This, dear readers, is what we're ending the year with. The beginning of another story.

This first chapter has sat in my drive for about six months, with me telling myself it wasn't fair to post the first chapter and force you all to wait on my fickle muses to get their butts in gear to update something else again and again. But I like where this is going, and I've been inspired to write more lately (I'm sure you've noticed). And what's more, this story will be a bit of you as well.

I have an uncle who meditates with his rabbits, one of which shakes his meditation bells when she thinks he's had enough. I have an aunt who has encountered the 8-10 foot bull snake named Matilda that lives on our family property. I have a sister who I have seen charging across the hills in her pajamas, bathrobe and rubber boots, cranking the BB gun up and aiming at the sheep running terrified before her at 7 in the morning. And now, I want YOUR childhood stories. This is a tale about children, and I do not have enough strange and classic kid stories to furnish three kids of varying ages. I need your help in this. Send me your childhood memories in a PM. If I use yours in a story (And I probably will), you will be given proper credit and many thank yous.

Happy New Year, everyone. Thank you for being with me!

When Sephiroth couldn't sleep, he wandered. The ShinRa building was a strange place at night, dimly lit and silent, the empty hallways stretching out forever into shadows.

Most of the soldiers who had night guard were used to seeing him, and he had an understanding with them: they would not report that the General was walking the building at night in an attempt to deal with frequent insomnia and he would not punish them for relaxing in their duties, playing solitaire on the floor or listening to music on concealed ear buds, so they left him alone, politely acknowledging him when he moved past them and otherwise saying nothing.

It was rare for Sephiroth to venture past the fourth basement level of the building, largely because he had very unpleasant memories of the labs and holding areas the deeper levels housed, but some nights he needed the heavy silence that only a subterranean space could have. Slowly, over a period of six months, he worked his way down, from minor labs to highly funded ones to the specimen rooms, testing areas, storage, and finally the labs where things happened that the men behind the desks high up in the building funded without knowing the details of. Those dark, claustrophobic corridors were always empty, with no guards and no cameras. Many of the labs and rooms were empty, waiting for someone to come up with a crazy idea that needed to be kept under wraps.

The insomnia seemed to grow worse as the seasons waned, so that Sephiroth hardly slept at all in the depths of winter and felt as though he could sleep all day in high summer. As autumn drew to a close, he found himself far underground, trailing his fingers along the wall of a hallway on the seventh level. It was cold down there, and strangely humid, just enough to make the back of his neck sticky.

Something hummed softly further down the hallway, drawing his attention away from the slick paint under his fingers. When he looked, there was a faint greenish light pooling on the floor and wall just before the hall turned a corner. Curious, he followed the sound and came to a viewing window set into the wall, looking in on the room beyond.

Three Mako tubes had been set up in the room, hooked into separate monitors and a wall of control equipment. Sephiroth was familiar with the tubes, having spent far too much time in them as a child; the thick, viscous fluid the tubes were filled with was enhanced with nutrients and varying levels of Mako as well as oxygen, so that when a subject was plunged into it, they only needed a bare minimum of equipment within the fluid to monitor the condition of the specimen. Sephiroth remembered the cold burning as the fluid filled his lungs, the terrible ache as his body readjusted to absorbing oxygen from the fluid instead of air, and being pulled out of the tubes with no warning only to suffer all over again as his system readjusted again. Most others were given the courtesy of a breathing mask.

Three children hung suspended inside the tubes. Sephiroth was surprised to see that all three of them were without breathing masks. A few tubes and lines were hooked up to them, but there wasn't much there beyond the basic monitoring equipment, indicating that they were being kept for something rather than being worked on.

They looked like him

Suddenly terrified, Sephiroth rushed around the corner and tried the door. Unlocked. He shoved it open and hurried inside, halting at the base of the middle tube and staring at the thin form inside it.

The boy couldn't have been more than seven years old, short and thin, his ribs showing faintly under his pale skin. His hair was a medium shade of silver, darker than Sephiroth's but still recognizable as a close variation of it, and floated around his face. A tattoo on the inside of his wrist had a small triangle and the number 3.

To his left, another boy, tall, slender, almost effeminate. His hair was long, though the exact length was impossible to tell as it was suspended in the Mako, and roughly the same shade as the first boy's, perhaps a shade or two darker. He appeared much older, thirteen or so, and the tattoo on his wrist had the same symbol with the number 1.

