her colleagues at the water treatment plant was selling the stories.

She took her evidence to the facility manager, who heard her out and immediately fired the guy who’d been selling the stories. And then she kept on going. She offered Olivia a raise, extra days off, a larger office, a gift certificate to a local leather goods store.

The manager was looking at Olivia but seeing Sephiroth, and she was terrified.

Olivia quit.

She sent out a new batch of resumes, this time with a much stricter filter. She opted for an entry level position at a library, figuring that librarians were often badasses and unlikely to hero worship the extremely sexy poster boy for a corrupt military organization.

Her new colleagues actively despised both Shinra and Sephiroth, which made them quite hostile to Olivia. She figured she’d have time to earn her place, but less than a week after starting work a hysterical fan jumped her in the stacks and sprayed her with acid while screaming, “Sephiroth is mine!”

Olivia’s quick reflexes spared her from suffering more than a few surface burns on her arm. With a little salve, they’d heal before she went home. She really did not want to know what Sephiroth would do if he found out about the attack.

Her colleagues tried to be sympathetic, but clearly found it difficult when Olivia was fine but the library itself had suffered damage—a dozen or so books had been splashed and ruined, and the acid had burned holes in the carpet. Then, when Olivia explained that they really, really needed to keep quiet about the attack they gave her these looks…

She quit the library job, too. It was too public. Her name was out there, her connection to Sephiroth known, and the guy cast a long shadow. Everywhere she turned, it loomed over her.

***

Sephiroth didn’t want Olivia to work—he couldn’t really approve of anything that took her attention away from him—and wasn’t sorry when she stopped. But she wouldn’t talk about it, and if prodded gave terse answers.

Then, after ignoring their brand new, state-of-the-art kitchen for weeks, she began cooking constantly. More food than any ten people could eat, let alone the two of them. She filled whole boxes with croissants and crusty baguettes, flaky biscuits and steamed dumplings, handing them out to anyone who showed the faintest interest, saying, “Please, you’re doing me a favor, it’ll go stale!” if the lucky recipient hesitated to walk away with what amounted to hundreds of gil worth of free food.

When Olivia sent a bewildered electrician home with a quart of freshly made chutney, Sephiroth decided he’d seen enough.

“If you cannot occupy yourself adequately, I will,” he announced.

Olivia, who’d already retreated to the kitchen and scattered a half-dozen bizarre ingredients across the vast, marble-topped island, fastened a glare on him. But then her shoulders slumped and she circled round to wrap her arms around his waist and rest her head on his chest.

“Thank you for the offer,” she said.

“It wasn’t an offer,” Sephiroth explained, annoyed. “It was an ultimatum.”

“It’s nice of you to worry for me.”

“Do not mistake indulgence for—”

“Sephiroth?”

“What.”

“What do you want to be doing in five years?”

His mind went blank.

“What could you be doing right now to make sure that in five years, you’re happier than you are today?”

Sephiroth couldn’t even begin to answer the question. If he’d ever experienced happiness, he wasn’t aware of it. How could he achieve something he couldn’t describe? Or even imagine?

Olivia tugged on his shoulders. “Lift me up?”

Sephiroth cupped her rear and lifted. She spread her legs and locked her ankles at the small of his back, speared her fingers through his hair and began to scratch at his scalp. It felt better than it had any right to, shivering pleasantly all the way down his neck.

“Can you sit down without letting me go?” Olivia asked, still scratching.

He didn’t have to do anything she asked. On the contrary: he could bend her to his will. Make her do as he pleased, or put her down and walk away without explanation.

…or he could humor her.

Sephiroth carried Olivia to the sofa and sat. Gently. She rewarded him by continuing to scratch at his scalp, leaning close to capture his lips with hers, plying him with slow, lazy kisses. His eyes slipped shut and this, too, she rewarded, running her thumbs along his eyebrows, massaging his temples, the back of his neck.

He relaxed by degrees, until his body felt heavy and his mind quiet. It surprised him when Olivia reached for the clasp on his trousers, opened them up and took him in hand. His mind had been elsewhere; he was completely soft.

“Don’t think about it,” Olivia murmured in his ear, one hand squeezing his co*ck while the other rubbed circles into his scalp. “Imagine you’re going to sleep.”

Sephiroth snorted. Even if he could, why would he want to?

“Dreaming, maybe? I never have sexy dreams, which is a real shame. They can be so fun and weird. Maybe that’s just the ones that people talk about, though. Maybe lots of sexy dreams are boring.” She shifted her weight onto her knees, rose up and bumped him a bit with her arms, and then—ah. Lined them up and sank back down, her inner muscles clenching hot and tight.

Even then, the coupling was—dreamlike, yes. Though he rarely remembered his dreams, and this would stay with him. How slowly Olivia moved, hovering close, soothing him all the while, murmuring nonsense. “You have such pretty ears.” The sort of thing that could be safely ignored.

Eventually, she guided his hand between them. He took the cue and worked her cl*t, opening his eyes for the first time since they’d started, because he liked to watch Olivia come. Liked it especially when she whimpered and shuddered and writhed, caught between torment and ecstasy.

This was something different, though. Her eyes were low-lidded, open just a slit, warm and unfocused. They squeezed shut as he tipped her into org*sm and she bowed into him, breath hot on his neck and lips moving silently.

He followed close behind, startled by the intensity of his release. By the racing of his heart. What had just happened?

After the constitutional convention, the Turks, SOLDIER, and Urban Development were absorbed into the new government. As the senior ranking officer, it fell to Sephiroth to assimilate the remnants of Public Safety—the troopers who hadn’t been fired or furloughed—into a combined force. When he succeeded, his unofficial appointment became official and he found himself the chief of his new nation’s military.

Public Safety’s sheer size, numbering hundreds of troopers for every one of Sephiroth’s SOLDIERs, had long since forced the bulk of the department out of the Tower. Their facilities hadn’t been damaged by the Tower’s collapse, and it took very little effort to adopt them as his new headquarters.

Serving the new government involved less corruption but more paperwork. Less prosecuting personal grievances for a petty tyrant and (as a direct consequence) less excitement, as well.

His enemies—the last of the people who had ever made him feel fear, however distantly—had died with Shinra. He had power, enough to shape the world to his will. His SOLDIERs received the care and attention they deserved, and flourished. Sephiroth established a new routine, substantially different from the old.

Substantially the same, too.

Still, he had meaningful work and few complaints. He’d experienced the opposite often enough to appreciate his situation. Deeply. The first real fly in the ointment appeared at the tail end of a sparring session with Zack—who’d improved markedly since they’d begun the practice—when the newly-appointed general said, in a diffident tone that boded ill, “Hey, Seph?”

“Out with it.”

“Uhh… okay. You know Kunsel’s been keeping an eye on the old Shinra warehouses, and especially lab equipment.”

“Yes.”

“He mentioned that Olivia requisitioned a few items that used to be used for mako showers.”

Sephiroth could not imagine what use Olivia might have for Hojo’s old apparatus. “And you want me to ask her about it?”

“Yeah. I mean, just to be clear, I already asked her about it,” Zack answered. “She told me to mind my own business. And asked me not to say anything to you.”

Unease settled in Sephiroth’s gut. “I’ll look into it.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Zack tried.

“Please do not attempt to reassure me.”

He went home that evening, the question burning on his tongue like a canker sore. But Olivia smiled at the sight of him. Asked about his day and interrupted his answers with questions, brighter and livelier than she’d been in some time.

He couldn’t put an end to her good mood. Not after watching her mope and stress bake for weeks. So instead of asking for an explanation, he spent the next day following her.

