Solipsism: The Dream Arc 6-10
Title: Solipsism (the Dream Arc, 2/2)
A collection of chapters 1-10, the best way to read it.
Pairing(s): Sephiroth/Zack, Sephiroth/Cloud, Sephiroth/Zack/Cloud, Zack/Cloud, Yazoo/Loz, Kadaj/Rufus, Rufus/Tseng, with hints of Sephiroth/Kadaj, Sephiroth/Tseng, and Kadaj/unnamed.
Rating: NC-17 for the collection, chapters are across the board.
Warnings: violence, sexuality, angst, d/s, dubious consent, rape, adult themes.
Notes: For starters, since it seems important to note these days, this fic contains portrayal of non-consensual sex and child abuse; I am not and this fic is not condoning these things. Secondly, be warned that many of these chapters are dreamlike, and that the progression of the chapters does not follow a specific storyline: hence, I call this the Dream Arc. The final chapter should make clear what I had in mind for these chapters to express. This is not the end of this epic, just of the dream segments.
VI: Redefine
"Inside the songs of our defeat,
They sing of treaties broken.
Inside this army's in retreat;
We hide beneath the thunder's call."
--Sting, Inside
"I thought it was harvest time.
You always loved the smell of the wood burning.
She with her honey hair,
Dalhousie Castle,
She would meet you there."
--Tori Amos, Toast
Watching them together made the skin tingle with electric shock. It burned and stirred, a mixture of awe and jealousy and desire. It left him feeling fragmented, as if the sheer force of their personalities could twist and transform and shatter. The beauty was a drug, a guilty pleasure. He should not have watched. He was helpless not to watch.
Zack's bare back arched, his tailbone pressed against rough stone. His hair a visual glissando, tossed darkness that the sunset light turned to gold. The sculpted grace of his body, nearly nude, was something Cloud would see forever echoed in painting and chiseled stone. It was what the master artist sought and never captured.
Sephiroth fit to him like an intricate jewel of interlocking pieces. He glittered, white as spun ice and moonlight. It seemed impossible that a creature so ethereal, so visually cold, could possess such strength and passion. That he could move against Zack, dripping sensuality, leaving skin pink and breath harsh with longing.
Where they met: such heat, such control; one should have melted, yet instead there was an ever-new dynamic of volcanic union. It left Cloud sweat-slick and torturously hard. He should not have watched them. What good could come of knowing how Sephiroth's hands closed over Zack's broad shoulders, or how Zack's tongue looked tracing one of Sephiroth's nipples? How one fit into the other as if made to do so. How they redefined beauty together.
+
He thinks of Zack whenever he drinks. When the first bitter burn touches his tongue, he thinks of the way Zack tasted the first time they kissed. He tasted of liquor, and laughed into the kiss. He nipped gently at Cloud's lower lip, sucked it and raked it gently as he drew back. His hands had been like hot brands over Cloud's hips.
When the alcohol settles, his mood invariably darkens. He thinks of other things. Sometimes he thinks of sitting in a ruined playground under a dry sun. Thinks of watching the dark honey hair of a pretty girl spread out behind her, of listening to her soft, sweet voice and thinking then only of a desolate time she had made him remember with her unknowing questions. How the demure tilt of her body was so opposite to his he thought of that it was almost as if they were the two pieces of the yin-yang set.
And he thought of how Zack had looked, flushed with fury, standing tall and proud, facing down Sephiroth. How his sword had barely been drawn and leveled, a silver flash, when Masamune sliced into him. Masamune like a river of water. Sephiroth's eyes, icy, lingered somewhere between amusement and impatience, containing not a hint of memory. As if those slick, satin nights had never occured, or had meant nothing to him. Not even as if the crimson flowing from Zack's wounds seemed beautiful to him, only as if they were all buzzing flies distracting him from his goals. How they had redefined pain together.
+
The cold wind whips at Cloud's face and hair. Beneath him, the chopper growls like an eager hunting cat. A violent twinge burns where the stigma scars his arm, as if mere thoughts of Sephiroth bring the planet's rage to a boiling crescendo. He winces and touches it absently. Around him the landscape twists and thickens, icy trees forever reminding him of him.
He remembers lying tangled under the hot, muscular weight of Zack's body. Remembers the softness of his breath against his throat. Remembers Zack's slow, half-crooked smile, full of mischievious sensuality. He remembers kisses like fire. And once, lying between them both, still sticky-sweet with sweat, with the remnants of Zack's sex. His skin burning to the touch. Sephiroth had watched, a small smile on his face. Afterwards, Cloud had felt that cool hair trail like silk across his skin, and a delicate touch caress his thigh as Sephiroth bent across him to claim Zack's mouth.
This memory burns him now, for he sees them in everything. They have redefined loneliness together.
VII. Sting
"Outside the rain keeps falling
Outside the drums are calling
Outside the flood won't wait
Outside they're hammering down the gate."
--Sting, Inside
"Understand this: every man plays a game,
If you know one different then shout out his name."
--Bruce Springsteen, the Hitter
His slim thighs are capable of bearing down an impossible pressure. They press against Rufus' ribs, and he almost can't breathe at all. Kadaj's scent lies over him like his cloak; it is bittersweet and mingled burnt oranges, cloves, leather and blood. His leather tastes of it: oranges and blood. Rufus thinks of blood oranges suddenly, and the memory pounces on him, visceral, unyielding. He has always been blessed (or cursed) with an eidetic memory. Everything comes back to him in a rush as he is pinned to his chair with Kadaj's coat against his tongue, the erection underneath insistent, the hands on his head forceful.
Remembrance. Blood orange juice on his tongue, still red and cold in the glass. It was morning and the kitchen was full of white, white on white reflected into infinity. So glassy, pure and clean he thought he had found the single corner of heaven in that dirty industrial slum. He'd been twelve years old, and that morning was the first time he ever caught sight of Tseng. Morning light pouring over that thick mass of long black hair. A young man, but with eyes so cold merely meeting them over a quiet greeting made butterflies dance in Rufus' stomach. Tseng hadn't answered him then. Rufus had known from that moment, this man will be mine- hands clenching into fists beneath the table and blood-orange sting acid-sweet on his tongue-
His tongue jolts against the salt of skin, the head of Kadaj's cock. It draws him back to himself. There's no choice at the moment, so he lets his mouth slide open, until it is filled with a swelling softness. He considers biting for a moment, but he can feel the pressure of Kadaj's fingers against his skull. They look so delicate, he looks so delicate, but the force in those fingers could crush his brainpan like an egg, and it's turning him on. His tongue swirls around the head, playing with the slit like a child with candy. He leans in, taking Kadaj to the root and begins to suck in a slow rhythm, moving back and fro, deeper and deeper. He can hear a soft intake of breath, feel the fingers tighten over his hood. Strange that Kadaj has not moved it.
But of course, Rufus realizes, this is not about me. It is about the body's need for release. And that spurs him on, because that puts him in control. This is about Kadaj's need. So Rufus gives it to him, every tongue trick, every burst of speed and slow, every edge of tempting teeth, even the deep-throat, fingers clenching into firm muscular buttocks, pulling his thrusts in hard enough to bruise.
