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by YUE魂 from reader jingjiming
Tifa’s the one who finds him, actually: wandering, bemused and exceptionally lost, through the streets of Edge, looking as young and bright as the day he had died.
As Tifa will later tell it, she sways where she stands, unable to believe her eyes, and only after a solid minute of doubting her sanity does she manage to tear herself free and run after Zack, suddenly and immediately desperate on Cloud’s behalf.
It takes no coaxing to bring Zack to Seventh Heaven. It’s Zack, after all, who asks her to take him to see Cloud.
To say Cloud reacts poorly when he walks up the front steps and through the front door of the bar that evening is an understatement.
First he walks in; he stops; he turns and walks out; and then, just when Zack is about to run out after him, Cloud comes charging back in, grabbing Zack by the shirtfront, white-faced and wordless, shoving him up against the bar countertop and Cloud, not Zack, making a noise as if his ribs have been kicked in.
“Sunshine, hey. Hey—”
“What the fuck.”
“Good to see you, too.”
“Zack.”
“That’s me.”
“It’s not. It can’t be.”
“It is, baby. Hi. Sorry it took me so long.”
“Z—za—”
Acutely aware of both the tears audible in Cloud’s cracking voice and of all the staring bar patrons, Tifa ushers them towards the stairs at the back.
Cloud won’t stop clutching Zack with both hands and Zack’s arms lock around him just as tightly. Tifa has to push them, gently, in the right direction, and if they get stuck halfway up the steps, Zack’s back pressed to the wall, that’s their problem. She closes the door to the stairwell and gives them their privacy.
Cloud says, almost hysterical, and laughing slightly, “I keep finding new ways to go crazy.”
“You’re not.” Zack touches his chin, doesn’t react at all to how Cloud has him pinned uncomfortably against the railing. “I’m right here. Look at me.”
Cloud hasn’t stopped looking at Zack since he grabbed him, but Cloud’s eyes won’t properly focus.
“Zack,” Cloud repeats.
“Cloud,” Zack says, all smiles, so familiar it hurts and hurts and hurts. “I missed you.”
Cloud actually yells, at that, completely heedless of his volume, covering his face with his hands and knocking the side of his head against the wall. “You can’t say that. You can’t fucking say that!”
Zack is quick to put his hand between Cloud’s head and the wall. “But it’s true.”
Cloud lets out a sound like he’s dying, like Zack is pressing on a wide-open wound.
“Hey.” Zack looms over him with unavoidable concern. “What is this? What's going on with you?”
“I need you to be real.”
“Done.”
Cloud shakes his head, still hidden behind his hands, and partially in Zack’s hair.
“You don’t understand,” Cloud grits out. It sounds like he’s grinding his teeth, like his throat is closing up. “I can’t survive this again. I can’t. If I open your eyes and you’re gone, I don’t think I can...” His breath hitches, and, so tightly pressed together, Zack gets to feel him shudder.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Zack promises. “Not ever again, not if you don’t want me to. If you don’t believe me right now...well, that’s okay. Keep your eyes closed, if you want. Whenever you wanna open them, I’m going to be standing right in front of you.”
Cloud shakes and shakes. Softly, Zack peels his hands away from his face. Cloud’s eyes stay squeezed shut. With his arms still around Cloud, Zack leads them upstairs.
The hallway is unfamiliar, and Cloud is no help, forehead crushed against Zack’s neck and fingers wrapped vise-like around Zack’s arms. At the third door he tries, Zack finds a room where the desk is littered with tools and the bed is made with hospital corners. He guides them inside, the latch clicking behind them.
“Tell me what has you so scared.”
Cloud laughs, right on the broken edge of a moan. “I broke into fucking pieces last time I lost you. Wanted to die when you turned away from me in that church. This—” Cloud digs his fingernails into Zack’s skin “—isn’t something I can come back from alive.”
“You missed me, huh?”
“Shut up,” Cloud says, but it’s all desperation and zero heat.
Zack rubs his upper back, still holding him close. “I’ll never hurt you, you know that, Spike. You can trust me. If I say I’m here, I’m staying.”
“Never hurt me?” Cloud laughs, a sound like metal scraping metal. “No one’s ever hurt me as bad as you did.”
“Cloud—”
“At least Sephiroth only try to kill everyone, at least he didn’t didn’t die for me, at least he didn’t bleed out in front of me with a smile, at—”
“I’m—”
“—least he didn’t break my fucking heart.”
Zack goes very still underneath Cloud’s grip. “Did I?” he asks. For the first time, his voice strains. “Me?”
“Don’t sound so surprised.”
Zack’s breath hitches.
He rubs his thumbs over Cloud’s cheeks—slowly, almost experimentally—then slides his hands into Cloud’s hair. His spikes are soft, and thread between Zack’s fingers like silk. Zack’s voice is hoarse when he says, “Do you still love me?”
Cloud still hasn’t opened his eyes. He breathes in hard. He’s shaking a little—the man who saved the planet, the only one who could take Sephiroth in single combat and win—trembling under Zack’s warm, gentle touch. Of course he is.
“Don’t ask me that.”
“I already did.” Zack tilts his head. “Tell me?”
The room is tense with laboured breathing. Cloud shivers, and Zack’s gaze bores into him, hot even through Cloud’s eyelids.
“I don’t know how to stop. Zack, I forgot everything about you, and even then I didn’t stop. I tried to stop, it would have been so much easier if I stopped, but—”
Zack kisses him.
Cloud goes quiet.
“Don’t stop,” Zack says, into his mouth, hands all over Cloud’s waist and breath heated where it mingles with Cloud’s. “Please don’t.”
“I just told you,” Cloud whispers. “I can’t.”
“Good,” Zack says. “I can’t either.”
Zack grabs one of Cloud’s thighs and lifts, hoisting Cloud a few centimetres off the ground in his joy, and spins them around. Cloud’s eyes fly open in surprise, and stay wide as they fall on Zack’s beaming, flushed face.
“Sunshine,” Zack says, the nickname like a vow, and kisses Cloud so deeply that Cloud moans from it, still shaking, still clutching, mouths burning as old and still-raw feelings lash to the surface.
When Cloud pulls himself away to breath, he stares Zack down with ragged disbelief.
“Zack. Zack.”
“Baby.”
“Zack, please.” His begging is feverish.
“What is it? What do you need?”
“You can’t leave. Not now. Not after—you can’t.”
“I won’t. How can I make you believe me?”
Cloud shakes his head, but now, he seems unable to close his eyes at all, almost unblinking as he stares at Zack like he’s trying to consume him.
Zack flexes the hand that’s holding Cloud’s leg up at his waist, making Cloud’s breath hitch. “Don’t I feel real?”
Whisper-hoarse: “You do.”
“Then what else can I do?” Zack nips his mouth, tugs Cloud’s lower lip between his teeth. Cloud groans, sliding downhill into an open whine, as Zack seals their lips back together and gives Cloud his tongue. “Anything, anything. You sound so upset. I hate it.”
“You’re why I’m upset.” Choked up with unshed tears.
“Cloud, please,” Zack says, his voice breaking for the first time into a beg. “I don’t want that.”
Cloud’s legs shift, and Zack quickly lifts him up the rest of the way, helping Cloud wrap his legs around Zack’s waist. Holding him up is effortless.
