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 & @manipulation & @michaelslight

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𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭. @bogachs : “ my whole life is a performance. ”

𝐢𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞, 𝐢𝐭 𝐢𝐬 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐰𝐨𝐦𝐛. or, it attempts to simulate the feeling. velvet curtains are very good at blocking sunlight. they also insulate,  same as the heavy woven rugs that hang from the walls here,  in deep reds and blues and sometimes violets,  which helps to keep the rooms from becoming too frigid.  this is a fool’s errand.  the chill of snezhnaya is cruel and penetrating. blood has never reached her lips;  they are dark and cold as a corpse,  same as the toes curled in her boots,  or her fingers,  even wrapped in gloves lined with the down of hares. leather - bound heels knock into the dark wood paneling on the far wall, a quiet thunk - thunk, one after the other, arms crossing tightly over the soft swell of her chest, as if by withdrawing and turning further inwards, the woman may conjure up some of her own body heat. she remains glacial. there is no warmth left in her bones.

smoke coats the back of sephiroth’s throat. if she opened her mouth wide,  there would be a layer of black sediment there,  she’s convinced. all her insides must be caked with the stuff, inky and viscid and rotting.  as a child, no older than fifteen, it had been easy to get her hands on these, which the adults around her seemed to rely on as much as food and drink. they were not made for children, so it caused her a great excite when she squirreled some away one evening and learned that breaking protocol is its own kind of reward. that first inhale hurt but no more than the hypodermal needles that they jam between the knobs of her spine. a girl’s trick:  ruin yourself before they do.  that way,  you’ll be left alone. and to be alone is a blessing. isolation is:  freedom?  liberation?  she’s not sure,  but moments of peace away from the white glow of the operating lights and the big syringes are taken for what they are,  which is pure bliss. 

now, she can burn a cigarette down to the filter and only want more. this is how one knows they are no longer a child. incense, heavy with tannic, acrid notes, collides with the tar stink of her cigarette. this room is too small. maybe it would be fine for one person, but the regrator alone is many people, his presence stifling as sunday mass, and sephiroth’s whole body is wound up tight as a spring from this sudden proximity. it isn’t often she’s put on his security detail. he can handle himself, perhaps, or would rather be alone— she doesn’t know which and thinks it probably doesn’t matter. either way, they’re stuck here together. a pale smudge, like someone had sketched her likeness but then rubbed their palm over the drawing until all the lines became grey and undefined, she does not look at pantalone, but her own shadow. it blinks in and out of reality; the lamp on the table between them is weak and keeps putting itself out before, almost sheepish, reigniting. they stayed this way, wrapped in uneasy silence, for a very long time.

it is he who shatters the quiet. the shards fall at her feet; they cover the mahogany table and refract the light, the pieces get stuck in sephiroth’s hair. her breath gets caught in her throat and sticks there and she lifts her head, looking him plain in the face. it is rare, that kind of honesty. he, perhaps more than the others in his position, so often appears to her as perfectly featureless. she would not be surprised if pantalone had no fingerprints, or any physical features behind his layers of clothing if she saw him in a state of undress; just smooth all the way down, like a doll. maybe he has ball joints, too. this must be by design. it is as though someone had taken him and scrubbed him clean of all affect. if not the tsaritsa herself, she wonders, had he done this to himself, this sterilization? he must be very strong to do this and be so convincing. this is why it catches her by surprise, his admission, and the smile that accompanies it. if she squints, behind pantalone’s dull eyes and cruel mouth is the faintest impression of feeling. just an outline. nothing more.

her face is very cold and numb to the touch when, robotic, her hand returns the cigarette to her mouth. nicotine turns to syrup, sap - like, deep in her veins. she watches the actor before her with measured interest, almost like a veil is in place between them. “ that much is obvious. ”

yes, all of him is a farce. a complete fake. he is many because he has crafted all sorts of faces for himself, they spill out from his pockets and litter the space around him. sephiroth wonders if what is behind all these is a man at all. perhaps this is why he leaves her on edge, more than the rest. a sharp inhale stings the inside of her nose and she is present, snapping to attention, suddenly clairvoyant, “ it strikes me that you would sooner kill yourself than give up this charade. ” airy, sephiroth’s voice flits from her to him, then back again. she hears her own echo. a light flickers on. she is one step closer to understanding. “ is it for you? ” fore and index finger flex, rolling her cigarette between them; slivers of pupil have widened just barely, her eyes that much darker in the cool, artificial light. “ — or—  god? ”

𝐝𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭. @theomakhist , from ardyn : “ most of the time, i have no regrets. ”

𝐬𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐰𝐚𝐭𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐲 𝐠𝐫𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐨𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐫. they happen so fast, and in such multitude that she has no time to close her eyes. they remain, then, in her memory. they grow fat and take up more and more space inside her with each passing moment,  like maggots,  or some kind of parasitic worm. one day sephiroth will be nothing but the replay, that endless loop of the moment of collision, of the scalpel. all that will be left of her is the wound. sometimes, she thinks that she would like nothing more than to make love, but there is a foul smell about her, like death.

for this, it is best to keep to oneself. there is a wide gap between herself and the other imperials that is not meant to be crossed. no touching. only look; eat with your eyes. it comes as a surprise, then, when her quiet is interrupted. pink - rimmed eyes flash up and into the face of her would - be invader when the loud strikes of his heels against the tile halt, and not far from her. the heart, that diseased organ, does not stop, but grows very cold. her face jolts away, and unbidden, her mouth purses into a small frown. the chancellor must be particularly bored if he’s picked her as his prey, she thinks.

