Miasma

Chapter 25 (End)

Consciousness.

The theoretical value of it was in question...Genesis supposed. When he was conscious, he felt empty...he felt old and he felt bereft. Standing on the helipad...he acknowledged that he didn't feel like a person anymore...he felt like a stranger in someone else's body. Going through what little emotions he could, putting on a face for Saoirse; it all felt like some type of carnival sideshow. He was-so he told himself often-wearing a mask for the benefit of those around him. It was a poor mask...it was a barely-there mask...but it was still a mask. And sometimes he felt like it was his face looking out at him, sometimes he felt like he was 'fitting into' himself better. Such moments were rare, fleeting things. They were more common with his daughter...she was getting older...bigger. Every time he pulled himself from the mire that was his misery he acknowledged she seemed more and more like him...more and more like Sephiroth.

Eight months had passed since she was born.

Eight long...agonizing months since her father had left the world. He was thirty-one now, a 'veritable old maid' as Circinae would have said if she was still alive to say it. The fact that he didn't look his age didn't make the passage of time easier to bear, didn't make his existence any more tolerable. It was tolerable when he looked at his child...when she smiled in that whole-hearted, earnest way that lit up her entire face. And he could make her look that way just by wandering into the room she was in. Sometimes, when she did it, he felt so dishonest he wanted to turn right around and do violent things to himself. Because no one should look at him that way anymore...no one should see him as so important. He wasn't anything...wasn't anyone...maybe to others he was...but he couldn't see that at the moment...couldn't feel it most of the time. And Saoirse looked at him like Sephiroth looked at him...not with the same elements of love...but with that patient, careful kind of observation that made his chest clench in a horrible way. She had his eyes...his nose...the curvature of her bottom lip-when she deigned to pout-was just like his. Though-of course-the General had never pouted. And she could be fiery and loud and she loved red but she was so much of Sephiroth...so much of both of them that there were days when he couldn't look at her; when he handed her off to Gillian and then went off to drink himself to ruins.

He moved out of Sephiroth's apartment.

This wasn't so much his decision as much as it was a joint effort between Angeal and his mother. And it was only enacted because his childhood friend found him halfway dead somewhere around the sixth month with a blood alcohol level that was higher than lethal. If he'd thought that the dark-haired first was angry on the landing pad, he was wrong. Upon waking up in medical, Genesis had the privilege of watching his best friend glare at him from beyond his hospital bed for several days only to continue to glare at him when he'd moved into the apartment adjacent from the dark-haired ex-First. Fed up with it, confused, upset, and feeling somewhat abandoned, the redhead snapped that if he hated him so much he should have just let him die. This was, apparently, the wrong thing to say because Angeal lost his head. Angeal lost his head in a manner that he'd never seen before and some part of him whispered that there was something very wrong about that. In the middle of a brawl that knocked out a fairly large section of the sublevels he didn't have time to examine it. He tried to but he was promptly punched in the face and then it didn't really matter so much anymore.

There was something healing about it.

Grappling, pushed up against concrete with no romantic connotations, just...release in the violent sense was freeing. His body was used to combat, used to blood and anger and he and Angeal had fought countless times in their youth. It was part of being boys, part of being men...understanding the lines crossed and uncrossed in camaraderie and loyalty. He didn't understand all of the emotionalism behind his friend's response and his adversary didn't understand the depth and scope of his grief but in this at least there was familiarity. And Genesis knew some of it was for Saoirse; that Angeal was fighting for her as much as he was fighting for his own rampant emotions. There was something sweet about that, something deeply sensitive and awfully kind. His childhood friend was also fighting for him...and he acknowledged that. Angeal was fighting for whatever scraps of him were left under this empty, soulless shroud and he did love him for it in the way that only brothers can love. Because it showed the depth of his caring, the depth of his fear and despite the fact that they were trading blows they were also trading unspoken, vulnerable words that articulation could never manage to get out on its own. Nobody was going for crippling shots...it wasn't a spar, but it wasn't a fight to the death either.