With a fingertip, Cloud traces Zack’s eyebrows, then the bridge of his nose, then his cupid’s bow. He touches the scar on Zack’s jaw, the two raised slashes that never did heal.
“You’re the same,” Cloud murmurs.
“It’s me,” Zack says, because it’s all the explanation he has. Then, soberly, he adds: “If I’m upsetting you this badly—if this is all too much—I can go.”
Cloud grabs onto his shoulders so tightly that he scrapes Zack’s skin through the cloth of his shirt. “What did I just say?”
“I’d come back,” Zack rushes out. “Of course I would. Tomorrow, or in an hour, or whenever you want me. But if you need some space to deal with—”
“If you give me space,” Cloud says, quite reasonably, “I’ll die.”
Zack breathes out, hard. “Okay,” he says. “Okay—I’ll stay. I’d really like to stay, actually.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“Wasn’t planning to,” Zack breathes. “Not ever.” He steps forward a little bit, deeper into the room. Cloud is still looking at him as if Zack’s eyes are magnets drawing him in.
“Happy to promise it,” Zack says, “In front of as many witnesses as you want, in fact.”
Cloud’s eyes go dark. Zack watches his chest fail to rise for two, three, ten seconds.
“Yes?” Zack checks.
“Yes,” Cloud breathes.
“Can I put you on the bed?”
Cloud exhales, harshly. “Put me on the bed, now.”
They go sprawling, already kissing before Cloud’s back hits the covers. Cloud strains up against him, even as Zack tries to press him flat into the mattress. Cloud tries to kiss him back even as he babbles.
“I missed you, and I forgot you, and I still missed you, and I don’t know how I lived, sometimes I think I must not have at all—”
Zack tries to shush him, lips against lips. “It’s okay,” Zack’s saying, “I’m here now.”
“Please, I want this to be real—”
Zack holds Cloud down by his biceps, mouths over his throat. “Focus on me,” he says, when he comes up for air, red marks already rising along Cloud’s pale skin. “This is all real. I’m dead serious about us. Don’t think about the past, okay? I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I can’t change it, but I’m here, and I’m staying.”
Cloud writhes underneath him as if struck by lightning. He pushes against Zack’s hold on him.
“Let me take care of you,” Zack says, into his clavicle, pulling aside Cloud’s collar with his teeth. “Let me make things up to you.”
Cloud groans, overwhelmed, and throws his head back against the bed, arching up against Zack’s body. Zack is steady, too strong to be thrown off, and latches his teeth into Cloud’s skin before following the bite with his tongue.
“Zack,” Cloud sobs, openly now. “Zack.”
Zack presses his face into Cloud’s neck. “Tell me what you want. Anything.”
Cloud’s legs, still wrapped around Zack’s waist, pull Zack in so tightly that he grinds them together, the both of them groaning loudly at the contact.
“Fuck.”
“Shit.”
Zack rocks his hips back into Cloud’s, and Cloud squeezes him like a vise again, the pressure between them unbearable.
“Let me go,” Cloud begs, straining to reach out for Zack, to kiss him.
“What’re you gonna do, if I let you?” Zack murmurs, barely brushing their mouths together at the limit of where Cloud can lift his head to reach.
Cloud says, harshly, “Don’t you want to find out?” and it’s a hell of a good reason, so Zack releases him with only a sharp inhale.
The first thing Cloud does is tear off Zack’s shirt as if it’s done him personal harm. Zack careens backwards, nearly standing back up, to tug the shirt over his head, and before he even manages to throw it away, Cloud is running hands up his torso, touching him greedily, pressing his forehead against Zack’s broad chest.
Fingertips press nearly hard enough to bruise as Cloud clutches Zack’s waist, his ribs, his chest. “Fuck, you really are the same.”
“How would you know?” Zack asks, amused.
“Was I not supposed to be looking?”
Zack sways, pupils expanding, a smile far from sweetness starting to creep onto his lips. “You were always welcome to,” he says, reaching for Cloud’s neck, “but you never touched.”
“My imagination is good,” Cloud says, and bites down around Zack’s nipple.
Zack moans; Cloud licks, then sucks, then bites again, his hands going hungrily to the small of Zack’s back.
“Cloud. Oh, fuck, Cloud.”
Unable to stay still, Cloud kisses his way up Zack’s body, getting up onto his knees on the bed to rise to Zack’s level.
Zack grabs his head as soon as it’s close and kisses him, messy and hard. “Cloud,” he breathes, “holy shit, I love you.” He scrabbles for Cloud’s shirt at the same time that Cloud goes for Zack’s belt buckle, and for a moment he’s dragging the hem up Cloud’s stomach, fingers scraping hot against the line of his abs, and then—
Cloud jerks back, jaw snapping shut, and Zack watches him go absolutely still.
Zack freezes, heart skipping a beat. “Spike?”
“I—shit,” Cloud whispers.
Cloud’s still holding onto Zack’s belt, but he’s staring at Zack with a sudden, very different kind of alarm.
Zack holds his hands out, palms open. “What is it?” he says, voice going low, catching a little with the sharp edge of his concern. “Did I do something?”
“Zack,” says Cloud, sounding strangled, and unable to meet his eyes.
Zack waits.
“I…can’t,” Cloud says.
“...Can’t do this?”
Cloud nods once, then twice. His fingers, though, twist only tighter in their grip on Zack’s waistband.
“Okay,” says Zack. “Okay.” He pauses, betraying no disappointment at being shoved away just abruptly as he was dragged into bed. “Sex, you mean? Or…us?”
Cloud opens his mouth. Shuts it. His eyes are blown-out and his shoulders are agonizingly tense. As if with great effort, he releases Zack and turns away, putting space between them on the bed.
He sits with his hands clasped between his legs, a muscle working in the corner of his jaw, and Zack waits for him to speak.
Finally Cloud makes a noise of disgust, of impatience at himself. “I can’t” —he waves a hand at himself— “take off my clothes. Okay? So.” And he doesn’t seem capable of saying anything more.
Zack lets out a relieved sigh. “Oh.”
Cloud shoots him an incredulous look.
“Baby, is that it? We can do this whatever way you wanna,” Zack says, inching closer to him on the bed. “You want me to keep my hands to myself—you got that.”
Cloud looks unspeakably frustrated, so Zack continues: “Or we can keep going.”
“I just said—”
Zack puts a hand on Cloud’s neck, lets it drag—heavily—down Cloud’s sternum, all the way down to his side. Rests it, hot and promising, on the dip of his waist.
“I heard you,” Zack murmurs. “Clothes stay on. I know a thing or two...if that’s what you want.”
The look Cloud gives him is full of such raw, anxious desire that Zack kisses him straight away, and Cloud returns it with untempered desperation, hands clawing at Zack’s bare shoulders and arching up into Zack’s touch.
“I got you, I got you,” Zack whispers, pulling Cloud against him. “Gonna make you feel so good, I promise.”
Cloud breathes out, hard—a sound of sharp relief. “You’d better.”
Zack doesn’t ask for further explanations, doesn’t pry; Cloud’s limits are nothing but highlights around a privilege. Driven, he crawls further onto the bed, forcing Cloud to shuffle back on his elbows—head tipped back and lips parted as he looks into Zack’s glowing eyes as if dazed.
Sliding his hands down Cloud’s hips, Zack grabs hold of Cloud’s ass and squeezes it firmly. Cloud’s hips roll in his grasp, a breathy whine breaking free of his lips as Zack’s teeth return to his neck.
