somewhat inpired by this comic by @birdblacksocialclub, which anyone who enjoys sephgeal should go check out (let us all cry together, everyone! that comic lives in my head rent free, i have so many thoughts about it.......)
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Sephiroth doesn't really know how to mourn, when all that he's every lost has always left without saying goodbye; has always left without really fully leaving, always lingering in soft pieces, fragments of memories that somehow always wash back ashore.
He doesn't really know, and that is in itself the worst part about it.
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He presses his left hand against one of the windows in the SOLDIER floor, chancing a glimpse at the outside world; despite all the lights in the distance, flickering sometimes like little stars, a coat of smog from the usual reactor operations clings heavy to the air.
It blocks any natural light that could have made it in and, with that, it seems to block out some of his ever fading hope as well.
In a time long gone, Sephiroth had wondered about all that awaited on the outside. Whether or not it could have taken him away from Shinra for good, just so he wouldn't have to pretend to live a lie anymore; just so he could be free from it all.
And in that time long gone, all that awaited him outside had pursued him until his heart grew as soft as dove feathers, only for the source of its quiet fluttering to become unreachable in the end; smog coating the sight of “stars” from his mind.
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“I’m just kidding.” Zack chuckled “You know I wouldn’t do that to you. We’re friends, right?”
“Yeah.” Cloud agreed. Of everything they could do, becoming mercenaries for hire didn’t sound so bad. They had the skills for the job after all and if they were luck, they could join one of the many resistance groups against Shinra; help bring the company down for every single thing they had done against the Planet, everything they took away from them.
Including Cloud’s memory of everything before the incident in Nibelheim, for when he woke up he couldn’t even recall his own name. Zack told him the things he knew that mattered the most; that Nibelheim had been the blond’s hometown, that a SOLDIER called Sephiroth lost his mind and destroyed the place and that Cloud had killed him. Of that last thing, there were echoes; of being stabbed with a long sword and somehow using this against a silver haired man.
Zack never told him about the kind of relationship he had with Sephiroth. If the blond didn’t remember, then he probably didn’t need to after that retelling of what happened in Nibelheim. The heartbreak or the guilt wasn’t needed.
If Cloud ever remembered it, then, he had an explanation ready for why he never told it, but for now, that was something he couldn’t do to him.
For now, they had to worry about how their life would be upon getting to Midgar, how they’d cross the border without being caught by the identification system, how they could go to see Aerith without the Turks knowing about it.
(He wondered how Aerith was doing, if she still sold flowers, if she had gone to the plate, if she still feared the sky… If maybe, she had believed him gone after that one year and a half he had been away, running from the army, and gotten over him altogether.)
He was pulled back from his thoughts by the sound of bullets being fired at their truck and Cloud letting out an annoyed “Oh shit.”
Zack immediately grabbed Buster Sword by its hilt and asked the driver to pull over. “C’mon Cloud, the ride is over.”
They let themselves fall to the ground and appreciate the rain after a long battle. They’ve done it; a feat almost legendary, to take down Shinra’s army just by themselves. Granted, those infantrymen weren’t enhanced like they were, but they were still many, thousands, against only two men. It was unfortunate, to kill so many of them, but it was either that or dying on that cliff.
“We’re going home… and nobody is stopping us…”
Cloud wondered whether or not he could call it “home” too, that place in the distance dyed in gray, covered in dark clouds of pollution almost like his memory.
Aerith, the blond decided, was the most colorful thing — or rather, person — he had seen all day after they got into town. She wore a pink dress with a red little coat over it and kept yellow flowers in the church. A bit of sunlight passed through the broken ceiling.
Cloud felt truly at peace in that place for the first time in many weeks.
(Even if Aerith scared the hell out of him by slapping Zack and yelling at him for disappearing on her like that, before she started crying and just gave into a hug. She was really kind, but the taller of the two men walking into her church like it was normal to just disappear then return made her really angry for once.)
She told them about the strange cloaked figures that were starting to appear in Midgar these days and by accident, gave Zack an idea.
Dressed like the strange cultists, they could walk around Midgar without anyone minding them. They didn’t know yet the reason, but Shinra didn’t care about those strangers wearing black cloaks, wandering around and saying things about the world’s end and a reunion that would happen. Maybe they even had a finger on that.
In any case, the disguise served them well.
It wasn’t enough for a woman not to recognize one of them. She looked strangely like the mountain guide of that mission that went terribly wrong and regarded them both with a certain anger and frustration about Cloud not remembering her at all.
She had, however, a job opportunity for them. One that involved destroying a reactor and causing problems for Shinra. Both Zack and Cloud loved the sound of that.
It started slowly. The strange calling, the headaches, the white noise in his mind harming him for his unwillingness. Until the point when, during one of his missions with AVALANCHE — the terrorist group Tifa was in — Cloud fell to his knees holding his head.
