joudama (stopthatgirl7) wrote in no_true_pair, @ 2009-01-11 18:19:00 |
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Current mood: | accomplished |
Current music: | 信 - 傷城 [Shang Cheng] City Of Sorrow |
A Hope in Hell (pt 1) [Final Fantasy 7/The King and the Clown: Angeal & Gong-gil]
Title: A Hope in Hell
Author: joudama
Fandom: FF7/The King and the Clown
Status: 1/3 (Broken up so I could have at least half of it out in time; the second half will come in a week or so, because the 'epilogue' third part is for a prompt the last week.)
Rating: worksafe, but PG to R just for themes. There are hints of m/m from The King and the Clown.
Word count: 7000+
Prompt: Angeal and Gong-gil with the title, "A Hope in Hell"
A\N: If you've never seen The King and the Clown...oh, god, I'm so sorry because you're missing out on an amazing movie. You don't need to have seen the movie for this--this takes place after the movie and is from Angeal's point of view, and he has no idea what happened during it--but oh, do see the movie. It's my favorite movie, no contest.
For those of you who haven't seen this (you know, all but me and maybe two other people), here, pictures!
Going from right to left:
Gong-gil, the street-performer the king becomes obsessed with (my friend and I spent of the movie going, "Poor Gong-gil! DDDD:")
The king, Yeonsan-gun (By the second half of the movie, "Poor Gong-gil! DDDD:" was usually preceded or followed by "...the king is fucking insane.")
Jang-saeng, Gong-gil's street-performance partner. Just as Gong-gil is prettier than you will ever be (see icon), Jang-Saeng is more badass than you will ever be. He's also voiced by Sephiroth's voice actor in the Japanese dub, and that alone shows his badassness. (Gong-gil is done by Ishida Akira, so there, now you have the same voices for them as I did, since I watched the dub.)
Not pictured is Jang Nok-su, the king's main consort. I didn't have a decent picture with all four of them, so. :/
And a close-up of Gong-gil by himself:
And lastly, here is the music video for the movie's theme song, In yeon, and this is pretty much the entire movie condensed into four-plus minutes; I'm not even kidding. The only thing it left out which I would consider important was one arrow-filled instance of the king's BATSHIT BONKERS. (And if the embedding is screwy, here's a link.)
This is slightly spoiler, since it takes place after the end of the movie. The movie...does not have a happy ending, but that's practically a given, seeing as its an Asian period drama, and those never end well. I've moved the movie from Korea to Wutai, specifically Daerimmun (「大林門」 a city I've used a lot in my Wutai war fic) in Chochung (the 'Korea' area of Wutai--「朝中」), and changed the king to a Wutai warlord who styled himself a king, and the hordes of attacking soldiers were instead ShinRa troops. After that? It's all the same, aside from me filling in some details from things that weren't in the regular movie but were things that were done by the historical King Yeonsan-gun (yes, he was a real person, and considered the worst king Korea had ever had), and using the "director's cut" edition that I have, which had extra scenes.
This prompt combo was practically a gift, yo. Which is why it's so long in total; sorry 'bout that. ^^;; (and for the length of these notes.)
--
When the city of Daerimmun fell, and with it the Chochung province, it was far simpler than they expected. The 'king' of Chochung was, from all accounts, a despotic madman. It had been the Wutai themselves, retainers to the king, who had in desperation come to the ShinRa camps, and offered information in exchange for toppling the "Mad King of Chochung."
If the stories Angeal heard from them were true--advisers shot with arrows, his father's concubines stabbed to death--he could understand why they had come.
Angeal had been left in charge of "securing" Daerimmun as Genesis swept northeast for Taishang and Sephiroth south towards Yamato. That included the more unpleasant aspect of things--overseeing the clearing of the bodies from the castle, interrogating the people who had been swept up and detained, setting the castle up as a base and organizing operations; all of the tedious things that wore down at you because they never seemed to end.
It was the bodies that got to Angeal. There had been a lot, and that included the women and children in the palace. There were too many bodies, and decisions had to be made about what to do with them, and quickly.
The most expedient thing would be to burn them, but he hated the smell of burning flesh. They didn't quite have the manpower to spend right then to bury all of them, not with the work that went into securing the whole damned city, and that meant they would have to force Wutai into the work, and that never worked out well.
Once a decision had been made, and black smoke rose into the air from the courtyard, blocking out the sun, Angeal sat down tiredly in what had once been the Mad King's chambers but were now Angeal's quarters, and wondered just what it was he was doing here.