He's never done this for Tseng. He wanted to, but he thought to be so wide open and wanton would tip the delicate balance of power that allowed them to be what they were. Tseng could split him open like a ripe fruit, yes, he could do it any time, and all the blood welling up would bleed out the old poison, but it would still leave Rufus on his knees. He'd sworn he'd never taint what they had with that. Never risk its annihilation that way.
Does Tseng know how often I've done this? For an instant advantage, for a way to break down some wall my acumen can't crumble? Rufus thinks back and realizes all the men he's been on his knees for are dead already, and can't speak. Can't tell tales of what his tongue feels like. Kadaj is nearing it, and Rufus lets him come. Takes it with only the briefest gag of distaste. Feels the slender iron body melt against his. There, there, he strokes the back of the thighs, the arch of the back. There, there, you son of a bitch.
Rufus purrs as he pulls away. Kadaj is still draped over him like a puppet with cut strings. He has a look on his face that is shocked, white. As if he never dreamed he'd go this far. Should it make things better, this innocent face? Clown-white, palpable childishness? It does not.
Once he'd leaned across a desk and kissed Sephiroth on the mouth. He'd opened it deep, let his tongue slide in, caressed every place he could think of in order to make him kiss back. Sephiroth had not reacted, not responded. He'd sat like a stone, and when Rufus pulled back, he merely looked down at his papers and lifted his pen. Rufus had half-smiled at that, at a hand well-played. If their situations were reversed, he would have done the same. A far cry to this poor second nightmare in his arms, pulse racing. Hard to imagine the rough cruelty he'd sensed in Kadaj only moments earlier.
Kadaj steps away, turns away. He's shaking. He draws the back of his hand across his mouth. Rufus feels a twinge of fury, till his face feels tight and cold. He throws off the hood, stands up sharply. "It's time to end this game." In the distance, his people are fighting a Bahamut, and he still has the taste of an enemy's seed on his tongue. He still smells blood and oranges.
"You had it all along."
It's time to hurt him. Time to avenge the tightness in his stomach, where he feels old and dirty and alone. "A good son would have known. You were practically on top of her."
He throws the box. In the sunlight it glints in hard silver flashes, like a bullet. Kadaj twists in the air like a tossed coin, but there was never any question of which way he'd fall.
In that moment, Rufus doesn't care anymore if he lives or dies, but he's going to shoot something. He tosses himself like a coin. Heads, you die. Tails, well, you've been there before. He hits the box with bullets, twice, before his body hits the net.
Sunlight on Tseng's long thick black hair. His stomach twists, but he says nothing.
VIII. Starless
Love is the child of an endless war,
Love is an open wound still raw..."
--Sting, Inside
"Be still, be calm, be quiet now, my precious boy,
Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more,
For it's much too late to get away or turn on the light:
The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight."
--The Cure, Lullaby
Loz's first memory is of blood-spray. His first game was played with fists against knives and metal poles. They have a joke that Loz was raised by wolves or wild street dogs. When he was cast aside by everyone and everything else, battle accepted him. Battle was his first father.
Picture the little silver-haired boy huddled on a frozen street. By then his muscle-mass was already above the norm. He was young in a time of flames and of gunfire in the streets. When the rooftops ran in glassy lead along the gutters and bricks exploded with frenzied pops. He learned to survive by slipping into the houses of the dead, like a sleek and muscular rat. Everything was fighting and eating and running.
There weren't playgrounds in those days. No child who belonged to anyone was ever left alone. The ones who were orphans wandered in packs, and for a time Loz had belonged to one such group. But then a man had come with a saccharine smile and invited the children to come with him. He had promised to save them from windchapped skin and growling bellies. But one by one the pretty ones, the delicate ones vanished, and Loz woke early one night with the sound of clanking chains in his ears. He knew, if not what was happening in detail, what was happening in abstract. Betrayal. Hurt. Disgrace.
He led the last of them out, in the darkness past the fizzled fishbowl gleam of lamplights, through twists to alleys where the light was blue from the moon or red from fires in the streets. Always, always, there were footsteps behind them. When the two other boys grew weary, Loz lifted them on his shoulders. He ran and ran.
In his mind the rat becomes the stupid one in the maze, because he could not find anywhere else to run but the old twisted playground where no one but the orphans ever went. A foolish place to hide, full of twisted metal and melted plastics and nothing whatsoever that could shield them. And there were dragging chains and footsteps and there was the gun... and not fast enough: Loz the big one, Loz the protector, could not protect them.
There was blood on the playground sand, red blood on filthy earth. Their wide eyes were without tears, like little dolls with their long hair and ragged clothes. Loz felt the determination that had sheltered him all his life slip away. Looking at death in that desolate playground, life itself became a game, a thing to smile and shrug at and not to care, never to care.
He didn't care even as he plunged his gloved fingers up into the pretty man's belly, till he found something amid the gore and the screams that beat like a heart and squeezed it (but the human heart is a lie).
He smiled.
In Loz's mind, battle is always that playground and life is forever a joke.
+
Loz knelt in the street, covered in dust and blood. His face was smeared with ash, he held in his arms the body of a dead child.
Kadaj said, "Come with me, and we will find Mother. Together. We will be brothers, you and I."
Yazoo stood a little bit back, smiling, and Loz thought: cold as a stone.
+
And Yazoo's first memory is of glass and gears. Some laboratory. His early life was bunks and flesh squeezed and pinched and injected, head aching and dizzy with unfamiliar words. He cannot recall when he first understood the tests that were being done, or the physical resemblance he shared with one who was fallen. He can, however, remember the exact moment when he realized that whatever it was they sought, they had not found in him. He was useless, discarded, catalogued and forgotten. Or he should have been.
Yazoo's understanding of beauty came in algebra, geometry, razor-thin precision. The combination of chemicals that slid through the syringe or the line of numerals on a computer screen might be beautiful. He did not understand human desire or human beauty until the day when he was eleven years old, pinned to the bunk in his cell like a butterfly, catalogued... and the man with the white coat, one of the assistants, running his hand through Yazoo's long silver hair, stroking along the back of a white thigh...
"So soft," he'd murmured, "like velvet. I didn't think you would be so soft. My velvet nightmare."
He hadn't understood the words, or the bite marks on his neck. The pain of it, twisted and nailed down without even dimmed light and no one to hear what he cried in the dark, if he spoke at all, which was seldom. How long had it gone on until he understood?
And then, at thirteen, he'd thought, I will teach you what a nightmare is. How he understood chemicals and perfection, and could open the automated lock. There, with the trigger of a gun warm against his fingers, he understood what desire was. When the bullets took his tormentor in the groin, and he thrashed and pleaded, and the scarlet spread like a dark curtain, destroying everything white, he understood what beauty was.
Because anything that can be broken so easily, deserves to be broken (like the human heart). Anything that creates an imperfection in perfect things deserves to be annihilated (like the human race).
+
And Kadaj is perfect.
+
The night might as well have been starless, for all the light in the room. When Loz woke, slicked in icy sweat from the dream, he found himself alone and shivering in the compound where the three brothers slept at that time. He could not stand it, to feel so alone again when only thin walls prevented him from seeing and touching skin that was like his and blood that pumped like his. So he slipped out the door, feeling his way in the darkness. In Kadaj's room he heard the sounds of fitful sleep, but in Yazoo's room there was no sound. Awake, then?
He carefully slipped open the door.
Yazoo sat in the far corner, huddled around his beautiful long-barreled gun. In the light of only a single taper, his hair seemed the same blued-steel color. He seemed to be crying. Loz took a step across the threshold, and the delicate face came up, grey eyes slicing into him.
