"Neither," she says, her tone just as measured as his. "It means you've got stuff to work on, though, so you owe it to yourself to not assume your perspective is infallible. And that's not always easy for a rational guy to do."
"Let's chase this rabbit. This isn't about stuff I need to work on, that's a tangent." He sets his elbows on his thighs, leaning forward in a position that is in fact actually pretty comfortable. "You have a man who until he went insane, was a kind and sensitive soul, who in spite of having a profession that revolves entirely around killing went out of his way to reduce casualties every time he was involved. He has not been brought onboard this ship to pay for any potential crimes. That man is dead, and for the hell he endured in life he deserves his rest."
Angeal fights to maintain neutrality, it's a struggle, this is a sensitive subject to him. "In his place is what was left when he threw away twenty five years of memories. Memory makes us who we are, how we feel, what we do. Strip it away and you have only razor intellect and base instinct to draw upon, and his ... our base instinct is that of monsters. The man who took his place has come a long way, but he is not who he was before. This one has slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and had no remorse. He's improving, I am told. Forming friendships, forging a life for himself." Even if it's just in pursuit of Cloud, but that's .. not the best start, but it's a start.
"In what reality would it be anything but a vicious cruelty to kill the man who committed the horrific acts but is learning to overcome them by putting those memories back, and force the gentle man who he used to be suffer for someone else's crimes?" For all that Angeal's sense of honor and justice might not always rest on the same axis as other people's, it was still very much a strong force in his life; the idea of doing any such thing ground against it like a glacier against bedrock.
Shaw doesn't interrupt, though as he talks, her expression shifts into one of faint bafflement.
"Okay, back up," she says slowly, once he's done. "Way back. You're calling the stuff you need to work on - the entire reason you're here - a tangent. You've gotta know how that sounds."
"It's the subject at hand now. It's what I came to talk to you about. I'm not here to debate whether or not Sephiroth should get his memories back, Angeal; I'm kinda interested in that by extension because your whole schtick doesn't exist in a vacuum, but it's so far from my biggest concern."
Shaw crosses her arms over her chest, drumming her fingers against her forearms.
"Zack called me after you guys fought. I know you guys disagreed about Sephiroth. But not being on the same page about that isn't what pissed him off the most, and it's definitely not what hurt him."
What hurt him comes out with just a smidge of awkwardness - talking about feelings, even other people's feelings, isn't easy or natural for Shaw. Zack had certainly been hurt, though, so she powers through.
"Wasn't that the point of why you sent me to talk to him at all?" He's good at reigning in anything like temper, but that's definitely a glower. "To be handed the recording of Nibelheim's destruction, told of the horrors my friends endured, the price the entire world paid?"
He hadn't thought it was his fault until then. How could it have been? He was dead. Except Genesis hadn't been, therefore he might not have been either, and maybe they could have done something. It's reasonable actions, he can't hold himself accountable if he didn't even know the full breadth of things that had gone wrong.. and why they went wrong. "What conclusions was I supposed to draw from finding out all that follows is years of suffering and misery and death that I might have been able to prevent? That I should focus entirely on myself, something that caused it to begin with or that I need to STOP doing that?"
"Nope. Making you feel guilty wasn't even a little bit my goal, and from the sounds of things, it wasn't his, either. I wanted you to have a real conversation with him about what happened because you died - because of how you died - and how he was affected by it. And from what I hear, when he tried to do that, you shut him down."
She pauses, briefly.
"You don't have to focus entirely on yourself; the people who do that have their own issues, and most of them are inmates, too. I'm glad that you care about your friends. But you're not going to be able to do right by them if you can't look critically at the big-ass mistakes you've made."
Angeal shakes his head, a small brief gesture. "Sounds like you had things misrepresented a bit. He went pretty much right for the recording, and everything that followed was about it."
How much of that is true, and how much is just how he's chosen to interpret it, is up for debate - but he seems certain of it. "I know the 'big-ass mistakes' I've made, Shaw. I've never been under any illusions otherwise. Never claimed to be innocent." And yet it would happen again if things unfolded the same way a second time, that's certain.
"Then please, by all means, be very clear about what you and he mean because telepathy isn't in the wheelhouse of any SOLDIER."
Well actually it is just not in his, that's a Sephiroth thing, mostly used for tormenting Cloud. As Shaw looks around at the scattered inmates and wardens, he sighs again, more about the circumstances of gym than anything else, shoving himself to his feet. "Don't think anyone's going to care if they over hear, but the garden is usually empty this time of day. You can give me your 'good authority' as we go."
