cadets npc account. (cadetsnpcs) wrote in missions, @ 2012-11-26 17:49:00 |
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Entry tags: | ! narrative, npc: sorceress edea, plot: the reunion |
A CHRONICLE OF EVENTS, PART ONE.
JULY 12, 2001.
"You're Edea, right? Edea Kramer?"
Edea turns to see a young man in a dark suit smiling over at her from one table over. He waves as if she isn't looking directly at him, and then looks at his hand sheepishly. She smiles.
"I am," she says. "Have we met?"
"Oh--oh, no--well, maybe!" he laughs, rubbing his neck. "I've been following your work. You and your husband's, with the Garden program."
Edea dips her head in acknowledgment. "Are you a SeeD graduate?"
"Me?" He laughs again and takes a drink of water. "No. No, I missed the cutoff for enrollment at Midgarden. May I?" he adds, standing up and gesturing at the empty seat at her table. "Your husband isn't joining you, is he?"
Edea hesitates--Midgar--but lifts her hand graciously at the chair. The man smiles gratefully and, picking up his paper and briefcase with a clumsiness that sends red all up his neck and ears, scrambles between their tables and into the seat. Edea can't place his age. At first she would have said no older than twenty, but now that he's closer, she can see the beginnings of smile lines around his mouth, and dark circles under his eyes. Twenty-five, perhaps. He smiles gratefully at her and thanks her again for letting him join her, then flags down the waitress to bring them two coffees.
"I'm Verdot," he says when the drinks come. Edea smiles and says nothing. "Ha, you know, you always seem so reserved in your interviews, but I didn't realize--well--" Redness creeps up his neck again.
"I've never been accused of loquaciousness," she says politely. "You aren't the first to say so."
He stirs three sugars into his drink, sips, grimaces, and stirs in two more. "You know, I really admire you and Mr. Kramer," he says after a few moments. "The Garden program and everything. My--mother was killed in the Sorceress War," he adds in a low voice. Edea feels her guard fall like a heavy curtain slashed from its rings. She had only escaped Adel's clutches by the skin of her teeth, and many of the orphans in her care had their own parents or loved ones taken away to Esthar, never to be seen again. Every sorceress, even nearly a decade later, still felt the ripples of Adel's devastation. She reaches out and lays a white hand on Verdot's arm. He pats her wrist appreciatively. "I don't want you to take offense or anything, Mrs. Kramer, but I have to say the Wars really made me distrust most sorceresses."
"Not every sorceress is Adel, Verdot," she says soothingly. "I believe most of us only want to live our lives out in peace."
He looks up at her curiously, and something moves across his face, behind his eyes. Processing what she said. She pulls her hand from his arm.
The conversation is brief. Verdot is jovial and inquisitive, asking about the particulars of the Garden program, what the Kramers intended for graduated SeeDs, what sort of plans they had in place in case another Adel should rise up. Edea answers his questions politely. They were not so very different than the softball questions news anchors lobbed her on afternoon talk shows. She wonders if he were simply too nervous to ask anything substantial (she was told she had that effect on people, with her cool features and dark clothes, despite all evidence to the contrary), or if he really had nothing else to say. They finish their coffee, and she excuses herself to leave for a meeting. He offers to walk her to her car; he still has a few questions he wanted to ask before the opportunity passed him by.
It's drizzling outside and, after slipping into slim black gloves, he opens a large dark umbrella over their heads. Verdot is quite tall. She places his age now at closer to thirty.
"I keep meaning to ask," he says, stepping easily over a puddle, "when did you get your Aeons? It's been decades since someone has developed affinity with both Bahamut and Anima."
She looks up at him curiously. The Kramers generally didn't broadcast her affinities. They were a matter of public record, of course, as all affinities had to be registered with the Temple; but it wasn't typically brought up, and Anima was a controversial Aeon in her own right. Most people didn't even want to broach the topic. She folds her hands over her purse. "Brynhildr I received during my bestowal; she belonged to the Lady Yocun. I developed affinity with Bahamut after a series of prophetic dreams while traveling in Wutai. And Anima I discovered at the Temple of Bevelle, in the north."
"Huh!" Verdot says. "You must be a pretty powerful sorceress. Four Aeons!"
