Chapter 1 - The Path of Least Resistence
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Nearly every night was the same, a torture that kept Ansem awake for a nearly two hours after he had sought to go to sleep. Tonight, three days later, his hair gleamed and smelled somewhat good, at least, for here there were not to many pleasant smells to be had. But it was wood-smoke smell, intoxicating scent that it was which Sydney wore like a cologne.
It was this strong cologne he could smell now, listening to his breathing, his subtle movements as he slept nearby - a testament to what he could not allow himself to have.
And yet, why not?
There was no one in this world who would give a damn what he did. No, that wasn't true. There was one, and it was Ansem himself. He shivered in his sleep, tensing at Sydney rolled over again, and was drawn inexplicably toward Ansem's warmth.
He felt his stomach tighten. Sydney stretched his arm across his chest and mumbled incoherently in his sleep, pressing to his side. He wore sweatpants and T-shirt, the same as Ansem, but through even that fabric he sensed everything. Every curve. Every dip, every motion...
He would have to leave soon. He no longer felt terribly ill, and his coat and clothes were as clean as they'd ever be. In the morning, he decided. I'll write him a note. No... that would seem too cruel, a coward's way of saying good-bye. He tensed and shifted slightly, which disturbed Sydney's sleep all the more. He sucked in a breath as the Dark-infused creature slipped closer and gave a light grunt of appreciation.
No.
He would have to leave now.
Carefully, he disentangled himself from the child's grasp, sliding from the blankets until he stood a foot away from the bed and watched him sleep. The bed seemed twice as large, larger than it should be, and Sydney's body barely took up a third of the space.
Get a grip on yourself, 'Sem.
But he seems so alone...
NO.
He left the room as quietly as he could, feeling his limbs tense as his emotions fought every bit of reason that had led him to make this decision. A despair hung now over him, a cloud darker than any that would be overhead when he stepped outside. A consuming passionate anger toward the unfairness of it. Why shouldn't he stay? Perhaps others had come, like him, but Sydney merely lied to say that they hadn't. Perhaps they, too, had felt this way and wanted to stay.
He didn't want to grow tired of Sydney, of this house and dreary town, but nor did he wish to leave him and drive him to a torment that no doubt had become part of his existence.
He said he'd come back. That would be enough. It *should* be enough.
Ansem no longer felt terribly hungry, but he took as much food as he could carry. Sydney had given him something the day before, something he called a "Seeker". A relic of useful power, as its possessor linked his mind to its seeking power and gave him the location of any true spirit for miles. He immersed himself in that power now, which was amazingly simple. He saw a detailed, however slightly fuzzy map of the surrounding areas, including the town and a distinct mountain range beyond. He turned himself slowly in the street, facing the mountains, and simply began walking. His tall shadowed form slipped in between gray, dilipidated buildings that towered over him like the corpses of dead beasts, grinning toothily or none at all.
His main reason for taking the alleyways at all was to avoid the phantom "non-living", for their very visage sent a shudder down to his still-living core.
But he reached the edge of town around mid-morning, its borders vaguely marked by what remained of a picketed fence that circled around the perimeter. He crawled under through a broken hole, and gaped as he stood up.
There, toward the mountains, was a break in the clouds. A slash of blue sky and hesitant golden sunlight which marked the edge of a storm, and distant rainless clouds beyond. The mountains spiked up into them, as if reaching for the welcomed warmth of the sun, their stops glistening with saturated atmosphere and a small rainbow beyond that. He trembled in spite of himself, for any sight of sunlight gave him some hope. Ansem trekked toward it, shouldering the bag of food-items he had taken with him.
Perhaps this wouldn't be so hard after all.
Spikes of pain jarred his mind from what would (laughably) call sleep. His logic fumbled for reality at once, stumbled uncertainly in the darkness that pervaded beyond his vision. Reason battled the impossible. Madness crept to steal him away into his nightmares once more, but the pain stabbed again, tightened on his throat and his body, until he couldn't even shut his eyes against the agony.
