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kinkfestTitle: Skin
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aliana_iskassa
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: D/s, bloodplay
Word Count: 2,605
Summary: Cloud wonders when he became so fucked up that he can only accept affection when given with agony.
Prompt: June 4th - Final Fantasy VII, Vincent/Cloud: bloodplay, D/s - "Hold me. Please. Please. I can't."
Author's Notes: The LJ-cut text comes from "Enough of me" by Melissa Etheridge. Takes place before Cloud moves into Aeris'church in AC.
Cloud wakes to pain.
White fury tears through his arm, and he watches in morbid fascination as his fingers curl in on themselves like paper set on fire, the tendons on his hand standing out in sharp relief before the process reverses and his limb snaps straight, a muffled scream snarling from his lips as he bends around it, knives slicing at the inside of his skull.
The agony’s become almost routine, now, although it never, never hurts any less. His vision goes black, stomach a lake of acid clawing its way back up his throat, and he curls in on himself, the cover on his arm hiding dying flesh. A scream unspools from between his teeth.
There is the whispery click of his window opening, and he turns to see a blurred form of red and black and gold prowl across the floor, a cold hand resting on the back of his neck, fingers curled in the short hair.
Time passes. The pain ebbs, and he uncurls like a moth escaping a chrysalis, the freezing sweat on his skin drying, the desiccated muscles in his infected arm loosening, returning to life like spring rain in the desert.
“Vincent,” he rasps from a throat scarred with screams. Thank God he came back, a silent comforter and tormentor, his claws the one thing that can make Cloud hurt worse than the Geostigma. That can make him feel human even when he’s not.
Vincent doesn’t smile- he never does- but brushes his thumb along the back of Cloud’s neck, the only affectionate touch he will allow, so early in the game.
“Undress.” The claws scrape lightly along his spine, a threat and a promise. An ache flares to life at the base of his spine, and it is all he can do to sit up- the world shudders around him, fragments of vision like the time in the Lifestream- and slide from his bed.
He kicks off his pajama pants, pulls his shirt off over his head with his good arm. A secret smile to himself, then- he and Vincent are even more alike now, both with only one good arm. Except both of them are too broken to ever form a whole, even with each other.
Vincent watches him, impassive, his burgundy gaze making Cloud harden further. Dark hair spills over his coat like shadows over blood. He is beautiful.
But there isn’t any time to contemplate beauty, not when they haven’t even started the real game.
Cloud sinks to his knees, naked but for the covering on his wasted arm. Because he can’t look at it, can’t let Vincent look at it- the open black wounds, the stench of decay, the bitter knowledge that here is Death, taking him one minute at a time.
Vincent’s eyes flick to him, then at his still-covered arm. One dark brow arches.
“When I said undress,” his voice is distant and as uncaring as the stars, “I meant all of it.”
Cloud bows his head and looks away. Golden claws, limned in moonlight, enter his field of vision, disappear beneath his chin, and he feels cells split and die, sticky warmth seeping through the broken layers.
The claws are a beautiful disaster, etched with golden patterns of swirls like flurries of snow in the mountains around Nibelheim, a poor covering for an arm mutilated beyond repair.
Vincent’s voice is low and as harsh as gravel on glass, Galian Beast’s howl an unsettling undertone, the golden blades cutting into his chin, blood pooling in the hollow of his neck like a macabre necklace.
“Don’t you dare presume to hide yourself from me.”
Cloud tries to stay still, to stay quiet, but fails-
Here, he can fail and not worry, fail and not worry that Vincent will die like Z- the name stutters in his own mind like a record skipping, and Cloud wonders when he started to know that his mind is no longer his own.
“I-“ he says, and stops.
The claws shred red and wet down lightly over his throat, opening rivers and tributaries like poisonous flowers, and pain jolts its way through him, burns its way along nerves. He closes his eyes because he can’t look as Vincent’s claws stop at his shoulder.
A cold thumb- Vincent is always cold as if the chill of coffin never left him- brushes over his lower lip in a minute concession to gentleness. He draws it into his mouth, tasting gunpowder and ice, hears Vincent’s breath hitch as the claws slice down over his arm, cutting the cloth apart, diamond-sharp tips somehow passing over the open wounds of Geostigma.
