The Wooing of the Moon

Chapter I: Waning Gibbous

A/N: Okay so I consider this this most bullshit thing I have ever posted. I wrote it over the course of three weeks this spring to get it out of my brain, and I just decided that I might as well crosspost it from AO3 because why the hell not.

It basically exists because I noticed there was a lot of fic for this ship but almost none of it used how complicated and weird their canon dynamic is, which seemed like a huge waste. Also because Angeal being a dick but also a good bro is my jam.

It was all because when Genesis came home from Wutai, opening one of those yet-again-rare windows of time where for a few weeks all three of Shinra's top SOLDIERs were in Midgar at once while other Firsts coordinated the newly reintensifying war effort, Angeal thought it would be a good idea to introduce his oldest friend to the Third he'd decided to mentor.

Lieutenant Fair wasn't Angeal's first project—he had an eye for potential and actually enjoyed teaching as something besides an opportunity to subject someone to pithy philosophical lectures, not that he didn't do that too—but he was the most pervasive, somehow. Like a half-grown dog that no one had smacked often enough, or rubbed its nose in its own messes. He wasn't precisely insubordinate, but his genuine adoration for Angeal made the fact that his attitude toward Genesis was something along the lines of 'cautiously prepared to like you' particularly noticeable.

It seemed like arrogance at first brush, but Genesis increasingly suspected that the boy was simply constitutionally incapable of being overawed. Or possibly awed at all.

Forty minutes later, Angeal was called away on a mission that shouldn't take more than an hour, and asked Genesis to keep an eye on the legally adult fifteen-year-old while he trained, and make sure he wasn't slacking off.

Genesis considered the only benefit of teaching to be that people were obliged to listen to you, so he sat in a chair at one corner of the training floor and proceeded to educate Fair about Loveless. At some point this transformed into grumbling about Sephiroth, who had been especially insufferable lately, possibly because Fair looked enough like Angeal to bring his guard down, or possibly because for such a chatterbox he was a genuinely excellent listener.

"You know," Fair remarked toward the end of the hour, spinning his broadsword over the back of his hand with a quirk to his mouth that said he was determined to get this trick right so many times it became reflex, and he could do it without trying, "I don't think the General's seeing anybody. You should make a move."

Genesis was floored. He managed to keep from showing it on his face. "What."

"Sephiroth. Ask him out. It sounds like you really care and you're obviously into him, and Angeal says you're one of the only people he actually likes to spend time with…I'm just saying, he could do worse." Fair shrugged, spun the sword up onto his back.

"You gossip worse than a Turk," Genesis scoffed. Nothing he'd said in the past twenty minutes had remotely sounded like it might convey really caring about Sephiroth, let alone…. "There's some kind of betting pool, isn't there. You took the long odds and are trying to rig the outcome."

"…there probably is a pool, but I'm not in it. Just trying to help a friend." To complete the surreality of this conversation, the boy swung his arms out in front of him and started doing squats.

Genesis lifted one eyebrow. "When exactly did I agree to be a friend of yours?"

"Aww, Commander Rhapsodos, that's harsh." Fair grinned. "Maybe I didn't mean you. Anyway, hour's up. I'm gonna go see what's keeping Angeal!"

Genesis was probably supposed to stop him doing that, but it wasn't actually his problem and he didn't care. It occurred to him the final change in topic might have been calculated to prejudice him toward this decision, which would make Fair the anomaly of someone similar to Genesis expertly disguised as a miniature Angeal—but no. Fair was much more high-energy than Angeal had ever been, but he was also an idiot.

He was an idiot. Who didn't know anything.

Genesis had a meeting with Sephiroth that afternoon. Well, with Sephiroth, Scarlet, Heidegger, and five of the latter's flunkies. It was not productive. It had never had a chance in hell of being productive. The addition of Angeal's presence would only have given it a candle's chance in a whirlwind, and Angeal had been sent out again on a tricky-sounding mission halfway to Wutai, and who knew when he'd be back.