“Zack,” Cloud pants, “oh my god. No, there’s no way you’re real.”
“Sunshine…”
Cloud shakes his head, hands running from the backs of Zack’s thighs to his ass to his shoulders, and back. “You would never,” he says, almost as if to himself. “Zack didn’t want me like this. Zack—” Cloud lets out a cry like a sob as they grind together again, the hard outline of Zack’s cock pressing against Cloud’s stomach through three layers of cloth.
“I want you like this,” Zack says. He drags his hands away from Cloud’s ass and uses them instead to pin Cloud down again: this time, bringing Cloud’s folded arms behind Cloud’s head, putting his weight onto Cloud’s elbows.
Cloud hardly squirms, just pants, tears visibly coursing down his cheeks. “Things don’t happen just cause I want them,” he insists. “You don’t just walk out of the grave and onto my doorstep and ask me to marry you—”
“I haven’t asked yet,” Zack says, evenly. “You’ll know.”
“—and get in bed with me, you don’t, not Zack fucking Fair—”
Using his weight, Zack stretches him out—holds down Cloud’s elbows, flattens Cloud’s body beneath his own, holds him perfectly still. Their mouths meet, and even crying, even hopeless, Cloud kisses him, needily, like it’s the only thing he wants at all.
They’re both way too hard to be having this conversation. But it’s not as if either of them are about to stop.
“Hold still,” Zack says, quietly. He shifts his grip, so that he’s holding Cloud just where Cloud’s wrists are crossed now, with just one hand, and can use the other to finally cup Cloud’s cock through his pants.
Cloud’s hips jerk up a centimetre, but he stays oddly silent, eyes affixed on Zack’s. His mouth is open.
“Can I touch you through your underwear?”
A whine escapes Cloud’s lips. “Yes,” Cloud says. “But, you can...I mean, it’s fine if it’s just...” He looks away, red in the face.
Zack strokes him again. He says, low and reverential, “Show me as much of yourself as you wanna.”
Still flushed, eyes shut, Cloud undoes his fly and pulls out his cock, pushing the elastic of his boxers away until it digs into the underside of his balls. Everything laid out for Zack to see.
He’s hard. Large, and leaking into his own palm. Slowly, Cloud’s hand rejoins his other, still held above his head. He doesn’t even have to be asked.
Zack lets out a harsh breath. “Oh, Cloud.” For a moment, it’s as if he can’t react at all. He licks his lower lip, eyes dark and heavy at Cloud’s waist. And then he’s in motion again.
“Thank you,” Zack gasps, pausing only to lick his palm. “Fuck, you’re so pretty...look at me. Keep looking. Feel that?” A hand, stroking him, making Cloud rock up against it. “That’s real. Watch.” He runs a thumb over Cloud’s weeping slit. He presses that thumb between Cloud’s parted lips. “Taste that?”
Cloud’s eyes are blue as forget-me-nots, clear as summer skies, as his tongue obediently meets Zack’s thumb.
“Beautiful,” Zack whispers. Then he reaches down and pulls himself out too, pushing his waistband down, and then he strokes himself, eyes never leaving Cloud’s. He licks his lips, sighing almost inaudibly as he palms his own cock—a couple times, a couple times more, until he bites down with a sudden jolt.
He withdraws his hand and presses the edge of it against Cloud’s mouth. “Taste,” he says.
Cloud licks, no pause.
“It’s different, right?”
Cloud nods. He seems to be having trouble breathing.
“So I’m real. You can believe me.”
Cloud just licks his hand again, the broad flat of his tongue running over his skin and then catching the base of his fingers too, eyelids fluttering a few times as he concentrates.
Zack can’t help but groan, loudly and shocked, as Cloud strains his head now to get at Zack’s fingertips.
“Baby,” Zack says, “I didn’t mean you had to—”
Cloud gives him an affronted look, so Zack obediently presses just the tips of his first two fingers against Cloud’s lips.
Cloud swallows them up quickly, swirling his tongue, moaning at his taste, taking them as deep in his mouth as he can reach. Zack watches, almost as if frozen, as Cloud bobs his head up to suck down past the second knuckle.
“Cloud,” Zack grates out, gasping, finally giving up on restraining Cloud’s wrists to instead grab Cloud by the back of the neck for support. Cloud keeps working his fingers, and at the same time, beneath him, Cloud’s hips strain and his thighs flex against Zack’s crushing weight.
“Fuck, fuck.” Zack grinds against him, heavy, not especially slow, as he cups Cloud’s nape gently and watches his fingers get polished by Cloud’s eager tongue. The wet noises it makes are obscene, almost as much so as the effect it has on Zack when Cloud’s big eyes open again and blink at him, mouth sealed in a ring around his fingers, and then a tongue presses between index and middle finger, as if parting thighs.
Zack spurts more precome, wet between their bellies, now, as Cloud kisses the webbed skin between his fingers, first delicately, then more fevered, sucking and tonguing at it like a body part Zack doesn’t even possess, looking up to Zack as if for affirmation.
Swearing, Zack aligns their cocks and presses against Cloud, over and over, no fabric left to muffle anything, now. Cloud whines, the sound striking the walls in a fierce echo, and Zack keeps Cloud’s legs pinned, doesn’t let him participate, just has to lie still and take all the pressure Zack wants to give.
“You’re so good,” Zack whispers, as he starts to slowly slide his fingers in and out of Cloud’s mouth, Cloud’s licking up each digit and again at the vee between them, “you’re so fucking good. You really have no idea how much I missed you.”
Cloud’s choked-off moan drags on even when he rolls his head to the side, neck going limp, finally seeming to give in to everything Zack wants to give him, over and over, the steady grind of their lower bodies, the heat like a furnace crawling under his kin, the way his heart is white-out blind from everything happening all at once.
Zack slams his hips downs a few more times, power behind each thrust, and his fingers tighten around the back of Cloud’s neck as at last the wet heat of Cloud’s mouth and the fierce burn of Cloud’s gaze and the strong plane of Cloud’s body beneath him send Zack flying into an abrupt and all-consuming orgasm, still fucking his hips through it the whole time, passing on the pleasure, mouth opening in a ragged inhale as he makes a noise like his soul finally waking up to the fact that he’s alive.
He finally stops when he’s shaking too hard to continue, dripping wet onto the shape of Cloud’s clenched abs underneath his thin shirt. He’s even come a stripe across the head of Cloud’s cock—which is now twitching, incensed and red, begging to be touched.
Cloud is making so much noise. All of it incomprehensible.
“I got you,” Zack promises, pulling his fingers out of Cloud’s mouth and wrapping them around the base of Cloud’s cock. Cloud swears like he’s dying, and Zack shuffles down his body, dragging Cloud’s hips down the bed and throwing one of Cloud’s knees over his shoulder.
“Oh god—”
Zack goes down on him.
Cloud shouts, hard enough that it rattles the windows, throws his arms over his face, can’t stop his hips from thrusting up into Zack’s mouth with astonishing urgency. Zack takes it easily, hands running up his sides in reassurance, then blunt nails scraping down again to his ass.
“Zack,” Cloud seems to be fighting to say. This throat isn’t letting him, or maybe it’s his lungs: breathless, hoarse. “Zack, I can’t.”
