Date: 2008-12-05 12:54 Subject: FFVII Fic: Accessories (1/1) PG13 Security: Public Mood: weird Tags: fandom: ffvii, fic, genesis, sephiroth, tentacles

Title: Accessories
Author: SkyFire (rabid_plotbuny)

Rating: PG13
Summary: A day not quite like any other for Sephiroth and Genesis.
Warnings: Tentacles! X_x Also some gore.
Word Count: 1817

Disclaimer: I don't own FFVII or any of its characters and no money is being made.


It was a day much like any other. The dark night time sky gradually paled in the east, visible even through the haze of pollution that was the Midgar air. The air itself took on that crisp pre-dawn feeling, and if there had been a cricket alive in the city, it would have been quieting down for the day. In the city itself, people began to sluggishly stumble out of bed and wander blindly around their homes with their eyes still mostly closed until they located the source of their morning caffeine fix.

In that way, it was like any other that had come before it.

In other ways, it was much different.

For you see, that was the day that he woke up with tentacles.

***

To say that the great General Sephiroth was pissed off as he made his way through the Shinra building toward the place where he was certain his current state of being had somehow originated would be like saying that the sun was a little hot. He was furious, Masamune in hand, wing out and quivering, his slit blue-green eyes flashing green with barely-restrained rage, that fury obvious enough that anyone who caught a glimpse got as far out of his way as they could and would later swear that they had seen their lives flash before their eyes and felt the chill from their brush with Death Incarnate.

Then again, the tentacles might have had something to do with that, too.

The Silver General didn't quite know how he was controlling the tentacles, but he was glad that his subconscious mind seemed to have it well enough in hand and that he didn't have to control them one at a time as they rolled and coiled along, bringing him to his destination with a speed that stunned even him and a flowing, gliding grace that none could match.

One murderous glare at the small crowd waiting for the elevator cleared the hallway and ensured that he was alone as he entered the glass-walled elevator and hit the button for the lab's floor. Slowly, the doors closed with a quiet hydraulic hiss, then the little compartment started to move.

Sephiroth leaned lightly back against the glass wall and closed his eyes against the sight of himself reflected back at him from the shiny doors, pulled his coat tighter about himself. He'd fastened most of the buckles that he usually left loose. Since he never wore shirts, only bothering with his pants, boots, and armored coat, with no legs to clothe, he was left with only the coat to wear. He felt naked. His coat fastened securely, he was clothed more modestly than he'd been since he'd thrown away his regulation uniform upon his promotion to First. His tentacles flared out at the bottom of the coat like some sort of thick, mottled fringe.

The supposedly-soothing elevator muzak was cranking his explosive fury to whole new plateaus of homicidal rage.

Hojo had done it to him, he just knew it. Even if he somehow wasn't directly responsible for it, he was behind it somewhere. He always was, when it came to both Sephiroth and any weirdness in the ranks. Like the Third who had grown horns and now could only eat raw meat and tomato sauce. Or the Second who had suddenly decided he was a duck and taken up residence in the company pool.

Everything could always be traced back to Hojo and his need to assert his mad-scientist god-complex on those unfortunate enough to have caught his attention.

And Sephiroth had been the focus of that attention his whole life. He knew 'Hojo Was Here' when he saw it, and his tentacles screamed of it.

At one with his rage, the tentacles twitched and writhed madly, betraying his agitation, flaring out as they tried to work out some of that aggravation on the walls of the elevator, retreating in restless compliance back under him as he reminded them that no they did not want to destroy the elevator, especially as it was the outside elevator and he was sixty-something stories up.

By the time the elevator dinged, Sephiroth's rage was such that he had begun to glow faintly with the beginnings of a limit break, more than ready to rip a certain mad scientist limb from limb.

Then the elevator doors opened.

***

To say that the lab had been trashed would be like saying that Sephiroth was a little modified.

It was dim; lit only by what few emergency lights remained. Equipment and medical supplies had been thrown everywhere, more things had been melted enough that he could only distinguish a vague shiny gleam in the middle of furious scorch marks. Ceiling tiles had been ripped down, and even the metal panels that made up the walls had been ripped out and hurled, in many cases leaving the heavy rivets that had held them there behind. Glass crunched underfoot (undercoil?), mixed with what remained of whatever had been in the tubes and beakers and jars.

A glop of something unidentifiable - that most likely looked not much different than it had before the destruction - slid down one of the barely-attached pipes in the ceiling to land with a wet splat on the burned, scarred, and debris-covered floor.

