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[cloud does not want coddling, so the moment sephiroth steps back and stands to give cloud some space, the blond turns on his side and pushes himself up to his knees. the weight of the buster sword makes his standing an awkward process, but he pushes up to his knees, the leftover weariness on the edges of his self.]

Shinra.

[is what he manages first, a wobble and ultimately picking himself up. he straightens his back—but breathes shakily, keeping a hand against the side of his head.]

It feels — like I've known it for a while. [it's a feeling he gets; like he's heard it before, a long time ago. he's standing three-quarters from sephiroth, yet he pulls his eyes to gaze at the man from this angle and speaks the following words quietly, a repetition of something he had heard from aerith before.] The source of everything.

[Shinra. Unsurprising, unhelpful in its expectedness. His mother had likely been affiliated with Shinra, of course, having died shortly after giving birth to him — the correlation was always a clear one, and he brushes the notion aside.

The rest, however, utterly baffles him. “The source of everything” is a vague and obtuse statement, more so since Cloud speaks it as though he is reciting someone else’s words. Sephiroth is unmoving, but the shadow casting across his face reveals his dissatisfaction.]

You can’t have known it. Unless someone had told you — unless you asked after it, like I did, once.

[But Hojo had given him an answer that was as short as it was dismissive, useless and coupled with a degree of sick amusement he couldn’t ever comprehend as a child. Shinra had become a company of interlocking secrets and veiled truths; he has no doubt that if there was more to know, it would have been easy to file sensitive information away behind lock and key, and Hojo’s security clearance would have allowed the man to do so. Would have encouraged him to do so.

Sephiroth rips his thoughts away from that man. He isn’t worth the time.]

Jenova is my mother’s name.

[And clearly he wants an explanation.]

Edited (hmmm hmmm some tweaking ) 2021-02-09 15:53 (UTC)

Your mother?

[it's not something that cloud can fully explain, nor understand at this point. the reason why it feels like he knows of jenova for much longer escapes him, but that train of thought eludes him the moment sephiroth's interest in the name becomes so clear it's almost laughable that such a connection exists.]

[because jenova is not human. jenova, whatever it may really be, is a monster. cloud fought it, alongside tifa and aerith and red. he fought against the tentacles that grew from the floor, was struck by dense, dark power emanating by it, existed within an illusion of the world it had created. jenova was not a living person—it was a body, aligned within a tank in hojo's care, without a head, with tubes connected to it, discolored and without a beating heart.]

[cloud turns to sephiroth, the look on his face (for once) struck with something that isn't trained in the usual contempt and calculated expressions he wears to give the other the impression that cloud is unmoving around him.]

[sephiroth thinks jenova is his mother, but jenova is—]

—a monster.

That thing can't be your mother.

[And like that, he is torn in too many directions at once.

There is the stark shard of denial that juts up, of course, and digs its heels in — that Cloud has it wrong, and his mother’s name is Jenova. And there are the questions that choke him from all sides, of how Cloud knows, in what context, and why he’s privy to that information when Sephiroth remained only in the darkest kind of ignorance. And then there is the doubt inlaid in it all; whose account is true? Cloud, with a broken mind and memory? Or Hojo, whose own mind and morality has long twisted into obsession and ego?

And then there is the word that jostles his core, lengthening those hairline cracks already quietly spiderwebbing across the surface of his psyche for years.

Monster.

Inhuman, other. Unbelonging and terrible; his mother? A lie? Which part is real? The fraction of what he once thought was the truth—Jenova, his mother’s name—is suddenly losing its anchoring gravity, trying to wrench itself free in the moments that may follow.

There is something sharper in his eyes. A cold fire, an almost-obsession often kept tucked neatly away.]

No. It’s what Hojo had always told me over the years — my mother’s name was Jenova. Lost to me shortly after I was born.

[And that alone tastes like bile on his tongue, leaning into that man’s words.]

Explain. What thing?

[in these few seconds, something becomes abundantly clear: sephiroth does not know—these normal, trivial things about anyone's life, of who your parents are, to whom you belong... sephiroth doesn't have this knowledge. it paints a different picture, and as cloud brings his hand down from holding onto his head, pity is in his eyes.]

