Archive of Our Own

The cold-weather gear that Sephiroth had been issued, seemingly as an afterthought, did not fit properly.

The bib was probably for later in the season when snow fell and remained deep on the ground for some time. He would have a few months to grow into it, and at this rate he probably would. He had also never seen real snow before, and looking at the bib made him feel a curious thrill.

But the puffy, down-stuffed coat was so large that the sleeves slipped down over his hands even when he strapped down the cuff tabs as tightly as they would go. It had been drilled into him that encumbrances to his hands were to be avoided, and that seemed especially vital now that he was impaired. While part of him noted, logically, that he hadn't been scheduled for combat or survival training in over a month and didn't seem likely to be in the future, another part of him was simply annoyed at how sloppy it was.

Why were they allowed to be careless and he never was?

Were all the things that had happened to him this year the result of their carelessness?

In the end, he put the coat on anyway. A threat demanding of his utmost dexterity, such as it was now, was only a slim possibility here; meanwhile, the cold was unquestionably present and, since the refrigeration piped into a simulation room surely didn't count, it was not something he was used to.

He could take the coat off after he finished his warm-up.

The Shinra employee who had been assigned to escort him here, whose name was Ian, was in the dining room. Ian had spent most of the four days since their arrival huddled there, processing the file boxes of documentation that had been the bulk of Sephiroth's baggage. Processing consisted mainly of expending one smelly marker after another crossing things out—sometimes entire pages in a row.

"May I go outside?" Sephiroth asked.

Ian's head popped up from behind a heap of manila folders. "Huh? Oh, sure," he said absently. He rubbed his eyes behind his thick glasses and sniffled; the marker fumes were taking their toll today. "Make sure you zip up, I guess? And be back before dark. I'll make tenderloin for dinner."

Sephiroth paused. "With apples?"

"No points for guessing!" Ian said. "Hey, before you go, watch this!"

He held up one of the fat markers and waggled it, then hurled it clear across the room. It landed with a clank and a rattle in the wastepaper basket positioned in the furthest corner. Ian thrust his fists in the air and cheered. "Four out of the last five!"

Sephiroth blinked. It seemed appropriate to say something here, but what? He finally settled on, "You're improving."

Ian grinned. "High praise from you. Anyway, don't let me waste your daylight. The sun goes down pretty early at this time of year, especially at this latitude. Go on, go have fun."

The word fun echoed in Sephiroth's ears down the hall and as he pulled on his hat and wiggled his feet into his boots.

He played games and solved puzzles in the labs, of course. Many of these were supposedly right off the shelf of an ordinary toy store, because they served an educational purpose without the Department having to reinvent the wheel. Others were strategy games conducted on tabletop with colored tokens of various shapes and sizes (which he knew what to do with) and field manuals in three-ring binders (which were still mostly beyond his reading level, and reportedly confusing even to seasoned officers). Recently, many of the exercises had been carried out with glowing green symbols on computer terminals that one operator had commented had cost as much to develop as Sephiroth had to raise.

A good scenario was challenging enough to engage Sephiroth's faculties without being so difficult as to cause frustration. The proctors called the resulting mindset a state of flow, but was it also fun?

Sephiroth thought so. How else could he feel so pleased, albeit furtively, even when he lost?

It didn't hurt that the computers were impossibly cool, too.

He zipped up his stupid, too-large jacket as he had been instructed, collected his practice sword from the umbrella stand, and headed out.

As he opened the door, a brisk gust made a fair attempt to snatch it right out of his hands. He had to drop his sword to wrestle the door shut again, and the sound of the sheathed blade clattering on the weathered stoop made him wince. He would never have done something like that before.

He sighed and picked it up. No nicks in the scabbard. And there was nobody around to make a pointed note on a clipboard or bark a reprimand, either. Maybe there never would be again. Maybe he was allowed to be careless now.