She visited a machinist’s shop and, after she left, Sephiroth took a look around himself. The owner, a man named Huel, had previously worked at Shinra. In Weapons Development. The merest hint of pressure convinced him to describe Olivia’s commission: six identical aluminum tanks, cylindrical, not quite as long as Sephiroth’s own arm and about eight inches across. Huel showed him the prototype, which Olivia had just approved. It looked a bit like a large fire extinguisher, without the nozzle attached.

“Did she tell you what she needed them for?” Sephiroth asked.

Huel shook his head. “I’m sorry, General. Not a word.”

Curious. Not particularly enlightening. But he’d figure it out.

That evening, Olivia announced that she’d be out of town for “a week or so.”

“No,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia rolled her eyes. ”I wasn’t asking.”

“No,” Sephiroth repeated. “Perhaps, if you’d done as I asked and learned to defend yourself—”

“I know this is hard to believe, but many people live to a ripe old age without mastering a weapon,” Olivia interrupted. “We just go about our business without getting into fights.”

“You ended up in Hojo’s lab,” Sephiroth snapped, abandoning the couch so that he could rise to his full, intimidating height. “You ended up in a cage. These blithe assurances of yours have been contradicted by facts so often I’m surprised you can make them with a straight face.”

Olivia shrugged. “Oh well. I’m still going.”

“I won’t allow it.”

“Uh-huh.” Olivia smirked. “What are you going to do? Tie me up?”

“Since you asked so nicely,” he seethed, then dragged her into the bedroom and hogtied her on the bed. And then, distracted by his own handiwork, he occupied himself with getting her off. Not just once but again and again, until every shudder of pleasure made the strained muscles in her back twitch and tears drenched her cheeks.

He untied her then, to prevent an injury. And then he took his time enjoying the wreck he’d made of her.

He felt certain she'd learned her lesson until she cuddled close and said, "You sure showed me," and he caught a hint of sarcasm through the exhausted slurring. So... apparently he'd have to try again. Later. He liked it when she clung to him after sex, but she didn't do it often. And he refused to speak his preference aloud until he'd figured out what prompted the behavior.

Olivia was still in bed when he left for work the next morning, but nowhere to be seen when he returned home. She’d left a small stack of boxed meals in the fridge, with a note taped to the top that read See you in a week.

***

“You seem unhappy,” said Aerith.

They were in the church again. Matt had made a bargain with Zack: he wouldn’t say anything to his sister about shutting down the reactors, so long as Zack pushed alternative energy projects as hard as he could. He’d just left for Cosmo Canyon with a contingent of ex-Urban Development engineers including Reeve Tuesti, so he was holding up his end of the bargain.

And the slice of Jenova they’d doused in Aerith’s latest rain spell had shrunk a bit, so they were making progress. It still wriggled, though.

“This is great,” he assured her. “You’re going to get this, I’m sure of it.”

“I know.” Aerith beamed. “I’ve got this in the bag. Which is why it’s so strange that you’re unhappy. You should be excited! Planning a party!”

Matt slumped. “I guess.”

“Wanna talk about it?” Aerith asked.

“My sister has been job hunting, you know? But she applies for the most boring jobs, like, seriously, who wants to work at a wastewater treatment plant? It's ridiculous. So I told her, ‘Why not join SOLDIER?’ She’s already got the enhancements. She knows the guy in charge, he’d zip her right through. But she just laughed and said ‘You know I don’t like military stuff.’”

“Ahhhh, I see,” said Aerith. “I bet you dreamed of being a big strong SOLDIER, huh?”

Matt nodded glumly. “Since I was little. I thought it would be so cool. Having super strength and getting a cool uniform and learning to use a sword. Sephiroth wants to teach her—the best swordsman in the whole world, he pesters her about it—and she refuses. She doesn’t care about any of it.”

“You’re jealous,” Aerith accused.

“I am so jealous,” Matt admitted. “I know it’s wrong. I wouldn’t say I had the easiest time of it, but the stuff she lived through is so much worse. I have no right to feel this way. I get that. And I didn’t, at first. Honestly. But… she fits here. She’s happy.”

“And you’re not,” said Aerith.

“And I’m not.”

***

Since Zack had left for Cosmo Canyon, Sephiroth went straight to Kunsel. “What equipment did she requisition?”

“Face masks and silicone tubing,” answered Kunsel. “The stuff we’d breathe through while immersed in mako tanks.”

Sephiroth mentally attached the mask and tubing to Huel’s tank prototype and came up with an unwieldy, inefficient delivery system for… poison? Completely useless, except that Sephiroth had a quick flash of Matt saying Maybe you should kill him in his sleep and Olivia saying I was worried it would be something like that.

If she had a stationary target—if he was asleep—she could hold the mask over his nose. He’d breathe in the poison, a little with each breath, probably with sleeping gas mixed in to keep him down… it might work.

“She left the city yesterday,” Sephiroth said next. “Can you find out where she went?”

Kunsel tapped at his PHS for a bit. “I can track her to Kalm, but she switched to a chocobo there.”

Sephiroth reined in his fury. If Kunsel couldn’t find her, no one short of a Turk would manage it. “Thank you,” he said, pleased when Kunsel flinched.

Over the next few days, he became more and more convinced that Olivia hadn’t just defied him—she’d plotted against him. She'd refused to name her destination or her purpose because she had no explanation. She’d realized that he’d caught the trail of her deceit and vanished before he could confront her with it.

With the prospect of betrayal so close, all the activities that might have brought him respite sharpened his fury. He couldn't retreat to his new apartment because Olivia had made it a home; he couldn't eat because Olivia had trained him to crave sensory pleasures; he couldn't sleep because she belonged in his bed.

The week Olivia had stolen passed at a snail’s pace. Every excruciating minute dragged on and on, while his temper burned ever hotter. He couldn’t reach her by PHS. She’d disabled the tracking. She’d thwarted him—betrayed him—plotted and lied—and he would find her, even if he had to track her across the whole of the planet, and teach her the consequences.

Then his PHS dinged. He glanced at the screen, saw Olivia’s name, and snarled every curse he knew.

Sorry I’m running late! read the text. No need to worry. I’ll be back in Midgar by morning.

Sephiroth crushed the phone. He hadn’t worried. But she ought to.

According to Kunsel, Olivia switched to a chocobo in Kalm. It stood to reason that she’d return the chocobo on her return, so he signed out a helicopter and flew it to Kalm. The town only boasted one small chocobo ranch that licensed travelers to leave with their birds, so Sephiroth made his way there and lay in wait.

Olivia arrived in the early afternoon, windswept and disheveled and full of energy. “The bird is a genius,” Olivia told the rancher, collecting her deposit. “But it turns out I am a terrible rider.”

The rancher asked if she’d run into any trouble. Sephiroth waited for the answer.

“Too much to tell! But I’m already late getting home.” Olivia smiled apologetically. “Thanks for the help, though, I’ll recommend the ranch to anyone who asks.”

She left at a jog, headed in the direction of… the bus station. Where she joined a short queue, shifting her weight impatiently and casting worried glances in the direction of Midgar.

Sephiroth retreated to the helicopter, returned it to the airfield in Midgar, and reached their apartment with time to spare. So he showered, to wash away any road dust. Olivia didn’t have the training to notice such clues, but better to be cautious. When Olivia arrived, she found him reclining on the sofa with a book open in his lap.

“Sorry I’m late.” She dropped her luggage at the door, toed off her shoes, and came straight to him. “Are you mad? You’re probably mad, huh?”

