What we call the beginning is often the end.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
(T.S. Eliot)

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"I'll be going now. I'll come back when it's all over."

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Death hovered in the sky, imminent and burning bright as the sun in the deep of night.

Below, all life fled screaming and dying as the city burned and collapsed around them. Amidst the inferno, two opposing forces met, sending massive gouts of light and energy into the night sky. One was the life-force of the planet, the power that bore life and hope and possibility; the other only brought with it despair and death—an end to all things.

The Highwind tipped toward the mad torrent of fire and smoke, but Cid held the wheel with an iron grip. He didn't dare bring the ship any closer. The heat coming off the burning city would have cooked them long before they could land anywhere that wasn't on fire. Not only that, but there was a strange pull that seemed to come from either of the forces, Meteor or Lifestream or possibly both, that he feared the ship would be sucked right into them. He could feel that force tugging at the ship as he circled the city.

"We're going to crash!"

Yuffie's shriek was tinny and sounded nothing like the braggart she was a day before, when the world hadn't been ending.

Cid snapped back, "I didn't invite you onto my deck! Get your ass below, or shut your mouth. I never crash!"

He wished he could manage to locate and light a cigarette with one hand, but he wouldn't risk trying to hold the damned wheel with just one. It'd be easier if they were all below, then he wouldn't be distracted by their fear or reminded of his own. And yet, there they were, all of them. Standing along the deck, staring down into the fiery mess that was now Midgar. Lifestream had risen like a massive limb out of the ground and seemed to hold Meteor, almost cradle it.

Tifa looked to Cloud, and asked, "Is that Holy? Is that what she did?"

"She summoned the Lifestream," Cloud replied. But it's too late, he thought to himself. Below, the upper plates of Midgar swayed and sent buildings toppling into one another. In a sudden flare of explosions, two of the sector plates gave way and collapsed.

Tifa gave an inarticulate cry, covering her mouth with a gloved hand.

Yuffie was pressed against the railing, clinging to them. Her fear had became an inexplicable cure to her air sickness. "It doesn't look like it's working at all. Meteor is pushing through," she moaned, her voice trembling.

"Don't fucking talk like that, it's here! It's pushing Meteor out!" Barret scowled, "We didn't come this damn far to lose here."

From the airship, the catastrophe seemed strangely silent. Distance swallowed scope, diminished catastrophe, and silenced the chorus of the wounded and the dying.

"Oh, gods. It's everything. Everything we know. It's all dying and we can't do anything about it," Tifa gasped, breathless in the heat. There wasn't a bit of her that wasn't bruised or broken, yet she stood, as solemn and wounded as the rest of their motley crew.

Cid held the wheel. All he could do was circle the chaos; all they could do was watch.

There was a sudden crack, like the breaking of the world. The sound was unimaginable; louder and deeper than anything he'd ever heard in his life, even more so than the sound his rocket had made when it'd been breaking around him.

Above Midgar, the Lifestream had split the massive meteor in half, pillars of teal-colored light held the split meteor aloft, preventing them from descending on the city below. Lifestream surged like a tide, spilling into cracks and crevasses and pulling the massive obstruction apart into smaller and smaller fragments.

Soon, it would be nothing but cinders and no further threat to the burning city.

Barret held the rail, and shouted, "It's working! See, I god-damned told y-"

The shock wave struck the ship port-side.

Cid felt his feet leave the floorboards and his body lift, but he threw his weight down against the wheel and turned it sharply. His teammates were airborne momentarily, before the ship rose to catch them; they struck back down against the floorboards, rolling freely and sprawling.

Nanaki scrabbled against the flooring, his nails finding no traction. The momentum of his body was sending him straight to a gap in the railings, and clear out into the sky. Metal fingers locked into the back of the beast's mane and yanked him back onto the deck, just as soon as he'd begun to go over. Vincent pulled him back and away from the edge and released him as soon as the ship leveled out again.

The beast hobbled away from the railing and growled, "You could have grabbed me before I went over. I thought that was surely the end of my journey there—you needn't have fooled me!"

Vincent observed Nanaki with a calmness unwarranted for the situation, then replied, "It seemed wisest to grab the end of you that isn't on fire."

The beast bared its fangs, in its own version of a grin.

In the night sky, the remaining fragments gave way to the probing clutch of Lifestream and burst apart in clouds of smoldering cinders, which drifted down over the city. Midgar was left to ruin as Lifestream retreated back into the night, back to the very depths that called to it. The fiery, celestial mass was gone from the sky, no longer a thundering calamity but a whispering aurora, lingering only as nebulous clouds of ash and cinders. The city remained; a third of it had collapsed within itself, the rest was in burning chaos.

Bits of flaming rock began to pepper the ship as Lifestream began to break the meteor down into smaller and smaller fragments. The bigger fragments punched through the body of the airship like shrapnel, which set off the combat sensors. He cursed and slammed a fist on the console.

"What is that? I thought you said we weren't crashing?!" Yuffie shouted over the alarms.

"Hold onto your asses!" Cid shouted back at them, before praying to himself, Come on, you old bitch, let's make it down gently.

Just one more time.

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Deep under still waters, a small crystalline orb of materia flickered faintly with pale light. It began to pulse, like the beating of a heart.

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At first, his consciousness ebbed—sinking and rising, as though he were drowning.

Before, there had been light—where warmth flowed peacefully around him—but he'd been pushed from it, back into the dark where the world burned coldly around him. His fingers were stiff and awkward as he groped blindly at the ground beneath him, which was cold and soft and sharp all at once.

Snow, he realized dimly.

He couldn't be sure of how long he'd been there, collapsed in the snow—moments, or days? Everything—even his name—escaped him. His neck felt stiff and it took every ounce of his strength to turn his face to the sky. His eyelids fluttered, crusted with frost, as he squinted at the sky above him. It was washed white with clouds, illuminated by an unseen sun. Its brightness was blinding and unearthly.

A flake of snow drifted out of the sky; he watched it turn and pirouette in the air before it landed in his unblinking eye, cold and sharp.

Suddenly, the man's body gave a jerk as an image flashed in his mind; conceivable only for a moment, and then it was gone. His mind picked at the half-seen image, attempting to pull it back out of the void of his memory, trying to put it into context—a monstrous burning mass hovering in a dark sky, imminent as death. Panic seized him and he began to convulse. It felt as if his skin had been set on fire, but it was different from being burned; it burrowed to the marrow of his bones and froze it solid. Fire in his lungs came sharp like a sudden blow, as the realization dawned on him; he was not breathing. He forced his mouth open and the flesh of his lips tore where it had frozen like a seam; his jaw felt as if it hadn't been used in decades. Warmth spread over his lips, bleeding where the flesh tore, as he sucked in air. It tore at his lungs like a barrage of needles. He was acutely aware of his own heartbeat and the blood coursing through his body.

Moving proved difficult; he felt stiff, like a corpse in the clutch of rigor mortis. He concentrated instead on breathing, on taking short, quick gasps in an attempt to raise his circulation and warm himself. Basic survival tactics trickled back to him, despite the haze of near-amnesiac disorientation. Slowly, his body began to respond; he carefully rolled onto his chest and pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. The snow had begun to mount on him and fell like white dust as he hunched over, suddenly overcome with nausea. The bitter taste of bile and blood filled his mouth as he retched on the ground beneath him. His hair fell around him like a white blanket, twisting around his torso as the wind tugged at it.

Pained, the man groped his torso, attempting to find its source; it was bloodied and wounded, with deep gashes that ran down his chest like trenches. Not recent, he realized. The injuries were at least a week into the healing process, still wet with coagulated blood, forming scar tissue and weeping clear fluids that had an unpleasant smell. It was an oddly familiar scent; it spoke to a history of wounds and wound management, of knowing the difference between the smell of infection to the smell of exuding wounds.

The man rose; dizziness all but overwhelmed him. He searched himself, reaching for something to shield his body from the piercing winds, but absurdly found that he was dressed merely in black slacks and boots. He stared into the horizon, unable to distinguish the snowy land from the white sky above. This is a whiteout, he realized. It was something to actively avoid when traveling through arctic lands, when weather turned the landscape treacherous. The best possible scenario was to hunker down and wait for conditions to improve, but it was not an option currently available to him. He had no equipment, no tent, no protection from the harsh winds that was steadily leeching warmth from him. His memory was as blank as the land that surrounded him; what the hell was he doing out here, wounded as he was and half-naked?