The last boy was physically larger than the other two, shorter than the second but taller than the first, and appeared to be between them in age as well. His hair was short and soft-looking, more or less the same shade at the first child's. While he appeared young, his muscle definition was only just believable on a child of eleven. His tattoo had the number 2.

The youngest one twitched in his tube. A breath later, the other two did the same, almost in the exact same way. Then the middle one opened his eyes. They were icy green and slit-pupiled, the same eyes he saw in the mirror every day. His eyes.

He'd stepped behind the main control panel and was keying in an access code before he really registered what he was doing. It was a bit of a surprise to find that the access code he had- supplied by Reno, who had a file of access codes for all over the building for just about every department- got him into the controls. Once it had, however, he set to releasing the seals of all three containment tubes. Mako drained out of them into holding tanks set into the floor, and after a moment, the tube retracted as well, leaving the three boys held up by the monitoring equipment.

Sephiroth vaulted the monitor station and went to the nearest child, number 1. He began carefully removing the needles and sticky pads and patches, and was surprised when a slender hand stopped him. The boy pointed at child number 2, who was struggling with a long needle inserted in his forearm. Sephiroth nodded and went to help before he managed to hurt himself, wondering how these boys hadn't responded to the sudden transition fro breathing through liquid to having air in their lungs.

"Hllgck!" The youngest child crumpled, tearing monitoring equipment off his body as he fell. He landed on his hands and knees, bleeding sluggishly from ragged wounds, and retched, coughing hard. Thick green fluid ran from his nose and mouth, puddling around his hands as he heaved, ridding his stomach and lungs of the nutrient sludge he'd been floating in.

The older two fell as well, both at once, leaving Sephiroth uncertain of which to go to. They decided for him- the two older ones huddled together, leaving the smallest to tremble on the floor, arms threatening to buckle under his slight weight. Sephiroth knelt beside him, sliding one hand under his body to support him. His skin was slippery with the nutrient solution, and under it Sephiroth could feel remarkably well-developed muscle spasming and jerking with his gagging.

Finally, quiet fell on the room. All three children huddled in puddles of vomit and nutrient fluid, panting and shivering. The older ones had scooted closer to Sephiroth and the little one, and when they could move without gagging, they both went to the youngest boy, touching him gently. Sephiroth watched them, noting that they seemed to communicate without needing to speak. He wondered if they could truly speak mind to mind, or if it was just a product of being very close to one another.

"Who are you?" The smallest boy spoke, looking up at Sephiroth through sticky, draggled bangs.

"I'm…my name is Sephiroth. I think I may be your father. Or your brother."

"We don't have any other brothers," the tallest one murmured. "We are the only ones. And we don't have a father."

The middle boy stared up at Sephiroth, green eyes wide and curious. "He looks just like us."

"He's a liar, Loz, just like all the men who come in here."

"B-but…he let us out."

"More tests," the little one spat. "Shut up."

"You should be grateful," Sephiroth muttered, getting to his feet and wiping slime off his hands. "I could have left you in there. I know how miserable it is."

"You…you've been in a tube too?" Loz asked. "Why?"

"When I was young, that was where they kept me whenever they wanted to closely monitor whatever they had done to my body recently."

The tallest boy drew Loz into a loose hug, looking from Sephiroth to his smallest brother and back. "They keep files about us in the cabinet over there," he said, pointing across the room.

While Sephiroth flipped through the three files, learning that the smallest boy was Kadaj and the tallest was Yazoo, the trio went to the drain in the corner and pulled the handle that drenched all three of them in icy water, rinsing the slime off and leaving them wet and gasping.

"Here," Sephiroth said quietly. "I found it."

Three pairs of feet slapped wetly across the bare concrete, and three pairs of eyes fixed on the papers Sephiroth was holding. He pointed silently at the sheet on top, stating that the goal of the experiment was to recombine Sephiroth's DNA with viable eggs and see what happened. The recombination was to come after a little tweaking, in the hopes of bringing out certain traits in the semi-clones, each for a different purpose.

"So I am your brother."

"Or our father," Yazoo said. "It's your DNA they used, not your father's."

"I like the sound of brother better," Sephiroth murmured. "I'm not old enough to have children your age."

"How old are you, then?"

"Twenty four."

"You look older."

"I always have."

