( closed ) and the lights will flicker

[supersoldier]

Who: Aerith & Sephiroth
When: During the Outpost event
Where: The ruins, mostly!
What: Aerith keeps wandering off and the duo has to deal with ghosties.
Warnings: Potentially angry ghosts. Will add if needed!

[The Bond — as temporary as it is — was stressed as an importance, a safety measure as they all ventured out into a wilderness untamed, providing magical fortitude and a constant, mental awareness of their partner’s location.

So he isn’t quite sure how Aerith manages to completely and utterly circumvent the latter, time and time again.

She’s prone to wandering, stealing away even under Sephiroth’s watchful nature. The first time it happened, he thought maybe the fault was his; the second time, it was likely blamed on her focus so easily swayed from one thing to another. The third? As he picks through the ruins of a dilapidated building, detritus strewn into the earth and clotted with overgrowth, he thinks he may remark how she must be doing it on purpose, on telling her to at least inform him the next time wishes to wander off into the night.

When he turns the corner of that half-fallen structure of stone, this mild discontent is immediately shorn away. Across the expanse of land, still littered with shells of a past life — buildings, charred bones, trinkets gone to rust and buried in the soil — there is movement. Specters that appear impossibly luminescent in the lack of light, their forms a smoky wisp until they’re not, until they are just children playing in what must have once been a courtyard, or men laughing at an inaudible joke, their shoulders shaking, or vendors behind stalls that are no longer there, beckoning invisible customers to come at browse through their wares.

And there is a cold, gnawing feeling at his core. Altogether foreign in how long it’s been since it lasted visited him — dread, knotted and twisted up and threatening to unfurl into something bigger, and it is only the many years’ worth of his SOLDIER training that allows him to push it down, steel his spine, and press forward.

Because in the distance, he sees her. He cannot make out just yet what she is doing, only that there is another set of these apparent ghosts near where she stands, appearing cognizant of her presence, and none too happy for it.

Sephiroth’s there in a matter of seconds, his stride steady and long, his tone inadvertently colder than what he had initially even planned, now hyperaware of every ghost that circles even remotely close to them.]

What are you doing?

Comments

[evanescent]

[If she had known a Bond would mean she was hovered over constantly, she would have never agreed to it.

Regardless of if she was being hovered over, that was how she saw it — that the uneasy truce she had with Sephiroth became more strained the longer she was observed, or found away from the group, or worse, when she could not quell the surges of irritation that filtered through their temporary Bond. So she is testing her bounds, out of curiosity but also, she would admit to herself, out of a burgeoning, and childish, sort of spite. She was fiercely independent, sometimes to her detriment, and this instance seemed to prove it.

She does not ask to find the spirits: she finds them herself, gathered loosely around the dilapidated remains of the town square, hovering in the skeletal structure of a house that had long since crumbled. They do not speak to her, which in itself is an oddity. She's so accustomed to spirits gathering around her that it makes her vaguely uneasy even before they do notice her. And when they do, the low-level dread that had overtaken her blossoms fully in her chest.

They were wrong, these ghosts. Wrong in a way she had only brushed upon in life, and rarely saw in death, overseeing the Lifestream. Sometimes people died very badly, but never has she witnessed an entire village like this, tortured and furious.

At Sephiroth's approach, she jumps, surprised, her face pale — she hadn't even felt him through their Bond, the malevolence that surrounded her was so strong.]

I —

[She feels oddly chastised, which is another feeling she doesn't enjoy.] I was trying to help them, [she manages, finally.] I usually can, but...

[supersoldier]

[Here, this close to the specters, he can make out the shadows and shapes that form their faces, twisted in unnatural lines of anger and pain. Their eyes are hollow and indistinct, yet they bore into them as if their gazes were a physical presence, a deep accusation that adds to the hanging sense of dread and snaking across each nerve.

Aerith’s explanation does very little to ease that feeling. Sephiroth cannot know exactly what she means, and this unknown fuels his certainty that remaining here overlong would be a mistake. He steps forward again, eyes on the ghosts that flicker, hover, shift in and out of discernible form, their furor sloughing off of him like foreign material.]

What are you talking about? They’re dead. How do you expect to help them?

[Help doesn’t seem like what they’re wanting.]