The fact that nothing was getting done made it harder than it should have been to keep himself from monitoring Sephiroth in his peripheral vision. His attention kept snapping over whenever there was a shift in the fall of silver. While looking steadfastly at the expense spreadsheets Heidegger's aides had provided, he found himself comparing the falling timbre of the voice on his left to velvet, and wanted to slap himself. It wasn't that it wasn't accurate, or that such similes were unusual in his mental narration, but it was—it was playing into Fair's practical joke, was what it was.

Heidegger and his minions probably would not notice much of anything if he spent the rest of the meeting glaring at Sephiroth's profile, but Scarlet and Sephiroth would, and the former would find a way to use it against him. He avoided acting particularly oddly, somehow, though he was certainly irritable, and at the end Heidegger's minions gathered the papers back together with every sign of satisfaction, as though a total lack of any progress had been their original goal, and then they were all free to go.

"Spar?" Genesis asked on their way out of the conference room.

Sephiroth nodded firmly, which was his version of a 'hell yes.' They headed for the elevator together.

The nice thing about sparring was that it gave Genesis every reason to stare. The hellish thing about sparring was that it gave Genesis every reason to stare. Genesis usually liked the Junon Cannon simulation because it was gorgeous and dramatic, but now it was only exacerbating his problem. The sunlight catching on that ridiculous mane and turning it into ribbons of pale fire wasn't real, but even in natural light he was fairly sure Sephiroth's lips would still look that soft.

That sheen, as if he had always just licked them, even though Genesis had never actually seen him do so. (Lip gloss, do you think? he'd joked to Angeal when they were teenagers; Angeal had replied without looking up from his training manual that he was in no position to make fun of other people's improbable good looks, because Angeal gave simultaneously the best and the worst compliments in the world.)

"You're distracted," Sephiroth murmured.

You're distracting. No, that was entirely the wrong style of repartee for this context. He substituted an attempt to set his partner on fire. (He had occasionally wished this was an acceptable riposte in dinner conversation. He suspected Sephiroth wished it far more often.)

"Something on your mind?"

"…not really."

He wasn't fighting at his best. Against almost anyone but Sephiroth, he might still have been winning, but in this fight he had no slack to use up and the distraction meant that even his successes took more effort, and his arms were sore and his magical reserves low well before they should have been.

"Yield?" Sephiroth asked.

Genesis fought to steady his breathing. "Never." He flung himself forward.

They clashed. Rapier went flying. Genesis mustered the magic to trap Sephiroth between a pair of Earth and Thunder spells, but he leapt out of range of the one and broke most of the other over his blade, and then the Masamune was lying against the side of Genesis' throat. "Yield?"

He was standing far closer than necessary. With the combination of his reach and his weapon he could easily open a throat from ten feet away. Genesis sneered magnificently. Stepped into the sword, which pulled back as he moved to stay against his neck without parting skin. Reached up and laid one of his gloved hands over Sephiroth's on the hilt. "Never." He pushed the blade aside, wrapped his other hand around one of the straps crossing Sephiroth's chest, and dragged him in.

Genesis missed a meeting. This wasn't entirely unusual—he engaged in exactly as much truancy as he could get away with, which was at this point rather a lot—but it was a meeting that also had Angeal at it. And Sephiroth.

Assuming Sephiroth had attended. He'd arranged to be occupied elsewhere at the last two meetings they were supposed to attend together. The second one had gone rather badly, because Genesis was not actually an adequate replacement for the General when not warned he was going to have to substitute for the General. He suspected Sephiroth of premeditated vengeance.

He should have expected the intrusion; was probably lucky Angeal didn't bring his puppy. If only because Genesis would probably have been entirely successful in setting the Third on fire. As it was, his childhood friend walked in alone on Genesis' forehead communing with the surface of his table. There was a copy of Loveless beside him, but it hadn't been as satisfying to reread as usual.

Angeal just stood in the entryway to the small kitchen area that went with First quarters, looking at him. Eventually he said,

"Are you going to tell me why Sephiroth has been avoiding us both for days?"

Genesis mumbled something into the tabletop.

