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Chapter Text

The beginning of the fall semester rolled around and Lucrecia Crescent was, for once, excited to see classes begin. Her boring prerequisites and maddening general education courses were behind her as she finally began her Junior year and upper-level electives. This semester promised a full load of courses she actually cared about. And, most importantly, this semester was finally the semester she got to take a class from the infamous Professor Strife.

The man was an absolute legend, even before Lucrecia had graduated high school and moved on to Junon University. The first words out of every teacher, advisor, and fellow student when she’d mentioned applying to the Integrated Biotechnological Sciences program at JU was “you mean the program Professor Strife teaches in?” He was inescapable. Everyone even vaguely science-oriented knew his Two Rules of Science:

1. Correlation does not equal causation
2. Don’t put your dick in the science

And now she was finally sitting in an actual class with him, front row, bright eyed and eager to learn what the hell was going on in his head to make him such a legendary influence in the field of Biotech—and a few related fields to boot.

The man himself wasn’t exactly what she would have expected, but he certainly was exactly as described. Average height, buff as a god, with hair like a chocobo’s butt. He was dressed in a sleeveless, ribbed black turtleneck (which put his arms on frankly mouth-watering display as he wrote the course number and name on the whiteboard in a blocky, efficient hand), black pants, black steel-toe boots, and a bright pink, badly-tied tie slung around his neck like an afterthought.

(Legend had it that Administration had told him he needed to look more”respectable” during lectures. He’d thrown a tie over his habitual outfit and called it a day. Admin stopped asking him for things after that.)

He turned around and leaned against the whiteboard next to BIO 3209, Biological Research Methods I, Professor Strife. His eyes were utterly piercing, a bright blue that seemed to border on unnatural. Lucrecia felt a thrill that was somewhere between delight and terror when those nigh-predatory eyes lingered on her.

“Morning class,” he said, voice low and a little rough. “The University requires me to take roll, so I’m going to pass this clipboard around. Make sure you initial by your name every day we meet. If you’ve read through the syllabus already, you’ll know that you get a half point of extra credit for each class you attend.” He walked to the end of the front row and handed the clipboard to the first student, a mousy little twig of a boy who looked as awestruck as Lucrecia felt.

“Welcome to BIO 3209. If you’re not here for Biological Research Methods I, you’re in the wrong place,” he said as he went to the podium and picked up a thick stack of papers before returning to the same student he’d given the clipboard to. “If you haven’t printed the syllabus already, take one and pass it down.”

Lucrecia sat up a little straighter. She had her own copy of the syllabus already, printed out and lined up neatly in front of her.

“In BRM I, we’re going to cover the basics of the scientific process and how it relates to the various fields of biology,” the Professor continued, returning to the board and slouching against it, arms crossed over his chest. His eyes drifted over the sea of students as he spoke, again lingering on Lucrecia. “I know you all must be sick to death of hearing about the scientific method by now. We’ll be diving deeper than you’re used to, trust me, so just be patient for the first week and we’ll get to the juicy bits.” He paused, an oddly resigned look coming to his eye. “Who can tell me the #1 Rule of Science?”

Over half the class’s hands shot up eagerly, Lucrecia’s included.

“You, in the blue polo,” Strife said, pointing toward the middle of the crowd.

“Correlation does not equal causation, Professor!” said a boy who sounded like he was on the verge of squealing with joy at being called on.

“Good. And—“ he sighed and his head tilted down a little “—the #2 Rule of Science?”

“DON’T PUT YOUR DICK IN THE SCIENCE!” thundered the entire class in unison.

(Well, most of the class. Lucrecia noticed a Wutai transfer student out of the corner of her eye who looked downright terrified.)

THWACK! went a giant sword against the whiteboard, pulled seemingly out nowhere. “CORRECT!” Professor Strife thundered back with equal volume. The Rule was, unsurprisingly, written in giant letters across the top, and he used the tip of the sword to direct the student’s attention to the word DON’T.

“You,” said Professor Strife, tapping the board again for emphasis, “will hear plenty of stories throughout the semester about people who ignored Rule #2, and even more when you take Ethics in Biotech with me. Ignore this rule and you will regret it.”

“Because you’ll make us regret it, Professor Strife?” piped up a student in the back of the room, and the class giggled nervously.