Furious.

She cupped his cheeks and tilted his face up, examined his expression. She wouldn’t glean anything from it; with his upbringing, he’d learned to hide his thoughts and emotions in the cradle.

“You’ve been driving yourself crazy, haven’t you?” She sighed, fondly exasperated. “Have you eaten? Can I make you something?”

Sephiroth swallowed. The last thing he’d eaten was a ration bar, two days earlier. He’d had to force down every bite.

“Please,” he said, despite himself.

“Of course.” Olivia kissed his brow. “In the mood for anything in particular?”

Sephiroth shook his head.

“Good!” She beamed and returned to her luggage, pawing through a disordered mess of clothing and toiletries before snatching up a bag full of… flour? “It's ground from a grain that only grows in this one little microclimate to the west. The locals mostly made flatbread. It doesn’t taste like anything I’ve ever eaten before—kind of nutty? Really hard to describe.”

Sephiroth stood, put the book to the side—he’d barely glanced at the title—and followed Olivia to the kitchen. “Where did you go?”

“Well…” She glanced back at him, a frown pinching at her brows. “I’d rather not say.”

“Why not?”

“Hmm.” She opened up the fridge, found it empty, and shot him a reproachful look. Then she tried the freezer, pulling out a few tubs and setting them aside while she washed her hands. “I’ve been working on something and I’d like for it to be a surprise.”

“I do not enjoy surprises,” said Sephiroth. He loathed them.

“All the more reason for me to make this one good!” Olivia answered cheerily. “If you take off a few days next week, we could go down to Mideel together and I’ll tell you everything. Any chance I can persuade you?”

“What’s in Mideel?”

“We’d find out together, actually.” Olivia grinned. “That’s part of the fun.”

She poured the flour into a large bowl, added salt and some other powder. Tossed it, added oil and… water? A bit of kneading transformed the mixture into a smooth dough, slightly brown in color.

She set it aside and opened up the freezer tubs, scooping a spicy roasted red pepper sauce into a pan and setting the burner to low. Sephiroth watched her work, feeling calmer by the minute.

Quickly, faster than her eyes could track, he slipped behind Olivia and grabbed her by the neck, pushing her to her knees while he worked his belts with the other hand.

She twisted in alarm and he snarled his fingers in her hair to hold her in place, straining and awkward, while he wrapped his hand around his co*ck and pumped. “Open your mouth,” he instructed, and then proceeded to splatter his seed across her eyes—hurriedly shut—and cheeks and nose.

“Hold it open.” He dropped to his knees and scooped the mess slowly, carefully into her mouth. “Swallow.”

Olivia’s obedience eased the coiled beast inside of him. She was his. She would only ever be his. He breathed deep, taking in their mingled scents, tipped her head back further so he could taste himself on her.

And he—settled.

Sephiroth had imagined himself saying a thousand cruel things. He’d prepared threats and insults, humiliations and hurts. All dissolved into smoke. Just knowing that she’d hurried back, that she’d sensed his anger and still come closer, that she grew pliant in his grip… Perhaps she did plan to betray him. Perhaps, as he suspected, she’d left in search of a poison strong enough to kill him. She’d fail, like everyone else who’d tried. So why should he care? Why should he give up what he wanted?

“I missed you too,” said Olivia, squirming on his lap. “But not in the eye, okay? That stuff stings.”

Sephiroth bit her shoulder.

“I’ll take that as a reluctant concession.” Olivia untangled her limbs and tugged him upright as she stood. “Now shoo. The sauce is going to burn and the fridge is empty and I’m hungry, too.”

Sephiroth returned to his seat. He watched, wallowing in contentment, as Olivia pan-fried the dough, and after a week when the mere sight of food made his stomach revolt, he ate with pleasure.

Olivia pushed her empty plate in his direction and stretched, both arms high overhead. “I’m going to shower while you wash the dishes. And then…” She peeked at him through one eye. “You’re not tired, right?”

The next morning, Sephiroth called Olivia from work to ask when she wanted to leave for Mideel, so he could arrange transport.

“We’re driving!” she replied.

“Why?” Sephiroth asked.

“It’s a surprise.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“Yes it is,” Olivia chirped back. “We can’t fly, we have to drive, I’ve already arranged everything.”

“I’m driving.”

Olivia laughed, openly mocking. “I knew you were going to say that. Sure, dude. You can drive.”

Sephiroth pulled the phone away from his ear so he could glare at it. How could she have known? What implication had he missed?

“No flying!” Olivia shouted into the speaker. “See you later! Have a nice day!”

She hung up. Sephiroth continued to glare at his phone. Why did they have to drive? What could she possibly have planned?

He would have preferred to drop everything and investigate himself, but with a week of leave coming up and the better part of a day lost during his jaunt to Kalm, it would have been irresponsible. After some deliberation, he called the ex-trooper, Cloud Strife, and assigned him to the task.

Strife wore a captain’s bars now, having been promoted in the aftermath of the Tower’s fall. He'd gained confidence along the way, enough to look Sephiroth right in the eye as they spoke. Not a small change.

“You want me to follow your girlfriend?” Strife asked in a surly tone that bordered on insubordination.

Sephiroth considered his response. A good soldier executed orders to the best of their ability with or without a proper explanation, but the circ*mstances were questionable. “She may be planning an assassination.”

Strife co*cked an eyebrow. “Of who?”

“Me.”

Shock wiped the disgruntlement off the boy’s face. “No! But… why?”

“Experience has taught me that discovering why someone has betrayed you is rarely a comfort,” Sephiroth answered. “More often, it is another blow.”

Strife heaved an oddly despondent sigh.

“She won’t succeed,” Sephiroth assured him. “But it will be best for everyone if I am prepared.”

“Sir.” Strife saluted. “I won’t let her out of my sight.”

Sephiroth returned to work, confident that he would be ready when the time came. He compartmentalized and focused, putting in extra hours in order to clear the way for his absence.

Strife returned the next day. “She’s definitely up to something, sir,” said the young captain. “She’s got these tanks that look like fire extinguishers, a bit bigger, and a machine of some kind to fill them with gas. Once they’re full, she puts on a mask and breathes it in for a while. And times it.”

“Testing an antidote, perhaps?” Sephiroth wondered aloud.

“I broke into the building at night to get a closer look at the machine and it’s covered in chemical formulae, but I don’t know what any of it means. I did make a copy, though…”

Strife showed Sephiroth the copy. It had columns for oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and rows with varying percentages entered in. “There must be something wrong here,” Sephiroth told him, disappointed. “These aren’t formulae at all. It looks like… air? The chemical composition of air?”

“I’ll go back and take another look. I might have missed something.”

“Caution is paramount,” Sephiroth warned him.

But when Strife returned, the machine and its incriminating formulae were gone.

Meanwhile, Kunsel reported another requisition from the old Shinra stores. This time, Olivia had laid claim to gear dating back to the Wutai war, for aquatic insertions. Utterly mystifying. Did Olivia plan to kill him on the way to Mideel and then escape overseas? Surely she could come up with a better plan.

But then, for all her many insights, she had a fairly rudimentary grasp of logistics.

Strife had little new to report as the date of departure loomed. Only that Olivia had packed all the odd equipment into a rented truck, with an excessive quantity of padding.

“The tanks might be explosive,” Strife suggested. “She seemed really worried about bumping them.”

“It’s not as much as I would have liked,” Sephiroth said. “But it will have to do. I’ll see you in a week, Captain Strife.”

