They'd gone on for hours, pleasure's cry twisted up and hailed the pale moon like the smoke of perfume. Genesis was tangled beneath him, like tree roots, skin pallid in the silver light, faint glow. His hair, poison apple red, lay sprawled along the factory floor, one eye covered completely, one icy blue mako eye peering between strands. Between gasps, he smiled, nimble fingers along the soft of his back.
Angeal beat him against the wood, feverish vigor. Over him like a beast, wild eyed and panting. Genesis traced his cheek with a finger, down his chin and his chest. Sculptural beauty, in an ancient sense. He pictured him as a statue, stood beside a pillar or buried in a thousand years of vines, dirt, and flowers.
He slipped his fingers between the wooden floorboards and cried out, though he felt nothing anymore, nothing but harsh numbness between his legs and liquid hot. He pressed Angeal closer anyway and pulled his head down so he could kiss his lips and whisper in his ear.
Onward, onward. Into the fire that burned on the horizon through the night. To keep chasing it even as the distance never closed. His words carried tinder for the fire when it flickered and dimmed, as did his touch and the smooth dance of his mako eyes. Over his face and his body. Keep going, he urged him.
He did not know what kept him as pleasure faded in the pursuit of it, but he seized it. They were like gamblers, he realized, betting on chance. The next hour might bring the greatest pleasure, or body would grow increasingly numb against the other, and they would continue forever in this misery, until they wasted away.
Such was the way of monsters, Genesis thought, then he slipped his fingers under himself and felt the touch of his own skin, the burning flesh. He pushed Angeal close enough to feel it again, and shuddered.
Together they were louder than the howls of wolves, loud enough that the sound carried out the windows and through the grasses, to the little homes arranged around the dirt paths.
A pity no one would hear it, no one but Gillian, but Angeal's mother. And as he remembered this thing, he howled louder, enough to shake the planks from their frame. To rouse the woman from her ill sleep.
Angeal let the cold water trace streams through his dark hair, and watched Genesis as he watched him. He was thin-lipped and wide eyed, his friend. The man he grew up with, like something his mother had told him of once, from legend. Half woman and half bird, and always watching like an old painting or a vulture. This thing, his friend.
He shivered as his fingertips pressed against his cheek.
"That was good. We should do it again sometime."
No. He never wanted to do that again, no matter how great his beauty or the longing of his body for his, the feeling of his fingers through his hair, like silk…
He could not betray himself like that again, nor could he betray his friend. What he saw before him, he was certain, was something akin to madness, but far more cunning. What they'd together experienced was madness of the more feverish sort.
Genesis pressed his lips against his. Pink lips and tongue, made slick with the water falling over their heads, racing down their cheeks. Angeal buckled to him, like a life sized doll, allowed himself to be moved, though he did not know why. He wanted to push him away, but he could not. He could not deny Genesis anything, especially his touch.
He hid so much pain behind the coldness of his eyes, behind the practicality of their arrangement, his impassiveness at it all—the project, the slaughter, the degradation. He was angry, yes, and he was desperate, yes, but he asserted that it was all under his control.
And yet Angeal had witnessed himself the wetness of his friend's eyes, his cheeks burning with envy, as the doctor welcomed him, gladly. He was closer to perfection, he'd said, though he was wise not to name relative to who. The giddiness of revealing to him this great secret, the operation they'd put together, fell away from Genesis's face. He'd watched from a dark corner, busied himself by putting something in his hands, as he'd known him to do when anxious. A Banora White. He didn't speak a word until the doctor was finished drawing blood.
"Do you need me?" But it was a question like a child eager to be called upon. Hollander had shaken his head, and told him he had all that he needed from him for now. That he wanted to study Angeal for a while, and Genesis had quieted again until the doctor left the room and his footsteps could no longer be heard.
There was something in there still, Angeal knew. The colder his gaze, the deeper the pain, that's how Genesis was. They spoke through doors now, but not quite strangers, no. Genesis would not speak at all, in such pain, to one he did not think there was some chance he could trust.
That's why he was still here, Angeal reminded himself, to find his friend in his madness and bring him back. Everything else could be figured out afterwards, including his mother and himself.
Genesis traced the hair along his chest with cold fingers. Again, Angeal shivered.
"So silent, Angeal. Have I angered you?" He smiled inconsiderately.
Angeal shook him off, and stepped from the shower, dried himself. Genesis shortly followed, like a slinking shadow. They dressed.
"You can't keep like this forever." Genesis scowled through strands of auburn hair. Angeal stared for the moment, distracted by how handsome he was, even without the slight tan to his skin. Though he missed it, he missed when his hair was always slightly unkempt because the breeze caught it and jostled it, or because they went at each other with wooden swords.
It was hard to imagine Genesis then as the same who stood before him now, thinning and pale, a spirit like a lich. He stepped toward him, moved so their chests nearly touched.