"What is it?"
"I thought you were crying." Loz always found that when he spoke to Yazoo, he stumbled over easy words.
"I'm not crying," Yazoo replied coldly, "go away."
Loz turned and then stopped. "I don't want to be alone. There's a dream..."
"Close the door."
He closed it and turned, coming closer into the light of the taper, an eerie luminescence that painted shadows across Yazoo's face, leaving it sometimes unearthly in its beauty and sometimes twisted in its ugliness, depending on how he moved. Loz came to the corner and sat, Indian-style, leaning against the wall.
He told Yazoo of the playground from when he was a child, of the children he'd known in the streets of that town and of the man who'd done something, taken them away. How they'd all died in the filthy ash-strewn sand.
"That place is in my dreams sometimes," Loz whispered, "but I don't dream of that night. I'm walking through that place, and it seems like I'm alone, but there's someone else there. He speaks to me, and when he speaks to me everything becomes too real. I can't stop feeling things that leave me sick when I wake up, but I can't remember who was there or what that person said."
"Do you want me to hold you?" Yazoo said with a faint smirk. "Do you want me to stroke your hair and say, 'Don't cry, Loz?' "
"I'm not crying!"
Then he sighed and curled on the floor, a great muscular animal, trembling. After a moment, he felt Yazoo's hand on his shoulder, pushing him on to his back. Yazoo slid on top of him, long legs straddling his waist. Yazoo was nude, and his long hair draped across Loz's skin like cold silk. His skin was like velvet.
"Wh-what are you doing?" Loz hissed. His voice sounded impossibly wrong.
"Am I heavy?" Yazoo murmured, cheek against Loz's neck.
"No."
"Then shut up."
They lay that way. Loz drifted nearer and nearer warmth and real sleep. His hands, of their own volition, stroked at sweet softness until they eventually lay still.
"Don't you even know what to do in this sort of situation, you child?" Yazoo's voice was gentler with exhaustion.
"I think you were lying," Loz replied. "I think you were crying in the place where people lie."
"The place where people lie?"
"The human heart."
Loz felt Yazoo's cheek brush his as Yazoo lifted his head. Soft lips pressed with gentle force, and then with sudden savagery, opening his mouth for a tongue that left his own numb.
"The next time you come into this room, I'm going to fuck you," Yazoo hissed. "Fuck you and make you cry."
He lowered his head back in place, breathed out slowly, and then settled still. In each others' warmth, skin to skin, they slept.
IX: Two Threads
"Love is shameless banner unfurled;
Love's an explosion;
Love is the fire at the end of the world."
--Sting, Inside
"I'm just one or two years and a couple of changes behind you
In my lessons at love's pain and heartache school,
Where if you feel too free and you need something to remind you,
There's this loneliness springing up from your life
Like a fountain from a pool."
--Jackson Browne, Fountain of Sorrow
"General?"
"Hm?" Sephiroth's pen had been still for several minutes. Now he slightly lifted his head, regarding his aide with a faint smile. All the sunlight from the office windows refracted off a bookcase set at a poor (or possibly strategic) angle, so that it shone off his platinum hair but left his eyes partly shadowed. The effect was to soften their incandescent green to a sea-color.
"Is there something wrong?" His aide asked.
"Wrong? No." Sephiroth glanced up at the sunlight at his window. "But I think I should go out for a little while. Even a General," he added with quiet humor, "gets stiff and flabby if he sits in an office all day."
"But your reports-"
"You can do them, can't you?"
"I can, but you know I shouldn't, Sephiroth-sama-"
Sephiroth laid a gloved finger against his slightly curved lips and ducked out of the office.
*
"Kadaj?"
"Hm?" Kadaj looked up from his book, casting his classmate a smile of such soft beauty that his heart almost caught in his throat.
"If you-" The boy stumbled on his tongue, then whispered, "If you aren't ready when they quiz us, you'll be scolded. You should really be studying with the rest of us."
Kadaj's smile did not change. The soft blue of his eyes seemed shaded as if by dappled leaves, and there was a faint sadness at the heart.
"I think more clearly while I move," he said quietly, closing his book.
The classmate shifted. "If you're sure it's alright."
Kadaj's fingertips trailed across the boy's cheek. "Thank you," he said.
*
The sunlight is warm. It seems to spread the scent of the grass and the magnolia trees, the fragrance of green buds and clover. He strips off his jacket and lays it on the grass, taking his sword from its sheath and turning its blade to the earth. He kicks off his boots as well, and feels the solid breaths of the world around him.
First, there is stillness. He waits until his own breathing matches the rhythm of the earth. Slow cooling breezes brush his hair away from his face.
Then, he moves. His movements are slow and pronounced, each muscle slowly tensing as his body forms itself into the perfect positions of a kata. He holds them for long moments, allowing his body to stretch and his mind to clear.
Suddenly he is moving at a tremendous speed, having leapt from the last pose of the slow kata into a whirl of whipping gesture and flashing blade. His lips skin back from a smile of cold attentiveness. He feels the perfection of this blend of grace and violence sing within his veins.
He stops, a faint sheen of sweat cooling in the breeze. In the distance, someone calls out something in admiration.
"Ha! As amazing as ever, Kadaj!"
But that isn't what he heard at first. He heard, "The General is as amazing as ever!"
"Yes, he's untouchable."
*
Sephiroth's fingers curved over Zack's shoulder, ghosting over the sheen of water on the ripple of his bicep. He lowered his head, the long hair trailing across Zack's chest, his tongue tasting water and the sweetness of Zack's skin as it traced the outline of a dark nipple and rose with a rake of teeth in teasing kisses up to the side of the throat.
His lips opened in a circular pressure, sucking skin between his teeth and closing them gently, slowly, as his tongue worked in patterns of spiral and flick. He could hear Zack moan, breathy and deep.
Sephiroth shifted his weight, pushing Zack harder against the wall. His hand flattened against Zack's sternum and slowly slid downward, until the fingers wrapped firmly around his cock. His thumb rubbed up across the head, then he began to move his hand, a rough tight friction growing between them. Zack's breathing was fast, his mouth open, gasping...
*
"Sephiroth..."
Kadaj stopped, his fingers tight around the velvet softness of his classmate's cock. His lips brushed Adavon's ear as he whispered, "What did you say?"
The boy flushed a little with embarrassment. "I said, not so rough," he murmured. Shrouded by his hair, the sudden sharp narrowing of Kadaj's eyes was invisible.
Kadaj's hand was a sharp white blur, lifting from its place on his lover's hip to send a trickle of crimson leaking from the bruised corner of Adaron's mouth. The boy fell, helplessly, staring up in shock as Kadaj calmly dropped to his knees in front of him. The hand that hit took hold of Adaron's chin and tilted his startled, frightened eyes to Kadaj's.
"Do you know what happens to boys who lie?" he asked softly.
"Kadaj," Adaron murmured. He had never seen anything to hint at this violence, and it terrified him.
Kadaj gripped Adaron's still-hard cock with his right hand, tightening his fingers just behind the head until the other boy gasped. Firmly, Kadaj gripped the boy's knee and yanked it upward across Kadaj's thigh. Two long fingers slammed forcefully into Adaron's anus.
