It Wasn't a Hug - Traverse Town [Log; Integra, Sephiroth]

[lithium_soldier]

Integra sighed quietly as the doors closed. It seemed to sum up her feelings perfectly.

A large black dog trotted up to her and she became aware of the eerily quiet Second District. Aside from the sounds of some far-off fighting, there were no Heartless anywhere. She wouldn’t have been surprised if the Third District looked the same way for a little while. Alucard simply gave her a look that implied his boredom and annoyance at being made to wait (he found little sport in killing heartless, but they passed the time)

The fact that he’d bothered to shift in the first place was odd though. Almost as strange as his reason for remaining in said shape while he waited for her to follow. It took her a moment to realize he was onto something else now, and she wasn't sure she wanted to know what.

They drew closer to the sound of the fight.

Turning the corner she stood frozen, rooted to the spot.

She was so exhausted she was seeing things, she decided. That was not the person she thought she was seeing and the sword was just a shoddy replica. Maybe it was an old soldier, some kind of weird imitator. Maybe it was a ghost or a vampire or some other freakish perversion because that was a lot easier to believe than what she was seeing.

She met his eyes when he turned. There was no mistake: it was Sephiroth.

Sephiroth, who had been cutting through Heartless for nearly an hour and collecting the munny the creatures invariably dropped - why the hell did they collect it, anyway? - was tired and in one of his less sociable moods. He enjoyed fighting alone; the Coliseum had gotten him into the habit, and there was something restful about not having to worry about anyone's hide but his own. He was not particularly prepared to deal with anyone interrupting him.

So when he turned and saw someone at the end of the alley, he wasn't able to hide the momentary flash of annoyance in his eyes - but he was far less prepared for the person to be (after taking a few moments to recognize her; she'd aged nearly a decade and didn't stand out quite so much in a crowd as he did) Integra Hellsing, of all people. He'd spent a month of sleepless nights over the years trying to figure out how to explain his leaving Hollow Bastion to some of his friends if the opportunity ever arose, and Integra had been on the top of his list as one of the people least likely to accept any explanations or excuses...one of the people, point in fact, most likely to have taken Ansem's word over his own, especially given - extenuating circumstances.

He stared at her, equally speechless, the initial feeling of supreme relief at knowing she was, in fact, all right well-tempered by his misgivings.

Likewise after his disappearance and, consequently, after Ansem's betrayal was discovered Integra had thought about the General often and what could have caused him to desert and never return. She had resigned herself to think of him as dead, maybe a casualty of Ansem's experiments. She couldn't think of another reason for him to have stayed away even after the fact. She had been what? In her late teens when she last saw him? He had been just a few years older than her and exhausting himself to run an entire military.

She had respected him and then for a long time she thought he had betrayed everyone. Morale had begun its slow spiral downward when he left and by the time Ansem disappeared… Back then she had felt it all the trouble had started with him. He was lucky she hadn’t discovered him during those years.

Looking at him now, she realized she wouldn’t have known what to do then either. Even Integra had her weaknesses; she knew deep down she’d wanted him to be dead because it meant she could believe what she wanted. She could believe that someone she’d respected had died without betraying them all.

Yet here he was, staring back at her with those same chemical green eyes (and that outfit). A decade was a very long time.

She drew her pistol in a smooth motion, leveling it.

She fired.

A crystalline heart floated away from some target just to the left of Sephiroth’s head. It was a knee-jerk reaction now, to shoot and kill on sight. With the Heartless gone they could be properly stupefied with each other.

The shot seemed to bring her voice back to her and Integra folded her arms, the pistol still hanging from her fingers. "You're alive."

Her tone was cold, as if she'd withdrawn to hide whatever emotions surfaced.

Sephiroth had, against all training, flinched when Integra had drawn and fired - not so much from fear, as he'd stared death in the face more than once and was perhaps more resigned to the idea of his own than was healthy. But he'd had, for a moment, the horrible feeling of a nightmare coming true...

But no. Integra was more disciplined than that; she wouldn't shoot him in cold blood unless she knew he'd earned it. And now, she seemed to be waiting for him to provide that reason. "I'm as surprised as you are." He wasn't quite meeting her gaze, but looking just to the left of her eyes. Icebergs were more welcoming than the look she was giving him now.

