A Day in Nibleheim

This is set way back in Chapter Nine of Ripples in Time, and goes into some character bonding I didn't get a chance to do.

Lucrecia glanced up as Genesis swore, catching his newly appeared wing in the door.

"Any luck?" Genesis growled as he rubbed his now sore wing.

"I'm afraid not, there are some vague notes to the cetra maybe having wings, but they all reference old myths." Lucrecia glanced at Sephiroth, who had tossed a notebook rather violently into the trash.

"From the way he carries on, you'd think he was in love with the fossil." Sephiroth looked vaguely ill.

"We all know Hojo's a psychopath, nothing's going to surprise me." Genesis muttered, still annoyed with his wing.

"What are these?" Angeal picked up a box.

"The remains of Professor Gast's notes. Vincent found them near Icicle Inn, I think." Lucrecia sighed. "Hojo tried to delete them."

"What was he working on?" Sephiroth looked up. "I remember he left for something, but he never came back."

"He found the last true Cetra. Some of those are videos of them talking . . ." Lucrecia sighed. "He fell in love with her and married her, they had a child . . . But aparently, that was too much for Hojo to pass up. Vincent found out he was the one to order the hit on Gast, and took both the mother and child into the labs."

"That . . ." Angeal paused, and shook his head. "You're right, I'm not really surprised."

"Do you know what happened to them?" Sephiroth looked at his mother, she shook her head.

"Vincent found the daughter, but I don't know much more than that, he's wary of ShinRa . . . Though, I suppose I'm not much better."

"Then why'd he trust Cid Highwind?"

Lucrecia shrugged. "He doesn't tell me everything, but I think the Captain impressed him." According to Vincent, it was because the Pilot hadn't really cared that he was found in a coffin and slightly morbid, whereas the others had varying times of warming up to the former turk. (Cloud and Nanaki had the shortest times, while Barret had the longest, though that had more to do with him being a former Turk than anything.) Unfortunately, they couldn't tell these three about the timetravel.

"The amount of swear words he can say without ever repeating himself is pretty impressive." Genesis muttered. Angeal resisted the urge to sigh. Sephiroth just shook his head.

"I thought you already cleaned this place out?" Tifa sneezed at the dust.

"Mostly notes that Hojo wouldn't miss, like Lucrecia's." Vincent sighed. "I haven't touched the equipment."

"Yeah. I noticed." Tifa sneezed again.

Eventually, searching through notes devolved into Angeal and Sephiroth figuring out ways to make the wing hidden, all of which made Genesis more than a little annoyed.

"This is going to be impossible." Genesis sighed.

"Nothing is impossible." Mrs. Strife came in with a snack tray. "Just difficult."

"I have a large black wing, how am I supposed to hide it?" She blinked down at him.

"It came from somewhere, didn't it? Why don't you try putting it back where it came from?" Genesis stared at her for a long moment.

"Do you remember what you were thinking when it came out?" Lucrecia looked up, catching on. "If it registers as a Materia, you might have to treat it as one." Genesis glanced away.

He'd been thinking about running, no, he'd been thinking of flying, and there had been a pull of magic . . . Genesis closed his eyes. He was good with materia for a reason, and that was his ability to feel it a little more strongly. There. An almost too small to be possible and still work flow of magic went from him to the wing. He started to pull the magic back in.

The others watched in fascination as the wing folded and disapeared into his back, leaving quite a few feathers behind. Genesis almost slumped in relief.

"That still doesn't explain how he managed it the first place." Angeal pointed out.

"I can still feel it." Genesis rolled his shoulder. It wasn't painful, just an odd feeling.

"You ought to practice with it." Mrs. Strife noticed the looks. "What if you accidentally summon it the next time you're upset?"

"It hurt." Genesis crossed his arms. Mrs. Strife just looked at him, before sighing.

"Alright, it was just a thought." She glanced at Lucrecia. "How are you holding up?"

"I'm alright." Lucrecia closed the file she was looking through. "I'll let you know if that changes."

"You've been working on this stuff for five years?" Angeal was having trouble reading the notes he had just picked up, the writing was almost illegible.

