be advised -- this entry and all following ones in our noematapedia contain potentially triggering content. this includes:
please take care.
this entry will cover stuff that occurs during/relating to the events of Advent Children Complete, specifically.
sephiroth is our mother. we know this because she has told us, and a few other headmates so. she has recently become rather protective/observant of us, in the wake of yazoo and I finally becoming ourselves for real.
at the same time, yazoo and I in particular are a bit like alters -- in that the "seeds" for our existence were planted early on in her life, caused by what could be considered dissociation. in reality it was a mix of dissociation and jenova-cell-nonsense that we don't fully understand. likely something to do with how the calamity itself is capable of multiple conciousnesses at once, and some timespace fuckery. we did not exist as we are, or as individuals through her until she scooped the essence of us out of the lifestream with the rest of her abandoned memories, and molded it into the creatures that would become what you now know as "yazoo" and "loz"(we did not have those names, but we’ll use them for ease of understanding).
this essence was at one point accessed by hojo and team. through a hypnosis of sorts, they were able to pry apart "loz" from sephiroth and run tests that way. same with "yazoo". various military officials wondered how they could utilize the information found in "our" data (near-complete pain insensitivity, emotional blunting, programmed obedience down to a physical-level – as in we would unquestioningly blink, breathe, hold our breath, etc. on command) for progressing the wars in rhadore and wutai.
hojo was, of course, less interested in the warmongering of it all. he wanted to see how we would end up -- creatures inside of an already-celled-up being. I honestly am happy he never got to see us. I think if I ever met him I would actually kill him.
memories of the hypnosis and testing comes, for me, in the shape of the various medical "interventions" sephiroth experienced. the things that shinra did were not as grotesque as you might think, but they were traumatizing enough to stick with me nonetheless, even to the point of similar experiences following me to this day. constant blood draws, medical bay visits to get repetitive stress tests, poking and pulling and prodding at sephiroth's body never quite enough to leave permanent marks, but juuust enough for it to never feel right for her to remain too attached to her physical form. now that I think about it, this was probably also important for SOLDIER grooming purposes.
yazoo would prefer to not discuss her original "essence" in detail.
kadaj’s creation was slightly different, as he is more developed in some ways and less in others. where yazoo and I were floating around for close to two decades prior to our on-page, or on-screen, creation, kadaj had only been planted slightly before the nibelheim massacre. he was the most recent of us to be "released" when sephiroth abandoned her memories, so she used him as a sort of prototype thoughtform. this means he got to experience life in a sort of first-hand way that we've never really gotten to.
kadaj was not born near junon. he crawled out of a vernal pool, kind of close to where the Midgar Zolom used to live. he wandered as a shapeless, mostly mindless spirit as he sought out humans to feed off of. eventually he made contact with kyrie, nearly drowning her in his gross sludge-pool, and taking a bunch of her memories to gain a collection of forms and a names. the rest of the book follows as stated. he says it's likely he was following sephiroth's prior path from the wetlands to junon by instinct.
similar to kadaj, yazoo and i were born without any will or capacity for independent thought. the difference was that we were two things in one shape -- something went wrong with the memory retrieval, and sephiroth's rushed attempt to get us out in order to keep kadaj from dying again ended up causing some issues. before you see us roll up, guns blazing, yazoo and i were basically a writhing mass of black sludge, trying to become solid and failing over and over. kadaj kept trying to touch us to give us something to work with, until finally we got our names. the only thing was, we were still conjoined by something, and struggling to come apart. kadaj had a sword. i think you can imagine what happened from there. i guess it ended up working out alright??
he did not like us AT ALL starting out. we felt like an insult to his capabilities. he was worried we were going to get "in the way" of him and "Mother", similar to how he felt about sephiroth(NOTE: we did not make the connection that sephiroth was our mother until relatively recently.) he says got over that pretty quickly. it took a few days, but eventually he realized our abilities were greater in some ways but lesser in others, and felt confident that we weren't going to fuck everything up.