He knew, at the very least, that if he stayed out in this cold he was going to die. He turned in place, seeking a direction, some indication of civilization or shelter, but all around him the world was white and featureless.

He felt as if he'd risen from death only to succumb back into it, like some cruel spectacle to amuse the gods, or the universe, or whatever force had brought him to this very place, without a memory left to him as to assume why.

"Oh, gods," the prayer started hoarse in his throat, and as if in answer, the world tipped beneath him, sending him stumbling forward. Momentum kept him moving, and fear kept him from stopping.

He walked for an indeterminate amount of time and soon realized that time held no relevance to him; it was unfathomable and could only be measured by the spaces between his labored breaths. He half-stumbled through the frozen wasteland, often losing his footing in the thick snow and ice. His feet ached terribly for a time, cold and sodden inside his boots, but eventually they grew numb and lost feeling altogether. The wind offered no mercy, stealing out of him the heat of his blood; it stripped him of the ability to think. A rational part of his mind knew that he could not feel such cold and live. He could only wonder at what kept his lungs drawing breath and his legs moving, what kept him from succumbing to the elements—by all accounts, it defied logic.

I should be dead. Darkly, he mused, Perhaps I still am.

He walked until nightfall, which brought with it even lower temperatures. It was then, in the deepening gloom, that he came to the base of a steep hillside. To his exhausted eyes, it may have well of been a mountain.

The man sank to his knees before it, worn and daunted, staring up at the massive rise of land. It looked treacherous, but at the crest somewhere in the ice, he could see faint lights.

Hope bloomed suddenly in his gut—There are people up there.

His throat swelled with pain, desiring of all things, water. He doubted that his mouth was warm enough to melt snow, and he couldn't afford to bring his core body temperature any lower than it currently was. Despite his fatigue and thirst, something was pushing him onward, a survival instinct that was at once inside of him and apart from him. It would not let him lie down and sleep; it would not let him die. Something was calling to the man; the world tipped almost imperceptibly beneath him, the same direction as before. Using that momentum, he rose from his knees and began up the hill, his legs sinking deep into the ice and snow and finding purchase against unseen rocks. His consciousness rolled back into a black haze, to where his thoughts did not stir and his movement became automated.

As the hill drew upward into a sharp incline, he gripped at the rocks and ice, ignoring the sharp pains that flared in his fingers and palms. The skin of his fingers and palms tore, but his movements were entirely mechanical. The pain dimmed and frayed into numbness, perhaps a result of damage to flesh and nerves; the loss of feeling made him clumsy, and he groped at the hillside as he began to lose his footing. Panicking, he grappled at the hillside and began to slide downward; a strange, warm sensation bloomed between his ribs, sending a calming sensation throughout his body.

Focus.

His eyelids fluttered in surprise; he found his footing, holding tight to the icy hillside. The panic had dimmed, but confusion was settling in. It was almost as if he'd heard that word said aloud, but there was nothing but the sound of the icy winds howling around him. It wasn't her, he assured himself. She was dead.

Digging his boots into rock, he rose and continued onward.

The stars had begun to show in the sky by the time the ground evened out. The man stumbled toward the lights that'd drawn him; it was a small town, which was dark but for the automated streetlights. He pounded on several doors, but the town was seemingly abandoned. He pounded on several doors, but was met with no answer.

Desperate, he stumbled through the street and towards a dark house. This time he did not knock, but instead turned the door knob; it resisted. A swell of desperation gathered in his chest—the cold was unbearable, it was too much—he wrenched the door knob. The lock snapped audibly and gave way, allowing him to stumble inside. He put his shoulder into the door, falling against it weakly as he shut it, barring the vicious winds from following him in. Part of him expected someone to come from a bedroom, armed and demanding who he was and what was he doing breaking into their home, accompanied by a few choice expletives. As he stepped further into the house, no one came to meet him from the back rooms.

He scanned the dark rooms, unnerved by the stillness and silence. Dust carpeted the floor so thickly that it must have lain undisturbed for years. His stumbling footsteps left messy footprints in the smooth drifts of dust. It was ominous, but he was far too grateful to be in out of the cold to be spooked by dust. The house wasn't heated, but it was considerably warmer inside than it was outside; the wind was wailing ominously and shaking at the windows like an unwanted guest.

He stumbled through the hall and into a bedroom, and collapsed onto the bed. He exerted only the sufficient energy required to pull himself fully onto it and draw the blankets over his wounded torso, before he succumbed to unconsciousness. He woke intermittently in the night, from the pain in his battered body. He would stare feebly into the dark, fixating on random aspects of the room, unmoving and dry-mouthed, before sleep would reclaim him again. It was after the third time he'd woken and lapsed back into unconsciousness that the nightmares crept up on him.

They were vivid, but came to him fragmented; pieces of a whole and out of order. He saw the flow of pale green light, like an ocean of peaceful fire; he'd gotten so close, enough to sense its calm and warmth, before the ice took him. As though he'd been denied, had been pulled from it. He saw a town burning; buildings, bodies, animals, and a man among them, unburnt and laughing hysterically. His mind reeled from it, back to the memory of the light, which allowed him to sleep soundly for a time.

That small reprieve, however, was brief.

Sweat beaded on his skin and the man writhed where he lay. He dreamt of that man; a white-haired demon who tore through tendon and sinew, through flesh as though it were nothing. He reveled in it, in the wanton bloodlust, flinging long streaks of it on the walls as he went, seemingly spurred entirely by focused insanity. He would have torn through the world itself had he'd been more than just a man.

Then, in the darkness, there was a young woman kneeling in a shaft of light.

Instinctively, he knew she was different. Just as he could recognize the demon for what it was, he knew what she was. She was the light and the flow, it was in her eyes as she looked up from her hands; she was something good. She was knelt in prayer, clasped hands tucked beneath her chin. She was so slight that it seemed a gust of wind could send her off and away, like a dandelion seed. The image of her brought momentary solace, a lull between nightmares, a deceptive stillness, before her chest cavity split in a gush of blood.

The man jolted awake.

His skin burned and his mind was reeling. His thirst was maddening. In his mind, he could still hear the psychotic laughter and the sound of a town burning. A sudden sick lurch in his stomach propelled him up and out of the bed, as he fumbled across the room and into the bathroom. He held onto the door frame, clutching at the doorway like a lifeline; his whole body shook uncontrollably. He felt for a light-switch, finding only smooth paneling at first, before fumbling over the small switch. A single bulb flickered on, dim and covered in dust; it filled the small bathroom with an orange, hazy glow.

He stumbled against the sink; in his fatigue, he let himself buckle to his knees. He rested his forehead against the cold porcelain, welcoming the sensation against his feverish skin. After resting a moment, he rose slowly and held onto the sides of the sink for balance. The man gave a start at his own reflection, which seemed foreign and alien to himself, and terrifying.

In the mirror was the demon, un-laughing, mimicking his terror and making a mockery of it. Something teetered on the edge of his memories, like a great dam waiting to burst, but it was only as fathomable and tangible as a wisp of smoke. The demon in his nightmare, looking back out at him from the mirror, had done something unspeakable, something so much worse than the blood and the fire, but the memory eluded him. His thoughts were sharp and throbbing inside his head, blood-memories, pulsing like thorns in his battered mind. He stared at the demon—at himself.

The revelations came between heartbeats—Soldier.

Pounded as his memory came back to him—Nibelheim.

His pulse drummed in his ears—madness.

There was no space for denial. The man in his nightmares and the man looking back at him from the mirror; they were one and the same. His body shuddered under the weight of clarity. A lifetime of memories rushed back into his mind, flooding into every crevice of his being. The war, Soldier, a Shinra-patented upbringing, training, the seduction of insanity, of—

Jenova.

The man gave a sudden shout, uttering an inarticulate sound that was something between rage and despair, as he slammed his fist into the mirror.

Shards of glass glittered like cold napalm and his fist exploded with pain; he drew his arm back and the limb began to tremble from the wounds. A shard of glass, roughly the size of a playing card, was jutting from between his ring and middle finger. It was a fourth-way embedded into flesh and tendon; he pulled it free and let it drop to the floor. The wound pulsed with pain and blood.