"They suffer," Kadaj whispered. Three fingers. They strained deep and twisted. Adaron moaned.
Kadaj said sharply, "What did you say?"
"I don't know," the boy whimpered. "Why are you angry with me?"
Kadaj shook his head. "You're still lying."
His fingers slid out of Adaron's ass, and he gripped the knee again, leaving white marks on its skin as he yanked the boy up off the ground. His hard grip never left the boy's cock, tormentingly tight.
Kadaj thrust. He made no attempt at gentleness, only to still some of the clear red fury that had tightened inside him. He did not understand why he was so furious, but he knew it was Adaron's fault. He set a punishing rhythm, pounding so hard that Adaron's shoulders and head slid back and forth across the floor. Tears leaked from the boy's eyes.
*
Sephiroth slammed shut the book and kicked his chair so hard that it splintered into pieces.
"These vermin..." He hissed. "They are hurting Mother."
*
Kadaj shuddered into his mattress. Beside him, Adaron had stopped crying. Kadaj leaned over and kissed the boy's cheek.
"I'm sorry I went off like that. Can you forgive me?"
"I- of course I can."
Kadaj smiled. "Alright. Then you better go back to your room."
He didn't take long to fall asleep after Adaron rose, on trembling legs, to the door.
Dreaming, Kadaj whispered, "Why are they hurting you... Mother?"
X: Circuits in Your Brain
"Love is a violent star,
A tide of destruction;
Love is an angry scar,
The pain of instruction;
Love is a violation, a mutilation, capitulation;
Love is annihilation."
--Sting, Inside
"I’m gonna rock you like a baby when the cities fall.
We will rise as the buildings crumble,
Float there and watch it all;
Amidst the burning, we’ll be churning.
You know, love will be our wings.
The passion rises up from the ashes
When the world ends."
--Dave Matthews Band, When the World Ends
The change is complete at that moment, clutching the box that holds all that is left of his Mother except for threads of tangled DNA. He is falling and above him the sun casts a brilliant crown of flame over Cloud's pale hair. His heart is still twisted with pain and the thought of failure, utterly anathema, sparks a deep and violent wave of black lust for vengeance.
Someone who believes that the human mind is basically a computer, like Dr. Hojo perhaps, would describe that moment as a connected circuit. To Kadaj, it is more like their minds, already close enough to echo through time, have simply overlapped. His pain, his hunger, his rage, his desires, all are soothed by the sheer magnitude of Sephiroth's emotions, soothed and comforted and ultimately subsumed by them.
When that black inferno washes his sense of self into nothingness, Sephiroth Ascendant, it seems Kadaj drifts for eons in dreamless sleep. Then he stands in a corridor, a long hallway limned and lit by steady red light. On each side of the hallway, at irregular intervals, are doors, also glowing red at their edges, and each is marked with a strange design. Geometric patterns, increasing in their complexity as they wind away from him into a horizon point.
Door One:
Wrapped in warmth, unable to move. It is a comforting sensation. Sucking at something fills his mouth with the rich sweetness of milk. Silken hair, long, brushes his cheek and his eyes slowly attempt to open. Blurred form against the light: it smells female.
Door Six:
Slash of steel against bicep, weak, burning. He stares up into the face of his weapons instructor, who smiles like a jackal. "You're going to have to come at me for real, boy." He lunges.
Door Eight:
Mako chamber. It feels like insects are crawling beneath every surface in his body. They're even crawling in his eyes and his sex. He tries to scream but his mouth is full of a taste of blood and flowers. How long has it been? Hours? Days.
Door Nineteen:
First time. Hesitant, full of images of softness, of colored light mingled together. It resolves itself slowly: Sephiroth's first time.
Black hair, willing lips. Young, so young he hardly recognizes the man he tortured not so long ago. This is a good match in that they both keep themselves completely contained except for the pleasure shared, the caresses and bites and slip of hot tongue or gentle slicked finger here or there- it is a bad match in that there is no fire. In both of them, for both of them, the mystery of what lay behind the mask was the attraction, and once even half lowered, the sex degenerates into a lesson.
Words like, "Yes, God yes," or "I love you," don't factor in. In their place, "More of an acute angle," and "Seven o'clock," and "Use your fingernails." It still sweeps them both away with pleasure, but there is no moment of disconnect, no emotional level.
When orgasm comes, the serrated feeling of loss of self that always grips Kadaj in that moment is not in it, but something strange and shadowy surfaces in the aftermath. Sephiroth's hand runs over Tseng's body, and there is no sense of distance, of touching another person. He feels duplicated, replicated and condensed. The feeling puzzles him, leaving no room for affection or complication. He gathers his clothes and goes.
Door Twenty-one:
President Shinra's hand cupping his privates. Disgust, rage. His gloved fingers caress the side of the flabby throat, squeeze... squeeze. Shinra's erection brushes against his thigh. Sick, he stalks from the room.
Door Twenty-six:
A dream of Jenova. A broken planet, the atmosphere on fire, glows with the multiple warm and bloody hues of death. Its entire crust is an ashfield of demolished cities and moving columns and clouds of burning air.
Door Thirty-eight:
Masamune slices upward through Zack's cheek, splintering bone. All the doors further back than twenty-six are closed to him now, so he is not forced to remember all the nights he watched the light lie on that cheek like a kiss and felt, as with no one else, enhanced by the depths of what clutched his heart when he looked at him.
Door Fifty-two:
Held in warmth, unable to move. It is not a comforting sensation. Sucking at something fills his mouth with the rich sweetness of milk. Lights flash in the background, red, and his eyes slowly attempt to open. Blurred form against the light: it smells male.
Door Sixty-six:
First time. Insistent, full of tension and disintegrated resistance, of colored light mingled together. It resolves itself slowly: Kadaj's first time.
It felt wrong at first, as if he were being smothered, obliterated by the sensations that filled him. Like losing himself in the pulses beating in every extended vein. But there are so many useless words, "I love you," and "that feels so good," even "I'm sorry." He finally releases himself to it, and as always, is swept away.
As always, a part of him seems to die when he comes, a part of his private universe opened for public view and annihilated.
These things he knows, so onward to the 1000th door:
It's a white room, shining like ivory mirrors. Perfectly cubicle, enclosed, windowless and unadorned. All there is inside it is a pool of spreading blood, and in the opposite corner, a chair with a man seated upon it.
The man wears black, and his hair is platinum silk, trickling into the nothingness of white, hardly darker. Kadaj draws back, but as the beautiful face rises, there is nothing of madness or of megalomania in his expression. It is gentle, open, a little sad. That sadness lives in his brilliant green eyes, descending to unspeakable depths.
Kadaj moves toward him. The blood curls out at once, wrapping itself up Kadaj's boots, covering him with bright red and the reek of it. He falls on the slick stones, hand extended helplessly for Sephiroth to save him.
"Soon it will envelop this room," Sephiroth says. "Soon of me there will be nothing left. To fight it you must touch it. If you touch it, it will have you utterly."
Crimson covers him.
It is so very cold and he is unable to move. He can feel slender but strong arms around him, cradling him. His eyes struggle to open, see a figure against the light. A familiar scent, a masculine scent. A brother: one who can hold, touch. Kadaj wants to warn him of the blood's corruption, that it is all over him, dripping warm crimson. But he knows instantly that this is his blood. A second scent, tantalizing, lingers for a moment. Then it is gone in a sudden breeze of flowers.