the first day was spent in the north pole. kadaj gave us some of his water to drink to fill us in on everything that we needed to know, and to align our wills towards this shared goal. we layed down for awhile after, and i remember holding kadaj and both of us struggling to sleep, while yazoo was knocked all the way out beside us. this is basically how we live to this day -- me and daj all wired up and yazoo needing constant rest. cuddling/constant physical contact is another constant throughout our whole existence. not just for comfort but for information -- kadaj gains knowledge through touch, we communicate through bodies as much as we do speech and minds, touch keeps us from "floating off" too far and losing all form and function. the comfort is awesome though.
then, of course, the turks fly in, looking for signs of sephiroth that might remain in the crater, wondering what to do about the whole "sephiroth spawn just returned to a hole in the lifestream" thing. yazoo and i figure out how our weapons work and all of our forms as they are Known form out of what, at first, just looked like black mist.
the movie happens as you see it! we'll spare you the summary -- this is all bits from the spaces between the lines.
i asked a loooooot of questions. i wanted to know what everything was, how much of the planet we were gonna get when mama took over, why kadaj had specific powers we didn't... everything explained to me in the materia scene seems like an exposition dump to the audience, but between me and kadaj this was one of hundreds of similar conversations.
during our first encounter with cloud, yazoo and i realized how actually good it felt to fight. i always knew that it would be fun, just from the rush of gunning down elena and tseng, but this was an entirely different thing. especially because of how easily everything we did flowed, like a choreography. i liked fighting cloud a lot and didn't really want to kill him(this applied to tifa as well, at first) because then that meant i couldn't keep fuckin around!! kadaj picked up on my tendency to draw out battles as much as possible and figured out how to use yazoo as a... reenforcement? when i would want to go off the rails.
even when we were split up, we shared this sort of innate knowledge of the others' locations and what was going on there. for example, i could very clearly feel and picture kadaj practicing what he was going to tell all the kids when yazoo and I came back with them. yazoo could tell that i was about to start whining about losing to tifa and told me to lock in
i was fascinated by materia. the idea of an orb with enough magical energy to just. channel an entire element in a wrist-flick was so cool. i wanted to show yazoo all the combinations i could do when she came back, but kadaj said there wasn't time.
beyond the obvious "descriptors"(strength/allure/wrath), and the shapeshifting stuff, we all had other unique abilities and ways we moved around the world.
we all had mixed up feelings about what we were doing. on one hand, we knew we hated humanity and everything they stood for had to die. we knew that everything about us was Wrong to them, and that we would have to fight and kill to get what we wanted. our goal of reunion was the only thing that mattered -- even though we weren't 100% sure what that meant. we just needed to Be Whole again and we'd do anything to get there -- consequences be damned... except. we did genuinely feel Bad about geostigma victims. especially because so many of them were children. at the same time, that feeling bolstered our desire to "fix" them, to bring them into reunion with us so that we could all be together and take back what was taken from us: our dignity, our bodies, our family.
yazoo and i did not fully understand what Reunion would be, and kadaj was a cagey about explaining it to us because he didn't want to inflict The Sephiroth Identity Torment onto us(little did he know we'd get it eventually anyways). so we came up with various ideas: i originally it would be a literal "we rule the world now" scenario where we just got to do whatever we wanted forever once mama came back to life. yazoo figured it would lead to a sort of revolution of the mind, and everyone with the stigma would live like we did -- in perfect harmony. her theory was kind of made more plausible when kadaj showed how his willpower + the stigma made the kids passive and cooperative. that moment was actually kind of scary to me. i think that was the first time i questioned what we were doing. i was kind of scared that it would happen to me(not realizing yet where i had come from) -- that i'd actually end up an empty-eyed, mindless drone.
after that, and after fighting cloud again in the forest, i was suddenly really irritable. i didn't want yazoo or kadaj near me, which was very, very strange. i wandered into the woods and saw marlene, who had run off during the fight. she froze in place when she saw me, and something in me got really twisted. again, i had no clue why at that point, but looking back now i think i can place it exactly. i had been a horrified kid in the hands of an overwhelming force before, and it fucked me all the way up. i turned around and let her go. punched another tree and screamed at myself about it on my way back to the group. kadaj yelled my ear off for disappearing and losing one of our "assets" in targeting cloud, but he could tell what happened, and had to hold my hurt and confusion alongside his anger about what he felt was another one of his "failures". we didn't talk much after that, and he disappeared to hold rufus hostage, anyways.