If Sephiroth looked closely, he would see that her free hand was balled in the material of her shirt, her knuckles nearly white. It talked. And that voice was deeper than she remembered it, but somehow just the same.

"It's been years." Her voice was harsh, edged with something very hard to identify. "I thought you'd died."

She thought her voice cracked a little on the very last word, and hoped only she could hear it. Seconds later it returned to full sharpness; cold, demanding. She knew who Sephiroth was years ago in the army, not who he was now or what had transpired between he and Ansem. "Explain."

The tip of Masamune dipped toward the ground as Sephiroth tried to think of somewhere to begin. If she hadn't heard about Ansem - but even if she had, what reason did she have to believe him? He had left Hollow Bastion, even if it hadn't exactly been because he'd wanted to run away... "Do you know what Ansem did?" he asked, finally.

Integra's posture relaxed very slightly and snapped her pistol back into the holster. She didn’t believe Sephiroth could hurt her, even if he’d obviously built some muscle over the years. It was just a default reaction, like much else lately.

"I know." Her eyes softened a little, which was to say they were more like icebergs now than all the coldness of the northern icecap. "God Sephiroth, I thought he'd killed you. I would have..." She shook her head, clearing it again.

"Just tell me what happened after you left."

"What happened before I left is important, too." Sephiroth cautiously spread his wing, a nonverbal explanation that, he hoped, would save him some breath in the long run. "You know what he was doing to people...?"

Whatever Integra had been feeling seconds before crumbled into a cold fury, not directed at Sephiroth but at the implications he'd all but hit her with. Her voice belayed an entirely unnatural calm, the coldness evident in her demeanor. Ansem had turned him into a monster, or at least part of one. She wondered what kind of effect a deformity like that would have on his personality, and if he really was the same man she’d known years ago. People changed. She had.

"I read the reports." It took a lot of effort to look away, and a lot more to meet Sephiroth's eyes again.

"I'm sorry."

Sephiroth shook his head slightly. "I brought it on myself," he replied stoically. "A little over a month before I had to leave, before he declared me a deserter - I found out what he was doing, by accident. I thought I might be able to handle it alone, didn't want to risk anyone else by telling them - I wasn't even sure I’d be believed. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but it was a mistake...and when he found out I knew, and captured me, there was no one who I'd told enough to be suspicious about it.

"And by the time he was done with me, and had made his announcement, I knew no one would believe me..."

Integra was stunned for a moment. She leaned against the wall she was beside, pressing one foot against the brick behind her. It wasn’t entirely physical exhaustion that made her feel like she might need the support.

"That's what it meant? All those hints you kept dropping and the sudden temper - we all thought you'd caved under the pressure of being General. I was worried, Sephiroth, everyone was." Integra's anger seemed to have faded a little, but her eyes have drifted back to the wing. "We even planned to pull you out of work the one day to force you to sleep."

She regarded him solemnly. "I trusted you, Sephiroth, did you really think I would have abandoned you even if I thought you were mad?"

"I didn't know what to think." It wasn't entirely weariness from fighting Heartless that colored Sephiroth's voice. "I'd just found out Ansem had betrayed us all, Integra. If I couldn't trust my king..."

"And I thought that the less you all knew, the less likely it would be that Ansem would go after you if he realized someone had caught on. I had more than enough trouble at the time without having to worry about dragging any of my soldiers into it."

I wish he had come after me, she thought. The way Alucard’s tail began wagged at that, she wondered if he heard it. They would have taken Ansem apart from the inside out, but as it was it would have been too little too late. Integra offered him a small smile, though it twisted a little at the edges with bitterness. After all that, he was still had morally sound reasoning. Foolish, but so very like him.

There was nothing to be gained from criticism now anyway.

"Why didn't you come back, after everything?" Her tone had lost much of the accusation, and what energy she had seemed spent. Now she was just weary.

Sephiroth smiled back slightly, almost cautiously. "I didn't want to return to Hollow Bastion until I was strong enough to defeat Ansem. When he captured me - it was frankly embarrassing how easily he subdued me, even if he was using the darkness. Anyway...it was a long time before anyone even knew that Ansem betrayed us all, so I wasn't exactly sure I'd even be welcome."

He looked away from Integra again; he'd finally begun to meet her gaze directly but apparently he was shying away from it again. "And - to put it bluntly, Ansem's experiments...I can't imagine anyone who survived them is anxious to go anywhere near where they took place."