[pity for a man that does not deserve it.]

And you believe anything Hojo ever says?

[though cloud knows, as he speaks it, that hojo can be many things—twisted, vile, amoral—but his words are strongly laced with truth, blunt as it may be. but something like this? it sounds farfetched and like a lie told to make shinra's biggest asset silent and demure were he to be insistent about his questions.]

We fought Jenova. It was a monster—a powerful one. It appeared to us in South Sister that one night. [with the tentacles and the face of death, across the many mirrors and the darkness.] —but once we defeated it, it was nothing but a maimed corpse.

[cloud frowns, and takes a step forward towards sephiroth—ultimately stopping as if remembering who this man is.]

Hojo fed you a lie.

[there's no other possible reason.]

[A lie. Would it be so simple, so easy to believe, if Hojo were a single-minded, spiteful man. And spiteful he can be — but the scientist’s mind is complex and calculating in its obsessive cruelty. Telling him his mother is a monster is subtle and insulting; perhaps he thought it amusing, but Sephiroth knows through experience that nothing is done without forethought. That it all has a reason behind it, steeped in science, even if it is to feed his megalomania.

Cloud steps forward, and Sephiroth is the first to break his gaze, as though his mind has begun to wheel elsewhere.]

You don’t know him like I do. There’s always meaning to his madness.

[Cloud didn’t grow up under the supervision and constant observation of that man; didn’t make his home in the labs, didn’t adhere to a constant routine of bloodwork, training, and number crunching to test his efficacy. He knows him more than he likes. It’s indelible at this point.]

This monster, how did you encounter it? Where?

[Not the twisted vision of it in South Sister.]

President Shinra's office.

[surely all this a tale for some other time, likely frustrating that all these pieces keep falling onto his lap yet sephiroth receives no complete understanding of what made those circumstances happen in the first place. it comes from cloud not having any particular interest in getting into detail—finding it unnecessary—and his eyes lock instead on the way sephiroth seems to steer away, something lost and unbidden in his usually calculated gaze.]

[cloud isn't certain what drives him, but he's reaching forward with his hand and grabbing hard onto a leather-bound arm, a connection bursting forth like sparks: synchronicity and jenova cells alike, alight in a warmth that sweeps away any deterioration caused by neglect from either of their behalves.]

[this time, cloud is ready for it, braces himself for the impact, but it's almost like the surge of atomic conflagrations ignite at the touch of the source, whirlwind around a memory not shared but existing somewhere in the recesses of his mind (or someone else's own?). sephiroth, standing before jenova, a look of determined happiness on his face, mother—together, we will reclaim this world, a promise, a threat to the planet. it nearly sends cloud for another stumble to the side, but he remains determined, anchored to the spot as the visions flash before his eyes—]

[and it's like he comes to understand something.]

[fear surges like bile to his throat, and cloud understands that he cannot let sephiroth conjure up whatever delusions he has of jenova, of his mother, and tarnish it into something deadly.]

[his grip tightens, leather on leather, and cloud's reluctant to let go, bites out through the pain.]

Look at me.

[In a future for Sephiroth that has not yet come to pass, the truth had been suffocating, and the days that followed sequestered in isolation allowed it to burrow deep into the recesses of thought. There, in that manor’s library, he had filled his head with misguided research, what was left of the truth he knew beginning to fall away. A mind left grasping for a place in the world newly lost, and finally seeing only one solution — to finally reconcile his differences with humanity not as other, but as superior.

The hint of such festering deterioration teases the edges of his emotions, his thinking torn away from the now-reality of Cloud standing before him. But they are both fortunate, now, in two things: what Jenova might be is still unclear, with no proof before them, and the purported ex-SOLDIER jolting him away from this ruminating path.

An explosion of connection. Cells that sing and vibrate between them. The faint, pulsing flow of gems embedded in skin. That hard grip around his arm.

Look at me.

He concedes, eyes clouded in the wake of incomplete uncertainty, pupils sharpening back into focus. He says nothing.]

