(no subject)
Let Me Love You
Cloud/Sephiroth
R
#27: Narcissus
Summary: A major rewrite of one of the hilltop scenes in AC.
“I said I’d live out both our lives,” Cloud whispered to himself as he stood at the crest of a barren hilltop overlooking Midgar. Swallowing thickly, he slid slowly to his knees, his trembling fingers reaching out to stroke reverently down the rusted blade of a ruined sword. Zack… Cloud choked out a derisive laugh. “Easy to make that promise.”
Taking a deep breath, Cloud looked down, focusing his eyes on the cracked earth beneath him. “I’m dying, Zack. I won’t be able to live for either of us. I’m sor-” He gasped as a flash of green overwhelmed his vision, searing him with a flare of vibrant agony. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he forced the green to the edges of his mind. “I didn’t love you like I should have. I couldn’t.” Eyes of a bright, glistening jade teased at his memory, threatening to bring to the surface everything he’d tried to banish to the lowest depths of his consciousness. “I still can’t.”
A flash of blinding light, an image burned across his vision. A memory that was not his own coursed through his mind. Sephiroth’s memory. Sephiroth… Cloud’s eyes slid closed as if of their own accord, and he pitched forward, his forehead resting against the crazed surface of Zack’s sword and his fingers clutching at the jagged blade as the world reeled and spun around him. An agonizingly familiar green mist was rising up from far, far beneath him, and this time…this time he didn’t think he could force it back down. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Cloud grunted, his face a grimace of purest torture as pain shot up his left arm, spreading wings of sharp, green-laced anguish throughout his body. No! Not again… He couldn’t deal with this again, couldn’t face this part of himself that was not himself.
“Zack!” He screamed, his voice harsh and desperate. But there was no answer. He was alone, doomed to struggle against this demon by himself. It wasn’t fair. After everything that had happened, everything they’d all gone through…why this too? Zack’s and Aerith’s deaths, his own murder of Sephiroth-twice!-even the Geostigma…those he could handle. But this? Shin-Ra…they’d taken his body and tried to strip him from it. They’d altered him, had made him more than he should have been. They’d made him into a demon. A monster. Sephiroth… He was there. Always. Cloud could feel him hovering just beneath his thoughts. But it wasn’t Sephiroth! Not as he should have been. He’d been twisted, distorted somehow…
This was not the Sephiroth Cloud had loved. This monster that crawled beneath his skin was the demon he’d killed twice over. This was the devil that had destroyed his General. And every day Cloud was forced to face him, to grit his teeth and grapple to keep this…this abomination from taking control. He couldn’t stop fighting, couldn’t give up. Couldn’t lose. If he did, Sephiroth’s death would have been for nothing because he would be back with not even the thinnest veneer of humanity to hold him in check. Sephiroth would be back. And the world would be swallowed in flame.
But he was tired. He was so weary of this constant, never-ending battle for dominance. There was so much anger, so much pain and rage burning deep inside him… Cloud knew. He knew Sephiroth had been betrayed and manipulated, that he’d been wronged. It was Shin-Ra’s fault, humanity’s fault that Sephiroth had become Jenova’s demon. He knew that these people with their love of comfort and technology had twisted his beloved General into a monster. Why shouldn’t they pay? Why shouldn’t they burn for what they’d done? It was a question, a fantasy that taunted him on the darkest nights. He hated them. He wanted them to suffer. They’d taken Sephiroth from him. They’d stolen him, twisted him. Killed him.
His hand had held the blade, yes, but his General had been dead long before he’d gotten there. His had been an act of mercy. He hadn’t hesitated. And he’d never regretted his actions. Sephiroth wouldn’t have wanted to live like that. He’d never have been a pawn for Jenova. But it hadn’t done any good. Sephiroth hadn’t been allowed to rest. And neither had Cloud. All this time, all these years, he hadn’t been able to accept what Zack had offered him when they’d been trapped as Shin-Ra’s lab rats. He should have been able to love Zack, had wanted to love Zack. But he couldn’t. It would have been a betrayal.
