Chapter Text
I’ve been waiting in this silence
While you’re sleeping, until you believe
I’ve been waiting in this silence
I’m on fire, I’m on fire
My son,
It was never supposed to be this way, but my mistakes have led me here. I see now that there is no hope for me, for us. On easier days, when I wasn’t plagued with pain, sadness, and cruel visions I couldn’t comprehend, I envisioned our life together. You, the planet’s savior, my precious boy. Myself, your proud and doting mother. We would have been a family, happy and whole. That was something I never had before, and I dreamed that you would give that to me, and perhaps I, too, would give that to you, despite all my failures.
But now that you are here, and I can no longer see you, I know the truth. I am broken, a monster. I can do nothing but cause pain. It’s for the best that you will never know me.
I’m so sorry, my darling. I was never meant for happiness. Your days will be brighter without me to darken them. Whatever hurt you feel now, I would have worsened. But you must know that I love you. I love you more than I ever thought I could love. If you can believe that, let it soothe your heart. My spirit will fade away, but my love for you will always remain, if you’ll have it.
Please, never blame yourself. I am the only one to blame. I do not regret having you; I only regret the sins I’ve committed against you. I love you, Sephiroth. I love you, my baby. I love you. I love you.
Your mother
Behind him, the waterfall echoed mutedly within the walls of the cave. Save for the eerie glow of the crystal clusters that populated the cave’s irregular surfaces, there was no light to guide him through the damp tunnels. No matter—Sephiroth could see perfectly in even the blackest darkness, better than any other human in broad daylight.
Not a human, he reminded himself bitterly.
He couldn’t explain the feeling, the heart-rending ache, that beckoned him here. It overwhelmed him the moment he fled Nibelheim’s borders only days ago, more true than any vacant promise that creature whispered into his vulnerable mind.
As his sense of rationality recovered, he began to regret following the call. After all, he nearly lost himself to the whims of another siren song in the basement library of the Shinra Manor. But he couldn’t help himself. The letter—he tried not to think of its contents, the words that both shattered his breaking heart and blessed him with a clarity he hadn’t known in years—gave him something like hope. How alien, that feeling. Hopeless for so long, for perhaps his whole life, he could no longer resist the faintest spark of it. He needed it more than he had ever needed anything before. Some thing told him that he would find it here, and nowhere else. So, he followed.
A soft murmur roused Sephiroth from his thoughts. His silver eyebrows furrowed, and he strained to hear more. Another nebulous murmur, slightly louder, seemed to emanate from everywhere and nowhere at once. It sounded… like a voice. Quiet, dreamlike, feminine. Sephiroth’s heart began to race in his chest, and he couldn’t fathom why. He nearly spoke himself, but he thought better of it and continued further into the depths of the cave, his footfalls silent.
“Se… oth…”
Sephiroth froze.
“Seph… th…”
He knew that voice.
“Sephiroth…”
How did he know that voice?
Against his better judgment, Sephiroth resumed his approach. The sound didn’t become louder, but clearer. Yes, that was a woman’s voice. It rang throughout the space like the tinkling of bells. It sounded beautiful.
How did it know his name?
Sephiroth blinked. A quiet, steadying breath passed his lips. His left hand flicked, and the Masamune shimmered into existence in his grip.
“Sephiroth!” it cried.
In just three long strides, the end of the cavern came into view. It opened, round and wide, cyan crystals coalescing into a tall, jagged column. The column sat upon a dais formed in the rock, and around the dais swirled a pool of mako. The sight reminded Sephiroth of the naturally formed mako springs scattered within the Nibel mountain range. Sephiroth’s eyes raked across the crystal column; blurred but distinct, there was a form nestled within it. Humanoid. He drew closer, his sword out at his side but not yet raised.
“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry…”
“What are you?” Sephiroth demanded.
“I am… broken. A monster.”
Sephiroth halted. His pupils narrowed to thin, black slits.
“Don’t speak her words.”
The voice went silent, and the figure within sharpened. Yes, it was a person. Creamy, porcelain skin. Long, chestnut brown hair with distinctively parted bangs. Wide and supple lips, the bottom plumper than the top, with a deeply pronounced cupid’s bow. A long, elegant nose. Though her eyes were closed, Sephiroth imagined that they would be round, alight with wonder and intrigue, irises the color of warm chocolate—
No.
