[ When Sharon reaches the junction of the Encantado and the Selkie, her pace eases. She follows the broken line of the river, keeping a wary distance from the pulsing gems, and her gaze sweeps the area for Sephiroth. She perks up at the steady rhythm of wings overhead. Adjusting the tote bag on her shoulder, she waits patiently for his descent. ]
Staying aloft for a few more minutes gives a bit of time to be certain they didn't have company. An occasional wandering spirit could be tolerated, anything else... well, there's a reason he sought solitude lately.
The racing shape hasn't changed any, still a black marked silver dragon, still the same rather smallish size for a dragon, and when he lands heavily in the dust, he doesn't change back immediately in favor of giving that shape a bit of a breather. Maybe he SHOULD have designed something for more stamina.
Sharon had said she was a Myth too now; he hadn't missed that bit of information. Unless she's learned to hide her traits faster than he did, it should be obvious.
When he touches down, Sharon lifts a hand in casual greeting. At first glance, she doesn't look all that different, but her skin is paler now, nearly ghost white, and her once-blue eyes are pools of ink-black that make her stare unnervingly wide. Her fingers taper into claws, the black of them fading into her altered skin. A Myth only if one knows what they're looking for.
"Hard fly?" she asks as she notes how hard he's breathing.
"I should have considered endurance racing too when coming up with this. It's a sprinter." And if he just. Sits here a moment in a scaly lump that's probably fine. He hadn't really been thinking he'd lose access to the other wings at the time or he might have tried for more versatility. It can't be helped now.
She hadn't had claws before, not like that. The pallor and smell wasn't right for undeath, so not a vampire; her husband continues to be far more restrained than stories suggested vampires should be. "What happened?"
"Something to work toward," she replies lightly, drifting closer with a kind of deliberate ease. Her movements carry no threat. She doesn't even carry a weapon—not that she needs one these days.
At the question, she lifts her shoulders in a shrug, though her expression tightens. "I think it was a lot of things, honestly. Thirteen kept sending people away, sent my mother away..." She breaks off, shaking her head as grief crashes over her like a sudden tide, then breathes it out, steadying herself. "I just reached the end of my rope."
Or at least, that's what she tells herself. Truth is, she isn't entirely sure what pushed her over the edge, only that something did, and this is where it left her.
That casual ease is something he watches sidelong, uncertain. Sharon was vengeful, in a way he only wished he could be with a clear conscience, and Cloud and Zack were her dear friends. "I see."
Emotional pain was a terrible thing. It didn't seem to ever actually fade. "I think I can understand that. I've ... never known my mothers enough to miss them, but .. I miss Vincent, and I can only guess how much more it must hurt." Carefully he gathers himself up and switches shapes; it's a fairly fluid thing, one moment there's a smallish silver dragon and the next his more normal form, albeit with new twisting horns, a long heavy tail almost like an extended crocodile's and claws that'd better suit a predator. His skin color's several more shades towards gray instead of simply pale, marked by a scattering of tiny silvery scales and blue-purple lines here and there almost but not quite like stripes.
As a Myth, he looks so startlingly different that it's almost jarring—visibly dangerous, a predator at a glance. She almost feels sorry for him. Underneath it all, he's still just a kid—still that child in Hojo's lab. And the truth is, it unsettles her more than she wants to admit.
"Loss is loss. It all hurts." Weighing grief against grief helps no one. This kind of pain cuts deep, like having your heart broken and a piece of it stolen away. "And trust me, if I ever lost Mayerling, you'd know. All of Folkmore would."
Because she is nothing if not vengeful, and logic slips away when she's aching. "What about you? What made you fall?" The word slips out with a sneer. She loathes the term, loathes what it implies. No wonder so many assume Myths are monsters.
Once he would have asked her to delay vengeance until he was finished with what he had to do. Now? Now he wasn't sure he wanted to do what he had to do. Wasn't sure he was willing to make that sacrifice anymore. Now he simply makes a note of it; should Mayerling disappear it would be an interesting time. He wouldn't wish it upon anyone, the pain of losing a partner that close, but the side effects would be .. memorable, for any who might survive it. "With luck that won't be necessary, then."
