The SOLDIER's name was Zack, and Aerith blushed very prettily when he smiled up at her.
Hawke watched with a crooked grin and figured that was the end of any magical lessons happening that day. Jolly teenagers.
The SOLDIER uniform worried her though. She'd seen the posters at every train station and hanging off of street lamps, Shinra's elite fighting force. There were stands of recruitment pamphlets in every convenience store and they gave out a free SOLDIER trading card with every cup of coffee or 250ml healing potion bought before 10 am. Hawke had acquired and promptly lost six Third Class Swordsman cards and one Second Class Combat Medic. It took her an embarrassing number of days to figure out who the red man from the train graveyard way. Given the price his trading cards sold at, he was quite the big deal.
The pamphlets said they were all enhanced with Mako. That made them kind of magic, right? Like Fenris, with his Lyrium tattoos. Jury rigged mages, she would have said, if their postures in the posters and their strategic placement around the slums didn't position them more like Templars, looking down on the populace and just waiting for someone to step out of line.
Zack didn't carry himself like that, he was friendly and endearing. None of the Turks outside were worried about his sudden intrusion, and even Aerith didn't hold the hole in the roof against him. He even laughed at one of Hawke's jokes, which was a true rarity.
He didn't stop to ask why there were Turks hanging around outside when he finally left.
Her contemplative mood followed Hawke into the Fade that night. She wandered the empty landscape, looking up at the looming floating islands with narrowed eyes.
Mako must have been different from lyrium after all if they were routinely treating people with it. The lyrium ritual had marred Fenris so badly he'd lost all of his memories, even his name. Templars took lyrium orally to strengthen their anti-magic powers, but that did nothing for their physical strength and she was pretty sure its real purpose was to just keep them addicted to a Chantry controlled substance instead of any actual benefit. Keeping the leash short.
What did that make the SOLDIERs?
Shifting pathways appeared and died out around her. A bit like the Wounded Coast, she thought, kicking at the clumpy dirt. There was a Fade version of the church, but she didn't stop. She rarely had the mental fortitude for Fade Chantries.
The island Aerith's house stood on drew to an end. The thick green void stretched out below, interrupted by other islands here and there. She wondered sometimes if there was some kind of bedrock if you kept going down far enough. She didn't know anyone who'd fallen off the edge without either waking up or just landing on another island.
What surprised her was the bridge.
An elegant white structure stretching out into the green. Its surface looked like mother of pearl, with a swirly sheen and depth to it. She tentatively took a step, and then took some bolder ones when it didn't fall out beneath her feet. It led high up to the upper islands, despite every step feeling like it was made on level ground.
Aerith hadn't said anything about building bridges.
The bridge curled around the bulk of an island in the way and Hawke paused mid-step.
A magnificent city towered up above her. Buildings like curling seashells, pearl towers reaching up from multiple islands, connected by elegant soaring bridges. A river of light rose up in directions rivers typically didn't, floating between the islands. The entire thing was made of the same white material as the walkway beneath her feet, with no brickwork or stone, looking more like a city that had been grown and cultivated than built.
No wind moved, no spirits roamed. No eyes peered down from the towers, and no banners flapped from flagpoles. It looked more like a painting than reality.
She would have to bring Aerith here. She had never seen such a solid structure in the Fade before, not on this scale. Was this the strength of the Ancients? Surely, they must have rivalled Arlathan at their height.
The notion brought the threat of memories not her own to mind. Crystal spires and tall elves in shining armour. She shook her head and kept walking. Not tonight.
The view disappeared when she reached the end of the bridge. She breathed a sigh of relief. It was so silent she felt like a brutish intruder with every step thudding against the pearl surface. This island was broken up with hills and gullies, the ground a lush green grass. Even that was more than she'd found anywhere on the lower islands outside of Aerith's domain.
She passed a tree.
She slid her staff off her back.
More trees clumped around little paths. They were strangely shaped, their trunks bending over like sad sunflowers. Purple apples dangled from the branches.