--
A number of people had been captured when the castle fell; most of them were locked up in the castle's jail. Most of them would have to sit there until Wutai was secured, and only the gods knew how long that would be. Some...some would not be detained long, not if they weren't cooperative in the right way.
A leader who swore loyalty to ShinRa would retain their power. One who did not was one that the people could rally around and cause problems.
It had had to be handled quietly, of course; the killing of a king--even a king only in his own mind--was a dangerous thing, and Angeal had to figure out who else it was of the upper echelons who needed to be neutralized. The King had been doomed; part of the condition reached with the advisers was that the king be removed. Perhaps they were thinking that meant exile, but as far as ShinRa was concerned, it meant death couched as a casualty of the invasion, and it mattered not at all if the king had still been alive when the castle fell--he hadn't lived long past its falling, after all. And now, it was a matter of finding out how many people had to "die during the battle for the castle" to make sure the fiction was kept.
Which is why he was in the glorified dungeons now. He'd been here all day and all of the day before, and finally was almost done--done at least with trying to figure out from the ones on the list his subordinate had given him of who would need further evaluation. There were only two people left and then finally he would be done.
"Sir!" the guard said when he went into the last section of the make-shift cells. They'd had to modify the prison of the castle to secure it and expand it, and the place showed the strain of the effort.
"At ease, trooper," Angeal said, smiling faintly to put the man at ease. "I'm looking now for a...a Jang, I believe." He looked around and saw a woman sitting haughtily in one cell, as if sitting on a throne and not in a dirty cell. The other makeshift cell held another woman alone, and the fact that both sat in cells alone warranted a double take.
The guard had apparently taken the 'at ease' to heart and gave Angeal a smirk that he didn't like at all. "The king's boy-toy, that one," he said, and gestured over to one cell with his thumb when he saw Angeal looking in. Angeal's eyes popped open despite himself; that was a man? Angeal was no stranger to pretty men--he'd known Genesis his entire life, and while no one would ever say it to Sephiroth's face, Sephiroth was pretty--this was something else. The man in the cell was striking, in the kind of way that made you doubletake just because it was hard to really believe you were seeing someone that beautiful. On second glance, it was more obvious he was a man--the width of his shoulders, his hands--but it just made him seem more incongruous and ironically enough made him seem more feminine and fragile, especially with the way he tried to make himself look smaller, turning his head away and inadvertently showing off the long, paleness of his neck.
He frowned suddenly. The man--was that Jang?--didn't look like he was in good shape at all. He was paler than most Wutai, and it didn't seem to be just a result of avoiding the sun. He looked washed out, bled out, almost. "Is he all right? His color looks...what happened to his wrists?" he said, frowning more as he stared at the man's wrists. The man was clutching his robes protectively, and one of his wrists were bandaged, and Angeal had a sick kind of understanding about why the man had looked bled out.
"Looks like he slit them or something. You know these damned wonks, can't take losing."
Usually, Angeal enjoyed the fact that his men felt relaxed enough around him to talk like he was a regular grunt like them.
...Usually.
Angeal ignored the idiot and focused on the man in the cell. "Hey, are you OK?" he said, talking directly to him.
"Oh, don't bother," the guard said, rolling his eyes. "He hasn't said a word, not even in that Wutai chocobo-gibber, this whole time."
"Has a medic looked at him?" Angeal said, giving the idiot playing at a guard a hard look because he had his limits, and the man squirmed slightly.
"I don't know, sir," he said, snapping more to strict attention.
"Oh, just let him die!" a sharp female voice said in accented Visgradian. She spat something out angrily in Wutai, obviously directed at the man, who flinched and seemed to curl in on himself.
"Oy, shut up, bi--you!" the guard said, snarling at the woman after a nervous look at Angeal.
"Watch out for that one," the woman said, ignoring the guard and giving Angeal a conspiratorial look. "He's nothing but a power hungry little prostitute. He's got ways, you see. No man you can't seduce, naa, Gong-gil!"
The man said nothing, just flinched again and bowed his head and let his hair fall in a dark curtain, blocking his face.
Angeal looked over at the woman. "Who is she?"
The woman raised her chin and sneered, haughty and imperial even in a dank holding cell. "I am Jang Nok-su," she said. "Consort to the King. Who are you?"
