Chapter Text
It’s still surprising how comfortable Sephiroth is with having Cloud rearrange his heavy limbs any way he likes.
How Cloud only needs to brush the edge of one knee to end up with the flat of a hooked thigh warming his side, sprawled carelessly open around him, and broad arms cocooning him so securely that Sephiroth can reach far enough to hold on to his own elbows.
It’s also strange how straightforwardly Sephiroth will seek physical comfort these days. And even stranger that Cloud finds it so natural to give it.
Has anyone ever trusted him like this? Without skittishness, or suspicion, or a single doubting glance? Has anyone ever looked to him for comfort with no misgivings, without imagining the person they’d rather be held by first?
Having memorised his spare, deadly movements; felt the sharp sting of his whip-fast strike; felt his terrifying solidity through every bruising clash of their swords, Cloud would never have imagined Sephiroth to be so…malleable.
For Cloud, though, it happens unthinkingly. Sephiroth doesn’t go rigid like when most people touch him. He’s also not so relaxed as to be dead weight (Cloud can lift him, but his size makes it awkward).
Is it normal for partners to be so tactile with each other all the time?
(Huh. Partners isn’t quite… Lovers? Hmm. Boyfriends? Definitely not.)
Yet another area in which neither of them knows what normal should be, and Cloud finds he doesn’t mind it that way.
They will never be normal. It’s best not factored in.
Sephiroth still chooses when to let himself go, in some ways. He’s as understated in bed as he is when he fights. Tiny gasps, held breaths that stop him giving too much away to his adversary, the shaken sounds of breathing through impact.
He’s not as painfully careful as he used to be, but steadfastly avoids doing anything that might make Cloud feel trapped — avoids resting his full weight anywhere near his chest or neck or shoulders. And he never grips too hard, with those hands that still occasionally haunt Cloud’s dreams.
Unless Cloud asks.
…
The seasons change, and the intensity of physical desire ebbs and flows, as these things do.
Sometimes it’s a lot.
…
One particular February night reminds Cloud of the saunas in the Nibel winter.
The sheets on the bed in their tiny cabin start crisp with cold, but smooth quickly against warm skin. Spicy cedar and pine and clean sweat; air growing in glow until it becomes a radiating heat.
Cloud has settled the weight of one long leg across his shoulder — wrapping his whole arm around Sephiroth’s thigh at its thickest point so he can feel the different muscle groups and tendons as they shift. He presses a blood-flushed cheek and occasional blunted teeth into what he knows now is some of the softest skin on Sephiroth’s body, as he holds him open and steady through every spasm.
Sephiroth stares hazily up at him, radiant and a little slack-jawed, clutching his knee to his chest. Almost like when he curls up to sleep, except this isn’t to protect his weak spots, but to spread himself open, for Cloud.
The flexibility makes sense given his habitual grace, but the extent of it still takes Cloud by surprise, perhaps because the back of one thigh spans Cloud’s entire torso.
It’s still a revelation how perfectly the warm backs of his knees settle over Cloud’s shoulders as they rock closer and find a sort of thrumming symmetry.
How when a body that large and powerful relaxes and lets itself be moved, it can be surprisingly soft and…jiggly.
Until you get it to tense again, that is.
How strange and wonderful that this is the only time either of them shows true exertion.
The thin sheen of sweat makes Sephiroth’s features look even more unearthly than usual, catching the mako gleam of his eyes, and cooling slightly in the air when they move. The thinner, slipperier sheen of lube starts in the obvious places and then spreads, feathering its gently altered sensation of touch and contained body heat along with it.
Listening to the bed rock distantly in time with their breath, to guttural noises muffled by loosened hair and jumbled pillows, pleas to go harder, to stay right there — many-textured webs of sound catching the amber light.
Sounds that should be distasteful but aren’t because it’s only them in this moment, and to look down and see Sephiroth’s burning delirium, see him lose himself this thoroughly when he still flinches away from the lightest touch from anyone else means everything.
"My death," Sephiroth chokes out, shoving Cloud’s palm hard into the scar that bisects his ribs.
