melodiesoflife | Taking responsibility [Semi-Open]

Entry tags:

Taking responsibility [Semi-Open]

Characters: Vincent, Sephiroth, others [Mostly Open; Refer to the top-level Prompts]
Where: Hospital, Aquares Ixen
When: 9th-14th September
Summary: Some aftermath of the fallout from Sephiroth grieving over Terra being in Crystal Stasis. Vincent helped disable Seph, and is now keeping an eye on him. Some people might want to have words with him about how he did so. In between guarding a Weapon for a few shifts...
Warning: Language maybe? Potential angst?

Sept 11th-13th at various times.
Vincent is one of those who is guarding the Ultima WEAPON'S wreckage. These are the only times he won't be found at the Hospital, keeping a guard over Sephiroth. If you want to interact with him, see here.

Sept. 9th-12th

Vincent will stay out of the way of the healers, but otherwise stay in the hospital and keep an eye on Sephiroth as he sleeps off both the post-Job exhaustion and the sleep status. Making sure the silver-haired SOLDIER is healing well, and not being bothered unduly. Occasionally Vincent will head to the Crystal Stasis wing, visiting those among his friends who are there. Ophelia can also be found bringing him a bag with a change of clothes, and a book or two.

He's unlikely to talk in the same room Sephiroth is resting in, but feel free to come check on the SOLDIER, or yell at Vincent, or check on Vincent.

Sept 13th--Closed to Sephiroth
Vincent has spent the past few days keeping watch over and not quite playing guard for Sephiroth, mostly so that when the other does wake--he can apologize. Also to keep others from overwhelming the silver-haired soldier right away. Sadly, Vincent understands heartbreak; he also knows Seph well enough to have some idea of how, hopefully, to help the other start healing.

September 13th, OPEN

Since part of Vincent's assumed role has been gatekeeper for a very private and recovering SOLDIER, he'll be keeping an eye out to ensure the other doesn't get tired, when others DO come to visit him. This is the prompt to use for visiting Sephiroth--and if you want to do so privately, Vincent can wait outside the door.

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Vincent had made no secret of his role as 'screener' of sorts, to those who had asked and dealt with the grieving Soldier at the time. Clear they cared about him, as did Vincent--so no need to hide that he was now being protective of the other.

"If he's awake, then likely yes." A pause, and crimson-eyes watched her for a moment. "You do know, he is not as experienced as you would think. This was his first experience with love, and the loss thereof." His voice was quiet and confidential. He would not share the information lightly.

Given how harsh Mary had been with Sephiroth at the time of the outburst, she wasn't sure if Vincent would allow her to see him, or if Sephiroth would want to see her at all. She frowned at Vincent's admonishment but it wasn't like she wasn't expecting it either.

"Aye. I'm afraid I made some assumptions about the man, but afterwards I'd come to suspect something like that. I don't know his experience, or yours. I just pegged him as the distant and stoic sort." She sighed and shook her head, "But I've known military men. And I thought I knew him better than I did, clearly."

"I won't claim to have known him well--he is the distant and stoic sort." Says the kettle about the pot, considering Vincent's own demeanor and nature. Lowering his voice though, a dart of his eyes around--unobtrusive--and a nod, beckoning Mary slightly closer. "I hadn't known how bad it was though, and his secrets are not mine to share. But Sephiroth has known nothing BUT the military lifestyle. Back home on Gaia, or here on Crystallis." A pause, crimson eyes seeking hers to be certain she was following him.

Mary nodded quietly as she listened. There was little more to say about the matter. Even with Sephiroth's worldmates she expected there hadn't been much he spoke to with them regarding Terra. If anything he probably kept them further at a distance if the whole experience was this new to him. That he was the sort to hide any perceived weakness or uncertainty was one of the things she had been able to glean from him.

"I've met career men in my time, but he clearly puts them all to shame. At least he hasn't worked himself to the point of giving his own life. There's hope yet for him to find himself." But it would be easier with Terra here. Her crystalization may have set him back, if anything. It all depended on what he decided to do with this incident: take the time to learn from it or push it down even further.

