#choco writing

Sephiroth was three years old when Hojo broke his arm.

Hot, noxious light. Lab attire. Gauzy gloves. Muddy hair. Fear. Anxiety. Resistance. Somewhere, there’d been a flash of yellow teeth, a burst of starry nausea. And the sickening scorch of the Professor’s voice as it burned his inner ears, his malleable psyche. He remembered the sharp chill of tile as he crumbled to the floor, his limb ablaze, a bruise swelling. How the ghost of snapping bone thundered in his brain, his world sloshing, the bulbs of his cell blotting into a fiery mess as he was dragged out of the closet-sized room and toward the labs, the operating table. How his surgery had become even more inevitable than it’d been before his resistance, before his guardian—a tower of security, order, simplicity, safety—had bent him into submission, wrenching his precious pet beyond repair.

Before then, Pain was very simple.

An easy equation.

What? What’s wrong, Sephiroth?

Before that morning, pain had been easily identifiable: a needle, a mako bath, monster slashes, rat bites, poison, burns—

Sephiroth? Come on, now, you love being picked up… no? Just once?

Of course, in Hojo’s eyes, the incident had been monumentally beneficial: An effortless, serendipitous way of augmenting his obedience, ensuring that he never protested a single treatment for the rest of his waking life.

Sephiroth, come now, I’m not going to…

Among other advantages.

All right, all right… I hear you, Sephiroth! Calm down—!

D-DON’T! I DON’T WANT IT!

Sephiroth, please! Calm down! It’s all righ—!

N-NO! YOU WERE GONNA DO IT!

Sephiroth—

YOU WERE GONNA…!

Shaking. Recoiling. Clawing. Snarling.

The aversion had turned him rabid.

YOU WERE GONNA HURT ME…!

Sephiroth! Sephiroth! You’re going to hurt yourself—guaah! Hey! SEPHIROTH?!

The familiar cheek, raked through by a talon of whetted fingernails, drizzled thin tracks of blood onto the tile below.

GO! GO, GO, GO! GO NOW!

It was one of their last confrontations, to Sephiroth’s memory.

The first of many rejections.

By the time he was old enough to be deployed for missions, his paranoia had festered to the point of petrification. His aura had hardened; it repelled people. Few SOLDIERs dared to get too close, too personal. Hardly any addressed him. Even less looked him in the eyes, their gazes tearing from mako-molten green to wherever it was cooler. …Weird kid. If a monster knocked him to the ground, he made sure to clamber back up at dizzying speeds, twisting away from any neighboring SOLDIERs that could pull him upright. Goddess, what is his deal? If medical attention was needed, it would be handled with the same blind acceptance that he’d endured in the labs: eyes closed, teeth caged, muscles gnarled. …Not a fan of needles, huh, Mr. Sephiroth? Wherein he obeyed every instruction from the medics for the simple reason of it being easier than resistance, and because it was the bandages—the gauze, the balm, the stitches—that ultimately grazed his exoskeleton, absorbing all the contact. …Relax your arm, Mr. Sephiroth. Please.