Shaw doesn't plan to share Zack's full comment. It's a bit long to read out loud, and it was written with her as the intended audience, not Angeal; as far as she's concerned, it's intel for her to mine herself, not a message to be passed on. But there is one line in particular that she feels Angeal could stand to hear in full - so she finishes chopping her current potato, wipes her hands on a dishrag, and picks up her communicator.
"'It's just like before'," she recites from the screen. "'Him deciding to be a stupid fucking martyr without even bothering to ask how he can actually help'."
She lifts her gaze back to Angeal.
"I'm saying no matter how rational and well-intentioned you are, you're not infallible. You're not gonna be the best judge of how to fix your own mistakes, and considering your track record, you're sure as hell not in the best position to unilaterally decide how to help going forward. He's not pissed that you disagreed with him. He's pissed that if you care about his feelings and opinions at all - and I'm guessing you do - you sure as hell don't act like it."
The silence that falls is a whisker away from outright incredulous.
It forces him to review everything said that he could recall of his conversation with Zack, and by the fact that nothing like annoyance or resentment creeps in, he's not finding an explanation. "What," he says with slow carefulness of someone measuring their words and thoughts as they go, "Am I supposed to be asking for help on, exactly, when the subject is whether or not Sephiroth should regain his memories? How is it making me a martyr? How was I being a martyr before?"
Of course Zack's opinions and feelings matter, but how they applied to this, IF they applied to this ... seemed terribly off-base.
"Was that actually the point of that conversation?" Shaw asks, sliding her communicator away again. "When I said I wanted you to talk to Zack, did I say, 'Hey Angeal, go brainstorm together about how to handle Sephiroth's issues, because that's definitely top of my priority list'? Because the way I remember that conversation going, I wanted you guys to talk about what you did to Zack and how it affected him."
"Maybe Zack had a different idea about what was important to discuss, since it came up very quickly and was almost the entirety of our discussion. If I'm supposed to be drawing different conclusions other than it being about Nibelheim and Sephiroth, then I missed it, because Modeoheim didn't come up."
Well, it did, but by then it was more an accusation than a discussion. There's no disparagement in his tone, either for himself or Zack; he knows his limitations. And Sephiroth absolutely is important to him even if it wasn't other people's priorities. "And maybe that's on me, because I chose to leave when it became obvious the discussion was going nowhere beneficial, for either of us."
"Did he tell you he wanted you to use the intel he gives you to work on yourself, instead of just zeroing in on Sephiroth? And did you tell him that you think the key to your graduation is doing the opposite?"
Shaw doesn't think Zack lied to her during his sum-up, and she doesn't think Angeal is lying to her now: but it's becoming clearer and clearer that their perceptions of the conversation had differed massively.
This sets off another silent review. As much as he'd like to just dismiss things and focus on the issues at hand - the issue it was about - it was the least he could do to make sure he's as accurate as he could be in his retelling.
"No," he concludes gradually, still ruminating. "Though he did say it wasn't just about Sephiroth, but about how he relates to others and the world around him, and that 'this', whatever it was meant to be, is what he thinks caused Modeoheim." It wasn't the same, at all. At least not to him. The circumstances were vastly different, and this had nothing to do with his then-wish to die. "It's .. some of the same people, in that it involves Zack and I. Sephiroth hadn't been there, and it ... had been selfish of me. Focused on myself." His fear. His worry about what would happen, and how fast it would happen.
Sephiroth had been left behind by all of them except Zack, and apparently that hadn't been enough. "If part of my graduation is making up for what I'd done, then I can't repeat that pattern. It's what caused this in the first place."
She picks up her knife again, getting to work on another potato.
"Sounds to me like we need to focus on finding you a workable middle ground. Because from where I'm sitting, your problem isn't selfishness in the sense of only caring about yourself: it's that conviction that you have to carry all this on your own, and because you have to carry it on your own, you know best how to handle it. That's a different kind of self-focus."
Her cutting board is pretty full of diced potatoes by this point, so she slides them into the baking tray, then moves to continue chopping.
"When you decided you had to die, and you decided Zack had to be the one to take you out - why'd you do it the way you did? Was transforming just a foolproof way to force his hand, or did you think killing you in, uh, chimera form would be easier on him?"
This is going to take a couple different oven temperatures, so he starts on the low end. 350 would mean a longer bake, but also .. would it crisp, EVENTUALLY? Or would it need to be hotter? And then, onion time. The acrid eye-burning will just have to be tolerated. "Some things are mine alone to deal with. Others are not. I do understand the difference, it isn't .. one response fits all situations."
The pungent smell of onion marks any eyewatering going on as purely onion based; right now, this conversation, with someone as steady as Shaw, it's not enough to draw tears out of the man.
