From: ZackFair21@SOLDIER.Shinra.mil
CC/BCC: None
Re: Talk to me
Angeal—It's Zack. Command told me not to try contacting you but I'm doing it anyway.
It's been a month now. Sephiroth's got it all wrong, lumping you together with Genesis. Genesis is a deserter who took a bunch of 2nds and 3rds with him. I know you would never condone something like that. You value your SOLDIER honor more than anyone else.
Angeal, just come back, please! Or if you don't want to come back, come find me. I go on a lot of missions out in the Wastelands on purpose, I'm easy to spot. I don't know what's going on but you're my friend and I respect you, and I trust you. Whatever's up I want to help.
Please.
Talk to me.
—Zack
Zack was all long gazes and quiet zoning in the Paragon transport chopper, whisking him over far green countryside toward his next mission: Banora. Genesis' hometown. Lazard thought there might be information there, but judging by the black-suited Turk strapped in next to him, Zack suspected a trap where he was the unwitting bait.
Words filtered back to him in echoes.
"Zack, it takes more than pride to become First," Angeal had said to him what seemed like a long time ago now. Zack had just smiled in triumph with his chest puffed out and his hands on his hips.
"Whatever it takes I've got it. And if I don't got it I'll get it! I will fulfill my dreams, and I will become a hero."
Angeal had regarded him, and turned away. It was the day he'd decided to take him on as his student.
"Very well, then you have my support."
They touched down on the outskirts of a farming village nestled on a prairie. Before them loomed a veranda of bowed white trees like the ribcage of a great beast buried halfway in the ground. Zack and his Clandestine escort walked through the overhang of indigo apples hanging from drooping boughs like bells.
"…Dumbapples?" Zack peered at the fruit, and the Turk regarded him.
"Where did you hear that?"
"Angeal said it once. Where are we?"
"Banora. Genesis used to pick apples here before he joined SOLDIER."
"So how did Angeal know about them?"
Sharp eyes peered at him through slanted slits.
"This is Angeal's hometown as well." Zack gasped at the Turk's emotionless explanation. "They grew up together, and were close friends."
Continuing on in silence, they came to a village of colonial style farm houses. Dead quiet. Litter blew across the dirt streets. To their left a small chapel stood made of brownstone, with a graveyard outside its rectory. However, the earth covering the graves had been disturbed…freshly dug.
The Turk's phone rang.
"Special Agent Tseng…" he answered. "…There is no one here. The town is empty. We can assume the worst…Understood."
He hung up his phone and nodded Zack into the town.
"Search the village…I'll check the graves."
Zack winced and headed off down the main avenue. Might as well start at the first house and work his way down. He picked a modest cottage at the end of a cul-de-sac and let himself in...and froze.
An old woman sat motionless at the table, hands folded in her lap.
"Can I help you?"
"Uh..." Zack choked on his words, until he saw the Buster Sword leaning against the wall. "I'm looking for someone named Angeal. Do you know him?
"He is my son. Who are you? What do you want with him?"
"…I'm his student."
The old woman looked away, as if looking through him.
"Are you Zack, the puppy?"
"Excuse me?"
She chuckled, so welcoming. "My son wrote to me once about you. 'Zero attention span, restless as a little puppy.'"
Zack grimaced. The old woman let her eyes fall down to her folded hands in sadness.
"Genesis came back here with an army of cohorts, and they proceeded to take the lives of many townspeople. Genesis…he used to be such a good boy."
Zack stood stone, afraid to hear her words. His eyes were pulled instead to the Buster Sword leaning sanctimoniously against the wall, mimicking how he himself leaned against the same wall, like they were brethren.
"That sword represents our family's honor," said the woman, gazing upon him with wise eyes. He saw where Angeal got his from. "When Angeal joined Shinra, my husband had that sword made for him, in the hopes that he would become an honorable warrior. We had to borrow a lot of money to have it made, and then, while fervently trying to return all the money, my husband succumbed to fatigue."
Zack sighed, sadness welling up in him that he pushed back. "It wasn't in vain. He didn't just become an honorable warrior, he became a hero. He taught me everything I know about honor, he's the shining example for all of us in SOLDIER. If you could see him in action, I know you'd be very proud of him."
"I am proud of him. He is more than an honorable warrior, he is an honorable son, a devoted husband, and a doting father."
Zack pricked up, he'd never heard that about Angeal. He sensed he was about to learn a part of his life that he'd kept sheltered and secret.
