Disclaimer: Not mine
Learning Not to Breathe
His breath comes in short. Every inhalation brings a rattling dryness to his throat; every exhalation brings blood. It is labored to breathe around the wound, much less speak. "You…" he rasps. "You."
"Yes." Cloud is a grave, luminous shadow, blotting out the sun. He stands at the crown of Sephiroth's head, where his hair had landed when he'd fallen, splayed artfully around him like coils of silver. "It's me."
Sephiroth grins, his eyes playing their last, mad green light beneath the sun. His Mother could have saved him. Would have saved him. She had fallen once too, hadn't she? And his tumble had been nothing as great as hers. He could have flown. Her Angel. Sephiroth, in a moment of dying delusion, imagines he can see a flutter of wings behind Cloud's shoulders. He begins to laugh. Blood wells from behind his teeth and dribbles onto the white skin of his lips and chin.
"Why are you laughing?" Cloud says. His sword is embedded into the ground besides Sephiroth's right ear, and his grip tightens on its hilt as he demands, "Why? Answer me!" The broken cadence of his cackle hiccups horribly, but when Cloud looks to strike him, Sephiroth is not so far gone as not to flinch. He is quieted momentarily to a shrill giggle. "Answer me…" Sephiroth's eyes do not clear, do not focus, and his gaze remains utterly green. Utterly insane.
Cloud's eyes are blue, like the setting sky above them, and they begin to shine in a glow that is too dull to be Mako, too wavering to be rage. "They loved you. I loved you. Wasn't that enough?"
Sephiroth smiles with fang; another deluge of blood escapes from between his red teeth."I l-" he whispers. Cloud leans inexplicably forward to catch his words. "I let you kill me"
He reaches up a hand which Cloud does not catch, so when it falls, it falls irrevocably, like grace, a withered leaden stain upon the silvered earth.
Cloud bites the flesh inside his cheek and crumples down into the spill of coiling hair.
His breath comes too short.