Professor Strife didn’t even blink. “I will if whatever you stuck your dick in doesn’t get there first.” He twirled the ginormous sword in a deft movement. It occurred to Lucrecia that, even with as mouth-wateringly buff as he was, he really shouldn’t have been able to wield a sword that size. “If you think this is for decoration, if you think I haven’t used it before, I’ve got news for you. Ask me. I’ll tell you, if you can stand to listen.”

The class was deathly silent, and Strife let the uncomfortable air linger for a moment as he went and put the sword behind his lectern. “But that doesn’t matter, because you,” he said, pointing, “are all smart students who are going to listen to what I say and not put your dicks in the science. So, let’s go over the syllabus and then we’ll jump right into a short review.”

Lucrecia swallowed hard and pulled out a highlighter. For some reason, she didn’t doubt the Professor meant every word he said. A thrill, like lightning, went up her spine as she once more met the piercing blue eyes of the Professor.

This was so much better than gen eds!

Chapter Text

Grimoire arrived at the tail end of Professor Strife’s office hours. The young man was doing very well, despite most of the faculty (including Grimoire) having substantial doubts at the beginning. As untested and dubiously educated as he’d seemed, he knew what he was talking about. In fact, he was jaw-droppingly brilliant, though he didn’t much advertise it. Even more shocking, he was an excellent teacher, every bit as patient with the students as he was brusque with the faculty.

Grimoire suspected he just didn’t much like authority, but that was a thought for a different day.

“Don’t stress over it, Jasmine,” Strife was saying to the student as he ushered her out of his office. “The rough draft is supposed to be bad. I’m not looking for polished, just finished.”

“Okay, Professor,” the student said, taking a shuddering breath. It looked like she’d been crying. Not an uncommon occurrence, as finals approached. “Thank you.”

She hurried past, sniffling. Strife watched her go with something like sympathetic exasperation on his face. Then his eyes snapped up to Grimoire and it was like a switch was flipped, turning those eerie blue irises into flinty chips.

“Valentine,” he said with no inflection at all.

“I seem to recall telling you to call me by my first name, Dr. Strife,” Grimoire responded mildly.

Strife leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms over his chest. He made a very striking figure, dressed all in sleek black with his bare arms on display. “And I seem to recall telling you not to call me “Dr.,” Dr. Valentine.”

“It seems we’re on equal footing, then.”

“Hmm.”

He’d successfully earned the vaguely amused grunt. That was far better than the vaguely annoyed grunt, so Grimoire decided to follow through on his plans. “I have a favor to ask.”

Strife’s eyebrows went up. “Shoot.”

“Can you watch my son while I attend a thesis defense?”

The strangest thing happened. Strife went still, to the point where he looked like he’d simply stopped breathing, and his eyes turned...distant. And then they slid to the side, searching, and Grimoire was mildly surprised when they landed unerringly on Vincent, who was sitting upside-down in one of the chairs that lined the wall in front of the reception desk.

“I—” said Strife, and stalled in the middle of his sentence. Grimoire turned back to him just in time to see the edge of a deep grief vanish behind his habitual stoic expression. “Sure. I’ll watch Vincent, no problem.”

“Have much experience with kids?” Grimoire asked, because he was a scientist and not above prodding both natural phenomena and people to get answers.

Strife cast him a very unimpressed look, and if Grimoire hadn’t seen the raw emotion the young man had quickly hidden, he might have been fooled. “Some.”

“Good enough. If you can get him to do his homework, I’ll loan you one of my graduate students for your next field trip.”

Grimoire almost did a double-take when he saw the ghost of a smile cross Strife’s face. “Deal.”

“Confident! Maybe I am in danger.”

“In danger of being down one grad student. Never bet on a sure thing, Valentine.”

Grimoire laughed. “We’ll see! And thank you.”

“...sure,” said Strife, looking at Vincent again with a slightly-too-blank expression. “No problem at all.”

Grimoire felt fairly accomplished as he left, leaving Vincent in Strife’s care and simultaneously building some inroads with the young Professor. Hopefully that would help him integrate a little more, and reduce the risk of faculty clashes. And, if they were really lucky and Vincent worked his pre-teen charms (and used the cookies strategically given to him as bribe material), it might even set the stage for actual inter-lab collaborations. It was only when he was entering the room where the defense was taking place that something odd occurred to him.

Professor Strife had known Vincent’s name without ever being introduced.

Chapter Text

It was a small thing, really. Just a tiny slip, a little loss of footing on a patch of slick rocks as he lunged forward to quickly pull Grimoire’s graduate student away from danger. Professor Cloud Strife was ridiculously capable. He could easily have caught himself, and they would have laughed over the momentary gracelessness while he shook his head at the students with longsuffering fondness.

