Paresthesia
A sensation of burning, prickling, itching, or tingling of the skin with no obvious cause.
The door to Leon's apartment creaked open and the light was flicked on.
The apartment was sparse. Clean; ordered; and only filled with things that seemed 'needed'. There was a large, flat-screen TV in the corner on top of a cabinet that held only a few DVDs and violent video games, a fold-out couch in front of the TV which was neatly put away, a single novel placed on the arm of it. On the opposite corner to the TV was a mini-grand piano, and beside that was a bookshelf filled with thick books from medical journals to murder mysteries.
Walking into his home silently, Leon's boots thudded lightly against the polished wood floor and watched silently as Cloud shuffled in after him. The blond man immediately walked past the piano to the small archway leading to the kitchen, beside the hallway which lead to the bathroom and bedroom.
As the door was closed and locked, the brunet's grey-blue eyes watched as Cloud pulled open the tall, old wooden cabinet with stained-glass panels to reveal bottles of strong spirits and liquors, as well as delicate shot-glasses placed in neat, ordered groups.
Plucking an average-sized glass and the large bottle of vodka out of the cabinet, Cloud was silent as he turned around and placed his items onto the bench before him, leaving the cabinet to hang open, sending coloured shadows across the floor from it's stained glass.
Leon was standing in the archway, at the edge of the kitchen, hands tucked into his pockets. His grey-blue eyes dragged slowly over the blond's ministrations with impeccable detail. Soaking up every twitch. Every shift.
Something was wrong, and he was going to find out what.
The blond throws back his first drink- a mixture of vodka, soda-water and a flavoured drink. Vodka, mostly. A slow hiss of appreciation is all he makes as the drink sears at his throat like bile, his empty glass slamming against the bench.
The blond is about to make another-- when a hand barely touches his elbow.
"Strife--"
He yelps. Cloud actually yelps. His whole body wrenches from Leon's fingertips against his arm- and his glass flies off the bench, having been grasped by the male, and shatters against the tiled floor with a piercing noise.
Leon is surprised more than anything. His grey-blue eyes are on the shattered remains of the glass by the fridge, then on Cloud's own, which are wider than they should be, clutching his arm where the other male had touched him.
Tiny pieces of the puzzle slowly squirmed themselves into their places in Leon's mind, and the brunet merely raises his eyebrows at the other male. A silent mixture of 'are you okay?' and 'why'd you do that?'.
Bright blue eyes blink a couple of times before Cloud looks away, a tongue sweeping over his dry lips, hand tightening on his arm and his eyes flickering to the shattered glass on the floor to his arm and then around the kitchen.
There was the sound of splashing water and the blond started in surprise, eyes snapping to the brunet before him, who was making another drink –practically all vodka– before holding it out to Cloud, grey-blue eyes analysing and boring into the blond's own.
With a thick swallow, bright blue eyes look away and Cloud takes the drink- careful not to touch the other male's skin, and steps around the brunet, walking into the living room, head bowed, circling the couch and sinking into it with a quiet sigh.
Leon cleans up the broken glass in the kitchen silently, eyes occasionally flickering over to the other male where he sat; Cloud silent and running his hands through his hair every few moments, drowning himself in his drink.
Finally, the brunet sank into the couch beside the other male, two hands' widths between them, Cloud's re-filled drink before him, beside the vodka bottle on the rug before them. Leon was still silent, sipping his own alcoholic drink, watching the other male from the corner of his eye.
The blond was suddenly gulping down his drink like it was air- like he needed it- but it was burning him, so he was struggling a little. He slammed the empty glass down upon the floor once more and let a shudder sweep through his body, teeth gritted in a grimace.
Every so slowly, the jigsaw puzzle was becoming easier as the pieces came together.
A hand touched Cloud's cheek and the blond jumped back; suddenly pressed against the arm of the couch, eyes wide and horrified, a gasp flying from his lips.