"…Angeal and his wife were very happy together, but they were having trouble conceiving. When she opted to adopt, he was so ecstatic, but that's where their problems began. They'd agreed that he was going to take a higher-paying job in his company, move up into a White Collar management position, but he couldn't bring himself to leave SOLDIER. He couldn't make himself work in a desk for his family, he viewed it as selling his soul. However, she viewed it as the responsibility he signed up for when he chose to have a family. He tried to compromise, taking on more and more missions to bring in more money, at the price of his time at home with her and his daughter. I tried to help them out as much as I could, but the poverty just got to be too much. The stress overwhelmed her. She and the baby left him about a year ago. The last I heard she remarried and now sells flowers in Winhill."
Zack stood stunned. How something that terrible could have happened to Angeal was beyond him, he'd never said anything about it. And the looming thought of something else hovered just over the cusp of an epiphany.
A year ago is when he had taken Zack as his student.
He caught something out of the corner of his eye. He went to a bureau where family photos were arranged in simple frames…was that a picture of Zack in a photo?
"Oh a picture of Angeal!" Zack muttered under his breath. "Wow, he's young. Must have been taken when he first joined SOLDIER."
He scanned the photos intimately.
"And there's that Buster Sword. Look at him showing that thing off. And he tells me to calm down!"
Another family photograph.
"This must be Angeal's father…He looks as serious as I imagined him."
And a picture Zack would have paid money to keep as collateral.
"Baby picture! This is Angeal? HAH he's so fat! Aw how adorable..."
But he realized quickly that he'd been mistaken. The baby in the picture was dressed in pink, cradled by a woman with auburn hair draped low around her hips. She was slight as a flower with eyes like irises, and arms like vines that wrapped around the little infant like a net. Zack studied her for a long moment, feeling a twinge in his heart for Angeal.
"Now, these two little runts must be Angeal and…Genesis…He and Genesis have been friends for most of their lives. That's a pretty long time, longer than…"
Zack pulled himself away from the photographs then. He didn't want to finish the thought that threatened to creep up in him, a terrible looming truth he needed to deny with everything he was.
She looked over at him pleading. "Please be a good friend to my son."
And something came over him, sacred and final. He knelt like a knight at her side.
"I'll take care of Angeal. You should go hide somewhere."
She looked away with a proud gaze, enshrouded in an enlightening aura.
"Do not be concerned. Genesis…cannot harm me."
He wanted to press her, but something held him back. He left the house with a heavy heart and stood on the threshold gazing at the sky.
Tseng called him.
"Come to the factory on the outskirts of town. I saw a Genesis copy go in."
Zack headed there from the Northeast ascent like the battle layouts at briefing had shown him, and found Tseng on a clifftop overlooking the facility.
"The missing 2nds and 3rds, some of them were in those graves."
The color rushed from Zack's face.
"His own unit? How could he!"
Few things shook a SOLDIER more to the core than blue-on-blue. The uniform meant family, and murder held a special sort of sadism in their hearts.
"Some probably had second thoughts about deserting. What about Angeal?"
Zack was quiet for a moment, looking down in morbid recollection. "He wasn't at the house."
Tseng looked away as if contemplating some business decision he really didn't want to have to make. Zack saw it, and a sense of urgency seized him like a bullet to the chest.
"But please, give me time! If I find Angeal, I can talk to him. If I can convince Angeal, maybe Genesis will come back too."
The sheer naiveté behind Zack's plea was like a child still blind to the world, his desperate zeal fulminating in innocent eyes. Tseng looked away and nodded.
"I understand now why Sephiroth chose you for this mission…"
Zack cocked his head.
"…Genesis and Angeal. Those two were Sephiroth's closest friends. He didn't want to fight them. That's why he refused this mission."
"Well, Angeal is my friend too!"
Tseng nodded again, but this time at Zack.
"He's counting on you to bring them both back. Let's go."
Zack broke through the ceiling glass of the factory, landing crouched on the floor. Tseng dropped down behind him with his colt pistol already out, scanning in a grid.
The factory was empty save for numerous shipping boxes stacked along the walls and two levels of elevated catwalks. Zack followed Tseng down to the lower level into a storage room with an old fashioned metal desk and an ancient box monitor.
Tseng checked the computer. "Looks like the copies are being made here. Check the second floor. Genesis may be there."
Zack nodded and hurried through a far doorway leading upstairs, ignoring the gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach. He climbed two flights of stairs to an abandoned loft-space, where light seeped in through the double-stacked panes of factory windows like milk.
"When the war of the beasts brings about world's end, The Goddess descends from the sky," came a voice like a playwright's sonnet.
There, seated upon the floor in romantic reverence, an arm on his knee and a book in his hand, Zack saw him.
" Wings of light and dark spread afar, fortelling his day to die."