The yard was a-swirl with leaves in shades of yellow, red, and brown. Sephiroth dragged his feet through drifts of them just to hear the crunchy sound they made. Yesterday, for lack of anything more productive to do, he had spent some time looking at one after another and finding each to be unique. After all, it was important to observe his surroundings, and even seemingly insignificant details could be advantageous. The yellow and red ones still seemed alive, lustrous, and impossibly vivid—why did they fall before they were dead?—but most were brown and crumbly. These, the pebbles, and the hard, glossy nuts with rough caps on them that also littered the yard might serve as units if Sephiroth wanted to recreate a strategy game.

Could he make one that was fun?

He leaned his sword against the low brick wall that faced the dirt road in front of the house and began his warm-up. After three reps of the sequence, he was ready to take up his blade without risking injury, and after five, he was beginning to feel the insulating properties of the down. He peeled off the hated jacket at last and draped it over the wall.

Professor Hojo and the President had always wanted to see his newest, flashiest moves, while his experienced combat instructors had always emphasized exacting repetition of the basics until mastery and then forever after. Neither were present, and Sephiroth's only monitors were the garden wall and the shuttered windows of the borrowed house, but it wasn't hard to decide which exercises to do.

His only concession to Hojo—and maybe he shouldn't have conceded anything at all, since the man himself was thousands of kilometers away—was that he did his basic patterns leading with his left hand first and then again, mirrored.

Sephiroth became aware of two new observers as soon as they rounded the bend.

A threat assessment was hardly necessary. They were ambling, chatting, laughing together; they made no attempt to conceal themselves despite ample cover along the road. They had to have seen Sephiroth, of course, because human vision and attention were based on movement. He was armed—even a blunt practice sword could cause serious damage when used with intent, and how could they tell at that range that it was blunt?—and they weren't. But they kept on ambling nevertheless, which meant that they had also decided—too easily?—that Sephiroth wasn't a threat.

By their stature, Sephiroth guessed that they were about his age.

He couldn't remember ever meeting children his age before.

Sephiroth caught a good look of them as he pivoted on the ball of one foot and stepped back with the other to raise a block against a hypothetical opponent attacking from his rear. One of the boys was dark-haired and stocky and the other leaner with auburn hair. They strolled up to the wall and leaned on its low parapet, making no pretense of doing anything but watching Sephiroth.

He finished up the pattern without altering his speed and sheathed his blade before turning to face them.

"Hey," the leaner boy said. "You're really good!"

"Thank you," Sephiroth said reflexively.

The boy smiled brashly. "Maybe as good as I am!"

Probably not anymore, Sephiroth thought. Aloud, he said, "Hm. Maybe."

"Are you new here or just visiting?" the other boy asked.

Sephiroth considered the question. Nobody had taken the trouble to tell him to his face if his departure from Shinra was permanent or not. But there had been a lengthy dispute over the phone between Ian and Ian's supervisor over the return trip, and the result had been the purchase of a single commercial ticket with a nightmarishly convoluted itinerary back to Midgar. That seemed conclusive enough. Finally, Sephiroth nodded, mostly to himself, and said, "I'm new here."

"Oh," the dark-haired boy said. "Cool. I'm Angeal."

"Genesis," the leaner boy said. He thrust out a hand over the wall.

Sephiroth stepped forward. He had seen people shake hands often enough, so he reached out and grasped Genesis' hand.

"I'm Sephiroth," he said. He turned and shook Angeal's hand as well. Another reflex shoved itself to the fore, something he had been taught long before Hojo had taken over his care. "Nice to meet you."

"Nice to meet you, too," said Angeal. "We don't get a lot of new people out here. Or visitors."

"When did you get here?" Genesis asked.

"Four days ago."

Both Genesis and Angeal blinked. Then Genesis said excitedly, "Wait, you didn't come in on that helicopter, did you? That's so cool!"

Angeal said, "I thought we were lucky just seeing it take off up close! Man, I want to ride in a helicopter, too! What's it like? How long did it take?"