He’d never told Sephiroth he loved him. He’d never kissed him, never caressed his face or drawn his fingers through his shifting mass of mercury hair. He’d never gotten the chance. He didn’t know if Sephiroth had loved him, if the General had hungered for him, wanted him. He would never know. And for that alone he could hate all of humanity. This hunger to cause pain, to kill…he knew where it came from. It was a devious desire that swirled through the green mist that clogged his mind, clouding his thoughts with a lust for revenge, shrouding his reason and his compassion. It was Sephiroth. Sephiroth’s pain, Sephiroth’s rage. Sephiroth’s insanity. They flowed through him, filtering insidiously into the deepest crevices of his mind. The demon’s madness permeated every level of his being, and it was so hard to deny him, so very hard to fight against him.
“Sephiroth,” Cloud hissed as a surge of savage agony thrilled through his veins. His eyes were clenched tightly shut as he tried desperately to close out the madness, to clamp down on the anger inside. Images flashed rapidly through his mind, snapshots from a life Cloud had never lived. Bright lights shining down on him. Straps holding him in place on a frigid metal table. A long syringe filled with a poisonous green liquid. Cloud gasped and a low moan escaped his throat. Zack’s sword at his throat. Zack flying back, lying in a broken heap on the catwalk.
Cloud’s eyes snapped open, but all he saw was green, a field of deep, impenetrable green. Only the sharp throb of pain in his hands as Zack’s blade bit into his palms cemented him in the material world. He screamed. “Don’t do this to me! I don’t want to fight you, not anymore! Sephiroth!”
He didn’t want to fight. He just wanted to give in, to rest. To have his life back. To have Sephiroth back. He didn’t want an enemy. He didn’t want to save the world. It was the world that had taken Zack and Aerith from him, that had given him Geostigma. It was the world that had taken Sephiroth from away from him. Cloud grunted as a searing pain ripped through his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. He felt the slick warmth as blood seeped down his skin, soaking into the fabric of his sweater. He knew, though, that if he’d been able to see past the green mist, there would be no wound. No blood. The cold metal blade burning through his body was nothing but a memory.
Just like Sephiroth.
A chilly voice chuckled deep inside his mind. Whispered. I’ll never be just a memory…Cloud.
Cloud screamed, the malicious power of that voice viciously slicing into him. No! Not again… He gritted his teeth and strained to release his grip on Zack’s sword, but his arms were no longer under his control. His nightmare was awake.
A low hiss. Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten my name, Cloud?
“You’re not him,” Cloud whispered through clenched teeth. “You could never be him.”
Poor little soldier. The fiery hatred rose up to choke the breath from Cloud’s throat, the green mist obscuring his vision bleeding streams of red. I was always him. How else could you have his memories? My memories?
“No!” Cloud cried out, forcing his eyes to focus. The red-streaked green mist flickered wildly in and out, punctuated with searing flashes of white-hot memory. The back of a yellow truck. Zack, talking and grinning broadly. A silver-haired young boy kneeling before Rufus Shin-Ra, his eyes flickering with a familiar madness. “Cloud, run!” Sephiroth, eyes gleaming, sword at his side. Immolated in flame. Zack’s body, slack and lifeless, drenched in liquid crimson. The white materia falling from Aerith’s limp fingers. A low moan of denial escaped his throat when he felt the telltale, contracting burn in his eyes. They were changing, poisonous green overwhelming blue. He was losing himself, falling to his nightmare. “No!” he screamed again. “You can’t have me! I belong to him…”
But Cloud… The whispering suggestion of a mocking sneer. I am him.
“He’s dead.” A tear, bleak and hopeless, slipped from Cloud’s burning eyes. “I killed him.” And now I’ll never know…
No, Cloud. Slowly, inch by creeping inch, the fingers of Cloud’s right hand wrenched themselves loose from the blade of Zack’s sword, blood seeping from jagged gashes across the palm and fingers. The rage swirling around and within him was different now, somehow, than it had been. It seemed ancient, haunted-the wrath of one denied what should have been his by right. His arm curled inward until his hand brushed his chest, his fingers clenching automatically around the zipper of his sweater and drawing it slowly, inexorably downward. He couldn’t feel his fingers, couldn’t feel the icy metal of the zipper or the soft sweep of the wool. It was as if it was another’s hand caressing him, another’s hand slipping behind the thick fabric of his shirt to trace almost tenderly across the trembling contours of his chest. You know. You’ve always known.
