The city hummed beneath him—endless, indifferent, a sprawling beast of steel and neon that pulsed with the rhythm of a thousand lives. Sephiroth stood at the floor-to-ceiling window of his penthouse office, his reflection a ghostly silhouette against the skyline. The night was restless, the kind that clung to the skin like static, and yet he felt nothing. Nothing at all.

His phone buzzed against the polished mahogany of his desk, an unwelcome intrusion. He didn’t move. Not at first. The glow of the screen cast an eerie pallor over the room, illuminating the sharp angles of his face—the cold, calculated indifference in his eyes. Another distraction. His fingers twitched, the barest hint of irritation flickering beneath his skin before he finally turned, snatching the device with a gloved hand.

Unknown number.

A beat of silence. Then, the voice on the other end—clinical, detached—delivered the news.

"Mr. Sephiroth? This is Midgar General Hospital. Your wife has been admitted. She collapsed on the street—"

His grip tightened imperceptibly around the phone. Wife. The word was a mockery, a hollow title forced upon him by the whims of greedy families and meaningless tradition. She was nothing to him. Less than nothing. A shadow in his periphery, an inconvenience he had long since learned to ignore.

"Is she dead?" The question left his lips like a blade—sharp, effortless.

A pause. The voice hesitated, as if taken aback by the ice in his tone. "No, sir. But her condition is—"

"Then call me when she is."

The line went dead before the hospital could respond.

He dropped the phone back onto the desk, the sound echoing in the cavernous silence of the room. His gaze returned to the city below, the endless sea of lights that stretched into oblivion. Pathetic. The thought slithered through his mind, venomous and dismissive. That she would dare intrude upon his time, even in unconsciousness, even in suffering—it was just like her. Weak. Needy. A burden he had never asked for.

A part of him wondered, idly, what had brought her to collapse. Had she starved herself again? Gotten sick from wandering the streets like some stray? Or had she simply given up, her fragile will finally crumbling beneath the weight of his indifference? It didn’t matter. None of it did.