Angeal raised an eyebrow. "Angeal Hewley, commander of the ShinRa division in Chochung," he said flatly, and Nok-su looked taken aback. "And if you're 'Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King,' you must be the Jang I'm supposed to interrogate. Glad to know you speak Standard, because it means I won't need the interpreter. Trooper," he said suddenly, calling for the guard, "I want the both of them brought to me for questioning tomorrow. I also want the people in cells 5, 8 and 2," he finished. He had been here all day and was ready to leave and at least see the sun for a few minutes. He felt tired, and wondered if he ought to just delegate this to someone else. But no...this was too important--or rather, too secretive--to be allowed to anyone else. And if he was going to be relegating these people to death for ShinRa's cause...well, he figured he owed it to them to look them in the eye before he passed judgment.
He was tired of this.
He headed out. On his way, he looked back over his shoulder. In his cell, the man--Gong-gil, was it?--had huddled against a wall, hugging himself even tighter. He was an unhealthy pale, especially in contrast with the dark walls and his dark hair. His loose sleeves had slipped down, showing his pale and bandaged wrists, so fragile that it seemed they would snap. Never in his life had he ever seen anyone who looked so alone or so broken, and Angeal felt like he had been punched in the stomach.
--
When the SOLDIER left, Nok-su instantly was on her feet and at the front of her cell. She sneered over at where she knew Gong-gil was, even though he huddled inside and hid himself.
She laughed, and it was an ugly thing. "Still twisting men around your little finger, eh, Gong-gil? You're amazing, not even saying a word and still getting that SOLDIER all but begging at your feet. Pretty, pretty Gong-gil, prettier than any woman...you'll always land on your feet. Or should I say on your back?"
There was only silence from Gong-gil's cell, and Nok-su just laughed until the guard came over.
--
It had been a long day, and it was only two-thirty.
Angeal had been at this all day, interrogating members of the king's court all morning. He'd missed lunch as well, and that never put him in a good mood. There were still several people to talk to, but it was down to only two at this point. The last two, and once he was done with them, he was going to get some dinner--it would be too late for lunch, and he'd be damned if he had to skip two meals in a row, not with what all the mako did to his system.
"Bring in the next one," he said, rubbing his temples as he gave the order. His interpreter, a young trooper named Park who'd been born in Midgar but whose parents were from Chochung, looked about as tired as he did, but had held up pretty well. Angeal would be lying if he said he hadn't had some small, niggling doubt at first about Park because he was Chochung Wutai, but he'd been proven wrong and was glad for it.
The door opened a minute later, well after Angeal had regained his composure, and one of the guards brought in a woman who looked familiar. It took Angeal a moment to place her, but as soon as the guard announced who she was--Jang Nok-su--he recalled her instantly.
"Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King," Angeal said, one eyebrow quirking up. "Please, have a seat," he said, indicating the chair across from his desk.
Her head went up. "I'll stand," she said, before the translator could say anything.
"If you want," Angeal said with a shrug. "But we're going to be here for a while, and I'd suggest you take a seat."
She sniffed once, loudly, and remained standing.
"Since you speak Standard, would you prefer to be questioned in it or through an interpreter in Chochungese?"
She sniffed again then said, "I can speak your language just fine."
"Very well, then. Park," Angeal said, looking over at his interpreter, "If you'd like to take a break, go ahead. You've been on your feet all day. I'll call you if I need you."
"...Thank you, sir," Park said, nodding once, sharply. "Sir!"
"You're dismissed," he said, and Park saluted him sharply, perfect parade style, before leaving.
Nok-su hissed something at him under her breath, and Park flinched slightly but walked out without otherwise reacting.
Angeal would be lying if he said he had completely trusted Park at first; he'd also be lying if he said Park hadn't been put through Hel's gauntlet by both sides at times.
--
It had been too long of a day, and it wasn't even four o'clock.
Interrogating 'Jang Nok-su, Consort to the King' had been a nightmare. The woman was fluent in Visgradian, and Angeal'd been thankful at first, until he'd realized she was fluent enough to have a tongue like a viper and the personality of one to boot. He was pretty sure she was going to be in the list of the 'casualties of the sacking of the castle,' just because she knew too much. She had skirted around it, of course, but she seemed to have known that the king had been alive when they took they castle, and that alone was enough.
Still, it left a bad taste in his mouth, that despite the fact that by the end, the woman had seemed to be taunting him.
