Zack tried to pretend this was just another late-night Shinra errand—another "nothing unusual" that would turn into paperwork and a debrief and a bad cup of coffee back at base.
"Alright," he said, pitching his voice loud enough to sound normal, light enough to be a joke. He glanced at the Captain like he was including him in the bit, because sometimes you had to make the room laugh just to keep it from bleeding. "So we check the reactor, wave at the locals, go home. Easy."
The Captain gave him a nod that was too eager, too relieved to have a script. "Yes, sir. The inspection route is prepared."
Zack's grin stayed on, but it felt like wearing someone else's face. He watched the villagers as they lingered in the green spill-light, watching back. Nobody went inside. Nobody yawned. Nobody did any of the normal little human things that said life is continuing even when heroes show up. They just stood there like a mural painted onto the street.
He looked to Sephiroth for the usual silent cue—some dry remark, some impatient correction, anything.
Sephiroth didn't answer.
He wasn't ignoring Zack. That would've been normal. This was different. Sephiroth's attention was tilted, like his whole awareness had rotated a few degrees off reality and locked onto something Zack couldn't see.
The hum from the refinery threaded through the town again—low, mournful, endless—and Sephiroth's gaze tightened with it. His eyes didn't track the Captain. They tracked the sound. Not the volume. The shape.
Zack's smile softened into something more real for half a second—concern sliding in before he could stop it.
"Seph," he said under his breath, the way you'd say a friend's name when you didn't want the room to hear the worry in it. "You good?"
Sephiroth blinked once, slow. When he looked at Zack, it was like coming up from underwater.
"I'm fine," he said.
But Zack knew the difference between fine and present.
They started moving.
The Captain led, two troopers flanking him. Zack fell half a step behind on purpose—close enough to hear, far enough to watch. Sephiroth walked beside him, and it felt wrong how perfectly the town made space for him. Not in the "celebrity" way. In the way crowds part for a knife.
As they passed the child under the awning, Zack caught the kid's stare again—still locked on Sephiroth, unblinking, like the child was trying to remember something old through a face too new.
Zack forced himself not to stop. Forced himself not to say something that would break the illusion of "everything's normal here, sir."
The kid's lips moved—barely. No sound reached Zack, but the motion was unmistakable.
A word shaped like devotion.
A word shaped like a destination.
Sephiroth's posture shifted, almost imperceptibly. Like he'd heard it anyway.
They left the neat main street and took the upward road toward the facility.
That was when the walk stopped feeling like a walk and started feeling like a descent.
Nibelheim's houses fell away behind them, their warm shapes shrinking in the sick green glow. The road narrowed into a service route—packed dirt and cracked stone turned to grated metal and maintenance plates. The air changed. It took on the taste of oil and hot dust and something mineral that sat on the tongue like a warning.
The refinery dominated everything the closer they got. From town it had looked like a looming silhouette. Up here it became a structure you could hear even when you didn't focus on it: pipes knocking faintly as pressure shifted, valves sighing, distant turbines grinding like teeth. Every sound had a purpose. None of those purposes were human.
The green light got brighter, less like moonlight and more like exposure—like standing too close to an X-ray machine and pretending you weren't worried about what it might reveal.
Zack had walked this route before. He knew the curve where the road should bend, the stretch where the guard checkpoint always sat, the little drop-off where you could see half the valley if you looked over the rail.
But tonight, familiarity kept slipping out of his hands.
The curve felt sharper. The checkpoint lights seemed too far away, then suddenly too close. The valley view didn't comfort; it looked flat and painted, like the world beyond the refinery had been simplified to keep your attention where Shinra wanted it.
He tried to blame exhaustion. Tried to blame the mako hum pressing into his skull. Tried to blame the weird villagers and the weird Captain and the way his instincts were throwing fists inside his ribs.
Then he looked at Sephiroth and saw the same thing reflected there—not confusion, not fear, but a growing alignment. Like every step toward the reactor was a step toward a place Sephiroth had been missing without knowing it.
The refinery rose ahead of them, all angles and platforms and welded seams. It didn't look like a workplace. It looked like a shrine designed by accountants and monsters: worship rendered as infrastructure, faith expressed as extraction, salvation measured in output.
Zack swallowed. His throat felt dry even in the cold night air.
"Man," he muttered, mostly to himself, "Shinra really knows how to build a romance spot."
No one laughed.
The Captain kept walking like he hadn't heard it. The troopers kept their rifles at the same obedient angle. And Sephiroth—Sephiroth's eyes stayed fixed on the heart of the facility where the mako ran brightest, as if the light down there wasn't just illumination.
As if it was a doorway.
The hum deepened as they approached the first major gantry, and Zack felt it in his teeth again—felt it in his bones. It wasn't just sound. It was pressure. A presence.
And beside him, Sephiroth's breathing slowed into something almost reverent.
Zack didn't like that at all.