Chapter Text
One day, Sephiroth fell into a church. Nothing had been right since then. On the second day, when the drugs had eased and Aerith stopped crying, he thought they’d understood the gravity of their situation. On the two-hundred-and-eighty-fifth day, he realised he was wrong.
Computers and Mako tanks in R&D lit the metallic room in sickly shades of green. Aerith, still so pale, looked ill in the glow. The mottling of their baby on her knees makes him look positively alien.
“Isn’t he perfect?” she countered his thoughts and bent her knees to raise the infant higher. Her bare feet scraped the smooth metal floor, the cold iron chilled her feet purple.
They no longer glanced at the scientists that passed them and spoke about them in their glass tank as if they were studying fish at an aquarium. Sephiroth had grown used to it. He could no longer taste the metallic tang in the air, which he had breathed more days than he imagined he would.
Standing with his back to the curved glass and his arms crossed, Sephiroth hummed his approval. “He has your hair.”
“He has your eyes.” Aerith’s sullen smile sent a pang to his gut. Sephiroth turned away. He didn’t want to see her fake smile or the mewling, blotchy baby she forced herself to smile at, trying to find a way to love him.
“It’s not the baby's fault,” she had said in the first days of pregnancy. “I’ll find something in him to love.”
Sephiroth had been sat on the old orange couch in what he could only describe as a cramped storage room. He’d turned his head to where she stood in the bathroom doorway, holding the privacy curtain aside. “He?”
“I know he’s a boy, I just do.” She’d looked up at the security cameras recording the red swelling of her eyes and blotchy cheeks. There had not been a night she hadn’t sobbed. “It will be hard, but he’s coming now, so we have to find a way to make him welcome… even though he’s an unwelcome guest…” She shook her head and Sephiroth was silent. “Promise me you’ll try.”
Sephiroth’s mouth was dry. He’d closed his eyes and laid his head back, a migraine forming as he thought of an escape attempt that might work. “I promise I’ll think about it.”
When the scientists wheeled Aerith into their tank a half hour ago, he no longer had to think of it. His gut churned with hatred, anger and his heart had swelled with something fierce.
How could an infant embody all of those emotions?
Visibly anxious, Aerith pushed her finger into their son's fist so he could grip her fingertip. “Do you think Hojo’s planning something?” she whispered.
Sephiroth glanced at the department. Scientists typed on their computers, they barely glanced at the small family they’d bred. Hojo was not among them – yet. “Undoubtedly.”
Aerith slim fingers stroked her son's day-old cheeks. “You should hold him.”
Horror ripped through his gut. “No.” He shook his head, and his bangs brushed his cheeks.
Aerith bowed her brows. She sadly looked down as if she understood. “Alright.” Sephiroth listened to the clicking of keyboards, the buzz of the lights, the bubbling Mako and clicking rubber soles on the metal floor. “I want to call him Hadley,” she suddenly announced.
Sephiroth quirked his brows. “Hadley?”
“You don’t like it?” She pouted.
“Who would?” He wrinkled his nose. “Considering the child was conceived in a laboratory, there is no need to insult him further with a name like Hadley.”
“Well, I like it. And I’m the one who spent six hours in labour, so I should get to name him.”
Hadley. Sephiroth shook his head. How could he refer to his son as Hadley? Did he even look like a Hadley? He couldn’t help but observe his son through reluctant narrow slits. Bundled in a scratchy white blanket, their son slept. “If you name him, you’ll get attached to him,” he sadly told her.
“We’re already attached. I carried him for nine months.” She rubbed her nose against his button one. “He’s my son.” Sephiroth didn’t miss her subtle shudder at the word.
“Hojo might not let you keep him.”
Her breath stilled. They had spoken about the possibility of separation, sometimes with tears, sometimes in anger, but always with plotting. How they would cope if they were separated, how they would find each other… how they might escape…
“Even if that does happen… when I talk about him, I’ll need to call him something. The least I can do is give him a name… to let him know how loved he is.”
Sephiroth stared up at the iron ceiling. It reminded him of a lid on a can. He had been told his mother named him and often hoped that his long name, unique and unheard of until he came into the world, was a sign of her love. Did he love his son? No. It wasn’t quite love. It was something unexplainable and untamed. “Briar.”