Oh, yes, I saw you yesterday, looking so intently at Gong-gil. Pretty as any woman, who's to say he isn't one? He wouldn't prove he had anything between his legs when I tried to call his bluff. Pretty, pretty Gong-gil, see him once and can't take your eyes away, eh? Ha! But still, I can't say I fault him. He's quite good at finding someone bigger and stronger to protect him and feed his ambition. It's just amazing, really. So here, some friendly advice: be careful of that one. Even if playing with boys isn't your taste, he'll find a way. How else can you explain how the king made him an adviser and gave him a title? So I wonder, eh, what'll you'll make him into? Maybe if he gets his tongue back, he can be your little interpreter. He'll roll over and betray his own kind just as well as that one you have now. And I'm sure you'd much more enjoy Gong-gil's way of...rolling over.
The way she had laughed had grated at him, his eye had been twitching by the end, and never had he been so glad an interrogation was fucking over.
And there was still one more to go--the infamous Gong-gil.
Angeal sat rubbing his temples for a few minutes. He was very, very tempted to say fuck it and do this one tomorrow--or at least after he'd had something to eat. But he was swamped tomorrow as well; he needed to get this all done today. Somehow. It was only four o'clock; he could soldier on through this last one and then call it a day--or at least take a break for dinner and spend the rest of his evening doing paperwork or something brainless.
He made a quick call to Lt. Park and ate some of the emergency rations he'd stuffed in the desk while he waited for Park and the guard bringing Gong-gil, and tiredly wished that he was anywhere but here--even fighting in the middle of the giant bog they called the Great Forest during the rainy season would beat this.
The guard brought Gong-gil in, and nervousness was practically radiating off the man as he came in, his eyes lowered and his shoulders hunched in, as if he was trying to make himself seem smaller than he was. His steps were hesitant, and he seemed completely lost as the guard more or less manhandled him into the chair across from Angeal's desk.
Angeal had wondered some if it had just been the terrible lighting in the glorified dungeon that had made him mistake Gong-gil for a woman at first, but no. Seeing him in the relatively good light of his 'office'...Gong-gil looked even more like a woman than he'd thought. So much so that Angeal shook his head trying to clear the cognitive dissonance resulting from knowing that Gong-gil was actually a man. It wasn't just his face, Angeal realized suddenly--Gong-gil carried himself very much like a Wutai woman did, down even to the prim way he sat looking down at his hands. His posture, his gestures, everything, down to the fucking ribbon in his hair, it all coded as female, and it was beginning to give Angeal a headache because his brain was all but twitching at the truth versus what his eyes were trying to tell him.
The man seemed even more feminine than Jang Nok-su had been, not that that was hard. Mind, she'd played coy at the beginning--the king's consort knew she was an attractive woman, as well as how to use it, but Angeal was tired, cranky, hungry, had seen it all before, had zero interest in her and even if he had was above all else professional. When it had become obvious Angeal wasn't even looking, much less taking the bait, she had dropped the act and started taunting him about Gong-gil.
And maybe she had a point, because, truth be told, in the full light of the office in the middle of the day...Gong-gil was a lot more beautiful than Angeal had initially thought. And a lot more pale, he thought with a faint frown--a very sickly, unhealthy pale, and the bags underneath the guy's eyes were practically big enough to carry his Buster sword in.
...and by the gods, he really needed to stop trying to use metaphors, because Genesis would have thrown something at him for something that dumb.
"What's your name?" he asked. He already knew the guy's name, but niceties were important--it was a way of breaking the ice and of seeing how easily or difficult this was going to go.
It seemed it was going to be a difficult one: Gong-gil said nothing, just stared at his hands. But what bothered Angeal was that it wasn't the sullen, defiant silence he normal got with that question--this was an entirely different animal. It was the kind of silence that made him want to make the guy a cup of tea or something and throw Genesis at him with a "You...talk to him or...something, I don't know. I suck at this 'talking' crap. So you do...something" and wave his hands in the air or something to indicate how out of his depth he was.
He sincerely hoped the silence was just because the man didn't understand him. He wasn't so dense as to honestly think that was it, but still, a guy could hope. "Do you speak Visgradian?" Angeal tried. Gong-gil didn't react at all, and so Angeal asked Park to translate for him, and asked his first question again: "What is your name?"
"Dangshin-ui ireum-eun mu-eot-imnika?" Park said softly, frowning slightly at Gong-gil, and oh, that wasn't a good sign.
There was no answer. Angeal knew for certain the man could hear--he'd watched the man just yesterday flinch at whatever it was that Jang woman had said to him--but you'd never know it now.