Olivia had covered her equipment with heavy blankets, an insultingly low-effort form of subterfuge, but she did insist on loading his bag into the trunk to keep him from getting a good look.

Sephiroth climbed behind the wheel he asked, “Where to?”

“Mideel,” she said.

He clarified. “By what route?”

“Whichever you prefer. You’re the driver.”

As he’d insisted, and she’d predicted. But if she’d pointed him toward a preferred route, he might have divined some of her plan from it. The trap must lie in Mideel itself.

She put on music while he drove, changing it often until she found things that he liked—he wasn’t sure how she could tell, but she had the knack for it—which she’d let run. She devised childish games and goaded him into participating. One called ‘I spy,’ another called ‘Twenty questions.’ She did not act like a woman bent on murder, but then again, when had she?

He tried to ignore the games but persistent nagging paid off in the end. He would never admit to enjoying them, but he won more than fifty percent of the time and found some satisfaction in Olivia’s good-humored complaints.

She had not brought along any prepared meals, and he failed to hide his disappointment.

“I know, I know,” Olivia said, in a poor attempt at empathy. “But road trips are for fast food! You have to stop at whatever random places you see and test your luck, it’s the rule.”

“I’d ask why, but it’s been weeks since you’ve given me a straight answer,” Sephiroth groused.

“That’s fair,” Olivia admitted. “Ever since the Tower fell I’ve been feeling homesick. Which makes sense. All the feelings I’d been suppressing because I was in emergency mode are making themselves heard. I can’t go home, obviously. I’m not even sure I’d want to at this point… but I can bring a little bit of my home to Gaia. Do some of the things that used to make me happy.”

“Like driving long distances, eating terrible food, and playing childish games?”

“Exactly.” Olivia propped her feet up on the dashboard of the truck, crossed at the ankles. “If you really don’t like the games, we can just talk.”

“Very well. Explain how you can find happiness in activities that, given what I know of your character, you ought to dislike.”

“Oh, it’s just how our dumb human brains work,” Olivia answered. “Really memorable experiences are kind of magical, one-off things. You can’t recreate them. But the place where you were, the things you were doing when the magic struck, they’ll absorb some of the magic. So you’ll get an echo if you go back, do it again.”

“You’ll use it up,” corrected Sephiroth, remembering how he’d snuck into Genesis or Angeal’s apartments in the weeks after they defected. At first, he’d felt close to them. But the feeling wore off with repetition. By the time he’d led Olivia through the vents, he couldn’t feel Genesis in the apartment at all.

“Yeah, mostly,” Olivia agreed. “But sometimes lightning strikes twice. Or three times. I have a lot of good memories associated with road trips.”

Sephiroth drove in silence, clenching his teeth on the words in his mouth. But eventually they escaped. “I have very few good memories.”

“It’s never too late to make some.” Olivia pointed at a farmstead advertising fresh jerky and homemade pie. “Hey, let’s stop. See if the pie’s any good.”

When they reached Mideel, she directed him to a company that rented boats. Olivia had made arrangements in advance, and the proprietor handed over the keys to a mid-sized houseboat docked at the pier behind his shop, along with a map of the surrounding waters.

“So here’s where I explain what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks,” said Olivia. “I’ve been trying to reverse engineer the equipment we use back home to dive underwater… which turns out to be way, way more complicated than I had initially expected. Even though you already have most of the tech on Gaia, figuring out how to put it together in a new way was an absolute nightmare.”

Olivia pulled the blankets away from the machinery she’d packed so carefully into the trunk, the six aluminum cylinders now sealed by a valve with a pressure gauge, alongside several boxes. “We’ll strap these tanks to our backs, and they’ll release compressed air into some tubes with a mouthpiece at the end. The hardest part was mathing out the dive tables—I am not trusting mako to fix the bends. I have a couple of wetsuits that should fit, weight belts, a depth gauge… will you help me load all of this stuff into the boat?”

Sephiroth examined each item carefully as he carried it to the vessel. The greatest danger clearly lay in the tanks. She could have put anything in them.

Once the equipment had been transferred to the boat, Olivia took the wheel and steered them out of the harbor. “There are coral reefs in the area, which are usually great for scuba diving. But it’s not the safest sport, and I’m worried because the atmosphere here is clearly different than the atmosphere on Earth, which is going to change things.

“You know how when you climb to a high altitude the air is thinner? That’s because the atmospheric pressure is less. When you descend in the water, the pressure is greater, and it increases really fast. If you go slowly, your body adjusts naturally. But if you go quickly, the air in your body won’t keep up with the changes and you can rupture your ears or your lungs… in really severe cases, the changes affect your blood and you can end up dead or with brain damage.”

Compliments to Olivia. He’d underestimated her. She had concocted a novel and highly creative way to kill him.

“So we’re going to play it really safe,” Olivia continued. “We’re going to stick to shallow dives, so all changes in depth will be extra super slow. But even though I’ve done my best, it’s still pretty dangerous. If you’re not up for the risk, we don’t have to dive at all.”

“I’m eager to see what you have prepared,” said Sephiroth.

Olivia shot him a worried glance, but quickly moved on to a long list of instructions: hand signs so they could communicate underwater, how to flush water from his mask, how to flush water from his regulator, how to borrow Olivia’s spare regulator should his tank malfunction, or vice versa. How to breathe, how to adjust his buoyancy, how to equalize his sinuses.

Eventually, she produced the aquatic insertion kit—a wetsuit, mask, and fins—and allowed him to gear up. Because he still suspected poison would be key to her plan, he switched their air tanks when she wasn’t looking.

She remained oblivious, but his fierce satisfaction at turning the tables quickly gave way to worry. Poisons that could pass quickly and harmlessly through his system would kill Olivia… and he didn’t want her to die. Even now, he wanted her alive and healthy.

So, this time when she was looking, he switched the tanks again. She didn't react. Had she poisoned all the tanks, and taken an antidote? When? He ought to have noticed.

She jumped in the water, made a ring of her thumb and forefinger to signal ‘okay’, and dropped below the surface. He followed and, within seconds, the whole world inverted. Instead of standing on the ground with the sky stretching infinitely above, he floated atop a vast abyss. It went down and down, and he could move freely through it, in all three dimensions, with a flick of his fins.

Schools of fish swept by, moving in eerie synchronicity. Coral bloomed in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes and colors; leaves of seaweed rippled in the current. Eels ducked out of sight, turtles moved with grace, octopi scuttled along the floor. Bathed in blue and profound quiet, he nonetheless saw color everywhere. Movement. A whole new world.

Much too soon, Olivia tugged at his arm, insistently making a thumbs up sign. Demanding that he ascend. He didn’t want to, but she tapped her watch, then the depth gauge, and repeated the thumbs up gesture.

He followed her to the surface and spat out the mouthpiece, feeling light right down to his soul. All his grievances, all his burdens had melted away, leaving him to fully inhabit a moment of such perfection that he never wanted it to end.

Olivia had not been plotting an assassination, she had been preparing a gift. And even though she’d laid out the terms of the exchange, how one gained power over others by giving them things, he would do anything for her. Anything, everything. He knew it, and he didn't mind. This gift had been priceless; whatever she wanted would be cheap by comparison.

“I understand,” he said, lazily fanning his fins to hold himself upright.

Olivia’s eyes shone. Her sudden smile made apples of her cheeks. “You loved it.”

Sephiroth nodded. He loved… it.

“I’m so glad.” She nodded at the boat. “We can do one more dive today, at a different spot?”

***

“You can go home now,” Aerith said suddenly.

