Within all the other emotions beginning to recede, Sephiroth could attribute his own thudding pulse to any single one of them; pain, anger, sadness - that it might be as a result of his fondness for Terra was outside of his awareness. Her small hand had given him something to hold onto, the gesture itself encompassing her words as if she hadn't needed to say them; she was there for him. She wanted to help. She wanted him to be happy too.

That time, in discussion now, had been the only time that he'd opened up to friendship where he'd spent the majority of his childhood carefully isolated away from what could have been 'detrimental influences' in the opinion of a father who -now he knew- ultimately hadn't wanted him. Sure, he was praised as the successful product of a great experiment, but not recognized for his own self. It was little wonder he pursued perfection so fervently.

"The truth. That we were all different branches of the same experiment...of which I was the successful product. Somehow I would always inspire jealousy, rivalry and inevitably outright betrayal. The fact that, like his poetry book it's quite likely that it was all plotted out by others to have gone that way-"

Sephiroth caught his voice in a noise similar to a hiccup which he sternly dismissed away while pulling his eyes from the floor where they'd become heavily drawn. He swallowed a dry, solid feeling in the back of his throat and made his gaze climb the side of Terra's cheek back to those bright blues.

"That everything I'd been raised to believe, my whole life, was ultimately a lie..." The last part dropped to an almost incomprehensible whisper.

"...he tried to tell me."