“Stop!” Cloud struggled to regain control of his traitorous arm, but his efforts were in vain. He was in pain, agony thrilling through his veins and blazing behind his eyes, but he could not feel his arm at all. That touch. Soft, gentle, it glided over his shaking flesh, calling up sensations and emotions Cloud had never before experienced. It was overpowering. Intoxicating. Tears of abject frustration welled in his eyes and coursed down his flushed cheeks. He wanted that touch, had wanted it for more than seven years. “No…please…”
What’s wrong, Cloud? You don’t love me? Cloud’s thumb brushed over a nipple, massaging, arousing, twisting.
Cloud gasped, his back arching as the fingers of his left hand clutched desperately at the sword that was the only thing holding him steady. He relished the sharp bite of the metal as it sliced into the thick skin of his hand. Zack. Zack’s reminder to hold steady, to fight. Zack’s reminder that Sephiroth was gone. “I love him.”
And he… Those deft fingers slipped lower, caressing warmly over his quivering stomach and nimbly unbuckling the waist-strap of his half-skirt. The button of his pants was quietly undone and the zipper slowly, teasingly drawn down. Cloud’s fingers whispered over his left hipbone. ...loved you.
A feral scream rent the air, and only when there was no breath left in his lungs did Cloud realize that he was the one screaming. He loved me? His muscles were strained and shaking, his entire body rigid and wracked with suffering and unspent fury. But his arm…his right arm moved with fluid, feline grace, whispering over his untouched flesh. He loved me? The thought echoed miserably throughout his body, throbbing with his pulse, driving him into the jade depths of his nightmare’s madness. Everything he was urged him to succumb to the insanity, to become one with Jenova. With Sephiroth. He loved me…
Yes, he loved you. Cloud’s hand-Sephiroth’s hand-delved beneath the now-constricting fabric of his pants, gripping his hard flesh with sure heat. Cloud groaned, biting his lip to hold back the needy whimper that fought to escape his throat. He’d never felt anything like this. Passion, lust, arousal-they had been abstract concepts to him. Alien. Empty. But this…
His skin was on fire, his body aching and arching, silently, traitorously begging for the touch of Sephiroth’s hand. His hand. His nightmare. The pain mingled with the pleasure and the humiliation in an intoxicating brew of filth and desire that threatened to take him over. He could still see the memories, the images flashing through his mind, but they were different now. Him, in battle stance, Sephiroth standing behind him, cradling him, guiding the sword through his hands. Sephiroth’s long fingers ghosting across the pale flesh of his cheek. His face, livid with fury as his sword plunged through his General’s breast. Him, on his knees, despair etched in every line of his face as Sephiroth plunged, willfully, into the Lifestream.
Oh, he loved you, Cloud. He wanted you. And you can still have him. The grip around his sex tightened, grew firmer, more possessive and demanding. Embrace me, Cloud. Let me in and I will love you. He will love you. And he’ll be with you again.
Cloud moaned, and his eyes slid shut, trapping the memories in the darkness of his mind, keeping them safe, holding them close. In his mind, he saw Sephiroth’s slender fingers as they gripped the hilt of Masamune, instructing his younger self in swordplay, and he cried as those same fingers gripped his flesh, instructing his present self in the ways of love and lust. Cloud bit down on his lip, reveling in the iron taste of the blood as it bathed his tongue with its red heat. Those were not Sephiroth’s fingers. No…
I love you, Cloud. His hand slid across his flesh in a furious, driving rhythm that could not be denied. Let me in. Be with me. The tantalizing scratch of nails as they scraped along his sensitized skin. Let me love you. Will you let me, Cloud? The grip tightened further, driving him deeper and deeper into emerald madness, and Cloud could feel himself rising even as he fell, speeding toward a blinding, long-sought release. Will you love me, Cloud?
“Yes!” The word was almost ripped from his throat, and Cloud threw his head back, his body lifting and straining to reach the man who’d haunted his dreams for so many years. Sephiroth…where are you?
