#also to note if shinra did what it does to all towns and took away whatever it relied on economically beforehand and changed its identity
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Dreams of the Morrow
Read it on AO3
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Genesis, various mentioned, also Tifa, Cloud, Denzel, and Marlene.
Summary: Genesis had always known exactly where he had wanted his life to go. Until it had all been derailed. And then - well. When you're looking for a means to cheat death, the future is something that happens to other people. Until it isn't.
Written for @genesisrhapsodosweek
By the time he was ten years old, Genesis knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life.
It wasn't carrying on the legacy of his parents in Banora, and it wasn't - as much as he loved the orchards, and as much as he loved the taste of the apples - to further it, and only ever be known for the things he could do with dumbapples.
He spent day upon day taking notes and paper and a torch, exploring the old caves under the town, not understanding everything he saw, but finding it beautiful in a serene, otherworldly way.
When he was down there, he felt safe. He didn't know what from, just that he was, and he'd copy out the letters he found there enough times that he could recite the verses of the poem, which his parents said were from a play, by heart.
There is no hate, the lines read at one point, the stone cracked and weathered but the words still legible, only joy. For you are beloved of the Goddess. Hero of the Dawn, Healer of Worlds.
He wanted that to be him.
He promised himself that was going to be him, one day.
...
Becoming SOLDIER should have made him feel that much closer to his goal, and he did feel stronger, he did feel tougher, but... in some ways, he didn't feel changed at all.
His dream of wanting to meet with, to befriend the great hero Sephiroth was a lot more complicated than he had first imagined. It wasn't as though he could just come up to the other boy and just ask, it wasn't as though he could be so forward as to assume-
In Banora, Genesis had never known the experience of being less important than someone else. Even if they were condescending, the adults always had to at least hear him out.
But now?
Sephiroth was most often too busy.
To their instructors, he was just another country boy who'd never seen a 'real fight'.
(He trains so hard just to prove them wrong, the instructors and Sephiroth both. He rises through the ranks, Angeal by his side, and they recognise him, just as he knew that they would.
He won't admit that he thinks that they're right when his first assignment to the war effort leaves him shaking and retching the moment he's away from everyone else, even Angeal, because he has his pride, and he won't let them see him like this. Fighting monsters was easy - human beings took something more.
He wants to say it gets easier, but all he does is distance himself so that it doesn't bother him, and they aren't the same thing at all.)
...
He finds out that he isn't even human, and more than that, that he's dying, and the world - his dreams - come crashing down.
Monsters, after all, don't have the luxury of dreams.
Monsters don't have pride, and they don't have honour.
...
He doesn't stop believing, doesn't stop searching, because he can't stop.
If he stops, he might never get himself back up again.
If he lets himself think, he might start to ask himself those selfsame questions that a newly-minted First had started to ask him, questions he'd ignored as much as he could.
If he let himself give in, he might die without ever having put his mark on the world-
He can't die, he can't.
(Monsters might not have honour, but they can get scared, and they can panic, he finds. And tries not to think about that too hard. It's easier to think of dying as a thing that happens to other people.
Sometimes, it's easier to think of himself as a monster, because to think of himself as human meant that a human being could be capable of such things, and those are thoughts best left well alone.)
...
It's years of time and distance from everything he once knew before he lets himself think of dreams again.
He had drifted his time away, and then he had slept, but there is a difference between being alive and living, and he should know. He had been one and not the other for far too long, long enough that once he started to realise that was the case, he wasn't even entirely sure how to live.
He finds new clothes, somehow.
A room above a bar becomes an apartment all of his own.
The hunts he'd done out of sheer restless energy became paid for, not like his old Shinra salary, but still a wage. And when Cloud was away, and Tifa was busy - they went to and relied on him.
But it's only on one odd day in the middle of the year that he's sitting at the table with Cloud, and Tifa, and Denzel, and Tifa asks him Have you got any ideas what you're going to do with yourself next?
He pauses in the middle of lifting his fork to his mouth, and he stares at her, and blinks.
It's then that he realises that he doesn't know.
"If you want to be a hero, you've got to have dreams," he remembered Angeal saying. He has a vague memory that he might not have been the only one Angeal had used the line on, either.
But what happened when you didn't have a dream? When you weren't sure- when the Goddess had almost outright told you that you were no hero?
"Hey." A small voice snaps him out of his thoughts, and he blinks again, looks over at the owner to find Marlene smiling at him. "It's okay not to know what you want to do yet. Cloud didn't know for the longest time, did you?" Cloud shrugged, although his mouth was full. Belatedly, Genesis realised that some of what had been on his fork had dropped back onto his plate. The fact that he could just hear Angeal teasing him over that created a pain in his heart. "There, see? And I don't know about Denzel, but... I don't know what I want to be yet either! It's.. a new world, after all."
