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He found himself ‘here,’ in this place again.
Not ‘here’ as in Midgar, barely a survivor of Meteor searing its edges like a cigarette cherry, its once brilliant neon lights now dishwater dull in the aftermath.
Not ‘here’ as in the bed he was laying in, in a spare room at the back of the rebuilt 7th Heaven, disheveled sheets smelling too much of himself, of days of unwashed skin.
It was a ‘here’ in the weighed down edges of his smiles, in the missing notes in his laughter, in the way he felt trapped in the iron-heavy bones of his own body.
A ‘here’ in that he had just started to think that he might yet get used to peace, but now it was falling just out of reach again, a new acquaintance distancing themselves, reverting back into a stranger.
It was as if any happiness he felt seemed less of an emotion, and more of a desperate fight against the hands of time, against some Unnameable Thing, pacing the ribs of his chest like a beast in a cage and snapping its teeth against the bars.
It was a fight that always, inevitably, led him back to
Here.
-
He could hear Tifa in the main room cleaning the bar area, could make out the faint clinking of dishes and collection of half-empty bottles. He imagined there were toys to pick up as well, littered across the restaurant, sitting slouched on tables and stuffed into the corners of booths. They were usually set up as a window display for wary orphans— a silent entreaty that, if they could set their distrust down at the door and enter, there would be food and shelter for them, they would come to no harm. Tifa collected lost children the way some collected stray cats.
He did his best to help her, to help the children, on other days that were not these days. But though he was only in the next room, he was ‘here,’ and here was a place that was somewhere far, far away.
There were toys strewn across his room as well, worn thin and filthy with age and love— Marlene’s doll, one eye stuck in place, the other lolling loose. Denzel’s bear, the stitching pulling undone, freeing small tuft clouds of stuffing. Tifa came in and swept both toys up in her arms— and then spotted a few dirty dishes that did not belong to the children.
Cloud had kept them stacked on his nightstand, crusted with food they had made together a week ago. He had nearly forgotten they were there. His nose had become numb to how sour they smelled.
He caught her gaze and she quickly ducked her eyes away, as if she could hide what he found there, a look that said she had enough children to take care of, she did not need one more.
They both knew that he had seen.
“It’s fine.” Her lips twitched into a smile. She took the dishes away.
And there was another ‘here’ he knew, in becoming a burden once again.
He needed to leave. He was dragging her down like a twisted ankle. The Unnameable Thing inside himself stirred in its cage, rose to all fours, leaped and rammed its shoulders against the lock of its door.
Like an answered prayer, his phone started to ring. He unearthed it from under his pillow, flipped it open, pulled it to his face. He tried his best to sound alive,
“Strife Delivery Service.”
-
“That’s not fair.” Denzel slumped, digging his fists into his pockets and kicking the dirt, “You promised you’d teach me how to hold a sword.”
Cloud stretched on his best smile and patted the boy’s head, gloved fingers carding gently through flyaway wisps and crests of brown hair. “I know, I know. But if I don’t take work when it comes, then people won’t call, and if people won’t call, how will I buy you a weapon of your own one day?”
Secretly, he could not be gladder to be going. His stomach twisted bitterly at how relieved he was. He shouldn’t be. He hated himself for every word— every consonant, vowel, and syllable— coming out of his mouth.
Why had he even made that promise? Teach Denzel how to hold a weapon? He hoped the boy would never have to. Holding a sword was the simple thing. There was no preparing the boy for the costs of being a protector, for the costs of failing to protect.
How could he even begin to explain those costs? To explain the veil between life and the Lifestream stretched thin, pierced through before you could even blink, before your eyes knew what had just passed in front of them, costs that even Cloud himself could not—
No.
His hand stilled on Denzel’s head as if stained by blood. He swore he could see it— sticky and seeping between his knuckles, heavy drops clinging to his wrist— but the boy did not seem to notice, instead sighing out, “All right.”
Denzel finally turned his face up to him, large blue eyes rounding, and tried on his own smile. “Just try not to take so long this time, okay?”
That open look reminded Cloud that the boy idolized him. That the reason Denzel wanted to protect others, to even hold a weapon, was because of him.
Gods knew why.
“I’ll get you something on the way back,” he said. He gave away nothing about when that would be.
There was yet another ‘here’— in turning away from something pure, from something he did not feel he deserved.