He'd never felt like this. Never in his whole life. He didn't like it. He hated it. It was new and confusing and terrible and he hated it! Leon was in his head and on his skin and inside him and whenever the male touched him it burnt and Cloud didn't understand and he HATED IT.
Brown eyebrows raise slightly at the other male's reaction, the brunet lowering his hand, glass gently nursed in his hand, the rim of the glass gently placed against his lips.
"Calm down, won't you?" Leon urged, voice low and gentle and... curious.
Cloud can only run a hand through his spiky, unruly, messy hair with a shaky breath and nod, shifting back into the couch, eyes averted. Blood was on his fingers and in his hair and his scalp hurt in places, but he could barely feel it.
Blue eyes squeezed closed and he gritted his teeth.
Why him?
Why?
"Want to talk about it?" breathed Leon, eyes on his glass, tilting it to one side, watching how his drink ripples and shifted, before tilting it to the other side.
"Nothing to talk about," grunted the blond in reply, eyes still tightly closed.
"You just inhaled some of my best booze, Strife. Cough it up."
In their own little language, the conversation was the opposite;
'I guess you don't want to talk about it, huh?'
'Not unless you go back to work and ignore the fiasco with Her and Seifer.'
'You know I can't do that.'
Cloud hated how he felt right now. Was it truly 'love'? Was Seifer right? If this was love, he didn't understand what people like so much about it.
His chest hurt to much it was hard to breathe, his skin burnt and tingled wherever Leon had touched him, all he could think of was the brunet, he felt heavy and light all at once and it was confusing as he hated it.
Grey-blue eyes drifted toward the blond before drifting away once more.
Quite a few silently-consumed glasses later, Cloud was sitting on the couch, elbows on his knees, staring down at his half-empty glass of... gin? Or was it tequila? He didn't know. Leon was beside him, alternating from pressing antiseptic-soaked cotton buds against the self-inflicted wounds in his scalp, and stitching them up.
The two of them hadn't spoken. Merely swapped empty glasses for full ones, and quiet, semi-pained grunts on Cloud's part every time Leon pulled too hard on a stitch. He'd slowly adapted to the burning he got whenever the brunet touched him. It'd now just turned into mildly uncomfortable tingles.
Long fingers raked through short blond spikes in a search for more fresh blood, and blue eyes slowly slid closed. He was insane. In 'love' with his closest... well, not really 'friend', but 'acquaintance'? That didn't sound so bad, but...
Blue eyes slid open again.
Leon was all he had, really. The only person who didn't expect anything of him. The only one who truly knew him for him.
He didn't want that to disappear.
Would it disappear if he told him?
He doubted he could keep it secret that much longer.
It hurt.
"Can you be in love with someone and still not find them sexually attractive?" the drunken blond found his voice saying, the start and ends of his words melting together ever so slightly.
The fingers paused in the movement of picking dried blood from his hair.
"... Why do you ask?" Leon finally murmured, lowering his hands and pulling off the plastic gloves he had been wearing. He'd had as many drinks as Cloud had, but he had a slightly better grasp on verbalisation than the other male. Lucky him.
Blue eyes stared down at a scuffed boot.
Dark eyebrows twitched upwards. "... Are you in love, Strife?"
The picture was becoming almost complete.
There were only a few pieces of the jigsaw missing now.
"This... this person," the blond mumbles, rotating the glass in his hands, watching as it rippled in the glass and distorted the image of the rug under it. "I... think I might love them-- It-- it makes sense, y'know. But I don't want to fuck them." He takes a sip. "... Or for them to fuck me," Cloud adds after a second.
"... I think."
"Platonic love?" Leon queried, placing his elbow on his knee and his cheek in his hand, eying the other male's profile with half-closed eyes. "You and platonic don't usually fornicate in the same sentence, Strife."
"Well, I don't know, Leonhart!" the blond groans, fisting a hand in his hair for all of half a second before he became aware of the stitches under his fingers and wrenched his hand away again.
"Why don't you check?"
Wide bright blue eyes snap to half-closed grey-blue ones.
