Chapter Text
Cloud was okay with the fact he wasn't special.
He got up for work at 6 am sharp while feeling like death warmed over. For anything to be awake at six am was unholy, much less Cloud.
He made his lunch that consisted of cured meat, fried bread, and a single store-bought pudding cup. The same thing as yesterday and the same thing as tomorrow.
He traveled across a stretch of the mountain to his mako reactor job and seamlessly became a face in the crowd of other factory workers. A gray sea of jumpsuits and respirator masks. Hundreds of people from nearby villages and townships commuted in on buses or walked from Nibelheim to work. Reactor work was stable. It was relatively safe if you didn’t mind the risk of mako poisoning. Cloud should be thankful for his employment. No matter how soul sucking. It paid the bills and allowed him to live a life he could tolerate.
The job title he held was reactor monitor, which was a pompous way to say he did what the engineers told him, and that normally involved reading heat levels and inspecting cooling rod corrosion. He moved from room to room. He weaved in and out of other factory workers' ways. He read what the dials said and tapped their numbers onto the tablet. Heat was steady. Pressure was good. O2 levels were a little high. Mako waste was at normal levels. It wasn’t hard work, better than the mindless assembly line, but it was dull enough to drain him. Tiredness crept into his bones, and it never felt justified. The work was never enough for the ache in his bones to feel warranted. It was just inputting gauge readings into a computer. It might have been better if he had someone. Anyone . His only friend had been Tifa, and she headed off to the big city. Maybe he should have followed her. They hadn’t spoken in years.
The only days when he didn’t keep a stony silence involved fists. Old habits that wouldn’t be crushed from days before the cogs of a system forced him into a shape that would keep the entire thing running.
Lunch hit, and the lunchroom was another big gray room. It was the only room in the factory where they weren’t required to wear the clunky respirator masks. Cloud yanked his off as fast as he could and threw it in his locker while grabbing his lunch. He didn’t try to socialize with his coworkers, not that Shinra allowed them to talk at lunch. The big Shinra Factory Rules were posted in every room, a depressing reminder of their lot in life. One of them was that talking during breaks was forbidden unless spoken to by an overseer. It was some kind of anti-unionization tactic. That’s why Cloud sat next to Liam, who was deaf and didn’t have much use for conversation without the hearing aid, which he took out at lunch. You won't get in trouble next to the one person who didn’t try to sneak gossip. When Liam spoke he didn’t care about the volume only that the other person understood he was deaf and stopped trying to talk to him. He ate his venison jerky and swapped his vanilla pudding cup for Liam’s chocolate one.
It was ok.
Liam signs, “Thank you,” and Cloud signs “You’re welcome,” back. The TV droned some bullshit propaganda going on in Midgar.
Sigh .
Back to work. Cloud wanted to break something when he saw someone had taken his mask in a juvenile display of bullying. Didn’t this shit stop after puberty? The mask was regulation and failure to conform to regulation was a demerit, and a demerit meant a dock in pay. Then again, you could get a demerit for anything the overseers saw fit.
Fucking damn it.
Cloud soothed himself by imagining burning down the reactor.
The day droned on, and his lungs protested the entire time. Mako burned the esophagus, but Cloud didn’t have the break time to go to the company store tomorrow to buy a new one. Almost half of the entire reactor was covered by Cloud and his team. They’d start on the other half tomorrow. They repeat the same thing the day after. Looked, read, inputted, repeated till the moon hung overhead. The end of day whistle echoed.
Finally.
They all shuffled back to the clock-out terminal in robotic lines.
Failure to leave on time was a demerit.
Cloud clocked out a zombie in all but state of decomposition and walked back home to his little cabin.
The walk home was silent besides the howling wind, the only mercy was his fur lined boots that kept out any melted snow that wanted to soak his socks. The cabin was two stories and despite it all was home. Cloud unlocked the door and met with a cold main room that connected to a kitchen. He only just bothered to heat up some canned soup on the kitchen stove and get the room warmed up with the iron wood stove that wasn’t in the kitchen but in the main room. There is technically a stove in the kitchen, but that involved Cloud paying a gas bill which he did not have the money for. He sat on his mattress that was in front of the stove and ate subpar soup. The crackle of the fire was nice, and Cloud made shadow puppets on the wall. Once upon a time he had dreams.
The kind that made people go to war or chase glory; that made young men stupid and dead.