As for what he did.. "It seemed reasonable at the time."
The knife is waggled a little; his tone is sober for all that the answer seems frivolous at first blush. "Degradation ... eats away at your ability to make rational decisions, and you'll still be so certain what you're doing is the right thing to do even as you're ... mm, carving pieces of yourself out to feed to monsters. It all makes sense. Sounds right, feels right." The onion, chopped fine enough to pass, is dumped onto the potatos. He can get through this, it's just a discussion. "I know what I did then made perfect sense at the time. Zack would fight if he was forced to, even without ... that form. But he would hesitate to finish it; he still saw me as a human being, and I knew I was not. Becoming visibly what I already was would remove that hesitation."
She's just guessing, here: it's not a question that she asked Zack. But from what he has said, and from how she knows he sees Angeal, she's pretty damn sure that he never saw Angeal as less than human no matter what form he took, and that hesitated as much and as long as he possibly could.
"Do you have any mental framework for not being human that doesn't come with, uh-- a value judgement? Not human, but also not an evil monster?"
"It did, he killed me as I wanted him to." And now there's an edge of reproach creeping in, though it's not aimed at Shaw. Things went exactly the way he'd wanted them to, and right through giving into the numbing pull of death, it had seemed like the right choice, the only choice.
Egg. Baking powder. Guessing on amounts, but that was par the course for most of his recipes. "Like I said. At the time, it seemed sensible. I didn't say it seems sensible now."
Lesson learned: do it himself, coward. It's a value judgment he'd keep making, too. "...My file didn't go into what was happening to us enough if you're asking that question." Cheese. How much cheese is too much? "You have a pretty strong stomach, right? I can clarify."
"I've got a strong stomach, sure, but I think your file went into it plenty."
She pops a second half-dozen carton of eggs out of the fridge, just in case he wants to throw in a few more.
"My mental framework says that even if your decision-making takes a hit, as long as you have some ability to make choices, you have the ability to make better ones, even if it's harder for you than it is for other people."
"You'd be wrong." The sticky, potatoey mess is considered for a long moment before he avails himself on an egg or two further, mixing carefully. Consistency is fine, it goes back on the pan, thin enough to hopefully crunch up. "If it was as simple as 'make better choices', none of us would have had the problems we did. Not just Genesis, Sephiroth or myself, but every single SOLDIER, monster and person we infected. This wasn't the equivalent of getting drunk and making a few bad choices."
"Who says making better choices is simple?" Shaw asks, arching an eyebrow at him. "It's hard as hell, not to mention confusing and complicated. A lot of the time you don't know what the right or wrong choice was until you're looking back on it in retrospect, and sometimes not even then."
The knife is put down, as is the pan. It should go in the oven but having something in his hands right then would have been a terrible idea, had he access to his full strength. Limited only to human norms, it's .. safer, he can't bend steel as he is. "You're not listening. This isn't some debate about morality and choices and what makes a person a person. There's no cure. There's no way back once it starts. If it happened to you, you would degrade once infected with our cells, just as we degraded. You will kill, and you will want to. Your body will warp and mutate, and you will become a monster. You will hate, you will rage, you will find excuses to lash out, and take as many with you as you can. It is inevitable, and it is terminal."
Angeal points one eggy, potato-and-cheese shredded finger at Shaw, expression dark, voice a low growl. It's not a sound that should come out of a human throat, turning his voice rough and grating, but there's stranger onboard this ship. "Sooner or later, you will be an unthinking creature of destruction, until something puts you out of your misery or you disintegrate. I watched it .. again and again and again. It isn't something you willpower your way out of. We are monsters, we are an infectious disease, and sooner or later instinct and nature would win, just like it did with ALL of our victims. My mistake wasn't in making sure I died before I stopped being able to think or could spread my cells any further, it was that I involved Zack. I should have killed Genesis myself and then seen to my own death without dragging him into it."
And. And maybe Sephiroth too. He didn't know if he had what it took to bring down Sephiroth. Maybe he would have died trying.
Shaw is entirely stony in response: not in a hostile, angry, or resentful way, but in a way that aggressive tone and body language aren't actually touching her. She's fully engaged, completely present with him as she meets his gaze, but nothing about her indicates that she's going to back off just yet.
"That sucks," she says, matter-of-factly. "It's a horrifying thing to have hanging over your head. But you aren't there yet. You still have control here, you still had some control at home, and you owe it to yourself and the people around you to keep using it well, the way you were trying to before you decided to have Zack take you out. You also have a hell of a lot more resources and options here than you did back there. You got any idea what Zack's deal is? I've never talked to him about it, but I'd put a lot of money on it being related to doing something to fix this mess."