Sephiroth looked at one and then the other. "Yes," he said. "I came on the helicopter. They are very loud, so we had to wear hearing protection. If the pilot wants to take off immediately, you have to run through the rotor wash. It took"—he paused, used to reporting exact times but somehow aware that it was unnecessary now—"most of the day to get here from Midgar."

"Midgar!" Genesis said, even more eagerly. "What's Midgar like?"

Sephiroth almost said small, because that was what it looked like from most of the way up the Shinra Building or from the window of a helicopter. But it wasn't small at all, was it? He took so long deciding how to answer the question that Genesis and Angeal glanced at each other uneasily.

"It smells bad," Sephiroth said at last. He didn't usually have to deal with it, because the air in the building was filtered, humidified, and cooled or heated according to season. But even the short walk to the helipads, which he took once or twice a month, was enough to give him some impression of the wider city below. "And it's noisy. There aren't any trees or stars or birds."

Genesis deflated slightly. "But there are theaters, right? And shops and museums and stuff?"

There was definitely stuff in Midgar, so Sephiroth tentatively agreed.

"How can there not be stars?" Angeal asked.

Genesis interjected before Sephiroth could respond. "Too much light from the city drowns them out," he said. "Mideel is the same, but not that bad maybe."

"There is also smog," Sephiroth added. "It's not like here at all. The air here smells—" He halted, unable to come up with a word for it. The opposite of sour was sweet, but that didn't quite fit, because, weirdly, there was also a kind of bitterness. It was completely different to the biting reek of partially-burned mako, though. How could bitterness be so nice?

Angeal smiled warmly. "It's fresh."

"Until garbage-burning day at least," Genesis said with a grimace and an offended wave of his hand.

Sephiroth stared at Genesis.

Angeal snorted. "Yep, you're from the city all right," he said. "Guess you'll have to get used to our backwoods ways. Are you here with your family or are they coming later?"

"No," Sephiroth said. "I'm an orphan."

Angeal's grin fell away. "Oh, uh," he stammered, "I didn't mean to—I'm really sorry—"

"Put your foot in it, Angeal," Genesis muttered inexplicably.

"It's fine," Sephiroth said. "I never knew my parents. I was part of a Shinra program until they sent me here."

He liked it a lot better when Angeal and Genesis were smiling, and, really, the strongest thing he felt now about not having parents was that he had liked being taken care of by Professor Gast far more than Professor Hojo. And now Hojo was half the planet away, maybe for good.

"It's fine," Sephiroth repeated feebly. He grasped for a diversionary tactic. "Anyway, I like it here a lot. I saw just about a million stars on the first night I was here, and they were amazing. I've only ever seen pictures of the galaxy before, in textbooks."

"That's good," Angeal said hesitantly. "I'm glad."

"Have you tried the dumbapples yet?" Genesis asked.

Sephiroth nodded fervently. "They're in everything I've eaten since I got here. They're good. They're... tart!"

"This time of year, yeah. We grow them here," Angeal explained. "The village association must have brought a bushel over as a welcome gift."

The chill had been seeping back into Sephiroth's muscles while he stood there talking. Somehow, Angeal noticed it at about the same time as Sephiroth did, and he picked up Sephiroth's coat from where it was draped over the wall and handed it to him.

"Thank you," Sephiroth said. He put it on and thumped his arms to warm up, then stopped because it made the sleeves flap absurdly.

Genesis laughed, not unkindly. "That's huge on you."

"Yes. I don't know why they gave it to me," Sephiroth said. He looked at Angeal and cocked his head to one side. Observations came together in his mind—the way Angeal's shoulders strained the fabric across them, the fact that he wasn't zipped up despite the low-and-falling temperature, the bareness of Angeal's wrists. "Your jacket is too small for you."

This was apparently a wrong thing to say. Angeal's shoulders jerked upwards convulsively and his face, already chapped by the wind, flushed blotchily. "It's fine," he said. "It will last the rest of the season."

Genesis looked dismayed again.

