you to whom life would taste so bitter

A/N: Someone on tumblr wanted Angeal POV and I was like, oh right, not every fic requires its own plot.

It was selfish, to demand this of Zack.

He'd been selfish all this time, though. Ever since Genesis had come up to him in the jungle of Wutai and said wait, I had a good reason to leave, trust me, and then delivered the punch to the solar plexus that had set every cell in his body on fire and left him lying there being told that everything he had ever known or dreamed or trusted in was a lie.

That he was a lie. That there had never been such a person as Angeal Hewley.

That Genesis was all he had ever truly had, they had been made as a set, and he should come with him and bring down Shinra and…honestly if the rest of Genesis' plans at the time had made any sense whatsoever Angeal might have gone with him then. He almost wished he had anyway. Maybe he could have reined Gen in, kept him from falling so far, so fast.

But more likely Angeal would have been corrupted beyond recognition himself, by now, because what he'd already suspected from the first, when he'd spread his absurd, asymmetric wings for the first time and fled into the night, had been borne out since by the evidence.

Genesis had already been too far gone to rein in, by then. Probably too far gone even to save. There was no way that their SOLDIERs had volunteered for what Genesis had done to them. No one would volunteer for that.

Hollander called it a scientific process and liked to inject vials of live cells to make himself seem more in control of the experiment, but Angeal had experimented himself, let a griffin lap his blood after it slashed him and watched it collapse and convulse until a death-mask of himself rose on its chest and it rose up a loyal pet.

He could feel it and all the copies Hollander had made, all the time, pressing at the edges of his mind, little echoes of himself, eager to please. It was no wonder Genesis had only grown more and more mad since he'd committed his first great crime, with hundreds of lesser selves whispering back his every thought.

Angeal wasn't dying. He wasn't stable, not after what Genesis had done, not like Sephiroth, but he wasn't dying either. He could go on like this indefinitely—alone, disgusting, unwilling to do anything to protect the world when he couldn't trust himself to be making rational decisions, let alone honorable ones. He could carry on like this until he drifted over the edge and began to forget what right and wrong were.

And he knew what his breaking point would be, too. The loyalty of his monsters disgusted him—it was artificial, forced, took away what little free will monsters had to begin with. But he had always been weak to affection. That was why he had refused for so long to believe Genesis could have fallen so far, wasn't it? Because it was his best friend?

It would be easier if he were dying. Then he could just…wait for the end. He was almost sure he could hold out, could hold fast to his pride even if every dream he'd ever had was ash, if he knew it was all coming to an end soon enough. It was time that would break him.

Sometimes Angeal looked at Zack and thought he's so much like me, and ever since Genesis had revealed the monster in him something curled in his chest when he thought it, alongside the affection and pride and the perpetual hilarity at the ridiculous kid who had been forced to grow up so much over the last several months, since Angeal abandoned him. Something curled in his chest that wanted to take that truth and make it more so.

Something that wanted nothing but to see the whole world made over into itself.

This had to have been what Genesis felt when he looked at his men and thought mine, and remade them until that was all they were. What had driven him to break the barriers protecting Angeal from his own biology. This possessiveness. This greed.

Angeal couldn't even trust himself to tell that grasping hunger from the twist of loneliness, anymore. And these months had been the most alone he had ever been. He'd never realized how much he needed other people until his certainties dissolved from under him. Until his own body had become an enemy, until his mother was gone and her memory poisoned, his closest friend had become an abomination, and everyone else he had ever cared for was dead at Genesis' hands, or stared at him across a naked blade and saw the monster.

He'd done this to himself. This was his fault. It was his fault his mother was dead, it was his fault Genesis had slaughtered their hometown while Angeal sulked the jungle and never guessed until much too late, and even afterward he'd lacked the will to take any kind of action—any vengeance, any measures to protect other innocent people from his best friend's rampages other than belated empty threats.

What right did a monster have to cling to his honor, anyway? To pretend he was any better just because he hadn't broken down to the same extent yet? How could he ever look his oldest friend in the face, the man who understood all his jokes, the boy who'd ducked his fancy tutors to run in the orchards with him and never cared that he was judged for his choice of friends; how could he look at what Genesis had become and cut him down like an animal, when he might turn around afterward and be just as bad?

But that wasn't an excuse. This was his responsibility. This was his fault.

The most important thing was that he not make it any worse.

