Archive of Our Own ^beta

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men.

This is the sort of thing a person never gets a reprieve from, he thinks.

In the realm that exists beyond the invisible, nebulous ivory walls that surround the tiny, vaguely triangular isle of Phoenix Downs, his experiences and those of his fellow islanders would have them joining the ranks of shell-shocked war veterans and trauma victims of every caliber. And they’d all be old, too – old as balls, older than anyone would have an easy or fun time comprehending, Methuselah-old. The world would fear or revere them, and while Internet forums and mostly-coherent blurbs on blogging websites tell him the latter is more likely than the former, those things and those people consistently refer to him as a collection of polygons or beautifully-rendered CGI instead of flesh, blood, bone, and impossible memory – a combination which is, of course, an entirely different entity than the fictional, almost mythological being he seems to exist as out in the Other.

It’s very strange, being a celebrity when no one knows you actually exist.

He is not a human being, not in the real world. Nobody on this fucking island is. It’s cute thoughts like that that get him through most days.

. . .

They have this term here called Fugue. Not fugue, not something you’ll find in your handy-dandy Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – it’s capital F, Phoenix Downs-specific Fugue.

Fugue is what happens when you get so lost and so entangled in your memories, in the crazily-wired synapses crammed tight and overflowing inside your skull and the way they all act when they begin to fire backwards, that confusing back then with right now becomes a very real, very intense part of your personal experience.

Fugue turns you into colorful, fractured glass shut up inside a marble bottle, the pieces of yourself scattered throughout the insane kaleidoscope of time and space and all so broken up and ragged that you haven’t clue as to how to begin gluing them back together.

Fugue has you drifting steadily away from all of the various yous out there and coalescing into one fuzzy, ill-defined you that bleeds all over the place and doesn't have a clear beginning or end, and they’ve all been taught pretty much since their Remembrances that it’s a very, very bad thing to conflate all of those yous. With conflation arrives psychological instability and permanent confusion of identity, according to the books they read and the things their doctors, philosophers, and teachers say. With conflation arrives the obliteration of normalcy – or, at least, the shitty semblance of it Phoenix Downers have become so adept at enjoying. With conflation arrives strife, and pain, and so much suffering.

Like he hasn’t dealt with that shit before and came out (mostly) acceptable and (somewhat) whole.

. . .

Phoenix Downs could easily be described as heavenly, given its pleasant humid subtropical climate and the beauty that pervades its streets, its sights, its various districts – the cherry blossom trees that can be at times overwhelming in their habit of turning up anywhere and everywhere you’d care to look, the pristine marble sculptures of heroes and villains and the kissing cousins of demigods, the sun when it burns and melts into the sea like an egg yolk at the end of the day, the sight more than merely breathtaking when you’re standing barefoot and wistful on the pastel-toned beach – but it feels to him much more like purgatory or limbo, the geographical equivalent of a tightrope line on which he and approximately five-hundred and nineteen others currently idle, their bridge between one fantastic world and, quite possibly, the next.

A train station, but with palm trees.

The city – which rests firmly on the borderline between microscopic metropolis and Pacific Basin suburbia – holds hands with a dense grouping of comparatively tiny mountains. All the way up from the peak of the mountain Fantasiaruns the Jinsei River, which winds its way down the highland alongside the colorful residential district of Destiny Heights, directly through the middle of the vivid hub of downtown, across the airy beachfront of Kaigan Vista, before spilling into the ocean – the name of which, nobody could honestly tell you. Nobody is actually sure where Phoenix Downs happens to be located on planet Earth, primarily due to the fact that to venture beyond the island’s shores past maybe two hundred yards or so has been patently impossible since the triangle of land sprang mysteriously into being an unspecified period of time beforehand.

There is no escaping this perfect limbo – not its asthma-inducing coasts lined with bright art deco beach houses and various business establishments, not the clean stone of uptown, not its vegetation- and eatery- and light-infested downtown with all of its primary-colored brilliance, not its quiet mountains and their seldom-traversed forests.

Nothing in the history books he studies can tell him where the island came from or why. The geology professors don’t know. Two of the three theology professors think its existence is divine and predetermined, but can never give him a definite answer when he presses further with the ‘why?’s and ‘for what reason?’s. The philosophy professors make his head hurt. His friends all have their own varying opinions.

“Obviously we’re in the Bermuda Triangle, or at least something similar to it.” That’s how Roxas’ brain works – logically for the most part, but with just enough whimsy to accommodate the total batshit insanity and lack of complete sense that comes with their existence here. “I mean, nobody from the outside world has been able to find us, and the island as a whole has just up and disappeared from the face of the planet. That’s what it seems like, anyway.”

“I think we’re all just dead. That thing you said the other day, about purgatory – I think that’s just it.” Squall had gone quiet for awhile after he’d said that, contemplating the glass of mai tai gently caged between his fingers – because for how somber and darkly masculine he was all the time, he could throw fruity drinks down like no one’s business – before finishing the thought with a quiet, but not very sad, “Still doesn’t explain why it’s just us, not the rest of the world.”

“I don’t think it has to matter, actually.” That was classic Aerith – or, at least, it was classic post-mortem Aerith. There was just something about dying prematurely and effectively becoming a quasi-supernatural planetary demigoddess with infinite knowledge and wisdom (or something like it) that made it incredibly trivial to ponder too hard about existential shit anymore. “Shouldn’t it be enough that we can finally relax? Go to sleep at night and wake up every morning without worrying about the whole world falling apart, you know?”

Him, he has a few ideas of his own.

Today – or any day of the week, really, barring holidays and particularly inclement weather – he could hop on his bike and head down to Zodiac, also known as ‘the game shop’, and pick up all three of his lives written onto discs and game cartridges and made playable on PlayStation, PlayStation 2, PC, GameBoy, and PSP for the incredibly low price of around $11.99 each, maybe even $6.99 if they’re having a sale. He could sit down at his gaming console of choice and boot up the worlds he used to inhabit, could relive his various lives through endless level-grinding and boss battles and almost numbingly technical strategy, and really – this admittedly strange, unsettling arrangement has had him wondering about the nature of his and his island’s existence more times than he’d ever truly care to admit.

“You think this is just another video game?" he asked him – him being his best friend-cum-significant other – one glaringly unspectacular Saturday afternoon. They were both off from work that day, and despite the fact that Cloud nearly never found himself in a state of true freedom, being the full-time parent he had been for three years now, Saturdays – particularly their afternoons – were the periods of time in which he was as close as he’d ever get to enjoying a moment or so that contained as little stress as possible in his painfully hectic life, and they were to be treasured and spent well for that exact reason.

Of course, on that particular Saturday, he and Zack had chosen to aimlessly roll around in bed together until the sun dipped fully below the horizon and it was time to do something about dinner, maybe. Time well spent indeed.

Zack’s face had adopted a vague, almost indescribable expression where it was hidden halfway beneath his muscled bicep, and he uncovered it to look at Cloud with both eyes, raised his head up off of his pillow to get a better view of the other man, who was clearly wading through one of his run-of-the-mill existential ponds in that instant if the mildly dazed look on his face was anything to go on.

“What, like… like The Sims: Final Fantasy Edition, this time with extra existential depression and a generous side of mundanity?”

Zack always did know how to put a killer spin on things.

“Yeah.”

The older of the two smiled something wry and perhaps a bit dark at that – sharp sliver of teeth, lemony amusement that didn’t quite reach his striking mauve eyes. He rolled himself up into a halfway sitting position to snatch the pack of cigarettes he’d discarded earlier up from the floor next to Cloud’s mattress, extracted one thin, quietly lethal Camel from that plastic-encrusted box, and as he lit up, he laughed, “Pretty shitty video game, if you ask me.”

So many people automatically jump to the conclusion that Zack is a happy person – and he is, make no mistake – but because of that mostly innocuous, mostly accurate assumption, they’ll very often miss that he’s more emotive than anything else, not just that plain, altogether too general thing of happy. Sometimes, he’ll say something that will force Cloud to see his pain with such blinding clarity that it makes it hard to recognize him, and on that glaringly unspectacular Saturday, that was the sentiment that hung heavy in the air between them like damp, humid air before a brief interlude of rain.

. . .

He still wakes up some mornings thinking they’re both long dead, Zack and Aerith, only to be dimly surprised when he checks his phone and finds that conversation he fell asleep on the night before, talking with Zack about Beyoncé or some such shit.

He wakes up tasting the bitter acidity of mako on his tongue when there really isn’t a thing but the continually-circulating air of the A/C unit venting into his room.

He breaks things – plates, sometimes the handles on coffee mugs – subconsciously feeling the same strength in his limbs and in his hands that he did a couple of lives ago, when his day job involved kicking monster ass on the daily and saving the dying hunk of rock he just happened to call home.

It’s hard for him to watch Hercules with the twins – they love laughing at all of Hades’ wisecracks, he knows, and he doesn’t ever really blame them, but him? That rapid-fire, oil-slicked voice has never quite stopped making him feel like a human screwdriver, like a goddamn child.

To think that a certified Disney villain screwed him over big time, once upon a life. He downs an extra Ativan at bedtime, knowing fully well that it’s not good for him and that he’ll hate himself the second he starts feeling anything other than sound of mind and body, but, well… that flaming blue hair has a thing about enamoring him with all kinds of minor self-destruction, it does.

. . .

It’s difficult if not damn near impossible to forget what your Remembrance feels like when you live on this island. Cloud doesn’t know a single person who can’t describe it in excruciating detail.

Tifa reached hers before he reached his, thanks to the handful of months she has on him in age. Just like the eternally mystifying circumstances of the island’s very existence, no one has ever been able to puzzle out why the memories of the lives they lead before arrive to each person in what can only be described as a mental meteor strike around their seventh or eighth birthday, but really, that’s not actually the point here –

The point is that at the time that Tifa Remembered, Cloud had absolutely no concept of the thing that took her out of school for the remainder of the school year, locked her up within the confines of her family’s home, made her into a ghost for how much he saw her after that huge, horrible thing slammed into her with all the force of a fucking semi (read: he didn’t see her at all). It wasn’t until three months later, freshly seven and set on fire in the horrid furnace of that goddamned impossible memory, that he understood, that he saw her again, that she first told him of the way she’d felt when it all came back to her –

“I didn’t know what to do.” She’d ridden her bike straight from her family’s bungalow to the pale two-story he’d inhabited with his mother and younger twin brothers damn near the instant she’d been told that he had Remembered, and his childhood bedroom on the second floor of that warm country house was where they huddled in the wake of their shared lives, where Tifa suddenly jumped about twenty years in emotional and psychological maturity and held Cloud’s exploding head in her hands and explained. “I couldn’t feel anything. Not even hurt. There was too much to feel about, so I just… stopped, couldn’t…”

And then she must have realized all at once what the head she was holding contained – the two of them had shared so much of their past lives, after all – because alarm abruptly took ahold of her dark features in the same way birds of prey took ahold of their dinners, and she looked down at Cloud’s face and his sky-colored eyes glazed over with pain and very nearly gasped, “Oh, Cloud, I hope you don’t feel anything!”