"I-- I can't do that!" Cloud hisses through his teeth. "It's just... That..." He wrinkles his nose a little. "... Ew..."
The last piece of the puzzle clicked into place.
"You?" Leon murmured, lifting his cheek out of his hand, "Unwilling to stick your tongue down someone's throat? That's new," he said nonchalantly, placing his glass down by his ankle and sinking back into the couch.
"I thought you meant fucking them," the blond mumbles slowly, eying the other male with confused blue eyes, fingers flexing around his cool glass.
The brunet raises a hand slightly and waves it in the air in a undecided motion before letting it fall back onto the couch beside him.
"You of all people should know you don't have to fuck someone to know if you're sexually attracted to them or not," he sighs, grey-blue eyes staring at the other male through dark eyelashes.
"You..." began the blond slowly, booze-addled brain struggling with the information. "Want me to kiss y... them?" His brain was still half-a-step behind, but it eventually got the point.
"You need to," explained the brunet with a one-sided shrug. "You need to know whether you want to fuck them or not, therefore proving if it is platonic love or not, and therefore hopefully getting rid of your confusion and shit."
Cloud stares at the other male, long explanation surprising him somewhat. "... You sure you're drunk?"
"Positive," chuckled Leon. "I used 'therefore' two times in the same sentence." He was always proud of his grasp on language. A frown melts onto his face. "Or was it three times...?"
He couldn't exactly ask the other male if it was two or three times he used that word, because that was the second that a pair of warm lips pressed against his.
Somewhere in the back of Cloud's mind, he figured a peck was enough, but he wanted to be positive, so, he parted his lips a little. Leon didn't struggle. He didn't shove the other male off. It was probably the booze messing up his head.
The kiss was slow. Careful. Deliberate. No touches were shared. Nothing except lips and tongue. Nothing. They were dancing on the knife-edge. Soft touches of lips. Gentle brushes of tongue. Hot breath rippling over mouths and cheeks.
Cloud felt... odd. He didn't understand it. He'd never been in love. He'd never understood the idea of love. He'd never kissed a guy, either.
Well--
Not like this.
The blond presses closer, movements slow, gentle, careful. He was always careful. He's doing most of it. The one against him is only reacting minimally. Only slightly. Almost testing him. Just seeing what he'd do. Licks. Gentle movements. Nothing big. Nothing sharp. Gentle.
Teeth sink into the blond's lip and he lets out a quiet, surprised grunt.
Before Cloud could make any half-hearted move to pull back, he felt words being breathed against his parted lips. Focusing more than it should really take to understand, he stays close and keeps his eyes closed.
"I suppose you need this, Strife.." It's husky. Demanding. Cloud likes it, but thinks it's just a little too low. No, wait... A little too... a... A little too... something. "All right. I'll play along."
Suddenly, lips are on his again, and it's far more carnal. Far more violent. Possessive. Harsh.
A hand comes up, and it's gripping his spiky blond hair. Cloud feels pain shoot through his scalp from the fresh wounds he'd inflicted upon himself when he'd been spewing every detail of his worries. He likes the pain. Kind of. He kisses back just as roughly. He bites. A hand grips tightly at that shoulder-length brown hair and pulls at the locks.
"Leon." The name falls from his lips as he's pushed onto his back, glass falling from his lax grip to clatter onto the floor, ice tinkling and alcohol splashing over the smooth wooden surface. He never said their names.
"Shut up, Strife," the brunet snarls quietly above him, teeth sinking into the soft fleshy lobe of his ear. Leon is trying to dominate him. The blond never liked being dominated.
Suddenly, Leon's back slams against wet floor and Cloud is straddling him, hand still fisted in that brown hair tightly. They're on the floor. Neither of them notice. The blond hangs over him, golden spikes framing his deceptively pretty face, his free hand planting itself on the slippery wet wood morphing into rug beside Leon's ear.
A hand grips tighter on blood-riddled locks and the blond is yanked down, swollen lips meeting once more in a bruising, violent kiss.
Cloud's abandoned glass rolls across the floor to come to a stop near the TV.
