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anyssia
Title: Guide
Author: Anyssia
Character/Pairing: Cloud, Zack, Sephiroth, Vincent. Eventually, Cloud/Zack/Seph
Fandom/Spoilers: Final Fantasy VII, Meteor Crisis.
Genre: adventure, what-if, slash
Disclaimer: not mine or I would have killed Hojo a long time ago!
Status: ch5/?, 1'900 words, 10/09/2010
Rating: no violence, G
Beta (s):![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lucime, Kage Kaze Kitsune, ![[personal profile]](https://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
vessamorana and jameva. All remaining mistakes are mine.
Summary: Nibelheim's reactor is due for a check-up and sixteen years old Cloud is hired to take the coming soldiers up the mountain.
Previous Chapters: 01, 02, 03, 04
Crossposted at:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
crisis_hardcore, ff7, ffvii_yaoi, FFnet
Taming the muse: prompt #219 – Rune Stone (Gnah, I hated this one >_<)
Previously, in chapter 4:
“[...] The annoying buzz from earlier came back with a vengeance and he felt his self-control slipping once again. He wanted to kill them both, to strangle, dismember, and destroy. To listen to their pleas and cries and...
Sephiroth swallowed back his anger and focused on Strife. He looked terrified but sincere, and for whatever reason, Sephiroth wanted to believe him. [...]”
“If you are interested, we gathered all the files referring to Project S.” Vincent’s quiet voice resonated in the silent room. Cloud held his breath without realizing it.
After a moment, the General turned to the ex-Turk. Cloud almost passed out from relief. The man had been staring at him so intently that Cloud had been afraid to even blink. He could still feel those piercing eyes on him.
Cloud nearly groaned when he realized that his body, at least, had liked being stared at by the General. This certainly wasn’t helping him get rid of his old crush.
He was so going to embarrass himself before long!
Sephiroth’s face was pinched and he seemed to have the mother of all migraines, but he still managed to look as if he was in his office back in Midgar, waiting for them to go ahead with their report.
At least, that’s how Cloud imagined it.
Feeling very foolish and inexperienced, Cloud slid to the edge of his chair and took over the conversation.
“Yeah, all the files are there,” he repeated, pointing at a couple of metallic boxes stacked next to the door. “I guess Hojo didn’t want to bother with all those papers and boxes and only took the data disks with him.”
Sephiroth glared murder at them for a second and Cloud couldn’t help but gape at the man’s expression. Up until now, it had been very obvious that the General was forcing himself to keep a neutral facade. To see him be so open with his emotions was... startling, to say the least.
“You said that Hojo first began to experiment on me when I was still a fetus in my... ah, surrogate mother, if I remember correctly. Are you saying that I was raised in this mansion?”
Cloud jumped nervously when Sephiroth brusquely turned back to him and could almost feel the heat radiate from his cheeks. “Not... Not in the mansion. Here really. In this room, I mean,” he stammered, blushing even harder, mortified by his own humiliating behavior. He was probably acting like one of those star-struck idiots that he despised. “The reports never mentioned you being allowed out of here, before the lab was moved to Midgar.”
“So I was locked up in this basement...”
“Yes, not that it really matters,” Cloud added as an afterthought. Sephiroth’s hard stare convinced him to elaborate quickly. “From what I read, I think that you spent most of your time sedated. It explains why you have no memories of growing up here.”
“You really think that Hojo would keep a child sedated for years?” Sephiroth asked with skeptically. “Not that I don’t think him capable of it, but sedating someone over a long period of time is very dangerous for their health. He wouldn’t risk losing his prize subject or rendering it a vegetable.”
Aware that the man was growing a little too jumpy again, Vincent took over the explanation. “What makes you think that you were so precious to him? This way, he didn’t have to take care of you, especially as this was a secret experiment. The underground laboratory might be well hidden and isolated from the town, but sooner or later, cries would have been heard or you would have escaped. Children are very good at that. Hojo couldn’t risk it.”
Sephiroth gave up any pretence of calm as soon as the ex-Turk began talking and Cloud started to wonder if those two were going to come to blows right in front of him, the fact that Sephiroth was still tied down notwithstanding.
“Of course, I’m valuable to him! He tells me so often enough!” Sephiroth spat with a harsh glare.