"We needed to figure out what Hojo had done, but as you can see, some notes are so vague and rambling it's impossible to get any sense out of them. Others are legible, to a degree, but then he goes into rambling again." Lucrecia sighed. "What I can tell, though, is that there's a definite progression from Jenova being just a specimen to Jenova being his . . . well, I'm not sure 'love' is the right word, obsession might be better."

"I'm a little more disturbed when he mentions Sephiroth." Angeal made a face at the first legible passage he had come across. "He goes between calling him Experiment S and son of Jenova." Genesis glanced over his shoulder and also made a face of disgust, before turning his attention to the notebook he had picked up.

"This looks like it's been tampered with." Genesis frowned, flicking a page back and forth. Sephiroth glanced up from Hojo's notebook extolling the power of the ancients.

"What do you mean?"

"Look, this page is soaked through to the point of illegibility but the next page has only two large drops of water." Genesis tilted the book up. "Binding isn't damaged much either." He noted both Sephiroth and Angeal looking at him in confusion. "I had a lot of free time in Wutai, the Princess was kind enough to get me a teacher in the art of book binding and restoration. You have no idea how many book of geneologies I had to repair." Sephiroth nodded, and Angeal gave a soft smile.

"Vincent . . . how's Lucrecia doing?" Tifa watched him put the two old scanners into a small bag.

"She's alright, she's holding herself together pretty well." Vincent paused and then sighed. "If you're going to say what I think you are, don't."

"Actually, I was going to ask if Sephiroth knows how badly she was affected." Tifa then smirked as they headed back out. "However, I'm now curious, what did you think I was going to ask?" Vincent looked at her, and she could tell he wasn't amused, or going to do anything to further the topic. "Is it such a bad idea that you might actually get a chance?"

"What about you and Cloud?" Came the quiet, but no less pointed, response.

"We're going to wait and see. We've got a couple years before we have to make a descision."

"Then why?"

Tifa rolled her eyes. "If you have to ask, then I'm not going to answer."

"Wait, Jenova is an alien virus?" Angeal stared at the small green notebook that had once belonged to Gast.

"Mm, the Cetra called her the Calamity from the Skies." Lucrecia nodded, looking up. "Unfortunately, I didn't know that at the time."

"Hojo did." They looked at Genesis who was now sprawled on the couch. "He calls her the Goddess from the Skies, he claims once that the Cetra were aliens as well, but then he changes his mind about halfway through, and starts calling her the wronged Cetra again." He put the book down. "It's annoying, like he can't be bothered to explain why he claims all this stuff, though I'll give him points for prose." Genesis added dryly.

"So, basically, Hojo is doing the opposite of what he says he does, and is being completely unscientific with his fascination with Jenova." Sephiroth looked amused. "Just like when we argued whether materia use was magic or not. He denied it was magic, but couldn't say what it was instead."

"It's magic." Lucrecia looked amused. "My mentor liked to say, magic is simply a different type of science we don't comprehend yet."

"That's a better balance than Hojo has." Sephiroth leaned against the chair Lucrecia was sitting in, having moved to the floor in order to reach the remaing notes without having to keep bending over, before frowning at the set of notes.

"Now what has the crackpot done?" Genesis looked up.

"It's a list of numbers and letters." Sephiroth showed them. "But I can't make head or tail of them."

"See you later, Vincent!" Tifa grinned, before heading to meet Zangan. Vincent just shook his head before returning to the house.

The first thing he noticed was that Genesis no longer had a wing, the second was that Sephiroth was all but curled up next to Lucrecia's chair.

"I see you don't actually need these anymore." Vincent noted, putting the scanners on the table.

"I can still scan the lose feathers." Lucrecia put down the notebook. "I think we're done here for today."

"How are you doing?"

"I'm holding up pretty good."

"Why do the two of you keep asking that? Mrs. Strife asked something similar earlier." Angeal looked at Genesis in disaproval.

" . . . Remember how I said I was pretty ill when Hojo injected the J cells into me? I still suffer from relapses, we're not sure why, either." Lucrecia gave a self-depreciating smile. "Hojo doesn't have any notes on me, since I wasn't all that important to the success of the experiment, and my memories of what happened during that time are vague . . . But I'm pretty sure I started having the, episodes, for lack of a better word, during that time. It shows up in some of my notes I tried to write and a few recordings." She shook her head. "Today's been pretty good."

