Final Fantasy VII, Cloud / Zack / Sephiroth: Mistletiptoe #5 - The Morning After
(sweatdrop) Because people wanted to see the morning after. I couldn't tag it onto a particular theme, at least not one I don't already have Evil Plans for, but can it stand as an appendix to one of the other four?
('nother sweatdrop) It occurs to me I've written about 50 pages in the past couple weeks. Ah, vacation, how I'm going to miss you after tomorrow...
Fandom / pairing: Final Fantasy VII, Cloud/Zack/Sephiroth
Theme: N/A here; a sequelthing to the Mistletiptoe 4-parter (parts posted here and here)
Title: Mistletiptoe #5: The Morning After
Author: ChibiRisu-chan
Rating: PG-13
Table of contents of all 30 fics (and then some ^^;;)
The light was coming at him from the wrong place. It was getting in his eyes. Cloud brought his watch up to his nose and blinked fuzzily at it -- no, it wasn't the middle of the afternoon, it was still morning, and it was a day off, so rolling over and going back to sleep sounded like a good idea, except that it was really weird for the light to be coming from the wrong place. After a few minutes' wrestling with the temptation to just ignore it and assume somebody with an explanation would come along sooner or later, Cloud sighed to himself a little and scrubbed at his eyes, trying to blink away the sleep-stickiness.
Definitely not his own room in the barracks, which was beyond weird. It had to be the room of someone in the military, because the sheets and blankets were standard military issue, but it wasn't Zack's room, because it wasn't full of decidedly non-regulation posters and books and magazines and boots and equipment strewn everywhere. The only boots in sight were his own, set neatly beside the edge of the bed, and the rest of the room was almost like a model that nobody actually lived in. Oh, sure, the right furniture was there -- a bed, a dresser, a closet; there was a room outside the door, where he could see the corner of a completely generic couch that also looked like standard military issue -- but it was all the sorts of things that showed up in staff rooms or lounges, not in people's living quarters. Especially not for people with enough rank to have an apartment with more than one room, instead of a barracks room with bunk beds...
Cloud made the bed out of courtesy, because it was military protocol and the room's owner would probably appreciate it being returned in the same state, and then he padded barefoot and groggy into the hallway to look around.
The first thing that struck him was the fact that one wall was nothing but window. Through the window, the ground was way the hell too far away. Cloud looked away from it hastily, not wanting to get vertigo when he still wasn't completely convinced he was even awake yet. --Couch. Generic couch that was good and solid and didn't give him a view of way the hell too much sky. A plant too, a tall pointy-leafed thing that would have looked right at home in a lobby somewhere, but seemed to do a good job of anchoring the end of the couch to keep a person's eyes from falling right out that window again and -- gaah, no more looking at the window.
There was a video panel set into the wall, and a pair of wooden posts sticking out a few inches above it for some reason, and by the other end of the couch there was a low table with a lamp and a remote and a couple of books, but the rest of the room was empty -- almost as if the furniture had been shoved up against the walls for some reason. After a minute, Cloud realized why: room to practice, room to train. There wasn't enough ceiling clearance to swing a blade, of course, but there was enough floorspace for kata and hand drills... he wished the couch did a better job of blocking off the view of that window; maybe it helped to be sitting in it sideways, but then he'd still know what was gaping at his back and... urgh. Vertical blinds, he thought dizzily. Somebody needs to put in vertical blinds or something.
In the opposite corner from that window, there was a kitchenish thing with a coffee maker and a microwave, and a couple of dishes stacked neatly in the drainer. One of them was a mug with a silly cartoon on it; good, somebody did actually live here, Zack hadn't just stashed him in the corner of some spare Shinra room left for people who worked too late to head home for a night. This had to be somewhere in Shinra headquarters; nowhere else in Midgar had that kind of a stomach-dropping view...
Cloud picked up the mug and turned it over in his hands. It definitely didn't fit with the rest of the room; Cloud almost wondered if it had been left by mistake.
