Chapter Text
It’s weird being the person who knows the most about Sephiroth.
People made it their business to do that for years.
I feel bad sometimes about how I was one of them. How often I imagined someone who wore his skin — dwelt on his features and the parts of his body with shamefully little thought of what he would want. Or even what he would like.
Sephiroth does not like cold metal on bare skin.
Especially near his spine, or his wrists, or the insides of his elbows.
He does not like having his back to the door.
You have to be careful how you wake him up. (His bitter self-recrimination after the reaction is way worse than the actual reaction.)
He hates when his feet stick out from under the blanket.
He loves resting with his head on my stomach or in my lap, clinging to one of my legs, and will go to impressive lengths to keep himself as warm as possible if there’s even a hint of chill in the air.
The hair at the base of his neck tangles really easily even though the rest is like silk.
For someone whose…projections used to say the most unbelievably suggestive things to me in front of every one of my friends, he is not interested in sex anywhere that someone besides me could see or hear.
And for all his veneer of perfect assurance, he’s mostly happy, sometimes visibly relieved to be told what to do.
Doesn’t like raised voices, though.
He’ll eat spoiled or burnt things if I don’t notice first because it doesn’t occur to him to complain.
But he hates when things are dirty or disorganised. (I can see his fingers twitching minutely to fix them in the corner of my eye.)
He forgets to eat at all when I’m not there.
He’s not vain but can’t walk by a mirror without reflexively checking his reflection.
He hates red lights. It’s worse if they flash on and off.
It’s hard to know what will set him off, because he can block things out for a frighteningly long time before he snaps.
The aforementioned metal on skin (my earring too near his spine on a cold day) got me thrown bodily across the room. This was a lot worse for the wall than for me, but I swear his shoulderblades didn’t retract fully for a week. And he barely touched me for a month after that for fear of doing it again.
It’s not like I haven’t had moments like that too. A few months after we moved into the new house, he held me down in a position that made me feel a little too weak and my mouth ended up full of his hair and I couldn’t breathe or speak, and so I shoved him away so hard I dislocated his shoulder.
(SOLDIER bodies heal quickly but they’re built to fight others, not to protect ourselves.)
It was bad.
I wanted to help; he was lost in a blank kind of terror I didn’t understand. Curled up naked and as small as possible on the bed with a sad, half-eaten bag of frozen peas clutched, dripping, against strangely knobbly skin. Jerking violently away from any kind of touch, even from me. Red-purple bruising spreading angrily, vividly against his translucent paleness.
He didn’t talk for a long time, and then:
‘When I underwent regenerative tests, the joints were the most unpleasant.’
And by ‘regenerative tests’ he meant…
‘Clean breaks in femurs and such are manageable, but joints…joints have many interconnected components. They twist and pop and fight each other back into equilibrium for days.’
Those fuckers.
Eventually I got him to talk me through the steps for maneuvering it back by pretending it was for someone else. He let me close enough to tuck him in and we sat there together for like an hour. Breathing. His breathing always sounds kind of held when something hurts. His eyes were closed but he wasn’t sleeping.
And then, in the near silence:
‘Do it.’
So I did it.
It’s still one of the few times I’ve heard him cry out in physical pain and while I’d always thought that would be satisfying to a deep-down part of me, it was the worst thing I’ve ever heard and I never want to hear it again.
Pain. Another weird one. His pain threshold and responses are…really fucked up.
Sometimes he can’t tell where he’s injured at first.
He’s lost the reflexes that should make him pull away from the oven shelf when it burns.
He begs me to bite, to scratch, to grip past the point of pain in the heat of the moment, but certain things remain bizarrely sensitive and off-limits.
Restraints, even those he can easily break out of, are a hard no. He didn’t say anything at first, just lay there trying to hold back the shakes until I noticed, and that made me really mad.
At him? For him? Probably both.
A long time ago I thought sex with him would be like fighting. And sometimes it is.
Other times it’s like those sweet, mumbly morning conversations which are more sounds than words.
Or holding someone gently as they break all the way down and cry.
He’s alarmingly okay with most things, so I learn to be careful. To not just ask about something at the start.
Because once orders are given, they have to be carried out. Failure is not an option.
But when I ask him to choke me one time in the middle of things, he gets angry. Actual, ice-cold, eyes narrowed, barely-moving angry.
‘I will not invite death into our bed,’ he hisses.