“Now, maybe. He has spent years on you, he can’t afford to have you go your own way anymore,” Vincent answered with a shrug. “But at the time, he had been working on you for what, three, five years? He could have started over again if the sedatives had damaged your mind. He did it often enough,” he added with a disgusted sneer.
Sephiroth stared at him for a moment, his neutral mask back, before turning back to Cloud, ordering him to explain with a single raised eyebrow.
Cloud hesitated, looking back at Vincent’s tense profile. “We found... reports, from previous experiments,” he explained slowly, staring at the floor. These particular files had given him nightmares for weeks afterward. Still did, in fact. “You... weren’t his first attempt at raising a child for this project.”
A heavy silence followed his words and none of them were in a hurry to speak again. Vincent was studying the wall and Sephiroth was glaring murder at the straps securing him to the chair.
Cloud felt ill at the memory, again. He was only thankful that whatever was left from those experiments had been cleaned up and that he hadn’t found any remains during his explorations.
Sephiroth broke the silence with a short, derisory laugh. “Unfortunately, knowing Hojo, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the truth.”
;;;
Surprised by Sephiroth’s bitterness, Cloud stayed silent for a moment. He spared a glance at Vincent, but the ex-Turk seemed lost in his own thoughts.
Cloud didn’t feel like taking control of the conversation, for once. He scratched at a flake of old paint on his chair and sneaked a peek at the General from under his bangs.
The man was just as pensive, probably trying to decide if they were telling the truth. Or else he was trying to remember his time as a child in a lab under the thumb of a madman. Heck, for all Cloud knew, the General was imagining an appropriate epitaph for Hojo’s grave, complete with runestone on top and offerings littering the ground.
“What was the Jenova project about?”
Once again, Cloud jumped at the unexpected question. He could feel his face heat from another expansive blush. His own inattention was getting more embarrassing by the minute and he couldn’t believe the impression he was probably making on the General.
He was acting like a back-water child who couldn’t even handle sitting in the same room as the man without becoming more nervous than a wolf during mating season.
“Hojo didn’t appear to be very objective and neutral in his work,” he began, talking slowly. This was the great General who trusted him to answer his question. He had to be thorough and clear.
Oh Gaia, this was his first report, to Sephiroth himself!
And again with the blush. Cloud could feel the heat slowly spread to his neck and he cleared his throat. Back to the subject. Now. He was currently the resident expert on Hojo’s early work; he had to act professionally!
“I have read every file in this room, even those Hojo had hidden away. It took me a while to put them back in order, as Hojo seems to have left in a hurry, abandoning his papers all over the place.”
“Hojo would never leave a paper lying around. He is much too paranoid,” Sephiroth interrupted him with a raised eyebrow.
“I know. Well, I don’t know, but I guess,” Cloud answered with a shrug. “Based on what I heard from the villagers and his personal remarks noted in the margins, it seemed strange to me too that he would leave everything like that. That’s why I think it was staged.”
“Staged?”
“Yes,” Cloud replied immediately. This, he knew. He had had enough time to think about all of this. “The reports left in the room weren’t random. There was a point to this mess, and I’m pretty sure that you were supposed to read them.”
“Was I, now?” Sephiroth asked with a frown. He looked almost in pain and Cloud couldn’t help but have a very bad feeling about all this.
“I think so, because all those reports mentioned you in one way or another. I mean, why only leave the reports about you here, if it’s not for you to stumble upon them? I wonder how you would have reacted if you had been alone here, while reading those horrible tales.” he explained angrily, warming to the subject. Every time he thought about that bastard scientist, he felt the need to strangle. “Plus there is the fact that the reports were fakes.”
“This is getting more unbelievable by the minute, Strife.”
Cloud almost squeaked when Sephiroth said his name, but he managed to stop himself in time. He’d promised himself a while ago that he wouldn’t behave like a hysterical fanboy.
“I know, I know. But this is Hojo we’re talking about. He sounds so callous and fixated. Wouldn’t you believe him capable of trying to twist your mind for his own agenda?”
Sephiroth stayed silent a moment, staring at nothing. Cloud knew that he was right – even if Vincent still wasn’t convinced by his theory – and plowed on.
“Anyway, at the time, it didn’t really matter, because I was the one reading the files, instead of you. It grossed me out and made me so angry,” he remembered, grabbing the first report on the pile he had gathered with Vincent’s help.
