Just Another Soul Spiraling Endlessly

More Gengeal but with Genesis as the devil clinging to Angeal's shoulder. This is a bit of a character study, I suppose.

Angeal has joined Genesis and Hollander in Banora, but he remains solely for the purpose of saving his friend.

⚠️Warnings: Pseudo-incest as a plot element, not a kink. Brief sex scene, but not smut

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Another thing, Genesis/Angeal. Imagine them, if you will, in the Banora Underground after Hollander has told Angeal the truth.

No warnings. Some sexual tension, but not explicit.

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Genesis tore into a freshly picked Banora White, recoiled, spit seed and core and bits of pulp onto the rock. He leaned like a tilted weathervane, his lips fixed into a similar shape.

They sat in silence, the two of them, like bitter rivals or passing strangers.

Angeal's raven hair hung over his face like cloth, over his neck. His chest and arms were bare and clean and white, save for a single bandage, where the doctor had drawn a small amount of blood. He watched his fingers brush mindlessly at the fabric. The first since he'd joined them, it would not be the last.

A crooked smile waxed over Genesis's lips, he considered the mouthfeel of the flesh of the apple, was reminded of his own bandages. Hidden beneath his uniform, mottling his perfect skin. He swallowed and licked his lips.

"It gets easier." And Hollander never took too much, not all at once. His own samples had been carefully collected from long before they'd ever considered defecting, long before he did, at least. Such was the doctor's patience.

Angeal let out a sound like a faint hum, like a dying whisper. His eyes remained on the floor, as they'd been since Hollander, spooked by his insistent rage, spilled like a compromised dam, everything. He'd told him everything that he'd told him, and he'd watched as the color drained from Angeal's cheeks, the slow shake of his head.

He knew what he'd been thinking, in the moments then and the moments before. That none of this could be happening, that none of the words which Hollander spoke could be true. That he did not see a perfect replica of his friend growing in each of the tanks, that they were not made in the way that he said, that it could not be true that the same could be done of him.

And yet he'd wilted and buckled, and sat himself against the table, dispondent. Hollander saw opportunity like a raven, and let his vials drink their fill.

Poor thing. He remembered when he had felt as such, but without the benefit of company. Angeal could count himself lucky to have him, for him to love him so much.

Genesis shrugged away the shadows, discarded the skeleton of the apple, and stepped around him like tossing wind, like a dancing specter. He loved the look of him, his dark hair, his sculptural muscle, at every turn.

He wrapped his arms around his neck, perched his head utop his shoulder. How warm he was, as if he were the sun himself, or held it in his core.

"Don't be so upset, Angie." He whispered the words in his ear, felt his body flutter beneath his cold touch and warm breath. He pressed himself closer, so the fabric of his uniform touched his back. "It's just us again, like it used to be."

I need only you, and you need only me. Such was the way of monsters, he'd learned. They were attracted to one another in the same way flowers tangled at the roots. Roses of the same bush thought each other especially sweet. He kissed his ear before he pulled away and stood, and left his hands and his body cold and empty.

Angeal regarded him with piercing eyes, glowing like the stilled waves of the sea or like a lake. And he found in them no less depth, there was his friend from birth, who'd suckled from the same breast and shared the same earth beneath his feet. Whose body desired his in the same way a torso desired its arm, and like it they would spend all of forever in longing for a fruit which could never be obtained. The sweetest fruit, satiating to thirst and hunger.

But wanting without end was what would spur them on. What greater pleasure than hunting the beast which could never be caught? In this way they could creep up on it, and ready their rifles and fire a close, but missing shot. Exhilirating, the closer the catch, but never the winning shot. And they could do this again and again and again.

He peeled his coat from his shoulders, shivering. The doctor was away in his laboratory, and he wouldn't mind. He would understand and perhaps relish in it, of similar excitement was watching the hunter take his shot, betting on him, and waiting in those moments as he placed his finger upon the trigger, steadied his hands…

Angeal caught him by the wrist. "Stop."

Reservations, he knew. Like those he'd had before he agreed upon Hollander's price. The wrongness and the strangeness of it all, but he was already degrading and he was already a monster. Monsters were quite wrong and quite strange.

He traced the beautiful shape of Angeal's half-naked body, fit an arm around his narrow waist and held him close. Closer than lovers in a storm. Angeal did not resist him, he released his grip on his wrist. Watched him cautiously and curiously. Good.

A little skepticism was necessary to comprehend the truth.