Zack pulls off with clear reluctance, shoving his cheek against Cloud’s clothed inner thigh and looking up at him with spit-slick lips. “What is it?”
Cloud’s face is still covered. His chest heaves. Zack watches a vein in his cock pulse.
“Baby. Tell me.”
Zack reaches up, and finally finds the fresh tears, hot where they drip off Cloud’s cheeks and into his ears, his hair.
“Please don’t cry while I’m sucking your dick,” Zack says, half-laughing, half-desperate. “I’ll stop if it’s that bad.”
“Zack.”
“Words, baby.”
“I’m going to...fuck, I can’t handle this...”
“You’re close, huh?”
Cloud’s moan is anguished. “I can’t believe I’m sleeping with a—fuck—a hallucination.”
Zack flinches.
He grasps, futilely, for a single thing he can do or say to make any of this better.
Cloud scrubs at his face as new tears escape the corners of his eyes. Zack pets his hair, face twisted with outright concern. “Isn’t this different?” he whispers. “Can’t you tell?”
Cloud rolls into the bed, hiding his face. Against his own thigh, Cloud is still incredibly hard, and Zack winces in sympathy.
Zack puts a knee up on the bed. He runs a light finger up Cloud’s cock, watching, transfixed, as it makes Cloud shudder. “Take a picture,” Zack says. “Make me bleed. Whatever will convince you…”
Cloud shakes his head again. He sighs, and finally pulls away, sitting back upright. “No,” he says. “There’s nothing.” He looks like he’s giving in to something, a pained reluctance on his face. “I just should enjoy myself, right? This is what I’ve wanted. And if you’re gone in the morning…that’s how it is.”
“No. No. That’s fucked up, Spike.”
“And?”
Zack presses their foreheads together, grabbing Cloud’s forearms tight. “I need you to trust me.”
Cloud looks away.
With an edge of desperation, Zack adds, “I need you to trust yourself.”
Cloud laughs. “Fuck me now,” he says, grabbing the back of Zack’s hair; rutting up against the plane of Zack’s stomach, hard and satisfying. “I don’t want to run out of time.”
“Don’t say that.” Zack bowls him over, drops down to his knees on the side of the bed, and drags Cloud bodily back to the edge of the mattress. “I’ll show you,” he says, almost savagely, fingers pulling at the paleness of Cloud’s thighs. “You’ll see. ‘M not going anywhere.” In a murmur nearly too quiet to be heard, “Your imagination can’t be that good…”
“I will not cry anymore,” Cloud mumbles, like a promise to himself. Then Zack’s mouth is back on him, and Cloud almost chokes, voice breaking in the middle of his loudest shout yet. “Zack, I swear to god—”
Zack swallows him, over and over, with unmitigated enthusiasm, dragging lips and tongue and the silk inside of his cheek, and he holds Cloud down with just a hand over Cloud’s heart. With the other hand, he rolls Cloud’s balls, cups the delicate skin, and it takes all of ten seconds—Cloud never had a chance. He comes down Zack’s throat, over and over, a delirious amount of time, all senses fusing into one.
“Damn, baby,” Zack is whispering, on all fours overtop of Cloud. “You gonna be ok?”
Cloud nods, the space between his ears fuzzy. “It’s...” he says, strangled, “been a while.”
“Oh?” Zack says, audibly smug. “How long?”
“Give me a break.” He is entirely out of breath. “It’s all your fault.”
“Mm, and now I’m fixing it.” Zack grins, self-satisfied, and crushes their mouths together. He can’t seem to get enough of manhandling Cloud, because he pauses only to strip off his own pants before dragging Cloud back—bodily, hauling him by his thigh—to lie on the bed. Cloud’s hips flex, minutely, at the treatment.
Zack lies across him, sprawling over him—naked, bronzed warmth all along Cloud’s clothed front. He presses kisses against Cloud’s forehead, gets his hands in Cloud’s hair so he can pull his head to one side then another to reach everywhere with his kisses. “I’m so lucky,” he breathes, and Cloud nods against him, eyes shut, a wet noise rising from his throat before it can be stopped.
Cloud cups Zack’s cock where it’s rising again, pre dripping from the slit just from going down on him. “I think,” he says, in a voice that wavers as if he’s still crying, “if I push my pants down a little, and you reach up—”
Zack sucks in a harsh breath. Cloud feels it against his ear. “You want to try?”
Cloud spreads his thighs around Zack’s hips. “Yes.”
It’s not something Zack could ever say no to. He sits up, and Cloud does too, but he doesn’t move from where he has Cloud pinned beneath him even as Cloud tries and fails to reach his bedside table drawer.
Cloud makes a sharp, indignant noise after a few seconds of struggling against the weight. “Gonna move?”
“Nah,” Zack says, beaming down at him.
Cloud’s eyes are glossy, his lips bitten, his hair fucked up. He looks up, arms crossed and mouth open as if to complain, but all that comes out is a strained, “I—please?”
Zack’s smugness fades. A hungry kind of softness overtakes his expression, and he pushes Cloud back down with a hand to his chest, then pulls open the drawer himself. “I’ve got you,” he murmurs.
The words seem to drag hurt sound from Cloud—as if pained by disbelief—and Zack presses forward to occupy his mouth.
Together they drag Cloud’s pants down to only mid-thigh, so that barely even a centimetre of skin manages to show between them and the hem of his boxers. Zack wants to kiss that strip of skin, but instead he bows his head and presses his lips to the fabric, low on the inner thigh, and Cloud keens.
“Okay,” Zack pants, between kissing him on the mouth, fervent and imprecise, and slicking up his fingers. “Is it just that you don’t want me to look? Can I touch you anywhere under your clothes? Bare skin?”
“No,” Cloud says, through laboured breaths. “Only—just my left leg. The top. The thigh. Please don’t—not anywhere else. Please.” And, even more affected than before, head tipping back as Zack goes at his neck, “Sorry.”
“Nothin’ to be sorry for.” Slowly, he dips his fingertips underneath the hem of Cloud’s underwear on the left side.
Cloud groans; shockingly loud.
But—“Just your leg?” Zack says, innocently, leisurely dragging his whole hand up Cloud’s thigh. His leg hair is barely scratchy underneath Zack’s palms; Zack lets his thumb smooth, deliberately, over Cloud’s inseam.
Cloud says, strangled. “I—think so—”
“Not complaining,” Zack says. “Just checking...what you want me to do...” His hand reaches the crease of Cloud’s hip, cloth bunched around his wrist, just brushing the heat of Cloud’s groin. “With this lube...”
Cloud cries out as Zack’s hand stops. “Yeah, there too,” he says, eyes screwed shut.
“Gotta say it.”
Cloud opens his eyes, but he turns his head against the pillow. “Goddammit Zack, please. Baby, please.”
The pet name makes Zack roll up and kiss him, hard, overwhelmed, and Cloud rocks up against him, whining. His squirming pushes Zack’s fingertips to brush over his sac and then he’s even louder.
“Baby,” Cloud cries.
“I just came back from the dead,” Zack says, smooth and low against his cheek. “Do this one thing for me?”
Cloud shakes, and holds onto Zack’s shoulders, and then says—voice raspy, eyes wet with tears, “In my hole. Zack. Please.”
Zack makes a noise at the back of his throat, loud enough to be heard downstairs. Uncontrollably, rocks his hips against the groove of Cloud’s thigh. “Thank you, sunshine.” His fingers swirl over Cloud’s rim, pressing down against it at Cloud’s voice hitches again into a sob. “Of course.”