“So I kept on searching and reading every file, trying to get them back in order, and then I found the cache. Well, really, Vincent found it,” Cloud corrected with a self-deprecating smile. “Freaky ex-Turk super power I say; I still don’t understand what tipped him off. I mean, I walked right by it for years and never even suspected something was amiss!” Cloud whined for a second, with a fake glare at Vincent. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure these files were the real ones, ‘coz I don’t think Hojo would have gone to such lengths to hide something totally unworthy.”
Sephiroth’s eyes were almost burning right through his soul, or so that’s how it felt. Cloud fidgeted, flustered, and took a deep, calming breath. “About the experiments themselves... – If we can really call them that. Hojo wasn’t exactly the perfect scientist. I can’t really tell what his point was, because he changed his mind several times during the research. He rarely followed through when he had an idea, which made it even harder to understand his reports.”
However, deciphering Hojo’s mind had been Cloud’s main obsession these last few years. Cloud knew exactly what he was talking about, especially in regards to Project J.
Most of the information in those reports had been frightening for a teenager, but it concerned Sephiroth and the SOLDIERs. Cloud would readily admit that he was obsessed by Sephiroth, just like about half of the world’s population.
That said, his social skills weren’t exactly up to standard, not after spending years with only Vincent Valentine and a mother who was slowly losing touch with reality, for company.
That probably explained how and why he found himself crossing the room in two steps, releasing the straps binding the General’s arms to the chair and sitting down on the armrest.
Cloud totally disregarded the mental voice currently screaming at him that he was a fool and a walking dead man and handed the files to the General.
“Here,” he said, ignoring the General’s stunned expression. “It began with an unknown specimen found in the North Crater, decades ago. At the time, Hojo wasn’t even the head of the scientific department, but Professor Gast...”
TBC
Here is another one! ;p Hope you liked it.
By the way, I wanted to warn you that I intent to participate to NaNoWriMo again this year. I won't be work on an original novel or anything, but instead will try to write Guide's whole story in one go, so that I have only the beta-work left, come December :)
So there probably won't be another chapter published before December, as at least one of my beta-reader will be trying NNWM too :3
--> Next Chapter: 06- A Voice in his Head
Author: Anyssia
Character/Pairing: Cloud, Zack, Sephiroth, Vincent. Eventually, Cloud/Zack/Seph
Fandom/Spoilers: Final Fantasy VII, Meteor Crisis.
Genre: adventure, what-if, slash
Disclaimer: not mine or I would have killed Hojo a long time ago!
Status: ch5/?, 1'900 words, 10/09/2010
Rating: no violence, G
Beta (s):
lucime, Kage Kaze Kitsune, vessamorana and jameva. All remaining mistakes are mine.Summary: Nibelheim's reactor is due for a check-up and sixteen years old Cloud is hired to take the coming soldiers up the mountain.
Previous Chapters: 01, 02, 03, 04
Crossposted at:
crisis_hardcore, ff7, ffvii_yaoi, FFnetChapter 5 – An Unbelievable Tale
Taming the muse: prompt #219 – Rune Stone (Gnah, I hated this one >_<)
Previously, in chapter 4:
“[...] The annoying buzz from earlier came back with a vengeance and he felt his self-control slipping once again. He wanted to kill them both, to strangle, dismember, and destroy. To listen to their pleas and cries and...
Sephiroth swallowed back his anger and focused on Strife. He looked terrified but sincere, and for whatever reason, Sephiroth wanted to believe him. [...]”
“If you are interested, we gathered all the files referring to Project S.” Vincent’s quiet voice resonated in the silent room. Cloud held his breath without realizing it.
After a moment, the General turned to the ex-Turk. Cloud almost passed out from relief. The man had been staring at him so intently that Cloud had been afraid to even blink. He could still feel those piercing eyes on him.
Cloud nearly groaned when he realized that his body, at least, had liked being stared at by the General. This certainly wasn’t helping him get rid of his old crush.
He was so going to embarrass himself before long!
Sephiroth’s face was pinched and he seemed to have the mother of all migraines, but he still managed to look as if he was in his office back in Midgar, waiting for them to go ahead with their report.
At least, that’s how Cloud imagined it.
Feeling very foolish and inexperienced, Cloud slid to the edge of his chair and took over the conversation.
