Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Square-Enix or Squaresoft or whatever they're calling themselves these days. Even I belong to them. Sephiroth, however, does not belong to them as he is untouchable.
Hey! Yeah, this was born out of a strange fever I had one night after having an "I love my room at Uni" moment. My room is not quite as bad as Cloud's is, but it has days when it comes close. I am NOT a tidy person. But yeah. This is my love song to the boys and to Uni in general.
Unbeta'ed because... um, I wanted to upload it now?
"What in Gaia's name... Cloud, you cannot be serious. You actually live in this pigsty?"
"Hey, shut up." The small blond pouted and thumped his older lover on the arm. "It's not so bad, there's still floor visible in the corner, look!"
Sephiroth looked.
"I see no floor." He arched a brow at Cloud, who frowned in genuine puzzlement.
"Really?" The young man picked his way through the debris of clothes, boxes and crumpled stacks of notes and books towards the aforementioned corner. "I could have sworn the carpet was still empty over here..." Shifting a stack of manga about twelve books high aside with his foot he reached down and pulled at the surface of what he thought was floor, his back to Sephiroth.
The man in question simply stood and regarded the room, fingers twitching slightly with the urge to... do something. Anything. Trying to distract himself from the agony of the messiness he let his eyes fall on Cloud's bent over form, the jeans that were ever so slightly too big for him falling down a little so that Sephiroth could make out the undulation in skin that would become a valley and a crevice if the jeans were just a little looser.... The blue t-shirt the boy was wearing suffered no such problems and Sephiroth rather suspected it was a long-treasured favourite if the way it was fraying at the sleeves and threads hung loose around Cloud's hips was any indication.
Cloud made a noise of surprise and the 'oh' made something warm and predatory shift inside Sephiroth's chest before it subsided, willing to wait for the opportune moment to strike.
"Um, I guess it wasn't the carpet after all." Cloud said sheepishly, clutching a fleecy item of clothing in one hand that did indeed bear a remrkable resemblance to the colour of the carpet, or at least the colour the carpet was suppsoed to be from what Sephiroth could see of the outside. For all he was aware the state of the floor underneath Cloud's piles of stuff might be an entirely different shade of unattractive, dull beige.
Sephiroth watched in bemusement as, like a two-year old whose toys for all intents and purposes disappear from their world after they stop thinking about them, Cloud absentmindedly unclenched his fist, the fleece dropping to rest half on a small cardboard box and half on a stack of Mechanics textbooks, knocking the top one sideways and making another stack of files unstable, bringing them to a sliding slump and burying several more items under their expanse.
"Heh. Oops." Cloud bit his lip, rubbing the back of his messy blond spikes and gazing at the file avalanche in consternation. "I guess it is a bit of a tip, isnt it. But here!" Suddenly he was all movement, pushing some clothes off of the bed into the maelstrom of the floor and smoothing the duvet out to create a relatively flat space. "You can sit here if you want. It's clean, I swear, I washed the sheets like two days ago, honestly."
Skeptically, Sephiroth put one black booted foot inside the threshold of the room, trying not to step on anything that looked breakable or sticky. He managed to reach the expanse of covers in three motions and gratefully leant his back against the wall between a poster of some rock band and a diagram of the inner workings of a motorbike. The bed was small, but his feet were lifted a quarter metre off of the ground which seemed to be enough to clear the worst of the stacks.
"I am positively sure that Zack's room was never this untidy." He stated, meeting Cloud's eyes and avoiding letting his gaze fall downwards, lest his neat freak reflexes 'freak out' as Zack would so eloquently have put it.
"Really?" Cloud said, now rummaging around in the desk drawers and just out of reaching distance of Sephiroth's arms. "But his apartment is a total mess! You know last October when you left that book on Marxist Theories of... of something or other in his living room? I went over to visit like the other day and we found it at the back of one of the kitchen cupboards while we were looking for another spatula, after Zack broke the first one by hitting me on the ass with it..." Cloud trailed off in thought, clearly speaking without thinking as Sephiroth knew the young man would never have stated the last part out loud if he had been paying attention.
The blond was annoyingly far away and Sephiroth found himself seriously considering shifting forwards so he could grab Cloud with his legs and draw him closer as he'd seen Zack do to the kid more times than he could remember. Reminding himself that he was a company director and therefore mature and sensible, he resisted the urge.
Cloud was still rambling. "Ooh, I bet it's 'cause he took an Arts subject... and an imaginary one at that. I mean seriously, what kind of degree is Theoretical Social Studies anyway? I bet he only had four textbooks or something ridiculous like that. I still can't believe he passed, with a two-two but honestly, Zack did work? It's like the world should be coming to an end or something."
"Cloud, why do you have a dress in your wardrobe?" Sephiroth suddenly interrupted, staring transfixed at the bright blue shimmery material he could see in the boy's closet, just about the only thing in there as every other item of clothing seemed to be strewn on the floor.
"What?" Cloud said, bringing his head up too fast and banging it on the desk lamp with a clunk that made Sephiroth look at him in concern. "Owww, that hurt. Uh, yeah, there was a drag party in freshers week and one of the girls I met lent me a dress. Turned out it was too small for her anyway and she insisted that it 'looked better on me.'" Cloud made air quotes with his fingers, mindless of the pot of pens and pencils that hovered expectantly near his elbow, almost begging to be knocked everywhere. "She said I had to keep it and so after the party... yeah."
"And how is it that I've never seen any pictures of this...party?"
"Well..." Cloud was shifting nervously, blushing very prettily in Sephiroth's opinion. "I never showed you any. I got quite...tipsy."
