There was someone in Sephiroth's mind.

He noticed it upon waking, one cold morning in a Wutai forest. A silent, unasked for presence in the back of his head.

He stared at the canvas of the tent's roof, the poorly mended hole a ninja had cut in it. His sleeping bag was pulled up over his nose. He recognised the presence for what it was but didn't know what to do with it. He was sixteen. That was old to be developing a soulmate.

Hojo had been relieved when puberty came and went without any connection appearing. Soul bonds were a distraction and a weakness, he said, a vulnerability that compromised objective thought. That made sense to Sephiroth. He was trusted with a great deal of Shinra's classified information, having some stranger with access to his head was indeed an unacceptable vulnerability.

Easy to say that then. What was he supposed to do about it now? He could find them and kill them, he supposed. That would certainly break the connection. Possibly at the risk of damage to himself, but Shinra would likely prefer he be injured over compromised.

He mentally prodded the presence. It didn't do anything. It didn't feel like much either, it wasn't even noticeably foreign. And yet he knew intrinsically that it belonged to someone else.

He lay still for a few more minutes, cataloguing the phenomena.

When nothing more revelatory happened, he got up and went about his day.

Their position in the forest was not stable. It had taken months to capture what they had, and the enemy endured still, every day that they took new ground they ran the risk of losing it behind them. He moved their camp to a more defensible location and spent three days and nights cutting down enemy units while his men set up the fortifications anew.

Standing in what passed for a command tent, covered in mud and filth, he requested over the radio to skip his quarterly return to Midgar for Mako boosters and a physical.

It was pointedly denied.

A thin sigh escaped him and he pinched his aching eyes closed.

"We'll lose the territory again as soon as I leave," he said, already resigned.

"You have your orders, SOLDIER."

"Yes, sir."

He had dodged it once, and only because pickup physically couldn't reach him. that was how he knew he didn't actually need another Mako shot yet, and the physical itself was just a formality at this point. It was nothing more than a powerplay from the Science Department and it was going to cost them lives and territory. Again.

The presence at the back of his mind opened and he felt angry. Indignant. Months of work would be lost, just so he could come back afterwards and do it all again next quarter?

He paused. The anger trickled through his mind, disturbing his calm. Curious. He examined it from all angles, trying to discern the shape and nuance of the foreign sensation. It was angry in ways he typically wasn't, with a self-righteous, defiant edge to it.

The connection in his mind quietened again, taking the anger with it.

That was going to be dangerous. Such a thing could threaten his equilibrium, possibly even compromise decision that needed to be purely objective.

It was troubling, but now he knew to be alert for it. It was odd that it had reared its head during a conversation, but not once during the previous days of combat. He would have to investigate it further until he had a better grasp of the mechanics.

What did it mean about whoever was on the other side of the connection that anger was the trait they brought to the table? He wondered, feeling quite self-indulgent at the train of thought, what traits he was providing them with.

He left to go pack his kit and abandon the outpost he had just secured.

There were folktales claiming soul bonds were a matter of opposites finding balance. The sort of unsubstantiated mystical thing Genesis liked. Perhaps, as such an angry person, they were getting his logic and calm.

It was a comforting thought.

Tifa was eight and her mother had gone over the mountain.

Dad told her to be good, to be brave. So did all the adults in the house, smiling awkwardly at her, in their black clothes and holding the little sandwiches Mrs Schmidt brought out after the burial.

"You're being so brave," they said. "She would be very proud of you."

She wanted to run and hide under the stairs. But Mum hadn't liked it when she did that and Dad told her to be good. Be good for mum. She scrunched her mouth up to stop from crying.

There was another sad person pretending Mum wasn't really dead in every room she entered. Over the mountain. Did they think she was stupid? They put her body in a box and put the box in the ground. She had been there.

Dad was watching her from the corner of the room with tears in his eyes. He kept looking away every time she looked at him. The house felt so small and her head felt fuzzy.

She couldn't breathe. There wasn't enough space, there were too many people, they were all lying and she couldn't do anything. She stomped her foot and went outside. She wanted to slam the porch door behind her but it was attached to an arm that made it close slowly no matter what you did. She crossed her arms.

She stared up at the mountain.