We shouldn’t linger here.

[evanescent]

[Even in his stoicism, she can see how she must seem to him. Flighty, irresponsible, running headlong into unfamiliar danger. But he didn't understand, is always her first thought, tinged with anger and frustration of her own, and then she realizes that she has not bothered to make him understand. She's been too busy waiting for the other shoe to drop, chafing at his presence, simultaneously feeling responsible for him and wanting to be as far away as possible.

She straightens up some, keeps her gaze well and away from the ghosts, which stare balefully and hover at a distance, but have not braved getting any closer to either of them. Lucky.]

... You're right.

[She seems unsteady. Rattled is the better term.] Then... then we'll go. And I'll explain.

[supersoldier]

[For a half-moment he wonders if she’ll comply, if a counterpoint to his suggestion will come paired with the way she straightens. But either she’s too shaken for that, too disturbed by the ghosts and their discontent, or she has a more rational head on her shoulders than he gave her credit for.]

…Then let’s go.

[He said there was no point in lingering, and Sephiroth stands by that. He begins to shift his body to turn and go the way they came, only stalling the motion to make certain that she’s keen to follow. An explanation is needed (or perhaps wanted, more than anything else, after what Cloud had told him of her), but they can walk and talk. There’s malevolence here, carried by these ghosts, an atmosphere oversaturated with it. Fear is a far-away emotion for Sephiroth, and it remains so — but discomfort is something that can crawl closer, and more quietly, and he would rather leave before having to acknowledge it.

And if their luck held out, maybe, it would have been as easy as that.

But a pair of the ghosts do not like the sudden dismissal, the two strangers turning away and leaving them with only their despair, their rage. Perhaps they would decry at the unfairness of it all, if their screams were not so wordless, but in the end, it doesn’t matter.

One twists and lurches forward towards both, followed by the second, and though their diaphanous forms present no physical threat, the whole gamut of their negative emotions will carry through to any they pass through. Maybe that’s some kind of twisted satisfaction in its own right. They make a desperate grab at the pair.]

[evanescent]

[Subdued, quiet, she follows, her gaze trained to study his back with an unwavering, uneasy focus. It is folly to turn away from the ghosts, but she remembers this too late. She moves a half-second too late, turns back a little too soon, and one of the ghosts passes through her, brief and harmless in the physical sense, but she feels it nonetheless: a numbing cold and a dread she has never felt, an awful, hopeless despair. She freezes in place, unable to move, unable to speak. Her breath feels frozen in her throat.

The Bonds are curious things, she's found. She will not get the full sense of her Bonded's thoughts, though sometimes she will feel something that is not her own, or get a flash of a memory through someone else's eyes, someone else's experiences. With Cloud, it had been good. It had been calm. She had felt more focused, and in turn had settled his anxieties. But here, with... with Sephiroth, something else happens. Something bad.

She sends him a memory.

The memory is of a room, small, far away, lacking detail. The hall leading to it is lit with unnatural, florescent light. In the room is a woman, and a child. The woman's head is lolled against the glass, her eyes dull and empty, her long, auburn hair unruly and uncombed. She stares at nothing, the blue-green of her eyes blank and uncomprehending, and slowly, the child — a girl, wearing a white hospital shift — tugs at her arm.

"Mother?" she asks. Another tug, more insistent now. "Mother, can you hear me?" Tentatively: "Can you see me? There's food, see?"

The woman returns to herself: slowly, then with a start, and affords her child a wan little smile, pats her head. "Oh," she says, distant, and then as if remembering herself, with more spirit: "Oh, so they have! Look at this, poppy. Those awful protein bars, bleh!"

"Bleh!" The girl repeats.

"But... wonder of wonders, look: an apple! From Banora, I would think."

"Really? ... Where's that?"

"Really. Banora," she says, and the girl clambers into her lap, settling into a story, "is a little town across the ocean. It's a sleepy place, and far, far away. Near... Mideel, yes. Lots of green, there. So many forests. But there are only a few trees that grow apples, so they're very special. Midgar couldn't dream of growing an apple like this. We lucked out today, you and me."

"Can we have it now?"

The woman's gaze shifts suddenly, to the glass wall, to the long hallway, and she nods. "Yes, of course. Of course. You go on ahead."

