towerofanimus | (no subject)

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Characters: AU3 Revolver Ocelot, Neal Cassidy, and YOU
Setting: Around the tower
Format: Starting action
Summary: Event catch-all
Warnings: trauma, possible character death

Revolver Ocelot

[The whispers in her ear didn't stop. It was maddening. Horrible. Liquid's voice was the loudest one. Demanding to tell him why she had let him die. It was her fault that the world was in ruin. Had she not ruined his plans, had she not set him up to fall, he would have succeeded.

The shadow child using his voice stood in her way, staring her down. Ocelot couldn't speak. There was nothing to say.

In the months since she had arrived, she had come to deeply, deeply regret the murder of her own son. But there was nothing she could do. Nothing. But there were other voices, too. Solidus too spoke to her. You called me son, he said, angrily. Accusingly. And yet you left me behind! You said that we would destroy the Patriots! You liar! You'll never know what happened! What should have happened!

In the silence, the old woman collapsed to her knees, hugging herself, fighting to hold back tears she didn't know she could still shed.]

Neal Cassidy

[Emma was following him everywhere. It was fate's way of telling him just how badly he had screwed up. Telling him how she had been abandoned by him once again. That he was a coward. How she could see the family resemblance. He deserved every bit of it. Emma has a right to be angry.

He never wanted to leave her again. But here? Now? He hadn't had a choice. If she could somehow be here too, if Henry could be here... he would have been happier. Worst of all, though, was the shadow on his opposite side.

Henry.

The small boy that he barely knew, wondering aloud in a small, sad voice, if he ever should have looked for his father to begin with.]

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[He will not cry.

But damn, his eyes burn with it. With the anger, frustration and outright lack of control Sephiroth has in getting the two dozen or so shadows he has stop shouting at him. Some might have called it harsh truths - Sephiroth doesn't think so. They are only shouting like they are because he didn't bite at them earlier in the week. However the fading nature of Sephiroth's violet collar betrays the toll they are taking.

He pauses in the Hallway to rub at his temples, the first tingles of a headache coming on. Then as if only just waking up to Ocelot's presence, cool green eyes rest on her knelt, hunched over form not too far away. Though there is only one visible shadowy form near to her, and compared to his veritable, angry horde - Sephiroth is more than a little disappointed in the older woman's willpower.]

"Get up." [He breathes down at her as he drew nearer.]

[It's too much. Some distance away, even ADAM watches her, yelling at her for vanishing, for allowing the world to fall into ruin. She has failed everyone. What does it matter?

She looks up at Sephiroth's words, though. Bleakly. Unable to show strength in her eyes.

Still, she stands. Despite everything, her face becomes rather severe.]

I'm fine. There's no reason to worry.

[Is that what she thought it was. Worry? Hardly. Sephiroth is just disgusted by someone that he might, at a stretch, call ally being made victim to their own despair by these shadows.

She could at least be venting the anger back at them like he had been doing. Even the severe face doesn't hide battered eyes.]

You shouldn't believe in what they say.

["Don't worry", in hindsight, was more a comment directed at herself. Did she care, truly, about what her allies thought about her? It didn't matter. She stared at him with a distant look, her face hardening. She wouldn't let herself be defeated.]

You as well.

[They can't afford to let themselves be defeated.]

I don't.

[No. Not even the harsher comments. About his Legacy. About Mother. Just whispers, well more like taunted shouts, left over from a dead world that he needs to let go of and move on from. Sephiroth resolved to do this months ago.

So why was it every so often he could feel vivid anger filling up behind his eyes? Why was he not sleeping again and staying out all night? They laughed when Sephiroth thought about such things so he was trying his best not to. However fatigue of his own doesn't make it easy - the lightening of his collar is probably a trick to make him think it's worse than it is.]

They can't hurt you, not really.

[She doesn't believe him. Their fading collars is proof enough that they are in trouble. She can hope to survive as much as possible, until she is able to shake off the shadows following her.[

At least not in a way that would leave obvious scars.

[They are so angry with him. For everything he's done before and since coming to the Tower. After all he did to take over his Planet and then abandoning them. These souls that by rights should be forming his Legacy, so utterly degraded from their glory now only as shadows to haunt him.

Sephiroth looks away from Ocelot for a moment, refocusing his gaze on a point on the floor nearby. His eyes lowered, his expression laced with distaste. The shouting is now starting to grate on him and he takes the 'time out' to reset his facade. He can't allow himself to appear irritated or weakened by these...things...]

Old scars can only be reopened so many times before the skin becomes calloused enough not to feel them. All scars are the same.

[Ocelot nodded.

Her sons were still there, angry and frustrated with her. She had left them behind. It hadn't been her fault, but the fact remained that they were dead.