He is thankful for that small kindness, and drags his teeth over Vincent’s thumb as the older man pulls it away.
“Undress me.” Cloud swallows, rocks back on his heels, reaches with shuddering hands for the buttons. The claws come back, cold lines of fire, resting on his chest- his skinny torso, eaten away from the inside with disease and pain and guilt.
“Open your eyes.”
He can’t, can’t look at his wasted limb, traced with black, rotting from the inside out in Sephiroth’s final victory. Vincent’s claws press deeper, light flashing behind his eyelids as blood seeps wet and hot from the wounds.
Suddenly a rough tongue is there, tracing the lines of pain, licking at the blood, and Cloud shudders, bites back the scream as he winds shaking fingers in Vincent’s hair, anchoring himself to earth, arches his back as he seeks more pain, even though these cuts are so shallow compared to the usual.
But he doesn’t need to worry, because Vincent knows what he can take, knows just how far he can go, even when Cloud doesn’t.
In a world where Cloud can’t trust anyone anymore-
Not even himself
-he knows that he can always trust Vincent.
Vincent speaks again, voice rumbling against his chest, and Cloud wonders fuzzily through the haze of endorphins why Vincent doesn’t sound angry-
He sounds sad.
“Cloud. Open your eyes.”
The sadness makes him.
Vincent is crouched before him, red leather all around him, spread over the floor in a poor imitation of a pool of blood, and his eyes bore into Cloud, cutting with a grief that is all the more painful for its lack of rage.
No- no, he can’t have disappointed Vincent, beautiful Vincent who knows everything about him- knows the dreams of scalpels and stitches that make him scream at night, knows how weak he can be, knows every inch of him and all his scars internal and external- and he chokes on the sob rising in his throat, lurches forward into a hard chest.
“Sorry- sorry-“ the words bubble ineffectually on his lips as he works at the buttons with trembling fingers, his grip slick with blood.
His heart is thundering in his chest as Vincent runs his good hand down his spine, pressing fingers into the notches between vertebrae, and finally- finally- the damn coat is off in a susurration of sound, and he glances up, meets Vincent’s eyes.
One elegant brow arches. Cloud shudders, looks down, mumbles an apology, the words thick and graceless on his tongue- and why does he need this, why does he need to break?
His grip slips on the last of the leather straps, and he closes his eyes, tries to stifle the snarling demons of doubt in the back of his head. Vincent’s pale hand closes around his own, stops him in his tracks.
“It’s all right.”
Cloud could weep.
Vincent shrugs out of the top of the leather suit, a trail of dark hair leading down from his navel to disappear into the other half, his skin littered with scars. Cloud glances at him for permission, gains it, leans forward and kisses the deep scalpel mark above Vincent’s heart.
He knows the feeling of a scalpel separating skin from muscle, and the knowledge is as thick as bile.
And he doesn’t want to know that, doesn’t want to think, but he can’t make himself stop because he’s too goddamn weak to help himself.
He chokes on a sob as he falls a little farther.
“Hold me.” The words fall like stones into water in the silence. Vincent meets his gaze, impassive and unchanging, a barely-leashed beast that will outlive them all. “Please.” Because he can’t forgive himself, he can’t punish himself the way he deserves it, he can’t comfort himself, he is still the same lost child screaming in the wilderness of a mind that is no longer wholly his own.
“Please.”
But he can’t admit it to Vincent, Vincent whose respect he values more than anyone else, Vincent who has lost everything like him and knows the horror of five long years in the labs of ShinRa in a way that no one else- no one except Zack, who only lives now in Cloud’s shattered fragments of a mind- ever can.
The silence stretches between them like a rubber band threatening to snap.
Vincent is otherworldly and pale, his back against the side of the bed, his dark hair spilling over his shoulders, red eyes black in the moonlight. The claws- stained red with Cloud’s blood- gleam silver, and all the scars that paint a painful tapestry across his skin only make him more beautiful.
He can’t say it.
Vincent waits.
