A/N:
This happens sometime before Chp 14 of Shouldn't Feel Like a Crime.
**Chp 15 has more about the box ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
When did we decide that cereals should go first in the bowl before milk?
When we realized that cereals taste better when they're fully moistened underneath the milk? That good cereal shouldn't be wasted in case you misjudged the amount you want in your bowl? That milk tastes far superior if you let the flavour of the cereal saturate in it? That milk spills everywhere if you pour cereal into it and causes a lot of mess? That milk is too expensive to waste?
Why does any of these questions matter?
Who decided that they matter?
What if you just want your cereal crunchier? What if you just don't like milk enough to keep pouring it? What if you know just the right amount of cereal you want in your bowl all the time? What if you just don't care about how much milk you might have wasted by spilling it because it's just a splash or two?
Also, since when are cereals assigned into the 'breakfast' category of meals?
What if you just want to have them for dinner?
These thoughts drift in and out of Cloud like passing shadows as he sits quietly at the kitchen island, scooping cookie crisps soaked in milk out of his bowl and putting them into his mouth on a Tuesday evening.
He lets the radio play on the refrigerator only because he needs some background noise.
Total silence drives him a little nuts lately.
He's not sure for how long he has already been in the kitchen. All he knows is that his cookie crisps have gone too soggy for his liking and this is after doing everything he could to make sure that they stay crunchy below the milk as long as they can.
He doesn't even notice that Tifa's home and has been around in the kitchen for quite some time, preparing dinner clearly not just for herself.
"You alright with your cereals?" he hears she ask in between thud noises of a knife knocking against a chopping board.
"I'll get by…"
She tosses whatever it is that she chopped into a pot without saying a word. A whiff of sweet aroma floats through the air as she starts stirring the pot.
"I'm having dinner somewhere else tonight," she tells him, still focused on braising her food. "But I'll leave you some of these so you can have them if you want to."
Like always. He almost wants to say.
This is how it is between them since Costa Del Sol.
They can barely hold any conversation besides the usual 'have you eaten?' 'yes, I have' 'no, I have not' series of questions and answers whenever they're alone together.
But he can't blame her at all.
He has been living life post-Costa Del Sol like he has no control over how his body moves.
Just a zombie floating around to keep himself alive and breathing.
Every morning when he (supposedly) goes off to work and tells her that he's coming home late, it's just lie after lie because the truth is, he hasn't been in the studio since almost 2 weeks ago.
So what's he doing out every day? Just loitering at places that don't require him to talk with people but lets him feel the sun or the afternoon breeze on his drying skin – places for him to take a breather like the abandoned and corroding church in his old neighbourhood, the quiet bar which he used to frequent as a college brat and the convenience store with an alley that people stay away from because it looks shady.
It's actually a miracle that there hasn't been a call yet to tell him that he's fired and no one wants to see him in the studio again.
He's stuck in between not giving a single fuck about anything, and giving too much fuck about everything to a point that it destabilizes him and all he wants is to stay in one place without making as much as one tiny move.
Doing anything, including talking to someone, takes a lot of effort and he just gives up most of the time.
Tifa's now filling her stackable 3-tiered lunchbox with the set of food she just made: fried rice in the lowest tier, some steam vegetables in the middle, and her favourite thinly sliced beef drenched in teriyaki sauce in the highest tier.
She's smiling.
And he knows that she's not thinking of him.
The fact that she seems happier spending time with someone else doesn't hurt him as much as it should have. He thinks that it's nothing compared to the things that he had done to her without her knowing.
It's who she's spending time with that really hurts him.
But what's he supposed to do about it?
He knew from the beginning who it would be from the moment she told him what she had been doing when she left their hotel room and was gone for hours in Costa Del Sol.
It almost feels like divine punishment for him.
"I'll be going now," she says, grabbing her lunchbox before making her way out of the kitchen.
At the doorway, she turns slightly backwards and reminds him, "Please eat, Cloud."
He used to think that she didn't notice the changes that were happening to him. It's these little things that she does which makes him believe that she knows but chooses not to harp on it.
She seems to have given up on trying to make them work too because if she hasn't, they would be fighting about how weird he has been acting.
An hour or two must have passed before he finally gets up from the island and drains the rest of the cereal and milk that he doesn't finish into the sink. He doesn't feel like washing his bowl, so he leaves it there, hoping that he would have enough energy to do so tomorrow.
He then hovers by the stove to try one of those thinly sliced beef Tifa left for him.
They're absolutely delicious.
His stomach quickly churns when he thinks of who they're actually for.
He closes the lid of the pot and heads straight to the bedroom.
The bedroom's all dark but he refuses to turn the lights on. Instead, he stays still near the door, just thinking about what he really wants to do.
His eyes are not tired. His body's not tired. He doesn't want to sleep yet.
Rather than sleep, he decides to rummage the closet and retrieve a box he hides somewhere at his part of the storage space.
A box that carries things he shares only with that man.
Looking inside it pains his chest like it's just a useless piece of paper that someone's twisting and crushing in their fist.
Overwhelmed, he almost shuts it close.
But he knows what he really wants to do and changes his mind.
He snatches one thing out of the box: a fleshlight, one shaped like an anus and a pair of testicles.
That man had cummed in it a couple of times before making him cum in it too. Cleaning it afterwards was hell but Cloud didn't mind, as long as he could drive that man mad by the idea of their cum mixing together.
Cloud lays on the bed with the toy in one hand and begins taking off his shorts.
Gradually, he thrusts his cock in the toy and winces at the sensation – soft rubbery material clinging onto every inch of his hardness.
He moves it up and down his shaft, while he stares into the blankness of the ceiling above him as he thinks of the one person he wants to do this to.
Grey blue eyes. A scar on the jaw. And a wicked smile that always leaves his heart pumping blood faster than it's meant to.
The quicker he jacks himself, the bigger the hole in his chest grows.
Marks left on his body which used to be purple-red have turned into soft brown but they still tingle, constantly reminding him of what he had let go.
If there's one thing he learned since Costa Del Sol, besides choosing to stay with Tifa might be a mistake, is the depth of his desire and expectations for that man.
If only that man loves him enough to let him entirely in.
His hand moves desperately, answering to his aching need for actual flesh to clamp his cock.
Every part of his body's wrecked as he reaches his peak. He yells with all his heart as he lets his cum clog the fleshlight, wishing that he's doing it inside that man instead.
As the feeling of pleasure wears off, he sprawls on the bed, exhausted and ashamed that he's thinking about things that he's not supposed to anymore.
A sudden phone call jolts him.
He crawls across the bed on all fours, grabs his phone from the bedside table and falls back onto the mattress.
With eyes closed and the phone near to his ear, he answers the call.
Immediately, he hears a familiar voice speaking from the other end of the line: "Hello?"
A voice he longs to hear.
It's a simple 'hello'.
But it's enough to render him speechless. Enough to sting his eyes with tears and rip out all the sobs he has tried his very best to contain in his chest.
He doesn't care if he sounds pathetic.
As if afraid that he wouldn't have the chance to do it, Cloud forces himself to clear his throat and say, "I miss you…"
A brief silence follows. He doesn't know whether Zack's a little too surprised to react, or if the other man's testing him.
After some suspenseful few minutes, Zack's finally speaking again: "So why are you not here by my side?"
That's Zack fucking Fair for you.
He knows just the right words to fly Cloud back to him.
Because why are you telling someone you miss them and not go back to their side?