Matt looked up from the weeding she’d roped him into. According to Aerith, all the gardening time she’d lost trying to make healing rain had to be made up somehow, and since he’d assigned her the task…

He didn’t mind. Who wouldn’t want to be gently bullied by Aerith? And, bonus, so far he hadn’t done anything extraordinarily embarrassing in front of her. Yeah, she'd convinced him to let the kids at the Leaf House climb on his back while he hopped around yelling, "Wark!" but he'd done that because he was a good person who liked making orphans happy.

“What do you mean?” Matt asked.

“Back to your world.” Aerith’s expression turned distant, her voice dreamy. “The planet needed both of you. It sent… dreams? Warnings?… and waited. And waited. Someone with your foreknowledge needed to make contact with someone that Sephiroth could… attach to. Someone from another world.”

Aerith gasped. “Sephiroth’s feelings of… attachment… are strong enough to prevent his soul from dissolving into the Lifestream. When he fixated on someone from Gaia, he couldn't die. He couldn't be killed. But Olivia wasn’t born from the Lifestream and cannot return to it. When she dies, Sephiroth will lose his anchor on Gaia.”

“Wait a second,” Matt objected. “Are you saying someone’s going to kill my sister? Because—”

“Of course not, silly!” Aerith snapped out of her trance and laughed her tinkling laugh. “The Planet sees time differently than we do. For us, a lifetime is long. But for the Planet, it’s just a wink of an eye. Olivia can live to a ripe old age, and that’s fine. That’s great. So long as she’s mortal, Sephiroth is too.”

“What does that have to do with going home?” Matt wondered.

“Like I said, the Planet sees time differently than we do. It’s not so linear. And the Planet is certain now that Sephiroth is—committed? There’s no going back for him. If you and Olivia returned home, he would never move on from her. He would… try to reach her, every day, for so long as he lived. Nothing else would matter. Until, eventually, he died.”

“That’s… grim,” said Matt.

“A little!” Aerith agreed. “But you saved us, so the Planet wants you to have the choice. Both of you.”

Chapter 17: there's always my way

Chapter Text

Olivia’s first thought, after Matt explained that he’d found a way home, was that she should at least pretend to consider it. She loved her brother. She loved her family. She had no interest in going back, but somehow it seemed important to hide that for a while.

Olivia had arrived on Gaia at just the right time, or—depending on who was looking—just the wrong time. If she’d been a few years older, like Matt, she’d have had a life to return to. A job and an apartment, all that jazz. Things he’d been working on, things he wanted to finish. Roots that didn’t wither easily.

But Olivia had just graduated from college. She’d been ready to start a new life, ready to find her own path, ready to try something new. And she had. In this strange, occasionally nightmarish fantasy world.

If she’d had no choice about going back, she’d have managed. But what could she ever accomplish on Earth to compare with kickstarting a revolution? How amazing would a guy have to be to make her forget Sephiroth? How much money would she have to earn before she’d have a kitchen half as cool as her new kitchen? Plus, like, would her eyes stop glowing? What if they didn’t?

“I need to think about it,” said Olivia.

“Okay.” Matt looked like he’d heard her real answer and not her pretend one. “There’s no rush.”

“You know I love you, right?” Olivia twitched and then, because she knew that deciding to stay would hurt the people she loved, she scrambled over to her brother and wrapped him in the biggest hug she could.

He hugged back, and for a moment she doubted. Could she really give up her family? Did she really want to live in a world where no one would believe in her, or fight for her, the way Matt had? Not for any reason, not with any angle, just because siblings looked out for one another.

“I know.” He hugged back, solid and comforting. “I get it, Liv. If I were in your shoes, I’d stay, too.”

“I’m thinking about it!” Olivia insisted.

“You’ve got a lot to think about,” Matt agreed.

It was nice of him to say something kind, instead of calling her out again. God, she’d miss him so much.

***

Zack finished his breakfast shake and rinsed the glass before leaving it at the bottom of the sink. “Gotta run,” he told his new roommate, who hunched blearily over his soup-bowl-masquerading-as-a-coffee-cup. Whatever his complaints about mako, it had spared him a caffeine addiction. “Seph is going to knock me around bright and early today. Catch you later?”

Cloud squinted up at him. “Give me a minute and I’ll come with.”

Zack shrugged. “Sure. Witness my humiliation. What do I care? Pride is gone, uh… hmm… how does it go?”

“You’re getting better,” Cloud offered.

“Against everyone else,” Zack whined. “Would it be too much to beat Seph in a spar just once?”

Cloud took a slow sip of coffee.

“Okay, yeah, it’s a big ask. Still. A man’s gotta have dreams.”

Zack took pity and gave Cloud five minutes, enough to empty the coffee cup, and they headed out together. The new facility, housed in an old Weapons Department warehouse, still felt a bit makeshift. It didn’t have many windows, and Zack had gotten used to a lot more privacy in the old SOLDIER gym. Still, it had all the necessary equipment.

Zack headed for the padded mats in the back reserved for sparring when a smooth, deep, familiar voice called, “Zack?”

He turned on his heel and—yeah, that was Sephiroth. Surrounded by a handful of soldiers, only half with the telltale mako eyes, with his coat off and his hair in a high ponytail but… still. Zack had walked right by him and that never happened. Seph’s aura was usually so chilling and huge and unmistakable.

It also usually kept the hoi polloi away. He’d never seen so may people crowding around the First before. Zack only recognized a few of them; one appeared to be a freshly-minted cadet.

“Can’t believe I didn’t see you there,” said Zack, joining the group and offering fist bumps where required.

“Don’t let your guard down, even in familiar settings,” Sephiroth advised, separating himself from the others before, with an awkward nod, turning his back on them. “Captain Strife.”

Cloud saluted. “I hoped to follow up on last week’s assignment.”

“Ah.” Sephiroth cast a wary glance over his shoulder and waited until they’d gained a bit more distance before dropping his voice to ask, “Her behavior struck you as suspicious, did it not?”

Cloud smiled brightly. “Are you asking because it wasn’t?”

“As it turns out, no. It was a gift,” Sephiroth admitted. “The equipment allowed us to dive deep underwater and remain submerged for hours at a time.”

“That’s what I wanted to know.” Cloud waved. “Have fun.”

Zack watched Cloud go, the guilt that dogged him flaring. Watching his friend rise through the ranks vindicated his early faith in his little buddy’s potential, but it killed him that Cloud could never become a SOLDIER.

“Something wrong?” Sephiroth asked.

“No.” Zack shook off the mood and turned his attention back where it belonged. Nothing he could do about it now. “What’s this about diving underwater? Are we invading another island? Do we have to?”

“Diving for leisure,” Sephiroth answered. “For the joy of exploring an utterly alien environment.”

“Wait, wait…” Zack tried to wrap around what Sephiroth had just said. “You went on vacation?”

Sephiroth nodded.

“You went on one vacation and came back like…”

Sephiroth co*cked an eyebrow. “Like…?”

Zack gestured vaguely.

Sephiroth waited, the troll. “I’m not going to guess.”

“Like a different person,” Zack finished.

Sephiroth blinked. “Sorry to disappoint.”

“No, no, that’s not it!” Zack clapped a hand on Sephiroth’s shoulder and then froze. It was the sort of thing he did often, unthinkingly, with everyone he knew… except for Sephiroth. Usually Zack couldn’t get close to the guy without feeling like whatever limb had strayed inside the no-go zone had frostbite.

They both stared at his hand for a moment.

Zack yanked his hand away. “Haha!” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m happy for you! Seriously!”

