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Language:
English
Series:
Part 1 of Cursed to Strife
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Published:
2020-09-24
Completed:
2021-12-12
Words:
1,491
Chapters:
2/2
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54
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1,504
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17,758

Baby Mine

Summary:

The baby has his eyes and Sephiroth's hair and while that would normally send him into a destructive rage, this time he's standing in an honest-to-goodness nursery with not a single mako tank in sight. Cloud doesn't quite know what to feel about this, but it hardly matters. He'll be back to bouncing through dimensions in a few minutes anyway.

Should he have changed the kid's diaper? Probably not, but he's too tired to think and he wasn't about to leave his (sort of) own baby to cry.

[Chapter 2 is a podfic]

Notes:

From a prompt by im-totally-not-an-alien
on Tumblr:

Final Fantasy 7 prompts # 45:
7) Cloud winds up in the home of happy Sefikura and is drawn in by the sound of a crying baby.
He can't help but coo and care for them, saddened that these are the children he will never get to have, but greatful he got the chance to meet them anyway. He finished changing a diaper when this worlds Sephiroth quietly complemented his diaper skills from the doorway.

(See the end of the work for other works inspired by this one.)

Chapter 1

Chapter Text

The painful staticky buzzing faded away and Cloud sucked in a much-needed gasp of air, working through a quick breathing exercise to quell the nausea that always accompanied his transition between dimensions. “Mmmfh,” he grunted, forcing his sticky-tired eyelids up. He would have to risk sleep again soon.

No immediate danger. No sounds of battle. Just the quiet rush of air from a nearby vent and the soft coos of a baby. Blinking away the haze of his exhaustion, he spotted the baby in question laying in an elegant white bassinet, swathed in soft purple blankets. Even as he listened, the coos turned to whimpers, then to the whining hiccups that he knew from experience preceded a wailing fit.

Cloud was too tired to really think, so he just acted, padding across the soft white carpet to the bassinet. Baby-fine silver hair and teary, unmistakable blue eyes greeted him. “Oh,” he said softly, his voice suffused with wonder. Under other circumstances he would have been ( had been ) alarmed and disgusted and enraged, but there were no mako tanks and sterile cages here—just a soft, lovingly-constructed nursery done up in white and gray and purple.

“Hello there, sweetheart,” he said. “I bet I know what the problem is, huh?” With his enhanced sense of smell, he could easily tell that the baby needed a change. He didn’t think he was too far off about the baby’s parentage either, considering the way they quieted down at the sight of him.

He knew, somewhere in the fog of his physical and mental weariness, that he really shouldn’t touch someone else’s baby, even if that someone was a version of himself. But then he looked at the soft slope of the baby’s nose and saw his Ma, and...he couldn’t leave the baby to cry, not when he was perfectly capable of solving the problem himself.

He’d be gone in a few minutes anyway. The others might not even notice he’d been there.

“I wonder if you’ll get to meet Gramma Claudia,” he whispered, lifting the whimpering infant from the bassinet with steady, experienced hands. “She would love you. You’ve got her nose, did you know that?” The changing table was nearby, set up in a way he found inherently logical. It took barely any thought to go through the motions of changing a diaper. Along the way, he discovered that his counterpart had a daughter.

He didn’t ( couldn’t ) stop talking to her the whole time. “My goodness, it looks like the version of your daddy that I knew really missed out, huh? I bet you’re gonna grow up and be just as strong as him. You’ve got his hair already, little lady. I hope you grow up to be a rebel and cut it short. Though, hmm, maybe not, if you inherited my hair. You’d look like a little dandelion.” He smiled, tickling her chubby belly once he’d fastened the clean diaper shut. “A pretty little dandelion, but I’m going to guess that you won’t like that comparison so much when you’re older.”

She cooed at him, waving her arms happily. It didn’t take any thought at all to scoop her back up and cradle her against his chest. For a second, his eyes burned. He wished he could go home.

“Thank you,” said a familiar voice quietly. “You are quite good at that.”

He reacted without thinking, dropping into a high crouch and holding the baby safely to his chest, turning to angle his shoulder toward the voice so he’d be ready to take any blows on his back while curled over the fragile little life in his arms.

Protect, his instincts screamed.

But then his eyes landed on the silver-haired man leaning against the doorframe in sweatpants and a tank-top and he knew he was being ridiculous. This was the baby’s father, and she was clearly well-loved. He didn’t need to shield her ( or protect himself ), but the instinct was too deeply ingrained in him to stop, even if this man was so clearly different from most versions Cloud had met.