Edea can see her car at the base of the hill. The street is quiet, stragglers rushing into buildings to get out of the rain as it begins to fall more heavily. She does not look at Verdot. "I suppose so," she says. "It is not something that I advertise, however."
"Still."
"Mm. Still."
They walk quietly. Edea tries to pick up her pace as they draw nearer to her car, but Verdot's long legs match her easily. She looks around coolly, trying to assess any points of exit, anywhere she could quickly move that was slightly less deserted than the street was becoming. There is no one left on the sidewalk. A car passes them by and splashes water up towards them; Verdot latches onto her elbow and pulls her out of the way with a sharp "Whoa!" Edea tries to pull her arm away immediately.
Verdot holds fast.
"You know, Mrs. Kramer," he says, in the same jovial tone, "We've been very interested in your work these last few years."
"Release me," she says quietly, sending a shiver of Blizzard up her arm. Verdot smiles indulgently at her, but doesn't remove his hand. She looks down--a small materia gem is embedded in the knuckles of his gloves. She tries Fira, sending heat blazing from her fingers to her shoulder, but he doesn't move. A Shield materia? "Release me," she says again, "or I will make the next few moments very painful for you. I do not take kindly to threats."
"Threats?" Verdot repeats. "Madam, the Turks never make threats."
She feels a sharp prick in her throat and a shiver runs through her, her limbs jerking and unwilling to respond. It is a monumental task just to bring her hand to her throat, to pull the dart out and look at it, small and unassuming, in her pale hand. Her legs give out. She casts wildly about the street, trying to see where the shot came from, lifting her arm and shooting Firaga into the air without any real target. Arms are around her on all sides--men had materialized out of the rain and the shadows in dark suits like Verdot's, and were lifting her smoothly, as if she had merely tripped. A car appears next to them and Edea is bundled into the backseat, her eyes fixed in her now immobile head on a man in a long white lab coat as her vision dims, and finally goes dark.
JULY 15, 2001.
"Hello, Edea," the doctor says outside her tank. Edea's vision swims. Her body floats weightlessly in a thick, Mako-green liquid, an aerator clasped over her nose and mouth. Everything outside the tank is murky. She can't move her arms or her legs; despite her weightlessness, her body still doesn't obey her. She looks down painfully at her arms and chest. Wires and cables stem out of her flesh like thin, white vines. Nodes dot unevenly across her shoulders. She is naked, and shame fills her, tries to push her hands to cover herself, but they won't move. The doctor examines her with all the lasciviousness of a man examining his shoe. He looks her over clinically, then steps over to a control panel and flicks a few dials. Something dark slides through one of the wires up her arm. She stares at the doctor, her eyes pleading, trying to understand what's going on.
The man from the car. The man in the white coat.
Professor Hojo's mouth moves in a thin, small smile. "We've got quite a lot of work to do, my dear," he says. The dark liquid slides like oil into her heart and her lungs, and she blacks out.
MAY 9, 2002.
Sometimes she is conscious for the tests. Always Hojo watches her, though her pleas for release, for mercy, mean as little to him as the squeals of his actual lab rats. After some time, she learns that silence is best. She stops struggling. She stops pleading. She thinks instead of her husband, and her home on the shore. She thinks of her children--how old they must be now. How have they grown? Are they doing well at Garden? Squall, Seifer, Irvine, Quistis, and little Zell, always getting into trouble. Sometimes the scientists milling about, sliding in her trays of food or medication, mention how well their son is doing at Midgarden, or how Galbadia has a blitzball game scheduled at the campus soon, and she thinks with a glow of pride how well the Kramers' SeeD project must be doing. She wishes she could get word to the White SeeD, but she knows there's no hope of that. She knows there is no hope of them of tracking her to a lab on the outskirts of Midgar, hidden in an unassuming warehouse.
At night, if she is not set back in her Mako tank for more infusions, she is allowed to sleep on the hard mattress in her cell, the Silence collar around her throat ensuring she won't try anything with her powers, though she is not so foolish anyway. She closes her eyes and thinks of home, until the snuffling, wheezing, screaming sounds of the other test subjects lull her to blessedly dreamless sleep.
FEBRUARY 27, 2005.