“What?” She turned her head.
His brow knitted together, and he forced himself to speak. “I like Briar.”
“Briar…” she tested the name on her tongue and looked down at her stirring baby. His mouth twitched. He’d want feeding soon. “What do you think of that, baby? Little Briar Gainsborough?” The baby cooed and Aerith giggled. “Sephiroth, come here! I think he likes it.”
Sephiroth dared himself to move closer and glance down at the podgy wrinkled face. He wondered if all babies looked like old men. Had he? If so, the boy was sure to be handsome when he grew up.
The lab door opened and Sephiroth heard Hojo’s shuffling walk. He wore a twisted smile on his sagging mouth.
Sephiroth stood tall. Aerith held Briar tight and painfully got to her feet, leaning against the curved glass for support. She hissed and pressed her legs together. Briar’s hungry wails were timely, his fists trembling with distress.
“Still sore, my dear?” Hojo leered. “I suppose you must be. I suggest you refrain from intercourse until the stitches are removed. A man of Sephiroth’s dimensions could cause you great injury.”
Sephiroth snarled and slammed his fist on the glass. Hojo stumbled back. “It seems another dose of neuromuscular blocks is in order.” Hojo never gave Sephiroth enough to paralyse, but just enough to weaken him. The build-up of drugs had considerably weakened him to the strength of a normal man. His muscles were wasting. Push-ups and pull-ups made him shake. For every dose they gave him, Sephiroth felt the hope of escape drifting away.
Aerith tried to rock Briar calm. She kept her eyes on Hojo and leant close to Sephiroth. He set a steadying hand on her shoulder, suddenly reminded of how young she was, barely sixteen, still a child herself, really. “You brought us here for a reason, I gather?” Sephiroth questioned.
“Why didn’t you want to meet your offspring?” Hojo spread his arms. “I know I certainly do!” He pressed his hands together on his chest. Aerith clutched Briar closer. “However,” Hojo calmed, “I never make the same mistake twice. The laws of science dictate that a superior outcome precedes new methods compared to the mistakes of the past. My dear, keeping you and your mother together made her wilful to the point of death. What we could have learnt from your infancy, if not for her.”
Aerith’s breath hitched, and Sephiroth balled his fist. On the other side of the glass, someone pointed a camera at them. He turned his back into a broad shield to shy Aerith and Briar from the prying lens.
Hojo stepped aside. “Say goodbye to it.” A little crib domed with glass wheeled past him. Several men stood by, judging by their build they might have once been Soldier’s, they certainly looked ready for a fight. Sephiroth snorted. If they wanted a fight, he’d give them one.
Frantically shaking her head, Aerith backed away. “No… no!” She gripped Briar closer.
“You are a mere sixteen! You will do as your elders bid you!”
Sephiroth wrapped his arms around her and arched his tall body as if to hide them in his shadow.
“You’re not taking him!” she screamed. It was the first time Sephiroth had heard her shout in such an aggressive tone. It was akin to the roar of a bear, hiding its cubs in the cave, and ready to charge at a hunter.
“He was just born.” Sephiroth glared.
Hojo’s laugh stretched the wrinkles in his jowls. “Now he’s interested in his spawn!” With a sinister grin, he clicked his fingers. The doors opened, and the men geared for battle stormed in. “How intriguing!” Hojo crossed one arm around himself and bent the other to his mouth. “Months without interest and suddenly he fawns!”
The tank's glass doors opened, and Aerith wavered, obviously not sure whether she should take the chance to run or not. Sephiroth kept a tight grip on her. The men he might have commanded only last year yanked him away from Aerith with ease and forced him to his knees. They didn’t even need their full weight to pin him down.
Sephiroth struggled, but he could only wriggle his fingers. His joints felt weak. He bared his teeth and howled. Using his hair as a grip, they positioned his head and forced him to watch Briar ripped from Aerith’s arms.
“No!” She ran and crashed into the glass that slid back in place, sealing Briar on the other side. “Briar!” she shrieked. “Bring him back! Give him back!” Her hands slapped on the glass. Sephiroth heard the crack as her finger broke.