-
The woman pressed a cloth pouch of gil into his palm, her hands trying stubbornly not to tremble, and what came across her face was not exactly a smile. “Thank you for delivering the flowers for me. I just… I didn’t have the courage to go myself.”
“It was no trouble,” he said, though there was a certain air about her, an air that made him feel the pull of needing to leave again, to be done with this transaction as soon as possible. This line of work always surprised him with how much lonely people admitted to strangers, and that smile she carried held a certain something in it, something too close to holding a mirror up to himself.
Still, the woman kept on talking. “My brother wasn't always very kind to me,” she said, “but I still loved him. And now that he’s dead, I just…” She laughed, and the sound of it was like a broken pane of glass.
Cloud smiled politely at her, trying to keep the shards of that laughter from digging underneath his skin.
The woman shrugged, a heavy, tired thing. “I just don’t know what to do with myself. What we had was… complicated. Have you ever had anyone like that?”
“Can’t say I have,” he said too quickly, as if it could keep her from opening her mouth again, from saying even one more painful sentence. “But I wish the both of you peace.” That, too, he had said too quickly.
He had not even realized the weight of his words until just after. At the time, it had just seemed like the placating thing to say.
He could barely watch as the woman's eyes blurred and then shined over. She blinked, her eyelashes darkening into wet, clumped points, tapered like the petals of a certain flower he once knew. “Thank you,” she breathed.
Cloud nodded and turned away from her. He saddled his bike and pocketed his gil. With a final backward wave of his hand, he was gone.
He rode, he ran, just as fast as Fenrir would let him.
From her. From everything.
-
He rode, he ran, but he could not escape that woman.
There was a lot more he could have said to her, if he could only be just as honest. But he wasn't in the habit of telling the tale of his life, his pain, to strangers. He had not even told his closest friends. Telling himself was impossible enough, except in times of these, of ‘here,’ where he was unraveling faster than a snapped bobbin in a sewing machine.
And what would he have said to her, anyway? Nothing good. Nothing anyone ever needed to hear.
Who needed to be reminded that some graves went unmarked by flowers? That some graves held no markers at all? Some graves— they were not places, but echoes— memories in the air of hailing bullets. Sunken in the waters of forgotten cities. Frozen in the ice of the Northern Crater. No ceremonies. No open caskets. No goodbyes. No so-called closure, fabled and loved by so many.
‘I wish the both of you peace.’ And what of his peace? Instead of any, he felt restless.
He pushed his foot down harder on the gas pedal.
He rode, he ran, but he could not escape Denzel.
He feared the day the boy would know that heroes were not as mythical as the Knights of the Round, that they were merely humans, that they could disappoint and hurt in ways far worse than broken promises. He could be the one to teach him that, if he wasn’t careful. He knew that, and yet he still could not stop himself from being reckless.
The boy made Cloud faintly remember having a hero himself. A legend, a demi-god, a bright star in Cloud’s sky that had served as a compass for the SOLDIER he had wanted to become. But ever since that light had gone out, at times like this, he was swallowed in darkness, he was lost, he could no longer tell which way pointed North.
Fenrir howled between his legs, humming vibrations up the bones of his arms.
He rode, he ran, but he could not escape Tifa.
Tifa used to leave messages on his phone when he was out this long— non-confrontational I miss you.’s, Are you okay?’s, When do you think you’ll be back?’s. She had tried for so long to be understanding, to be willfully blind to the way he was healing— or failing to— but eventually, his disappearances had bred enough resentment for her silence to break.
“We’ve lost you to the memories, haven’t we?” she had said, snapping up yet another dirty plate. “When are the people who are still alive going to matter to you more than the ones who are dead?”
And then, right after—
“I’m sorry,” she said, in whispered horror, wrapping her arms around herself as if to keep any more vitriol from spilling free. “I finally said it, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”
He had wanted to tell her then, to scream then, that a bright young woman with fists so strong and a heart so big should never apologize for a man like him. That she deserved so much better than someone so willfully broken. That her life could be so much lighter without his dead weight chaining her down to the ground.
That she had every claim to her anger because she was right.
But he had said nothing.
After that, the messages on his phone lessened and lessened. Until finally, one day— they stopped.
He rode, he ran, but he could not pull free from the beast, from the Unnameable Thing inside of him. From the jaws that had once more sunk into his throat and dragged him down, down, forever back down, into all of these places, these ‘here’s,’ where he had hoped he would never be again.