It might have been somewhat funny if his whole world hadn’t been engulfed in flames.

Not all Phoenix Downers had such negative Remembering Experiences. Cloud and Tifa, they are of the class that took their memories like searing railroad spikes through the crowns of their heads – pain so intense and so unbelievably hot that it pushed them directly over the edge into shock and into numbness – but it hasn’t been that way for all of them.

“I cried like a baby, of course, but not because I was super upset or anything. More than anything, it just… felt like my head was growing? Like it was physically expanding. But it didn’t hurt, not really… it was actually kind of awesome.”

Sora had paused only long enough to shove another cheese Pizza Roll into his mouth and chew it maybe twice before continuing heedless of the processed gunk in his mouth, head hung backwards over the edge of the sofa on which he was haphazardly sprawled over.

“It all kept washing over me in these big ol’ waves. It was overwhelming, and kinda scary, but I felt like… like I’d suddenly remembered how to find my way back home.” He loved sentimentalism, his eyes practically swam with it when those words passed through his lips and his gaze landed on the place where Cloud had been sitting several feet away, legs crossed in one of the old armchairs Angeal used to hold Zack and tell him stories in when he was a child.

“So you’re saying you didn’t mind it?” It had always been difficult for him to reconcile with the kind of enthusiastic acceptance of anything and everything Sora constantly carried around with him.

“Yeah, I didn’t.” A smile had stretched slow and breezy across Sora’s face – like oozing, molten caramel – and his sunny eyes remained on Cloud as he noted, “Wasn’t the first time I’d gotten a hold of something that wasn’t completely mine.”

Tidus lives on an emotional rollercoaster because of the memories – sometimes ecstatic and in love and so very thankful for his second, actually third, actually fourth go-round on this thing called Life, sometimes shattered and in pieces and barely even there under the titanic weight of his own existence. He’s never been very good at correctly separating his various selves or keeping himself from melding and melting into this huge, indistinct watercolor nebula of a person, and Cloud has conversed with him about this strange condition of his – this Fugue – in the frigid waiting room of Zanarkand Institute many times over the past couple of years or so.

“It’s like I’m made of vapor sometimes.” He hadn’t been too frantic at that moment, not like he’d been the week before when Cloud and Squall had rushed in the latter’s steel-hued Elantra over to his apartment and found him nearly delirious and high with the notion that he wasn’t actually real, that none of them were – but that vaguely wild look still hovered in his cerulean eyes and had his words coming out a little wobbly, and goddamn if Cloud didn’t know that one like the back of his hand.

“I know what you mean,” is what he’d said. Tidus used to be a dream, he used to be a puppet – friendship and empathy readily molded themselves around those two facts when it came to them.

“Have you ever hurt yourself?” The question was alarming to Cloud – more because it was Tidus of all people asking it than simply because of its implication – but that alarm instantly evaporated when Tidus burrowed his hands into the unipocket of his high school spirit hoodie and shook his head after the words had left him, sun-bleached hair shifting around his head like the feathers of some sandy blond bird, and added, “I’ve never done it – thinking about doing it is kind of weird, you know – but I’ve heard about people doing it when they get confused like me, to ground themselves.” The pause that followed warned Cloud to expect something potentially upsetting to come out of Tidus’ mouth next, and he very nearly closed his eyes and removed himself from the conversation entirely when Tidus had indeed said, “I’ve heard that Sephiroth used to.”

He could have said the thing that instantly jumped into the forefront of his consciousness upon hearing that – ‘He deserved it’, as ugly and as bitter a thought as he’d ever have – but instead, he studied the pale waiting room floor and murmured, “I’ve never done it either.” He’d pretended not to be offended when Tidus actually looked surprised at his answer, but he should have been expecting that, really – as far as everyone else was concerned, he was the poster child for existential depression and soul-wracking exhaustion in this town.

Of course, there are those Phoenix Downers who have handled their memories with abnormal strength and composure, and they’re usually the ones you’d least expect that kind of self-possession from.

“I think maybe you guys were meant to be my parents,” is something Marlene had told him last week, eating lunch at Gilgamesh and waiting for Tifa to return from the bathroom. She said it with two fat, greasy French fries in her mouth and with a sort of airy casualness that made Cloud have to stop and replay her words in her head to realize how serious they actually were. He’d put his fork down then.

“What do you mean?” He and Tifa tried not to talk about how shitty it was that the kid had never been given the option of not being an orphan in both of her lives, but children had a thing about tasting shit like that in the air that surrounded the adults in their life, of smelling pity like small police dogs.

“It’s always been you and Tifa and Daddy,” Marlene replied, but instead of sounding disheartened about that, she sounded so proud that Cloud’s eyes might have begun watering, just at the prospect of being someone this girl was honored to have in her life. “Maybe that means we were always meant to be together.”

Some people interpret their Remembrance as positive reinforcement, then.

This isn’t a thing for the rest of the world – normal people don’t make use of words like Remember/Remembering/Remembrance with a capital R, or Fugue with a capital F – and despite all the attempts of Phoenix Downs’ various professionals and intellectuals to explain the phenomenon in scientific, medical, spiritual, philosophical, and psychological terms, no school of thought from the outside world can quite pin it all down.

The memories come, and no one knows why. That is the singular unchanging facet of their collective existence. It’s a miracle they’ve all been able to function at all.

Cloud wishes at times that he could have at least a legit photograph from way back, a snapshot of him and his personal planet-saving crew, or perhaps one of Tifa and Denzel and Marlene.

Sometimes, though? He wishes he could go back and raze that godforsaken hunk of rock to a crisp. (When he's in the midst of a memory-induced rage, he finds himself understanding Sephiroth's omnicidal tendencies a lot more than he would otherwise.)

Sometimes, he will wrap the lives he lived around himself like three thick, padded quilts.

Sometimes, those quilts will warm him to his core.

Sometimes, they will suffocate him.

Sometimes, he will spend an afternoon doing nothing but drifting in the thick, steaming stew of his past, wondering why he was blessed and cursed with the impossible memory of it all.

He resents that sometimes he misses it, aches for it even – aches for purpose, despite the fact that with that came almost nothing but pain and death and loss loss so much fucking loss. It’s not that he’s even remotely interested in holding his guts in with his bare hands or watching the people he loves get ripped like wet paper with bullets and blades and all manner of psychologically horrifying instances again – it’s just that that’s what he knew before, and in spite of everything he still knows it now, but instead of a whole world filled with magic and warfare and planetary crises of apocalyptic scale, he has car bodies to root around in and twin brothers to care for and university courses to pass to contend with on a daily basis, and he knows that once upon a time he prayed for an existence such as this one, but now –

Now, he is bored of comfort and stability and the prospect of a normal, happy, fulfilling life. Now, he is so restless and jaded at times he could just die.

Remembering does that to him (to everyone, in a lot of ways).

Remembering will have him standing on the edge of the world someday, fat and happy and saddled with his own personal laundry list of heroic accomplishments and emotionally traumatic experiences, with friends and with family and with every reason to be just amazed at how far he’s come, and yet asking the void – “Is that all there is?” (He’s a regular Peggy Lee, he is.)

Remembering? Is bullshit.

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

It’s the last Wednesday of July when he allows himself – finally – to laugh about the district attorney instead of just silently wallowing in the state of muted fear the man puts him in simply by existing around him.

Aerith shoots him a call out of the blue at a quarter to ten, and when he answers – literally just having stepped out of the shower and dripping, naked, all over his bathmat – she says, with characteristic whimsy and the pleasant forwardness she’s always had about her, “Let’s get some brunch, Cloud.”

And he has to be at work in an hour and fifteen, but both of the twins aren’t home for once and he hasn’t spent much time with Aerith at all this summer – not when so much of his “free” time for the past two months has been consumed by his brothers or Zack or Tifa or Riku and Sora or his goddamn support group – so instead of instinctively doling out one of the many excuses he uses to avoid extensive social interaction, he replies, “Do you want me to pick you up?” He knows how much she likes the Harley, likes riding on it with her arms wound securely around his middle, and as his question leaves him and as her eager reply of ‘yes, please’ leaves her, he tries very hard not to think about why.

Of course, her eatery of choice is Mog’s Café – also known as quite possibly the busiest establishment in all of Phoenix Downs, thanks to its adorable barista and everyone’s collective caffeine addiction – and when she catches the barely-there, slightly pained expression on his face as they’re walking up to enter the bistro, she gives him a sympathetic (but not at all remorseful) look and lets her hand rest momentarily on his right bicep, says, “Maybe if you keep your sunglasses on, it won’t be so bad.”

One slim, golden-brown eyebrow rises above the dark rim of said sunglasses, screaming incredulity. “Uh, have you seen my hair?” he asks. The very faintest of smirks worms its way onto his mouth at Aerith’s responding giggle as he pushes the deep mahogany door open with one outstretched, still-gloved hand, holds it that way to let her pass on through.

Sure enough, the instant he crosses the wooden threshold into the café on Aerith’s heels, it seems as though every customer’s attention swivels and pulls directly to him like iron filings to a magnet – eyes zeroing in on that ever-haphazard shock of blond spikes, spines reflexively straightening in the presence of the illustrious Cloud Strife, Saver of Planets and Wearer of Black. It’s shit like this that has him seriously considering shaving his head at times, or possibly just investing in a nice, nondescript beanie (he’s never quite been able to pull that look off, though, not like Roxas – that kid is such a skater he swears it must be coded in his DNA, some kind of recessive gene Cloud ditched in favor of the biker factor).

