Final Fantasy - All Series Fan Fiction ❯ Stormbringers ❯ Stormbringers ( Chapter 1 )

[ T - Teen: Not suitable for readers under 13 ]

Title: Stormbringers
Author: GuiltyRed
Rating: PG
Warnings: angst
Word count: 604
Summary: Monster or angel? Who was the fool who suggested they weren't one and the same?
Prompt: Angeal/Genesis: Wing kink - "O miserable man, what a deformed monster has sin made you."
A/N: Title is a nod to Michael Moorcock and the Eternal Champion. (Now THAT would be an interesting crossover…)



The wind catches us, throws us higher into the storm, though the storm we bring in our hearts outmatches the cruelest wind.

“Leave me be!” he cries, hurling bolts of energy to knock me from my path.

I know him too well, and dodge, flying closer until I can almost touch him. “Geni, let me help.”

“There is no help.” He spits the words, his tone calling me the fool for trying. “We are monsters, Angi, the boys we were long dead.” Genesis drags in a deep breath, nostrils flaring with effort: pain etches everything. “It's only a matter of time before we are completely lost.”

Now, in this moment, I strike, colliding with him chest to chest and wrapping my arms around him. My grip fouls his wing, and he flails against the wind, fury lighting his eyes brighter than the mako.

Together we begin to fall, like coupling hawks locked talon to talon, spiraling through the tempest. I hold him until he ceases to struggle, then gently pull us both out of the dive and up into the concealing clouds.

“Why, Angi?” he whispers in a voice grey with grief. “Why not plunge us into the rocks?”

“Two reasons,” I reply, brushing his hair away from his eyes. “One, I doubt it would be enough to kill either of us now. And two, I still have hope.”

Genesis grabs my hand and squeezes not too kindly. “But you just said it yourself, we are monsters that cannot die. What hope can you still hold in that fool's heart of yours?”

I accept his punishing grip and release my hold around his back. Gently I lift my free hand and caress the leading edge of his wing. “Angels are monstrous too, in their own right,” I whisper, the image forming in my thoughts as I spoke. “Guardians against the most terrible foes, and avengers when there is nothing left to guard. Perhaps my hope is that we are the same as angels, Geni, and not what you most fear.”

Genesis ponders this, his hand slowly releasing mine as his eyes become shadowed.

Before he can sink into a new melancholy, I pull him closer and press my lips to his. Frost blooms into droplets at my touch, though the air around us is beginning to sparkle with ice. My fingers slide along the length of his seabird's wing as I try to communicate my complete acceptance of him through our kiss.

Then a new sensation startles me: his hand on my upper wing, mirroring my hand on his. His firm touch explores the shape and solidness of it, mapping it with his fingertips as he caresses from shoulder to wingtip, spreading the flight feathers gently at the end. It feels unsettlingly pleasant, like having a hand massage, and I feel myself smiling.

Our eyes meet and there is something in his besides pain. Tenderness? A memory of tenderness? Either way it is there and it is sweet, something I'd been missing for far too long. I cling to him and he to me, wings and magic keeping us aloft with no effort now. We kiss the way we first kissed: soft and tentative and hopeful.

In this moment, we are neither men nor monsters. We are simply as we are: maimed angels, guardians of a sacred trust that may yet prove too great a task, yet for which we are both willing to die. In this moment, suspended between sky and ground, we might steal a breath or two before carrying on with that task, and with each breath, a loving kiss goodbye.