SOMEWHERE IN MIDGAR, THIS AFTERNOON.
It has been years since he's seen the sun.
Consciousness comes in fits, like a fever. He has spent so long looking through someone else's eyes, he has almost forgotten what his own are like. Sight comes back in a haze of fluorescent green. A respirator covers his nose and mouth. His body--his body, yes, his own--floats weightless in that same green mass, buoyed up in semi-viscous gel. He can feel his hands, long-fingered, not as dexterous as they used to be. His heart thuds against his ribs. He isn't sure how long he's been healed, how long they've kept him under. He isn't sure what finally rouses him, after all this time. His eyes blink slowly, trying to in his surroundings.
The area is dark. He can't make out much between the murky green liquid and the dim room. But there, across the way: another splash of green in the darkness. Another half-healed body, encased in metal plates. He exhales into the respirator, a breath he has been holding for six years.
The door opens, bright white light flooding the room as two figures shuffle into view. One is hunched, his gaze focused on a clipboard in his hands. His white labcoat reflects the pale green light from the capsules. Behind him is a man in a blue uniform and helmet with a gun, which the man in the coat waves off irritably, like a fly. The guard's visor is up. His eyes glow the same green as their cells.
Sephiroth looks across the great abyss of space, and stares at the headless body of his mother. He can just make out her name through the murk, stamped in large letters atop her casing.
Then he looks at the SOLDIER.
The scientist notices that he is conscious first, and making a noise even audible to Sephiroth in his cell, he turns to run for the door. The SOLDIER shoots him down without blinking as Sephiroth's mind presses into his own, strange genes seeking their familiars. The man moves mechanically, taking the keycard from the dead scientist and moving to a series of locks and levers by Sephiroth's cell.
Good.
He swipes the card, presses a series of buttons. With a great rushing sound, the Mako-treated water begins to drain out of his tank. Sephiroth feels the cool, dry air of the lab hit him for the first time in years. He lifts his long-fingered hands, still trembling from disuse, and unhooks the respirator. The door to the tank unlocks with a click, and opens at his touch.
The SOLDIER is waiting dutifully. Sephiroth steps out of the tank and stands for a long time, feeling the cool cement beneath his bare feet, the stale laboratory air on his skin. His hair lies slick and wet on his back. He looks to the SOLDIER, who without hesitation draws a long sword from a sheath on his back, and hands it to Sephiroth. Ex-SOLDIER, first class: his hands still remember how to hold a blade.
"What is the date?" he asks, his voice sounding foreign.
"September 8, 2012," the SOLDIER says instantly.
"2012," he repeats. Has it been so long? He looks down at himself, and then at the SOLDIER. "Give me your clothes."
The man strips, leaving trousers, boots, jacket, and helmet at Sephiroth's feet. Sephiroth steps into them slowly, carefully. His body doesn't move as it used to. But he'll recover soon, he knows. Once dressed, he regards the SOLDIER coolly, and moves past him to the other green-filled tank. The creature inside is barely identifiable: a headless, armless torso, crisscrossed in veins that do not reflect any Gaian physiology, riddled in ancient scars. Casing surrounds the body, giving it shape and form, filling in the gaps. A helmet sits atop its trunk, a face shaped of smooth metal plates gazing unseeing out into the small lab. It is, in a word, inhuman.
But then again, so is he.
Sephiroth takes the sword and plunges it deep into the controls of the capsule. An alarm goes off in the main portion of the lab. The Mako begins to drain out of the case, but he cannot wait. He slashes deep into the glass of the tank, once, twice, three times; great chunks of glass shatter on the ground at his feet. The edges of the door cut his hands as he reaches in, tugging at the cables on the helmet that supply the body with Mako. SOLDIERs rush in, their weapons ready, and fall still when they enter the room. The helmet comes away in his hands in a stream of electric green. The body hands loosely on its cables and cords, and he reaches in, batting them away as easily as flies, until his mother's mangled corpse falls out into his arms. She is light, so light, and so small.
The scientists in the small laboratory stop their frantic emergency procedures when he steps out of the back room. It is silent, except for the alarms.
Then someone screams.
His body begins to move as it ought, the SOLDIER's sword--so inferior to his own--cutting easily through the soft, malleable flesh of the scientists. He hates the sound of their screaming. He hates these petty humans, these foolish children of Hyne. What are they, he thinks, sliding the sword out of a young man's chest--what are they to a god?
Within minutes, the few scientists stationed in the small lab are dead. Alarms are still ringing, casting the room in a bright, bright red. He kicks papers off desks, knocks over experiments, and slashes open electrical wires with his sword. Sparks flash out in blue and white and catch on the papers. Fire builds around the room. He pushes more papers into it, stoking the flames. He pours incendiary chemicals in that explode in fire and heat. Only one minute is wasted: gently placing his mother in a small laboratory canister, which he slips under his arm as he strides towards the door and out into the sunlight.
The lab is hidden inside an unmarked warehouse, set in the middle of a hundred other unmarked warehouses. Smoke billows out the door after him, and a workman on his cigarette break down the row glances at the door as Sephiroth steps out of it, his mother's canister hooked under one arm. Sephiroth stares blankly at him; the man turns away, his eyes focused on his cell phone.
He walks through the warehouses, following the sound of cars until he reaches a small side street. A large truck lumbers into the alley and a man in a jumpsuit leaps out, whistling. The truck remains running behind him. He stops when he sees Sephiroth.
"Uhh," he says, shielding his eyes from the sun. "You okay, there, fella? You look a little worse for wear."
Sephiroth glances past him to the truck. "Is this your vehicle?" he asks.
"Well...yeah," the man says uncertainly.
"What are you delivering?"
"Uh, nothing," the man says. He jerks a thumb back towards the truck. "Picking up. She's empty."
Sephiroth glides forward, faster than the man can blink, and plunges his sword into the driver's chest, pulling it out and kicking the man to the ground. He only wastes enough time to wipe the blade clean before he clambers up into the truck, sets his mother on the seat next to him, and backs out of the alley onto a road heading north. He can see the warehouses behind him in the rearview mirror. He can see the smoke rising, at first in trickles, then in great black billows, into the sky. He can see the rush of fire and debris as the lab, and all its contents, explode into the Midgar sky.