He could not say if the creature lived or if it had died; it was silent in his mind, and did not stir. His body shook like an addict as he realized he was cut off from the influence of the creature. He stared into the broken mirror, at his own image distorted by fractured glass. A sudden sense of determination washed over him, causing the fear and panic and pain to ebb away.

Hands trembling, he removed a wide shard of glass from the mirror. He gathered up a fistful of hair and began slicing away chunks of it. He sawed at it, disgusted and angry, in the hopes of shedding his past as easily as the glass freed him of his hair. He was not that man; he wanted to be anything but that man. Clumps of silver strands fell to the floor, landing among blood and glass. The sickly orange hue of the bathroom light gave the blood a deeper cast, causing it to appear almost black on the tile flooring, as it soaked its fingers into the fallen hair. Fistful after fistful was cut away, before he relented and discarded the glass.

Carefully, he pulled open the medicine cabinet, careful not to shake free the broken glass clinging to the cabinet door. Inside, the shelves were mostly empty; there were a few medication bottles, a pair of fingernail trimmers, a bottle of perfume, and a hand-held hair clipper, all coated with a layer of grimy dust. He retrieved the hand-held clippers and closed the cabinet, hoping that it still worked. The man carefully unraveled the cord and plugged it into an electrical outlet on the wall. He switched the clippers on, which after a stalled second, buzzed to life. Without hesitation, he began meticulously shearing away the last of the silver hair, and the trembling in his limbs ceased as he became more certain of his actions. The sounds of the shears was startling loud in the silence, but comforting.

This was the beginning.

Wisps of silver-white hair floated about his hand and collected on his shoulders like snow. The buzzing hair clipper ran smoothly over the curve of his skull, shearing away the last evidence of the pale hair that grew from it.

Whatever he had done, whatever happened to him; it was past.

He set the shears down, before running his hands over the white-fuzz of hair that covered his scalp, brushing away the last bits of hair. He looked different without the long fall of white hair; he looked lean and drawn, unassuming but for the glow of Mako-enhancement in his eyes. He looked like someone who could live at the fringes of society, without drawing too much attention to himself; he looked like someone you'd find living in the Midgar slums. Ex-Soldier, yes, but no longer. He looked like he could be anyone, or no one at all.

No one at all, he thought.

That was where he would start.

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The flat, unwavering tone of the electroencephalogram signaled brain death.

Still squeezing the patient's heart in rhythm, the surgeon wavered. He brushed sweat from his brow on his free arm; instinctively, his hand griped the heart again, trying to will life back into the young man, but fatigue and hopelessness was settling in. He stopped after the third clutch.

An attendant touched the doctor's shoulder, "He's gone."

"Yes," the surgeon agreed, weary, and released hold of the patient's organ. The body was too damaged and it had given out under the stress. The young man had been perhaps twenty, at most. Too young, the surgeon thought, though there were younger among the dead, and more dying in the halls.

A sheet was drawn up over the young man's body; bloody spots bloomed and saturated the clean fabric. The attendants and assisting nurses lifted the body and transferred it to an awaiting gurney. A young nurse pushed it out into the hall, and carefully navigated it toward the elevator. People were screaming and sobbing, filling the hall to near-capacity, making it almost impossible to get the gurney through. The emergency lights were activated, as the city's main power grid had been destroyed. Only a handful of generators kept the hospital working, though only at partial capacity. Only a few elevators were left in use, and strictly for the most severely injured and the disposal of bodies. The nurse pushed the gurney into the open elevator and hit the button that would take it to the basement level.

A man was waiting in bloodied scrubs, as the door opened again. He grimly took possession of the gurney, without a word. The morgue was full and now they'd begun to fill the basement levels, as a temporary solution until transport services could alleviate the influx of the dead. The staff had begun to fear they'd run out of room long before that.

The morgue technician wheeled the gurney into one of the many storage rooms, and laid the body out among other cadavers. The freezers were long-since full, and they didn't have enough power to keep them running and maintain working capacity to treat the living survivors. The man left the dead in silence.

The hospital shook; dust and bits of plaster rained down over the cadavers. Somewhere in Midgar, another plate had fallen. The reverberations shook the hospital to its core, despite the distance. The cement flooring cracked and fissured from strain to the hospital's structural integrity. As the dust settled, small sparks of green began to shimmer in the cracks.

A thread of pale green-white light snaked up out of the tile flooring, twisting in a slow upward spiral. It arced over the cadavers, lined up side by side, blindly examining each body before settling on the young man's corpse. It tenderly explored the dead man's chest cavity, before splitting into various fingers and digging down into the flesh. One gripped the exposed heart, the other coiled around the brain stem.

On the dead man's hand, one finger twitched.

Then another.

His eyelids fluttered. His chest rose, as he inhaled deeply; his eyes shot open as he shuddered and gasped. Threads of light streamed into his body, as he shook violently and struggled to sit upright. The last bit of light filtered into him, and the shaking ceased. He breathed slow and evenly as he stared at his hand as he flexed the fingers.

He rose, carefully. The storage room was largely empty of supplies, but there were a few boxes of clothing gathered from the dead. His own was torn and bloody. He rummaged until he found a white long coat, and slipped it on; it was loose on his small frame. The blood on his torso had dried and did not seep through.

He stepped to the doorway and listened for the worker who'd laid his body on the floor, but heard nothing. Calmly, he stepped out and toward the elevator. His hand hovered over the buttons; each floor number was labeled. He pushed the button for the Pediatric Ward.

The elevator hummed mechanically as it transported him to the fifth floor. He drew the coat's hood over his head as the doors opened. The hall was dim and quiet; only a few nurses moved between the rooms, carrying trays and equipment. None so much as paid him any heed as he walked down the hall.

He paused in the doorway of a darkened room; it was filled with beds pushed together, and on them, more children than he could count. There was hardly an inch between any of them, and most huddled together in their sleep seeking comfort. A little boy, just barely four, sat at the edge of one of the beds. As though he'd been waiting. The boy looked up and stared at him with wide, pale-green eyes.

The dead man smiled. "Hello," he said, in a quiet, broken voice.

"You're here," the small boy replied.

"Are you ready?" The dead man held out his hand.

The boy slid down off the edge of the bed and came to the doorway; the dead man took his hand.

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Early morning light streamed in through the muslin curtains, setting dust particles aglow as they drifted in the stale air.

With the window closed, one could almost forget the catastrophe outside; you couldn't smell the ash of a city burning, still burning days after the sky fell, or the rot beneath the smoke. The hospital was sterile and stale, deceptive in its quiet at times. It made her all the more aware of a sense of absence inside of her, of what was missing.

The metallic frame that bordered the window reflected her image back to herself, blurred and abstract. She knew that it was her reflection, but the sight didn't elicit a single feeling of recognition. Hours of scrutinizing herself, from the sharpness of her features to the scar that ran off-center through her bottom lip; it elicited nothing. No sense of knowing, no memories, no emotion—nothing. It frustrated her, this deepening sense of incompleteness; all the emotional impact of having lost something very dear, yet having forgotten precisely what it was in the first place. There were dark bruises and contusions on her, most notably on the bones of her face and under her eyes; it distorted her features and made her look almost ghoulish.

Cognitive disturbance, resulting in loss of episodic memory and personal identity—she'd read it on the chart the doctor carried with him, when he wasn't looking. In his fitful, near-indecipherable script, the doctor had written: Retains semantic and procedural memory. Displays post-traumatic symptoms in concurrence with crush injuries and renal failure. Acute muscular dystrophy—possible pre-Meteorfall traumatic experience? No organic etiology for cognitive disturbance, complete absence of head injuries.

Reading it had given clarity to her situation, but it seemed more salt on the wound that she knew precisely what was wrong with her, but could do nothing to rectify it. She recognized objects, remembered key historical events, but couldn't answer questions regarding who she was, where she'd originated or what happened to her. The doctor had insisted it would come back to her. Even the nurses and the orderlies, in their comings and goings, would smile and pat her hand and reassure her that it'd come back to her, because—didn't she hear?—the world had not ended. It was still burning in the city outside, but they were alive and insisted she should be happy about it. She found their optimism to be bordering on madness, as though they all feared that if they weren't recklessly hopeful, that the reality outside of the hospital would seep in through the walls and overtake them all.

She didn't know what they were talking about until one of the nurses turned the television set on.