She wanted to be able to believe Sephiroth's words. To know that he knew what he was talking about, but with both of their collars fading, she knew that this was ultimately foolish.]

We will survive this.

[He knows it's useless to lash out at them but that shout right then-

IT'S HARDLY YOUR SHINING FUTURE

Sephiroth swipes an arm through the offending shadow with it's white-white grin. Eyes narrowed and anger barely contained beneath his crumbling facade. Then he draws himself back up again and even brushes the front of his jacket down as if the shadow had left some residue there. His expression, though clearly still irritated, hardening back an instant later.]

Yes we will. Just to spite them all.

[She watches, carefully. Nearly stunned at what to her looked like a sudden outburst.

It's a second later before she realizes that the shadow, whatever it said, must have hit a nerve.]

Of course.

[That headache of Sephiroth's is starting to pound more away at his temples, to irritate at that spark of anger. But rather than further demonstrate his discomfort he sets his jaw against the sensation for the sake of saving what little of his controlled facade he has left after that little outburst.

He draws his gaze up from a shadow which lingers near the floor, back to Ocelot. Noting as if for the first time that he's not the only one with a fading collar, but not making a direct comment at it either.]

Pathetic really.

[They clearly don't like him trying to push their taunts to the back of his mind. But it's all he can do to carry on.]

[She'll still try and fight it. The soldier swings an arm at a nearby shadow, watching it jump away without hesitation. She doesn't even know who is was that she swung at.

The hissing voices in her ear don't stop, don't even acknowledge that she had attacked one of her own sons.]

They want to break us down.

This is revenge for whoever blew up the elevator.

[Even with those she cared about calling her a traitor, she still can't believe that someone was able to find real explosives in a tower where nothing is real.]

Or it's a consequence of. Though I don't trust that surgeon of ours.

[Either it was staged, or there were some other party at play here that had managed to stay below all of their attentions thus far. Nothing of Glamour can really hurt the Tower, or Sephiroth himself would have broken through a wall right away when he'd first gotten here.

He will not let them break him, like this. No matter how that sickly feeling brought on behind his anger was starting to twist around in his mind. Jason came so close last time - Sephiroth is determined not to let him, or whomever was responsible really for breaking the elevator, win now.]

[Ocelot was of the opinion that it had to be a yet to be seen party. She was sure that it would have come out if it had been one of the known factions. Neither Pandora nor her alliance were particularly good at keeping secrets from their own members.

That much she was confident in.]

Doing it himself to frame us? That is a possibility.

[This is a popular theory, Sephiroth has much the same idea.]

I wouldn't put anything past that man. Though, considering his track record it's somewhat less physical than before. Well as far as actual physicality can be taken here.

[Sephiroth pauses, seeming to lose himself in a glare at one or two of his shadows as he ponders.]

It's hardly an experiment on the populace as a whole, being as personal as these monsters seem to be.

[She considers this. Since she has arrived in the tower, Jason's months have always been an experiment of some kind. There's something to be said about the distinct lack of residents getting experimented on this month.

She thinks back, to when she had awakened in the Administrative levels in time to see Zo shouting as he ran past her. Not having any context to it, she hadn't given it much thought since the incident, but maybe, just maybe...]

Perhaps the experiment was to see what these creatures would do to us.

[Sephiroth's eyes follow the same two shadows of his, his brow wrinkle some in the middle. Trying to recall exactly those voices he recognizes but can't place. Whilst at the same time the discussion with Ocelot proving distracting enough not to really be listening to their jibes.]

But the results are the same for everyone, and at least from what I saw he knew what they would be. [He raises a hand to his collar, he knows it's lightening and has seen many more like it. Gloved fingers idly touching one of the tubes.] Before there have at least been variables and besides, the collars are his work...

[-why would he want to damage them? Sephiroth falls silent. Could this be the real punishment for the boycott...]

[What could it be? What's the common element? Surely killing them and weakening them isn't exactly a good sort of experiment, though it's not as though Jason's mind is something that she can understand.]

Perhaps so.

[It doesn't take a genius to see just how badly most people are suffering.]

If this was his work... he must be after something.

[Still idly feeling one of the tubes of his collar Sephiroth's eyes narrow as he ponders, a single crease between silver eyebrows mars deeply what is usually a blank canvass of an expression. This just didn't make any sense.]

All he can be learning from this is that we can all be tormented. Which he clearly already knows how to do.

[He doesn't want to think about the other things that Jason has done to him. Picking at those aforementioned old scars is only going to inflame issues that he would prefer to be as far out of his mind as possible. However the conversation tickles at these past events, and the mass shadows around Sephiroth seem to ripple in reaction. He blinks and makes a renewed effort internally to not listen to them.]

Questions like that lead to the still greater ones. What is our purpose here? Why 'rescue' us at all?

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Revolver Ocelot 16th August

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