FF7 - Restore - chapter 8 part 2 (end of chapter)

[askerian]

I WOULD SAY I WAS SORRY BUT I WOULD BE LYING. :D (also i might have to go back and trim off some of the whining but I'll check that later. Can't see the forest for the trees right now.)

Archive - Previous



The bathroom was small, a little cramped. His legs barely fit in the tub.

It wasn't a camp's bucket of cool water behind three flapping sheets. (He wouldn't have minded if it was. Damp, rapidly cooling skin, goosebumps, gritty earth and loose pebbles between his toes. Rough old towel. The heavy twist of his wet hair slapping against his shoulder blades. He remembered.)

It was strange to have a body again. The sheer ... physicality of it, the heartbeat and the inflating-deflating lungs and the way his stomach was starting to send out small, barely noticeable 'I don't know if you remember, I'm empty right now' queries. A little light-headed. Maybe it was the hot water in the little tub, his legs folded and pressing on his chest.

He could have kept standing and taken a shower instead, Strife's bathroom was set up for that much.

He wasn't in that much of a hurry. He'd taken showers in his apartment in the Shinra tower, never baths, because he was always ...

Because his old bathroom had been a wide-open, sleek, highly efficient thing in chrome and sober lines, and he'd always found it strange that the latest fashion amongst the much-too-rich mimicked the stainless steel of a lab's decontamination area.

A corner of the tablet over the sink was taken up with colored little bottles in fancy sizes and fancier shapes. Some of the tiles didn't match. Razors and toothbrushes, hairbrushes, hair bands. Lived in, this bathroom. Nowhere he'd ever been.

He let his head fall back. The ceiling was painted a weird off-pink color; he could still see brush strokes.

Nowhere he'd ever been. Or thought to be. Life might be full of those things, from that point onwards. If he lived. If they allowed him to.

It was a very noble impulse, to allow himself to be judged, something he owed. But losing this again? He lifted a hand out of the water, watched it -- spread fingers, tendons and joints, veins blue under the skin. The tugging feel of stretching muscles.

He'd pay anything but that.

He thought Strife had to know it.

Through the door he could hear light steps on the wooden floor, someone (Miss Gainsborough; when trying to be quiet Zack didn't glide so much as stalk like a hunting cat) opening the dryer in the small room next door. His loaned clothes must be clean. She puttered for a minute, cloth rustling, and left again. Past the bathroom, down the corridor -- a door being nudged open... She wasn't coming to get him yet, she or Zack.

Sephiroth had only been granted leave to wash himself. Perhaps this was their way to be kind, letting this brief moment stretch out. Perhaps they'd just wait for him to come out on his own, let him have as much time as he could steal.

And then in a few hours Strife would come home to find him pickling in his tub and be oh so pleased by this flaunting the spirit of his rule while giving lip service to the letter. Sephiroth thought that wasn't half as he would be displeased in himself for hiding in a tiny bathroom grabbing all the minutes he could take -- it seemed to him that the only reason to do that was a strong belief that he would not be alive to grab them afterwards.

Defeatist. Surrendering without even having laid eyes on the battlefield. He could feel his upper lip curling up in disdain; he was grabbing the edge of the tub and hauling himself up in the next second. Water cascaded down his body, louder than he expected as it splashed and danced in the tub. He stepped out onto the rug.

At worst he would retreat to fight another day. He refused to envision the future otherwise.

He picked up a towel, started rubbing himself dry. It chafed a little, the feeling almost negative but not quite, leaving his skin alive with blood-rush warmth. Reddened, a little. Alive.

Alive. He breathed, eyes closed, feeling the slow beat of his heart resonate through his whole body. How long until he got used to it again, until it faded into the background hum of his awareness?

'If I kill you again, you'll be awake,' Strife had promised. Sephiroth felt inclined to believe him. He wasn't the only person in his group, though, and perhaps one of his friends would decide to take matters into their own hands. He couldn't count on being able to wake himself in time. Sleep spells might not hold him but they still made him slow, lethargic; he couldn't break them in a second the way he woke from ordinary sleep.

Frowning at himself in the fogged mirror he kept rubbing, working the cloth between his fingers and behind his ears and into crevices he was sure he never used to bother with. His bangs dripped cooling water onto his cheek, his chest.

