it was the answer he expected, but hearing it still felt smothering, a heavy weight upon the shoulders he was trying to keep straight. his face drops as he watches sephiroth process what little he’d been told, and it takes running a hand over it to regain his composure, lack of rest catching up on him.
“… i don’t know the exact details of what happened on that mission, only the broad strokes told to me by someone who’d been there.”
eyes that wandered find rest on sephiroth again, and it truly feels like a joke was being played on him, anguish creeping up on him at the thought of all that he had to say. it had always been a little hard to believe that the sephiroth he knew would ever have gone through with anything strife had said but…
he’d read the reports with his own eyes, he’d seen the afterimage of the man they chased to combat a world wide crisis twice.
having sephiroth here, as he once was, rational, hesitant, human – it was just cruel.
a chair he’d brought in from the kitchen to watch over the other is dragged over, and kunsel sits down, not quite facing sephiroth, focusing instead on his hands as he thinks things over. the truth will come out eventually, there is no denying that, but he can’t just barrage the man with every sin he’d committed immediately.
it would be needlessly, relentlessly sadistic, fit for someone who held a grudge against him. but kunsel didn’t. perhaps if he had been there it would be different… but he wasn’t. and what reason does sephiroth have to immediately trust everything kunsel says? kunsel has to start small, with things he can prove, and work up from there.
“the mission went south, and everyone that went on it was declared dead. nibelheim was completely taken over by shinra, and professor hojo moved stations there for the next four years.” kunsel’s head tilts to the side, wondering if sephiroth would guess that yet again, being set as ‘killed in action’ was only an attempt at covering their tracks. “but you weren’t really dead. at least two of you survived, you were just…”
in nibelheim, under hojo’s ministrations, his new pet project. and kunsel knew. and he couldn’t do anything about it. with his elbows on his knees, kunsel rests his face against them and he lets out a sigh.
the murky waters of his past are being kicked up with more ferocity than he expected.
the familiarity of such things burns him, brings a bitter, mirthless smile to his mouth. a shin-ra cover-up in nibelheim would hardly be the first of its kind there. sephiroth may not be able to recall what they pertained to, but he knows they've happened, has seen file after file with [REDACTED] in bold, threatening red.
most of them are about him.
maybe this isn't so out of the ordinary, if he really bends his thought on it; there's more than a decade missing at the beginning of his life, isn't there? nothing he recalls before wutai, as though all of it had been erased, but he always thought it was better that he hadn't known, despite the mystery surrounding where he'd come from. angeal and genesis had been luckier, and—and they—
they were both dead, weren't they? or, no—angeal was. genesis... it was less certain. sephiroth had expected to run into him. sometime. maybe not in nibelheim, but eventually. there had been a leak at the reactor to investigate, such a simple thing, and maybe he had thought nothing of it. or everything of it. he'd spent so much time in the data archives, uncovering tidbit after tidbit. looking for old records, pulling up whatever copies or originals he could find, comparing, trying to figure out what had been hidden where.
there was something in red on one sheet that was black on another, a name. a warning he did not obey. a warning he chased the way he kept chasing genesis, and something he was afraid of the way he'd been afraid of genesis. there were too many secrets, too many undone too quickly.
a reckoning, coming. and his head had hurt so very, very terribly and he couldn't name why. he remembers nibelheim. the old buildings that looked like they had stood for hundred or more years.
some of it comes to him. dimly, slowly. he takes another long drink of water, feeling as though it isn't enough and holding the cup to his chest as he thinks, wondering if he should think, as if some great shadow looms over his mind and holds everything at bay. the way zack had looked at him; an unnatural laughter springing from his own lips. the flashing of blue eyes that he knew, and sephiroth had said, cruel and unnatural and resenting all that was lain before him: you will rot.
"kunsel." he remembers that, a little; the beginnings of a friendship, easily kindled after zack fair had shown sephiroth that there was more. more beyond genesis and angeal, that there had to be or else there would be nothing left for him. there was kinship and there was trust to be found, and now, it might as well be all he has. "my mother wasn't in nibelheim either, was she? hadn't i gone to look for her?"
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