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FF7 - Restore - chapter 8 part 2 (end of chapter)
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.)
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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~"
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~"
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The omake makes me giggle.
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score one for the omake! u.u
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Didn't see any obvious typos, I can skim again later if you'd like.
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If you want to read back and you happen to find typos, it'll be awesome! but otherwise don't make yourself, hopefully someone else will notice them. or maybe *gasp* this time around there'll be none?! :DDDD
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I'll probably reread it at some point, I'm avoiding end-of-semester work right now.
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You too, huh?
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... ...
... *facepalms* And it's not there because the internet apparently timed out when I hit post. Thankfully it was still in my tabs, patiently waiting for me to come and refresh. Right, it has been salvaged from the intarnet demons and posted.
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tl;dr, will beta read now.
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2) noooo, the hairs. D= Though now Cloud's not the only one that can be called Spike now. I don't think the others could get the cajones to do it, though.
3) Also, Aeris? Is totally adorable and I think I love her even more. =D
edit-to-add: Gah, sorry this didn't post. o.O; internet's been odd lately in this house.
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1) we'll get Zack on it though. Safer for everyone else. D:
2) XD I think it's only something you could call spike when it's all ruffled up, but yeeeeeah. I hope no one will see that and make a crack about how Seph and Cloud look like young/old versions from the back, it won't help Cloud's identity issues. XD
3) yay! aeris is loveded!
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Aeris is the sweetest thing, to help Seph with that.
The hot coco thing? yes. Kitten ... not so much. I can't imagine Seph with a cat. .... Even a cat like Dark Nation. And I don't think he needs cuddled ... just ... leaned on, sorta.
I loved this. And I didn't see any typos, so YAYS!
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Er. Sorry. What I meant to say was, great characterization work and emotion, and I love that you made this decision, with the hair. It's wonderful, and I think it kind of throws the readers off too, makes us realize that things are going to change.
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♥ ^________^ thank you!
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your characterization of Sephiroth is AMAZING and I love it I love it I love it! this scene between them, unf. I wasn't sure how I felt about the idea of them at first, but seeing them interact is wonderful. my inner shipper is beside herself waiting for Cloud to come back, but Sephiroth and Aerith make the wait very bearable >3<
FANTASTIC SCENE! Thank you for writing it ;o;
can't wait for the next part! :D
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I wasn't sure how I was going to handle the Seph/Aeris interaction before I sat and wrote it either, so yay for it working for you! XD
CLOUD WILL BE THERE SOON. *lovesquishes you*
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Before Cut (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v443/Ryouseiteki/IRL/fulllength.jpg)
After Cut (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v443/Ryouseiteki/IRL/thedeedisdone.jpg)
So yeah, I can totally feel him here. ♥
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I didn't cut it for like, a decade so... it was pretty long.
It's real bitch to take care of though.You go through shampoo and conditioner like crazy, showers take over an hour, drying it out takes forever, putting it up or styling it takes ages as well (mostly I just tied it back in a ponytail or let it hang). And you know, no one ever really mentions this, but it can get painful too. It gets knots and snarls easily, gets caught on things (once got snagged on a guy's backpack as he was walking by, that wasn't fun), and I accidentally sat on it all the time lol.
I think I mostly cut it to save myself the time to care for it, though honestly I'm still surprised when I'm brushing my hair that there's so little there to work with - muscle memory, you know.
I remember it was a spontaneous decision to cut it, and I was fine at the time, but a week or so afterwards I had a bit of a cry about it. Most of my friends want me to grow it back though, haha.
Do you cut it often? I was a bit paranoid about getting it trimmed and had maybe half an inch taken off every 8 or 9 months or so, just for dead ends.
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My hair never really gets knots, but then again it's almost baby-fine and bendy, so it slips free of everything. Especially hair clips. :/ Also it doesn't hold a curl more than a half-hour. Waugh. but at least no tangles! XD
I haven't cut it since my grandmother decided I needed to have it chin-length without bothering to consult me. DX I'll trim the frayed ends at some point but right now i'm allergic to the idea of shortening it more than one inch. It's still barely past shoulder-length. growing so sloooooow aaaaaaa.
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My hair's always been thick and coarse, splits easily and likes to get tangles. *sadface* It's fine with clips, and pulled back shorterm, but I can't tie it up intricately because of its weight! Hahaha. Grass is greener, amiryte?