Her listless eyes had been met with images of devastation; a whole city on fire and collapsed into itself, people wandering amidst the rubble, news reports that followed groups of resolute aid-workers as they worked tirelessly to recover the dead and the dying. Spurred by horrified disbelief, she'd gotten out of bed and used the intravenous equipment like a crutch with wheels and stumble-slid to the window. The electrodes taped to her body had been pulled off in the struggle, causing the monitors behind her to send out an alarm and summon nurses. Before they could pull her away from the window and back to bed, she'd caught sight of the city outside, still burning, a heap of stone and metal and smoke. It was no longer in her mind some faceless event, not like some old Science Fiction movie, the kind where you could see the strings attached to the meteors hurtling towards the planet. No, it wasn't a movie; in the movies, disasters were always averted and the day was saved by plucky, determined heroes. There was nothing but death outside.

Calamity or not, her current condition had not entirely been a result of Meteorfall. The doctors surmised that she'd been incapacitated long before that. The hospital had been unable to retrieve her medical history in the chaos of the disaster, as most of the computer systems were down and many of the records had been destroyed in the fires. But the physical evidence spoke for itself; it took a prolonged state of inactivity, most likely a coma, to produce the degree of deterioration that her body was in. The doctor gave the rough estimate of a year as her muscles had atrophied such that it'd left her incapable of walking unassisted, or bathing herself, which left her feeling humiliated and infantilized.

The woman's eyes trailed from her reflection and down to the bedside table. It was empty save for a half-filled glass of stagnant water and a plastic name tag. Her only assurance of possible identity lay in the black letters printed on the tiny badge. It had been taken from her hand when her body had been recovered beneath debris outside the mako reactor in the Eighth Sector. She reached out with a weak hand and turned it, so that the name faced her.

Mira Creed.

It was her name, it belonged to her; it was the only thing in the world that she had to hold onto. Her eyes moved down to her left hand, still wrapped in gauze; there were two spots of blood seeping through the palm. She'd been told that when the aid workers found her, she had been clutching the name tag so tightly that it had to be surgically extracted from her palm. It'd been embedded in her palm long enough for the skin to start growing around the metal pins.

Her eyes roved over the blankness of the wall adjacent to her bed, up to the ceiling, tracing the outlines of the panels with her eyes. She couldn't recall what day it was—they were all the same to her. She kept track of the hours, though; it'd been exactly one-hundred and six hours since she'd first woken in the hospital. The was nothing before that. Each day brought in more wounded and dying from the streets, pouring in from the aftermath of what was being called Meteorfall. The sounds of their agony kept her awake at night. When it wasn't the sounds, it was the nightmares; dreams of bones, of wastelands and demons, as though the near-apocalypse outside was seeping into her unconscious and tainting it.

A dull twinge of pain smarted behind her ribs; frowning, she rubbed her knuckles against the spot, but it did nothing to alleviate the sudden discomfort. Her skin flushed hot, and her heart began to palpitate unsettlingly fast. Gasping, she rolled over; it took considerable effort to move at all, to turn over onto her back and away from the window. She gripped the side rails of the bed to pull her useless body from one position to another. She was careful to not tangle the intravenous lines taped and secured to her hand and forearm; they'd been masking the pains of her wounded and wasted body with medications, but this pain was growing steadily stronger than what the analgesics were capable of mitigating. She fumbled to find the call button for the nurses, near-breathless from the sensation of her ribcage seemingly expanding, as though the pain were pushing against her insides.

And then, as quickly as it'd come, the pain began to quiet. A strange feeling tickled at her skin, causing the hair on her arms to rise; she was suddenly aware of being observed. Lying on her side, her breathing shallow and quick, the woman turned her attention to the doorway, where light flowed into the darkened room from the hallway. There, a small figure stood, cast in silhouette. A sudden sense of absurdity filled her; the boy was much too young to be up and about on his own, unattended. He couldn't have been more than three or four years old.

There was someone standing just out of sight in the darkness, holding the boy's hand. The boy looked up at the unseen escort and gave a nod, before letting go and stepping into the room. His footfalls fell silently on the tile floor; he might as well have been a ghost. Mira found herself appalled by his abrupt presence; from the moment she'd gained consciousness, she'd refused the company of other patients and only barely tolerated the comings and goings of the nurses and doctors. Her confusion and anger had left no room for coddling or company, and the boy just a baby, a little thing that needed care-taking and supervision, something she wasn't capable of providing. She couldn't walk to the bathroom unassisted, let alone return the boy to his room—what was the person in the hall thinking? She wasn't fit to watch a child. Looking past the him, she saw that the other had gone; silent, as if they'd never been there to begin with. Frustrated, she cleared her throat to call out, but her tongue was dry and useless and the words came out in an unintelligible rasp.

The boy came to the side of the bed and slipped his arm under the side rail, and took hold of her bandaged hand—the muscles in her arm twitched reflexively at the sudden unsolicited contact of his little fingers against hers.

His voice was a whisper as he asked, "Are you okay?"

Mira found his uninvited concern for her health bothersome; the sentiment that bloomed between her ribs and in her gut was alarming. It was at-once a tickling and suffocating sensation, like warm fingers raking over her lungs, only to clutch viciously with an emotion she couldn't put a name to. She wanted to shoo the boy away, but found herself at a loss for words; the touch of his small hand gave her the sudden conviction that she knew him. She couldn't validate the feeling in her state of memory loss, but something inside of her told her that it was right, it was familiar. Her eyes grew hot and dry, and she silently cursed the boy from sneaking into her room and evoking such unwanted emotions from her.

The little boy's pale green eyes seemed to pull at her like an ocean tide as he stared up at her, peering just over the mattress. Without provocation, he proceeded to reach up and grasp the side rail to clamber up beside her. Alarmed that he'd fall, she reached and grasped the back of his shirt, tugging him up until he was safely past the rail and on the mattress. He settled against her, his round face peering up at her own, before he said, "... I don't want to be alone."

Mira had to admit, however reluctantly, that she didn't either.

.

.

.

Sephiroth slept until pain and hunger woke him.

Bits of sunlight pierced through the drawn blinds, which illuminated the bedroom in a dim, dusty glow. Pain flared in his muscles and joints as he slowly sat up, easing his legs over the side of the bed. He inspected the stitches he'd sewn into his hand the night before with sewing thread. The wound was red, crusted with flakes of dried blood, but showed no signs of infection. He'd checked the house for medical supplies when he'd stitched his hand and found some in one of the closets, but they were considerably out-dated and all of the ointments and medications had expired. He hoped to find something suitable in town.

Every inch of him ached and throbbed, but his feet; in the haste of his exhaustion, he hadn't thought to remove his boots. They were still sodden from trekking through snow and likely rife with bacteria. He winced and hissed at the pain as he brought a foot up and laid it across his knee. He loosened the laces before attempting to remove the boot; pain flared sharply as he carefully tugged it off. He cursed as he pulled the boot free and threw it across the room in anger. He took a steadying breath before he began peeling the sock from his foot gingerly, and was met with the sight of large, weeping blisters along the sides and under the arch of his foot. Removed from the heated wetness of the sock and boot, the blisters throbbed in the chilly air of the unheated house. His foot was red and raw where the epidermis had peeled away, leaving deep bloody fissures.

Scanning his torso and arms, he took note of each and every bruise and their severity. There wasn't hardly a bit of him that wasn't contused in some manner, to varying degrees of severity. There was a hematoma on his right bicep, which caused stiffness in his elbow and reduced its mobility. Probing the limb, he was certain that it wasn't severe enough to cause compartment syndrome. There were also lacerations on his body, deep cuts that'd stagnated and scabbed over; suturing them wasn't an option as the flesh was already beginning to knit over with scar tissue.

These wounds are weeks-old, he surmised, bewildered, but that was impossible. There was no way that he could have been out in the snow wastes for a day, half-dressed and unconscious, let alone weeks and not have died from exposure. Even with his advanced genetics, he was still a man. Strife's attack had not killed him, but by all rights, the cold should've finished the job.

Strife.

His thoughts lingered on the man who'd "killed him", idly wondering where Strife and his companions had gone. Had they truly destroyed Jenova, before they'd come for him? If they had killed the creature—what had brought him back?