the blood on her hands is still wet. they will never be clean again. she can scrub and scrub them in her quarters, or in one of the dark iron sinks in the barracks, but the water never runs clear. they wring, thoughtless, in the space against sephiroth’s stomach, maybe because of the sudden attention from ardyn, but more likely because of the itching on the insides of her wrists and between the delicate bones of her fingers. first it is a faint buzzing under the skin, then comes the sting; a bolt of lightning or maybe a piton struck deep into the tissue of every joint and tendon; it is a white - hot hurt, the kind that sometimes leaves her blind, reeling and dry heaving from the intensity of it all. the pains are only getting worse. sephiroth knows the symptoms now, has seen them in others, none of which who lived for long after diagnosis. daemonification, they call it. long fingers curl tightly into the soft flesh of her palms. she does not look at the chancellor, but at the dark shadow he casts. he’s real, then.

ardyn’s voice comes across as mocking, it always does. he has never been sincere, which makes the contents of his statement all the more baffling to the soldier, who knows very little about men and why they do the things they do. why tell her this if he doesn’t mean it? maybe he can smell her weakness on her like the stench of a dead animal. her heavy head falls to one side, streaking her vision with limp, pale curls. “ what great privilege. ” she remarks and is only half as spiteful as she could be. her eyelids fall like the ingots used to counterbalance ships laden with cargo. she is so tired that if she were to fall asleep now, there’d be no guarantee of her ever waking.

“ — what about the other times? ” one foot is in the water. it would be easy to wade in, to submerge herself fully. insubordination does not frighten her— that would require some respect for authority, which is and always has been absent— but there is, to her, a vague sense that it is better to not humor ardyn more than one ought to. ‘ does it make you sick, the guilt? ’ sephiroth wants to ask. ‘ does it crush you when you lay down to sleep? do you hate yourself for what you’ve done?’ she holds her tongue. it has grown much harder to go against the gods as she once had. easier, then, to lay down and expose the belly, to take what is being offered, even if it is the knife.

sephiroth is a parasite. she is both host and the tapeworm. it is crucial in understanding her character to recognize that she herself has very little that she defines herself by, and she only comes to understand any part of herself through the absorption of attributes from those around her. she is the sum of many parts because jenova is actively feeding on her and exerting its will onto her, who already suffers from the derealization of a child soldier and abuse survivor, who is already so hollow and on the precipice of collapse. she must take and take from others to make up for her own lack. tell her what she is supposed to be, but also give yourself to her, so she can pick your brain and your bones clean for any qualities that would suit her. it is a cycle. sephiroth inherited this. why does jenova never appear as itself, plainly? it is always taking the appearances of others, the mannerisms and voices and lives of others. it does this to its child, too. a snake eats its tail ...

there is an inherently (trans)formative quality to this parasitism as well ... the programmed desire to change your flesh in some irreversible way, to absorb, to make yourself into something new using the objects in your environment. think tetsuo the iron man, titane, crimes of the future. sephiroth believes the flesh is sacred but she alone is not enough. when hollander rebuffs her and does not allow her to offer her tissue for genesis, it is a sense of duty that makes her disturbed by her inability to be a donor, but also the fact that she then cannot become a part of him. she is denied this divine intimacy, and that unsettles her. is this reunion? or something bigger? the caterpillar must eat and eat before it can pupate. already, she had memorized his actions and interests, could recite loveless as well as him even though she never particularly cared for it, and thought of it as childish. consumption was the next step, to reduce them both to sameness, but by the time that was an option, he had hurt her beyond any hope for reconciliation.

all this talk of parasites has, however, a racialized quality. i think of the verbiage used to reference black migration to europe, to america, the images of insects, swarms, disease. the myth of the welfare queen, blackness as a parasitic growth on the american state. the way that the ebola epidemic was callously depicted by the media. the wake! the ship! it is queer, too: queerness, especially black queerness, is regarded as a vector for disease, for corruption and illness. aids/hiv in particular, but the way that pundits speak of being queer (and trans, especially) as a virus that infects children. sephiroth is seen as a contagion not just because of the calamity, but because she is black and transfeminine and therefor a threat to white, heteronormative hegemony. this is made literal through jenova’s infection of the cetra, of the clones, of cloud, of zack ... but also the children taken by the remnants, the epidemic of geostigma.

while i don’t acknowledge ac at all, really, geostigma has always struck me as a crude example of queerness as illness. sephiroth and jenova both— feminized threats who are seen as more pure evils than the masculine corporate entity that gave rise to the current unbearable living conditions for all but the uber - wealthy in - universe ("shinra is not the real enemy," right?)— being rejected by the planet in death and in retaliation spreading disease that seizes control of the minds of those infected, which is a trope often employed in anti - communist horror (invasion of the body snatchers being perhaps the seminal example), is ... tone - deaf, to say the least. and the fact that geostigma seems to primarily infect children and effeminate men, easily queered through psychoanalytic readings, is not lost on me. whatever criticisms the og had of corporate greed and the neoliberal world order fall apart the second you examine what happens in ac, or even the end of the og. and by the remakes it is a corpse. the corporation is its own kind of parasite but it is, if anything, more sinister than the creature who cannot help but leech from others for survival, because it is not a living thing. why has its role been diminished once the symptoms of its own system become too large to contain?