"Why won't you speak to me, Ange? Talk to me, we're friends."
Angeal cleared an obstruction from his throat, his voice weak from disuse. "I just need time to think," he muttered. Time to think about what Hollander told him, the disconnect between Genesis then and Genesis now, the words he would tell him which would change his mind, move his heart.
It would be some long and emotional thing about how good he was, about how what he saw before him was not the man he'd known him to be, but who he could still be. At the end of it, he would tell him to come home, so he could hold him in the comfort of a bed, and maybe later, some many years later, they would laugh and say it was the greatest lecture he'd ever given.
"I'll give you three days," Genesis asserted. "Then you must speak to me, like we always have."
Angeal nodded along silently, though he did not agree with what was said. Contemplation could not be set like a timer on a clock, but anything to appease him, for now. Three days would have to be enough, three days, at least, to ease himself into the idea of winning back his stale heart.
Genesis desired him, but he would not allow him in. He wished to speak of plans and the world through the eyes of a monster, he did not wish to hear his thoughts on the matter, the pain he did not think he should feel. He'd smothered that notion the instant he'd made an attempt to discuss it, to question the insanity of him, his friend who had chased SOLDIER and glory all his life, casting all of it to the flames and taking with him a host of their men, turning each of them into bastardized reflections of himself, following the orders of a madman and a monster. The very monster who inflicted this curse upon them.
Monster. Angeal remembered then that he was a monster too, like Genesis. He was struck with lucidity in waves as he peeled away at his mind for the truths he'd learned, which had gone nowhere but had buried themselves so they were hard to grasp, fully, until he allowed himself to be splashed with that cold water.
Genesis stretched himself out against the floorboards like a feline, turned so he could see just his profile, his one uncovered eye. He unfolded Loveless upon his lap and began to read, faint morning light streaming in through the uncovered windows, specks of dust dancing about his hair. He turned the pages of the book as though he were not even there.
Angeal felt heavy, like cinder blocks. He stumbled from the factory on stiff legs and shied from the bright face of the sun, the endless blue of the sky. He found the corridor of Banora White trees in the near distance and strolled through them, and imagined Genesis was there beside him in a button up shirt and dusted farmer's pants.
He saw him laughing and smiling, reclining against a tree. Back when they were human but before they were soldiers and men, when things were blissful. He could bring it all back with the right words, he was certain. Somewhere in Genesis there must've been a memory, something precious and great enough, greater than his anger or his fear, than Hollander's hold over him. He just needed to find it.
Though he realized, as he wandered through the trees and glimpsed here and there sporadically growing Banora Whites, fresh fruit to never be picked, that there were no words and no memories which could undo what had been done. He could not raise the dead with his tongue, he could not return Shin-Ra their soldiers, and he could not, in any world, unwind the poison from their blood and make them human.
Nor could he take that knowledge from either of them.
His mother paced about the window, arms hugged over her shoulders, fidgety. He tried not to look at her, spared her the judgement of his eyes, but he knew that she felt it anyway.
"I should've never…never…" She cried, burying her face in her hands. He watched the sun coming up in the horizon through the open curtains flick off her dark hair. She'd flung them open, as if to let in air more than light.
Angeal stared down at his childhood dinner table, at the frank life he'd regarded with so much pride. The life forced upon them because she took a chance on her own life, for the sliver of hope at saving his. Tears stained his face, but he did not make a word or grimace as he cried. It was still as though nothing was real.
"I'm so sorry," she wailed, still pacing, still shaking beneath her own touch. Aging hands, dimpling like raisins, which he'd always thought were pretty in an interesting way. They made him think of the oldest trees in the orchard, which, parting that tree which was owned by Genesis's parents, bore some of the sweetest fruit.
In all the years he'd been away, she still remained very pretty to him, and she still remained his mother. He could not hate her for all the sins in the world. He thought that she knew this, and that this was the cause of her grief. She always thought of him before herself, she always let him eat first to ensure he would have enough food.
And so he held that she cared about him, despite this.
"You were never, never meant to be involved," she whispered. She quit pacing, and braced herself against the kitchen counter. He watched the light shift that morning yellow over her shuttered eyes.
"We didn't know at the time, we thought…we thought…"
Angeal shook his head and pulled the tears from his cheeks, chest throbbing. A mother had a whole life to see her child cry, but rarely did the son see her as he saw himself, as a person with all the same capacity for flaws.
"It's alright," he told her.
"It isn't. I've wronged you horribly, my baby. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
It's okay, he reiterated, as she buried her face back into her hands. He stood and crossed the distance between them, and pulled her into his arms. He felt every tremor in her body and held it as his own.
"I'm going to take Genesis back to Shin-Ra, then we'll get you out of here."