The other Sephiroth didn’t miss a single thing. His eyes swept quickly up and down, cataloging every nuance in Cloud’s posture before they returned to his face. It was a little startling to see round pupils in mako-green eyes, but that alone was enough to relax the tense line of Cloud’s shoulders. He lowered his hand from where it had gone to grab his sword and thought it a little concerning that he couldn’t remember shifting the baby to one arm.

Gaia, he really needed to sleep.

Sephiroth’s eyes were strangely sad. Cloud couldn’t understand why he was so calm, much less sad. A stranger was holding his daughter. Why wasn’t he hostile? Why had his first reaction been to complement Cloud’s diaper-changing skills? Absurd. The man was clearly still a warrior. He should have known better.

As if he could hear Cloud’s thoughts ( he couldn’t; Cloud checked ), Sephiroth said, “it’s alright, Cloud. I think Claudia would know you no matter what form you took.”

In a split second, Cloud’s throat closed and his eyes burned and even as he wondered why are you taking this so well, he also thought Claudia, and his heart broke a little in his chest . “Well,” he said, coughing when his voice came out in a strangled rasp. “Well. I…” He didn’t know what to say to that. He didn’t know what he could say to that. “Don’t...worry. I’ll be gone in a minute. I just…”

“It’s alright,” Sephiroth repeated, though something uncomfortably like grief flashed through his expression. “She’s happy, so I’m happy.”

Cloud glanced down. Claudia was drifting off in his arm, tiny eyelids staggering up and down as she listened to the steady beat of his heart. Well. Fair enough, he supposed.

Sephiroth’s voice turned hesitant. “Did you...was she your…?”

“No,” Cloud rasped, unable to look away from the daughter that wasn’t his. Or, perhaps, unable to look at her father. “No...it just...didn’t take much to guess.” He laughed, quiet and unsteady and so, so tired. “Or maybe I would recognize her in any form she took.”

Familiar tingling had started in his toes, slowly creeping up his legs. His time here was running out. He moved back to the bassinet and carefully put little Claudia back down, tucking the soft lavender blankets in around her. She drifted off to sleep as he brushed his fingers across her rosy cheek.

“I’ll be gone in a minute, don’t worry,” he murmured, then turned and was startled by how close Sephiroth suddenly was. It took everything he had not to stumble back into the bassinet.

“Thank you,” the other man said. He reached out, pausing for a second when Cloud flinched, and carefully tucked a lock of blond hair behind his ear. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Cloud looked away, breath frozen in his chest. The tingling had spread up to the base of his spine. He had a few seconds left before the burning started. “No,” he managed to say, swallowing past the painful lump in his throat. “No, there’s...nothing anyone can do.”

He probably would have reacted very badly to the arms that came around him, had he not seen them coming. He didn’t understand it, but he did anticipate it. Humans were such strange creatures, and this Sephiroth was unquestionably human, if also stupid enough to hug a cross-dimensional visitor with unknowable intentions.

“I’m sorry,” Sephiroth whispered, breath ghosting across his scalp. “I wish I could help.”

Cloud shook his head into the man’s collarbone, holding the rest of his body absolutely still as the customary burning sensation began to sear through his veins. “You don’t owe me anything,” he said firmly.

“I do. I do. I love you in all your forms, Cloud Strife, with everything I am. No matter where you came from, it hurts me to see you suffer.”

He should have stayed quiet, but his cynicism slipped through with the pain. “Stupid of you,” he said.

Incredibly, Sephiroth laughed, sliding one hand up to cradle the base of Cloud’s skull. “Perhaps. But I believe I shall do it anyway.” Lips pressed chastely against his temple, which was so utterly baffling that Cloud couldn’t figure out what to feel about it. “You are the strongest person I have ever met, Cloud. Whatever this is, I know you will best it.”

Misplaced trust, thought Cloud, but he couldn’t have said the words aloud even if he’d wanted to. Black, burning pain licked up through his throat and into his head, turning the world to white static. The last thing he felt before he faded into the space between dimensions was Sephiroth’s forehead pressed to his.

If he was lucky the next world would make a little more sense, but he would settle for it being a safer type of painful.

Chapter 2: Podfic

Summary:

Podfic of Baby Mine, read by yours truly

Notes:

Be nice to me this is my first attempt

Chapter Text

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