"OK, so, you're not a talker," Angeal said after a very, very long silence had stretched out well past the point of being comfortable. "I just need to ask you a few questions. I'm trying to figure out who should or shouldn't be in those cells. I doubt you want to be in there, that place isn't fit for man nor beast," he said, and apparently a) Gong-gil could understand Visgradian Standard and b) Angeal had said something very wrong. Gong-gil flinched, noticeably flinched, and seemed to shrink in on himself even more. He looked like Angeal had just hit him or something, and he was too used to getting blows.
Now Angeal felt kind of like a heel, and had no idea why.
"Well, I see you speak Visgradian. Can you at least nod or something? Please? So I don't feel like I'm talking to my materia for company?"
Gong-gil gave a tiny, hesitant nod before he hunched his shoulders in more. By the gods, Angeal wondered, what happened to this guy?
Completely unbidden, an image of Gong-gil's bandaged wrists floated up in Angeal's mind, and he realized whatever this was, it ran deep, deeper than the Lifestream, and had started before ShinRa had come.
And figuring out what it was might mean the difference between life and death for this guy, and realizing that reminded Angeal just how deep things ran here for him as well.
Although right now, it looked like he was going to have to figure out yes-or-no questions, meaning this was going to take forever. Meaning no food for him for a good, long while, and that thought made him want to bang his head against something hard.
"Your name is Gong-gil, right?" he said.
Gong-gil gave another small, hesitant nod after a long silence.
"Have you been at the palace long?" Angeal began, and Gong-gil's brow furrowed slightly, as if in confusion.
Park jumped in immediately, translating it into Chochungese, but that didn't help matters--Gong-gil did that flinchy, kicked-while-down thing that made Angeal want to scrub his face with his hand and apologize. Which was pretty much the wrong reaction for a general carrying out an interrogation.
This was going to be a long interrogation.
...or maybe not, Angeal thought suddenly. "Are you all right?" he asked sharply. It wasn't his imagination; Gong-gil had been getting paler and paler, and now he was swaying even though he was sitting down. "Hey, now, don't you pass out on me."
Gong-gil looked up, blinking quickly, and tried to sit up straighter.
"Let's just do this later," Angeal said, shaking his head. "You're in no shape for this, and right now I'd eat my materia if I thought there was any sort of way to spit-roast it, because I haven't eaten in a good nine, ten hours. It's making me grouchy, and you look like what you need right now is a doctor, not an interrogation," said pragmatically.
Gong-gil looked over at him, the first reaction the man had shown the whole time, just long enough for Angeal to see the surprise registering in the man's eyes before they went flat again and he looked away.
"...Later," Angeal said, struck again almost physically by just how pretty Gong-gil really was, the words more to himself than anyone, and Gong-gil reacted again--his hands tightened against his robes, slender fingers clutching nervously at his knees as he swallowed thickly, and that, that just didn't sit well with Angeal at all.
--
"What do you make of him?" he asked Park, after the Gong-gil was escorted out.
Lt. Park frowned slightly, as if he was thinking. "I'm not sure, sir. He seems...broken."
Angeal made a face. "You have no idea how much I was hoping it was just my imagination."
"...Sorry, sir."
"He really didn't look healthy, did he?"
"No, sir."
"I was hoping that was my imagination, too."
"Sorry, sir."
Angeal sighed. "OK. Get a medic to look at him, then, and report back to me. When he doesn't look like death warmed over, we'll try this again. It's not like there's a big rush. Dismissed."
"Sir yes, sir!" Park said once, as sharp and crisply as he always did, and with that same parade-perfect salute, left Angeal to his thoughts.
--
And he was wandering in the mists.
He was alone. There was no one else around; he was alone and all that there was was the mist; obscuring everything, making him lose his way. He was trying to get...somewhere, he had no idea. He had no idea where he was, no idea where he was going, all that he knew was that he was lost. He wandered, looking left and right and growing desperate as there was nothing to help him find his way. There was only the mist.
And a voice, like something scrittering across crumbling marble, that whispered in a way too faint to hear from inside his head. It needled at him, it put him on edge and it felt like death.
And around him was the mist, only the mist growing deeper and thicker, covering even the sky, and it was seeping inside of him, it and the voice were seeping inside, were getting their fingers into his consciousness, and were pulling at it, trying to fray him apart and he swung, but there was nothing to hit, there was nothing, there was no one, only the mist the mist this mist and that whispering in the skittering voice on the edge of--
He woke up with a sharp yell, his heart beating too fast, and for a moment, he had no idea where he was.
"What the fuck kind of dream was that?" he muttered to himself, shaking his head. Whatever in Hel's realm that dream had been, it creeped him out more than it rightfully should have, and the thought of trying to go back to sleep made a slight shiver of revulsion go through him.