There is no sense thinking consciously about breath or voice, because by this point movement and pressure dictate the pattern and depth of their breath for them and sound just happens. Action and reaction shifting air between two pairs of lungs faster than even enhanced ears can follow.
Everything in the service of this shared, suffocating, blissful heat.
"My life," Sephiroth gasps into the space between them, curling forward to hide his face in Cloud’s neck where their mutual lifeblood pulses loudest.
Touch between them is a purifying fire, turning gnarled wood to ash in an instant. Ash soft and silky, like the few downy patches and silvery peach fuzz that are the closest Sephiroth gets to body hair.
Together, their edges soften as they burn. Skin tender and human on the surface, but with unyielding, enhanced muscle tensing underneath, always reminding them what they are. Palms to palms against the sheets by Sephiroth’s head, fingers interlocked to brace against something solid because the two of them will always be too much for the structures of the ordinary world.
And then the smallest thing shifts, and gold threads of flame are spinning skyward while silver stays on earth.
Heat spun from the aliveness of the moving body. Heat that creates rather than destroys.
Heat and pressure that peak in the minuscule instinctive grind and pulse at the moment they’re most deeply joined: that incandescent split second when the air around them quivers like a just-struck match.
"My everything," Sephiroth breathes into one of these sudden stillnesses, with the tenderness of someone to whom tenderness is still so new.
Cloud surges forward, bending Sephiroth easily, willingly in half, and turns the open-ended breath into a searing kiss.
Long-ago reminders of burning wood and the resinous crackle of sticky sap set Cloud’s nerves prickling. Roots burning down through layers of frozen soil and calcified memory. Pleasure that skims the edges of pain and smoulders all the deeper for it.
"Cloud," murmured against his mouth — the hum of speech, and liquescent slide of tongue, and rounding of lips becoming just another wet continuation of their joining.
"cloud, cloud, cloud"
everything everything everything
…
Later, tucked into new flannel sheets after Sephiroth insisted on turfing them both out of bed to change all the linens (all of them, the clean freak) before they slept, Cloud tries to remember Sephiroth’s face twisted in hatred, instead of pleasure.
Tries to imagine him looming icy with indifference, instead of soft beside him in sleep. To imagine frigid green fire in place of gentle red-gold embers to be stirred up again in the morning.
To imagine being cold or hollow or nothing or alone.
And he can’t.
The thoughts are there, but the images won’t…coalesce. Not while Cloud’s senses are still full of memories of being enveloped by limbs so much larger than his; by a body that knows to leave space where he wants it, but holds him fast in the ways he needs it most.
As he drifts away, other thoughts begin to twine their way into his mind. Fresh recollections and long-buried fantasies converge with a jolt behind his eyelids.
He lets himself re-imagine the feeling of his legs wrapped around Sephiroth’s waist, now that he knows its dips and curves and patches of surprising softness by heart. Thinks about the sensuous, all-consuming way Seph’s hips roll when they ride him, and overlays that with the thought of those same hips pressing up into him so there’s nothing left to do but press back and writhe against that immovable weight, and let it all wash over them.
The possibility feels…promising, he thinks with slight surprise. It doesn’t force his thoughts to a screeching halt, at least.
Cloud sinks into sleep feeling alive and content and just the smallest bit empty.
…
Sometimes it’s new and surprising. Even after all these months.
…
One overnight trip along the coast means falling exhausted into bed as the sun rises, and then waking up slowly and reaching for each other in the tawny stillness of a late spring afternoon.
Too relaxed to rush being closer. Too relaxed to sit up and take clothes off properly as they kiss, so they just kick off their pajama pants and twine their legs together for warmth.
Cloud rolls on top, but it’s more of a lurch really because sitting up too carefully would mean separating from heartbeats; from worn fabric further loosened by body heat; from the soft-strong give of Sephiroth’s large body at rest.
There’s an instinctive ripple of hips as the wind picks up between them.