I’m here, Cloud. Can’t you feel me? Faster, harder, drawing him deeper and deeper into the green mist, pulling him down to the very core of his being. I’ve always been here. All you have to do is give in. Let go. The strong fingers flying along his sex were hard and desperate, and Cloud could feel his release, his redemption, hovering just beyond his reach. Give in, Cloud. Let me love you.
“Sephiroth!” Cloud cried frantically, and all the walls and barriers crumbled to dust in his soul. “Please…please, Sephiroth…”
I’m here, Cloud. The green rose up to envelope him in a furious, roiling fog, pulling him under, drowning him. He could feel the world blanking out around him. The memories, the red lights, the sharp metal piercing his fingers-they all disappeared until the only thing he knew was the green mist and the feel of Sephiroth’s hand clenched around him. And he gave in, lost himself to the dark echo of a man who had loved him but never claimed him. Until now. And as white-hot completion overwhelmed him, his nightmare-his fantasy-took him. He was taken, owned. He belonged somewhere. To someone. It was over. He didn’t have to hold on anymore, didn’t have to fight or hold back.
He could feel Sephiroth with him, within him. He was a blazing green fire infusing Cloud’s body with foreign strength, with a surety of identity he’d never known before. Pleasure and contentment-completion-tingled along his nerves and a sticky warmth clung to his still trembling stomach. For a moment, a bare, shining moment, he felt whole. Happy.
Then a cold, brutal laugh shivered in his mind, and he was gripped viciously by mental hands and cast down into frigid, mocking darkness. As he tumbled and crashed among the shards of himself, Cloud heard an icy, familiar voice whisper, Fool. Who could ever love a weakling coward like you? Who could love a man who did nothing as his best friend was murdered before his eyes? A man who stabbed his General in the back? You weren’t good enough for Sephiroth. A bitter chuckle from far above him. You aren’t even worth the effort it would take to kill you.
Soundlessly, formlessly, Cloud wept. His nightmare was right. He didn’t deserve love. Or trust. He was weak. Worthless. And as he broke and shattered among memories of Zack, Aerith, and Sephiroth-beautiful, tortured Sephiroth-he had only one thought, I failed.
I failed you.
Cloud/Sephiroth
R
#27: Narcissus
Summary: A major rewrite of one of the hilltop scenes in AC.
“I said I’d live out both our lives,” Cloud whispered to himself as he stood at the crest of a barren hilltop overlooking Midgar. Swallowing thickly, he slid slowly to his knees, his trembling fingers reaching out to stroke reverently down the rusted blade of a ruined sword. Zack… Cloud choked out a derisive laugh. “Easy to make that promise.”
Taking a deep breath, Cloud looked down, focusing his eyes on the cracked earth beneath him. “I’m dying, Zack. I won’t be able to live for either of us. I’m sor-” He gasped as a flash of green overwhelmed his vision, searing him with a flare of vibrant agony. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he forced the green to the edges of his mind. “I didn’t love you like I should have. I couldn’t.” Eyes of a bright, glistening jade teased at his memory, threatening to bring to the surface everything he’d tried to banish to the lowest depths of his consciousness. “I still can’t.”
A flash of blinding light, an image burned across his vision. A memory that was not his own coursed through his mind. Sephiroth’s memory. Sephiroth… Cloud’s eyes slid closed as if of their own accord, and he pitched forward, his forehead resting against the crazed surface of Zack’s sword and his fingers clutching at the jagged blade as the world reeled and spun around him. An agonizingly familiar green mist was rising up from far, far beneath him, and this time…this time he didn’t think he could force it back down. Wasn’t sure if he wanted to. Cloud grunted, his face a grimace of purest torture as pain shot up his left arm, spreading wings of sharp, green-laced anguish throughout his body. No! Not again… He couldn’t deal with this again, couldn’t face this part of himself that was not himself.
