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Zack? Zack hits hard.

"When Shinra showed up they found two survivors in the reactor. Me an' the First Class they'd sent along with Sephiroth. Zack. I guess you knew him, since you're carryin' his sword around."

Angeal froze, a lump forming in his throat, impossible to swallow past. Slowly, he turned his head to look at the Buster Sword as Cloud continued his awful tale. Zack had been there that day … of course he had. Shinra threw him at every ugly thing they possibly could, didn’t they? At him, at Genesis. Zack had probably gotten somewhat close to Sephiroth during that time, but it would never have been close enough. Zack would never have been able to talk Sephiroth down from the ledge, no matter how hard he tried to.

But, Zack wasn’t the one to stop Sephiroth that day. Apparently it had been Cloud, and briefly, Hewley wondered if Cloud had even a quarter of the strength then that he did now. What a hell that must have been – everyone you knew slaughtered, your home set aflame, the world’s hero the cause. He filed away one piece of information for later; Sephiroth calling Jenova mother. The most he’d ever heard about Sephiroth’s mother was that she’d passed away in childbirth. Leave it up to Shinra to feed him a lie like that. Or, was it a lie? Was that thing really his mother, somehow? Or was he infused with its cells, as an unwilling infant experiment?

Cloud’s story only got worse from there. Hearing Hojo’s name filled Angeal simultaneously with dread and a burning hatred. In his attempts to stop Genesis’s crusade against Shinra, he’d kept his friend from killing Hojo, and what a mistake that had turned out to be. What had Zack suffered all those years, kept as Hojo’s experiment? He was already a Soldier, durable, pumped full of mako and Gaia only knew what else. And if Cloud was mako poisoned, that must have been when he gained his Soldier features. Another unwilling experiment, fresh from the worst nightmare of his life.

Zack and Cloud became defectors, and Angeal knew well what happened to those who ran from Shinra. The blood in his veins felt like ice as Cloud explained he didn’t remember much, just Zack dragging him along despite being comatose. Zack, who never left anyone behind. Zack, who tried to save everyone.

”Shinra gunned him down outside Midgar.”

Zack … He just wanted to be a hero.

Sephiroth coming back from the dead hardly made it through Angeal’s skull. Instead, Hewley focused on the Buster Sword again. It made sense now, why Cloud was so experienced using a broadsword, despite it being clunky for his size. That sword was probably handed to him on a deathbed. It had a habit of trading hands like that.

“Zack was my pupil,” the words left Angeal quietly, before he could catch them, Zack’s grinning face in his mind’s eye. His entire body felt heavy, and his heart ached harder than he could ever remember it doing so. He let silence sit in the room for a moment, before softly continuing, “I passed along the Buster Sword to him at the time of my death. I can only assume he … passed it on to you, next.”

When he left, how heavy would that sword be on his back? The spirit of three tragic stories soaked into its metal.

Angeal cleared his throat, doing what he did best, and burying the ache for the time being. He would mourn what happened to Zack after he left. He grabbed the suture set, turning his burning, glowing gaze back to Cloud, his tone more terse and strained, “Sit up straight so I can close this up. Sephiroth came back from the dead – what’s next?”

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Just NORMAL DUDES BEING NORMAL

”You couldn’t have come at a better time.”

Angeal frowned, staring at the steaming liquid in his mug. He certainly could have shown up at a better moment, both now and back before this new-world thing began. Again, the cascade of apologies sat at the edge of his tongue before crawling back down to form the uncomfortable lump in his throat. He forced a sip of his too-hot drink to stop the cyclical thoughts in his mind once more, instead turning his gaze back to Sephiroth once the scalding sip had made its way to his tense stomach.

Sephiroth mentioned having seen the blonde soldier before. Hewley watched his friend carefully, and beneath that stoic mask Sephiroth wore day in and day out from the moment he was small, there was … something. Angeal couldn’t have put words to it, even if he’d tried. Bothered, worried, anxious perhaps? Yet, none of those words seemed to correctly capture the brief emotion in Sephiroth’s downturned, green eyes.

Despite the blonde not being a true Soldier – Sephiroth was right, he lacked proper training and his mind was certainly clouded by rage – he hit like a tank. Angeal dared not to shift in his seat, knowing that his body would ache in protest. The damage they’d sustained even before the blonde’s suicidal attack was impressive, for some nobody against two 1st Class Soldiers. It should have been a simple matter for them to eliminate him. He shouldn’t have been able to get back up after the damage he’d sustained from the two of them. And yet, look at what became of them. Sephiroth was lucky to be alive, and they would both be nursing limps, sore ribs, and changing bandages for days to come.