He had helped save The Planet, but in doing so, he had lost so many, many things. He was hailed as a savior, but that title did not fit at all right to him; not when he knew what he had failed to save. Buried in the center of that, there was an inappropriate grief, a shapeless sorrow, something gnawing at his soul that was completely forbidden to him. There was no voice for him to speak of it, no home where it would be welcome— and so it wandered, it paced, never resting, never finding a place to curl its weary limbs and sleep.
Any time he tried to make peace with the animal, to give it words and form, his mind recoiled with the screams of all those he loved— those who hated in the way that he should hate, those who would never understand:
He burned your home. He killed Tifa’s father, your mother.
He murdered Aeris. And before, he manipulated you, he made you beat her.
He preyed on your muddled identity. He used you to summon Meteor.
And yes, all of those things were true. So many awful, awful things were true. He did not forgive any of these sins. They were unforgivable.
But he could not outrun this bittersweet feeling with no name, or his shame for it, either.
-
He was here, finally, at the church again.
Why he had first chosen this place, he did not know. Had it been a need to repent, to be forgiven?
But what did it matter anymore…
He knew what he came back for.
He set up his tent, then rested his back on the dirt floor, folded his arms behind his head. Once, this patch of dirt had been covered in flowers of white and gold, petals tapered into delicate points, like cut-out paper stars. Those flowers had been sacred to him in the memories they brought him, but eventually they had all dried up and withered. The moon sifted through stained glass windows, painting his skin in ghostly gleams of color, making his paleness seem something ethereal, and he set his eyes above, stargazing through the hole in the roof.
Sometimes, on nights like this, he would catch dark echoes of Zack or Aeris looming above.
He could not bring himself to look at their disappointed faces, the reflections of his guilt, so different from the smiles they once wore in life.
He waited.
-
Nights and days passed, countless and identically gray. Afternoon came. A cutting wind stirred in the broken church, sweeping black feathers across the dirt ground, one pair and then another, gliding like skating lovers on a frozen pond.
Cloud watched them. A breath he had long been holding, burning at the center of his lungs, escaped. The lead-sluggish beating of his heart picked up into something resembling a pulse, into something moving and pumping and actually alive in his veins. Finally.
One by one, the feathers gathered, congealed, shaped themselves like clay. First into a frame of connecting bones, then into elastic string tendons and slabs of pink muscle. Next were branching networks of nerve fiber, vein, and artery. Teeth and tongue filled out a hollow skull, the jaw twisted into a ghastly smirk. Twin orbs popped into empty eye sockets, illuminated with mako irises, pupils surfacing as wide ink dots before thinning into slits. Near last to form was the skin, pale grafts painting over the time-lapsed sculpture, giving it color and concrete form.
Cloud drew his Buster Sword out.
Sephiroth shook his head, silver hair rippling with the motion. The last of black feathers smoothed and melded into his leather coat. Amusement touched his thin lips, a mirror of the bone jaw smirking underneath. “Why must you always fight, Strife? It was your mind that called me into being.”
Cloud cut the sword across, then drew it out again, the tip of the blade level with Sephiroth's nose.
Sephiroth stared Cloud down through the blade as if only a pane of glass stood between them. “Do you truly believe this pointless scuffle absolves you of anything?” He cocked his head to the side, arching a fine brow. “That if you only put on enough of a show, you can tell yourself later that you actually did not want this?”
In a hazy flash of materia blue, Cloud attacked.
Steel collided with steel. Sparks flew in the air like darting fireflies. Shock waves bounced off stone pillars with each parry, the hiss of scraping blades singing within the church’s walls.
Cloud fought back with all he could, with all he had left in him, until the muscles he had been starving were stiff and screaming, until the blowing wind around him hurt like daggers to inhale. His eyes flew around wildly, zeroing in on any opening, his mind more awake and alert than it had been since that day at the Northern Crater.
All it took was for him to falter for half a second.
Sephiroth’s pauldron knocked him in the chest, sending him flying into wooden pews, breaking them into halves. Splinters hooked into his clothes, scratched angry, swelling stripes up his bare arms. There was no time to react. He felt himself being grabbed from behind and dragged back up onto his feet, dragged back to the patch of dirt where dried up flowers brushed against his boots.
He found himself with his wrist pinned against his mid-back. His shoulder ached, strained in its socket. The cold steel of the Masamune pressed up against his throat, preventing him from moving forward, trapping him against Sephiroth's chest. He swallowed in air and the blade nicked his neck in the motion. A bead of blood, red and warm, spilled down and gathered into a pool at the dip of his collarbone.