Zack was fighting Genesis right now. If it started to go badly, Angeal could step in. That would be a reason he could believe in, a cause to lift his sword that wouldn't sour on his tongue and make his hands go weak—protecting Zack was reason enough to face Genesis down.

But Genesis was dying, and Zack was strong. He thought he really might not be needed. Zack was doing Angeal's duty for him. Zack was every day growing out of being a good kid and into a good man.

If Angeal had ever been that, he didn't think he could claim he was anymore.

A good man would have killed his heart as much as necessary to stop Genesis before so many people suffered for his cowardice. A good man wouldn't be leaving that fight to a boy even now.

A good man would have the courage to just fall on his sword somewhere monsters wouldn't get the chance to eat the corpse.

And maybe death was just another escape, but it was also a duty. The only one he trusted himself to perform anymore—and really, he didn't even trust himself with that. Genesis had started to break down that day he took a wound that refused to fully heal, when Angeal's sword had shattered as he tried to hold his friends back—what if the approach of death was what it took to break his will?

What if he flew off to a deserted patch of island to die, and what came back was a hungry shell of a thing wearing his face, that would do whatever it took to make sure the companions he chose for himself would never ever leave him?

No. He couldn't even trust himself to die properly.

All he had done since his dreams died was run. Run and try to hold fast to the scraps of his honor, even though he didn't know what to believe anymore, when the woman who'd taught him to have faith in himself had lied with every breath, when the father he'd aspired to emulate might never have existed, when the friend he'd always supported had gone where he refused to follow, and the company he'd entrusted with his honor was a factory of horrors that saw him as no more than a faulty product.

What had he ever accomplished, in life? What had any of his efforts been worth? He'd fought in Wutai, protected the lives of his men, but most of those had since been lost to other deaths or Genesis' greed, and he had lost his naïve faith that the lives and liberty he'd taken in the war had really been necessary sacrifices, to protect the peace for future generations and help him deserve his SOLDIER strength.

It was hard to believe he'd ever been the boy who thought his commanding officers knew everything, and all took their honor as seriously as he did, and cared about his success. Maybe the general they'd had when he first shipped out really had been as great as Angeal remembered him, but the man was long dead, and…

It hadn't been much more than ten years since he'd been just like Zack. Albeit slightly less obstreperous, heh, maybe Zack reminded him a little of Gen, too. But that thought didn't make him worry the way it maybe should have, because the Genesis fighting and dying downstairs wasn't who he used to be, but Angeal could trace the cracks in his old friend's heart to the cracks their shared monstrosity had made in his mind easily enough.

Angeal had always been the less fragile of the two of them; that was probably the only reason he hadn't gone mad just as quickly. And Zack was less fragile still. Zack was…teaching Zack was the only thing he'd ever done he was still sure he could be proud of.

The one good thing. The one person who had come to him after he ran away from a life that no longer felt like his and put aside his weapon and said why and please and those wings don't make you a monster and stop it with the bad jokes.

Zack's faith in him had broken not at rejection but at the fall of Banora, when he found Angeal beside his mother where she'd fallen, her cup still half-full of the infusion of foxglove that had stopped her heart. He hadn't fought back, then, because Zack had been wrong but still right in all the ways that counted, and the fist against his jaw had barely delivered a fraction of the punishment he knew he deserved for failing her, for being angry with her even as her corpse still cooled.

Hadn't been pain enough to even feel, compared to what it felt to know how much better off she would have been if he had never existed. To know that the student he'd seen as the younger brother he'd always wanted, believed him the kind of monster who wouldn't balk at senseless matricide.

He would have to fight, this time, because Zack was an honorable man and he would hold back if his opponent let him, would have mercy if Angeal allowed it. I have no reason left to live wasn't reason enough for him.

Zack was capable of believing him no more than a monster. Angeal would play the monster to the hilt, whatever it took. To make his old pupil live up to their promise, and protect the world from the suffering Angeal might bring.

This was an unfair burden to place on Zack, and the burden he hoped to leave if he got a chance for dying words was worse—to ask a young man just growing into himself to shoulder the memory of the man Angeal had tried to be, the weight of his sword and his dreams and his honor. It was cruel, and it was selfish, and Angeal would do it anyway.

Just so long as it meant he could be absolutely certain of being put out of everyone's misery.

So long as it meant he didn't have to die alone.