"The only one, huh, Aerith?" she muttered when a building came into view.
It was a curious mis-matched thing. Half a grand old mansion, like something that could happily seat a minor Orlesian nobleman, and half modern townhouse like the ones she saw on realtor ads. The two halves were haphazardly wedged together in a confused mess of old-world grandeur and minimalist modern chic. Some of the décor, wandering beyond the bounds of the walls, actually looked pretty good together, but it was the feeling that mattered in the Fade. And it had the same feeling as a lamppost grafted onto a tree. Whoever was doing the dreaming had no grasp of the Fade at all.
It was a good thing there were no spirits here. This was entirely too open.
A familiar voice floated on the air, reciting poetry.
She rounded a corner and there he was, Genesis Rhapsodos of SOLDIER, sitting on the curve of a bending tree, his legs dangling beneath him and a book held high in his hand. An ornate chandelier hung above him. Not hanging from anything in particular, just hanging.
"Legend shall speak," he recited, with a bard's composure and enunciation, "Of sacrifice at world's end. The wind sails over the water's surface. Quietly, but surely."
She leaned against the wall behind him and listened. It had been a while since she had had the luxury of enjoying a performance. Varric didn't tell stories in taverns in the same way anymore and bards and musicians got weird if they recognised her in the audience.
He fell silent. He had a straight nose and a sharp jawline, under vibrant red hair. She idly observed that they had the same haircut.
"I know you're there," he said.
"I was waiting for the next stanza," she replied.
He looked at her from the corner of his eye, turning his head only enough to look over his shoulder. "As are we all."
She walked around him in a wide arc, moving to a more polite position to hold a conversation.
"Tough crowd I see," she said, nodding at the field of trees curving away before them.
He smiled. "But they never demand new material or critique the performance."
"Perhaps they're humouring you."
"Likely." He studied her from upon his tree trunk, running his fingers up the open page of the book.
She looked to the orchard, intruding on a lovely tea room. A branch heavy with purple apples was brushing up against a packed bookshelf. She could draw some conclusion about him from it, but she didn't know where it all fit in with the man the posters called the 'firebrand.'
"Why are they called Banora white apples when they're clearly purple?" she asked.
"They're white on the inside."
She tilted her head. "All apples are white on the inside."
He frowned, then tossed his hair dismissively. She grinned.
"Did you know your mind cannot invent faces?" he said. He snapped the book shut, then slid off the tree and landed facing her. "All the faces you see in dreams are people you've seen elsewhere."
She watched him with her tilted head. "That's… definitely not true."
"Which leads to the question, oh dream-o'-mine," he continued, undaunted, "are you wearing the real face of the woman from the slums or has my mind simply supplied you with one?"
"You don't know where we are, do you?" she asked.
He shrugged. "I've always been good at lucid dreaming. I imagine I'm wrapped up quite comfortably in bed."
She grinned again. There was a luxurious bed out in the middle of the orchard and an apple tree blocking the door to the kitchen, and he thought he was good at dreaming? Did Shinra know it had a mage in its top ranks? Did he?
"And you?" He narrowed his eyes. "Where are you?"
She shrugged. "The same. Different bed."
"I need to find you. I'm running out of time."
She paused at the urgency in his voice. "Why?"
He stood tall. "You can heal me."
Oh. Of course, he had the Blight. Her shoulders sank. He was indeed running out of time. "Did you get injured again?"
"No, but I will, inevitably." A hand drifted up to the shoulder she had healed. "Until you heal the degradation within me, I walk upon the precipice of disaster."
Her eyes fell. "I can't heal that. I'm sorry."
He shook his head in denial.
She stepped towards him. "I can't heal the Blight, Genesis. Nobody can." If she had that power, she would have started with her father. Or her brother. Or Anders.
"Blight?" He looked down at his hands, running his thumb over his fingertips. "An apt term for it. I feel blighted, marked by the goddess. Monstrous and cursed."