Integra realized how harshly she'd been dealing with Sephiroth. She knew she couldn’t help it, after years and years and all the pent up frustration from one thing to another, she had to know. She couldn’t possibly accept him until she did.

Some part of her still couldn’t understand why he never returned to face Hollow Bastion to help with the war, and she was more than a little badly-disposed about it. She could only imagine what he’d been through but somehow she always thought that Sephiroth would be stronger than anything life could throw at him and that, if he could, he would have returned to Hollow Bastion. She had still been young at the time. Maybe that was something like naïveté.

She was silent for several moments, her eyes focused on Sephiroth. Finally, she sighed. "I wish you would have told me you were alive somewhere."

She glanced down at Alucard, who greeted her lazily with one red eye open, then back up at Sephiroth. Despite everything, there was something about seeing him again that brought everything back. If anything, over the years she’d learned to show emotion less than she had in the military, so it was no small feet when she caught herself adding;

"I missed you."

Sephiroth actually blinked, as if taken aback, then smiled a bit more genuinely at her. "...Thanks. I missed you, too. I've been worried about the soldiers I left behind for - well, ever since I left. I only found Zack and Cloud again a week or two ago."

"I've been looking for soldiers for the last few years.” She admitted, letting go of the ice demeanor. She was a little more relaxed now, and a lot less weary than she had been. "I was hoping to bring the military back to Hollow Bastion but it's been slow going."

Sephiroth took a step closer to Integra, closing some of the distance between them. "How many have you found?" It wasn't just professional interest; part of him, the part that still thought of his soldiers as family, wanted to know who had survived...

She pulled a cigar out from somewhere on her person, lighting it in a smooth motion. If she noticed Sephiroth moving closer, she made no move to stop him. "Some here and there, but it's impossible to know for certain how many survived."

"Alucard's still with you, I see..."

Integra had to smile a little at that, because Alucard was all but smirking up at the General. She realized in the back of her mind that they’d met the same way, Alucard and Sephiroth. Irony. That explained it.

"And I see the two of you still get along." She glanced between the two, brow furrowing a little at Sephiroth. He probably had the some misgivings about her too. "Is something..?"

"It's just strange...having you suddenly here, after all this time not knowing if you were dead or alive." Sephiroth gave her a small, tired smile. "And suddenly everything comes rushing back."

"It's strange having you here after we all but held a funeral." Integra deadpanned, taking a long and much-needed drag of her cigar. She would have suggested drinks or something, but she wasn’t in the mood for anything that dulled her senses. She rarely was.

"I don't think traitors get funerals." Sephiroth folded his wing tightly against his back again. "Burned in effigy, perhaps."

He still had the same sense of humor, no doubt. Integra smirked a little, the only sign of weary amusement.

"At first I didn't even give you that," She admitted, "But after I found out what happened I thought you deserved it."

"Do you know anything about what happened while you were gone?"

"A little. I wasn't gone from the moment I disappeared from the public eye, after all. It was a month before I escaped from Ansem, and I spent a little while after that hiding on the fringes of the city, trying to figure out what to do. After I finally did leave...I've heard a bit about it from Zack and Cloud." His eyes darkened a little, as they always did when he was thinking of something unpleasant.

Integra cocked her head. "What did they tell you?"

"That everything more or less went to hell when the Heartless attacked, after Ansem disappeared. No one was prepared for it; it was all the military could do to hold the Heartless off long enough to evacuate the civilians off the world, and they took heavy losses for it...especially without a general to command them." From the expression on Sephiroth's face as he said the last sentence, however necessary he felt his flight was, he hadn't exactly forgiven himself for it either.

Integra looked away, focusing on the wall across from her. It explained why she couldn't find him for all the searching she did, but after getting away... She still couldn't forgive him for not coming back during the fight with the heartless. They were his men, damnit. All of them.

Many people she cared about had died in that fight, SOLDIERs under her command, civilians fighting for the first time, people she'd only met because of the sudden war - all of them were just gone. It didn't matter if he knew they were fighting at the time, having spent a month with Ansem he would have known something about the threat.

Knowing Sephiroth, he didn't forgive himself any more than she did. "They're right."