The hot-headed man with a gun in the place of one of his arms — Barret, if Cloud wasn’t wrong — pulled him out of it by impatiently yelling that they had to go before the bomb exploded the reactor and they both as well.
He didn’t talk about it, but he was concerned.
The nightmares soon became a regular occurrence. A city burning down, blood, blood everywhere. And that man, Sephiroth.
“The traitors, leave them.” The man would say.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Fine. Let’s see how long it takes to break you.”
He woke up in the middle of the night aching, longing for something he didn’t know exactly what was. Cloud decided that all of that was probably some response to trauma finally showing.
“Hey, man, you look great!” Zack whistled.
Cloud wanted to disappear. He liked that dress he was in and knew it was necessary to rescue Tifa from whatever kind of shady business she may have gotten herself in, but he didn’t want to wear that in public, didn’t want people to know… didn’t want the kind of look and thumbs up Aerith was giving him or the whistle from Zack.
The girls at Honey Bee Inn made his eyes look amazing with that make up session. It made him feel both fantastic and awful at the same time. He’d rather melt into a puddle than be dressed like that in public.
“Wow, Cloud… how can you walk in high heels so well?” Aerith asked, the teasing tone just there.
“It’s not that hard.” A lie in the place of saying he must have practiced at some point of his life.
Things quickly escalated from dresses, make up and rescue missions to losing an entire sector of the city, having Aerith kidnapped, trying to rescue her and ending up rescuing a large… dog? Lion? Whatever creature this being going by Red XIII was.
And finally, the confirmation that Cloud hadn’t been having only after effects of traumatic events. Somehow, Sephiroth was back.
“Heh, forever the show off, even insane.” Zack noted when they left the cells they had been in after their rescue attempt ended up with all of them being detained and found blood covering the floor.
It brought back a little echo of a memory Cloud had long lost.
Several centuries after Cloud's death, Sephiroth still roams the land in regret, while trying just to be.
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The Planet heals.
It takes enough time that several generations pass and while the vines, moss and grass find their way back to Midgar, swallowing the old city whole, countless stories are told and then forgotten.
Still, they tell tales of the hero.
A fair haired man and his party who together faced the monster who summoned a calamity to the skies and a plague to the land.
All of the names are gone, like leaves in autumn.
The monster changes a lot; at one time it’s a space octopus, at another, a fierce snake. Then a dragon, just like the classics. But ultimately they can’t pinpoint which form he was even supposed to have, if a fixed form at all.
Sephiroth finds that he really likes the one in which he’s a wolf.
One year after Robio, Sephiroth and Angeal are sent to a mission in the northern continent… only to get stuck in a cabin together while trying to escape a snowstorm. Shenanigans ensue.
-
They send the two of them to the far north, into a mission that Sephiroth thinks, at first, a single SOLDIER would handle best.
He’s so, so wrong about it.
Not because the objective of the mission poses much threat; it's a search and destroy of a rather weak monster, in a supposedly easy to spot area. They're to take a sample back, but that's all there's to it, really.
And he isn't wrong about Angeal’s capacity in handling this particular mission. A year gone, but the events that took place in Robio are still in his thoughts.
No, no, it's something else.
It's the weather.
It starts innocently enough and is expected; soft snowfall covering their heads in a fine layer of white. Much less noticeable on Sephiroth's head, not unlike powdered sweets.
Cloud starts receiving notes in bottles from cats, all of a sudden. Where they lead is completely unexpected. ══════════════════
Every day, without fail, a cat delivers a tiny bottle with a strip of paper inside.
It starts relatively mundane; a little beauty with fur as blonde as his hair sits just outside of his window one day, meowing like crazy; the most stereotypical noise that he’s ever heard out of a cat, almost as if she is just a figment of his imagination.
Too perfect to be an actual cat, but a cat nonetheless.
Cloud allows her in, anyway, just as he does with most people that come across him.
She picks up a little bottle on her way in and nudges at his hand insistently.
In the time between pulling the message out and reading it, the cat vanishes the way she came, much like sunlight hiding behind a cloud.
Don’t go to the cliffs near Midgar today, it reads, and pretty much freaks him out.
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Angeal tries to write a will. He comes up with a completely different decision, instead.
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Angeal turns to look at him; ah, this sick man, with this disgustingly self pleased look on his face of someone who just turned a weapon against its own wielder. Absolutely insufferable. A cat who got the cream.
This is the man whose life he saved, whose safety he would gladly die for, who their shared best friend had to witness him fawning over more than usual, for months on end, without realizing that it wasn’t just his usual need to help and protect others around him, but something else. Something tender.
Or, as Genesis had very eloquently put, “You should just fuck him already.”
But no, really, this is the man he makes love to, and Sephiroth dares to give him this kind of look.
