Chapter Text
he was dreaming.
that was the first thought cloud had, in the searing vibrance of the vast, shallow sea he had found himself in waist deep, water clearer than the most polished glass, an eerie tinted shade of jade nonetheless.
it reminded him of the mako tanks, only much less glowy.
the sun above was pure white, no hint of yellow, blazing and burning but he felt no heat from it at all. in fact, the absence of heat was the most worrying, other than the fact he could see no island, but when he looked through all the clear water, he doubted he would drown unless someone purposefully pushed him under.
it was not the strangest, most feverish dream he’d had. in fact, it was quite the opposite, with so much clarity that had it not been for the strange circumstances, he would have thought he was awake and breathing as easily as ever, but he very distinctly remembered falling asleep in his apartment, tifa getting him a place in the sector seven slums.
it was all so quiet, and then it was not.
there was a single, too smooth, simple inhale of a breath, behind him, and he whirled so fast the water flew up around him, reacting as he did, panicked, shimmering and refracting a thousand different colors in their droplets with the light from the white sun, before they settle, and his heart stopped with a thud in his chest.
every single hair on his body rose, he felt them all stand at attention at the back of his neck, felt the adrenaline pump like gasoline through his veins, felt the conditioning to react at the sight before him-
“oh, fuck you,” he said first, before the other got to speak, before the other can condemn him right to hell, “fuck you, there’s no way i’m dreaming of you.”
“hello to you too, cloud,” came that low, deep, thrumming hum of a voice, overly composed and robotic and yet just as easily flowing and divine and terrifying. of all the people to see in dreams. cloud had many a dream before, hundreds upon hundreds by now, but all of them were absent of the fear embodied before him, gentle dreams, and he was surprised that the nightmares were rarer still. it seemed like that had finally come to change.
“what do you want now? you’re not real. this isn’t real. hell, i’m fucking dreaming. i know that i am.”
a tilt of a head. too innocent.
“are you?”
the response sent so much rage boiling and blasting through his veins that suddenly the buster sword was in his hands and he was pointing it, and he almost didn’t even notice the fact that sephiroth was in nothing more than a simple white button-up, his leather coat gone; though the SOLDIER uniform’s lower wear was still present. the boots were gone. the other was barefoot. casual clothing... why should he care-
“cut your cryptic bullshit. tell me why you’re here, bastard, and it better be quick--”
a patient, calculative noise.
“or what? a dream is a dream, cloud. you have proclaimed i am not real, and that you are dreaming. thus, i am nothing more than a fragment of your mind.”
the wording of that last sentence puts him even more on edge.
“ahem,” sephiroth, general sephiroth, the silver-haired angel of shinra, self-proclaimed son of jenova, absolute insanity wanting world domination, corrected, as if sensing this immediately, “the person you see before you is purely imaginative, and is not influenced by your cells, biological mako augmentation, or the sephiroth in reality.”
“...and i should believe you why?” he countered, narrowing his eyes and readying into a battle stance that he’d taken again and again to take down this monster, this terrifying, horrible whirlwind of a monster who has taken from him, again, and again-
sephiroth proceeded to make a face of complete and utter frustration at him, dropping the composed, perfectly smooth facade of the deity he seemingly was. the face didn't look right on him, and yet the absurdity of it was so apparent that it almost, almost made cloud laugh right where he was standing, waist deep in clear sea water and all.
“let me ask you this then. would the sephiroth you know ever wear a white button-up with his sleeves rolled up and unkempt, and would he ever be speaking as casually to you as he is supposedly doing right now?” he still felt like he wanted to punch the other until that unholy beautiful face like carved marble or porcelain was cracked through.
“...well, no. he just taunts me every moment i see him,” and he almost didn't catch himself, the warning almost didn't make itself apparent, that he was openly admitting this to a dream fragment that had sephiroth’s face. a too-human sigh from the dream in front of him, the other fiddling with his hair. fiddling with his hair. that was... weird, to see the other brushing his own bangs and pushing it back over his shoulders. that hair was still a silver-white shade of monstrosity.
“alright. say that you aren’t the sephiroth that’s been haunting me for the past few weeks and not the sephiroth who burned down nibelheim. if you’re just a fragment of my… mind, as you put it, then that means you’re just me?”
sephiroth shrugged at him. a shrug. the behavior was so obviously, clearly, uncharacteristically not sephiroth at all.
then, the other raised his hand, and without a word, the water was gone, in its place an empty, grassy field. no flowers or trees or buildings in sight, just an uneven, jade-green grassy field, and the white sun above them.
he almost forgot to breathe for a second, at the scenery change, but the other spoke before he could process it.
