supersoldier | noctium ic inbox.

[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)

[He had friends once, too, Cloud. They simply died, or turned traitor against him.

If the words cut, dig into revealed insecurity, he doesn't let it show. He watches as Cloud disappears past the back gate, leaving him behind. Alone with his blade, back to whatever task he conjures up for himself.

His focus will suffer in the wake of their discussion, so many things left unanswered. But he forcibly sews it back together all the same, and spends the rest of the day training with no one in the yard of an empty townhouse.]

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