He'd be more self-conscious of his changes, how blatantly it made it clear he was anything but human, had she not similarly been warped towards what most would call dark and malevolent.
The smile that follows her question is humorless. "I decided if they wanted a monster they'd get one. My own resolution. It seemed to be enough for Thirteen." There's a subtle tension that doesn't ever fade. Right afterward, he forced them to try to kill each other. it had gone nowhere, as it was supposed to. "It was a choice."
She frowns at his answer. "I don't think it was as much of a choice as you think." Her tone is careful, thoughtful, as she steps a little closer. "You've spent your whole life being told you're a monster, Sephiroth, trained to obey no matter what. Add in the struggles this place adds on, the isolation, the lack of guidance... why wouldn't you eventually give in?"
She remembers him in Hojo's lab—small and used, measuring his worth only by what he could endure. It's hard to see him as anything else, even now, changed as he is. To her, he's still a child, still wrestling with who he is, who he'll become, and who he could be.
More than this, for sure. More than just a monster.
"But when I look at you, I don't see a monster. Not even now. You're still that kid in Hojo's lab, doing what he's told even though it hurts, not realizing he deserves so much better than that." The way he hadn't wanted Hojo to die. The fear in his eyes. The reluctant trust.
Those that didn't mean it badly called him a cyborg instead of a monster, a different form of engineered weapon but still, ultimately, inhuman. A perfect creation. The culmination of countless research projects and vast amounts of money. He'd come to terms with it, more or less.
He'd come to terms with what was expected of him, more or less, and the price it would demand. So why was it fraying now? "That's a nice way to spin it," he says after a long uncomfortable moment of silence. "It's good for making me seem like an innocent victim, but I'm not." There's a subtle shift in his posture, from wariness to uncertain disquiet. He'd thrown a similar accusation, right before his wings burned to ash. Treat someone like they're an irredeemable monstrosity long enough, and they'd believe it. Tell them they'll fail..
Well. He failed. "I'm responsible. Cloud and Zack merely pointed out the obvious and I got tired of hearing it. I'm not a monster because of what was done to me, Sharon. I am because of what I choose to do with it. Even when I tell myself I'm trying to help, it's not about helping anyone but myself. In hindsight it's pretty obvious."
He was never going to forget those furious words, or Zack's broken agreement with them. And how right they were.
He never should have been a legend to begin with.
"And don't believe everything you've heard about the lab." Cloud's perspectives would by necessity be distorted. Aerith might give a more accurate view, but did she and Sharon talk? In dreams things had been different. But only in dreams would any of it be possible.
Sharon listens, her expression carefully composed. He is a victim, innocent or not; he was born into an impossible cage with no way out. He was molded into a weapon, taught to be useful, to be emotionless—or at least to fake it convincingly.
"You're not a monster at all," she says on a quiet exhale. The fact that he truly believes he is cuts deep, because how many times has she stared into a mirror and seen one herself? Even before the fire, before she turned Silent Hill into a ghost town—and then she became the very demon they said she was. But when he keeps talking, she straightens, confusion pulling her brows together.
"I didn't hear about the lab from anyone." The memory lives inside her, sharp and unshakable. The horror of watching that small child hop onto the examination table as if it were routine. "Wait—do you not remember? Mayerling remembered the memory we experienced together, I thought you did, too."
"Agree to disagree. You don't know what I've been doing. I'm no different than my future self, or my.." It's been well over a year since he learned the truth of what Hojo is, and his mind flinches still from the idea of calling him 'father'. "Creator." The screaming had been the same, hadn't it. His willingness to completely disregard it in pursuit of his goal.
The petty vindictiveness that followed.
Shared memories were occasionally part of Trials, but he doesn't recall one happening. No one had ever discussed what happened during Donatello's efforts to bridge worlds, and so there is no immediate connection to it at all; his almost-blank confusion isn't faked. "I remember my childhood very well, but I don't recall a Trial here that shared any of that."