“Hm.” The corner of Sephiroth’s mouth twitched. “Very convincing.”

“I am, I am, I just…” and then Zack trailed off, because he didn’t have words for the feeling that had been weighing on his back like a behemoth.

“Sparring clears the mind,” said Sephiroth, and manifested Masamune.

Zack leapt backward before Sephiroth won the first round with one of his borderline-cheating tricks. Masamune swished through thin air where his shins had been and Zack couldn’t help a quick jeer. “Too slow!”

“Slow?” Sephiroth echoed, with relish.

Between the vacation and Zack’s extended trip to Cosmo Canyon, he’d forgotten why he never trash talked Sephiroth. The bastard took too much pleasure in making Zack eat his words.

In this case: Sephiroth launched himself at the wall and then… kicked off? Hard to tell because he moved so fast he blurred. Zack extended all his senses, but not in time: Sephiroth’s palm landed between his shoulderblades and shoved.

Zack twisted to take the fall on one shoulder and put the maximum momentum into his roll, springing up on the other side of the mats with his sword already in a guard position.

“Show-off,” Zack complained.

“I thought you’d thank me for showing mercy,” Sephiroth returned, standing at apparent ease with Masamune held high. “Such ingratitude.”

“Your banter game is weak,” Zack taunted, closing the distance between them in two quick strides and forcing Sephiroth to move. He hadn’t beaten Sephiroth—he had serious doubts about whether he ever would—but he could honestly claim that these days, he made Seph work for his victories.

Zack called up a shield spell but waited to cast it until Sephiroth risked an approach. Masamune bounced against Zack’s shoulder and while Sephiroth was momentarily jarred by the impact, Zack swung the Buster high and fast.

Sephiroth dodged, but that had been close—it really had!

Unfortunately, the close call pushed Sephiroth into no-more-playing-around mode, which was like his usual mode only meaner. Within seconds, Zack found himself disarmed with the sharp edge of Masamune tickling his throat.

“Good,” said Sephiroth, withdrawing. “Again.”

After a quick water break, they squared off and started round two. By the end of the hour, Zack was exhausted and dripping.

“So,” said Sephiroth, while he toweled off. “You are unhappy. What needs to be done?”

“Not that kind of problem, I’m afraid.” Zack sighed. “Every day, I look around and… this is better. Everything is better. So why wasn’t I on board? I knew what was going on at Shinra, I knew how wrong it all was. And yet, when you set out to change things, I tried to talk you out of it.”

Zack rolled his shoulders, resettling the Buster in its harness. “If it were up to me, nothing would have changed. That’s… I am so ashamed.”

“It is in your nature to find something—or someone—to save,” said Sephiroth. “And to believe in people, long after everyone else would have given up.”

“If I believed in people, Cloud would be a SOLDIER,” Zack countered. “I’d have had more faith in him, and you, and the program. He trusted me, and I stomped all over his dreams.”

“There is a difference between optimism and stupidity,” said Sephiroth. “And I don’t ask for you advice because you’re stupid.”

“But you don’t ask me for advice…” Zack scratched the back of his head. Had he just been insulted? If he had to think about it, probably.

Sephiroth co*cked an eyebrow.

“I’d have noticed,” Zack insisted.

“Apparently not.” Sephiroth sighed. “We have enough serum left to make approximately one hundred new SOLDIERs. If Cloud is still interested, he could get his first shot tomorrow.”

“Is that—are you serious?”

“He’s talented and reliable.” Sephiroth glanced at the clock on the wall and then back at Zack. “We are all subject to our own natures, Zack. I am built for destruction at scale, and I have been glad of it exactly once: when I had the opportunity to turn my abilities on the people who made me this way. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Sephiroth strode away before Zack could reply. Maybe that was for the best. He headed for the showers, letting his mind wander as he cleaned off. He did feel better, to his surprise. He was still disappointed in himself—still sick at heart—but it helped to see another side to the story. An angle he hadn’t let himself consider.

Zack dressed and made his way up to the roof. The new facilities weren’t half as tall as the tower, and didn’t have much of a view, but he could watch the steam rising from the reactors and see a haze at the horizon, heat rising off the Wastes.

They were going to start piloting alternative energy programs in Sector 2, instead of rebuilding the reactor. Tuesti thought it would be possible to phase out mako energy entirely within twenty years. Maybe, if Zack lived long enough, one day he’d look past the edge of the plate and see green again. Farms. Paddocks. Parks.

Shinra might be gone, but life went on. There’d be new problems, and new choices. He’d do better next time.

***

A discreet light pulsed on Tseng’s sleek, shiny intercom. It was brand new, like everything in his office. Depending on his mood, the surroundings reminded him either of how much he’d lost or to appreciate the fresh start.

Preparing for his next appointment had tipped the balance toward the former.

The Turks—assimilated into the new government as Administrative Research—had set up shop in a modest office building a fifteen minute walk away from the foundations of what would eventually become a new capitol complex. Tseng liked the location. Pleasant but unassuming, convenient but not busy, near to a half dozen good takeout spots. If they were ever offered space in the new capitol, he’d turn it down.

And he’d be the one to make the call, most likely. Veld had taken advantage of the fact that retirement was a real option now, instead of a bleak euphemism. He’d said it was time for a changing of the guard and retired.

Tseng put his finger to the touch button.

“Your ten-thirty is here,” said his secretary.

“Send her in.”

A moment later, Olivia walked through the door. Although they’d never met face-to-face, all footage of Sephiroth had automatically been filtered from feeds monitored by Tower security and directed to the Turks for review. So he’d reviewed a fair bit of surveillance tape in which she appeared.

Olivia was not extraordinary in any obvious way. To the contrary, she seemed quite aggressively normal. Around Sephiroth. He hadn’t recognized that for a red flag until too late.

After the Tower came down, he’d snagged on a memory of reviewing after-action reports while tape of Sephiroth in the training room played on a small laptop screen. Olivia sprawled in a corner, her back propped against a duffel bag, reading a book while Sephiroth demolished virtual armies.

And that was it. Boring tape. Nothing happened. But almost no one—Tseng would, until quite recently, have made the statement unequivocal: no one—could relax around Sephiroth. Almost no one could take their eyes off of him in battle mode, let alone focus on a book. But Olivia scanned the lines; she turned the pages.

Sephiroth had noticed the oddity before Tseng. He’d maneuvered himself closer to Olivia and swung the tip of Masamune dangerously close to her unprotected face. She’d looked up and, while the training rooms didn’t record audio, Tseng had been able to read her lips. “Don’t be a dick,” she’d said, and returned to her book.

He’d figured her days were numbered. Once Sephiroth’s infatuation faded, her insolence would lose its charm. She’d mouth off, Sephiroth would snap, and Hojo would claim the body.

Time had proved Tseng wrong. But if he couldn’t dismiss Olivia as criminally stupid, what ought he to make of her? He supposed she kept a cool head. As a Turk, he could at least appreciate that.

She entered his office wearing a silky black shirt and slim-fitting black pants. Tseng knew—again from routine monitoring—that Sephiroth bought all of Olivia’s clothes. The Silver General had wasted an embarrassing amount of company time selecting them, and if Olivia happened to spend some of the gil he lavished upon her to buy clothes better suited to her own taste, Sephiroth threw them out.

“What can I do for you?” Tseng asked.

“I’d like to apply for a job.” Olivia extracted a sheet of paper from the slim folio tucked under her arm and slid it across his desk, face down. “I know it’s not usual to apply with the person in charge, but I wanted to talk to someone who would feel free to turn me down.”