"…now I know it was you. Gen, I haven't seen your hair like this since we were thirteen. What did you do?"

Genesis raised his head enough to fix one eye on his friend in soulful wrath. "If you must know, I kissed him."

Angeal pursed his lips, unshipped the sword from his back, and propped it in a corner. "…I have to admit I'm torn between asking why and being surprised it took you this long."

Genesis raised his head several inches this time, the better to aim a binocular glower. "If you thought this was likely you could have warned me!"

"If anybody deserved a warning, it was Sephiroth." Angeal drew out Genesis' other chair and sat down. "I've decided, I'm asking why."

"Ngh," Genesis told the tabletop, head down again. "I very much doubt you want me to describe my motives."

"My blanket request not to know about your sex life doesn't extend to not wanting to know whether you kissed our friend—who is, if you've forgotten, also our commanding officer—because you were suddenly smitten or because you thought he would have an interesting reaction."

"He's not our commanding officer unless we're in the field with command of a unit subordinate to one of which he has control," Genesis retorted, because he had in fact looked this up a long time ago; it was a regulation applying only to the upper three tiers of command and had apparently been enacted in a moment of unusual forethought to in theory ensure multiple viewpoints were reflected in strategy. Angeal was aware of the technicality but considered it far less significant. He waited patiently. "I don't know," Genesis grumbled. "I—his stupid face," he complained, which was a level of eloquence he had rarely descended to since roughly the age of eight. He clenched and unclenched his right hand on air as if on an invisible sword. "He. I."

He'd tasted like steel and mako and, oddly, lemons. He got that bright mocking look in his eye when Genesis came especially close to landing a hit on him and Genesis wanted to kiss the smirk right off his face, he wanted the second hand that Sephiroth only occasionally bothered to use in wielding the Masamune to let go the hilt and close around his waist, he wanted to get a double handful of silver hair and lick his way up the General's throat, he had legitimately no idea how long he'd been feeling like this but now that he'd noticed he could not stop.

Damn Lieutenant Fair anyway.

"I very much wanted to," was the motivation he felt comfortable verbalizing to Angeal. "And also I wanted him to stop gloating. But mostly. I wanted to."

"And you'd like the chance to do it again," Angeal filled in.

"Yes."

"But he didn't react well."

"No." It was a blow to his pride, that he had given away his desires in such a—wild, injudicious manner, and then been rejected. The fact that Sephiroth really did seem to be avoiding both of them was—he didn't know if it was a studied insult or mere reflection of personal discomfort, and wasn't sure which he would prefer.

"Too bad." Genesis must have looked surprised, because Angeal said, "You're both my friends, I'd prefer you make each other happy than the opposite."

Which of course just made Genesis feel worse, took him past the sting and excruciating embarrassment and the sick feeling of having ruined a friendship and into the thought of how actually yes, it would have been very nice if Sephiroth had been in favor of Fair's terrible idea, and of how he had lost that pleasant potential future before he'd even had a chance to fully conceptualize it. He dropped his head onto the table again. "He's not speaking to me, Angeal."

He would have liked to find and crush the confluence of circumstances that had brought him to this point, maudlin in his own kitchen over destroying a relationship he would until a few days ago have claimed not to care about. The arrow has left the bow of the Goddess, he told himself. There was only the future.

"Seems like an overreaction."

Genesis blinked. It did, actually. Now that he thought about it. It really seemed more in-character for Sephiroth to be pretending nothing had happened. A certain chilliness would have been unsurprising, but the blatant avoidance— "Did he attend today's meeting at all?" Genesis asked, sitting up straight.

"He came. He avoided addressing me directly and wouldn't meet my eyes. He was subtle about it," Angeal shrugged. "As much he could be. But it's a hard sort of thing not to notice. He pretended not to hear me when I asked him for a word."

"Curious."

"He hasn't done that to you?"

"He's pretty handily avoided being in the same room as me." Not that Genesis hadn't been supporting him in that quest. He definitely hadn't tried to draw him into a private conversation. "…that's fairly dramatic of him, isn't it."