[it's strange, to see sephiroth in this state. a man that despite his madness and the constant torture he threw cloud's way never quite wavered in his certainty. right now, that is what is lacking in him—the posture the man of the highest caliber of SOLDIER should be.]

[there has never been a moment so stark with clarity, that this sephiroth doesn't know; has not yet conceded to madness.]

[his throat is dry, but for all the consequences that this connection between them brings, cloud feels the inklings of elation; how it pulls him forward, threatening to swallow him whole, the pain ebbing away, likely the synchronization aiding in that.]

Fight me.

[ridiculous, perhaps, but cloud hesitantly lets go of the other. puts the grip of his right hand on the hilt of the sword at his back, takes a few steps back.]

[Synchronization wars with discontent and a mind wanting to recede into itself. The spike of dizzying elation tries to wash it all away, and when Cloud steps back, he feels deprived of it. Aware.

Familiarity beckons him, instead; fight, and become a weapon again, do what he was trained for, feel purpose return, despite the talk of Jenova threatening to assail it later.

Silent, he reaches down the retrieve Masamune. His demeanor tries to put itself back into straight lines and hard edges, though it is as if something still remains askew.]

Fighting you won’t change what you’ve told me.

[His grip tightens faintly around the sword hilt. There are no answers to be carved out of Cloud. Now he wishes Hojo existed in this place, only so he could press the point of steel close to his carotid and demand he spill answers, if not blood.]

[cloud isn't sure he wants to fight sephiroth, not like this. there is still suspicion and hatred boiling beneath the surface—except that something is different now, a molecular, tinny push outside the edges of reason that made sense.]

[the hand on the hilt stays where it is, but uncertain and without drive.]

It won't.

[he concedes, falters a moment, then grapples again for the right words.]

What I fought was a monster, not your mother. [ah—] I've killed you once before. With my own hands. You're still flesh and blood, no matter what Hojo would have you believe. I may not know him like you do, but we all know the shit that goes on in Shinra behind closed doors.

If you let that be your truth, then you're not your own man at all.

Edited 2021-02-10 03:43 (UTC)

[Flesh and blood and the mortality that comes from it. Agency coupled with the choice to define oneself on their own, not by what one has been told. Fine and novel concepts, but there is a part of Sephiroth that he keeps wrapped up within himself, unseen to the world, that disallows him to take it to heart.

But it sparks, maybe for the first time, a further want to explain.]

You don’t understand.

[He steps back two more paces, adopting a ready, defensive stance seen just minutes before. This won’t clear his heart, but maybe it will organize the thoughts in a single file line. Masamune gleams.]

Flesh and blood. Fallibility. That doesn’t change the fact that I’m different from you — from everyone I have ever met.

[The squeeze of leather, grip tight.]

Do you think telling me what I had believed was a lie makes it better? If not descended from a monster, then descended from nothing, instead?

[A blank space where family should be — emblematic of a want unfulfilled.]

Don’t. If you want to fight, then begin.

[cloud could, if he wanted, throw it all back at sephiroth; that he killed his mother and reveled in that act like it was a triumph, holding it over cloud's head even when he was supposed to be dead and gone—a memory of something catastrophic done and gone. that in his want to belong, he took home and family from someone who admired him so deeply—]

[but that's pushing into territory cloud has no recollection of; a time when things start getting hazy and uncertain.]

[cloud may never understand, how the person he so desperately wished to be like could be left with wanting the things cloud had once left behind to find himself anew.]

[the buster sword off his back, cloud strikes forward forcefully. his parry comes down heavy, the blows of the blade used similarly in the style of a man who wilded the weapon before him, the very same man cloud doesn't remember having existed. cloud's form is off, though, careening through the pull of a dulling ache in his head, and all the while fueled by something new, something that makes him want to close the distance between the two, lethal but yearning.]

Huah!

[and so many more times irrational, cloud unable to understand, even as the blade lands on the ground with the force of a downward thrust, why this pull even exists at all beyond his reckoning.]

[Their first meeting in that foggy, twisted town had begun with the swing of that same sword, flying at him in a whorl of anger and accusation. Sephiroth had thought then the same as he does now: it's a pale intimidation of how another man swings, like a shadow trying to mimic something real and grounded. And as a result, Cloud telegraphs through a language likely unknown to him, but he can read it as clear as day.