Sephiroth touched a congealed gash along his rib; he nudged the wound, gently testing the fresh scar tissue, letting the slight pressure jar the surrounding nerves. No nerve damage, at least, he thought, avoiding the thought of himself having deserved his wounds.

His face contorted, warring between anger and grief, despite himself. His perspective felt split between the madman he'd become and the man he'd been before. He could not help feeling both disappointed and angry about his failure to complete Her plans, while also being aghast and repulsed at the very thought. His mind was silent in the absence of Her—no longer did Jenova's influence blur and warp his ego and sense of morality, or play on his insecurities and the rage he'd felt at his own origin to suit Her needs. In that absence, he could feel the full weight of his actions, from the moment he'd set Nibelheim ablaze to the moment Strife had cut him down and killed him. But he was not dead, and the world had not ended.

Hadn't it? Or was the town merely abandoned for reasons unknown? He couldn't be sure of it, only that Jenova was gone from his mind, and all that seemed left to him was a shaking sense of absence and the stark reality of his history. Sephiroth slumped, resting an elbow on his knee and putting his face in his hand—what ungodly force kept him tethered to life, to this world? He'd met a just end at the hands of the man he'd tormented—what could be gained from letting a monstrosity like himself continue living?

He was not sure how long he sat there, lost in his own thoughts and self-repulsion, but the necessity of hunger soon roused him out of his self-repulsion. He knew he wouldn't find anything here, as these house had been abandoned years ago. Though the whole town itself seemed deserted, he could only hope that he could find food and medical supplies somewhere in the settlement.

Sephiroth rose, swallowing a grunt at the pain of standing; he needed to bandage his feet, and soon. He moved toward a small closet tucked in the corner of the room, ignoring the sharp pains eliciting from the pads of his feet, and opened the wicker door. He rummaged through moth-eaten shirts, pulling out several undershirts and long-sleeved shirts, a sweater, a scarf and a winter coat. He carried the bulk back to the bed before he began to slip on layers of clothing; part of the Wutai-Shinra War had raged in winter, and he knew from experience that keeping warm wasn't as simple as wearing a thick coat as it was layering one's clothing that made a difference in keeping the cold out.

Zipping up the coat, he moved toward a dresser. His head felt light without the weight of his hair upon it, which left it feeling cold and naked and lacking the insulation he was used to. He rummaged through the drawers until he found a knitted cap to cover his head with; he also found a second pair of pants and a fresh change of socks. The pants were loose on his hips, a size or two larger than needed, but it would do until he could acquire more suitable attire. Removing his other boot was excruciating, but the fresh change of socks was crucial. Cold temperatures and wet clothing were a disastrous mix. He ripped strips of cloth from one of the bed sheets and wrapped his feet, before slipping on the socks and boots. The padding helped, but did little for the pain. He'd have to endure it for the time being.

When he finished dressing, he moved cautiously through the house and lingered at a window beside the front entrance. He looked out into the small town, surveying for any sign of activity. The settlement's layout was simplistic and circular, radiating outward from a large water well with a mechanical pump. It reminded him of Nibelheim; the world seemed to tip under him and he slumped against the well, gripping at the window frame tightly. It was as though something unseen tugged at him, as though something were summoning him.

Nonsense, he thought, as he straightened and scanned the streets outside the window. It's only the nausea. There was no movement outside, save for the wind stirring snow and tree branches.

It was unsettling; it felt as if the world had ended.

The buildings remained, but it was as though humanity had vanished and all that was left was their remnants—much the same as the Cetra ruins that lingered in the world, as its people had long-since vanished. It was a terrible sensation; a profound absence. Sephiroth tugged the scarf up to cover the lower half of his face, before opening the door and stepping out into the cold. The silence that hung over the town was jarring, with only the crunch of snow beneath his feet echoing between the buildings. It was hard to shake the feeling that he was the only living person stumbling about on the planet.

He cut across the snow and past the well, heading for one of the larger houses, hoping that he could find what he needed there. He was surprised to find the door unlocked as he entered the house; unlike the house he'd slept in, this one was well-kept—it was even warm. It was proof that someone had resided here until very recently, having left their heater running in their haste to leave, or perhaps, in the abruptness of death. As he moved deeper into the house, he was surprised to find himself dreading the prospect of discovering bodies. A quick reconnaissance of the grounds proved that it was simply abandoned, with no trace of death or struggle among the rooms.

His first incentive was to survey the food stocked in the kitchen. Rationally, he knew that he couldn't eat a full meal, not without making himself severely sick, it had to be gradual to allow his body time to adapt. Sephiroth rummaged through the cabinets until he found cans of soup. It would have to do for now, until his body recovered enough strength to cope better with digestion. Just by looking at himself in the mirror, he was certain he'd lost a percentage of his overall musculature. His hands trembled the entire time it took him to open the can and heat it in a pot, before setting the pot down on the table with a pot-holder under it. He gripped the spoon tightly, trying to will his hand to stop shaking as he brought spoonful after spoonful of hot broth to his mouth. It was salty and thin, but nothing ever tasted so good in his life.

Among newspapers and other items spread out on the table, was a map. He ran a finger from the snow-wastes south of the Northern Crater, and came to a stop on a small settlement labeled Icicle. That must be this place, he surmised; a resort town, if he remembered correctly. Only permanent residents would be found here this time of the year, with vacationers doubling the population during holidays. It didn't explain the entire absence of people, though. The next town, Gento, was nearly a hundred miles south. It was a fishing town with a port, from which ferries regularly cycled between the northern and western continents.

Afterward, he began searching the house for medical supplies. He was surprised to find a supply closet stocked with, among other things, an array of medical equipment and related items. The resident must have been the local medical practitioner. No materia, though. He'd have to heal the old-fashioned way. He grabbed an armful of antibiotics, rolls of bandages, sutures, and painkillers. He found a small duffel bag in one of the bedrooms and packed the medical supplies in it, as well as a change of clothes that were better suited for his size. In the kitchen, he gathered what canned foodstuffs he could fit into the remaining space of the duffel. He found a bag of dry rice and a bag of oats in one of the other houses, and plenty of bottled water in another. He took books from several of the houses, to fill up the long quiet hours of the day and to distract himself from troubling memories that he'd rather not face. He wouldn't be fit to travel until his feet healed, at the very least.

Backtracking to the house he'd initially broken into, he discovered an armored snowcat in the garage of one of the larger houses. The garage was well-secured, and the windows were too small to break and slide through. It was the only vehicle he'd seen in the town, and quite possibly the only safe way to travel south. He circled around back and found that the rear door was locked; he shattered the small window in the door, and reached in carefully to unlock it.

Inside, the house was much like the first house he'd broken into—a tide of dust coated everything, making the air stale and dry. The difference, was that this house was minimally furnished and cluttered with equipment and boxes. The door to the garage was locked, unsurprisingly. He moved into the living room and circled a desk; it was in disarray, as though from a messy owner, or from having been previously searched. He rifled under piles of papers and folders, and turned out the drawers but he didn't find keys of any sort.

Leaving the desk, he went to a staircase that descended loft-like down into a bedroom. He rummaged through several dressers, hoping that somewhere in the house was the key to the garage as well as to the vehicle. Finding nothing in the drawers, he moved to the closet. Half the clothing inside were suited for a man much shorter than himself, the other half had belonged to a woman. Their shoes sat side-by-side in the floor of the closet. There was little else inside, let alone keys. He turned and scanned the rest of the room; the full-size bed was still unkempt, as though their last morning had been chaotic, hurried. In the corner, beside the bed, was a small cradle.

The pale yellow baby blankets were mottled with dust and what looked to be old, dried blood.

Despite himself, Sephiroth shivered.

He did not want to begin to guess what happened to the previous occupants. He backtracked up the stairs and into a hall, to a living room. He checked all of the cabinets and bookshelves; a majority of the books were texts on rather specific medical or scientific areas of study. He found an antique silver pocket watch in one drawer; the casing was locked and it lacked a key. He was not particularly interested in what was inside, nor interested in turning the house upside down looking for the key; his priority was the vehicle. Still, he pocked the watch, considering that he had no gil or means to pay for the ferry.