The mug had a picture of a generic gray building labeled 'Institute for the Study of Stress,' and a white-coated doctor with a clipboard had just been thrown out one of the windows and was plummeting toward the ground; a voice from inside the building was commenting, "Hey, I feel better already."
It was bright and tacky and as un-military as it got, aside from the comically overdone stark gray featurelessness of the cartoon building, and Cloud wondered surreptitiously who on earth would have the nerve to bring a mug like that inside Shinra Headquarters.
Then he smacked himself on the forehead. Zack, obviously -- that kind of irreverence had Zack's name all over it. Zack clearly knew who lived here, to drop him off when he'd gone and fallen asleep waiting for him to finish helping with the General's paperwork...
...the... General's...
Cloud set the mug down quickly, before he could drop it, and flattened himself against the wall through sheer instinct, staring around.
Military issue everything. One of Zack's mugs -- or else a mug that had been given by Zack. Given Zack's less than kind commentary about the kinds of things the researchers had done to Sephiroth even more than to the first-class soldiers, in the name of science... the mug was suddenly making a disturbing amount of sense.
Especially the fact that Sephiroth had kept the mug. And used it, regularly. In the middle of Shinra headquarters. Possibly in front of the researchers who experimented on him -- the kind of nerve that took, or the kind of residual pain --
--that was all beside the point; he was standing in the General's apartment, looking around at his personal belongings as though he had any right--
--he'd slept in the General's bed--
He had to get out of there, now. He started for the door, and remembered that his feet were bare, and wavered for less than a second before he decided to abandon the boots and run first and beat Zack to a bloody pulp second and requisition a new pair of boots later on.
Beating Zack to a pulp was nearly as high on his list of priorities as getting out of the General's apartment; of all the places for Zack to leave him -- even the couch with that window behind it would have been better -- scratch that, the middle of a Sector 6 streetcorner would have been better, then he wouldn't have to worry about what the General would say when he came in and discovered a cadet's boots beside his bed like some insane military edition of Goldilocks--
--he even remembered the Mako-glowing eyes, leaning over him in the dark; neither of them had needed to turn a light on because they were both genetically modified maniacs who could see in the dark like cats, like...
cats...
eyes like cats' eyes, vertical-slit pupils and luminous, shimmering green, like magic materia, and just a hint of a smile...
Cloud turned around and whacked his head against the wall, hard, but that didn't dislodge the image in his head. Because he could remember the feel of the General's hair beneath his hands too, and the warmth beneath the black leather gloves as he'd had to coax Cloud's hands free, and...
Cloud slid down the wall and buried his face in his knees.
It would have been one thing if it had been Zack putting him in the General's bed for the night; Cloud could have gone ballistic on his ass with no qualms, because of course Zack would be leading in to a Goldilocks joke the next time he saw them both and Zack knew his pride would never survive that and so he'd earned himself a good attempted pummeling even if Cloud knew the attempt was already doomed to failure. But Zack had been the one taking off his boots, not the one carrying him...
The next coherent thought he managed to put together was I should go get my boots.
Because if Sephiroth had put Cloud in his own bed, then Cloud was clearly going to need his boots in order to run far enough to escape the amount of teasing Zack was going to have stored up.
...And, failing that, since he was pretty sure there wasn't anywhere far enough to escape Zack's teasing-- at least he'd get a lot farther trying to kick Zack's kneecaps in when dangling from an arm-length grip in army boots than in his bare feet.
...Yeah. Boots.
Cloud had just gotten the first one tied and had the second in hand when he heard the door slide.
Zack was the first one in the door, of course. "You awake yet, Sleeping Beauty?"
As Cloud debated whether or not he could hide himself underneath Sephiroth's bed without being noticed, Zack turned and called conspiratorially over his shoulder, "Hey, Prince Charming, I think somebody needs a wake-up kiss. Care to do the honors?"
Cloud flung the boot straight at the back of Zack's head.
