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The wind swept through your hair softly, the heat of the day ebbing away. One hand was resting on the railing, the other hanging at your side, twitching with unease.
He’s here.
You didn’t have to turn around to know that a familiar face would be staring right back at you, blue eyes locked onto yours. You drew in a sharp breath and grit your teeth before looking up to the rising moon in the darkening sky.
“Hey.”
He had come to see you earlier today. Usually he’d just wait until everyone else had turned in for the night, bright eyes flashing in the endless shadows. He always seemed to know where you were. Rain or shine, he’d stay out here if you were. Cloud always brushed off the confused looks from both me and all the others. Everyone knew it wasn’t normal.
Cloud was slipping.
Tifa, his longest friend, had slowly begun distancing herself from you. Her dark eyes, once so bright and welcoming, now barely brought their gaze to you at all. Her face somehow had a permanent trace of worry, even more than usual.
She was scared.
Of what, exactly, you couldn’t know for sure. It could be AVALANCHE and whatever risks she constantly warned us of. But the only other thing she would worry herself stupid over was…Cloud. Tifa’s feelings towards him were no secret. She knew him and cared for him and blushed at her red boots whenever he looked away.
But Tifa knew something. You saw right through her and yet you didn’t know why.
Now you turned around and looked at him. Really looked at him. He seemed heavier, as if the burdens he already carried were too much. From what you could see in the dark, his eyes were…different somehow, was it the shape?
“You’ve been out here a while,” he rasped. Like he was out of breath somehow, yet something was amiss.
“I guess I just wanted to wait until the moon came out,” you replied, eyes sharp and unmoving from Cloud. He matched your stare, like always. He took a step closer, your breath hitched.
He was tense and rigid, and yet his eyes flitted across every feature on your face in an unfocused frenzy.
As he was committing every detail of you to memory.
“Huh. It’s gonna…be a while, then.”
“I like the calmness of waiting, I guess. All of the stars start to, uh, show up. And I like the way they look.”
You stumbled through your answer, heart pounding.
Why were you getting so nervous?
You gazed back towards the sky, the moon beginning to illuminate the two of you. It wasn’t that bright yet, but that was half the fun to you. Waiting for it. Nights like these were your favorite.
You feel Cloud’s eyes roam across the side of your face, and it felt burning. It felt stifling.
“I get that. The planet does strange things sometimes.” His voice…felt off, ever so slightly. Lower.
Your brows furrowed. Cloud had never cared about the planet…ever. He rolled his eyes at Barrett’s long-winged lectures- no, rants- and routinely stuttered over Aerith’s insistence of her own connection to the planet.
“It’s almost as if,” he paused, looking back to you ,”it’s becoming more alive.”
He stepped closer to you again, blue eyes searing through yours again.
Your heart just about stopped.
They weren’t the familiar, brilliant blue that you had looked into time after time- they were sickly, toxic. Mad. Those eyes were mad.
Full of hatred, and anger…even devotion. But the most sickening part of searching through those eyes, was the realisation of why you recognised them.
Cloud’s eyes were narrowed into cat-like slits, green and blue and turquoise merging and twisting into a mockery of someone, something else.
You knew those eyes because once, they had been everywhere. TV, rare photographs, magazines. Shinra propaganda. The war hero that everyone in Midgar either feared or admired.
Sephiroth.
“Hey, what’s wrong? Are you okayyy….?”
You didn’t even hear the rest of what Cloud was about to say before a crashing pain practically smacked you in the face.
Everything was warping and distorted, shapes of the flowers Aerith loved, broadcasts of war on a muffled TV; it all existed inside those eyes, spilling over everything you could see.
You felt yourself falling into something, a body of water except it felt thicker, deeper. The usual blue of the ocean did not meet your vision, except the fluorescent green of mako did.
Was this the Lifestream?
“Suffering is how we know who we are, (Name). It creates us.” The words sent your head into a tailspin- suffering? Creates what?
You felt his gloved hands grip your waist, one slowly moving upwards to cup the back of your neck. His touch, usually fleeting and urgent, was calm and leisurely, as if he had all the time in the world.
This- this had to be impossible.
Sephiroth was dead. He had died five years ago, close to the timing of the Nibelheim incident. Cloud was there, that’s what he said.
“Cloud, y-your eyes…what’s happening?,” your voice was trembling, eyes wide at what you were seeing.
His fingers tightened slightly on the back of your neck, making you tense up at the sensation. He deftly manoeuvred his hand so that it angled your head directly at his, ignoring your squirming and simply quirked his head so that “his” eyes stared into yours.
They were half-lidded, as if this entire ordeal was pushing him to the brink of exhaustion.
Well, you and him both.
“The planet is changing, [Name], for the next stage of its plan. Her plan will be realised,” he whispered, hushed and gentle in your ear.
You simply kept your eyes on those slits, hoping, praying for them to change back.
You couldn’t find Cloud no matter how hard you tried. He was still in there, you knew, but his strength was weakening under the pressure of this…episode.