“Yeah, all the files are there,” he repeated, pointing at a couple of metallic boxes stacked next to the door. “I guess Hojo didn’t want to bother with all those papers and boxes and only took the data disks with him.”
Sephiroth glared murder at them for a second and Cloud couldn’t help but gape at the man’s expression. Up until now, it had been very obvious that the General was forcing himself to keep a neutral facade. To see him be so open with his emotions was... startling, to say the least.
“You said that Hojo first began to experiment on me when I was still a fetus in my... ah, surrogate mother, if I remember correctly. Are you saying that I was raised in this mansion?”
Cloud jumped nervously when Sephiroth brusquely turned back to him and could almost feel the heat radiate from his cheeks. “Not... Not in the mansion. Here really. In this room, I mean,” he stammered, blushing even harder, mortified by his own humiliating behavior. He was probably acting like one of those star-struck idiots that he despised. “The reports never mentioned you being allowed out of here, before the lab was moved to Midgar.”
“So I was locked up in this basement...”
“Yes, not that it really matters,” Cloud added as an afterthought. Sephiroth’s hard stare convinced him to elaborate quickly. “From what I read, I think that you spent most of your time sedated. It explains why you have no memories of growing up here.”
“You really think that Hojo would keep a child sedated for years?” Sephiroth asked with skeptically. “Not that I don’t think him capable of it, but sedating someone over a long period of time is very dangerous for their health. He wouldn’t risk losing his prize subject or rendering it a vegetable.”
Aware that the man was growing a little too jumpy again, Vincent took over the explanation. “What makes you think that you were so precious to him? This way, he didn’t have to take care of you, especially as this was a secret experiment. The underground laboratory might be well hidden and isolated from the town, but sooner or later, cries would have been heard or you would have escaped. Children are very good at that. Hojo couldn’t risk it.”
Sephiroth gave up any pretence of calm as soon as the ex-Turk began talking and Cloud started to wonder if those two were going to come to blows right in front of him, the fact that Sephiroth was still tied down notwithstanding.
“Of course, I’m valuable to him! He tells me so often enough!” Sephiroth spat with a harsh glare.
“Now, maybe. He has spent years on you, he can’t afford to have you go your own way anymore,” Vincent answered with a shrug. “But at the time, he had been working on you for what, three, five years? He could have started over again if the sedatives had damaged your mind. He did it often enough,” he added with a disgusted sneer.
Sephiroth stared at him for a moment, his neutral mask back, before turning back to Cloud, ordering him to explain with a single raised eyebrow.
Cloud hesitated, looking back at Vincent’s tense profile. “We found... reports, from previous experiments,” he explained slowly, staring at the floor. These particular files had given him nightmares for weeks afterward. Still did, in fact. “You... weren’t his first attempt at raising a child for this project.”
A heavy silence followed his words and none of them were in a hurry to speak again. Vincent was studying the wall and Sephiroth was glaring murder at the straps securing him to the chair.
Cloud felt ill at the memory, again. He was only thankful that whatever was left from those experiments had been cleaned up and that he hadn’t found any remains during his explorations.
Sephiroth broke the silence with a short, derisory laugh. “Unfortunately, knowing Hojo, it wouldn’t surprise me if this was the truth.”
;;;
Surprised by Sephiroth’s bitterness, Cloud stayed silent for a moment. He spared a glance at Vincent, but the ex-Turk seemed lost in his own thoughts.
Cloud didn’t feel like taking control of the conversation, for once. He scratched at a flake of old paint on his chair and sneaked a peek at the General from under his bangs.
The man was just as pensive, probably trying to decide if they were telling the truth. Or else he was trying to remember his time as a child in a lab under the thumb of a madman. Heck, for all Cloud knew, the General was imagining an appropriate epitaph for Hojo’s grave, complete with runestone on top and offerings littering the ground.
“What was the Jenova project about?”
Once again, Cloud jumped at the unexpected question. He could feel his face heat from another expansive blush. His own inattention was getting more embarrassing by the minute and he couldn’t believe the impression he was probably making on the General.
He was acting like a back-water child who couldn’t even handle sitting in the same room as the man without becoming more nervous than a wolf during mating season.
“Hojo didn’t appear to be very objective and neutral in his work,” he began, talking slowly. This was the great General who trusted him to answer his question. He had to be thorough and clear.
Oh Gaia, this was his first report, to Sephiroth himself!
