a/n: Here follows a drabble-thing written while on the verge of drunkenness. Have fun with it.
I have only seen mountains.
by - Seimei
Through a web, spiraling, his vision turns against the dark blur of the hair splaying from her scalp; he watches the curve of her cheek crinkle into a smile, a soft line of skin against the coffee musk of the watertower. Her young legs are skinny and smooth, pale in comparison with her dark eyes and the navy sky overhead. She laughs when he flushes red; the sound is like a warm afternoon, a breeze against hot flesh, white teeth and full lips.
He spins her around in his mind, taking in her fullness: her soft curves, her not-yet-a-woman figure, her promising breasts. Her boots are muddy from hiking in the mountains and they smell of damp green and yellow ochre sunlight. The bugs buzz in his ears, sending a symphony of sound and music into the shivers of his bones.
Will she touch him? He wonders at this. She makes no moves, but instead stares, perplexed, at his freckled face; his eyes are caught beneath the tumble of strangled blonde hair, she notices—dirty from the wind and mountain sky. The lungs in her ribcage tremble against her own will.
"Cloud, it's been awhile," she begins tentatively. Her voice is petite and fair, like her hands, wrung into tiny balls of white knuckles and pink fingers. Strained, she whispers, "I'm sorry that I came so late."
He had just been thinking that she would never come. He had hummed his anxious strings to the stars and buzzed this tension between pursued lips until he had seen her silhouette meekly treading through the dark. He is still relieved; the night is warmer with her presence near, thick with sounds and smells and quiet murmurings. The old well rises against the sky without the chilling ground to grasp and taint it.
It doesn't matter that she comes late, he thinks. She's come at all, and that is more than anything. His eyes find before him a beacon of heavenly dance, a mirror of the stars that echo his hopes above his head.
"Cloud, have you been waiting long?" She wants to know. His small shoulders tremble and he begins his love eulogy with a lie.
"No, no, not at all, I've been out here for only a moment." A moment in the dark, he thought, but he knows not from where the words come, for they are older than his own thoughts.
Many other things enter his mind; her relaxed curls tumbling against the small of her back as she swings her head to look at him.
"Well, that's good," she says.
"I've been looking at the stars," he murmurs. What he doesn't say is that each one reminds him of her luminous skin, her eyes alight, and the spaces of shadow between the waves of her dark head.
She joins him in his heaven-bound gaze. "Yes," she remarks, "They are surely something to perceive."
She feels his breath in the chill and a tumultuous feeling rises within her legs. Spinning, spinning. She must keep her mind straight along the path set before her, she thinks.
He steals the time from her. "I'm leaving in the spring," he says swiftly. The air around him travels without pretense. She turns towards him slowly, not sure of his words. He repeats himself, and then she nods.
"Yes, all boys are leaving town," she says sadly. She swings her thin legs against the wooden tower, cutting through the chasms of murk that snake through the planks. Those legs glimmer in the corner of his vision, but he stays the course and continues dutifully to drive syllables from his mouth.
"I'm going to make something of myself. I.. I'm going to be just like him one day."
"Who?" The question is almost stupid.
"Sephiroth, the great Sephiroth." One day. I'll be just like him.
Her legs move like the rocking chair on the porch of her grandfather's house, rhythmic like a lullaby. Those tiny hands grip her knees, and she is then sullen in his eyes.
"Well… okay." She can say nothing more. The words rising in the ribs of her flesh fill her with hesitation. Nothing is coming like screaming thunder, but nothing—even as loud as all of that—is simply what it is: nothing.
Be nothing—there it is again—but the boy before me, the shy blonde with the speckles of sand in his warm face—with those icy eyes of a sea that I have never seen; a whirling of foam and fizz against a rocky coast, blue winds caught in the clouds—and here, I have only seen the mountains, and nothing more; but your eyes bring me to the place to which my heart returns night after day after morning forever and ever—
That spring, he left. A pit filled his chest, and when he returned after half a decade, there was nothing left to fill the deep but dust and ash.