A collection of chapters 1-10, the best way to read it.
Pairing(s): Sephiroth/Zack, Sephiroth/Cloud, Sephiroth/Zack/Cloud, Zack/Cloud, Yazoo/Loz, Kadaj/Rufus, Rufus/Tseng, with hints of Sephiroth/Kadaj, Sephiroth/Tseng, and Kadaj/unnamed.
Rating: NC-17 for the collection, chapters are across the board.
Warnings: violence, sexuality, angst, d/s, dubious consent, rape, adult themes.
Notes: For starters, since it seems important to note these days, this fic contains portrayal of non-consensual sex and child abuse; I am not and this fic is not condoning these things. Secondly, be warned that many of these chapters are dreamlike, and that the progression of the chapters does not follow a specific storyline: hence, I call this the Dream Arc. The final chapter should make clear what I had in mind for these chapters to express. This is not the end of this epic, just of the dream segments.
VI: Redefine
"Inside the songs of our defeat,
They sing of treaties broken.
Inside this army's in retreat;
We hide beneath the thunder's call."
--Sting, Inside
"I thought it was harvest time.
You always loved the smell of the wood burning.
She with her honey hair,
Dalhousie Castle,
She would meet you there."
--Tori Amos, Toast
Watching them together made the skin tingle with electric shock. It burned and stirred, a mixture of awe and jealousy and desire. It left him feeling fragmented, as if the sheer force of their personalities could twist and transform and shatter. The beauty was a drug, a guilty pleasure. He should not have watched. He was helpless not to watch.
Zack's bare back arched, his tailbone pressed against rough stone. His hair a visual glissando, tossed darkness that the sunset light turned to gold. The sculpted grace of his body, nearly nude, was something Cloud would see forever echoed in painting and chiseled stone. It was what the master artist sought and never captured.
Sephiroth fit to him like an intricate jewel of interlocking pieces. He glittered, white as spun ice and moonlight. It seemed impossible that a creature so ethereal, so visually cold, could possess such strength and passion. That he could move against Zack, dripping sensuality, leaving skin pink and breath harsh with longing.
Where they met: such heat, such control; one should have melted, yet instead there was an ever-new dynamic of volcanic union. It left Cloud sweat-slick and torturously hard. He should not have watched them. What good could come of knowing how Sephiroth's hands closed over Zack's broad shoulders, or how Zack's tongue looked tracing one of Sephiroth's nipples? How one fit into the other as if made to do so. How they redefined beauty together.
+
He thinks of Zack whenever he drinks. When the first bitter burn touches his tongue, he thinks of the way Zack tasted the first time they kissed. He tasted of liquor, and laughed into the kiss. He nipped gently at Cloud's lower lip, sucked it and raked it gently as he drew back. His hands had been like hot brands over Cloud's hips.
When the alcohol settles, his mood invariably darkens. He thinks of other things. Sometimes he thinks of sitting in a ruined playground under a dry sun. Thinks of watching the dark honey hair of a pretty girl spread out behind her, of listening to her soft, sweet voice and thinking then only of a desolate time she had made him remember with her unknowing questions. How the demure tilt of her body was so opposite to his he thought of that it was almost as if they were the two pieces of the yin-yang set.
And he thought of how Zack had looked, flushed with fury, standing tall and proud, facing down Sephiroth. How his sword had barely been drawn and leveled, a silver flash, when Masamune sliced into him. Masamune like a river of water. Sephiroth's eyes, icy, lingered somewhere between amusement and impatience, containing not a hint of memory. As if those slick, satin nights had never occured, or had meant nothing to him. Not even as if the crimson flowing from Zack's wounds seemed beautiful to him, only as if they were all buzzing flies distracting him from his goals. How they had redefined pain together.
+
The cold wind whips at Cloud's face and hair. Beneath him, the chopper growls like an eager hunting cat. A violent twinge burns where the stigma scars his arm, as if mere thoughts of Sephiroth bring the planet's rage to a boiling crescendo. He winces and touches it absently. Around him the landscape twists and thickens, icy trees forever reminding him of him.
He remembers lying tangled under the hot, muscular weight of Zack's body. Remembers the softness of his breath against his throat. Remembers Zack's slow, half-crooked smile, full of mischievious sensuality. He remembers kisses like fire. And once, lying between them both, still sticky-sweet with sweat, with the remnants of Zack's sex. His skin burning to the touch. Sephiroth had watched, a small smile on his face. Afterwards, Cloud had felt that cool hair trail like silk across his skin, and a delicate touch caress his thigh as Sephiroth bent across him to claim Zack's mouth.
This memory burns him now, for he sees them in everything. They have redefined loneliness together.
VII. Sting
"Outside the rain keeps falling
Outside the drums are calling
Outside the flood won't wait
Outside they're hammering down the gate."
--Sting, Inside
"Understand this: every man plays a game,
If you know one different then shout out his name."
--Bruce Springsteen, the Hitter
His slim thighs are capable of bearing down an impossible pressure. They press against Rufus' ribs, and he almost can't breathe at all. Kadaj's scent lies over him like his cloak; it is bittersweet and mingled burnt oranges, cloves, leather and blood. His leather tastes of it: oranges and blood. Rufus thinks of blood oranges suddenly, and the memory pounces on him, visceral, unyielding. He has always been blessed (or cursed) with an eidetic memory. Everything comes back to him in a rush as he is pinned to his chair with Kadaj's coat against his tongue, the erection underneath insistent, the hands on his head forceful.
Remembrance. Blood orange juice on his tongue, still red and cold in the glass. It was morning and the kitchen was full of white, white on white reflected into infinity. So glassy, pure and clean he thought he had found the single corner of heaven in that dirty industrial slum. He'd been twelve years old, and that morning was the first time he ever caught sight of Tseng. Morning light pouring over that thick mass of long black hair. A young man, but with eyes so cold merely meeting them over a quiet greeting made butterflies dance in Rufus' stomach. Tseng hadn't answered him then. Rufus had known from that moment, this man will be mine- hands clenching into fists beneath the table and blood-orange sting acid-sweet on his tongue-
His tongue jolts against the salt of skin, the head of Kadaj's cock. It draws him back to himself. There's no choice at the moment, so he lets his mouth slide open, until it is filled with a swelling softness. He considers biting for a moment, but he can feel the pressure of Kadaj's fingers against his skull. They look so delicate, he looks so delicate, but the force in those fingers could crush his brainpan like an egg, and it's turning him on. His tongue swirls around the head, playing with the slit like a child with candy. He leans in, taking Kadaj to the root and begins to suck in a slow rhythm, moving back and fro, deeper and deeper. He can hear a soft intake of breath, feel the fingers tighten over his hood. Strange that Kadaj has not moved it.
But of course, Rufus realizes, this is not about me. It is about the body's need for release. And that spurs him on, because that puts him in control. This is about Kadaj's need. So Rufus gives it to him, every tongue trick, every burst of speed and slow, every edge of tempting teeth, even the deep-throat, fingers clenching into firm muscular buttocks, pulling his thrusts in hard enough to bruise.
He's never done this for Tseng. He wanted to, but he thought to be so wide open and wanton would tip the delicate balance of power that allowed them to be what they were. Tseng could split him open like a ripe fruit, yes, he could do it any time, and all the blood welling up would bleed out the old poison, but it would still leave Rufus on his knees. He'd sworn he'd never taint what they had with that. Never risk its annihilation that way.
