A/N: Hey guys, just a note up top about content warnings. As I would have hoped is obvious by now, this story deals heavily with terminal illnesses. This is not a subject I have any authority on and am not trying to treat lightly, but its 2020. If it's harmful for you to be reading about debilitating medical conditions and careless and culpable governments at this point in time, please be warned. Take care of yourselves, everyone.
Genesis worked on autopilot. He walked back into HQ, handed Angeal off to the medics, and reported to Sephiroth and the director. Years of procedure had beaten correct behaviour into him and he fell back onto it. The incident had been on an official mission, there would be no hiding the truth now.
The director, in his neat little reading glasses and silk cravat, recoiled at the sight of him. He was too numb to care or process why. Sephiroth's face was as yielding as a rock as he debriefed him, as reliant on procedure as Genesis to sort out the mess.
Genesis reported that they had faced a monster in the Sleeping Forest. He dodged the matter of the Fade and Hawke and Aerith, but Sephiroth asked too many questions, and he didn't have the energy to lie about the degradation anymore.
The two of them stared at him. The director didn't sound surprised at the new, only the result. Sephiroth's hard expression cracked, just for a moment, then he was back on form. Genesis was ordered to sleep and recuperate. He nodded, and was dismissed.
He ignored his orders and walked directly down to the science department to find Angeal. He was hidden inside somewhere, they wouldn't let him see him, so Genesis sat on a plastic seat under the bright lights of the waiting. There he waited.
There was a commotion as doctor Hollander was arrested. He called out for Genesis as the Turks took him away. Genesis watched, motionless, as his only chance for viable desertion was hauled away in handcuffs. The arrest was under charges of falsifying SOLDIER health reports and unethical human experimentation. The thought that it was only ethical when it worked percolated through his fugue, and a cracked smile pulled at his face.
Within him he felt the gnawing ache of degradation. It wasn't buried deep inside of him anymore, it hummed through his fingers, coursed up his spine into his scalp and down to his very toes. His coat hung off him awkwardly. He took it off, and shivered in the cold office.
Sephiroth arrived. He ground to a halt at the sight of Genesis. His formal work persona was shaking, Genesis idly noted, his forced indifference crumbling. He looked away. He didn't know if he wanted to find out what was beneath it. Disgust probably.
Sephiroth drew closer.
"How long have you known about this?" he asked, his voice low. There was nobody at the desk or down the hall, but the overbright lights and white walls made it feel exposed.
"Over a year," Genesis admitted. "Since my injury in the training room."
There was a long pause. Finally he looked up. He had never seen Sephiroth make such an expression. Like someone had stabbed him.
"You didn't tell me."
Genesis dropped his head again. He clasped his hands together, feeling nothing but weakness and insufficiency in the pull of his tendons. There was no excuse. He had known it then too, he just lied to himself.
It felt absurd now. The idea that everything could just be fine if he played his cards right, that nobody needed to know, that the problem and solution could be his alone.
The silence stretched out longer still.
"Where did it come from?" Sephiroth asked.
"We were born with it. We're SOLDIER's prototypes, Angeal and I. Just not very good ones."
"But you recovered," Sephiroth said.
Genesis shook his head. "I treated my symptoms. The degradation… the contamination has always been part of me. I may as well be in there with him."
"How did you treat the symptoms? Will it work for Angeal? Do the Doctors know about it?"
"It was the first thing I tried. It's not enough."
Genesis looked up at him. His neck strained. Sephiroth looked so lost up there.
"What can I do?" he asked.
"I don't know."
Sephiroth shook his head. "There must be something. Blood transfusions. Gene therapy. Specialists, I know people in the Scientific community outside of Shinra, I could-"
"There's nothing, Seph. There's nothing to do." Genesis could only shake his head. "If I knew of something, I'd be doing it."
Sephiroth recoiled, his brow furrowing.
"Why didn't you tell me?" he pleaded.
"So you wouldn't look at me like that. I don't want your pity," he said, trying to sound scathing and proud. It came out raspy and pathetic.
"Genesis, you're dying," Sephiroth said, lost and helpless. He put a hand on his shoulder.
It was the equivalent of a weeping hug from Sephiroth. Genesis felt his breath leave him. Maybe he wanted someone to mourn with him after all.
"I'm sorry," he forced out. For so much. He tried to recollect himself, feeling he was on the verge of an undignified emotional outpouring himself.
"The arrow has left…" he managed. He put a hand over the one gripping his shoulder. "'…the bow of the goddess.'"
"Loveless. Act four," Sephiroth offered.
Sephiroth finally convinced Genesis to go home and sleep, and he took over the watch in the waiting room.
He sat down on the low seats, leaned back, closed his eyes, and waited. There was nothing else to be done. He felt as though he was being used by both Shinra and his friends against each other. A pawn held in check, and in contempt, by all parties.