"Mm."

"I mean, if he's that upset you'd think he'd confront me about it." Possibly Sephiroth was mortified with embarrassment? That might be a slightly less awful reason for his behavior. One that reflected less on Genesis, anyway, even if it did not bode well for his prospects.

Angeal's first two fingers tapped slowly on the table. "Do you think he minds especially that you're a man?"

Genesis shrugged. His own preference was most often for women, and without SOLDIER strength might have been nearly exclusive—he liked partners that were not submissive but let him retain control, which was a dynamic more easily negotiated when one could lift all prospective partners off the floor one-handed without significant effort. It might be possible to wrongfoot Sephiroth into leaving him in control throughout one encounter, but he certainly wouldn't stand for it in the long term, which just raised again the issue of how unspeakably frustrating this situation was. "I suppose it's possible."

"We still don't know where he's from," Angeal pointed out.

A question relevant because opinions of this permutation of romance varied across the surface of the world, but generally lowered the further you went north and west, where it ran up against some odd and rigid standards of masculinity. (Until of course you reached Wutai where same-sex relationships were considered the preferred form of adultery since they didn't risk blurring anyone's lineage.) It was generally regarded as very romantic but not quite correct in Banora, a combination which had admittedly always vaguely appealed to Genesis, and perfectly normal across the straits in the lava plateaus south of the Mythril Mountains.

Midgar was a very cosmopolitan city, with the result that the balance of the population felt it best to politely pretend relationships between men were not romantic in nature whether they were or not, unless specifically informed otherwise, and gossip furiously behind closed doors, while anyone who considered being openly offended by them no matter how obvious (short of public indecency) was scorned as a provincial boor.

Sephiroth might well object to giving the public yet another subject for gossip. He could be a prig like that.

"True," Genesis allowed.

"But we do know the Science Department had custody of him by the time he was ten, if not earlier. Which means he's spent over half his life around Hojo."

This was an excellent point. Hojo (whose opinions on the world Sephiroth periodically repeated verbatim when he had none of his own, or even occasionally alongside ones he did, which was a curious relationship to have to someone you so clearly despised) was so utterly unromantic as to have a minor vendetta against overly sentimental turns of phrase being applied to any subject at all germane to his interests. Including to Genesis' certain knowledge materia, natural parturition, and electric lighting. Genesis pursed his lips in disgust. "So he might not believe in…fraternization."

The good news there was that Sephiroth did not actually like agreeing with Hojo, and if you gave him a good rationale for an alternate belief would probably seize on it immediately.

Angeal shrugged. "Or, you know, he might just be confused. I don't know exactly what happened but I'm willing to bet you didn't exactly recite a treatise on your motives."

Genesis snorted. "At that point my motives were approximately as coherent as anything your pup says—by the way, if you saw this coming is it your fault he decided Sephiroth and I would make a charming item?"

"…Zack said that?" Angeal shook his head. "We don't talk about our personal business. He didn't know we were friends until you dropped by that day."

Genesis shrugged. He guessed it was still possible Angeal had influenced the boy subliminally somehow, but he was forced to entertain the possibility that he'd been telegraphing an interest he hadn't consciously acknowledged. Maybe he should be grateful Sephiroth was so socially inept; he was more or less certain the General, at least, had been taken entirely by surprise. Not that that had necessarily been to his advantage, but it salved his pride.

Everyone knew Sephiroth was gorgeous, but you could notice that without...taking it personally, as it were. But of course Genesis took his rival personally. No wonder Angeal at least had expected him to eventually...

He drummed his fingernails on the table. "So we've established that his upset could be with some aspect of my person, with my approach, or with the entire category of interaction." Genesis snorted at the uselessness, but the fact was that having put it all into categories rendered it a strategic problem he could take steps to address, rather than a morass of failure and rejection threatening to swallow him alive. "Shyness I can deal with. Confusion I can deal with. Hojo I can deal with. The rest of it…"

"Whatever the problem is, you know you have to talk to him."

