InsaneJournal

ficlet - ff50 Lazard/Sephiroth #040
I haven't forgotten about my Lazard/Sephiroth claim! I just have been seriously blocked on it. Lazard is amazingly slippery and hard to write. Sephiroth isn't much better. They're both very smart and complicated men, and it takes a lot of attention to even try and write them, something that, well, I'm not very good at.

Today's addition is short, completely worksafe, and totally a downer.



Prompt: 040, Twilight
Words: ~440

He was dying. Hollander’s witch-brew of cells had stolen through his body and turned him all against him; he was already, at a very genetic level, no more. Half Angeal, barely half himself, and all of it settling rapidly into decay. His hair had turned black, then gray and white; his soft flesh had become brief SOLDIER hide and then collapsed to a pale, bruising husk. His memories, his desires, were no longer all his own. When had Lazard ever considered Genesis his brother? –Yet the sight of red-coated man flooded his weak heart with a fraternal love he had no right to feel.

He was Angeal now, and Angeal was dead. He could feel the coldness rising slowly, up from his legs, dragging towards his lungs and heart. But Angeal had believed in the Promised Land. Between breaths he thought he heard the earth calling. It was okay. He had survived amazingly long for an unenhanced man. It was okay. He had let go of the hatred he had borne his father, and the ambition that had brought him up and tore him down. Every day he lived, his attachments to his past life grew fewer, until it seemed that only one was left.

With the memory of perfect eyesight he saw himself and Sephiroth, standing side by side like mismatched tin soldiers. Angeal had suspected them, in the end, and found Lazard wanting—too cruel, too inconstant a man for his fellow-SOLDIER, his comrade, his friend. He had known what Lazard would do long before it had even come to pass. In every fleeting glance and lingering touch he had seen disaster looming, heartbreak imminent, because he had seen that Sephiroth loved a man that did not love him back.

“Did he?” he wondered, in a dusty-throated parody of Angeal’s handsome voice. The little blond SOLDIER seemed to nod in his chair, though it was only the trembling of a body shocked by mako. “Didn’t I?” Underneath the tree, the wounded Angeal copy whined and stretched its couplet of wings. Even when the sky to the east started to lighten, he still couldn’t say. A weakness had clasped his heart. He wanted Sephiroth; he wanted that moment back, the moment he had held his tongue and opened his palm and let the bird with the silver song fly from his life.

“Come home,” he heard a voice like his mother say, very clearly in his ear.

“Will Sephiroth be there?” he wanted to ask, but his throat seemed to have closed, and the green that pulled him now had no need for regrets.