Chapter Text
Their correspondence came to an end once Hojo decided Aeris was old enough to spend a few hours alone.
Lucrecia held onto every note, and maybe it was a risk, but they never searched her room. She never left it, and she never had visitors. Sometimes, they even forgot to feed her, though it never troubled her. It was as though time had no affect on her in here. By now she had passed 40, and she imagined that the moment she stepped outside, all her missing wrinkles would appear at once.
If she ever stepped outside. She read Ifalna's notes again and again. Ifalna had never passed judgment on her one way or another, either to condemn her for what she'd done to Sephiroth or to forgive her for it. She'd related her encounters with him. They'd talked about him and Gast and Aeris. They'd shared their darkest thoughts, because there was no one else to confide in, and the alternative was to let those thoughts rebound endlessly in their own skulls.
Lucrecia would reread the words and imagine Ifalna sitting in the room with her, speaking them aloud to her. Sometimes it felt quite real, and she thought she was finally going insane.
Ifalna always said when they escaped. Lucrecia had often slipped and written if.
She tried to focus on Ifalna's version. When they escaped. When, when, when.
When she slept, she dreamt of her son, locked in his own cell, staring up at the same grey ceiling. In her more lucid dreams, she would sit down on the edge of his bed and tell him how she missed him. She would braid his hair, which grew ever longer as she imagined him growing older.
Sometimes she dreamt of him in the main observation chamber, facing off against horrid monsters unearthed from who-knew-where. A manifestation of her fears for where the Project would lead: if Sephiroth couldn't guide Shinra to the Mako-rich Promised Land, then that funding still had to yield some results. Even as a child, he'd demonstrated a heightened aptitude for materia use and strength beyond what his muscle density suggested--ideal qualities for a soldier.
But her son was not meant to be a soldier. He was meant to be a leader, the first in a new generation who would unlock secrets about this Planet that Lucrecia could scarcely imagine. The wisdom of the Cetra in the modern age, furthering their natural talents with human technological advances. President Shinra had always been too small-minded to see the possibilities, but Shinra was where the funding was.
If they'd known there was still a Cetra living, they might not have done any of this, but Lucrecia couldn't wish away the existence of her son.
The door to her cell slid open, and Sephiroth stood there. He looked exactly as he did in her dreams, so maybe this was only another dream. He was nearly as tall as she was, having grown so much since last she had seen him. Ifalna had dated her notes whenever she overheard enough to piece it together. The last one had been January 2, 1989. Sephiroth would have been 11, then. How many months had passed since?
"Are you...?" Real? she wondered. She reached for him, pulling him into an embrace. He tensed, but she felt his fingers curl into the back of her shirt.
"...Mom," he said.
The moment stretched, and then ended. Sephiroth drew back.
"Put this on," he said, handing her a lab coat. Still attached to the breast pocket was a key card with a name she didn't recognize. Some new hire in the years since she had had any say in it.
There was a speck of blood on the lapel.
"We have to move fast," Sephiroth insisted, and Lucrecia shrugged her arms mechanically into the sleeves. He took her hand and tugged her out of the room, just like that.
Nothing mystical happened once she crossed the threshold.
They hurried down the hallway, and Sephiroth keyed open the door to what Lucrecia recognized as Gast's old office. All this time, it had been Ifalna's room. She stood at the ready, her long hair wound into a thick braided bun.
It looked good on her.
Ifalna pulled on the lab coat that Sephiroth offered her in turn. Lucrecia realized the hairstyle was meant to make her appear more professional, less conspicuous. She and Sephiroth had been able to coordinate this.
"We're leaving?" Lucrecia asked as the question finally made its way through her haze of disbelief.
"Hojo was called to Junon," Ifalna explained. "Something about contamination from the reactor."
"And today is Rufus's birthday," Sephiroth added.
"Rufus?" Lucrecia repeated. Did she know who that was?
"The President's son. It's a big party that means a lot of security someplace that isn't here."