Does Tseng know how often I've done this? For an instant advantage, for a way to break down some wall my acumen can't crumble? Rufus thinks back and realizes all the men he's been on his knees for are dead already, and can't speak. Can't tell tales of what his tongue feels like. Kadaj is nearing it, and Rufus lets him come. Takes it with only the briefest gag of distaste. Feels the slender iron body melt against his. There, there, he strokes the back of the thighs, the arch of the back. There, there, you son of a bitch.
Rufus purrs as he pulls away. Kadaj is still draped over him like a puppet with cut strings. He has a look on his face that is shocked, white. As if he never dreamed he'd go this far. Should it make things better, this innocent face? Clown-white, palpable childishness? It does not.
Once he'd leaned across a desk and kissed Sephiroth on the mouth. He'd opened it deep, let his tongue slide in, caressed every place he could think of in order to make him kiss back. Sephiroth had not reacted, not responded. He'd sat like a stone, and when Rufus pulled back, he merely looked down at his papers and lifted his pen. Rufus had half-smiled at that, at a hand well-played. If their situations were reversed, he would have done the same. A far cry to this poor second nightmare in his arms, pulse racing. Hard to imagine the rough cruelty he'd sensed in Kadaj only moments earlier.
Kadaj steps away, turns away. He's shaking. He draws the back of his hand across his mouth. Rufus feels a twinge of fury, till his face feels tight and cold. He throws off the hood, stands up sharply. "It's time to end this game." In the distance, his people are fighting a Bahamut, and he still has the taste of an enemy's seed on his tongue. He still smells blood and oranges.
"You had it all along."
It's time to hurt him. Time to avenge the tightness in his stomach, where he feels old and dirty and alone. "A good son would have known. You were practically on top of her."
He throws the box. In the sunlight it glints in hard silver flashes, like a bullet. Kadaj twists in the air like a tossed coin, but there was never any question of which way he'd fall.
In that moment, Rufus doesn't care anymore if he lives or dies, but he's going to shoot something. He tosses himself like a coin. Heads, you die. Tails, well, you've been there before. He hits the box with bullets, twice, before his body hits the net.
Sunlight on Tseng's long thick black hair. His stomach twists, but he says nothing.
VIII. Starless
Love is the child of an endless war,
Love is an open wound still raw..."
--Sting, Inside
"Be still, be calm, be quiet now, my precious boy,
Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more,
For it's much too late to get away or turn on the light:
The spiderman is having you for dinner tonight."
--The Cure, Lullaby
Loz's first memory is of blood-spray. His first game was played with fists against knives and metal poles. They have a joke that Loz was raised by wolves or wild street dogs. When he was cast aside by everyone and everything else, battle accepted him. Battle was his first father.
Picture the little silver-haired boy huddled on a frozen street. By then his muscle-mass was already above the norm. He was young in a time of flames and of gunfire in the streets. When the rooftops ran in glassy lead along the gutters and bricks exploded with frenzied pops. He learned to survive by slipping into the houses of the dead, like a sleek and muscular rat. Everything was fighting and eating and running.
There weren't playgrounds in those days. No child who belonged to anyone was ever left alone. The ones who were orphans wandered in packs, and for a time Loz had belonged to one such group. But then a man had come with a saccharine smile and invited the children to come with him. He had promised to save them from windchapped skin and growling bellies. But one by one the pretty ones, the delicate ones vanished, and Loz woke early one night with the sound of clanking chains in his ears. He knew, if not what was happening in detail, what was happening in abstract. Betrayal. Hurt. Disgrace.
He led the last of them out, in the darkness past the fizzled fishbowl gleam of lamplights, through twists to alleys where the light was blue from the moon or red from fires in the streets. Always, always, there were footsteps behind them. When the two other boys grew weary, Loz lifted them on his shoulders. He ran and ran.
In his mind the rat becomes the stupid one in the maze, because he could not find anywhere else to run but the old twisted playground where no one but the orphans ever went. A foolish place to hide, full of twisted metal and melted plastics and nothing whatsoever that could shield them. And there were dragging chains and footsteps and there was the gun... and not fast enough: Loz the big one, Loz the protector, could not protect them.
There was blood on the playground sand, red blood on filthy earth. Their wide eyes were without tears, like little dolls with their long hair and ragged clothes. Loz felt the determination that had sheltered him all his life slip away. Looking at death in that desolate playground, life itself became a game, a thing to smile and shrug at and not to care, never to care.
He didn't care even as he plunged his gloved fingers up into the pretty man's belly, till he found something amid the gore and the screams that beat like a heart and squeezed it (but the human heart is a lie).
He smiled.
In Loz's mind, battle is always that playground and life is forever a joke.
+
Loz knelt in the street, covered in dust and blood. His face was smeared with ash, he held in his arms the body of a dead child.
Kadaj said, "Come with me, and we will find Mother. Together. We will be brothers, you and I."
Yazoo stood a little bit back, smiling, and Loz thought: cold as a stone.
+
And Yazoo's first memory is of glass and gears. Some laboratory. His early life was bunks and flesh squeezed and pinched and injected, head aching and dizzy with unfamiliar words. He cannot recall when he first understood the tests that were being done, or the physical resemblance he shared with one who was fallen. He can, however, remember the exact moment when he realized that whatever it was they sought, they had not found in him. He was useless, discarded, catalogued and forgotten. Or he should have been.
Yazoo's understanding of beauty came in algebra, geometry, razor-thin precision. The combination of chemicals that slid through the syringe or the line of numerals on a computer screen might be beautiful. He did not understand human desire or human beauty until the day when he was eleven years old, pinned to the bunk in his cell like a butterfly, catalogued... and the man with the white coat, one of the assistants, running his hand through Yazoo's long silver hair, stroking along the back of a white thigh...
"So soft," he'd murmured, "like velvet. I didn't think you would be so soft. My velvet nightmare."
He hadn't understood the words, or the bite marks on his neck. The pain of it, twisted and nailed down without even dimmed light and no one to hear what he cried in the dark, if he spoke at all, which was seldom. How long had it gone on until he understood?
And then, at thirteen, he'd thought, I will teach you what a nightmare is. How he understood chemicals and perfection, and could open the automated lock. There, with the trigger of a gun warm against his fingers, he understood what desire was. When the bullets took his tormentor in the groin, and he thrashed and pleaded, and the scarlet spread like a dark curtain, destroying everything white, he understood what beauty was.
Because anything that can be broken so easily, deserves to be broken (like the human heart). Anything that creates an imperfection in perfect things deserves to be annihilated (like the human race).
+
And Kadaj is perfect.
+
The night might as well have been starless, for all the light in the room. When Loz woke, slicked in icy sweat from the dream, he found himself alone and shivering in the compound where the three brothers slept at that time. He could not stand it, to feel so alone again when only thin walls prevented him from seeing and touching skin that was like his and blood that pumped like his. So he slipped out the door, feeling his way in the darkness. In Kadaj's room he heard the sounds of fitful sleep, but in Yazoo's room there was no sound. Awake, then?
He carefully slipped open the door.
Yazoo sat in the far corner, huddled around his beautiful long-barreled gun. In the light of only a single taper, his hair seemed the same blued-steel color. He seemed to be crying. Loz took a step across the threshold, and the delicate face came up, grey eyes slicing into him.