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First Encounters
Read it on AO3
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Genesis, Cloud, Zack.
Summary: He introduces himself, and it strikes him that this is the first time he has done so, the first time they had actually, properly, met.
Written for @strifesodosweek! I hope you don’t mind it’s mainly platonic/pre-relationship stuff here.
...
The first time they met, it was more of a non-meeting. Genesis was more concerned with Hollander and the fact that the man had been lying to him about his ability to find a cure, and with Zack's presence, to notice the trooper who was trying - valiantly, but failing - to detain Hollander.
The kid had guts, if nothing else.
He continued to focus on just about anything other than the trooper; even an army grunt of higher rank than that would fall easily to his blade if he felt the need to be anything other than dismissive, after all.
...
He knew that Zack had been at Junon. Because of course Zack had been at Junon.
If anyone had asked him to pick out any specific trooper from the many crowds, he would have been stumped, however. Troopers were not SOLDIER, were not important, and as long as they didn't get in his way, Genesis couldn't really say that he cared.
...
He saw that there was someone in a blue army uniform in Nibelheim, but the only reason he had to take note was the fact that this was one more set of eyes and ears, and a slight irritant when he was exiting the reactor.
He had let his Copies do all of the actual work on that one. He had been tired, and distracted, and the last thing he had experienced had been a rather final rejection that had set him in a foul mood.
It wasn't as though the trooper even often took their helmet off, anyway.
...
By the time he intercepts Zack on the highway, he knows the trooper's name. The information, however, comes from what little he could find by way of medical files and reports.
He isn't interested in the trooper. He isn't even interested in Zack. All he cares about are the cells they carry within them, and what they might mean for him.
...
If he's honest, he doesn't get what Zack sees in the trooper. Ex-trooper now, he should say, since he was neither serving in Shinra's army nor wearing the army's uniform, but in that case he would be an ex-SOLDIER, and for some reason he's never been able to - or willing to - put his finger on, Genesis isn't quite ready to make that distinction.
When Zack carries him back out of the Banora Underground, puts him down on the ground next to the chair on the other side to Angeal - not-Angeal, because all of the reports had said that Angeal did not degrade, and this man was degrading, just like he had been, and more than that, he wad dying, but if he thought about that too hard then it felt like Angeal dying all over again - it's the first time he hears Zack call the trooper by his name, or rather, the first time he actually takes it in.
Cloud, he thinks to himself as consciousness drifts away from him. I've flown among the clouds. I wonder if you would have enjoyed it like I did, Sephiroth... the one good thing about being a monster.
...
When he wakes up, he is underground, and there are no clouds underground.
He seals himself away, because he knows that he is dangerous and his body is dangerous in the wrong hands, which is anyone's hands but his own, and the lake reflects only the ceiling of the cave.
...
He first sees Cloud as a flash of a spell and a blur of black and silver and gold in the distance, and decides to watch and wait.
This is the one that Zack wanted to protect, he realises. He can see some of Zack's style even now.
He can also see some of Sephiroth, although it is much more subtle, and much more akin to the way in which he and Angeal had gained echoes of the younger man's style through fighting him - which makes him wonder, just how someone like this Cloud could have taken on a dead man, or if it really were just the S-cells having that much of an impact.
...
His opportunity comes by chance when he was minding his own business and the next thing he knows, screams are assaulting his ears, high-pitched and irritating, and-
reminding him of swords in civilian towns and burning villages
-he still doesn't have a decent replacement for Rapier yet, but no one took his materia, and he had grown up with Angeal, who had always preferred to use his fists when he hadn't had to use a sword, and had wrestled with him much to their parents' distaste.
It felt good to fight at full strength again.
And then the monsters were misshapen, charred messes in the ruins of the city, and the two children were racing over to-
Black clothes, not quite like a SOLDIER's. Mako blue eyes. Blond hair that stuck up every which way like a chocobo's crest. A sword big enough to rival Angeal's Buster Sword.
Genesis wasn't well acquainted with the practice of making oneself look less threatening or intimidating, but he hoped that the effort at least was appreciated.
From the look of bemused incredulity, Cloud wasn't exactly sold.
He sticks out one empty hand, and smiles with all of the charm that had once served him so well at executive functions in a building long since destroyed.
"Genesis Rhapsodos, SOLDIER First Class," he says by means of introduction, uncertain of the way that Cloud's eyes narrow at his self-proclaimed SOLDIER status and rank.
It had taken him a long road to regain his SOLDIER honour and pride. Things would become difficult if that were no longer... acceptable. Or trusted.
The moment passed, however, and Cloud's eyes passed him by after a cursory investigation of his face as though they had never once met.
