Chapter Text
Sephiroth left Cloud’s shop feeling a fool.
The blond had read him like a book and given some cheap prediction before rattling off prices (which were frankly dirt cheap, despite what Cloud himself had said; he’d bought more expensive potions before). He’d known going in that he was approaching an expert in a subject that he had little to no knowledge in, but he didn’t appreciate having his nose rubbed in how uneducated he was. He understood objectively that, well, Cloud must have seen dozens of cases like his, but he was close enough to this problem that having it treated like it was so common stung.
Still.
He’d gone to Cloud because, according to everything he could find, he was the best in Midgar. He didn’t seem to know his reputation, based on his prices, but it was still there. Oh, it was hard to find, to be sure. If you wanted the best psychic, you got a very different list. If you wanted a paranormal investigator, also a very different list. But if you went in to occult specialists with a spirit problem, there was one place they sent you.
No one seemed to quite know where Cloud had come from. One day he just sprung out of the ground in that ratty little hole in the wall of his and began out-performing everyone else. If you wanted spirit work or truly old, traditional magic, you went to Cloud. He’d heard the blond called a lot of things: medium, shaman, spirit worker, psychopomp. He’d had to ask for explanations for what exactly those terms meant, because his understanding for the first two was dramatic actor and rattle-shaker respectively, and he had no real guess as to the latter. He was discovering that there was an entire world out there for the paranormal beyond ghost television shows where hapless men wandered into severely haunted areas with cameras.
To be honest, Sephiroth hadn’t even believed in spirits until he’d come across his own. He was, hard and fast, a man of science. He believed what there was hard proof of, what there was evidence of, and nothing else. There were just too many ways to explain away all the “evidence” of paranormal activity for him to give it much credence.
And then it happened to him.
It began with footsteps on the floor above him, which was odd, because he was on the highest floor. Still, there was a helicopter pad up there, and maintenance men came and went. It was odd in its surprising frequency, but didn’t really ring an alarm bells.
Then doors began to move on their own. Again, odd, but the windows were open sometimes. If it was too hot for that, the AC was on, and if it was too cold for that, the heat was on. Either way, air was moving in his apartment. It was strange that it hadn’t happened before, but maybe it had, and he just hadn’t noticed.
Then he started getting knocks on his door. When it was the front door, it was weird, because every time he checked the door, no one was there. When it was his bedroom door, or the bathroom door, it was weirder, because he didn’t really have an explanation. He assumed he was mishearing and wrote it off.
He started catching snippets of conversation, voices he could hear but not make out. He checked the hallways a few times, but there was never anyone there. He didn’t have any neighbors except a few apartments across the hall, but no one he shared a wall with. He wrote it off as conversation coming through the air ducts. Maybe they were doing work on them.
He became slightly concerned when Masamune began falling off its mounting. That sword had never fallen before. There was no way for it to fall. That mounting had been carefully constructed and had a hook shaped lip that came up on the edge to keep the sword in place. It had to be lifted out or, at worst, knocked out of place physically from underneath. This, this he had no explanation for. He told himself that maybe the building had shook in some way to bump it out of place, but he didn’t really believe it.
He was content to continue ignoring it despite the steadily increasing frequency of all of these events until he couldn’t anymore. Which happened one day when he’d come back from his office and hung Masamune in its place and turned around just in time to watch as the remote control flew off the table, aimed directly at his head. It was a simple matter to duck, but even he couldn’t deny that.
So he went to the most superstitious person he knew.
“Dude, you’re haunted.”
“Zackary, what?”
Zack shrugged, leaning back on the couch, safely within his own apartment, a floor beneath Sephiroth’s allegedly haunted one.
“Everything you’ve just told me? Classic haunting. You’ve got a ghost, my friend, and things will only get worse from here.”
“Ghosts aren’t real, Zack.”
“Like hell they aren’t, Sephiroth.”
“If this is more Gongagan superstition—”
“Oh shut up, you came here because you needed someone superstitious and we both know it.”
Zack stood and walked to his counter and began rummaging in his junk drawer.
“Perhaps. Say you’re right. What then?”
“Well, if you’d come to me with this earlier, I’d have just gotten my sage and done your apartment myself—don’t look at me like that, my place is clean of spirits because I take care of it, alright? Too many people have died in the Infirmary or suffered in the Science Department for this building not to be haunted. I tried to talk you into letting me cleanse your place a long time ago, but you wouldn’t hear it.”
“I remember, thank you, and I-told-you-so’s are unbecoming.”
“You’re only saying that because you’re wrong.”
“Focus, Zack.”
“Right. At this point, we’re beyond your average sage-ing. There are a few other tricks I know in case of a pinch, but I think we’re beyond those at this point. We’ll need a professional.”
“A professional? There are professionals?”
Zack gave him a withering look before resuming his search.
“Of course there are. Someone has to clear up hauntings. In Gongaga, we used to have at least one spirit worker per generation. That died out a few generations back, but the practice was recent enough that we’ve still got some sense of what to do. There was a really nasty one when I was a kid—we had to bring someone in from Cosmo Canyon. I’m not sure—oh, here it is!”
Zack crossed over to hand Sephiroth a little business card. Third Eye. Sephiroth had to keep from rolling his eyes.