The fuzziness in her head was getting worse.

She started to run. That felt better for a moment, the wind was cold and the gravel crunched under her nice shoes, but she didn't care. She kept running for as long as she could. Her head stopped feeling fuzzy and she didn't feel so trapped.

Then Cloud caught up to her, and the bridge collapsed.

By the time her Dad found them she was panicking. He blamed Cloud but Cloud was hurt and it wasn't his fault, it was hers, she just- she just wanted Mum back. Her head felt so fuzzy.

It wasn't until much later, when Dad had calmed down, all the people had gone home and she was tucked into bed that she thought about the way her head had felt all day. The fuzz had gone away but something was still different.

Her Dad sat on the end of her bed, his elbows on his knees, staring bleakly at the wall.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"I know, sunshine," he sighed. "I'm not- I'm not angry."

She nodded, unconvinced. "Is your head-friend alright?"

He looked at her with a frown. "Of course. They're safe on their Chocobo ranch. Why?"

She picked at the scratchy wool blanket. "How did you know when you got them? In your head?"

"I…Tifa, honey," he paused and patted her hair gently. "Is that what you think happened today?"

"I don't know." The something in her head felt like maybe it was a someone.

"You are very young for it. It's alright if you did just… I'm not angry at you for running away." He smiled, that same awkward smile all the adults were giving her all day. "We don't need a soul bond to make us act a bit silly sometimes."

She sank down in her blankets. "My head feels too full."

He looked at her closely, his mouth wonky with his thinking face. "Alright. Would you like to tell me about them in the morning?"

She nodded and sank down further until her head was under the blankets entirely.

"Night, night, my little sunshine."

"Goodnight," she said. She heard him click the light off and leave, shutting the door behind him.

"Goodnight, she whispered to the something that might have been a someone.

That night she dreamed she was in a helicopter. Greenfields were speeding away below and golden sunlight was reflecting on the glass. It was so quiet.

The presence at the back of her head was still there when she woke up. She felt calmer.

Maybe… maybe Mum had sent them.

She didn't talk to Dad about it that day, he was too sad, and thought she had forgotten.

She saw them sometimes. Well, she saw through them. She was playing behind the house when suddenly the fuzzy spot in the back of her head did something and she could see two things at once. The house was still there, and the scraggly grass and the mossy tree stump. But she could also a table covered in papers and a man in suit sitting on the other side of it. She couldn't hear anything, but their mouths were moving and sometimes they adjusted the papers. It went on for some time, and she grew disappointed. It was so boring. Eventually, it faded away without anything interesting happening and she went back to playing.

In her dreams, she was floating in green water in a glass tube. She woke up feeling like her room was too small and opened her bedroom door. She didn't sleep with it shut again after that.

Her dad was surprised when he asked a few weeks later and she said they were still there.

"What are they like?" he asked, looking worriedly up from pouring pancake batter.

She hummed. "They're tall." The ground was so far away when she saw through their eyes.

He laughed. "That's not what I meant. Do you know how soul bonds work?"

She shrugged. She had read the books and seen the cartoons. It always ended in kissing in the stories, but her dad had never even met his one, and he wouldn't have kissed someone who wasn't Mum anyway. She knew it was rude to ask about someone else's soulmate.

"You're a little helper for each other," he said, expertly flipping the first pancake. "When you're getting overwhelmed they pop up and give you some of their strength. Whatever that looks like."

"They don't feel strong." They felt.. tense. Like bad things were coming and they didn't know what to do. Or maybe that was just how she felt. How was she supposed to know what was her and was them?

"Not actual strength, its what's strongest about them. What makes them them, deep down inside."

She frowned. That didn't make much sense to her.

He saw and ruffled her hair. "My soulmate gives me curiosity. Oh, they're so nosy, they get into such trouble." He smiled sadly. "I would never have met your mother if not for them."

She gave him a hug. He wrapped one arm around her and kept pouring and flipping the pancakes with the other.

"I don't know for sure, but I think I share my sense of fairness with them," he said.

She didn't think that was true, but she didn't want to say.

"You know when you see what they're seeing?" he asked, carrying two full plates to the table. "That's you helping them."

