AU: Predecessor
When he was presented with the medical readout it had been difficult for Angeal to believe. Oh, he had known that it was possible, even probable – nearly every SOLDIER did – but like most hadn't paid it much mind. After the first few had come forward, causing a PR nightmare turned opportunity, the hubbub died down as it became accepted that, barring abstinence, every SOLDIER over twenty-five probably had a child.
He still hadn't expected it of himself. Angeal had never really been one for one-night stands or hurried affairs, though that wasn't to say he hadn't had any. But his past girlfriends had remained, for the most part, good friends: he would have known if one of them had conceived. His few imploded relationships would have let him know, and if not mutual friends would tip him off. Even the thing from the abyss that Amy had turned into would have contacted him if only to suck him dry of child support. So, really, he should have known.
But he would have paid this boy no mind had he passed by in the street. He likely had passed him in the halls of the training complex. It was unusual for a SOLDIER son to go so long unremarked in the Cadet Corps, as most were picked out as they arrived by the tell-tale eye-glow, faint though it was. But if there was no resemblance the glow could have been written off as a natural effect. Any person who lived long enough in the Nibel Mountains would gain a Mako sheen: it was the same in Mideel, around the southern Eastern Continent and in some parts of Wutai where the ground levels were high.
And yet there sat Officer Cadet Cloud Strife who strongly resembled his mother, a camp follower and brief fling Angeal was relieved to be rid of even over fifteen years after the fact. Still, when he watched though the glass as the boy received the news, telling details began to talk. The eyes, lightly lit, belonged to Angeal's mother, though he himself had missed them. A softer jaw, angled like his own. The same nose, the same startled little frown he had caught in the mirror too many times. A slimmer and shorter – much shorter – frame, an echo tempered by the slender mountain blood in him.
And he began to believe that he could have a son.
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Word count: 400
A.N.
Cloud's original design became the base of Angeal's. Or so I read somewhere. At least the hair, anyway. So in-universe reversal.
Mako is life-essence and magic. So it becomes both a fertility drug and very good at getting around birth control methods. Ergo SOLDIER babies.
This is part of an AU (possibly cross-over) that I've been planning for a while. In a universe where Jenova was unearthed fifteen to twenty years early, Project G precedes Project S by about the same number of years. How much changes, and what happens when Angeal and Genesis are not only not rivals to Sephiroth, but prior life-long Shinra experiments, his superior officers and nearly old enough to be his father?