for an exchange on AO3, more info on my ao3 under errantnight (along with a lot of fics I can't upload here...)
Prompt: Cloud and Genesis meet in a post DOC world... could be soulmate based, could be trauma based. Only requirement is that they never met previously at Shinra (as per canon!).
Genesis rolled the name over his tongue, yet again. It was such a dramatic little thing. If he'd been reading a novel and the main character was named 'Cloud Strife' he'd have called it pretentious and stupid. But the image on the inside of his left wrist didn't lie. A sun wrapped in hazy clouds, the ancient Nibel runes worked into the curls of the design spelling out 'trouble'.
He'd been utterly delighted as a boy when his soul-mark, his Engraving, had appeared - one day the skin on the inside of his wrist had been bare and the next he'd woken with the promise that somewhere out there, someone was waiting for him. Someone perfectly matched to him, someone who would love him.
Angeal had said it was fitting that his soulmate would be troublesome, but this was not the sort of trouble he was looking for. Genesis had expected a lot of things from the person who was destined for him, and had feared some of them as well. He'd been a rather sickly child for the first decade of his life, a thing he understood now to be his body desperately struggling against the alien DNA introduced to his system in the womb. At first, he dreamed of his soulmate as his own personal hero - someone who would come and rescue him from all sorts of dangers.
He'd often imagined being saved from a dragon's horde, specifically a Nibel dragon once he'd deciphered the strange symbols that turned out to be ancient runes. But as he'd got older, and stronger, he'd wanted to be the hero himself - he could save himself, he could be a hero alongside his soulmate, they could be adventurers together.
Occasionally, on his bad days, and particularly in the throes of the worst of his degradation, he'd feared his soulmate would be disgusted by him. What if Genesis wasn't a match for him? What if his soulmate was so much more powerful, more noble, so much more of everything Genesis had ever wanted to be that he would reject him? Genesis was too weak, cowardly, villainous, to deserve something as wonderful and miraculous as destined love?
He'd built up in his head as being somewhat akin to some combination of Angeal and Sephiroth perhaps; someone who would stand above Genesis and shelter and protect him… someone who might overshadow him and keep him safe when all he wanted was to be the hero himself.
Cloud Strife was nothing like the giant and imposing figure of his imaginings. The more he learned about what Cloud had been through and what he'd accomplished, despite having too little hope and too much of his namesake, the more Genesis burned to find him.
His soulmate was a heroic figure, to be certain, so much more of a hero than Genesis ever had been. He tried to remember if he'd never actually caught the boy's name when he was little more than pathetic baggage carried hither and thither by Angeal's mentee, he remembered vaguely thinking he was pretty but all that had been trumped by his mad chase after Sephiroth's cells.
More than one nightmare, recently, had revolved around what he might have done to his soulmate by accident. What if he had managed to take him, what if he'd got what he'd wanted and then left him to die? His own soulmate , just another black stain on his shredded honor that was already covered in them.
He looked down at his PHS as it stated once more, in a toneless robotic voice, that the man's mailbox was full. He snapped it closed and put it back into his pocket, leaning against the wall and wondering if the man just kept it on silent at all times. His current attempt at tracking down the man who should have been his all along, was simply to lurk near where he was known to be seen and calling his number. He'd like to be able to follow the sound of a ringtone, it would make this hunt a lot easier.
His soulmate had no known permanent address, apparently. Genesis flitted from one of the mystery man's known haunts around Edge in search of him, when he had a chance anyway, he did have to attend to all the boring minutia of earning a living and paying his bills now that Shinra didn't exist to take care of those things.
It seemed as though there weren't many particular places Cloud gravitated to when he wasn't haring off on his ridiculously over the top bike to deliver packages. There was the church where Angeal's sword stood as a monument, the bar run by one of his friends where he had a room he rarely slept in, and the tiny office he kept things in for his delivery service that was mostly to track his finances and occasionally receive orders in person. None of which Genesis had managed to track him to in the few months he'd realized who Cloud was.