"Even if you didn't think you would be trusted, do you think we would have turned down any assistance against those creatures?" She had gone tense again while she thought, and her demeanor shifted suddenly. She turned fully facing Sephiroth and slammed her fist into the wall beside her. "How could you have abandoned us?! What excuse do you have for that?!"

At lest she was yelling. It was better than giving him the cold shoulder.

"There are no excuses." Sephiroth didn't flinch this time; in a way, there was almost something like relief in Integra's reaction, the feeling of a long-deserved punishment finally arriving after years of expectant waiting. "I could give you reasons, but I've no right to defend myself. I've been trying to explain it to Zack and Cloud, trying to even help myself remember the reasoning I was following at the time...and the more they accept my reasons, the less I feel that they were valid. What could I possibly say?"

Integra's eyes were cold and focused again. Sephiroth was one of the few men who could weather being on the receiving end of that glare. That he didn't try to offer her any excuses - she likely wouldn't have accepted them anyway - at least got her to stop yelling.

"And what about now? What the hell have you been doing for the last decade that's kept you from coming back? The fight didn't end with Hollow Bastion, Sephiroth."

Sephiroth hesitated. "At the risk of it sounding like an excuse," he finally said, "I had no idea what happened on Hollow Bastion until years after the fact. I stole a ship when I left, a prototype - the beginnings of the gummi ships people use now. I had no idea how to fly, no idea where I was going. I don't think there are odds high enough to express how fortunate I was to get off the ground in the first place, then not only find another world before I ran out of fuel but survive the crash landing. No one had charted the routes between worlds; making my way across the universe entirely blind was an exercise in desperation I wouldn't engage in twice. Even if that hadn't kept me preoccupied, hardly anyone knew other worlds existed - news of Hollow Bastion was impossible to come by even if I hadn't been dreading what I might hear."

"When I eventually wound up at the Coliseum - I stayed there. It seemed like I could train there, and I figured I'd taken enough chances with gummi ships for a lifetime by then. I didn't leave for years, not until well after the worlds were beginning to be charted and people were beginning to travel between them - it was only five or six years ago that I found out Hollow Bastion still existed at all, much less anything that had happened there."

He didn't know, basically. He couldn't have. The princesses had only been there for about four years and most people didn't know about them yet. Sephiroth didn't have a reason to return to Hollow Bastion; it must have looked like a dead world to him.

"And you only met Zack and Cloud two weeks ago..." She shook her head. Maybe she had been wrong to chew him out, maybe not.

"Do you know it's become the base of operations for the Light?"

"They mentioned something to that effect. And something about a council of princesses running things, which sounds pretty strange to me since apparently they're not even Hollow Bastion natives." Sephiroth shrugs slightly. "Integra, by the time I heard about Hollow Bastion, it was overrun and everyone was gone. And now it seems to be as much under control as it could ever be with the Heartless around - thanks to the Keyblade Master, who can apparently do things even I could never hope to accomplish."

Integra regarded him silently for a long moment then nodded. For now, she could accept that, even if things were rushing to the surface all over again. She'd respected Sephiroth a great deal once, and as a credit to that she gave him the benefit of the doubt.

"A lot has changed since then." She moved her hand away from the wall, dusting it on her pants. When Sephiroth had known her, she would never think to do such a thing. "Hollow Bastion...and us."

"So I've noticed." Sephiroth gave her another one of those small smiles, as if expecting another furious outburst at any moment. "You've grown up."

"So have you." She returned the smile tentatively, as if she wasn't sure she wouldn't feel the need to chew him out again. There were a lot of things she never got to say.

It grew a little, into a small smirk when another thought struck her. "I remember when you barely filled out that outfit."

Sephiroth's own smile quirked a bit. "If I said the same, you'd probably have Alucard tear my throat out."

Integra snorted softly. She was fifteen and most of SOLDIER thought she was male, which was something she’d subtly encouraged throughout her military career. She still bound her chest and wore men's clothing though she had changed in the Gummi Ship so she wouldn't be covered in blood and dirt.

Her grin widened a little, to show she wasn't serious. "I don't like to let Alucard do what I can take care of myself."

Sephiroth's own smile broadened a little. "I really have missed you."

Integra couldn’t help but chuckle quietly. "You have no idea."

"Thirteen years of not seeing a single person from Hollow Bastion? No, I rather think I do." Sephiroth's grin didn't change, but something in his eyes did.