"May I speak to him?"

"Tread gently and carefully, I would recommend." A sigh, and keeping his voice low, there was sadness in it. "I suspect that the first time he has experienced anything close to normal life, has been on Crystallis, while with Terra."

Mary--James Kidd--had earned a measure of trust and respect. But Sephiroth's secrets were still not Vincent's to share. Not without drastic reason. "I am reluctant to share more of his own secrets without permission."

"Aye. I keep telling myself not to expect that everyone else has lived the same sort of life, been prone to the same risks as I have. But even then I find myself surprised at times by how vast the differences have been." She took a moment, looking Vincent over. She guessed she'd probably learn a lot about him if she simply asked, he seemed the sort to either keep things secret or to tell all there was to know with no middle ground.

But now wasn't the time.

"I'll have to ask him directly then. I think I've earned a straight answer or two at this point." The comment was bold, but her tone was a bit softer. She'd put her trust in Sephiroth and it hadn't quite been repaid. Perhaps it was her fault for not pressing the man sooner, but there was nothing to be done for that now.

She gave Vincent's shoulder a gentle rap with her knuckles before moving to enter the room.

Vincent appreciated the gentle tone, and there might've been a hint of smile. Barely. "It depends on if he sees it that way himself." Was the mild comment in response. "He is not used to seeing anyone except as a military comrade, or civilian." A nod, wishing her well as he'd keep watch still and try to give them privacy.

Some of the uncomfortable atmosphere that had been left behind by that first conversation, when Sephiroth had first come around from his days-long slumber, still lingered in the room in Vincent's wake from when he'd finally left the silver-haired man alone to his own thoughts. There hadn't been any other visitors yet, and aside from finishing another cup of water Sephiroth had nothing else much to do other than to sit back against the now-inclined back of the bed and stare across the room.

Occasionally he felt his consciousness slipping, his eyes close again as he sat there but no sooner would his head drop to one side that he'd pull himself back awake again. He was dozing out of boredom, surely there was no way he was still tired-!

At the sound and movement of the door opening, Sephiroth blinked himself further awake again and pushed with his good arm against the bed, out of a need to make sure he was sat up as opposed to lying down. His right was still strapped firmly in a V across his chest, preventing movement that would impede healing.

He'd expected it to be Vincent. A short huff of a noise passed in acknowledgment as Mary entered instead. All of a sudden, that itchy feeling of vulnerability seemed to quadruple.

Mary paused as she entered the room, glancing about and taking it all in. It was as much to give Sephiroth a chance to see her as it was for her to assess him. Given their last encounters she wasn't sure how he'd react to her, nor how his recovery was going. A frown ticked briefly across her face as she laid eyes on him. She was learning more and more she didn't know what was going through his mind, but their friendship and association were at least such that she could make a guess based on his past actions.

She recognized the tired and drawn look of a man of action who had been confined to bed longer than he wanted and yet for his own good. The way the arm was taped down and the way his muscles had tensed were at odds with the bags under his eyes and the pale look on his face. Clearly he was fighting the sleep his body knew he needed.

"Ahoy there. Was wonderin' if I could speak with you, if you're willing."

(ooc: I swore I replied to this already...and then I accidentally closed the tab mid reply)

(ooc: No worries at all!)

Even if he hadn't know Mary's profession and practiced art of being an assassin, the very fact that she had been one of the ones who had tried to stop him a few days ago would have added tension to any atmosphere. She'd intervened, to stop him from trying to break Terra's crystal with his bare hands and now at least for the most part that madness had been slept back into dormancy, if anything he felt foolish beyond compare for being seen in that way.

She'd been there before as well, when he'd been a drunken wreck on a street corner over something of a related issue too. How could he ever forget?

Sephiroth shifted once more in his seated position, drawing a long breath as the reduced muscle mass in the back of his shot shoulder threatened to tense up into a less bearable level of pain. Like a stitch of a feeling he tried to roll with it, looked away across the room a moment -intentionally or not, showing Mary a respectable level of trust- before answering her.