Sleepy hands working open buttoned sleep shirts — plain cotton for Cloud, and impractical, coveted silk for Sephiroth. Cloud’s fingers seeking out the two points where Sephiroth’s chest yields that little bit more under cool silk, dabbling like they would in a brook to keep everything soft and sensitive, the way Cloud knows he likes it; skimming over the surface and then slipping under.
…
Over time, Cloud has noticed that sometimes when Sephiroth is wearing a thin shirt, he’ll sit there with his hand on his collar and shift his forearm just slightly and shiver. Or he’ll let his bicep drag a little more than necessary as he puts his hair up.
If he’s extricating his arm from between their bodies, he might let a couple long fingers trail behind, and Cloud will feel a tiny loosening of tension and fluttering of lashes against his forehead.
At first Cloud isn’t sure how much of this is conscious, and how Sephiroth would feel about him explicitly noticing (it is nice how often it tends to happen when he’s nearby, when Sephiroth seems the most relaxed).
So, slowly, when it happens he starts joining Sephiroth’s fingers with his own. Takes is as a cue to nuzzle with his cheek, or leave tiny glistening swipes with his tongue, or, if the time seems right, slide his lips over a raised nub and suckle, until Sephiroth is hard and leaking against his hipbone, and Cloud is grinding his own hardness against one of those endless thighs.
One day when Cloud’s hands are mostly busy holding him up so he can do other things, he even dares to nudge one of Sephiroth’s hands in the right direction and whisper in his ear that he should touch himself. He gets a slight, self-conscious widening of eyes, but a couple reassuring kisses and a long heated look later, Sephiroth does.
Cloud almost regrets it, because seeing him all stretched out and sweaty, with the swell of his breast heaving against seeking fingers (and the occasional brush of knuckles or the back of a hand when it gets to be too much) makes it very hard not to come immediately.
…
Back in the present, a seafoam flick of hair is pushed aside, swishing cool across flushed skin. Cloud’s tongue laps gently at one nipple, like the tide kept warm in sunny shallows. Salty seaside breeze that leaves everything glazed and rosy, and touch lighter and brighter than the depths of an ocean.
Unsteady breaths are kissing hot against Cloud’s ear, his forehead, as he becomes the currents in the water — heated by something vast under the earth and swirling, sucking, pulling faintly and letting go.
Sephiroth is squirming by now, hair fluffed into a bird’s nest on one side and plastered flat to his face on the other.
One warm leg has spiralled itself around Cloud’s waist, and in an uncharacteristically naked display of his own desire, Sephiroth tangles his hand in Cloud’s hair and pulls him to the other side.
Brackish mineral seawater, sweat; the slightest changes in friction because of it.
The slip of fingertips over smooth pebbles. Soft-dense-heavy flesh held tenderly so it gives but keeps its shape. The drag and tense of muscle and blood and skin under Cloud’s slickened lips and hands, centered where nerves spark dense and hot, focusing where touch goes from pale and transparent to rich and deep.
Anticipatory goosebumps give way to deep geothermal heat between them both. There’s a faint dampness swiping at Cloud’s belly through the fabric of Sephiroth’s underwear and cooling tacky against the air.
Cloud’s weight alone isn’t enough to hold Sephiroth in place when his large limbs are twitching like this so he just tries to get in a position where nothing bony is digging in (and, crucially, no-one is being kneed in the balls), and lets himself be rocked very slightly by the waves.
Lets his tongue and breath diffuse over sensitive skin, pink-tipped and ruddy — flushed in that supernatural, over-saturated way Sephiroth gets when he’s been touched, and tasting very slightly of rubbed copper.
Cloud is in a pleasant daze, relishing the occasional nudge of the cock pressed hot against his stomach; appreciating the slippery plushness of warm skin against his lips and tongue; watching the rhythmic glide of his fingers, when Sephiroth seizes. His abdomen flexes in a powerful wave under them both, and he bites off a moan so suddenly that he almost chokes on his own inhale. Several juddering, breathless tremors later, he settles, and Cloud with him.
…
"Did you just—?"
The long, long exhale and shivery, languid embrace that follow tell him ‘yes’ before Sephiroth’s words do.