They’re both insensate to the noise they make as Cloud clings to him, as the bed rocks underneath them and Zack works himself into Cloud’s tight, shocking heat; as Cloud throws his head back and moans, going boneless as Zack reaches the right spot inside of him; as Zack tugs at Cloud’s lower lip with his teeth and fucks his tongue into Cloud’s mouth in time with the slow, deep slide of his fingers. When Zack is up to two, Cloud cries out and his hips buck, straining for more, so Zack pins his hips down sharply with arm across his waist and just keeps going, torturously careful, hardly even blinking as he takes in the sight of Cloud panting and open for him.
“I thought about this,” Zack confesses, mouth dry, “before.”
Cloud clenches up around him, throws his head back and arches his back. A noise follows, prolonged and strangled. On the comedown—as Zack stares in undiluted astonishment—he pants, “Me?”
“Yes, you.” Zack slides out and presses three fingertips to Cloud’s fluttering, slicked-up hole. Cloud moans, and nods, fervently, head turned half into the pillow, in assent. “Did you think about me?”
Cloud laughs, but it sounds crazed, and then he shouts, hips bucking chaotically against Zack’s hand, as he gets his fill.
“Sh, sh.” Zack holds him down, grinding his fingers at their deepest. The noise Cloud makes is the precursor to an open sob.
“Yes I fucking thought about you,” Cloud says, all at once, breathless, and starts crying again as Zack speeds up. “Zack, Zack.” He grabs Zack’s wrist: not to stop him, just to follow the gesture.
Tears spill down Cloud’s cheeks. Zack kisses them, smears them. “Alright?”
“Get in me,” Cloud sobs.
“You can wait.”
Cloud wails, “I missed you,” and Zack doesn’t waste another second.
He slicks his cock up, shoves the leg of Cloud’s underwear up as far as he can, and actually lets out a growl when he finds he can’t quite shove himself in the space that’s left. Cloud whimpers; Zack tugs the fabric further.
Cloud says, “Just tear it.”
Zack tilts his head. “You sure?”
Cloud nods. He flushes. The dry tear tracks on his face run parallel to fresh ones. “Just—don’t look. Please.”
Zack stills, despite his desperation. “You know,” he says, “there’s nothing that could make you look less than perfect.”
The laugh Cloud lets out is erratic, anguished. “Sure,” he says. “Keep believing that.”
“Cloud.” Dead serious.
Cloud reaches between them, and the sound of fabric ripping makes everything else quiet in comparison. His hips nudge up against Zack’s.
“Later,” Cloud says. “You’ll be here later—right?” His voice pitches, sharp with anxiety. Zack rubs his hands up and down his sides, then pushes aside what Cloud tore.
“Yes,” Zack breathes, “Always,” and lines up.
Zack blinks as if stars are swimming before his eyes, and makes a sound as if he, too, might start to cry, just as the tip of his cock slides into Cloud’s heat.
Below him, Cloud has stopped breathing. As Zack watches, one solitary tear races down his cheek.
“Zack,” he says.
Zack presses the chastest of kisses against his lips. “Cloud Strife,” he says. “I found you again.”
He slides in slowly. Cloud’s nails scrape, just as slow, down his back, as they join closer and closer together.
Cloud’s body is drenched and slick and tight, easing him in, making Zack groan and sweat drip down his brow. The fit is a close one; Zack feels like he’s stretching Cloud almost too open, making a space for himself, one that will be there forever, and Cloud sobs and takes it willingly, grateful hiccups smothered as he starts to cry in earnest.
“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Cloud says, hunching in on himself, curling up towards Zack. He tries to spread his legs further, but he can’t, his pants still tangled on his thighs, and his lower back arches as if turned on all the more by the struggle. “I—god.”
When Zack bottoms out, Cloud shouts from it, wavering with pleasure.
“Yes,” Zack pants, subsumed in heat. “There we go.” He scrambles to cup Cloud’s chin, tears running off Cloud’s jaw and onto his fingers. “Doing so well.”
Cloud whimpers, twitches his hips to ask for more.
“You’re so, so perfect.” Zack aches to look down, to see where he’s pressed as close to Cloud as he can be, but he honours his promise and, with violent willpower, keeps his eyes locked on Cloud’s face.
Cloud squirms, and gasps, and nearly yells again as Zack leans in a fraction deeper. “Zack—!”
“Fuck. You react so pretty.” Zack starts to speed up, gripping onto the sheets above Cloud’s head for self-control. “It really has been forever since someone fucked you, hasn’t it.”
Cloud throws his head back and doesn’t hold back his moans. “Years,” he gets out, between thrusts that tap the headboard against the wall. “I didn’t want anyone else...couldn’t fucking think of anyone else...”
“Oh, baby.” Zack kisses him, steadily, not without remorse. He grips Cloud’s waist in one hand, wraps his fingers around his slenderest point. “’M here now.”
Cloud weeps for it. Zack murmurs at him, short helpless adorations, but keeps going, as Cloud wraps his arms around him and buries his head in Zack’s neck and hot tears fall on Zack’s shoulder, even as Cloud tightens and spasms around him, feet kicking on the bed.
“Please,” Cloud wails. Zack can hear the backslide. “Please, you have to be real.”
“I am,” Zack says, desperate to be believed, and his hips speed up to match. He drags his hand through Cloud’s hair, cups his head against his shoulder, even as he almost tears the sheets with his other one. “I’m right here, I promise.”
“I need you to be real,” Cloud keeps sobbing, keeps slamming his hips up to meet him. “I need you, I’ve needed you, I can’t do this again. I have to keep you.”
Sweat, dripping down his chest. “You are, baby, you are.”
“I don’t wanna let go. I can’t.” His cries rattle the window panes, and he seems oblivious to Zack’s responses at all. “Zack.”
“Not letting go.”
“Please, please. Please be real. Ple—” he shrieks through a stroke that shakes his body up the bed “—fuck, Zack, I love you, please stay please stay please stay—”
Zack kisses affirmations into his mouth, clutching him, holding him, fucking him wildly through the tears. “Yes, yes, yes,” he promises, pointlessly, their bodies slapping wetly together, the only satisfaction he knows how to give.
“Need you need you need you n—”
“Gonna come in you,” Zack says, heaving. He grips Cloud’s face. He glistens with sweat; hair falls in his eyes. “That’ll be real.”
Cloud nods, over and over, neck flushed, kissing every part of Zack he can reach, chanting like a prayer. “Stay stay stay stay stay stay—”
Zack digs his nails into Cloud’s thigh and slams himself home, both of them crying out as Zack fills him, floods him, fucks him wet and full. Cloud comes for a second time, dribbling across his shirt in a dark stain, and it’s that or the astonished, gratified scream Cloud lets out that punches a noise from Zack’s gut. He finds it within himself to come just a little bit more.
They lie, wrapped together, raggedly catching their breaths, as Zack goes soft inside Cloud. The room has gone dim around them, the sun falling under the curve of the planet, and their bodies are overheated but they can’t stop holding each other close, not even to let the sweat cool.
Zack’s damp bangs press into Cloud’s forehead. “Sunshine?” he says, throat scratchy from the effort, but also from love.
Cloud’s voice is so, so small: “Don’t go.”