“perhaps i am the view of sephiroth you had when you were younger?” the other proposed, and he coughed so hard at the sentence. no. no, a dream of sephiroth did not just say that he was aware of cloud’s fanboying tendencies after everything- did that- did that prove that this sephiroth really was just a weird dream he was having? or would sephiroth mess with him like this? act all languid, casual, non militaristic, no devious smirk or firm grip around the masamune in hand… it seemed too odd to be… sephiroth.
“are you even sane enough to mess with me on a level like this?” he asked the dream.
“i would ask myself the same question.”
he huffed.
“...you are still too sentient for a dream,” he said lowly, and the buster sword still had not left his hands, and he readied it.
there was silence in the air for a long moment, sephiroth’s jade-eyed, serpentine gaze boring into his, expression monotone and empty as the seconds ticked by. it was quiet for a long while as he waited for an answer. the answer came in terse words.
“fine, then,” and there’s the sharpness, the obvious, deep hum that sent shivers up his spine, made something visceral tear through his chest, and cloud leapt to cleave him in two as his body reacted before his mind did.
sephiroth dodged with godlike grace, sidestepping as the broadsword was brought down upon his head, then back as cloud swung it to the side with all the speed he could muster. it felt so strangely heavy, for some reason, in this dream. however, he noticed now that the other swordsman did not have that smile on his face that he usually did in their momentary fights. he swung until it all but blurred, yet all of his movements were each more sluggish than the next.
it was a dance, he remembered, and sephiroth wasn't blocking his hits, no, he was dodging, with all the nonchalance of a cat resting in a sunbeam, and the fact that cloud could see himself moving so slowly was making him more and more and more angry. what rules were set in this dream that were preventing him from finally tearing the other in two? it's his dream, dammit, shouldn't he be able to kill the other as much as he pleases? lucid dreaming? he swore-
and he was panting, clinging to the hilt of the blade in front of sephiroth, whose hands were simply at his side, whose complexion was still immaculate, no sign of wear whatsoever on him.
maddening.
“...why are you here?” he repeated, voice brimming with frustration, with anger, with the want to press his sword through the other’s ribs and twist it until he knows for sure the general is dead and gone for good after the last time, despite the awareness he was most certainly only dreaming. or maybe if he killed sephiroth here, that'd kill the real one- fuck, the boundary between everything was too thin-
“what answer do you desire, cloud?”
his grip tightened on the hilt instinctively. the general was still using those damn rhetorical...
“stop answering my questions with more questions,” he hissed, standing up to full height again and swinging the blade out in a warning, glaring daggers at the other, ignorant of how unbalanced the weight of the sword was in his hand for some reason.
sephiroth was still not smiling, and that was the only reason he had not put more effort into killing him in this dream and trying to wake. the other always had that arrogant smile on his face, when they fought. smug, superior, infuriating in a thousand ways, and even more painful, when cloud had never had the strength to be the one smiling and for sephiroth to be the one frowning or screaming at him.
how many... times had they fought? strangely enough, he felt like he had fought with sephiroth countless times, but he had only begun having those visions so recently... hold on...
“hm,” the other decided on, staring at cloud without blinking, inhumane, but his eyes were narrowed in how they narrowed when the swordsman was still truly a general, not a madman hellbent on bringing the world to its knees for an alien, narrowed in how they did when he was contemplating something, deep in thought, before issuing orders or giving a report.
“the part about being a fragment of your mind was technically not a lie-”
“i said cut the damn bullshit already," cloud cut fiercely.
sephiroth merely hummed without any intent to his tone again, before he closed his eyes.
those lashes fell heavy. he almost looked serene.
now. again, his body reacted far before his mind, and he was too eager to take advantage of any weakness the other showed.
he didn’t even think before he swung the buster sword again, directly into sephiroth’s side, and then, the impact resonated deep inside him. he made a startled noise when he made the connection of feeling the blade actually hit its target for once, unblocked, and even more so, when sephiroth promptly crumpled after being hit, sudden rivers of red flowing through his clothing as he went down to his knees with nothing more than a breath, as if he wasn’t surprised by this at all.
the sound of a white button-up fabric tearing, of human red staining into silver-white locks, pouring into a pond around the other, more blood loss than possible in the real world, more obvious they were dreaming, and seeming to fill the whole dream with a shade of red, the sun even more overbearing now.
“ah,” the other made a soft, tiny little sound, voice ever so slightly tinged with weakness and pain, more than any he’s ever heard from the sephiroth in the waking world- and he's at least a little impressed that that's all the sound sephiroth made upon being cleaved in the side with a broadsword-
“this is going to be difficult.”
and then cloud was sitting up in bed, very wide awake, clutching his side as if he’d been the one wounded.
he did not dare go back to sleep.