Maybe if Genesis had said something earlier there would have been something he could have done to help. But he hadn't and there wasn't. Hours passed. Angeal came out of a surgery, and Sephiroth was allowed to see him from the other side of a glass screen. Professor Hojo had taken over his care, and didn't appear surprised or impressed by his findings. Sephiroth had known Hojo long enough to know there was no point asking for information.
So he continued to wait. It felt like that was all he ever did. He stood motionless at the window, watching over the closest thing he had to family.
Angeal looked terrible. Worse than when he had been received into the building, and undergone a bevy of tests. He had been heavily sedated, but his eyes moved feverishly under his eyelids. He was sweating through his hospital clothes and bedsheets. He didn't look like himself, there just wasn't enough of him there. Mako enhancements consumed a lot of energy, if you didn't keep up a high calorie intake you would cannibalize your own muscle mass to keep going.
He looked worse than he had after three weeks on a starvation diet in a Wutaian prisoner camp.
Hojo tutted and scowled at some figures on a screen.
Sephiroth glanced at the old scientist and then back to the bed.
Angeal and Genesis were not his family. No matter what they might have sworn to each other on long nights under siege. Reality did not bend to his wishes. He had to take the world as it was, not as he wished it could have been.
"Come here, boy," Hojo called. "You'll help."
He did as he was told.
By the time Genesis got home he was running on fumes. He had been tired and come out the other side to a surreal place where he felt completely untethered from reality.
He turned his key in the door and stepped inside.
The only thought he could process was what needed to be done next. The list ran loops through his head, picking up tasks with every cycle. He had to write a formal report. He would have to go back to get checked himself in the morning. The director wanted more information about the mythical beast in the Sleeping Forest, he would need to invent the details and forward them to him.
He had to answer Hawke's texts. There was a backlog he had been ignoring.
He stood in the centre of his lovely apartment and felt cold. The list in his head ground to a halt, then evaporated. What did he need to do next? It had to be something. He couldn't think what.
The night had settled in, the lights of the city shone in through the living room windows. The horizon stretched out, a black smudge beyond the end of the twinkling city limits. It was empty, free of all of Shinra's sins.
He wanted to escape. To simply… fly away into the horizon and never come back.
There was a strange ripping noise. He fell to his knees, the breath knocked out of him.
Black feathers rained down around him.
He twisted his neck and saw a big black wing stretching over him. He didn't understand. He stumbled back to his feet, his balance shot and his back starting to scream with raw and torn ligaments. He reached a trembling hand up and felt the sensation of it brushing feathers. His feathers.
There was a knock on the door. Too numb to know what else to do, he went and opened it.
Hawke was on the other side. Her eyes grew wide at the sight of him. Her mouth dropped open and she tried and failed to say something.
"I'm a monster," he said.
She would leave now. Even in his dreams he couldn't believe anyone would be fooled into missing what a disappointment he was. He didn't need the Blight to be broken. He closed the door.
Hawke shoved her foot in the way and pushed her way in.
He stepped back. She followed him, until he stopped backing up. He was breaking and didn't know what to do. She put a hand on his chest and magic he didn't know flared through his ribcage. She stared into his eyes, focused and searching.
He shook his head. "You can't cure me of what I am."
The magic receded, and her eyes softened.
"You're not a monster, Genesis."
She pulled him into a strong hug. He gasped a sob. She held him up and he crumpled.
Genesis had a wing.
It wasn't the weirdest thing that Hawke had seen but it was up there. As soon as she saw it she checked if he had been possessed. After a week in the Fade who knew what might have happened, but the magic came up empty. He wasn't an abomination, there were no demons hitching a ride in his mind, he just… had a wing. Jutting violently out of the left side of his upper back.
He was also a mess. She took charge and started cleaning up the mess.
She had him sit backwards on a kitchen chair, then raided his towel cupboard and got to work. He passed out shortly after. She worked through the night, pulling broken feathers and torn skin out of the gaping wound, and washing it as best she could.
The wing was longer than she was tall and not strong enough to hold itself up. A number of the hollow bones were broken and its musculature not fully formed, missing clumps of feathers leaving tendons and nerve endings exposed. It was sticky with blood and dark body fluids that ran all the way down his back. It was all contaminated with Blight, he would have to burn the towels afterwards. There was one meagre positive in that he hadn't been wearing his jacket: it was much easier to cut his woollen uniform shirt off him than it would have been the enchanted and reinforced leather.
The lights of the city painted the sooty black feathers in sickly greens and reds. She didn't want to risk waking him, so she worked in the dark, only illuminating the details with bobbing mage lights.
She pressed a hand against its base and sent a questing note of magic into the muscle. It brushed against the telltale signs of shapeshifting magic. So he didn't just grow a single wing at random, and it wasn't Blight magic, he had summoned it. Presumably he would be able to banish it again, once he figured out how.
She opted not to think about why a man who could barely cast a single spell without materia would be capable of complex shape shifting magic. She had enough on her plate.
He drifted back up to consciousness after she had reset the broken bones. She had both her hands around the widest part of the wing while supporting the rest of its weight with struts of gentle healing magic, slowly building up the weak muscles.
