Angels Still Have Faces

Chapter 1: What Did You Do In The War?

Sephiroth wasn't sure how long it had been going on before he noticed it. Could have been weeks.

Could have been that the day he first noticed Angeal running his hand over a perfectly ordinary steel banister with the same reverent attention he'd been known to pay his father's sword was the first day these behavioral tics began.

Even then, he couldn't exactly say he'd noticed at first. Merely observed. Observed that his friend's mood had grown more thoughtful of late. That Angeal was paying more attention to things he had taken for granted, which was already far fewer things than Sephiroth or Genesis. That he'd developed a tendency to turn his face up to the sun and fill his lungs to their fullest capacity when out of doors.

He noticed, in the sense of taking note, once he realized Angeal was arguing with Genesis.

They disagreed all the time, of course—his two friends had very different ideas about what was important. But they didn't…fight. Even when one of them seemed really annoyed, or even both, the next time he saw them it was always as though the spat had never happened.

He'd always assumed the sort of communication involved in this dynamic required having known one another from shortly past infancy, and tried not to consider it a shortcoming of his own, that he could not begin to understand it.

But now they had had a disagreement sometime around the beginning of the week, and it wasn't over the next time he saw them. In fact, he did not see them together for days in a row—which was not unusual, even now that the War had shifted to a passive footing and all three of them were in Midgar together much of the time—until on the fourth day, looking out a second-floor window, he spotted them together on one of the outdoor training fields once again exchanging harsh words, only for Angeal to wheel around and storm off at the end.

It was less dramatic than a Genesis storm, but his back was stiff and his heels hit the pavement with a pointed sort of rage, and Genesis stared after him almost as baffled as Sephiroth felt.

Genesis was still on the training court when Sephiroth got down to him, and accepted an offer for a spar, but he was both more aggressive and less focused than usual, and curled his lip when Sephiroth asked about the argument. Ripples form on the water's surface. It was none of his business, apparently.

It was none of his business. That didn't stop him from being—interested.

The mess hall at Shinra headquarters was technically designated a cafeteria, the one for 'security personnel,' but the troops and SOLDIERs who had spent time at the front all persisted in referring to it as the mess. Sephiroth didn't visit it very often, and even more rarely stayed to eat rather than grabbing a sealed drink and a plastic-wrapped sandwich and carrying them elsewhere, but when he did he always got a table to himself.

On occasions like this one, when the room was not especially crowded—it was three in the afternoon, relatively few non-SOLDIER military personnel were free who did not have the whole day to themselves, and relatively few troops on leave stayed in the building instead of visiting the attractions of Midgar—he tended to get a table to himself, surrounded by other empty tables. He had a very good forbidding expression. He had been developing it since he was ten years old.

He was sitting close against the wall, both because it was always better to have something solid at your back and because it lowered the number of tables adjacent to his and raised the odds of being left entirely alone—people at adjoining tables made him look more approachable to his juniors in SOLDIER, overenthusiastic cadets, and troopers on dares—as he ate his way through a large portion of the day's lunch.

Cafeteria food was generally better than what they got at the front, if only because more of the ingredients were fresh, but there was a particular baked noodle thing one of the cooks they'd had on campaign had introduced to the mess tent, that had been one of the only remotely pleasant eating experiences they ever got out there. Asked for his secret, the cook had reportedly said that it was a peasant recipe designed to be cheap and filling, rather than an inferior version of rich people food like most of their menu. The man had recently been transferred to Shinra tower, and Sephiroth was perhaps indulging in a bit of nostalgia.

He knew without looking up that the body intruding into his space was Angeal, even before his friend slid a tray onto the circular table two seats to his left, and sat down. Angeal hadn't taken any of the noodle stuff, he just had applesauce, cheese, and a cup of tar-black coffee. When Sephiroth glanced up at his face, he looked like he needed the coffee.

"Afternoon," said Angeal.

"Hello," Sephiroth agreed. "How was your mission?"

Angeal shrugged. "Tedious. But nobody died, and we cleared out the infestation. So a success." He seemed cheerful about it, but the disinterest also seemed real. He fiddled with his spoon. He wasn't wearing gloves. He hadn't worn them in weeks. "How was your inspirational speech?"

"It went fine." Sephiroth was actually fairly good at talking at length when he had cause, something that surprised a lot of people who listened to him converse first.

His speeches naturally took the form of lectures, but he'd taken note of other people's most effective communicating strategies over the past few years, and thought the addition of more dramatic language and short, vaguely optimistic sentences had improved his performance. SOLDIER was as much a propaganda unit as a combat one, after all, and even before he'd become definitively Shinra's strongest SOLDIER he'd been used in publicity work, because he photographed well. Giving intentionally bad speeches, he had learned early on, merely meant they made him memorize speeches other people had written for him, which was much worse.