"If the Chantry is right, then yeah, more or less," she said, off-handed, scratching the back of her neck. Maker, the Blight. Had any Grey Warden's survived the fight at Adamant Fortress? Were they still under Corypheus' control? Was Carver under Corypheus' control?
Genesis looked up at her with a scowl. She probably deserved it.
"How did you get it?" she asked. "I haven't heard anything about Darkspawn here."
"I'm a SOLDIER," he said with a sneer.
"And… what are SOLDIERs?"
"Quite."
"I was legitimately asking." She crossed her arms on top of the tree trunk he had been sitting on.
"Why, we're Shinra's most elite abominations, of course," he replied with his arms spread wide. "With enhanced strength and speed and magic no normal human could possibly attain, sent out to conquer the world on the president's whims."
"But you're a mage."
"A red mage, yes."
"Are you all mages?" she asked, her eyes narrowed. Was this a Tevinter situation? Why all the song and dance with Materia then? "Is Shinra run by a cabal of mages?"
He shook his head, his brow lowered. "What? No. I'm more magically gifted that my brothers in arms but we're not… SOLDIER is comprised of swordsmen. And there is no special power in the blood of the Shinra family, believe me."
"But there is in yours." There had to be. He was here.
"And it is my undoing."
She propped her chin upon her knuckles, thoroughly confused. He looked back at her with just as baffled an expression.
"What do you mean when you say mage?" he asked slowly.
"I don't like this city." She turned away from him, looking to the sky in frustration at the sheer nonsense. There was no Black City in sight. She looked back down, not prepared to deal with that either. "I want it on record: Midgar is strange and upsetting, and I am putting my foot down."
"Yes, that'll show them," he drawled.
She sighed. A warm wind sighed through the orchard.
"You healed my shoulder," Genesis said quietly. "I have faith in you."
She didn't look back at him. "You really shouldn't."
"I won't be dissuaded, don't waste what little sleep I have. I'll track you down, whoever you are, wherever you are."
"You're going to be disappointed when you do."
He let out a sigh. "Sombre dreams tonight."
She looked up at him. His eyes were downcast, and his fingers clutched the book of poems.
She crossed the distance and put a hand on his upper arm. He started at the sudden contact, like he hadn't thought there was anything around to touch, let alone reach out for him. The muscle of his arm was strong through his leather jacket and her calloused fingers were too. Real. No Fade fabrication.
"My name is Hawke and I am not a dream."
"Hawke..." He looked at her with something between confusion and desperation. "Do you fly away now... to a world that abhors you and I?"
"Do you know what we are… you and I?" she asked, taking a chance.
"We?"
"Don't see anyone else here, do you?" she gestured around the empty orchard. "Only us dreamers."
"What are you talking about?"
She sucked in a breath. "I can do nothing for the cause, but you don't need my magic to heal your injuries, you have your own."
He shook his head. "Materia are not enough."
"I didn't say materia," she whispered.
He raised a curious eyebrow but she felt the dream lose cohesion. He may have spoken but no words reached her and she woke to the light of day.
Aerith stepped boldly into the Sector 5 public library. Hawke stood at her side, armed with pens and notebooks and empty book bags. It was research time.
Hawke sauntered over to the information desk with great confidence of purpose. She asked for a library card, brandishing a fake ID, fake proof of a fake address, and a fake upper plate bank statement to go with it: all the required documentation.
Aerith watched from a couple of steps behind her, a bubbling mix of excitement and irritation fuelling the butterflies in her stomach. She didn't have a library card, neither she nor Elmyra had the credentials to open an upper plate bank account or the contacts to get convincing fakes. Or the guts to risk it either, there were consequences for these kinds of things.
Hawke didn't seem to care.
The librarian saw nothing amiss and handed over a new card with a smile.
"Can you point me to anything you've got on the Ancient Cetra?" Hawke asked, matching the young man's welcoming grin.
He wrote down some suggestions and pointed out the relevant shelves.