Sephiroth's instincts were screaming at him that diversionary tactics wouldn't work here. The way out was sometimes straight through, and maybe that principle applied as well to conversations as it did to battles. He said, "My jacket is too big and yours is too small. Why don't we switch?"

"It's fine," Angeal repeated stubbornly. There was a notch between his brows now that deepened moment by moment. "People will think I stole it. And it's not a fair trade, anyway. Yours is brand new."

Sephiroth thought for a second. "Mine doesn't have a hood lined with fur," he pointed out. "And yours has four pockets. Mine only has two."

"Six," Genesis interjected. He reached out and snagged the flap of the hip pocket on Angeal's jacket with a finger. "They're double, a pocket on top of a pocket."

"It is a fair trade," Sephiroth maintained.

"Don't be pigheaded, Angeal," Genesis said. "He's obviously sick of those sleeves."

After a few tense moments, the notch in Angeal's brow softened and went away, though his frown did not.

"Why don't we go ask your mom?" Genesis added. "Maybe she'll give Sephiroth a tartlet, too."

Angeal glanced at the house. "What about your—um—well," he trailed off, flushing again. "Yeah, let's go ask Ma. My house is just down the road."

"Come on," Genesis said in an exaggerated conspiratorial whisper, shielding his mouth with a hand, "let's go before he changes his mind!"

Sephiroth glanced at Angeal, who rolled his eyes. That was better than the frown, at least. Sephiroth tucked his sheathed practice sword into his belt and hopped nimbly over the wall.

"There's a gate...? Whatever," Angeal sighed.

They set off down the dirt road in the same direction that Genesis and Angeal had been heading before they stopped. Just down the road turned out to be a greater distance than just down the hall, but within ten minutes Genesis was crowding Sephiroth and Angeal through the front door of a small house, built in the same wattle and daub as the one Sephiroth was staying in. The air inside was toasty warm and fragrant with delicious food smells, all competing for Sephiroth to identify them.

"Ma, I'm home!" Angeal called. He and Genesis began pulling their coats and boots off, so Sephiroth followed suit. His practice sword he leaned next to the umbrellas by the door.

"Hello, dear," came a woman's voice from upstairs. "I'll be down in a moment. How was school today?"

"Fine," Angeal said. "Genesis is here. And a new kid."

"From school?"

"Um, not yet. He's still moving in."

Genesis turned to Sephiroth. "You'll definitely be in our class at school," he said. "There aren't enough kids to have separate classes for each grade."

Sephiroth nodded mutely, a little dazed by the idea. Maybe once Ian ran out of documents to cross out—or smelly markers—he would fill out the paperwork that was doubtless needed for Sephiroth to start at school. Professor Hojo called schools processing plants for docile factory workers, but Sephiroth wondered how accurate this judgment was. Sephiroth had never met a single docile factory worker but, to his knowledge, had also never met a single person who had not gone to school.

There was a clatter and series of thumps as Angeal's mother came down the creaking wooden stairs, burdened with a mop and heavy bucket. Sephiroth turned to face her, two very different responses mingling weirdly in him—one the preparation to evaluate a potential threat and the other the anticipation of meeting someone new.

The bucket hit the floor with a hard bang and sloshed dingy water onto the floorboards, though it didn't tip over. Angeal's mother stood as rigid as an I-beam, staring as if transfixed, and Sephiroth found that he couldn't tear his gaze away from her face either. Her expression set off alarm bells in his mind, and his left hand might have twitched toward his weapon if it were capable of such involuntary actions anymore.

"Ma?"

Angeal's voice broke the spell.

His mother looked at him, briefly stricken, before recovering. "Goodness," she said, turning back to Sephiroth and peeling off the rubber gloves she was wearing, "where are my manners? I'm Gillian Hewley, Angeal's mother."

Sephiroth swallowed. "Sephiroth," he managed. "Nice to meet you, Dr. Hewley."

He yanked off his own glove and stuck out his hand. If it shook slightly, she didn't seem to notice.