"It's not one of my strengths but-" Finally he seemed to lean himself back again, breathe a little easier.

"-sure."

She nodded and closed the distance to his bed. He was a smart man, intelligent and wise at the best of times, but now she knew he was a soldier before all else. And almost to the exclusivity of anything else. She could only imagine the sort of life he lived to reach that point. The necessary isolation and pressure.

Grabbing a chair she sat down at the foot of the bed, giving him a long barrier between them while still getting close enough for a private talk. She thought a long moment about her words before she finally spoke up.

"I don't blame you for what you did. For all my anger in that moment, I understand. And I'm not here to scold you about it either. I expect it's been enough already and you're doing the rest all on your own." She paused a moment, running her tongue along her teeth as she considered her words, "But how long are you planning on carrying all that weight on your shoulders by your lonesome? It seems you have a fair few strengths and a handful of weaknesses, and naught at all in between." Had he been a fellow pirate she'd have thrown in a jab about his shoulder not being very good for that weight now.

Though Mary being sat at the foot of the bed rather than the side did afford some additional room between them, it made it no easier for Sephiroth to avoid looking directly at her. Given how he was sat up, facing forwards, it was only too natural to have his bright eyes keep meeting her face, even as he forced them to look down and away as she spoke.

Simple truth. Bitter in the fact that she did indeed have him figured out enough to accurately call it. There were reasons why Vincent had remained a constant vigil nearby even though he had been the perpetrator to Sephiroth's newest injury. To attempt to mitigate the scolding that, if no one else delivered it, his own consciousness screamed along the back of every hint of the uncomfortable aching in his shoulder that he now felt.

It was driven deeper, given more of an edge as Mary told it alongside a question Sephiroth would not have expected. He blinked in response, a little taken aback at both her keen perception of how things were with him, and how transparent he had to have been in order for her to see it. Again that weakness that the closeness to another person seemed to have festered in him.

"It's only the same weight that every single person here bears within themselves. I just seem to have misplaced the strength that I once had-" A noticeable break in his voice caused Sephiroth to pause and look away again, steeling himself again raw emotions that were still not quite settled back.

"-to hold it up, somehow."

Welcome to Assassin interrogation techniques. Not that this was one and not that it was wholly intended, but the point was to keep her in his focus even as she kept her distance. They needed this talk, the two of them. It wasn't something they could bother to simply put off for convenience without further problems down the line.

"Aye, we all have. We seem to have lost our grip on it one way or another on our way here." She frowned at him. She didn't buy his wall for a minute. She didn't need the brief faltering of his confidence to tell her that. "Some of us had powers. Most of us had friends we could rely on. Or we were the ones offering that guidance. So in place of Kenway I have you. So tell me, what was that strength that you relied on? Who was it you'd speak to in your world when you were troubled?"

In all fairness, they could well have done with such a talk at points in the past, not that either of them were one to call out hindsight but perhaps current circumstances could well have been dampened, if not avoided altogether. As Sephiroth settled to the fact that Mary were sat there, the atmosphere did seem to turn into one charged with the knowledge that he'd known for a while it might be only a matter of time before she might have come to discuss certain things with him.

Mary had always been there, throughout a large bulk of Sephiroth's difficulties in the months before Terra had slipped away from them. At the very least, he owed her a little more than the standard brush-off of an explanation that he'd be inclined to dish out to most others.

"I always had strength-" Mary's frown at the small slip of the confidence he always had worn so stubbornly threatened to fracture it once more. Sephiroth's monotone voice in trying to explain now, told a story of a man that wasn't sure he wanted to care anymore.

"-I'd look forwards, to the next objective, the next record to break. I was always good at pushing that bar of excellence; in my training, in my duties. To always improve, and do better. Not once did I break, under pressure from myself or from others."

