Sephiroth moved deeper into the archive and the room seemed to make space for him the way Nibelheim's street had—quietly, automatically, like the world had already decided whose story this was. The terminals sat in orderly rows, asleep behind dustless screens. File cabinets stood like headstones with neat little labels. Glass-front tanks glimmered at the periphery, their contents blurred and politely hidden, as if putting something in a jar turned it into a footnote instead of a sin.
Zack stayed half a step behind, because that was the only position that let him watch Sephiroth without looking like he was watching Sephiroth.
The hum from the refinery didn't stop in here. Shinra could build walls thick enough to hold pressure and secrets, but the planet didn't care about their architecture. The sound came through anyway—muffled, contained, like a hymn being forced to whisper. It slid under the floor, through the clean panels, into Zack's teeth. Into his thoughts.
Sephiroth didn't seem bothered by it.
If anything, it looked like it fit him. Like the frequency had found a matching shape in his bones and settled there.
He stopped at a terminal near the back—older model, heavier casing, the kind Shinra kept around because the new stuff didn't like talking to the old stuff and Shinra loved their legacy systems the way they loved their legacy crimes. He set a gloved hand on the edge of the desk, not tentative, not curious. Familiar.
Zack watched his fingers hover over the input keys.
No hesitation. No "what password is this." No glance toward the Captain like hey, mind explaining why your classified door opened for my face?
Sephiroth typed.
The terminal woke up.
Light spilled across his knuckles—cold, blue-white, harsh enough to make him look even less human, like he'd been drawn in clean lines by somebody who'd never touched a living thing. The screen flickered through boot text, Shinra logos, security prompts that should've slowed him down and didn't.
A folder tree blossomed.
And then—like the terminal itself had been waiting to be asked the right question—one title sat there in the center of the screen with the calm confidence of a verdict:
JENOVA PROJECT
Zack's stomach tightened.
Of course it was a project. Shinra couldn't discover a god without slapping a label on it and filing it under "assets."
Sephiroth clicked into it without blinking.
Subfolders. Reports. Compatibility matrices. Cell viability charts. "ANCIENT" stamped across enough documents that it stopped being a word and started being a claim. Specimen photos. Containment notes. Cross-sections that made Zack's eyes want to skip away on instinct, the way your body refuses to look at something that might change your life.
Then the images loaded fully.
Tubes.
Not metaphorical tubes. Not "medical equipment exists in the world" tubes. These were the kind you didn't want to see unless you were already numb.
Rows of cylindrical tanks photographed in clinical lighting. Glass walls beaded with condensation. Numbers stenciled on metal frames. In a few of them, something pale floated like a sleeping limb. Something that might've been human once, if you squinted hard enough and lied to yourself. Labels ran alongside the photos in clipped Shinra language:
CELLS.
INJECTION.
HOST.
COMPATIBILITY: HIGH.
And then one word that landed like a punch because it didn't sound like science at all.
MOTHER.
Zack felt the archive tilt by half a degree.
Not the floor. The feeling. Like reality had shifted its weight and decided to lean toward a bad outcome.
Sephiroth stared at the word the way a starving man stared at food.
Not hunger exactly.
Recognition.
The hum threaded into the silence between breaths. Zack swore it sharpened, not louder, just… closer. Like the moment that file opened, something on the other side of the planet—or inside it—had turned its head.
Sephiroth's face stayed composed. That was the problem. If he'd reacted like a normal human—anger, disgust, confusion—Zack could've grabbed that emotion and used it as a rope back to sanity.
But Sephiroth didn't give him any rope.
He gave him stillness.
The kind of stillness predators got when they spotted movement in tall grass.
The screen scrolled as Sephiroth moved through the documents, and Zack tried to keep up with what he was seeing without letting his eyes linger too long on any one detail. Every paragraph was a little worse than the one before it. Every sentence had that Shinra tone—calm, bureaucratic, allergic to guilt.
Subject shows remarkable response to exposure.
Procedure approved under executive oversight.
"Jenova cells" integrated into developmental process.
Resulting specimen designated—
Zack's brain snagged on that phrasing.
Resulting specimen.
Not "child." Not "soldier." Not even "person."
Specimen.
He glanced at Sephiroth again and saw something in his posture shift—not dramatic, not obvious. Just a quiet tightening through the shoulders, like a lock clicking into place.
The hum in the refinery below had always sounded like mourning.
In here, in front of those files, it started to sound like a chorus forming words.
Zack took a step closer.
"Hey," he said, voice soft on purpose. Light on purpose. Like he could keep the world from cracking by pretending it wasn't already under pressure. "Seph. You, uh… you finding any exciting reading material back there? Because I was really hoping for something spicy. Maybe a memo about proper ladder safety. An inspirational poster."