Would have, had that little slip not plunged him over the edge of the rocks and into the mako pool below.

His startled blue eyes were the last thing they saw before he vanished with a heavy splash.

“PROFESSOR!” several voices screamed. The other two faculty members supervising their interdisciplinary field trip had to yank frantic students back as everyone scrambled to try and help, too inexperienced to know that there was nothing they could do.

“Get back!” Professor Valentine snapped, getting between the undergraduates and the edge of the pool. The shaken graduate students were, thank the gods, helping him and Gast in their efforts. “He wouldn’t thank us if any of you went over too!”

“But, but we have to help him!” one frantic girl cried, tears in her eyes.

Gast looked at the girl with a heavy heart. These were just undergraduates—part of the field trip was meant to teach them exactly how dangerous mako was. They just...hadn’t intended to lose faculty in the process. He tried to explain, as gently as he could manage. “There’s nothing we can do—”

CLANG!

He never finished his explanation, because he was too busy doing what Grimoire and the graduate students were doing—namely, whipping around toward the sound of Cloud’s enormous sword impacting the rocks as if it had been tossed out. A hand appeared, gripping the edge of the pool.

“Oh for fuck sake, ” said Cloud, impossibly still alive and functional.

Grimoire recovered before Gast, scrambling forward to grab Cloud as his other hand appeared too.

“No!” snapped Cloud, hauling himself up with ease. He glared at them, eyes glowing a bright, bright blue. Literally glowing. “Don’t touch me, you idiot, I’m covered in mako.”

“Professor!” cried one of the students as he got a knee up on the edge and then stood. Grimoire hovered like a hen and Gast hurried over to join him. “You’re alright!”

“I’m fine,” he said, wiping excess mako from his bare arms with irritated disgust. “But none of you will be if anyone repeats that, so stay away from the edge of mako pools , do you hear me?” He narrowed his eyes at the student he’d saved and she hunched in on herself. The undergraduates also wilted beneath the force of his ire.

Gast knew he was gaping like a fish as he watched Cloud try and clean some of the mako off. He knew he was being useless. It would have been better to react like this was a chemical mishap in one of the chemistry labs—go get water, maybe. Start cordoning off the area that was now covered in toxic pure mako. But he was too busy trying to wrap his mind around the fact that Cloud was still alive.

“How…?” Grimoire said, equally as dumbfounded. His hands were still hovering halfway between himself and Cloud. “You should be dead!”

“Probably,” Cloud agreed, like this was a normal occurrence. And wasn’t that something? They’d done this interdisciplinary field trip once a year for the past fifteen years, and Cloud knew better than anyone how deadly mako was. It was something he impressed upon his students year after year, even more so than Gast and Grimoire. 

But he wasn’t surprised to have crawled out of a pure mako spring none the worse for wear.

“Cloud…” Gast started, an odd suspicion forming in his mind.

He was ignored, as Cloud looked to Grimoire’s graduate student with a much gentler expression than before. “Lucrecia,” he said. “Go get water, a biohazard bag, and a tarp. Take the undergrads with you. I’m going to need to wash off here and decontaminate my clothes later.”

“R-right,” she said, pale as a ghost. Gast understood why both Grimoire and Cloud seemed so fond of her when she rallied herself and took charge of the terrified younger students.

“Cloud,” said Grimoire, content to leave the situation in the hands of his highly capable graduate student, “what the fuck?”

“Why Grim, I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard you cuss without the help of alcohol.” said Cloud dyly, examining his sword for damage.

“Don’t you deflect right now, Cloud! How are you alive! And why aren’t you as surprised about that as we are!”

Cloud sighed heavily and seemed to consider his words for a long moment. “I’m immune.”

Gast felt his brain short-circuit.

“...you can’t be immune to mako!” Grimoire exploded, arms flailing under his ridiculous field coat.

“Sure you can. If you get dipped enough.”

“You’ve been in mako before?” Gast managed to squeak out in a pitch like he’d inhaled helium.

“I was pickled in mako for some of my formative years. 0/10, would not recommend.”

Both of the senior faculty gaped at him. “Pickled in—!”

“Here, Professor, here!” Lucrecia interrupted, hurrying over with a bucket of water and a biohazard bag slung over one arm. A line of students trailed behind her with buckets of their own. “Get that off you, quick!”

