CloudxIrvine
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Pairing: Cloud StrifexIrvine Kinneas
Theme set: Epsilon
Rating: PG-13 all around, with one instance of the dreaded f-word
A/N: Crack pairings are the product of a demented mind, fed by another demented mind - eva_kasumi in this case. This Irvine is a KH version that I've invented for him, and yes, he only has one eye. Go figure.
Don't even ask me how long this took to get done. I figure, at least, that no one else was clamoring to take the claim.
1. Motion: Irvine doesn’t move like he knows what he’s doing; Irvine moves like he wants you to think he knows what he’s doing, all jaunty strides and cocky winks and tips of the hat
2. Cool: “Damn, guys,” Irvine huffs at Cloud and Leon having one of their ‘bitchier than thou’ contests, “it gets any colder in here, I’m gonna get frost bit.”
3. Young: Irvine tries to imagine Cloud young, like in the stories Zell paints of Radiant Garden, but he just can’t manage to compact all that stubborn crazy into any sort of child.
4. Last: Cloud’s always the last one in at night and the first to leave in the morning - until Irvine forcibly drags him one evening to supper, hand clamped firmly around Cloud’s wrist.
5. Wrong: “You think no one else has ever done anything wrong?” Irvine demands, breaking into Cloud’s current monotone diatribe about darkness, “bet you never tried to kill your own mother!”
6. Gentle: Cloud isn’t sure how to be gentle and Irvine isn’t exactly an expert on the issue himself; eventually, they just decide they don’t mind things a little rough around the edges.
7. One: “There’s never just one of me,” Cloud whispers, and then refuses to explain even when Irvine pokes him.
8. Thousand: Irvine peers up to the sky and tries to find his ‘home star’ in a sea of thousands, then very firmly decides he doesn’t give half a shit.
9. King: “If you were King of the universe, and you could have anything you want, what would it be?” Irvine asks, fiddling with the gun in his hands; Cloud stares at him, unsure, and the replies, “my world back.”
10. Learn: When Irvine asks him where he learned to wield a sword like his, Cloud clams up and refuses to speak for days; saying Zack’s name would be too much for him to bear, right now or ever.
11. Blur: Irvine’s days in Whatever-The-Collective-Crazy-Is-Calling-Radiant-Garden-Today are fuzzing together into a pleasant blur of laughing at Zell, harassing the girls, and following after Cloud Strife, trying to make him smile.
12. Wait: Time and Cloud wait for no man, and if Irvine isn’t up and ready by six in the morning he can kiss spending the day with his new favorite psychological issue goodbye.
13. Change: Everyone else senses that something is changing, just a little, when Irvine mutters something sullen about moombas and Cloud snorts into his cornflakes.
14. Command: Irvine blinks at Leon and demands to know if he just said the words ‘command post’ in all sincerity; Cloud is certainly not snickering in the background.
15. Hold: Cloud is trying to hold onto the past, a utopia that exists only in his head, and fumbling around with the intangible has the present slipping through his fingers like water.
16. Need: “You know what you need?” Irvine asks, tugging on one of Cloud’s spikes, “you need to realize the universe doesn’t revolve around Cloud Strife.”
17. Vision: Cloud spends a lot of time wondering how Irvine makes it with his one-eyed vision, but never actually manages to ask.
18. Attention: “If you don’t start paying attention to where you are now,” Irvine warns, “I’m going to start doing embarrassing things to you in public.”
19. Soul: “You keep things bottled up just as much as I do,” Cloud growls, grip threatening on Irvine’s arms, “so don’t pretend you’re some pure soul.”
20. Picture: Irvine keeps a picture in his back pocket; there’s a woman with long black hair, an imperious blonde girl, and a little boy whose mischievous gaze would be the same if you took away an eye.
21. Fool: Cloud wonders if he looks like a fool, covered in house paint; he also wonders if it’s too late to pretend he’s not having fun.
22. Mad: “Sometimes my dreams make me think I’m mad,” Cloud whispers against Irvine’s shoulder, clutching tight enough to leave telling bruises; Irvine can’t say a damn thing to refute Cloud’s crazy, so he just rubs his back until the tremors stop.
23. Child: Irvine has the attention span of a child - chasing after butterflies, flirting with the girls, and teasing the hell out of everyone - until you stick him in battle, then his focus narrows frighteningly.
24. Now: Cloud hears Irvine swearing up a storm, sighs under his breath, and goes to ask his unofficial stalker what he’s managed to break now.
25. Shadow: The shadow lunging for Cloud’s face explodes in a flurry of black mist and vapor; Cloud looks up to the town’s walls and Irvine salutes with his pistol, grinning like he’s just won a gold medal.
