𝘰𝘯𝘦 𝘪𝘴 𝙘𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙙 ,

           𝐢. 𝐝𝐨𝐬𝐬𝐢𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐢. 𝐢𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐥 𝐢𝐢𝐢. 𝐭𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐯. 𝐜𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭

𝐚 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐲 𝐢𝐧 : the tools and victims of empire, violence as subjugation, war, and war as the history in the room, innocence neutered from birth, alienation & othering, carrying the sins of your father, the inexorable draw of unseen forces and the struggle against them, a doomed existence, a martyrdom of sorts, being in and of the wake, living in the margins of womanhood, and the yearning for normalcy.

                                                                             blogroll : @openness

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𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫. @1stchild : “ fear can make you strong, sometimes. ”

𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐫𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐦𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐚𝐝. you may think that earth carries that burden but it is the ocean that is made up of layers of decay and new life blooming within it, like in whalefalls and the desiccated remains of shipwrecks and planes that crumpled into the water mid - flight. this is because water preserves tissue for much longer than soil. it just can’t let go. neither can she. the human body is mostly made up of water, so it stands to reason that her cells hold on to these dead and decaying memories, even as they turn black and bloat to two times their original size. with time, sephiroth has grown heavy with this immense weight.

japan is hotter than home, which she hardly thought was possible, and it is surrounded on all sides by the rising sea level. everything is half - melted and streaked with shades of blue and white from the unforgiving midday sun. since 2nd impact, water covers even more of their little planet. sephiroth thinks of the miles of land that were formerly coastlines on every continent, now buried under hundreds of feet of glacial melt. whole cities have been preserved in that blue amber at the exact moment of their collapse. this one is blue, too, and ageless, like the sky and the ocean, which are becoming increasingly similar in their vastness.

the pale face looking at her is free of all affect. it isn’t unlike looking in a mirror, but one that fails to replicate her likeness because the surface is uneven or twisted up in some way. too many aspects are off: rei’s eyes are larger, her mouth smaller, her whole body stunted in its growth, almost; her features are pinched into the center of her face like a doll, one of those porcelain ones dressed in ruffles and with marbles for eyes. yet, something remains below the surface that is, in some way, too familiar to ignore. like if you plated their tissue and placed it under a microscope, the images would be identical. set in an otherwise impassive mask, nocturnal eyes narrow. what was done to this girl? something like a chill skitters across the surfaces of sephiroth’s arms and neck when rei opens her mouth. the room is sweltering from the heat exhaust emitting from the servers lining the walls.

“ — are you afraid? ” it sounds like an accusation. you shouldn’t have told me that, it says. don’t admit your human weakness.

“ you shouldn’t be. ” her voice is low and thin from disuse. only speak when spoken to: father’s most important lesson. they have no use for a child who acts out of turn. rei knows this as well as she herself does, maybe this is why her sudden insight rattled the older girl like a dropped shell. sephiroth sniffles, straightening her spine as if to highlight the discrepancy in their sizes. “ there is no worse feeling in the world than fear. it makes you dangerous. irrational. ” years ago, she slit the throats of women and children because she thought she saw the devil in their eyes, but it feels like yesterday, and she must live with this feeling forever, now. the graves she dug were shallow because she had to do it with her bare hands. even if that island hadn’t crumbled into the sea with the rest of the american coasts, they would have been exhumed and eaten by beasts within weeks, if not days. now it is the water that carries their long - dead bodies. it is unclear if this is an improvement or a detriment. her body is laden with them either way.

she could bridge the gap between them, place a comforting hand on rei’s shoulder, prove that they are both real. instead, she retreats inward. arms cross over her chest and her eyes drop to the hangar floor. “ you don’t need to be strong. you just have to live. ”

𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫. @holyshe : “ you are not alone. ”

𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐝𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞. 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐝𝐢𝐞. someone told her this in a dream. the voice had no body and neither did she, floating somewhere in the space between heaven and the hard ground, which seemed, rather suddenly, quite similar. they were both a green gossamer and smelled of damp earth, like the air inside a cavern, spore - tinged. maybe it was a woman speaking to sephiroth, but she couldn’t be sure, because she can never discern where the voice was coming from; it was almost as though it were inside her. she thinks this should frighten her, but she has grown used to them, these other selves who give birth to themselves in sleep and die in waking.