Lucrecia slowly put that together. Hojo was away. Security was light. Her eyes fell on the katana at Sephiroth's side, and she realized he had a key card of his own. Was he 12? 13? Were they training him with the military now?
Aeris tugged at the edge of her coat. Lucrecia looked down. Aeris was older, too, nearly as old as Sephiroth had been the last time Lucrecia had seen him. The gap between them, those were her lost years.
"You remember me?" she asked Aeris.
Aeris nodded. "Sure, Aunt Lulu. Mom says we're leaving now forever. You're coming, too, right?"
When, she thought. This was when.
"Yes. Of course I'm coming."
Lucrecia didn't look up at the cameras they passed, but she felt them like eyes on her back. The lab coats would only fool a stranger glancing at them, not the limited security team cleared to monitor this floor.
"Someone will see us," she said.
Sephiroth glanced up. "I asked Mayor Domino to loop the footage," he said. "He promised us an hour."
"The mayor...?"
"Shinra moved his office into the archives, and... they let me read in there."
Lucrecia knew that she had been cut off from the world, but she only felt it hitting her now. All these small, essential pieces of knowledge that Sephiroth and Ifalna had collected, and she didn't know them, even though they came from other parts of the same building. For years, Lucrecia had imagined nothing outside of the lab itself, because everything she cared about was inside its walls.
She wasn't prepared for what awaited them beyond it.
Their pilfered key cards gained them access to the stairwell; they didn't use Sephiroth's, because his movements were more likely to attract notice.
"I know it's a long way down," said Sephiroth as they passed the 66th floor exit, "but the elevators are too exposed. There's cameras on every floor, and they can just shut down the cars."
"We'll manage," said Ifalna. She met Lucrecia's gaze as though to confer her own certainty. She'd noticed: Lucrecia could manage stairs, but everything else threatened to overwhelm her.
Aeris tired first. Ifalna carried her for a while, and then passed her to Lucrecia when she herself began to flag. Sephiroth led the way, alert for the sounds of anyone else in the stairwell. He'd halt them sometimes to wait until someone had passed from one floor to the next below them, but for the most part they were alone. In a building this big, most people used the elevators.
"Where are we going from here?" Lucrecia asked as they descended.
"There's a train station in the basement level," said Ifalna. "That should get us away."
"And then?"
Ifalna met her gaze instead of answering, which told Lucrecia she didn't know. The plan was just to get away, nothing else.
As a plan, it was lacking. But Lucrecia's meticulous plotting against Hojo had come to nothing, so maybe it was better to just seize an opportunity and run with it. Or maybe the problem was her, because being impulsive had never won her anything in the past either.
She hoped it was a curse she wouldn't bring down on them now.
When they reached the first floor, Ifalna tried her key card on the exit. It didn't work. Neither did Lucrecia's.
On the floor above them, the door opened, and boots sounded on the stairs.
"They noticed," said Ifalna.
Aeris's arms tightened around Lucrecia's neck. Sephiroth's hand fell to the hilt of his sword.
It was Ifalna who stepped back the way they had come. As the soldiers appeared on the stairs, her hands moved, and a powerful Aero spell knocked all of them off their feet before they could fire a shot. Sephiroth darted forward and tore a key card from one man's belt.
They burst out of the stairwell into the lobby, and Ifalna and Sephiroth both hesitated. If either of them had ever seen this floor, it was once, when they were first brought into the building. They knew of the train station, but they didn't know where it was.
It felt like a lifetime ago that Lucrecia had been a free woman. Her memories of her commute were like a dream. But she had them.
"This way," she said, taking the lead. On the far side of the lobby were the escalators down into the station.
They broke into a run as the stairwell door opened behind them, the soldiers not far behind. The lobby security guards peeled away from their posts to join. Bullets whizzed past and Aeris screamed before someone shouted to hold fire, they wanted them alive.
They hurtled down the escalators, momentarily breaking line-of-sight with their pursuit. Just lose us here, Lucrecia thought desperately. This wasn't a plan. They might have made it to the station, but Shinra wouldn't let the trains leave with fugitives on them.