He wouldn’t dream of it, not even to clean themselves up. Not now. Not today.
Zack presses his lips to Cloud’s cheek. “I promise.”
In the early morning, they wake to a strip of sunlight through the curtains, and the expression he catches on Cloud’s face is not one he ever wants to see again.
Shock—terror—dread—Cloud sits upright with a start, shaking Zack into alertness, and Cloud stares down at him, overcome and petrified for seconds longer than Zack can really stand—before his face crumples, eyes burning with a relief so sharp that it looks painful. He bows over as if stabbed, and presses his forehead to Zack’s bare stomach.
“I’m real,” Zack says, over and over, as he rubs a hand down Cloud’s back and as Cloud shakes with silent, unshed tears. “I told you. I’m here for good.”
“I don’t believe it,” Cloud says. He’s curled over Zack like a penitent. Like he’s on his knees in supplication. “I don’t believe it.”
“I’ll be here every morning until you do,” Zack says, because it’s all he can truly offer.
Cloud shakes his head, his head still lowered so Zack cannot see him.
“I will,” Zack insists.
Cloud says, in a whisper: “I don’t deserve it.” He sits up; he looks around the room, as if seeing it for the first time, and not sure how he even arrived there. “I never...I didn’t...not even close. How could...? What…?”
He stares blankly, adrift on a loss Zack can only start to comprehend.
Zack drags him down on top of him, gives him no room to struggle as he wraps him in his arms. “You deserve everything,” he says, hotly. “We deserve to get to be happy, together.”
Cloud shivers. He tucks his hands underneath Zack’s arms, and presses his cheek to Zack’s newly beating heart. Zack doesn’t know if Cloud believes him, but it is what it is. Zack will prove it to him, eventually.
In the weeks and months that follow, they figure out how to be alive together.
So much has changed since Zack closed his eyes on that cliff. The world; themselves; what’s left of the people they loved. There’s a lot for Zack to learn, and Cloud—who has borne his grief for Zack for so long and so imperfectly, scar tissue thick both inside and overtop his heart—is forced to discover who he is outside of a prison of guilt and unfulfilled longing.
Cloud still startles when Zack steps into the room; Zack still catches a haunted expression on his face, sometimes, when Zack looks over his shoulder and finds Cloud watching him do something unremarkable, like folding napkins. Whenever Zack sees that look, he has to abandon whatever he’s doing and attach himself to Cloud, immediately, even if it’s just with a hand to the shoulder.
Cloud always shivers when Zack kisses him for the first time.
Zack runs deliveries around Midgar. He gets to know the Seventh Heaven regulars. He has beers with Barret and barters for new bracelet charms for Marlene. Before he leaves every day, Cloud always seems to have some new protective amulet or bracelet or sash he wants to fit on Zack, and Zack has to kiss his face four times—one in each compass direction—and promise he’ll be fine. That he’ll come home before dark.
He intends to keep that promise forever.
Cloud’s bare, unlit little bedroom becomes their bedroom, and with Tifa’s help, they get a double bed up the stairs. They find some curtains for the windows and after trial and error finally manage to hang them. Zack comes back one day from the market with a stack of pre-Meteor magazines that someone gave him for free, and he makes Cloud sit down with him and cut out pretty, strange things to go on their wall: a marlboro eating a sports car. A waterfall in space; a string of fruits and lipstick lips and brightly coloured beetles.
They practice sparring, baking under the hot wasteland sun, in the dusty lot behind the bar; when the house is empty enough, they topple into bed.
Whatever the occasion, day or night, Cloud remains buttoned up. Zack has kissed his wrists, his neck, the tops of his feet; sucked his cock, and, under different combinations of clothing and darkness, fucked him and been fucked; but never has he gotten to lick the lines of Cloud’s abs, or run his hands up Cloud’s thighs.
They make it work, of course. Zack is nothing if not creative and relentless. Cloud, too, is very willing, and memorably had devised an outfit of a Barret-sized shirt, tall dark stockings, a bandage for one thigh, and no underwear. Zack isn’t ashamed of the noise he had made, the very first time he got to grope Cloud’s bare ass.
Every time they come together, Zack can’t help but tell Cloud how gorgeous he is—how perfect—how much Zack adores him, and how no wound or mark or difference could ever make Zack love him less, find him any less hot as sin—but Cloud never wants to talk about it. Zack has no better idea why Cloud hides his skin than he did on the first day of this new life.
It’s not as if Zack minds. He tries not to push. As badly as Zack wants to touch him, to hold him skin to skin and pour his affection out into tangles of their body—even then, if Cloud never feels comfortable baring himself to Zack, that’s something Zack can live with. At least Zack has a life at all, and one he gets to share with Cloud, at that.
In bed at night, he pulls Cloud close by the waist and presses goodnights and I love you’s into the man he’s been reunited with through nothing short of miracle. Counts his blessings and can barely comprehend the extent of them.
…But it kills Zack that he can’t help. That something pains Cloud enough to keep constant secrecy, and that he carries that hurt every day, and still he’s unwilling to share it with Zack.
He has no doubts that, whatever is beneath Cloud’s clothes, it will be nothing that can faze him—nothing that can compare to the sheer enormity of his love—and that if Cloud ever decides to confide in him, Zack will be ready to worship Cloud’s body, and to set all Cloud’s fears to rest.
Zack is asleep when Cloud comes to bed, but he wakes when he hears the door creak open. Just a little: still hazy with sleep, he lies there, eyes half lidded, and watches the faint outline of Cloud getting changed in the dark. Can’t discern any details, but is warmed through by the intimacy of it all: of Cloud, in their room, in their bed. His clothes in their shared drawers. The door clicks shut once more as Cloud leaves to brush his teeth, and Zack closes his eyes again, lets sleep tug at him.
When Cloud comes back and finally slips into bed, it’s pure habit that has Zack reaching for him even in the thick fog of his almost dreamlike sleep. All the same, he feels the difference right away: no sweater, no shirt. Just Cloud’s skin, hot and smooth under his fingertips.
Bare.
Silently stunned, Zack retracts his touch until it's hardly a hover. Goes quite still, unsure of what he’s meant to do.
Cloud pushes back against him. Curls, with the warm length of his naked back pressing against Zack’s chest, and drags Zack’s arm over his waist.
There are no words exchanged between them, but Zack lets out a soft sigh of reverence. His fingertips brush over Cloud’s stomach, the soft skin of his shoulder pressed into Zack’s own.
Zack squeezes his eyes shut. Presses his forehead to the back of Cloud’s head, and wills all the gratitude he can in Cloud’s direction. Doesn’t bother Cloud with the praise he’d sorely like to, but leaves him to his rest instead. Falls asleep enwreathed in contentment, down to his marrow.
Cloud’s tossing and turning wakes him, hours later, when the sun has only just barely begun to rise and the room is that cool blue that precedes dawn. In the dim, he can only barely see Cloud’s nakedness, still flush against his own, and it’s only his second priority anyhow, not when Cloud’s eyes are on his, hair in his eyes and a sleepy frown on his face.
“Baby?” Zack brushes his cheek.
Cloud pulls him into a kiss, and Zack scoops him up gently. Sighs against the feeling of their bodies together. At last, at last. It’s right. It’s like coming home.
“Morning,” Cloud breathes.
“Good morning,” Zack says back, slowly kissing his mouth, his cheeks. “I love you.”
