Mysterious Circumstances

At first they checked on him all through the day. He kept throwing them out. It turned into once daily. At the end of the first week Zack took to leaving a couple plates by the door. He would come back the next day and find little bites taken out of the sandwiches. Tiny, narrow, sharp-toothed bites. He tossed the leftovers, plates and all.

At the end of ten days, Sephiroth did not seem so frantic anymore. They found him lounging on the huge desk, listless, with one of the journals forgotten in his hand. They urged him to eat. He said he wasn't hungry. They urged him to sleep. He said he had just woken up. And not once did the light in the basement go out.

It was the evening of the fifteenth day, when they didn't find him anymore. They searched the whole basement, then the mansion, then the mountains and the woods. Cloud knew all the trails. Back up from Shinra came two days later.

Turks and scientists swarmed the town. The residents were questioned one by one. No one had seen Sephiroth. Not leaving, not arriving, not going up to the reactor since coming down. The light in the basement was still on but the stacks of journals were beginning to fall.

For seven weeks Shinra infested the town, turned it upside-down, drank up all the ale at the inn and harassed the local girls. And Sephiroth was not found. The reactor was pristine, untouched. The head scientist, Hojo, frowned and scratched his head at that. For three days he took his turn pacing the basement floor, flipping through pages as if there would be notes in the margins to give him the answer he wanted. He conducted the better part of his investigation alone.

Back in Midgar the news had hit like a bomb. 'SEPHIROTH M.I.A.' was the headline of the day. The conspiracies were wild, 'Abducted by Aliens' or 'Defected to Wutai'. Tabloid sales soared. The public reeled. The fanclub grieved, and the world began its long wait.

It was three months before Zack and Cloud were allowed to breathe again, to return to what was left of the lives they had been living. Three months they had been quarantined, humanely, and questioned days on end by Turks, by Lazard, by Hojo, by the President himself. Zack had little to offer them, Cloud even less. Three months to conclude that they knew nothing of the disappearance, only able to speak of the man's distressed state, his changed behaviour in the days before.

They were released to a world that was still learning not to wait, although the whispers in the bars and the word on the street was that Sephiroth would turn up any day now. That he was on a secret mission. That he was being hidden on purpose to make Wutai lower its guard.

Zack returned to his girl, quiet and changed, aware for the first time that he was a watched man. He met up with Cloud several times a week for drinks and they sat together in the dive of the evening, full beers before them, not saying a word.

A year rolled by and the world stopped waiting. Mako rates climbed and the sky looked greyer. The science department was a tense, unpleasant place to be. Never friendly, Hojo had taken to muttering all the time, pacing the halls asking what went wrong.

The talk on the streets still touched on the vanishing, but now it was gossip more than print. Sephiroth had run off to live the quiet life, tired of the fighting. He was a game hunter up north and an apple grower down south. He had met a pretty Wutai lady in the war and had slipped off to be with her. He had undergone surgery and was now living as a woman himself.

He was spotted too, or so the rumors went. One giddy set of campers claimed to have seen him in the woods. A respected astronomer said she had seen Sephiroth's exact likeness dart across the sky one dark morning. She retired soon after. An old-timer who kept shop in Kalm claimed the General had come in for ammunition once, ridiculous since Sephiroth did not use a gun. A sales rep in Costa said he had come in looking for a pretty dress.

Sometimes when Zack and Cloud were feeling chatty, they discussed life after Shinra, making plans. Nothing solid yet. Nothing viable. The paychecks were still good. But there was that little something they couldn't put their fingers on that had them looking ahead.

For a while the tourist trade flourished in Nibelheim as hero worshipers and conspiracy theorists alike flooded in to follow Sephiroth's trail. But most of it was barred to the public, and there hadn't been much of one to begin with. Still, Tifa made brisk business as a guide, and Mrs. Strife's sales of jams and jellies and knitted goods had never been better. She got mail orders for some time after the first crowds had thinned.

Tourists still came, checking out the mountain the way people visited the alleged birthplace of Ifrit, or that cave down south that led Hades' realm. Nibelheim had a legend and a mystery now, and it was good for business. The townspeople learned not to worry about the ways of strangers so long as the money was good.

So if a couple of those strangers wanted to keep their hoods and cloaks up tight, nobody pried. Winter came early in Nibelheim. If they wanted supplies, they were directed to the store. If they didn't want a guide, well, some of those damn fools were adventurous but it was on their own heads. And if they headed out in a different direction entirely, hell if it was anybody's business.

"I hope she likes me," one of them said.

"She will," said the other, and they headed out, black and red, into the snow.