Everyone knows about him and the grand things he accomplished before – he may just have the largest reputation as a former hero in Phoenix Downs, possibly barring Warrior – and of course, that garners him all sorts of stares and questions and the kind of stupid, awed smiles that only ever appear in the presence of celebrity every time he steps out of the house for more than ten minutes, some days even five. Aerith and Zack, among others, both think he should take pride in the attention. Cloud mostly just wants to take a nap in the face of it.

He isn’t a narcoleptic today, though – instead, he’s Aerith’s wordless, awkward shadow, trailing her to the counter and eyeing the chalkboard menu from behind his sunglasses and trying his damndest to ignore the plethora of tiny lasers boring into his back and head.

“Mor-ing, y’all. What can I get for you?” Noel – the aforementioned adorable barista – has a way of speaking that quavers and trips over itself. Most Phoenix Downers have gotten accustomed to respectfully ignoring or accommodating it – after all, it’d be ridiculously rude to reprimand someone for a disability.

“Hi, Noel.” Aerith smiles, and that single flash of teeth could damn near count as an independent light source, how remarkably bright it is. “Tell us what’s good, will you?”

At some point during Noel’s semi-stumbling enumeration of his personal favorite items on the menu, Cloud’s right ass-cheek vibrates insistently. Half-annoyed at the prospect of having to a) utilize a touchscreen, and b) socialize, he fishes his phone out of his back pocket and surveys the notification waiting for him, surprised to have his irritation drop down to about a third of its initial amount when he actually gets a look at the text.

zack
good morning sunshine ;))

Zack is right on time. Had he not elected to text Cloud at that very moment, Cloud might have gone ahead and done something drastic (not to mention rude) to remove himself from his eyeball-filled hell, like conveniently realize that he was actually supposed to pick Roxas up this morning (which would be a blatant lie – Axel has his own vehicle, and almost everyone in Phoenix Downs has had the unfortunate experience of bearing witness to it at some point), or possibly shove his head into that blender that’s been growling and grinding and grating on his nerves – which are already pretty short just by default – ever since he and Aerith showed up here.

It’s when Cloud turns politely away from both Aerith and Noel to thumb out an affectionately sarcastic ‘you’re aware that the morning is almost over, right?’ in reply to Zack that the district attorney walks in in a black Versace business suit – no tie – and shiny patent leather dress shoes that click softly against the honey-gold wood of the floor with his every step. It’s a bit of a struggle for Cloud not to do what he’s secretly been dying to for ages and just drop his phone, possibly shatter that screen he hates so damn much, at the man’s entrance.

The district attorney has the opposite effect Cloud’s presence does on those presently occupying the warm, bright little café. Where Cloud has gazes following him almost everywhere he goes, the district attorney has those same eyes dropping with near-comical quickness into vacant laps or hastily relocating themselves to the ground, to the nearest wall, to anything that might be even remotely interesting. Where Cloud inspires fascinated, almost prideful awe in the people around him, the district attorney inspires dread – sometimes even revulsion – in the vast majority of Phoenix Downers, aided in every part by his past actions and all of the people who suffered due to them.

The district attorney doesn’t seem altogether too bothered by this chilly reception, however. In fact, there is none of Cloud’s habitual discomfort and tension in the line of his shoulders or on the canvas of his face – he is a blank, expressionless statue, impassive, and apparently just as interested in getting brunch on a Wednesday morning as Cloud and Aerith happen to be.

Feigning indifference – or would ignorance be the more correct term? – and feeling every inch a robot calculating his every movement, word, and breath – a robot he very often has to be in the presence of this horrifying ivory tower – Cloud turns his back on the district attorney and plays at listening to Aerith and Noel’s conversation, in actuality only catching a word or two here or there: ‘cinnamon’, ‘really spicy’, ‘sure you’ll love it’. When prompted to break his silence and finally decide on something to order, his attention is split cleanly down the middle by the distinct noise of a cellphone buzzing behind him, and he knows then with a sharp pang of something in his gut that Zack is probably texting the district attorney, too.

Zack did mention something about wanting to do lunch with him and Angeal the other day.

“I’ll, uh.” His mouth is super dry all of a sudden – weird. “I’ll just have what she’s having.”

Aerith gives him one of her many Mildly Concerned looks at his vague, noncommittal answer, but he doesn’t have any time to entertain it, really – because Noel is ringing their order right up, because his ass just vibrated again, because Aerith is noticing the man standing a respectful foot and a half behind them, noticing his strange, flowing hair and his mint-colored eyes.

And then – in one of the oddest, most quietly unsettling instances Cloud has witnessed this whole past week – Aerith smiles at the district attorney. It isn’t just any one of her smiles either – it’s that sparkling, illuminating thing that can instantly set a room alight, the kind of smile that had Cloud falling helplessly in love with her three lives ago, the kind of smile most people would do a whole hell of a lot to bask in, to be the special, singular focus of.

“Good morning,” she chirps, and maybe Cloud kind of wants to shake her for it, ask her where the fuck her mind went or something, but when he casts a short, fleeting, entirely involuntary glance at the district attorney, that urge just up and flies out the window with all the speed and power of a goddamn fastball, because –

Because he’s never seen a man look so uncomfortable in his life.

He’s never seen the district attorney look so uncomfortable, either – never seen furrowed brows or a tight, miniscule frown that silently screams nausea on that otherworldly, angelic face of his – and the sight of it is so shocking to him, he forgets for a moment that he himself is supposed to be the uneasy one here. That image haunts him all through brunch, sends him to work even later than he initially planned on, has him (somewhat desperately) bullshitting Cid with some ‘Ventus got sick this morning’ crap just to get the older man to lay off with his bitching and let him mull over the memory of that bizarre display of distress under the hood of Jecht’s steaming, ill-maintained El Dorado in peace.

It is only that night, peeling his clothes off and retrieving a battered old sleep shirt from the overhead shelf in his closet, that the humor, the irony of all finally knocks him in the head, just like that fastball urge from before.

Aerith isn’t afraid of the district attorney. She never has been, Cloud’s almost entirely certain of it – not even before, when he’d hunted her like a dog and taken her life in the incredibly abrupt, incredibly violent way he had, did she have even the inclination of terror where he was concerned – and given how kindly she’d treated him today and all of the lovely things she’s said about forgiveness and acceptance in the wake of her Remembrance, Cloud suspects that, more than anything, she empathizes with him instead of living in fear of him.

This woman – one of his closest friends, the strongest, sweetest person he knows – got under Sephiroth’s skin this morning, actually made him uncomfortable with her courtesy, and he – big damn hero of the planet formerly known as Gaia, slayer of all of Sephiroth’s various dragons in the three past lives they shared – he couldn’t even really look at the man, let alone acknowledge him as anything other than what he happened to be this time around.

In the dark, Cloud’s fingers find his lips – usually made of marble, usually stiff and unmoving to a fault – and make a failing attempt at caging in the laugh that has suddenly come bubbling up his throat and out of his mouth in a soft, low rumble. That’s the sort of coincidental, existential humor that usually only reveals itself after the sun has gone down and when he is entirely with himself and no one else, and it’s funny, it really is – in that twisted way he likes, sharp enough to seriously cut himself on if he isn’t careful.

He keeps going back to the shock that had smeared itself across Sephiroth’s features like skin-toned war paint, to his hilariously, astonishingly obvious discomfort in the face of Aerith’s completely absurd generosity, and you know what? He might even cackle a little, he’s so darn tickled by the thought.

Nothing like a hearty chuckle or two to take the bite out of all that residual, perhaps somewhat misplaced fear.

. . .

There’s no reason he should fear Sephiroth now. He knows that very well.

He knows from every time he’s been at the man’s house, accompanying Zack while he’s picking up Riku for their preplanned lunch date or grabbing his jacket after having forgotten it there last week at dinner; knows from coming out of countless sleepovers with Riku alive and unharmed and without even seeing the boy’s father; knows from every ridiculous story Zack has ever told him about that time he gave Sephiroth about two-hundred tiny silver braids all over his head, and that time the man made him laugh so hard with some particularly right-on quip about the irony of having Rufus Fucking Shinra as their mayor that he had Corona coming out of his nostrils for three hours afterward, and that time Sephiroth let him spend a whole week and a half under his roof when he was seventeen and things with Angeal and Genesis were getting really bad on Zack’s end – he knows that he has absolutely no reason to turn into the quivering, petrified thing he does at the very mention of this man’s name, at even the threat of him being present. 

“Seph is alright, Cloud,” Zack told him once, on that very first drive to said man’s house, that very first sleepover with Riku. “I know you can’t rewrite the past or anything, but he’s different now. He was an actual person before he went totally cuckoo, you know?”

And yet –

And yet.

He still wakes up in the dead of night – sweating cold and hard-pressed to find any air to take into his lungs – with the memory of that cat-eyed, angel-faced monster hovering over and smothering him, gleefully threatening to choke the very life out of him and all that he cherishes, burning him alive.

Call it spiteful, but Cloud doesn’t see himself casually brushing off those midnight terrors any time soon. No amount of round, pleading puppy eyes out of Zack or Riku will change his mind.

. . .

It’s too fucking hot.

8:57 AM sits like a circus elephant on a primary-colored stool over the whole of Phoenix Downs, the air conditioner is broken and has been for the past week thanks to his inborn allergy to any and all kinds of telephone usage, the golden discus of the sun is a raging inferno streaming light and heat through the window and searing directly into his face, and it is too fucking hot for him to even be breathing right now. The two living space heaters blissfully sandwiching him in his own personal sixth circle of Hell aren’t helping matters much.

Releasing a deep, supremely weary sigh, Cloud wrenches himself out of the muggy crevice he’s wedged himself into overnight, careful to disturb his massive, slumbering cat and his massive, slumbering boyfriend as little as possible. Once upright, he dives headfirst into his recurring morning game of Getting Out of Bed Without Waking Zack.

With practiced stealth and almost comically slow, cautious motions, Cloud commits to the meticulous task of picking himself out from under the thin sheet he and Zack share. Painstakingly, he removes one leg from its cotton cover, folds it delicately beneath himself, then moves to retract the other in identical fashion, bringing himself up into a half-crouching position as he does. He perches, birdlike and silent, on the broad of his pillow for the tense few moments in which it takes him to ascertain from Zack’s labored breathing and general stillness that the man is, thank God, fast asleep still, then – and this here is the move he’s been working on for months – like some alien hybrid of panther and lemur, arms and legs stretching and bending Tarzanesque and animalistic, he crawls lengthwise across the mattress until, after what feels like an entire eon, finally reaching the foot of the bed and readying himself to take off for the rest of the apartment –

At which point he’s yanked abruptly backwards by the hem of his shirt and rolled rather unceremoniously into one particularly warm, particularly tight embrace, two leanly muscled brown arms wound like a pair of incredibly insistent boa constrictors around his neck and his torso. Mako, evidently roused by the commotion, makes a soft, trilling noise of confusion somewhere behind him; in front of him, there is Zack – dancing eyes, smirking lips, dog breath galore.

