The second voice didn't arrive like a shout.
It didn't need to.
It slipped into the gaps where the refinery's hymn stuttered—into the tiny pauses between turbine-teeth, into the places your brain usually filled with nothing. Zack felt it first as a pressure change, like the room had lowered its ceiling by an inch and nobody had told his lungs.
Sephiroth's eyes stayed on the screen, but the way his pupils tightened made Zack think of an animal catching scent.
Not fear.
Not surprise.
Recognition that came with appetite.
The archive lights didn't flicker. Shinra didn't allow flickering. Their sins were too expensive for bad lighting. But the glow from the terminal shifted anyway—washed greener for half a breath, as if the mako beneath the floor had found a seam in the building and decided to leak upward.
Sephiroth's breathing slowed.
Zack noticed because it didn't slow like a man calming down. It slowed like a machine throttling into an optimal range. Like he'd found the exact frequency where everything inside him clicked into place and stopped wasting motion on being human.
Sephiroth didn't look up.
He didn't need to.
The hum threaded through the room and rearranged itself, and suddenly it wasn't "sound" anymore. It was meaning wearing sound as a disguise.
They made you small.
Zack's stomach dropped.
He didn't hear it with his ears. It landed behind his eyes, like an intrusive thought you couldn't claim because it didn't have your handwriting.
Sephiroth's fingers paused above the keys.
A fraction of a tremor ran through them, so quick Zack almost convinced himself he imagined it.
Then the hand went still.
Not steady.
Still.
Like whatever had twitched got corrected.
They put a leash on you.
The glass tanks around the archive caught the terminal's glow and threw it back in warped streaks. For a second Zack saw his own reflection in one of them: SOLDIER blues, a face trying to stay brave, eyes just wide enough to betray him. The reflection looked like a hostage video.
Sephiroth didn't have a reflection. Not a real one. His face in the glass was too clean, too composed, like the world was careful not to distort him.
Zack wet his lips. The air tasted like cold metal and antiseptic and the faint, sick-sweet bite of mako—the way a lightning strike smells if lightning had a payroll department.
"Seph," he tried again, softer than before. Not joking now, not performing. "Sephiroth. Listen to me."
Sephiroth's jaw tightened by a millimeter. His eyes didn't leave the report.
You are not their weapon.
Zack's heart thudded once, hard enough to hurt. That line—weapon—hit too close to home, too close to everything SOLDIER pretended not to be. The thing that got filed. The thing that got deployed. The thing that got praised when it behaved and disposed of when it broke.
Zack had always been able to laugh at the shape of it.
Sephiroth had always been able to pretend he wasn't shaped at all.
You are mine.
The last part didn't feel like a thought.
It felt like a hand closing.
Zack moved without fully deciding to, stepping closer like he could physically block a voice that wasn't using air. He watched Sephiroth's shoulders. Watched the way the coat hung off him like ceremony. Watched the way that predatory calm settled in, not as rage, but as ownership finally claimed.
"Hey—" Zack started, then stopped because his own voice sounded wrong in the archive, too alive, too messy. Like talking in a museum.
Sephiroth's hand lifted from the keyboard.
It hovered there for a second, above the keys, above the report, above the word ORIGIN like he was weighing whether to keep reading or to finally look away.
Then his fingers lowered—not to type, not to scroll.
To rest.
Palm flat on the desk.
Like he needed something solid to confirm the world still existed while it rewrote him.
Zack swallowed. His throat ached like he'd been breathing smoke.
"You're shaking," Zack said, and hated how small it sounded.
Sephiroth's hand trembled again. Just once.
And then—like the tremor had been a mistake someone corrected—everything in him locked down.
He spoke without turning, voice quiet, almost gentle.
"I was never born."
Zack froze.
Sephiroth's words weren't dramatic. No flare. No collapse. He said it the way you said "it's raining" when you stepped outside and felt water hit your face. Like a fact that existed whether you approved or not.
"I was assembled."
The archive seemed to listen.