He blinked away from Mary's face, down towards where his free hand rested in his lap, gingerly moving those bound up fingers. He hadn't only taken a bullet to the shoulder, after all, his fists had met crystal several times before that. Sephiroth chewed on his thoughts for a long moment, idly running the inside corner of his mouth between teeth discreetly; it almost seemed to make him pout.

"I- did all of that myself. I had grown out of being troubled, there was not ever the time."

Hindsight was a sinister thing at times, but time had a way of slipping away in this world. So many crises and so little guidance, often things had to be made up as they went along and they could only really appreciate the result further down the line. But they were here now, and perhaps things could be sorted out for the sake of the future.

"The simple life of the military. A straight line and the assurance that you're on the proper path. You just needed to think about what was right in front of you while everything else was left to your commanders." As harsh as those words might be there was no hint of accusation in Mary's voice, but in fact understanding. The Navy hadn't been what she'd stuck with, but she still served for a time. And while the Assassins were encouraged to be open and flexible it wasn't an entirely different existence.

"So when you arrived here you not only lost the physical strength you had before but also your direction." She closed her eyes and took a long breath. "What does being a Hero mean to you? We may not have had a choice in the matter but we've all been finding our reasons to fight for this world and it's people. Are you merely doing it because it's expected of you?"

And then there was the matter of Terra. He was finding his own purpose, his own desire, and then it was torn from him.

Sephiroth looked immediately back up to Mary's face as she commented on the 'simplicity' that she perceived of his life up until the point he'd been brought to Crystallis. Pupils had retracted and it looked for a few seconds that those words had been taken with a very real offense, until it cooled as his logical thought process caught up. To remind him that she really had no way else to relate to it; he'd seen her world once, or a memory of hers from her world, he remembers the military presence there.

His life had hardly been so simple, but then wouldn't everyone be so inclined about their own life? Each man had his own mountain, to some it might seem gigantic, to others it might be a comparable molehill. Sephiroth had never been in the habit of blowing up about his own circumstances, aside from a few occasions in his adolescence which he'd left behind as he'd grown older. In some ways, Mary was right in her reasoning.

"When I arrived here-" He frowned as he thought back, indeed it was not only a matter of time but also of different circumstances as he had first recalled them. Not only had Crystal Stasis had once seen it fitting to return some of those memories to him, but even as a result of being here he'd learned more, so it were a little jarring to think back to a time he hadn't known what he did now. "-it took a long time to adjust to that physical 'step down'. But afterward, I wanted nothing but to show that I could be exactly the champion that I'd --obviously-- been brought here to be. It wasn't an expected, it was a given."

So naive that he'd been, so egotistical and confident in his role. Sephiroth looked away from Mary again, eyelids lowered once more into his lap. He seemed to shudder a little, before shaking his head.

"To defeat the Calamity...to save this World, seemed just like the next biggest challenge and I'd never failed to rise to them before.

"But things...happened, surfaced questions...correlations to old concerns, prepubescent doubts over self-purpose. I began to question exactly the mechanics that had brought me here. It felt like...I was drowning in the mundane, direction-less living each day as it came and every now and again something would come along to remind me that I really wasn't what I thought I was.

"I enlisted to Esdham, to find that purpose again. A familiar environment at least, where I could contribute best."

Mary nodded as she listened, letting him speak, not risking stopping him by interrupting. She knew enough to understand the vulnerability he was feeling here, but also counting on it to help the momentum of his confession to keep the floodgates from closing once more.

Even if she was wrong about him in one way or another, that he was talking was victory enough. And honestly it didn't sound to her like she had him pegged so wrong in his reasons for serving with Esdham's military either. He might consider it the best use of him, but he also just admitted to being overwhelmed by this world in the breath prior.

"There's nothing wrong with questioning the world around you. It's frustrating to be sure, but it doesn't mean you aren't contributing if that's what you're concerned about. Everyone has their skills and does their part, and it's up to everyone else to pick up the other burdens." She turned and looked out the window, taking a breath before continuing.