It shouldn't hurt, he tells himself. It shouldn't. It isn't as though they'd ever really met before - it isn't as though those meetings were ones that he would have wanted someone else to remember.
It still does.
"Cloud," Cloud says. "Strife." Of course, Genesis thinks. Of course someone like him would have a name like that. "Raye. Este. What've we told you about playing so close to Midgar."
"I didn't mean to get this far," the girl said, still looking like she was going to start crying again any minute. Genesis hoped that she wouldn't. "But I was chasing Patch and then Raye came after me, and-"
He tuned the rest out, focusing instead on the way Cloud sighed.
"Well? What do you say when someone saves your life?"
"You say thank you!" the kids chorused.
To him.
He almost misses the amusement on Cloud's face as they do so.
...
("Thank you", he later says in the church, after he's realised that Zack is now dead - dead like Angeal, like Sephiroth, like so many others. Like most of Midgar, it looked like. And yet, Genesis was alive, even now.
"Thank you," he says, because even if Zack hadn't been the one to cure him, he had been the one to remind him how to live again, and that was just as important.)
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Brothers In Arms
Read it on AO3
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII
Characters: Angeal, Genesis, Sephiroth, Zack, others mentioned.
Summary: Sometimes family isn't who you're born to, or whose cells were grafted onto you, but the people you find out were part of the same project that would one day create SOLDIER, and it's something you create for yourself.
This was only supposed to be a 'what if AU where...' post on tumblr, damn it. But, just like the one I did the night before last, it grew until all I had to do was edit the first few paragraphs or so and there it was, actual flash fic.
So, uh... keep this in mind if some bits don't flow as easily. I tried to smooth things over in editing but may not have caught everything. Also: there is another character who cameos at one point, but is never named.
Realising that they were all part of some elaborate Shinra project while stationed out in Wutai is bad at first, bad enough that Angeal doesn't want to share it with the other two at all, half because he's uncertain he'd want to share information given to him by a potentially unreliable source, half because he doesn't know how either of the others would react upon hearing the news. He knows he's tempted to defect simply out of disgust, but that in itself is exactly the beginning of the train of thought that makes him stop.
He wonders how Genesis and Sephiroth would take his departure. He wonders about the Third Class he'd been keeping an eye on.
With all the time between the truth being revealed to him and his return to Shinra, Angeal has a lot of time to think. Which is why, when he'd finished explaining what he'd been told to the others, that he mused about how this could, in a sense, make them sort of like brothers.
It was meant to be an offhand statement, intended to diffuse the tension in the air and make Genesis and Sephiroth less likely to act on the expressions of murder that they had gained on their faces, but what he had not expected was their completely undivided attention. The worrying glint in Genesis' eyes. The outright hungry look that briefly appeared in Sephiroth's.
Nothing could have prepared him for Genesis declaring, suddenly, that in this case he was their older brother, which meant that Angeal, who had come second, was the middle sibling, and Sephiroth, still not yet twenty years old and sometimes, times like now, had a look of such vulnerability on his face when no one else was looking or he didn't care that they were, that made what Genesis said next all the more apt - that this news would, in some strange way, cause Sephiroth to be their younger brother.
The fury at knowing that they had been used as experiments, that they might not even be perfected experiments, still simmered away under the surface, easily seen to the three of them but no one else. Genesis' glee at having the new and only half self-appointed status of older brother of the great Sephiroth, much more noticeable. But Angeal doesn't have the heart to suggest that it might be safer if they didn't mention that too much either, because no matter how dangerous the information might be, the new, if tenuous, connection with the others is worth far more.
Sephiroth, although this is while he’s still adjusting to how he was an experiment, a specimen, a scientific creation, doesn’t end up able to dwell on it so much. It’s rather hard to when he has Genesis lording over him that he is now Sephiroth’s elder brother, and does that mean he can pull rank? He’s going to whether Sephiroth likes it or not.
Sephiroth himself would never forget the mortification of being referred to as ‘the baby of the family’, dignity forgotten and honour having no place in sibling spats, while being held close to Angeal’s chest as Genesis laughed.
Without the raw frustration at feelings of inadequacy, Genesis never pushes his training room spars with Sephiroth too far, and whenever Angeal tells them to stop, he’s often answered with an annoyed - although sometimes amused - “Yes, mother” from the other two. Zack even watches sometimes, on those times when they don’t sneak in.
Sephiroth, who had never known or even truly understood what having a family meant except in vague terms and unreadable emotions that had passed only on other peoples’ faces, slowly began to realise that it was no longer some unattainable dream, but something that he had.
Knowing already what their conditions are, none of them defect. Not so soon, and not one by one. They think about it, though - but there’s Zack to think of, and the rest of the SOLDIERs, too.