The look she levels at him makes it clear she disagrees, strongly, but she lets it pass. He's been told the lie so many times that he's accepted it, surrendered to the idea that he can't be anything else. He doesn't need to be a hero, sure, and he's made his share of mistakes, but that doesn't make him a monster. Not yet. Not by a long shot.
"You really don't remember?" The words sting, and she instinctively crosses her arms, brow knitting tight. "It was back in February, after everyone finally got free of Donatello's bullshit. You couldn't have been more than eight or nine. I snapped Hojo's neck and tried to get you out."
Good people don't do the things he's done. That she's willing to let it go (for now) is taken at face value, and he puts it aside as well. It stalked his thoughts and nightmares regularly anyway, it wasn't as if he could escape it.
Besides which, what she says next thoroughly disrupts that entire chain of thought.
It's painfully obvious he does know exactly what she's talking about by the way he goes utterly still. Not at first, calling Donnie's efforts bullshit draws an unsubtle irritated lash of tail and little else; Donatello didn't do any bullshit he was helping people and it would have been amazing, ages didn't mean anything either but he remembered with a clarity that defied how dreams normally went, a single one where his subconscious had for some unknown reason latched onto the idea of Sharon being willing to extricate him from the hell that was Shinra's sixty-eighth floor.
And how the Professor died in that dream.
As false as it had been, as delusional as he'd been to even imagine such a scenario, it had brought him comfort in the intervening months. Made Jenova's efforts to win him over just a bit more difficult.
He remembered. And that someone else could impossibly remember it too stops him dead.
He remembered the other dream in the same night, for its horrors and difficulties it too had left a warmth behind he cherished. But they weren't real. "That was a dream. It wasn't.." Sephiroth's denial falters into uncertainty. People hadn't discussed what happened aloud, at least nowhere he'd heard of it.
"...That was you?" It sounds weak to his own ears, pathetic and small. Really her, and not just some idealized, dramatized version he'd invented. "You would have.. would you really have tried to.."
Sephiroth goes still, and Sharon watches the realization break over him. He tries to push it away, to deny it—proof that he's spent the past six months convincing himself it was just some vivid dream. Something his mind made up. It never once crossed his mind that it was real. And when he finally speaks, his voice is small, as small as the child he was then.
As small as the child he still is now.
"Why wouldn't I?" She could answer the question herself: because no one else would have. Because no one else did. Sharon knows that feeling all too well: being treated as something less than a child, having adults look the other way when it was easier, or more useful, to ignore the harm and abuse. That kind of dismissal scars in ways most will never understand. But she does.
"I'd have torn that whole place apart to protect you, to-to avenge you. I hate Hojo for what he did to Cloud and Zack, but seeing you just..." Her voice falters, breaking sharp and sudden, and she clears her throat hard, trying to force the surge of emotion back down.
"I couldn't have left you to that. I would've never left you to that."
"Because no one else ever had." It's an echo of her own thoughts, a shared experience for all that the exact circumstances differed. "No one thought it worth bothering over." Not either of his mothers, not Professor Gast, the earliest memories of something like kindness he had. Not Vincent, trapped in a hell of his own. Not even Glenn, Matt and Lucia years later.
He'd given up on any thought of rescue long ago. But it had been a nice dream, a consolation even if it hadn't been real, let him muse now and again on how things might have been different, if it hadn't been just a dream. If someone else had been there, not afraid of him, willing to help, able to do the things he couldn't bring himself to do. Like kill the chief source of his torment. He couldn't even do that now.
It's still a dream. None of it was real, but it had been shared, those private faded childish hopes laid bare to someone else. It had been strange and wonderful, even for a little while, to be able to rely on another. To feel safe, to believe even for a little while things might be okay.