Genesis scowled. "The wandering soul knows no rest."

"Stop pouting. We don't know what Sephiroth's problem is. We don't know enough to guess. So the only question you have left that you can answer right now is do you want to try again, or do you want things to go back to normal? If you try for both I think you'll go down in flames." Angeal's mouth pulled up on one side. "Maybe literally."

Genesis clicked his tongue. "What kind of question is that? Of course I'm trying again." With those as the choices, he had no real option. They couldn't return to the previous status quo even if he could persuade Sephiroth to try, because then there would still be Genesis, acutely aware of wanting. He had never been much for holding back when he had a goal.

"This is part of your dream now?" Angeal asked. He was smiling at Genesis, which wasn't usual—they'd always been the sort of friends who laughed at each other more often than they smiled; this was an expression Angeal was normally more likely to wear looking off into the distance thinking about the future of the world or talking about his latest project, and even then not that often.

Genesis hesitated. Because his dreams had always been of greatness, of recognition and of power and this seemed—incompatible, somehow. It wasn't that winning Sephiroth would somehow make him unsurpassable—if anything, it would bring them nearer level—but it was still…a distraction. A complication.

"I want this," he said. Let his eyes close. Pictured green ones, with upright pupils, pale and intent. "Very much," he repeated. He'd been doing his best to push it aside the past few days, ever since his first move had met with rejection, but after all this time talking about why he might not be able to have what he wanted the yearning was aching all the way up his torso and in the palms of his hands. He opened his eyes again.

Angeal let out a long breath, and when he was done his smile came back a little different. "You know I have your back," he said, which was accurate. Genesis had never questioned that certainty. "But I'm his friend, too, so I have to say…if there's a good chance what you're looking for with this is one of those no-strings flings of yours, you should drop it now and move on. Let it go."

With this thoroughly unsupportive friendly advice, he patted Genesis on the shoulder, retrieved his sword from the corner, and left, probably to go do paperwork or something, like the disgustingly responsible sort of person he was.

Genesis bounced his forehead off the table a few more times after Angeal was gone. As if it was even possible to have a no-strings hookup with a close coworker you saw on a regular basis. Well, it probably was possible, but it would require both parties to take an exceptionally casual approach to sex. Genesis was fairly sure he wasn't that casual about sex. And Sephiroth…Sephiroth wasn't casual about anything.

He spent a little longer coddling his sore forehead and muttering about Sephiroth turning every little thing into a dramatic production, until the irony became too much even for him and he pulled himself together and went to have a shower. Angeal was right, his hair was dreadful. He wouldn't be seducing anybody looking like this.

It took him a few days to get around to the conversation. This was only a little bit procrastination; much more significantly Sephiroth was still making himself scarce, and the few times Genesis came close to catching him alone they were interrupted. There was certainly no way he was having this conversation with an audience.

If he waited too long, though, one of them would be sent back to Wutai, which would be a long-term posting short of the war abruptly coming to an end, and if this went unresolved a full month or two the end result might be nothing more than an unsalvageable former friendship. Unacceptable.

Sephiroth was wily, but Genesis was wilier, and once he really set himself to guessing where the General might be going to avoid him, his ambush was simplicity itself. Moving before sunrise to minimize unwanted encounters was a standard. He let himself into a training room on floor 49 to find Sephiroth in a highly convincing simulation of the Northern Continent, fighting off the onslaught of an absurd number of ice wolves. Genesis waited until they had all been dispatched to cancel the training sequence, and as the ice and snow melted into green light and then into nothing around them, he deliberately stayed between his friend and the exit.

"Listen, Sephiroth…" Genesis crossed the floor toward the Silver General, and the Masamune stayed low at his side. Sephiroth was turned slightly away from him, chin lowered, and the glance he gave him was slanted across his own cheekbone as though out of a cave. "I think we should talk."

Sephiroth acknowledged this assertion with a blink.

"Are you willing?" Genesis prodded.

Sephiroth shrugged, a small gesture multiplied by his wide silver pauldrons. "Talk."