“Zack!” He screamed, his voice harsh and desperate. But there was no answer. He was alone, doomed to struggle against this demon by himself. It wasn’t fair. After everything that had happened, everything they’d all gone through…why this too? Zack’s and Aerith’s deaths, his own murder of Sephiroth-twice!-even the Geostigma…those he could handle. But this? Shin-Ra…they’d taken his body and tried to strip him from it. They’d altered him, had made him more than he should have been. They’d made him into a demon. A monster. Sephiroth… He was there. Always. Cloud could feel him hovering just beneath his thoughts. But it wasn’t Sephiroth! Not as he should have been. He’d been twisted, distorted somehow…
This was not the Sephiroth Cloud had loved. This monster that crawled beneath his skin was the demon he’d killed twice over. This was the devil that had destroyed his General. And every day Cloud was forced to face him, to grit his teeth and grapple to keep this…this abomination from taking control. He couldn’t stop fighting, couldn’t give up. Couldn’t lose. If he did, Sephiroth’s death would have been for nothing because he would be back with not even the thinnest veneer of humanity to hold him in check. Sephiroth would be back. And the world would be swallowed in flame.
But he was tired. He was so weary of this constant, never-ending battle for dominance. There was so much anger, so much pain and rage burning deep inside him… Cloud knew. He knew Sephiroth had been betrayed and manipulated, that he’d been wronged. It was Shin-Ra’s fault, humanity’s fault that Sephiroth had become Jenova’s demon. He knew that these people with their love of comfort and technology had twisted his beloved General into a monster. Why shouldn’t they pay? Why shouldn’t they burn for what they’d done? It was a question, a fantasy that taunted him on the darkest nights. He hated them. He wanted them to suffer. They’d taken Sephiroth from him. They’d stolen him, twisted him. Killed him.
His hand had held the blade, yes, but his General had been dead long before he’d gotten there. His had been an act of mercy. He hadn’t hesitated. And he’d never regretted his actions. Sephiroth wouldn’t have wanted to live like that. He’d never have been a pawn for Jenova. But it hadn’t done any good. Sephiroth hadn’t been allowed to rest. And neither had Cloud. All this time, all these years, he hadn’t been able to accept what Zack had offered him when they’d been trapped as Shin-Ra’s lab rats. He should have been able to love Zack, had wanted to love Zack. But he couldn’t. It would have been a betrayal.
He’d never told Sephiroth he loved him. He’d never kissed him, never caressed his face or drawn his fingers through his shifting mass of mercury hair. He’d never gotten the chance. He didn’t know if Sephiroth had loved him, if the General had hungered for him, wanted him. He would never know. And for that alone he could hate all of humanity. This hunger to cause pain, to kill…he knew where it came from. It was a devious desire that swirled through the green mist that clogged his mind, clouding his thoughts with a lust for revenge, shrouding his reason and his compassion. It was Sephiroth. Sephiroth’s pain, Sephiroth’s rage. Sephiroth’s insanity. They flowed through him, filtering insidiously into the deepest crevices of his mind. The demon’s madness permeated every level of his being, and it was so hard to deny him, so very hard to fight against him.
“Sephiroth,” Cloud hissed as a surge of savage agony thrilled through his veins. His eyes were clenched tightly shut as he tried desperately to close out the madness, to clamp down on the anger inside. Images flashed rapidly through his mind, snapshots from a life Cloud had never lived. Bright lights shining down on him. Straps holding him in place on a frigid metal table. A long syringe filled with a poisonous green liquid. Cloud gasped and a low moan escaped his throat. Zack’s sword at his throat. Zack flying back, lying in a broken heap on the catwalk.
Cloud’s eyes snapped open, but all he saw was green, a field of deep, impenetrable green. Only the sharp throb of pain in his hands as Zack’s blade bit into his palms cemented him in the material world. He screamed. “Don’t do this to me! I don’t want to fight you, not anymore! Sephiroth!”
He didn’t want to fight. He just wanted to give in, to rest. To have his life back. To have Sephiroth back. He didn’t want an enemy. He didn’t want to save the world. It was the world that had taken Zack and Aerith from him, that had given him Geostigma. It was the world that had taken Sephiroth from away from him. Cloud grunted as a searing pain ripped through his chest, forcing the breath from his lungs. He felt the slick warmth as blood seeped down his skin, soaking into the fabric of his sweater. He knew, though, that if he’d been able to see past the green mist, there would be no wound. No blood. The cold metal blade burning through his body was nothing but a memory.
Just like Sephiroth.
A chilly voice chuckled deep inside his mind. Whispered. I’ll never be just a memory…Cloud.