He needed a strategy. Something to slow them down even as he lay there unconscious -- ideally several interlocking strategies, since he wouldn't be awake to see them through to optimal resolution. He'd learned that in Wutai, how they never bothered going against a column of Shinra armored cars straight on; instead they would puncture a tire here, siphon motor oil there, shift a little stream to make dirt roads into swamps -- they broke the column's momentum piece by piece.

Zack, he acknowledged quietly, would be his first line of defense.

(He had long since lost the right to give that order. He didn't even need to ask.

He didn't get it. He didn't ... he didn't deserve it.

Even so.)

Miss Gainsborough would be rational, convincing, but that only helped if people let themselves be slowed down enough to be talked to. If someone broke past Zack somehow, slipped around him... well, there would only be a few seconds until he caught up, but a few seconds might be all it took.

What to do about it, Sephiroth mused, as he wiped some more dripping water off his chest. What could be done, put in place as he slept. Boobytrap the attic? Strife would not be amused, not to mention there was nothing in there lethal enough to be a true hindrance.

How to shock them into slowing down, he wondered, watching himself in the mirror, hands on the sink, leaning forward. How to jar them out of their path, when they saw him lying there, and they hated everything he represented.

... Oh.

Porcelain chipped under his fingertips, a radial pattern of cracks in the glaze. His pupils tightened into lines. His first reaction was a swift, jaw-clenching no. One that went 'how dare you' and 'this is mine', and he wasn't giving anything away.

Not even to prove his good faith, because how dare they, because why did he have to, because -- he closed his eyes tight, breathed out between gritted teeth.

Because pride was apparently more important than survival? (Yes it was, he wasn't humbling himself before anyone, he refused to bend his knee and beg and if he truly wished to... there was materia in the house, he knew there must be, and weapons and

if he was going to go that way, why not do it now, take what he needed, get back in top shape for the inevitable confrontation. Kill Strife, this time around, kill his little band of annoying friends, take care of the last Shinra and his dogs, and then he could live free, live however he wanted.

Why not. He just had to leave Zack and Miss Gainsborough behind. Make liars out of them, fools. Who cared.

He cared. Damn it.)

He ought to start as he meant to go on.

Being ruthless -- seeing what needed to be done and taking the straightest path there, no coddling, no distracting pity -- was a fine, useful trait, but only if one wasn't too cowardly to turn it on oneself. He started rummaging through the drawers.

Five minutes later knuckles rapped lightly on the door, pulling him away from his staring contest with himself. "Sephiroth, may I come in?" Miss Gainsborough inquired. "I have your clothes."

There was no reason to put it off. "Feel free," he replied.

The next second when she paused in the doorway and blinked at him he remembered that the only towel he was wearing was currently across his shoulders.

"My apologies," he said, briefly irritated at himself for the lapse in etiquette -- Cetra or not, in this world she was a young lady, not a fellow soldier or a lab tech -- and grabbed a second one off the rack, but by then her gaze had shifted higher up his body and the playful grin blooming on her lips had died.

"Oh. Oh, Sephiroth."

His shoulders tensed and he didn't even mean them to. He wanted to turn away, break eye contact. Pretend nothing was wrong and could she go away now.

The back of his neck was cold, too bare to expose. She might see right through him.

She would see right through him nevertheless, so he may as well meet her upfront.

They stared at each other for another second or five, Sephiroth defensive and still angry, and her looking ... he wasn't sure, too something that he thought leaned a little too much toward pity.

He felt like a child caught just past a fit of pique, precisely in that mortifying time between being angry enough to do something ridiculous and being calm enough to get rid of the evidence. A flippant 'I've been meaning to change my look for a long time now' would only make it seem worse. His... his ridiculous emotional reaction to shedding a bunch of useless dead cells was much too see-through; it wasn't worth the bother.

"... This is ... not the neatest job I could have done," he forced out. "Might I ask--"

"Oh, Sephiroth," she said, teasing with her voice and with her eyes all soft and not teasing at all. "Giving me permission to play hairdresser? This is like asking if I would please eat all your chocolate."

