A/N: It feels like I wrote this years ago when it's really only been a week or two. I'm also wondering where this came from. But oh well. :D
inducement
If his hormones had not been quarantined such a long time ago, somewhere lost in the great labyrinth of things, he figured that she would have looked beautiful with the blood framing her body.
Perhaps, though, it was the way the blood spilled or the sound of the sword slicing across her chest. Maybe it was both. Or maybe...
It was the sword. When it glinted from the light from Mother just behind him - so close, so close - and it refracted onto her skin that looked porcelain. Or maybe pale. So soft and so pale and so utterly bloody.
There were shadows created on her neck when she flew through the air like that. He figured it would've been considered a sensual pose, her head lolled back - waiting for something - while her body was jutting upwards, legs folding at the knees, arms reaching for his gloved hands.
But Mother was lighting her, and he made her fly. She was like an angel, with bloody veins weaving up to her face and staining her cheeks with real blush. Her paleness and its darkness created a stark contrast that he thought, maybe, he would've liked.
His heart hadn't beat for a long time - those brainless, SOLDIER bastards never seemed to notice that he never sweated or flushed from exertion. Or bled. Or got cut. They saw his god-like tendencies, which always made him smile - if they could notice that then couldn't they figure out the rest?
He was fine with that though. Nobody liked pestering questions.
A poison pulsated in the back of his mind; Mother was making her presence known again - he figured she was just jealous.
Still, he turned away from the feathered falling angel that would crack against the floor pretty soon. But Mother, oh, almost-infatuation was nothing to love; but it couldn't be love if he had no heart. Perhaps it was passionate obsession. Yes. He liked that. Or maybe, he would have liked to like that.
He reached up to touch her, the goddess that would make him a complete god (i.e. murderer, blood whore, loveless), and he could feel and be happy with her. Forever and always, she promised. He had never felt so sure as when he saw the love she felt for him leaking its way through to his fingertips.
He guessed he had it wrong, when she was before him. The stark contrast between her eyes and pale skin set the world on fire. He felt something small. Very small. Smaller than small. He didn't have a word for it because if he was being totally honest, he only had words for very brutal things.
But she was there, and - he had never realized her eyes were the same as the blush - glaring with hate and wretched feelings that maybe should have hurt him. He was a hollow, insane madman he knew, but sometimes he wished that he could feel again; it's funny when you forget silly things like that, only to want them back.
He thought now, he may have been betrayed. All he did was eye her for a few seconds - but he had figured out that Mother was not only the goddess from the sky, but also of grudges.
That didn't matter to him right now. This girl, now in front of him - again - was looking at him hungrily (he also wanted to remember hormones, desperately in this instance) but this wasn't the type of hunger he used to incite in most girls.
"This is for father."
Oh. Oops. Maybe he wasn't betrayed after all.
Her kick was hard and merciless, just like him, but it didn't stop him from wanting to feel it. (It must've been his want to hear anything but hollowness when the blow made contact on his chest.)
No matter how hard he tried, the girl with the red eyes and the pale skin and the rough demeanor - she wouldn't see him. Who he was, who he used to be - that ghost of yesterday. Even he couldn't remember him, not as he stumbled back and fell without feeling. Fell without falling.
He saw her on the cliff above, the sun burning her with red, everywhere, covering him in a blanket of what could've beens and what ifs, hot enough to be blood (he had a fleeting thought that he liked blood way too much), and even Mother wasn't there to catch him at the bottom - but then again, promises were empty and meaningless; like life and death and feelings.
But he lost the air when his body cracked against the surface, and in the split second of wanting so badly, he remembered.
And he hurt.
It was because of the girl whose father he killed (along with however many nameless others he didn't care to recall), and it made him sick with regret and hope.
But he blinked, and it was gone; he blinked, and it was never there; he blinked, and he felt her scar on his chest.
He always had a feeling Jenova would fail him.
So he stood, and he laughed at the world of his slaughter, the girl with bleeding blush, and the love that he could've-almost-never had.
When he cracked against the ground, for the final time, he looked up to see blue eyes filled with such harsh emotion and feeling. Hojo screwed up, leaving him unfinished like that.
Yet, he finally, finally felt himself seeping into something that was greater than himself - seeping and trickling - until the broken puppet strings and blackened feathers laced his eyes shut.
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