He moaned aloud, tossing his head, feeling the razor-sharp fangs around his neck tighten and shred his scabbed, raw throat, opening new portals through which his life's blood flowed freely. He stiffened and croaked pathetically, hearing them.
Little hungry demons clambered over his skin. He quaked in nausea at their clammy touch, their twisted nonsensical hyena-like chatter, their unsatiable, ravenous hunger.
They reached, not into his flesh, but *through* it, into his soul, and the madness seized him at once and he heard nothing else but their delighted shrieks and his deranged, hellish screaming. The more he struggled to shake them away, the more his skin was shredded, the more he bled. The more vicious they became.
How long would such a torment continue? Could he, despite everything, even count the hours? The days?
Eternities later, they left him and in their wake left silence and a throbbing, numbing emptiness that soon was followed by his companion, his release. His second torment. Sleep. Nightmares.
He closed his eyes against the burning darkness, once again unconscious to his bleak and monotonous hell of pain and hunger. He relinquished his mind to the dream, to memories that drifted in and out with the tide of sleep. Sometimes, he never remembered what he dreamed. Merely lived them. It was the closest thing he had to living itself.
Sephiroth hardly thought about their missions together. Just completed them and finished them well. He soon lost count of their number, and realized with a sickening realization that he was being treated now as a Turk. Dirty work, stupid jobs. But he was the best at them, and not even the great Tseng could hold a candle to that.
Personally, he enjoyed the quiet moments in between each mission. Better yet, he had at least someone to enjoy these days with, who understood that Sephiroth was *not* a mere SOLDIER to be used until obselete, or dropped like a bad habit. Formally an accomplished Lieutenant from the Wutai Confrontation (a tentative title for the awful battle that lasted for a decade), his closest companion was another soldier named Zack.
Over the course of a few days sometime during the middle of the war, they had grown very close. Zack was glad to have someone listen to him; Sephiroth was glad for Zack's cheerful, non-judgemental and friendly temperament.
In some deranged, silent and possessive way, Sephiroth's rare affection for Zack gave Zack the impression that Sephiroth loved him. Zack loved him, too. Perhaps their feelings for each other were strained, for there was no way they could fully express it without the danger of angry sentiments from all sides.
Zack was the first to point out, one day, their new recruit. A young brat, not even infused with Mako, dressed in his ill-fitting uniform made for a private of SOLDIER. The boy stood nearly a whole head shorter than Sephiroth, almost the same height as Zack, and the boy's attitude toward everyone seemed reserved, often malicious, when he wasn't brooding in a corner or tending to his duties.
Charged with the new guy, Zack showed him the ropes of Sephiroth's little posse. They're group was considerably small, doing odd-jobs like fixing malfunctional reactors, putting down small but irritatingly significant resistence against Shinra, and dealing with naturalist factions who despised what Shinra did to the Planet. But since no such dangerous jobs were around, reactor-fixing was all that was left to be done.
Next month, Sephiroth had to go to Nibelheim and see to a monster problem in the mountain village, and see to the local reactor and neutralize its malfunction.
Dreams vanished long before he could understand them. The ravaged man twisted in his confinements in the dark, foundered on the edge of awakeness, and discovered sleep again.
"Cloud."
Purposefully calm and stoic, he pushed the door open and stepped into the upstair's bedroom of Nibelheim's one and only available inn. It was their second day, the morning of their leaving to go up to the reactor atop Mt. Nibel.
It was a chilly, heartless morning, the air laden with fog. The clouds were straining to release their burden as it hovered above the mountain village.
The young man lay sprawled upon the bed farthest from the door, his face hidden beneath the flower-scented pillow. His arms were spread-eagled, his bare hands simply hanging off the sides of the bed, and clenched so tightly that Sephiroth could tell - even from this distance - how white his knuckles were.
"Cloud," he said again, louder this time.
The hands relaxed slightly, the young man sighed.