He slumped a little against the wall in a narrow alley behind one of his last resort locations to lurk - the massage parlor of a certain 'Madam M' that Cloud had spent a little time in once in a while. Considering that he might have to give up for the day, he brightened as his PHS began to ring, eyes lighting with excitement as Cloud's number scrolled across the screen. He flipped it open, bringing it to his ear and exclaiming, "Finally!"
"Um," a young female voice came across the line, "are you trying to find Cloud too?"
Genesis thought quickly. He'd sat in Seventh Heaven for hours at a time over the last week, nursing drinks that would never affect him while pretending they did so. Two children lived upstairs, one adopted and one fostered out from a friend working a dangerous job somewhere else. This would be the girl then.
Dread pooled in his stomach, had Cloud left his PHS there and not come back for it? For how long? Where had he gone, and in this awful weather? A drizzle of late November rain had been steadily accumulating ever larger puddles on the pockmarked streets, and threatened to become freezing rain once night fell.
"Yes I am," he said after a moment, "I take it you haven't seen him either? Is your…" he wasn't certain what to call the woman who ran the bar, "Ms. Lockhart there?"
"No, but," the little girl whispered, then yelped as the device was removed from her grasp and another young voice, the boy, hissed under his breath the very excellent advice that you shouldn't tell strange adults that your caregivers aren't at home.
"How do you know Cloud?" The boy's voice was suspicious, and rightfully so, he could imagine his soulmate had made many enemies.
"I met him a while back, when we were both ill," Genesis didn't quite lie, knowing that the insinuation would be that he'd met Cloud during his bout with geostigma. It didn't really matter that neither of them had been suffering the same fate at the time, "and I've been trying to find out if he's alright now…"
A breathy exhalation on the other end preceded the soft response, "We don't know where he is either. Tifa and Vincent are out looking, but he went on a delivery a few days ago and forgot his PHS. The guy he was delivering to in Kalm said he got his package really quick, but nobody's seen him since…"
"There's an awful lot between here and Kalm," Genesis mused, "Fear not, I shall be the one to find him."
"Wait," the boy's voice rose in query, "Who even ar-"
Genesis slipped his PHS back into his pocket, striding out of the little nook between two shops where he'd been lurking. He traced the dark lines of his Engraving just beneath the edge of his sleeve. He began making a list in his head of what he would need to acquire, particularly in order to take every possible outcome into account. A pool of dread began rising like the mucky puddles he began dodging in a sudden burst of energy that had his heart racing.
He wasn't often… or ever, really, anyone's rescuer. There was a thrill to that, in its own way, that appealed to his dramatic flair, but he was less familiar with the faintly sick feeling lodging its way into his stomach - he'd never rescued anyone in his life. That was always someone else's job, Angeal's usually and his squad of well trained seconds and thirds and little troopers that followed them like ducklings. Genesis blew things up and performed the vital duty of crowd control and setting important things on fire so that if Shinra couldn't use them then other people couldn't have them either.
"Channel your inner Angeal," he muttered, "what would you say we need, old friend?" His gaze lit on a pharmacy tucked between a liquor store and a boarded up storefront, "That'll do nicely."
As a general rule, nothing much stronger than a pack of Kalm fangs usually roamed the lands around the small city Cloud had left behind, and certainly not something like an old Shinra sweeper that had been beefed up to the size of a king behemoth. And especially not one that had been beefed up with twice the usual load-out.
And again, generally, this wouldn't cause any problems for Cloud. He should be able to defeat something like that without too much trouble. He shouldn't have been so distracted and in his own head, it wasn't even that cold, he wasn't even that tired . Something that huge shouldn't be able to get the drop on him, but it had taken out two of his wheels and sent his bike skidding and tumbling over before he'd crested the hill to catch sight of it. He'd leaped out of the way, barely avoiding being trapped beneath the heavy vehicle, but it had taken the various blades that made up Tsurugi with it, rolling to a stop and he'd only managed to snatch one hollow blade and get painfully to his feet.