Genesis drew nearer, enough to feel his breath against his cheek, however restrained. He smelled of exhaustion and thick summer sweat, a delicious smell. He pressed together their lips and kissed him, slipped his tongue into his mouth.

Angeal let his fingers linger near his cheek then, reservations overcome, slipped them into his hair. And he kissed him back, the way a stag accepted the dance of hunter and hunted as it twitched and it bolted through the thick of the woods. They could begin, but there was one more thing.

More tinder for the fire, the music to their dance. Anger and despair, overwhelming despair. Let Angeal feel it, he thought, and let him unleash the fury we together share upon me.

Genesis probed his back with two fingers and thumb, searching for the place, the slightly soft spot along his back. Between the shoulder blades, not too high nor too low. The same place the doctor probed him so very long ago.

He found it and he pressed. Skin gave, molded between his fingers, reshaped into something new, into what it always was but had not been. He felt it, he grasped it, and he pulled, hard, as if yanking chains from the body of his friend. Chains of humanity. He watched his face shrivel in pain, his mako eyes grow wide with realization that something strange had happened.

Yes it had. Something strange indeed.

Genesis stepped back, from his hovering grasp, and felt his own eyes widen. He traced the protrusion, watched Angeal scramble to feel it and he shouted something, something he could not hear but it was probably a question of how and why and what.

He found himself distracted, like a hunter happening on a swan upon a silver lake, the calm moments of breeze and grass as he cocked his rifle at the waiting doe.

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Gillian rubbed her knuckles behind his ears. She got the impression of an abandoned puppy left in a squalid box, the way he shut his eyes and shuddered against her touch.

He was clean though, they always kept him clean and fed. He was thin, a couple of pounds short of being underweight, only because he tended to take his meals in sporadically, and ate just to the lip of his hunger.

Gillian's eyes flickered to the camera, buried in a dark corner, in the way one might exchange a glance with a close friend. This one was her research partner, and she could not see him but she could see his face. Satisfaction with a low hum.

The boy was slow to develop, but quick to attach. In the absence of words, at the age of five, he relied on feelings. He could understand her, she was certain—there was too clever a spark in his eyes when his ears grew curious—but he would not speak.

Hollander worried, though, that their tinkering may have stunted his development.

Gillian stood and straightened out her dress.

"Doctor Hollander will be in momentarily. Just two pinches, then we're done, okay?"

He stiffened without a sound, which was all she needed. Those words also served as her partner's cue to come inside, she'd merely arrived first to prepare him for what would follow.

He was always on edge. Maybe that meant she should speak to him more, but she found herself occupied by more pressing concerns.

The well-being of her own child, of Angeal.

She watched the red-headed child until she heard the beep of Hollander's keycard being accepted, and the click of the door as it slid open.

There would be more than two pinches. She knew Hollander, he always got carried away. Were she not his research partner, she was certain this child would be in a far worse state. He always took too much and gave too little. The boy would starve or most of him would be squared away in tiny vials and containers as samples, without her.

She held no delusions of being his savior though. This was work, she was simply careful about it. That's why she was partnered with Hollander to begin with.

She caught Hollander's hands trembling as he rolled in his cart. Excited as a child when he set about his work. He hastily assembled a syringe, breath steadying as he went along.

The child watched him with wide eyes, wordlessly. She'd always thought it was less about the needles and more about the stranger. Hollander scarcely spoke a word to him, ever.

The researcher pushed the needle into the soft of one of his small arms. His mouth gaped as if to gasp or whine, but he didn't make a sound.

Good boy. She smiled, his winter blue eyes settled a bit. He'd be so handsome if he ever grew up—She didn't expect him to.

"I'm going to leave for a bit. I'll come by again before I head to my quarters for good."

She was already shrugging her white coat from her shoulders.

"Yeah, sure. Just come back before five, please."

"That is what I said."

Distracted, as always. He shot her a sheepish glance, but she was already halfway out the door, her coat up on a hook. She passed through the laboratory, up to the residential section of the mansion, up to her room on the top floor.

Her fingers trembled as she fished her keys out of her bag. There was always that nagging fear at the back of her mind that she would, someday, open the door, peer inside, and he would just be gone. Taken by someone, somewhere. Probably Hojo.

Shin-Ra property, but, above else, he was her son, and they would not live like this forever.

She followed the motion of her daydream to a pleasant outcome. He lay in bed, sleeping, as she'd left him, his dark hair tossed over his eyes. She made a mental note to clip it some, at least around his face, then stepped inside.