26. Goodbye: Irvine never plans on saying goodbye to this beautiful, messed up new home he’s found, but he can’t seem to get Cloud to believe that.
27. Hide: Sometimes, Irvine just wants to hide behind Cloud’s greater physical strength and forget he ever learned how to fight and kill, but that wouldn’t be fair to the other man.
28. Fortune: In an effort to make up for his shitty life, fate has given Cloud the greatest of luck when it comes to the little things; Irvine very quickly learns not to play cards against him, not when bets are involved.
29. Safe: Irvine hasn’t felt safe in years, hasn’t allowed himself to, because when you feel safe you’re off your guard; he feels protected around Cloud, crazy as he is, and Irvine allows himself that.
30. Ghost: Cloud likes to pretend that nothing reaches him, nothing scares him - if he was really that fearless, he wouldn’t come looking for Irvine after Yuffie got done telling over dramatic ghost stories.
31. Book: Irvine’s never really had a head for learning - books are too damn still for his tastes - but he’d be willing to read an entire fucking encyclopedia on Cloud Strife.
32. Eye: “How’d you lose it?” Cloud asks, finally, running a hand over the damaged eye that Irvine never covers; “I chose the wrong time to get into the middle of a gang fight,” Irvine explains, as if that’s entirely normal.
33. Never: “Never mention to Cloud that I told you this,” Aerith whispers, grinning conspiratorially, “but high heels make his legs go for miles.”
34. Sing: Cloud Strife would never do something as undignified as sing in the shower, and if Irvine keeps insisting he does, soap is going to find its way down someone’s throat.
35. Sudden: It’s horrific and strange and terrifying and sudden - all at once, Cloud finds himself in love, with no way to run away from it.
36. Stop: “You two either need to stop having sex, or learn how to do it quietly,” Leon growls over breakfast, “because I am sick of being woken up at three in the morning.”
37. Time: Time has not been kind to either of them, Cloud especially, and if they could figure out a way to freeze this moment, they would.
38. Wash: Technically, the hose is for washing Heartless goo off of the cobblestones in front of Merlin’s house; Irvine finds that a dripping wet Cloud is a much more interesting application.
39. Torn: Cloud is unbearably torn between two needs - telling Irvine to run away, as far as he can, before he gets caught in the crossfire of Cloud’s life, or begging Irvine to please, please stay and help.
40. History: “That’s practically ancient history,” Cloud mutters, when Irvine does, indeed, mention the high heels, and then turns several interesting shades of embarrassed red when he realizes what he’s just admitted to.
41. Power: They are not without their power struggles, but in the end, it is easier for Irvine to extend the trust it takes to put control into another’s hands.
42. Bother: “Does it bother you,” Cloud asks, “the way I am, does it -“; Irvine cuts him off, tells him that stupid questions don’t warrant answers and probably shouldn’t be asked in the first place.
43. God: For years and years, Cloud fell in love with people because they were something sacred, godlike, unreachable - Sephiroth’s perfection, Aerith’s purity, everything Zack was and wasn’t - and vows never to do so again; Irvine, being Irvine and thus extremely difficult to mistake for anything divine, makes it easy.
44. Wall: “Darlin’, you’ve got more walls than a stone maze, but I’ll tell you one thing - I’m good at climbing.”
45. Naked: It is Irvine, not Cloud - Cloud the soldier, Cloud the detached, Cloud of ‘I Can’t Descend to Giving a Shit’ - who feels that nudity is a vulnerability; it is a fight to get him out of layers, as much skin as they might show anyway, and that’s a battle Cloud is glad to give a shit about.
46. Drive: It is when Irvine grins lazily and asks if he can drive Fenrir that Cloud knows, for certain, that he’s a certifiable lunatic.
47. Harm: It drives Irvine crazy to think that anyone he considers ‘his’ might come to harm somehow, and no one - not Zell, not Cloud, not anyone - can convince him to stop worrying about it.
48. Precious: Cloud does not hold with pet names, so as soon as Irvine figures that out he starts referring to Cloud as ‘pookie’, ‘princess’, ‘buttercup’; Irvine figures Cloud’ll lose it somewhere around ‘snooky-bottom’, but it’s ‘precious’ that earns him a black eye.
49. Hunger: It is not hunger that drives them together - Cloud has trained and broken himself to be above such things, and Irvine could sate his appetite in any number of less bothersome places - and it is a relief to know that.
50. Believe: “I believe you are doing your damndest to drive yourself crazy, Mr. Strife, and I also believe that I’m not going to let you.”