"As for not being who you thought you were, I imagine that's true of a lot of us now. Torn from our own homes we've learned to adapt to our new surroundings. We're not the same people we once were. This would be true in any world over time, it's just happened suddenly enough here for us to notice." She returned her gaze to her fellow Hero, looking him up and down once more. She didn't expect she'd soothe his troubles with this meeting, but she hoped for insight and perhaps to get him to think more critically. If he had hurdles to overcome he had to be the one to ultimately leap.

"If you don't mind, what correlations do you mean? You're one of those who come from a world similar to this one, right? Something about our situation reminds you of your world?"

It seemed that, just as those floodgates had been opened and since Sephiroth were essentially backed up against a wall due to his current condition he could do little else but let pent-up words spew out, the flow of the same was over all too soon. He frowned some at the end of his last statement and then seemed to retreat back into himself more than a fraction again; to attempt to quietly pull those doors back closed.

It took a few more seconds to kind-of re-affirm within himself that Mary had pretty much a right to know those quite personal things that he'd just informed her. He'd crossed her path enough times, she'd been there to attempt to steady his too often. There was plenty to mull over, still, in the silence that led to Sephiroth eventually lifting his eyes back to watching Mary as she continued to speak.

Both points were well worth taking in and if the bright gleam, that was present across his eyes again by the time she looked back, was anything to go by the silver haired warrior was soaking it all up keenly. Like some dried out sponge. For the first time in a great while, for just a few moments, it felt like it was normal to have the concerns that he did. To feel as insecure and uncertain as he did; the sharp edge to those issues were blunted some.

At least until she then backtracked, but Sephiroth had looked back up and it didn't seem right to look away from her again under the weight of further questioning. He'd come this far, it was time to have the balls to share the rest as well. Still, there was always that sharp sliver of doubt not too far into the back of his mind.

"A fair few things run shockingly parallel...apparently. The Life cycle here seems similar, in theory if not practice. WEAPONs created to destroy that which threatens the Planet's existence. The Calamity..."

Ever since it had first come to light that it was driven by the desire to be whole again, the correlation to Jenova's will -in particular what he'd learned from Palitutu's file on him- made it all run too close for comfort.

"...it's not really all that easy to explain but-

"-that's what I really am."

Quickly followed by a shake of his head, Sephiroth then looked down into his lap once more. He's acutely aware of how crazy this might all sound to Mary and he was hardly comfortable with the confession itself but it seemed to be the simplest way to put it. He could wax and wane on about destiny and how future wasn't set in stone, as so many others had encouraged him. That Terra had near enough managed to get him to believe.

It didn't change the foundation upon whatever future might be built.

She saw the change in his eyes as he listened to her, and for a moment she was encouraged. She sat tense as she waited for his answer to the question she posed. She had set him up, to a point. Let him be comfortable, let him know she was here to support him, and then ask a critical question. The offering she was making wasn't untrue, but she was indeed hoping he'd play along and pay her back in kind.

She almost didn't expect him to answer.

She nodded as he spoke, his words lining up with those of some of the others she'd met, Reno in particular. Those parallels were bold indeed, and if she were to make some sort of cartographer's map of the worlds this one would clearly lie close to his like islands just over the horizon from each other, perhaps dimly visible but only naturally traversable by the birds which could fly between.

But his last comment gave her pause. She sat there, for a moment, processing it before her eyes widened somewhat in understanding. They then narrowed and she pursed her lips, trying to determine just how to respond. A soft echo of Haytham's memory glanced across her mind, words spoken by that Cycle's Cloud. Something she had discarded in the face of more pressing concerns. It offered her little revelation but it was the glue that helped put the pieces together.

"I see...and set free of your own world you don't know what that means for you." Crossing her arms she leaned forward, thinking, not quite sure what to say beyond that. This was beyond merely wondering about one's purpose in life, and to a degree being lost didn't seem like the worst outcome.

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Taking responsibility [Semi-Open]

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(sorry Mary, bit of a book <3)

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