He once had wanted more than Nibelheim could ever give him.
He once had dreams of being a SOLDIER.
Then life had other plans. Plans that involved bad lungs and stunted growth.
So he did the realistic thing and gave up.
He settled.
He worked.
It never killed the horrible feeling that he was missing something. That this wasn’t supposed to be it. It crept up on him in the small hours of the morning when sleep evaded him or in the boring parts of life like eating and bathing. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be. His wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing. Cloud prayed at home and in the Hall, but the gods never gave him answers. He set out fruit for the Goddess, but she didn’t answer him either.
This couldn’t be it? Could it? Just alone in a cold cabin on the edge of town. Wasn’t he meant for more than this?
Cloud took another bite to eat
6 am came too early and too quickly. Get up, pack lunch, go to work. Work was fine.
(“Do you think you’re meant for more than this?” Cloud had asked before clocking out.
“I bring home a paycheck that puts food on my wife’s plate, so I don’t really care if I was,” Salem, Cloud’s team leader said clearly bothered that she was being spoken to.
“Yeah- I guess,” Cloud had stammered out, and tried to rub the awkwardness out of his arms.)
Trudging through the snow was maybe a bad idea for anyone other than Cloud. He was raised in these mountains, knew them like the lines of his palm. Other people though? The mountain killed other people with monsters or frost. He was raised on the rule of respect the mountain’s might and fear its anger, which is why he wasn’t surprised to find a vaguely man-shaped hill with a hand partially uncovered by snow. This wasn’t the first dead body he’d found up here, and probably wouldn’t be the last. Cloud stared down at the person in the snow.
What if he just didn’t bother . It wasn’t his fault some dumbass got himself frozen this far away from town. He could just leave and let his tracks be covered by snowfall.
Cloud brushed snow away from the head area to see the face anyway, and nearly screamed.
This is such a stupid idea.
Cloud knew he was prone to bouts of dumbassary, but this took the cake. This was worse than the time he played Chocobo with a Nibel dragon and had to be bailed out by his mom. This was worse than starting a food fight in the great hall. This was even worse than trying to steal from Alvin Rustles, the biggest kid on his street who happened to hate his gut because….. Cloud didn’t know. He existed?
This was stupider than all that.
Cloud was dragging a passed out General Sephiroth with a massive BLACK BIRD WING ON HIS BACK through the snow into his poor excuse of a house. Why? What would make him do such a colossally stupid thing?
Because his Ma raised him with manners. Nibels don’t let city folk die in the snow when they underestimate the mountain. General Sephiroth was a city boy. No self-respecting backwater mountain citizen had that much skin showing that often. It was just asking the Frost Giants to blow a winter storm through. Cloud looked down at the bare chest of the most famous person on the continent, then looked away to save his last shred of self-respect.
General Sephiroth was supposed to be leading a parade right now. He was, in fact, Cloud had seen it on live TV back at the reactor.
So what was this?
The bitter mako drenched air of the area surrounding the area of the reactor where he worked burned his lungs without a mask. Sephiroth went *clunk* over a rock and Cloud winced. He was trying to be gentle, but his knees were acting up and that always meant a storm, and they *really* didn’t want to get caught in a storm. That was the worst thing to get caught in, in his humble opinion, and Cloud had been caught in a lot of things.
He was dragging General Sephiroth, the silver demon of Wutai, through the snow. What was his life?
Once inside, Cloud got the iron stove going, shoving some pieces of wood into it to warm the house. Cloud’s house was small and dank, but it kept him on the edge of town away from the children who placed possums in his wood piles and rotted fruit in his mailbox. He liked being alone. Alone was safe. Well, he wasn’t alone anymore. As the house warmed, he watched as the massive black bird wing twitched and retracted close to his body.
The wing was beautiful; dark as the clear night sky, and there were soap bubble rainbows within the feathers. Cloud wanted to take a feather to make a quill pen out of.
Sephiroth shifted, eyes that were much more green in person looked at him. Cloud’s stomach roiled. It reminded him of a predator deciding if a piece of prey was worth going after.
He was being sized up to be eaten.
Cloud knew that prey was the right word as his heart pounded in his chest like a rabbit yanking its foot in an attempt to escape only to ensnare the trap tighter around its leg.