In a small dresser that was topped with a television set, he found a box of video cassettes marked only by dates, which stated they were made over two decades ago. Out of sheer curiosity, he attempted to play several of the tapes; most of the film gave way when he tried to play them, coming apart in their age, and the ones that played did so distortedly. Great stretches of snowy static and disembodied voices, near-indistinguishable, and occasionally images blurring into brief near-focus. A woman sitting in a chair, hands folded in her lap, dark and indistinct in the blur of old film. She was speaking to someone off-screen, and her words filtered through the static and made little sense. He sat back on his heels, strangely compelled by the near-indistinguishable woman on the screen, whose voice came clear and strong, but broken by the distortions.

"... as long as... exists... will not die, not until..."

The image flickered, shifting to a closer shot on the woman's face. It was dark, blurred, but hauntingly familiar. Sephiroth moved closer to the screen, bewildered; it could not be her—the tapes were far too old and she would have been a child, or perhaps not yet born.

"The planet... never heal, not..."

The woman hesitated. The camera focused closely on her eyes.

Sephiroth touched the glass screen, running his fingertips over the woman's eyes; what was that there, that haunted her so deeply? She looked resigned, defeated. Her features were indistinct, the colors entirely desaturated; she could have been anyone. He was only seeing her because the woman's shadowy features made it easy to project his guilt onto her image, to trick his eyes into seeing the Cetra girl.

The footage skipped, and showed the woman sitting in the chair again, hands folded.

"... must waken..."

Pin-prick spots of white-hot light flared on the film. Around the dark figure of the woman, they looked like stars.

"... very last, my only..."

A spot of light bloomed on the woman's shoulder and slowly spread outward in a hot-white flare. The woman's voice distorted, grew slow and thick like honey as the film came apart. The television screen went black and silent, leaving him with a strange sense of incompletion.

With his hand still against the now-dark screen, the world tipped from under him. He fell to the side, on his hands and knees, with the unsettling sensation of the world turning beneath him, tugging at him from his very core. Unbearable dizziness swelled and blurred his sight; he pressed his forehead to the floor until the sensation passed, his palms flat against the hardwood, as though he were bowed down in prayer.

It was undeniably like the manner in which Jenova had first summoned him, after he'd woken out of stasis in the Lifestream, only different.

As his sight cleared, he spotted a set of keys under the dresser.

He snatched them up and rose up from the floor, sitting back on his heels. His pulse pounded in his ears; something was summoning him, and he couldn't be sure if it was Her or something else. Whatever it was, he had the feeling that if he didn't find it, it would surely find him.

He rose and headed through the house, to the garage. He stopped at the front door and recollected his luggage, before heading out and around the house to the garage. He tried several keys before before the lock released; inside, the garage was meticulous. Tools were arranged on work tables, hung from the walls. The armored snowcat was a relic from decades past, but it looked solid and reliable. He hit the switch to open the garage entrance and went to the vehicle; he climbed up to the cab door and cycled through keys until he found the right one. He tossed the duffel bag onto the passenger seat, and climbed in. Sephiroth ran his fingers over the controls, briefly flashing back, to nearly a decade ago. In the war, they'd use many different vehicles, but most of the war had been fought in the winter. He was not a stranger to this type of vehicle. It might not have been Shinra-issued, but the design was similar enough to be familiar.

He turned on the ignition, flicked a few controls, and the heavy machine rumbled to life. The fuel tank, surprisingly, was half-full. Sephiroth gripped the steering wheel, as his body tipped south and west. His forehead all but slammed against the top of the wheel. He sighed in frustration as the sensation ebbed away and leaned back in his seat, staring out at the snowy landscape.

Whatever it was that was summoning him, he would find it.

.

.

.

The lake below looked silvered in the moonlight, its waters calm but for the waterfall that fed it. From the balcony, the sound of the falling water was swallowed in the vacuum of distance, diminished, so that it seemed to his ears no more than a sigh. Unmoving and slouched in his wheelchair, the stillness of Rufus Shinra's body belied the torrent of his thoughts.

It was no great miracle that he was still alive. He'd been pulled from the fires and resuscitated, with second and third degree burns over seventy-percent of his body. Shinra's medical staff were the elites of their fields, but unsettlingly enough, presided over by the late Professor Hojo. In the surreal daze of intravenous induced state of numbness, he vaguely remembered the slight man working over his body. He'd shouted and screamed, but his voice didn't work and all of his protests had been in his head. No, not him, anyone but him, he'll make me into a monster. By the time his voice was coming back to him, they were putting him into a medically-induced coma.

The good professor could never refuse a pliable test subject and Rufus's burned body had been a perfect chance for Hojo to test his theory on the restorative capabilities of Jenova cells on wounded tissue, of which he'd submitted a thesis on weeks before the Weapon attacked Midgar. Blood tests confirmed his earliest suspicions; he was now a carrier of that alien's cells. Despite Meteorfall and the actions of the people his company had often named terrorists, the calamity remained. It was in him and in others, thanks to a madman who'd had the authority and access to. The dark marks on his scarred body were an ever-present reminder of the insidious presence that lurked within him; he obsessively counted and marked the days of his calendar like a convict, awaiting the day his own body would turn traitor. It was not simply paranoia or pathos. He'd seen the monsters born of that alien's DNA with his own eyes. No one who carried Jenova's cells went unchanged, neither the ones who turned into abominations, or the human-shaped ones, such as Strife and Sephiroth. They were all children of the calamity, in their own way.

That was what they called it—the calamity from the skies, he mused. Part of it now lurked within him, a shadow under his skin, slowly turning his body into a stranger. What plagued him most was the idea that Jenova, though existing now only as cellular remnants, still posed a viable threat to the Planet. Sociopath or not, Hojo's most adamant hypothesis had been the Jenova Reunion theory, that even if the whole of it were separated, the parts would find their way back together. It was a hypothesis that'd played itself out with chilling precision, not but a half of a year past. There was no denying that if it could happen once, it could happen again. It left him with the notion that his days were numbered; it was what motivated his present actions.

Rufus Shinra was no fool; he knew very well that there was nothing he could do to redeem himself for the part he played in the undoing of the world, the catastrophe that could have been, and the one that still lurked in the unknowing and the unwary. Even the debridement of his burns paled in comparison to the fires that the meteor had brought with it. He had no illusion to ever making peace with his soul, but it didn't stop him from using the resources that remained to him; he had a debt to pay, one that he didn't expect to ever fully recompense. Anonymously, he funded organizations that centered around the humanitarian effort that was currently underway in Midgar, as well as a restoration project that was still only in its infancy. Blood money, gleaned from decades of subterfuge and atrocity and lies, poured into programs that saved lives, that rehabilitated, that brought hope.

Hope, he scoffed. An obscene hope, the hopelessness that could only precede such failure, a history of failure and wrongdoing. But hope, nonetheless. It was all he had.

He'd found that the human body—specifically his—experienced a powerful gravitational pull in the direction of hope. In the first weeks of his recovery, he'd all but been paralyzed by it. His wounds, in a way, were a tangible form of penitence; there were parts of him that'd been burned so severely that it had required skin grafts to close the wounds. Portions of his torso and extremities were no longer capable of sensing most stimuli; if he pushed hard enough, he could feel the pressure deep beneath the scarring, but it was a dull and distant sensation. It made him grateful for the parts of him that remained that could feel the shift of clothing against his skin, the whisper of errant breezes, or the deepening cold that winter brought with it. He'd lost most of the sight in his left eye due to ocular burns; the iris was clouded over now with a milky cataract. All of this was nothing in comparison to what lurked inside of him. Rufus stared down at his hand; the mark that stretched between his thumb and index finger was unassuming in appearance, looking like little more than a bruise, but he knew better.

"Sir?"

Rufus Shinra lifted his gaze and turned towards the balcony entrance. Rude stood there, quiet as a ghost, before turning and retreating back into the facility. Shinra knew enough of the Turk's facial nuances and his inclination toward the unspoken to know when he was being beckoned. Nudging the small switch on the arm of his motorized wheelchair, Rufus followed after him. The compound had once served as a lavish retreat for the elite executives of the Shinra Company, but had since been converted to a medical and research facility. Presently, the staff was minimal, comprised primarily of two nurses from Junon and three research assistants that'd served under Professor Hojo, as well as what remained of his Turks. He'd sent Elena to Junon; a good deal of the survivors had been sent there for medical treatment and rehabilitation. For now, her assignment was to simply observe. The other two had become his shadows, rarely leaving his side unless ordered to do so.