"Helping them how?" she asked, following him with the maple sauce and butter dish. "What's my strength?"

"I don't know." He picked up his cutlery with a wink. "That's your soulmate's little secret, isn't it?"

Sephiroth didn't report the change.

He had intended to, had even drafted half the report in his head on the flight back to Midgar.

Then he was met at the landing pad by a trio of Turks. They escorted him to meet the President at a party of executives. He stood silently in his armour while the president showed him off and told jokes he didn't understand. The meeting, or party, whatever it was, lasted hours, and he didn't know what was expected of him except to stand there and be speculated upon.

Anger trickled slowly into the back of his mind. He locked it away.

Midway through, his vision doubled and he saw a grey sky behind the silhouette of a mountain. He blinked, unmoving. He had expected this. He watched intently, trying to uncover as much as he could about them. They were running, the scenery blurry and vague as it passed them by. They came across a rope bridge and slowed their pace. He couldn't see it, but he felt someone was behind them, he willed them to turn and defend their back.

Instead, their vision swung down to the bridge supports.

His gut clenched. There was no sound but he could almost feel the fraying rope snap. The bridge collapsed. The bottom of a rocky ravine sped up to meet them. The vision dimmed.

"What do you say to that, eh, Sephiroth?"

"The north is better fortified than the south," he replied on autopilot, his mouth suddenly bone dry. "Progress will continue to stall."

There was a "tch" and a couple of rolled eyes around him.

"But that's what you're there for, isn't it, boy?" President Shinra said, slapping him on the back.

But he wasn't there. He was here. Doing nothing.

He stared fixedly into the middle distance. Had the fall killed them? He prodded the connection at the back of his head. It was still there.

The vision slowly returned, blurrier and staring up at the grey sky. A middle-aged man's face floated into view, too close to his, theirs, panicky and on the verge of weeping.

He blinked it away. The room's attention had drawn away from him. He let out a strained breath.

He was excused soon after. He marched down to the science department for his physical examination and a debriefing. He was given a Mako bath and idly prodded the presence his head while looking out through the glass wall of the tank. It was an increasingly secure node like it had sunk its pilings deep into his mind.

He felt useless. Just as trapped and ineffectual inside his head as he was out of it. But they were his. He had tried not to think on it too subjectively since its appearance, but that was what it amounted to, no matter what personal significance he gave it. They were his and he was theirs.

Hojo asked if he had anything to report.

He did not.

Tifa was pretty sure they worked for Shinra. She saw the logo in her visions and dreams often enough, emblazoned on walls and stamped onto paperwork.

She was pretty sure Shinra wasn't very nice to them.

As the years passed it struck her as odd that she really only saw through their eyes when they were talking to people. Sometimes during arguments, but the channel would stutter and falter if people started yelling or fighting. She didn't know what that meant. Talking to people obviously stressed them out, but what about other stuff? Burning the toast and setting the fire alarm off? Sleeping in and being late for the day? She never saw anything like that. Maybe their life was just so boring that unpleasant conversation was the most stressful thing that ever happened to them.

All she really knew was that they felt lonely. Well, that just wouldn't do. She cared for and loved people as good as anyone else, maybe that was her strength to share, maybe that was why they were partnered. To balance each other out.

She concentrated next time her vision doubled and tried to send love and comfort down the channel.

It frustrated her that she couldn't just be there. She imagined a quiet, skittish little person, surrounded by people who were obviously mean to them. Midway through a game with her friends, she scowled at the sudden vision of the same old grumpy looking men giving them a hard time. Why did nobody see how stressed and lonely they were?

Cloud wilted at her suddenly severe expression. He had run off by the time she blinked out of it.

It all made her want to march down to Midgar and free them. She'd give all the people who made them feel so trapped and helpless a piece of her mind.

She felt the channel in her mind open when the teacher held her back for not doing her maths homework. She froze in the sudden sensation that she was stuck and failing and would never escape maths ever again. It was silly, it would end, she could see the clock. Dad would get angry at her, but no worse than he did when she forgot to hand in her assignment the last term. She grumbled at her paranoid soulmate and refused to panic. She buckled down, did the work, and handed in her completed worksheet, feeling very proud of herself. She hoped her soulmate saw.