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weartearrust) wrote2024-07-10 05:31 am
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Angeal fights to maintain neutrality, it's a struggle, this is a sensitive subject to him. "In his place is what was left when he threw away twenty five years of memories. Memory makes us who we are, how we feel, what we do. Strip it away and you have only razor intellect and base instinct to draw upon, and his ... our base instinct is that of monsters. The man who took his place has come a long way, but he is not who he was before. This one has slaughtered thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and had no remorse. He's improving, I am told. Forming friendships, forging a life for himself." Even if it's just in pursuit of Cloud, but that's .. not the best start, but it's a start.
"In what reality would it be anything but a vicious cruelty to kill the man who committed the horrific acts but is learning to overcome them by putting those memories back, and force the gentle man who he used to be suffer for someone else's crimes?" For all that Angeal's sense of honor and justice might not always rest on the same axis as other people's, it was still very much a strong force in his life; the idea of doing any such thing ground against it like a glacier against bedrock.
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"Okay, back up," she says slowly, once he's done. "Way back. You're calling the stuff you need to work on - the entire reason you're here - a tangent. You've gotta know how that sounds."
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Shaw crosses her arms over her chest, drumming her fingers against her forearms.
"Zack called me after you guys fought. I know you guys disagreed about Sephiroth. But not being on the same page about that isn't what pissed him off the most, and it's definitely not what hurt him."
What hurt him comes out with just a smidge of awkwardness - talking about feelings, even other people's feelings, isn't easy or natural for Shaw. Zack had certainly been hurt, though, so she powers through.
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He hadn't thought it was his fault until then. How could it have been? He was dead. Except Genesis hadn't been, therefore he might not have been either, and maybe they could have done something. It's reasonable actions, he can't hold himself accountable if he didn't even know the full breadth of things that had gone wrong.. and why they went wrong. "What conclusions was I supposed to draw from finding out all that follows is years of suffering and misery and death that I might have been able to prevent? That I should focus entirely on myself, something that caused it to begin with or that I need to STOP doing that?"
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She pauses, briefly.
"You don't have to focus entirely on yourself; the people who do that have their own issues, and most of them are inmates, too. I'm glad that you care about your friends. But you're not going to be able to do right by them if you can't look critically at the big-ass mistakes you've made."
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How much of that is true, and how much is just how he's chosen to interpret it, is up for debate - but he seems certain of it. "I know the 'big-ass mistakes' I've made, Shaw. I've never been under any illusions otherwise. Never claimed to be innocent." And yet it would happen again if things unfolded the same way a second time, that's certain.
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She pulls her communicator out of her pocket, wiggling it.
"-- that that really wasn't what pissed him off. So why don't I read you a little bit of what he said, and we talk about that."
Her eyes cut around the gym - not crowded, but not entirely empty, either.
"Uh, not here, though. I'm thinking somewhere more private; your call on where."
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Well actually it is just not in his, that's a Sephiroth thing, mostly used for tormenting Cloud. As Shaw looks around at the scattered inmates and wardens, he sighs again, more about the circumstances of gym than anything else, shoving himself to his feet. "Don't think anyone's going to care if they over hear, but the garden is usually empty this time of day. You can give me your 'good authority' as we go."
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"'It's just like before'," she recites from the screen. "'Him deciding to be a stupid fucking martyr without even bothering to ask how he can actually help'."
She lifts her gaze back to Angeal.
"I'm saying no matter how rational and well-intentioned you are, you're not infallible. You're not gonna be the best judge of how to fix your own mistakes, and considering your track record, you're sure as hell not in the best position to unilaterally decide how to help going forward. He's not pissed that you disagreed with him. He's pissed that if you care about his feelings and opinions at all - and I'm guessing you do - you sure as hell don't act like it."
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It forces him to review everything said that he could recall of his conversation with Zack, and by the fact that nothing like annoyance or resentment creeps in, he's not finding an explanation. "What," he says with slow carefulness of someone measuring their words and thoughts as they go, "Am I supposed to be asking for help on, exactly, when the subject is whether or not Sephiroth should regain his memories? How is it making me a martyr? How was I being a martyr before?"
Of course Zack's opinions and feelings matter, but how they applied to this, IF they applied to this ... seemed terribly off-base.
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Well, it did, but by then it was more an accusation than a discussion. There's no disparagement in his tone, either for himself or Zack; he knows his limitations. And Sephiroth absolutely is important to him even if it wasn't other people's priorities. "And maybe that's on me, because I chose to leave when it became obvious the discussion was going nowhere beneficial, for either of us."