Lucrecia passed Aeris to Ifalna over the turnstile. No one stopped them from jumping it. Boots sounded loud against the concrete in their wake.
There was a train waiting at the platform, the sign overhead indicating it would depart in 6 minutes. The doors stood open in invitation. They burst into the nearest car, and none of the handful of passengers so much as glanced at them.
"Fan out!" a man shouted behind them. "They can't have gone far." Had he not seen them? Shouldn't he have seen them? They hadn't been far ahead.
Don't look, she thought. She and Ifalna crouched down below the windows of the train car. Sephiroth positioned himself just beside its open door. The passengers paid them no attention, as though they weren't even there.
Was this even real? Maybe she had sunken fully into her imagination, picturing for herself the escape she'd long desired. Her breath in her chest felt far away, shallow.
Ifalna laid a hand on her shoulder.
A red light began flashing inside the car, startling all of them, including the other passengers.
"Type A Security Alert!! Unidentified passengers suspected. A search of all cars will be conducted!"
A man seated not far from them groaned. "Seriously? What is this, another system test?"
Lucrecia exchanged glances with Ifalna, finding a shared confusion in her face. Weren't they behaving suspiciously?
A minute passed, and another announcement stated they had locked down one car and were proceeding to the next. Sephiroth joined them.
"They're going car-by-car. Maybe we can stay ahead of it."
"And when we get to the end?" Ifalna wondered.
"Duck out, double back," he proposed. The doors were still open. They'd be exposed on the platform, but maybe their luck would hold. Maybe no one would see them.
They started moving towards the front of the train. After a few cars, a woman finally glanced up at them, but their passage earned them no more than a faint frown. Their pace was quick, but not frantic. In their lab coats, they looked like employees. Employees who had for some reason brought their children to work, but it was odd, not suspicious.
The forward car was empty. Lucrecia didn't know the day, but it was the middle of the afternoon. Any rush of salaried employees working 9-5 wouldn't come for hours. There was no crowd to hide them, and a glance confirmed soldiers standing alert on the platform outside. They hesitated.
The door opened into the driver's compartment, and the engineer motioned them inside. "In here. They won't search in here."
The intercom told them the search had entered the car behind them. There wasn't time to interrogate his motives; they piled into the small compartment with him. He shut the door and motioned for them to crouch down beneath the windows. Ifalna sank back against the wall, closing her eyes.
"Mom!?" Aeris whispered sharply.
A red stain began to blossom through the white of Ifalna's lab coat. None of them had noticed it against her dress, under the flashing red lights.
"It's just a graze," Ifalna murmured.
It was more than a graze. Lucrecia thought of the blood smudging the basement floor. Nothing left of him but that.
"Damn," the engineer whispered, glancing down at them. He looked over his shoulder. "There's a first aid kit in the forward car. As soon as they clear out--"
The search moved into the forward car, and all of them fell silent. Lucrecia balled up the end of Ifalna's lab coat and pressed it into the wound. She winced, but didn't make a sound.
The minutes ticked by under the flashing lights as the soldiers searched the otherwise empty car with a painful thoroughness, as if they could be hiding beneath the seats or in the overhead rack.
At last the flashing stopped. The intercom inside the driver's compartment crackled to life, advising him that he was clear to depart. He closed the doors, and the train at last pulled out of the station.
The engineer opened the door back into the car and helped them carry Ifalna to a row of seats. Sephiroth grabbed the first aid kit off the wall, but he didn't seem to know what to do with it. Unthinking, Lucrecia held her hand out for it.
In her university days, she had entertained the idea of going into medicine for the length of a single summer. It was a field with prestige, of course, but Lucrecia had wanted to do something bigger than healing one person at a time. She had wanted to be a part of cutting edge research, to make some grand discovery that would change the world.
Would things have turned out better if she had chosen to curb her ambitions? Or would she have just disappointed more people in a more mundane fashion?