"Your cure feels like a weighted blanket," he mumbled in the dark.
"Does it?" she asked. "Varric always says it's like being hit with a sandbag."
"A sandy weighted blanket." He shivered under her touch and gave a soft gasp. "Soft. Like old wool."
"Like those scratchy ones, with the little silk edges?"
"Mm. That's you."
"Too irritating to be comfortable?" she asked, grinning.
He made a soft noise of protest. "A textural medley." He pulled his arms up and rested his head on his crossed forearms.
"You're not fully awake right now, are you?" She moved her hands, soothing out the feathers on the tendon she had rebuilt.
His healing rate was not what it had been when she first met him, it wasn't even what it had been back in Junon. It only sluggishly responded as she poked it into working. She took a swig of an ether and added the empty bottle to the pile.
He made a different noise of protest, more of a grunt before falling into comfortable silence. She stretched out her hands, cracking her knuckles, and then got back into it.
"Why are you here?" he asked some time later. He sounded more cognizant.
"Because it's where you are."
"Do you enjoy seeing me weak and broken?"
She raised an eyebrow at the back of his head. He had his shoulders drawn up.
"What did Sloth show you?" she asked.
He turned his head. The wing jostled and he gasped.
"What does that have to do with it?" he forced out.
"I wouldn't be healing you if I liked this, and I think you know that already. And stop moving." She braced it into place again. "I'm not a complete monster," she muttered.
"What did Sloth show you?" he asked.
"I asked first."
He turned his head forwards again.
"They're not some deep truth about you, the illusions, you don't have to feel bad about it," she said, in a stunning display of hypocrisy. "It wanted to keep you passive, not satisfied. It's not Desire."
"I would have preferred meeting one of those," he said.
"No. You wouldn't."
He stayed silent for a long time, and she finished the bulk of the healing. She let out a laboured breath and rolled her shoulders. It was strong enough to hold itself up now. She had learned more about wing structure in one night than she had over a lifetime of hunting and cooking ducks and geese. Her mana reserves were a hollowed out void inside her. She emptied the buckets of discoloured water and refilled them for the final clean.
She wrung out a cloth. Outside the sky was fading from black into stormy grey.
"It showed me Sephiroth," Genesis confessed quietly. "As he was as a child. Or… how I once imagined him to be. How I hoped he might be."
"How did it feel?"
"Degrading. To the both of us." He pressed his forehead into the back of the chair. "He said everything I ever hoped he would, and I couldn't believe a word of it." He gave a laugh, short and bitter. "I thought less of him for calling me his equal. What does that say about me? Even in my dreams I can't believe that I'm..."
"It says the spirit misread you." She focused on the movement of the cloth over black feathers, searching out the last of the filth to wash away. "It thought you would be satisfied with being handed praise and accolades for something you don't think you've earned."
"I have earned it. I'm a hero of Wutai."
She looked at the back of his head. She went back to her work, offering no comment. His shoulders sank and he let out a shaky sigh.
"There. I told you what it showed me."
She rinsed the cloth again and steeped it in the clean water before wringing it out again. She raked through the feathers, focusing on the motion and the comfort of simple repeated motions.
"I saw Kirkwall. The last time I was there."
"Was it beautiful?"
She smiled brokenly. "It was a pile of burning rubble."
"I'm sure you defended it with your all."
The smile turned into a jagged, bitter laugh. He had so much faith in her. The fool.
"I'm the one who burned it down. Those are my heroics."
He turned his head. He didn't look as shocked as she had hoped he would.
Her hands slowed their motions in the feathers. She heaved a sigh, all humour gone. "My Mother was there. Dying in my arms. She wasn't on the day, of course, she was long gone by then. But you know, dreams." The wing twitched under her hands, a strong and stable limb now. She wasn't really seeing it. "She asked me to stay with her until the end... but... there is no end. There's no finish line. No destination, no peace. It never ends."
"What did you do?"
"I gave her an end," she whispered. She held the wing too tight and he gasped. "Sorry," she said, startling herself and letting go.
Genesis turned in the chair and looked at her. She couldn't meet his eyes.
He held out his arms for her. She leaned against him, holding him close. His hands were warm and for all that she'd just spent the night picking him back up he was strong and undeniably real. No Fade trick thrown in her face. She sniffled, and squeezed her eyes shut.
She gave up being strong for the moment and just sat, collapsing onto the floor with no dignity. He kept an arm around her shoulders, and slid down to join her on the floor. They sat slumped next to each other, surrounded by kitchen chairs, soggy towels, and buckets of water.
"What a pair we make," he said into her shoulder.
"Well. We are both heroes."
He snorted a laugh and she joined him, unraveling and absurd, giggling together in the wreckage of his kitchen floor.
A/N: Thanks for reading! Remember when this had jokes in it? ha ha, good times. Anyway, I promise it's not going to be so unrelenting grim forever, some of the laughter may even be genuine. Reviews and constructive criticism are much appreciated.
Next Time: When G-d closes a door, smash a window.