Pairing: Cloud StrifexIrvine Kinneas
Theme set: Epsilon
Rating: PG-13 all around, with one instance of the dreaded f-word
A/N: Crack pairings are the product of a demented mind, fed by another demented mind - eva_kasumi in this case. This Irvine is a KH version that I've invented for him, and yes, he only has one eye. Go figure.
Don't even ask me how long this took to get done. I figure, at least, that no one else was clamoring to take the claim.
1. Motion: Irvine doesn’t move like he knows what he’s doing; Irvine moves like he wants you to think he knows what he’s doing, all jaunty strides and cocky winks and tips of the hat
2. Cool: “Damn, guys,” Irvine huffs at Cloud and Leon having one of their ‘bitchier than thou’ contests, “it gets any colder in here, I’m gonna get frost bit.”
3. Young: Irvine tries to imagine Cloud young, like in the stories Zell paints of Radiant Garden, but he just can’t manage to compact all that stubborn crazy into any sort of child.
4. Last: Cloud’s always the last one in at night and the first to leave in the morning - until Irvine forcibly drags him one evening to supper, hand clamped firmly around Cloud’s wrist.
5. Wrong: “You think no one else has ever done anything wrong?” Irvine demands, breaking into Cloud’s current monotone diatribe about darkness, “bet you never tried to kill your own mother!”
6. Gentle: Cloud isn’t sure how to be gentle and Irvine isn’t exactly an expert on the issue himself; eventually, they just decide they don’t mind things a little rough around the edges.
7. One: “There’s never just one of me,” Cloud whispers, and then refuses to explain even when Irvine pokes him.
8. Thousand: Irvine peers up to the sky and tries to find his ‘home star’ in a sea of thousands, then very firmly decides he doesn’t give half a shit.
9. King: “If you were King of the universe, and you could have anything you want, what would it be?” Irvine asks, fiddling with the gun in his hands; Cloud stares at him, unsure, and the replies, “my world back.”
10. Learn: When Irvine asks him where he learned to wield a sword like his, Cloud clams up and refuses to speak for days; saying Zack’s name would be too much for him to bear, right now or ever.
11. Blur: Irvine’s days in Whatever-The-Collective-Crazy-Is-Calling-Radiant-Garden-Today are fuzzing together into a pleasant blur of laughing at Zell, harassing the girls, and following after Cloud Strife, trying to make him smile.
12. Wait: Time and Cloud wait for no man, and if Irvine isn’t up and ready by six in the morning he can kiss spending the day with his new favorite psychological issue goodbye.
13. Change: Everyone else senses that something is changing, just a little, when Irvine mutters something sullen about moombas and Cloud snorts into his cornflakes.
14. Command: Irvine blinks at Leon and demands to know if he just said the words ‘command post’ in all sincerity; Cloud is certainly not snickering in the background.
15. Hold: Cloud is trying to hold onto the past, a utopia that exists only in his head, and fumbling around with the intangible has the present slipping through his fingers like water.
16. Need: “You know what you need?” Irvine asks, tugging on one of Cloud’s spikes, “you need to realize the universe doesn’t revolve around Cloud Strife.”
17. Vision: Cloud spends a lot of time wondering how Irvine makes it with his one-eyed vision, but never actually manages to ask.
18. Attention: “If you don’t start paying attention to where you are now,” Irvine warns, “I’m going to start doing embarrassing things to you in public.”
19. Soul: “You keep things bottled up just as much as I do,” Cloud growls, grip threatening on Irvine’s arms, “so don’t pretend you’re some pure soul.”
20. Picture: Irvine keeps a picture in his back pocket; there’s a woman with long black hair, an imperious blonde girl, and a little boy whose mischievous gaze would be the same if you took away an eye.
21. Fool: Cloud wonders if he looks like a fool, covered in house paint; he also wonders if it’s too late to pretend he’s not having fun.
22. Mad: “Sometimes my dreams make me think I’m mad,” Cloud whispers against Irvine’s shoulder, clutching tight enough to leave telling bruises; Irvine can’t say a damn thing to refute Cloud’s crazy, so he just rubs his back until the tremors stop.
23. Child: Irvine has the attention span of a child - chasing after butterflies, flirting with the girls, and teasing the hell out of everyone - until you stick him in battle, then his focus narrows frighteningly.
24. Now: Cloud hears Irvine swearing up a storm, sighs under his breath, and goes to ask his unofficial stalker what he’s managed to break now.
25. Shadow: The shadow lunging for Cloud’s face explodes in a flurry of black mist and vapor; Cloud looks up to the town’s walls and Irvine salutes with his pistol, grinning like he’s just won a gold medal.