"Nice to meet you too, Sephiroth," Mrs. Hewley said, smiling kindly. The strain wasn't fully gone from her voice, but she took Sephiroth's hand anyway and shook it, much more gently than Angeal or Genesis had. "But it's Mrs. Hewley, please, not Doctor. Welcome to Banora."

"Understood," Sephiroth said, "Mrs. Hewley." He looked at the floor, his thoughts racing. He hadn't wanted to attack her, he decided, because that didn't make any sense; he had wanted to defend her. That only made slightly more sense. She had looked frightened. And not of him, though he couldn't say why he thought so.

"Angeal, why don't you three help yourselves to some of those tartlets while I swab up this mess I made?" Mrs. Hewley said, putting her gloves back on. "Genesis, there's milk in the fridge and you know where the mugs are."

It was only when Mrs. Hewley stepped outside to empty the mop bucket and the three boys were seated at the rough-hewn wooden table in the center of the room that Angeal said, quietly, "That was kinda weird."

"Yeah, but," Genesis said through a mouthful of custardy pastry, "we all got tartlets."

Angeal nodded. "I guess."

Sephiroth stared at his tartlet. He felt mesmerized by the spiral pattern of the indigo slivers of peel that edged the layered slices inside it. Slowly, he said, "Maybe it was because of my eyes."

"Huh? What's wrong with your eyes?"

Sephiroth made himself look straight at Genesis. He even pushed his hair out of the way, so there could be no question.

But Genesis shrugged and took another bite. "They're a pretty color," was all he had to say about it.

"They look fine to me," Angeal agreed.

"You better eat that," Genesis said, pointing to Sephiroth's yet-untouched tartlet, "before Angeal starts eyeing it."

Angeal scoffed. "I wouldn't! You take that back!"

Mrs. Hewley returned and immediately headed back up the stairs, then backtracked a few steps until she could lean out over the railing.

"I've got a phone call to make, so don't set the house on fire, all right?" she said.

"I'll make sure Genesis doesn't," Angeal said pointedly.

"Shut up, Angeal!"

Mrs. Hewley looked exasperated. "Maybe you two should tone it down in front of your new friend?" she said. "Especially since he's probably been..." She trailed off and looked pensively at Sephiroth, but Sephiroth didn't notice.

New friend. That was him.

"Well, we'll see," Mrs. Hewley sighed, shaking her head. "Keep it down to a dull roar, will you?"

Angeal stared after her. "Still kinda weird," he muttered.

"Really, Sephiroth, you should eat that," Genesis said.

Sephiroth finally picked up the tartlet with his right hand and took a bite.

"Oh," he said, then wiped his mouth of the crumbs that spilled out. "Oh, it's..."

"Good, isn't it?" Angeal said. "Ma has a special recipe. Everyone else uses just cinnamon, but Ma has a secret mix of five spices."

"One is still cinnamon," Genesis whispered too loudly, "and another is obviously ginger."

Angeal glared at him. "But the rest are a secret, and you better shut up about the ginger or else."

"If people don't know ginger when they taste it, that's their problem," Genesis said, shrugging. "Hey, we forgot to ask about the jackets!"

"Aw, drop it, Gen."

"How many times do I have to tell you not to call me that, Ange?" Genesis said. "I'm not gonna drop it—you drop it!"

Sephiroth let their dispute wash over him. He could also hear the ceiling creaking and groaning with each step Mrs. Hewley took as she paced restlessly overhead, and he knew that if he focused he would be able to hear at least her side of the phone conversation. But for once in his life, he let himself ignore the input of his enhanced senses—ignore everything but the sweetness, the spices, the tartness, the chilled custard, and the crumbly crust of his pastry. He began taking smaller bites to make it last.

It didn't last nearly long enough. But maybe he would get another one sometime.

Once even the crumbs were gone—and they were tasty crumbs—Sephiroth followed Angeal and Genesis' lead and walked his empty plate and mug over to the sink to wash them. Angeal leapt up from his chair and intercepted him.

"Ma would sit on me if she found out I let you wash your own dishes," Angeal said.