"There isn't a lot left to play with now."

"Pshh! Quality, not quantity. Sit down here, you're too tall," Aeris said briskly, waving him to the edge of the tub.

He turned to sit sideway, one knee up, tugging the towel to fix the gap. Aeris hummed in a falsely solemn way and raised a hand to touch the end of a gray lock that hung just a little over his bare shoulder. He'd hacked it all off in three or four big snips; the ends were jagged.

He could see her hand from the corner of his eye as she combed the locks smooth. The first thing he'd seen, the first thing he'd touched in this world, small and narrow and soft as it pulled him into life.

He'd killed her before. She'd been a threat. She was a threat. One he owed several debts to, and the only thing she seemed to want to do about it was to do him more favors, huge and small, seemingly just because. He didn't think he would ever fully understand her.

"You're not going to ask why."

She paused for a second in mid-brush, tilted her head. "No, I'm not." She started brushing again, more cautious than he would have bothered to be. "If you want me to know, you'll tell me."

"You already know. Don't you?"

A faint chuckle. "We're not in the Lifestream anymore, and even in there I wasn't omniscient, you know."

"Weren't you?"

"You flatter me."

Still unruffled, and still artfully dodging the question. She never did let him ruffle her, stayed pleasant and polite and sometimes it reminded him of his own masks, his own distance at board meetings, in public galas. Sephiroth chose to be cool and she chose to be warm, as befitted their respective natures, but it didn't mean either facade was genuine.

"So how short do you want this? You do have a very nicely-shaped skull," she added, laughter at the back of her voice. "You could probably afford to have it as short as you want."

'...You have to admit, the lines of his skull are striking.'

'Like the rest. What does it matter? He was made that way. Are you done with the hair clippers yet?'

"... I don't think so," he replied, very politely.

Miss Gainsborough didn't answer, hands coming to a stop, sliding out of his hair. "Oh," she said. Sephiroth's shoulders tensed up; when he turned to meet her eyes he wasn't surprised to find that look in them, uncomfortably compassionate. Knowing.

He shifted to the side to get up; she placed a hand on his forearm and he stopped moving, though his hand was curled into a fist.

"I didn't see anything. It was ... a feeling. No details."

A feeling. His feeling. He closed his eyes briefly, breathed out. Even without details, there were few enough things she hadn't seen in the Lifestream.

"I don't do it on purpose. It's just... sometimes things come to me." She hooded her eyelids, more thoughtful than apologetic. "I think perhaps you and I are close enough to the Lifestream that I feel you better than most. I can't hear Zack at all anymore."

Perhaps he liked cool analysis better than apologies, at that. They would only require more reminders of things better left forgotten. He frowned slightly, thinking back. "You seemed to interact on the same level you always do earlier."

"That's mostly because we've known each other a long time. We have enough background to guess." A small smile. "Also, good body language skills. Sometimes there isn't much of a difference."

She smoothed her skirt down her thighs, watching him, head slightly tilted. He didn't have the first idea how to interpret that.; he was obscurely grateful when she shook herself, blinked, and then smiled, all traces of remote scrutiny gone.

"Shall we continue? I think I've got an idea. Jaw-length alright with you?"

He'd seen himself in the mirror; he (looked too much like Kadaj) didn't want to go out like that. He gave in with a quiet sigh, allowing her to position him and start fiddling with the brush and his hair again. She was saying things about layers and feathered tips and he didn't even pretend he had a clue. The scissors came back up, snipping a dozen hairs here and there, a meticulous, slow-going job.

"I don't suppose you want to keep some length in the back. That'd be kind of mullety. Can I shorten things on the back of your head? Here," she added, finger trailing in a horizontal half-circle from ear to ear. It tickled a little.

So long as it wasn't a buzz-cut. "Go ahead."

Snip, snip. His hair was mostly dry; when she put down the scissors and the brush to give it a quick rub with a towel he could have told her what would happen. He didn't even need to look to know she would be biting her lips, trying not to laugh.

"Um."

"Yes," he said dryly, "I was blessed with inordinately powerful follicles."

"It's all spiky. Oh, Gaia bless."