He was up before he'd even decided what to do; slipping into his fatigues because sleeping was right out, and the thought of doing paperwork made that mist-nightmare look good. He felt played up and out-of-sorts, like there was something itching just under his skin, and he decided he ought to go out for a while--take a walk in the courtyard or something; look up and see the moon and not mists and darkness. It was the middle of the night, but it wasn't like someone would question him.
The courtyard was fairly large; big enough the walking the whole thing would tire him out, Angeal figured. And it was good to be out--the night was cool and the moon close enough to full that Angeal had no problems seeing. He'd been cooped up inside for too long. At heart he was still a country boy, preferring to be outside than in, and breathing in the fresh air helped clear his mind.
The fresh air could only do so much, however. It was unfair, he thought, that he couldn't even have a decent night's sleep. And he'd made a mistake, he realized. There were the guards and troopers on duty, but...but everything was too still, and his aloneness stabbed at him, almost a physical ache.
He pulled out his PHS and sent off a quick e-mail. You awake?
An answering mail--correction, mails, three in rapid succession--came back a minute or so later.
No.
Fuck you.
And don't mail me again before sunrise unless you're dead or I *will* kill you. And if you're dead, I *will* find your zombie ass and kill you *again*.
Asshole.
ZZZ.
Angeal laughed, because he could imagine Genesis, not a morning person under the best of circumstances, snarling at his PHS when it went off, and sending off a mail, then deciding that didn't quit convey the full extent of his wrath. He shook his head and put the PHS away, holding on to the smile and to that one touch of connection to someone else and home. The smile faded though, and standing out in the empty courtyard under the moonlight, Angeal felt alone, and it was like a weight, almost worse because of that one moment of connection.
Something made a faint crackling sound, like wood breaking, under his foot.
He stopped and looked down, wondering what he had stepped on, then frowned slightly. Half buried in the dirt was an old Wutai folding fan. He stooped to pick it up and looked at it carefully. It was nothing like any of the ones in the palace he'd seen so far, delicate and full of decoration and gilding. It was larger than the normal fans and made from plain whitish cloth, ripped and torn, and the thin spines were broken, like it had been stepped on many times. It looked worn, like it had seen better days long before it had ended up under his foot.
It was completely out of place.
Kinda like me, he thought. Battered, broken, a little worse for wear, all by itself and stupidly out of place, but somehow still here.
He felt a small, self-depreciating grin touch his face, and before he knew it, he had tucked the fan into his belt, and patted it once for good luck.
It was stupid, maybe, but...somehow, it helped.
--
Angeal's morning was going pretty much the way he hated, stuck behind a desk and dealing with a mountain of paperwork higher than Da Chao, when there was a knock on the frame of the paper door to his office and quarters.
"Come in!" he yelled, and put the papers back in their folder.
"General Hewley, sir!" the medic, Dr...something or other, he was drawing a blank, said with a sharp salute as he entered.
Dr. Constantin. That was it.
"I'm here about the prisoner you ordered examined, Gong-gil."
That got Angeal's attention. "How is he? Uh, here, have a seat," he said, waving at the chair across from his desk. "So how is he? The guy did not look healthy."
"Because he's not," Constantin said flatly as he sat. "I swear, it's as if this place has no materia at all. Or no one with power enough to use it," he said, shaking his head in disgust. "Self-inflicted injury to his wrist, treated with herbs. Herbs. It's no wonder it got infected."
"Can you do anything?"
"I Cured the wound, which closed it up and will help the raging infection that had started to set in because only the gods know when that dressing had been cleaned last, and have started him on antibiotics to clear it out. Blood wise, he probably lost quite a bit when he slit his wrist, and there's nothing that can be done for that at this point," he said flatly. "Other than wait for his body to remake the blood he lost. He probably should be in a medical facility, but we're running low enough on resources for our own people," he said, giving Angeal a pointed look, and Angeal remembered there had been a pile of forms requesting more medical supplies...somewhere. "Let alone Wutai. But now that he's on antibiotics and the wound is closed up, he should be all right."
"Is blood loss and that infection the only problem?"
Dr. Constantin shook his head. "Well, there are also some bad bruises on him that are just healing, as well as signs of malnutrition that have probably gone back most of his life...but I bet half the people in this forsaken-by-the-gods pit are like that. There's not much that can be done about that other than feeding him up, and the guards assure me he eats, just not very much. Which is a normal sign of being under too much stress, and 'too much stress' is a given, all things considered. Physically, he's in not in great shape but will recover. Mentally, though..." Constantin started, shaking his head, "I'm sure you noticed he's not talking."