“Relax, Lu,” Cloud said, softening. Even after a decade and a half of friendship grown between him, Grimoire, and Gast, he was still gentlest with the students. “If it didn’t kill me when I was in it, it won’t kill me now. This is just to make sure none of you come into contact with it. Come give me that tarp.”

Further discussion of the impossibility of Cloud being alive was tabled for later as they arranged a way for him to wash off. Gast and Grimoire held the edges of the tarp up as he stood on it, both to direct the mako-tainted runoff back into the spring and to cover him as he stripped down. One of the male students passed him the buckets one by one, until Cloud (and his sword) were completely mako-free. His clothes went into the biohazard bag.

Lucrecia also had the good sense to bring him a spare pair of pants, no doubt dug out of some undergrad’s pack. He seemed disgruntled at how big they were on him, but some pants were far better than no pants.

It wasn’t the first time Gast had seen Cloud shirtless over the past fifteen years—there had been plenty of field days spent in lakes and streams, plenty of faculty trips and scientific conferences held in places with beaches or pools—but here, bathed in the bright glow of mako and reeling over him being alive, it was the first time he really noticed the scars that laced Cloud’s torso.

Some of them were starting to look remarkably like surgical scars.

Lucrecia burst forward as soon as Cloud stepped off the tarp, latching onto him with all the force she could muster. “I’m so glad you’re okay, Professor!” she said into his chest, voice thick with tears. “I thought—!”

He looked vaguely uncomfortable—but then, he always looked that way at physical contact from anyone except the kids he babysat. He patted her back gently. “I’m fine, Lu,” he said. “Really. It takes more than that to keep me down. Now, question: you’re not using this as a shameless excuse to hug me when I’m shirtless, right?”

A startled laugh burst from her and she let go, backing up. She wiped at her eyes. “M-maybe,” she said, half playful and half wobbly.

“Hm.” He was smiling.

They never got any more information out of him about how he’d survived.

They never forgot what little he’d said, either.

Chapter Text

“Hey, Professor, so when you say we shouldn’t stick our dicks in the science, do you mean that metaphorically or literally? Like, what does Rule #2 really mean?”

Professor Strife paused, turning toward the student who’d piped up in the middle of their introductory lecture on p-values and statistical significance. He stared for a moment, until the student was squirming guiltily in their chair, before he sighed and capped his dry-erase marker.

“Alright, how many of you have been thinking about this?”

Three-quarters of the hands in the room went up and there was a general murmur of agreement. Richard Hollander, who was sitting in the back of the room grading assignments as the Professor’s UTA for the semester, rolled his eyes. Of course they were thinking about it. Everyone did, until they got through Ethics in Biotechnology. That was the class where he really went into detail. Horrifying, nausea-inducing detail.

Hollander didn’t ever want to sit through that lecture again—but he sure did want to watch the faces of the students who were sitting through it for the first time. 

“Alright, hands down,” Professor Strife said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “The Rule means ‘don’t stick your dick in the science’ both literally and...metaphorically. Don’t involve your dick in the science—no hybrid babies, no germ-line alteration, no catgirls, Jeremy.” He glared.

Jeremy shrunk down a little in his seat.

Professor Strife leaned his back against the board and crossed his arms over his chest. “But it also means don’t involve human people in the science, including yourself. Don’t lick the science, don’t inject the science into people without prior rigorous studies using animal models, don’t mess with people’s heads for the science without informed consent, et cetera, et cetera.”

The class was silent, absolutely enraptured by the sheer absurdity of what Professor Strife was saying. And, more importantly, how he was saying it as if he had personal experience with each and every scenario he rattled off.

“Look, the gist is that science should be clean. It progresses slowly, because it’s designed to do that. We are not engineers. We do not stick our dicks in the science and see what happens from there.” His creepy blue eyes swept the room and landed on Hollander, who straightened automatically. “We do things the right way. The smart way. The ethical way. Or you will regret it. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Professor!” the class said, stumbling over themselves to answer him. Even Hollander found himself joining in out of sheer instinct not to piss off the dangerous guy staring at him.

Especially when that dangerous guy was the Professor he admired so much.

Professor Strife closed his eyes for a second and smirked. “Good. Now, if you thought that was going to get you out of learning about null and alternative hypotheses, you’re mistaken.” He turned back to the board as the class groaned. Hollander shook his head and re-focused on grading assignments. Professor Strife’s classes were so weird. Cool, and important, but still—weird.

Hollander wanted to be just like him one day.