Yeah that's what my mom did when I was little, and what prompted me to grow it out (well, not so much grow it out as DON'T CUT IT, NO STOP, NO TOUCHIE, EVER EVER EVER)
I miss it a lot, but then I roll out of bed in the morning and it only takes like 5 min to brush my hair, or I hop out of the shower without having to clean the drain (looks like the Beast decided to use my bathroom guys) and I think it's okay. XD
GOOD LUCK THOUGH. I hope your hair gets the hint and just grows already! ♥
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Also, yay that he knows he can depend on Zack! (Even if he has no idea why.)
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I am evil and totally enjoying how baffled he is by Aeris. mwahahahaha.
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It was such along chapter too! This makes me so happy, you've no idea. It gave me a chance to really sink into the situation and Seph's mindset. :D
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With a buzzcut he would look disturbingly hot, like always. Just more "normal enlisted guy
who should be posing for military-themed gay porn mags" hot, probably. >__>Without the hair and the trench coat, what's his style going to default to? Mostly nekkid? That would definitely give him the element of surprise. Hurhur.
*deds of lmao*
My friend suggested hawaiian shirts. D: I am scared.
PFF LONG CHAPTER. It was a SCENE! You have not yet seen a long chapter. XD *horribly verbose*
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Ok, more seriously, it does surprise. I was like O.O and I only realized now that very few people/writers actually dare to cut his hair. I wonder if it's because they're afraid the fans would go rabid, or if it's a personal kink of them.
(even if, having had long hair for years, I can tell them what a pain it is to take care of. If I remember well, you had long hair too? or I'm mixing with Kineko)
Still, you gave a very good reason for him to act that way, so I forgive you ;p
Also, this:"Her eyes were green just like his own, but the shade was different, leaf versus LED" was totally PERFECT!! ^___________^
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Well, his hair IS pretty iconic and important for the character image. It's pretty much long silver hair - black trench coat - longass sword. And oops, now he's got none of them! So who is left behind that. I found it interesting to wonder. XD
(and nah, it was kineko with the ass-length braid. WHICH SHE ALSO CUT! *shakes fist* My hair never got any farther than mid-back at most. ;__;)
♥
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Which, even if he'll still make heads turn, he won't be as distinctively remarkable.
I think he'll look more like a distinguish corporate/businessman than a dangerous warrior.
(also, you forgot the half naked torso in your description *drools*)
PS: you're going to hate me too, because I cut mine too xD It was getting a bit too... hum. damaged? (I can't find a better translation ^^;;).
I had them 'ass-length' too and cut it over the ears :D
But now that all the split ends and years of purple color have gone, I'm letting it grow back! \O/
(because really, I can't stand to have it short, it's just too weird, even if it has been a year already ^^)
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And, Seph's hair, nooooooooooes. Hope he'll regrow it later (or not, I think it suits him too).
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I think he might let it grow back in a little while, when the neighbors will be used to him and his new identity. He'll probably pull it back into a ponytail too. Then even if someone goes "hey, you remind me of someone" they won't easily make the link with TEH GENERAL since they'll be used to his shorthaired face. And then they'll be more likely to go "hey, it's funny, buddy, you must hear it often, you kinda look like..." XD
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Gonna worship your footsteps a little bit now. Hope you don't mind.
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Having read through the comments, I like your reasoning for what Sephiroth did; ruthlessly logical for someone whose hopes are pretty much slim and none. Also like that it all comes down to strategy, tactics, and how everything in his life relates in military terms, that being one of the strongest influences on Seph's psyche. Kudos for showing that.
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I only just started posting on ffnet. I want to post slowly so I don't reach the end of my ready chapters and people bitch up a storm for waiting too long for the next part, considering it took me a couple years writing everything that's on LJ already and I'm not even one fifth of the way into the plot.
I'm really glad you liked it and thought it made sense! thank you. ^________^
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He started rummaging through the drawers.
Five minutes later knuckles rapped lightly on the door,
Somewhere in between the two lines, he went for scissors and started snipping away in the five minutes. It's implied rather than said so that people realize it slowly as the scene goes on.
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(Anonymous) 2011-05-28 09:15 pm (UTC)(link)But seriously: fantastic story! Love the voices (astonishingly, ALL of them: I have my obvious favorites naturally but you make all the characters interesting to read) and the pacing. FF VII was among my very first fandoms, and the first game-based one. It's been so many years but I'm glad I stumbled upon it again -and very glad I got reintroduced via your tale. Looking forward to the next chapter!
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Thank you! ^______^ I'm really glad you like it that much. Whee! *does dance of glee* Come back to ff7, cooome baaaack, the fandom needs you~
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Eagerly awaiting more of this!
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Sephiroth is a secret woobie is why. ;^;~
Writing more right now! :D
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:( Woobie Sephiroth makes me so sad. I want to hug him and squeeze him and give him chocolate, but I don't want to be skewered...
Oh, boy! :D