The words are bitter and clogged with tears,
“I- I can’t.”
Vincent moves, so fast that Cloud can’t see it, and suddenly he is enfolded in a crushing, one-armed embrace.
A hot mouth burns against his lips, the claws clicking against each other. Vincent kisses like he lives, methodical and controlled, leaving nothing unexplored, and he leaves Cloud breathless, his hands woven in Vincent’s dark hair, like ink flowing over his fingers.
He takes control of everything, and Cloud lets him- lets him hold him, lets him punish him, lets him force the encroaching thoughts of guilt and grief away with slices of filigreed metal.
The wounds are already healing- he wonders for a moment if Hojo would count that as a success.
“On the bed,” Vincent says as he tears his mouth away, fingers coiled tight in his hair, the pain making him feel drunk. Cloud blinks, dazed- how is he supposed to move now, light-headed and missing pints of blood?
But Vincent thinks he can-
And Vincent knows him better than he knows himself, because only the insane can understand the insane.
Geostigma screams in his arm as he takes a harsh breath and claws his way atop the plastic sheeting already stretched across the mattress. ‘Vincent really can do anything- even remake a bed.’ The thought is tainted with whimsy. He feels high on endorphins, the sharp agony faded like old jeans to a throbbing pleasure-pain.
Vincent steps out of his boots and the last of his suit. Cloud’s blood is streaked across the claws, and he lifts the golden-silver blades to his mouth and licks it off with slow swipes of his tongue.
“Where-“
“B-“ he pauses, tries to think of the word, slurs, “-bedside drawer.”
The old wood bangs as Vincent- surprisingly hasty- snatches the lube, coats his fingers. He kneels between Cloud’s legs, slicks himself up, and picks Cloud up as if he weighs nothing- and Cloud should be afraid, but he isn’t because this is Vincent- holding him above Vincent’s cock.
“Lower yourself down.”
It’s strange that Vincent doesn’t trust himself not to hurt Cloud in the only way that matters, even though Cloud has spent his entire life being hurt so many times that even the spiraling cuts across his chest are nothing but another curiosity.
But he does it anyway, because it’s Vincent, and only Vincent understands-
Failure, madness, weakness
And heat, and pressure, and Vincent’s moan as dark as night in his ear.
“Oh,” he says, before the words are lost in a long, ragged hiss as the ache intensifies, “Oh,” and light explodes in starbursts behind his eyes like the fire of Holy. Vincent’s voice rumbles through his skin, shudders in his chest like the growl of some great beast.
Vincent’s good hand leaves bruises on his hipbone, holding him still, even though God he wants to move, and a long whine escapes him before he knows what he’s done. Vincent’s eyes sharpen, the beasts inside called by the sound, and nails dig into his skin. Cloud moans at the reminder that the man who’s stripping him down to nothing is more than a man, more than even a SOLDIER.
“Move,” Vincent says, and nobody should sound so damn calm when they’ve just spent twenty minutes carving bloody runes in someone’s chest.
Cloud rolls his hips back, a muffled sound splintering on his lips as he lets his head fall forward on Vincent’s chest, his fingers tight on Vincent’s skinny shoulders as the older man- with methodical precision, the inhuman grace of a Turk- moves inside him, the pain of his bloody chest mingling with the slow heat rising up his spine, Vincent’s lips sealed over the open wounds, a macabre kiss.
Cloud wonders when he became so fucked up that he can only accept affection when given with agony.
Vincent’s hand slides down over his chest, blood smeared across pale skin, and takes hold of him with calluses and cold- he gazes into Cloud’s eyes, red touched with beastly amber meeting blue, and sees something there, because he nods- and in three long strokes and twists of his wrist, he tears Cloud from reality and hurls him into darkness, silence, peace.
* * *
Cloud opens his eyes again and watches a shaft of moonlight slide across the floor like the blade of the Masamune. His arm is rebandaged, his chest and back whole. The blade of light moves, stops at Vincent’s feet, outshone by the other man’s paleness.
Vincent is sitting in the chair, unmoving, something as old and strange as the Temple of the Ancients gleaming in his eyes, in the slight curl of his bloody lips. A Heal materia rests on his knee.