Sephiroth yearns, but doesn't get everything he wants.
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He floats within the darkness of an eternal abyss; time seemingly suspended all around him and all voices silent, as if they have ceased existing.
That's when it floats in front of him, the object he’s thought to be so long gone, unrecoverable.
The locket.
Inside, he hopes to find his mother's picture, and hopes to be whole again. To be young, again. To undo all of his mistakes, even if in this space he’s unable to remember them. Hopes for too much, with so many strands of silver all around him.
But Sephiroth opens it to something else, a cruel trick.
Something out of this world with unnatural looking skin and silver hair, like his. It's shocking enough of a sight that he backs away from it, allowing the locket to float before him once again in this void.
“What…?” He asks, even though his voice doesn't seem to really come anywhere past his lips, “That's… that's not…”
“But it is,” a somber voice calls out from… somewhere. Too close but too far away to grasp. Familiar. Not coated at all in any malicious intent. “You wanted to see Jenova, right? That's what it looks like.”
It couldn’t be… right? The face of his mother, that soft expression he has yearned for years… It had to come from somewhere. It couldn’t be this. Even though it would make sense as to why humans would abandon him at every turn, if so. If all they saw from his mother was this monster, who can really say that it isn’t the same for him?
Sephiroth glances at the locket anxiously as it spins softly in this nothingness, almost seeming to glow bright with some sort of hope.
A wrong kind of longing.
That’s when the voice materializes in front of him, covering his sight of the locket altogether; blond, unruly hair that he’s come to know better than his own soul. His own ruination, but also his only certainty.
The abyss around them shifts into something more tangible and terrible.
The laboratory in the Shinra Manor’s basement. Oh… Sephiroth remembers it, and remembers it well. He spent days and nights reading about the experiments that made him, soaking in every mention and description of Jenova as if it were gospel. Marinating in all the darkest feelings he had shoved deep inside with the years and refused to properly confront, to bury in a way that felt final, that would have allowed him to move on.
He half expects to see a ghost of himself walking through the corridor, within these walls.
(Sephiroth expects many things and gets none of them, every time.)
Instead he’s hit by the heart twisting sound of a woman crying her soul out.
He walks past Cloud to see her. She looks much more like the picture in the locket as he remembers it, rather than… whatever it was that he’s just seen a few moments before. Sephiroth doesn’t mind that he looks like a pathetic, desperate child; he must go to her. He must hold her and tell her that everything is going to be okay. That he’s still here, that—
His legs don’t move, and all he wants is to scream with how far away she is, despite being so close. The closest she’s ever been to him.
Cloud takes his hand, slowly prying it open from the enraged fist it’s balled into.
“Her name was Lucrecia,” he says, “Hojo took you away from her when you were still very young, to keep experimenting on you and to research—”
“Why can’t I join her?” Sephiroth asks suddenly, and it’s probably the most heartbreaking thing Cloud has ever heard from him.
Not that the list of such things has a lot, really, which is in itself a rather sad thing, especially with all that he has learned about Sephiroth through the years. It makes him shrink under the weight of sadness, and he looks to the side to learn that Sephiroth, too, looks so painfully young, with a hand lifted against an invisible veil of shattered dreams.
“Because… you’re still alive. We were fighting and you fell into uh… the pool of water in the church. I guess you’re in some kind of coma, now?”
Sephiroth curses under his breath, somewhat agitated. Cloud’s hands are suddenly on his cheeks, bringing him in closer, having their foreheads touch one another in quiet comfort.
The world fades to nothing but the feeling of floating on a bubble.
“I could take you to see her… well, her resting place, at least. I could… give you a place to hide or anything else, just… I’m tired of fighting you.”
Please let me rest, echoes all around Cloud’s form and all at once, the evidence of battle is on him; on his damaged clothes and skin. Only so fast mako can heal all of it, after all, and Sephiroth isn’t so much different. His hair is thoroughly soaked to the point of annoyance and he can feel a cut or another here and there from where Cloud’s blade almost came close enough to putting an end to their fight.
Gods, he’s tired too, past the point of caring whether or not he should be given any chances at all. Past the point of questioning Cloud’s intention.
“If I say yes, do I just wake up?”
Apparently, yes.
He comes to by the altar, with light shining down upon him. Instantly throws an arm over his eyes and groans at the sensation. The white noise in his head seems to be missing too, so quiet that it feels nearly suffocating.
“How the hell do you even do that…?” Sephiroth asks, even though the question he really means to ask is why Cloud would even try after everything.
“Well… you could just say I kinda do a little bit of everything.” His tone is playful and too casual, almost like something Sephiroth has lost a long, long time ago. Something definitely nostalgic that’s hard to grasp at. Hard to remember.
Somewhere, by the water's edge, a rusted locket lies forgotten.