Aerith had been here before, of course, with her old school. She'd had a look around: timidly snooping through the shelves, or so it had felt at the time. She's caught sight of Tseng watching her once and lost her nerve.
What information could they even have, in a Shinra funded public library? Nothing accurate, probably. She'd listened to the Planet's song and that had been enough.
She walked between the shelves now, probably double the height from when she had last been here, and felt giddy at the sheer number of books.
"Oh!" she said, turning her head sideways to read a cover. 'Cetra burial urns at the Bone Village third Grave Circle,' with half a dozen authors and co-authors listed beneath it. She pulled it out and held onto it, only to immediately see another next to it about the Bone Village excavation, and grabbed that one too.
There was so much information!
It had been here. All this time.
Hawke just… just asked for it. As always, just strolling in, with her strange words and lack of reverence and taking whatever information she wanted.
Getting her grimy hands on it.
Aerith hunched her shoulders a little, feeling quietly embarrassed at the thought.
She put her two books down at the nearby table where Hawke was settling their things. She met the woman's eyes for a second and received a wink. She ducked back between the shelves.
It wasn't that she herself was somehow cleaner- Hawke wasn't dirty. It was just that she made everything feel so cheap. So mundane. She brought new and exciting concepts, like the Fade and Dreamers but she made it all out to be about as hallowed as the cracked concrete they walked on to get here.
There were so many books to choose from she grabbed five at random and wove back to the table.
The silly thing was, she didn't even want to be special. Being a special Cetra had gotten her nothing but trouble. It… cost her mother her life.
She didn't want that sacrifice to be for nothing. If being a Cetra had cost her mother her life that meant it couldn't be some common cheap thing. It had to be special.
They arranged their haul on the much graffitied wooden table.
" 'The Old Mystic: Cosmo Canyon's Place in Historical Preservation,'" Hawke read, running through the list. Aerith's excitement dimmed now that she was really looking at them.
" 'Cetra Crafting for Old Souls', 'The Lost City of Pearl: the myth of the 'Ancient'', 'Unleashing your Spirit: the Ancients' Guide to Freedom of Mind', 'The Cetran Coquette' — I'm just going to put that one back — and 'Cetra Grave Goods and the Place of the Matriarch in Ancient Northern Continent Society' by Ettie Lackner, PhD." Hawke gave a low whistle. "Choices, choices."
Aerith turned the crafting book open to a random page. 'Making enchanted Cetra wind charms from wire coat hangers and chipped crockery,' read the header.
She looked up at Hawke with a raised eyebrow.
The human woman coughed. "Maybe I'll put that one back too."
"There's nothing here." Aerith hugged her arms.
"Most of it is rubbish, but most of most things is rubbish," Hawke offered apologetically. "There might be some leads, something to go off if nothing else. If any of these authors sound like they know what they're on about, we can look into them and just toss the rest."
Aerith didn't look up. She'd seen the cover art of The Cetran Coquette. It wasn't new or shocking, she saw get-ups like that at costume shops and in cartoons all the time. She felt silly coming all this way to look for validation from these people.
"We can go back home if you want," Hawke said.
She steeled herself. "No, I… I want to do this." She pulled the book about the Bone Village excavation closer.
"Alright. I'm shouting lunch afterwards. Those ramen smells have taunted me for too long, today is the day I discover the flavours behind them."
They traded smiles and pulled out their seats. The hours passed in quiet study. Some of it was interesting, some of it not so much.
After a while, she noticed Hawke had a couple of medical textbooks in her stack.
"What are you reading?"
"I'm looking for anything about the Blight here," she said, briefly looking up from her page flipping.
"What's the Blight?"
"Precisely," Hawke said.
She shrugged and went back to her own research. There was nothing concrete about Ancient magic, which was their main goal. The archaeologists had a lot of theories about rituals and how certain tribes and settlements arranged their lives hundreds of years ago, but it was just that, theory. The vases were beautiful.