He ached, something in his left shoulder burned, but he forced himself forward. He'd still had his Materia, thank Shiva, or he'd have had to run and probably would have lost everything to the sweeper's rampage. He'd managed to take it out, scrambling across rain-slick roads and dodging the ever present potholes the size of his bike as he did so. It hadn't helped the injuries he'd sustained in the fight when a stroke of lightning had caused the fuel tank to explode, sending him flying through the air to skid across a patch of ice that cracked and sliced through the thick material of his trousers to the skin of his thigh beneath.
Cloud's entire left side was something of a mess, blood slowly clotting as the Mako that ran through him tried to heal the damage. Carefully, he probed the bullet wound in his calf, sighing in relief as he found the exit wound on the opposite side. He didn't want to think about what he'd do if he needed to dig it out - a soft bitter chuckle spasmed in his chest at the very thought of trying to get to a hospital. He'd managed to take care of such wounds before, but he didn't have a full medkit, it was somewhere scattered across the ground with everything else that had been flung out of the compartments of his bike. His thigh was just as mangled as his calf, cold air biting at the wounds the ice had left like razors.
He thought, maybe, he had a concussion, but wasn't sure what to do about that if he did. Thankfully, he'd remembered just in time that it was probably a bad idea to try and cast any spells when your head was fucked up - and a Cura directed badly could give him brain damage. Actual medical Mages knew what they were doing, had honed their Mana as fine as a scalpel, and could push the magic into their patient's body with pinpoint accuracy.
A sliver of light pierced through a break in the overcast sky, and he winced at the intrusion - concussion, yeah, maybe, the light hurt .
He pulled himself up to his feet, breathing hard as his leg nearly buckled beneath him, and staggered off of the road and collapsed beneath a slight overhang. A little dazed, he dragged himself further in, finding the crevice deeper than he'd expected. Cloud blinked against the light again as he realized the sun had somehow dipped a great deal lower in what had felt like a few seconds.
Shuddering, he realized he'd faded out for a bit and deliberately shook himself awake.
You weren't supposed to sleep with a concussion, but he didn't have anyone to wake him up - the last two or three times he'd had one, well, someone had always been there. It would be fine, probably. He didn't have any potions, which were marginally safer than Materia. He didn't have any food. Or water. It was fine. He was pumped so full of Mako that he could go a very long time without either of those things - definitely three or four times longer than a normal person.
It would be… fine, he reassured himself as he curled up against the very back of the shallow cave and found he couldn't stop his eyes from closing.
As another general rule, Cloud didn't usually mind the cold, or at least he hadn't in the past. He was a mountain boy, born where the sun disappeared for months out of the year. Snow in Nibelheim had regularly trapped everyone inside their houses until the storm stopped and you had to dig yourself out or starve. The problem, now, was that the one place on the planet that was colder than the Nibel Mountains in the dead of winter was the Northern Crater - and when Cloud got cold, now, well…
The cold was insidious, creeping in with edges of ice every time the sun went down and barely receding in daylight. He kept convincing himself, almost, that is wounds were healing - his enhancements would take care of everything. He could drag himself out just to find the wreckage of his bike and hope his Materia and potions were still in their compartments.
But it was slow, and the pain and the cold kept dragging his thoughts in the worst directions. To things he'd forgotten. Had wanted to forget. Dizzy and helpless and so far from…He kept losing track of time, just like the last time he'd been so cold. He kept telling himself he needed to stop hiding in here, to get out and try and find his PHS, or had he even had it with him? He wasn't exactly the most responsible with charging the thing, and he'd forgotten it more than once.
Had he dreamed of crawling out and searching his things? All he knew was that it was dark, and then light, and then dark again, and Cloud shielded his eyes as something cut off the light at the mouth of his shallow cave. His tongue flicked out to wet his chapped lips and a thin whine slipped out of his throat as a too familiar figure, the silhouette of a long coat and a sweep of black stretched out to one side.
