#ex-scldr

Cloud: …pleb!

@ex-scldr​ says: you have to stay awake. ( I obviously hate myself, lol )

( Miscellaneous angst starters. )

★  ―――― You have to stay awake, dammit!

What about everyone waiting for you to come home?

Zack is bleeding out over the ground. He can feel the pebbles and dirt beneath his back, smell the rusty tang of blood in the air. There’s red on his chest bubbling up. There’s red blooming beneath him like cruel petals. The sky watches this with its rumbling clouds, ready to swarm in with the latest storm. A clap of thunder growls along the horizon. 

It begins to rain and patter over his bloody, ruined face. 

You have to stay awake!

Zack tries, flutters his blue eyes and all he can see is the angry gray above.

He knows he’s dying.

There’s a heaviness over his limbs, his arms and legs feel too tired to move, his breathing is shallow and ragged, he can feel every bullet punctured through his skin--

Stay awake!

The Mako tries to keep him alive--it pumps and rings through his head, so much that it hurts. Zack winces, groans in the mud swamping around his body. And still, he can’t move--

And then: he sees Cloud.

The blonde drags himself over all that gore and mud to meet him here, halfway through death. Zack is so grateful his eyes water and he manages a small smile. Someone’s here at the end...

His thoughts try to grasp everything that happens, but Zack knows this moment is fleeting, it will slip through his fingers and drift away on the haunting wind if he’s not careful. He can feel his heart thudding, pounding away in his chest, but each beat gets a little softer...and he feels himself fading despite Cloud so near. 

As Zack looks at Cloud’s stunned, slackened face, he knows.

He has always known.

Zack was never meant to be the hero.

Zack can see the fringes of his vision begin to darken. Cloud merely looks at him, too shocked to do much else.

“Zack...” He murmurs, detached and far away. The Mako has done this--left Cloud as a rag-doll. 

Zack can only hope everything he did was enough.

Stay awake! 

“For the... both of us...” Zack finds himself saying roughly through the blood burbling up his throat and that punctures through his ribs.

He knows, somehow, that this is right.

Zack believes in Cloud, believes in him more fiercely than anyone else. 

You have to stay awake!

“Both... of us?” Cloud asks softly, staring at Zack’s bloody corpse on the ground, the blonde is still lost among the gore and the rain.

And Zack stares at those blue eyes that now match his, flaring with the teal glow of Mako, and he says, each word dropping like a stone:

“That’s right... you’re gonna...” Zack squeezes out, his eyes fluttering again, the world growing darker, darker.

“You’re gonna...?” Cloud asks, so near Zack can almost reach him...

And Zack does, he reaches out a gloved hand and presses Cloud’s forehead to his chest, where his meager, pathetic heart is petering out, so slowly it feels agonizing with the cold rain and biting wind and roaring sky.

“You’ll be... my living legacy.”

Zack says this heavily, as loud as the thunder in the sky with its meaning. And Zack doesn’t realize how he breaks the small boy in the mud then--he doesn’t see the fractured seams that start to crack over his face, the delusion settling into his bones.

Was this enough?

Stay awake! 

“My honor... my dreams...” Zack says slowly, heaving as he does so. “They’re yours now.”

The sky rumbles and claps above them, but Zack takes his Buster Sword in his hand and drags it through the mud despite how much it makes him heave and gasp to do so...

Zack shoves his the sword into Cloud’s reluctant grasp.

He looks at Cloud and he sees all that promise that he has always known was there. Cloud will do great things, Zack only hopes this was enough for him. The raven-haired SOLDIER knows he’s leaving too soon--before he can teach Cloud how to properly handle the Buster, without giving him all the wisdom he garnered over the years, the way to survive in a world this mean--

And he knows he thrusts promises far too big to wield into Cloud’s shaking fingers--

But he doesn’t have enough time.

He only has this moment to give Cloud his dreams.

His hopes. His bravery.

They belong to someone else now. 

So Zack closes his eyes slowly, drifts and drifts until he has quietly drowned into the Lifestream--

@ex-scldr​ -- Send me ಠ_ಠ to know an inappropriate thought my muse has had about yours.

      ❝ so were those two inches of Nibelheim thunder a growing or a showing -- i have an inkling it’s the former ❞

@ex-scldr​                                                   CLOUD STRIFE

The two of them stare at one another from across the walled metal room, both hidden behind a stack of ShinRa crates that conceal them from a Behemoth that lurks out front, waiting to tear them to pieces given a chance. But once they get past the brutal giant, it’s home free from this awful place. Squall would much rather be down in the slums than trapped in a cold ShinRa warehouse. There’s no warmth in these places, no happiness, it’s all steel and sorrow, even    the employees look devoid of hope.

Unfortunately, he’s stuck working with Cloud to escape in one piece which has its own unique difficulties, and they had been attempting to do so by mouthing ideas back and forth in total silence. But perhaps the brunette should have informed his companion that he isn’t proficient     in lip-reading because everything that the other says doesn’t sound like a good plan.     

                                 Use your nice? dice?

𝐐𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍 𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐒 II Accepting

“One of us has to go Cloud….” She turns back, knowing that longer she looks at his face the harder it becomes. 

“It’ll be okay…I’ll be okay..” 

violent muse reaction prompts // @ex-scldr​

       The impact is like thousands of venomous blades piercing into his defined jaw but— damn lucky it wasn’t the sword. He’d hate to have a scratch on his face but a blue bruise seems to be fine. It pushes him back by a bit, and quickly acting upon it, the redhead sends his body into a backflip where he can feel the ground below his feet properly after landing back on it.

She doesn’t hear him enter and curse when he spies her out the window, nor does she register that he’s attempting to scramble out to get her. Nope. 

Instead, she has the bottle of wine in one hand while she’s balancing, walking out onto the rooftops. A small giggle leaves her lip, tilting to one side and leaning towards the other to attempt to make sure she doesn’t fall. “Aerith!!!” That catches her attention, but doesn’t notice the absolute horror on his face when she sways. 

She’s fine!