A/N: Long Update I know. So I am sporadic, I admit. I'm ashamed of it, but it's sad to say schoolwork comes before fan-fiction. (Although, I do spend at least two hours of every day on Xx). Enjoy! This chapter gets AU ish.
2. Ruthless
He was pale, shivering; bare skin on equally barren marble. Trembling again, the pounding of his heart was faint and sporadic, but the disjointed breaths and forced gasps resonated as desolate, pleading echoes. He choked, sputtered, and coughed on the grotesquely coagulating crimson pooling in his throat.
He was dying, he inhaled, choking again, he was finally dying. He had to admit with closed eyes, the darkness did not seem so cold and unwelcoming, acquiescence seemed so much less frightful now. Abandon seemed almost sympathetic to his tortured plight.
He had been foolish to follow a blind, homicidal man's path of fury for his own vindication, revenge, for his own goddamn vengeance, and it had cost him more than he would ever care to admit. The battle between them had been long, fierce, and agonizing, and Cloud had been lagging, joints had grated, muscle had been short of ripping, and passion and fury melded together to formulate a synergy of leaps, lunges, and swings.
The silence went on forever, the darkness lingered and hovered about him like a swarm of flies, but the spark of life still stayed, clinging, still beating the perforated bloody mass in his chest. How ironic that even death showed little mercy.
"Oh my." A mocking whisper sounded luring him out of a lucid daze. "Surely, Strife, you didn't assume I would leave you here to wither." Sephiroth's mysterious, fluid voice reverberated against the pallid skin of his throat. Cloud felt lush lips draw into a brutal smile; teeth and tongue grazing raw scratches drawn out over his neck.
"Silly, silly child." The man was equally cold, if not more, than the trembling blonde below him, any spirit of life equally stagnant and devoid. "How could I ever dispose of such a beautiful toy?" Agile, slender fingers traced the curve of his jaw.
Cloud didn't bother to open his eyes; he knew what vision would wreak havoc on his sight. Mass chaos, blood, discarded swords, soiled tattered garments, and the living embodiment of feline cruelty slyly smirking at his conquest. Sephiroth's grip on the boy's arm tightened.
"You're suffering, aren't you?" His lips traveled to the edge of Cloud's jaw, lingering, flesh on tender, dying, flesh, drawing a feeble, breathless moan from the boy's parched lips. Thin, fluid tendrils of blood effortlessly slid down the curves of quivering lips and chin. Sephiroth paused; jade transfixed at the sight, and nonchalantly moved to lick the blood of his face, and for Cloud, the contact had been blatantly sobering.
Eyes snapped open, he had wanted to shriek, and scream, snap his arm away from the older man's grip, and just die in peace, but even the cold bastard refused to let him that. The battle wounds were of little consequence to his already battered, deceived, and crushed heart. All he could do was groan pathetically, and turn his face away from his former commander.
"What the hell do you want?" He closed his eyes, and prayed to whatever form of omnipotence that reigned over the heavens that this was just a horrid tantalizing nightmare of fire and devastation from which waking was long, long overdue.
"Why Cloud, I thought it was obvious." He detected a distinct tone of mocking laced with laughter in Sephiroth's voice.
"I want you."
Perhaps, once there was a time where his young heart would have cried in joy at those words, but this admission could not have filled him with more dread the vision of the ashes of his life.
A/N: So I've been grudging through this chapter for the last say oh hour and a half in order to break through the mass of writer's block, so if this seems a bit forced or up to par, then I truly apologize, I've moved this rating down to a T, because unless with some serious hawt lemon it should stay at T than an M, but what do you all think? Any aspects I need to improve on. I've been exploring word pay, and my limitations as a writer also, and this is my little experiment project for different styles and such. I thank you for reading, and you know give me incentive to update faster and Review! Even if it's totally meaningless and series of exclamation points or flames, pleeeease review?
Much love,
Faded-Justice