| Eight - Final Fantasy 7, Meteor/Cloud
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| In the days to come he couldn't ever forget the feel of it heavy and
dark and stolen in his hand, and how when he had placed it in Sephiroth's
beckoning hand and let go, it had seemed to drag half of what he was with
it.
He felt empty. He couldn't even feel betrayed, like that ability had been pulled right out of him along with everything else. Sometimes he would look at the palm of that hand, where the black materia had rested, and he'd see smudges of black on his skin, like a small part of Meteor was still with him. And he'd blink and they'd vanish, but he knew they were still there, and if he looked hard enough, he'd find them again. He never did, though. All he ever found were flashes of light as his eyes protested the treatment. And then they'd show up again when he wasn't expecting them. Once Vincent had asked what he was staring at and Cloud had showed him, holding the palm of his hand out towards Vincent. Vincent said he saw nothing. Cloud didn't believe him. And it burned. Every time he looked out a window and saw the meteor, hanging pregnant in the sky, his hand tingled. Occasionally he'd look down to discover he'd bunched that betraying hand into a fist. He didn't remember doing it, but that was almost normal, now: wasn't he a puppet? Wasn't he? He must have been. Certainly it couldn't have been his fault that sometimes, when he wasn't controlling his mind carefully enough, he almost felt pride. An entire world in jeopardy and hadn't he done that? Hadn't he been pivotal? That couldn't have been him, thinking that. That was the man who controlled him, certainly. It had to be. Didn't it have to be? With this hand I doomed the world, he thought, staring up at the otherwise ordinary calluses. With this hand the meteor was born. And then he'd rolled over in his narrow bunk and stared at the opposite wall, vibrating slightly from the power of the Highwind's engines, and rubbed the tingling palm of his hand against his chest to kill the itch of it. His black-stained hand eventually traveled down onto his stomach. He didn't notice. He didn't notice until his hand shoved its way under the waistband of his pants and grabbed him, his cock suddenly and achingly stiff in his guilty hand, and even as he convulsed with it he didn't know who it was that was jerking him off. And it jerked through his mind like a broken mantra, with-this-hand-I-doomed-the-world, with-this-hand-I-doomed-the-world, with-this-hand-I-doomed-the-- --and there was that twisted pride in his own power again, that faded into nothing but a static buzz even as he came hot into his own hand, and after that he couldn't ever find the black marks again. |
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