“I have to hand it to you, Spike.” He pushes his nose against Cloud’s with that, rubbing their tips together, and he’s fucking laughing at him, goddamn him. “You almost nailed it this time.”

Cloud has yet to actually win this morning game of his.

Making a face like crumpled paper, Cloud works a fist up between the meager space between his clothed chest and Zack’s bare one, halfheartedly (and unsuccessfully) pushing for a few inches of distance between them. “Your breath is atrocious,” he bitches, beginning-of-the-day attitude in full and triumphant swing.

Zack’s mouth unfurls into a grin that, believe it or not, gives that blazing sun a run for its money. Such is to be expected out of him, considering that Cloud’s habitual moodiness has never done anything but bounce right off of him. “So is yours,” is his purring, alarmingly seductive comeback, and without further ado, he’s taking Cloud’s lips with his own, halitosis be damned.

Cloud is prepared to fight for his freedom, ready to valiantly wrestle his way out of Zack’s love grip (that’s what they’ve started calling it in lieu of a death grip – it’s much more pleasant and much less triggering that way), but, well… that fist of his, instead of pummeling into Zack’s chest, relocates itself to the place between the man’s shoulders, pulls him in closer until they’re pressed flush together and can adequately enjoy each other’s sweat and early morning grossness. Making out in Hell is surprisingly enjoyable when he’s doing it with Zack.

He convinces Zack to make breakfast (mostly because if he even attempts complex food preparation, there’s a healthy chance the entire apartment complex will end up in flames – and like hell does he need any more heat today) while he embarks on his second A.M. pastime – Waking Up the Twins. This game isn’t as fraught with difficulty and danger as its predecessor, but it requires a much higher degree of stamina and persistence – both of which Cloud happens to be markedly short of before noon most days.

He has a very fun life, you see.

First stop is Ventus’ room. Cloud designates the older twin as his first target primarily due to Ven’s superior kindness and agreeability over his slightly younger double.

Without knocking (because it’s damn near an impossibility for this boy to be awake before one in the afternoon if left to his own devices), Cloud lets himself into Ven’s bird’s nest of a room – clothes and books and all manner of knickknacks strewn haphazardly about the floor and the room’s various surfaces. He makes a mental note to remind Ven for the sixty-eighth time to clean up at some point today.

The boy in question is lost somewhere beneath a sea of blankets (how in the hell he can sleep like that in the middle of the summer is an ongoing mystery), so Cloud makes it his mission to – after expertly traversing the ocean of junk between the doorway and the bed, that is – tug back those quilts and duvets of varying designs and dimensions and uncover the slumbering teen hidden within them. Much to Cloud’s complete lack of shock, Ven is red in the face and sticky all over from being entombed in so much cotton all night.

“Ven.” His gaze is momentarily drawn to a tiny bruise marring his brother’s collarbone, but he and Roxas were horse-playing like a couple of lunatics last night, so he doesn’t pay it much mind. “Wake up, sleepy.”

As per usual, Ven doesn’t so much as flutter his eyelashes.

Cloud exhales audibly, gathering the two, three, four blankets Ven has himself cocooned in in one hand and, after a moment’s hesitation, whipping them back off of Ven and halfway onto the floor.

That gets some kind of reaction out of the teenager, but not a very promising one. Ven simply shifts vaguely in the direction of his missing covers, weakly searching them out in his sleep with grasping fingers, then settles right back down with a quiet sigh, apparently content to go without. Cloud has found over the years that the boy is probably the best at making decisions when he’s unconscious.

It’s time to pull out the big guns, then.

With the sort of wanton mischief only bred by familial relation and a lifetime of being an older brother, Cloud peels the hem of Ven’s t-shirt up over the boy’s stomach, lowers his mouth to press against the pale skin there, and blows the loudest, wettest raspberry he can muster.

Ven wakes up giggling wildly, body writhing and hands grabbing thoughtlessly at Cloud’s hair and pulling until the older one’s exclamation of, “Ow, Ven, shit!” alerts him to the harm of his actions.

“Oh!” Ven’s expression is as sheepish as it is sleepy when Cloud raises his head to shoot him a mildly reprimanding look. “M’sorry, Cloud, I’wasn’ thinkin’…”

Cloud gives a dismissive shake of the head. “S’cool. I’m the one who went in there without my hardhat.”

Ven reaches one apologetic hand out to smooth down Cloud’s assaulted hair, laughs in a breathless, drowsy way when those unruly blond spikes do as they’re wont to and fluff right back up heedless of his petting. It isn’t even noon yet, and this kid already has Cloud’s heart in a metaphorical orange juicer with his Ventusness.

Ventusness (n.): the quality of being kind and/or gentle in a way that is thoroughly adorable; often has the effect of causing heart palpitations, hyperventilation, and inhuman exclamations of glee

“C’mon,” Cloud urges with a well-aimed poke at Ven’s navel, smiling softly when the teen emits another helpless, squirming giggle in response. “Zack is making breakfast, so you should get up.” Then, taking a second account of Ven’s damp, feverish skin – “And change your shirt, maybe.”

As Cloud picks his way back across the room to the door, Ven takes stock of his sweaty clothes and overheated state. “I’m gonna need to change more than just my shirt,” he notes, earning him one of Cloud’s specially patented Faintly Disgusted and Unimpressed Looks before he disappears out into the hallway, mindful to leave the door open so as to further prompt Ven to actually get out of bed and close it.

And now, onto the monster.

Cloud knows going in that he’s going to have to employ a slightly different set of tactics to rouse Roxas. He wouldn’t dare blow a raspberry on his stomach – while Ven might have accidentally yanked his hair a bit, Roxas will no doubt give him a bloody nose or a black eye on purpose if he tried the same sort of boisterous affection on him. Similar as they can be, they’re very different creatures, his younger brothers are.

Speed and precision are the goals Cloud has his baby blues firmly set on as he barges his way into Roxas’ room – significantly neater than that of his slightly older twin, without even a spare thread or a speck of lint tarnishing the nondescript beige carpet – and, with viperlike accuracy, whisks the curtains covering the window above his brother’s bed wide open to let in a near-blinding stream of sunlight, the sunlight that had him waking up in Hell not even fifteen whole minutes earlier.

Before Roxas can even groan in full, Cloud is throwing back his covers (a thin duvet and a single sheet does it for Roxas – unsurprising, considering he’s the sensible twin) and grasping the boy’s naked ankles in his hands to tug him halfway onto the floor, fast enough to startle him but slow enough so that he doesn’t inadvertently bang his head against anything hard. Like the expert he is, Cloud dodges the instinctive, almost routine horse kick to the thigh/groin Roxas attempts to land, stepping safely back out of the boy’s range of motion and watching with dull amusement as this newly-awakened, marginally pissed baby bird tries to orient himself. His first step: sliding fully onto the floor, bottom first.

“Oh, good,” Cloud sighs. “You’re awake.”

The look Roxas shoots him in reply fills him with the split-second fear of his head spontaneously bursting into flames. Roxas’ glares are the sort that have strong-willed men and women composing their own obituaries in their heads, just in case they’re unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of them a second time. Amazingly enough, Cloud has survived about a million of them, not entirely unscathed.

“A simple ‘wake up’, would have done it,” the sixteen year-old grumbles, scrubbing a hand against his sleep-encrusted eyes.

“You’d think so, but I’ve tried it before and my success rate isn’t too pretty.” Cloud makes to exit, then, glancing momentarily over at his brother to add, “Zack’s making breakfast, so unless you want us to have all the fun–”

“What’s he cooking?” It’s almost magical, how fast Roxas (or anyone, really, but especially Roxas and Sora) perks up at the mere mention of Zack in the kitchen.

“Those fancy pancakes you like so much.” Cloud pauses at the distinct scent of cooking meat. “And bacon, by the smell of it.”

That has Roxas rolling to his feet and stretching all four limbs to the heavens and the earth – and it’s almost embarrassing, really, that this kid is gaining on him in height when Cloud is four years his senior – then practically charging past Cloud through the doorway like the goddamn human-shaped bull he is, throwing a hasty, “I’m goin’ to the bathroom then I’ll be right out!” over his bare shoulder. Such a teenager.

Cloud ascertains with a brief knock on Ven’s now-closed door that the boy hasn’t gone back to sleep on his way past – “I’m up!” Ven calls through the wood – and then, himself more than content with the idea of crawling back to bed and staying there until he’s aged a few years, pads catlike and sleepy into the combination kitchen/dining area, where Zack is busy at the stove and itching for a cigarette, if the staccato rhythm he’s beating against the floor with his foot is anything to go on.

“Don’t touch those.” Zack waves his fork in the direction of the plate currently piled high with pancakes and sitting dangerously near the edge of the breakfast bar. “I used strawberries in them.”

“To think I actually let you bring strawberries into my house…” Cloud narrows his eyes at the offending hotcakes (the ones he happens to be very allergic to, thanks to their secondary ingredient), the expression accentuated with a barely-audible ‘ugh’. “They look like they have open sores.”

Zack turns away from the stove to assault Cloud with his thoroughly insulted and waiting for an apology eyes, half-dancing (because that’s just how he happens to move when they’re together more often than not) over to where the blond idles a safe distance away from the apparently melanoma-infested hotcakes to give him a reprimanding wag of the fork. “Don’t trash talk the pancakes. They’re sensitive.”

“Maybe they should see someone about that.” Cloud brandishes his sarcasm like a sword, most days. Thankfully, Zack is Phoenix Downs’ reigning maven when it comes to meeting his blows.

“Are you suggesting my pancakes seek professional help?” The hurt on Zack’s face would be perfectly convincing, were it not marred by the slightest twist of a smirk.

Cloud can’t help but mirror that smirk back to him when he replies, eyes stubbornly fixed on Zack’s eyes instead of his lips, “I can refer them to my therapist. She’s really understanding.”