Exhaustion settles on Cloud like snow, the edges of his vision tinged with gray, and he can feel his heart fluttering like a weakened bird inside his chest.
But now his mind is wiped clean of regret and fear and the clinging memories of those he has lost, and the sharp ache in his arm of what he will lose.
And the pain of Zack and Aeris and Hojo’s madness is gone, the hand made of knives that lacerates his heart with each breath dulled, because Vincent understands-
He understands, and he is the only one who can give absolution.
Vincent knows- the only one who knows- what it is to fail all those you ever loved.
The floorboards creak beneath Vincent’s feet as he slips across the room, the shadow thrown on the wall nothing like human, a changing silhouette of claws and wings and horror.
The sheets lift, dark hair brushing his face, leaving a trace of gunpowder around him as Vincent slides in beside him, skinny and solemn, all hard planes and harsh angles like the mountains of Nibelheim- the name no longer stings- as he leans forward. Cloud closes his eyes, a sinner receiving forgiveness.
Cold lips brush against his brow, Vincent’s gun-callused fingers tracing the contours of his cheek, and a whisper soft as ashes falling into the grave curls like smoke in the air.
“Beautiful.”
Cloud moves closer into Vincent’s chest, and listens to the heartbeat that will outlive them all.
Author:
aliana_iskassaRating: NC-17
Warnings: D/s, bloodplay
Word Count: 2,605
Summary: Cloud wonders when he became so fucked up that he can only accept affection when given with agony.
Prompt: June 4th - Final Fantasy VII, Vincent/Cloud: bloodplay, D/s - "Hold me. Please. Please. I can't."
Author's Notes: The LJ-cut text comes from "Enough of me" by Melissa Etheridge. Takes place before Cloud moves into Aeris'church in AC.
Cloud wakes to pain.
White fury tears through his arm, and he watches in morbid fascination as his fingers curl in on themselves like paper set on fire, the tendons on his hand standing out in sharp relief before the process reverses and his limb snaps straight, a muffled scream snarling from his lips as he bends around it, knives slicing at the inside of his skull.
The agony’s become almost routine, now, although it never, never hurts any less. His vision goes black, stomach a lake of acid clawing its way back up his throat, and he curls in on himself, the cover on his arm hiding dying flesh. A scream unspools from between his teeth.
There is the whispery click of his window opening, and he turns to see a blurred form of red and black and gold prowl across the floor, a cold hand resting on the back of his neck, fingers curled in the short hair.
Time passes. The pain ebbs, and he uncurls like a moth escaping a chrysalis, the freezing sweat on his skin drying, the desiccated muscles in his infected arm loosening, returning to life like spring rain in the desert.
“Vincent,” he rasps from a throat scarred with screams. Thank God he came back, a silent comforter and tormentor, his claws the one thing that can make Cloud hurt worse than the Geostigma. That can make him feel human even when he’s not.
Vincent doesn’t smile- he never does- but brushes his thumb along the back of Cloud’s neck, the only affectionate touch he will allow, so early in the game.
“Undress.” The claws scrape lightly along his spine, a threat and a promise. An ache flares to life at the base of his spine, and it is all he can do to sit up- the world shudders around him, fragments of vision like the time in the Lifestream- and slide from his bed.
He kicks off his pajama pants, pulls his shirt off over his head with his good arm. A secret smile to himself, then- he and Vincent are even more alike now, both with only one good arm. Except both of them are too broken to ever form a whole, even with each other.
Vincent watches him, impassive, his burgundy gaze making Cloud harden further. Dark hair spills over his coat like shadows over blood. He is beautiful.
But there isn’t any time to contemplate beauty, not when they haven’t even started the real game.
Cloud sinks to his knees, naked but for the covering on his wasted arm. Because he can’t look at it, can’t let Vincent look at it- the open black wounds, the stench of decay, the bitter knowledge that here is Death, taking him one minute at a time.
Vincent’s eyes flick to him, then at his still-covered arm. One dark brow arches.
“When I said undress,” his voice is distant and as uncaring as the stars, “I meant all of it.”
