{ and you should know that the lies won't hide your flaws. }
Who: Kunsel (iluphone), and OPEN to anyone in the vicinity of Sion's house.
When: Backdated to Jan 12th, just as Sephiroth is breaking loose.
Location: Sion's house, Midgar ruins.
Rating: PG. Contains more hallucinations, Sephiroth-related things, and what every FF character does best: Guilt.
Summary: Kunsel has been out for four days courtesy of Sephiroth and now wakes as the man he helped set loose approaches Midgar, causing the newly awoken Jenova cells in Kunsel to respond.
Small disclaimer: Everything Kunsel hallucinates is not necessarily the views of the person being portrayed in the hallucination, especially in the case of Sion. They're his own feelings, projected on to other people because, well, it's a hallucination.
»·»·»·»·»·»
For three days, Kunsel slept.
He was aware of nothing, he dreamed of nothing, he was nothing. He was completely hollow, bereft of emotion, of sensation, of thought. Sephiroth had reached into him and torn out his very sense of self, waking the Jenova cells that slept within him and forcing them to multiply until their grip was strong enough to use Kunsel as source of energy. A living, breathing battery. The need for energy, for anything and everything Kunsel had to offer, had been so overwhelmingly strong that Sephiroth had taken near all the man had to give and left him as something close to a shell. Like a puppet who had served its limited use and had its strings cut, Kunsel had been left in a completely unresponsive state while his mind tried to find its way back from the place Sephiroth had banished him to.
It was a grim state, but Sephiroth had not killed him. And, as long as he was still alive, Kunsel's body continued tirelessly trying to survive as it always had. As he slept, it mended itself, trying desperately to undo the damage done to it. It rejected the sudden onslaught of new Jenova cells, identifying the foreign matter for what it was despite the fact that the cells contaminated the entirety of Kunsel's body. His immune system tried to purge the contamination, attacking infected and healthy cells alike in its dire bid to heal him, effectively causing his body to shred itself from the inside.
Geostigma.
On the fourth day, Kunsel began to dream.
At first, it came to him only in flashes. Images too fast to process, with no apparent cohesion, no rhyme or reason. Fragmented memories, some his own and some increasingly memories of someone else entirely.
Flash.
'Welcome to SOLDIER, cadet.'
The green, warm glow of Mako, rippling in gentle currents all around him.
Black feathers.
White sky.
Flash.
'Mother.'
The pale, cold green glow of a computer screen.
Notes.
A swelling black ink stain.
Nibelheim.
A mission roster illuminated by sterile overhead lights.
Flash.
'SAI!'
The milky green light of Cure.
Black blood.
White skin, deathly white.
Flash.
Red.
Red fire.
Red blood.
Dead eyes illuminated with a dim red glow.
Meteor.
A cruel smile.
'Mother!'
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
Flash.
The disjointed images bled into a series of flashing lights that lingered and stayed, a distant rattle growing louder and louder in Kunsel's mind until he found himself standing in one of Midgar's rail cars, alone. The lights illuminated the car in flashes as they drove past, and it took Kunsel a few moments to realize he was not alone. There was something in the corner of the car, wrapped in filthy rags. It moved.
Stepping over slowly, Kunsel bent over the bundle and peeled back the rags until he found himself looking into the bright eyes of a fair-haired infant who stared up him impassively, almost like a lifeless doll. The child made no noise or any hint of expression, and on second glance Kunsel realized that there was something terribly amiss. The infant's pupils were slowly dilating into narrow slits. In horror, Kunsel stumbled backwards and caught movement out of the corner of his eye.
In the car just behind them, there was a woman. She was dressed in filthy, threadbare clothes and her hair was a tangled mess, her face streaked with grime and dirt. She seemed to be crying. Kunsel found himself opening the door between the cars, moving closer to her without knowing why he felt so compelled to. As soon as she saw him, she began to sob.
