8. Love and Blood

Sephiroth rejoined the group sitting in the lounge. It had been four hours and no one had been able to find Leon anywhere. He had disappeared before, but never for so long and everyone was starting to get worried.

Sephiroth suddenly leaped up. He couldn't stand the uncertainty as to where Leon was and whether he was all right. Even though he couldn't admit it to himself, Sephiroth's feelings for the dark and temperamental fighter ran deep and had marked his heart forever. He could not tolerate sitting and doing nothing.

He looked at the others and muttered, 'I'm going back to Leon's place, to see if he's come home yet.'

With that perfunctory statement he ran out of the door and sprinted across the woodland path to Leon's house. He could not explain the urgency he felt but he knew that he had to get to Leon as soon as possible.

The door was unlocked, and this heightened his sense that something was wrong. He burst through the door and took the stairs two at a time; his awareness that something wasn't right was clutching his heart. He kicked the first door of the hallway in and found it led to a bathroom. The next door however opened into Leon's bedroom.

Sephiroth crashed through this door and pulled up short. He couldn't speak, couldn't breathe, and felt his head spin with the awfulness of the scene in front of him.

Leon was lying on the bed, one hand loosely clutching the knife from the table; from his wrists and throat bright red blood flowed steadily. The gashes on his forearms were deep, as was the slash across his pale neck and the blood had already stained most of the bed coverings a vivid red, draining his face to pallid white. His blue eyes were closed; he already looked dead

Sephiroth sank to his knees and uttered a choked groan of agony. All of his life had been spent on battlefields and around death, but this was the most terrible sight he had ever witnessed. The man he loved, lying motionless, with his life slowly draining away.

At that moment something inside Sephiroth snapped. He suddenly knew that he couldn't kill any of these people to save himself, and he could not let Leon die. He jumped up and rushed into the bathroom next door.

Ripping open the medicine cabinet above the sink, Sephiroth desperately searched for anything that could possibly be used as a bandage. Finding nothing, he shoved himself away from the sink with a grunt and ran back to Leon's room. As he entered, his eye lit upon a pile of white sheets beside the bed.

Grabbing a handful, he moved to the bedside and, with strength born of desperation, tore each sheet into long strips. Sitting on the edge of the bed, unmindful of the puddles of blood, he gently picked up Leon's lacerated arm and began wrapping the lengths of sheet as tightly as he dared around the long slits in Leon's wrists; tears silently dripping down his cheeks, despairing moans of pain forcing through his bloodless lips. He could feel the pain that consumed Leon as though it were his own.

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