The bullet had torn through too much flesh to be called a graze, but it hadn't hit anything vital. Lucrecia cleaned the wound, reached for the surgical thread, and paused. There was no anesthetic in the kit.
"It needs stitches," she told Ifalna. "This is going to hurt."
"I'll manage," said Ifalna. She held out a hand for support, and it was Sephiroth who took it. Aeris stood just behind him, eyes wide, hand fisted in his shirt. The three of them knew something of going through these moments together. While Lucrecia had suffered her confinement alone, they had endured Hojo's scrutiny together.
Lucrecia worked as quickly as she could, never glancing at Ifalna's face. A professional would have done neater stitching, but it would do. She cleaned it again and taped a bandage over the wound. Ifalna relaxed slightly as she finished, letting out a breath.
"...is Mom gonna be okay?" Aeris asked.
"I think so," said Lucrecia. The sight of how much red had soaked into the lab coat warred with her knowledge of how much blood the human body could survive losing. Ifalna looked pale, but she always looked pale. Her heart rate and breathing felt normal.
Lucrecia wiped her bloody hands on her own coat and stood, letting Aeris move close to her mother. Ifalna gave her daughter a wan smile. Still conscious and aware.
"How far are you going?" the engineer asked, and Lucrecia started. He offered her a bottle of water. She opened it, rinsed her hands, and passed the rest to Ifalna.
"I don't know," Lucrecia answered. Where could they go? Who could hide them? "As far as we can."
The engineer nodded. "This line goes as far as the Sector 5 slums. There's security at some of the stations close to Shinra facilities, but not that one."
"...why are you helping us?" she asked him finally.
He shrugged. "They told us they'd be implementing these security protocols with how things are heating up with Wutai, but you all don't look like spies to me."
A conflict brewing with Wutai. Lucrecia's eyes fell on Sephiroth's katana. Was that what Shinra was preparing him for? They meant to send her son, a child, to fight in the coming war?
She wasn't sure if he had killed the scientists whose coats they wore. A part of her was perfectly satisfied with it if he had. Did they not deserve it? Did Sephiroth not deserve to revenge himself against the people who'd held him prisoner all his life?
Another part of her understood that it was a tragedy if he'd been able to. Her son had never been granted the innocence that was meant to accompany childhood.
"Of course we're not spies," Lucrecia said.
The engineer eyed her, and when she offered no further explanation, he ventured slowly, "A lot of powerful men in that building. Probably some that don't treat their families too well."
"Mm," she said. If he wanted to surmise that they were fleeing abusive husbands, then in her case, it wasn't so far from the truth.
It was absurd that he should have so much power. It was just given to him, while she had always had to claw for any bit of it. She hadn't escaped him under her own power, but she had escaped him, for now.
All they had was a destination, a place where they'd be dumped out and left to fend for themselves. If Lucrecia knew nothing about the Sector 5 slums, then neither did the others.
But it was Shinra's city, and Shinra would come looking for them.
By the time they reached the end of the line, they were the only remaining passengers. The engineer stepped out to help them get Ifalna up and out the door. He apologized for not being able to take them farther, but Lucrecia encouraged him to keep his schedule. A delay at this station might draw Shinra's attention sooner. They thanked him, he went back inside his compartment, and the train pulled away.
It ought to have been late afternoon, but with the plate overhead, the sky was dark, like a brewing storm. Some light shone far off at its edges, but everything nearer was cold and electric. Lucrecia struggled to remember what sunlight felt like; even before, she'd worked such long hours that she'd rarely seen it.
The platform was empty. A mismatched assortment of concrete slabs and chain-link fence partitioned it away from piles of scrap and garbage. A dumping ground for things Shinra didn't want.
Sephiroth, Ifalna, and Aeris weren't that, but maybe they could hide amidst it. With Ifalna's weight across her shoulders, Lucrecia knew she had to take them from here. She took a step.
"This way," Aeris said suddenly, tugging on her coat. She pointed to a gap in the fence, away from what seemed to be the main path away from the station.
Why not? None of them knew where they were going, so one direction was as good as any.