He knew this face like the back of his hand. Better, even. It took all of Sephiroth’s long honed self-control not to stumble toward the crystal like a newborn fawn to its—
“Mother…?”
His plea brought the gentle, quivering susurrus of her voice into being again.
“Sephiroth… Oh, my baby… my baby…,” whimpered the woman. Her lips, the ones that so resembled his own, were still. Her eyes remained closed. The crystal itself appeared to be the source of her voice.
He should have doubted. He read her suicide note in that gloomy, wretched basement. Sephiroth’s mother was dead. He already spurned the voracious advances of one false mother. He shouldn’t throw himself into the arms of another. He knew better. This path could only lead to ruin.
And still he pressed, “How… How is this possible?”
“Give him back… Give him back to me! Give my son back!” she shrieked.
With wide, awestruck eyes, Sephiroth arrived at the edge of the mako pool. He could see even more clearly the face that filled the blackness every time he closed his eyes. Her body was obscured by the crystal, but there was no mistaking it. It was her. The Masamune dissolved into nothingness, and he slowly extended his now empty hand toward the crystal. The toe of his left boot slid over the bank of the pool.
“Mother. I’m here,” he said, scarcely above a whisper.
“I deserve this,” insisted Mother. “This is… my punishment.”
Sephiroth shook his head. He blinked rapidly, banishing tears. “Mother, please. Come out.” His foot inched further.
“You’re not real.”
Panic seized his heart and escaped as a tremor in his voice. “Yes, I am. I am your son. I am Sephiroth.”
“Sephiroth… is better off without me. I am… broken. A monster.”
He recalled the blotched and smudged ink on the page of her note, the final evidence of her tears. He recalled the blinding fury and despair that nearly subsumed him in the Nibelheim reactor.
Am I the same as these monsters?
“So am I,” was his low, vehement reply.
“No! No! My son is not a monster. My son is a human being. My son will not be her monster!”
As he pored over document after document in the library, Sephiroth had envisioned the circumstances of his creation. Jenova’s ancient, mummified body could not have carried him, at least in the traditional sense, and thus he decided that he must have developed within a surrogate mother. A volunteer hoping to earn some money, perhaps. No, but this was Hojo, after all—far more likely that the surrogate was unwilling. Perhaps Hojo hadn’t quite lied, and the trauma of Sephiroth’s birth had killed the doomed woman who bore him. With madness encroaching on his psyche, Sephiroth had resolved that whatever her fate, that woman was insignificant beyond the minor role she had played in his creation. A traitorous human ought to be proud to die delivering the last son of the Cetra.
Now, Sephiroth was reminded what a fool he was to believe Hojo. Even the once infallible wisdom and kindness of Professor Gast could no longer be trusted. The truth stood before him now, encased in a crystal prison. There was no surrogate. There was only his mother, his real mother. The beautiful woman in the golden locket.
He needed her.
“I can’t leave you here,” pled Sephiroth. “Are you trapped?”
Her motionlessness disturbed him. The notion that she was long dead, her thoughts merely projected from the lifestream through the walls of her crystal, pierced him with dread. A distant part of him yearned for a return to the days when he would have been skeptical of fairy tales like the lifestream.
“I can do nothing but cause pain,” came her mournful response. “Leave me be.”
“No.” Sephiroth’s hands balled into fists, the leather of his gloves creaking. Ire and anguish clashed within him. Finally, one tear spilled from his eye, then another.
“Mother, don’t leave me,” he begged. “Please, don’t leave me again. I need you. I need you!” His eyes were wild. Ribbons of tears cascaded down his cheeks. He had no care for restraint or for poise any longer. “Mother! I’m alone. I’ve always been alone. I can’t be alone anymore. I need you.”
One second of silence passed. Another. Another. Sephiroth’s ragged, uneven breaths filled the quiet. A teardrop dripped from his chin and landed in the mako pool with an echoing plink.
“Sephiroth? Sephiroth? Is it really you?”
Suddenly, the haunted, surreal timbre was gone from her voice. She sounded almost lucid. Sephiroth leapt at his chance.
“Yes!” he cried. “Mother, please! Come out. Don’t leave me again!”