He shook his head, blinking, trying to make the vision fade. The stupid cold, the pain pulsing through his head… it was too familiar, too reminiscent of the days, maybe weeks, that had felt like years, he had spent with Him trapped in the crater. He could almost hear the voice in his head, telling him it was alright, the pain would make him stronger, make him worthy of being bonded soul-deep to a god forever.
The Engraving on his arm burned, the serpent wrapped around the elaborate blade felt like it was writhing beneath his skin and trying to burrow deeper. He couldn't count the number of times he'd been tempted to try and remove it, wondering what would happen if he went so far as to skin himself. Would I grow back? Would that mean that his soulmate… was Sephiroth still bound to him forever? Was that what had let him come back over and over as He'd said?
A black feather drifted in and brushed his cheek…
The sight of the wreckage had sent Genesis into paroxysms of horror, a light dusting of snow with no footprints in sight and more falling gently down to cover everything. He'd landed in the middle of it, stilling his own breath and forcing himself to ignore his suddenly racing heartbeat as he walked in slow ever widening circles in the hopes of finding something, anything, other than a body.
When he'd noticed the dark opening in the hill he'd scrambled up to it, listening intently and letting out a ragged sound as he heard a faint breath and scratch of stone.
The pale face he'd seen in the newspaper clippings he'd collected was deathly white, a tiny scattering of freckles across his cheeks standing out in stark contrast where he hadn't even noticed them in the photos. The accident and subsequent struggle against what looked like a reject from one of Heidegger and Scarlet's joint ventures into psychotic machinery had done as much damage to the small man as it had done to his mangled bike.
Messy blond hair stuck to the sweat on Cloud's dirty face, his blue eyes widening he shook his head and whispered, "No, you're…" the soft panting breaths and an expression of sheer terror was not the best reaction to Genesis' Knight in Shining Armor attempt, not at all.
"Cloud, darling, I'm," he held up his empty hands as the other man stared at him, and it was suddenly clear that he wasn't seeing Genesis at all.
Especially when Cloud shifted, trying to rise, and fell back again, muttering, "you're dead…" A thin blade with an odd hilt was brandished, trembling, until it abruptly dropped with a soft thump on the bottom of the little cave-let and Cloud's eyes rolled back in his head as he collapsed.
"No!" Genesis heaved himself the rest of the way into the claustrophobic space as Cloud went limp, bright green flaring around his left hand and sinking into Cloud's skin even as a golden glow in his right brought up a magical Scan that flickered red around the edges in a warning.
Magical triage wasn't Genesis' specialty but he knew the basics, barely registering the first skin to skin touch he shared with his soulmate as he ripped off his glove and pressed fingers against the faint pulse that was there , it was there , and he was breathing. Potion, a low level one of the cheapest sort seemed like it would be the wrong choice but a stronger potion had a stimulant mixed in and that was positively dangerous when you weren't sure exactly what was wrong.
You were, truly, not supposed to move an injured person either, but Genesis had no other option - He tucked Cloud's body close against himself and spread his wing, turning toward Kalm and rising into the air.
Genesis kept his hand, casually, on Rapier's hilt as he watched the doctor that he'd summoned to his hotel room finish checking that Cloud's wounds were healing properly. The woman's hands barely trembled as she set her Scan Materia back into her medical bag, naturally not used to being held at swordpoint during a medical exam - regardless of the exorbitant fee she was receiving for the duty
Oh, Genesis had money , he'd never been stupid and had deliberately squirreled away a great deal of his funds before and during his defection, but he was keeping most of it in savings now. It wouldn't last forever and, since becoming a highwayman wasn't high up on his to do list, monster hunting and resource fetching paid his bills just fine. He'd planned to use his secret funds for the occasional entertainment or vacation but this was far more important.