Even the refinery's hymn under the floor paused, like the planet itself had taken a careful breath.
Zack's mind scrambled for something—anything—that would make those words less lethal. A joke. A correction. A way to reframe it into something survivable.
"You—" Zack started, then stopped because his mouth kept trying to lie and his body kept refusing to cooperate.
Sephiroth's gaze stayed on the screen, but his eyes looked different now. Not glassy. Not unfocused.
Focused in a way that didn't feel like concentration.
Focused like inevitability.
Zack shifted his weight, slow, careful. Approaching Sephiroth right now felt like approaching a skittish animal that also happened to be carrying a sword longer than Zack's entire torso and the authority to end wars by existing near them.
Zack forced himself to breathe. In. Out. Don't let your lungs start sprinting. Don't let panic take the wheel.
"Sephiroth," Zack said, and this time he didn't dress it up. "You're you."
Sephiroth's eyes flicked—almost imperceptible—like the concept irritated him.
Zack pushed through anyway, voice steadying as he spoke, the way it did when he stopped performing and started meaning it.
"You're the best man I know," Zack said. "Not the strongest. Not the legend. Not the poster-boy Shinra keeps laminated. You. The guy who stands between civilians and monsters. The guy who doesn't have to be kind but still… still tries, in his own terrifying way."
Sephiroth didn't react.
Zack took another half-step in, slow enough it couldn't be read as a threat. His hands stayed open at his sides, like he was trying to show he wasn't here to take anything from him.
"Don't let a file tell you who you are," Zack said. "Shinra writes paperwork like it's scripture. That doesn't make it holy."
For a second, Zack thought he'd gotten through.
Not because Sephiroth softened—he didn't—but because there was a pause. A tiny delay where the air shifted, where the hum tightened, where the voice behind the sound seemed to lean in closer to hear what Zack would say next.
Zack held his breath like he was trying not to startle a deer.
Sephiroth's fingers lifted again, slow and deliberate, and Zack's brain braced for violence the way it always did around SOLDIERs: if hands move, something dies.
But Sephiroth didn't reach for the Masamune.
He reached up—two fingers—to touch the side of his own neck, right where a pulse should be. Right where you checked to prove you were alive.
His expression stayed serene.
And Zack realized that serenity wasn't peace.
It was acceptance.
The kind that came after a decision you couldn't unmake.
Sephiroth finally turned his head.
Just enough to look at Zack with the side of his face, not fully. Like Zack was something he needed to acknowledge before he stepped over him.
In the terminal glow, Sephiroth's eyes looked almost green—not the normal mako sheen SOLDIERs carried, but something deeper. Like the color had gotten into the parts of him that were supposed to be private.
His mouth lifted into the faintest thing that wasn't quite a smile.
Gratitude, maybe.
Or the imitation of it.
"You're trying to save me," Sephiroth said softly, like Zack's effort deserved credit.
Zack's chest loosened a fraction at the sound of that tone—gentle, familiar, almost human—and he almost let himself believe.
Then Sephiroth finished the sentence.
"From the only thing that's real."
The words didn't land like an insult.
They landed like a door closing.
Zack felt it in his bones. That subtle shift where a person stops being reachable—not because they hate you, not because they're angry, but because they've chosen a truth that doesn't have room for you inside it.
Zack stared at him, the way you stared at someone you loved after they said something that changed the shape of the whole world.
"Seph…" Zack whispered, and his voice cracked despite his best effort, because some part of him had finally accepted what the rest of him was still refusing to name.
Sephiroth's gaze drifted past Zack, back to the screen, back to the word MOTHER sitting there like a brand.
The hum beneath the floor swelled again—mournful, mechanical, hungry.
And in it, threaded so tight it felt like a promise, the second voice purred in the silence between beats—
Mine.
Not loud enough for anyone else.
Not loud enough to prove.
Just loud enough for a man who'd been built out of mako and lies and too much capacity to hear it as truth.
Zack didn't move.
Because moving felt like it might be the moment he admitted he was too late.