"Genesis washed his," Sephiroth said, baffled. He didn't ask, but wanted to know, whether Mrs. Hewley would literally sit on Angeal and why that apparently constituted a punishment here. It sounded like an easier punishment than running laps, if only because Mrs. Hewley was not a particularly large person.

Angeal shrugged. "Yeah, but that's Genesis. He's practically like a piece of furniture around here. Loud furniture that doesn't match anything else."

Sephiroth didn't know what that meant at all, but he relinquished his dishes anyway. Did Angeal mean loud in the same sense as the Urban Planning Division's notorious quarterly Loud Shirt Day? Either way, Genesis seemed to fit the bill, although how he resembled furniture still escaped Sephiroth.

Heralded by creaks and thumps, Mrs. Hewley reappeared.

Genesis all but tackled her.

As a result, Sephiroth found himself side-by-side with Angeal while Mrs. Hewley evaluated the issue of the coats. At her instruction, he spun about this way and that, stretched his arms in every direction, allowed her to tug and fuss at Angeal's jacket on his body, and then watched with bemusement as Angeal, squirming, endured the same treatment wearing his coat.

"Well," Mrs. Hewley said, "it looks like you'll both have room to grow into them. What were they thinking, getting you an adult size?"

"See, I told you so!" Genesis said. He looked so impossibly smug that Sephiroth felt faintly annoyed on Angeal's behalf.

"I'll agree to the trade," Mrs. Hewley concluded. "But Sephiroth, if you have any problem later on, you come on over and we'll make it right, got it?"

"Understood, Mrs. Hewley," Sephiroth said quietly. "And... and the same for Angeal."

Mrs. Hewley smiled at him and tucked a lock of his hair behind his ear with a feather-light touch. "You're a good kid, aren't you?" she said. "You'll be all right here. And I'm sorry for startling you when I dropped the bucket."

"It's all right," Sephiroth said.

"Now then," Mrs. Hewley said firmly, pointing at their mound of boots in the entryway, "you kids are just wasting this nice clear day cluttering up my dining room and devouring my food. Why don't you go out and give those jackets a field test? Sephiroth, when do you have to be back?"

"Before dark."

"Then you've got plenty of—hmm, maybe not. Genesis, keep an eye on the time, will you? The temperature's going to go right down when the sun sets, and I don't want you boys caught out."

In the end, it wasn't the least orderly withdrawal Sephiroth had ever participated in. He at least made it out the door with everything he had arrived with, whereas Genesis had to run back in to retrieve his gloves.

The light was already beginning to slant through the trees and turn golden. They headed back up the road the way they had come from, presumably in the direction of the school, and they kept going around the bend past the house Sephiroth was staying in. At some point, Genesis whirled about and began to walk backwards, apparently just because he could. Sephiroth trailed behind him and Angeal, lost in thought. Ian would be going back to Midgar, and the borrowed house would be shut up and become vacant again. Where would he go? Surely there were a limited number of households in a village of this size that could or would take him in. If Shinra had not yet made a permanent arrangement, perhaps he could stay with Genesis or Angeal until one was made.

"So why...?" Genesis mused aloud, gesturing vaguely. "Why'd they send you here?"

It wasn't that Sephiroth missed the intonation of the question. But he had spent so much time chewing over the other question, why did they send him here, that he skipped right over what Genesis meant, which was why did they send him here of all places.

Sephiroth came to a parade-ground halt. Genesis stumbled, stopped, and grabbed Angeal by the arm.

"They sent me here," Sephiroth said, unbuttoning the wrist strap of his left glove, "because of this."

The Advanced Weaponry Division had tested samples of plastic that were matched to Sephiroth's skin tone only to find them too brittle for combat use. Sephiroth himself had been secretly relieved when they switched to a matte grey material for most of the arm and black metal for the joints and actuators. He had not liked the way the skin-colored prototypes looked, though he could not explain why. And given the way the robotic limb was articulated, it was clear that nobody would ever mistake it for a flesh-and-blood hand anyway. On top of all that, he had worn gloves routinely to begin with and would continue to do so afterward.