"He's out of the woods now," the doctor drew his attention fully as she closed her bag and settled it on her shoulder, "he needs to stay warm of course, and the… whatever it is that you SOLDIERs have in you seems to be starting back up again to boost his healing. I thought the bullet wound would need more but the hyper seems to have kickstarted it into overdrive."
She shook her head, a bitter look flickering across her expression for a brief moment, "I wish all my patients had that ability, he's lucky he does." It wasn't the first time and wouldn't be the last that a physician expressed some mingling of envy and disgust - and there was a very good reason of course. Shinra's science department had kept everything related to the SOLDIER enhancement program top secret and all of that information was still either missing or purposefully destroyed.
The research could very well have been twisted towards the better , it could theoretically be used in all sorts of ways to benefit mankind, but truly the only way to learn about it now was to study the body of a SOLDIER. Genesis failed to see how any of that was his problem, and thus, the secrecy and the threat were rather necessary.
"Quite," Genesis replied coldly, pressing a wad of folded one hundred gil bills into the woman's hand and directing her out the door. Money for her services and some to pretend she didn't see who and what she'd seen.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he absently pulled his PHS from his pocket and sent a quick message to Cloud's own device still safe in the hands of his friends - 'I have Cloud, he's safe'. That duty done with, he tossed the PHS onto the sofa. Genesis let his shaking knees take him down to the floor beside the bed where he could finally take Cloud's hand in his own to sit vigil until he woke.
Cloud looked even smaller than he was and far more vulnerable against the white sheets, with his black clothing carefully removed to reveal his myriad wounds. The trash can beneath the bedside table was filled with wet-wipes, covered in dirt and blood from where he and the doctor both had done what they could to clean him up.
Genesis rubbed his thumb over the back of Cloud's hand, humming softly as he turned it over to finally get a look at the Engraving on the inside of his wrist. He'd seen the black lines there, but everything had been far too frantic and rushed to get a real look at it.
He frowned, slightly, eyebrows raising as his eyes roved over the image… it was… wrong. So wrong. Very wrong.
The sinuous lines carved out the shape of a serpent, twined around a Wutaian tanto knife. Its fangs were poised to strike, focused over the fluttering pulse-point, drops of venom a potent threat. There was the faintest brush of color, a pale green so faded he might have missed it if he wasn't looking so close, in the narrowed, slit-pupiled eyes.
Genesis had spent a great number of years researching the rare phenomenon of soulmates, and their Engravings in particular. This went against everything he'd ever read, every documentary he'd watched, every historical soul-mark ever recorded. An Engraving was never like this, never threatening, even if it did involve dangerous animals or even monsters.
And it didn't match himself . It couldn't possibly be the Engraving that linked him with Cloud . Hesitantly, he pressed his own wrist against Cloud's, watching to see if anything happened. He shouldn't do this when Cloud wasn't conscious, when he couldn't join their Engravings of his own will, but Genesis had to know … He wasn't certain if he was horrifically disappointed, or incredibly vindicated when there was no reaction.
There was still no doubt in his mind that Cloud was his . Everything in him yearned to be with this man, their souls were meant to entwine, they were made for each other. It wasn't a guarantee that your Engraving would be in the same place, after all, Genesis just needed to find it.
Gently, carefully, Genesis slipped into the bed beside Cloud and pulled the blanket down to shamelessly search. Perhaps Cloud simply had the very worst taste in tattoos, he mused to himself as he reached out to grasp the younger man's right hand to find smooth skin with the faintest smudge of dirt that he absently wiped away.
Even more gently, he tipped Cloud's body away from himself and settled him onto his side to look at his back. Cloud gasped softly, a little wounded breath that made Genesis wince and whisper apologies, only to stutter to a halt as his fingers ghosted up one bruised and scraped shoulder to hover over the delicate swirls and bold lines at the back of Cloud's neck.
He brushed aside tangled blond hair, not daring to actually touch the beautiful Engraving. He felt a well of pure joy bubble up in his throat in a soft and rather satisfied chuckle as he uncovered what was unmistakably the mark to match his own… a Phoenix.