"Oh, my apologies." Genesis rubbed his side where Angeal's elbow had impacted against his ribs.

"It's alright."

Genesis quickly retreated from the study, and found Mrs. Strife mending sheets in the kitchen.

"Finally emerge for air?" She looked up with a smile. "I was starting to think I'd be serving dinner in the study."

" . . ." Genesis didn't have much he could say. "May I ask you something?"

"Go right ahead, if you want to sit, you can move those rags to the floor." Mrs. Strife put down her needle and turned to look at him.

"Why did you help me last night?" Genesis sat down in the spot she'd had offered. "I wouldn't have . . . Blamed you, if you'd been unable to."

"You were hurting, in more ways than one." Mrs. Strife looked at him. "What kind of person would I be if I didn't try to help?" Genesis shrugged, not really having an answer. "You aren't a monster, Genesis. Monsters are the ones that choose, in some way, to give up their humanity. You haven't lost that, you just lost some ignorance." Very gently, she put a hand on his shoulder. "As for you sprouting a wing- You should see Vincent's limit breaks sometime, your wing is positively cute in comparison."

"Cute!" Genesis managed, some indignation over her word choice evident.

"I'm sorry, should I have used beautiful? Handsome? Dignified?" Mrs. Strife was clearly teasing him, and despite himself, he found his lips twitching into a smile.

"Anything but cute!"

Sephiroth looked up at his mother, grateful that Vincent and Angeal had left them alone.

"Mother . . ." He paused, suddenly very unsure how to ask the question. The explanation the previous night had not been very detailed, but the description of her having 'relapses' had made him wary of putting too much stress on her.

"Yes?" She looked at him expectantly.

" . . . I'm glad I got to meet you." He could wait. For now, he was happy to spend some time with his mother, talk about their various interests.

"What are we going to do about Hojo and ShinRa?" Angeal finally asked at Dinner that night. "We can't just ignore what they've done."

"Well we could always feed Hojo to the Nibel Wolves." Mrs. Strife offered. "Putting a Cacutuar in his office and locking him in, though any type of monster would do."

"I was being serious."

"So was I." She raised an eyebrow at him. "Letting him live is just asking for trouble later on down the road."

"What about summons?" Genesis asked, thoughtfully.

"To easy to trace back to someone, might be better if it was just an assasination." Even Sephiroth seemed to be getting in on it, Angeal noted with dismay as the silver-haired general considered the options. "Problem is our swords leave very distinctive marks."

"Vincent, you're a good shot, do you think you could-"

"I could kill him." Vincent nodded.

"Might be easier to poison him." Lucrecia offered, surprising the others. "What? I've been thinking about it for years- I know of a couple poisons that wouldn't show during an autopsy."

"Except he might check for poison, he's a little on the paranoid side." A soft groan drew everyone's attention back to Angeal who had his face in his hands.

"Seriously, though, we've got a few things in the works, though it might be for the best if you're not completely aware of all of them." Mama Strife took pity on the honor-oriented soldier. "Unfortunately, we have to wait to deal with Hojo directly, as long as President Shinra is incharge, Hojo is protected by quite a bit."

"So, we wait."

"Wait, and do your best to keep your soldiers from disapearing, especially on home ground- You're not the only ones being used."

"SOLDIER is just one large experiment, then." Angeal looked up in shock.

"To a lesser degree, yes."

" . . . If we go, we better take them with us." Genesis muttered, to the agreement of Sephiroth and Angeal.

Dinner ended fairly light heartedly, after all the various discussions and plans that were set.

So . . . This might actually turn into a two shot if I have the time to write a second chapter . . . Please leave a review.

Genesis's wing- we all know it's impossible to fly with one wing. However if said wing was magic, then it might be possible, hence why the wing registers as a 'Fly' materia/spell. (So yes, this is me making up a reason for why Genesis (and later Angeal) don't end up flying in circles in Crisis Core)

Edit 10/20/12: fixed some grammar and spelling, as well as formatting issue.