jukeboxhound_backup | fic: eir's tomorrow omake (ffvii)

Eir's Tomorrow
Omake 1: Sephiroth tends to think too hard.
No, really. At least it's a step up from Zack's nubbins. Written as a joke because I tend to pull this kind of shit on dina all the time. X3

...Don't take it seriously. At all.

______________

If he hadn’t known Sephiroth as well as he did, Cloud might have been worried. As it was, when he and Zack walked into the man’s hotel room and encountered a blizzard of papers left on every available surface, he just rolled his eyes.

“Now what’s shoved a stick up his ass?” Zack groaned, drooping over melodramatically.

“Sephiroth?” Cloud tried, sidestepping a pile of papers. It looked like most of them were covered in strange diagrams consisting mostly of circles, lines, and sine-waves, all dissected by the General’s elegant script. Lost as he was in a flurry of scribbling, Sephiroth didn’t even look up and continued muttering to himself.

Understandably, this was making Cloud increasingly uneasy.

“Sephiroth?” he repeated more forcefully, stepping forward to put a hand on the other’s shoulder. “Se—“

“You,” the General whirled around suddenly, nearly scaring Cloud back into the Lifestream, “shouldn’t exist.”

“Gee, thanks,” the blond muttered, but Sephiroth didn’t appear to hear him.

“This—none of this—should be possible,” he announced, gesturing broadly at the papers scattered around the room. Zack had to duck to avoid being knocked into the wall. “What you’ve done goes against every line of logic.”

“…What’d I do?” If Cloud sounded like he was speaking to a ruffled and agitated chocobo, well, that was because it wasn’t common to see Sephiroth so ruffled and agitated.

Sephiroth took a fresh piece of paper from a swiftly dwindling stack and poised his pen above it almost threateningly. “This,” he said, making a dark point on the page, “is a past event. A situation uniquely confined by a specific combination of factors at that very instant.

“And this,” he continued, making another dot a few inches from the first, “is another such event. We have now established a timeline in which history follows a linear path, involving a past and present and, presumably, a future.”

“Okay,” Cloud said slowly, wondering where this was going. Zack scratched his head absently.

“According to this visual, an instant can’t be repeated. An event is a one-time occurrence that is never repeated again, right? But you—“ he jabbed the pen in Cloud’s direction, “managed to go from here to there.” He drew a curved line arcing backwards from the second dot to the first. “But in order to go back in time to a past event, there’s a presupposition that the past event exists in the present as well, making it an eternal moment. The beginning and the end become the same point, and therefore in effect proves that time is circular. But if time were circular, then our construction of a linear history is false, and how can you claim that our lives are a single eternal instant?”

Cloud was hardly stupid, but he thought that a certain someone was overanalyzing things. “Well, somehow it happened, because here I am,” he pointed out calmly.

“Which brings me to another point.” A definite note of ‘ranting’ was starting to color the General’s voice. “I can disregard the problems involved in transporting a human-sized mass through time, since that isn’t your original body, but there’s the issue of your consciousness. How would you have been able to transcend the speed of light, even as pure energy? There’s the possibility of a wormhole, essentially folding space-time in half so that Points A and B exist in the exact same time and space, but the Planet couldn’t possibly generate the sheer scale of power needed to produce and then stabilize such a method.”

“Then obviously something must exist outside of all the time and space,” Zack chimed in with a shrug. “If something doesn’t fit, it usually means you’re missing something. I mean, people know all about neurons and transmitters and whatnot, but they still don’t know what makes a person a person.”

Sephiroth stared at him. “A Gestalten universe? But…there can’t be anything outside the space-time continuum, especially if space-time itself is an eternity.”

“But there are different types of eternity, aren’t there? Different infinites?”

Sephiroth twitched. “What you’re suggesting would point to several different modes of time rather than a singularity, and if time ‘splinters’ from the original timeline to produce a parallel, it has to be mutually exclusive. If they weren’t, then we wouldn’t be able to form a coherent progression of events since every possibility would literally be happening at once. So we’re back to Cloud’s time-traveling being impossible—unless you want to claim he’s from a parallel universe?”

“Um. Not really,” Zack said timidly.

“Not necessarily,” Cloud suddenly interjected. “What if those eternities were concentric? Look at an individual person. As far as we’re concerned, they’re born, they live, they die, and that’s it—it’s all very linear. But if you look at the human race as a whole, then it’s a constantly repeating cycle of events. Maybe the timeline we know is just a smaller bit of a larger one.”

The stare that Sephiroth leveled at him nearly made the blond take a step back. Without another word, the General whirled back around and started scribbling again on the paper, apparently forgetting Cloud and Zack’s presence entirely.

“…By the way, dinner’s ready,” Cloud added weakly. Zack sighed gustily and slung an arm over his shoulders.

“He’ll be around when he’s done driving his head into the wall. Let’s go keep your mum company.”

xxx

Missus Strife set a pot of baked potatoes on the table, and glanced at both Cloud and Zack. “Where’s Sephiroth? A growing boy really shouldn’t be missing dinner.”

“He’ll be along soon, Mum,” Cloud said, helping himself to the stewed beef. “After he’s done having an existential crisis.”

“Oh dear,” she murmured to herself as she bustled back into the kitchen, “I should put a plate for him in the oven so that it’ll still be warm when he feels better.”