Genesis still couldn't help the troubled frown that returned as he looked over Cloud's shoulder to his left wrist; the reptilian eyes of the serpent tattoo somehow seemed mocking. It was eerie enough that he thought it might move at any moment. He shook himself, returning his attention to the important thing… Making his soulmate as warm and comfortable as he could.
Cloud came to consciousness gradually, aware only of lying on something soft and covered in warmth. Warm was nice…? His eyes cracked open to find himself in blue twilight and surrounded by mounds of white. Warm was bad, wasn't it, if he was buried in the snow? A puff of warm air stirred the hair on the back of his head and he tried to turn over, finding he was stiff and sore.
A heavy weight was wrapped around him, pinning him down in the white, dragging him under the burning winter ice and he forced himself to go as still as possible.
His head spun, as he tried to remember where he was, when he was, why did everything hurt? There was a faint burning sensation that flushed against his wrist and crept in tiny increments up the vein and he locked the frightened whimper into his throat. The question he'd asked so many times, begged even, stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth, 'if you love me, why does it hurt?' and the same answer as always was burned into his thoughts, 'because you don't love meenough yet, puppet, give me more.'
He couldn't stop the soft whimper that jumped into his throat as the arm locked around him pulled away and a light came on over his head. The blanket of snow… the … blanket, a warm white blanket was pulled away from his face and he blinked warily as a figure that was somehow both intimately familiar and entirely unknown hovered over him.
"Did I hurt you?" The man's voice was anxious, his eyes half lidded with sleep... glowing blue mako-eyes.
Cloud shoved himself back, falling gracelessly onto a plushly carpeted floor and scrambled up to his feet. He glanced around, taking in the white… everything. That had confused him, he realized, nearly everything in here was white - and expensive looking. White leather couch, pale gray carpet, white bedding, and white walls broken up by the sort of dull impersonal artwork that always seemed to hang in hotel rooms no matter how much they cost.
He found himself stumbling back again, as the stranger had somehow managed to get out of the bed and step close as he evaluated his surroundings. His head still hurt, a little, that must be it.
"Here," the man held out the single hollow blade that Cloud had dragged into the small cave he'd gotten to, hilt first, "take it."
Cloud snatched it from his hand and backed up one more step and stared hard at the other man. The cool air on his skin made him twitch, the sinking realization that he was nearly nude brought a whole host of problems and questions. It was relieving that his strange bedmate was fully clothed, black jeans and a black t-shirt. He was even wearing socks, Cloud was bemused to notice.
"How are you feeling?" The other man's voice was soft but thankfully not patronizing, "You've had quite the rough go of it, precious."
Cloud couldn't stop the little scoff in the back of his throat, "Precious?" he asked, subtly tensing and relaxing the muscles in his legs and arms to see what might still be injured. The last few days were a blur, the sort of loss of time that he loathed and feared, unable to put together anything resembling a timeline between his disastrous fight against the giant mecha, surviving somehow in that shallow cave with his injuries slow to heal in the cold without any magical or medical help, to waking up in the arms of a stronger who called him pet-names.
The other man's lips quirked in a little smirk and he shook long auburn hair from his face, "You are very precious, you know, do you have any idea how terrified I was when I found you?"
Choosing to ignore that, Cloud shook his head, "People are going to be looking for me."
"I know," the man said, "I told them I found you already."
Cloud took that in, frowning. It wasn't the answer he was expecting - not at all. He'd been certain he'd get more like 'and they'll never find you,' or something like that. But then why give him a weapon if he was trying to keep him here? His head still hurt.
"And you are?" he asked after a long pause.
"I'm your, s̵̹͘o̴̙͂u̸̖̓l̴̟̔m̸̲͐a̸̳͑t̵̗́e̴̟͂," the man's lips shaped a word but Cloud heard nothing but static. He only felt a flash of pain that lanced from his wrist up into his skull, like a hot wire burning a line directly into his brain as he gasped and fell to his knees. The hollow blade dropped heavily onto the carpeted floor at his side as he clutched his arm, the air trapped and burning in his lungs.