He was a dashing rogue with cheekbones like a sculpted marble statue, and a rust-colored shag cut sheared with a sharpened stiletto. He borrowed the look of Sephiroth's pauldroned coat, but instead of Gunmental black, his was in Tiamat red. Silver bangles hung from his ears, Zack had pierced ears but not that pierced. He took one look at him and thought yep, totally the kind of guy who wouldn't want a wife.
He looked up at Zack with eyes that knew something he didn't, eyes that seemed to know him better than he knew himself.
Zack held his ground until Tseng ran up behind him, his colt drawn but his barrel still pointed skyward. Then they saw the cryotank in the corner, filled with liquid Mako that gleaned in an eerie neon glow. Tseng hurried to it aghast, and through the observation port, all their fears were realized.
A Genesis copy floated in the gel.
"Where are the SOLDIER's you kidnapped?" demanded Tseng.
Genesis stood up throwing his coat tails behind him like a flowing cape, a tall imposing force of errant beauty that thought too highly of himself. He faced the two operators with a building rage in his eyes, his hand poised as if to summon a specter.
He glared as a slowly flaring light emanated from his palm.
"SHINRA LAPDOGS!"
A Fira cast jettisoned Tseng and Zack out through the door they'd come through, back like a meteor bolt sprawled across the steps. Zack ripped his sword from his back with a fury that dwarfed rage and ran back up to face the rogue SOLDIER 1st Class. But Genesis had vanished, a hole in the roof above where he'd been.
Zack ran down for the main entry bunker door to go after him, where a pair of Genesis copies leapt to disembowel them. Fired gunshot dropped them just as quickly. Zack turned to see Tseng fully recovered and holding his colt pistol on target.
More Genesis copies spawned seemingly from nowhere to ambush them as they both dropped into combat stance.
"The Airstrike is inbound! Are you sure there's nobody at Angeal's house?" asked Tseng.
"…"
"Hurry!"
And Zack dashed past the copies as Tseng laid down suppression fire for him. He rushed out of the factory, down the path through the cliffs careening toward Angeal's house for dear life.
When he got inside, he froze.
There on the floor Angeal's mother lied dead. He gasped as the weight of what he was seeing sank into him, her life gone from her body, sucking the life from his chest.
He stumbled back, unable to breath, unable to think. A sigh behind him made him turn, and he saw Angeal leaning against the wall—a dead look in his eyes and his Buster Sword unsheathed in his hand.
"What the hell did you do Angeal!" Zack slammed into him, rage overtaking him. He shoved Angeal back, bashing him into the wall again and again, but Angeal didn't fight him. Zack punched Angeal square in the jaw, sending him flying out the front door to topple across the ground like a corpse.
Angeal struggled to his feet, clutching his sword seemingly for dear life. A dead look in his eyes spread throughout his entire body.
"My mother…could not continue to live." His voice cracked ever so slightly. "And neither can her son."
"I told you," another voice called like a song, and Genesis appeared on the roof of the house. He leapt down before Zack, leering at Angeal. "You can't live on that side anymore."
Angeal struggled, fighting a war with himself. The brooding storm he'd always kept at bay had finally broken free, engulfing him in a living hell. There was nothing left to do, and he had nothing left to say. He sheathed his massive sword, and walked off.
"Angeal!" Zack ran after him, but Genesis caught his leg sending him flying over the same place he'd punched Angeal to. Zack struggled to his stomach, grief welling up so great his limbs wouldn't move. "ANGEAL!"
But Angeal kept on, not glancing back at Zack, leaving him down and alone.
"My friend, do you fly away now? To a world that abhors you and I?" Genesis' voice followed him like the wind.
"SHUTUP!" screamed Zack.
"All that awaits you is a somber morrow."
"SHUTUP! I'M WARNING YOU!"
"No matter where the winds may blow…"
The rage flowed through Zack again like fire thawing his grief-frozen muscles, and he turned on Genesis with a savage hunger that pulled him to his feet.
"Why are you doing this? What happened to dreams and honor!"
He bore into Genesis with a stare that could summon daemons, but Genesis gazed longing and lost out into a private abyss.
"We are…monsters…We have neither dreams nor honor."
He touched the brim of his forehead with two fingers, then flayed his hand out like a proclamation, unveiling a single charcoaline wing.
Zack leapt back aghast at the one-winged angel.
Black feathers floated around Genesis as he glanced back at Zack over his shoulder. The distant hum of helicopter rotors intensified over the mountains. The airstrike and evac were very near.
Genesis leapt into the air, flying off against the sun. In one breath he was gone, and Zack was truly alone.
[Received Silver Earrings]
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