"What is it?"
"I thought you were crying." Loz always found that when he spoke to Yazoo, he stumbled over easy words.
"I'm not crying," Yazoo replied coldly, "go away."
Loz turned and then stopped. "I don't want to be alone. There's a dream..."
"Close the door."
He closed it and turned, coming closer into the light of the taper, an eerie luminescence that painted shadows across Yazoo's face, leaving it sometimes unearthly in its beauty and sometimes twisted in its ugliness, depending on how he moved. Loz came to the corner and sat, Indian-style, leaning against the wall.
He told Yazoo of the playground from when he was a child, of the children he'd known in the streets of that town and of the man who'd done something, taken them away. How they'd all died in the filthy ash-strewn sand.
"That place is in my dreams sometimes," Loz whispered, "but I don't dream of that night. I'm walking through that place, and it seems like I'm alone, but there's someone else there. He speaks to me, and when he speaks to me everything becomes too real. I can't stop feeling things that leave me sick when I wake up, but I can't remember who was there or what that person said."
"Do you want me to hold you?" Yazoo said with a faint smirk. "Do you want me to stroke your hair and say, 'Don't cry, Loz?' "
"I'm not crying!"
Then he sighed and curled on the floor, a great muscular animal, trembling. After a moment, he felt Yazoo's hand on his shoulder, pushing him on to his back. Yazoo slid on top of him, long legs straddling his waist. Yazoo was nude, and his long hair draped across Loz's skin like cold silk. His skin was like velvet.
"Wh-what are you doing?" Loz hissed. His voice sounded impossibly wrong.
"Am I heavy?" Yazoo murmured, cheek against Loz's neck.
"No."
"Then shut up."
They lay that way. Loz drifted nearer and nearer warmth and real sleep. His hands, of their own volition, stroked at sweet softness until they eventually lay still.
"Don't you even know what to do in this sort of situation, you child?" Yazoo's voice was gentler with exhaustion.
"I think you were lying," Loz replied. "I think you were crying in the place where people lie."
"The place where people lie?"
"The human heart."
Loz felt Yazoo's cheek brush his as Yazoo lifted his head. Soft lips pressed with gentle force, and then with sudden savagery, opening his mouth for a tongue that left his own numb.
"The next time you come into this room, I'm going to fuck you," Yazoo hissed. "Fuck you and make you cry."
He lowered his head back in place, breathed out slowly, and then settled still. In each others' warmth, skin to skin, they slept.
IX: Two Threads
"Love is shameless banner unfurled;
Love's an explosion;
Love is the fire at the end of the world."
--Sting, Inside
"I'm just one or two years and a couple of changes behind you
In my lessons at love's pain and heartache school,
Where if you feel too free and you need something to remind you,
There's this loneliness springing up from your life
Like a fountain from a pool."
--Jackson Browne, Fountain of Sorrow
"General?"
"Hm?" Sephiroth's pen had been still for several minutes. Now he slightly lifted his head, regarding his aide with a faint smile. All the sunlight from the office windows refracted off a bookcase set at a poor (or possibly strategic) angle, so that it shone off his platinum hair but left his eyes partly shadowed. The effect was to soften their incandescent green to a sea-color.
"Is there something wrong?" His aide asked.
"Wrong? No." Sephiroth glanced up at the sunlight at his window. "But I think I should go out for a little while. Even a General," he added with quiet humor, "gets stiff and flabby if he sits in an office all day."
"But your reports-"
"You can do them, can't you?"
"I can, but you know I shouldn't, Sephiroth-sama-"
Sephiroth laid a gloved finger against his slightly curved lips and ducked out of the office.
*
"Kadaj?"
"Hm?" Kadaj looked up from his book, casting his classmate a smile of such soft beauty that his heart almost caught in his throat.
"If you-" The boy stumbled on his tongue, then whispered, "If you aren't ready when they quiz us, you'll be scolded. You should really be studying with the rest of us."
Kadaj's smile did not change. The soft blue of his eyes seemed shaded as if by dappled leaves, and there was a faint sadness at the heart.
"I think more clearly while I move," he said quietly, closing his book.
The classmate shifted. "If you're sure it's alright."
Kadaj's fingertips trailed across the boy's cheek. "Thank you," he said.
*
The sunlight is warm. It seems to spread the scent of the grass and the magnolia trees, the fragrance of green buds and clover. He strips off his jacket and lays it on the grass, taking his sword from its sheath and turning its blade to the earth. He kicks off his boots as well, and feels the solid breaths of the world around him.
First, there is stillness. He waits until his own breathing matches the rhythm of the earth. Slow cooling breezes brush his hair away from his face.
Then, he moves. His movements are slow and pronounced, each muscle slowly tensing as his body forms itself into the perfect positions of a kata. He holds them for long moments, allowing his body to stretch and his mind to clear.
Suddenly he is moving at a tremendous speed, having leapt from the last pose of the slow kata into a whirl of whipping gesture and flashing blade. His lips skin back from a smile of cold attentiveness. He feels the perfection of this blend of grace and violence sing within his veins.
He stops, a faint sheen of sweat cooling in the breeze. In the distance, someone calls out something in admiration.
"Ha! As amazing as ever, Kadaj!"
But that isn't what he heard at first. He heard, "The General is as amazing as ever!"
"Yes, he's untouchable."
*
Sephiroth's fingers curved over Zack's shoulder, ghosting over the sheen of water on the ripple of his bicep. He lowered his head, the long hair trailing across Zack's chest, his tongue tasting water and the sweetness of Zack's skin as it traced the outline of a dark nipple and rose with a rake of teeth in teasing kisses up to the side of the throat.
His lips opened in a circular pressure, sucking skin between his teeth and closing them gently, slowly, as his tongue worked in patterns of spiral and flick. He could hear Zack moan, breathy and deep.
Sephiroth shifted his weight, pushing Zack harder against the wall. His hand flattened against Zack's sternum and slowly slid downward, until the fingers wrapped firmly around his cock. His thumb rubbed up across the head, then he began to move his hand, a rough tight friction growing between them. Zack's breathing was fast, his mouth open, gasping...
*
"Sephiroth..."
Kadaj stopped, his fingers tight around the velvet softness of his classmate's cock. His lips brushed Adavon's ear as he whispered, "What did you say?"
The boy flushed a little with embarrassment. "I said, not so rough," he murmured. Shrouded by his hair, the sudden sharp narrowing of Kadaj's eyes was invisible.
Kadaj's hand was a sharp white blur, lifting from its place on his lover's hip to send a trickle of crimson leaking from the bruised corner of Adaron's mouth. The boy fell, helplessly, staring up in shock as Kadaj calmly dropped to his knees in front of him. The hand that hit took hold of Adaron's chin and tilted his startled, frightened eyes to Kadaj's.
"Do you know what happens to boys who lie?" he asked softly.
"Kadaj," Adaron murmured. He had never seen anything to hint at this violence, and it terrified him.
Kadaj gripped Adaron's still-hard cock with his right hand, tightening his fingers just behind the head until the other boy gasped. Firmly, Kadaj gripped the boy's knee and yanked it upward across Kadaj's thigh. Two long fingers slammed forcefully into Adaron's anus.
"They suffer," Kadaj whispered. Three fingers. They strained deep and twisted. Adaron moaned.
