Miasma

Chapter 4

He wasn't going to sleep.

Shifting under the scratchy, featherweight blanket, Sephiroth opened his eyes, turning his neck to glare through the fabric to the invisible ceiling above. Unconsciousness was futile. Beneath him, the thin pillow he was lying on might as well have been a sack of burlap. He was uncommonly hot and his socks were bothering him. His hair had somehow ended up stuck to the side of his face-more than likely from sweat-and his mouth was dry and somewhat stale tasting. In a different time, in what felt like a different world at this point, he'd have gotten up two hours ago to do paperwork. Because-as far as he was concerned-he would more than likely kill someone for the opportunity to do paperwork right now. He was bored practically to tears ninety-five percent of the time, and the other five percent he was usually apprehensive or furious.

Maybe he could stretch.

With an inward growl, the silver-haired man sat up and scrubbed his fingers through his hair; settling into a cross-legged position...blinking to get the residual sleep out of his eyes. Around him, the lights in the room brightened somewhat in response to his movement. It wasn't a luxury in terms of his own comfort; no, it was merely the current cameraman's way of letting him know he knew he was awake and moving about. Sephiroth had never been able to fully discern the source of the spacial luminescence; he only knew it was manually operated and aided surveillance. If he thought about it too long, it bothered him; privacy was important to him...but he tried not to think about it because it wasn't going to do him any good.

Sliding down onto the floor, the silver-haired man gritted his teeth as his scrubs bunched up over his middle; and he tugged them back down before assuming a position to stretch. He would need new ones soon. The idea wasn't attractive at all, but according to Hojo, he was beginning what would amount to month five, and while the changes in his physicality were minimal, nothing given to him initially was going to stay comfortable for very long. He was still reluctant to acknowledge it...even if he'd become irrevocably attached. It was incurably strange to think that his daughter was growing inside him...becoming something more than a bundle of cells...something more than mindless biology. Occasionally, when he was feeling particularly emotional, he would talk to her; they weren't usually long conversations, but it was comforting to know that someone was listening. And she did listen. When Sephiroth murmured something idle in the dead of night, something about how incredibly hot he was or something silly about Genesis, he always received a soft nudge just under his belly button.

She knew his voice.

He was fairly positive of it, because no one else garnered such a reaction, and he was only a recipient himself if he spoke directly to her. He immediately chalked it up to heightened intelligence, and immediately afterward felt like a sentimental individual of the opposite sex. Because thinking of a five-month-old fetus as communicatively sentient was borderline insanity. And maybe such sentimentality might have been acceptable in a different situation. But in this particular case...it was not. Because the more attached he got, the more he set himself up for failure...for painful separation. Even now it was more agonizing than he'd have liked to admit...the idea of giving up the life he'd created in order to walk away to die.

More and more, however, he was beginning to think Hojo wouldn't allow that.

The scientist was clearly displeased with the fact that he'd managed to create a daughter. The bespectacled madman muttered discontentedly about it during every ultrasound...voiced his dislike for women clearly and liberally...even when the topic wasn't one of discernable necessity. To his sincere dread, Sephiroth was starting to believe Hojo might simply force him to end gestation and wait until heat had him crawling back to his partner again. It was a real possibility; because while women weren't technically barred from joining SOLDIER, they were at a distinct physical disadvantage to men. Biologically, mako was unfriendly to the female sex, and while Sephiroth could handle it well...he'd never heard of a woman ever surviving treatment. The fact that he even had to consider his daughter as a potential member of SOLDIER was atrocious, but there was little else for her in this world unless she chose to work for the Turks. The silver-haired FIRST would rather die than let her within a dozen feet of the organization, but he also understood that it was not his decision to make.