Angeal studied Sephiroth for a moment, his hot mug still grasped between calloused hands. That man … had been familiar to Sephiroth in a way to affect his judgment. Hewley certainly hadn’t recognized the blonde at all. Looking back, the only thing that seemed possibly familiar, were perhaps some of his movements with his broadsword – but there were only so many ways to swing a sword of that size.

And Sephiroth’s life after Angeal had died … how long did he go on for? What did he experience?

Genesis was possibly the only one to know the details.

“What you’ve forgotten … ,” Angeal finally spoke, his voice more gravelly than usual with exhaustion clawing at his back, “We’ll get it figured out. Together. But, not tonight.”

He took a long sip of the tea. It may not have been up to his standards, but it still hit that relaxing and comforting note. The aches and burns soothed every so slightly.

“You need to rest, best you can. Body and mind. We have time.”

There was something unspoken, mixed into his words. A promise, that Angeal wouldn’t leave again. He wouldn’t abandon Sephiroth when he needed someone – not this time. Never again.

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It's been 4000 years...

The blonde was tense under Angeal’s hands. It briefly crossed the Soldier’s mind how delicate the trust in this situation was, how the young man was only acting in such a way to keep himself alive. He had no idea that Angeal wouldn’t dare fight a man that could barely walk, that his honor was so strong he would never got against his own word. Briefly, Hewley wondered what the blonde was like outside of these life-or-death situations. He mentioned his friends earlier in the forced conversation, so was he less of an angry, wet cat outside of situations like these? Angeal would never know. He was likely on the blonde’s hit list for life.

However long of a second life he’d have in this world, anyway.

Angeal listened intently to the story as he finished peeling away the layers of older bandages. He set them neatly aside before grabbing gauze and gently applying pressure to the oozing wound. At least the edges of the wound were clean, and it didn’t appear that the blonde had pulled his stitches entirely out with his little bat stunt. They would just need to be re-threaded and tied off again. Nothing Hewley hadn’t done out in the field plenty of times for injuries basic potions wouldn’t cover.

The story of Jenova continued, and Angeal wished he could have been more surprised by the outcome. Instead, all that came was a deep and terrible sadness. He could almost picture it, Sephiroth completely alone, feverishly reading through report after report on Jenova, on the experiments that he turned out to be. It took Angeal days to find the strength to pick up the research notes on himself that Genesis had forced out of Hollander. He knew firsthand what it felt like. To find out your entire life was a lie, that you were toyed with, that at your very core you weren’t a human but a monster. Just the memory of it made Angeal nauseated.

No one could say how they would react to something like that until they experienced it for themselves. Genesis took out his anger on Banora, on his adoptive parents, and then on Shinra itself. Angeal flip flopped on taking it out on anyone that got too close and burying the pain to try and help others, but in the end, he was just as terrible as any monster.

Zack’s haunted expression, staring down at him as he died, hung heavy over Angeal constantly.

“I’m not here to make excuses for him,” Angeal sighed, lifting the gauze to check the oozing wound, “I’m here to hear your story. And the things you said earlier imply that this isn’t the end of what Sephiroth did to you … to everyone, I guess.”

With the wound under control, Angeal grabbed the antiseptic spray, “This’ll burn.”

With the wound properly treated, Hewley began figuring out the best path to restitching the skin together. He was no trained healer, but he could manage it well enough. He set the pickups and scissors among the collection of measured gauze, giving the young man a break from his capable, albeit rudimentary care.

“So, Sephiroth found out the truth of his life, lost it, burned down Nibelheim and killed everyone there. What happened from there? I’m assuming Shinra managed to cover it up. That was what they did best with rogue Soldiers.”

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RAMBLING

Something deep and dark within Angeal threatened to rear its ugly head when Caius mentioned how cautious he was being with his trust. People suffered because of his mistake. He didn’t have to say the words for the implication to uncomfortably scratch its way up Angeal’s spine. Someone betrayed Caius in the past. The terrifying monster that lived in the depths of Hewley’s soul simmered, just below the surface; an ever present reminder of the betrayals he himself had committed. Promising to always be there for his friends. Forcing Zack to turn a blade on him.