"Have you found more of them, then?" Rufus brought his wheelchair to a stop, and reached for the cane he'd left standing against the wall. With some difficulty, he stood.

Rude reached into coat a removed what seemed to be a thick newspaper; the cover was bare but for the title; The Meteorfall Enumeration. The Turk opened the publication to a marked spot, folding the cover back. "Possibly," the Turk replied. "It is difficult to say with any certainty, unless—"

"We are trying to keep the vivisections to a minimum, aren't we?" Reno interjected, his humor perverse. The red-haired Turk was lounging on the sofa, watching live coverage of what appeared to be a press conference from the former head of the Urban Development Department for the Shinra Company. Brief amusement struck Rufus; Tuesti shared the same path that he did, however unknowingly. The only difference was that Reeve pursued his redemption publicly, and his intentions were likely less selfish than his own.

"There are non-invasive indicators as to the presence of Jenova cells," Rufus reiterated, thinking briefly of the dark marks that'd appeared on his body. Wearied, he gestured at his desk, "Leave it. I'll cross-reference your supposed targets with the records Hojo kept in the morning."

"Sir," Rude repeated, insistently holding out the publication. "If you would."

With some annoyance, Shinra took it; the page had two rows of faces lined on it with minimal notations under their polaroid portraits, all of them were survivors of Meteorfall. Most of them were photographed in their hospital beds, some were clearly unconscious. Two photographs had been circled in red ink, one of a boy with startling green eyes, and one of a dark-haired woman.

"This boy," Rufus muttered, exhaling at the obvious resemblance; He looks just like his mother. There was no denying that no other could have been his mother, but her.

The woman in the neighboring photograph, however, was a ghost. To his knowledge, she had been executed years past for capital offenses against the Shinra Company; being that she was a product of the Department of Science and Research, specifically one of many pet projects of Professor Hojo's, Rufus found that he wasn't entirely surprised to see that she was alive. The professor's pet monsters had a way of sticking around. What perturbed him was not simply the fact that she was alive, but that she was a documented carrier of genetic material from Jenova. Not simply injected with cells as many of the "clones" had been, but genetically engineered in-utero to be something closer to the original creature. Rufus smoothed his thumb over the glossy photograph; Mira Creed's strange dark eyes stared up at him, unemotional but for a trace of irritation. Another ticking time-bomb, he thought, disquieted. The woman in the photograph looked frailer than he recalled; he had only been an adolescent when the woman had allegedly been executed. Beneath her picture, there was minimal information, primarily listing her medical status.

"Amnesia," Rude stated, sounding unconvinced.

"A convenient cover story," Rufus remarked. "Though these days it is quite prudent to disavow former ties to the Shinra Company."

Interest brought the red-haired Turk from the couch; he stared down at the publication in the ex-President's hand, disbelieving. Angry, Reno asserted, "She was executed. I saw the death certificate, the official re—"

"I imagine you saw precisely what you were expected to see. Her body was given back to the Department of Science and Research, back to the man who created her. Not the wisest move on my father's part, granted, but then he had little interest in the goings-on of his company beyond the preservation of his sovereignty and wealth," Rufus stated. "It is not a great leap to think he concealed her."

"Insurance," Rude agreed.

The former president stared at the woman's dark eyes, disquieted. "Precisely."

A grim notion struck Rufus; perhaps the entire point to Hojo's projects, his Jenova Reunion Theory, had not simply been to study whether or not the creature would indeed reform itself into a whole. Insurance—but for what? The Jenova Project had not only been successful with the creation of Sephiroth, it had been the backbone of Shinra's elite military division, Soldier. There had never been a time when those projects were even in consideration of being discontinued or terminated. So what had spurred the man to make a backup, if his projects were not threatened? Hojo was not a man of 'if', Rufus thought, sourly. Dismembering Jenova and scattering the fragments made it impossible to eradicate the creature in a single blow. Turmoil coiled in the pit of his stomach as he spoke, "Professor Hojo's machinations concerning Jenova are irrelevant. Were he alive, I doubt he'd share his intentions with us."

Leaning heavily on his cane as he walked, Rufus moved to set the publication down on a table, "The matter at hand is whether or not Jenova's influence remains. The hypotheses surrounding that creature's power and control are quite varied, and I'm certain the late Professor Hojo kept most of the facts to himself. The cells in my body are seemingly dormant and inactive; they do not diminish, nor replicate. I have not mutated and I have not lost my sanity."

Yet, he thought, bleakly.

Clearing his throat, he continued, "The "reunion theory" we know to be fact; Jenova's conscious will exerted the control that brought together enough of its form to recreate itself; we witnessed this at the Northern Crater, where many of the Sephiroth "clones" gathered."

Insurance. He glanced at the mark on his hand; there was something inside of him that didn't belong there, and he could feel it. Even though the numerous tests had proven that the cells were inactive, it seemed to him only false hope. However much he wanted it to be dead, a part of him knew better. Its main body might have been destroyed at the Northern Crater, but there were still many pieces that had not, for whatever reason, joined the "reunion". It was as though they were dormant, sleeping, or perhaps lying in wait. In nature, they called it thanatosis; a defense mechanism to ward off predators by feigning death. Troubled, he mused, "Is there enough of it remaining, to cause another reunion? Is the creature cognizant, or has its awareness been eradicated? If the creature's will is no more, do the remaining cells—however dormant—pose a health risk to the carriers? These are questions to which we must find the answers."

He fell once more into a brooding silence, his thoughts on the Northern Crater. Idly, he wondered if Strife and his companions had survived their foolish, solitary bid to save the planet. Only fools can afford to be so altruistic, he thought idly. Of their meager group, he knew that both Strife and the sentient beast were known carriers. If Tuesti knew anything of their survival, he gave no public indication of it; the world still knew Avalanche as an eco-terrorist group, one of which that was no more. If they had survived, they would certainly be under the radar; they would need to be located and observed.

"Sir?"

Rufus glanced up from the dark mark on his hand. The red-haired Turk looked concerned for him, but otherwise left his apprehensions unvoiced, and instead asked, "Your orders?"

Finding Strife and the others were not his immediate priority; until it was confirmed that the self-proclaimed ex-Soldier had survived, it was no use chasing after shadows. In time, whether or not they'd survived would come to light. For now, there was the woman, and his own infected body to monitor. With sudden certainty, Rufus replied, "Approach her. Assess what she knows. If she has no memory of her past, that may work to both our advantage, and hers."

"Ignorance as bliss, eh?" Reno replied, with some annoyance. "Approach, assess—then what?"

Rufus turned back toward his wheelchair; sitting down back into it proved harder than standing had. He wondered, briefly, if she was in the same sorry state he was. In her photograph, she looked half-dead. When he'd finally settled back into it, he simply replied, "Extend my invitation to Creed to join us here at this facility. I'm sure she'll find private care to be preferable to the current state of flux that Midgar is in."

Perhaps she might have a chance to begin again, he thought. Perhaps we all do.

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The lake was undisturbed in the vacant city known as the Ancient Capitol, its waters as still as glass and glittering in the sunlight. Structures made of pale stone and shell still stood, older than any human could say.

Pale, ethereal light shone down from the canopy of tall, white-barked trees. Silence hung in the air as thick and tangible as a cloak thrown over the city, an amalgamation of memories and spirits of the long-dead Cetra. It was a sacred place, a place of power, a place where the ground itself seemed to sing. You could hear it in the rocks, in the wind, in the water. It was almost like the hum of electricity—it itched at the skin, to ones who did not know how to listen. Now barren and neglected, the streets once bustled with the life of the first race; the Cetra. The People of the Planet, who were one with it, who were its own children and guardians. The day they left their grand city behind to sacrifice themselves for the world, it fell into an eternal silence, never again to come alive with the sound of their music and their life. Yet, the city never diminished completely, never faded into dust, as if it had been left in memorial to the first and the last of the planet's first children.

Two thousand years the city had stood in silence—waiting patiently for the wayward, sole-surviving Cetra to come and wake it. Two thousand years had passed since the original calamity, almost to the day, before the sky had turned red with the fires of Meteor. Again, the children were called, though only one remained to heed it, to selflessly give the final sacrifice. In the great expanse of the Cetran city, he imagined how small she must have felt, in coming here, in coming alone. If she had not spirited off from her companions, perhaps she would still be alive today. Whether she'd done so in hopes of preventing her companions from being witnesses to her execution, or to make it easier on herself to accept her fate without loved ones looking on, he could not say. He imagined the pale ghost of her form walking the stone walkways—would she have strode with confidence to her destination, sure of her mission and impending fate, or would she have wandered tentatively, with a thorn of fear embedded somewhere in that selfless heart of hers?

