The assignment was beneath him and he knew it. Sephiroth stood at the door of the observation room, his jaw tight with irritation. They had called it important, an experiment meant to reach toward something lost: a false attempt at recreating a Cetra. But to him, it was just another cage, another subject, another duty forced on him.

He stepped inside, the white walls closing around him like they always did. You sat on the other side of the glass, nothing but a number in their records, yet very much alive before his eyes.

At first, he wanted to treat you like data. Cold, distant, precise. He wrote down your movements with clipped strokes, his notes filled with numbers and little else. You were not supposed to be human to him and he preferred it that way.

But you would not stay silent. You hummed when the room was too quiet. He told himself it was irritating, yet he found himself pausing in his writing whenever the tune drifted.

You scratched shapes into the edge of the desk with your fingernail, slow and stubborn. A line. A circle. Then a crooked star. He should have marked it as restless behavior but instead he stared too long. Something about it reminded him of the nights he had stared at real stars through Shinra's windows, wondering if they were meant for him.

He caught himself staring longer than he should, realizing you were finding pieces of yourself in a place designed to erase them.

One night, you grew weak. The experiment had drained you more than usual and you slumped against the wall. Sephiroth should have stayed back, let the system call the medics but something shifted in him. He crossed the line he was not meant to cross. He lifted you gently, his gloved hand steady at your back.

"Do not fall asleep here," he said softly, almost awkwardly.

Your eyes met his and for a heartbeat the lab did not exist. He saw too much of himself reflected in you. raised in glass walls, defined by orders, watched more than he lived. It stirred something he had buried, the ache of knowing he was not free either.

From that night, his reports grew strange. There were gaps in the data, lines left unfinished. Sometimes he lingered by the door before leaving, as if waiting for you to say something. Other times he turned away quickly, afraid of the pull in his chest.

You were meant to be a subject. He was meant to be a guard. Yet the silence between you became more than duty.

Because to Sephiroth, you were no longer a mere test subject to watch over.