Kadaj said sharply, "What did you say?"
"I don't know," the boy whimpered. "Why are you angry with me?"
Kadaj shook his head. "You're still lying."
His fingers slid out of Adaron's ass, and he gripped the knee again, leaving white marks on its skin as he yanked the boy up off the ground. His hard grip never left the boy's cock, tormentingly tight.
Kadaj thrust. He made no attempt at gentleness, only to still some of the clear red fury that had tightened inside him. He did not understand why he was so furious, but he knew it was Adaron's fault. He set a punishing rhythm, pounding so hard that Adaron's shoulders and head slid back and forth across the floor. Tears leaked from the boy's eyes.
*
Sephiroth slammed shut the book and kicked his chair so hard that it splintered into pieces.
"These vermin..." He hissed. "They are hurting Mother."
*
Kadaj shuddered into his mattress. Beside him, Adaron had stopped crying. Kadaj leaned over and kissed the boy's cheek.
"I'm sorry I went off like that. Can you forgive me?"
"I- of course I can."
Kadaj smiled. "Alright. Then you better go back to your room."
He didn't take long to fall asleep after Adaron rose, on trembling legs, to the door.
Dreaming, Kadaj whispered, "Why are they hurting you... Mother?"
X: Circuits in Your Brain
"Love is a violent star,
A tide of destruction;
Love is an angry scar,
The pain of instruction;
Love is a violation, a mutilation, capitulation;
Love is annihilation."
--Sting, Inside
"I’m gonna rock you like a baby when the cities fall.
We will rise as the buildings crumble,
Float there and watch it all;
Amidst the burning, we’ll be churning.
You know, love will be our wings.
The passion rises up from the ashes
When the world ends."
--Dave Matthews Band, When the World Ends
The change is complete at that moment, clutching the box that holds all that is left of his Mother except for threads of tangled DNA. He is falling and above him the sun casts a brilliant crown of flame over Cloud's pale hair. His heart is still twisted with pain and the thought of failure, utterly anathema, sparks a deep and violent wave of black lust for vengeance.
Someone who believes that the human mind is basically a computer, like Dr. Hojo perhaps, would describe that moment as a connected circuit. To Kadaj, it is more like their minds, already close enough to echo through time, have simply overlapped. His pain, his hunger, his rage, his desires, all are soothed by the sheer magnitude of Sephiroth's emotions, soothed and comforted and ultimately subsumed by them.
When that black inferno washes his sense of self into nothingness, Sephiroth Ascendant, it seems Kadaj drifts for eons in dreamless sleep. Then he stands in a corridor, a long hallway limned and lit by steady red light. On each side of the hallway, at irregular intervals, are doors, also glowing red at their edges, and each is marked with a strange design. Geometric patterns, increasing in their complexity as they wind away from him into a horizon point.
Door One:
Wrapped in warmth, unable to move. It is a comforting sensation. Sucking at something fills his mouth with the rich sweetness of milk. Silken hair, long, brushes his cheek and his eyes slowly attempt to open. Blurred form against the light: it smells female.
Door Six:
Slash of steel against bicep, weak, burning. He stares up into the face of his weapons instructor, who smiles like a jackal. "You're going to have to come at me for real, boy." He lunges.
Door Eight:
Mako chamber. It feels like insects are crawling beneath every surface in his body. They're even crawling in his eyes and his sex. He tries to scream but his mouth is full of a taste of blood and flowers. How long has it been? Hours? Days.
Door Nineteen:
First time. Hesitant, full of images of softness, of colored light mingled together. It resolves itself slowly: Sephiroth's first time.
Black hair, willing lips. Young, so young he hardly recognizes the man he tortured not so long ago. This is a good match in that they both keep themselves completely contained except for the pleasure shared, the caresses and bites and slip of hot tongue or gentle slicked finger here or there- it is a bad match in that there is no fire. In both of them, for both of them, the mystery of what lay behind the mask was the attraction, and once even half lowered, the sex degenerates into a lesson.
Words like, "Yes, God yes," or "I love you," don't factor in. In their place, "More of an acute angle," and "Seven o'clock," and "Use your fingernails." It still sweeps them both away with pleasure, but there is no moment of disconnect, no emotional level.
When orgasm comes, the serrated feeling of loss of self that always grips Kadaj in that moment is not in it, but something strange and shadowy surfaces in the aftermath. Sephiroth's hand runs over Tseng's body, and there is no sense of distance, of touching another person. He feels duplicated, replicated and condensed. The feeling puzzles him, leaving no room for affection or complication. He gathers his clothes and goes.
Door Twenty-one:
President Shinra's hand cupping his privates. Disgust, rage. His gloved fingers caress the side of the flabby throat, squeeze... squeeze. Shinra's erection brushes against his thigh. Sick, he stalks from the room.
Door Twenty-six:
A dream of Jenova. A broken planet, the atmosphere on fire, glows with the multiple warm and bloody hues of death. Its entire crust is an ashfield of demolished cities and moving columns and clouds of burning air.
Door Thirty-eight:
Masamune slices upward through Zack's cheek, splintering bone. All the doors further back than twenty-six are closed to him now, so he is not forced to remember all the nights he watched the light lie on that cheek like a kiss and felt, as with no one else, enhanced by the depths of what clutched his heart when he looked at him.
Door Fifty-two:
Held in warmth, unable to move. It is not a comforting sensation. Sucking at something fills his mouth with the rich sweetness of milk. Lights flash in the background, red, and his eyes slowly attempt to open. Blurred form against the light: it smells male.
Door Sixty-six:
First time. Insistent, full of tension and disintegrated resistance, of colored light mingled together. It resolves itself slowly: Kadaj's first time.
It felt wrong at first, as if he were being smothered, obliterated by the sensations that filled him. Like losing himself in the pulses beating in every extended vein. But there are so many useless words, "I love you," and "that feels so good," even "I'm sorry." He finally releases himself to it, and as always, is swept away.
As always, a part of him seems to die when he comes, a part of his private universe opened for public view and annihilated.
These things he knows, so onward to the 1000th door:
It's a white room, shining like ivory mirrors. Perfectly cubicle, enclosed, windowless and unadorned. All there is inside it is a pool of spreading blood, and in the opposite corner, a chair with a man seated upon it.
The man wears black, and his hair is platinum silk, trickling into the nothingness of white, hardly darker. Kadaj draws back, but as the beautiful face rises, there is nothing of madness or of megalomania in his expression. It is gentle, open, a little sad. That sadness lives in his brilliant green eyes, descending to unspeakable depths.
Kadaj moves toward him. The blood curls out at once, wrapping itself up Kadaj's boots, covering him with bright red and the reek of it. He falls on the slick stones, hand extended helplessly for Sephiroth to save him.
"Soon it will envelop this room," Sephiroth says. "Soon of me there will be nothing left. To fight it you must touch it. If you touch it, it will have you utterly."
Crimson covers him.
It is so very cold and he is unable to move. He can feel slender but strong arms around him, cradling him. His eyes struggle to open, see a figure against the light. A familiar scent, a masculine scent. A brother: one who can hold, touch. Kadaj wants to warn him of the blood's corruption, that it is all over him, dripping warm crimson. But he knows instantly that this is his blood. A second scent, tantalizing, lingers for a moment. Then it is gone in a sudden breeze of flowers.