Cloud screamed, the malicious power of that voice viciously slicing into him. No! Not again… He gritted his teeth and strained to release his grip on Zack’s sword, but his arms were no longer under his control. His nightmare was awake.
A low hiss. Has it been so long that you’ve forgotten my name, Cloud?
“You’re not him,” Cloud whispered through clenched teeth. “You could never be him.”
Poor little soldier. The fiery hatred rose up to choke the breath from Cloud’s throat, the green mist obscuring his vision bleeding streams of red. I was always him. How else could you have his memories? My memories?
“No!” Cloud cried out, forcing his eyes to focus. The red-streaked green mist flickered wildly in and out, punctuated with searing flashes of white-hot memory. The back of a yellow truck. Zack, talking and grinning broadly. A silver-haired young boy kneeling before Rufus Shin-Ra, his eyes flickering with a familiar madness. “Cloud, run!” Sephiroth, eyes gleaming, sword at his side. Immolated in flame. Zack’s body, slack and lifeless, drenched in liquid crimson. The white materia falling from Aerith’s limp fingers. A low moan of denial escaped his throat when he felt the telltale, contracting burn in his eyes. They were changing, poisonous green overwhelming blue. He was losing himself, falling to his nightmare. “No!” he screamed again. “You can’t have me! I belong to him…”
But Cloud… The whispering suggestion of a mocking sneer. I am him.
“He’s dead.” A tear, bleak and hopeless, slipped from Cloud’s burning eyes. “I killed him.” And now I’ll never know…
No, Cloud. Slowly, inch by creeping inch, the fingers of Cloud’s right hand wrenched themselves loose from the blade of Zack’s sword, blood seeping from jagged gashes across the palm and fingers. The rage swirling around and within him was different now, somehow, than it had been. It seemed ancient, haunted-the wrath of one denied what should have been his by right. His arm curled inward until his hand brushed his chest, his fingers clenching automatically around the zipper of his sweater and drawing it slowly, inexorably downward. He couldn’t feel his fingers, couldn’t feel the icy metal of the zipper or the soft sweep of the wool. It was as if it was another’s hand caressing him, another’s hand slipping behind the thick fabric of his shirt to trace almost tenderly across the trembling contours of his chest. You know. You’ve always known.
“Stop!” Cloud struggled to regain control of his traitorous arm, but his efforts were in vain. He was in pain, agony thrilling through his veins and blazing behind his eyes, but he could not feel his arm at all. That touch. Soft, gentle, it glided over his shaking flesh, calling up sensations and emotions Cloud had never before experienced. It was overpowering. Intoxicating. Tears of abject frustration welled in his eyes and coursed down his flushed cheeks. He wanted that touch, had wanted it for more than seven years. “No…please…”
What’s wrong, Cloud? You don’t love me? Cloud’s thumb brushed over a nipple, massaging, arousing, twisting.
Cloud gasped, his back arching as the fingers of his left hand clutched desperately at the sword that was the only thing holding him steady. He relished the sharp bite of the metal as it sliced into the thick skin of his hand. Zack. Zack’s reminder to hold steady, to fight. Zack’s reminder that Sephiroth was gone. “I love him.”
And he… Those deft fingers slipped lower, caressing warmly over his quivering stomach and nimbly unbuckling the waist-strap of his half-skirt. The button of his pants was quietly undone and the zipper slowly, teasingly drawn down. Cloud’s fingers whispered over his left hipbone. ...loved you.
A feral scream rent the air, and only when there was no breath left in his lungs did Cloud realize that he was the one screaming. He loved me? His muscles were strained and shaking, his entire body rigid and wracked with suffering and unspent fury. But his arm…his right arm moved with fluid, feline grace, whispering over his untouched flesh. He loved me? The thought echoed miserably throughout his body, throbbing with his pulse, driving him into the jade depths of his nightmare’s madness. Everything he was urged him to succumb to the insanity, to become one with Jenova. With Sephiroth. He loved me…
Yes, he loved you. Cloud’s hand-Sephiroth’s hand-delved beneath the now-constricting fabric of his pants, gripping his hard flesh with sure heat. Cloud groaned, biting his lip to hold back the needy whimper that fought to escape his throat. He’d never felt anything like this. Passion, lust, arousal-they had been abstract concepts to him. Alien. Empty. But this…
His skin was on fire, his body aching and arching, silently, traitorously begging for the touch of Sephiroth’s hand. His hand. His nightmare. The pain mingled with the pleasure and the humiliation in an intoxicating brew of filth and desire that threatened to take him over. He could still see the memories, the images flashing through his mind, but they were different now. Him, in battle stance, Sephiroth standing behind him, cradling him, guiding the sword through his hands. Sephiroth’s long fingers ghosting across the pale flesh of his cheek. His face, livid with fury as his sword plunged through his General’s breast. Him, on his knees, despair etched in every line of his face as Sephiroth plunged, willfully, into the Lifestream.