It’s way too comfortable to think about moving right away.
But the damp is going to spread eventually.
At least they don’t have to change the sheets this time.
(An hour or so later they have to change them anyway.)
…
Sometimes it’s weight and touch so light and effervescent that it barely exists.
…
Cloud gets some of his favourite reactions when he’s gentle and consistent and touches everything at once.
It’s a clear morning that reminds him of the day they first set off together on the open road as not-quite-enemies but definitely strangers, even if the leaves are waiting to fall now rather than bursting into bud. Mild, but with an expectant fizz in the air.
Sephiroth used to curl his bulky frame into the smallest possible ball to sleep. A seed hidden snug in the dark earth. Awake, when he isn’t fighting, he still hunches in on himself to take up less space.
Always inclined very slightly toward Cloud, hair falling forward, neck drooping like a poorly planted sapling. Overgrown, thirsty for food and water and sun. Always graceful, but never quite stood up straight in this world not built for him.
Now, Cloud finds the right spots, and stroking, squeezing, rubbing just a little, he opens up.
Leaf by leaf. Limb by limb. Petal by petal uncreasing to drink in the world.
Cloud pulls back when it gets too much. Then gives him a little more.
Perfect. No gritted teeth or frozen limbs, just fluttering breaths, full-body ripples and Sephiroth’s usually-bowed neck arched long.
His pulse points smell faintly like peaches today, and Cloud smiles to himself about Sephiroth’s bizarre taste in bath products. The brighter and sweeter the goop, the more fascinated he is…though he has an odd knack for picking fruits that are in season.
(Tifa is not allowed to give him any more bath bombs with glitter. Sephiroth doesn’t mind being glittery for a couple of days, but the glitter also ends up on Cloud, who definitely minds.)
There’s a point where Sephiroth just looks at Cloud for a moment, in that way he does when he’s cataloguing things to make sure they’re real.
And then the surface tension breaks.
Face lit up with pleasure, well-kissed lips falling open with a tiny smile, cheeks stained a deep, almost purplish-pink like the curled edges of a rose in full bloom — windblown but holding on.
There are thorns, gentle catches of nails and sharp teeth, to keep them both feeling real.
Bruised lips and blackberry blood, fruit over-ripe and glossy.
Sheets of silver hair secluding them together in their secret room behind the waterfall.
Two veiled faces; two bodies tangling together in white sheets like a shared burial shroud.
Together in life or death or the in-between.
They look at each other in this perfect moment, as the lines between their minds and intentions blur as much as they ever can these days.
"What do you—"
"Anything," Sephiroth rasps, breathless and hungry and wild-eyed. "Just touch me."
So Cloud does, and marvels at how something he’s…pretty familiar with changes when it’s Sephiroth in his hand. How instead of desperately, grimly chasing oblivion, his mind fills itself with warming sun, with drops of morning dew beaded at the end of grass blades, with delicate, velvety shades like the insides of flower petals.
Carried away by this fit of sensation and daring lightness, he rolls himself over and reaches back.
"Cloud—"
Widened eyes and a noticeable twitch of silky, feverish skin against his palm tell him that this is not what Sephiroth was expecting.
The lube does not go where Sephiroth expects either.
There is something about seeing his own inner thighs glisten like that, about the feeling of—
"Just tell me if this is too, uh… If you don’t want to—"
Sephiroth definitely wants to.
The way he leads their movements with silent nudges and rolls of his body is a million times better than Cloud’s patchy imagination ever managed to dream up.
There is so much in the way his hips twist and drag to mean ‘like this’ or ‘stay there’, in their shared rapturous sighs, in the warm, blunt pulse of Seph’s cock slipping between them. In the way the rhythms of their bodies lock into something fervent and instinctive, and all interference falls away.
They curl into the dark earth, rocking gently like meeting currents or winds at a front folding into each other. Shivering together, like the heart-shaped golden leaves of the linden tree out front before the wind whirls them away.