A hearty and agonisingly instantaneous throb of pain was what brought Cloud Strife out of his blissfully numb and dreamless comatose slumber. Vaguely, in the back of his mind –as aforementioned 'mind' sluggishly rebooted and started up Windows XP– the blond got the idea that God hated him and wanted him to die an agonisingly painful death from drowning in a pool of mucus and vomit whilst strangling himself with his own intestines.
God was used to Cloud Strife's hangover-induced thought of suicide and continued flipping through the paper.
Senses slowly connecting themselves to his brain one by one like lines being connected by a half-asleep phone-operator, Cloud shifted slightly from his place, trying to figure out where he was, why he was there, what he'd been doing, and if he was naked.
He wasn't ashamed of his body-- he just wanted to know if he should ready himself for a grope any time soon. Cold hands weren't Cloud favourite thing, really.
Another hearty slam of agony exploded just behind the blond's eyes and he let out a low, guttural noise that could've easily been related to a cat being strangled and run over a couple of times by a monster truck.
A voice beside Cloud replied in a thick, cottonish manner.
"... Stop screaming... you... mother of a... ohGod..."
God paused in his giggling at the comic page of his paper to pick up the phone.
In all fairness, the two doctors Cloud Strife and Squall 'Leon' Leonhart could've easily been in a much worse position than they were now, but, since their brains seemed to them be imploding, exploding and shifting dimensions and only just keeping the wave-form from collapsing all at the same time, neither of them really cared. The two men were laying on the fold-out couch in the centre of the diagnostician's apartment, fully clothed, hangovers using their brains as batting practice.
Cloud lay on his stomach, one arm brought up and bent so he could use the back of his forearm as a pillow, his other arm curled over his head, shielding his eyes and face from any and all light, and also covering his ear too, which was kind of lucky. Leon lay on his back beside the other male, one leg bent, one arm flung over his eyes, keeping all light away from his sensitive and pretty minty grey-blue eyes, his other arm draped over his stomach daintily.
"I'll..." croaked the blond slowly, his mouth feeling like it's full of cotton, his head throbbing painfully every second or so, eyes closed under his arm, mouth barely moving as he rasped the words out. "I'll stop... screaming... if you do."
"I'm... not the one... screaming," wheezed Leon in reply, in much the same condition. Neither men moved a single muscle except their mouths. They were in too much agony to figure out how to move and breathe at the same time. Breathing was fun. "... You are."
Quite suddenly, the air around them exploded with indecipherable, ear-shattering noise, and both men screamed.
"Make it stop!" sobbed Cloud, clutching both ears and curling into a foetal position, face contorted in what could only be described as the kind of unadulterated agony akin to slamming your dick in a car door so hard that it would even make Superman wince. "MAKE IT STOP!"
"Stop screaming!" shouted Leon, both hands fisted in his hair, barely able to struggle himself into a sitting position with his brain doing stomach-jarring back-flips and slamming itself onto the parallel bars repeatedly, and the man squinted around his apartment with a blurred eye.
The phone continued ringing, it's piercing tone making both men's hangovers level-up, receive another four AP, and the ability of Nausea.
With a groan, Leon planted a hand on the blond's other side and leant over the prone, agonised man, reaching his other hand as far as he could; toward the phone that was ringing far too loudly by the table on the other side of the couch's arm. Just as the brunet's fingertips brushed the white plastic of the machine, his arm buckled, and he fell onto Cloud.
They looked like some kind of warped cross, really; their stomachs the only things touching. The blond had been shoved onto his back from the weight of the other male, and the brunet was still reaching for the ringing phone... And, if anyone was to look, Cloud was turning green.
"Get off me," croaked the blond quickly, still slightly green. It wasn't a trick of the light. Nausea was a powerful attack. He turned greener. "Get off me." And greener. "Get off me!"
With a grunt, Leon finally snatched up the phone and heaved himself into his prior position, leaning over Cloud but not touching him, the other male slowly fading back into a slightly healthier colour.