Vibrant glossy photos displayed ceremonial necklaces, tabards of woven flaxes, and mother of pearl tipped staffs. She bit her lip and studied the ancient pieces of art. There was a set of gleaming Jade-edged armour, thought to be purely ceremonial.
She adjusted the book to see better and a thin academic journal slid out from between the pages.
'The Last Nomads' read the title.
A grainy black and white photo of a group of about twenty people looking sternly into the camera filled the cover. In the middle of the group, a portly older woman with a wizened face smiled cheerily.
'Cetran settlement in the face of the industrial revolution,' said the subtitle. Aerith looked at it puzzled for a moment before it dawned on her and she sucked in a breath.
"Hawke! There's a photo! A tribe!"
She flicked it open, there were more photos inside, not enough, not nearly enough, but it was more than she'd ever seen before!
Hawke looked over her shoulder. Aerith held it open, trying to focus enough to read the thing. It was written in dry language but not dehumanising, which was more than half the others could boast. It reported the story of an eastern continent tribe that dwindled down to just one extended family roughly a hundred years ago and then settled in the Junon fishing village. Quotes by the tribe's leader, the smiling old woman, filled its pages.
They were a tall and golden-haired group, with what looked like coppery skin in the monochrome photo. They looked strong and hardworking, with hats and bandannas to keep the sun off them. So foreign from Aerith and her life, but these were her people. Nearly a century ago in a different city, but they were hers. A hundred years wasn't that long. That was only, what, three mothers ago?
Aerith smiled fiercely down at the photos.
The Matriarch's words carried determination and a stubborn cheeriness. She was wearing a dress dotted with little strawberries under a neat white apron, her sleeves rolled up past her elbows. She had set up shop in the village as a laundress and sent her sons out to work on the fishing boats.
The more she read the less foreign the story sounded. For all her cheeriness, it was obvious they were poor and struggling. They settled in the village because their nomadic way of life was no longer possible in a world where every scrap of land, drop of water, seabird and river eel had an owner and complex licensing rights.
She looked sidelong at the glossy academic books on the table. They waxed poetic about relics sold between museums for tens of thousands, all kept in high security, temperature-controlled vaults, where only the most decorated scholars could touch them. The last scraps of a people who died in poverty.
She tugged the little journal closer to herself.
"Is your family from Junon?" Hawke asked.
"I don't think so," she replied, looking down at the matriarch, with her chubby cheeks carved deep with smile lines. "My mother didn't look like this."
"There were probably other tribes. This was just the one the human world chose to see."
That was a nice thought. Shinra had called her the last. But Shinra didn't know everything. "I wonder if they're still there," she said, daring to voice it. The information was hardly secret, she'd found it in an under-plate library for planet's sake, but just knowing felt like rebellion.
"Their decedents probably are," Hawke said, her head tilted in thought. "I wonder if they know they have a cousin in Midgar."
Aerith couldn't stop her grin. She buried her nose back in the book.
The strange dream followed Genesis throughout the day.
It wasn't that he didn't have enough to focus on, he was leading the next push north in Wutai in a matter of days and run off his feet with work, but Hawke's words and sharp eyes lingered with him.
It was the most he had seen of the woman from the slums since she healed him. And until the war ended or he got rotated back to Midgar again, it was all he would see of her. A dream of her saying she couldn't help anyway was not how he had hoped to see her again before shipping out.
It was just a dream, he said to himself while rejecting poorly formatted requisition requests. Not even a poignantly symbolic one. There were no mystical implications and symbols to pour-over. If anything it was frustratingly mundane: a dream correcting him on how dreams worked. How droll.
It raised an interesting concept though. Magic… without Materia. Perhaps his subconscious trying to lead him to the answer?
He turned the subject over while exchanging passive-aggressive emails with Director Heidegger.
How would he go about it? If not Materia, then what?
Limit breaks, they weren't technically cast through Materia. You did need to have at least one equipped, but they were cast with built-up energy mid-fight, an explosion of your own mana in the heat of the moment. They were an expression not of weaponry but of the self, hence their unique qualities.