"What have you done?" she demanded, crying into her near skeletal hands as she backed away from him. "Oh what have you done now, what have you done? It was a mistake, wasn't it? It was a mistake-- I should have never had you. I've done such a bad thing. What have you done? Do you know what you've done? So many people are going to die. So many people, so many people--"
"M-Mom...?" he asked uncertainly, "I don't understand. What have I--"
"...done?" The voice that answered him was cruel, clipped and almost mocking. Kunsel turned sharply around and found himself face to face with his father. The rail car was gone, replaced by the familiar walls of the ShinRa building.
"I always knew it would come to this, boy," his father sneered, shaking his head in evident disappointment. "My own son. You were always so weak-willed, so useless. Second Class SOLDIER, no ambition to speak of. What good is a Second Class, Kunsel? Where are you when your friends need you? What can you do for them except get them killed? And now this. You'll never stop being a puppet, will you? You're worthless on your own. All you're good for is acting as an extension of other peoples' will. Do you even have a will of your own?"
Kunsel wanted to speak. He wanted to deny his father's words, wanted to tell him how wrong he was. But he couldn't. Because his father wasn't wrong. Because everything his father was saying now was all the things he had ever hated about himself.
"Do the world a favor, you sniveling whelp. Since you can't seem to do anything worthwhile with your life, at least try to make your death meaningful. You should at least have enough ambition for that, hm?"
"D-Dad... What are you--"
"--saying? God, what is this, Kunt?" Sion's voice now, and when Kunsel turned around he saw a war-torn battlefield, broken bodies garbed in SOLDIER uniforms littering the ground. His friend was smirking at him, blood trickling from the corner of his lip. Kunsel could see the myriad of bullet holes in his chest, the entire front of his shirt soaked black.
"Just look at you, clinging to life for some stupid hope that Zacky'll come back to you. What the hell is that? Don't you think he's better off with that friend he escaped Nibelheim with? Who wants the fucking guy who got saved by his daddy while the rest of us dissidents marched off to die? You whored yourself out to ShinRa for years after he went missing and months after I died for your good-for-nothing ass. At least the kid he was with did something for him, was there for him and shit," Sion spat, laughing cruelly as he spoke. "Where were you? What the fuck did you ever do? Like Zack really needed tech support and shitty text messages from you.
"Here, Kunt. It's your turn. Try to die with a scrap of dignity, if you can even manage that, yeah?"
As Sion spoke these last words, Kunsel heard a gunshot sound, and the next thing he knew was blinding, searing pain in his shoulder.
With a strangled scream, Kunsel jolted awake, eyes snapping open wide and sightless as sensation came back to him. The pain went in shocks down his arm and his back, immobilizing the left side of the body as he felt pressure in his head, his hearing drowned out by the hiss of white noise and indistinct whispering. The pain intensified until Kunsel no longer even had voice for it, only able to lie pale and rigid as the agony of his body destroying itself crashed through him in waves.
Then, just as suddenly, it was gone, ebbing away to nothing more than a dull ache. Coherent thought slowly returned to Kunsel's mind as his body went lax, and he was finally himself again for the first time since he collapsed from his seizure. For a few moments, he didn't even know where he was. All he knew was his mouth and throat were dry and cottony, that his head throbbed with old, aching pain, and his shoulder burned in a faint echo of the torment he had woken in. His body felt weak, boneless much in the way Kunsel remembered feeling when he had run a dangerously high fever as a child. Disoriented, he struggled to sit up to see where he was, to try to understand what had happened to him.
Sion's house. The last night he was conscious came back to him in snatches, though the seizure had robbed him of all memories of seeing Sephiroth and the hallucinations that had come after. All recollection of his dreams had also fled him upon waking, and so he had no idea of why he had woken with his face streaked with tears. All he had were intermittent memories of their drinking games, of blacking out at some point after having a little too much. Then--
Then nothing.
Then now.
Unease began to build in Kunsel's chest, anxiety eating at him as he became filled with the sense that something had gone horribly wrong.
"Zack?" he called out, voice hoarse and cracking as he tried to use it. He could barely manage a call above a whisper despite his best efforts. "Zack-- Sai? Angeal? What... What's going--"