The plural pronoun had been very intentional, but if Sephiroth wanted him to take the initial plunge Genesis couldn't say it was unreasonable. "About our training session last week."

"You weren't up to your usual standard," Sephiroth observed tonelessly.

Genesis was aware of an initial outrage, and a temptation to challenge Sephiroth to another match here and now. But over that was layered calculation. Would it help, if they had another spar? Reestablish the terms of their relationship on safe pillars? Was Sephiroth trying to provoke him? But as Angeal had said, possible literal flames. Mixed messages could only make this worse. Genesis smirked. "You were distracting." He moved forward again, feeling out Sephiroth's reaction. He held his ground. "Don't you think there was something a little more noteworthy that day than just another fight?"

Sephiroth shrugged. "You were trying to be distracting."

Well, then. "Hardly just that." Genesis ducked in, stretched up, and stole another kiss. This one was glancing and crooked, because while Sephiroth notably did not dodge, he didn't stand still and let it keep happening either. "I hope you didn't think I didn't mean it," Genesis said, gazing up through his eyelashes. The difference in their heights was an aggravation, but he knew for a fact that he had gorgeous eyelashes and at least he was getting a chance to use them.

Sephiroth's voice was remote and frosty, and he'd turned away ninety degrees, so Genesis could only see his profile. It seemed as though he had never been so distant, at exactly the moment Genesis wanted him to look at him like he never had before, and he had been wanting that ever since they met. "My questions center around what you meant by it."

This wording was a marvelous feat of ambiguity. 'What do you mean by' could be asking after Genesis' intentions, or it could be an even more genteel approach to 'how dare you.' Since it was Sephiroth, the odds were roughly even on whether he did this on purpose. The coldness still stung.

"What I meant…" Genesis echoed thoughtfully. "What else could I mean? I wanted to kiss you."

"And since you wanted it, you took action."

"Of course. You know my opinions on irresolution."

Sephiroth frowned. So did Genesis. This was not going well. This noncommittal detachment was starting to be far more annoying than any of the careless slights against his power that were the usual consequence of too much time around Sephiroth. He needed to scout his terrain. "But we know what I want," he said, making his lips curl up warmly. "You should talk, too."

"I have nothing to say."

Genesis frowned harder than before, at that blandness. At this point he was willing to settle for any strong reaction at all. "Your reaction is too negative," he declared. "Is it just me you object to, or are you that offended to be approached by a man?"

Sephiroth sheathed his sword. "Not at all. You may make use of as many men in such capacity as you see fit without censure. I myself am unavailable."

Genesis was gaping again. "What is that supposed to—" Sephiroth strode out of the training room and the door slid closed behind him.

Somehow this felt both exactly the same and much, much worse than any time a challenge made in the fierce spirit of rivalry had been met with cool equanimity. Did he even care?

It was still half an hour before dawn. This did not occur to Genesis as potentially relevant until he had already let himself into Angeal's quarters, but when he burst into Angeal's bedroom he sat bolt upright and seemed alert, so he didn't worry about his timing. "'Unavailable!' he says," Genesis expostulated. "Is that no? It sounds like no, right? But he wants to know 'what I meant by it!' What does that mean? Does he want me to explain myself in detail? Does he want me to declare it was all a misunderstanding? How am I supposed to determine what he means by wanting to know what I mean? We could go in circles for eternity that way!"

Angeal held up both his hands, as if he could physically stem the tide of words, and after several seconds Genesis acknowledged the gesture with a, "Yes, what?"

"Gen. It is…four-thirty-seven in the morning. I will deal with your crisis once I have some coffee."

Genesis was so determined to get useful advice that he filled and started Angeal's coffee maker while his friend rolled out of bed and washed his face.

"Alright," said Angeal, with the waspish infinite patience Genesis always expected of him, once he was settled at his kitchen table with a hot black mug. "From the top."

Genesis launched into his rant again, longer but somewhat better streamlined and chronologically arranged. Angeal's kitchen was not large enough to pace properly; he paced anyway. By the time he finished Angeal was more than halfway through his coffee and the furrow between his eyebrows had gone from sleepy to thoughtful.