With a press of a button, the ear-shattering ringing stopped, and both males let out a dual sigh of relief.
"Hello?" the diagnostician mumbled throatily, letting his eyes close, holding the phone a little more than a hands' width away from his ear. He didn't need his eyes for talking, and the light hurt, anyway. The brunet felt the other male on the couch curl against him, a warm forehead pressing against his hip.
"Doctor Leonhart!" came the disgustingly chipper voice of nurse Rikku through the speaker, the frequency of her voice causing a spike of agony to shoot through both males' heads like a rusted arrow through an unwittingly slow cow. "Hey there!"
The phone was held at arms' length.
"Ms. Geinsborough told me to call you! You and Doctor Strife are late!"
"Late?" breathed Leon, a grey-blue eye peeking blearily open to stare down at the man curled against him. Cloud twitched his shoulders in an oblivious shrug, trying to become comatose once more, nose gently pressed against the other man's thigh.
The blond's watch wasn't much help, because the numbers were just a neon green blur to the diagnostician, so, he closed his eyes again.
"Y'still there?" queried nurse Rikku after a second of silence.
"Still here," Leon sighed.
"Huh?"
The phone was brought slightly closer to the diagnostician's ear, but not too close. "Still here..." he repeated slowly. His hangover was lethargically fading away, but that didn't mean he was ready for anything other than silence.
"You sound tired, doc! What happened? You have some hot and heavy sex last night?" giggled the nurse happily.
Grey-blue eyes peeked open once more and Leon looked down at the half-asleep blond beneath him. "Strife, did we have sex last night?"
In all seriousness, Leon did not remember anything from the moment he entered his apartment last night. It was a mere dark blur that he was in far too much agony to try and decipher. He really wanted to know.
Rikku made a sound that was oddly like a muffled, gleeful squeal from the other end of the line.
Blue eyes almost seemed to creak open and Cloud shifted slightly onto his back, staring up at the other man with a look that seemed to be a mixture of confusion and dumb shock.
"Why are you asking me?" the oncologist finally croaked, still weighed down because of his hangover; Leon being the quicker to recover out of the two men.
"I'm not one to take it up the ass," the brunet grunted, his shoulders twitching in a minute shrug, the phone barely held in his lax grip.
"And you think I am?" Cloud returned as haughtily as he could, a golden eyebrow twitching upwards.
"Are you?" queried Leon, in too much pain to actually add a lathering of the usual smug, bastardised 'hurhur yer gay' subtext. He was too much of a gentleman to do that, anyway. He'd just leave a stack of gay porn magazines on the blond's desk next time he knew someone important was going to visit the oncologist.
The blond just stared up at Leon with a look of silent disapproval and shifted both of his legs a little. With a quiet sigh, Cloud rolled over once more, turning his back on the other man, and he curled his arm back over his head. "No, sweetheart. Nothing happened that dear little Rikku needs to know."
With a vague grunt of understanding, or at least a very vague grasp of whatever the hell Cloud said, Leon closed his eyes again and went back to making low, guttural, monosyllabic answers to whatever Rikku squealed through the speaker of the phone. After a while, he started hinting to her to hang up. He was far too polite of a man to say anything that included her mother and the next-door neighbour's family cactus, so, he just kept hinting.
Body motionless and brain slowly and stubbornly easing itself into a bath of warm water and chicks in sequinned bikinis, Cloud sighed gently into the mattress and went back to envisioning a nice big paddock of green grass, flowers, the sky a nice blue without a cloud, and a couple of chicks in sequinned bikinis.
In the back of his mind, as the agonised slams of his hangover was sulkily dancing about the doorway and refusing to leave, plus burning pain on either side of the blond's scalp he'd yet to figure out what it was from, something clicked and the oncologist's blue eyes opened just a fraction.
He felt lighter.
Twitching a golden eyebrow upwards slightly at himself, Cloud continued staring blearily through his eyelashes at the blurred patterns of the couch mattress. Lighter? Why would he feel lighter?