Other times the channel opened and it hit so strong she couldn't do anything at all. She got home and dad wasn't there. She ran to his office at the town hall building, but he wasn't there either. She ran to the graveyard and nobody was there. Maybe he was at the hospital. Like Mum.

She felt so useless and alone that she burst into tears. Dad found her there some thirty minutes later, having panicked himself and gone looking for her at school.

When she had calmed down enough, he suggested she take up martial arts to feel more confident. Master Zangan had come back to town and had offered to train anyone interested.

She stood opposite the scary-looking master and bowed like he told her. She had never fought anyone or anything before. He led her through the basic movements of a beginner and then said she would practise against him.

She sank into her opening stance, unsure on her feet, and the channel in her mind opened. She looked at her opponent, suddenly hyper-aware of everywhere that he could trap or hurt her. It felt different during a fight, like a little paranoid voice in her head telling her not to yield ground or she'd never recover it.

Frustration over all the little things in her life bubbled up. She let them all out against Master Zangan, who defeated her soundly. Then he helped her back up, and they did it again.

It became routine and she learned to listen to the obsessive presence looking out for threats from the back of her head. The practice became meditative. Deep into her training, mindlessly going through drills and practising against her punching bag, she found a wonderful soaring place where it felt like her and her soulmate were working towards the same thing for once. It was so peaceful, her fists thudding against the leather, that she didn't ever want to stop.

Master Zangan complimented the speed with which she picked up the form.

She sat up in bed one night, unable to sleep. The channel had been humming open and closed all day, not quite strong enough to show her whoever was picking on them, just enough that she knew they were having a bad day. Or night. Whatever time it was where they were.

Her vision doubled, suddenly strong and clear. The sky was grey like the sun was about to come up, and there were mountains in the distance.

Bodies lay on the ground around them, stretching away in every direction.

She covered her mouth with her hands.

They were standing in front of the body of a First Class SOLDIER, with grey hair and a grizzled, scarred face. His empty eyes were open.

She tried to look away but couldn't.

Her soulmate sat by the dead SOLDIER and did nothing.

The sun rose and the sky brightened. She cried, her eyes squeezed shut, but the vision not fading. The channel stayed open, stronger than it ever had before. Like they were calling on her for strength. She tried to help, to push whatever she had at them.

Then the channel snapped shut, sudden and jarring. The presence was dull at the back of her head, there but closed and pointed.

She didn't sleep that night. Or for many nights after that.

Chased by the faces of the dead, she climbed the mountain again. She didn't run and the bridge didn't collapse this time. She roamed the high slopes and found freedom up in the thin air and winding paths.

Whatever her soulmate was going through, she couldn't help much. She tentatively tried at the presence and the channel opened. A cold wind whipped past. Even with the intensity of feeling her soulmate sent, she couldn't feel trapped or helpless out in the open. She felt free and in control of herself.

With the channel open she stared at vast view of the lands below. It was beautiful in a bleak way, and she hoped they could see it. She made a habit of it, muscling through the unhelpful sensation they sent to show them the little joys she discovered. If they picked up even half of what she tried to send then they probably knew the mountain as well as she did.

It became her escape and she climbed the mountain over and over until she was the undisputed expert on the dangerous terrain even though she was only sixteen. She grew to think of the trails as theirs: shared walks she took them on

She didn't see any other terrible things in the visions, in fact, she saw almost no visions at all. She didn't know why they had been on that battlefield and she refused to try and think about it. It was too terrible.

She sat on a ledge high up the mountainside, looking down on the plains while she ate a peanut butter sandwich.

Most soulmates never met. She knew that. But she entertained the idea, she was a strong fighter and getting stronger by the day, Master Zangan said. She could get them away from whatever Shinra had over them and together they could… she didn't know.

She imagined kissing them. Upon the highest ridge of the mountain, by the view that she liked to show them. It would be just before sunset when the sky turned golden.

Her legs swung over a steep drop and she hummed a song she'd been learning to play on the piano.

She had a job the next day: guiding some Shinra folk up the mountain trail to the reactor. Maybe one of the party would know them.

A/N: Thanks for reading. Reviews are always welcomed.

Next Time: The Nibelheim Incident.