After a long moment he shakes his head a little in an effort to shake the thought off too. "It ...." A breath. Steady. "It doesn't matter now. At best, maybe in some reality or other there is ... another you, and another me, and things went differently." Alternate realities can be so close to the ones already known, like Zack appearing twisted by Jenova but still having the right relic for the one Sephiroth knew. "Don't let it bother you." Or bother himself, for that matter. It might shake the tenuous peace he had with his upbringing and let wrath boil back up that it took a woman from an entirely different reality to be the first to even consider trying, and if even one did even in shared dream, maybe he didn't deserve everything that--
Sharon grimaces at his words, the mirror of her own thoughts, and it hits too close because she knows exactly how much it hurts. There's nothing worse than realizing the people who were supposed to care, the ones who should have cared, chose to look away. It shattered her as a child, just as it's shattering him now.
Her chest aches as she reaches out, resting a hand on his shoulder. She knows what he's doing—trying to shut down, to give her an easy way out—but she sees straight through it. She's done the same damn thing herself.
"Sephiroth, it will always bother me. I wish—" she stops, biting her lower lip hard, "I wish I could've changed things for you. But just because we can't rewrite your past doesn't mean we can't build you a better future." Even if that future only exists within Folkmore. "You deserve good things. Happiness. Love. Family. I know you don't believe it, but you do."
There's a tangible twitch, some reflexive urge to jerk back or prepare for attack that is squashed before it can go any further. It's always an unpleasant dichotomy, between being okay with contact, even wanting it badly sometimes, and the lessons of a lifetime in a lab.
It would be easier if she were angry. If he could provoke her into hostility and accusation, which given the things he'd done, the things he'd been doing, would be right and deserved.
Being tired of hostility over things he hadn't done was very different. He'd earned this.
"It doesn't matter if I do or not. You can see that, don't you? Even if I rewrite the future, even if I don't burn down that stupid little town, it's not going to give me my mother back, or a father, or..." Any of it. The planet would still be the planet, with the same people doing the same things. "..Or all the other things. Even the man I'm supposed to become was alone in the end, and he'd had friends. They left him. What chance do I have?"
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 10:36 pm (UTC)switching to nonbrackets just for ease of typing, you don't have to!
Date: 2025-09-06 10:49 pm (UTC)The racing shape hasn't changed any, still a black marked silver dragon, still the same rather smallish size for a dragon, and when he lands heavily in the dust, he doesn't change back immediately in favor of giving that shape a bit of a breather. Maybe he SHOULD have designed something for more stamina.
Sharon had said she was a Myth too now; he hadn't missed that bit of information. Unless she's learned to hide her traits faster than he did, it should be obvious.
i match babyyyy :3
Date: 2025-09-06 11:01 pm (UTC)"Hard fly?" she asks as she notes how hard he's breathing.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 11:30 pm (UTC)She hadn't had claws before, not like that. The pallor and smell wasn't right for undeath, so not a vampire; her husband continues to be far more restrained than stories suggested vampires should be. "What happened?"
no subject
Date: 2025-09-10 11:14 pm (UTC)At the question, she lifts her shoulders in a shrug, though her expression tightens. "I think it was a lot of things, honestly. Thirteen kept sending people away, sent my mother away..." She breaks off, shaking her head as grief crashes over her like a sudden tide, then breathes it out, steadying herself. "I just reached the end of my rope."
Or at least, that's what she tells herself. Truth is, she isn't entirely sure what pushed her over the edge, only that something did, and this is where it left her.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-10 11:33 pm (UTC)Emotional pain was a terrible thing. It didn't seem to ever actually fade. "I think I can understand that. I've ... never known my mothers enough to miss them, but .. I miss Vincent, and I can only guess how much more it must hurt." Carefully he gathers himself up and switches shapes; it's a fairly fluid thing, one moment there's a smallish silver dragon and the next his more normal form, albeit with new twisting horns, a long heavy tail almost like an extended crocodile's and claws that'd better suit a predator. His skin color's several more shades towards gray instead of simply pale, marked by a scattering of tiny silvery scales and blue-purple lines here and there almost but not quite like stripes.