Cloud bows his head and looks away. Golden claws, limned in moonlight, enter his field of vision, disappear beneath his chin, and he feels cells split and die, sticky warmth seeping through the broken layers.
The claws are a beautiful disaster, etched with golden patterns of swirls like flurries of snow in the mountains around Nibelheim, a poor covering for an arm mutilated beyond repair.
Vincent’s voice is low and as harsh as gravel on glass, Galian Beast’s howl an unsettling undertone, the golden blades cutting into his chin, blood pooling in the hollow of his neck like a macabre necklace.
“Don’t you dare presume to hide yourself from me.”
Cloud tries to stay still, to stay quiet, but fails-
Here, he can fail and not worry, fail and not worry that Vincent will die like Z- the name stutters in his own mind like a record skipping, and Cloud wonders when he started to know that his mind is no longer his own.
“I-“ he says, and stops.
The claws shred red and wet down lightly over his throat, opening rivers and tributaries like poisonous flowers, and pain jolts its way through him, burns its way along nerves. He closes his eyes because he can’t look as Vincent’s claws stop at his shoulder.
A cold thumb- Vincent is always cold as if the chill of coffin never left him- brushes over his lower lip in a minute concession to gentleness. He draws it into his mouth, tasting gunpowder and ice, hears Vincent’s breath hitch as the claws slice down over his arm, cutting the cloth apart, diamond-sharp tips somehow passing over the open wounds of Geostigma.
He is thankful for that small kindness, and drags his teeth over Vincent’s thumb as the older man pulls it away.
“Undress me.” Cloud swallows, rocks back on his heels, reaches with shuddering hands for the buttons. The claws come back, cold lines of fire, resting on his chest- his skinny torso, eaten away from the inside with disease and pain and guilt.
“Open your eyes.”
He can’t, can’t look at his wasted limb, traced with black, rotting from the inside out in Sephiroth’s final victory. Vincent’s claws press deeper, light flashing behind his eyelids as blood seeps wet and hot from the wounds.
Suddenly a rough tongue is there, tracing the lines of pain, licking at the blood, and Cloud shudders, bites back the scream as he winds shaking fingers in Vincent’s hair, anchoring himself to earth, arches his back as he seeks more pain, even though these cuts are so shallow compared to the usual.
But he doesn’t need to worry, because Vincent knows what he can take, knows just how far he can go, even when Cloud doesn’t.
In a world where Cloud can’t trust anyone anymore-
Not even himself
-he knows that he can always trust Vincent.
Vincent speaks again, voice rumbling against his chest, and Cloud wonders fuzzily through the haze of endorphins why Vincent doesn’t sound angry-
He sounds sad.
“Cloud. Open your eyes.”
The sadness makes him.
Vincent is crouched before him, red leather all around him, spread over the floor in a poor imitation of a pool of blood, and his eyes bore into Cloud, cutting with a grief that is all the more painful for its lack of rage.
No- no, he can’t have disappointed Vincent, beautiful Vincent who knows everything about him- knows the dreams of scalpels and stitches that make him scream at night, knows how weak he can be, knows every inch of him and all his scars internal and external- and he chokes on the sob rising in his throat, lurches forward into a hard chest.
“Sorry- sorry-“ the words bubble ineffectually on his lips as he works at the buttons with trembling fingers, his grip slick with blood.
His heart is thundering in his chest as Vincent runs his good hand down his spine, pressing fingers into the notches between vertebrae, and finally- finally- the damn coat is off in a susurration of sound, and he glances up, meets Vincent’s eyes.
One elegant brow arches. Cloud shudders, looks down, mumbles an apology, the words thick and graceless on his tongue- and why does he need this, why does he need to break?
His grip slips on the last of the leather straps, and he closes his eyes, tries to stifle the snarling demons of doubt in the back of his head. Vincent’s pale hand closes around his own, stops him in his tracks.
“It’s all right.”
Cloud could weep.
Vincent shrugs out of the top of the leather suit, a trail of dark hair leading down from his navel to disappear into the other half, his skin littered with scars. Cloud glances at him for permission, gains it, leans forward and kisses the deep scalpel mark above Vincent’s heart.