Tseng pulled the sheet close but didn’t flip it over. “It is not usual for job applicants to go to extraordinary lengths to increase their chances of rejection.”

“Most applicants haven’t dealt with the consequences of being hired every time they submit an application, no matter how poorly they’d suit the position,” said Olivia.

Tseng had reviewed a brief summary of Olivia’s activities post-Shinra and made a note of her spotty employment. “Is that what happened at your previous places of employment?”

Olivia shrugged. “More or less.”

Tseng clenched the pen he held poised above a notepad, but refused to let his irritation show otherwise. “Which is it? More, or less? For future reference: when I ask a question, I am rarely satisfied with vague and uninformative answers.”

“I took two positions. First at a wastewater treatment plant, then at a library. At the wastewater treatment plant, a colleague sold stories about me to the Silver Elite. At the library, a crazed Sephiroth fan threw acid at me in the stacks. I liked the work—in both cases—but my presence created more problems than my labor could solve or compensate for.”

“And you don’t expect such problems here?”

“I’m hoping my connection to Sephiroth will be an asset,” said Olivia. “An unofficial channel of communication with the military isn’t a bad thing. And for the rest, I’ve learned how fiercely the Turks guard their privacy and their independence. You don’t crumble under pressure, and you don’t lose your heads.”

“Most people, when applying for a job, explain what they could do for their employer,” Tseng said, sharp. “Not the reverse.”

Olivia nodded to the sheet of paper he still hadn’t glanced at. “Let me know if I can be of use.”

Tseng flipped over the sheet of paper. The other side contained, in small text and with minimal line spacing, an accounting of Olivia’s acts of sabotage against Shinra.

The first item on the list read 30 billion gil in financial damages, followed by a list of her techniques. He recognized about half of them. The others had persisted, undetected, even with the Turks on alert for such sabotage.

If this ‘résumé’ were accurate—and he feared it might be—she’d caused the power outage, too.

“You were the mole.”

“Mole is not the right word,” Olivia answered. “I was captured and imprisoned. I made no promises of good behavior, no attempt to hide my poor opinion of the company, and I was regularly surveilled.”

“Are we arguing semantics, now?” Tseng answered, just for the pleasure of seeing Olivia’s eyes narrow with frustration. She couldn’t answer without actually arguing semantics.

Tseng set the resume on his desk and tapped it. “How much of this could you have accomplished without Sephiroth’s help?”

“None. Without his help, I’d be dead.” She paused, considering. “Or worse.”

“It sounds like I ought to hire him, then.”

Instead of wilting, Olivia smiled faintly. “By that logic, Sephiroth could claim credit for everything anyone accomplished while working at Shinra.”

Tseng acknowledged the point. The scope of her sabotage humbled him, and made him want to humble Olivia in turn, but Sephiroth’s education had—by design—several notable gaps, including computer literacy.

“It’s an impressive list,” Tseng acknowledged, tapping the resume with one finger. “Since you’re familiar with this scenario, imagine you’d belonged to the Department of Administrative Research in the weeks leading up to Shinra’s downfall. What would you have done to secure and stabilize the company?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Olivia answered brightly, relaxing into her seat. “I would have fired Sephiroth.”

This was so far from the answer that Tseng had expected—let alone the options they’d contemplated at the time—that he could only respond, “I beg your pardon?”

“By the time I arrived at the Tower, Shinra had already backed itself into a corner.” For all her apparent ease, Olivia’s eyes were cold and unapologetic in a way that caught his attention. “Sephiroth wanted to know what had happened to his friends. He wanted to know if he’d be next. That’s obvious, right? I don’t think you’d have to know him very well to figure that much out. And even if you had no idea what he’d discover, you could guess that it would be bad.

“If you had even an inkling of how bad, you should have done everything in your power to keep him from the truth. From what I know of Shinra, that would usually mean murder. But Sephiroth is hard to murder, so your best option would have been an early retirement. Too many people here are loyal to him, and proximity presented him with opportunities. Distance—and the possibility of a new life of his own making—might have distracted him from his burning need for answers. It would at the very least have given him a reason to feel something other than suspicion and rage. If you’d sent him away with as many good feelings as you could gin up, you’d have had a shot.”

“Are you seriously suggesting we should have left Sephiroth to his own devices?” Tseng asked. Just speaking the words made him uncomfortable. The man was frightening enough as an obedient automaton. Remove the leash, though…

“Yeah.” Olivia’s expression chilled even further. “That’s what you should have done.”

“That would have been impossible.”

“You mean it wouldn’t have been permitted.” Olivia shrugged. “Your loss.”

Indeed, it had been.

“I cannot help but wonder why you want to work for the Department of Administrative Research,” Tseng said.

“If the government is serving its intended function, I’ll be glad to put my skills to good use,” answered Olivia. “And if it’s not, I’ll be one of the first to know.”

Not the answer a novice would give—but then, she had more field experience than most rookies. If she’d been on their payroll, a fraction of what she’d listed on this resume would have won her a promotion.

In truth, he’d decided to hire her as soon as he got a good look at it and spent the remaining interview testing her temperament. Clearly, she’d caught on.

“You’ll have to learn a weapon,” he warned her.

Her nose wrinkled but she answered gamely enough, “I’ll give it my all.”

“Then welcome aboard.”

***

Cloud was still reeling from the news that he’d be admitted into SOLDIER—admitted and actually get to follow through this time, instead of watching a childhood dream transform into a nightmare—when Olivia’s weird brother burst his bubble with a, “Hey, Cloud. Hey. Do you have a minute?”

Cloud did have a minute, but he didn’t really want to admit it to Olivia’s weird brother.

“It’s important,” Matt added.

Cloud sighed. “Yeah, fine.”

“Okay, good. Let’s go, um…” Matt looked around. “Someplace private.”

“Private?” Cloud echoed. Why private? This was why he hadn’t wanted to stop. Olivia’s weird brother always wanted something weird.

Come to think of it, Cloud did not want to know what sort of weird place Matt would consider ‘private.’

“I live nearby,” he offered.

“Oh.” Matt released a deep breath, relieved. “That’ll work.”

Once they reached the apartment Cloud shared with Zack, Matt checked that every room was empty before he pulled a thick envelope from his backpack. He opened the envelope and inside were… more envelopes.

Cloud really wished he’d pretended to be busy.

“Okay, so, you know how Olivia and I are from another world?” Matt began.

Why him? Truly, why him?

“No,” said Cloud. “I didn’t.”

“Zack didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Cloud answered. “Zack definitely did not mention that.”

“Oh.” Matt looked a bit glum. “Nothing about how we know the future?”

Cloud hesitated. “I talked to your sister about it once.”

“That’s something, at least. I really hate explaining this. I feel like a maniac every single time.” Matt scrubbed his palms over his face. “My sister didn’t really know much—”

“That was what she said,” Cloud chimed in.

“God knows how many lies she had to tell to survive Shinra, but that part was true,” said Matt. “I knew a lot more than she did, but we were brought here to change things, and we did, so it’s a bit of a moot point now.”

“You were… brought here… to change things?” Cloud echoed, thinking that sounded like a big deal. A really, really big deal.

“By the Planet,” Matt affirmed. “From, uh. Another world.”

Cloud tried to wrap his head around that bombshell while Matt sorted through the envelopes he’d spread across Cloud’s coffee table.

“I’m going to go home soon, so I wrote down everything I know that might come in handy. This envelope right here”—Matt tapped the thickest of the stack—“describes future that we prevented. Please, please do not read it. The whole thing is tragic and awful.”