"I picked up on that when I tried to interrogate him," Angeal said with a wry half-smile.
"Yeah. There's no physical reason for it at all."
Angeal blinked. "So he can talk, he just won't?"
Constantin nodded. "I worried at first that they had done something barbaric like cut out his tongue, after seeing one of the bodies where their eyes had been freshly burnt out, but no, still there."
Angeal's jaw dropped. "What?"
Constantin looked disgusted. "One of the bodies from the invasion. When we were sorting out the dead from the half-dead, we came across one where the man's eyes had been burnt out, and pretty recently, too. And of course he was untreated, aside from a dirty bandage tied around his face."
Angeal's eyes narrowed. "What under the Heavens happened here?" he muttered to himself. What could make someone try to kill themself like that, and then leave them so broken that they wouldn't talk?
"You've got me," the medic said. "I heard rumors that the 'King of Chochung' was as crazy as they came. Looks like they might be true."
Angeal frowned, thinking only of the broken man who had been sitting in the chair Dr. Constantin was now, hunching in on himself and clutching at the dirty cloth of his robes as if for support. And the fragility of his wrists in the holding area.
Something, he figured, pretty terrible had to have happened here, and it needled at him.
"Thank you," Angeal said distractedly. "Keep checking on Gong-gil, and keep me updated. Also, check the other prisoners again, make sure everyone's at least sort of healthy. Any weird or self-inflicted injuries that came before we took the castle, inform me of immediately."
Constantin nodded and stood up.
Angeal smiled wryly. "And I'll see about getting you your supplies. The requisition forms are here. Somewhere," he said, gesturing at the mountain of paperwork and making a face. "I'll get to them as soon as I find them, but it might take a while."
Constantin gave a short laugh. "Thank you, sir."
"Dismissed," Angeal said, and went back to his pile of papers, but for some reason just couldn't concentrate on them anymore.
--
It was two o'clock, and he was still stuck in a meeting with the old advisers to the king, the ones who had come to ShinRa and agreed to help them in exchange for ShinRa deposing the king.
Something didn't sit right with Angeal, working so closely with people who were, by pretty much any definition, traitors. Or so he had felt at first; seeing Gong-gil and remember some of the rumors he had heard made him wonder if there was more to this than met the eye, especially since none of the men seemed like they were in this for power. It was agreed that this arrangement was temporary; that a successor to the king, one who would be properly loyal to ShinRa, would be put in place, and Chochung would, so long as she didn't rebel, more or less be left alone. Angeal wanted to speed this process on as much as he could--he didn't like sitting here every day fighting with paperwork and trying to figure out mysteries...trying to decide who had to be killed for knowing too much. He preferred the battlefield, where, bloody and horrible as it was, things were a shitload simpler. Everyone had guns and swords, and everyone knew where they stood. Not...this.
...and having this after lunch had not been one of Angeal's brightest ideas; this was boring as all else, and slowly putting Angeal to sleep. The only thing keeping him awake was him biting the inside of his mouth when he felt like he was about to nod off, and at this rate, he was going to end up bleeding or something.
He had no idea how Park did it; Park was as much at attention as he had been when the meeting started. Then he noticed Park pinching his leg, and Angeal had to bite back a grin--it was nice to know he wasn't the only one bored stupid. Everyone spoke Visgradian Standard, but it was easier to have Park there--in case there were misunderstandings, and, more importantly, so the advisers couldn't say something in front of him with the assumption he wouldn't understand.
They may have helped ShinRa, but Angeal made no assumptions that they were on ShinRa's side.
"We would like to place the king's half brother in his stead," Hong said formally. "He seems, unlike his brother, to be more than capable, and he is aware of the...political realities. He has stated that he accepts them and will swear loyalty to ShinRa."
Angeal frowned slightly--this was awfully sudden. In fact, it seemed like they had already decided and were expecting him to simply rubber stamp it. Probably, he thought dryly, they already had decided well before they came to him. And the gods all knew it would be better to get some sort of security in Chochung, and the longer ShinRa was sitting in the castle, the longer it would look like the occupation it was, and the more likely some of the more radical elements would decide it was time to try to take their country back.
And it wasn't like he wanted to be here.
Still, they couldn't just turn everything over in a week, like Hong, Yu, Bak, and Seong, the men who had come to ShinRa, seemed to think. Angeal and ShinRa weren't going anywhere, even with putting a puppet in charge.