Sephiroth ran a hand through his still-slightly-damp hair, raking the towel-tangled locks backward. He truly didn't want to know how close that first ruffled look was to Strife's. Swallowing her giggles, she attempted to help, fingers darting in to tuck this or that strand in a more advantageous place.

"Alright -- alright, that's better," she said, still giggling. "I should have guessed it would do that, though -- your bangs... I bet growing your hair so long in the first place was at least half self-defense."

Hearing herself she went still, her hands in his hair, cupping his temples, and for a brief instant she winced.

Her eyes were green just like his own, but the shade was different, leaf versus LED. And he owed her everything.

"... The benefits only came to me afterwards," he said, a little too quiet, before she could apologize for pressing, for joking about it. "At first I just didn't have the time to deal with it."

She teased a lock free from behind his ear, smoothed it along his cheek so it would frame his face. The gesture was strange, too soft. Too -- he'd seen her touch Zack like that, he'd seen mothers in the streets touch their children like that, careful and. Gentle. Tender. It was -- it felt --

"Stop," he breathed, eyes closed. Her hand lingered for a second and fell away.

They kept silent and still for another too-long moment, until Sephiroth couldn't stand thinking-trying not to think about it and got up from his perch.

She seemed tiny when he stood, the top of her head barely reaching his chin, shoulders narrow, wrists almost frail. Physically she was no threat. He felt boxed in anyway, relieved when she decided to take a step back out of his space. He took the towel off his shoulders, shook the cut hair off it and into the wastebasket.

In the mirror at first he barely recognized himself. His bangs came to a point underneath his cheekbones, making them seem sharper, freeing the line of his jaw. His eyes, by contrast, seemed more shadowed than the rest of his face, stood out slightly less (only slightly; short of colored contacts and shades nothing would ever obscure them completely). His neck and shoulders were more visible as well -- it was strange how such a small detail could impact things so much.

It was faster while fighting through the swamps to tie it all back and stop worrying than to go back to camp and sit for a hour as someone he didn't necessarily trust much stood behind him and used a razorblade on his head.

(It wasn't faster or easier to politely tell Hojo to fuck off, that he didn't much care whether long unbound hair was unpractical -- like he could talk, and if it was good enough for greasy scientists it was good enough for their experiments. It wasn't faster or easier but at the end it made things clearer between them -- Sephiroth might have left for Wutai his project, but he had come back a celebrated General, and they would have to put him in a coma first to ever get him back into a surgical gown.)

He narrowed his eyes at himself in the mirror, tried to ignore Miss Gainsborough who was crouching on the floor to gather long shed locks. If he didn't put a stop to this childish tantrum she would likely overhear again.

He'd made his choice, for solid tactical reasons. It would grow back. At least there was still that small, white line over the end of his collarbone where he'd broken it as a pre-teen; rough, raised patches on his knuckles, in the crescent of flesh between his thumb and index, from sword practice. Most of his wounds had happened on the battlefield, instantly healed, and due to his immediate plunge in the Lifestream Strife's attack in Nibelheim had left no traces; the biggest scar he still wore was a slice along his thigh, where the geisha had tried to slash through his femoral artery. The poison on it had made it heal red-purple and knotted, raised over the skin. He rubbed it through the gap in his towel, feeling the tug on the skin.

Still his body.

He wasn't pleased (he hated it) but he had to show he was willing to compromise, to sacrifice some. And he doubted Strife had long black leather coats in his closet, so that was two trademarks gone, two things his friends couldn't blind themselves with to avoid seeing the person underneath.

He scrutinized himself a last time. Yes, that would buy him a bare minimum of five whole seconds, if only for the potential assailant to make sure they had the right person. It would do.

"I'll get dressed and join you outside," he told miss Gainsborough, who smiled and swept out. No more hiding in the bathroom. Time to go.

OMAKE 3

He narrowed his eyes at himself in the mirror, tried to ignore Miss Gainsborough who was crouching on the floor to gather long shed locks. The biggest scar he still had was a slice along his thigh. He rubbed it through the gap in his towel, feeling the tug on the skin.

On the floor Aeris let out a delicate cough, and then started singing under her breath, "I see Midgar, I see Corel, I see Sephi's wiggling man-bells~"