She doesn't know how long she's been here. Time slips and slides past her in great chunks of unconsciousness. She can't remember the last time she saw the sun. Sleep is her only refuge now. Her mind knows no bounds, no fetters, no Mako-filled tubes, no tests. Her mind is her own. In her mind, she is free.
For what little good it does her.
AUGUST 18, 2006.
The tranquilizers are no longer strong enough to keep her unconscious as long as the scientists hope, and Edea drifts groggily awake several hours before her next testing session. She is in the Mako tube, of course, dim green IVs flooding her veins with refined Lifestream. Light flashes off to her right and the door to the small infusion room opens, Hojo scolding two men in Shin-Ra uniforms wheeling something large in on a dolly. She watches them under half-lidded eyes as she adjusts to the light, and the silhouettes become clear.
"Be careful, you incompetent oafs, be careful!" Hojo snaps, ushering the men towards the empty Mako tank across from Edea. A gurney is strapped to their dolly, a man with half-healed wounds bound to it, his neck immobilized in a brace. Silvery-gray hair spills in his face and over the gurney's edge. He is unconscious. Hojo yells at the workers as they carefully unstrap the unconscious man, remove his brace, and slide him into the harness of the empty Mako tube. Together they lift him into the canister as Hojo presses a series of dials on the control panel. Within minutes of the door closing, the silver-haired man is floating in a hazy green mass, just like Edea. Small machines eject from the walls of the tube, tending to his wounds, attaching nodes to his chest and arms, setting an IV in his injured right arm.
Hojo watches appreciatively, shooing the men out of the lab, and spends a long while adjusting controls on the man's container before he even thinks to check Edea's. He doesn't seem surprised to see her awake.
"Aren't you lucky?" he says, patting her tube like a stablemaster with his prize mare. "You get to spend some time with my greatest creation, Edea. A candidate for sorcery like you, you know, though I'm afraid the SOLDIER testing made it nearly impossible for him to go through bestowal, much to my chagrin." He inhales deeply and lets it out in a long, slow breath through his nose, staring at the man in the tube. His mouth turns up at the corners. "My son. Sephiroth."
Edea looks across the dim room. Sephiroth floats aimlessly in his tank, but for a moment, she thinks she sees his fist start to clench.
DECEMBER 1, 2006.
They are never conscious at the same time, Edea and her silver-haired companion, though when she wakes groggily in her Mako tube he is often there. Off to one side is Jenova, in a tube of her own, though the Mako is a strange, purplish color, blotted with great heaving masses of something thick and dark. Edea has long gotten over the shock of the old Yevonite myth, here and headless in the bowels of Shin-Ra, Inc. She has grown accustomed to its mottled blue flesh. She is no longer terrified by the humanoid mask attached to its shoulders, by the flickering tubes in its back. It is just another test subject of Professor Hojo, like herself. Like Sephiroth. She wonders if they will all die here. She wonders if any of them are not dead already.
They have begun new tests now, pulling small vials from Jenova, comparing them to vials pulled from Sephiroth. Hojo slides Jenova's sample into Edea's IV, and something pulses deep inside her.
At night, she hears voices whispering in the back of her eyes and her throat, like strands of cotton scraping against the back of her skull. She feels a darkness creeping in through her teeth in each injection. She is becoming something else. In her mind, she is no longer free, but running, always running, and she is so very tired.
FEBRUARY 14, 2007.
Edea, says a voice in her heart. Edea.
She shuts her mind. She runs.
Edea. Edea. Edea Edea Edea EdeaEdeaEdeaEdeaEdeaEdeaEdeaEdea
APRIL 6, 2007.
She looks across the lab at Sephiroth. They exhale into their aerators simultaneously. When she looks down at his heart monitor, it moves in time with her own.
APRIL 29, 2007.
Edea dreams and in her dreams she is small and she is fragile and she is trapped, trapped, she is looking out through her own eyes and she is watching herself set fire to her keepers, kill her keepers, impale her keepers, and she sees her reflection icy and unfazed and murderous and she sees them fall in piles at her feet as she frees herself, frees herself, she is free, they are free, and the sun is on their face and their hair and they hate this world and all the little people in it, the little people who have hurt them, the little people who have profaned the Planet and battered and killed and torn their mother to shreds
and she is someone's mother, isn't she
isn't she
SEPTEMBER 13, 2010.