He... didn't remember jack shit from last night. He highly doubted Leon did, either. What could have possibly...
Behind him, he heard Leon mumble something into the phone and the blond felt something inside his chest squirm a little.
'The fuh...
A blink.
Oh yeah.
Rinoa- Seifer- stitches- love. Oh, right.
Rolling onto his back once more, the hungover oncologist stared up at the brunet with half-open eyes. Leon still sat there, one hand planted on Cloud's other side, almost trapping the blond man, but not really, the diagnostician grunting a few half-hearted words to the phone, which was being held in the air, half an arms' length away, and Rikku replied with a happily chipper statement.
After a moment, grey-blue eyes peeked open and stared down at Cloud in a silent, deadpan, questioning look that one could easily translate as 'the fuck do you want?'.
Funnily enough –at least, to Cloud–, he didn't feel that sudden explosion of panic to the point of suffocation and nauseating awkwardness that he'd been having at the mere thought of the other man ever since Siefer and his 'talk'. His chest just felt... warm.
He didn't know why he didn't feel panicked anymore, but, in his hungover-induced lack of any neurones that mattered firing, he guessed that it'd been sorted out while he was in a drunken stupor, and there was no need to worry anymore.
Twitching his shoulders slightly in a 'I don't know' kind of nonchalant reply, the edge of Cloud's mouth hitched up a slight bit, blue eyes still half-open and staring up at the other male. Everything was back to normal. Kind of.
Leon's grey-blue eyes dragging closed, a long, slow breath of an utterly dissatisfied sigh floated from the brunet's nostrils. After a moment he shifted to the side, slowly letting himself settle back into the mattress of the couch, lifting the arm that'd been propping himself up and folding it behind his head.
Rikku's voice continued bounding from the phone's microphone like a delighted little puppy. The girl continued babbling on about something or another, the smooth white phone placed half an arm away on the mattress, the speaker muffled against a handy throw-pillow.
Feeling a sigh against his side, Leon peeked an eye open and looked over at the blond beside him. Cloud was silent, laying on his side once more, nose pressed up against the diagnostician's ribs, eyes closed, golden spikes tickling lightly against his side.
With a quiet grunt, the brunet reached his free hand over and tried combing those unruly spikes away so they'd be less irritating.
Apparently, Cloud's hair was as irritating as his presence was, and refused to be even remotely helpful.
"Mnuhh..." mumbled the ever so articulate oncologist Cloud Strife.
A few more tugs at his spikes of gold, and the blond doctor made another quiet noise, reluctantly raising a lax hand and batting at the bothersome fingers fiddling with his hair with the ferocity of a kitten which only just figured out it had four legs, instead of two.
A quiet chuckle was all he got in reply before his lax hand just landed on Leon's stomach and decided to stay there.
Bugger it.
He was tired.
A low noise, something between a hum and a sigh, rumbled from the brunet's chest, and, even whilst being half-comatose, Cloud could understand just what the other man meant in their own little language.
'Being a little clingy, aren't you?'
With joints that seemed to be filled with sand and sawdust, and muscles that seemed more fitting for a noodle-dish than anything else, the oncologist shifted his hand which was placed against the other man's warm stomach and curled it into a one-finger salute.
A quiet, deep chuckle was all he got in reply, and the blond felt a smile warm his hidden face.
It was like everything was back to normal.
His chest felt... funny, but not like it'd been before.
It didn't hurt.
He almost, almost... liked it.
The doors to the Radiant Garden General Hospital hissed open at exactly two-fourteen in the afternoon and the head of oncology and head of diagnostics shuffled into the slightly busy lobby; patients, nurses and the occasional run-away doctor scuttling around the lobby and nurses' station like a semi-chaotic beehive.
Cloud shuffled forward, a hand coming up to rake through his blond spikes, which were a little messier than usual, his fingertips gently pressing against the hidden stitches in his scalp experimentally.
"Stop fiddling with them," Leon grunted from beside the other man as they wove their way through the crowd of people, both men wearing sunglasses and smelling of the soap in the brunet's shower.