Your head was spinning as you looked at the sky, vacant from the moon and stars but pulsating with life; it was shattering and intense in the worst sense.
And you had no way out of it.
Is this what had been building up all this time? The months and months of stares that once would have your heart fluttering, but soon made your skin crawl?
The way Tifa was once so open and welcoming, but shut down so suddenly and resorted to sad looks that didn’t say anything.
Aerith got away with a bit more, but under the guise of talking to you about the planet, or flowers as it was an interest the two of you shared.
Soon after she was silent, opting to leave the room whenever Cloud entered, as if his very presence had done something to upset her.
Cloud seemed unbothered at the very least when this had started happening. He hadn’t really changed his behaviour much, but he seemed to be a bit more open in talking with you.
About useless things mostly, and he was still insanely awkward.
But the three of them seemed so detached from each other now. Barely looking up when Cloud walked in the room, and as a double insult the girls talked in hushed voices among themselves.
Each time you caught them they whispered apologies, looking towards Cloud with some sort of scathing accusation whilst he took no notice.
They didn’t look like they wanted to go along with it, rarely in fact. But something- or someone- was intent on dividing you.
He seemed happy that he was able to talk to you more; as if the others were somehow in the way.
“M’ sorry I got so jealous of them. Aerith and…Tifa.”
Your heart squeezed in what felt like a suffocating shock, trying to keep your composure as you heard Cloud’s voice echo in your ears.
It was sounding like his usual self again, lighter but not without an undertone of warning that you couldn’t decipher.
You cleared your throat. “Why would…would you have been jealous of them, Cloud?”
Sitting up, you took a second to try and catch a glimpse of his eyes- the mako had dispelled to his natural former state, that slits also showing no sign. His breath wasn’t as laboured.
“Because I wanted to talk to you. Without them,” he explained, tone flat and blunt as always. “I…wanted to talk to you alone. But you were always with them, or Barrett. So I changed it.”
“And, uh, how did you do that?”
“Telling them to stop distracting you, that you didn’t need their help.”
He turned his head to you, bowing his head slightly, as if he only now just felt some form of shame.
His jaw was clenched and his hand ran through his spiky blonde hair, something he did when trying to avoid something.
“I only did it because I…like you.”
Your breath had been held in for several minutes yet this confession simply knocked it out of you. He told Tifa and Aerith to stop talking to you because he was jealous?
“But they’re my friends, they’re our friends Cloud!,” you couldn’t believe what he was saying, this had to be a joke, all of it.
“You told my friends to stop talking to me, then stole me down here? What is happening, Cloud? What did you do?”
“Who are you?”
He grit his teeth and gasped, one of his hands shooting up to the side of his head. His knuckles turned white from the grip he had on his hair, huffing could be heard as he fell down to the ground.
Water soaked even further into his clothes but he didn’t even seem to feel it. Cloud seemed to be writhing in some sort of mental prison, something you couldn’t see or feel. His gloved hands were wrung so tight his knuckles threatened to burst from the leather.
The only thing you could feel was the quickening of your heartbeat, rapid and panicked as you tried to find an answer for all of this.
You kept your eyes trained on Cloud, for as wary as you were with him right now, it’s not like you didn’t care about him.
“He said you would be with us forever…with me…if I got rid of them.”
You backed away by one step, water squelching beneath your feet and rippling towards him. He looked up then, eyes clouded with that sickly green light that seemed to make his skin look pale.
“You can’t leave now…they have us here,” Cloud rasped, hands having left his head and clawing through the water.
Your steps were becoming frantic and clumsy; you couldn’t bring yourself to look away from Cloud but you couldn’t stand to be near him.
It wasn’t him, it couldn’t be!
“Cloud, whatever this is we can just go back, you don’t have to explain anything-“
“I do, I have to make you SEE!” In barely a second he was in front of you, breathing hard again, the bottom half of his uniform soaked through completely.
“They won’t let us go,” he whispered. “They will always come looking for us.” His hand found its way to your face, leaving a smear of water drops across as he trailed the shape of your jaw.
He was still there.
“Is it…Sephiroth? Is that what you’re saying?” you hardly even heard yourself speak yet the echo of your voice reverberated through the clearing.
“I… love you too much to let this happen to you.”
“What’s going to happen? I don’t understand, Cloud, you’re not making any sense!”
Cloud seemed resigned but not surprised by your panicked demeanour, simply putting his other hand on your upper arm and leaning in.
Whilst he kissed you, you stayed silent and still. Cloud was passionate enough to run a hand through your hair which pulled you even closer to him.
You could barely breathe.
Finally it was over. Arms draped over your back and encased you in Cloud’s embrace. Your mind was telling you to run for it, punch him in the gut and break for it…but you felt so…drained.
“I had to keep you away from everyone else…so I could just talk to you…”
The rest went unheard as you slipped away, into a restless sleep where you still felt the cold water lapping around you.
And Cloud’s head in the crook of your neck, a weight that you were unsure if you would ever escape from.