Angeal, her angel. She breathed, then lay down beside him, cradled him in her arms. He was warm and alive, her child. She pressed a kiss against his cheek and watched his blue eyes flutter open, just a moment, then close. He had a terrible habit of staying up late; the latter hours of the day were usually when she returned.

But she sought out moments too, like this. She shut her eyes, and pretended they were somewhere far away from this place. Somewhere where the grasses greened and the sun would tan his skin, where she could run with him, forever, into the deep blue sky, or show him the beauty of a lily in the palms of her hands. How his eyes would wet at the sight of a lily, like dew, like when she'd stolen away with him into the world outside, and shown him the white of a cloud.

He would ask, she knew, where his friend was. Genesis, they had named him, the red-headed child in the basement. Scarcely seen but ever known, and she was not certain whether they'd ever exchanged a word at all. Genesis would not speak to her, but would he speak to Angeal?

It didn't matter. When he asked, she would tell him, simply:

That Genesis was very far away, in a place beyond the plains of their eventual home, over the hills and in the breeze caught in his hair, on the tips of every blade of grass, and in the soft cavity in his heart.

No warnings

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A wooden door creaked on its hinges, blown against its frame by a balmy mid-summer breeze. Genesis passed it by, peered though the windows without stopping; saw no one home and nothing but a round dining table and a cold meal laid out across its spread.

The buzzing of flies swelled in his ears.

There wasn't a single house unlike this, though all showed varying states of life. Some were abandoned at dinner, others at bedtime or during leisure. Some promised children who would never come home.

Well, there was one. One home he'd spared his crimson wrath, a tiny cottage at the village's center, whose curtains had been drawn over its windows since the day he came.

The home of Gillian Hewley, the mother of his best friend.

Genesis kicked at the dirt path with the tip of his boot, impassive eyes scouring windows for souls he'd already sent. There was something strange twisting up inside him, like a blood-red lily bloomed from his heart, splintered it sevenfold.

He almost wished he would see someone, that he'd spot a child huddling behind a barrel of freshly picked Banora Whites, glimmering darkly like amethyst, or a lone figure sat around a table meant for four, wide eyes and limp limbs, resignation.

He hoped for someone spared his wrath, though he knew he would hunt them if they fled, or he would send his blade through their chest if they simply watched him with wet eyes, and accepted the fate swiftly, suddenly brought upon them and their family, their neighbors.

Either way, he would kill them. And either way, Banora remained the same.

He stopped at the foot of Gillian's home, the old cottage inhabited for over twenty years. There were memories of this place, of running through the far-stretching corridors of Banora White trees, spurning the raging summer sun high up against the empty blue sky. Running, all the way to Gillian's home, hand in hand with the only friend he'd ever known, through the door, small bodies thrown into seats at the table. The familiar, sweet smell of freshly baked apple pie. A smell like sugar and heat.

Genesis pressed himself against the door, his ear to it, and listened, listened for the sound of the beat of her heart. Her breath as she slept or as she turned through the pages of a book. He remembered it from when she wrapped her white arms around his shoulders, and hugged him close enough to touch her cheek to his.

Still she'd never told him, but all the signs had been planted. They could speak honestly now.

He wrapped his fingers around the knob, twisted, opened the door. Gillian was inside, watching him the long while, before he'd appeared in her doorway, from the moment he climbed out of the Underground, and made his way here.

She was older than he remembered, which didn't seem right. He shut the door behind him, and stepped along the paneled floors. He liked the way his heels clicked along old wood.

"Good afternoon." He smiled like a viper.

Gillian laced her thin fingers together, latticed against the table. She turned her head down, eyes flickering away from his face. He felt her trembling, though he could not see it.

"What do you want?" Weary and far too cold. She would not speak to him like this, he remembered then that the doctor came by first. That was the explanation.

Genesis leaned against one of the chairs, across from Gillian. He beckoned her eyes with his, an icy, sharp blue. How could she not look at him, when it had been so long? Ten years past, he was a man now and far prettier without his childhood fat.

She should want to see him, see what he'd become.

"I'm sorry about Hollander, I know he's come by to nettle you since we've arrived. I wanted to speak with you myself, but…"

Genesis swallowed a stone, remembered how Hollander shook his head when he returned to the Underground, bristling with irritation.

He'd shivered beneath his skin, more than just his nakedness or the touch of Hollander's cold fingers along his bare body, when the he finally told him. Fingers he'd felt a thousand times over, yet they grew no warmer.

She won't help, he'd told him. She hates the project, she hates what they've done.

So, then, she hated him.

Shortly thereafter, Genesis had emerged from the Underground and killed both of his parents.