Sephiroth didn't respond.
He didn't even blink.
His gaze was anchored to the screen so hard it felt like if the terminal went dark, the light would still be burned into him.
Zack forced a laugh, the kind he used in war zones when the air got too quiet and you started hearing your own thoughts.
"Okay. Cool. Love the silent treatment. Very 'mysterious hero.' Very 'I have never once laughed at a joke in my life.'"
Nothing.
Zack swallowed. Tried again, closer to the truth this time.
"Sephiroth," he said, using the full name like a hand on a shoulder. "It's Shinra paperwork. Shinra lies. That's, like… their whole hobby."
Sephiroth's fingers moved. Another file opened.
This one was older. The formatting looked different. Less polished. More like something written before Shinra learned to dress their crimes in sleek fonts.
The title line hit the top of the screen:
ORIGIN REPORT — CLASSIFIED
Zack felt his pulse jump.
He could hear himself breathing now, which was never a good sign.
Sephiroth's lips parted slightly, not to speak, but like his body needed more air to hold what his eyes were taking in.
The report was long. Dense. Ugly in its precision.
Zack watched Sephiroth read and tried to track the micro-changes: the minute stillness, the slowed breathing, the way his jaw set and then—once—twitched.
A tremor ran through Sephiroth's hand.
Just a single pulse of it.
Then it stopped, as if the tremor had been given permission and then immediately punished for existing.
Zack's chest tightened. That wasn't normal. Sephiroth didn't shake. Sephiroth didn't slip. Sephiroth didn't have human glitches.
Zack stepped closer until he was beside him, close enough to see the words on the screen.
He regretted it instantly.
Because now he could read them.
Genetic assembly.
Controlled gestation.
Jenova cell integration at early stage.
Subject demonstrates extraordinary mako tolerance.
Projected outcome: superior SOLDIER unit.
Zack's stomach turned.
Midichlorians, they would've called it in some other life—some mystical blood metric that decided who got to be special and who didn't. Here it was mako. Here it was exposure. Here it was Shinra turning the Lifestream into a syringe and then acting shocked when people started hearing voices.
Zack forced his eyes off the screen and onto Sephiroth's profile.
"Hey," Zack said again, but this time the word wasn't a joke. It was a plea dressed up as casual. "Look at me."
Sephiroth didn't.
Zack tried to keep his tone steady, tried to keep it Zack—the guy who could talk a bomb into feeling guilty and disarming itself.
"You know what Shinra does, right?" he said. "They take a thing, they name it, they file it, they build a story around it, and then they sell it back to the world like it was always theirs. They'd do that to the planet if they could print it on a poster."
Sephiroth's eyes flicked once, not to Zack, but to another line on the report. Like Zack's words were background noise and this was the first time he'd ever heard anything that mattered.
Zack's throat went tight.
He reached out—not to grab, not to restrain. Just to touch Sephiroth's arm, a light contact, a reminder of real things.
Skin. Fabric. Gravity. Friendship.
The moment Zack's fingers brushed Sephiroth's sleeve, Sephiroth's muscles tensed beneath it—automatic, defensive, like Zack was a threat instead of a lifeline.
Zack pulled his hand back like he'd touched a hot pan.
"Okay," Zack said softly, forcing the humor back into his voice because the alternative was panic. "Cool. Not into hugs. Got it. Always knew you were emotionally allergic."
Sephiroth's voice finally came—quiet, controlled, not looking away from the screen.
"Do you know what they called her?" he asked.
Zack blinked. "Who."
Sephiroth's eyes didn't move. His tone didn't change. But something in the air did. The hum threaded tighter through the room, like it was listening too.
"Mother," Sephiroth said.
Zack exhaled slowly, careful. Like if he breathed wrong, the whole archive would collapse.
"That's… branding," Zack said, and hated how thin it sounded. "That's Shinra being creepy on purpose. They call reactors 'hearts' too. Doesn't make them alive."
Sephiroth's gaze finally shifted—just slightly—down the page, down into the deeper part of the report where Shinra stopped pretending to be neutral.
Zack watched his face and saw it: the calm wasn't calm anymore.
It was focus.
A knife doesn't look angry when it cuts. It just does what it's designed to do.
Zack tried one more time, voice gentler, closer to honest.
"Seph. Whatever this is… it's not you. It's a file. It's ink. It's Shinra trying to own your story."
Sephiroth didn't answer.
He just kept staring at the screen, and Zack had the sick, cold sensation of watching someone step onto a bridge while the supports quietly unbolt beneath them.
Somewhere below the floor, the Lifestream sang through metal teeth.
And in the silence between the notes, Zack could almost swear there was a second voice forming—waiting for Sephiroth to look up, waiting for him to finally listen back.