“Try asking there; it’s where I get my sage. They ought to know someone to refer you to,” Zack said, sitting down across from Sephiroth again. “Now, you don’t want a psychic. Psychics usually just do divination readings, and most of them are fake anyway. Ask for a medium, that’ll work better. You wanna stay here until it gets sorted out?”
Sephiroth fingered the card absently and shook his head with a little puff of laughter.
“I’m not going to be removed from my home by flying remote controllers.”
“Yeah, well, it starts throwing anything more dangerous, you’ve got a place here.”
“I appreciate the offer, Zack. Thank you.”
Third Eye was exactly as tacky as Sephiroth had imagined it. There were large displays of crystals and incense and candles and herbs, a glass case of tarot cards and rune stones, elaborate statues, and a “wishing well” built out of a large electronic water fountain with a statue of a fairy mounted on top and a smattering of pennies across the bottom. It smelled heavily, almost cloyingly, of incense, though Sephiroth couldn’t find where they were burning it. He wandered around the store, trying to get a feel of the place and decide if he wanted their advice at all. He decided that no, no he did not, but he also knew that he didn’t really have many options.
The woman at the counter, old and frazzled, was of little help. After her initial reaction, wherein she called him “dear” far too many times, she proceeded to give him an exceedingly long list of contacts, but ended in her top recommendation of “the medium, Cloud Strife.”
Still, he wasn’t one to be content with that much, especially not from so unreliable a source. So instead, he went home and (ignoring loud footsteps from above) researched nearby occult shops. He ended up going to a plethora, many of which looking remarkably like the first, and got a wide array of recommendations, but most included this Cloud Strife on the list. He’d gotten his bland, poorly designed business card the most.
He tried researching him online, but found absolutely nothing. He wasn’t sure if the lack of a website was good (authenticity, perhaps?) or bad. It certainly wasn’t in his favor that the storefront was in the bowels of the slums. But then again, maybe that meant that he wasn’t a scam artist taking advantage of the whimsy of the rich. There was no way to know but to go.
So go he did. And he immediately regretted it. No amount of recommendation was worth a smart mouth with nothing to back it up.
He had been very firm on that point when he discussed it with Zack.
Who hadn’t been on his side.
“I don’t know, Sephiroth, I don’t think it was attitude for attitude’s sake. I think he’s probably seen a lot of guys with ghost problems that don’t believe in the paranormal and has gotten a lot of shit from them.”
“That’s no reason to take an attitude with a customer.”
“Isn’t it though? It kinda sounds like you went in acting like you knew more about his job than he did. You wouldn’t do that to a plumber.”
“Those aren’t comparable.”
“Aren’t they?”
“I don’t need to ask a plumber a thousand questions to believe in the workings of pipes.”
“It’s not his fault that you don’t believe.”
“Still.”
Zack held his hands up and leaned back.
“Either way, you have your next step, right? Go home and see if things turn out how he says. If they do, go back, if not, we find someone else. Just try and figure out if you believe him before too long. I don’t doubt that his price really will go up.”
Sephiroth, begrudgingly, did just that.
Considering that the haunting had built up slowly, Sephiroth hadn’t quite noticed how much activity there was until it was suddenly absent. The apartment suddenly felt much, much too quiet. He hadn’t realized how many times he’d been absent-mindedly shutting doors and cabinets that mysteriously opened.
He wasn’t sure if he was happy or not that the activity was gone. On the one hand, this had been the goal in the first place. On the other, Cloud’s prediction had him tense, waiting for the other shoe to drop.
A week passed. He was very aware now that he was up to 200 gil; he thought about it every time he realized how silent his apartment was. He was beginning to get confident that things really had passed when he began to feel strange. Like everything was foggy, like he was surrounded in cotton. He felt like he was watching his life, not actually living it.
Another week. 300 gil. The feeling hadn’t gotten any better; in fact, it had gotten worse. He hadn’t placed the odd experience until his reaction time was so slow Zack landed a hit that actually sent him to the Infirmary, much to Zack’s distress (he’d thought he’d block it in time). It was then that he remembered Cloud’s prediction. His spiritual body separating from the flesh. It had sounded like such nonsense. It still sounded like nonsense. But there was a delay between his thought and his action now, and his description of what it would feel like was eerily accurate. It wasn’t enough for him to go back.
Another week. 400 gil. It was halfway through that week when things got worse. It was Thursday night when he got home to find every door and cabinet, even the dishwasher, ajar. He’d narrowed his eyes at the doors in a silent standoff, but eventually just began closing them; there was nothing else to do about it. He knew in his gut what this was, but he was hoping that maybe Zack was playing a prank. He was ready to leave it at that until the night, where it sounded like a marathon was being run on the roof. His door handle kept rattling. Eventually, his bed began to shake.
Eventually, he shouted, “Enough!”
Surprisingly, it worked. It worked right until he woke in the middle of the night with a shadowy figure standing above him, pressing down on his chest. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t breathe.
It passed after a time. He settled back down to sleep, telling himself it was a strange bout of sleep paralysis, nothing more.
Things continued like that for the next few days, neither improving nor getting worse. He began spending more and more time at his office or in Zack’s apartment. If Zack gave him knowing looks, he just ignored them.
Another week. 500 gil. He came to a breaking point when he just barely managed to turn around and catch a knife that had come flying out of the block, aimed right at the back of his head, cutting his hand wide open. Cloud had said it would get violent. With his delayed reaction time, he couldn’t put it off any longer.
He wasn’t happy about it, but he went back.