Sephiroth raised a knowing eyebrow, smirking slightly. They were both aware that they both knew that when Cloud said 'tipsy' he meant roaring, shrieking, dancing-to-Abba-songs-and-snogging-random-strangers drunk. "Oh Gaia." Sephiroth was suddenly struck by a horrible, earth-moving thought. "Tell me... tell me that Reno wasn't at this party. He was, wasn't he?" One look at Cloud's guilty face and the way he was biting his bottom lip and making it swollen and red said it all. "You didn't have sex with him, did you?"
"What, no, no!" Cloud cried, looking horrified. "I would never sleep with him, or anyone, even while... tipsy. Especially whilst tipsy, in fact. But, um... we may have... kissed a bit."
Narrowing his eyes, Sephiroth used his business-voice, the one that made clients and employees cower and submit to his demands immediately. "Was there tongue?"
"... A little?" Cloud said, nervously smiling and giving his lip a real work over with his little white teeth. "And... Kadaj was there too."
"What?" Sephiroth had to physically stop himself from jumping up and crushing Cloud's myriad of debris under his boots. He reminded himself firmly that there were other people in the building, ones who would probably not appreciate shouting. "Why in Gaia's name was he there, the boy is far too young to be at such a thing. Isn't he still in high school?"
Cloud shrugged. "He skipped a couple years, I guess. Must have inherited the brains from Yazoo."
"I suppose." Sephiroth hummed, disinterested in the topic suddenly. His desire to have Cloud close was returning with a vengeance. "Come here." He murmured, and Cloud turned to him with the look on his face that he always got in such a situation, blushing and pleased and adorably hesitant. Spreading his arms Sephiroth smiled in satisfaction as the blond bounced onto the bed, enjoying the way the young man fit so perfectly into his embrace.
"I love you..." He felt rather than heard Cloud whisper into his chest and he smiled, stroking a hand over the blond spikes and carding the fine hairs at the base of Cloud's neck in that way which he knew made his little love go all shivery and delicious.
"I know. I adore you also." He bent and kissed one lovely cheek but pulled away in affront. "Cloud, your skin tastes like motor oil."
"What, really?" The blond said, sitting up and Sephiroth heard an inner Zack say Yah really, Princess! He informed the inner Zack that he was to be silent. "Oh, must be from class this morning. We were taking apart and rebuilding an aircraft engine to see how it worked and it got kinda messy. I thought I'd cleaned it all off. Sorry."
"It is okay, the taste is not exactly unpleasant but the smell... is odd."
"You don't mind the taste?" Cloud gave Sephiroth a funny look. "Zack said it tastes like chemical vomit scraped from the inside of one of the Science Department's fume cupboards."
Determinedly pushing aside the question as to how Zack knew what the inside of the fume cupboards tasted like, Sephiroth focussed on the far more important question. "When has Zack been licking you exactly? And in what context?"
"We made cookies when he came to visit me a couple of weeks ago and he kept poking me with cookie dough on his fingers and then licking it off." The blond said innocently, looking up at Sephiroth with those big blue eyes that he knew many people compared to water, or sky, or some other ludicrously romanticized poetic image. It was enough for Sephiroth that they were looking him and he frankly didn't care what colour they were, he was sure that he would love the ridiculous, naive blond regardless of the prettiness of his eyes.
That didn't change the fact that they were very beautiful, however.
"You know, people ask me what you're like." Cloud suddenly said, still gazing up at him. "You're pretty famous here, what with that picture of you up outside the main faculty office."
"Oh?" Sephiroth tilted his head to the side. "What do you tell them."
"I tell them that you have flaws." The blond stated, clear eyes bereft of any hesitance now or uncertainty. "That you aren't like the media make you out to be, you aren't an untouchable ice god or whatever. They always seem... disappointed."
Sephiroth kept petting the damnably soft blond spikes and studying his lover's face even as he spoke. "People don't want a reality, Cloud, they want an illusion. Relationships can come as a big surprise when you realise it isn't all blind devotion and rainbows and smiles."
The young man smiled softly. "Nope. It's three am wakeup calls from your clients or my mother, and stupid arguments about shoes because the coffee machine is broken." Sephiroth chuckled softly, remembering both of those incidents with the humorous glaze of hindsight. "And the toothbrush thing."
Frowning and managing to look amused at the same time, Sephiroth gently poked Cloud in the side, making the young man giggle in a very un-manly fashion. "Now do we really have to have that conversation again, Cloud? Because you know I'm right."
"You are not right!" Cloud exclaimed, kneeling up between Sephiroth's thighs so that their faces were level and Sephiroth could hold the boy around his waist. "But let's not go there. The point is that we both have flaws, but just because something is flawed doesn't mean it can't be perfect just the way it is."
"Flawless things are dull and monotonous anyway." Sephiroth agreed. "Because flawless things are untouchable. To possess one is to spoil it. I much prefer those things I can hold here in my hands." He squeezed Cloud tight as if to emphasize his point.
"Yeah." Cloud said, smiling happily at the way his world, for this moment, was all worked out. There were no problems and no complications, just him and Sephiroth together in the here and now. Burying his face once more in the soft, warm black material of the man's shoulder he allowed himself a quiver of glee and contentment. He wouldn't trade this feeling for anything, because together they were whole, perfect.
At least until the fire alarm went off.
AN: Awwwwww, shameless fluffy goodness. Dont you just love them?
btw, I am not bashing Arts students. I am an Arts student. I just find the whole science/arts thing hilarious. Also, the little fire alarm bit at the end was added specially in honour of yesterday, when there were four fire alarms in one day in my halls, at 6pm, 8pm, 12am and 3am. We were not pleased. Love you guys so much!