Integra caught his eye. She couldn't say anything to that, really. They knew what the battle and the years following it had taken.

Sephiroth had really only intended to take a single step forward. But Integra had seemed to move a step forward at the same time, and somehow one step became five and then his arms were around her waist and her arms were around his neck and they were probably the only people in the city to have a dog laughing at them.

It had just happened, no thought or any real signal that they’d shared. Just one step after the other and he was there and alive, not just a figment or a ghost. It seemed she only snapped back to her senses when they began to pull apart and she automatically shot Alucard a look that told him to shut up or he would be eating garlic through the wrong orifice for a month.

They both looked at each other or, more accurately, a little to the left of each other, a little awkward now that the moment was over.

Sephiroth cleared his throat, also shooting Alucard a glare as he regained his composure. "I've been so busy explaining what I've been doing that you've yet to tell me what's happened to you since last I saw you," he offered after a long moment, hoping to distract them both.

Integra cleared her throat as well, running a hand through her hair. It was a credit to Sephiroth that he'd gotten her to drop her cigar, which had weathered worse than heartless on the front lines.

She sighed and crushed it with her boot. "A lot."

She tried to pick a place to start and realized it would have to be the very beginning. She gave Sephiroth another one of those weary looks. "Do you remember the story that went around about me being an orphan?"

"Yes." Sephiroth gave her a thoughtful look; 'story'...? "As an orphan myself, I never really thought you acted like one. But it wasn't exactly any of my business."

Integra folded her arms, winding up for a long explanation. She couldn’t talk about one thing without the other. "Well it wasn't entirely true. My parents died when I was young but I did know who I was and where I came from."

"I wasn't born on Hollow Bastion."

Sephiroth considered the implications of that. "Then you came from another world...before...?"

Integra nodded. "Alucard brought me. It's probably the only thing that kept my world from being destroyed later. He sensed something but neither of us knew what it was - I think he knew the war was coming."

Actually, he said he could smell it.

"I couldn't tell anyone, obviously.

“I went because it was my duty to protect the country I came from and my Queen. Going to Hollow Bastion to meet the threat was the only way I could be prepared for something so big.

"After it fell, I went home again and found that the Heartless had already taken root there. We managed to hold them off until the Keyblade Master locked the world, but only because of the knowledge I’d gained on Hollow Bastion.

”After that I had intended to stay and carry out the duties I'd left behind… But I realized there were more important things at stake. That's why I went back. I wanted to rebuild the army to fight against the Heartless. The way we were scattered, there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell that we could win a war like this.

"It's why I've been looking for SOLDIERs, people with the skills to train others. The Princesses appointed me General, but by the time they had I'd more or less taken up all the responsibilities."

She didn’t cut around any corners about that.

Sephiroth took all this in, face remaining impassive even at the end. "I can't think of anyone more qualified for the job," he said after a few moments. "Except perhaps Zack, but you're more responsible than he is."

Integra folded her arms again. "I can, but I'm not sure if he's the same man anymore."

Sephiroth shifted his wing against his shoulder again, moving past her. "He probably isn't sure either."

"He's had years to beat himself up about it." She wasn't going to let him go that easily, not by a long shot. She turned when he brushed past her, stopping short of grabbing his arm. "I think that's more than enough."

"He should make up his mind about what's really important." She paused for a second. "Because I respected him for a damn good reason."

Sephiroth paused, just far enough past her that she couldn't really see his face. "...if it were up to you, what would you have him do?"

"It's not up to me." She said quietly. "He has to make a choice on his own."

"And what makes you think he hasn't made one already?" Sephiroth began walking again, skirting around Alucard by a good few yards.

“I don't make a habit of overestimating people." Sephiroth would be the first in a very long time and that was the last thing she wanted. She knew very well she couldn't force him to fight again.

Sephiroth paused at the entrance of the alleyway, glancing over his shoulder at her. "If you want to hear the hypotheses we've come up with on the Heartless, and our plans, we're actually going to have to go get the others, you know."

Integra silently released a breath she hadn’t noticed she was holding. She was sorely tempted to throw a rock at him. Some part of her always expected the worst from those she chose to trust and, while she never really believed that instinct would change, she was always secretly glad when it was proven wrong. She caught up, falling into step.

Alucard trotted along behind them