Cloud tried to gain control over his panting. He closed his eyes slowly. In his blurring vision, the tattered church roof gleamed liked burning paper in the red-gold sunlight. Steadily, gently, all light and color in the world sucked away and desaturated, drowning into an endless, soundless black. His fingers clenched into a fist.
He pressed his back into the man behind him.
He rocked his hips.
He pushed himself back, back, farther back, into buckles and leather, nearly manic in his search to feel something hard.
Sephiroth’s mouth was on the corner of his lips in an instant— but the feeling of it was not right. It was not enough. It was too soft, too warm, too velvet, the pressure too tender and teasing. It lingered on his mouth for far too long.
Cloud winced and pulled away, eyes slitting open into a glare. “Don’t kiss me like that.”
Sephiroth chased his mouth with his— one singular soft kiss, full on the lips. “Like what, exactly?”
But Cloud would not say.
“Like I’m a man you once looked up to?” Sephiroth tossed the Masamune aside, his gloved hand gripping Cloud solidly by the chin. His other arm circled Cloud’s waist and pulled him ever closer. His mouth hovered over the nape of Cloud’s neck, the touch of his lips still as gentle and fleeting as butterfly’s wings. “Perhaps even a man you loved?”
“Do you always have to talk this much?”
The shape of a smirk brushed Cloud’s pulse. “Your mind gives me more substance than the empty protests of your lips. If you truly wanted things any other way, then they would be that way.”
“Shut up.”
“But you can barely tell yourself what you really want, can you?” A wet tongue swept over the apple of Cloud’s throat, marring the streak of blood that the Masamune had drawn from him. “You cannot reconcile the lover you once longed for with the truth of what I am.”
“Shut up.”
Sephiroth grazed the shell of his ear with blunt, hard teeth and whispered, low and cutting, “You want both men, don’t you?” He bit down on the lobe and tugged, then continued his murmuring, relentless, as if baring all of Cloud’s secrets to the dying sun, “I am here to be whatever you dream, Cloud. Both the hero you wished for and the monster you think you deserve.”
Cloud barely kept the tremble out of his voice, “Just give me what I need.”
He felt a hand gather in his belt and yank, his waistband snapping off his hips, his pants dropping to his ankles. Sephiroth took him by the shoulders and shoved him down onto his knees. He fell onto crumpled brown flowers and dirt. The rest of his clothes dispersed into tendrils of black smoke, leaving his thin frame exposed to the wind, goosebumps dotting across his bare skin.
On his knees did not seem to be enough. A hand seized him by the scruff of his neck and forced his face down into the ground, positioning him on all fours, his ass hiked high in the chill air. The hand closed in, the iron vice of Sephiroth’s fingers pressing into his trachea, stealing away just enough air to leave his head pleasantly dizzy. The other hand moved to his mouth, forcing gloved fingers passed his lips.
Cloud bit down. As his teeth sunk into the soft leather, he felt the sink of Sephiroth inside him in turn, cock deliciously hot and slick with Elixir. He keened into the fingers. Sephiroth drew back, slow. Then, with a swing of hips, Cloud felt himself pierced to the hilt, his muffled cry vibrating in his throat.
Sephiroth drew back to the tip and thrust in again, forcing their pale bodies flush. The reverb of Cloud’s cry hummed in his chest now. He bit down harder into the leather, tried desperately to swallow to keep himself from drooling. His eyes hazed over, pupils like drugged black disks in thinning irises.
This had all just started, but oh, his body already ached, and he could not tell if it was from being opened up so roughly, or from needing so much more. He spread his thighs apart in a silent plea for Sephiroth to just move, and it was answered with a purr that made his swollen cock twitch.
Sephiroth rut into him with a force that skinned his knees against the dirt.
It was exactly what he needed.
Cloud lost himself to the fingers suppressing his tongue, to the grip around his neck, to the greedy arch of his own back, the power of the torso and hips working behind him. To a cock so heavy and hard, that had him so fucked and full.
He was hurting himself. Some distant part of him knew it; this was self-harm. This was slitting something deep inside himself wide open, endorphins rushing through his veins to numb the pain, flooding his head until he could not think clearly, until he blessedly could not think clearly.
The cage in his heart swung open on its hinges with an ugly creak. It was empty. The beast was free, for now.
Here there was no Nibelheim in flames, the air choked with floating embers and smoke. No Meteor looming above, searing the sky in shades of blood red. No Aeris kneeling, her fingers daintily folded, waiting patiently for her execution.