Oh, he loved you, Cloud. He wanted you. And you can still have him. The grip around his sex tightened, grew firmer, more possessive and demanding. Embrace me, Cloud. Let me in and I will love you. He will love you. And he’ll be with you again.
Cloud moaned, and his eyes slid shut, trapping the memories in the darkness of his mind, keeping them safe, holding them close. In his mind, he saw Sephiroth’s slender fingers as they gripped the hilt of Masamune, instructing his younger self in swordplay, and he cried as those same fingers gripped his flesh, instructing his present self in the ways of love and lust. Cloud bit down on his lip, reveling in the iron taste of the blood as it bathed his tongue with its red heat. Those were not Sephiroth’s fingers. No…
I love you, Cloud. His hand slid across his flesh in a furious, driving rhythm that could not be denied. Let me in. Be with me. The tantalizing scratch of nails as they scraped along his sensitized skin. Let me love you. Will you let me, Cloud? The grip tightened further, driving him deeper and deeper into emerald madness, and Cloud could feel himself rising even as he fell, speeding toward a blinding, long-sought release. Will you love me, Cloud?
“Yes!” The word was almost ripped from his throat, and Cloud threw his head back, his body lifting and straining to reach the man who’d haunted his dreams for so many years. Sephiroth…where are you?
I’m here, Cloud. Can’t you feel me? Faster, harder, drawing him deeper and deeper into the green mist, pulling him down to the very core of his being. I’ve always been here. All you have to do is give in. Let go. The strong fingers flying along his sex were hard and desperate, and Cloud could feel his release, his redemption, hovering just beyond his reach. Give in, Cloud. Let me love you.
“Sephiroth!” Cloud cried frantically, and all the walls and barriers crumbled to dust in his soul. “Please…please, Sephiroth…”
I’m here, Cloud. The green rose up to envelope him in a furious, roiling fog, pulling him under, drowning him. He could feel the world blanking out around him. The memories, the red lights, the sharp metal piercing his fingers-they all disappeared until the only thing he knew was the green mist and the feel of Sephiroth’s hand clenched around him. And he gave in, lost himself to the dark echo of a man who had loved him but never claimed him. Until now. And as white-hot completion overwhelmed him, his nightmare-his fantasy-took him. He was taken, owned. He belonged somewhere. To someone. It was over. He didn’t have to hold on anymore, didn’t have to fight or hold back.
He could feel Sephiroth with him, within him. He was a blazing green fire infusing Cloud’s body with foreign strength, with a surety of identity he’d never known before. Pleasure and contentment-completion-tingled along his nerves and a sticky warmth clung to his still trembling stomach. For a moment, a bare, shining moment, he felt whole. Happy.
Then a cold, brutal laugh shivered in his mind, and he was gripped viciously by mental hands and cast down into frigid, mocking darkness. As he tumbled and crashed among the shards of himself, Cloud heard an icy, familiar voice whisper, Fool. Who could ever love a weakling coward like you? Who could love a man who did nothing as his best friend was murdered before his eyes? A man who stabbed his General in the back? You weren’t good enough for Sephiroth. A bitter chuckle from far above him. You aren’t even worth the effort it would take to kill you.
Soundlessly, formlessly, Cloud wept. His nightmare was right. He didn’t deserve love. Or trust. He was weak. Worthless. And as he broke and shattered among memories of Zack, Aerith, and Sephiroth-beautiful, tortured Sephiroth-he had only one thought, I failed.
I failed you.