“Are you tired?” Cloud whispers, and Zack’s attention is drawn to the incredible heat of Cloud’s cock pressed hard against his hip—his naked cock, his naked hip, the naked stretch of his stomach leaning into Zack’s.
Even if he had been tired, he would have forgotten so in an instant.
Zack presses his smile into Cloud’s throat. “Want me to wake you up?” Cloud nods, lips pressed together as he smiles back, and so Zack rolls him onto his back.
It’s a revelation—getting to have Cloud like this, finally, all of him out for Zack to touch—and Zack doesn’t question why it’s suddenly being offered, only tries to make his gratitude plainly known.
Cloud is warm from sleep, from being tucked under the covers, and Zack lays his body against his to feel it all. He’s not sure whether to be surprised that he finds nearly all of Cloud’s skin to be smooth and unmarred. The few times his fingers do find a patch that feels raised or rough, he takes care not to linger, not to draw any attention to it. Cloud has finally laid himself out for Zack to touch, and Zack isn’t going to make Cloud feel any less than safe from judgement.
The sun is slowly creeping into the sky. Diffuse light spills through the room, adding definition to shapes, slowly adding detail, and Zack marvels about how Cloud doesn’t stop him or pull away. Realizes he’ll be allowed to see Cloud this morning, too, and the notion makes him almost wild with joy, except instead he pours all his affection into making it slow, making it so fucking sweet—into putting their bodies together carefully and perfectly and well, making Cloud flush with pleasure. Proving himself worthy of this privilege.
It’s as Cloud is lying on his back, panting slightly, moaning softly with each thrust, Zack holding his wrists against the sheets and groaning his encouragement, that Zack finally sees the blurry, white scar on Cloud’s chest for what it is.
His heart comes to a thunderous stop.
“Cloud.”
Cloud squeezes his eyes shut. Doesn’t respond—as if from Zack’s tone alone, he knows what Zack has just noticed.
Zack freezes, hips coming to a standstill, as he looks down at his own name burned in tidy, uniform letters over Cloud’s heart.
“Cloud.”
“Please.” It’s almost too faint to hear.
Zack has no words.
Cloud says, again, in undisguised plea: “You promised.”
Zack promised it wouldn’t matter. Zack promised that he’d still love him, find him beautiful, no matter what he found underneath Cloud’s layers.
Zack never promised he wouldn’t lose his mind.
He lets go of Cloud’s left hand. With morbid, stunned curiosity, he traces over the imprint of his dog tag.
It’s beautifully done. The letters are all clearly demarcated, even though the skin is puffy and shiny with the damage, and Zack’s vision swims as he feels each stroke of his birthdate, of his blood type, of his goddamn SOLDIER rank. How did Cloud even get his hands on his tags?
“Baby, why?” he forces out, voice breaking.
Cloud makes a sound—a snarl that breaks on a sob. “Missed you.”
Zack knew that. Zack saw that for himself, when he came back and Cloud seemed practically delirious with fear and relief both.
But this is different. Concrete. More than Zack really knows how to handle.
“You shouldn’t be able to scar like this,” is what Zack whispers, devoid of any words to fix it, as he traces the letter of his name again.
Cloud laughs, a choked, teary sound, and it makes him clench around Zack’s cock and oh, fuck, they’re both still hard, maybe even harder than before. Without meaning to, Zack jerks forward into Cloud’s heat again and they both hiss at the feeling, suddenly six times more sensitive.
“I made sure it stuck,” Cloud says, and Zack groans. He puts his head down on Cloud’s chest and swears, as loudly and long as he knows how, while Cloud trembles beneath him, his breathing unsteady.
“Baby, you can’t—you shouldn’t’ve—” Zack says, voice thick with emotion, and Cloud throws his head back.
“It’s done,” Cloud grits. “If you hate it, leave.”
Zack sucks in a harsh breath. Cloud, Cloud, Cloud.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he says. And then, with another mindless mill of his hips, and much more quietly, he says, “You have my name on you, Cloud. Fuck.”
Cloud moans, covering his eyes with his hands and rubbing them in a way that looks painful. “Go on then,” he scrapes out. “Look at the rest.”
“The—” Zack curses, realizing that of course there must be more. That Cloud hasn’t stayed as buttoned up as a nun in church for weeks just because of one scar. He feels winded, like he’s been dropped six stories, and he doesn’t know whether to look down Cloud’s body with dread or anticipation, but he does.
He starts at Cloud’s wrists, works up until he finds the second burn mark, right there on the inside of his left forearm.
“Cloud,” he repeats, anguished, as he presses his thumb into the singed shadow of his own dog tags. Then he drags it up to his mouth and kisses it, hard. “This is—goddammit, Cloud, how could you use them for this?”
“What?” Cloud whispers. When Zack looks up at him, his eyes are damp, staring at Zack with something like dismay.
Zack can’t help his nails from digging into Cloud’s arm a little. “You used something of mine to hurt yourself.”
“I—” Cloud frowns, like he hadn’t ever even considered that. “It barely hurt.”
To scar a SOLDIER…Zack doesn’t even want to think about how hot the metal must have been. Wonders if Cloud melted down his fucking dog tags in his crusade to get Zack carved into his body.
Zack shakes his head, inconsolable, disbelieving, and because they’re both wrecks that haven’t gone soft in the least, he rocks forward into Cloud gently, and Cloud moans, grabbing hold of the sheets once more, closing his eyes with satisfaction.
“You asshole,” Zack whispers. He kisses the forearm burn again, making Cloud swear. “I didn’t want this.”
“You weren’t here.”
And Zack can’t say anything to that. Can only breathe, hard, through the dizziness and the heat in his skull, and start up a slow tempo again, and then run his eyes across Cloud’s body with something that’s heavy with dread but electric with something more.
He snarls when he finds the dog tag inside Cloud’s right elbow. Kisses it, too, fervently, like he can somehow heal it with his touch, and it makes Cloud shake, rocking back against him, leaking pre all over himself. He makes a noise that can’t be distinguished between pain or pleasure when he runs his palms down Cloud’s back and knows the bumps to be his name, his number, his mark, permanently on Cloud’s shoulder blade.
In the arch of Cloud’s spine, right above the curve of his ass, Zack presses his fingertips into a scar and makes Cloud moan.
Zack pushes aside the blankets, drags Cloud’s bare legs over his shoulders, and he’s overwhelmed at finally getting to touch and see and drag his hands all over them even before he has to hold back a shout at seeing his dog tag on Cloud’s ankle, above his knee.
“I can’t believe you,” Zack curses, wetly, fucking into Cloud recklessly now, all reservations abandoned, fingers digging into Cloud’s legs, thumb pressing hard into the tough skin of a burn.
“I told you I went crazy,” Cloud says, voice wrecked, almost gasping, and there are tears beading in the corners of his eyes now, colour high in his face, as Zack bends his knees back nearly to the sheets and looms over him, fucking him roughly up the bed with each thrust. Cloud hangs on tight. “I’m not—I wasn’t okay—I’m not okay—”
“You’ll be okay,” Zack says, like a warning, like a threat. “I’m here now. You don’t have to—not like this, not ever again—you won’t need them—”
“I’m not sorry,” Cloud says, in something sibling to a sigh, even as he fights for breath. The sheets crumple as he fists his hands in them, right beside his head. “I’d do it again.”