"...Shit!" He caught it, of course, but the laces were close enough to tangle in his hair under the momentum; Cloud took it as an obscure sort of pathetic half-victory as Zack laughed. "Good shot, kid!"
...And then he looped the laces around his hand and let the boot dangle over his shoulder, thus ensuring that Cloud couldn't get it back in order to run. Dammit.
NEVER hand the enemy your weapons, especially when the enemy is HIM, Cloud yelled at himself fiercely, and went hobbling out into the living room to see if he could humiliate himself enough to convince Zack to give his boot back.
The two pegs over the video panel were to hold the Masamune, because Sephiroth had just hung the sheathed blade there; he slumped into the sofa and let his head fall back, and the shimmering curtain of his hair spilled to the floor.
Zack set a brown paper bag on the low-set table and pulled it around in front of the couch, then shoved Cloud's boot deep under the sofa with an evil grin as he pitched his voice to carry. "I take it back; you're Sleeping Beauty and he's Goldilocks. I guess that makes me Prince Charming?"
"More like Prince Pain in the Ass," Cloud growled, hands opening and closing helplessly around nothing as he wondered whether it was actually sacrilegious or just a damn bad idea to take the Masamune off the wall to use to try to fish his boot out from where Zack's longer arms could have shoved it under the sofa. "Give me back my boot."
"You're in no hurry," Zack said smugly. "Go get me some plates, will you?"
"How do you know I'm in no hurry?"
"Because you haven't even got both shoes on, of course!"
"Zack," Sephiroth said faintly, "I don't know where you get your energy from, but I'm too tired to listen to the two of you attempt to destroy my apartment around me. If you must bait him, please do it quietly."
"It's all that hot cocoa and flavored syrup," Zack replied with a grin. "Tons of sugar. I am so far past wired it's not even funny! Come on, Spike, three plates and some glasses already. --I've got pancakes."
Cloud wavered for a minute, and then stumped into the kitchenette to find some dishware. A feud was one thing, but he could try and fail to pound some human decency into Zack later; the General wanted it quiet, and there were pancakes, and that was a devastating combination.
"Take the other boot off, kid, you walk like a pirate like that," Zack called, unrolling the bag and getting out the various containers inside.
There were pancakes, and syrup, and real butter, and scrambled eggs, and fresh-made sausage, and the General had juice in the mini-fridge under the kitchenette's countertop, and if it hadn't been for the fact that Zack was sitting right in front of where his boot had vanished and wearing the smuggest grin he'd seen for weeks, Cloud would have started to wonder if he was still dreaming.
"Where'd you find all this?"
"It's good to be cute and friendly," Zack said happily. "Flirting shamelessly with the old ladies in the third-floor canteen never hurts either. Sure, the younger ones might be better looking, but older ones have got lots more years of experience around a kitchen!"
"Devious," Sephiroth murmured.
"I prefer to think of it as intelligent reallocation of available resources, boss."
Sephiroth didn't bother to take up the debate, pushing his hair back from his face with one tired hand and poking at his pancake with a fork. Zack deposited another one on his plate, and Sephiroth took a minute to look at it blankly before looking up at his nuisance of a friend.
"How many hours were you on shift anyway?"
"Twenty-six, I think."
Cloud choked on his juice, and spent a while coughing. Zack patted him on the back gently, and said to Sephiroth, "That's about what I figured. Have some more juice. You could use the vitamins."
The corner of his lips quirked faintly. "Now who's the mama chocobo?"
"Seph, if you're going to go taking triple shifts so that everybody else can go see their families, you're damn well going to take care of yourself afterwards. And don't even start on that four-days-in-Wutai story because last time I checked this place is damn well not the front lines of a war zone. We clear on this?"
When he could breathe again, Cloud wheezed, "I'm sorry, sir -- I'm so sorry -- I was sleeping in your bed when you--"
Sephiroth waved a hand absently. "I was on duty," he said. "It's not like I'd have been using it."
"But -- I should have been doing something..."