Of all things, that’s what pushes Zack across the scant few inches between them and has him kissing Cloud full on the lips. Cloud knows the timing probably has everything to do with the fact that that last quip of his amused Zack so much he couldn’t not laugh at it, and rather than surrender the whole verbal fencing match to Cloud, he’s chosen to just derail it altogether like the hound dog he is. Cloud doesn’t have it in him to take it personally, not even with the laminate edge of the breakfast bar jutting uncomfortably into his lower back and the incredibly distracting teeth worrying at his bottom lip…

“Younger brother present!” Roxas clears his throat just as loud as he walks when he passes into the kitchen, eyes everywhere but on his older brother and the man currently pressing him against a very hard, very sturdy surface. Cloud breaks away from Zack with a sharp maneuver of his head and the very faintest of eye-rolls, doesn’t catch any of the amusement plastered all over Zack’s expression with the new distance between them.

“Well, good morning, Rox.” Zack wastes no time wrangling said teen into a deliberately weak half-nelson, laughing that syrupy, honey-poured-over-thunder laugh of his when Roxas rewards him with a punch to the gut that does absolutely nothing to him. His hand snatches out to ruffle Roxas’ untamed flaxen hair and pinch the boy’s freshly-washed cheeks, shit-eating grin on full and nearly breathtaking blast.

“It was –” Roxas smacks Zack’s grasping fingers away from his face, but he’s smiling as he does it. “– before I walked in on you defiling my brother. Now it’s all gone to pot.”

“Oh, please. Like Cloud can be defiled at this point. You should’ve walked in on us last night, now that’s what you’d call defileme–”

“Good morning, family!”

Upon his entrance, Ven is greeted by the rosy, immeasurably mortified faces of his brothers and a damn near impossible degree of self-satisfaction radiating in waves off of Zack. His gaze drifts, happy and oblivious, between each member of the trio – from Roxas’ wide, horrified eyes, to Zack’s mouth chock-full of feces, to the tips of Cloud’s ears, which, at the moment, are quite a bit red.

“You’re about to burn the bacon,” Cloud says, the words coming out through loosely clenched teeth, and yeah, that would be him smacking Zack unapologetically hard on the ass as he rushes back over to the stove to get all that pork on a plate. He tries not to laugh at the questioning look Ven gives him, fails when Roxas mimes gouging his eyes out with a neon purple bendy straw.

The bacon’s a bit too crispy and not even the electric fan does much to kill the oppressive, damp heat that has conquered the apartment in an altogether Mongolian fashion, but the twins (as always) devour their sugar-frosted strawberry pancakes with much enthusiasm and Zack’s thigh stays warmly pressed against Cloud’s where they eat side-by-side on the couch all through breakfast. Roxas doesn’t even complain when, halfway through the morning’s episode of Looney Tunes, the resident adults share one brief, lightly-powdered kiss.

. . .

Cloud was seventeen years-old when their mother disappeared.

They’d all been a month or so into the school year – Cloud a newly-christened junior in high school, simultaneously near to and so far from adulthood; Roxas and Ventus both eighth-graders more than ready to move on up and join the leagues of the big kids – when one quiet, entirely ordinary September morning, they woke to find their rock, their anchor, their tether to sanity and normalcy for their relatively few years on this earth gone, vanished without any indication that she’d ever really existed beforehand.

Cloud was the one who’d first made the discovery – he was up the earliest, after all, the high school tardy bell rings an hour before the middle school one does – and it had been one long, exceptionally cold look around his mother’s suddenly vacant bedroom and the careful inventory he’d taken of all of the photographs of her in their two-story craftsman (i.e.: zero, zero photographs) that told him all he needed to know about that warm woman with the meager bosom but strong arms, warm arms, and the sky-colored eyes she shared with him and his twin brothers –

The cyclone had come and whisked her off to Oz. Despite everything, despite years of hanging onto her when so many other Phoenix Downers were magically orphaned so much sooner, the three of them had finally contracted the infamous Parent Disappearing Syndrome. So much for all the luck they seemed to have in spades beforehand.

They stayed with Angeal – Zack’s surrogate father after falling victim to the Syndrome himself at the age of three – for the two months that followed their surprise abandonment, and in those eight weeks, their fractured family began to slowly piece itself around their sharp edges and their various deficits, their strengths and their soft points.

Cloud was no cook, so frozen grocery store pizza and meals of the simplest variety, preparation-wise, became the standard.

The motorcycle could only seat one extra passenger, and motion sickness would likely never permit Cloud to learn how to drive a car, so carpooling to school was integrated into the twins’ daily routine.

Thanks to Angeal’s generous string-pulling and the fact that in two short years, Cloud would be a university student and live on campus anyway, the three brothers were given a subsidized apartment in the university complex, one not so far from Zack and Angeal’s so as to offer some degree of security (as if any sort of real security could be offered to them, that trio of small adults).

It wasn’t easy, especially in the beginning. Their impossible memory had made things hard enough, tricking them into mental and spiritual maturity while their bodies remained that of adolescents, but the abrupt, painful ejection from their second/third/fourth childhood into full-blown adulthood was more than just difficult – at times, it was fucking unbearable.

‘Why can’t you just be our brother again?’ Words Cloud heard almost too many times within that first year.

‘Which pizza tonight, guys – pepperoni or supreme?’ They ate so much pizza it was damn near repulsive.

‘Cloud? Aren’t you going to get out of bed?’ And sometimes he wouldn’t get out of bed because he just couldn’t fucking stand to, and the twins would mold themselves to his back and front and make themselves into his brothers for twenty, thirty minutes, stop being his children just long enough for him get a grip on himself and return with his head held high to that place in which they depended on him for everything, that place where the thought of raising them didn’t crush him under its colossal steel-toed boot and steal from him the ability to breathe.

There are still nights when he sinks into that dark, him-shaped pit in the middle of his bed, nights when Roxas and Ven – like clockwork, with their wordless, inexplicable psychic attunement to each other and to him – will find him there and lie beside him and dig him out with their frivolous words – talk about the fight that happened at school today or something cool they learned in geography class – or with their dual presence alone, but in the morning –

In the morning, Cloud will wake them, blowing raspberries and opening curtains.

In the morning, their teeth will be brushed, and Cloud will risk unconsciousness and pure, unadulterated disgust by having each twin breathe on his nose, just in case they’re bullshitting him.

In the morning, they will eat fruit salad or the waffles that you put in the toaster, and at the breakfast bar, Ven will shove permission slips and teacher’s notes at Cloud to sign at the very last minute, and Roxas will ask Cloud if he can hang out with Axel or Hayner after band practice, and Cloud will sometimes say no if Roxas has been slacking off with his homework, but it’s very rare that Roxas does that, so most of the time the answer is ‘yes’.

In the morning, Cloud will walk the twins down to the complex driveway and wait with them for the Squallmobile, and he’ll make drowsy small talk with Squall about the trials and tribulations of being an older sibling that’s been prematurely promoted to parenthood while his brothers pile into the backseat with Sora and Vanitas, and after waving them all off and wishing them well at school, he will return to their three-bedroom apartment and crawl back into bed and remain there for another hour, until he himself has to get up and attain his own education.

And when he settles back into that place in the very center of his mattress, it won’t be with any of the heaviness and the gravity of the night before. That disappeared hours ago, riding on the glowing coattails of the moon.

. . .

“Turn around, bright eyes…”

Phoenix Downs is filled with shadows.

On the radio, he hears Jessie’s voice – “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, you’re listening to one-oh-one-point-three, THE PHOENIX!” – and she’s a disc jockey now, passes her days with her fingers at a laptop and a soundboard, but Cloud knows that those hands once fashioned and handled all sorts of terrifying and incendiary devices with all the love and care that mothers handle their children, knows firsthand the kind of destruction that woman was once capable of, the kind that even she didn’t fully comprehend until it was too late.

In class, he takes notes during Angeal’s lectures, and though the man talks about revolutions and independence days and verbally traverses the ins and outs of world history with his words this time around, Cloud knows the man used to discuss honor and dreams with just as much fervor. He’s changed records, no doubt, but the First Class SOLDIER is still there, singing softly – Cloud can hear him in his voice.

When he gets coffee, it’s Noel. At the grocery store, it’s Bartz and Olette. When he got in his accident, it was Kunsel that painstakingly coached him to regain his strength. At Seventh Heaven, he sees everyone.

They used to be heroes, villains, and every morally vibrant and dull shade in between, but now? They scoop ice cream and sweep the roads in the early morning, and drift sleep-deprived and already too full of knowledge into lecture halls and college workshops. The battles they fought and the wars they raged in the name of good and evil, now trivial in the face of their daily struggles for enough food for the month, for enough money, for enough sleep. Loves that would change the face of the world and shake the universe to its very core, all so small compared to the sleepy kisses they give and receive upon waking, the socks neatly and meticulously folded by their significant others, the extra toothbrush on the bathroom counter.

“You bought me a toothbrush?” The sight of it had hit him so hard, he might have mistaken the blow for a stab – and here it came, this awful Fugue of his, confusing this small bathroom for some rain-drowned cliff that lay an impossible distance away.

“It was only a buck-fifty, and you keep forgetting yours.” Zack grinned at him with all his teeth in the mirror, then pushed a hand into the small of his back, and it was a casual, meaningless gesture, but they’d done this enough times for Cloud to know that Zack knew exactly what he was doing and exactly how to use that hand of his as an anchor. With four fingers, he pulled Cloud back to their pastel-colored, entirely mundane now, and said, “S’no big deal.”

No big deal? That toothbrush looked and felt like a lifeline to Cloud, sitting in that old plastic cup on the counter next to the sink – but honestly, Zack was right. He was making mountains out of molehills again.

“Every now and then I get a little bit restless and I dream of something wild…”

He sees Tidus and Yuna holding hands in public all the time, sharing kisses heedless of whoever may be watching, and it’s strange, really – they kiss like they’re a week from their fiftieth anniversary, but Yuna is only a year older than Cloud, and he and Tidus had almost all of their classes together throughout high school. Everything about his life and the lives of those that surround him is strange – except, of course, for the things that totally aren’t.