In a moment, quicker than Cloud could comprehend, Sephiroth pinned him by the throat to the wall of his cabin. Hands forged into an iron strong grip by warfare and closed around his throat. Air struggled to enter his body, and he fought hopelessly; each breath shallow and gasping. Even with one eye closed in pain, Cloud could still see the precision that Sephiroth inspected him with. His gaze tore through the walls of Cloud’s facade that he carefully presented to everyone else. Sephiroth looked at the parts of him he hated, the parts he loved, and the parts he cursed for being so unfortunately mediocre.
“Why can I see myself in your eyes? Why Do I Not See Those You Cherish In Your Eyes, Cloud Strife ,”
Sephiroth didn’t shout, as he exerted his presence so greatly to overwhelm every other sound in the room. Cloud felt hot tears run down his cheeks. He was going to be choked to death by a Sephiroth. He’d wasted his one chance at life. Darkness hazed around the edges of his vision; his lungs and throat screamed or maybe that was just him. He didn’t want to die here. He didn’t want dying to be the most interesting thing he does.
As the first tear dropped onto Sephiroth’s hand, he yanked back. The little droplet born from both the pain of having his windpipe crushed and from the thought of dying became the center of his universe. He stared down as if the mere existence of the little drop was an affront to logic.
Cloud took the chance to run.
He ran into the snow he’d grown up in. The snow that took his mother. The snow that bit at his exposed skin and snarled at the rest of him. Cloud ran till his legs gave out and collapsed in a heap of fear and adrenaline. He shook on the ground in a ball, clutching at his legs. They burned inside and out at the abuse. He had to get up, run. Run! His breath fogged up in front of him. It swirled with the wintertime wind, mixing with the flurry of wind. The cold numbed his mind the same way it numbed his hands. It split his attention between the pain in his body and the threat that hounded him. The skies, he had to watch the skies, but his legs hurt so much that he couldn’t move.
The sound of massive wings appeared above him. Sephiroth with his rainbow wings hovered in the air, not flying but just suspended there like something placed directly into the world without any thought for physics or gravity. It reminded Cloud of the Valkyries painted on the ceiling of the Great Hall, but he knew if he was caught there would be no Valhalla on the other side. He dived wings pinned close, and Cloud was helpless except to watch him grow closer and closer. At the last second, his wings snapped open stopping his drop whipping up snow into a flurry. Cloud never saw Sephiroth’s hand grab him, but Cloud screamed as he went higher and higher. The rapidly thinning air made it hard to focus on panicking, made it hard to focus at all. Thoughts swirled and swam, before disappearing completely.
Cloud passed out before Sephiroth even noticed.
Cloud awoke with a start to Sephiroth staring at him very intently. He was laid out on his bed with this awful feeling that Sephiroth had been staring at him the entire time he was out.
“Your eyes are wrong,” Sephiroth says it like an accusation. How could his eyes be the wrong? They’d always been blue. The kind of blue that people who got nice weather pictured the sky as. Blue-blue, not the smoky gray blue that colored the Nibel sky. It was the one thing he liked about himself.
“What- what color are they supposed to be?” Cloud choked out. It was useless to try to keep the tremble from his voice.
“Green.” Sephiroth narrowed his own very green eyes.
“You are not my equal. You’re a poor excuse for a facsimile. You tarnish the memory of his stre-“ Sephiroth stops his strange tirade so abruptly, Cloud flinched. He paused and tilted his head like a marionette.
“I don’t want to kill you,” Sephiroth sounds curious. As if the idea of not wanting someone dead, or maybe him specifically, was a novelty . Blood dripped from Sephiroth’s nose. It splashed down onto the brown wood floors of the cabin. The blood wasn’t glowing or green like bad rumors said it was.
Just red.
Like Cloud’s.
Then Sephiroth collapsed like every muscle in his body just gave out all at once ass over teakettle; passed out face-first into the floor.
Cloud flinched sharply at the sudden movement. Then winced a little in sympathy. He’d made friends with that floor and intimately knew exactly how hard it was. Sephiroth made no hint of moving for a solid 10 minutes as Cloud sat on his bed paralyzed. A part of him had the inane idea to poke him with a stick to see if he’d twitch. That course of action was quickly shot and killed.
What the hell did he do now?
The knots weren’t good, but they were at least on him. Not that tying up Sephiroth was anything but a waste of rope. Ankles were tied together, and his wrists were tied to his ankles in a hogtie. One final rope wrapped around his torso to keep that wing tucked away. Cloud had done better work in the past, but he’d also done a lot worse. Cloud sat with his hunting rifle tucked close to his chest, with bullets in his hand, just staring. Sephiroth was just as pretty in person as on TV, which was a shame because now Sephiroth seemed ready to kill him.