"But you —"

"We're saving up, remember?" The movement she makes now is subtle, and very quick, but one of the protein bars disappears from the dented silver tray sitting besides them. Her gaze shifts again to the hallway, and she sighs, slumps some, and tries for a smile. Her voice drops playfully. "For our adventure. Now, go."

The child studies her uneasily, wise beyond her years, her green eyes dark and very worried, but then, as always, dutifully:

"Yes, Mother."

Aerith jerks forward, away from the ghost, inelegant in a way that she never was, and stumbles forward into Sephiroth's back, not cognizant of it, not really, just needing something to grab on to, needing to get away from the thing that made her feel that way, dredged up such a memory. Her breathing is unsteady; her heart jackhammers in her chest.]

cw; needles

[supersoldier]

[Sephiroth perceives the ghost’s lurch, but there’s nothing to be done. It passes through Aerith, and all he can do is watch as emotion overcomes her, feel as it bleeds into his own chest, and their bond overcompensates by flooding his mind with images. The memory plays behind his eyes.

This room. He knows this room— no, he knows many like it. They are all the same level of impersonal, the same degree of sterile-clean that he’s grown to dislike. They are only differentiated by the goings-on within, and he sees a woman, a child. Mother, she is called. An apple from Banora. He knows those, too. Whose emotions are these? They are not his own, surely, but he feels them poignantly in the far-away gaze of the mother, in the knowingness of the girl. They are to go on an adventure, and all of them know what that means, and he is overcome by a quiet, resigned sadness.

Something juts up between the framework of these replayed images, tearing away at its cohesiveness. He knows this room, or he knows rooms like it. He knows this whole building so very well, and some of it is more familiar than the rest. His mind offers association, and the Bond yanks them out of the ground, exposing their roots.

”Wake up! You’ve overslept again, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to allow you to become sedate and sedentary.”

The child does not feel like he’s overslept; he feels like he’s only just closed his eyes. But every morning is the same, woken up by the same black-haired man in a white lab coat, sporting the same cruel features carved from the same scientific curiosity and apathy alike. Every day, every day after, for weeks, maybe for years. Wake up, wake up.

He grows accustomed to it, but he learns to dislike it. He dislikes it so much that he trains his body to rise from sleep long before it’s necessary, so that he’s prepared and alert and he never has to awaken to that voice again.

And— and then—

The scene shifts to an array of needles. Or just one needle, always pricking the same part of his arm, always drawing the same milli-measurement of blood. Multiply this by every waking day that he knows, and it becomes that countless array of needles, so maybe it is.

He’s heard that his veins should have bruised long before now, but that he heals quickly, as if that justifies abusing the same tract of skin over and over. It doesn’t hurt, but it is strange watching them take so often, and he wonders why so much of him needs to be sucked up in a syringe and stored away to be examined later. It’s no different than before, and his blood is red like everyone else’s. Isn’t it?

“Make a fist,” the same voice says again. The child makes a fist and the needle goes into his arm.

And then, and then—

One final change, the world rearranging itself into a VR training room. His targets are man-shaped and made of light, but they scream like real people when he sets them on fire. Today is magic training, strengthening his familiarity with materia, and though the exercises always have variance, they are easy. The boy has taken all the effort out of killing.

But sometimes, it still isn’t enough. A voice crackles over the audio systems, tinny and displeased, the same voice he has grown to hate. It speaks over the cries of his illusory target engulfed in flame, having observed from another room this whole time.

“Two-point-four seconds slower than yesterday’s session. Utterly unacceptable! You’re distracted and sluggish today— Why?”

“I’m hungry,” the boy unaffectedly replies. It is as simple as that, but he knows it won’t matter. The man’s thin laughter following that admission is a razor blade against his ears, and already the room flickers, resetting.

“Hungry? You’ll eat when you’re done, as scheduled. Your caloric intake has remained stable for these last few sessions; this only proves that you’re now exerting more effort with less impressive results. And I haven’t put in this much work to allow my research to backslide into mediocrity!”

The boy frowns and watches as a row of new targets shape themselves into faux realism.

“Do it again. Time starts now.”

This time, he immolates them quickly, shaving off two-point-four seconds of time.