“Then, uh.” Cloud hesitated. “Why write it down and give it to me?”

“Because if things go really wrong in the future, the new one that everyone’s living in now, some detail or clue here might come in handy. I doubt it. Most of this stuff could never happen, it would be impossible. But if there’s a chance…” Matt shrugged. “Just send it somewhere far away, to someone who will keep it safe and not peek. Your mom, maybe.”

“Okay,” said Cloud, reminded again of how weird Matt was. “I’ll send it to my mom.”

“Great.” Matt tapped another envelope. “This has a lot of the same information, but it’s more organized. Less of an infodump. I made a list of stuff to watch out for. Early warning signs for some big problems, notes about people who you might run into along the way. Potential allies.”

“This sounds kind of involved,” said Cloud. “I do have a job, you know.”

“I should probably mention that in the future my sister and I prevented, you saved the world.”

“Me?” Cloud echoed, disbelieving.

“Yeah, more than once,” Matt assured him. “You’re pretty good at it.”

“That’s…” not right, he wanted to say. Impossible.

“You had help,” Matt added. “Not a lot of help, but some. I list all the people on your team in this second envelope. You might want to look some of them up, just for the fun of it. You became really good friends.”

Cloud found this whole conversation disorienting. Saving the world? With his friends?

“I’ve also done my best to list the treasures and rare artifacts that you acquired, so you can go looking for them,” Matt added. “The instructions aren’t too precise and I’m not positive that you’ll actually find anything… but if you do, some of this stuff is really powerful.”

Cloud was thinking about how much would have to go wrong before he was the top pick for a savior. Like, who’d ask Cloud for help when Sephiroth was right there? Which made him realize that if Matt was going home, his sister probably would, too. From what Cloud had observed, all signs pointed to Sephiroth not dealing with that very well.

“What about your sister?” Cloud asked.

“Oh.” Matt looked away. Took a deep breath. “She’s probably going to stay.”

“So why not give this information to her?” asked Cloud. “If she’s from another world like you, and she understands how this alternate future thing works.”

“You’ll understand once you’ve read through it all,” said Matt. “I always knew my sister was amazing and it turns out I’d lowballed it. But… if things go wrong, she’s not going to be the hero the world needs.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I’m too hung up on all this stuff that will never happen. You know what they say about spending all your time figuring out how to win the last war, instead of fighting the next one.” Matt straightened. “If you can get Olivia on board, you should. On top of being some sort of evil genius, she’s an amazing cook.”

“That’s what Zack says,” said Cloud.

Matt shook his head. “I really cannot think about my sister cooking dinner for Zack Fair. This whole thing has—anyway, you’ve got the idea, right?”

“I might need to save the world,” said Cloud. From an unspecified danger, at an unspecified time, by unspecified means. Hopefully these envelopes had some useful information because Matt’s rundown had been short on details.

“Pretty much.” Matt stood. “I’ll get out of your hair. Thanks for hearing me out.”

Cloud showed his guest out and then, curious despite himself, sat down and began to read.

***

Olivia treated her new job like a pregnancy: she didn’t tell anyone about it for a solid month. Of course Sephiroth knew she had a job, but after she dodged his first few questions about it he didn’t push. For all his obsessive tendencies, he took a hands-off approach to many things that other boyfriends would never have been able to leave alone.

She didn’t want to talk up her excitement over a job that could easily crash and burn like the last two. But that wasn’t all. She hadn’t forgotten Matt’s offer. It turned out she hadn’t lied when she said she’d think about it.

She had to figure out how to be Sephiroth’s girlfriend without losing her own identity. If she couldn’t figure out how to survive in his shadow, she be better off going somewhere it didn’t reach. Like Earth.

Plus, the pessimist in her couldn’t help but think: if she found it challenging to be Sephiroth’s girlfriend, what would life be like as Sephiroth’s ex?

Her first month with Administrative Research went great, but she spent most of her time in training. Learning spy skills like surveillance and interrogation was neat, but probably not representative. A couple of weeks in, Tseng agreed that ‘poison’ could count as a weapon specialty, so long as she learned to fire a dart gun. So, out of sheer stubbornness, she bargained herself into learning how to fire an extra-complicated firearm in addition to what amounted a chemistry degree.

At the end of the first month she was assigned a partner: Cissnei. Olivia liked Cissnei, but expected the veteran Turk to hold a grudge. When she didn’t, Olivia’s opinion of the woman went up. They spent a couple of days a week together and Cissnei took her mentoring duties seriously. She was thoughtful and observant, always pushing Olivia just beyond her comfort zone.

Olivia still hadn’t told Sephiroth about her new job when she arrived home late from a stakeout one evening. He emerged from the dojo wearing nothing but a pair of thin cotton drawstring pants, so it took her a few seconds to spot the angry glint in his eye.

Olivia glanced down at her suit. “I was going to tell you soon.”

“There are a half-dozen like it in your closet,” said Sephiroth. “I figured it out weeks ago.”

“Ah.” Olivia hung her blazer up next to Sephiroth’s leather duster and headed for the kitchen, where she filled the electric kettle and flicked it on. “Are you going to try to tell me I’m not allowed?”

She chose a teapot and tipped loose tea leaves into a strainer while she waited for Sephiroth to answer. At last, one hand curling into a fist at his side, he said, “Do as you wish.”

Olivia frowned as the water boiled and she poured it over the tea leaves. “You’re allowed to have an opinion.”

“You know my opinion, and I know you’ve disregarded it,” said Sephiroth. “What is there to discuss?”

“Hmm.” Olivia shifted the teapot to a small tray, along with a pair of cups and a jar of honey. She carried the tray out to their living room, settling it on the table by the sofa. “Sit with me?”

She only poured for herself. In Sephiroth’s current mood, assuming that he’d do as she asked would only nettle him. He watched her take a sip and then, with obvious reluctance, settled on a chair kitty-corner to her spot on the sofa.

He’d been like this, off and on, since they got back from Mideel. Oddly and unhappily acquiescent.

“I can guess why you’re not thrilled with my new job.” Olivia offered Sephiroth her hand. “So I want to make you a promise.”

He took it, but shot her a very dubious look.

“I promise that if I ever have to choose between my job and you, I’ll choose you,” said Olivia. “I don’t mean, like, you need a plus one at a party and I’ve got a work emergency. I’d go to the work emergency. But if they ever want me to hurt you, or act against you, or undermine you, they can go to hell. I’ll choose you, no matter the cost.”

Sephiroth didn’t answer, or shake her hand.

“I won’t surveil you or report on you,” Olivia added. “I will guard your privacy. I’m sure that at times I’ll act as a go-between; when that happens, I will never hide my purpose.”

“Why—” He cut himself short, turned her palm face up, traced the lines on it. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because you want to.” Olivia shrugged, helpless. “That’s how this works. If I haven’t earned your trust yet, I’ll keep trying. I don’t blame you for doubting. But…” She hesitated. “Sephiroth, this is the least of what you’ve earned from me.”

“Loyalty,” he said quietly. Not the word she would have picked, but one he understood. He dropped her hand and rose to his bare feet. “I don’t want to.”

He crossed to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out over the city, folding his arms across his sweat-sheened chest. “If I could live the rest of my life without extending faith to another living being, I would. It’s a fool’s game.”

“Neither of us wants to be back in that tower.”

He laughed, brief and bitter.

“For you, Olivia, I will try.” He returned to his seat and when she reached for the teapot, to pour him a cup of tea, he clasped her hand properly and shook it. “May it be true.”