Cloud's form is off, like he's tangled up in the invisible knot of connective tissue between them. And Sephiroth, who might usually wring amusement out of the first few minutes of a fight, finds himself giving no leeway. On the heels of a fresh sync turning each nerve hyperaware, to talk of a lie that stripped it raw, he is calculative coldness in his reply of steel -- the parry is missed, and the downward force of the blade glides along Masamune's length as he meets it with his sword. Both end with metal in the ground, but Sephiroth jolts back in a half-step, unearthing his weapon from the earth and careening it up, aiming along Cloud's chest.]

Slow.

[The utterance lacks mirth; only assessment, blunt.]

[it is slow.]

[whilst sephiroth dances with his blade like it was just another rehearsed choreography, cloud fumbles with his own at best. there is weariness in his actions, with the way he guides himself upwards with the tip of masamune on his chest, clambering to his feet with uncertainty as to what his next move should be. sephiroth is guarded—and in their fight prior to cloud's arrival in south sister, the only way the blond managed to get a hit in was when parrying off any devastating blow swung his way.]

[cloud steps back and then forward, careening the weight of the buster sword through to give himself the space and opportunity to slam the edge onto sephiroth—]

[a move that would surely manage some kind of purpose were it not for the fact that cloud's movements are slow, tired and uninspired.]

[Cloud’s move would harbor impressive force and purpose behind it, were it actually impressive at all. But Sephiroth can read the rush forward with a gaze directed at his footwork; he can judge the balance of the Buster Sword too clumsy in such a slow maneuver; he knows the follow-up will just be as cumbersome as the initial attack.

And he’s not wrong (though perhaps that’s unfair, pairing anyone’s physical abilities next to Sephiroth’s), because it’s easy to simply twist his torso and shift his boots in the ground, and the flat of that blade whiffs by. It touches not a single one of his buzzing atoms — it even misses the silver of his hair that trails a full second behind him like a river of mercury.

Again, only an imitation of the real thing. The irony feels sour.]

“Not your own man”, you said.

[Parroting back Cloud’s advice moments before. Masamune careens up at the Buster Sword’s guard before the weapon passes him completely. If it rattles the bones in Cloud’s wrist just enough to make him lose grip, then so be it.]

And yet you fight me like this.

[it doesn't rattle his bones into losing his grip exactly, but it does cause whatever confidence he may have had to flounder. his heart wasn't set on fighting sephiroth like this, born out of pity, of wanting to stop seeing the details of a fractured humanity leaking through instead of the usual unreadable smugness cloud almost expects to find every time he turns to look at the man.]

[right now? it's clear that sephiroth's devoid of all these things cloud was hoping to see, to just have an excuse to strike.]

[the tremors of his earlier push towards the limits of how ascertained he is to his own self still crash and ebb within him, making him deliberately sluggish. exhaustion hardly keeps him upright, and he turns to sephiroth, trying to catch his breath.]

—when you held my hand...

[a solid press of his boot forward, the buster sword far away from any form of antagonism.]

That isn't how it works.

[he had held hands with sasuke before, in some kind of handshake, and the reaction had not been strong like that.]

[And like that, the spark of fire behind the fight—already a waning thing—flickers and finds itself extinguishing beneath Cloud’s exhaustion. Sephiroth only stands with Masamune gripped, seeing little point in continuing like this; he will raise his blade of Cloud swings at him again, ringing steel between them like clockwork, but there’s so little antagonism in his frame that he thinks it’s unnecessary.

What he says, after all, is something more worthy of his attentions than this fight.]

What do you mean?

[Given that Cloud was Sephiroth’s first, he has no frame of reference to compare.]

It wasn't as intense.

[for once, at least, cloud manages to explain without hiding behind half-truth or offering an unreliable report of things. still, one could say that his lack of understanding could also be seen as unreliable.]

I did the same with someone else. [hold hands. he swallows, hard, and stands upright.] It felt warm, but it didn't...