At Sin, the local gym, he overhears a conversation between Barret and Wakka concerning their children. Marlene is thirteen this year while Vidina is only three, but that all-prevailing wonder at the curiosity and the magnificence of their little people is something that doesn’t fade at all with age, if the empathy between those two fathers is anything to go on – “Don’t ever think I’ll get tired of hearin’ that girl’s laugh, I tell ya,” Barret says in the warm, husky voice only Marlene seems to be capable of bringing out of him, and Wakka hums his concord, all dreamy and paternal in the eyes.

Graffiti decorates the mailboxes and sidewalks of Phoenix Downs, glyphs of orange flames and monochrome x’s and cool-colored water serpents, and Cloud knows who the artistically-inclined criminals behind the tags are, but he doesn’t say anything when Roxas comes home after a night spent with his Organization buddies with spray paint clinging stubbornly to his fingers.

Squall shoots him a message one afternoon while he’s hard at work at the garage – ‘Give me the strength to not kill all of these children I s2g’ – and Cloud would tell him that it’s his fault for designating high school band teacher as his calling in life, but instead, he stifles the laugh Squall can’t actually see in the curve of his arm (since his hand is gloved and slick with motor oil), answers (with bare thumbs), ‘it helps me to think of boxes full of kittens’, then proceeds to forward him every adorable and ridiculous cat picture Zack has ever sent to him – and no, he is not smiling at all the blushing emojis Squall texts him back in reply, no matter what Rikku claims to see playing at the corners of his lips.

On the corner of Bhunivelze Boulevard and Etro Avenue, he watches a simple disagreement between Kadaj and Shuyin suddenly erupt into a full-blown fist fight, and he knows even staring through the distancing, mostly-soundproof windows of the ice cream parlor that the struggle isn’t entirely about an accidental bump of the shoulders or even the dark, overly aggressive way Shuyin happens to look at everyone – it’s just that there’s too much anger on this island for everyone to mete out against the punching bags at the gym or scream hoarsely into their pillowcases after dark. They were all warriors, once upon a time. Sometimes, fighting just comes as naturally as breathing.

“Every now and then I fall apart.”

Cloud used to listen to that one Bonnie Tyler song a whole hell of a lot, especially during his post-mother, pre-boyfriend period when everything was about 120% more intense than it already was under normal circumstances and the insides and edges of him were raw and blistered with heat and rage almost all of the time. He’d lie face-up on the floor of his bedroom, and instead of doing his schoolwork or washing the dishes rotting in the kitchen sink, he’d just loop that track about a million times on his CD player and listen to it with his eyes shut like the pathetic, 80s-obsessed, overstressed, overemotional thundercloud he was.

There were these two lines he'd go back to in his mind, over and over and over again –

"I don't know what to do and I’m always in the dark!
We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks..!"

He’s had a hard time believing that song wasn't written for every migratory soul that somehow wound up in Phoenix Downs.

“No kidding, Cloud.” Tifa gives him a murmured ‘thank you’ when he hands over the glass of ice tea she requested before his quick trip back inside her apartment. Her dark, mocha-hued bangs ride up and blow back to expose her forehead with the damp summer breeze – she has the tiniest scar there, not very many people have borne witness to it with it always being covered by her hair – and there’s the beginning of a smile pulling at her mouth when she says, “I used to listen to that song all the time, too.”

“You’re joking.”

“No!” Her elbow comes out to jab playfully into Cloud’s side as he settles his weight back against the balcony, half-consciously mirroring her position – ankles crossed, elbows propped against the stainless steel railing. Her body is warm and soft where it presses close to his bare arm, her smile that open, quietly glowing thing it usually only ever becomes when he’s present, and she’s singing to him – “Every now and then I know you’ll never be the boy you always wanted to be…”

She doesn’t know that he spent a good thirty seconds watching her through the glass door leading out here before he actually took it upon himself to rejoin her. As much time as they’ve spent together across their shared lives, he only just recently discovered the merits of gazing upon her when she isn’t aware that he’s looking – not in a creepy way, of course, but because when he’s around her, he turns her into the Tifa she wants him to see and he’s always done that in some unwitting, stupidly oblivious way. When she doesn’t know he’s there, though, the pieces of her come together to form one unbroken whole, and he loves her always, he really and truly does, but he might just love her even more when she’s fully submerged in the Pacific Ocean of herself.

“Every now and then I know you’ll always be the only boy who wanted me the way that I am…”

Through the glass, he watched her stare off in the general direction of the beach, gaze emptily at the dying sunset with the bare bones of a smile decorating her face, and he wondered then what she was so gently pleased about, marveled silently at the hair that touched her lower back and the beautiful grass sprouting on the back of her naked calves, the skin there unshaved for about a week and a half.

“Every now and then I know there’s no one in the universe as magical and wondrous as you…”

And now, because he wants to, he nudges his forehead and the bridge of his nose against her pale, unclothed shoulder in a silent and vague declaration of affection that’s so wildly characteristic of him, Tifa looks like she might actually laugh for a second or two. But she doesn’t laugh.

Instead, she brings one firm, muscled arm around to drape across the back of his golden, sun-tanned shoulders, leans the two of them close together, and keeps singing.

“Every now and then I know there’s nothing any better, there’s nothing that I just wouldn’t do.”

He nearly never reaches this point.

The insistent red glow of 11:05 flicks soundlessly to 11:06 amid a gathering of cigarette packs and small jade statuettes, and throughout the spacious, colorfully lived-in abode of Phoenix Down University’s premiere history professor, late morning silence and the mystical swirling of dust motes reigns supreme – with the small exception of them.

“Yes…”

A bright shaft of near-noon sunlight slices into the room through the crack in the gauzy white curtains, and it’s sticky in here – the air weighs about a thousand pounds, all that moisture packed into it – but it helps, really. Sets the mood.

He reaches a hand up, and it touches the wall above and behind his head, thin fingers damp and splayed.

“Unh, shit…”

Sweat pools gradually in the shallow dip of his throat, and just as slowly, the tongue currently mapping the lightly-freckled topography of his shoulders and collarbone laves in and licks it up clean. It would be disgusting, were either of them thinking about it, but at the moment, nothing exists but the pulsing and the throbbing in and between them – beating out against the inner walls of Cloud’s chest, rattling the strong cage of Zack’s ribs, buried tight and entirely welcome inside the smaller, younger of the two, deep enough to set a miniature earthquake upon his pale lashes and lower lip.

That would be his fingernails digging into the bronzy flesh of Zack’s shoulders.

“Zack,” he breathes into the humid air between them, and the man chuckles darkly and eats the sound of his own name up in earnest. Some hazy, half-formed quip about him being a narcissist for that flits through the hundred-degree fog of Cloud’s sleep- and sex-addled mind, but it evaporates just that fast – Zack’s making miracles happen with his tongue and his hips here, you see.

Believe it or not, he prefers not to be woken up this way. Most mornings, all he wants inside of him is a cup or two of java and a piece of fruit, maybe. This happens to be a special one, though, for in a week from now, the fall semester will begin and the stress-free, fun-filled days of summer will vanish, taking with them much of the time he has to, well… engage in a little TLC.

Hence: the impossible arc of his back where it arches and curves upward off the mattress, and his good friend’s dick gleefully and repeatedly disappearing up his ass.

“Cloud.” Zack puts a momentary pause to the nifty rhythm he’s got going – the one where he retracts himself with beautiful, agonizing slowness and the sort of poise prima ballerinas dream of before dropping his pelvis with a near-audible snap to drive back into Cloud, hit him in that bright, almost painful place with every thrust – to spread his fingers like butterfly wings over the too-sensitive skin of Cloud’s stomach, trace something loopy into his left hip with the tip of his index finger. His lips are on Cloud’s chin, he’s talking to him – “I love you, you know that?”

Zack loves having deep conversations mid-coitus. They’re his honest-to-God definition of a good ass time, Cloud is certain.

“Te sientes tan bien, mi ave…” – and there’s his palm, pressing up into the curve of Cloud’s spine, and the tenderness of the gesture and the stillness of them has Cloud’s hips jumping impatiently of their own accord, lithe body tightening around Zack and mouth grinning when the man’s breath hitches in response. Something shifts in Zack’s expression – an incredibly ominous, incredibly promising sign – and before Cloud can decide whether to be scared out of his mind or thrilled out of his mind, Zack is moving back onto his haunches and dragging his hips with him and the crown of his head is in the mattress and his eyes are on the wall, and Zack is moving –

Holy shit, he’s moving.

“Make that sound again.” Zack teases it out of him with his teeth, nipping at Cloud’s sternum, flashing bright when Cloud indeed does make that sound again – the obscene intersection between a gasp and a curse – and his hands have been skating restless and greedy over every inch of skin he can get at since Cloud was awake enough to whisper his consent, but suddenly, they are anchors clutching tight at the nape of Cloud’s neck and the base of his back, pulling him in like gravity pulls sunken ships to the ocean floor as he fucks into him, steady and unrelenting as a motherfucking metronome –

And there’s sweat all over them, covering them in a thin, faintly glistening sheen, and the covers are long-discarded so it’s just them bare-assed and in flagrante delicto for every hanging picture and sitting statue to see, and there’s a small, stupidly country part of Cloud that still gets embarrassed about having lungs-heaving, cock-jumping, thighs-wide-open-and-toes-curling-tight-enough-to-sprain sex in the open and in the daylight like this, but he isn’t thinking about that right now, literally cannot think about that right now, cannot think about anything right now but this –

And it’s slow and it’s lazy but it’s good, it’s so fucking good, it’s too fucking good, it’s too fucking much – the walls covered with old photographs and the wool-cotton blend of Zack’s sheets and the warm chinook of Zack’s breath ghosting over his too-tight skin and the dull sound the bedframe makes every time it’s pushed into the floor with their body-rocking and their hip-rolling – and his whole world is cast in Technicolor and not a thought stays with him very long before it’s incinerated in the fire pit of his gut and he actually fears making love sometimes because of the chance that this overwhelming, almost religious destruction of self could happen to him and really – he nearly never reaches this point.

Something sizzles so hot in the back of Cloud’s head that his right cerebral hemisphere short-circuits and sends him spiraling out into dangerous, sex-drunk territory, shoves him full-force out of his mind and onto his knees. He’s only ever hit this kind of high once before in this life (and never before in any others), so this morning – teetering on the brink of insanity and this crazy, ridiculous love that’s strong enough to edge him right into the realm of Fugue – he makes a point to savor it, goddammit.