At this moment, he pushes Cloud’s knees a little higher, and finally catches sight of why Cloud has been hiding one of his upper thighs.
Zack could scream. “You put my name...”
He palms the burn, spreads Cloud’s legs to stare at it. Tidy and legible as all the rest, his full name and rank stamps its way across delicate skin, just a handbreadth from where Cloud’s hole is swallowing him. Cloud spasms when he touches it.
Zack experiences an emotion so raw that it’s like touching open flame.
“To remember you by...” Cloud loses his voice. Two tears run, hot and fast, into his hairline, and Cloud messily rubs them away. “So I wouldn’t break my promise…not again...”
Zack sits upright and drags Cloud into his lap, brusque and sudden, without once letting Cloud off his cock. “You kept your promise,” he says, fervent, pinning Cloud against him as he rocks his hips upwards. He still can’t stop pressing a hand to that mark, to that soft vulnerable place that Cloud mutilated as his. “You lived, baby, that’s all I wanted, in the end—you lived, and you made me so proud—”
Cloud shudders, knees splayed around Zack’s thighs, clinging to Zack’s shoulders as he’s bounced up and down. “Proud?” he says, voice trembling with disbelieving laughter.
Zack pulls the hair at the back of Cloud’s head, grinds their hips together on the next stroke so that Cloud’s jaw goes slack with pleasure. “Always.”
Too overcome for words, Cloud shakes his head, which infuriates Zack. He kisses Cloud, roughly, too struck with passion.
“I have never, ever been disappointed in you,” Zack vows. “You…fuck…you’ve always been perfect.”
In absolution, Cloud comes between them, silent as if the air had been ripped from his lungs. His thighs twitch; Zack keeps pounding into him; and as Cloud shakes, swaying on the spot, held up only by Zack’s strong hands, his eyes roll back. Soft, nearly inaudible sounds are punched from this throat. His lips move soundlessly around a word or three.
Zack trembles, almost undone by Cloud’s seizing around him, edging him to his limit. He licks his lips. Utterly hoarse, he says, “Do I keep going?”
Eyes closed, tear marks at the corner of his eyes, Cloud nods, and Zack sighs, putting Cloud back down on the bed. He lays atop him, gently spreading one of Cloud’s knees off to the side for himself.
“Love you so much I came back to life,” Zack says, chasing oxygen; canting his hips quicker now, but more shallowly. “You gotta know that I think you’re amazing. The shit you dealt with…goddammit…was so hard, and you always stood back up, you always did your best, you’ve had me in awe baby—”
Cloud threads his arms around Zack’s neck, pulls their faces together. “Even though,” he says, thigh trembling under Zack’s hand, breath coming sharply as the thick length of Zack’s cock makes him shiver with almost too much sensation, “I’m fucking stupid?”
“You’re not.” Zack bows forward and presses his lips to the place where Cloud burned him into his heart. He dips his forehead into Cloud’s collarbone, feels each thrust travel through Cloud’s body. “I’m only sorry that you hurt so much.”
Cloud lets out a shaky moan, his legs trying to close despite himself.
Zack helps keep him steady, keep him open.
“Wish...” It takes effort for Zack to speak, eyelids falling half-shut. He bites his lip. “Wish I hadn’t left like that. Wish I wasn’t the reason you hurt so bad...”
“Not your fault,” Cloud whispers, hoarsely, and then letting out a sharp cry as Zack gets something perfect. “You’re here...now...you made it back...”
“’Course I made it back.” Zack’s hips pound frantically. “Had to make it back. There was a boy waiting for me with my name printed on him.”
He licks, tongue wide, across the burn on Cloud’s chest, digging his fingers around the burn inside Cloud’s thigh, and Cloud sobs as he comes for a second time, dry and achy and stripping his throat raw with noise. He goes so terribly, impossibly tight that Zack has no choice but to follow with a cry.
“Love you.” Who says it into whose mouth is indistinguishable. “Love you.”
In the still aftermath they untangle themselves very little. Zack has never before had the good fortune to cuddle Cloud skin-to-skin in the afterglow, and he has no intention of wasting his first real chance. Legs brushing, hips overlapping, Zack threads his hand through the back of Cloud’s hair and watches Cloud’s head, pillowed against Zack’s chest, rise and fall with every breath he takes.
The sun has risen in full. Even as Zack pets Cloud’s head, he can’t help but stare at the pale stretch of Cloud’s skin, his slender thighs, his strong back...and marks now exposed all along every part of him. Heat stirs in Zack’s stomach to know that there’s no way for anyone to see Cloud naked and not see his name there.
Permanently. No take backs.
Zack shudders, pressing a kiss to Cloud's hair. Unknown satisfaction floods him as if through a broken dam.
“Okay,” he says. His voice feels hoarse with disuse, but it’s probably the shouting. “My beautiful boyfriend. Good morning.” He tugs Cloud into a one armed hug. “Thank you for letting me get to see you, fuck you’re gorgeous.” Then he tips Cloud’s jaw back. “Please tell me you don’t do that to yourself anymore.”
“Of course I don’t,” Cloud says, but it’s sleepy with contentment. He drops his head back down onto Zack’s chest. “I’ve got you.”
They lie there for as long as they can, basking in the skinship and the early morning glow, but eventually they do have to drag themselves out of bed and start their days. Zack watches, sitting on the edge of the bed and leaning back on his palms, as Cloud pulls clothes from their dresser.
The shirt Cloud chooses for the day is a t-shirt. Its light yellow sleeves fall just above Cloud’s elbows.
Zack swallows, watching the white mark of his name left exposed for all to see. “You’re done hiding them?” he asks.
Cloud pauses. For a second he looks guilty. Then he shrugs, turning his face away, saying, “Everyone else’s already seen them.”
Zack’s thoughts rearrange, messily and suddenly, like they’ve all been rudely dumped down a flight of stairs.
He gets up, picks up Cloud’s wrist, stares harder than ever at the dog tag printed white and horrifyingly precise, low on the inside of Cloud’s forearm. High enough that a bracer won’t cover it, low enough to be unmissable.
“Everyone...” Zack licks his lips.
Everyone who knows Cloud, has known that Zack was someone to him. Has seen so written on his skin. Even though Zack was dead, even though Zack was gone, even though Zack had turned away from him and waved his goodbye—Cloud’s never hid it.
Zack’s voice fails him.
Oh, Cloud.
“I don’t really think I deserve you,” he croaks, voice thin and thready.
Cloud scoffs, as if he barely even registers the words. He rises, ever so slightly, onto his tip toes; leans into Zack and kisses him, slow and sweet. Zack gives in without second thought.
“Breakfast?” Cloud says. His voice is scratchy, but light. Gentle enough that Zack could tear it, but he never will.
Sunlight falls across Cloud’s face, illuminates the glow there. The small smile on his lips; the warm, unafraid eyes.
Zack cups Cloud’s face. Not for the first time, he’s astonished that he gets to be so happy.
He traces his name on Cloud’s arm. “I feel like I owe you,” he says. “Like, some people just wear a ring.”
Cloud grins, turning his head away, but not before he can temper his smile to something more demure. His eyes shine brighter than ever. Zack can’t believe his fucking luck. “Yeah? You offering?”
“No,” Zack says, swaying in close. “Not yet…I told you: you’ll know.” He’ll make it perfect.
They go downstairs, hand in hand.