Sephiroth stepped around the foot of the bed as he reached it, his arm hovering over the pillow before his hand snatched it away from his face. The pale boy's eyes squeezed shut instantly against the lamplight.
"Come on, Seph... I was sleeping."
"Any deeper, you would have made your hands bleed. Did you speak to your family?" Sephiroth rested the pillow against his hip, no longer weighed down by the weight of his long, cape-like overcoat.
Cloud blinked slightly, his impossibly spikey blonde hair drooping slightly from gravity. No doubt, he wonders why I would care about such a thing. But it's obvious it bothers him, and it's my duty to know about if it's going to affect his performance in battle.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Consider this as a command, Private Strife. You *will* tell me, or it's punishment for you."
"Ooh. Which one this time?" Cloud blushed as he said this, for although Sephiroth wasn't in any sense of the word 'kinky', Cloud sometimes enjoyed taking after Zack and twisted his words around to mean something else. It often back-fired with Cloud, but Cloud was hoping at least this time Sephiroth would loosen up.
For a second, Sephiroth's mouth twitched into a smirk. "Come on. Never mind this 'command' ridiculousness. I only wish to know, out of the benefit of you. Something troubles you."
Cloud sat up, reaching over to take the pillow and drop it back to its proper place. He stroked its surface for a few seconds, before he turned his back away and let his legs hang from the edge of the bed. "We have to move out soon."
"We have time. Talk."
"But we--"
"Cloud."
The young man sighed, his shoulders stiffening at the tone. Then they sagged at once. Sephiroth watched him, and frowned when his shoulders started to shake slightly. He slowly walked over, regretting at once asking at all.
You only think it's for the benefit of the party when we ascend the mountain, he thought. But it's more, isn't it? You see past his furious exterior, his rage. You see a soul within, a terrfied and fragile thing.
The urge to protect Cloud from pain was hard to resist. In the past, he simply brushed it off as a teenager's rebelliousness and wondered at how he could have ever even made SOLDIER at all. Zack understood him better than anyone else, though. And was it not Zack who told him, rather sadly, of Cloud's infatuation with Sephiroth himself?
Since then, he felt obligated to give Cloud what he wanted, which was maybe a tenative friendship which blew into full-blown infatuation with each other. Infatuation though it may have been, Sephiroth felt intensely drawn to Cloud's sensitivity.
He stood in beside him awkwardly, reaching to rest his hand against his shoulder. Beneath his touch, Cloud quivered with his withheld sobs. His arm tingled slightly and his fingers tightened of their own volition, when the young man surged to his feet, throwing his arms around him in one smooth, desperate motion. His grip was tight, his face buried in his chest as his heated breath assaulted his skin with his muffled moans of misery.
Sephiroth marveled at his tight grasp, and fervently his own arms moved about him. A mixture of emotions twisted inside of him, fatherly protection battling against--against--
He stood beside the vacant bed where Cloud had sat, supporting him now as he caressed his shoulder, kissing his mouth again and again to Cloud's bafflement, silencing his resistence and encouraging instead to simply let him touch him. For god's sake, the boy needed it. And so, he admitted, did he.
Gradually he felt the tension drain from the boy's body, felt response and lust replace fear and uncertainty. A breath of relief escaped them both, and Cloud's hands slid up behind his neck to the back of his head, pulling him down to his mouth where his tongue touched his. He tasted like sweetness... flowers, while Sephiroth tasted to Cloud like smoke and fire...
"Sephiroth...?"
Cloud shot out from his grasp like a hawk, standing against the edge of the end table, staring at the floor and keeping his mouth shut tight. Sephiroth looked at Zack, who stood in the doorway. The black-haired man's was slightly agape. Not shock. Not horror. But pain. That he had been betrayed, as though everything he had believed about people was utterly wrong. Zack's carefully crafted disguise of the Nice Guy slowly crumbled, and his expression twisted into one of--
"Zack--"
"No. Don't explain. I'm gone." And just as quickly he vanished from the room, leaving Sephiroth heavy with guilt.. at the utter and complete unfairness of it all.....