The last time this had happened it had almost got him killed in the ruins of Midgar. The pain radiating from the mark on his wrist had pinned him to the ground just as surely as if Sephiroth's blade had run him through and into the concrete beneath his knees. He told himself that, anyway, that the other man would have killed him then. He'd managed to shake it off in time, the hand reaching for his throat batted aside in a spray of blood by his own blades.
S̵̹͘o̴̙͂u̸̖̓l̴̟̔m̸̲͐a̸̳͑t̵̗́e̴̟͂ mine, only mine
"You're not," Cloud whimpered as the word began to make sense, "S… Sephiroth…"
Half a sob wrenched from his throat as he tried to breathe and suddenly, blissfully, it all stopped. A warm hand wrapped around his arm, pulling it away from his own grasp where he held it against his chest. The stranger's light voice dropped a vicious curse as he stared at the soul mark, seemingly glaring into the snake's eyes.
"You… I should have thought of it, but how did he… I should have…" the man muttered to himself, then shook his head, "I'm so sorry Cloud, this isn't how I wanted to do this."
Before Cloud could jerk free, the man pulled him into a tight embrace, the hand not gripping his arm wrapping around to grasp the back of his head. The body he was pulled flush against was so warm, and the hand that tangled in his hair was surprisingly gentle.
"I'm Genesis," the man whispered into his ear and the word wavered in Cloud's mind, as though he should know it, as though he should have always known it, and the fear peaked once again for a fraction of a second before it was washed away in a wave of heat.
Something was wrong, or was it finally right? The back of Cloud's neck burned, but there was no pain at all. He sagged against the other man, against Genesis and every tense muscle in his body relaxed.
Genesis shifted Cloud in his arms, "Look," he said, "I don't know what the fuck he did, but he's a liar. He lied to you, Cloud, it isn't real."
Cloud turned to look at his arm, held tenderly in Genesis' hand, and watched as the black lines began to fade. Not entirely, still there like a scar that might never fade, but the sharp feeling of fangs burrowing into his skin that he'd lived with for so long disappeared and left him gasping at the lack of it.
"And, see?"
He looked again, at the pale wrist held out to him - the Engraving of mist and sunrise was glowing, pink and gold and blue rising like a blush into the design brighter and brighter until it was awash in color. The runes of his family's namesake were surrounded by something almost metallic gold and he huffed a slightly hysterical bit of a laugh as Genesis leaned down to kiss the top of his head and whispered, insanely, that he loved him.
"I don't even know you, you don't know me ," Cloud's voice was a little choked, a little wet with the tears he tried to keep from falling. He had no idea who this man was, as familiar and unfamiliar as he was, but he was his all the same somehow.
"Mmhm," Genesis answered, "I know. And I already love you all to pieces."
The boot prints were relatively fresh, Vincent thought, as he followed the progress of the steps taken from the middle of the wreckage towards an overhang of rock. They appeared in the dusting of snow, from nowhere. Carefully avoiding them, he made his way to the dark recess and ducked beneath its low ceiling. He could smell blood, very faintly, and as his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting he could see the marks of where Cloud had dragged himself into the shelter.
Something moved in a stirring of air and he caught it before it could flutter out of reach. If he could pale any further than he already was, Vincent would have certainly done so as he stared at the long black feather in his hand. Dread washed over him as he returned outside, following the boot prints again to find them ending abruptly once more as though the one who wore them had simply vanished .
Or flown .
Vincent swore softly as he pulled out his PHS to call Seventh Heaven. Whatever had happened here, they had a single message to go on that Cloud was safe, and that had seemed slightly reassuring… but now it felt like a threat. Someone had Cloud, and his chest ached at the most obvious answer available.
Sephiroth.
(This is marked as finished, although I have plans to write more in this AU eventually, just not as a direct continuation)