Reality slams back into him, and his mind is a struggling whirl that tries to slot everything back into place. Someone is latched onto his back — a threat? no, only Aerith — and with a half turn of his body, he sends Masamune slicing through the remnants of the spirit having passed by. It is ultimately a useless gesture. It fades away, the damage done.

Sephiroth’s moment of recovery, those dreadful emotions still churning in him, is one in which his free hand grasps at his head, willing out what is unneeded. Expel them, like poison.]

What was that? [He hisses out, inelegant, too, and unlike himself.] Your... mother?

[When he’s recovered, he’ll remember what Cloud had told him about her. For now, though, their memories and emotions are a tangled mess, exacerbated by the bond.]

[evanescent]

[Her own memory collides into his own, settles into a strange and unnerving familiarity. There isn't much she remembers about her captivity as a child, only enough to give her bad dreams, to settle over her moods in the times she'd been alone. But seeing this fragment of his own childhood, the droning, awful monotony of tests and needles, constant criticisms, is enough to bring her own back in a way they hadn't been in years: vivid and hyper-magnified, hopeless and frightening. She feels seasick, and flinches absently when he half-turns to draw his sword. Another memory threatens to break through, one somehow much darker than the last, but she remembers herself at the last moment, and pushes it down, leaving only the barest sense of apprehension, the guarded caution that was present in all of her interactions with him.

She doesn't answer him right away, and though his tone makes her want to pull back, she stays there, her fingers curled in the fabric of his dark coat, her face hidden against his back. Trembling. Eventually the shaking stops some, and she remembers where she is, that she is (relatively) unharmed.]

I-I... [she starts, unsteadily, and rubs at her face.] Y-yes. Yes. [She realizes what she's doing all of a sudden, who he is, and pulls back, quickly, gathering herself.] That was my mother.

[supersoldier]

[Eventually, he finds himself, too.  His thoughts realign, and his mind, which had felt so unsteady it had been worrisome for several handful of seconds, remembers its composure.  He gathers himself back up, hand dropping and spine straightening, in a way that very few have ever witnessed.  There is almost never a reason for Sephiroth to recover from anything.

When he speaks again, his tone has returned to normal despite the traces of emotion and memory still pulsing behind his ribcage, and Cloud's explanation wraps itself around his head.  Her real mother escaped a Shinra research facility with her when she was small.  She didn't make it.]

…You were both held captive by Shinra.  Did Hojo oversee your testing? 

[The question is sudden, perhaps cold, but he asks it because he is backed by the remembrance of his own childhood... and the realization that she must have seen the same. Quite quickly, another query takes precedence, even if a half-cognizant part of him reminds him they have been given an even bigger reason why not to linger.

He turns to face her properly. He hadn't even noticed when she detached herself.]

Did you see anything else just now?

[evanescent]

[It's a question she should be expecting, and yet it catches her by surprise nonetheless. Aerith instinctively takes a half-step back, then thinks again of the ghosts, and uneasily looks over her shoulder, more rattled than she'd care to admit.]

He... he did, yes. A long time ago. And after... for a little while, when I was captured again.

[His eyes are so cold. She thinks of the scant traces of humanity there, that she'd witnessed in his childhood memory, piecemeal and faint: a boy's confusion smothered under a soldier's dedication to the craft of killing. But it's hard. It's always hard to remember he had once been a person, that he still was one, here and now. Her mouth thins; she twists her hands in subdued anxiousness.]

Yes. I saw you. And Hojo. [Now it's her turn for questions.] Did he speak to you like that all the time? He —

[he's a monster, she almost says, and something stills her tongue.]

[supersoldier]

A delusional megalomaniac. A hack scientist.

[Let him finish that statement for you, Aerith.

The words are chilling, matching his look, and it’s obvious that he has no love for the man. No respect, his biases crafted from childhood and onwards and in completely unflattering ways. The associations are too strong, too bad, and even in his adult years, he can see how Hojo cared only for his research and the furthering of it. Emblematic of the Science Department as a whole.

There’s so much more he could say. More that he might normally admit to, given what she had glimpsed of his past, though discomfort flits through their bond at the thought. He is a very private person, and Aerith had just peeled back a deeply embedded layer — but she would understand, too, in her own way. What it is like to be under the scrutinizing gaze of that man, to hear his empirical criticisms, his grating laughter.