Hojo held Briar in both hands and held him higher to the light as if checking the worth of a diamond. “Intriguing.” He set him in an enclosed crib and waved to the elevator for the scientists to wheel him away. Hojo closely followed and the elevator door closed behind him, silencing Briar’s wails, swift as death.
Aerith screamed and attacked the door as the weight on Sephiroth’s back shifted and the former SOLDIER’s walked to the doors.
As if she’d forgotten about the painful birth she’d endured, Aerith swiftly slipped passed the SOLDIER’s and ran out. She darted around the reaching scientists and chasing guards to stop at the elevator doors and frantically push for the elevator. Three men tackled her and called for a fourth to help restrain her.
“Briar!” she sobbed. She must have been blind to the pain. Sephiroth could see blood running down her legs. She sprained her own wrist as she tore it out of the enhanced grip. “Bring him back! Bring him back!”
Sephiroth struggled onto his knees. His legs were so weak he wondered how he would stand. He had already seen a love so fierce that all else was forgotten. He had seen a mother lift a car off her daughter, seen a father run faster than any Olympian with his premature child in both hands, he had seen a sister stand before her brother and face an army with nothing but a stick in her hand.
Lifted off her feed, Aerith kicked and wailed as the guards pulled into the elevator she’d summoned. The SOLDIER’s returned for Sephiroth pushed him into it. Instinct told him he could twist, punch the man square between the eyes and take his weapons. Experience proved it would be another futile attempt at escape.
***
Their room was a prison with flowers and animals brightly scribbled on the walls. It was a storage room, a place for old files and out-of-date prescription pills. It was where things went to be ignored and forgotten until Hojo needed them again.
He was almost shocked to see Hojo in the room, waiting for them. The door locked behind them and Aerith slumped to her knees. Her hands and forehead pressed to the floor, and she sobbed as if her tears could rust through the metal.
“As I said,” Hojo spoke as though his subjects were idiotic children. “Do not mount her until her stitches are removed.”
Shrieking a roar, Aerith flung herself at Hojo and clawed his face. Her nails dragged long red whelps down his face and one of the two guards in the room pushed her to the ground. She curled into a ball as tight as Briar had been nestled inside her only yesterday, and cried.
“That’s not going to happen!” Sephiroth growled.
“It will. I shall ensure it! Just as I did before.” Hojo held his hand to his scratched face.
Sephiroth’s breath hitched. He couldn’t breathe. When Aerith had become pregnant, he thought they’d surely have no more need of him. When Briar was born, they’d let them go. What other purpose could they serve? “You want us to produce another,” he realised. He should have known. It was just like Hojo to be so greedy, and yet Sephiroth struggled to believe it.
“In case of failure to thrive, it is always beneficial to have a backup or two, the sooner the better.”
“Look at her!” he barked and pointed at Aerith, curled prone on the floor. “If you do this again, she will die! We will die!”
Hojo made an annoyed sound in his throat. “You do not have the right to die until I say so.” He headed towards the door, the guards stationed there readied to open it. “Clean yourselves up.”
“Humans are entitled to two things!” Sephiroth called. “Death and freedom, if we can’t have one, we will have the other.”
Hojo stilled and kept his back to him. “Perhaps a human would,” he chortled, and left. The door slid closed and clicked locked behind him, leaving Aerith and Sephiroth in a windowless room with nothing but each other for entertainment.
Anger shook Sephiroth’s core. They had told him on the seventh day of his capture about the origin of his birth, that the making of him may not have been much different to the making of Briar. He hoped his mother hadn’t suffered as Aerith had.
The day they manipulated a sperm sample from him to check his vitality, Hojo had squawked, “the Ancient should be bred by now!”
“Why me?” Sephiroth twitched and his voice trembled with rage. His weakened arms and legs remained strapped down, and a strap kept his forehead kept his head still. His sperm was in a jar at his side and the air on his naked body cooled and the sweat glinting off him.
He was angry. He was humiliated. But considering what he did to Aerith every day, supposed a strangers gloved hands fondling his testicles and sticking a probe up his anus was the least he deserved. He knew he was special… but this?
Hojo had started babbling about Jenova cells implanted into foetuses, degradation, and his desire to recreate an Ancient. “Your birth secured my position in Shinra. Your mother would have had a glittering career on par with my own had she not ended her life.”
“You said she died in childbirth.”