With a deep, full-bellied groan he half-consciously knows he just killed Zack with, he comes hard, aneurysm-hard, the sort of piercing, incapacitating orgasm that has him shaking all over and attempting to crawl away even while his heels dig into the dimples in Zack’s lower back and pull him in closer, deeper. And then – in possibly one of the most uniquely embarrassing moments of his impossibly drawn-out existence – he blacks out.

Bless his poor, unfortunate soul.

When he comes to, Zack is there, tracing with his fingers the kanji tattooed on the (surprisingly clean) skin over his ribs and watching him with a gaze entirely empty of judgment and full of affection. He’s very good to him in that way.

“Did you come?” Those weren’t the first words he planned on having fly out of his mouth, but well. He just fainted via orgasm. No one can blame him for being a bit scrambled.

Zack’s responding grin hooks vicious in the bottom of his stomach and pulls swiftly downward, spearing entrails and skin. His hand moves from Cloud’s ribs to the side of his right thigh, pulls the blond’s legs up and over to hook over his own, and he’s touching their noses together when he purrs, “Of course I came. That hit me like a fuckin’ truck.”

“Mmnh.” Cloud doesn’t have the energy to do much more than lazily press his mouth into the dip between Zack’s lower lip and chin in reply – he’s more than happy to find that Zack seems to take a whole world of pleasure in that simple gesture.

“God, I love you.” It’s the little things that have Zack declaring his adoration for him, too.

And really, Cloud isn’t a fan of catch-and-return phrases, he never has been, but his most favorite person in the world just blew the everloving fuck out of his mind and is thoroughly content with the prospect of remaining in bed for the remainder of the day and engaging with Cloud in their shared all-time number one activity – Olympic-level napping – while they turn on Family Feud and eat cold pizza out of the refrigerator –

And, after all, it would be the falsest of falsehoods to claim he didn’t feel the same –

So he curls in closer and gives Zack the blowfishiest kiss of all the blowfish kisses – it’s important to be silly, otherwise they’d never know the two of them were serious – cheeks puffing up chipmunk-like and lips sucking noisily against the sharp curve of Zack’s jaw, and while Zack laughs that honey-sweet, eye-crinkling laugh he thinks will happily murder him one day, he says, “I love you, too.”

Sometimes it’s nice, to have an exception.

. . .

With Zack, he has hickeys for days.

His friends make fun of him for it, especially the ones in his support group – Tidus crowding into his personal space to tug aside the collar of his t-shirt and eagerly show off to Bartz and Zidane the unsightly constellation of bruises decorating his collarbone like some kind of love garland, and last week, Squall actually looked him dead in the face and said to him, “It looks like you’ve been bitten by the love bug,” and Cloud honestly didn’t think it was possible for him to laugh as hard as he did on that day, but there can be miracles when your typically-stoic best friend breaks character and you have a boyfriend who’s mouth is as talented and well-loved as Zack’s is.

With Zack, he smiles too much.

He isn’t quite sure where the notion that he’s been allotted a finite amount of smiles to use up like a credit card balance came from, but he knows for absolute certain that on any given day he spends with Zack, that man has him in the fucking red with his wandering, eager hands and his slick, dirty wit and his high, careless enthusiasm and his ceaseless insistence on sucking (sometimes literally) every last ounce of tension out of him in any way possible, just like he always has – from the day Angeal and Cloud’s mother placed them together in this life, Zack four and Cloud three – and from the day they first met eternities ago on a snowy mountain path, laughing at each other like they’d been created to do just that.

With Zack, he remembers and forgets in equal measure.

It’s difficult sometimes, and there are places on both of their bodies that used to be scarred and calloused and just fucked beyond repair that are now smooth and unmarred, and Zack draws attention to those places without even realizing he does, and he says things like ‘I just about killed myself laughing’ and pretends not to see the way Cloud flinches at his choice of words like he’s been burned by them, and he talks soft and sentimental or hard and angry about ‘back when I was in SOLDIER’ like that was a time that existed a couple of years ago instead of all the way across the space/time continuum – but Zack also speaks a language now that he never spoke back then (“Usted tiene los ojos más increíbles,” he says, knowing that Cloud doesn’t understand) and stands by Cloud’s side some evenings, drying the dishes he’s just washed and pinching his ass as if after a full year of dating, it’ll actually distract Cloud this time; and there’s a silver ring in his left nostril that Cloud likes to kiss, another one pushed through his right nipple that Cloud likes to touch; and many nights, he will be Cloud’s pillow and watch Netflix with him on either one of their laptops or sit on the sofa with the blond’s lean legs stretched over his lap while something frivolous plays in syndication on the television – and this is all nothing like the lives they lived before.

There’s no magic in the way Zack kisses Cloud even when his nose is dripping and runny with snot.

With Zack, magic doesn’t exist. Cloud thinks he prefers it that way.

. . .

“You can’t start a fire! You can’t start a fire without a spark!”

Across the center console, Tifa’s hand reaches over to grasp Cloud’s, both of their palms damp and sticky with sweat – the summer in Phoenix Downs can be a real killer, some days. Their conjoined hands fist around each other and pump emphatically in the thick, muggy air of the truck cab, squeezing one another like the overexcited walls of a heart muscle in time with the music.

“This gun’s for hire!” He lets her have that one all to herself because he loves her voice when it’s powerful and husky and wrapping itself all around Springsteen – the day he first discovered that, a couple of years ago, he found himself with a brand new girlfriend and color high and bright in his cheeks – but they have, have, have to finish it off as a duet like they almost always have, so his voice, low and glass-edged, mingles and entwines with hers for the ultimate line in imperfect, but wholly pleasant harmony – “Even if we’re just dancing in the dark!”

This has been their thing since Tifa turned sixteen and inherited her father’s battered old pickup – belting out power ballads at her rust-colored dashboard while they ride around town, running errands, cruising aimlessly. It’s something Cloud can’t bring himself to share with anyone else – only Tifa bolsters his nerve and inflates his lungs to sing along at maximum volume to the hits of the 70s and 80s, heedless of spectators that may be riding in the cars alongside them or standing on adjacent sidewalks.

It’s an old mixtape he made for her when they were sophomores that’s playing – Cloud can tell when the dying chords of Dancing In The Dark fade into the telltale opening bass guitar of Hot Child In The City – and an invisible, transparent smile plays on his lips as he reaches into the flimsy plastic grocery bag between them to fish out–

“Don’t you touch that sushi, Cloud.” Tifa’s hand, having returned to its place at the bottom of the steering wheel since Bruce Springsteen surrendered the radio to Nick Gilder, darts out to slap the top of Cloud’s forearm with an audible snap!.

Cloud shoots the woman a look of dull surprise. “I was grabbing my tea,” he says, giving his mint green Arizona a demonstrative shake in her direction.

“Oh, sorry, hon.” She smiles sheepishly at the yellow light ahead, eyes apologetic when she cuts them at Cloud. “You can’t blame me for being paranoid, the way you get with sushi.”

“That was one time and we were both drunk,” Cloud retorts without heat, shaking his head at the distant, hazy memory of two high school juniors making complete pigs of themselves over a pint of sake and a sushi boat from Firaga, the local hibachi grill. He cracks open his can of sweetened green tea and takes a healthy sip from it, lets his gaze idle on the sakura tree in full bloom on the street corner. “If I were my brothers, though, then you’d really have to be afraid.”

“How are they, by the way?” Tifa reaches across to adjust her twisted bra strap where it peeks out from beneath the slightly too-wide neckline of her v-neck t-shirt, the garment about an eternity old and riddled with tiny holes. Absently and under her breath, she sings along with the high, crooning voice on the radio – “No one knows who she is, or what her name is…”

“Deep in the throes of pre-first day dread,” Cloud replies. Without thinking, he reaches over to straighten Tifa’s bra strap himself – the sort of things overfamiliarity makes you do, right? – brushing her fingers aside to twist the strap once, twice, three times counterclockwise until it lays flat against her creamy shoulder. He ignores the half-amused, half-puzzled look she gives him in response in favor of continuing to talk about the current state of his twin brothers, soon to begin their sophomore year of high school – “Yesterday we went shopping for school supplies, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as offended by the sight of a day planner as those two were.”

“Poor babies.” Tifa’s right foot goes down on the accelerator as the words leave her, the traffic light having flicked to green at the tail-end of Cloud’s sentence. “Remember when we actually got excited about going to school? Denzel’s still in that place, thank God.”

“I don’t think I was ever excited about going to school…” Cloud remarks dryly over the rim of his green tea.

“Every day when he gets off from school, all he can talk about is all of the interesting things he learned in class. His Remembering has no bearing on how excited he is about rediscovering all the things he knew before.” Tifa smiles her mother’s smile, then, eyes taking on a sudden, liquid sort of warmth. “I miss feeling like that.”

“You don’t get excited when you go to class?”

“It’s different when you’re in college.” Tifa puts her whole arm into it when she makes the turn onto Crystal Drive – she treats driving like exercise sometimes, Cloud has noticed. “Now, we’re all learning for a specific purpose. Then, you just learned for the sake of pure knowledge, you know?” She shakes her head, the gesture soft and fleeting as if she isn’t even fully aware of her doing it. “It’s different now.”

Where Cloud majors in history, Tifa’s focus lies in forensic psychology at Phoenix Downs’ resident university. There’s something intriguing and almost thrilling, she says, about viewing crime through the insightful, somewhat clinical lens of psychology after having looked upon it from such a distinct vantage point for so long, but Cloud knows that her heart isn’t entirely in it the way it’s in her bar, doesn’t see the light shine quite so brightly in her eyes when she talks about her studies as when she discusses the mundane goings-about at Seventh Heaven.

He knows they’re both considering dropping out, despite the fact that neither of them have said anything about it yet.

After parking, they carry Tifa’s groceries up to her second floor apartment. Garnet is out with friends and Denzel is having a sleepover with Dajh tonight, so the home will be entirely theirs for the majority of the night.

“Oh my God, was Zack actually serious earlier?” Tifa asks as she’s fiddling with the lock on her front door, jiggling the key until it gives.

The incident she’s referring to occurred about an hour and a half earlier, when – after Tifa arrived to pick Cloud up for their annual pre-semester spa session/sleepover – Zack took notice of the winged eyeliner the woman was sporting and then spent a good five minutes playfully begging Cloud for an open relationship, citing their shared romantic history with Tifa and his own eternal weakness for eye makeup of that sort. 