at this time of day, the church is deserted. not many people seem to come here, anyway, other than the elderly and its self - appointed caregiver. aerith, too, exists in this in - between. frayed pink skirts weave between the broken or collapsed floorboards, in the gaps of which are bursting with new life: tender shoots of freshly - sprouted bulbs, peeking through the soil, giving the impression of children hiding behind their mother’s silhouette, poking their heads out only when they think their guest is not looking. if sephiroth squints from where she stands, she can see that there is an afterimage of aerith that is several degrees off, either at an angle or moved slightly to the left, so it does not lay perfectly over her physical body, the one that is here now. this imprint is pale and lacks the opacity of something solid and real. it is something like a ghost, but she is very much alive. which time this image belongs to is a mystery, then. instinctively, she looks down at herself, opening a fist and then closing it again, searching for that same temporal disconnect. her skin sloughs off until her palm is pink and featureless. afraid of aerith seeing this, maybe, she quickly tucks her hand behind her back and against the support beam, her torso interposed between the flesh mid - metamorphosis and the younger girl.

a red thread connects them. it is a fool’s errand to attempt to hide anything from aerith, but still she tries, ashamed of her own flesh. of course she gets caught. tipping the rusted watering can back upright, the girl is facing her and thrusting her back into the light with a tug on her forearm. her words rub up against sephiroth’s cheek. they bring with them the warmth of a human body, or maybe the sun. there are spindly arms around her middle and a head tipped against her chest, which she had long ago thought to be cold and unresponsive as a stuffed bird. when was the last time someone held her like this? a mother’s hands on her shoulders, or pressed palm - down against her quivering back, telling sephiroth that she’s sorry, that they cannot live like this anymore, she has to stay strong for all of them. i am not strong, she wanted to say but had no voice. this remains true.

her saliva has turned to ash in her mouth, thick and sticking to the backs of her teeth. words get caught in this like insects in amber. still, she reciprocates the touch, even though her limbs move as if they were disconnected at the joints as they come to gently halo aerith. the fleshless hand thrums with feeling. too - bright eyes list in reminisce; sephiroth remembers placing a gauze - wrapped hand on the crown of aerith’s little head and lying to her, telling her that they would be fine. she was young too but knew that this was false. the shadows told her so. they were very good about warning her of the misfortunes that were to come, of which there were many.

one hand stiffens, fingers curling into the worn - out fabric of the dress that doesn’t quite fit right, like it had been passed down from an elder sibling. something swells in her, redolent with the blood flowing between them. the younger of the two would cry, sometimes, when they were children. for all the scientists would do to her mother or sephiroth herself, aerith was usually spared— they poked at her and kept her under their watchful eye, but she was not flayed like them, cut open and sewn back up again and again— it was not out of fear for herself that she would weep, like most children. when her big eyes would well up with fat tears, the kind that would roll down her ruddy cheeks like marbles and pit - pat onto the collar of her dress, it was because she felt their pain as if it was her own.

things are very much the same as they were. they are older now, but only just. sephiroth was left behind and her heart became a pool of stagnant water, like the puddles that gather in the pock marks in roads after heavy rain. ‘ i have changed very little. ’ she thinks. her head has grown too heavy and falls towards aerith’s crown. it smells of topsoil and a powdery flower and she could drown in the scent. ‘ i am a motherless child. ’

finally, her voice returns. fawn - small, it tumbles out. “ it’s funny, like no time has passed at all between us. ” there is something of a smile in sephiroth’s speech, though it remains wounded. it bleeds at the corners of her mouth. a tiny shake of her head unsettles her overgrown bangs so that they get caught on her damp eyelashes. “ but now, you’re the one trying to comfort me. ”

time passes. years, maybe. she doesn’t let aerith go. if it were up to her, she never would. “ thank you. ”

𝐚 𝐛𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐬𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐬 𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐢𝐣𝐢𝐧𝐠. @heartinhands , from medraut : “ i don’t like the way ishgard talks about you. ”

𝐰𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐮𝐩 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠, sephiroth discovered that she had teeth growing from her back.  she’d tried craning her neck against her half - flattened goosedown pillow and found that there was a tugging against her nape when she tried to extend too far, like her hair had wrapped itself around something in her sleep. already, this was strange; she’d stopped wearing anything with buttons or clasps on the backside years ago, sticking to shifts and formless pullovers in the pale linens that line her small, modest wardrobe. sitting up, she slipped from bed and made her way to the mirror in the corner of the room, pushing the stone wash basin aside with her foot and turning away from the reflective surface.

her fingers wandered, searching for whatever her hair had caught on, and her fingertips brushed over several spots that were hard and protruding. unlike a scab, these were smooth. the body seemed to have no need for scabs, anyway,  maybe it is disgusted by them or sees them as redundant,  because that step gets skipped whenever something manages to wound sephiroth.  curiosity seizes her like any girl. there is no excitement like that which ignites when she lets the blade graze her, or holds her arm too close to an open flame. but where her heart remembers the electricity produced by these encounters, her body remains unmoved. no sooner has her skin split or twist does it thread itself back together with a neat suture, and hours later, not even the puffy flesh of a scar remains. with her back facing the wash basin mirror, face turned over her shoulder, that made the discovery of these abnormalities even stranger. what could have happened to make her body remember the genetic sequences for teeth, of all things? gingerly, she caressed the new pieces of herself, sticking out from the quiet brown of her flesh at random, considering what to do with them. someone should have thought a little harder when they built her. they’d put her together all wrong.