"But you still have Mayerling, I hope."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-20 11:46 pm (UTC)"Loss is loss. It all hurts." Weighing grief against grief helps no one. This kind of pain cuts deep, like having your heart broken and a piece of it stolen away. "And trust me, if I ever lost Mayerling, you'd know. All of Folkmore would."
Because she is nothing if not vengeful, and logic slips away when she's aching. "What about you? What made you fall?" The word slips out with a sneer. She loathes the term, loathes what it implies. No wonder so many assume Myths are monsters.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 12:00 am (UTC)He'd be more self-conscious of his changes, how blatantly it made it clear he was anything but human, had she not similarly been warped towards what most would call dark and malevolent.
The smile that follows her question is humorless. "I decided if they wanted a monster they'd get one. My own resolution. It seemed to be enough for Thirteen." There's a subtle tension that doesn't ever fade. Right afterward, he forced them to try to kill each other. it had gone nowhere, as it was supposed to. "It was a choice."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 01:35 am (UTC)She remembers him in Hojo's lab—small and used, measuring his worth only by what he could endure. It's hard to see him as anything else, even now, changed as he is. To her, he's still a child, still wrestling with who he is, who he'll become, and who he could be.
More than this, for sure. More than just a monster.
"But when I look at you, I don't see a monster. Not even now. You're still that kid in Hojo's lab, doing what he's told even though it hurts, not realizing he deserves so much better than that." The way he hadn't wanted Hojo to die. The fear in his eyes. The reluctant trust.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 02:18 am (UTC)He'd come to terms with what was expected of him, more or less, and the price it would demand. So why was it fraying now? "That's a nice way to spin it," he says after a long uncomfortable moment of silence. "It's good for making me seem like an innocent victim, but I'm not." There's a subtle shift in his posture, from wariness to uncertain disquiet. He'd thrown a similar accusation, right before his wings burned to ash. Treat someone like they're an irredeemable monstrosity long enough, and they'd believe it. Tell them they'll fail..
Well. He failed. "I'm responsible. Cloud and Zack merely pointed out the obvious and I got tired of hearing it. I'm not a monster because of what was done to me, Sharon. I am because of what I choose to do with it. Even when I tell myself I'm trying to help, it's not about helping anyone but myself. In hindsight it's pretty obvious."
He was never going to forget those furious words, or Zack's broken agreement with them. And how right they were.
He never should have been a legend to begin with.
"And don't believe everything you've heard about the lab." Cloud's perspectives would by necessity be distorted. Aerith might give a more accurate view, but did she and Sharon talk? In dreams things had been different. But only in dreams would any of it be possible.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 03:15 am (UTC)"You're not a monster at all," she says on a quiet exhale. The fact that he truly believes he is cuts deep, because how many times has she stared into a mirror and seen one herself? Even before the fire, before she turned Silent Hill into a ghost town—and then she became the very demon they said she was. But when he keeps talking, she straightens, confusion pulling her brows together.
"I didn't hear about the lab from anyone." The memory lives inside her, sharp and unshakable. The horror of watching that small child hop onto the examination table as if it were routine. "Wait—do you not remember? Mayerling remembered the memory we experienced together, I thought you did, too."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 01:23 pm (UTC)The petty vindictiveness that followed.
Shared memories were occasionally part of Trials, but he doesn't recall one happening. No one had ever discussed what happened during Donatello's efforts to bridge worlds, and so there is no immediate connection to it at all; his almost-blank confusion isn't faked. "I remember my childhood very well, but I don't recall a Trial here that shared any of that."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 11:14 pm (UTC)"You really don't remember?" The words sting, and she instinctively crosses her arms, brow knitting tight. "It was back in February, after everyone finally got free of Donatello's bullshit. You couldn't have been more than eight or nine. I snapped Hojo's neck and tried to get you out."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-21 11:31 pm (UTC)Besides which, what she says next thoroughly disrupts that entire chain of thought.