Cloud makes an ugly, skeptical noise in the back of his throat – something growling and suspiciously similar to the sounds Cecil’s engine was making in the garage yesterday afternoon. “You wish.”

“I don’t wish.” At last, the door comes open and man and woman step inside, the former heading for the kitchen to start putting away all the refrigerated items, the latter moving towards the end table where she keeps her key bowl and answering machine. Tifa raises her voice to accommodate the growing distance between them, says, “Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not a huge fan of open relationships. Too messy for my liking.”

From the kitchen, Cloud calls, “You can’t knock it ‘till you’ve tried it, Teef.”

Index finger frozen and hovering over the answering machine, Tifa shoots a shocked, faintly questioning look at the kitchen doorway – coincidentally at the exact moment Cloud happens to be passing back through it. “Have you been in an open relationship?” she asks him, a touch accusing, facial expression distracted and confused when he reaches out to unhook the grocery bags currently occupying her arms.

“No.” Then – subtle enough that only she’d be able to see it, with her infinite knowledge of Cloudlanguage built over eons of studying his infuriatingly microscopic expressions and wordless tics – he smirks at her, lets their faces hover close together when he says, “I was just giving you a hard time.”

She lands a quick, solid smack against the left side of his feathery head, and she’s laughing – low, easy – when she finally touches her finger down against play/pause button and starts the procession of voicemail.

. . .

Their history is a slightly complicated one.

When they were kids, they sat side-by-side in the grass of Tifa’s backyard, and Cloud let her tie a clover loop around his left ring finger while she hummed the oldies under her breath. In middle school, they laid together in pillow forts and practiced touching their lips chastely together in the uneven light of an industrial flashlight. In high school, two months after she’d broken off probably the most stable and fulfilling relationship she’d ever had with Zack – citing the momentous, everliving tangle of emotion she’d always harbored for Cloud – she came straight running to him, and their song was Maps by The Yeah Yeah Yeahs because it was the way they’d known how to love each other from the very beginning: in that painful, electric guitar way; in that pleading way; in that constant, throaty reassurance that they were everything to each other and they would be for the foreseeable future.

They sang along to it on Tifa’s ancient radio without knowing what it really meant, only hearing ‘I love you’ and not all of the insistent, plaintive cries of ‘Wait!’.

They were married before, in that first life – Cloud rubs his ring finger at night sometimes and thinks about the clean, almost businesslike way in which they’d tied the knot before, the way they’d done it because they had to as parents working to become a real family, with their childhoods and their shared pasts and their love being a quiet, unspoken footnote to all of their responsibility. They could be married again, but he knows it won’t happen, no matter how much he sort of wishes it would when she holds his hand in her truck or smiles at him like she sees the sun in his eyes.

“I can’t do this,” is what he’d said to her two years ago with rocks in his throat, meaning it, “I’m sorry, but I can’t. And you deserve more than that.”

Zack and Aerith were a month from their engagement then, so the two of them should have been completely happy, possibly even planning to get engaged as well – but it had been too many months of Cloud sitting back and cutting himself on the thought of watching the person he loved spend the rest of his life bound to one of his very best friends and working with Tifa the best he could to just get over Zack – and it wasn’t fair to her, it really wasn’t, for him to tie himself up to her and just keep hoping it would eventually make him fall in love with her again – so he had to end it, for both of their sakes.

Because it wasn’t the first time Cloud had loved someone else in Tifa’s place, it did no damage to them in the long run. Because Tifa has the kind of strength Cloud can only dream of, she held them both together. Because Tifa is a bona fide, sanctified, beatified, and canonized saint, she’s been nothing but supportive and pleasantly present for Cloud in the ongoing whirlwind of his personal life since they broke up – not because she’s obligated to, but because she wants to and she cares. A lot of days, Cloud doesn’t quite know what to do with that.

Thankfully, she has no problem letting him know.

“Stop looking at me like that!” Her hands will come up to caress the sharp edges of his face. “You’re making me think I have something on my face.”

“How do you want me to look at you?” he’ll ask, and she’ll say –

“Smile at me.” She’ll demonstrate for him with a smile of her own. “If the two of us are okay, I want you to smile.”

He’ll always slip backwards and Fugue-like when she says that, into the middle-aged, softly-wrinkled married couple they used to be – him going on milk runs, her cutting his hair and pressing close-mouthed kisses to his scalp throughout – and what they do now isn’t all that different from back then, really. He’s still got her heart and her grocery lists engraved in his inner walls, and she still has her arms wrapped around the whole sorry bouquet of him, peonies and existentialism and the soft, thundering way he looks at the world.

And that alone will make him smile.

. . .

Last Thursday, at his support group meeting, he had… a bit of an outburst.

The details don’t really matter – he was yelling, people were shocked, that little peanut boat Tifa likes to leave on every table at Seventh Heaven got knocked the fuck over, spraying peanut shells and cigarette ash in its wake – but suffice it to say that the whole experience led him to the conclusion that he is not as stable as he and his therapist previously thought he was.

“Obviously you still have a lot of pent-up anger, Cloud,” she said to him in that soft, sweetly patronizing tone of hers, and at that point, she was no longer offended by the borderline venomous eye-rolls he was ever-so-fond of dishing out in response to her Captain Obvious moments – only quietly amused.

She told him (two weeks before the beginning of what was going to be a grueling fall semester, if his courses syllabi was anything to go on) that he needed to start looking for legitimate ways to relax, and honestly – who better to help him relax than his good friends Squall, Tidus, and trusty ol’ Shaka bud?

“Oh my God…” Tidus’ words were all gauzy around the edges, half-transparent with the thick white smoke that snaked from his mouth like dragon’s breath. “This is… really strong.”

“Where’d you get this?” Squall’s eyes hadn’t opened for the past minute and a half, his crown leaned back against the dark, rough trunk of the cherry blossom tree they languished under. His voice – usually tight, almost growling – came out of him in the same vaporous fog Tidus’ did, permeated through and through with the pastel-colored haze of cannabis.

It smelled awful, but it felt so good.

“Roxas knows people.” Cloud, for his part, laid flat on his back and gazed up at the gradually dimming sky where it peeked through the clusters of sakura flowers. He brought his joint up to his lips – said, “I don’t condone it, but…” – and then he was inhaling sweet serenity into his lungs, letting the smoke lick his insides and the parts of him that burned altogether too unpleasantly too much of the time.

Truthfully, they’d been doing shit like this since their high school days. It was a convalescence they fell into when life became a little too fierce for their liking – their collective resting place for an hour or so – and normally, it was Tidus who was the instigator, being that his chronic Fugue damn near called for this sort of rehabilitation.

It never really mattered who needed it first or the most, however. That saying, about bad things happening in threes? Seemed to be their thing, more often than not.

On that particular evening, Squall talked about his steadily-increasing fear that he was burning out – “I love my job, I really do, but sometimes it makes me just want to blow my fucking brains out,” he said, and Tidus had given him this crazy, stupidly exquisite look and retorted, “Isn’t that how everyone feels, though?” – and Tidus related to them that Yuna wanted to start trying for a baby – “Having a kid would be so great, but would I even be good at it? I mean, with my old man, do I even have what it takes to do it right?” he asked, and with a seriousness that almost seemed out of place, given the weed and the timing, Squall replied, “You know not to be like him.” – and Cloud –

Cloud said, “I guess I’m just frustrated.”

Squall flicked the ash off his joint, then took a quick drag. “Nobody blames you for what you said last week.”

“Yeah, I mean…” Tidus trailed off to inhale from his own blunt, moaning quietly as the smoke filled his lungs, and then, with the haziest of smiles – “Anyone who acts like they’re not totally fuckin’ bananas on this island is doin’ just that. Acting.” He laughed – that hysterical, unforgettable laugh of his – and the tail-end of it was almost entirely lost on Cloud. “We’re all in pain…”

Ah, yes. They are in pain.

Cloud passes them – the heroes, the villains, every lost and sidetracked soul – in grocery stores and university hallways, spies them lurking in the darkest corners of Seventh Heaven and caterwauling like fiends on the beach, and no amount of formal study or ceaseless praying at the temples or aimless staring up into the sky, at the clouds and the stars and into the blinding light of the sun – no amount of wondering will fix them. The gods will not descend to pull them out of their rusted Iron Age, and no gene will be coded that will explain their strange, excruciating, impossible memory, and their ancient battlefields will continue to idle softly somewhere lightyears away across space and time – abandoned by them, haunting them forever, watching with stained glass eyes as they play silly games on their dusky beach and laugh and drink into the night as brothers and sisters born from the womb of some distant, final fantasy.

Somewhere far away, he sleeps in his mountain home and dreams of a life like the one he has now, a life where the air is clean and he is in love and there are friends all around him, laying down their hands on him and telling him he’s okay.

That’s nothing if not wholly, completely painful… but beautiful, too.

When they left the garden, they dropped their finished roaches and watched them bounce twice on the ground before wedging into the minute cracks in the pavement, and Tidus wound his arms around both Cloud and Squall and declared to the sky that he loved them, these friends of his – without them, he’d be entirely lost.

. . .

It hurts pretty bad, but he doesn’t mind.

“You sure you don’t want to take a break?” Firion asks from where he looms over Cloud, tattoo gun in latex-covered hand and tone dominated by a note of concern.

Cloud gives a dismissive wave of the hand, mindful not to move his head or neck. “I’ve been through worse,” he quips, and they both have to share a small laugh at that one – on this island, they’ve all been through worse.

When it’s finished, Cloud has Firion take a picture of it with his cellphone so that he can see the final product – two kanji inked dark and loud across his nape, haloed by angry, inflamed skin:

平静
Serenity

It’s something he will need very much of in the coming months.

Hours later, sitting on the beach with thirty-two ounces of blue Powerade in a Styrofoam cup from the gas station, he resists the urge to pick at his bandage and instead watches the horizon, the egg yolk sun burning and melting into the sea, and contemplates his purgatory –

His train station, but with palm trees –

And for the briefest of moments, he feels everything he’s ever felt in all his lives – every heartache and every sharp, breathtaking instance of ecstasy, every death and every birth, so much blood and so much breath – and he is suddenly indistinct under the planetary weight of his Fugue, all of the Clouds that have ever been.

But then his phone vibrates, and it’s gone.

zack
come see me when you’re finished, i have a surprise for you :)

He sips from his drink, closes his eyes, and enjoys his reprieve.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.