and i say it's worth it, too

[exsurgo]

[ He’d been wrong for so long. All those dreams, all that talk of being a hero, and it turns out doing the heroic stuff is kinda shitty. 13-year-old Zack Fair packing his bags to head off and join up with Shinra would have been horrified to even think it, but a quiet life is pretty damn good.

That’s what they have now, for the most part. Cloud hooked him up with a place to stay (in the same house as Cloud, but not in the same room) and a job (for Cloud’s delivery business – Cloud Strife, entrepreneur! Who’d have thought?), and even friends, even if Aerith smacks him in the arm (with tears in her eyes, to be fair) over all her unanswered letters. And it’s good. It’s good to have fighting be the rare exception rather than the norm, to get up early because he wants to rather than because he’ll get hauled into disciplinary proceedings if he doesn’t, to come home at the end of the day to meals they all pitch in to make and a table full of laughter. And it’s so, so good to be with Cloud. Even if he hasn’t been – you know, with Cloud.

Not that they haven’t been intimate! Some of the time they’ve spent together has felt more intimate, more naked than any of the sex they’d had before... everything. Times Cloud came into his room and held him close and ran quiet fingers through his hair after Zack woke up screaming from another dream about Cloud being trapped in that mako tank again. Times when they’d laid together on the bed and Cloud had told Zack what he remembered and Zack had filled in the blanks, wanting to be careful not to overwhelm him but so eager to share he almost couldn’t help it. And they’ve kissed, a few times, chastely and briefly – but there’s still a distance between them. Zack had thought Cloud might have had someone else, for a little while. Been convinced he was with Tifa, who is beautiful and funny and kind but not enough of any of those things for Zack not to feel relieved when she smiled at him and told him no, no. We tried it, but... it didn’t work out. It’s just... Cloud, keeping a kind and polite but pretty firm boundary between them.

It’s okay. It’s okay! A lot has changed! Cloud has been through so much that he seems like the older one now, and Zack had... died, maybe, but at least not been there for some literal world-endingly intense stuff. But he still loves Cloud, in that way where you know no matter what you do or what you try it’s not going away, and still wants him. So Zack does his best to be respectful, telling himself that if it’s meant to be, it’ll be.

That doesn’t mean he’s gonna turn down a chance to help it along, though. So when it’s a quiet evening and the house is empty but for the two of them – unheard of, but Barrett and the girls have taken the kids out to see some show – and the lights are low and Cloud is talking in his quiet, measured way about something that had happened out at work and Zack doesn’t hear a word of it because he’s thinking yet again about how gorgeous Cloud is -

well, who’s gonna hold it against him if he leans in and kisses Cloud right on the mouth?

...not Cloud, hopefully. ]

Comments

[disheroic]

[ things... are good.

and for most of cloud's life, he might have followed that thought up with better than he deserves, but he's trying to do better. trying not to let the anchor of his own self-doubt take away from moments like these, trying not to let himself get so lost in searching for forgiveness that he loses out on what's in front of him.

just having zack back is so good that cloud thinks he could make it last for a lifetime.

being able to talk with him, to share space with him, to push a thermos of coffee into his hands whenever zack stumbles down the stairs bleary-eyed in the mornings. to watch how good he is with marlene and denzel, to watch how easily the edges of their (objectively) weird little family open up to make space for him. just to see zack being alive again -- laughing at something someone's said, sore after a long day of work, enthusiastic about tifa's cooking. (and sometimes, in those stolen moments when he slides into zack's room after a nightmare to hold him, when he's allowed to just watch zack breathe.)

all of that is so good, so much more than what cloud deserves, that it's okay if things are different from the way they used to be. cloud gets it. he's different, so far removed from the starry-eyed teenager zack fell for that they might as well be different people. and zack still cares about him, wants to be close, and that's so achingly good all on its own that how is cloud supposed to ever complain about anything being missing?

and cloud never feels like he lost anything when things didn't work out with tifa; when they came to a mutual understanding that they were always going to be better as friends than as anything else. she still loves him, and he still loves her -- he doesn't need to be with her to know that. so it should be the same with zack, right? it's okay if all zack ever wants is the occasional kiss, chaste and fleeting. it's okay if the way zack tells him that he loves him now is as light as it is bright, with a hand ruffling his hair or an arm squeezing his shoulders. it's okay, it's okay, it's okay. it's enough just to have him, it's enough.

it's just that sometimes, maybe, he gets tangled up in some shard of memory about the way things used to be. the way zack used to kiss him like he wanted to climb all the way inside him, until they were both breathless and dizzy and grinning at each other like idiots. the way zack used to whine like a puppy when cloud managed to stumble into doing something good despite the overwhelming mountain of his inexperience, the way zack used to breathlessly ask if he could have just a little bit more despite the way every inch of cloud's body was already singing to give him everything. the way they never seemed to manage to find the bottom of wanting each other, even after cloud's knees were jelly and his brains were mush and zack was sprawled bonelessly on the mattress and loudly avowing his plans never to move again.

cloud never had that with tifa, so he never had to navigate learning to be without it. but that's okay. he can -- because if it's for zack, cloud is willing to do almost anything.

... like being kissed right on the mouth when he's mid-sentence about trying to haggle over fuel costs. zack's mouth is warm, and even if the kiss is as light as ever, cloud's selfish enough to let himself linger there before he finally pulls back.

smiling, wry, even though he makes an effort at sounding gruff. ] If you didn't want to hear why the route to Junon's getting more expensive, you could've said.