The faintest scratch of brambles where Cloud’s shoulder meets his neck, a whisper of long hair, the all-encompassing warmth and solidity of Sephiroth’s arms, and the heavy slick heat of him between Cloud’s thighs.
When Cloud reaches blindly back to pull Sephiroth closer and feels the fluid shift of his hips, feels the hollows that form along the side of his ass when he thrusts all the way forward with a sound that’s low and quiet but obviously a cry of pleasure, it’s very easy to imagine the possibility of something else.
And both the present moment and the imagining feel vivid, and good.
Even better when one of those safe, anchoring hands runs its way decisively over the mess between his legs and reaches for him in earnest.
"Cloud…" against the shell of his ear. Lips fit around his earlobe and there’s a hint of open mouth heat on the unprotected back of his neck.
The prickling wave has never swept across his skin or rushed down his spine with such swiftness.
The wind picks up again. The trees rock and shake — living wood that creaks and groans as it bends. Is it them? Is it the bed? Is it the growing storm outside? (There’s a rising scent of petrichor.)
It doesn’t matter.
Not when every shaking shard of who Cloud is and who he thinks he is is singing, held together by the fervour of a soul who knows better than any what it is to be torn apart.
Pale limbs surround him — skin delicate and real and full of sensation.
There’s a lustrous gold aura wherever they touch. A glorious confusion of shifting, lingering pressures. Sticky nectar from the stems of sweet purple flowers, stone fruit, warm gusts and showers; thunder rolling out in waves from late summer storms.
…
Sun breaks through the thick clouds and makes their sweat-slick bodies shine like lacquer.
The laundry needs doing again.
Nobody remarks on the tear-stained pillowcase.
Outside their bedroom window, the garden is looking particularly vibrant.
…
And sometimes, the weight of the past hangs heavy on them both.
…
The days are growing shorter.
Which means the nights are growing longer.
...
It’s the silent, early hours of the morning. Seventh Heaven has felt strange and empty during the refurb, and Tifa’s been away more and more lately.
Their bed has been subtly reinforced after last time. And thank the gods for soundproofing wards.
But there’s always something to remind them that the world is not built for bodies like theirs. Right now it’s the sheets stretched between Cloud’s knees that are threatening to rip with every thrust.
He adjusts them both, caressing the faint silvery shimmer of long-ago healed stretch marks that crisscross Sephiroth’s lower back and fan out to decorate his buttocks and thighs. Grown-in memories of when he grew too fast for even enhanced skin to contain him.
There are smaller ones on his calves and shoulders as well.
Cloud knows them all.
The lifestream erased the gash in his side but kept these, kept exactly seven moles, kept his hair the length it was when he fell. When he died. Why?
He lays himself out so easily for you. He always has.
How can he bring himself to do that for anyone?
Vividly, Cloud hears a memory of the muted clatter of scalpels on gauze in a metal tray.
No. That’s not the same.
Sees smears of blood left on the white sheets where Sephiroth’s nails dug into already-healed palms.
Metal around flexing wrists. Fingers which are so much more graceful and breakable out of their thick black gloves. The sound of a bone saw starting up.
No. That noise isn’t real. It’s coming from inside his head.
This isn’t the same. This isn’t the same.
Their active undulations, their shared movements are not the controlled, screaming, rigid muscles of the lab.
He’s telling you yes when he braces his arms against the headboard so he can grind closer. He leans into your hands wherever they touch him.
It’s fine.
It’s real skin on real skin when you grab handfuls of his ass to pull yourselves even closer together.
Stability. Grounding.
The tiny silver webs warp under Cloud’s fingers.
It’s real, it’s real.
He’s the one who begged you to keep going tonight, to make him lose himself and keep the dark at bay.
You had lain awake together for hours, and when you finally reached for him he pulled you close with a desperation bordering on violence.
It’s real.
He’s the one who frantically turned himself over for you, who stuffed the pillow under his own stomach when he couldn’t keep from spasming wildly with overstimulation on his back. Whose long, thickly muscled limbs were too shaky by that point to hold him in place any other way.
It’s fine.