And again with the blush. Cloud could feel the heat slowly spread to his neck and he cleared his throat. Back to the subject. Now. He was currently the resident expert on Hojo’s early work; he had to act professionally!
“I have read every file in this room, even those Hojo had hidden away. It took me a while to put them back in order, as Hojo seems to have left in a hurry, abandoning his papers all over the place.”
“Hojo would never leave a paper lying around. He is much too paranoid,” Sephiroth interrupted him with a raised eyebrow.
“I know. Well, I don’t know, but I guess,” Cloud answered with a shrug. “Based on what I heard from the villagers and his personal remarks noted in the margins, it seemed strange to me too that he would leave everything like that. That’s why I think it was staged.”
“Staged?”
“Yes,” Cloud replied immediately. This, he knew. He had had enough time to think about all of this. “The reports left in the room weren’t random. There was a point to this mess, and I’m pretty sure that you were supposed to read them.”
“Was I, now?” Sephiroth asked with a frown. He looked almost in pain and Cloud couldn’t help but have a very bad feeling about all this.
“I think so, because all those reports mentioned you in one way or another. I mean, why only leave the reports about you here, if it’s not for you to stumble upon them? I wonder how you would have reacted if you had been alone here, while reading those horrible tales.” he explained angrily, warming to the subject. Every time he thought about that bastard scientist, he felt the need to strangle. “Plus there is the fact that the reports were fakes.”
“This is getting more unbelievable by the minute, Strife.”
Cloud almost squeaked when Sephiroth said his name, but he managed to stop himself in time. He’d promised himself a while ago that he wouldn’t behave like a hysterical fanboy.
“I know, I know. But this is Hojo we’re talking about. He sounds so callous and fixated. Wouldn’t you believe him capable of trying to twist your mind for his own agenda?”
Sephiroth stayed silent a moment, staring at nothing. Cloud knew that he was right – even if Vincent still wasn’t convinced by his theory – and plowed on.
“Anyway, at the time, it didn’t really matter, because I was the one reading the files, instead of you. It grossed me out and made me so angry,” he remembered, grabbing the first report on the pile he had gathered with Vincent’s help.
“So I kept on searching and reading every file, trying to get them back in order, and then I found the cache. Well, really, Vincent found it,” Cloud corrected with a self-deprecating smile. “Freaky ex-Turk super power I say; I still don’t understand what tipped him off. I mean, I walked right by it for years and never even suspected something was amiss!” Cloud whined for a second, with a fake glare at Vincent. “Anyway, I’m pretty sure these files were the real ones, ‘coz I don’t think Hojo would have gone to such lengths to hide something totally unworthy.”
Sephiroth’s eyes were almost burning right through his soul, or so that’s how it felt. Cloud fidgeted, flustered, and took a deep, calming breath. “About the experiments themselves... – If we can really call them that. Hojo wasn’t exactly the perfect scientist. I can’t really tell what his point was, because he changed his mind several times during the research. He rarely followed through when he had an idea, which made it even harder to understand his reports.”
However, deciphering Hojo’s mind had been Cloud’s main obsession these last few years. Cloud knew exactly what he was talking about, especially in regards to Project J.
Most of the information in those reports had been frightening for a teenager, but it concerned Sephiroth and the SOLDIERs. Cloud would readily admit that he was obsessed by Sephiroth, just like about half of the world’s population.
That said, his social skills weren’t exactly up to standard, not after spending years with only Vincent Valentine and a mother who was slowly losing touch with reality, for company.
That probably explained how and why he found himself crossing the room in two steps, releasing the straps binding the General’s arms to the chair and sitting down on the armrest.
Cloud totally disregarded the mental voice currently screaming at him that he was a fool and a walking dead man and handed the files to the General.
“Here,” he said, ignoring the General’s stunned expression. “It began with an unknown specimen found in the North Crater, decades ago. At the time, Hojo wasn’t even the head of the scientific department, but Professor Gast...”
TBC
Here is another one! ;p Hope you liked it.
By the way, I wanted to warn you that I intent to participate to NaNoWriMo again this year. I won't be work on an original novel or anything, but instead will try to write Guide's whole story in one go, so that I have only the beta-work left, come December :)
So there probably won't be another chapter published before December, as at least one of my beta-reader will be trying NNWM too :3
--> Next Chapter: 06- A Voice in his Head