( 🐦‍🔥 ) : how does your muse reinvent themselves after being destroyed?

sephiroth is, frankly, in eternal flux. she is always teetering on the very edge of destruction and is left trying to pick up the pieces before they fall. her body, unreal and never really hers, is a lesson in both fluidity and futility. between her life falling apart time and time again (losing her mother, losing gast— who represented a sort of ideal for how a paternal figure could be— then losing aerith and ifalna, meeting and losing glenn, the rhadore mission, everything that happened in wutai, angeal forcing his way into her life and then leaving as soon as things got too hard, genesis, the list goes on) and the both physical and psychological distress caused by jenova’s presence, she feels rigged to explode. one push that’s too strong and she could completely fall apart.

it is a miracle that she can function, ever. she only can by refusing to face that there is something horribly wrong with her. part of this can definitely be attributed to her fear of hojo and his ilk; she has a well - placed distrust of them and knows that if they are made aware of her abnormal symptoms, they will only torment her further. whatever freedom she has now will completely disappear in favor of keeping her under close observation and conducting even more invasive experiments on her. better to ignore her own suffering, then.

the simple response is that she just does not reinvent herself. she lacks the faculties to do so, even as her body and mind undergo extreme change almost daily. sephiroth struggles to hold herself together and tries to keep pushing on without acknowledging what is actually happening to her. when that doesn’t work, she collapses in on herself. she gives up. she is prone to bouts of agoraphobia and isolating herself, refusing to eat, either curled up in bed or obsessively reading / watching television until her eyes burn, plagued by auditory and visual hallucinations, and typically cannot get out of these episodes without external force interfering. this used to be genesis and angeal. when they can no longer act as the hand pulling her out from under the waves, she is a lost cause. the tomb closes. this was a long time coming, anyway.

( 🐐 ) : what has your muse achieved just to prove they could?

i’ve spoken before about how she truly does not have much of an ego— when she was younger, she could be a brat, sure, but that mostly would come from either not being used to interacting with people (note that how we see her navigate conversations in canon isn’t quite how i see her speaking, especially in ec, when she has literally never even left the labs ... she struggles a great deal with communication, verbal and nonverbal.), or her being overly defensive. this is someone who was never properly socialized, even if she typically does not mean anyone any harm.

that being said, she is not beyond acting out. sephiroth is, at the end of the day, very young (only in her early to mid 20s by the end of the wutai war), and rather emotionally immature. there have been times where she does things, advisable or not, purely because she had the means to do them. testing both your own limits and those of others is something all children must do. it is something like a game that she plays with her handlers and the scientists, and even genesis and angeal: if i do this, how will you respond? can you really stop me? she has to find her fun somewhere.

breaking equipment and company facilities by not holding back (which she nearly always is.), talking back to people technically above her in the company hierarchy (hojo and the other executives, lazard, the turks, or even rufus), pushing responsibilities onto lower - ranking officers, starting to smoke when she was a teenager in wutai, sneaking into places that are off - limits, injuring genesis in friendly spars or otherwise using excessive force in training— these are all ways that she expresses what little autonomy she has.

( 🦋 ) : what moment changed your muse so completely they can’t go back?

is there one moment in her life that is a dividing point? something with a clear before and after? if i have to choose, i believe that it’s the rhadore mission and its utter collapse.

this was sephiroth’s first actual deployment (with all the stories about shinra’s golden child that had made their way into the news cycle and were gossiped about by other SOLDIERs and personnel having been pure propaganda) and the first time that she was in an environment that was not so aggressively managed and hermetically sealed from the real world. she is outside, breathing fresh air and touching the packed earth and the trunks of the pink - blossomed trees; smelling the mako springs and the decomposing matter in lakes and streams, and the salt sting of the ocean; seeing plants that are not the waxy - leaved ficuses and arums that dot the halls of hq or sit neglected on the desks of the scientists. the stink of antiseptic and nitrile is finally gone from her nostrils and clothes. while overwhelming and at first completely unreal, these were all welcome changes.

this was also her first time interacting at length with people outside of those who she grew up around, the majority of which treating her not as a person, but as an object belonging to the company— first glenn and his team, and then, briefly, critically, rosen. in her interactions with them, all we see is that she wants little more than to be accepted by other people. she misspeaks and does the wrong things, but sephiroth wants to earn the respect and love of these people and for them to not leave her. she considers them her friends. certainly before this she had formed a very close relationship with ifalna and aerith, but that was still within the confines of shinra’s cage, which colored their interactions with a sort of dream - like quality. this felt more tangible, like if she tried, really tried, she could get them to stay with her forever. but rosen begs her to kill him and glenn defects shortly after with lucia and matt in tow and sephiroth is alone again.