For now, though, a ghost’s translucent form shimmers at a distance, and he remembers their present environment. He frowns, and-]

We walk and talk.

[They’re leaving. Now. He makes certain she moves past him first before he follows, hyperaware of the ghosts, but none make a move to trail them now.]

...He’s always been that way. [-he continues, eyes on the path ahead.] Only ever caring about his results. But he can’t speak to me like that now.

[He could, truly, if he wanted to, and likely undeterred at that. But Sephiroth performs at peak efficiency now, having earned his reputation, and there’s no longer room for even Hojo’s criticisms.]

I wouldn’t concern yourself with what you saw. It’s in the past. [Aerith, though, is apparently exempt from this reasoning.] What did Shinra want with you and your mother?

[Cloud said she had a strange power, being the last of her kind, but he wants to hear it from her. Perhaps it was what she was going to tell him before the ghost sent them careening into memory.]

[evanescent]

[Though she has some measure of the animosity that existed between Hojo and Sephiroth, his interjection surprises her. To her, he seems cold to the point of inhumanity, even this version of him, so removed from his madness. For the first time she reads this coldness as something else.

It's controlled, true, and stripped of all warmth, but the lack of regard is there, a simmering sort of dislike. It doesn't warm her to him — she thinks nothing might — but it does give her context that she would not have had otherwise.

As they walk, he continues, offering her up information without her asking. These admissions are sparse, but she reads between them (he can't speak to me like that now) and understands. Imagines years of training and nothing else. Not a parent's hand on your back to support you, no one to help you to your feet if you fell, no one to hold you after a nightmare. (No one to humanize you.) Only a barrage of tests, criticisms, battle after battle, learning how to stand on your own two feet before anyone should be reasonably be expected to. Until you were above criticism, above reproach. Above everyone. It was not love, and would never be. But it was better than the alternative.

She feels sorry for him. So often souls would come to her, carried by the flow of the Planet, and she would see the whole of them, and know that they had been dealt a bad hand from the beginning. This was no different.

It's in the past, he says. But it wasn't, not really. Time was not a single point from A to B. It was fluid; it flowed and folded over into itself.

Her gaze drops. She distinctly did not want to talk about her mother. But, in the interest of fairness, she does anyway.]

Have you heard about the Ancients? They were a race that could speak to the Planet. Shinra thought that they had some sort of secret, that they knew of a land overflowing with mako. The Promised Land, is what it's called. My mother — that is, my birth mother — she was the very last of that race. And me too, I guess. I'm only half, though. The rest were wiped out.

They were keeping the two of us to study us. They thought we'd be able to show them the way. But they misunderstood what it meant. That's not really a surprise though, don't you think? Hojo led the project, after all. And you're right. He really is a hack.

[supersoldier]

[The hard edges of his demeanor soften barely perceptibly when she begins to speak of her background — their shared memory has set him rigid, and Sephiroth remains obliquely aware of their surroundings, too, refusing to be caught off guard a second time.

But what Aerith tells him matches up with Cloud’s more generalized information. The last of her kind, an Ancient. He had heard the tales, perhaps spinning in the rumor mill that he didn’t care about, but never paid them much heed. But of course Shinra would seek a means to take advantage of a location with unlimited mako energy, and of course they would utilize Hojo to find a way to make that possible. Cloud had told him about the company’s desire to create a Neo-Midgar based on the results, their ambitions expanded ever outward like a hungry beast that could never be sated. It seems Aerith and her mother would suffer for it.]

I had heard about them, but I didn’t know if there was any legitimacy to the rumor.

[Obviously it was more than just rumor. He’s speaking to someone who’s proof of it.]

But I’m not surprised that the project was misguided from the start when headed by single-minded leadership. [He empathizes, but it’s hidden beneath so much that it is difficult to articulate.] At least that situation isn’t a part of your reality anymore.

[That’s about as much as he offers.

He could ask what wiped the Ancients to near extinction. He could ask about the validity of the Promised Land, and what it actually was if not a physical place brimming with energy. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, he focuses on the subject of her mother. The concept has always been a splinter in his mind that his thoughts snag against when they try to bypass it.]

Was it the testing that made your mother grow ill? [Her state had been so obvious from the memory.]