He knows the feeling of a scalpel separating skin from muscle, and the knowledge is as thick as bile.
And he doesn’t want to know that, doesn’t want to think, but he can’t make himself stop because he’s too goddamn weak to help himself.
He chokes on a sob as he falls a little farther.
“Hold me.” The words fall like stones into water in the silence. Vincent meets his gaze, impassive and unchanging, a barely-leashed beast that will outlive them all. “Please.” Because he can’t forgive himself, he can’t punish himself the way he deserves it, he can’t comfort himself, he is still the same lost child screaming in the wilderness of a mind that is no longer wholly his own.
“Please.”
But he can’t admit it to Vincent, Vincent whose respect he values more than anyone else, Vincent who has lost everything like him and knows the horror of five long years in the labs of ShinRa in a way that no one else- no one except Zack, who only lives now in Cloud’s shattered fragments of a mind- ever can.
The silence stretches between them like a rubber band threatening to snap.
Vincent is otherworldly and pale, his back against the side of the bed, his dark hair spilling over his shoulders, red eyes black in the moonlight. The claws- stained red with Cloud’s blood- gleam silver, and all the scars that paint a painful tapestry across his skin only make him more beautiful.
He can’t say it.
Vincent waits.
The words are bitter and clogged with tears,
“I- I can’t.”
Vincent moves, so fast that Cloud can’t see it, and suddenly he is enfolded in a crushing, one-armed embrace.
A hot mouth burns against his lips, the claws clicking against each other. Vincent kisses like he lives, methodical and controlled, leaving nothing unexplored, and he leaves Cloud breathless, his hands woven in Vincent’s dark hair, like ink flowing over his fingers.
He takes control of everything, and Cloud lets him- lets him hold him, lets him punish him, lets him force the encroaching thoughts of guilt and grief away with slices of filigreed metal.
The wounds are already healing- he wonders for a moment if Hojo would count that as a success.
“On the bed,” Vincent says as he tears his mouth away, fingers coiled tight in his hair, the pain making him feel drunk. Cloud blinks, dazed- how is he supposed to move now, light-headed and missing pints of blood?
But Vincent thinks he can-
And Vincent knows him better than he knows himself, because only the insane can understand the insane.
Geostigma screams in his arm as he takes a harsh breath and claws his way atop the plastic sheeting already stretched across the mattress. ‘Vincent really can do anything- even remake a bed.’ The thought is tainted with whimsy. He feels high on endorphins, the sharp agony faded like old jeans to a throbbing pleasure-pain.
Vincent steps out of his boots and the last of his suit. Cloud’s blood is streaked across the claws, and he lifts the golden-silver blades to his mouth and licks it off with slow swipes of his tongue.
“Where-“
“B-“ he pauses, tries to think of the word, slurs, “-bedside drawer.”
The old wood bangs as Vincent- surprisingly hasty- snatches the lube, coats his fingers. He kneels between Cloud’s legs, slicks himself up, and picks Cloud up as if he weighs nothing- and Cloud should be afraid, but he isn’t because this is Vincent- holding him above Vincent’s cock.
“Lower yourself down.”
It’s strange that Vincent doesn’t trust himself not to hurt Cloud in the only way that matters, even though Cloud has spent his entire life being hurt so many times that even the spiraling cuts across his chest are nothing but another curiosity.
But he does it anyway, because it’s Vincent, and only Vincent understands-
Failure, madness, weakness
And heat, and pressure, and Vincent’s moan as dark as night in his ear.
“Oh,” he says, before the words are lost in a long, ragged hiss as the ache intensifies, “Oh,” and light explodes in starbursts behind his eyes like the fire of Holy. Vincent’s voice rumbles through his skin, shudders in his chest like the growl of some great beast.
Vincent’s good hand leaves bruises on his hipbone, holding him still, even though God he wants to move, and a long whine escapes him before he knows what he’s done. Vincent’s eyes sharpen, the beasts inside called by the sound, and nails dig into his skin. Cloud moans at the reminder that the man who’s stripping him down to nothing is more than a man, more than even a SOLDIER.