"Are you going to leave us here?" Loz asked timidly.

"I…no, I don't think so. They had no right to make you and then keep you from me."

"You can't have us," Kadaj spat, bristling like a kitten, small and rather defenseless but not caring at all. "We're not property." It bothered Sephiroth that he was so young but could speak so intelligently.

Sephiroth looked at Kadaj, then decided to take the route he often took with new cadets who were so terrified they became belligerent out of self defense. "I never said you were property. But which would you prefer? Being left here to be punished for escaping your tubes and then put back into them for more tests? Or taken upstairs where you can be protected and won't ever be put into a tube again?"

"Upstairs," Yazoo said firmly. Loz nodded in agreement. Kadaj looked like he might argue, then gave his brothers an irritated look and sighed.

"But you don't own us," he reminded Sephiroth. "We get to have real clothes, and real food, and we don't have to do tests all the time."

"That was what I had in mind, yes," Sephiroth said evenly. "But you will get less of everything and of much poorer quality if you continue to behave this way. I expect you to respect me, and to be thankful."

"You can't make me respect you."

"No, I can't. But I can teach you to respect people who do things for you rather than to you. And I can teach you to respect the fact that how you behave directly impacts how you are treated. If you really get under my skin, I can promise that your brothers will have a better life than you, and that you will be distinctly aware of it. If you behave yourself, you will have a comfortable life." He was more than capable of providing for three young children, financially at least. His monthly salary was appropriate for a man in his position, but he rarely bought anything beyond the bare essentials the company didn't provide, and the bulk of his wages grew quietly in a personal savings account. It would be a simple thing to pay for clothes and food and whatever else his brothers would need.

"I'm not going to like you," Kadaj muttered.

"Did I say that you have to?"

"No, but-"

"Do they keep some kind of clothing around here for you? Robes or something?"

"In the cabinets over there," Yazoo said at once.

"Get dressed. I don't want to stay down here any longer than is necessary."

"They won't let you keep us," Kadaj spat, obviously trying a new tactic.

"Actually, they can't really argue against my claim to you," Sephiroth said mildly, closing and stacking the files and tucking them under one arm. "Since you are biologically my children, I have claim to you before any one else. And really, Kadaj, there is no one in this company so suicidal that they would willingly try to physically take you from me, were I to refuse to give you up. But if you like it here so much, you can stay. I'm not stopping you. I'm just going to take your brothers home with me and make them some hot chocolate."

"What's hot chocolate?" Loz wanted to know.

"It's a drink. I like to have it before bed sometimes. It's warm and sweet and it smells good. I put marshmallows in it."

"What are marshmallows?"

"Little pillows of sugar and a bit of vanilla. They squeak when you bite into them, and they melt in hot chocolate."

"That sounds good."

"It is."

"We can really have some?"

"You can have a whole mug each, if you like it."

Loz grinned and ran to the cabinet, pulling out long cotton tunics and flinging them all over in search of one that would fit him. Yazoo took slippers out of a second cabinet, handing Loz a pair in exchange for a tunic in his size. Dressed, he carried another tunic and a pair of slippers to Kadaj, laying both in front of him.

"If you want to come," he said quietly. "If you don't, maybe we can come down and visit you."

"You'd leave me?"

Yazoo looked at him for a moment, then shrugged. "We hate it here. You hate it here. This is our chance to get out. I'm going to take it. So is Loz. We want something better. If you don't want to come, then fine. We'll miss you."

Kadaj was screaming when they left the room. Yazoo held the files so he and Loz could each hang onto one of Sephiroth's hands.

Halfway down the hall, the screaming stopped. Sephiroth didn't slow down, though Loz hesitated for a moment and looked back. There was nothing in the hallway behind them.

Just as they reached the elevator doors, however, bare feet slapped on the concrete floor behind them. "Waaaaiiiiit!" Kadaj wailed. Sephiroth turned around to see the boy tearing down the hallway towards them, tunic in one hand and slippers in the other.

He couldn't stop in time and ran smack into Sephiroth's legs, which he clung to, half panting, half sobbing. When he'd caught his breath he looked up at Sephiroth, red in the face and teary-eyed.

"I wanna come too," he whimpered. "Don't leave me alone."

The elevator doors opened with a soft chime. Sephiroth stepped inside, taking all three children with him. "I never said you couldn't come," he said quietly. The doors closed on them.