He liked to think that she had been smiling—hadn't she always been smiling?—even at the end.

He stood before the serene lake, unmoving, a mere shadow of the man he'd once been. He watched shafts of light pierce through the white canopy above, which sent glimmers of light dancing across the still waters. Motes of earth and dust turned slowly in the light, their movement reminding him of Lifestream—he'd watched Holy come and go, like the ebb of a tide as it thwarted Meteor's advance. He'd been given orders in those last reckless moments, to move one of the pawns from its prison and put it in a position of active play, but in his flight from the city, the massive sight of the two opposing powers had stopped him in his tracks. He wondered at how many others, despite the overwhelming biological imperative to flee the burning city, had stopped to watch it as he had?

In the end, despite its catastrophic capabilities, it'd only been rock. Lifestream had torn it apart, like some celestial cephalopod prying open an astral clam, and rendered it little more than fiery dust. In the end, Meteor had never been the true calamity; it had been a distraction from the true, insidious threat that remained. A threat which had long-ago plucked him from a natural death and caused him to persist, to live on in a mockery of life; a threat to which he remained bound to, however unwillingly.

Beside his feet, his coat and shirt lay folded atop his boots. Even the air here feels old here, he mused. On his torso, a livid scar ran from his left clavicle down to his abdomen, sweeping sharply to the right just below his navel. Tseng touched the thick scar tissue, briefly remembering how he'd slumped down against a column in the Cetran Temple, desperately holding onto the savaged flesh of his abdomen and praying that his innards would not spill out of him. It didn't take long to bleed out from a wound like that, and in the end he'd welcomed the slow, almost serene descent into death.

When he'd woken again, strapped down to a table with Hojo's nightmarish visage standing over him, everything had changed.

Tseng took a slow breath, stilling his thoughts; he knelt and sat for a time on his knees, meditating and clearing his mind, preparing himself for the act of desecration he was about to commit.

Ordering him to retrieve the Cetra's body had been cruel; any of the other pawns wouldn't have blinked at dredging the Cetra up from her final resting place, but he could barely stand the thought of it. It made him feel nauseated, angry. Taking slow, measured breaths, the ex-Turk pushed the feelings far from him, until he felt outside of himself, merely an observer who watched as his body waded into the water and dove without hesitation down into its depths.

The stark coldness of the water brought him back into his body, and the absence of breath in his lungs burned as he plunged into a depth that no light pierced. He searched along the limestone bottom of the lake, his hands searching blindly ahead of him; alarm began to tickle at the edges of his lungs, which were beginning to cramp sharply with a need for oxygen, before his fingers became entangled in what was unmistakably human hair. A body; her body. He fumbled, got a hold under the Cetra's armpits—in the gloom of the lake's depth, he could not see any better than the corpse in his arms could—and with great effort, he kicked off from a squat at the bottom of the lake. As he swam for the surface, dragging her with him, the dead weight of her body slowed him, causing his lungs to burn for air.

Tseng broke the surface of the lake, sputtering as he sunk under again, dragged down by the dead weight of her.

What a mercy it would be, to be drowned by the dead, he thought, wryly.

Resurfacing, he swam for the shore, relieved only when he made it to the shallows, all but crawling as he dragged her onto the shore with him. He let her sink from his grasp to lay on the pale shore, hair plastered across her face and chin tucked against her collarbones, as if she slumbered. There wasn't a touch of rot on her; the icy waters had preserved her well. Her tone was ashen and her lips blue, but the only thing that marred her was the gaping wound in the gap between her ribs, beneath her breasts; all the bright, shining life in her had left from that dark chasm in her sternum. He was certain, on some level, that the Lifestream could have restored her life for all the trouble she'd gone through for the planet, but in the end, the world had gone on being the same apathetic piece of rock it'd always been.

The good ones die while the monsters linger, he thought, darkly.

A pity that it hadn't; who else was left on this planet that could stand up to the calamity? The Cetra, the Lifestream, whatever powers-that-be that governed the world—they'd thrown away their last ace when she died.

Darkly amused by that irony, Tseng collapsed beside her, his breath still labored and ragged as he stared up at the sky she could not see; somewhere, above, birds sang. In the quiet, he spoke to her, as though she could somehow hear him.

"I never wanted to catch you, back then. I always hoped you'd outwit me at every turn and never find yourself in the possession of those who would dissect you, or use you."

He stared at the sky; it was too warm and too bright. It made the act of body-thieving all the more abominable, to be done so openly, under such light.

He chuckled, "Even now, I'd hoped that some divine thing would have objected to this, that the earth would've shaken and the lake would have closed up on us. That the planet itself would swallow us up, before this whole game of world-ending came gets underway."

The Cetra said nothing.

Wants aside, nothing had stopped him. Neither the oblivious birds singing in the trees or the vulgar vividness of the sky, nor the will of Lifestream itself. No cosmic moral compass course-corrected his actions; no gods above smote him where he lay. The world around him was still, and didn't give a single fuck for what he was doing.

So much for divine intervention, he thought.

Sighing as he sat up, Tseng regarded the dead woman with sudden remorse; she looked so small. Almost as if she were a child again, not yet a woman. Gently, he brushed the wet strands of hair from her pallid face, "I hope you aren't in there. I hope you found your Promised Land."

A sharp twist between his ribs stole the breath out of his lungs and shocked the guilt out of him; he was delaying, and She knew it. The pain left no room for defiance. Without hesitation, he abandoned his pitiful soliloquy and lifted the Cetra's body, catching her under the knees and lifting her as though she was merely a slumbering child. Head bowed and eyes closed; Tseng was glad that he could not see her eyes. He moved toward an idling chocobo and laid her over its back; the only apology he offered for this brazen action was in doing so gently. He pulled a small mobile phone from his saddlebag and dialed to a secure line; it went straight to voicemail.

Tseng cleared his throat, and said, "I've recovered the body. Its condition is superior to what was expected. I will have it delivered to headquarters before the week is out."

Switching off his radio, Tseng packed away it away before he mounted, sitting just behind the Cetra's lifeless body. He first secured her to the saddle with straps, before he gave the feathery beast a sharp nudge of his heel; it screeched and ran swiftly towards the outskirts of the long-forgotten city.

Some small, futile part of him hoped that the Cetra would forgive him his theft, though there was no part of her left in the world to give it.

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Author's Note: This story has been rewritten several times since its first publication in 2004. The core story remains, but all of the excessive storylines have been reworked or omitted entirely. This revision is dedicated to those who enjoyed its first incarnation before the rewrite. Even after all of this time (despite the complications of real life getting in the way), I feel compelled to finish this story for those first readers, even though they may have moved on. To new readers, I hope you find just as much enjoyment.

The primary POVs include Vincent Valentine, Sephiroth, Cloud Strife, Tifa Lockhart and Mira Creed, with secondary POVs occasionally recurring as the story warrants. The setting is post-FFVII, with only faint Advent Children overtones, that being the inclusion of Denzel, but sans the Remnants. It also disregards Before Crisis, Crisis Core, and Dirge of Cerberus, as I first began writing this story long before any of those were released and am not satisfied with where the prequels and sequels took the story. So this story is old-school FFVII to the bone.

The same warnings remain. This is a dark piece of fanfiction; it is not for the casual reader. If you're looking for sunshine and daisies, fluffy romance and neatly-packaged happy endings—there's plenty of that to be found elsewhere. This story is oftentimes very violent, and descriptively so. Obscenities, adult situations (sans the porn, kiddos), body horror, substance abuse, grievous wounds and gratuitous em dashes abound. There are no declared pairings in this, because "pairings" implies a story built on the premise of a romance and this is not that sort of story. There are however musings, missed-moments, the unrequited, tensions, confusion and things not working out as expected.

I do notown Final Fantasy VII or Advent Children, or any of its characters, themes, or settings. I do not profit from this story in any manner. The only thing I own is the handful of original characters, whom I tend to beat upon regularly and with impunity.

And yes, I shaved Sephiroth. I think that says it best that this story will not be everyone's cup of tea.