"Do you think we'll be sent back to Wutai soon?" Angeal asked. The pleasant blandness was beginning to seem forced.

"I hope not," Sephiroth said frankly. "The men need time to recover."

"Don't we all," said Angeal, biting into his lump of cheese. He chewed it slowly, as though deeply contemplating the combination of salt, fat, and faint sharpness that was cheap white cafeteria cheese.

"Angeal," said Sephiroth, "are you leading up to something."

A startled, abortive laugh, deferred in favor of swallowing cheese rather than spraying it across the table. "I'm not subtle, am I." He scooped up a spoonful of apple sauce, placed the whole thing in his mouth, and pulled it free between his closed lips, keeping all the applesauce inside. His throat worked. He let out a voiceless sigh, and put the spoon down. Pushed his tray back as though abruptly revolted by the idea of food, or maybe just making space to lay his hands on the artificial wood surface of the table.

"Have you ever," Angeal asked, in a low voice that managed to avoid sounding hushed through its sheer evenness, "had to kill civilians? Or have men under your command do it?"

Sephiroth looked sharply at him, wondering if this was the source of the strangeness somehow. If Angeal had had to do such a thing for the first time only recently, and…but it had been weeks since he returned from his last deployment, and anyway why would that make him act so grateful to be alive? Why would it make him fight with Genesis? "…I have."

"In the war?"

"Where else?" Sometimes after Shinra took a region, guerilla activity in the area would spike, and the Turks would trace it to a local population that was supporting the insurgents.

Early in the war, after their first burst of success had died down and the advance slowed, Sephiroth had done much of his early service hunting rogue ninjas behind the front lines, on the grounds that his speed was useful for it, while his size at the time had been impractical at the front. There had been more than one instance of executing collaborators. Department policy was exacting.

Angeal shrugged. As if Sephiroth might have had any number of occasions to slaughter noncombatants, and he hadn't wished to make assumptions. "How did you feel about it?"

"…did HR put you up to this?" Not that they had any particular record of hounding him about his mental health, but they were known for enlisting people's friends to pry into their business, and Angeal trusted authority most of the three of them, and would thus make the most likely patsy.

Angeal's shoulders shook with another startled laugh. "What? No. It's…" Grave again. "It's related to my argument with Genesis. There aren't that many Firsts to compare notes with, you know, and fewer I'd feel comfortable asking."

Using Sephiroth as an emotional baseline was certainly an unheard-of resort, which did signal desperation. "I'm not sure I understand the question."

Angeal's face did something strange, an understated grimace maybe. His eyes had drifted to his hands. They'd folded themselves together on the table. It was an uncharacteristic gesture, somehow. "It was different from killing enemy soldiers who had no chance against you, right?"

Sephiroth tipped his head. It certainly was different, but he was not sure just how. Attacking enemies who posed almost no threat required only slightly more alertness than watching to see that an execution was not interrupted, and killing enemies as they fled was more challenging only inasmuch as it required either running after them, or target practice.

When you went into a village and your men dragged people out of their houses, the organized nature of the activity made it unlike battle. Even the greatest commander was never really in control of a battle. The pleading, the cursing, the single sharp gunshots spaced even seconds apart—the gleaming shuriken flashing toward your exposed neck as you turned your face away….

Well, you were never totally in control of anything. Whatever Hojo thought.

"It was," he affirmed, after too long a pause. Returned to Angeal's original question. "How did it feel, hm." He still wasn't the best person to ask, but Angeal had already explained why he was the only option, and he did want to give his best effort.

Cupped his hands around his tea, then looking down at them recognized the gesture as the Wutaian method of holding a teacup, adapted around the handle of the Eastern-style mug, and unfolded them again. "Disgusting," he said at last.

He'd never really thought about it before, because thinking about emotions was never useful and this one had not forced itself to his attention, but now that he had, the feeling associated with those memories…more than anything shared the same character as listening to Hojo gloat, or having to visit the sewers in the course of a monster hunt.

Angeal nodded slowly. Sephiroth still couldn't quite read his expression—he was always harder to read than Genesis, who might not always emote sincerely but at least did it with enough emphasis that it was usually clear what he meant. Angeal was only unambiguous when he laughed, and even then there were sometimes layers, especially if he was laughing at one of his own jokes.

There was a pinch at the corners of his eyes, now. "You didn't want to."

Sephiroth shrugged. "That isn't a useful consideration at war."

"Isn't it?" Angeal's eyes dropped back to his coffee, which he swirled in the cup, watching it lap against the white-glazed crockery and run back down, leaving only the faintest trace of itself. "I guess I usually did think about whether something would be dishonorable, rather than if I wanted to do it," he admitted. "I've never been faced with…that."