Did Hawke heal him with a limit break then? All sorts of otherwise impossible things were possible via a break. Unlikely. The fight had already ended by then and she didn't look all that worked up.
He could typically discern what kind of break someone might have and he doubted hers would be support spells. More likely to be something that stabbed or exploded, if he was any judge.
'I didn't say Materia,' the dream had said. 'You don't need my magic to heal your injuries, you have your own.'
He frowned, his fingers stilling over his keyboard. What more magic was there?
Nothing. There was nothing else. Everyone knew that.
He narrowed his eyes. He was deeply sceptical of things 'everyone knew'.
He got up, taking a deep breath. His eyes stung from staying at the screen all day.
Everyone had once known he wouldn't make it into SOLDIER, he was too scrawny a little thing.
He picked up his coat and marched out of his office.
And when he made it into SOLDIER anyway, everyone had known he would never make it to first Class. He had the wrong build. He was too temperamental, too cerebral. 'Everyone' made no allowances for the exceptional and could not be trusted.
He arrived at a VR room and selected a generic magic training setting. Gentle hills crested with wildflowers, swaying in a false breeze, stretched away in every direction. Twisting old olive trees dotted the landscape.
Limit breaks proved you didn't need Materia. He had never thought of it that way before, but their very existence proved it.
He plucked his mastered fire materia from his bracer and observed it. It caught the synthesised sunlight, refracting through the green crystal beautifully. The first he had ever mastered. It responded to him so readily these days it was practically automatic.
Without so much as a blink or a hitch in his breath a fireball shot from the materia. It roared in a graceful diagonal arc before colliding with a tree. The flowers and long grass at the tree's base caught fire. He triggered his ice materia just as easily and the flames died on his command.
The ability to cast independently was inside him, somewhere.
Not everyone had the ability to break their limit. It was a rare skill, held only by a minority in the already small pool of people with the ability to use Materia. It wasn't an ability that could be taught or consciously grasped, it either happened or it didn't. Well, why? Who said it couldn't be done consciously?
Decades of peer-reviewed scientific studies, that was who. It was a well-known and extensively studied phenomena. Those same scientists had said his shoulder couldn't be healed with magic, so what did they know. Hawke must have figured it out.
He paused, regarding the frozen, burnt tree before him.
'Hawke' wasn't actually her name. It was only what his subconscious labelled her. It suited, though. A bird of prey rarely found in Midgar, no tamed pet wearing Shinra's collar.
"'Wings of light and dark spread afar,'" he murmured, "'she guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting'."
He put his materia away and stretched out a hand. He narrowed his eyes with concentration and irritation at how foolish it felt.
He visualised fire. The lick of flame, the roar of combusting oxygen, the wave of heat.
The frozen tree sparkled in the sunshine.
He pursed his lips and closed his eyes. Fire. It was the first thing he had ever cast, the element that all but called to him. He pushed mana into his hand as he would with a new materia and concentrated.
Nothing.
He threw his hand up with a snarl.
Well, what did he expect? If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.
But if some random slum dweller could do it, then so could he.
He pulled out his phone and reprogrammed the VR room to send some enemies after him. Generic makonoids rose from the ground and charged at him. He cut them down and threw regular materia spells at them. He was nowhere near breaking, but he could feel the mana build up within him, starting to simmer beneath the surface.
He threw his hand out again, willing a fire spell to explode out.
The monster launched itself at him, decidedly not on fire. He bared his teeth and cut down the last of the enemy wave.
His mana build-up dispersed and he paced in the stamped down grass. He rolled his fire materia between his fingers again. It was poor form to hold them while casting, instead of keeping them all in a bracer, but he still indulged from time to time. It felt better. There was something about that sudden release of power that bracers lacked.
He focused on the little bauble.
What was it actually doing? He activated it, and again, the tree was on fire before he had finished drawing breath. He shook his head and cast again, forcing himself to slow down. He had trained to cast as fast as possible, faster even than Sephiroth on a good day.
