A/N: Peace offering for being so tardy. Originally part of veeery long and exasperating one-shot that refuses to consider itself finished, so if it seems fragmentary or anything, that's the problem. Enjoy. Or not. …okay, just be disturbed, anything's good these days.

When Sephiroth was a child, he was fascinated with dead things.

He used to pick up the decomposing corpses of animals, birds – road kill, mostly, though he sometimes went beneath the Plate and killed monsters there – and study them intently, spellbound by the way the flesh rotted away to reveal pale bones and captivated at the way those fragile skeletons fitted together, an organic jigsaw. He would flex legs, wings, jaws, trying to discern how it was all held together, how it would all fall apart.

It might have been the ordered neatness of the laboratories in which he spent his childhood that caused him to seek out the temporary mess and horror of decay, it might have been that he had never witnessed the natural order of dead things before. It might have been that.

He had a pet pigeon once. He tamed it with breadcrumbs and kindness and low, loving coos of adoration, until it would flutter into his cupped hands when he called it, and sit still with beady eyes closed as he carefully pushed and pulled its wings, felt with inquisitive fingers the shape of the skull and body beneath soft feathers. Then one day he grasped the back of its head gently between thumb and forefinger and with a quick, indifferent twist, felt as well as heard the fragile bones in its neck crack and break.

He watched as its plumpness melted away, an illusion of flesh and feathers, watched as the maggots ate out its dark eyes, burrowed and twisted into its flesh, gathered in the ribcage and consumed the soft, putrefying innards once kept safe behind bars of hollow bone. When the scavengers had taken their fill he placed the bones in bleach, scraped and cleaned away the last clinging remnants of mortality. For a while, that was enough.

Later, as a slightly older child on his first battlefield, he had walked among the dead soldiers, knelt beside them, flexed their stiffening limbs, opened and closed their empty eyes, estimated the time they had before the flies came, and the maggots and the worms and the beetles - all the little creatures that would enfold those empty husks back into the earth. He was incredibly disappointed when others came to gather the bodies and put them in boxes.

Human bodies and animals, they were not so very different, he thought. The humans had all died as easily as the animals of his childhood. The strength of their bones was an illusion, for all their size – they snapped and twisted under his curious hands as easily as their animal forerunners. And they would melt away just as the animal corpses did. Even, he decided, if they were put in boxes thanks to the pathetic squeamishness humans were capable of. He never did discover whether he was pleased or disappointed with this revelation.

Later still, as a young man used to the hushed presence of death beside him – used to and comforted by it – he would sit next to those on the field who were dying. He was incredibly adept at spotting them, at scenting the heavy iron tang of too much blood spilt, at hearing the heavy, exhausted gasps for air that would soon run out for them, at recognizing the slight glaze of the eyes that was not the result of shock or injury, but of a death soon to come.

He would sit beside them, listening to their gasps for air, watching them force their bodies do something they had done without thought for years upon years, smelling the heavy scent of their futility in their pointless struggle to breathe, breathe, breathe. He listened to men scream for their mothers, scream that they were dying, scream wordlessly from a disconnected vortex of pain, and broke their jaws if they became too irritating. He watched the light in their eyes go out. He watched their limbs slacken; he watched their hoarse, laboured breathing stop, freeze in their chest. He watched their mangled bodies still. He watched their spirits depart.

Once, there was a boy. He doesn't remember what he looked like or if he wore ShinRa colours or Wutai, it didn't particularly matter; the boy himself was inconsequential. It was the manner of his dying that enthralled Sephiroth. It was the way he slipped toward his death as easily as if he were falling asleep. He didn't struggle; his last breaths didn't tear their way out of his throat, he didn't spend his last few moments pawing helplessly at the dirt he was dying on, struggling for purchase upon a world he was already slipping out of. No, he greeted death with wide open eyes and a faint smile and it was this that made Sephiroth lean down and cover that wondering smile with his cold, cruel mouth and steal his last breath from him.

He wanted to taste the nature of dying, he wanted take from the world at large that precious last exhale, have it for his own. He wanted to taste of death and so he did, neck craned awkwardly and arms clumsily braced, the ends of that molten hair stained brown and red with mud and blood. There was a tremor through that dying body and a silent, insubstantial whisper of used air was pushed out through tired lungs and a beaten mouth and he caught it in his own. It tasted of regret and suffering and loss, but not of fear and defeat, as Sephiroth had thought it would.

And then there was simply another corpse and Sephiroth stood and went out to deliver swift death to others with a sharp sword and a mirthless smile.