Who has buried his face in his arms and the other pillow and is making more noise than you’ve ever heard him make before.
No green. No powdered nitrile. No artificial hum of air filtration. No smell of antiseptic. It’s fine. It’s real.
"More," Sephiroth gasps, so Cloud grips harder, moves faster.
The unmistakable sounds of flesh on flesh.
"Mmm—…no, more—"
There’s a large hand tugging unsteadily near his ribs, so Cloud leans forward and flattens himself against Sephiroth’s back, ear pressed to the heartbeat thudding steadily underneath.
Skin on skin. Sephiroth has always liked—
Skin.
Insides.
innards.
no.
not like that
It’s fine.
Warm light. Warm skin. Fabric under your knees, not crinkling paper. Sheets and the thicker give of the pillow compressed under you both. Not vinyl with its lingering plasticky smell even after it must have been hosed down hundreds of times. Not metal. No metal. At all.
Sephiroth is whimpering, and the sound lances through Cloud’s chest too.
"Cloud," over and over, as if from far away.
He’s fine.
Sweat is gathering behind his knees and you’re both growing wet patches wherever you touch the mattress. Long hair sticking to your chest, friction-static-charged flyaways tickling at your lips and nose.
It’s real.
Sephiroth’s back is shuddering uncontrollably as Cloud kisses along it, as he opens his mouth and taste and smell combine into grass and metal and saltwater and rose. As he bites down and tastes blood because that’s just one final way of holding on.
It’s fine.
Sephiroth lets out something verging on an animal howl, vibrating through the pillow, through them both. Shoulders and the cage of his ribs rigid and rippling, and the rest of him pulsing around and against Cloud in desperate, instinctive spasms.
Cloud jolts as well, but it’s as much because of the sound and confusion as any tactile sensation.
…
…
…
I still…feel cold.
…
…
…
It’s an unspeakable relief when Sephiroth turns his head back, and he’s dishevelled, but clearly satisfied. Happy. Whole.
And he knows something is wrong already, because of course he does.
"Cloud, you didn’t…?"
No need to ruin it for both of them.
"Sorry. I think I just got in my head."
"…do you want—"
"I’m okay, I just need a break."
"Okay."
Sephiroth cleans up the worst of the mess ("It was almost time to do laundry again anyway," he murmurs soothingly) and then holds him, tucked protectively into the hollow between his chin and chest and bent knees. He pulls the covers over them both with one arm, like a soft grey wing.
"Did you see something?"
"Not exactly. Nothing that was real. Or seemed real. Oh, you know what I mean. It was just memories."
"Whose?"
"Couldn’t tell."
"Hm."
…
"It doesn’t seem right," Sephiroth says tightly, quietly.
"What?"
"Being with you keeps my worst memories away, while I bring yours back."
"They’d be there anyway. You know it’s better that I don’t bury them."
"Hm."
Sephiroth rests his chin gently on top of Cloud’s head. A couple of silver strands flutter between them as he exhales.
Cloud wants to say that having someone who believes him unquestionably, who never edges away from him, even in his worst moments, who knows when he’s mired in the past and gives him time to come back, means everything.
But the right words don’t quite come.
…
They still don’t fall asleep.
"Seph, can we try again?"
"Of course."
"You’re sure it’s not too much."
"You could never be too much."
Cloud can’t bring himself to look up and meet the fond smile he hears in those words.
"You get why I worry when you say things like that."
"Perhaps."
"Will you look at me this time?"
Cloud finds himself flipped onto a broad chest with annoyingly little effort.
"Yes."
"I like the way you look at me," Cloud confesses to Sephiroth’s clavicle.
"And how do I look at you, Cloud?" he purrs — husky, self-satisfied, with pinpricks of his old obsession shining through like the stars in the night sky.
Cloud can tamp down on one side of his smile, but not the other, as he responds, gruffly, "I just like the way you look at me."
He barely has to wait a second before he’s drawn close. Swept away from the emptiness and into the illimitable pearly warmth of the everything; tumbling gently forwards into an enthusiastic, four-limbed embrace.