It's painfully obvious he does know exactly what she's talking about by the way he goes utterly still. Not at first, calling Donnie's efforts bullshit draws an unsubtle irritated lash of tail and little else; Donatello didn't do any bullshit he was helping people and it would have been amazing, ages didn't mean anything either but he remembered with a clarity that defied how dreams normally went, a single one where his subconscious had for some unknown reason latched onto the idea of Sharon being willing to extricate him from the hell that was Shinra's sixty-eighth floor.
And how the Professor died in that dream.
As false as it had been, as delusional as he'd been to even imagine such a scenario, it had brought him comfort in the intervening months. Made Jenova's efforts to win him over just a bit more difficult.
He remembered. And that someone else could impossibly remember it too stops him dead.
He remembered the other dream in the same night, for its horrors and difficulties it too had left a warmth behind he cherished. But they weren't real. "That was a dream. It wasn't.." Sephiroth's denial falters into uncertainty. People hadn't discussed what happened aloud, at least nowhere he'd heard of it.
"...That was you?" It sounds weak to his own ears, pathetic and small. Really her, and not just some idealized, dramatized version he'd invented. "You would have.. would you really have tried to.."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-22 01:39 am (UTC)As small as the child he still is now.
"Why wouldn't I?" She could answer the question herself: because no one else would have. Because no one else did. Sharon knows that feeling all too well: being treated as something less than a child, having adults look the other way when it was easier, or more useful, to ignore the harm and abuse. That kind of dismissal scars in ways most will never understand. But she does.
"I'd have torn that whole place apart to protect you, to-to avenge you. I hate Hojo for what he did to Cloud and Zack, but seeing you just..." Her voice falters, breaking sharp and sudden, and she clears her throat hard, trying to force the surge of emotion back down.
"I couldn't have left you to that. I would've never left you to that."
no subject
Date: 2025-09-22 02:30 am (UTC)He'd given up on any thought of rescue long ago. But it had been a nice dream, a consolation even if it hadn't been real, let him muse now and again on how things might have been different, if it hadn't been just a dream. If someone else had been there, not afraid of him, willing to help, able to do the things he couldn't bring himself to do. Like kill the chief source of his torment. He couldn't even do that now.
It's still a dream. None of it was real, but it had been shared, those private faded childish hopes laid bare to someone else. It had been strange and wonderful, even for a little while, to be able to rely on another. To feel safe, to believe even for a little while things might be okay.
After a long moment he shakes his head a little in an effort to shake the thought off too. "It ...." A breath. Steady. "It doesn't matter now. At best, maybe in some reality or other there is ... another you, and another me, and things went differently." Alternate realities can be so close to the ones already known, like Zack appearing twisted by Jenova but still having the right relic for the one Sephiroth knew. "Don't let it bother you." Or bother himself, for that matter. It might shake the tenuous peace he had with his upbringing and let wrath boil back up that it took a woman from an entirely different reality to be the first to even consider trying, and if even one did even in shared dream, maybe he didn't deserve everything that--
no subject
Date: 2025-09-26 11:10 pm (UTC)Her chest aches as she reaches out, resting a hand on his shoulder. She knows what he's doing—trying to shut down, to give her an easy way out—but she sees straight through it. She's done the same damn thing herself.
"Sephiroth, it will always bother me. I wish—" she stops, biting her lower lip hard, "I wish I could've changed things for you. But just because we can't rewrite your past doesn't mean we can't build you a better future." Even if that future only exists within Folkmore. "You deserve good things. Happiness. Love. Family. I know you don't believe it, but you do."
lurches upright ok
Date: 2025-10-04 12:03 am (UTC)It would be easier if she were angry. If he could provoke her into hostility and accusation, which given the things he'd done, the things he'd been doing, would be right and deserved.
Being tired of hostility over things he hadn't done was very different. He'd earned this.
"It doesn't matter if I do or not. You can see that, don't you? Even if I rewrite the future, even if I don't burn down that stupid little town, it's not going to give me my mother back, or a father, or..." Any of it. The planet would still be the planet, with the same people doing the same things. "..Or all the other things. Even the man I'm supposed to become was alone in the end, and he'd had friends. They left him. What chance do I have?"