[cause him to black out momentarily. neither did it feel like there was a pull between them.]

[thought they are kept feet apart, cloud is keen to want to understand.]

D'you feel that?

[the kind of energy, physically, between them, feeling as if it's curling inwards and making cloud incredibly aware of where sephiroth stands, no matter that cloud can see him with his own eyes.]

[Of course he feels it, but it was always so easy to blame it on something else. In South Sister, the town’s propensity for mind games. Here, the ease of syncing causing connections to bloom, maybe some of them more lasting than others.

But Cloud says none of his previous were as intense, didn’t achieve that same level of fulfillment and completion (words unspoken, but he knows what he feels; he feels it too) and for the first time for either of them, they are forced to face a reality they had ignored before.

Just why do they feel this way?]

It’s been like that from the start.

[He says, finally, as though it should have been obvious; revealing that he had felt something keenly like it before, but it was simply never brought up in their passing conversations.]

A knowing; where you are, when you approach. It’s been that way since you met [attacked] me in that other world. Haven’t you realized it before?

No.

[admitting to something that he wasn't able to make sense of and landing himself underneath sephiroth is not what cloud would rather do, but it seems important to make a point of it—to show that this is something that bothers him enough to allow himself in that position.]

[for cloud, it's never worked with the same clarity as sephiroth. sure—he knew where the man was at any given time, but he had figured it was because cloud just happened to know where to look for.]

[he doesn't realize, either, that it pulls him to want to be close to sephiroth.]

What the hell is it?

I don’t know.

[Blunt, clear. He doesn’t. How would he?

He can only compare how he feels now, versus how he felt around Cloud when he was nothing more than a cadet; no attachment, no connection. Barely an awareness of his existence, a Shinra army grunt who wouldn’t take off his helmet.]

But it wasn’t there in Nibelheim. Whatever the change is, it has to do with you.

[And perhaps something also with that broken memory of his.]

...whatever happened after Nibelheim—

[he stops, pulling away from that train of thought before he can even bring himself to consider that he brought it up at all.]

[this is another reason why cloud loathes the fact that it's sephiroth from before nibelheim burnt who stands before him; that it's not sephiroth, seemingly all-knowing and confident of something cloud wasn't even aware of even surmounted to anything.]

[it is why he mutters—] Useless. [—an echo of a statement in another world, how sephiroth is nothing but useless to him in this state, devoid of answers and insight, in a similar quest as him to figure things out.]

[with a huff and exhaustion clear in his movements, cloud steadies himself and places the sword onto his back again.]

Now you know how it works. [synchronicity.] Don't go dying just 'cause you're too embarrassed can't ask someone else to hold your hand for a minute.

[all this barking, cloud,]

[All bark, no bite. Always on the precipice of an answer, it seems, before Cloud’s own stubbornness—or the state of his mind—seems to steal it away from them both. Sephiroth’s brows twitch in response to that uttered word (useless), but the fire between them has already flared in the clashing of steel, and he cannot bring himself to light it a second time.

If this is Cloud’s way of being helpful, he’s not quite sure it’s succeeded, now in the wake of their conversation. But Sephiroth accedes the point, brief and without any real motivation to argue.]

And you?

[As in, you don’t seem to be the hand-holding type, either, Cloud.]

I have friends.

[it's perhaps unfair, what he says, but should cloud not be able to strike sephiroth significantly with his blade—he can at least do so with his words, a pettiness that will always remain there, a hatred that will never die no matter if the man before him may not deserve it as far as committed actions go.]

[and while sephiroth may very well be capable of making his own friends, cloud digs into the sore sport revealed from this conversation—this lack of belonging sephiroth seems to bothered with.]

But you're my responsibility. I'll check up on you again.

[his boots feel like they're filled with rocks as he forces himself to make his exit now, towards the back door, his attempt to sound cool only able of being matched by his actions and allowing no further room for discussion, after all.]

Edited 2021-02-28 15:21 (UTC)

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supersoldier - 2021-02-28 20:48 (UTC) - Expand

noctium ic inbox.

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cw: general spoilers about jenova ? maybe

Everything is surely fine

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