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Shaw doesn't think Zack lied to her during his sum-up, and she doesn't think Angeal is lying to her now: but it's becoming clearer and clearer that their perceptions of the conversation had differed massively.
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"No," he concludes gradually, still ruminating. "Though he did say it wasn't just about Sephiroth, but about how he relates to others and the world around him, and that 'this', whatever it was meant to be, is what he thinks caused Modeoheim." It wasn't the same, at all. At least not to him. The circumstances were vastly different, and this had nothing to do with his then-wish to die. "It's .. some of the same people, in that it involves Zack and I. Sephiroth hadn't been there, and it ... had been selfish of me. Focused on myself." His fear. His worry about what would happen, and how fast it would happen.
Sephiroth had been left behind by all of them except Zack, and apparently that hadn't been enough. "If part of my graduation is making up for what I'd done, then I can't repeat that pattern. It's what caused this in the first place."
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She picks up her knife again, getting to work on another potato.
"Sounds to me like we need to focus on finding you a workable middle ground. Because from where I'm sitting, your problem isn't selfishness in the sense of only caring about yourself: it's that conviction that you have to carry all this on your own, and because you have to carry it on your own, you know best how to handle it. That's a different kind of self-focus."
Her cutting board is pretty full of diced potatoes by this point, so she slides them into the baking tray, then moves to continue chopping.
"When you decided you had to die, and you decided Zack had to be the one to take you out - why'd you do it the way you did? Was transforming just a foolproof way to force his hand, or did you think killing you in, uh, chimera form would be easier on him?"
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The pungent smell of onion marks any eyewatering going on as purely onion based; right now, this conversation, with someone as steady as Shaw, it's not enough to draw tears out of the man.
As for what he did.. "It seemed reasonable at the time."
The knife is waggled a little; his tone is sober for all that the answer seems frivolous at first blush. "Degradation ... eats away at your ability to make rational decisions, and you'll still be so certain what you're doing is the right thing to do even as you're ... mm, carving pieces of yourself out to feed to monsters. It all makes sense. Sounds right, feels right." The onion, chopped fine enough to pass, is dumped onto the potatos. He can get through this, it's just a discussion. "I know what I did then made perfect sense at the time. Zack would fight if he was forced to, even without ... that form. But he would hesitate to finish it; he still saw me as a human being, and I knew I was not. Becoming visibly what I already was would remove that hesitation."
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She's just guessing, here: it's not a question that she asked Zack. But from what he has said, and from how she knows he sees Angeal, she's pretty damn sure that he never saw Angeal as less than human no matter what form he took, and that hesitated as much and as long as he possibly could.
"Do you have any mental framework for not being human that doesn't come with, uh-- a value judgement? Not human, but also not an evil monster?"
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Egg. Baking powder. Guessing on amounts, but that was par the course for most of his recipes. "Like I said. At the time, it seemed sensible. I didn't say it seems sensible now."
Lesson learned: do it himself, coward. It's a value judgment he'd keep making, too. "...My file didn't go into what was happening to us enough if you're asking that question." Cheese. How much cheese is too much? "You have a pretty strong stomach, right? I can clarify."
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She pops a second half-dozen carton of eggs out of the fridge, just in case he wants to throw in a few more.
"My mental framework says that even if your decision-making takes a hit, as long as you have some ability to make choices, you have the ability to make better ones, even if it's harder for you than it is for other people."
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Angeal points one eggy, potato-and-cheese shredded finger at Shaw, expression dark, voice a low growl. It's not a sound that should come out of a human throat, turning his voice rough and grating, but there's stranger onboard this ship. "Sooner or later, you will be an unthinking creature of destruction, until something puts you out of your misery or you disintegrate. I watched it .. again and again and again. It isn't something you willpower your way out of. We are monsters, we are an infectious disease, and sooner or later instinct and nature would win, just like it did with ALL of our victims. My mistake wasn't in making sure I died before I stopped being able to think or could spread my cells any further, it was that I involved Zack. I should have killed Genesis myself and then seen to my own death without dragging him into it."
And. And maybe Sephiroth too. He didn't know if he had what it took to bring down Sephiroth. Maybe he would have died trying.
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"That sucks," she says, matter-of-factly. "It's a horrifying thing to have hanging over your head. But you aren't there yet. You still have control here, you still had some control at home, and you owe it to yourself and the people around you to keep using it well, the way you were trying to before you decided to have Zack take you out. You also have a hell of a lot more resources and options here than you did back there. You got any idea what Zack's deal is? I've never talked to him about it, but I'd put a lot of money on it being related to doing something to fix this mess."
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