[ WHY DO YOU HATE ME OMG. What makes me saddest is the little everyday things that he's not use to though. And the things he missed out on. And just... happiness.]
/knuckle crack.
Sephiroth wasn’t a child, honestly. A child who makes their first murder at five isn’t a child. It was just someone Shin-Ra got off the streets, the low-lives were always prevalent and he was good at killing even as a boy, never had any troubles with it and they trained him over and over.He learned that emotions wouldn’t be tolerated, was barely handled enough as a baby to make him tame, to make him understand that touch was needed and as soon as that stage was over, the laboratory assistants were almost forbidden to touch him except when necessary because a weapon doesn’t need to know what it is to touch and be touched, they don’t need to know what it is.He shuts his emotions down, keeps them cold, keeps them hidden, though flickers still come through and only when Gast leaves does Sephiroth wrap himself in ice and steel and refuse to know anyone at all for he doesn’t need that.The Turks train him as much as the tutors Hojo flies in do, though, and they mitigate some of the disaster of his upbringing, helping to lessen the ice, to buff away the steel, but they can’t fix it.Sephiroth doesn’t know how to comprehend ‘childhood’ or ‘family’, not until he’s a young teenager and he’s meeting the two older boys from Banora, watching them with solemn, large eyes and a silence that is born out of survival instincts and habit for Hojo could be sharp-tongued - Sephiroth learned from him but he also learned that his keeper was not tolerant of what he saw to be ‘stupid questions’.He doesn’t understand simple joys at first, not of ice cream or walking around in the sunshine or of watching a movie - he cooks and fends for himself but he doesn’t indulge in things, not until Angeal and Genesis turn up, eyes blue as the rich vastness of a summer sky and they are laughing and everything he’s not and he doesn’t know how to understand them.He’s thirteen when he has his first real taste of ice cream with ‘friends’.He’s fourteen when he stops flinching at being touched, fourteen when he has his first kiss, fourteen when Genesis and Angeal, more Genesis than Angeal though, teach him what it is that they have between them and he is enfolded into their emotions.He’s sixteen when he is named General of the Wutai War, when the campaign is effectively declared over even though years of clearing out resistance fighters will still carry on but it’s over they’ve won, he’s sixteen and he’s broken the back of a major power in the world over his knee, he’s sixteen and dreams of blood in his teeth when most boys should be worrying about acne and their hair and girls and other boys and their voice is breaking.He meets Angeal and Genesis when he’s twelve and for ten long, blissful years, he learns happiness, he learns what he has missed, his lack of social graces are mitigated but Angeal and Genesis can only do so much for him.
He’s twenty-two when Lazard informs him that Genesis has defected from Shin-Ra, taking half of SOLDIER with him.
He’s twenty-four when Zack turns up, hollow, red-eyed from weeping, to tell him that Angeal is dead.
He’s twenty-five when he is in Nibelheim and everything crashes down around his ears.
And somewhere, he’s almost thirteen when he smiles at something that Genesis has said and done for the first time.Somewhere—Before the memory goes out like a candle flame.