He found Genesis waiting beneath the orchard on the path he'd walked before, reading. The red-haired soldier peered up at him past the pages of his book and smiled halfway.
"Gone to see your mother?"
Angeal straightened his shoulders some and continued past him. He could not hear him as he rose, but he heard as he snapped his book shut.
"What did she say?" He caught up, hovered just behind him, just close enough that his breath was distinct on his ear from the thick summer heat.
"We talked."
"That so?"
Angeal nodded and turned his head down to the dust. Walking down the corridor of Banora White trees, sheltered from the sun by the intertwined fingers of their branches, like they had as children. The only thing missing was his camera, and Genesis's eagerness to be captured again by his lens. And feelings, Angeal felt less than numb inside, like something that should have been there was not there at all.
And Genesis danced to his steps, sensed cold veins like sweet fruit. He wore a giddy grin on his face, though he moved like fluid, like he was on water. He reached up and yanked a Banora White, fresh and unspotted, from a branch without looking and held it to his chest.
"Did she tell you about me? That I paid her a little visit?"
Angeal continued, languid stare. It was the thick heat, lack of sleep, the nothingness of his circumstance. Genesis waited the length of a heartbeat, then stepped in front of him. His eyes piercing, he scowled.
"Answer me."
They halted and stood together among the trees and the breeze. He did not recognize the man before him, and yet he still loved him so, for what he certainly still was. He just needed something, something, but words escaped him and they would not be caught.
He complied.
"There was…a lot. I can't remember most of it—"
"Liar!" Genesis's eyes grew wide, seemingly paler, like the little blue in them fled for safety at the circumference of his irises. His expression was strained, his body near to shaking. He saw most of it held in the hand which clasped around his book.
"You listen to every word that woman says, as does she to you. You remember, so tell me."
Angeal let his gaze drift downward once more. "She said…she regrets all of it, the project, the—"
"Not that!" Genesis shouted. Specks of saliva flew from his lips and fell upon his cheek. He bared his teeth like a beast. "I don't give a shit about how sorry that woman feels."
But you loved her once, Angeal thought silently. Brimming with a bit of anger, stirred from the pit, he could raise his eyes to look upon the face of his friend. Furious and pale white, like a candlestick.
He watched as he paused, considered.
"Did she tell you about me? That she refused to help me, to save my life?—
—That she's my mother?"
Angeal stared at him wordlessly, eyes wide. The simmering anger for his mother's guilt and her pride, which she would not defend herself, and this new feeling, this new realization that had crept over him as he put the pieces together and worked his way toward Genesis's conclusion.
"You knew this?" He asked slowly, as though the breeze had stilled and held back time with it.
Genesis smiled, a laugh behind his lips.
Angeal seized him by his collar and threw him to the ground. He was over him now, and another word or flicker of his irises away from battering him into the dirt.
Genesis didn't fight him. He lay back, book held over his chest, the apple rolled from his open hand. He was laughing in the exhausted way of one wrung dry by madness. Angeal formed a fist, stopped, took his collar up in his hands again. He couldn't hit him like this, he couldn't.
"You knew and you didn't fucking tell me?" He'd intended to yell, he was supposed to, but the question left him as a whine. Betrayal and utter horror, and that was the reason Genesis laughed. He could not coax him to fell an innocent soul, but there were other sins too grievous to bear upon a human life. He had committed one of them and it was fresh enough—the passion, the warm feeling of Genesis under him—that it burned him with shame.
He beat his fist against the dirt instead while Genesis laughed.
"You shouldn't worry yourself so, Angeal. She considers me no more her son than she considers you her experiment. I'm the bastard child."
Genesis crawled away, climbed to his feet and brushed a hand about his coat.
"We are monsters, you will see. These reservations you hold are human, and you are human no more."
damn. if only the information Sephiroth guzzled down in the ShinRa Manor was locked behind an archaic computer instead of lining the walls like a rotten Christmas feast. maybe then he would’ve just been malding over the sheer glacial speed of the processors (let alone trying to figure out Hojo’s passwords after ”IHateMySon123” failed too many times) and storm out of the basement instead of rage quitting on the entire human race.
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.
He was a monster, like him, and he was beautiful, so beautiful. And the single wing which grew from his back was white.
Another thing, more Gillian and Genesis. No warnings
-----------------------------------------
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.
She would tell him that Genesis was gone and that he would not ever come back, even if he wasn't. And that would be the very last lie she would ever tell him.
Note: A thing I wrote because I enjoy giving myself depression and my Genesis Rhapsodos obsession is back full-swing.
No warnings
-------------------
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.
I experimented smth so it's not perfect but I drew Genesis in the style of Operia Omnia, I really love that chibi style and it's a shame he's not in the game, so I drew it in my own way 🫡💅
izzy806
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
yousharknotpass
gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
ellievsbear
origamiaround