Angeal and Genesis leaned close to look. Sephiroth flexed his prosthesis for them, turning it face up so they could see the clear, molded silicone pads that cushioned his palm and fingers. Unmuffled by leather, the mechanisms gave off a soft whir. He touched the tip of his thumb to each fingertip; it was the first exercise that he had been set during his recovery from that last surgery, and he could now carry it out unconsciously.

Sephiroth told the story slowly, aware of all the lessons he had been given in handling classified information. He had been instructed to say camping trip; but, even having known Angeal and Genesis for less than an afternoon, he still recognized that this would only provoke questions that would be harder to answer. Only an idiot would believe it had been a camping trip. And they were both obviously stubborn in their own respective ways.

"My hand and wrist got broken," Sephiroth said. "They couldn't tell how badly, so the caster in our party didn't want to use magic on it. But—"

But Hojo and the rest of his team back at headquarters hadn't wanted to stop the exercise for a medical evacuation unless it was a critical case. Their schedule had been tight and growing ever tighter, with war preparations piling up and overflowing the timing allotted to them like an overloaded conveyor belt that couldn't be shut off. Now, of course, that schedule was blown to pieces....

Genesis was nodding. "That's the first thing they teach you about using curative materia—make sure any bones are set properly."

"But the caster had to do it anyway, and—"

"That's awful," Genesis exclaimed. "Why?"

Sephiroth shook his head. He hadn't been party to the argument that had gone on over the radio; he had only seen how furious the caster had been when he returned to Sephiroth's side accompanied by the equally grim-faced sergeant.

He had felt fine for an hour before his hand began to swell. By the time the helicopter arrived, the arm had ballooned grotesquely in size. The skin had felt like it was about to split apart in a dozen different places. Later, he would overhear that the squad's first aid packs only had pain medication in adult doses, which might have put him into a coma or killed him at his weight and size. Sephiroth had kept himself from crying, at first because he didn't want the grizzled sergeant to see but ultimately because even the slightest motion of his body sent shocks of agony racing up his arm, shoulder, and neck.

That same grizzled sergeant had cried as he tried fruitlessly to talk Sephiroth through breathing exercises to keep him from holding his breath until he passed out.

"Anyway, the blood vessels got all tangled up"—the real explanation was more complicated, but Sephiroth hadn't been able to follow the medical jargon—"and I had to go into surgery for it."

Sephiroth had no memory past the overwhelming torrent of sound of the helicopter landing in the field. He had been rushed into an operating room immediately on arrival back at headquarters. That surgery and the precision-targeted healing magic that went with it had mitigated the risk of a potentially fatal embolism, but further operations would be required once Sephiroth's condition had stabilized.

"I guess they weren't able to fix it," Angeal said faintly. "Since..."

Sephiroth shook his head again. "They might've fixed it, but after the second surgery I got a bad infection, so they never knew if it worked or not. It was too early to tell."

He remembered waking up in the infirmary one morning feeling the best he had since before the accident. A nurse in cheerful cactuar-print scrubs had taken him for a walk around the labyrinthine corridors of the ward, four circuits before lunch, which had been a club sandwich, somewhat dry. After that, he had felt a little sleepy and sore and decided to indulge in a nap. Naps whenever he wanted were one of the best parts of being in the infirmary.

The next time he woke up was days later, and his arm was gone below the elbow.

Sephiroth realized that at some point, Genesis had clasped his prosthetic hand between both of his own, and their warmth was starting to penetrate the outer shell to the sensors within. He looked up, only to find looks of open horror on both boys' faces.

"So—so they kicked you out of your home because you got hurt?" Angeal demanded.