isolation is made more difficult after she knows what it’s like to have friends, and to have people who genuinely cared for her well - being. but, isolation is then the only way to keep her safe from that kind of heartbreak; she closes. rumors spread of her being unsociable and stuck - up, but really, she is only trying to protect her tender heart. no - one can get too close.

rhadore, too, made very clear to her the goals and values of shinra. despite them keeping sephiroth very insulated from the outside world, i think she knew very little about what shinra actually does until she must experience it firsthand. their willingness to not only uproot but slaughter an entire people just because they think that they may be able to construct a new reactor in rhadore (which sephiroth goes along with because that is all that she has been taught, that she must kill to survive and that every person is a potential threat) becomes, to her, untenable. the entire island sinks into the sea and thousands of years of history disappear with it, and for what? shinra got nothing from the mission but thousands of dollars wasted on personnel and field supplies. in the chopper above the water, her hands are soaked in the blood of someone who she would have done anything to be friends with. she was complicit in this, child or not. how is anyone meant to recover from that?

the mission is later classified. sephiroth is coached to keep her mouth shut during interviews and press conferences and eventually, reporters stop asking questions in favor of the new conflict in wutai. she still sees him, sometimes. mostly in dreams, but sometimes while awake, she feels her hand on the hilt of her sword and how it got hot and wet and rosen’s eyes were wet, too, either irritation from the smoke or because his family was dead or because he was dying. she does not ask if the gods will forgive her because she knows that she is beyond redemption.

( 🦉 ) : what does your muse notice that others consistently miss?

she is remarkably observant— to a fault, you could argue. some things are better left unseen. having been raised in such a sterile environment, where even the slightest aberration from the norm could indicate that she was due for some operation or another, or that hojo may handle her more roughly that day, or even that she may be left blissfully alone; this taught sephiroth to become hypervigilant and aware of every shift in her immediate surroundings. jenova’s influence, too, heightens this. it is an apex predator: a hunter. perhaps more importantly, its primary means of hunting prey is to mimic behaviors its quarry sees as non - threatening in order to insert itself into human colonies before using these same mimetic tools to drive its prey into either killing itself, or letting jenova sublimate it with little resistance.

sephiroth, unaware of jenova’s overreaching authority over her body and its senses, is simply in tune with these minute shifts in her environment in order to protect herself. from the way someone is carrying themselves to the tightness of their jaw, or a change in their demeanor— none of this goes without her noticing. this doesn’t necessarily mean that she knows what someone is thinking or feeling, because not only is she human, but her being neuroatypical makes it difficult to fully understand the meaning behind the minutiae of nonverbal behaviors. she can just see them and attempt to weather herself for the storm.

it is these powers of observation that also make her near - unbeatable in battle, as she is always moving reflexively, responding to every tell, no matter how small.

( 🐞 ) : how does your muse cope with being overlooked or underestimated?

the idea of her, of all people, being underestimated sounds ridiculous. isn’t she a war hero? hasn’t everyone the world over heard of her military triumphs? (ignoring, of course, that these have largely been fabricated.) in truth, it happens constantly, certainly within shinra. anyone who is not blinded by being in such close proximity to a superstar will know that sephiroth not only has no real power in the company (i.e., her position as a general is in title alone, no SOLDIERs report directly to her, and she cannot issue any orders), but that she is frequently regarded by the higher - ups as little more than a mascot. her and stamp have an awful lot in common. this leads to company shareholders and figures like the president treating her not as the formidable force that she is, or even like a person, but more like a symbol of status. she is ornamental. objects only hold as much power as you imbue them with, and in the presence of the people who own her, sephiroth is stripped of whatever weight she is given when she’s being trotted out in military parades or when her portrait is plastered over every enlistment poster on the continent.

how does she cope with this? barely, and with gritted teeth. on good days, she’s all but given up, because that makes the indignity of it all easier to handle. it isn’t that she is arrogant or believes herself to be worthy of more than the shit she’s given, because that would require her to be a real person, which she isn’t. we see in her interactions with glenn’s team that she does not necessarily see her unmatched physical and technical skill as anything special, and even when she would spar with genesis and angeal, she enjoyed the act of pushing them and having them give her all that emotional and physical intensity more than beating them; sephiroth really has no ego to speak of. she simply feeds off of the people around her. a parasite to the end.

perhaps afraid of the consequences, or deeming it too much trouble to act out, she keeps her mouth shut and bears it. it isn’t as though she’s ever been treated with respect, anyway.