He could see from the tension in her aging hands, the strain on her face, that he was right. She dreaded the words that Hollander spoke, and dreaded that they would, now, come from him.

But he would allow her to hide no longer.

"Gillian—"

"—Please, just leave. Please." She shut her eyes, instead of looking at him.

Genesis dug his fingers in against the chair, eyes widening, widening with that same look, the icy cold, pale mako blue. He had the same feeling creeping up in his bones, the one he had when they arrived and he drove his scarlet blade through the chests and the necks of all the men, the women, and their children.

He licked his lips, and channeled all of the feeling into his fingers, growing numb against the wood backboard. He tasted blood.

"Will you listen to me?"

Gillian shook her head, still unlooking. "There's no point, I already know what you're going to say." Her voice was cinched, like something clipped her throat together inside.

Genesis lowered his eyes from her face, as though his gaze truly burrowed holes into her. Like icicles.

He wanted to bury his head in her breasts. Pale fingers, but he knew they'd be warm against his skin. And she seemed so pathetic a thing now, but he knew there was a fierceness in her.

He'd seen it once, when Angeal had been caught stealing an apple, when an old farmer drove him to the door of her home with a stick, and made him knock. And Gillian saw the spiderweb welts along his arms, from the old man's cane.

She could protect her own, which he was. She could protect him from Hollander, and she would because she loved him.

She still loved him, he was certain.

"Please," he whispered.

Gillian lifted her head, traced his uniform, his coat, up to his face. His eyes, juvenile, wet, and wide. It was like something had steeled inside of her.

He could no longer feel her trembling.

"No." She spoke harshly, decisively. There was an edge to her voice, like a blade. "I will not help you."

Genesis stared at her, stilled, like paralyzed by poison. He searched the room like he searched his mind for answers, for interpretations, meanings of the words. They couldn't mean what they did, there must've been something else.

Or he was still sleeping in the Underground, put under by Hollander's anesthetics and being carved away by his knife, piece by piece, until he would be left with nothing but his shivering skeleton, the bones underneath. And this was a nightmare, one dreamt out of desperation, and twisted unrecognizably by his own despair.

His lips quivered.

"But…I'm dying," he whispered. Don't you love me?

Gillian stared through him, blank eyed. A wax figure of the woman who'd just sat, head hung, before him, the woman he'd known to be kind so long ago. When his own parents felt distant, when he was like a stranger in their home.

"Leave, please."

A nightmare. Months ago he was plunged into a nightmare. He was not convinced he'd ever woken up. Hot tears stung at his eyes, the first emerged and streamed down his cheek.

His fingers were numb and trembling.

"But you're my…"

"Genesis." Cold, so cold, as though he were a stranger. Did she not hold him in her arms once and stroke away at his hair? Did she not cover his face in a hundred burning kisses once, when he was so young and small enough to sit in her lap?

The tears came and they stung and they would not stop.

"But you're my mother!"

What mother did not want her own child to live? Gillian turned her head away, lips pressed together, and he realized, he realized she would speak to him no more.

He knew the reason, it set off a spark in his chest, hollow and dry like a tree's dead trunk. In moments, he was ablaze.

He was her child, but he had not been born from her womb. More than Angeal, than her real son, he was a test tube child. He was not her son, he was her experiment, a research specimen, and, once again, he realized, he had been made a fool.

"You're my fucking mother!"

He screamed it, again and again, louder than the men in the Howling Fang, their bodies twisting up into caricatures of his own, louder than the screams of the men, the women, the children of Banora as he set upon them for the slaughter. Louder than his mother, as he sent his blade through her breast, and his father, as he watched and knew that he was next.

He tore the table from under her, sent it against the wall. The photos, the flowers, glass shattered and wood splintered. He screamed and the tears burned, they stung, but nothing stung more than this and everything that came before.

He screamed until his voice withered away, like his soul, his numbly aching soul, until the tears dried up and left his eyes, still burning, without reprieve.

He stood panting, a wild eyed beast. Gillian only sat and hung her head, not a single shiver along her skin. Unaffected by his tantrum, the raging, dying flames of a life left to burn out.

And she didn't look at him, the test subject, the son, she'd condemned to certain death.

He stepped through the door, left it open, and went away. Over the hills, into the sun dipping below their horizon, down the path he'd traced a hundred times as a young child. The arching Banora White trees, resilient to time. Everlasting. They had seen him grow, seen him leave, would shortly see him die.

He went underground, to the Howling Fang, where Hollander waited and a thousand souls cried, their voices echoing off the walls of the prison cells like song.