The children pulled the opening wider so Lucrecia could help Ifalna through it. The path on the other side continued through an abandoned construction yard. They were moving nearer to the gap between the plates, and Lucrecia wondered if Aeris had chosen the direction because it was the nearest glimpse of daylight.
Ifalna leaned on her more and more, but she didn't really seem so heavy. Had Hojo not been feeding his precious specimens either, or had she refused it? Lucrecia hooked an arm under Ifalna's knees and lifted the other woman into her arms. Ifalna made a soft noise of surprise, and Lucrecia marvelled at how little burden she was.
Beyond an old warehouse rose the roof of an actual building. A church, Lucrecia realized as they rounded a pile of scrap, not fully in tact but impressively so compared to the broken shells of the buildings that neighbored it.
Lucrecia didn't realize they had all stopped to stare at it until Sephiroth went ahead up the steps to push open the door. She followed him inside.
The interior felt immense, especially after the confines of her cell. From the high ceilings to the broken floorboards, there was nothing sterile or efficient about it. Despite the damage to the masonry, not a single window was broken, and distant sunlight through their colored glass threw patterns across the floor.
Lucrecia had always disdained religion. Unscientific, superstitious nonsense. The gods that people invented only obscured the wonders of the Planet they were meant to explain. They kept people ignorant and incurious.
Though it was deserted now, this church had been designed as a place for people to gather and sing the praises of things they never expected to understand.
The exact opposite of the lab, something she found oddly comforting in the moment. When she was younger, she had always felt out-of-place on the rare occasion she stepped into a place of worship, but for that same reason, it felt like a place the likes of Hojo could never touch.
A silly notion. Superstitious. But in a practical sense, it could be a refuge for them. It could shelter them while they worked out what to do, and while it had no mystical power to repel Shinra, it certainly wouldn't be the first place to look for them.
"I can hear it," Ifalna murmured, relief easing the strain from her features.
"Hear what?" Sephiroth asked, glancing around.
"The Planet, silly," said Aeris.
The Planet? The Cetra were meant to hear its voice, but Ifalna had written of it only in passing. Lucrecia had swallowed her questions, knowing Ifalna was subject to enough scientific curiosity over what she was. Had the Planet led them here? To a church?
Lucrecia couldn't identify which god this place had been built to, but surely it was centuries since anyone built temples to the Planet itself.
She could puzzle it out later, when they were permitted the time for idle curiosities. She carried Ifalna to the nearest pew and laid her down across the bench.
"I'm going to have a look around," she said, "and see what we might have to work with here."
Doors on either side of the altar led into the rear of the church, and somehow it while was passing through them that it really hit her: she was free. She could do something as simple as decide to walk into the next room.
The door fell shut behind her and she took a few steps to lean against the stone wall for support. The urgency of their escape was waning, the tension of its moments no longer propping her up. She was out, she could choose--anything.
It was a burden she hadn't born in years. Much as she had despaired of her prison, in some ways it had been easy. If she could do nothing, then there was no expectation to do anything. She could wallow in the guilt of her past mistakes, but she couldn't make more of them.
Now, if she wanted to, she could turn around and walk back into the room where Sephiroth waited, and she could try to be a mother to him. And she would fail. In some way, she knew she would fail.
She thought of his hand fisted in her shirt. He needed her to try anyway.
There was a storage room off to her right, crammed with stacked chairs and cleaning supplies. The sight of a broom leaning neatly against the wall made her realize that for all its state of disrepair, the church wasn't dirty enough to be completely abandoned. Someone came here periodically to sweep the floors and wipe the dust from the pews.
Would the sort of person who did that be likely to turn them over to Shinra?
A staircase led up into the gallery, the sort of staircase you saw women descending in old movies, taking their lovers' hands as they reached the bottom. The building was grand enough, it could have served as a movie set in its heyday. Vincent would probably have known.
The handful of other side rooms had probably served as offices, once. An old cot rested in one, but it was so worn-out, Lucrecia suspected it would collapse if any of them tried to sleep on it. She found a few blankets instead and carried them back into the sanctuary.