Sephiroth was surprised to feel one line of tension along his spine unbind. "Good."

When Angeal had been a Second, he'd spent a short while under Sephiroth's direct command, and now he thought about it Angeal was one of the ones he'd never considered putting into such a rotation. He'd kept him on the battlefield, facing equal odds against canny defending armies, and let other officers engage in the dirty work of securing the rear. It seemed other commanders since had all concurred.

Angeal had looked up sharply at that one word, but his expression didn't seem angry, nor did he look like he had figured out that Sephiroth had kept him out of such things on purpose.

For a second it seemed he would say something, eyeing Sephiroth's expression, but then his gaze dropped again. He reached blindly for his coffee, and took a sip. "Genesis doesn't…I don't think he enjoys it, exactly, but he likes even less doing things he dislikes, so when he's had to kill civilians he makes it into a—a story, where they're wicked conspirators who deserve what's coming to them, and he's justice, and there's no reason to feel bad."

Sephiroth…could see that very easily, now Angeal had described it. Genesis building a narrative around this brutal act of war so that it was a literary drama, one that made him righteous as well as powerful. It probably did help. If Sephiroth had had half as much imagination as Genesis he might have done something similar himself.

Angeal's hand tightened around his mug. "And feeling good about what he's doing means he gets…carried away. He wiped out two whole villages last year, when he was just supposed to question them all and kill the ringleaders. I only just heard about it."

Sephiroth had wiped out a village once when he was sixteen. Not because he was carried away, though. He'd been on a mission to make an example. "You're angry that he doesn't regret it."

"He's angry that I think he did something wrong." Angeal's lips pressed together. They were always less visible than Genesis', being nearly the same color as the rest of his face, but it still looked odd when they vanished altogether. His knuckles were white.

"It isn't that any of us are innocent," he said quietly, "but what is our pride worth if our honor depends on calling whatever we do 'right,' instead of trying to find the right thing to do."

Sephiroth shook his head. His pride was worth a lot to him, but he was never sure if he understood what Angeal meant by honor. Genesis had once said uncharitably that neither did Angeal.

"He won't listen to me!" The words burst out between clenched teeth, slightly louder than the rest of the conversation had been, and Angeal's cup cracked sharply in his hand, and suddenly there was coffee spreading over the table and spattered over both their faces, and Angeal was holding a fistful of pottery shards that was beginning to ooze blood into the base of the mug, which had fallen onto the tabletop still containing a few milliliters of coffee.

Angeal's expression was blank-faced shock, and Sephiroth was torn between concern and the urge to burst out laughing, and as usual compromised by showing nothing at all.

He blinked hard, then leaned forward to pluck the stack of paper napkins from their holder in the middle of the table and begin dropping them in the spill before it could start to drain onto the floor or into their laps, except for the one he used to blot the coffee spray from his own face and chest. Angeal took his coffee with sugar. He was going to need to wash his hair tonight. "Put those down," he ordered Angeal, because two seconds was quite long enough to be dazed in the middle of the mess hall with people watching.

"Open your hand and stop holding onto the pieces," he repeated, when there was no immediate response.

Honestly, Angeal was a grown SOLDIER, he'd been First for years, this kind of accident usually only happened to new members of the Department. "Carefully. And then get to Medical so someone with tweezers can make sure you don't heal with any fragments in your hand to damage your tendons."

Tendon injuries were the worst; healing magic could fix almost anything else with no worse than a faint lingering ache—mended bones were often stronger than before—but even magic never entirely restored a tendon or ligament to its pristine state once it was cut or torn.

The oldest SOLDIERs these days were just turning forty, and while their visible aging was if anything behind the curve of the standard population—except the ones with baldness in their families, that was proceeding apace—there were complaints of deep aching, and a few who had been especially cavalier with their joints in the overconfidence of youth were on the brink of applying for retirement on account of chronic pain. Angeal could not be allowed to permanently damage his dominant hand by coping badly with frustration.

Angeal lowered his hand to the table before opening it. Tipped the mess of shards out and looked blankly at the ones remaining, either embedded in his flesh or small enough to be glued by the welling blood. Shook himself. "I," he said, and then his eyes focused again. "I, yes, you're right. I apologize."

"No need." Sephiroth gestured toward the exit with a balled-up napkin half-soaked in coffee. "Go on."

Soon after Angeal departed a cafeteria staffer hurried up to insist on cleaning the spill up properly, and since Sephiroth was neither invested in coffee mopping nor possessed of the proper equipment, he wordlessly moved his tray to an adjacent table. This transferred a small part of the coffee spill, but since these tables had to be wiped down regularly anyway, he doubted this did any harm.

He ate the rest of his lunch rapidly and without really tasting it, and left.