Chapter Text
Rain drummed on the pavement. The drops splashed against the tiny pools that gathered in the texture of the cement, throwing out minuscule sprays of water in all directions. Angeal’s eyelids twitched in reflexive response as he… tried to piece himself back together.
His face was pressed against the ground, he realized. He remembered… being furiously angry. Genesis had finally come clean about—about Cloud getting hurt all the time. By… Sephiroth.
There were two other people nearby. Angeal could hear cars all around, accompanied by the sounds of a bustling city. Midgar? That didn’t seem right. He’d confronted Sephiroth in Wutai. In the camp. And then…
Would you like them to live, my Cloud? To be insulted like this by these insects… you will have to want them to live very badly indeed.
Angeal felt a jolt of adrenaline and sucked in a breath, trying to bolt upright. His body didn’t quite respond, and the breath he took was too shallow. He managed to get up a few inches, only to fall back onto the wet, warm concrete.
Why was it warm? How long had he been lying there?
He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to remember how he’d gotten to wherever here was, and simultaneously started testing his muscles in groups beginning at his toes. The two people nearby were starting to feel conspicuously like Genesis and Cloud. He remembered… Cloud defending them from the Demon. He remembered… wings.
Wings. A black wing. Two pale gold wings, almost white, disproportionate compared to the tiny boy who bore them. He remembered reality tearing. And then he remembered… sensation. Emotion. Memory.
Cloud… loved them so much. Cloud was so scared that it was incredible he could even get up every day. Cloud hurt so deeply that Angeal couldn’t even comprehend it. Cloud… let the Demon tear him apart in order to protect them as they fell… between worlds?
Everything was so much worse than he’d thought just a few hours ago. Genesis had been right to keep the truth from him. He’d charged off to kill Sephiroth and now they were in this mess—whatever this mess was.
He managed to roll onto his stomach. “...ow.” His head hurt more than the rest of him did, and it felt like communication between his brain and body had been slowed or disrupted. Still, he got his arms under him and forced his body to cooperate.
Genesis was also lying sprawled across the wet pavement. They were tucked away in a little dead-end alley between two buildings, shielded from view by a dumpster. Angeal’s stomach dropped when he spotted Cloud lying just past Genesis.
“Cloud!”
His knee gave out the first time he tried to get up, but he persisted and managed to stumble-crawl over to his little charge. Genesis could wait. “Cloud!”
The six-year-old (almost seven now, though Angeal only knew because he’d accessed Cloud’s records to get his birth date) was unconscious, bleeding sluggishly from multiple wounds. His breath was alarmingly shallow, and his heartbeat fluttered unsteadily. When Angeal peeled his eyelid up, the mako glow in his eyes was dangerously dim.
“Okay,” he whispered, swallowing down his panic and guilt. “Okay. I’ve got you, Cloud.” He put the little boy in a recovery position and crawled over to Genesis. The nascent healer would know what to do, and if he didn’t wake then Angeal would take his Cure materia and do the best he could on his own.
“Gen. Gen, wake up. Cloud needs you.”
Luckily, Genesis groaned low in his throat and shifted. It took him a few tries, but he managed to rasp “...Geal?”
“Yeah. Get up, Cloud’s hurt and he needs you.”
Gen’s eyes snapped open. Like Angeal before, he tried to bolt upright but failed.
Angeal kept his head from smacking into the concrete again. “Slow,” he said. “We’re both roughed up too.”
“Auhh. Clearly,” Gen said, gathering himself and trying again. With Angeal’s help, he crawled over to Cloud. He leaned hard into Angeal and checked his bracer with shaking hands. The Cure was still safely there. He set to work.
Only then did Angeal have enough spare concern to look around for his swords. The Buster was back where he’d woken up. Gen’s own standard-issue sword was still attached to his hip, dragging clumsily along the ground at his side. Cloud’s knives were next to him.
“Cloud,” said Genesis, pulling him out of the recovery position and into his lap. “Wake up.” The kid was already mostly healed up, which was a testament to how experienced Genesis had gotten stitching Cloud up all those other times he’d been secretly tortured by their commanding officer.
Angeal set aside his fury. He didn’t deserve to be angry right now.
“Cloud. Cloud!”
“What’s wrong with him?” Angeal asked when Gen’s increasingly firm efforts to wake the kid failed.
“I… don’t know. He doesn’t have a concussion. But—” Gen frowned and touched his own temple gingerly. “We… didn’t exactly go through something normal just now, did we? Anything could be wrong with him and I might not even be able to tell.” He took a shuddering breath. “At least that bastard is dead.”
Angeal jolted. “What? You—how do you know? Do you know what happened?”
Genesis looked at him with more gravity than Angeal had ever seen from him before. “I felt him die. And haven’t you figured it out, Angeal? We’ve fallen between worlds. Until Cloud wakes up, we have no chance of getting home.”
The phrasing knocked the wind out of Angeal. He sat back and pressed his hands into his eyes. What were two sixteen-year-old, newly-minted Second Class SOLDIERs supposed to do in a different world? Their Little General wasn’t even conscious to give them insight, assuming he had some.
“Well… where are we, anyway?” He stood up, retrieving his family sword and returning it to his harness before helping Gen to his feet. Cloud looked so small in his arms. They limped out from behind the dumpster until they could peer cautiously out of the alley.
A whole city, totally foreign in appearance and population, greeted them.
“…the kind of place that likes identification, I think,” Genesis said dryly.
“Shit,” said Angeal. They retreated back into the shadows when the risk of being spotted grew. “No one I saw had swords, either. We’ll stick out like a SOLDIER in the Turk department.”
Genesis exhaled roughly. “Nothing for it,” he said, putting his back to the wall and sliding down to sit. “We’ll just have to move at night and hope Cloud wakes up before then.”
“Yeah,” said Angeal, taking up a defensive position beside Gen. He worked hard not to slump. His head hurt quite a bit.
Please, Cloud, he prayed. Wake up.