"It wouldn't have made a difference, Spike," Zack said, rueful. "This is a twenty-four-seven operation. Someone has to be on duty at all times, to be able to call in the right people if anything goes wrong. It was literally a case of waiting for the next shift to come on duty. It doesn't change that he's an overgenerous twit for pulling that kind of stunt, but one more body in the room wouldn't have let him finish sooner; I don't have the clearances needed to monitor some of those systems either." Zack refilled Sephiroth's glass with juice, and said, "Have you got any vitamins around?"
"I'll be fine once I've slept."
"So finish your breakfast. Dinner. Whichever."
"I would," Sephiroth agreed, "if you'd stop giving me more things to eat."
"At least drink your juice."
Sephiroth poked at his pancake again, making quiet sounds in the back of his throat. Cloud stared, because it sounded suspiciously like "wark wark wark wark wark."
Zack nearly sprayed his juice across the table and clamped a hand over his mouth to catch any stray drips, choking on laughter and juice in nearly equal proportions. "Son of a...! All right, that's it, the next time I want to take you out partying I have to get you seriously sleep-depped first! I swear, if I ever told anybody the great General Sephiroth goes around making chocobo noises at people, I'd get put on the funny drugs so fast..."
"Only at people who make mother hens of themselves," Sephiroth said placidly, and took another bite of pancake.
"At least I'm not chewing on your hair to make it lay smooth," Zack protested, all wounded indignance. "And pancakes taste a damn sight better than sylkis greens."
"You're still feeding us and fussing about vitamins. By the way, what exactly did you puree to put into that green flask?"
"That was just peppermint syrup!"
"Ah. Convenient, that."
"It was!"
Cloud couldn't stop grinning, because finally, finally, Zack was getting some of his own back. Zack noticed his expression and rolled his eyes.
"Laugh it up while you can, Goldilocks. I'm still stockpiling ammunition with your name on it."
Cloud stuck out his tongue at him, and kept eating, because the pancakes really were too good to let get cold.
Zack nagged full glasses of juice into both of them, getting in a couple of digs about "Well, at least theoretically you're a growing boy, Spike!" in the process. Cloud warked back at him, and then dissolved into laughter, and beneath tired eyes, Sephiroth actually smiled at them both.
"Give me those plates; I know when I'm being abused, I may as well make myself a good little house-slave while I'm at it," Zack mock-grumbled.
"Leave them be," Sephiroth said around a yawn. "I'll deal with them later."
"I know you, boss," Zack shot over a shoulder. "You'll wash them before you let yourself fall asleep; I swear you're more fastidious than a cat. I do the dishes, you go sleep. Got it?"
Sephiroth thought about it for a minute, then decided, "Shower first," standing and unfastening the buckles on his boots. He didn't stop there, though; the leather shirt was next, without any hesitation, and Cloud hastily scooped up the glasses and fled toward the kitchenette in case that wasn't all.
As Sephiroth folded his blacks and set them neatly outside the bathroom door, Cloud caught a flash of long silver hair and turned to face the front door hastily. His face was burning so much even the nape of his neck felt scorched. Unfortunately, Zack noticed, and started grinning.
"Like the view, eh?"
"Shut up! I mean -- he -- just -- oh gods..." Cloud hunched his shoulders around his ears and scrubbed at the glass fiercely. It took him a minute to realize Zack wasn't taking any of the potshots he could have, though; almost scared of what he'd be letting himself in for, Cloud risked a glance at Zack, who was staring too quietly at the cartooned mug in the dish drainer.
"...Zack?"
"You're a cadet, and a kid; the communal showers in the barracks probably still make you embarrassed, don't they," Zack murmured.
"Do they ever not make people embarrassed?"
"It depends on how you adjust," Zack said, "coming from a civilian world. I've gotten used to it. I was never really shy, though."
"But... um... the General... he seems like a private sort of person." Cloud scrubbed at his glass with more emphasis than it really needed.
"You're still thinking like a civilian, Spike," Zack said quietly, and remembered to scrub at the plate in his hands. "And Sephiroth's not. He never has been a civilian. You can't forget that."