Or…
Not kill him? Based on the end of that entire homicide attempt.
Sephiroth shifted and moved slightly in his bindings as if he were having a bad dream. The murmuring became louder, and Cloud rapidly became sick to his stomach. The faint murmurs were calls for his mother. Even the demon of Wutai had a mother at one point. Cloud tightened his grip on his gun, as the uncanny green eyes slowly opened up. He looked down at the rope around his body in confusion. Then promptly broke them.
Waste of good rope.
“If I wanted you dead. You’d be dead by now,” Cloud blinked and Sephiroth was standing in front of him. How the Hel did he do that? Panic spiked in his chest as Cloud made the same dash to the outside as before, for some reason when he was outside he’d been spared. The mountain would protect. His path was blocked by the massive black wing. An iron grip latched onto his arm tight enough to bruise.
“Do not scurry away like a cowardly rat,” His voice was as hard and punishing as his grip. The prideful part of his brain, what was left of it anyway, felt that running away was a very justified and sensible action. Of course, he was going to run away. A second grip latched onto his chin and jaw, wrenching his face to look at Sephiroth’s so hard it hurt.
The same feeling of being inspected wriggled under his skin. Of having all his secrets and shame be inspected on a dissection table as catlike eyes raked across his face, taking in every flaw and imperfection. Cloud felt another wave of panic, it crept up his spine and made his heart pound in his chest. What was he looking for? What did Cloud have that this guy wanted? Sephiroth couldn’t seem to find it, because he kept Cloud trapped, holding his face and arm till they ached from the touch.
This was the most anyone has touched him in months. His skin prickled under the attention.
His lungs joined his heart in working overdrive. His breathing sped up, which made his heart beat faster and he couldn’t control it. His body wasn’t listening to him. Stop it. Slow down. Stop. Breathe. Breathe. He can’t breathe, a Valkyrie has his face in his grasp. Piercing, uncanny eyes burn into his face. The hand on his face and arm burns, burns, bur-.
Sephiroth’s expression twitches, then he yawns . The big one that shutters though your body. Was terrifying Cloud boring him? Was his suffering tedious? It was damn near comical at the expression on Seohiroth’s face. Like when puppies were spooked by their own bark, or babies when they make upsetting discoveries about their own sounds.
Sephiroth let Cloud go to look confused at his hands, or maybe just at himself. Cloud caught Sephiroth’s yawn, or maybe it was just— Gaia 4am – and Cloud had work in two hours. Sephiroth looked just as perplexed at Cloud yawning.
“Do you not know what a yawn is?” What the fuck was he doing? Why was he talking to the murder bird?
“Yawn… A yawn means I’m tired ,” He spoke like he was reading from a “how to human” instruction manual, but it was written by aliens, and also in Ancient.
“What do I– sleep. I’d forgotten about sleep,” Sephiroth looks around dazed, a shark tipped onto its back. Cloud was too afraid to ask how Sephiroth, or Not-Sephiroth because again Sephiroth was in Midgar distinctly wingless, forgot sleeping. As Sephiroth remembered things like ‘tired’, it seemed to have more effect on him. His eyes drooped, and his face fell into a mask of weary indifference. He blinked slowly and lethargic, and even his big wing relaxed.
“I’m so tired,” Sephiroth spoke with an exhaustion that Cloud hated he understood to the deepest parts of his soul. It was so much more than just a lack of sleep. The kind of weary that irradiated your bones and soul.
Carefully and cautiously, Cloud moved around Sephiroth like one would a sleepy dragon to the linen closet. Sephiroth watched him move but made no further actions other than a small tense when the closet opened. Cloud offered a pillow and blanket to Sephiroth.
What else was he supposed to do?
Run, probably.
He didn’t though, Cloud was stupid like that.
Sephiroth, strangely gentle, grabbed them. He inspected them, much like he had done to Cloud not 10 minutes before. A large hand gently stroked the cotton pillowcase.
“Soft,” He whispered.
Sephiroth settled on the floor with his back to the wall as if on autopilot or a puppet on strings. He stayed like that, waiting for something Cloud didn’t know.
Good Gaia and more, how did he get here?
Cloud didn’t sleep.