Sephiroth struggled to understand the question. He felt lightheaded and strange. "No," he said at last. "No, that's not why. There's more to it than that. And that place wasn't—"

Professor Hojo had left the subsequent procedures to the infirmary and AWD, but once Sephiroth had been well enough, he had returned to Research and Development to resume his program at a reduced tempo. It had still been difficult at first: fatigue dogged him, and his ability with his new robotic hand advanced only in fits and starts. After a month, however, he had been satisfied with his own progress, convinced that this was a setback that he could overcome.

Hojo thought otherwise.

Sephiroth saw less and less of him as the weeks and then months dragged by, and more and more of the graphs with red lines that were flattening out, wobbling fitfully, or simply going down and never rising again. Would Angeal or Genesis understand what those meant? Did he, really?

"The program I was in—I had to be good enough to protect myself and others," Sephiroth said. Hojo had always emphasized perfection for its own sake, but others on the team had explained that Sephiroth's abilities would save lives someday. Nobody ever said it, but it stood to reason that if his abilities weren't good enough, he might die or the people he was supposed to protect might die. "They didn't kick me out of the program—it was the program itself that ended."

Unsurprisingly, this did not satisfy either Genesis or Angeal any more than it satisfied Sephiroth. Angeal's face was blotchy again, this time with anger, and Genesis looked about to explode.

Sephiroth felt his own face go hot, though he knew he was not the target of their fury. His pulse was racing, his right knee was quivering, and his eyes were stinging. "I'm not—it wasn't—maybe if it was my right hand instead of my left, they would have—"

He stopped; tried and failed to breathe the way the sergeant had taught him.

"Sephir—" Angeal began.

"That place wasn't my home!" Sephiroth snapped furiously. "And I'm glad they kicked me out! They—he didn't give me enough time to get better. I'll get better. I'll do it my way, and Professor Hojo can just go to hell! He was the one who forced the caster to do it! He ruined his own stupid experiment! I hope he gets fired!"

Genesis and Angeal's faces blurred to smears before him. The tears felt like acid etching his cheeks as they spilled over. He ducked his head, trying to hide behind the ample curtain of his hair.

That never worked.

Angeal came at him from the right, wrapping his big arms around Sephiroth's shoulders. Genesis crashed into him from the left, engulfing Sephiroth around his ribcage and having to wriggle one arm under Angeal to latch on.

"This is your home now," Angeal said fervently. "Got it? Your home is right here."

Genesis nodded against Sephiroth's shoulder. "Hojo or whatever his name is can go to hell. We'll send him to hell. If anyone has a problem with that, they can go to hell too!"

"We'll go with you back to Midgar when you're ready," Angeal said. "We'll do it together."

"Nothing shall forestall our return!" Genesis declared.

Sephiroth was pinned between them. It should have been intolerable to be immobilized and helpless like that, with his arms squashed by the press of bodies, his sword inaccessible, and his feet fenced in by theirs, but it felt the opposite. He let his head sink down onto someone's shoulder.

They stayed there until his convulsive, gasping sniffles petered out.

When Genesis and Angeal pulled away again, Sephiroth recognized that they had been crying too. There were damp patches on what had until recently been Angeal's jacket. It made him feel vaguely guilty, but it was also strangely consoling.

Angeal stuffed his handkerchief into Sephiroth's hands and used his scarf to wipe his own face.

"Thank you," Sephiroth croaked.

"Give it to him when you're finished, 'cuz I'm sure he forgot—"

"I did not!" Genesis said hoarsely, whipping out a handkerchief of his own. "I don't need Sephiroth's snotty cast-offs and you're not my mom, Angeal!"

Angeal laughed into the fabric of his scarf. "How much time do we have left before the sun goes down?"

Genesis consulted his watch. "About an hour," he said. "More than I thought."

"Why don't we go kick rocks down the cliff? That should help," Angeal said.

Sephiroth looked at him blearily. "Will it?"

"Well," Genesis said, "you've got good enough boots that it can't hurt."

The reasoning eluded Sephiroth, but—

"Yes. Let's go do that," he said.

Oddly enough, it did help.

So did watching Ian fill out his school enrollment packet over dinner that evening.