They know less about Sephiroth’s own origins, but that’s because Hollander had been quite clear when telling Genesis and Angeal that Sephiroth wasn’t of Project G, and wasn’t of his creation, but Hojo’s, and none of them are sure that they are quite ready to find out the truth because of that. None of them liked Hojo - there may have been some respect at first, but it was now tempered with a wary respect and fear that, despite their never explaining any of the details to Zack, passed down to him, as well as any of the others who noticed the habits of the four of them.
Hojo, when he finds out how the results of his and Hollander’s projects are acting nowadays, is less than impressed. He makes them fight harder in their training, and ensures that they get sent off on missions far away from each other, whenever possible, constantly complaining under his breath about specimens acting outside of their parameters, and breaking the control of the experiment.
Sephiroth, unwilling to remain ignorant when in his eyes his friends (his brothers) had gained a better understanding of themselves, and through it a sort of confidence that he had never seen in them before, puts himself to his investigations in his own time, until such a day happens that, by chance - or so he thinks at the time, although there are doubts later on - he finds himself in Nibelheim on what should have been a standard, routine monster extermination mission.
The dragons took a mere few minutes, even with Zack’s favourite trooper following on his heels like a chocobo on a lure and their guide to protect. The fact that he had felt a wave of distant familiarity pass over him as he entered the town, however, had led him to stay longer.
He spends the first night at the inn. The second day, however, is filled with the task of he and the trooper, who stubbornly refused to take off his helmet even in the dark of the caves, hauling books up from an underground library to take them into the Shinra mansion proper, where there was more room and easier access to the town.
He left as silently as he had arrived, deep in thought. Genesis and Angeal had discussed with him their thoughts and findings regarding their own origins - their discussions had been frequent, sometimes heated, and never once simply accepting the facts that they had been given as they were.
Genesis was the one who picked up the first ‘book’ of papers full of notes he’d taken from the books before taking the books back down to the library, as though he’d never been. His face remaining blank only so long before it contorted in fury.
“I take back everything I ever said about wanting to be more like you, little brother,” is all he says. “This is... monstrous.”
Sephiroth doesn’t say a thing, only demurely - to an outsider, one who doesn’t understand that Sephiroth sitting like this only means that he has withdrawn into himself, is in the same mindset as he had been in during his childhood, when experiments were par for the course.
Angeal is the next, picking up another book of notes, another page, his eyebrows rising.
“This says that they thought Jenova was some sort of Ancient - er, Cetra. Weren’t those the ones they say could talk to the Planet?” The others both looked at him. “All I’m saying is, if this was true, then wouldn’t we all have some of those abilities?
They’d done their research, after all. Angeal had even gone down to Cosmo Canyon, once, while they were searching for a cure to their degradation, when they had come to terms with the fact that it would be a ‘when’, not an ‘if’. Before they had humoured Genesis into taking them back to Banora, the first time Sephiroth had ever tasted a dumbapple, and he had watched, amused at the very idea that LOVELESS could have hidden the answer to healing something in the real world, until a goddess had appeared from the lifestream.
Genesis had been awestruck for days. The first time he said anything after his - literally - religious encounter, it had been to inform his brothers that they were not allowed to insult his respect for the play ever again.
I thought that given what I have heard about these things... it is the job of the younger siblings to cause irritation to the elder, Sephiroth still remembered saying, and still remembered the conflicted expressions on both of the others when he’d said the words - and the loud laughter that had come from a nearby Zack.
They had communed, if briefly, with the Planet, or at least an emissary of the Planet.
“But then,” asks Genesis, by now concerned and pacing the room, “if what they made Sephiroth with is the same as what they made us with, and it certainly doesn’t seem to be anything to do with the Ancients, then what are we?”
An oppressive silence falls over the three of them, until eventually, Angeal shrugs.
“Hell if I know what that is, but I do know what we are. We’re SOLDIERs. And what was it that Zack once said?”
“He said that wings such as ours are not those of monsters but angels. I remember,” Genesis says testily. “And I suppose that’s your answer, is it?”
“One-winged angels,” Sephiroth says, and they turn to him, noting the bittersweet smile on his face, the way his gloved hands had turned into fists. “Half of the gods, and half of hell. But even monsters return to the Planet.”
“Wings of light and dark spread afar, she guides us to bliss, her gift everlasting,” Genesis recites.
“LOVELESS, Act One,” Sephiroth and Angeal say at the same time, and that seems to be that.
#final fantasy vii#angeal hewley#genesis rhapsodos#sephiroth#ff7#ff7 stuff#Leona fic#also inspired by how I kept having that thought of 'but technically they're kinda all brothers?'
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