26. Goodbye: Irvine never plans on saying goodbye to this beautiful, messed up new home he’s found, but he can’t seem to get Cloud to believe that.
27. Hide: Sometimes, Irvine just wants to hide behind Cloud’s greater physical strength and forget he ever learned how to fight and kill, but that wouldn’t be fair to the other man.
28. Fortune: In an effort to make up for his shitty life, fate has given Cloud the greatest of luck when it comes to the little things; Irvine very quickly learns not to play cards against him, not when bets are involved.
29. Safe: Irvine hasn’t felt safe in years, hasn’t allowed himself to, because when you feel safe you’re off your guard; he feels protected around Cloud, crazy as he is, and Irvine allows himself that.
30. Ghost: Cloud likes to pretend that nothing reaches him, nothing scares him - if he was really that fearless, he wouldn’t come looking for Irvine after Yuffie got done telling over dramatic ghost stories.
31. Book: Irvine’s never really had a head for learning - books are too damn still for his tastes - but he’d be willing to read an entire fucking encyclopedia on Cloud Strife.
32. Eye: “How’d you lose it?” Cloud asks, finally, running a hand over the damaged eye that Irvine never covers; “I chose the wrong time to get into the middle of a gang fight,” Irvine explains, as if that’s entirely normal.
33. Never: “Never mention to Cloud that I told you this,” Aerith whispers, grinning conspiratorially, “but high heels make his legs go for miles.”
34. Sing: Cloud Strife would never do something as undignified as sing in the shower, and if Irvine keeps insisting he does, soap is going to find its way down someone’s throat.
35. Sudden: It’s horrific and strange and terrifying and sudden - all at once, Cloud finds himself in love, with no way to run away from it.
36. Stop: “You two either need to stop having sex, or learn how to do it quietly,” Leon growls over breakfast, “because I am sick of being woken up at three in the morning.”
37. Time: Time has not been kind to either of them, Cloud especially, and if they could figure out a way to freeze this moment, they would.
38. Wash: Technically, the hose is for washing Heartless goo off of the cobblestones in front of Merlin’s house; Irvine finds that a dripping wet Cloud is a much more interesting application.
39. Torn: Cloud is unbearably torn between two needs - telling Irvine to run away, as far as he can, before he gets caught in the crossfire of Cloud’s life, or begging Irvine to please, please stay and help.
40. History: “That’s practically ancient history,” Cloud mutters, when Irvine does, indeed, mention the high heels, and then turns several interesting shades of embarrassed red when he realizes what he’s just admitted to.
41. Power: They are not without their power struggles, but in the end, it is easier for Irvine to extend the trust it takes to put control into another’s hands.
42. Bother: “Does it bother you,” Cloud asks, “the way I am, does it -“; Irvine cuts him off, tells him that stupid questions don’t warrant answers and probably shouldn’t be asked in the first place.
43. God: For years and years, Cloud fell in love with people because they were something sacred, godlike, unreachable - Sephiroth’s perfection, Aerith’s purity, everything Zack was and wasn’t - and vows never to do so again; Irvine, being Irvine and thus extremely difficult to mistake for anything divine, makes it easy.
44. Wall: “Darlin’, you’ve got more walls than a stone maze, but I’ll tell you one thing - I’m good at climbing.”
45. Naked: It is Irvine, not Cloud - Cloud the soldier, Cloud the detached, Cloud of ‘I Can’t Descend to Giving a Shit’ - who feels that nudity is a vulnerability; it is a fight to get him out of layers, as much skin as they might show anyway, and that’s a battle Cloud is glad to give a shit about.
46. Drive: It is when Irvine grins lazily and asks if he can drive Fenrir that Cloud knows, for certain, that he’s a certifiable lunatic.
47. Harm: It drives Irvine crazy to think that anyone he considers ‘his’ might come to harm somehow, and no one - not Zell, not Cloud, not anyone - can convince him to stop worrying about it.
48. Precious: Cloud does not hold with pet names, so as soon as Irvine figures that out he starts referring to Cloud as ‘pookie’, ‘princess’, ‘buttercup’; Irvine figures Cloud’ll lose it somewhere around ‘snooky-bottom’, but it’s ‘precious’ that earns him a black eye.
49. Hunger: It is not hunger that drives them together - Cloud has trained and broken himself to be above such things, and Irvine could sate his appetite in any number of less bothersome places - and it is a relief to know that.
50. Believe: “I believe you are doing your damndest to drive yourself crazy, Mr. Strife, and I also believe that I’m not going to let you.”