“I said she died after you were born.”
Sephiroth’s world had been shaken ever since. “She killed herself… because of me?”
“She killed herself because she could not handle greatness.”
“How… why was I injected with Jenova cells if Jenova was my mother? What was the point?”
Hojo had laughed, “You always were a little slow. I had hoped you might inherit my genius, but apparently not. Jenova and your mother were two separate beings two-thousand years apart. One was a colleague, the other an alien mass. We had hoped to recreate the perfect Ancient.” he looked Sephiroth’s nude from up and down, his tinted glasses and the light bouncing off the lenses, hid his eyes. “And we succeeded.”
It took time to adjust to the information. He would never recover. He had two mothers and that for a father, a father that had imprisoned him and forced him to…
“My mother and I lived here,” Aerith said. “I drew those pictures when I was a child. Everyone wanted to see them. Even the President came to look.” She’d told him that night, under the covers, pulled over their head to hide them from the camera pointed at the bed. “Hojo wanted me to draw more. He told me that every day I didn’t draw, someone would die. My mother flirted with the scientists so we could escape. She died. A woman I now call my mom found me. Her husband was in SOLDIER, actually. I never knew my father. The Turks watched over me my whole life and now I’m back here, with you, because Hojo wants me to have a…” she firmly looked him in the eyes. “If I can recover with two moms and a father I don’t know, so can you.”
She’d turned her back to him. Sephiroth rolled over, put his arms around her and whispered his new ideas for escape into her ear. Ideas that had failed.
Now, he wanted the whole story more than ever. He didn’t want his son to continue a legacy steeped in secrets.
“Get up.” He pulled Aerith off the floor. She was limp, too heavy for him to move. “Don’t let them see it got to you.”
“I don’t care!” she screeched.
Sephiroth dragged her to the rug and draped her against the sofa. He wrapped the old blanket around her, sat down, and listened to the sound of hours passing, the ticking clock, the buzzing lights, and the dripping tap.
Aerith’s wails died to sobs, then howls and finally noises that reminded him of a small animal in a trap. It was enough to drive him mad.
“Aerith,” he said on the seventh hour and slid off the sofa. He crouched and put a hand between her shoulder blades. She was hot and shaking. “Stop now.” It was an order, but he tried to sound gentle. There was no need to make a bad situation worse. “You’ll make yourself sick and you need your strength.” She wailed louder, as if to defy him. “Stop.”
She squeaked, pulled her hair, and curled around her sagging, bloated belly.
“We knew this may happen from the beginning. We’ve had nine months to come to terms with it.” Her hand clapped around his face. He didn’t move. He wasn’t surprised.
“Cold-hearted bastard!”
“You need to stop crying so we can plan an escape,” he sternly reminded her.
“You’ve been saying that for months!” She sat up and twisted, glaring at him with eyes almost swollen shut, her face red and wet, sad eyes animalistic. He saw the depths of her grief. Milk soaked through her tank top, pouring from breasts fuller than the day they met.
He straightened his back. “Did they hit you?”
Her lips quivered. She didn’t wipe the stream of snot reaching her chin.
“Your eye,” he said. She raised a hand to it and winced away from her own touch. Sephiroth sighed. He had seen that injury before. The whites of Aerith’s right eye were blood red, the green of her iris luminescent against it. “Don’t be alarmed when you see it.” He wiped her nose on the corner of the blanket. “You’ve burst a blood vessel in your eye. You’ve cried so much you’ve injured yourself.”
She raised her hands to her eyes and sobbed again. Sephiroth pulled her hands away. “Stop!”
“I can’t!” She shook his hands off her and didn’t flinch, despite her sprained wrist. “They’ve taken him!”
“I know!” he barked, then took a breath. His heart sank to his stomach as reality hit. “I know.”
“They’ll never give him back!” she wept.
“I know.”
“He’ll be all alone! He’ll be scared! I want him back!”
Sat on the floor beside her, he pulled her close and pushed her down to rest her head on his lap. “I know.” He set his hand on her head. “Don’t let them see you cry.”
“I don’t care anymore,” her voice broke, muffled in his lap.
“You are angrier than ever. Sleep, curl up like a cat and let your body heal.” Her whimper shuddered through him. “Rest.”