"What do you mean...?"
"Before he was in the military, he was a laboratory specimen," Zack murmured. "He's never had the luxury of being body-shy. Never had enough privacy to think of it. Never realized other people had that privacy. Nobody notices it in the military, because we spend so much time either showering in lines or getting clothes ripped off of anywhere to stitch up holes in us, but... He thinks of his own body as an object, a tool just like that sword -- whether sheathed or unsheathed, it is what it is, nothing more or less than a weapon. No matter how much I try to show him, to convince him that bodies can be so much more than weapons -- whether with sweets or cocoa or..." Zack stopped, and sighed, and picked up the cartooned mug to put it away in a cupboard. "Don't ever expect him to think like a civilian, kid. Not about anything. You'll be in for a hell of a shock."
"...oh."
Zack looked over at him again, and something behind his eyes gentled, even as he turned the grin up a few extra watts. "Besides, he sure as hell doesn't have anything to be embarrassed about, does he? Really, you should watch next time; Sephiroth doesn't care, he doesn't realize he's basically giving away a free show, which is a damn good thing for my wallet--"
"--you horny bastard!" Cloud looked around for something to throw that wasn't breakable, then remembered the drying towel, and grabbed at it and wound it between his hands. "I can't believe you -- no, I take that back, I believe you would, I just can't believe anybody decent would--!" He snapped at Zack with the towel; Zack blocked, of course, but the snap stung anyway.
"...Ow."
Cloud's eyes lit up. He aimed the towel again.
"Come on, Spike, be nice, I was just kidding-- ow. Cut that out, really. No, rea--... ow."
"Give me my boot back and get your horny ass OUT of the General's apartment!"
Zack picked up another dishtowel, grinning like Bahamut on a bad hair day. "Make me, cadet."
By the end of their dishtowel-snapping duel, Cloud had wedged his much slighter figure in behind the sofa as protection from Zack's greater speed and reach, and concentrated on trying not to get hit too often. Zack was bobbing and weaving like a Wutain drunken-fist martial artist, complete with babbling a bunch of Wutain words that Cloud could have sworn came off the dinner menu of the Jade Dragon restaurant in Sector 5.
"Shumai moo shu chop suey tsingtao hwaaaaa--!"
Cloud was laughing too hard to aim; he flailed around half blind with his dishtowel, trying vainly to block anything that might be coming his direction.
"...What are you two idiots doing?"
Sephiroth was standing in the hallway with a towel about his shoulders, braiding his long hair into something tamed enough for sleep. He was wearing a bathrobe, but hadn't bothered to belt it, and there was a long, pale sweep of smooth bare skin from the hollow of his throat to -- to well past his knees, but Cloud glued his gaze on the man's face lest his traitorous mind try to pick out any details more specific than that.
Zack, the imbecile, decided it was still playtime. "Moo goo gai pan! Ling ling mai fuuUCK-- Damn, Sephiroth, that stung like a mofo--"
"You have a dishtowel," Sephiroth pointed out, draping the towel back over his shoulders in order to fasten the bathrobe's tie around the end of his braid. "I have a bathtowel and it's wet. There will be certain differences in reach and velocity."
"Okay, this obviously calls for a rematch! Got any more bathtowels?"
"...I am going to sleep, Zack. You can have your rematch later. Stop picking on the cadet and give his boot back before you go."
"Sure thing, boss," Zack said, cheerfully. "The rest of the food's in the fridge in case you get hungry later."
Sephiroth cleared his throat behind one hand politely, but the sound was more like "kweh." Zack snorted his opinion of that, picked up the end of the sofa with one hand, and nudged Cloud's boot towards him.
Cloud had never laced his boots so fast in his life.
...Hopefully, if he ran fast enough, he could get into the elevator and get the door closed before Zack started unloading the collected tease-ammunition. Zack's bright-eyed grin gave him little enough hope of that, but after all, Yule was all about wishing.