It was Angeal's job to make sure it was, in fact, a puppet they put up, and he was going to do his job because, dammit, once he left the Great Forest, he never wanted to fucking see it again.
"I'll meet with him, then," Angeal said flatly. "Have him, and any other candidates you may have, ready to meet with me sometime in the next month."
Seong frowned. "But...Prince Yeok is the next in the line of succession. He should be--"
"Lines of succession change," Angeal said just as flatly, cutting them off. "Don't forget that."
There was a long silence, and Angeal stared them all down. They would not, after all, forget that it was ShinRa, not them, calling the shots now.
"Understood," Hong said with a low bow, and Park narrowed his eyes. There was some slight there, Angeal thought, but he didn't care as long as he got what he wanted. "Is there anything else that you would wish?"
Angeal frowned suddenly, and debated whether or not to even ask, and then the question was out before he could stop it. "Actually, I've got a question for you, and it's got nothing to do with succession, but it might with Yeonsan-gun. The man, Gong-gil...what was his position here?"
Hong drew in a sharp breath, then pursed his lips tightly. "A player. A foul, manipulative little street performer and nothing more. It was he, more than anything else, that was the cause of the king's madness."
That matched what the woman in the cells had said...but it didn't match what Angeal had seen; a pale and broken man with slit wrists, huddled against a wall. It just...it didn't fit, something just didn't fit.
"I see," Angeal said, frowning. "Thank you. That's all," he said, his words a dismissal. The former officials all bowed and left one by one, and Angeal stared after them, frowning more to himself. Something didn't fit.
Something just didn't fit.
--
"Lt. Park, I've got a job for you," Angeal said once the advisers had left his office, and put on a big grin because he knew this was going to go over well.
Lt. Park was a smart man. "Sir?" he said, something wary touching his voice.
"I'm trying to figure out what happened here, before we took the castle," Angeal said. "There look to be a lot of records that were kept by the court scribes. But I can't read Wutai aside from 'bathroom,' 'booze,' and 'kimchee'." Angeal's grin grew. "Which means you get to do it."
Park look less than enthused. "...Understood, sir."
--
"I've come with a request from General Hewley," Park said formally. "I wish to request access to all court records for the last six months, possibly more."
"This is rather sudden," Seong, one of the former advisers to the king said. "We were told ShinRa would stay out of things, once we had set someone appropriate in place."
"Things have changed," Park said, stiffly. "General Angeal is requesting information for his investigations."
"What sort of information? If there is anything he needs to know, we can tell him directly."
Park gave the man a level stare, knowing full well it would unseat the man, because such things were simply not done in Wutai--you only looked someone in the eye if they were of a lower station, and Park figured the man needed to be reminded that while he was once a nobleman and adviser to the king...things had changed. His king was dead and his province conquered, and those were the realities.
"That will not be necessary. This is now part of an official ShinRa investigation, and we will be reviewing all evidence ourselves. Which is why I am informing you that I would like immediate access to all court records from the last six months," Park said flatly, but making it clear in his tone and word choice, dropping all the formal polite speech normally used by someone younger to an elder of high status, that he was the one of higher status and this was not a request. "Please take me to your record rooms immediately."
They may all have called him ShinRa's dog behind his back, but it was the dog calling the shots, and he was not going to allow them to forget this. And he was not going to be swayed from his orders by men with something to hide.
Seong narrowed his eyes and drew a sharp, insulted breath, but bowed sharply. "Very well. Follow me."
--
"This isn't good," Seong said, frowning. He had sent messages to the others not long after Park had made his requests, and they were meeting quietly, in secret, as they sometimes did. "It looks like that little player is starting to get his hooks into the ShinRa people and may be why that fool of a general is becoming so difficult. If Gong-gil has indeed begun to sink his claws into him as he did the king, it's not going to take long before he finds a way to make a mess of everything," he said, narrowing his eyes. "We've already seen the madness he causes in people. We may have traded one mad king for another."
They all looked concerned, before Yu, friend to the man the king had killed, spoke up. "We have all seen the madness he causes, and have lost those who put the country first by trying to rid the king of his clown. We have all seen the way that only death and misery have come in the wake of Gong-gil, even for those he values above others, like the player Jang-saeng. We cannot afford to wait until the ShinRa general is as enamored as the king. We must remove him now, and we must do it quietly. We must be rid of this meddlesome clown. Before we find ourselves shot through with arrows this time," he finished grimly.
There was an equally grim silence, and they all began to nod.
--
Part Two