A crack formed in the center of the crystal. Sephiroth jumped, drawing his hand back. His heartbeat pounded in his ears. The crack spread in spindly tendrils, marring the image of her face. Like roots, the crack spawned branches, and the branches grew across its face. Mako bled from the wounds in the crystal, seeped into the pool below, obscured the body within, and then—
The crystal shattered.
Sephiroth surged forward into the pool. Above him, Mother’s body collapsed from the rocky dais, limp as a corpse. Sephiroth held out his arms, and she fell gracelessly into them.
Frantic, he pressed his forefinger to her jugular, then sighed with unabashed relief when a steady pulse greeted him. He maneuvered her body in his hold, one arm under the crook of her legs and the other around her back. Her limp hand brushed with the mako’s surface as he climbed from the pool. Her eyelids, closed in repose, began to twitch, then opened languidly to reveal gentle, brown eyes. An unmistakable cyan ring surrounded each of her wide pupils.
“Sephiroth…,” she rasped. Her voice was hoarse from disuse, but lovely nonetheless.
She lifted a trembling hand and rested it on his cheek. Like a needy child, Sephiroth leaned into her touch, his expression naked with want.
“Mother?” he breathed. His hold tightened around her.
She began to shiver. At a glance, Sephiroth noticed, finally, that she was nude—likely a consequence of the corrosive mako that encased her within her crystal tomb. Without delay, he shrugged off his pauldrons and his coat, kneeling as he gently set her down on the ground. He tried to ignore the cruel stab of grief in his gut when his gaze fell on her stomach, which even now appeared round and stretched with pregnancy. Miraculously, she was preserved just as she was twenty five years ago, her face full of youth and her body wrought with testimony of the trials that brought her to this cave.
“Sephiroth…”
He draped his coat around her shoulders and fastened it around her waist. Her breath hitched, her lip wobbled, and she began to cry.
“Yes, it’s me,” he soothed. “It’s me, Mother.”
“You’re grown…,” she sobbed. “I missed s-s-so much…”
Again, Sephiroth’s arms encircled her as he lifted her from the ground. He very dearly wanted to sob, too, but he steeled himself for her.
“They t-took you away fro-om me. I never g-got to hold you. I never got t-to feed y-y-you.” She shook harder, her volume building to a shrill, bereaved howl. “I couldn’t go on anymore! I couldn’t live without you! I just wanted to die! She wouldn’t let me die! I just wanted to die!”
Sephiroth could hardly understand the confused skein of emotion that ensnared him. He loved her. He loved her desperately and completely, more than he had ever loved anyone, and perhaps he had never truly loved anyone until now, for all that he loved her. He seethed, desiring nothing more than to charge into the Shinra Building and set the whole tower ablaze, to skewer the president on his blade, to smite every secretary and intern and assistant and scientist, to find Hojo and flay him alive until he begged for the mercy of death. He abhorred her cowardice and resented her weakness, that she would seal herself away for twenty five years and leave her son in the care of opportunists, sadists, and maniacs. That she would rather kill herself than live for him.
She was not the perfect goddess he conjured up in his imagination when isolation clawed at his soul. She would not have stormed into the labs with righteous fury and rescued him from his childhood tormentors. She hid. She cowered. She nearly succumbed to sorrow. She was… flawed, deeply so. Complicated.
Perhaps Sephiroth could live with that. Perhaps that was what he needed: complicated, flawed, scarred, imperfect. A mirror held up before him, reflecting his own imperfections back at him.
He loved her too much to forsake her simply for being human.
Sephiroth cradled her quaking form to his chest as if she weighed nothing at all. Another defiant tear slipped from his eye. “Shh,” he consoled. “I have you.”
Again, Mother reached up, now with both of her elegant hands, and caressed his cheeks. Her eyes brimmed with disbelief. The pad of her thumb traced tenderly along the ridge of his cheekbone. Her breath hitched once more, a stifled, mournful moan escaping her. Her gaze roved over his face as if to memorize its every feature, to drink in every ounce of growth from infant to child to man that she wasn’t there to witness.
“My baby,” she sighed, at once forlorn and hopeful. “My son.”
His eyes never left her as he carried her from the crystal cavern and back into the world she left behind.