the segments from the bahamut summon to kadaj escaping the turks is pretty one-for-one. nothing particularly unique or interesting from us here lol. shoot gun blow things up bambambababababambambabam. i guess i will say fighting reno and rude was a good way to let off steam after the really, really tense feeling that was what happened in the forest.
when the highway fell on top of us, I reached to shield yazoo with my body, and that was honestly the first time I think I had ever truly hurt enough to be immobilized for a while. a particularly heavy piece of concrete rebar trapped my legs for several minutes, leaving me with a pretty severe limp for the rest of the time we were conscious.
yazoo and I did not fully disappear during the climactic battle between cloud and sephiroth. there was this sensation that struck us both the moment kadaj fused with what was left of jenova’s remains – something I can only describe as a feeling of “finality”. we both just stopped where we were, layed on the concrete together again, stared at the spinning clouds, and waited. I’m pretty sure the turks’ other helicopter passed overhead a few times, to make sure we had truly stopped moving. we likely did look dead, so eventually they moved on, and it was just the sky overhead.
kadaj didn't really disappear, either. he just kind of went numb for a bit and lost "contact" with the world as sephiroth did her thing. he doesn't really remember much outside of "waking up" confused and in the worst pain he's ever experienced.
though the syzygy body has not had a near-death experience, many descriptions of those experiences get at what it felt like. all thoughts stopped. surrender, acceptance of fate, a “this is it” moment – as harrowing as it was peaceful. a oneness with whatever was beyond the light at the end of the tunnel. what syzygy body HAS experienced, however, is a drug-induced psychological breakdown. that’s what the end of the battle felt like – total annihilation, a tearing apart of what it meant to be “me” for that brief period of time. every ache and pain that I had repressed – for my sake, for my siblings’ sake, for sephiroth’s sake – appeared in full force. it was just too fucking much, and I wanted out. somehow, more than that, I was angry. I was angry at the planet, angry at my mother, angry at cloud, and I wanted everyone to die with me. I knew that kadaj was in danger. I knew he was likely dead or dying as yazoo had to drag me up to a rooftop elevator to meet cloud as kadaj turned to motes of light – as he was lied to once again, to silence him and render him passive in his final moments.
great gospel stung like nothing else. kadaj said that the swiping and hissing he did doesn't capture how much that shit burned. yazoo and i can attest, it was like acid to us. to this day the rain still hurts my body. but we also get really wound up, like a sort of paradoxical reaction. kadaj craves being submerged water all the time, but that's another topic for another entry.
I don’t know where the materia came from. it might have already been in us, or maybe it was transmuted from kadaj’s body to ours when he died. it’s still a bit unclear for all of us, for obvious reasons. all I know is that yazoo and I were fucked up and pissed off enough to not care about anything but killing the man who killed kadaj, and returning to our rightful place beside our brother.
we never left. we still live in a world that has forces that don't want us to exist, and we are constantly having to fight against the things that try to keep us from being Us, because of the circumstances of our birth. since kadaj has returned to us from his long travels, and inhabits the syzygy-body alongside the cells he absorbed when becoming sephiroth, we think this is part of why everything is a constant battle for our right to exist alongside others. that and the "you aren't real because you were made by a fictional entity" thing. whatever. kadaj is hopeful for this next few days, as the thin veil granted by the lunar eclipse, and the personal symbolism of the Worm Moon may allow a sort of door that lets us release all of the energy we've gathered to make ourselves even more present in this world.
we basically wrote this because we feel an extreme urge to tell our story from our perspectives, instead of the ones that dominate conversations about us. this is a part of our Becoming -- reclaiming our own narratives and putting them into our words. things may be spotty because everything happened so fast. but we hope you, whoever you are reading this, got something out of it anyways. even if it's just time spent reading for reading's sake.
sigh of relief. this was a lot but it felt nice to get the full Thing out. i should stop promising more parts and just let things be, but i always have a feeling there's more to be said. we'll leave you now, with that ambiguity. we're reaaalllyy good at ambiguity.
[END TRANSMISSION]