Work Text:
Inspired by this video on Tumblr
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Cloud lands with barely a whisper of sound, one hand braced against the rocky ground and the other wrapped around First Tsurugi’s hilt.
There’s the familiar burn of his own mako-infused blood sitting thick and heavy in his mouth.
There’s a cut weeping sluggishly above his right eye and a strip of flesh and muscle has been completely carved out of his left bicep.
But it doesn’t matter.
The blood, the wounds, the pain.
None of it matters.
Hasn’t in … a very long time.
The damage, Cloud knows, is temporary.
Unlike so many other things about him, it will always be temporary now.
Cloud can already feel the cuts sealing themselves closed, can feel that specific sort of itch as his flesh reconstructs itself, new muscle, fat, and skin writhing into existence to replace what Sephiroth has cut from him.
Returning his body to the pristine state he’s been frozen in for so long now.
A blank canvas once more, untouched and awaiting the only brush capable of slashing colors across its surface.
Just as it always does.
Beyond that …
Well.
Pain is just … pain.
And Cloud is well acquainted with its many forms.
So no, it doesn’t matter.
All that really matters to Cloud these days is …
There’s a cough from in front of him, the sound wet and ragged as it floats across the still air.
Cloud looks up, attention snapping towards the sound like a magnet drawn toward its true north.
As it always does.
For a moment suspended in time, they just stare at each other.
Cloud crouched on one side of the barren clearing, his bloodied blade in hand, and Sephiroth on the other, Masamune nowhere to be seen.
All while that invisible thread that connects their existences practically vibrates in the air between them.
“Not bad, Cloud.” Sephiroth finally says, the low timber of his voice turning Cloud’s name into something like a caress as he pulls a black-blood-spattered hand away from his face.
Sephiroth’s mouth curls into that same small smirk that has haunted Cloud's dreams for as long as he can remember.
That same expression, trapped somewhere between smug and unbearably fond, whose absence spawns every one of Cloud’s nightmares these days.
Sephiroth unfolds himself from his kneeling crouch, rising to his full height even as he takes a step backward.
Closer to the edge.
Those cat-like eyes stay locked with Cloud’s own even as the heel of Sephiroth’s boot finds nothing but the open air.
Cloud moves without thought
Doesn’t even realize he’s done so until his fist closes around the lapel of Sephiroth’s coat, the leather creaking from the force of his grip.
They stand there for a moment.
Cloud clutching at something he should never touch.
Sephiroth kept from falling into the abyss only by Cloud’s grip on him.
As he always is.
As they always are.
“What are you doing?” Sephiroth finally asks, something almost soft in his voice.
“Will you …” Cloud stops, swallows, keeps his eyes trained on the toes of Sephiroth’s boots.
Ignores the way his hands are shaking.
If he looks up …
If he meets those eyes …
If he has to watch them fade out and away from him again …
Cloud has been broken for decades upon decades now.
Has been shattered and reformed over and over again at this man’s hands.
Cloud should hate him, should have learned to hate him somewhere in the long years after he’d discovered just what price he had unknowingly paid to rise up and become Gaia’s smallest but most effective WEAPON.
But …
“Will you come back?”
Cloud breathes the question out, unable to help himself.
Unable to quiet the fear that this time will be the last time.
That this push-pull, this give-and-take, this blood-and-steel sung dance of theirs will finally end.
Just as Cloud had once hoped it would but had always quietly, secretly, dreaded even considering.
That somehow this time Cloud will be left behind.
Again, as he always seems to be, but for the final time.
Left to wander the wide earth now truly, wretchedly, alone.
Sephiroth huffs out a small, amused sound.
There’s a hand on the back of Cloud’s head then, leather-clad fingers tangling in the sweat-matted spikes of his hair.
When Sephiroth tugs him forward Cloud doesn’t resist.
Couldn’t even if he wanted to.
Which he doesn’t.
Which he never really will again.
Sephiroth presses Cloud’s face against the wide expanse of his chest.
Cloud’s lips tingle and burn where they brush against bare skin.
Sephiroth curls down around him.
His lips brush first across Cloud’s temple.
Then down across the shell of his ear.
“Always,” Sephiroth breathes the word, the promise, to him.
Into him.
And then he’s gone.
Dissolving away as he always does.
Slipping through Cloud’s fingers like black starlight.
Like the whisper of the memory that he’s vowed to never become.
Cloud stands there, alone, on the edge of that cliff for the longest time.
Face turned towards the sky.
Heart turned somewhere else.