It took more will power than he expected to slow the process down, like throwing himself back into the body of his 15-year-old self, still trying to figure out how to force the bauble into co-operating.
He took a steady breath and kept a tight lid on his mana. Letting it fill the materia in his right hand but not actually cast.
There were patterns within. Different from other materia, ice felt sharp and smooth, cure felt almost molten, but this.. this was like smoke if you could hold it down and pin it in place. He could feel it, fluid and shifting but very definitely structured.
It felt like a fire.
He raised his empty left hand and tried to replicate it. The fluid pattern that felt like the very concept of a flame. His mana didn't sit right in his hand, it didn't want to be outside of his body without a medium to shape it.
He held his breath. He felt for the materia again, hovering uncomfortably in that half-cast place. He almost had it.. just.. a little more. He pushed more mana into his hand. How to trigger it? How to get ignition?
A fireball exploded in his face. He flew backwards and landed on his back in the dirt.
A fine rain of town grass and dirt and daisies fell down onto him. He groaned. Damnit, how long had it been since he was getting blowback from failed spells? He let his rest back on beaten-down grass. His left hand stung from the burn. One more injury he didn't need.
Wait. His left hand.
There was a rumble of laughter. Silver hair intruded on the blue sky above him.
"What on Gaia are you doing?" Sephiroth asked.
Genesis sat up and stretched his hand out, studying the damage that burned through his thick leather glove. His materia sat warm but inactive in his other hand.
"Trying a new casting technique," he said, distracted. It was a sign. He could do it, he could. The dream had been right.
Sephiroth surveyed the damage as well. "And…?"
Genesis rose to his feet and readjusted his coat. He fixed his hair, feeling a genuine smile cross his face.
"Well, you know what they say about omelettes and broken eggs."
"You're not an egg, Genesis. Please don't fry yourself," Sephiroth replied, his brows furrowed. A cautious smile tugged at his lips. "Not before deployment at least."
Genesis snorted a laugh. "I shall wait until Shinra no longer has use for me then."
Sephiroth gave him a cautious look. "What brought this on?"
Genesis frowned, looking to the small ring of destruction. It wasn't much, not by either of their standards. He hadn't said anything particularly shocking either.
"Brought what on?"
Sephiroth's tentative look remained. He didn't elaborate, retreating to silence as he typically did when unsure of context. He maintained a respectful distance from him too, a borderline awkward distance for a normal conversation.
A normal conversation, when did they last have one of those? How long had Sephiroth been tiptoeing around him? How long had he… chosen not to notice?
His shoulders sunk with shame. Hollander styled Sephiroth as the better version of himself, something to strive against and resent. But Sephiroth was his friend. Genesis had chased him down and all but demanded it be so when they were still teenagers. It was a friendship hard-won and something he valued.
The look in Sephiroth's eye said otherwise.
"They say the Ancients could cast without materia, do they not?" he said, trying for a change of subject.
"They say a lot of things about the Ancients," Sephiroth said with a raised brow. "Is that what you were trying to do?"
Genesis shrugged. "If they could do it, why can't we?"
"I doubt it's possible for anyone."
"How do you know?"
"I would have figured it out if it was," Sephiroth said simply.
"Oh, would you just?" Genesis drawled. Honestly, he was friends with the most blindly aggravating person on the planet. "Have you tried?"
Sephiroth watched with eyes narrowed as Genesis drew his sword.
"Perhaps you'd care to teach me," he said with a grin.
"You're in a good mood." Sephiroth drew his own sword, his cautious expression replaced with something more confident. Sparring had always been safer territory then emotional woes.
"Why shouldn't I be? I'm about to beat you into the dirt," Genesis said, taking his stance. The wholly inaccurate boast stung a little, as it always did. But it was a familiar sting and almost comfortable now. He wasn't ready to stop trying.
"If you say so," Sephiroth said with an easy smile.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Reviews and concrit are welcome.
Next Time: A tale of three cities.