"I would if you'd have done them properly," the oncologist mumbled haughtily back. Both of the men's voices were low, deep and quiet. Their hangovers were being like clingy door-sailsmen- refusing to leave, and even taking it upon themselves to talk at them through the locked door.
Over by the nurses' station, a young intern fumbled with a trolly of different kinds of equipment before the metal trolly tipped over completely and it all crashed to the ground.
Both doctors froze.
Leon's eyes were squeezed closed behind his sunglasses, his jaw purposefully slackened, agonised trembles dancing down his arms to his clenched fists and a broken, pained gasp floating from his lips. Cloud's eyes were wide behind his sunglasses, his mouth hanging open, the kind of grunt you get when someone slams a baseball into your gut flying from his throat.
Peeking a weeping eye open, the diagnostician looked to his companion silently as the trolly was hefted loudly back upright behind them and everything was placed back onto it was painful clangs and bangs.
The oncologist was silent, hands covering his face, trembles shaking his frame. He was going to cry. His cranium was going to shatter. Oh, God, the pain.
God waved a hand noncommittally in the doctors' general direction. He had a plague he needed to see to.
"Doctors!" came a feminine voice.
Both men winced and the blond one of the pair barely swallowed back a sob behind his hands.
Aerith strolled out of her office, her slender arms crossed over her pink-clad bosom, long braid swinging along behind her before she came to a stop before the two doctors, her lips pursed unhappily.
"Doctors," she said again, with the tone of a scolding mother. The kind of tone that stated quite flatly that she knew what they'd done, and just wanted them to admit it.
"It's his fault," said both men at once, Leon pointing at Cloud, and Cloud removing one hand from his face to point at Leon.
The Dean rolled her forest-green eyes skyward and she sighed gently.
Looking back at the two men, Aerith pursed her lips once more, unfolded her arms, and rose her hands in front of herself, her bangles clinking together and making both men twitch.
With a little sigh, Aerith clapped her hands loudly.
The oncologist choked and the diagnostician winced violently.
Aerith clapped her hands again. And again. And once more.
Ignoring the curious glances from onlookers, the Dean lowered her hands and placed them on her hips, eying the two agonised men before her who were either covering their face with their hands to hide their tears, or placing a shaking hand to their temple in a feeble attempt for soul-searching silence.
"Next time, watch it," Aerith warned, flicking her dainty nose upwards slightly. It was her hospital. Her responsibility, and she was the sheriff around here. "Watch how much you drink, too. Don't come into work like this again, please." With that, the elegant and beautiful woman turned on her heel and floated back to her office.
The doors of the elevators hissed open moments later, after the two doctors forced their tortured bodies over to the steel boxes with shaky steps and quiet sobs, and the two men were met by a chipper Zack Fair.
"SPIIIIIIKE!" Zack squealed at the highest, most piercing pitch and loudest volume possible, an ear-splitting grin plastering across his face. "HEY THERE!"
The dark-haired desk-worker took a moment, then blinked at the sight of Cloud curled on the ground in the foetal position and clutching his head, beside Leon, who was on his knees with his hands fisted in his hair.
"This is your fault, you cretinous, eel-faced swine!" Cloud sobbed.
"Be quiet, you foul, bile-laced toad-spawn!" Leon moaned back.
Zack blinked.
"You guys okay?"
Yep. Back to normal.
((I apologise for the four-month wait for this. I wrote this story purely so that everyone could enjoy it, not just the slash fans- and I'm a 'perfectionist' my friends say, so, it took a long while for me to get this chapter the way I wanted it, plus the slash scene that wanted to be in there. I really hope anyone who enjoyed this fic until this point doesn't stop reading now because of the slash. But, I'm sorry if you do. There will be no more hardcore geiness... Hopefully. I would also like to thank 'Knit . pump' for putting up with my whining early in the writing of this chapter, and thank 'Moonwillow', 'Jollander', and 'KitVis7' for their reviews. They were very, very helpful and nice. I hope you all enjoy!))