Sure, he had tasted betrayal. Betrayal from the company he worked so diligently for, betrayal from his mother who lied about the circumstances of his birth his entire lifetime, betrayal from his best friend. Yet, those seemed like ripples on the water’s surface compared to the tidal wave of shame caused by what he did to his own friends.

There was no sense dwelling on that, though. He could only focus on not making the same mistakes twice.

Caius’s story about the teenager he met certainly explained the reason for his cold shoulder, though. It must have been another person from their world, who lived well past after Hewley had died. Though his conversation with Cloud consisted mostly of anger and righteous fury, Angeal couldn’t deny that the blonde’s story had been laced with the very same fear of near-extinction. Whatever Sephiroth had become in the years after his death … it was something beyond imagination. Something much worse than he himself ever became. A god. A demon. Yet, at the very base, Sephiroth was still a man – one who had a heart, who felt just as much as anyone else did, who suffered in the absence of his friends, an experiment who was lied to his entire life.

Angeal silently flagged down the bartender for water, and turned to the glass in his left hand, his brows knotted and glowing eyes obviously conflicted. The relationship between himself and Sephiroth. The nostalgia of it nearly made the corner of the Soldier’s lip curl in humor, but the heaviness of the moment stopped it. However, Angeal’s expression softened the longer he stared at the cup of water in his hand – still not taking a drink, despite how his parched throat complained.

“I met Sephiroth as a teenager, while climbing the ranks in our military,” Angeal explained, gaze distant as he recalled his earlier years with Sephiroth. There was so much the Soldier Extraordinaire didn’t know. It was hard enough forcing Sephiroth to let them be friends, and the word was even more foreign still. The world’s greatest Soldier, nearly the same age as himself and Genesis, had never had friends. He’d never had a home cooked meal, never been complimented beyond his ability to fight, never attended a play or read poetry. One could almost count on a single hand the things Sephiroth had done, and they were all related to the military, to fighting, to powerful progress. He was a fighting machine.

And so obviously … lonely. He and Genesis were perhaps the only two people on the planet who’d ever seen the man crack a (tiny, could have easily been a smirk) smile as an adult.

“It was obvious that he’d been forced into military life since he was a child. Battle was all he really knew – you’d find no better genius for strategy – and no one could really best him in a fight. The best I could do for a long time was make him break a sweat. I think that’s why we became companions, at first.”

Those early spars were a struggle. Angeal and Genesis worked day after day, night after night, just to be able to keep up with Sephiroth. It was a slog, but Genesis’s dream of besting Sephiroth kept them trudging forward, while Angeal … well, he simply ended up enjoying the job. Slowly, whether they all realized it or not, they began to slip into their own roles; a trio that could never be defeated when working together. They covered each other’s weaknesses perfectly.

“We’ve been good friends for years, and I acknowledge that … well, I was one of the only friends Sephiroth ever had,” Angeal explained with a frown, pausing only to finally take a refreshing, deep drink of the cold water he’d ordered. “He’s never been a social person. He wasn’t raised to have friends. He’s socially awkward, introverted, and was never allowed to have many interests outside of the job he was raised for. He was isolated for a long, long time before I got to know him. But, despite that, we became close friends. I helped him experience a lot of everyday, mundane, normal activities for the first time. He was a behemoth on the battlefield, but as calm as a gentle breeze, otherwise. Much calmer than myself, even.”

Sephiroth was certainly the calmest of their trio, by a mile. Genesis was all spitfire and barbs, while Angeal himself was the stubborn mother hen, unable to hold his tongue when something clashed with his obstinate morals. But Sephiroth was … calm. Collected. Quiet and direct with sarcasm, with jokes so subtle they almost always flew over the heads of anyone who didn’t know him.

Finally, Angeal turned away from nostalgia and focused his attention onto Caius, “I’ll be frank. I was dead – mostly unrelated, long story, don’t ask – before Sephiroth snapped, but I know the stories about what happened are indeed true. However, the Sephiroth currently walking around on this world is the one I knew. And if there is one thing Sephiroth absolutely cannot do, it’s lie or pretend. If he truly was the … monster these people are claiming him to be, the one that they knew, I’m sure the entire world would know it by now. From what I understand of that whole story, he wasn’t exactly subtle.”