Here there was only the vibrant song of his pounding heart and trembling body, his hips bucking back incoherently into every snapping thrust, every nerve in him tunneling and stoking and building into a joyful live wire, until there was only Sephiroth, Sephiroth, Sephiroth…
His beautiful, fucked-up angel.
“You're getting close.” Sephiroth pulled his gloved hand free from Cloud’s mouth, gripping into the flesh of his ass instead. Bruises bloomed in the shape of his fingers. “I can feel you falling apart around me.”
And Cloud knew it was true. His walls twitched erratically, pulling Sephiroth in deeper with each pulse, but signaling their end. “Please— ” his voice was something wrecked, something just as broken and hollow as he had felt, days ago, on a mattress in a back room in 7th Heaven, “ —don't let it stop.”
“It will never stop for us,” Sephiroth said, rough like a promise. He chuckled, dark and cruel and beautifully breathless against Cloud’s shoulder. “How could it end when you never let it begin?” He bit down, hard, the points of his teeth sparking lightning through Cloud’s system, until Cloud was spilling himself in long white spurts over crumpled flowers.
And it was done.
Cloud wanted to feel Sephiroth come, too— to feel that satisfaction, hot and claiming like a brand inside of him. He wanted it so badly. But Sephiroth never, ever came. Instead, black feathers burst and swirled around Cloud, dissipating with the wind, abandoning him to sit alone in the broken church once more.
He felt his own release dry along with the sweat prickling his thighs, sticky and chill. His body kept shaking in the open air— weary, dirty. Bone cold.
He could barely see the dead flowers through the burning that threatened his eyes.
He pulled a mud-caked fist to his mouth and screamed, the shattered edges of his voice muffled.
But no, he would not cry.
-
This was the last time, he promised himself. He would never do this again.
Tifa did not ask where he had been. He almost wished she would. Like the messages on his phone, it seemed to be something she had given up on, for both their sakes. She simply smiled at him in a way he knew he had not earned, beautiful and sun-bright, and told him, “Welcome home.”
He stepped inside, still wondering— but grateful— that ‘home’ was a place where he was still welcome.
There were no real bruises on his skin, but he could still feel them— finger points etched into his neck, indents cut into the roundness of his ass, the trace of teeth on his shoulder. Marks of blue and purple, faded greens and yellows. He was convinced that Tifa could see them, that she could spot a certain oddness in his gait.
His throat swelled just underneath the jawline. His stomach soured, twisted. He nearly dry-heaved on the spot.
No more.
He would become a man worthy of Tifa’s kindness and understanding. A man who would not take advantage of her in his weakness. A man that Tifa would never have to make excuses for, never again.
He took a shower. He let the hot water rain down on him and cleanse him, let it rinse his troubles down the drain along with days of sweat and dirt.
He spent the afternoon in the kitchen. He rinsed stalks of vegetables in every color, cut them up into neat slices, steamed them to serve alongside rice for their dinner.
At the table, he gifted a steel rod to Denzel, apologizing for being away for so long again. They would begin practicing outside tomorrow. A rod was a good weapon for a kid, and it would be a good starting tool for the boy to learn, one day, how to properly wield a sword.
He surprised Marlene with flowers that he had picked up off the road. They were not as pretty, not as elegant, as the white and gold bouquet he had once bought her— but their bubblegum pink petals still had a fun charm. Marlene liked them, and she seemed overjoyed that he had thought of her, so it was enough.
After they ate, Tifa washed the dishes and he dried them, putting them away in their wooden cupboards. They talked in low, pleasant tones together, careful not to wake the children. Tifa told him about a particularly odd experience with one of her customers that day, and he found himself laughing.
He felt so, so relieved to hear himself laugh again.
At the end of the night, he fell, exhausted, into bed. He crawled into sheets that no longer smelled of himself, but of something crisp and light and almost sweet. He had nearly closed his eyes when he spotted something— a bit of white ceramic— poking out from underneath the bed skirt.
The handle of a coffee cup.
He picked it up. Dried brown liquid lined the bottom, pocked and curved into the shape of a crescent moon. A spoon pressed against the cup’s ceramic walls, glued there with creamer that had long gone sour. The whole mess had probably been hidden under his bed since before he had left, and who knew how long before then. Tifa must have missed it.
He sighed. He set the mug back down.
He would put it away tomorrow, he told himself.
He didn’t.