Ifalna and Aeris hadn't moved, but Sephiroth had pulled away from them as though he'd been about to come looking for her. Her heart swelled.
"We're alone here, for the moment," she said as she joined them. "It does seem like the place has a caretaker."
"That's probably all right," Ifalna reasoned. "Shinra won't be advertising our escape to the public."
"No," Lucrecia agreed. "It will be a task for the Turks now." Would Hojo even want her back, or just order her disposal? How ironic, if she were killed by Vincent's replacement.
"The Turks?" said Aeris.
Ifalna reached out to brush Aeris's bangs from her face. "Don't worry about them. We're safe here."
Aeris was young enough to believe her mother's assurances. Sephiroth's glance told Lucrecia that he wasn't.
"We'll spend the night here," Lucrecia said. "In the morning, we'll figure out the rest."
Ifalna nodded her agreement and lay back. Lucrecia's gaze fell to her bandaged side. Moving on in the morning would be too soon; Ifalna needed somewhere to rest and recover.
"Once I've rested, I'll be able to heal it some myself," Ifalna told her. "Don't worry."
"You're sure?"
Ifalna nodded. "But thank you, for looking after me."
"It was nothing. I just... I'm grateful you didn't leave me behind."
"Of course not. I promised we'd leave together."
As if it was that simple. "It's a little strange, actually talking," Lucrecia admitted. "We never really had the chance before."
"I know," said Ifalna. "It all feels surreal."
It was surreal, and a little awkward. As often as she'd imagined it, she'd never really had Ifalna's eyes on her as they spoke. "...I'll let you rest," she decided, and turned to her son. Was that any less surreal? They hadn't spoken in years, not even on paper.
"...your braid's coming loose," she observed. "Would you like me to fix it for you?"
Sephiroth hesitated. "Okay," he decided.
They sat down together on another pew. Lucrecia gently pulled the tie from the ends of his hair and combed her fingers through it. It was smooth and silky, like she remembered, but it hadn't been long enough for a proper braid the last time they'd seen each other.
"I always dreamt about doing this for you," she admitted. "It was one of the few things my mother did for me, when I was young."
Sephiroth was quiet for a long moment. "I know," he said. "You told me."
"Did I?" she wondered. She didn't remember getting the chance, but it had been so long, and her memories got tangled with her imaginings.
"When you come in the dreams," he said.
Lucrecia's hands stilled. "You mean... Are you saying you had the same dreams?"
"...yes. Sometimes." He sat very still, but there was a hesitation in his breathing, uncertainty over whether to say more, whether he'd already said too much.
"I thought they were just dreams," Lucrecia whispered. "You look exactly like I pictured... It was just a coincidence."
"Maybe that's all," said Sephiroth, like he thought it was what she wanted him to say.
Lucrecia let go his hair and shifted to look him in the eye. "Maybe not," she said. "I'm sorry... It's confusing. But you're a special boy, you know. You can do things other people can't. Maybe it was real."
"But it's weird. Right?"
"It's not typical," Lucrecia conceded. "But that doesn't make it bad. All this time, I... I wanted to see you. I wanted you to know I still thought of you, I still loved you. If that really reached you, if it wasn't just in my head, then I'm so grateful."
Sephiroth's hands were clasped in his lap, his thumbs fidgeting. "...I wanted it to be you," he said. "Professor Gast used to ask me if I heard people talking to me, who weren't there. But Professor Hojo... he never asked me that."
Lucrecia laid her hand atop his. "We'll figure it out together. Okay? I know that there's so much you can do, and now you'll really have the chance to do it."
She wanted him to find his potential, and then whatever he chose to do with it, she would support him. That was what a mother was meant to do, wasn't it? Surely it wouldn't be hard, just to support him. Just to love him. She could do that.
Could she do it unselfishly?
Sephiroth nodded. "Okay," he said.
Lucrecia managed a smile and sat back, reaching for his hair again. All she had to do was just love him.