I take a second to absorb that decidedly Sephiroth turn of phrase. Another to breathe through the jolt of my suddenly-hammering heart, and another to quell the fluttery panic that still flares to life when he rounds on me and pins me down with those glowing eyes like a dried-out bug in a specimen case.
Then I try to explain, badly. To say that the whole point is that it bridges the gap between who we are and who we were. That we both know there has always been something thrilling at the intersections of passion, death, physicality, pain, violence. (I say it way worse than that and it takes a few tries.)
‘I believe I understand why you would want that. But I will not do it.’
Nothing wavers, for either of us, until he speaks again, more controlled this time.
‘Is it something you’ve experienced before?’
‘No,’ I say, but I’ve thought about it a lot.
He looks…worried for me. That wasn’t what I—
‘What is the specific appeal? The violence? The altered state? Being overpowered?’
The heat of the moment is well and truly gone and there are way too many uncomfortable thoughts drifting around now.
‘...not the altered state. You’ve altered my state enough for one lifetime.’
I try a weak laugh but it doesn’t break the tension.
‘I heard it’s…intense, I guess. And I do like it when you’re intense.’
I can’t meet his eyes.
‘I know it’s kinda fucked up. I guess I thought…we could be fucked up together.’
What is that the tiny tightening of his eyes? Regret? Despair, even?
‘Cloud, you will not risk brain damage in the name of intensity .’
I don’t know why I want to double down on this. Embarrassment? Frustration as the mood well and truly wilts?
Who the hell is he to humiliate me like this? When he— It’s fine that he doesn’t want to but he doesn’t have to be so—
‘...when you ask for things like this I sometimes think you’d rather I were him.’
Sephiroth exhales heavily.
And I remember.
…
Remember his expression when I told him that the Sephiroth in my head would wake me choking.
Remember how I felt that awful night when he turned to me, in our bed with the borrowed, faded Stamp-the-dog-patterned sheets, and straightforwardly asked me to take my revenge for his past life out on his body. As if that was something he had been expecting — maybe even planning for.
Remember an even deeper flash from long ago in his mind, like a reflection in the far depths of a well, of a short-haired Sephiroth near my height, unarmed and ghostly pale in a way you can only be when you’ve never seen the real sun, facing down a too-human monster.
A metallic voice echoing from above.
‘You must experience death to understand it. Watch the life leave their eyes.’
Sloppy, hissing sibilants like snakes.
Small hands tight on the not-human’s windpipe.
They can’t reach all around the throat. But they don’t need to. Just enough to obstruct the arteries that feed the brain.
It’s frighteningly quick this time (it’s not always, but every so often the heart just—)
‘Boy, if you look away, I will make you regret it.’
…
‘No. No. I would never wish you were him. I only ask because it’s you and I— I’m not explaining this right. It’s like how you react when I touch you where you’re weak. The way you love that I know exactly where the blood runs closest under your skin. Because I could hurt you. But I don’t. And you know that I’m not going to.’
...
We compromise. His hands span my collarbones and hold me down but carefully avoid obstructing my blood or my breathing.
…
I’m standing by the bathroom mirror with water dripping down my face and cum threatening to do the same down my leg when I feel a familiar guilt for being thoughtless and springing something like that on Sephiroth.
To this day he surprises me by being gorgeous, older (whatever the fuck that means when we’ve both spent half our lives in stasis), unfairly poised, and almost completely missing any Midgar (or Shinra, I guess) norms around sex.
I go to dry my face and there’s a long silver strand tickling my nose. Why is his hair always on my towels. Wound around my toes. In my asscrack. Why is it everywhere.
I guess it’s good that Sephiroth would be clear with his boundaries for once. He’s usually so frighteningly bad at it. The weirdest mix of cool suspicion, simmering paranoia, and blind loyalty.
I sit on the toilet and clean myself out.
I do kind of like it when he’s protective. Secretly. Maybe not so secretly.
And sometimes it’s protection from myself. I’m not stupid enough to think I don’t need that. Sometimes.
I wash my hands in the rose-scented soap that reminds me of his hands.
His hands which have reached for me countless times now — in fear, in wanting, with care.
His hands which span most of my waist. All of my neck. Easily.
I look in the mirror.
I told him a long time ago that he’d be better off with someone else.
(I think about that a little harder and while it’s still probably true, it makes me want to break something.)
We should talk about these things beforehand.
I know.
…
When I come back to bed I apologise. He brushes warm lips over the slowly-blooming bouquet of fingerprints on my collarbone. Settles his heavy head over my heavy heart and his arms around my waist.
He looks so much younger when he sleeps.