The elevator dinged again and Sephiroth coiled his way out of the small cubicle before they closed, eyes scanning the destruction that had only the day before been a lab, sensitive ears straining to pick up any sound, any hint of movement, of life, raising the Masamune into a defensive position.

Sephiroth moved deeper into the lab, barely wincing as he moved over broken glass and twisted metal, the tough skin of his tentacles keeping out most of the debris, but enough dug in that he knew he'd be spending a significant amount of time digging things out of the appendages later.

He found the first body not long after; rounding a corner to find the man - or what was left of him - sprawled on the floor, a look of terror on his face. The blood-spattered tag on his lab coat betrayed his position as one of Hojo's lab assistants.

The next two - or it could have been three, enough pieces were missing that he couldn't tell - had apparently been Hollander's.

The two scientists had been forced to share a lab for the past few weeks as Hollander's lab underwent major repairs after he'd pissed off Genesis one too many times.

Actually, it had ended up looking rather like Hojo's lab did.

Another one of Hojo's people, identifiable only by nametag, was in the entry to the containment area, a mere smear of blood and scorch mark on the floor.

That room looked much the same as the rest of the lab. Tiny glass fragments from the SOLDIER-proof Mako tubes covered the floor in a mess that was almost pretty as the shards glittered in the dim red light.

From further into the room, Sephiroth could hear the occasional hissed breathy curse. He lowered the Masamune as he realized its owner's identity, then studied the floor in the voice's direction. He had no intention of picking all that glass out of his tentacles later. He looked around for an alternate route.

Before he had consciously made the decision, his tentacles had reached up, grabbed hold of those unidentified pipes that ran along the ceiling and pulled him up. Hanging upside-down from the pipes, he sped across the room.

Hojo, it seemed, was still alive, as was Hollander.

They were both being held up off the floor by the throat by a furious Genesis. Or rather, by Genesis' equally irate tentacles.

It seemed Sephiroth wasn't the only one to have awakened to a writhing mass of tentacles where his legs had been.

"What do you mean you can't fix it?" Genesis was demanding, shaking the two men in his coils until they flopped like rag dolls, the hazy red glow from an impending limit break flaring and receding around him as his rage spiked and ebbed.

Hollander gurgled something Sephiroth couldn't make out. Apparently Genesis could.

And that was the end of Hollander.

Throwing the remains away from himself, Genesis turned to the other scientist in his coils.

Even at that somewhat perilous moment, Hojo was a scientist. Hanging suspended over the floor by a tentacle around his throat, he was madly scribbling away on a clipboard, occasionally pausing to poke at a tentacle or take measurements and other observations. He ignored Genesis' rants and demands. Finally he looked up, pen poised. "Now, you're inferior to my Sephiroth but I can use the data for comparison. Tell me, in detail, everything that you can about this change and any new abilities you may have-"

Sephiroth then had the somewhat dubious honor of seeing Genesis go purple with rage, then see Hojo torn apart by already blood-covered tentacles.

It was a truly heart-warming sight, and a memory he was sure he would remember fondly for many years to come, even if he hadn't had the satisfaction of doing it himself.

It didn't fix the tentacle problem, or his rage at being even less human than he'd been before, without so much as a warning, but it helped.

At least a little bit.

***

Angeal found them a bit later in Genesis' quarters, camped out on the floor of the living area, picking bits and pieces of debris out of their tentacles with tweezers, Hojo and Hollander's notes - for apparently the whole tentacle thing had been a rare combined effort - spread out on the floor all around them. An ever-growing heap of bloodied debris sat on the floor between them where it had spilled from the over-filled trash bin and neither had felt like getting up to change it and losing track of which coils they'd been working on. A small collection of Potions was nearby, for after they were done tweezing.

Hopefully somewhere in the heap of theoretical mad scientist babble and chicken scratch that made up the notes, was some sort of indication on how it could be reversed.

In the mean time, though, Genesis was coping a bit better than Sephiroth now that he had discovered that he was now able to hold not only more dumbapples at once, but multiple editions of Loveless and still have both hands free for a good spar. The fact that he was now also faster than he had been and able to climb vertical and inverted surfaces easily was something he looked forward to pushing the next time they managed to sneak into the Training Room and the simulation program there. Their VR fights had never been boring – they were a bit too evenly matched for that – but they were about to gain a whole new level of interesting.

He couldn’t wait.

END