She has no concept of time anymore. She does not know when Sephiroth finally, finally, after days or hours or months or years, gained control of her--true control, unbridled control. When she could no longer fight him, when the cells of his mother inside her (no, of Jenova, she had to remember, she had to remember the truth) sang out to his own DNA like a cacophonous harmony, and Edea was too weak to claw her way out. She no longer sees through her own eyes. She lies quietly in the back of her mind as Sephiroth uses her face to rip the Planet in two, and she waits.
MARCH 4, 2011.
"Matron?" someone says. A young girl, her jaw clasped in Edea's (no, not Edea's) hands, looking up with pleading brown eyes. "Matron, please."
The girl bestows on her, roughly, desperately, and dies. Edea stirs in the back of her skull.
APRIL 28, 2012.
"Matron? Matron, it's Irvine--don't you remember me?"
Sephiroth looks at him and the boy withers, shrinking back behind the police line with the other students vying for her attention. Edea scrapes her way forward and tries to see, tries to make this blurry greenish vision something clear. The boy is gone now, but she clings at the front of her mind. She holds onto that word like a lifeline.
Matron.
SEPTEMBER 8, 2012.
Her body is unconscious, but it is her own. It's the first time in years, years, since she could say that. Edea cannot rouse herself. That requires a strength she doesn't have, not yet. But she thinks, and she dreams, and when she feels the rush of shade and power that is her body welcoming back its parasite, something shifts. His word, his strength--his mother--that word belongs to her now. She is someone's mother, isn't she?
She sees the boy, tall and blonde and strong, his two friends at his back. She knows him well, though he does not recognize her.
Edea's heart cracks open, and hope spills out.
OCTOBER 12, 2012.
Sephiroth wants the Cetra. He wants her power. He wants her dead, for his mother's sake. Edea has to protect her. She has only a moment. Two men are holding her, one fair, one dark, and something in them reaches out to her--she feels the Jenova cells in them humming with her own, with Sephiroth's, as he loosens his grip on the sorceress to reach into their minds. She has only a moment. She cannot trust anyone Sephiroth can control.
"I must protect the Cetra," she says, each word dragged out of her on fishing hooks, scraping along her throat and her lungs and bleeding them raw. "The Planet," she rasps.
Ice shoots from her fingers and pierces the boys, their blood so similar to hers. She doesn't know what good she has done, if any. Sephiroth reels back into her as if struck himself, splitting, searing pain wracking every nerve in her mind until Edea loses her tenuous grip. She sinks back into herself, and she holds onto the pieces of her heart, and her words, so small and weak now. Matron. Mother. The boy is smiling cruelly as they slip through the wall, back to the cavernous grotto far in the North that she has made her home. Edea does all she can, and holds on.
NOVEMBER 18, 2012.
The crystal of the materia cavern is cold and rough beneath her palms. Edea has never felt anything so wonderful. She sees Sephiroth's boots in front of her--his body is strong enough now, strong enough that he no longer needs hers, and he sneers down at the sorceress, his newly useless tool.
"How pathetic you have become, Edea," he says, reaching down to lift her by her throat. Her legs are weak. Though her body has been moving, her control is weak, and her feet slip on the crystal floor helplessly as she reaches up to claw at Sephiroth's arm. He is so much stronger than she. Always so much stronger. "I have what I need now. You are no longer of any use to me, my little puppet."
Her eyes flicker towards the headless figure in a corner of the cavern, set up in a makeshift shrine. Jenova looks so small without her casements and her wires. The stench of her fills her nose and Edea thinks she might vomit, but trains her gaze back on Sephiroth, fighting for breath.
"Your mother?" she whispers venomously.
Sephiroth laughs, and then pauses, his eyes drifting to one side as if listening for something. Edea follows them but there is nothing, no sight, no sound. Sephiroth smiles. "Right on time," he says, and drops Edea roughly to her knees. Without her power he cannot put her into crystal stasis, but it's no matter: Sephiroth lifts his sword and a Break materia glimmers in its handle. Within moments, Edea is encased in stone.
But her body is hers. Her thoughts are hers. She waits.