“Move,” Vincent says, and nobody should sound so damn calm when they’ve just spent twenty minutes carving bloody runes in someone’s chest.
Cloud rolls his hips back, a muffled sound splintering on his lips as he lets his head fall forward on Vincent’s chest, his fingers tight on Vincent’s skinny shoulders as the older man- with methodical precision, the inhuman grace of a Turk- moves inside him, the pain of his bloody chest mingling with the slow heat rising up his spine, Vincent’s lips sealed over the open wounds, a macabre kiss.
Cloud wonders when he became so fucked up that he can only accept affection when given with agony.
Vincent’s hand slides down over his chest, blood smeared across pale skin, and takes hold of him with calluses and cold- he gazes into Cloud’s eyes, red touched with beastly amber meeting blue, and sees something there, because he nods- and in three long strokes and twists of his wrist, he tears Cloud from reality and hurls him into darkness, silence, peace.
* * *
Cloud opens his eyes again and watches a shaft of moonlight slide across the floor like the blade of the Masamune. His arm is rebandaged, his chest and back whole. The blade of light moves, stops at Vincent’s feet, outshone by the other man’s paleness.
Vincent is sitting in the chair, unmoving, something as old and strange as the Temple of the Ancients gleaming in his eyes, in the slight curl of his bloody lips. A Heal materia rests on his knee.
Exhaustion settles on Cloud like snow, the edges of his vision tinged with gray, and he can feel his heart fluttering like a weakened bird inside his chest.
But now his mind is wiped clean of regret and fear and the clinging memories of those he has lost, and the sharp ache in his arm of what he will lose.
And the pain of Zack and Aeris and Hojo’s madness is gone, the hand made of knives that lacerates his heart with each breath dulled, because Vincent understands-
He understands, and he is the only one who can give absolution.
Vincent knows- the only one who knows- what it is to fail all those you ever loved.
The floorboards creak beneath Vincent’s feet as he slips across the room, the shadow thrown on the wall nothing like human, a changing silhouette of claws and wings and horror.
The sheets lift, dark hair brushing his face, leaving a trace of gunpowder around him as Vincent slides in beside him, skinny and solemn, all hard planes and harsh angles like the mountains of Nibelheim- the name no longer stings- as he leans forward. Cloud closes his eyes, a sinner receiving forgiveness.
Cold lips brush against his brow, Vincent’s gun-callused fingers tracing the contours of his cheek, and a whisper soft as ashes falling into the grave curls like smoke in the air.
“Beautiful.”
Cloud moves closer into Vincent’s chest, and listens to the heartbeat that will outlive them all.
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 07:14 pm (UTC)You portrayed Cloud as vulnerable and f'd-up without being a wimpy uke.
Vincent is just spot on!
The whole fic is just so gut-wrenchingly gorgeous and brutal all at the same time.
Great, great job!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:15 am (UTC)Thank you for reading!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-04 11:52 pm (UTC)I'm trembling. This is amazing, and perfect, and the utter nastiness of it is just...gods. The rotting, open wounds of the Geostigma, the almost absent wounding, the recognition that he's lost pints of blood but keeps going. Cloud's utter need to be broken and shattered and told that it's okay to break, at least when he's there, with Vincent.
*whimpers a bit, and keeps trembling, wordless now*
no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:40 am (UTC)Thank you for reading!
no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 02:49 am (UTC)Yeah, what they all said....
no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 04:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-06 01:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-05 08:25 am (UTC)(And the last line, perfect).
I must say - what I loved most about this fic is fact that you show Cloud as needing the pain, as much as the affection -- it really hit home to me, because I've been trying to figure Cloud's motives out (in terms of relationships) and I really, honestly think that Cloud is damaged to a point that he does seek that pain.
And yeah, there should totally be more Cloud/Vincent fics around, I love them together. Anyway - awesome fic! :D
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Date: 2008-06-07 03:23 am (UTC)There absolutely should be more Cloud/Vincent: the prettiness and the awesomeness and the whole 'I can understand everything you're going through' demands it!
Thank you!
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Date: 2008-06-05 11:50 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2011-06-19 12:00 am (UTC)