"Hm," Angeal said. "Let's go over his exact words. He said that…"

Genesis prided himself on his verbal recall. Even when he wasn't strictly paying attention he could generally repeat what he had just heard with considerable exactitude—a skill he had used to stymie their schoolteacher in Banora while reading under the desk—and he had certainly been paying attention this morning. "That I could 'make use of as many men' as I pleased 'without censure' but he himself was 'not available.' What does he think I do in my off-hours, attend orgies?"

"In between performances, maybe."

Genesis scowled at his best friend, who had no right to be deriving amusement from his pain. "Angeal."

Angeal swallowed the last of his coffee and got up to pour another cup. "That is a strange choice of words, though," he mused. "Make use of. And why 'unavailable?'"

Genesis flung his hands wide to emphasize his own bewilderment. "I don't know! If he's taken, he is doing an extraordinarily good job of hiding it!"

Angeal's hand had gone still in the air. It wasn't noticeable until his mug began to overflow, at which point he seemed to shake himself out of it, lifted the cup again, sipped the excess away from the rim, and wiped up the small mess with a paper towel, which he of course threw away afterward. (Angeal was the ideal roommate. Genesis spoke from experience.) "What?" Genesis demanded, since his friend had clearly had a revelation.

"I don't think he knows you're approaching him romantically," was the announcement. Angeal carried his cup back to his seat at the table in the silence it provoked, and sat back down, kneading at one temple as he did so.

"…what?" asked Genesis at length. He didn't really see what space for ambiguity his passionate interlocking of lips had allowed.

"I think," said Angeal, "he believes your interest is purely physical. He's offended because he sees this as an attempt to exploit him, or possibly to take advantage of your friendship. To get into his pants."

Well, he couldn't blame Sephiroth for being a little uncertain what he had wanted to begin with, considering how confused Genesis had been, but he thought he'd made himself fairly clear today.

Of course, even with that untouchable aura the man projected, he couldn't be the first person to make a move on someone who had undoubtedly been strikingly good-looking all his life and was currently working his way up, via the tireless march of Shinra's propaganda machine, toward the status of foremost living sex symbol on the Planet. He should have taken that into consideration.

"I'm hardly one of his brainless fans," he groused anyway.

Angeal looked up judgmentally over the rim of his coffee cup. "You did kiss him without permission. Twice. That qualifies as sexual assault in several jurisdictions. It's technically sexual harassment in Midgar."

Genesis' mouth was hanging open. He didn't have the presence of mind to do anything about that. "Se…shu…" he wheezed. It was just. Not only the absurdity of anyone doing something like that to Sephiroth, but the idea that he could have—

"You need to remember," Angeal said, "he grew up in Shinra Corporation."

Genesis held up a hand for time and squeezed his eyes shut, tired of resembling a beached fish even in front of his oldest friend. So there was a very real possibility Sephiroth regarded his—admittedly ill-timed and poorly articulated—romantic confession as belonging in the same category as the President's habit of grabbing the secretaries' behinds.

Genesis would be even more offended if not for the fact that in this scenario, Sephiroth had cast himself as the secretary.

He'd often wished Sephiroth regarded him as a real threat, but this had not been what he meant.

"Right," he said after a few seconds, letting the hand fall. "Hojo and the President. No wonder he has no idea what to make of me." It was entirely possible the only depiction of romance as-such Sephiroth had ever been exposed to was when Genesis dragged him to productions of Loveless.

And frankly the Prisoner's romantic plotline, while moving and eloquent and the framing device, was heavily subordinate to the larger plot, highly stylized, and entirely atypical. "I may need to communicate my intentions with words. Don't make such an expression," he added, which made Angeal snort and apply himself all the more intently to his mug. "I am excellent with words."

"Mm." Angeal was excellent at conveying dubious agreement without words.

Genesis would show him.

A/N: Featuring Zack as agent of chaos and Angeal as longsuffering ace friend. This is how romcoms work, right?