sephiroth, “tol alien boy”, SOLDIER first class. (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
supersoldier) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
middaeg2020-02-21 06:46 pm
supersoldier) wrote in middaeg2020-02-21 06:46 pm
Entry tags:
( closed ) and the lights will flicker
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?
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?
no subject
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?
no subject
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.]
no subject
[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.]
no subject
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.
no subject
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.]